Christine Simpson writes in:

Just nobody light a match...

The Columbia Undergraduate Science Journal has fired another salvo in their ongoing feud against Jester, claiming responsibility for the recent disappearance of 700 issues of the most recent Jester issue. They've placed the once-missing issues all over campus, and attached a message: "Jester Promotes Scientific Fallacies." The full-page manifesto contains many of the CUSJ grievances, a sampling of which can be found on the (truly crazy, and we're not sure if it's in a good or bad way) website the CUSJ missive directs readers to.

First among them: "The 'Liquid Issue' is clearly not made of LIQUID at all but rather PAPER, which is SOLID. Jester should be ashamed for misleading readers regarding states of matter."

Too far, or not far enough? Catelyn Liu reproduced CUSJ's damning allegations in full, featured after the jump.

Overheard in Fayerweather:
Professor: "How many Americans believe in fairies, pixies, trolls..." [goes on to name several other mythical creatures]

Student: "Five."

Wrong answer! At least two:

Overheard on Broadway:
"You do know that unicorns walk among us..."
"Yes, but..."

Welcome once again to Cooking With Bwog, bringing you the cooking tips you need to eat well using dorm kitchens, a lack of utensils, and a tight budget. This week, Bwog's culinary team brings you tips for using your microwave.

Microwaves are so informal in the cooking world that they often aren't mentioned in cook books. The truth is, most restaurant chefs use them often - at the restaurant Bwog worked at, pasta sauce was made at the beginning of the week and reheated in the microwave when people ordered the dish. Microwaves in America are as pervasive as TVs, and yet people generally use them for only the simplist cooking tasks, such as reheating and cooking popcorn, and even these are often botched by uninformed cooks. Here are a few things you can do to cook with your microwave.

Keep in mind that a microwave operates by emiting microwave radiation. These microwaves are of a certain frequency, which happens to be the frequency that makes water molecules rotate. Physics aside, this means that when you put something in the microwave, the only thing in it that is being heated is the water. If you put something without much moisture in it it will become dehydrated. When you want to reheat Mac and Cheese, for instance, you should always add about a teaspoon of water to the bowl and stir it into the pasta, and when you want to make quesadillas you should wrap the tortillas in wet paper towels to keep them soft.

Recipes, cooking times and more after the jump!

"Gandhi, Newton, and Enlightenment": University Lecture delivered by Professor Akeel Bilgrami in Low Memorial Library Rotunda, October 25^th.

Akeel Bilgrami is Columbia's secret big deal. He's not a Foner, Sachs, Khalidi, or even a Massad, but... Bilgrami... that sounds familiar right? If it doesn't, Alan Brinkley's introduction to Bilgrami's University Lecture ("Gandhi, Newton, and Enlightenment") confirmed overwhelmingly that it should. For, Bilgrami's CV ranks him high in the upper echelons. He is a founding member of Columbia's Committee on Global Thought, teaching a seminar on secularism and diversity this semester with Nicholas Dirks and Partha Chatterjee. As director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities, he's attracted first tier academics like Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish. And then, his day job: Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy — a position last held by aesthetics superstar Arthur Danto. In this capacity, Bilgrami has produced heavy-hitting work in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and moral psychology.

If undergraduates know Professor Bilgrami, though, it is because he's made them cry. His blistering CULPA reviews relate the even more blistering intellectual "pimp-slaps" received in his introductory philosophy class; "I have a whiplash tongue," one review quotes him as having said, "and I won't hesitate to lash you all over with it!"

To hear Bilgrami loose his whiplash tongue on an academic quandary, however, is to realize his frightening brilliance. The problem linking Gandhi, Newton and that great behemoth the Enlightenment was simply this: is there in the secular continuity with the religious? Bilgrami began his lecture by disputing Salman Rushdie's claim that secular humanism is just another religion. Perhaps, he suggested in his slow, lilting, and sometimes barely audible British accent, Rushdie meant simply to avoid charges of blasphemy. To seriously equate the two, though, is to sell both short. And yet, Bilgrami took pause. There is something here worth talking about. Beneath Rushdie's remarks is something that presses on the minds of perhaps every liberal secularist: is there something in my beliefs which is continuous with the religious?

A recent item on Salon.com gave us pause:

The Harvard Gazette reports that researchers in Australia have now successfully grown a complete, functioning breast from a single stem cell. Though the experiment, set up by Kaylene Simpson, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School, was performed on a mouse, experts are confident that the study's findings can also be applied to humans.

"Until now, no one has been able to take one cell and make it do everything involved in a fully-functioning, milk-producing breast," Simpson tells the Gazette. "There were lots of technical obstacles to overcome and it was very difficult to attract funding at first." Indeed, the breast project took five years to complete. But once similar human breast stem cells can be isolated, scientists are determined to try to grow a human breast in a laboratory.

There's hope for SEAS students yet.

Overheard in an EC elevator:

Girl #1: "You have insomnia?"
Girl #2: "No, I have wind ensemble."

We prefer to view this exchange not as an example of mishearing, but as one friend inquiring about an ailment, and the other friend expounding on its cure.

Eight years after Katie Holmes decides to permanently defer enrollment at Columbia, Daddy Holmes decides he wants his $500 deposit back. Is the Scientology wedding really turning out to be that expensive?

From Astrology.com:

Horoscopes for February 21, 2006.

Larry Summers (Born: November 30, 1954, Saggitarius)

Daily Extended:

If any sign is famous for always being game to try something new, it's you. But right about now, the universe is just about insisting that you try something, believe it or not, when it comes to finances. If you've begun thinking about making a bit of cash on the side, be sure it's by doing something you consider fun. With so many diligent, hard-working astrological energies on duty now, you're set. Just tell the powers that be that you're ready.


Lee C. Bollinger (Born: April 30, 1946, Taurus)

Daily Extended:

Now is the time to let go of all the 'what ifs' you've been allowing to hold you back from doing exactly what you really want to do. You're just about guaranteed to be smart enough to only take well calculated risks, so whether it strikes you that this would be the perfect time to try sky diving, bungee jumping, telling that long-distance lover that you want them to come home now, or something equally precarious, if it feels right, do it. You can't win if you don't play.

Seen on a Student Government Office computer during the weekly Fed meeting: The Wikipedia entry for "Slash Fiction."



What is Slash Fiction?

Slash fiction is a type of fan fiction in which one or more media characters are involved in a homosexual relationship as a primary plot element. These gay pairings are often described in explicit detail, and largely occur outside the canon of the source. ...

A writer at the Brown Daily Herald has alerted the Columbia College Student Council that, for a year between 2003-2004, CUIT sold our emails to Columbia panopticists, er, sociologists, Gueorgi Kossinets and Duncan Watts for this Science article. The study, which discusses the formation and evolution of social networks, did not name the "large university" whose electronic communications were analyzed. Two weeks later, tech gazette eWEEK.com decided to state the obvious in a January 20th post. 'Twas us who was snooped!

... Columbia is the 7th best university in the country. Take that, U.S. News!*

*They ranked us 9th.

In the East Sky lounge of the Broadway dormitory a keen observer will find exposed wires protected by the pen-written text, "Tampering will knock out AC/Heat."

Violations will result in electrocution and a slap on the wrist.

From "Revealed Preference Determinants of Mate Selection: Evidence from an Experimental Dating Market":

"We find that male behavior is very well explained by a simple model date-quality maximization. By contrast, we find a number of patterns in female choices that are inconsistent with this model."

No wonder they call it the dismal science.

Funky abstract after the jump. (Hat tip: Splog)

Columbia says:

Middle School Girls Experiment With Science Day

Before you know it, they'll be building meth labs.