Sex Determination

A friend just sent me a link to this paper concerning the field we study:


Let me know if you actually want to read the article and don't have subscription access.

Sell

I <3 Sarah Silverman.

Faith

So, isn't the Christian god supposed to be able to save his chosen leader without the aid of human technology?

Soda Shop

After watching Shortbus I found more music from Jay Brannan. Here's the song, Soda Shop, that he performed in the movie. Totally hot.

Mr. Deity

God explains to Jesus how prayer works:

Too bad it's not a candy cane

Ahhhh Malaysia, hailed as a moderate Muslim nation. Where attempting to have sex with your FIANCEE can be punished by up to three years in jail. Fortunately for one couple, they're getting off light with only a £1,000 fine each and a public caning.

Islamic religious police caught Mohamad Shahrin Abdul Majid, 29, and Nadiah Najat Hussin, 24, wearing only their underwear in a car at an office parking area in May.

They pleaded guilty to trying to have sex out of wedlock and were sentenced to six strokes of the cane. They were also fined £1,000 each.

Where is the Muslim outcry? Are the moderates concerned? I'm sure they're telling us that it's just a misinterpretation of the text. Or maybe they'll handle it the way many contemporary Christians regard the bible, "Oh, that text was meant for a different culture and it's not necessary today any more." Who decides that? What critical thinking skills did you use to cut off that excess moral depravity and go instead with your evolutionary intuitive moral compass??? Isn't the whole text holy and divinely inspired (if not divinely verbatim/written)? What intuitive moral compass are you employing to claim that this section is out of date but others are not? Why not go a step further and question teachings that you think are fine but that someone else might come along and say are out of date, let's say, the idea of gay marriage?

Then again, when people live their lives by fairy tales it's futile to determine the arbitrary assumptions with which they choose to build their arguments and govern their conscious world. It's based on feelings, not on a pursuit of truth. And for that, I'm thankful to live in a country where *most* laws are not directed by religious teachings.

Shame on you, Malaysia.

Your Daily Dose of Stupid

Every thought about what it would be like to live in a society where murder isn't murder, but just vigilante justice? Apparently this is how it works for Pastor Steven Anderson: killing Barack Obama and executing homosexuals does not actually count as murder, rather a sense of diving justice. In fact, it's been reported that he petitioned his congregation to pray for divine intervention to kill President Obama.

Sequence me up!

Yay! Sequencing technology is getting cheaper and cheaper. A company called Complete Genomics has cut it's price of sequencing a human genome from $250,000 to $20,000!!! Their goal? To sequence 10,000 genomes by 2010.

Only days ago Complete Genomics announced that it had raised $45 million from investors excited by the potential of an economic sequencing technology. By radically reducing the cost of sequencing, Complete Genomics expects to cater to a large field of developers looking for genetic clues to treat disease and identify patients most likely to respond to new therapies.

Dude - forget about genetic disease for a moment ... I just want to know if my ratio of G-C to A-T pairs is above 1 ... or let's see how functional my telomerase is. And what I've really been waiting for - see how many times the sequence GATTACA shows up. Where's 20k when I need it?

Seriously though, this is an amazing economic breakthrough - having more human genomes is awesome so that we can really get data on SNPs and do fine-mapping of disease alleles. Now we just need to get all those people who get sequence to sign release forms to do comparative analysis ... making the world a better place one genome at a time.

Gambling with Religion

This is too good not to share. Via Pharyngula.

Epicurus

After another successful atheist movie night at my house (tonight we watched The God Who Wasn't There) and a vigorous discussion about the personal impact of conversion and the individual (usually intellectual) capacity to undergo the conversion to atheism, this quote from Epicurus came up:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able, and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?