Pineview Elementary school in Reedsburg, Wisconsin has a traditional “Wacky Week” and on the Friday of this week they encourage the kids to dress up as members of the opposite sex or senior citizens.

Well, wind of this outrageous display of disgustingnes this prompted rage from a Christian radio group, Crossroads in Milawaukee (which is syndicated across the state). They were pissed off because this elementary school was apparently promoting alternative lifestyles with this wacky day.

“We believe it’s the wrong message to send to elementary students,” said Jim Schneider, the network’s program director. “Our station is one that promotes traditional family values. It concerns us when a school district strikes at the heart and core of the Biblical values. To promote this to elementary-school students is a great error.”

Following the program the school started getting angry calls. Not surprisingly the school claimed that promoting the transgendered lifestyle was not their intent, but rather something FUN for the kids to do.

The kids picked the idea themselves, and now the theme will no longer be tolerated or done again at the school. What I absolutely hate about this is that the kids who may have caught wind of the situation will now think that the way you dress defines you as a person. Or that transgenderism is wrong. I think they need to make me the president or boss or whatever of this school district for a week so we can have a pride week and the kids can learn all about different sexualities, dressing how they want and taking pride in everything they do.

Then I’ll take on the christians. *growls* bring it!

<3 

I think my favorite thing about this playoff season is that Toronto didn’t make it. *giggles* … One side of me likes it because I hate the leafs, but also… I don’t have to see all my friends get their hopes up and then have them crash down when Toronto gets kicked out 2nd or 3rd round. Now they know… it’s just not going to happen. And probably never will again. I think this is the 52nd year since Toronto has won a cup. *sorry, i was wrong, it’s only been 41 years, but they have won it the 3rd most times in the league. Colorado won it twice… that’s 16% of their years in the league where as Toronto, even with 21 wins sits at  23%, and for a lot of those years there were only like 5 other teams to go up against… my point here is… Toronto sucks.* The last time the Avs won it? 2001. Delicious.

Anyway - I’ve been following hockey in the time that I have, but haven’t actually watched any games this season (I know…) And I’m still amused by the “shitty” teams now being in the top 10 simply because of the cap. That cap changed so much. But Detroit and Montreal are still the top 2 (as it sits now) …. I’m not so sure anything can really bring them down. Dallas and Colorado aren’t as high as I’d like them to be, but I still heart them.

Last night I sat in on a really good discussion with my parental units and a few of their friends. I meant to come down and start writing about it but I drank a lot of wine and watched Sex and the City instead. I will write about it after I get home from work tonight. It’s good. I promise.

WOO! GO AVS! Forsy was a star last night

Katie = Livid. A U.S funded health search engine blocked the word “abortion” because they’re crazy christians who think that 4 cells has a soul. It is the largest database on reproductive health and by blocking abortion they have hidden over 250 000 results. They do, however, suggest dancing around the issue and trying to find information on abortion by using terms such as “coat hanger” and “evil baby eating atheists”.

“The main function of their site is keyword search, and if you use a phrase that contains the word ‘abortion,’ it ignores it,” notes Melissa Just, the library director at the cancer research institute and hospital named City of Hope in Duarte, California. Just followed the conversation on a listserv and said she was outraged when she found out about the censorship incident.

“Even if you were trying to make an argument to someone that abortion is a bad idea for them — whether it’s a health risk, or you’re concerned about their mental well being, you wouldn’t be able to find articles about your claim,” she notes. “It’s shutting off both the pro and the con access.”

Here is the e-mail exchange with the librarian who discovered the loss of the term.

Larry Moran has made a very depressing post on all the creationists that are at my school. It’s sad how many there are, really. Check this:

 David K.Y. Chiu is Professor of Computing and Information Science and Professor of Biophysics Interdepartmental Group. He has a Ph.D. in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo (Canada).

Professor Chiu is head of the Pattern Learning Research Group. Most of his recent papers have to do with recognizing patterns in bioinformatics data.

Durston, K.K., D.K.Y. Chiu, D.L. Abel and J.T. Trevors (2007)doi:10.1186/1742-4682-4-47]

Measuring the functional sequence complexity of proteins”, Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling 4:47. [
Chiu, D.K.Y. and K. Zhang (2007) Biomolecular data analysis: a post-genomic reflection. Biomolecular Engineering, 24:319-320.

