on the enormity of grammatical abuses

Must I declare a national grammatical emergency? As with Elijah in the wilderness, it seems Jezebel has whacked all of the nation's copyeditors and I alone am left. At least once a week, my browsing eyes are violated by the misuse of the word "enormity" where the word "enormous", or some form of it, is thought to belong.

The issue here is that "enormous" is an adjective, and in those all-too-frequent cases in which a noun is called for, lazy writers cheaply noun-ify the adjective. This practice is even odiouser than lazily adverbifying an adjective. (See what I mean?)

The problem is that "enormity" already has a well-established definition. An "enormity" is a monstrous injustice, a grave moral wickedness, an ugly sort of travesty. Think of it this way:

• Hurricane Katrina was enormous.
• The aftermath of Katrina was widely regarded as an enormity.

The natural noun form of "enormous" should rightly be "enormousness", but "enormousness" sounds too unwieldy and low-class; our aforementioned lazy writers substitute "enormity" as a pretentious shortcut to bolster their weak style. But what of "immensity"? Is that inadequate? How utterly ironic, in my ever-so-humble opinion.

Be not deceived, dear reader: the definition matters. These two possible choices of definition for "enormity" are nearly impossible to differentiate based on context alone. Consider the following: "She was stunned by the sheer enormity of the thing." Two quite different meanings arise, do they not?

(For the inevitable exception to the rule, I suggest the following: The healthcailoutulus bill was an enormity. Works on multiple levels, that.)

physics, helium balloons, 6-year-olds, and Lawn-Chair Larry

PHYSICS ALERT! PHYSICS ALERT!! (I post about actual physics so rarely that I thought a disclaimer warranted. But don't worry - this is a high-school-level problem.)

Unless you've been hiding under a rock for the past few days, you heard about the reality-TV-"star" family drama this week in which 6-year-old Falcon Heene was alleged by his 9-year-old brother to have flown away in a homemade helium balloon. (Yes, his name was Falcon; you can't make this stuff up. Well, I couldn't, anyway - I won't speak for you.) The story exploded when the balloon finally fell to earth and rescuers found no one inside. After a long search, the boy was found hiding in the attic over the family garage; he had never been in the balloon.

Reporters were admittedly unsure whether the boy was actually in the balloon as it rose to 7000 feet and drifted some 50 miles. It seems, however, that no one in most newsrooms or in the police department tried to actually figure out, scientifically, whether the boy could have been in the balloon at all and have it fly. Surely no blame should be placed on the police; they are obligated to act to prevent the worst-case scenario. That said, the calculation isn't terribly difficult, and is worth noting for future reference. In this case, the calculation doesn't give a definitive answer, at least not with the information some physicist on the other side of the country reading a sketchy AP article has access to. But we can draw a few conclusions.

Here's how to determine whether the balloon could lift the boy. There are two forces at work in the problem: 1) gravity pulling down, and 2) the buoyant force of the atmosphere pushing up the less dense helium-filled balloon. It's really this simple; if the gravitational weight force of the boy + balloon is greater than the buoyant force, he won't get off the ground. If the buoyant force is bigger, he flies. Here's what you need to know for the calculation:

• The weight of the boy: A typical 6-year-old probably weighs 50 pounds. For calculations, it's more convenient to use metric (SI) units, which in this case means that the boy's mass is 22.5 kg (kilograms) and the gravitational force on the boy is 222 N (Newtons).
  
• The weight of the balloon: This is something we don't know, but can estimate. The balloon's weight comes from the Mylar and the carriage. We'll come to this again in a few minutes.
  
• The volume of helium in the balloon: We know this because we know that the balloon was "saucer-shaped", about 20 feet wide and 5 feet tall. A saucer shape is mathematically approximated by an "oblate ellipsoid", which is just a squashed sphere. The formula for the volume of an oblate ellipsoid is V = 4/3 * pi * a^2 *b, where a and b are the half-width along the long and short dimensions respectively. Here a = 10 ft and b = 2.5 ft. Plugging in these numbers, we compute a volume of 880 cubic feet of helium. In metric units, that's 24.9 cubic meters.
  
• The densities of helium and air: We know this from the Internet, or from a chemistry textbook. The density of helium is about 0.18 kg/m^3, and the density of air is about 1.25 kg/m^3. Helium is much less dense than air; that's why it floats - or really, why the air sinks around it. (Interestingly, the buoyant force is just gravity in disguise.)

