Best Student Excuse Ever

Via Rate Your Students:

I have multiple personalities, and the personality who took the exam is not the one that sits in lecture.

On this condition: I’d agree to “start over” on health care reform

Workout notes 4000 yards: 1000 slow (18:06), 5 x 100 drill/swim (fins) on 2 (25 front, 25 free, 25 3g, 25 swim), 10 x 50 fist on 1 (50-53), 5 x (25 side, 25 free, 25 side, 25 free) on 2 (1:50-1:56), 10 x (25 free, 25 back) on 1:05, 5 x 100 IM on 2:15, 500 in 8:23 (100 paddle, 100 free, 100 paddle, 200 free); raced a woman who was swimming with zoomers

Injury: still cramping up at times.

Health care reform

Frogs to the Recuse: Artifical Photosynthesis

Really.

n natural photosynthesis, plants take in solar energy and carbon dioxide and then convert it to oxygen and sugars. The oxygen is released to the air and the sugars are dispersed throughout the plant — like that sweet corn we look for in the summer. Unfortunately, the allocation of light energy into products we use is not as efficient as we would like. Now engineering researchers at the University of Cincinnati are doing something about that.

Research Assistant Professor David Wendell, student Jacob Todd and College of Engineering and Applied Science Dean Carlo Montemagno co-authored the paper, based on research in Montemagno’s lab in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Their work focused on making a new artificial photosynthetic material which uses plant, bacterial, frog and fungal enzymes, trapped within a foam housing, to produce sugars from sunlight and carbon dioxide.

Foam was chosen because it can effectively concentrate the reactants but allow very good light and air penetration. The design was based on the foam nests of a semi-tropical frog called the Tungara frog, which creates very long-lived foams for its developing tadpoles.

“The advantage for our system compared to plants and algae is that all of the captured solar energy is converted to sugars, whereas these organisms must divert a great deal of energy to other functions to maintain life and reproduce,” says Wendell. “Our foam also uses no soil, so food production would not be interrupted, and it can be used in highly enriched carbon dioxide environments, like the exhaust from coal-burning power plants, unlike many natural photosynthetic systems.”

Violence: we are LESS violent now than in the earlier days! Really.

16 March 2010 (pm)

They think that you aren’t paying attention:

Tom DeLay? Duke Cunningham?

Ok, the shots at Rangel and Massa were fine.

The President and CSPAN? Yes, the committee meetings were the various bills were hashed out WERE carried on CSPAN and the big give-aways will be fixed via reconciliation.

Much better.

Science and Religion Unseen and Unknowable..by Eric Michael Johnson:

Allow me to lay it out as simply as I can. It is my view that religion and science are incompatible in a very specific and important way. I say this as someone who previously drank the Kool-Aid and spent countless hours studying what was described to me as the Holy Spirit. I have been confirmed in the Lutheran tradition and have recited the Nicene Creed so often throughout my life that, as an adult, I no longer paid any attention to what the words were saying. They came out of me as rote, like a wind-up monkey who clapped his symbols at the turn of a crank.

We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth.
of all that is, seen and unseen.

[...]

Faith, as Gary Whittenberger discusses in Skeptic magazine, has multiple common uses.

“Faith” may refer to a religion or worldview, as in “My faith is Islam.” It may refer to an attitude of trust or confidence, as in “I have faith in my physician.” Or it may refer to believing propositions without evidence or out of proportion to the available evidence.

It is this latter use of faith that is incompatible with science. His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (which has 140 Hare Krishna centers in Europe and North America alone), has been up front that he denies the evidence of evolution. Why? He didn’t argue that the methods employed may have biased the results and that he’ll reserve judgment until the studies are replicated. He didn’t dispute the sample size or suggest a separate interpretation of the observable facts. He completely disregarded the entire pursuit of such knowledge because it contradicted his faith in a prime mover. His faith told him that he is correct, regardless of what the facts may be. There is a word for that, when you prefer your own private fantasy to the real world. I think Richard Dawkins used it as part of the title to one of his more popular books.