We are missing a point here and that is that there are women out there governing states, woman with REAL executive experience, women with REAL demonstrated achievements in getting things done -- includng healthcare -- by working with people of differing views. Granted, HRC has that in the Senate but she is really, really polarizing.

We are acting as if Obama would never name a woman to his ticket. Not so. I think the smartest move would be to pick one of the governors as his running mate. That would defang the Hillary supporters who think it's about her chromosomes. It would make a statement about his desire to make contact with people who have governed and use their experience. It will have all the positives and none of the negatives. People who would vote for Satan over Hillary could vote for Obama comfortably.

Granted, it would take on two incomprehensibles at once (black and female on the same ticket) but it would also make them comprehensible in the process.

Pardon me if I don't go into shock about this. While Elizabeth Edwards prefers Hillary's views on health care, understandably a big issue for her as it is for me as a breast cancer survivor, Hillary's other views don't fit well with them. I really think it's going to be a good fit and it will give Obama something he desperately needs -- a white Southerner with strong credentials. I don't think he wants or needs to be on the ticket -- been there, done that -- but he is lining himself up for the AG in an Obama Cabinet, a job he could do very, very well.

Turn off the heat and turn on the light. I suggest that the atheist send his friend a book on how to teach science as vividly as possible rather than just throwing up his hands. Assure the person of his ongoing personal regard and that the disdain is for a religiously-based scientific theory and not for the friend. The friend is not considering putting his hands in children's underpants. Yes, it may have an element of withholding something valuable (the truth) and yes, it is thus immoral. Maybe the atheist might suggest consulting the local laws on the separation of church and state so that there is a more powerful controlling legal authority that the friend can use to counteract the frankly-illegal attempts by the man's pastor.

I consider it profoundly wrong to teach young earth creationism or Intelligent Design, the child with a three-digit IQ, in science class. I am a theologian, by the way, trained as a neuroscientist before I started to study religious history -- my field. As a theologian, I am appalled at the over-reach by some of the more fundamentalist representatives of religion. Christian dominionist views have no place in the American social and legal fabric. They're fine in church but keep them out of the body politic.

As long as the theist is convinced that the atheist cares about him, the tutorial on ethics and science teaching could work. Above all, the man wants to be a good teacher. Help him find a way to do that.

I remember reading the "Andromeda Strain" and thinking it was massively farfetched. I saw the movie and thought it was overdone so I am not optimistic about a redo.

That said, five years after the book came out, there was a rather puzzling event in a small corner of Central Africa, near the Congo River. A man went to a nurse at a mission in Yambuku, Zaire, with the symptoms of malaria. He got a shot of anti-malarial from the nursing nun who ran the dispensary. He died horribly a week later, bleeding to death. He was one of the 318 vicitms of the first emergence of the Ebola virus.

The doctors who responded to the outbreak, which killed 280 of the affected people, were scared out of their gourds. Two patients got as far as Kinshasa where they died in hospital. A nurse got it, too, and died a week later after having gotten around the city before getting too sick to get out of bed.

The discovery of AIDS and other emerging infectious diseases and of antibiotic resistant strains of germ have made the news a lot scarier than anything that a fiction author, no matter how gifted at raising panic can produce. Richard Preston's "The Hot Zone" and Stephen King's "The Stand" are a lot scarier than "Andromeda." The scientists from USAAMRID who tackled Ebola Reston weren't sure they were going to get out of it alive. We live in a scary world. Crichton is nowhere near raising goosebumps on my arms.

Anyone who wants to be more scared than a fictional account like "The Stand" can give is welcome to read Laurie Garrett's superbly reasearched "The Coming Plague." Her end notes are superb. Much more worrisome than Andromeda, her book raises the consequences of our almost unpardonable neglect of global public health issues. It covers the early years of the AIDS plague better than most sources and more readably.