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My God — life! Who can understand even one little bit of it? — Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

Some folks at Harvard, apparently.

Warning: the following video may be educational. It’s an eight-minute animation of the inner workings of a cell, down to the molecular level. Unless this is your field, you might not understand it all. I didn’t, anyway.

Some people believe the intricacy and complexity of the internal mechanics of life force us to one inescapable conclusion: that life was formed by an intelligent designer. That leads to an inescapable question: where did the designer come from?

There’s a hoax email going around about an atheist who files a discrimination suit because religious people have all sorts of cool holidays and atheists don’t have any. The fictional judge says that atheists have April Fool’s Day, quoting Psalms: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.'”

John Wilkins thinks we may be onto something here:

Though this is legally and constitutionally false, and the judge would immediately be censured by a higher court, I actually think it has a germ of a good idea.

Let’s celebrate the foolishness of religious beliefs on April Fool’s Day. If you happen to be religious, celebrate the foolishness of all other religions that day. If you are agnostic, celebrate the foolishness of definite opinions about Gods. If you are Catholic, celebrate the foolishness of Protestants. If Protestant, of Catholics. Sunnis can celebrate the foolishness of Shiites, and vice versa. Mormons can celebrate the foolishness of all Christian religions, and everybody (I mean everybody) can celebrate the inane gawking train wreck stupidity of Scientology.

What a great idea! I know what I believe, and I’m certain that my beliefs are correct. For one day, each of us could revel shamelessly in our certainty, knowing that anyone who believes differently is some kind of idiot, at best.

Every other day of the year, while still feeling secure in our own beliefs, we’d have to accept other people and their right to their beliefs.

That could change everything.

As always, Bob Geiger has collected another good batch of political cartoons. The second cartoon, comparing Newt Gingrich and John Edwards on family values, is particularly illuminating.

Interesting comic on belief vs. reality.

A million people can call the mountains a fiction, yet it need not trouble you as you stand atop them.

But there are exceptions.

The Scientific Indian paid a visit to the Albert Einstein Memorial in Washington, D.C..

The quotes engraved on the bench on which Einstein sits:

As long as I have any choice in the matter, I shall live only in a country where civil liberty, tolerance, and equality of all citizens before the law prevail.

Joy and amazement of the beauty and grandeur of this world of which man can just form a faint notion …

The right to search for truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true.

Einstein knew that the world is not pure. The United States he lived in was deeply flawed, but he knew there were places in the world far worse than this place. He knew he might not be free to choose where to live.

How do you suppose he would feel about today’s America?

Josh Rosenau says that while we’re all focused on the big political stage, extremists are making their move at the local level:

One of the great ironies of politics is that the most local offices, the ones that ought to be most responsive to constituent needs, are often the least-known. Presidential elections are hotly debated, even in a state like Kansas where the outcome is fore-ordained. But a local or state school board election can be decided by a few hundred votes, yet draws substantially less interest. That apathy towards local races has made them prime targets for extremists and ideologues…

A disturbing number of local extremists wind up in Congress. Time to start paying a lot more attention.

Respectful Insolence insults chimpanzees.

Ed Brayton has a number of videos of musical comedian Roy Zimmerman. Here’s one of them:

More at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Guess who:

Our men and women in uniform love their country more than their comfort. They have never failed us, and we must not fail them. But the best intentions and the highest morale are undermined by back-to-back deployments, poor pay, shortages of spare parts and equipment, and rapidly declining readiness.

… these are signs of a military in decline and we must do something about it. The reasons are clear. Lack of equipment and material. Undermaning of units. Overdeployment. Not enough time for family. Soldiers who are on food stamps, and soldiers who are poorly housed.

That was candidate George W. Bush back on August 21, 2000.

Now he threatens to veto bills calling for the troops to be fully trained and equipped when they ship out to Iraq.

If the Democrats had a time machine and could bring the George W. Bush of 2000 into the present day, they might suppose he would switch parties to join the chorus of voices criticising the way this administration has failed our military. But they would be disappointed. The Bush of 2000 was only kidding when he said “we must not fail them.”

Surely the total disaster of this administration isn’t something that happens by accident.

