Tid bits

It's been a while since I did this. Baltimore on Dawkins. Three kingdoms? Skeptical publishing. Libertarians & adolescents? Kant vs. Archimedes. Yes they're all below the fold.

David Baltimore reviews Dawkins' The God Delusion. [HT: MM, FCD]

Larry Moran is writing a whole series of posts on Microbial Phylogeny and Evolution: Concepts and Controversies, or why the whole three kingdom description of life is flawed. Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5.

PubSkep? You betcha. It even comes with it's own intro.

Some great quote on libertarians found in the comment section of a tristero entry at Hullabaloo:

Libertarianism relies on the fact that some people never outgrow adolescence.

But most people do outgrow it, which is why libertarianism is always a radical fringe ideology at best.

Libertarianism relies on a deep misunderstanding of -- and contempt of -- democratic self-government.
Che Pasa

...

To be blunt, there's a reason that diehard libertarians are almost always straight white (and usually young) men, and that reason is that it's much more pleasant for them to deny these underlying problems, since their essentially privileged position would then be somehow earned, and not bestowed by fate. Pretending that their elevated position is due to personal merit instead of a structural advantage is always going to appeal more than the randomness of being born into an already-established power structure.
Latts

Amnestic at www.gnxp.com asks, Dendritic spines! Good God! What are they good for?

Dan at Migrations, (who has a nice new banner) just defended his thesis and slapped his dissertation intro on the net: Integrin receptors and determinants of polarity in directed cell migration. Hey, that sounds like one of my papers!

And last, but not least, the internationsl philosophy competition. [HT: Pharyngula]