Traditional Christian beliefs continue to resonate with large swaths of Americans: 70 percent believe in a personal God, according to the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey, and nearly a third believe the Bible is the actual word of God that should be taken literally, according to recent Gallup polls. Another 47 percent believe the Bible is divinely inspired.

Another 47 percent? Nice of the Post not to begin a sentence with a numeral, but not so nice to avoid the gaffe by prepending a word that obscures the meaning of the numbers. I’ll resist the temptation to draw possible Venn diagrams, in part because I don’t know how to represent 117 percent of Americans.

That doesn’t sound good at all.

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To be fair, this might be a better representation of the world’s “computational knowledge” than, say, a calculator.

I’ll pass on the photos, thanks.

When a male was chewing or severing the Chinese fan-palm leaves to make a tent, or when males crawled upon the upper surface of a tent or were grooming themselves within a tent, a female would fly to the tent, stretch her wings, move her head slowly towards the male, and then sniff the male’s face and neck. Subsequently, the pair’s heads extended towards each other and the bats would lick one another. At this time, the male would make approaches to the female with his thumbs.

If you teach statistics and have a good lawyer, you might consider using this article in class. Figure 2 (not shown) doesn’t have a bat illustration, but it has a fine interpretation of the regression line slope: “Therefore each second of licking prolongs copulation by approximately 6 s.”

Reference: Tan M, Jones G, Zhu G, Ye J, Hong T, et al. 2009 Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time. PLoS ONE 4(10): e7595.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007595