Science

It looks as if there's an outside chance the short session of the General Assembly won't be derailed by a contentious debate on intelligent design. Even some Republicans who might be inclined by philosophical predisposition to support including ID in science classrooms, such as Bill Friend and Brian Bosma, seem to have a good conservative aversion to the state dictating local education issues.

The British Heart Foundation is appalled that about a third of 8-to-14-year-olds don't know that chips are made from potatoes or that cheese is made mostly from milk. This seems especially clueless:

Peter Hollins, the director general of the British Heart Foundation, said: "Kids have lost touch with the most basic foods and no longer understand what they are eating . . . "

Me, I'm a firm believer in the health benefits of red wine, but I know this will please a lot of my friends:

Research is showing that beer could join the ranks of other guilt-inducing but wildly popular foods — chocolate, coffee and red wine — as a possible disease-fighter.

It turns out that beer hops contain a unique micronutrient that inhibits cancer-causing enzymes. Hops are plants used in beer to give it aroma, flavor and bitterness.

I like my brightly lit places; the house is blazing all hours of the day and night. So I hate light bulbs. Friends give me sacks and sacks of them at Christmas, and I still run out before spring ends. I try to stock up at Sam's Club, but it usually carries only one kind at a time; I need 100-watters and 40-watters, and I can't tell you how many times it has had nothing but 60-watters.

So I regarded with interest this story about the possibility of the end of light bulbs:

I haven't read enough about NASA's Michael Griffin to make a definitive judgment, but I like what I know about him, and he seems to be the right person for the right job at the right time. For those disheartened about what the roving band of generic managers has done to American business, this alone is encouraging:

If our recent hurricane experience is any indication of how prepared we are for diaster, the prospect of an avian flu pandemic ought to make us very afraid.

A lot of people think the current president's bioethics council is concerned a little too much about the ethics and not enough about the bio, although the way they usually put it is "religion trumps science" or some such. That's a fair assessment; I think the administration is less science-friendly than it should be. But some people don't worry enough about the opposite extreme, our scientific enthusiasms running way ahead of our ethical and moral sensibilities.

"Creation science" is an oxymoron, and "intelligent design" is just a different way to try to get religion into science classsrooms. That's not to say that religion shouldn't be explored in schools, but mixing faith and science will benefit neither. It would be nice if we could follow this debate from afar, but that's not to be.

I was watching "Good Morning America" yesterday, and a NASA representative was being hounded by one of the Silly Morning People about plans to spend $104 billion to get back to the moon by 2018: What about some people who say this kind of money shouldn't be spent on this kind of foolishness when we have poverty and hunger here and are spending so much money on the Iraq war, and there is, you know, this huge post-Katrina problem?

At some point, is it possible that science and religion will meet, as we get closer to the beginning of the universe and the mind of God? Just asking. Read a little quantum mechanics if you want to really start to wonder; Newtonian principles do not explain everything. Oh, and don't miss this: