Smug and delusional

Ken Ham took Bill Nye on a personal tour of his big ol’ fake boat, and they argued some. I think Ham came away with the idea that he won.

bill-nye-and-ken-ham-at-ice-age-exhibit

We’re glad Bill Nye took me up on my friendly offer to show him the Ark. During his visit I was able to personally share the gospel with him very clearly. On the first deck, I asked him, before a crowd of people including many young people, if I could pray with him and was able to pray for him there. Our prayer is that what he saw will have an impact on him and that he will be drawn to the gospel of Jesus Christ that is clearly presented at the Ark.

Many people have tried to share the gospel with me, as well, and it’s never been done clearly. It can’t be done clearly: have you ever read that Jesus story? It’s an incoherent mess, and makes no sense. Now maybe Ham performed a miracle and and explained it lucidly, but I rather doubt it: I’ve listened to him and his usual approach is to condescendingly talk down to people in that sing-song voice he uses when preaching to children.

I’d also tell Mr Ham that prayer doesn’t work, and that his whole pointless project is saying that we’re going to win, and he’s going to lose.

oneworldtwoviews

Look at this detail from a display in this photo: One world, two views. I can tell already what theme he’s hammering on in the Ark Park, and it’s the same one he repeats over and over again in the Creation “Museum”. We’re all using the same evidence, he claims, and the only difference is in the interpretation, which in their case is informed by evidence the scientists reject, the literal testimony of the Bible.

It’s a lie. They ignore most of the evidence, and what they do let in they have to twist and distort to make it fit. We’re looking at a great big jigsaw puzzle, and we’ve assembled enough of it to get a general idea of what it illustrates — a very old Earth — and what Answers in Genesis loves to do is to grab a couple of random pieces, pound them together until they mash up, and then tell you that the Bible clearly explains that this mangled cardboard shows that the Earth is very young. It’s frustrating to listen to, and touring his “museum” is an exercise in chronic irritation, as every exhibit is a dishonest mess, all justified with that pathetic excuse of One world, two views, and hey, this is just our opinion, and it’s just as valid as everyone else’s. Only it’s not. AiG doesn’t get to have their own facts.

But this is also their weakness, and how we’ll win, eventually. Their big, expensive projects are monuments to the fact that prayers and the Bible are not enough, and they know it. They desperately desire to have evidence on their side, to the point that they have to start inventing their own and misrepresenting the facts.

Bill Nye is not going to be persuaded by the fake Ark, because he knows what the actual evidence is, and seeing the place lying at every point is the opposite of persuasion — it’s active dissuasion to anyone knowledgeable at all. It’s a giant affirmation of ignorance, and so the ignorant will revel in it, while everyone else will be repelled.

This is why I’m not afraid to encourage scientists and atheists to visit: what needs to be done to correct its influence is informed discussion of its fundamental dishonesty. To do that, we need to witness it. But unless we fail to educate the public, this foolishness is ultimately doomed.

So this is how we solve problems now

lapierre

We’ve brought up a whole generation of people who think the appropriate response to problems is to bring out a gun and shoot them…and the bigger the problem the bigger the gun. We’re dealing with racism by shooting black people, dealing with trigger-happy cops by shooting random police officers, and presiding over it all, the gleeful NRA. Wayne LaPierre does look like a good avatar of death, doesn’t he?

This is not going to end well.

Conodontia

conodonts

Conodonts are strange and extinct animals that left behind lots of fossils: their teeth. Practically nothing else but teeny-tiny, jagged, pointy teeth. I remember when the animals themselves were total mysteries, and no one even knew what phylum they belonged to — it was only in the 1980s that a few eel-like soft tissue fossils were found, and they were recognized as chordates (very small chordates, on the order of millimeters to centimeters long) with big eyes and membranous fins.

CarboniferousConodont

And now today I find two artistic reconstructions of the conodont animal that please me.

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Friday Cephalopod: They can see color?

cuttleeye

This is kind of awesome: cephalopods only have one kind of photoreceptor, so it was thought that they would be only able to see the world in shades of gray. Those amazingly clever camouflage tricks they pull? That was just matching intensities and textures, fooling our eyes. But now someone has figured out a way they could see color, and special bonus, it also explains those funky weird pupil shapes, like you see in the cuttlefish eye to the right.

They use chromatic aberration! We think of chromatic aberration as an imaging problem — it’s caused by the fact that the degree refraction of light is partly dependent on wavelength, so the blue light in an image focuses closer to the lens than the red light. When you focus optimally on the green wavelengths, for instance, that means that the red and blue colors form an out of focus, blurry image on top of the sharp greens, producing a pattern of color fringes around objects. They jump out clearly to me when I use the cheap student microscopes here, and are why I spent a lot of extra money getting planapochromat lenses for my microscope. They have lots of corrective glass to tweak the different wavelengths into the same focal plane.

But where I see an annoyance, cephalopods evolved an opportunity. Where an object comes into sharpest focus on the eye can actually tell you what wavelengths are — so by focusing backwards and forwards on something, they can extract a rough idea of its color.

And that leads into the next nifty explanation. Where I want to minimize chromatic aberration, cephalopods want to increase it…and as it turns out, having weird off-axis apertures causes more disparity in the focal plane of different wavelengths of light, which makes it easier to discriminate color using this mechanism.

Chromatic blur and pupil geometry. The (A) full and (C) annular aperture pupils produce more chromatic blurring (CB) than (B) the small on-axis pupil, because they transmit rays with a larger ray height h. Vertical lines show best focus positions for blue, green, and red light.