To calculate the buoyant force, we use the famous relation from Isaac Newton: F = ma (that's force = mass x acceleration, where in this case the acceleration is that due to gravity, 9.8 m/s^2.) We calculate the mass by multiplying the difference between the densities of helium and air (1.07 kg/m^3) by the volume of helium in the balloon (24.9 m^3), and we find the force by multiplying by 9.8 m/s^2. Multiplying these three numbers together, we get 261 kg*m/s^2, which is the same as 261 N (Newtons, the SI unit of force, was named for Isaac for obvious reasons).

We already know that the weight-force of the boy is about 222 N. With just the weight of the boy accounted for, there would be about 40 N of lift force left over in this equation, because 261 N - 222 N = 39 N. To translate back into English units, that's just about 9 pounds.

That means that if the Mylar balloon and whatever carriage or box the boy would have been sitting in weighed only ten pounds, the boy would not leave the ground.

Keep in mind a couple of things: First, if you saw the balloon on the TV, it looked like the balloon wasn't quite fully inflated. This was probably because it had a small leak that allowed helium to escape so the balloon could descend. However, if the balloon had been filled only to 80% of capacity, it definitely could not have taken off with the boy on board. (Tip o' the cap to a chemistry professor friend of mine who commented on Facebook!)

Second, let's assume for the sake of argument that the balloon was full and the box and balloon weighed only five pounds, leaving 4 pounds of lift force (or in SI units, 18 Newtons). We can calculate how fast the boy would have left the ground, again using the equation F = ma. In this case, we know the force (18 N) and the mass (24.9 kg), and we want to know the upward acceleration of the balloon. Rearranging the equation to read a = F/m, we compute a = 0.72 m/s^2.

That means that the boy's speed would increase by 0.72 meters per second every second. So after one second, his upward speed would be 0.72 m/s, which is 1.6 miles per hour - a pretty gentle start. After two seconds, he would be a few feet off the ground and his speed would be 3.2 miles per hour. But after ten seconds, assuming he didn't jump off after two seconds when he realized what was happening, he would be a couple of stories up and going at the healthy rate of 16 miles per hour. (Now, admittedly, we've assumed that the balloon box was overly light in this analysis - but the point is, it doesn't take much of a difference between the boy+balloon weight and the buoyant force to send someone traveling up pretty quickly.)

So to sum up, it's not terribly likely that the boy would be able to float away with that balloon - but it's just close enough to give a police chief heartburn, even if he had done the calculation, in this case.

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One of the reasons why people are inclined to believe that anyone could float away in a balloon is the famous case of Lawn Chair Larry, winner of an Honorable Mention in the Darwin Awards. In 1982, Larry Walters strapped a bunch of weather balloons to his lawn chair and, miscalculating, ended up floating to 16,000 feet and trespassing on LAX Airport airspace! You can read all about it at the links. What I want to point out is that the Darwin Awards write-up is particularly interesting in light of the above calculation - because if you believe what they have to say about the balloons, Larry never would have gotten off the ground.

The Darwin Awards story says that the 45 weather balloons Larry strapped to his chair were 4-foot-diameter balloons. They even calculated for you how many cubic feet of helium one of the balloons contains (33). Here's the problem: If you go through the math, 45 x 33 is 1485 cubic feet, or 42 cubic meters. The buoyant force from 42 cubic meters of helium is 440 N, which in English is 99 pounds. Judging from the picture, Larry was not anorexic. Between him and his chair and his cooler, there had to be at least 200 pounds. There's no way he ever would have left the ground if he had been using 4 foot balloons, much less "taken off like a shot", as the writeup claims.

Here's the mistake: Look at the picture of the chair and the balloons: the balloons were considerably larger than Larry in his chair. This Wired article corrects the record - there were 42 balloons and they were eight feet in diameter. Okay, wrong by a factor of two, no big deal, you say? Wrong! A factor of two in diameter means a factor of eight in volume, and therefore the buoyant force (subtracting 3 balloons) was 740 pounds! Let's calculate the upward acceleration like we did for the boy, assuming Larry + chair weighed 200 pounds: a = F/m = 2402 N / 90 kg = 26.7 m/s^2.

By comparison, the acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 m/s^2, sometimes referred to as 1 "G". So when Larry's friends cut the ropes, he was pulling almost 3 Gs. The Darwin Awards article says "he streaked into the LA sky as if shot from a cannon"; indeed!

