Please allow me to assure you that with this entry, I will not be veering into regular essays on the trappings of banal domesticity. However, I think this is a damn fine minestrone. I typically make it during the cooler months of the year, so as a nod to the recent autumnal weather here in the central regions of the Gaaah-duhn State, I figured I’d toss it out here on the Refuge
Buon appetito, you bonobos!
This minestrone soup recipe produces something more akin to a stew rather than a mere soup. It has a rustic, robust yet nourishing and comforting quality to it, and for this reason, I often make this soup as a gift for parents of a new baby, and also enjoy serving it to good friends and family. Thus making this minestrone, albeit rather involved, is a labor of love.
I have included suggestions for a vegetarian version in the notes following the recipe.

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At Retrospectacle, Shelley talks about “gene doping,” expected to complement pharmacological and physiological methods of shadily gaining an edge in sports in the near future.
At Respectful Insolence, Orac bemoans the Discovery Institute’s gleeful support of anti-evolution doctors, who constitute an almost negligible fraction of physicians worldwide. As Orac points out, people often forget that there are nuts in every field, and emphasizing that they’re a minority — which scientists are obligated to so — does just what the DI hopes: It not only sows doubt in the minds of a credulous pubpic, but gets scientists agitated at other scientists.
At Corpus Callosum, Joseph notes that China’s government has banned reincarnation. No word on how they plan to monitor or enforce this.
At Blog around the Clock, Bora posts a classic — his 2005 scholarly dissection of an idiot’c claim that circadian rhythms constitute evidence against evolution.
And at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, Ed Brayton provides coverage of SciBling (and other science blogger) activity at the Yearly Kos conference.

A study published in Science suggests that early dinosaurs, rather than quickly replacing their “dinosauromorph” ancestors 200 to 230 million years ago in the late Triassic period as accepted previously, actually lived alongside them for many millions of years.
Scientists analyzed fossils from New Mexico’s Hayden Quarry, part of the Upper Triassic Chinle Formation, and on the basis of anatomic findings concludes that the transition from dinosaur-like creatures to their bona fide dinosaur descendants was gradual, extending for 15 to 20 million years and was probably diachronous at different paleolatitude

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Yeah, that looks as morbid as I thought it would.
Former Major League All-Star and relief pitcher Rod Beck was found dead in his home outside Phoenix on Sunday. He was 38.

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There’s been ample chatter on these blogs lately about the need for the proper “framing” of science by scientists — i.e., the requirement that scientists themselves present their findings and ideas in a maximally user-friendly way so that the general public more easily understands pertinent concepts and, so the thinking apparently goes, more readily accepts them.
Maybe I need to bone up on this a little more, but this seems like a crock of shit to me.
The problem isn’t that people can’t understand the basic concepts underlying evolution, greenhouse gases and cosmology; folks don’t need to be able to solve triple integrals in their heads in order to grok one of the zillions of available science-museum or picture-book presentations on global warming, natural selection, and the like. The problem is that too many American citizens are systematically trained to mistrust scientists by self-interested preachers, greedy plunderers of natural resources, and the elected officials abetting both parties. As a result, mere understanding doesn’t imply acceptance, as some appear to believe — not by a long shot.

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…but on life support.
Sadly, the Frinksters and their fearsome pants-armadillos are entubated and awaiting a court order.
Frink Tank filled a much needed niche in the science blogs arena, and in fact they were part of this cozy community until they were sent packing into exile for something unspeakable.
A word from the Frinks:

beep – beep – beep
FrinkTank is currently in a persistent vegetative state. We’re not pulling the plug, and our archives are fully viewable for all (eleven) of our fans to see, but the appearance of new content in the near future is about as likely as a postmortem communique from Terri Schiavo.

Fellahs, I will drop by every week, then once a month, and then maybe twice a year, and talk one-sidely to you about my two dozen cats and the latest gossip from my pinochle club, hoping that you can hear me, and I’ll leave grocery-store flowers by your bedside. Just don’t give up the ghost.
Signed, one of your eleven fans,
Doc Bushwell
FrinkTank’s archive is still extant so be sure to check the still twitching body out.

