If you’ve ever wondered exactly what the weather is like where I’m at (“why, no, PZ, I never have, but you’re going to tell me anyway, right?”), I’ve just learned that there is a little weather station directly above my head, accessible via the internet. This is good news, since it means I don’t have to look out my office window before I go outside.
This is Gigantoraptor erlianensis, a newly described oviraptorosaur from late Cretaceous of China. It’s a kind of nightmare version of Big Bird — it’s estimated to have weighed about 1400kg (1½ tons for non-metric Americans).
Histological examination of the growth structure of the bones suggests that this fellow was a young adult, about 11 years old, and that they grew rapidly and reached nearly this size by the time they were 7. And since it is a young adult, there were probably bigger gigantoraptors running around. They also compared limb length to other dinosaurs, like the tyrannosaurs—gigantoraptor had longer, slimmer legs and was more of a runner than they were.
There’s no sign whether it was covered with bright yellow feathers.
Xu X, Tan Q, Wang J, Zhao X, Tan L (2007) A gigantic bird-like dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of China. Nature advance online publication, 13 June 2007.
And now Kent Hovind has transcribed one for us.
I don’t know. God sounds like a condescending, sanctimonious dick to me. I think I’m rather glad we aren’t friends.
While once I might have pined for an iPhone, I think right now I might prefer an rPhone. Arrr.
Watch out, Apple.
Chuck Colson has a list of the three greatest enemies of Christianity right now. They are:
Islam. It’s “evil incarnate.”
Atheism. It’s “virulent.”
Christian coffee shops??!?
OK, that last one is a little strange, but I had an epiphany. I’m sitting in a Christian-run coffee shop right now. It’s great for fairly good inexpensive coffee, it’s got an open wireless net, and some of the conversations around me are inspiring—I write some of my anti-religion screeds while the Bible Study Group meets at a table in front of me.
Gosh. Chuck Colson is right.
An important change: UCL is reinstating Colquhoun’s blog on its servers and has announced that it “continues strongly to support and uphold Professor Colquhoun’s expression of uncompromising opinions as to the claims made for the effectiveness of treatments by the health supplements industry or other similar bodies”.
University College London caved in to complaints from alternative medicine quacks and asked Professor David Colquhoun to remove his skeptical blog from their university servers. Ben Goldacre summarizes the complaints:
They objected, for example, to his use of the word “gobbledygook” to describe Red Clover as a “blood cleanser” or a “cleanser of the lymphatic system”. Somebody from the “European Herbal and Traditional Medicine Practitioners Association” complained that he’d slightly misrepresented one aspect of herbalists’ practice. One even complained about Colquhoun infringing copyright, simply for quoting the part of their website that he was examining. They felt, above all, that this was an inappropriate use of UCL facilities.
It’s chilling: a couple of anti-science kooks send in some email to the provost, and the provost goes running to one of his professors and tells him to take it all down. Rather than booting Colquhoun’s pages from their server, perhaps the timid provost ought to have been fired; the job of a provost is to lead, not to scuttle.
But then again…
Why is the reality-based community ignored? Because the other side, the Jesus-loving wingnut loons, is committed to defending idiocy, while the Democrats have a complete lack of any guiding principle, other than to get elected. Nick Coleman has another perfect example, not that there’s any shortage of them, in the defeat of a sensible bill here in Minnesota.
We all knew him as Mr Wizard, of course. He was a great no-nonsense science teacher who influenced a whole generation of kids — he taught us that science was a very down-to-earth process that worked. He didn’t have a lot of flash and pizazz, and the production values on his show were downright cheap, and he never seemed to get carried away; he was the exact opposite of the televangelists, who were all gaudy extravagance and no results.
True nerds loved Mr Wizard. Being undemonstrative nerds meant we never said it. We’ll miss you, Mr Wizard.
I think a nimble-fingered Albanian got a little souvenir. Too bad the market for Bush memorabilia is in the dumpster right now.
Coyne not only dismantles Behe’s argument, he gives a nice primer in the basics of evolutionary biology. He also points out that Behe, one of the few biologists in the Intelligent Design camp, has conceded virtually everything to science, and is left clinging to one forlorn hope, that mutations are inadequate to produce the variation that is the fuel of natural selection.
I think he should have titled his book The Edge of Intelligent Design: Behe is hanging from the precipice by one trembling hand, and Coyne and nearly every other biologist in the world is stomping on his fingers.
Whoops, if you can’t read that link, try this one. Hmmm. I don’t subscribe to the New Republic…does my university? I got it with no registration required.
