Starry Starry Night, All Fall Down

Not only do you get to watch dominos fall, but you see the sheer amount of effort involved in setting it up. The 3-D effect of some of the swirls is a really nice touch:

New Protein Synthesis Video

This is a video of the steps in the assembly of the ribosome and the making of a protein, done with a certain undeniable style and exciting music. Plus it's only a minute long. What's not to like? (Protein Synthesis by Nuk Vikolic)

Protein Synthesis from Vuk Nikolic on Vimeo.

How Death Changed

I've watched a lot of operas and read a lot of Edgar Allan Poe (minor fact: my first publication was about him), so in my mental landscape there are a lot of deaths by tuberculosis. But of course, TB is not high on my list of worries for my kids. Ever wondered how these worries changed from 1900 to 2000? Here's a nice graph that spells it out by causes of death over time, edited by the Washington Post with original data from The New England Journal of Medicine. No wonder so many climactic arias involve TB.

For the more data-inclined, the NEJM has an interactive chart that shows how things changed decade by decade. (Notice the huge 1918 flu spike.) Can we project from this? Accidents may be going up, and the disease I first find that's increasing is Alzheimer's, which involves protein folding and is somewhat close to my current research. Also, chronic airways diseases, still going up. This chart contains the other point that cancer is actually going down, although barely, and heart disease has a steeper downward slope. There's lots more to find, and that interactive chart is a nice way to look at the data: I'd say have fun with the data, but that seems kind of weird when you're talking about causes of death.

Can You Tell What This Is?

This might LOOK like a brain, or perhaps a nicely parted head of hair, but it's not. To find out what it is, and for more amazing pictures, check out this link. I keep thinking of Moses and the Red Sea for some reason.

Anatomy and Physiology, LEGO Style

If I was an artist, I think I'd make something like this as my art. But I'm a biochemist, so I'll just post a link to pictures of how these sculptures were made. I especially like the endoskeleton makes sense in a LEGO-logic kind of way.

Waiting for the LEGO Radiology Facility now.

Darwin is Not Dawkins

I just found this article by Denis Lamoureux in the latest issue of Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, titled "Darwinian Theological Insights: Toward an Intellectually Fulfilled Christian Theism—Part I: Divine Creative Action and Intelligent Design in Nature."

It wins the triple crown: it makes a provocative point, it makes a useful point, and it does it with panache. Oh, and I think it's full-on right. I tried to come up with a one-sentence summary but instead I have three (a haiku?):

Charles Darwin was ambivalent about faith, he was not anti-faith.
Charles Darwin was an agnostic, not an atheist.
Charles Darwin was open to design, and Richard Dawkins' interpretation of Darwin is a cherry-picked portrait that ignores the ambivalence.

I also find it interesting that Lamoureux, in one sense the farthest thing from an Intelligent Design advocate, is insisting on using the word "design" to describe the good organization in nature. It's almost like Lamoureux is saying "This is a song ID Proponents stole from Charles Darwin. We're stealing it back."* I like that.




* A U2 reference. Google it with "Charles Manson" and "the Beatles" instead for the original context. (Guess I'm cherry picking?)

** Yes, three posts on a Saturday night. This is how I choose to use my Saturday nights. That reminds me of an old Bloom County comic that I won't bother making into a fourth post because that would be silly.

*** Lamoureux presented some of this in a talk at an ASA meeting with a similar title. Those itching to read part II might hunt that down in the meantime.

Colbert vs. Krauss

The reason why Stephen Colbert's TV persona works so well for so long is that sometimes he can go places others can't with it. Ironically, it takes the false personality to get closer to the truth. That's kind of a serious beginning for what is really a very funny clip. But those with ears to hear will notice in the final line a very serious and very old theological quotation (I associate it most strongly with John Scotus and technically it's a statement of apophatic theology). Pretty heady stuff, and like a lawyer in argument how he gets there is brilliant as well (makes my previous note on this blog about Krauss seem like, well, a quickly thrown together blog post):

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Lawrence Krauss
www.colbertnation.com
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