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HowStuffWorks has a nice synopsis of helium balloons, too.

UPDATE 10/18: The balloon story is now believed to have been an intentional hoax. One of the reasons that police arrive at this conclusion (aside from the boy's inadvertent confession on Larry King Live) is that, while Falcon weighed only 37 pounds (!), the balloon weighed 18 pounds more than what the publicity-hound Heene dad originally told police. After more precisely measuring how big the balloon is, investigators have concluded that Falcon never could have gotten off the ground after all. Physics 1, Reality TV 0!

the nobel peace prize is officially a joke

Home sick, sleep in, check my email, see the news, shock. And awe.

There's only one possible explanation for this that I can see:

The Nobel Peace Prize must now be the booby prize for missing out on the Olympics.

Okay, okay, seriously: President Obama got the award for not being G. W. Bush. Don't laugh - even the AP thinks so. Check the article:

The award appeared to be a slap at Bush from a committee that harshly criticized Obama's predecessor for his largely unilateral military action in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The Nobel committee praised Obama's creation of "a new climate in international politics" and said he had returned multilateral diplomacy and institutions like the U.N. to the center of the world stage.

Given that, how upset must Hillary Clinton be right about now for losing the nomination?? I wouldn't want to be within 50 miles of D.C. this morning.

(uh, wait. Er...)

(crickets chirping)

And oh-by-the-way, as SNL helpfully noted:

• We're still in Iraq.
• We still haven't figured out Afghanistan.
• Gitmo hasn't been closed.

Imagine what the Norwegians would have done for him if he had closed Guantanamo Bay. Renamed their capital city Obama-lo? Offered him the crown?

The Prime Minister's quote is almost beyond satire:

"The exciting and important thing about this prize is that it's given to someone ... who has the power to contribute to peace," Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said.

Come again? Here's the actual requirement courtesy of Nobelprize.org:

"the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses"

Emphasis mine. See the SNL skit above. Was there nobody else they could have awarded this to? In fact, they've actually not awarded anyone the Prize on 19 different occasions!

Obama hasn't done anything, except give a few international speeches mostly apologizing for America. The Norwegian parliamentary committee failed to follow their own guidelines in handing out this award.

tenets for tenants

It's sad, truly sad, when it takes a grammar mistake in a major online mag to elicit a post here for the first time in months. I first posted this notice on Facebook; today family and friends, tomorrow the world, as I take arms against a sea of troubled verbiage. (My Christmas list this year consists entirely of a blender; the better to mix my metaphors with - I mean, the better with which to mix my metaphors.)

And so it begins.
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I've now seen this mistake twice today: once in a job posting and once in an opinion article. Here we go:

A "tenant" is someone who occupies a dwelling; the usual usage refers to someone who is renting it from a landlord.
A "tenet" is a doctrine, belief, or principle. (That's principle, not principal. I'm not going over that again; you should have learned it the first time.)

To say you wish to hire someone who is "familiar with the tenants of physics and engineering" is to say that you want someone who has merely met the faculty at a research university. In that case, you have first forgotten to capitalize Physics and Engineering as the title of the building, and, secondly, you may have caused consternation among some of the non-tenured faculty by drawing attention to their less-than-permanent employment status.

You may not sleep better knowing this, but you should.
------

The particular mistake occurs here, painfully, just before the end of the first page, in an otherwise well-reasoned article - the first I've seen by a liberal publication acknowledging the legality in principle of the present Honduran administration and questioning the Obama administration's position.

That's all for now - sweet dreams.

Not the face of the movement

I've been wondering whether to say anything about the Perez Hilton beauty pageant scandal. (The scandal is about Hilton's atrocious behavior; it's not about the runner-up contestant.) But Stan has basically said it for me:

As I said, I'm glad that Carrie stood on principle. I don't think she was treated fairly. I am not surprised, but I am disappointed that she has been so abused for stating her opinion. Up to this point I'm with you. But when we begin to see a beauty queen as our best spokesman on the topic of same-sex unions, I have a problem. Congratulations, Carrie, for standing on the truth. Now, can we find a better "front man"?

Yes, please. And don't miss Stan's followup post, either:

One side says, "We are intolerant and judgmental of sin" and the other side says "We are not intolerant or judgmental ... but we hate everything you believe". Which of those is hypocritical? You tell me.

