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© 2008 Adam Barrowman. You can't save your poetry, so be sure to do a screen capture. Or just write it down!

My daughter has an eye for art:

The painting below is Golden Calf 2, 1985, by Irving Norman. A recent post on Massimo Pigliucci's blog Rationally Speaking proposed a "classification of types of commitment, from the most ludicrous to the most defensible". Pigliucci started with "commitment to a symbol", and he didn't pull any punches: This is the stupidest form of commitment ever invented by human beings. I’m referring to people who “pledge allegiance” to flags, or who worship religious symbols of torture, such as crosses. It seems to me that nationalism and religion in particular are among the worst causes of human misery, and that more generally it is profoundly irrational and highly immoral to “commit” to a symbol for the symbol’s sake. Flag burning, or making sculptures of crucified frogs, while not acts I have ever actually engaged in, ought to be protected and even encouraged forms of free speech. He followed this with some interesting thoughts on "commitment to an institution...

Thursday, December 4, internationally renowned peace and justice activist, Senator Douglas Roche, O.C., former Canadian Ambassador to the UN for Disarmament, will speak at a special public meeting in Ottawa. The venue is Southminster United Church, corner of Bank St. and Aylmer Ave., (just South of the Bank St. Bridge over the canal). His topic will be “The Human Right to Peace”—the title of one of his recently published books. (Incidentally, I looked up some reviews of the book: here and here .)

Fascination with identical twins goes back a long way: think of the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, and the astrological symbol Gemini. Our modern understanding of genetics has given us a scientific perspective on identical twins, and yet it too is accompanied by a mythology. By virtue of being genetically identical, identical twins would seem to provide an ideal source of evidence concerning the heritability of traits. Since identical twins share physical characteristics, is it not conceivable that they also share traits such as intelligence and personality? There is, however, a fly in the ointment: the influence of the environment in which twins are raised. While eye colour has a purely genetic basis, couldn't intelligence depend on how twins are jointly brought up? There are two ways around this obstacle. Twins: Take 1 The first depends on a rather unlikely occurrence: identical twins separated at birth. Which brings us, my dear Watson (and Crick) to the curious case of Sir...