Ooooh, it’s a simple recipe and accompanying video for cooking octopus. I want to do this. My wife and daughter would see that video with rising horror, and are probably greatly relieved that they’ve got me quarantined in the frozen midwest, far from any coast where I might actually come home some evening with a large mollusc and a hungry glitter in my eye.
The latest Tangled Bank is available at Archaeoporn. The theme is … Ben Stein. Yeesh. That makes me feel a little queasy.
(By the way, there’s a glitch in the numbering. This one actually is the 100th edition.)
The Vatican wants to erect a statue to Galileo, which is ironic enough. But to put the cherry on top, they plan to place it near the cell where he was held during his heresy trial. Do you think they’re doing this as a sign of papal humility, a sort of grand, ornate slap to the forehead and admission that “boy, did we make a boner”? Somehow, I suspect arrogance plays a bigger role.
Will Smith’s last movie, I Am Legend, was apocalyptically bad — in particular, the ending was awful. Now Phil has the alternate ending that was filmed but not used — I agree with him that it’s not perfect, but it is immensely better, and is also a little closer to the spirit of the book.
All right, so she’s not a child any more, but she’ll always be my baby girl … and she doesn’t seem to think highly of the Kalam Cosmological Argument. Does anyone?
(Yeah, she’s probably going to beat me up tonight for calling her a child. “So silly a mature 17 year old can see through it” just isn’t as punchy.)
This one is just too cute for words: a little girl summarizes Star Wars. The younger your eyes, the better that movie looks.
Uh, well, maybe this one isn’t appropriate for lunch. There’s nothing immediately off-putting about it, but it will sneak up on you. It made me laugh, anyway.
I despise him.
He’s an ignorant buffoon and a professional liar. I hate what he does in his attempts to corrupt public education, but as a human being, I find him simply contemptible.
I just had to set the record straight. He seems to be taking pride in who hates him, but there really is nothing there that elevates him to the level of hate-worthy; he’s just a sloppy ideologue who faked his way through a degree program.
A couple of small towns in Vermont passed an unenforceable law to declare Bush and Cheney criminals. I like it. Personally, I favor something more like Megan’s Law, in which Bush and Cheney would forever after be required to register with local law authorities where ever they go, with their names, photographs, addresses, and a list of their offenses made public. (I’m actually not a big fan of Megan’s Laws, but if we’re going to publicly track one kind of monster, I think far more wicked monsters should be subject to the same penalties.)
A Catholic bishop (of a weird breakaway sect, admittedly) has endorsed the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion and declared that Jews are conspiring to rule the world
.
Obviously, the man must be an evolutionist. Only through Darwin can one become a hateful racist.*
*Necessary disclaimer: obviously, I’m saying this with a sarcastic sneer.
I and a diverse group of people got a question in email, one that we are supposed to answer in a single sentence. The question is,
What is evolution?
You know, Ernst Mayr wrote a whole book to answer that question on a simple level, and I’m supposed to have the hubris to answer that in one sentence? OK, knowing full well that it is grossly inadequate, here’s my short answer:
Evolution is a well-confirmed process of biological change that produces diversity and coherent functionality by a variety of natural mechanisms.
Go ahead, you people try to answer it in one sentence in the comments. It’s harder than it looks, especially since I feel the itch to expand each word into a lecture.
By the way, when I say this question was sent to a diverse group of people, I mean a diverse group of people. One of them was the author of this book, and another was from this site, and you can imagine what their answers were. (Sorry, they were sent out with some expectation of confidentiality, so I can’t tell you them. Maybe they’ll notice all the traffic to their websites and share it with us.)
