Modulator Quotes # 1
Disease usually results from inconclusive negotiations for symbiosis, an overstepping of the line by one side or the other, a biologic misinterpretation of borders.
Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Germs
Science
Acid Substitute
PZ Myers has found a non-chemical inducer of a bad acid trip:
My cortical neurons were arcing and snapping and dying with agonized wails from the first page; it’s like the dark book of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred to rational people, where words writhe in insane alien geometries and infiltrate the mind of the reader, leading to madness and death and worse-than-death.
Caveat Lector!
Education and Science
There is plenty to learn and think about at The Carnival of Education and the Tangled Bank!
Add Zombyboy’s article Why the Schools Won’t Change to your education reading list!
And, don’t go to the Discovery Institute to learn anything. As PZ Myers reports
…their earlier implications of legitimization have been shown to be crass spin, and it has been sharply and unambiguously criticized as “not consistent with
There is a Medical Slant…
…to the 28th edition of Tangled Bank which is hosted this week at Chronicles of A Medical Mad House.
Go read!
Reminded by PZ Myers.
The 1st Anniversary Tangled Bank
Yes, the 1 year anniversary edition of The Tangled Bank is up at Circadiana. This entry is interesting:
If you think the Creationist stickers in textbooks are a new development, think again. Dave, a physicist blogging on Second Order Approximation translates for us the old Osiander Sticker that warns the audience that Copernicus’s stuff is “just a theory”. No kidding.
There is precedent for the ongoing evolution/creationism debates:
And even though scientists had all but agreed that the Copernican system was indisputably correct by the close of the 17th century, theologians and popular writers on science continued to argue over whether or not to accept the theory for another 100 years. In terms of education, although it was taught in many schools from 1700 on, the Sun-centered solar-system did not become the sole model taught at Cracow Academy in Copernicus’s native country of Poland until 1782. That’s almost 240 years.
There’s plenty of variety at the anniversary edition including snails, vulvas, mind control, genetics, health care, and much, much more.