Chiu, D.K.Y. and Y. Wang (2006) Multipattern consensus regions in multiple aligned protein sequences and their segmentation. EURASIP Journal on Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, Vol.2006:1-8.

Ma, P.C.H., K.C.C. Chan, X. Yao and Chiu, D.K.Y. (2006) An evolutionary clustering algorithm for gene expression microarray data analysis. IEEE Trans. on Evolutionary Computation 10:296-314.

Hwang, C., Chiu, D.K.Y. and Sohn, I. (2005) Analysis of exon structure using PCA and ICA of short-time Fourier transform. L. Wang, K. Chen, and Y.S. Ong (Eds.): ICNC LNCS 3611, pp.306-315, 2005, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.(also Second Intern. Conf. on Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery, joint ICNC’05-FSKD’05, 27-29 Aug. 2005, Changsha, China.)

Durston, K. and Chiu, D.K.Y. (2005) A functional entropy model for biological sequences. in supplementary volume of the journal, Dynamics of Continuous, Discrete and Impulsive Systems, Series B, 2005 (also Proc. 4th Intern. Conf. on Engineering Applications and Computational Algorithms), pp.722-725.

Holy moly. I guess Duston is our “big one” and he’s actually the nicest person I’ve ever spoken to. I’m sure once we “got into it” he wouldn’t be so “nice”. But from what I can tell he’s a perfectly awesome guy (almost as awesome as Dr. Shallit… who I have to mention again… was the BEST speaker I’ve ever heard. Seriously.)

I ran into my favorite creationist today, Andrew Middleton - a main player in our “C4C group… I don’t think he likes me very much, and I think he got my university e-mail suspended. LAME. (I sent an e-mail out to his entire mailing list asking them to come out for the Larry Moran event… they didn’t look too highly upon that, apparently. Whoops.)

My worry is that with these creationists getting degrees that soon my school will become a joke in terms of academics - hopefully I graduate and get into a good grad school before then. *sigh*

Apparently I’m sending mixed messages to people. First I say I’m not a fan of Richard Dawkins and then go on raving about how I’m an out loud atheist.

I’m not about to go and say that all people who believe in God are stupid like Brian Sapient, Richard Dawkins or PZ would. I don’t appreciate or respect the way that Dawkins speaks about religious people. I live with two fantastic people who are religious. I work with an incredibly kind and intelligent girl who is christian.

I am no more intelligent now than I was when I was christian. For all intents and purposes - I haven’t really changed. I still abide by the rules I was taught while I was a christian, because they’re pretty moral and make a lot of sense - they are things that people really wouldn’t argue with in general. My community has changed from Sheridan United Chruch or Campus For Christ to the Center For Inquiry, University of Guelph Skeptics and the Freethought Association of Canada.

I guess I lucked out in that I was born into a very liberal christian family - rather than a conservative one, which I feel is where I would struggle more with adapting to the idea of respecting everyone and their choices.

I just don’t believe in God. In any sort of definition. My step-dad often pulls out the “reason is your god” line on me (that which you hold highest), but I don’t think it’s right for someone else to define for me what God is in such a …vague and weird way. …What if I’m a biologist and hold mitochondria in the highest regard in my life? Does Paul then get to deem mitochondria my god? Something just isn’t right about that.

Anyway - I’m an atheist. I don’t hate christians. I don’t like people who don’t respect christians who are perfectly open minded - like my parents and some of my friends. I will forever be thankful to my mother for bringing me into a family where I was raised with the option of being religious - but given the resources and knowledge to question.

In other news - I am sooo tired. Something about being at work from like 6 am - 5 pm just doesn’t sit right with me. I am also the new vice president for the Freethought Association Of Canada - which is now a charitable group. Woo. I’ll be more excited after I get some food into me.

Also - I don’t think I’m sexual active enough to date boys… they’re always so ready to go, when most of the time I’d rather watch American History X or talk about philosophy… or math. … or math and logic fused together - mmm. mathematical logic > sex.