[Hat Tip: Jennifer Smith]
On Tuesday night I went to a meeting of Liberals in my riding and heard Michael Ignatieff speak.Canada, with its polyglot population and its military fighting fundamentalism in Afghanistan, is more interested in Middle East conflicts than it is able to influence them. At best it can exert pressure on all sides not to reduce future peace prospects by making the immediate situation worse.Sounds good to me.
What's possible is relatively straightforward. Canada should be as forceful in holding Israel accountable for its actions as Hamas. And when the shooting stops it should invigorate honest-broker efforts to address the inequities and injustices that inevitably spawn violence.
While no panacea for a conflict layered in complexity, it would at least reaffirm values and principles that in the past informed Canadian Middle East policy. Beyond Israel's security, they include its legitimate expectation to live without fear and the countervailing requirement that Palestinians be released from decades of bondage in their own land.
Not taking sides does not mean not taking a stand. Unequivocal support for Israelis and their safety does not require equivocation on Palestinian human rights and political freedom.
Canada can best serve Israelis and Palestinians by finding its voice when it's time to say "enough."
1. I'm also a fan of Susan Sarandon
"for their discoveries relating to chemical transmission of nerve impulses"
Sir Henry Hallett Dale (1875 - 1968) and Otto Loewi (1873 - 1961) won the Noble Prize in 1936 for discovering the role of chemicals, especially acetycholine, in transmitting nerve impulses. It was generally thought that impulses in the nerves act directly on the muscles or glands bringing about a change in their activity. But as early as 1904, Elliott presented a different interpretation. From the medulla of the adrenal glands, which, as embryonic development shows, is related with the sympathetic nervous system, a substance can be produced, i.e. adrenaline, the effect of which is remarkably similar to that produced by increased activity in the sympathetic system. Elliott therefore supposed that the impulses in the sympathetic nerves produced a release of adrenaline in the nerve endings which would then be the real vehicles of the stimulation effect. Ten years later, Dale published a comprehensive investigation of another substance, acetylcholine, for which he found a corresponding conformity with the effect of the parasympathetic stimulation. As, however, at that time acetylcholine had not been met with in the body, there was not sufficient basis for a discussion as to whether it normally transmitted impulses.
The images of the Nobel Prize medals are registered trademarks of the Nobel Foundation (© The Nobel Foundation). They are used here, with permission, for educational purposes only.
[Photo Credits: Henry Hallett Dale: Jamd; Otto Loewi: ©Copyright Encyclopedia of Austria]
Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. [...] What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?The answer, by the way, is "yes." Mary will learn something when she actually experiences how photons of different wavelengths impinge upon her retina and are interpreted by her brain.
Falling into a pit may be a much better analogy for evolution than adaptive peaks and climbing Mt. Improbable. To find out why read Chris Nedin's blog Ediacaran [Climbing Pit Improbable].
"The bad news is that God does not exist. The good news is that you do not need him."[Hat Tip: Friendly Atheist]
Discount Thoughts has posted a wonderful description of how we taste the glutamate in monosodium glutamate [How we taste umami]. The taste is called "umami" and it's distinct from the four standard tastes of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. 
If you can't identify the organism in the photograph then read The Beautiful Angel of Death on Catalogue of Organisms. 
ScienceOnline '09 is being held in the Research Triangle, North Carolina (USA) this weekend. For those of you who aren't familiar with the region, the "triangle" consist of Chapel Hill, Raleigh, and Durham. I've spent a lot of time there over the past 25 years but unfortunately I can't make it this weekend.
Some of you may not recognize "laggania." It's Laggania cambria, one of several species related to Anomalocaris. Collectively they are known as Anomalocarids. 
Anomalocaris and Laggania were among the species made famous by Stephen Jay Gould in his excellent book Wonderful Life. Gould pointed out that these species so not fit neatly into any of the existing phyla, although they have some of the characteristics of arthropods and onychophora (velvet worms).The Burgess Shale includes a range of disparity in anatomical design never again equaled, and not matched today by all the creatures in the world's oceans. The history of multicellular life has been dominated by decimation of a large initial stock, quickly generated by the Cambrian explosion. The story of the last 500 million years has featured restriction following by proliferation within a few stereotyped designs, not general expansion of range and increase in complexity as our favored iconography, the cone of increasing diversity, implies. Moreover, the new iconography of rapid establishment and later decimation dominates all scales, and seems to have the generality of a fractal pattern.Scientists have been chipping away at Gould's thesis over the years since the publication of Wonderful Life in 1989. Several problematic species have been reliably assigned to existing phyla and others have been tentatively squeezed into the standard animal phyla. The goal is to discredit the idea that life was more diverse (disparate) during the Cambrian and the conclusion that the evolution of animals is characterized by the extinction of major lines.
1. Fossil animals for each letter of the alphabet.
[Hat Tip: P (pteraspis) Z (zalambalestis) Myers]
Blogger has finally fixed the problems with RSS feeds. As I mentioned earlier [Trouble with Blogger] this is a problem that the blogger team seem to have created back on December 19th. It was fixed on January 9th—21 days later.
