Tomorrow is the National Day of Prayer.  Whoopee!  Unfortunately, some evangelical Christians aren’t too happy about it.  You see, they’re worried that some lesser people (you know, non-Christians) might think that they can pray, too.  But they have made some progress in excluding people who believe in a different magic man in the sky than they do.

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Religion kills again.  I can only hope that those parents get locked up for a very, very long time.

ABC News has an article about a report that indicates that childhood vaccine rates are falling, with only 72% of children properly vaccinated.  The ABC story goes into some possible reasons for the decline, like parental confusion about the sometimes complicated vaccine schedule, and I have no doubt that the causes discussed in the story are accurate.  That said, I think they missed one, and it has reared its ugly head in the story’s comments section:  Antivaccination hysteria.

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Jason Rosenhouse at EvolutionBlog has a question about punctuation.  What is the proper way to make a noun that ends with an s possessive?  For example, should we write “Dawkins’ book” or “Dawkins’s book”?  Personally, I think the latter just looks silly and I’m not going to use it, Strunk & White be damned.  Also, “Dawkins’s book”, read aloud, would sound like “Dawkinses book”, which is not how I would speak of “Dawkins’ book”.

I suppose it’s about time I wrote about some science.  Ideally, I’d like to write about peer-reviewed research once a week, but I don’t know how well that is going to work out.  In this post I’ll be writing about a recent article published in PNAS detailing a method for generating protein structures from NMR chemical shifts alone.  The title of the article is “Consistent Blind Protein Structure Generation from NMR Chemical Shift Data”, and it was a collaborative work between several groups led by some fairly big names in the field, such as Ad Bax and Thomas Szyperski.  I’ll try to keep my summary/discussion free of more technical details, as I’m aware that NMR is a highly technical method that relatively few people are familar with.  Read the rest of this entry »

About a week or so ago, Pat Boone dropped a hot squishy turd of anti-ACLU inanity over at the WorldNutDaily.  Well, the ACLU wrote a reply and took poor ol’ Pat out behind the woodshed.

David Limbaugh, the brother of right-wing gasbag Rush Limbaugh, has a commentary at the Worldnutdaily about supposed electability problems with Barack Obama.  I’m only mentioning it because it is entirely typical of the arguments that Republican talking heads are and will be pushing during this election. Read the rest of this entry »

As I thought, there have been more articles at Townhall.com praising Ben Stein’s turd of a film, Expelled.  This one by Nina May just may be one of the most perplexing things I’ve read in a while.  It’s garbage, of course, but also just plain odd.  At times nearly incoherent, it’s a rambling mess of non sequiturs, straw men, and ahistoricity.  An example:

As though it is a new idea to discuss creationism in the arena of science exploration, and this movie has exposed a truth that has never been discussed, the responses to its release have been amazing. But oddly, the most venomous attacks have been responses to a press release, to the media, which are on “press lists.” It is so cute to see these professional journalists send back, expletive deleted responses ending with, “Take me off your list.” ……..Oooookkkkk. So that means, you, oh brilliant journalist, want to be taken off the key media list that disseminates all the press releases for all the major activities in the country. Yeah, you could be god.

I just….I….WTF?!  Perhaps this is some new strategy creationists have devised, write things stupid enough to appeal to the believers, but bizarre enough to leave the opposition dazed and dumfounded.

Concerned Women for America has sent out an alert to its supporters that boldly lies about the Miller-Jenkins case.  For those not familiar, this case is a custody dispute between two women, Lisa Miller and Janet Jenkins.  The two are former partners who had formed a civil union in Vermont before having a child together, with Lisa as the biological mother.  The couple eventually split and Lisa moved to Virginia with the child and became a born-again Christian (praise the lord!).  Lisa subsequently asked a Vermont court to dissolve the civil union, award her full custody of the child, and to grant Janet visitation rights.  After the passage of Virginia’s anti-gay-marriage amendment, Lisa filed suit in Virginia court to deny Janet any visitation rights to the child and was victorious.  That decision was eventually overturned on appeal as it clearly violated the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act, which prevents all States from interfering with a prior custody decision made by a court in another State.

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Ungh, this is depressing, both of the Democratic presidential candidates have expressed some support for the scientifically discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.  So now Obama, Clinton, and McCain have kowtowed to the antivaccinationist kooks, giving the finger to medical science.  Oh well, I suppose it truly was audacious to hope for a pro-science presidential candidate.