A Pre Snow Shoveling Musical Moment:

Because Atrios should not be the only one permitted to post tunes for the (enjoyment of) no apparent porpoise:

Christianity, Red in Tooth and Claw

More internet funnies: You’ll have to zoom to get all the details. FYI:  This is what the choir is really thinking when they’re hittin’ no.151 for the umpteenth time.  Just in case you were wondering.  (Forwarded to me by a church-singing pro.)

Updike, R.I.P.

Just got the word that John Updike is dead.  Too young — 76 isn’t even up to the life expectancy of an American child born these days (though it still puts him just a skosh ahead of the white male number). Updike was never one of my obligatory reads — I didn’t race to buy [...]

Who Cares About Warrantless Surveillance…

When we are so willing to do it to ourselves?   (h/t kos). Seriously, it’s not just the law that hasn’t caught up with the technological transformation of the last decade or so.  Our own habits assume a level of trust in the cloud that the dataset is too small to justify.  IMHO, as always, and [...]

Live-ish Blogging the MIT Darwin Bicentennial Symposium

9:30 ish:  Jonathan King starts us off.  Makes reference to Ken Miller’s visit to MIT last spring, when he told his audience that despite the victory in Dover, the battle is far from over.  That reminded me of something Stephen Jay Gould said after the Arkansas creationism trial in 1981 that in many views marked [...]

Yes I Can…

Post this once more:  Bruce singing us into the possibility of a different world:

Read it and weep…

I did, listening to the 44th President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama, deliver this text.

Have I Got A Good Job Or What?

Via Michael Drake over at Strange Doctrines, the link to a WSJ article and study on the best and worst jobs in America. Clearly, the math folks have the last laugh:  rated number one, they get the money, the working conditions and no stress: She [Jennifer Courter] telecommutes from her home and rarely works overtime [...]

History Matters (and so does the environoment) — Steven Pinker/Personal Genomics dept.

Steven Pinker has made something of a splash with his account of confronting his personal genome, published in the NY Times magazine last week.  The article is interesting, though Pinker’s hint of nervousness about just how much he wants to know of himself genetically gives it a slightly odd list to port. There was also [...]

Quick Question: David Brooks — willed stupidity or mere useful idiocy?…part one

Just a quick post before heading out to contemplate much more interesting minds than that of Mr. Brooks at Science Online ’09, but reading today’s column, a number of howlers stood out.  I’ll try to get to the meat of them in posts between conference sessions tomorrow, but to begin at the beginning — check [...]