New post about a local Christian cult is up at Suscitatio Incendia.

And, because my former roommate got hitched and moved to Oklahoma to go to grad school and become... God knows... an astrophysicist or something, here's a cartoon that came across my radar today.

Liberal Arts Student Blinded By Science

As a frequent debaucher without regard for mortality, a respect for the artist's infinite infectiousness, an unconquerable affinity for the insubstantial wishy-washy nature of the humanities, I've always considered myself--and other students and professors would agree--fairly intelligent. A senior in college, I'd blown my English and Psychology classes out of the water; state the facts and your golden, exercise your rhetoric a little bit and you're the star of the show (i.e., ENGL 4463 or PSYC 2517 or the like).

Last semester, all that changed. Sacrificing my soul for a science-based degree, I signed up for the most sciencie classes I could push myself into (Evolution Psychology and Evolution-BIOL), I was determined to become a neuro-scientist. Two weeks in, I'm downing books on genetics, The Origin of Species, documentaries on the nature of, well, nature. I love it and I hate it. In the arts, you deny there is a god and then debate the relative nature of deism, constructed reality, and theology. In biology or chemistry or physics, you get to the bit about divinity, shrug your shoulders, and keep studying Mandelbrot sets

EG

(from WikiEducator: 

http://wikieducator.org/images/9/90/Mandelbrot.jpeg)

There's certainly a compelling reality that seems completely disconnected from what I've studied up to this point. I've always considered myself this great mind exploring the avenues of academia, but aside from the occasional documentary or nonfiction article, I realize how little I know about the scientific community. It's challenging to make the mental leap from Faulkner to Watson and Crick, but I feel it's also important to break free of that system of self-aggrandizement, the safe lull of the MLA format and dive into the Council of Biology Editors style.

The Grand Design