(Via Crooks and Liars.)

Al-Jazeera television is an influential voice around the world, but the English language version is difficult to find it on cable or satellite TV here in the Land of the Free. Conservative groups have pressured satellite systems and cable operators not to carry the channel.

U.S. Navy Captain Frank Pascual, part of CENTCOM’s Dubai Media Team, thinks this is a mistake. On the PBS program Frontline, he said:

I’ve never been afraid of ideas. And I have no fear that any ideas brought through journalism to the United States would be something that would so harm us that we not only can’t survive it, but can’t learn something from it and do better. And it’s [the Middle East] a part of the world we need to do better in.

The problem with ideas is that they get people thinking. And once you get Americans thinking, this Administration and the rubber-stamp Republicans in Congress don’t have a chance.

Madeleine Albright last night on the Colbert Report:

I understand that there are 100 million Americans who believe in the Rapture … and that they believe that the end of the world will come that way, but Armageddon is not exactly a foreign policy.

I remember when the government worked hard to prevent the world from ending… just yet, anyway. This administration is full of bold new ideas.

Via Slashdot, voting machine manufacturer Diebold is suing Massachusetts for picking a competitor’s product over their own.

Diebold Election Systems Inc., one of the country’s largest manufacturers of voting machines, is scheduled to argue in court today that the Office of the Secretary of State wrongly picked another company to supply thousands of voting machines for the disabled.

Diebold says it will ask a judge to overturn the selection of AutoMARK, a Diebold business competitor, because the office of Secretary of State William F. Galvin failed to choose the best machine.

…

[A lawyer representing Diebold] said Diehold was so stunned it did not get the contract that it now believes “it’s worth the time and money” of going to court to challenge the contract’s award, even though the company at this stage has no hard evidence of unfair treatment.

…

“We want a judge to either order the contract awarded to Diebold, based on his review of the proposals, but if he does not want to go that far, to at least order a reopening of the competition,” he said.

Weisberg said the company is not alleging any improprieties by the secretary of state’s office. Instead, it is saying the office acted in good faith but made a mistake in the selection.

This isn’t Diebold’s first controversy. For example, a former CEO raised campaign money for George W. Bush and sent out fundraising letters saying he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president” in 2004.

Looks like the paranoiacs were right. If Diebold thinks the wrong candidate has been chosen, it will stop at nothing to change the vote.

Wired has a couple “Get a Mac” parody ads from software company Novell, promoting Linux.

Via This Modern World: aren’t you glad we have an “fair and balanced” alternative to the old, biased news media?

I grew up mostly in Bellefontaine, Ohio, about sixty miles northwest of Columbus.

It was a quiet little town. We would get excited whenever Bellefontaine was mentioned on one of the Dayton or Columbus TV stations — that was the Big Time! — and frustrated if they pronounced it Bell-fon-TAYNE. We pronounced it Bell-FOUN-tin.

We were proud of our little town. We had the first concrete street in America — a test of whether concrete made sense as a paving material — and the shortest street in the world. (Wikipedia says the “shortest street” claim is in dispute.)

Bellefontaine is near the highest point in Ohio — which is also the highest point between the Allegheny and the Rocky Mountains. When I lived there, the two local radio stations were WOHP (Ohio’s Highest Point) and WTOO (Top Of Ohio), so you can tell we were proud of that, too.

The Bellefontaine Opera House opened in 1880, and when I was growing up I was told that, in its time, many prominent performers had played there, including the great W.C. Fields.

But maybe I got that last part wrong.

I just got this collection of W.C. Fields movies and watched The Old Fashioned Way. Except for an early train sequence, the whole movie is set in Bellefontaine, Ohio. Fields is The Great McGonigle, head of a theatrical troupe who perform at the Bellefontaine Opera House. I thought it might be a Bellefontaine in some other state, or a purely imaginary Bellefontaine, but the address on a letter delivered to McGonigle at the end of the movie removed all doubt.

What a surprise! What a thrill! I’m sitting on Top of Ohio! This is the Big Time!

I’m only sorry that, through the whole movie, everybody except one Pullman porter pronounced it Bell-fon-TAYNE.

Drat!