Shelley at Retrospectacle tagged the Chimp Refuge for a Thinking Blogger Award Hey, thanks, Shelley, but when you mention “scathing wit,” we know you’re talking about Kev and Jim because women just aren’t funny.
Anyway, the rules for the tag you’re it blogger game are to be found here at The Thinking Blog
Here are the rules (via the Thinking Blog – see link):
Should you choose to participate, please make sure you pass this list of rules to the blogs you are tagging. I thought it would be appropriate to include them with the meme.
The participation rules are simple:
1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog – see link to Thinking Blog).
And below the fold….

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After all my previous squawking about women reading science fiction and fantasy, OK, I mean hottus scientificas chicas who do or do not read the genre, I can’t believe I missed this. Well, maybe I can. I am a near geriatric, after all.
Here are the various responses from my SciBlings: Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last Fifty Years.
The list is below the fold, and the books which I have read are in bold text: 36 of 50, if I counted right. My brother, 10 years my senior, is an avid science fiction and fantasy fan, and not only had many of these books in paperback form, but also pulp mags like Isaac Asimov’s SF & Fantasy and Analog. As a kid and teenager, I devoured the stuff, and I kept it up through grad school & my post-doc.
The majority of my science fiction and fantasy reading occured between age 9 to 35, and since then, I read the genre sporadically. My mom was good friends with Neal Stephenson’s late grandmother (or aunt, something like that) so she makes sure I read his work.
I recently re-read The Silmarillion by Tolkien. This post-modern reading from my perspective as a career-scientist and an atheist was revealing, and the subject of another post. Let’s just say that Feanor, the Elven-smith, transformed from a scary pain in the ass in my 1977-1980ish readings of The Silmarillion to my long suffering scientist-hero in 2006.

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That’s not an introduction to another one-sided exposition by a blogger, it’s the title of a Web page by University of Virginia physics professor Lou Bloomberg. It’s an impressive repository of questions about the physical explanations for a host of everyday phenomena running the gamut from the intracacies of microwave ovens to building an electricity generator from scratch.
Bloomberg has also written a book dealing with the same more or less infinite range of topics. Judging from the formidable number of questions and answers, many of you have probably already seen the site.

While we’re on the topics of sports and dreams, Stanford graduate Ryan Hall ran 59:43 at the U.S. Half-Marathon Championship in Houston this morning, lopping an amazing 1:12 off Mark Curp’s American record. Curp’s mark of 1:00:55, set at the Philadelphia Distance Run, had stood for an equally amazing 21-plus years. Hall’s time for 13.109 miles averages out to just over four minutes, thirty-three seconds per mile.

The 24-year-old Hall, who has yet to run a marathon but plans to compete at the U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon in November, is an immediate threat to every American mark from 10 kiliometers up and is currently the only male with the potential to run with the best distance runners on Earth. Hall already held the American record for 20 kilometers (12.43 miles), having run 57:54 in Belgium last October. Although that mark broke the previous one by 48 seconds, Hall likely passed through 20K — a distance not contested nearly as often as the half-marathon — this morning in about 56:30. In December, Hall’s younger brother Chad won the Foot Locker National High-School Cross Country Championships in San Diego, making him one of the better runners in the family.

My neighborhood has a plethora of interesting Christmas decorations, including one yard entirely consumed by an intriguingly obscene ensemble consisting of Santa and crew whooping it up in a #48 Team Lowe’s NASCAR Chevy and a bevy of elves monopolizing a chairlift or gondola-like conveyance, all beneath a porch flag claiming allegiance to the hapless Miami Dolphins. Everyone around here sports super-sized inflatable decorations clearly purchased from Wal-Mart, but at least these seem as varied as they do gaudy. Cool stuff, really. This time of year brings out the chimp in all of us, but I do like the sights. I’d take some picture but I seem to have left my digital camera — as well as most of my motivation to churn out repetitive anti-irrational garbage; I may actually write about, or at least think about, science someday — in the distant time zone to which my holiday travels took me.
All of which brings me directly to my point, which is that someone a few streets over has a real-estate-style sign that reads Christmas is a Birthday. That it is; one of the greatest contributors to the wisdom of humankind was — going by the Julian calendar — born on December 25th and, as you’ve already guessed, his name is…

