Texas Text Book Standards and American Education

ABC's Nightline has a nice concise video outlining the current state of national educational standards, and the incredible amount of influence that Christian fundamentalists like Don McLeroy have over curricula nationwide. The New York Times reports:

Dr. McLeroy still has 10 months to serve and he, along with rest of the religious conservatives on the board, have vowed to put their mark on the guidelines for social studies texts.

For instance, one guideline requires publishers to include a section on “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.”

Powerful conservative leaders are continuing their anti-intellectual assault on American society. Attacking science and evolution is bad enough, but they're now widening their efforts to re-write American history and politics as well. It seems they believed Stephen Colbert when he said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

Don't Eat The Agarose!

I wanted to share some pictures of the cookies that my wonderfully bookish and supportive fiance made for my Darwin Day party. For those of you that aren't molecular biologists, they're electrophoresis gels, and are used to separate DNA or proteins by size and/or charge. Generally, DNA is loaded into a well at one end of the agarose gel. An electrical current is then passed through the gel, and since DNA is negatively charged, it slowly migrates toward the positive electrode. Smaller fragments are able to move faster than the bigger ones, so it acts as a kind of molecular sieve -causing the DNA to separate into the bands seen below. The gel is then stained with the chemical (in this case Ethidium bromide) that allows you to see the DNA. The Ethidium bromide binds to the DNA and fluoresces under a UV light, which is why the bands look hot pink in color.

The cookies were delicious and huge hit with my Darwin Day'ers. You can find this cookie recipe at the blog Not So Humble Pie, along with plenty of other science-themed treats.

An excellent likeness, if I do say so myself!

Another Year Down.

Yesterday was my 26th birthday, and all-in-all, it was a pretty great weekend. I spent time making merry with people I love, and really that's all you can ask for in this world. Mortality has begun its slow creep towards me though, and I already feel like I'm staring down the short end of my twenties. I've reached the age I'm going to be when I get married, which is a strange but exciting thought. Andrea and I have been talking alot about how we're going to spend the next 5 years (and the next 50+), but so much is still up in the air that we're infuriatingly unable to satisfactorily plan for even the next 5 months, seized in the sludge of bureaucracy and bet-hedging.

On a related note, Friday was science jounalist Brian Switek's 27th birthday, and on his blog Laelaps he presented the cover of his forthcoming book, Written in Stone: Evolution, The Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature. It made me realize that, if I can clear my life of distractions, I too am perfectly capable of completing such a project by the age of 27. As I've said before, I've been diagnosed with a serious case of shiny-ball syndrome and I need to structure my life as an academic accordingly. This point motivated me to download the Firefox Add-on LeechBlock:

LeechBlock is a simple productivity tool designed to block those time-wasting sites that can suck the life out of your working day. All you need to do is specify which sites to block and when to block them.

I configured the system so that I'm unable surf one set of time-sink websites while I'm at home at night, and a whole slew of others while I'm at work during the day. The next step is to complete the final 10% of the work necessary to submit my thesis work for publication. I'm not sure why I have such a mental aversion to working on it. I'm so ridiculously close, and yet it still feels ages away from completion. Its the worst case of writers block I've ever had in my life, so I welcome any strategies or advice for overcoming it!