Preaching to myself

As I'm once again in job-search mode, only this time in a much less rosy economic climate, I needed to go back and read my own words today.

Book Lists

National Review Online has linked to a list of the books high school students should supposedly read before graduating. K. J. Lopez has already said she's gotten feedback from folks saying The Great Gatsby doesn't belong on the list. I read Gatsby in ninth grade; the only thing I remember from it is that one of the towns was West Egg. Dumb name, that. A supremely unmemorable book, I recall thinking even as I was reading it. Perhaps I was too young too appreciate it, but I doubt it.

The worst inclusion is the one I read most recently: The Catcher in the Rye. The only reason I finally picked it up last year, to be honest, was that I felt a little like Mel Gibson's character in Conspiracy Theory: it was a classic that everyone had read, except me. I suppose I wanted to feel "normal".

Guess what? Normal sucks. Catcher is a lame excuse to force (or, alternately, allow) high-schoolers to read the F-bomb approximately one thousand times in one hundred pages.

So here are the other ones that I've read: The Bible (duh); Declaration of Independence/Constitution/Gettysburg); Huck Finn (though I preferred Tom Sawyer); Macbeth; The Iliad; Great Expectations; 1984; The Scarlet Letter; Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; Frost's poems; Dickinson's poems; and Machiavelli's Prince. Those are the ones I remember, anyway, and without exception I'd recommend them. I'm still partial to John Wesley's quote regarding The Prince (tip o' the cap to this blogger, who perhaps has been raised on the A Beka Book curriculum, as I was):

“In my passage home [from Scotland], having procured a celebrated book, (the Works of Nicholas Machiavel,) I set myself carefully to read and consider it. I began with a prejudice in his favour, having been informed, he had often been misunderstood, and greatly misrepresented. I weighed the sentiments that were less common; transcribed the passages wherein they were contained; compared one passage with another, and endeavoured to form a cool, impartial judgment. And my cool judgment is, that if all the other doctrines of devils which have been committed to writing since letters were in the world were collected together in one volume, it would fall short of this; and, that should a Prince form himself by this book, so calmly recommending hypocrisy, treachery, lying, robbery, oppression, adultery, whoredom, and murder of all kinds, Domitian or Nero would be an angel of light, compared to that man.”

UPDATE: Jeff the Baptist linked - thanks!

Numberless enviro news makes me skeptical

AP IMPACT: Tons of released drugs taint US water

I don't doubt that having certain levels of certain chemicals in wastewater streams is a bad thing. But stories like this (linked by Instapundit) do not prove that those levels exist. (To his credit, Prof. Reynolds says so, too.) Furthermore, the numbers they do present occasionally undermine their narrative. Consider the following:

Two common industrial chemicals that are also pharmaceuticals - the antiseptics phenol and hydrogen peroxide - account for 92 percent of the 271 million pounds identified as coming from drugmakers and other manufacturers. Both can be toxic and both are considered to be ubiquitous in the environment.

Wait a minute - 92% of the load that you're wigging out about consists of antiseptics? And they're ubiquitous in the environment anyway? Color me unimpressed. Two paragraphs later there's this:

Residues are often released into the environment when manufacturing equipment is cleaned.

I suppose they'd rather we leave the toxic stuff in concentrated form on the factory equipment for the workers to get sick on. More:

What's more, because the EPA hasn't concluded at what level, if any, pharmaceuticals are bad for the environment or harmful to people, drugmakers almost never have to report the release of pharmaceuticals they produce.

Since we don't really know what level is harmful to people, and given the dramatic and proven benefits that pharmaceuticals have generally been to human populations, shouldn't the burden of proof be on these advocacy organizations to demonstrate that a given level is toxic?

Another codeine plant, run by Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Noramco Inc., is about seven miles away. A Noramco spokesman acknowledged that the Wilmington, Del., factory had voluntarily tested its wastewater and found codeine in trace concentrations thousands of times greater than what was found in the Delaware River. "The amounts of codeine we measured in the wastewater, prior to releasing it to the City of Wilmington, are not considered to be hazardous to the environment," said a company spokesman.

Classic alarmism. They don't tell us what the absolute levels are in the Delaware River or in the waste stream, or compare those to any known standard or toxicity level. They just insert the entirely plausible statement that the level in the wastewater is THOUSANDS OF TIMES GREATER than the general level, insinuating that THIS IS BAD without ever establishing that as a fact. If you'll pardon the imagery, this is a little bit like complaining that the level of poop in my sewage pipe is THOUSANDS OF TIMES GREATER than the level in the Atlantic Ocean. It may be true, but it's entirely irrelevant.