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No, not that kind.
Yesterday I hacked away at a Kerwin Brown post for about forty-five minutes, a stretch of time that I’ll never get back and should have used to work on any one of at least forty-three tasks of theoretically higher priority than belitting mentally unhinged pseudopundits. After duly saving this post several times as I urged it toward a wildly irrelevant crescendo and finally publishing it, I noticed the usual thirty or so typos and a handful of broken links, and when I went to fix them the server swallowed about the latter one-third of the post. After scowling and sneering for a better part of a day, I published what remained, sans corrections or further scrutiny, a few minutes ago.
Although I might be able to reproduce the four or five paragraphs the server ate without too much trouble, I’m too lazy and bitter and will take the glitch as a sign that God wants me to quit fiddlyfrigging around here and blog about science topics. (I could assume with equal confidence that this disruption to the normally unchecked flow of my verbal shitstream is a sign that I’ve been drinking out of the wrong color of plastic cup all these years, but whatever.) So I’m game for any suggestions. I’m reading a book about the history of the Adirondack Park right now and am therefore in natural-sciences mode, but would be glad to pose as an expert in anything you faithful sickos propose.

Like myriad other normal Americans, my wife and I like to carve what we affectionately call punkins the weekend before the empty hotdog holiday (AKA Hollow-weenie). While my wife just sort of dives right in, hacking out gourd-guts with a butcher knife and great zeal, I tend toward the more methodical, usually sketching a face on my favorite orange orb with a pen before picking up a paring knife. In this year’s rendition, my happy punkin is giving the googley-eyes to my wife’s somewhat twisted rendition of the classical jack.

A friend of mine is putting on a cross-country race and has designed a logo to put on the official race hat. I think the red letters should be changed to orange ones, as I like the orange-white-black thing, but my color preferences obviously may not represent whatever the norm is. Please add your comments on this below, unless you’re blind (I’m working on a braille interface).

Who says NASCAR has more potential for dramatic crashes than running?

The Chicago Marathon, one of the world’s premier 26.21875-mile footraces, was the site of one of the more bizarre and dramatic victories in recent memory yesterday morning when winner Robert Cheruiyot, after outsprinting Daniel Njenga in the final stretch, slipped at the finish line and smacked his head on the pavement (video). He woke up in the hospital $140,000 richer for his trouble; presumably, race organizers will in the future more carefully consider the wisdom of placing a slick-looking but slick logo in runners’ path on a rainy day.

In other running news this week, the only female president in the history of the Boston Athletic Association, Marja Bakker, died last week of cancer at 59.

Bakker served as the BAA’s invited athlete liaison in the early part of this decade, when I was busy using her employer’s pride and joy — perhaps the most famous road race in the world — as an annual locus for pursuing my hobby to both its most soul-searing and most fruitful ranges of perambulatory performance. My best time to date, 2:24:17, was accomplished on Boston’s storied route.

2001 proved to be perhaps my halcyon year in competitive distance running, as I was the top New England finisher and the seventh American at the Boston Marathon that April. That November, largely on the basis of being a local, I was selected to represent the U.S. at Boston’s sister city race in Japan, the Kyoto City Half Marathon, the following February. I was in the mountains of New Mexico at the time, largely isolated from phone and e-mail contact; Marja personally did her best to track me down; somehow she did, but unfortunately not in time for me to accept the invitation.
Largely thanks to her efforts, the next U.S. Women’s Olympic Marathon Team Trials will be held for the first time in Boston on April 20, 2008 — what would have been Marja’s sixty-first birthday.