It's way past time.

Oprah gets a well deserved hammering by Weston Kosova and Pat Wingert over at Newsweek. Too bad Oprah's fans are not into reality and will probably never, ever crack open a mag like Newsweek or read an entire paragraph because they are the ones who really need to understand this article and hold her responsible.

Why do creationist have to lie?

Because they've got nothing.

McLeroy Is Out!

The Texas Senate tossed the appalling Don McLeroy out of the chair at the Texas State Board of Education. That is a good thing. Sadly, the message probably will not register on the rest of the creationist on that board and Perry will probably just appoint another bible thumping fool to take his place.

Mama, Don't Let Your Babbies Grow Up To Be Conservatives

Conservatism and cognitive ability are negatively correlated.

Ida

Ed Yong gets Ida right. "Ida was hailed as a "missing link" in human evolution, beautifully illustrating our transition from leaping about in trees to rampant mass-media sensationalism."

While I'm thinking about it...

Cell phones should act as access points and mesh routers too. There are bazillions more cell phones than PCs and such in the world and they are all talking to networks already. Most cell phones spend most of there time doing nothing. If someone was industrious enough, it seems to me that all those unused processors could be put to good uses. One good use might be to connect them up as a cloud to be used as a giant distributed cluster and metered out at a few pennies per megaflop minute. The accessibility would be phenomenal. Everything from sensors to nodes could connect from just about anywhere. And on and on. Give me some royalties.

Road Wireless

Since about 1996 I've been telling everyone I know that every car and truck should carry a mesh router. Robin Chase now thinks so too and she has more stroke than me or my friends. So maybe it will start getting done.

A conspiracy to kill a child.

Daniel Hauser is a 13 year old victim of Hodgkin lymphoma here in Minnesota. Doctors give him a 5% chance of surviving the disease, not because he has some particularly lethal form of the cancer, but because his mother is a religious fruitcake who who wants to deny her child treatment.

I disagree with PZ Myers. The mother's reasoning is not insane or a consequence of ignorance, it is criminal and the product of criminal conspiracy. I hope she and all her religious associates rot in prison for conspiracy to murder after someone rescues Daniel.

Found; The Holodeck Connection!

The keys to the holodeck may have been found. Only there is no need to actually enter the holodeck as it is in your head. There is nothing to learn, you are born with it. There is nothing you can do about it, either.

In a report published in Science May 8, 2009, Michel Desmurget, Karen T. Reilly, Nathalie Richard, Alexandru Szathmari, Carmine Mottolese, and Angela Sirigu demonstrate that stimulating the brain results in the perception of action even when no action has occured. Futher, they dmonstrate that stimulating a different spot of the brain results in action that the person does not perceive. Abstract:

Parietal and premotor cortex regions are serious contenders for bringing motor intentions and motor responses into awareness. We used electrical stimulation in seven patients undergoing awake brain surgery. Stimulating the right inferior parietal regions triggered a strong intention and desire to move the contralateral hand, arm, or foot, whereas stimulating the left inferior parietal region provoked the intention to move the lips and to talk. When stimulation intensity was increased in parietal areas, participants believed they had really performed these movements, although no electromyographic activity was detected. Stimulation of the premotor region triggered overt mouth and contralateral limb movements. Yet, patients firmly denied that they had moved. Conscious intention and motor awareness thus arise from increased parietal activity before movement execution.

So, I guess we can see some iPhone developers connecting transcranial magnetic stimulators with something worth doing that can be carried around on iPhones and shared though the ether. Then I guess we could all just imagine our lives. Just think, too, how great the un-fettered free market system will operate. No need for marketing and advertising or even real products or services, just connect and force people to send you their money and all you have to do is return a stimulus package directly to their brain that tells them they got everything they wanted and so much more. Then you will have all their money... until someone imagines it back, that is. So now, which matters most, intention or action? What about that volition thing?

For Our Daughters

PhysioProf kicks of the Letters Letters to Our Daughters Project, Then, Dr. Pascale Lane writes and PZ Myers chimes in with a powerful piece exposing the blind bias culture and society has toward womenz. For those not inclined to click through, you gotta see PhysioProf's profile so you can't say you didn't know.

The Egyptian goddess Isis was celebrated as the ideal wife and mother.

The blogger known as Dr. Isis has some fancy-sounding degrees and is a physiologist at a major research university working on some terribly impressive stuff. She blogs about balancing her research career with the demands of raising small children, how to succeed as a woman in academia, and anything else she finds interesting. Also, she blogs about shoes. In fact, she blogs a lot about shoes.

...And behold, he raised the motherfucking Jameson on high as Isis bedecked her feet in glory, and the masses were sated. -- The Holy Gospel According to PhysioProf

Now, write those letters.