I'm all for avoiding obvious mistakes by dumping drugs into rivers at concentrations that are known to be harmful to humans, even locally. But I want to see some hard numbers, like, say, the number of gallons of water these 271 million pounds of toxic substances were dumped into, before I'm convinced.

Capacitive Diractance

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present two engineering feats for the ages:

The above technology is based on an older version, seen here:

I can't wait for the 21st century edition. I think there's some serious stimulus opportunities with this technology...

Huh?

Backwards editorial argument of the day:

Finally, an idea that could benefit both Detroit and everyday Americans. We're talking about a cash-for-clunker idea that needs fine tuning but should see fast action in Congress.

The plan calls for government rebates ranging from $3,000 to $5,000 for drivers who turn in older, low-mileage gas hogs. The payments could be used to buy gas-thrifty, newer models, providing an instant boost to automakers.

It's an across-the-board win: Gas guzzling clunkers will be retired, more efficient cars and trucks will take over, and pollution and foreign oil dependency lessened. Detroit stands to collect cash for its assembly-line output instead of begging for another Washington handout.

Um, can somebody explain to me how a $5000 government rebate for trading in your 2006 Hummer fails to qualify as "another Washington handout"?

Term Limits. Term Limits. Term Limits. Term Limits.

Dave Ramsey brings the point home while discussing BonusGate: We desperately need term limits for these clowns in Congress, just as we have for the Presidency. More thoughts:

The Obama administration has been absolutely cowardly over BonusGate, and so has Chris Dodd. Here's the bizarre thing: They were actually right the first time, if you believed their initial alarmist claims about all the bailouts and stimulus stuff. On Wednesday I pointed out to the Power Line guys that Timmy Geithner and Larry Summers had asked Dodd to not restrict the AIG bonuses. Dodd eventually got his story straight (probably from Glenn Greenwald and Jane Hamsher - I wonder if JournoList was involved?) and tried to palm it off on Treasury, who should be taking responsibility with Dodd for approving the contractual bonuses.

But the point is this: The bonuses were apparently the only way to retain the people at AIG who, according to the Obama Administration, were the only ones who could fix this problem. Remind you of a certain Treasury secretary selection process? 'We have to forgive Geithner's tax evasion because he's the only one who can fix our mess.' So if Obama&Co (and Bush&Co, but I repeat myself) were correct about the severity of the situation, how if we let AIG go under then the whole system would come crashing down, then keeping the bonuses was absolutely the right thing to do in order to keep the company that we now own from imploding. And now that the bonuses have become politically unpopular, they don't even have the intestinal fortitude to stick to their economic principles and defend their initial decision (with the possible exception of Summers). Which is another way of saying they don't have any economic principles. And we wonder why investors aren't confident.

Seems like since electing The One, we've gotten a whole slew of The Ones for free. By next year Al Gore ought to have a really interesting take on what e pluribus unum means...

By the way, Chuck Grassley's suicide comments frankly disqualify him from holding high office in this country ever again, as far as I'm concerned. He should go.

John Hinderaker has a good take. So does this Politico writer, who actually noticed the now-controversial clause even if the morons voting on it didn't.

The sad thing is that Obama won't even stick up for his Treasury department, which tells me that he either has no clue what their plan is or doesn't care. If I were feeling cynical, I'd guess that Obama's fine with letting the economy tank so long as it gets his social engineering agenda passed.

Science Vs. Morality: The 4000-Year Test

PJ O'Rourke (referred to ironically by Instapundit as a "noted Christianist") makes a superb point while discussing Obama's doublespeak on embryonic stem cell research:

But, lest anyone think I'm not serious, let me quote with serious revulsion the following passages from the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1911)--that great compendium of all the knowledge science possessed, carefully distinguished from ignorance and misunderstanding, as of a hundred years ago:

[T]he negro would appear to stand on a lower evolutionary plane than the white man, and to be more closely related to the highest anthropoids.

Mentally the negro is inferior to the white.

[A]fter puberty sexual matters take the first place in the negro's life and thought.

The above are quoted--not out of context--from the article titled "Negro" written by Dr. Walter Francis Willcox, chief statistician of the U.S. Census Bureau and professor of social science and statistics at Cornell. I trust I've made my point.

