Science Week February 5 through 11

One of my pet peeves is that science bloggers spend an inordinate amount of time blogging about other things than science. Of course that doesn't apply to my blog which is of course not a science blog. But the host of Just Science has just issued a challenge to all science oriented blogs to publish only about science starting next Monday. The challenge can be found at:

http://www.justscience.net/?p=7

Just science observes that science blogs spend an inordinate amount of energy fighting against anti science-creationism, anti global warming and other such non sense...so this a week for NOT doing that. Here are the rules:

Bloggers who self-identify as scientists and science writers should post on:

1. Published, peer-reviewed research and their own research.
2. Their expert opinion on actual scientific debates - think review articles.
3. Descriptions of natural phenomena (e.g., why slugs dissolve when you put salt on them, or what causes sun flares; scientific knowledge that has reached the level of fact)

Bloggers who claim to be philosophers of science (or have been accused of so much) should post on issues, ideas, and debates in philosophy of science that are not frequently used or dictated by anti-scientific groups. The demarcation problem, for example, should be avoided unless it\n can be discussed without reference to anti-science movements.

And bloggers who are not scientists – focusing mainly on public and policy debates on scientific issues – should post on issues that are legitimately controversial for scientific reasons. Topics that are controversial simply because of anti-science movements should be avoided.

Ooops since Monday is when Kansas Guild of Bloggers comes out which is non science I guess technically I won't be able to meet the challenge...but since it is a scheduled carnival maybe I can find some way around that...hmmm.

All the feeds from participants are supposed to be fed into an aggregator for subscription but it looks the details are yet to come. Should be fun.

Update the feeds are up! Here is the feedlink:
http://www.justscience.net/?feed=rss2 for subscription or you can go to the just science website at this link:
http://www.justscience.net/

The site and feed are updated about once per minute. My first entry hasn't hit yet but you can view it here.

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HPV virus, ethics and parental rights.

Kansas has a new controversy. A bill has been introduced in the Kansas State House which would require all 6th grade girls to be vaccinated against the HPV virus using a newly approved vaccine called Gardasil produced by Merck. Of course the religious right is opposed to this bill claiming that it usurps parental rights and promotes sexual promiscuity. The significance of this vaccine is that is 20 million people are infected with this virus in the United States and the virus is a leading cause of cervical cancer.

Personally both these arguments are wearing a bit thin. Having a vaccine is not really going to contribute to sexual promiscuity as far as I can tell; teens are already sexually active today even in the absence of this sort of vaccine. The way the opponents of this vaccine really think should be obvious from this statement by a Texas Parent quoted in the Journal World:

“What they are proposing is vaccinating a bunch of healthy girls that are responsible and that do come from good homes for the benefit of irresponsible people,” said Dawn Richardson, a co-founder of Parents Requesting Open Vaccine Education.

Uh huh...good Christian homes and probably the right kind of Christian too. Further the benefit is for the kids. Sooner or later that 'responsible' girl may want to have kids and that generally requires having sex with a man who may or may not have been 'responsible'. The kicker is that men can transmit the virus and then it is too late to take the vaccine.

In fact one might ask why the vaccine is not being required for 6th grade boys as well. Not only can boys carry the virus but it turns out, and this was news to me, that the same HPV viral strains that cause cervical cancer are a leading cause of anal cancer in gay men. So requiring the vaccine for 6th grade boys would serve an double function. Of course the right would say no responsible person would be gay...but I suspect my readers know what I think about that argument.

I note that the Kansas Bill has an opt out provision to accommodate parent's who have "medical, moral or philosophical" objections. This is in line with provisions for other sorts of medical procedures. But you know that argument is wearing thin as well. We are letting parents put their kids at long term risk on a philosophical whim?

OK maybe that isn't fair..but in my more ornery moments I wonder if it is right for parents to force the consequences of their philosophies on their kids in matters of health and education. It's one thing to tell your kids what you believe and teach them your values and how you hope they would grow up. But when it comes to something that is harmful to them, opting out of medical procedures that are beneficial to the children puts them on the line for YOUR beliefs. That sounds uncomfortably like child endangerment to me.