Chromatic blur and pupil geometry. The (A) full and (C) annular aperture pupils produce more chromatic blurring (CB) than (B) the small on-axis pupil, because they transmit rays with a larger ray height h. Vertical lines show best focus positions for blue, green, and red light.

It’s settled then. Cephalopods are cleverer than we are. Or maybe it’s evolution that is smarter than we are. One of those two.

Stubbs AL, Stubbs CW (2016) Spectral discrimination in color blind animals via chromatic aberration and pupil shape. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2016 Jul 5. pii: 201524578. [Epub ahead of print]

Gene activity in the dead

Now you’ve got another paper you can file with that dead salmon fMRI paper: one that analyzes the transcriptome, or excuse me, the thanatotranscriptome, of dead zebrafish and mice.

You should not be surprised to learn that when a multicellular organism dies, it’s not as if every single cell is abruptly extinguished: the integrated, functional activity of the individual as a whole ceases, but individual cells struggle on for a while — they’re not getting oxygen or nutrients, in a mouse they’re experiencing thermal stress as the body rapidly cools, but it takes a while for all of the cells to starve or suffocate or undergo necrosis. It seems to take a couple of days, actually. You can measure the declining amounts of RNA present in the dead animals, and yep, it looks like everything is done after a few days. This kind of study has also been done in human corpses, which show that RNA transcription continues for a couple of days.

Total mRNA abundance (arbitrary units, a.u.) by postmortem time determined using all calibrated microarray probes. A, extracted from whole zebrafish; B, extracted from brain and liver tissues of whole mice. Each datum point represents the mRNA from two organisms in the zebrafish and a single organism in the mouse.

Total mRNA abundance (arbitrary units, a.u.) by postmortem time determined using all calibrated microarray probes. A, extracted from whole zebrafish; B, extracted from brain and liver tissues of whole mice. Each datum point represents the mRNA from two organisms in the zebrafish and a single organism in the mouse.


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Minnesotans react to the Philando Castile murder

falconheights

I knew exactly where the killing took place: midway between Minneapolis and St Paul, east of the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota. I’ve driven on Larpenteur many times. But Greg Laden knows the area much, much better.

A neighborhood where bad things don’t happen, filled with people who probably carry out their share of white collar crime (or who are academics, and thus have other problems) but otherwise pretty quiet. Nearby are the scary neighborhoods, the neighborhoods that are actually pretty typical urban zones, with varying degrees of charm, development, decay, all that. Nothing exceptional. But I have the sense that the people of Falcon Heights, Saint Anthony, Lauderdale, and this part of Roseville, a generally liberal and highly educated enclave, collectively identify, label, and talk about those other neighborhoods, which are blacker, crimier, scarier, bits of the “Inner City” (a term disdained by Twin City dwellers, just so you know) creeping out into the “better neighborhoods.”

The victim, of course, was a school employee and citizen of good standing who didn’t live in any of those nearby scary neighborhoods, and was not part of an inner city creeping, even if such a characterization was valid (which it only barely is). But he and the others in the car were black, and they were driving down a street where the city police probably feel a duty to keep the Inner City away, keep the blackness away. One good way to do that is to encourage black people to avoid driving down that particular street, a major local thoroughfare, and instead, stay south and in the city. Let Saint Paul take care of its own problems. Don’t be driving through our quiet neighborhood. How do you do that? Pull over black people with broken tail lights, obviously. Then shake them down. Make them regret driving down that particular street.

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I shoulda gone to the Ark Park today #OhNoahHeDidnt

I didn’t attach any importance at all to the opening day of Ken Ham’s Ark Park, but maybe I should have — all the photos I’m seeing are of nearly empty spaces, with more protesters than creationist attendees, so it may not be around all that long. I’ll still definitely try to make a trip out there at some time, and now maybe I’ll have to attach a little more urgency to it.

But, you see, today I had other, better things to do.

I got a root canal. Seriously.

Rage

This is Diamond Reynolds speaking out after the murder of Philando Castile.

The Roseville police held her in custody at the precinct after one of their own murdered her boyfriend. They kept her at the police, and separated her from her daughter, when she should have been at the hospital with her dying boyfriend.

This is appalling. The Roseville police are apparently incompetent bumblefucks — whey else would you treat this woman like a criminal?

Motherfuckers. Remember this. The American police force no longer deserves any respect at all. You have to obey them because they’ve got guns, but they have earned no honor.

All problems will be solved in #Rationalia

I am so happy. Most days I wake up to a world of pain and chaos, and don’t know what to do…but now Neil deGrasse Tyson has fixed everything with a single tweet.


Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence

Why has no one thought of this before? It’s brilliant!

Let’s try it with a simple test case and see if it works. There’s currently a bit of a tussle between competing interests in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of Minnesota, which, if you’ve never heard of it, is a gorgeous pristine wilderness in the northern part of my state. On the one hand, you have the fact that it’s beautiful and wild…but that doesn’t seem very logical, especially when, on the other hand, a Chilean company wants to excavate a giant open pit copper mine there.

So, rational reasonable residents of Rationalia, please use your reason and rationality to deliver an evidence-based verdict to this problem. And don’t you try to sneak in human values into your solution, that would be cheating.

I’ll wait on that rational answer, preferably delivered in the form of a mathematical equation with clearly defined, confirmable parameters, before moving on to a slightly more difficult problem.

Aww, OK, I know you’re going to tear through the easy problem fast, so I’ll just give you a hint of what’s next: are justice and equality rational?

I’d recommend you avoid reading any philosophy on that kind of thing — it’ll just muddy the waters of your cold clear solutions — but I suspect it would be a superfluous warning, since all the philosophers in Rationalia are hanging from the lampposts, anyway.