July 27 2008 Comments

Commentary
If you notice, this is not an anonymous blog. Yes, every once in a while it can lead to trouble (e. g., some neo-nazis got mad at me). But for the most part, it is a positive because

1. It forces me to fact check what I say and to admit it when I make a mistake. I never want to intentionally put out false stuff.

2. It forces me to keep (most) of my irrational rants off of this blog. Yes, I have my prejudices. But part of my growing up is my learning to keep my irrational prejudices to myself. Of course, I will comment and give opinions on various issues and beliefs.

Politics
The “how dare Obama not visit the troops” flap:

Hat tip to Seattleforbarackobama blog. Note: McCain’s attempt to make political hay out of this has been denounced by others in the Senate.

John “more of the same” McCain: Do you still believe that he is a “straight talker”?

1. Yesterday he violated his pledge to run a respectful campagin with scurrilous attack on Senator Obama.
2. Today, McCain refused to rule out raising taxes on Social Security, a sharp reversal from his previous positoin
3. Today, honoring the memory of the fallen conservative hero Jesse Helms, he reversed positions on affirmative action.
4. Today, he also re-flip-flopped on gay adoption, seeming to retake his previous anti-gay position.

Ironically, the only thing giving McCain’s sad and listless campaign any momentum is his flip-flop on off-shore oil drilling, after which the oil industry dumped more than one million dollars into his campaign over the course of about ten days.

Yes, sometimes politicians change their minds on an issue. But what is interesting is that when their political opponent has a mind change, they become a flip-flopper.

Here is a nice list of McCain’s “changing of the mind“. Caveat: yes, sometimes two seemingly opposite positions are not really opposites; sometimes a circumstance has changed, or the wording of a bill had changed, or one gets an important compromise.

Of course, in McCain’s case, you never know whether he has had a change of heart, is responding to a change of circumstance, or just doesn’t know what his own position is.

I can’t make this up.

This is what John McCain’s official advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin said.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain’s chief economic adviser, says the numbers he provided to the TPC aren’t secret—they’re the same ones he provides to anyone who asks. He also disputes the way the study takes suggestions McCain has made on the stump out of context. “This is parsing words out of campaign appearances to an unreasonable degree,” Holtz-Eakin said. “He has certainly I’m sure said things in town halls” that don’t jibe perfectly with his written plan. But that doesn’t mean it’s official.

Local Politics
The Decider’s visit to Peoria has made other blogs:

To see what one local blogger thought of the visit, go here.

Check out the comments.

Religion I had talked about the so-called communion cracker incident (where some student went to Catholic communion and walked out with the wafer. Evidently the Catholic student organization on his campus (University of Central Florida) filed charges against him and a friend; he and his friend are now facing student disciplinary charges, which include expulsion.

Science Avenger links to a Fox News article:

Benjamin Collard is the friend of the student who smuggled something sacred out of Catholic mass. That friend, Webster Cook is under fire for going to mass June 29th taking a Eucharist and not eating it.

Catholics believe the small bread wafer is the Body of Christ after a priest blesses it.

Cook eventually returned the Eucharist but faces charges from the school.

The problem according to his friend Collard he’s facing the same charges, and he said he did absolutely nothing wrong.
“I tried to look at my class schedule,” Collard said. “There was a hold placed on my account that I couldn’t sign up for classes. I went to the office of Student conduct to see what was going on and they told me Catholic Campus Ministries filed charges against me.”

Collard learned that he has been charged with misconduct, disruptive conduct and giving false identification, the exact same charges as Webster.

Collard has been silent since the episode but when he learned of the charges, he decided he’d be silent no longer.

He said during the incident he sat silently while everything else around him was happening.

“I didn’t talk to anybody, didn’t say anything,” he said. “While the situation, disruption happened, I was sitting in my seat looking forward, I did nothing.”

“I never spoke to a university official, I never lied about who I was,” Collard added. “I never engaged in any disruptive conduct. I just think this is absolutely disgusting that they’re going after me.”

Video here.

Note: the student who took the wafer got death threats.

Note: the Mass in question was on the UCF campus.

Still, one wonders if we live in a theocracy. Yes, what the student (Cook) did was wrong, rude, and uncalled for. But since when do students face disciplinary charges for bad manners?

Science Sandwalk has a nice piece on Stephen Jay Gould. (yes, he once spoke at my university)

But here is something that I don’t understand: Sandwalk claims that what Gould wrote here was counter to what someone like Dawkins believes about evolution:

This inverted iconography, however interesting and radical in itself, need not imply a revised view of evolutionary predictability and direction. We can abandon the cone, and accept the inverted iconography, yet still maintain full allegiance to tradition if we adopt the following interpretation: all but a small percentage of Burgess possibilities succumbed, but the losers were chaff, and predictably doomed. Survivors won for cause—and cause includes a crucial edge in anatomical complexity and competitive ability.