**Ornery alert**

The latest wrinkle is that Merck is allegedly is funding a push in state legislatures to require vaccinations for HPV. I am more than a little uneasy about this and agree with conservatives who wonder if the relationship between Merck and an organization called Women in Government is a bit 'too cozy'. Of course Merck is only following the lead of other businesses that have injected themselves into other debates by funding front organizations. These same Conservatives get upset about Merck but ignore big oil's funding of front groups skeptical of global warming. Seems there is good coziness (opposed to hard line toward global warming) versus bad coziness (protecting kids).

Other links:

http://www.cdc.gov/std/hpv/STDFact-HPV-vaccine.htm

http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2006/nov/27/tweens_prove_they_do_grow_so_fast/

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/30/health/30virus.html?ref=science

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Kansas Guild of Bloggers current and upcoming

This week's KGB is at Josh Rosenau's blog, Thoughts from Kansas, and next Monday the Guild will be here at The Force, so if you blog about Kansas, even if you are, as I am, from so far East you think the capital of Kansas is Tapioca, submit your entries to the KGB carnival page or e-mail them to me directly at pdecell@sunflower.com. Oh and be sure to check out this week's KGB at Thoughts from Kansas.



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Lucifer's Moon

When Antares blows, the world will die-

All creatures great and small stuck

With poison darts flung

As its horizon collapses on itself.

And maybe it is done nine hundred

Years ago and we will not awake,

Not birds, coral or paramecia-

Just a few cells left to start again.

The power that we have is not in tasks

But rests in our relationships

Even with you black and white friend

When the vet confirmed the bloat

And we had to make you sleep;

Nothing to do for an old dog's

Twisted gut.

Driving home I hold my wife's hand

And watch your moon

Half black, half white,

Turn into the red shield

Of Mars against Antares' darts.

Why is this person smiling?

This is my car pool mate Lynn and she's probably smiling because she doesn't have to put up with my bad driving and rather than riding in a small vehicle in a large stream of gas guzzling SUV's, both she and I are riding the new bus service between Lawrence and Overland Park Kansas, about 30 miles away.

We pick up the the bus at Haskell Indian Nation's University in Lawrence and get dropped off right at the Carlsen Center at JCCC. And as an added bonus the coffee bar is right on the way to my office. Each ride is $2.50 each way but one will be able to buy 10 rides for $15.00 so the cost then will run $3.00/day.

Less stress, we get to ride the biggest thing on the road instead of her hybrid and my Subaru, and if this pans out less wear on the cars and reduced insurance cost. What a deal!

Kansas Guild of Bloggers

That's right, time again to sample the best in Kansas Blogging. So though it be dreary outside, stay by the fire with your laptop on your lap, or a cat on your lap and enjoy.

Some bloggers were lucky enough to travel. AJ at Bittersweet Life just returned from Louisiana including a brief foray into New Orleans. He also has links to New Orleans pictures from an earlier trip. On the other hand, the Prince of Thrift in Topeka is journeying to new frontiers of frugality, hoping to survive on one dollar a day for food and still eat healthy. Wisely he is limiting the experiment to 90 days. No mooching Kevin! In contrast, poor Happy in Bag is getting some bad service from an area Denny's. I wonder if Grand Slams trans fat.

While prowling around Lady Gunn's I found the Laws of Cat Physics. Finally cats explained. It is not from this week and posted from another blog, but I couldn't resist the chuckle. I also can't resist yet another in John B. 's rants about "collage students". Yes that is "collage students" and if you don't get it you need to visit his first rant about "collage students".

Of course no KGB is complete without political blogging and Red State Rabble is all over the antics of Phill Kline, the new Johnson County Prosecutor. With friends like Phill, who needs enemies? Red State Rabble does manage to find a bright side of sorts for having Phill in Johnson County.

On a more serious note Josh at Thoughts from Kansas posts a sermon by Martin Luther King Jr. that seems appropriate to me, given the current state of our nation.

In his sermon King says:

"As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted."

Not much posting about the weather we have had in Kansas this week, though Gwynne at The Shallow End seems to have made out OK, getting to work at home. By the way, just in case you expect to find yourself at home EMAWKC has a prediction about which format HD DVD or Blu-Ray is going to win the video format war. I think you find his argument quite compelling.

