What's awesome

Sitting at Mozart's with a cup of coffee on a clear Tuesday night and using the free wireless to look up an online star chart to check out the constellations. Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, and Mars are all the same rusty color and relatively near each other. Sirius and Rigel are bright and blue. It's rare for a city-dweller to even be able to distinguish the colors. Awesome, and still so pale in comparison to being far from civilization. I need to get away from the light pollution sometime.

A raccoon just walked up to me.

Blogger widget

I know I've been MIA for a while, and this post isn't going to blow your minds or anything.  I'm just trying out the Blogger dashboard widget.

Just sayin'

My birthday is next Tuesday, when I will be reaching the ripe old age of 26. If you're out there in the blogosphere and just dying to give me gifts, I do have an Amazon wishlist.

In other news, this blog needs a facelift. This template is so 2004. Done!

Tags: personal

Human-animal hybrids

Human-Animal Hybrids

Everyone got a laugh when President Bush mentioned banning human-animal hybrids during his State of the Union address. Kieran Healy reminds us that a human-animal hybrid already exists, and in fact serves a vital purpose.

Its job is to slave away producing a substance that millions of people use routinely. That substance is insulin. Virtually the entire commercial supply these days is produced by genetically modified e-coli bacteria that contain human DNA, live in a fungal substrate and secrete human insulin. I take it that the President isn’t planning to put every Type I Diabetic in America into hypoglycemic shock. I don’t think it would be a popular policy plank.

Knee-jerk hysteria about genetic engineering distracts people from the benefits, real and potential, it provides to people in need.

[via Crooked Timber]

Tags: politics, Bush, State of the Union, science, genetic engineering