(warning: bad math pun follows)

So Kate Bush this past year finally returned to the limelight and released her first album since '93, Arial.  What I've heard is not bad at all, but XM's Fine Tuning keeps playing a particular track, "pi", where she actually sings the digits of pi in order.

My thought?  The song starts out pretty strong, but gets less and less significant as it goes along...

QotD

"Last Saturday was more fun than was legal." -- Brad Graham, FBMM Squire.

(inside joke - due to the rain saturday, we had to dance in places where we didn't have permits and got kicked out by building securities twice...)

*sigh*

Red State Rabble: Just Say No:

Tomorrow, the Kansas Board of Education is expected to take up a proposal to require abstinence-only sex education across the state. Under the proposal, districts that teach more than abstinence could risk losing their accreditation.

While the board would be wise to just say no to abstinence only sex education, which has proven ineffective in case after case, the right-wing majority on the board will undoubtedly vote to approve, once again placing their own narrow sectarian religious beliefs ahead of sound public policy and the welfare of Kansas students.

Vitamin C may help stop cancer cells, but only in IV doses.

Stochastic, The Seed Blog:

Fortunately for poor old Pauling [the Nobel prize winner who late in life was pro-Vitamin C, only to be discredited as no-one could duplicate his results of its effecacy], this story might yet have a happy ending. Two papers published in the last year are forcing a re-appraisal of vitamin C's effects on cancer. The first, from the September 20th, 2005 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that vitamin C selectively killed various cancer cell types, leaving normal cells unharmed, but only when in serum concentrations achievable solely via intravenous administration.

The second study, published in the March 28th, 2006 Canadian Medical Association Journal, presented 3 well-documented cases where intravenous injections of very high doses of vitamin C had apparently extended the lives of advanced cancer patients. An accompanying commentary should temper any pro-Pauling optimism with its discussion of spontaneous remission rates and unknown sample sizes, but it leaves the question open and the door cracked for further inquiry.

Others at scienceblogs.com are still skeptical...

Aetiology: Linus Pauling--is Vitamin C the cure for cancer?:

I just thought I'd weigh in a bit on the science of the issue, particularly since Lee makes it seem as if Pauling has been unfairly maligned.

She then does a quick analsys of the studies of Vitamin-C and intravenous to see what has actually been done in the meantime, and finds more inconclusive studies than these two.

Our "Christian Nation" Beginnings? Not so "Christian" after all...

Ed Brayton takes on the "War on Christians" Conference where the speakers (including several Baptists) often invoked the memory of John Winthrop's speech about the Massachusetts Bay Colony being a "city on a hill".  Shame they don't know just what kind of Christianity was being practiced back then.

Dispatches from the Culture Wars: America's Christian Colonies:

Not only was the Massachusetts Bay Colony a brutal Christian theocracy, it didn't even spare Christians from its wrath if they were the wrong brand of Christian [he gives examples of Quakers who were killed and Baptists who were whipped]. And that colony was not alone. Virginia was officially Anglican and it was a crime to be a Baptist there as well. James Madison was inspired to fight for religious freedom and the end of such religious establishments when, as a young man, he saw Baptist ministers being imprisoned for the crime of preaching the wrong kind of Christianity. So there is extraordinary irony in Christians, especially Baptists, citing the early colonies as models for a "Christian nation".

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were an explicit repudiation of these practices. The Declaration's insistence on unalienable rights could not have been more in contrast to the theocratic rule of most of the colonies. The Constitution's guarantee of religious freedom and ban on religious tests for office were the last beginning of the end for the authoritarian madness that masqueraded as Christian piety under religious establishments.