And while we are on the subject of visuals, Bruce over at his blog reflects on Bible translation and I find that he and I have a fondness for the same translation of the Bible. Biblical meanings and what what science can or cannot know about God is a common theme for Josh over at Thoughts from Kansas and he accuses Intelligent Design proponents of making a mockery of traditional religion.

Finally my own contribution this week is a poem written as part of Poetry Thursday that has nothing to do with Kansas per say but is reminder that summer will come again, to which I will also link a very subtly related posting over at Blogmeridian about writing rubrics related to aesthetic appreciation- and we thought writing rubrics relating to diversity was hard.

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Poetry Thursday

This week's Poetry Thursday was all about cliche's and thinking about them in a new way. Well I had to jump start my juices by googling cliche and looking for one that struck me. The first site that came up is called Cliche' Finder and it had a page that generated random sets of 10 cliche's from a data base. One that struck me was "There are ears in the corn field", a cliche I have never heard before. I am not even sure what it means aside from the literal interpretation, but it brought to my inner ear an incident that happened during summer 1970 when I had a job as a research aide at Cornell in the Agronomy Department doing marathon data gathering sessions in a hot corn field. How many types of ears are in this poem?


Ears in the Field

In the day's last warm breath
The leaves of the corn wave
And scrape each other
Like grasshopper legs drawn
Against the wings
That whinny and neigh.
As I walk and mouth my data
Into the recorder, band wings snap
Flashing their wings yellow and orange.
I comment how many there are,
Take some readings and note
How the wind makes hard
Measurement of light deep
In the corn.
This is what you asked of me
Collect impressions
Along with light and transpiration.
So I listened to the field.
The voices behind my ear lulled me to sit
In the shade among the stalks,
And I did not remember
The data gap even
When you called me
To your office to listen to what
The transcriptionist found,
Hear my soft sleeping song
Among the neighing grasshoppers
After recording my anumeration
On light.
But you laughed with joy
That your models finally
Worked in the real world
Because I listened to the field.

1/11/2007
For Dr. Lemon.

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I've been tagged...

...by one of those pesky memes which has manipulated Jon Voisey (No wonder he's the Angry Astronomer) to tag me. Seems I am supposed to grab the nearest book, go to page 123. This part would be hard to do were George Bush tagged. Then go to the fifth sentence and write down the next three sentences and then tag three other unsuspecting bloggers. Jon had a really good book closest to him and it's too bad I got tagged while I am sitting in my living room with my laptop...hmmm wonder if a pdf of Origin of the Species counts? Quick download one!

But OK no cheating and no digressions about just what is a book these days anyway and what do you mean by nearest book? The Nearest book happens to be Circle of the Moon by Barbara Hambly. The jacket says:

"Returning to the wondrous world of Sisters of the Raven, Barbara Hambly presents a suspenseful new story of a fledgling group of women who must develop their own magical properties before the demons of the past return to kill again."

I take this to mean the ID people aren't done with Kansas yet. On to page 123:
OK...fifth sentence and write down the next three...write them where? Oh type them into the computer!!!

Here we are:

"I don't understand." Shaldis moved her shoulders into the powerful massage of the bath woman's hands. She and Summerfield had passed through the soaping and rinsing, the bubbling hot pools and the steam in small talk and silence; now they lay on towels and warmed marble in the delicious afterglow stage that made actual baths-as opposed to the pan and pitcher scrubs with which most people started their mornings-such addictive pleasure. The royal bath women were the best in the realm and had hands like blacksmiths."

Ohh those hands! Well at least Jon knows I didn't run to the computer in my study. It's on and close to lots of really cool books. My only defense of this book is that anything supernatural in clearly intended to be fiction.

Now who to tag...ah I know. I am going to tag John at Blogmeridian. He always has cool books. Next I think I will go down South and tag Elissa Malcohn over at Chronicles from Hurricane Country. She's been real busy getting her own book out but this is a sneaky way of maybe getting a taste. **eg** Finally it's back to Kansas to tag J.D. over at Evolution-take the next step. He's a mathematics type which means he's got lots of cool books even if they don't make much sense to the rest of us.

Now I guess I am not supposed to tell them they have been tagged but let them discover it themselves.

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