But the Burgess pattern of elimination also suggests a truly radical alternative, precluded by the iconography of the cone. Suppose that winners have not prevailed for cause in the usual sense. Perhaps the grim reaper of anatomical designs is only Lady Luck in disguise. Or perhaps the actual reasons for survival do not support conventional ideas of cause as complexity, improvement, or anything at all humanward. Perhaps the rim reaper works during brief episodes of mass extinction, provoked by unpredictable envirnonmental catastrophes (often triggered by impacts of extraterrestrial bodies). Groups may prevail or die for reasons that bear no relationship to the Darwinian basis of success in normal times. Even if fishes hone their adaptations to peaks of aquatic perfection, they will all die if the ponds dry up. But grubby old Buster the Lungfish, former laughing stock of the piscine priesthood, may pull through—and not because a bunion on his great-grandfather’s fin warned his ancestors about a coming comet. Buster and his kin may prevail because a feature evolved a long time ago for a different use has fortuitously permitted survival during a sudden and unpredictable change in rules. And if we are Buster’s legacy, and the result of a thousand other similar happy accidents, how can we possible view our mentality as inevitable, or even probable?

We live, as our humorists proclaim, in a world of good news and bad news. The good news is that we can specify an experiment to decide between the conventional and the radical interpretations of extinction, thereby settling the most important question we can ask about the history of life. The bad news is that we can’t possibly perform the experiment.

In short, some mutations might not be beneficial for the current environment but if the environment changes, they might be beneficial for the new one. Hence the seemingly better adapted species die out and the “lucky?” ones survive.

A consequence of this is that if one starts out life from scratch once again, what ends up evolving in the second run might not have much resemblance to the life we see now; what we get would be the result of a combination of randomness (the mutations), changes in environment, and yes, natural selection. But how is this counter to the way that someone like Dawkins looks at things?

Note: we have seen evolution respond to changes in the environment; the voles near Chernobyl provide a recent example.

Dr. Chesser, a geneticist at the University of Georgia, and Dr. Robert Baker, from Texas Tech University, periodically venture into the most radioactive areas they can find inside the six-mile “exclusion zone” in Ukraine around the reactor that melted down in 1986. Wearing no special protective gear other than shoe covers, and sometimes respirators, they go in quest of the mouse-like rodents known as voles.

The mystery that keeps luring the two back is that voles and other rodents are thriving in the zone, an environment so contaminated that the animals themselves become radioactive. The research team considers them safe enough to handle, but Dr. Chesser said, “You wouldn’t want to keep one of those voles in your pocket for any length of time.”

Despite their hardy appearance, the voles sustain extraordinary amounts of genetic damage, Dr. Chesser and Dr. Baker reported last month in the journal Nature. “The mutation rate in these animals is hundreds and probably thousands of times greater than normal,” Dr. Baker said.

The Chernobyl accident has, in essence, compressed several thousand years of evolution into a decade, according to Dr. David Hillis, a molecular biologist at the University of Texas who wrote an editorial accompanying the Nature paper.

Dr. Baker and Dr. Chesser measured mutations by studying the DNA in a cellular structure known as the mitochondrion, which processes energy. They chose that structure rather than nuclear DNA because the mitochondrial genes are smaller and better known than nuclear DNA. In addition, the mitochondria cannot repair their DNA, making tracking genetic damage easier.

Despite the mutation rate, the vole population was booming. There were more animals inside the exclusion zone than outside it, probably because people had been evacuated, improving the habitat for animals. Except for enlarged spleens, which may signal infection or the onset of cancer, the voles seemed healthy.

Walk and worry

Workout notes 17 mile course, 3:56 (35:37 last leg, 2:18 at the turn-off). I saw lots of IVS folks on the course, some of Frank Stash’s group, and Beth Haynes (a local ironwoman tri-babe) with a another tri-babe.

Upshot: this walk was just a tad easier than last weeks; the right leg ached just a tad less and I was faster on all segments. This old, tired, fat body is gradually getting into shape again.

Photos: from FANS this year (my attempt at a 24 which turned into a 12)

Worry: Evidently someone showed up at the Knoxville (TN) UU church and shot people. The shooter was not a member of the church. I don’t know anything about possible motives.

I still have a soft spot for UUs though I admit that I don’t consider myself one anymore; I honestly don’t respect superstition of any variety. But the people in UU churches are, in general, nice and open minded.

Wildlife note I saw the usual variety of wild-life, including one squirrel that was “almost” black.

Perhaps it was half-a-shade lighter than this one.

Local Politics Peoria Pundit has a nice write up of the Callahan fish fry; the comments are worth a look too.

What did the working class people who attended Callahan’s soiree get out of it? These are people who are just sick of the way the country has been run for the past eight years. They are sick of war, and they want the Iraqis to take over. They want a government that doesn’t authorize torture and doesn’t spy on citizens.

They resent being told by the pundits that Aaron Schock has just too much money, too many connections, too much of a lead and too much fo a head start for a nobody like Colleen Callahan to win. They think Schock is too young, too reckless and too ambitious to be good for the 18th District and for the nation. Nukes to Taiwan? Are you serious?

Think about it: More than 700 people crowded into a basement of a tiny building on the outskirts of Kickapoo, Ill., to show their support for a woman whom all the experts say cannot win.

Laugh at my optimism if you must, but this has the makings of a people power movement, right here in the River City.

Yeah!!!!