Now let's look at the things morality has known. The Ten Commandments are holding up pretty well. I suppose the "graven image" bit could be considered culturally insensitive. But the moralists got nine out of ten--a lot better than the scientists are doing.

I made a similar point on this blog a long time ago:

On any question involving both ethics and technology, ethical considerations must come first, and must be answered with near-total disregard for technological considerations. When technological issues are treated as more fundamental than ethics, ethics is no longer ethics, but rationalization. Put less abstractly: Any life-and-death ethical answers at which we arrive today must be the same answers we would have come up with 500 or 1000 years ago. Technology must serve ethics, never vice versa.

Nature hears no dissent

The journal Nature declined to print my letter to the editor, so I'm going to post it here for the benefit of my readers. In their polite rejection letter, they claimed that they have to be very selective due to space considerations. That may be, but this week they published four Correspondences compared with last week's dozen or so. All four had to do with science funding levels; none were about embryonic stem cell research, the subject of my letter. First, I quote at length from the letter that merited my response:

...The controversial and moral question of when human life actually begins is the basis of limitations placed on work such as somatic-cell nuclear transfer or the derivation of new cell lines from embryos discarded from in vitro fertilization procedures. On 29 May 2008, the Brazilian Supreme Court approved legislation allowing stem-cell research. One of the arguments for this approval is that embryos that have already been frozen would never be implanted in the uterus.

Although many people affirm that human life begins when the sperm is impregnated into the egg, either naturally or artificially, they ignore the role of the uterus. Human status is attributed by some to 5-day-old embryos, which consequently would receive the same protection rights as any person. Do frozen and/or inviable embryos, which could never be implanted in a maternal uterus, deserve this status? To begin the process of forming a living human, there must be connection of an embryo to a mother's epithelial cells. This requires the interaction of the embryo with the endometrium (the wall of the uterus).

The Brazilian constitution states that the civil rights of a person begin at the moment of live birth. The law extends these neonate rights from the moment of conception — but only if the baby is born alive. A fertilized egg that is not implanted in the uterus is neither a neonate nor a person. According to traditional Roman law: "Nasciturus pro iam nato habetur, quotiens de commodis eius agitur", which translates as "The unborn child is treated as a child already born in all things respecting its interests". This was presumably conditional on its being born alive. If not, then this protection becomes obsolete.

For a human being to exist and to benefit from civil protection laws, the uterus is a crucial component.

My response follows, edited for the blog only slightly:

SIR: [This letter] is replete with facile and pernicious arguments. First, for what purpose are “leftover” human embryos (which have their own unique DNA) to be frozen at all? Has it not always been that people were rightly squeamish about destroying human organisms which could potentially later be implanted in a womb? [M. Z. Hemingway made the same point at GetReligion, in the comment thread.]

Secondly: Any law stating that “the civil rights of a person begin at live birth” is absurd from the outset because the moment of birth is, not to put too fine a point on it, a complete fluke. In particular: At which point during the baby’s traversal of the birth canal does it count as a “live birth”? When the head emerges? What if the child is breech? What about C-sections? More broadly, if a mother has a C-section scheduled for March 13, does the baby have no human rights on March 12, even though she could have been born prematurely, say on March 1, and easily survived?

Thirdly: Far and away their worst contention is that the protections of law for unborn children become somehow retroactively obsolete if the child is not in fact born alive. In that case, there are plainly no protections at all! If the argument hinges on the “intent” to bring the baby to birth, I strenuously object: Since when do a third party’s fickle intentions determine a first party’s personhood? Such an argument is useful only in defending odious practices like slavery, and the wanton destruction of human organisms is of the same order of enormity.

I do not care one whit about the putative (and still unproven) “utility” of embryo-destroying research. Harvesting organs from day-old infants could prove “useful”, as could enslaving an identical twin of yourself so as to have a backup of your body, and I trust that we are not yet so far gone as a society as to deny that these would be wrong. Having demonstrated that there is a line, the question becomes where it should be drawn, and this question cannot be answered by science alone. Science is not inherently ethical; it must be politically regulated, particularly where it infringes on human dignity.

There's more to be said. I'll bet some of you can say it yourself, in the comments.

upgrading layout...

I apologize if the site looks funny for a bit - I'm upgrading to Blogger Layouts and it will take a little while to get all the changes done.

Thanks for visiting, as always!

UPDATE: The page is mostly done. Let me know in the comments if anything's not working properly!