Links

• 50 Reasons Why Star Wars is Better than Star Trek. Even as a ridiculous Star Trek fan (I am reading a Trek novel written by William Shatner right now), I still laughed.
• Doctor's Successful Removal of Gallbladder Through Woman's Vagina Impresses Some, Repulses Others. Get a load of the diagram of the surgical path. My God, I'm shocked they didn't go for her tonsils while they were in the area.
• When I used to teach Biology, in homage to the long sordid history of stupid stuff we'd make kids do, I'd assign students in groups to make posters, artwork, paper mache, decoupage, the whole bit. But that was before the Age of the Computer. Here's Mitosis to Rap. Here's Mitosis to Interpretive Dance. And my all-time favorite, Mitosis to Synchronized Swimming. Again, when we hit late telophase and those guys jump in to pinch off the two cell walls, I am doing the laugh-o-snort.
• I've been watching the news broadcasts of Cho Seung-Hui. It was released because we are drawn to images of guns and danger. The broadcasts had nothing to do with the mental health of anybody. Can we view the videos and tell ourselves, "Ah, yes, he's obviously seriously mentally disturbed" vs. "Ah, yes, he is sociopathological and will obviously kill someone" vs. "Ah, well, we really don't know for sure what this video means, because we are viewing it in a vaccuum." We need to figure out who has conducted a physicial and psychiatric assessment, and what those assessments showed, and who did anything about it. It should not be so unbelievable that not all loud obnoxious Asian gun-slinging college students will kill. To draw such conclusions on clips splashed on TV brings me back to the days when Governors and Senators stared at their TV sets at video clips of Terri Schiavo, one of them unbelievably a physician who claims she is aware of her circumstances even though he's never conducted a physical exam. A video tape shows a lot, but tells very little.