Heteroteuthis hawaiiensis
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
The government of the UK has officially apologized for its past abuse of Alan Turing. Here is the full statement.
2009 has been a year of deep reflection – a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.
Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison – was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.
Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.
I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.
But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate – by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices – that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.
So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.
Today is 10 September, which happens to be the birthday of the Trophy Wife (I won’t tell you the birth year because she will give me the evil eye, but I will say that she is much, much younger than I am, as a Trophy Wife must be). It would be very nice if she got home from work tonight and, as she usually does, sits down and checks out the blog to see what horrors and outrages I have perpetrated today, and discovers that a few of you had written her birthday best wishes, instead.
Someone needs to start an organization with this name just so they can use this logo that I got from Glynn Lane:
Students could join, and then they could all run out and get these t-shirts:
Unfortunately, there’s pretty much nothing we could do to be even creepier than that other, better known Campus Crusade for some guy.
A very devout Catholic was trapped on an elevator for a while, and after it was working again, rushed to church to thank God. Then, something unfortunate happened:
He seems to have embraced a stone pillar on which the stone altar was perched and it fell on him, killing him instantly. We have found his fingerprints on the pillar. We are now investigating the case further.
Now, you see, if he’d rushed off to thank the elevator repairman, that wouldn’t have happened. Given his bad luck, the repairman might have been a demented homicidal maniac who would have clubbed him to death with a spanner, but no altar would have fallen on him. Therefore, religion is bad for your health.
Speaking of being underwhelmed by the arguments, we’ve actually got people arguing for the existence of fairies and bigfoot. They even say they’ve got evidence: here’s the Croydon photo:
Looks like an ugly flash artifact of an insect caught in flight.
Some guy in Kentucky had a video camera set up to monitor his backyard, and it caught this frame of a purported Bigfoot:
I have no idea what that blurry blob is…somehow, whenever one of these mysterious creatures is seen, the lucky witness is always either a really awful photographer or is using garbage equipment.
There are some real mysteries here, though. Why was that woman going out to take pictures of her ugly lawn furniture at night, and why does that guy need constant video surveillance of his weedy back yard?
Don’t you just love a challenge? I’m always looking for some splendid argument from a creationist that would make me think, but they always give me such silliness, instead. And then, I saw this: a mainstream newspaper (well, the Telegraph…but at least it’s not the Daily Mail) offers us an article with a tantalizing promise: they’re going to give us the the five very best arguments to support creationism. Whoa. Cool. I’m sure they also put their very best science reporter on the job to get some real stumpers for scientists.
Here goes. Brace yourselves. Prepare to be provoked and excited!
David Colquhoun reviews Unscientific America, and pans it on an interesting point:
I think Mooney and Kirshenbaum have it all wrong. They favour corporate communications, which are written by people outside science and which easily become mere PR machines for individuals and institutions.  Such blogs are rarely popular and at their worst they threaten the honesty of science. More and more individual scientists have found that they can write their own blog. It costs next to nothing and you can say what you think. A few clicks and the world can read what you have to say.  Forget corporate communications.  Just do it yourself. It’s fun. And think of the money you’d save for doing science if the PR people were just fired.
I don’t know if it’s quite ‘corporate speak’ they want, but they do seem to want to put gatekeepers in place, and filter the voice of science to remove any rough edges.
I don’t speak Spanish, so I’m going to have to rely on the summary that was sent to me. Perhaps some of our bilingual readers can pull out a few details?
Javier Armentia, Spanish astrophysicist and director of the Pamplona planetarium, is hired by the radio station COPE (property of the Catholic Church) as a popularizer of science.
A Catholic website announces (google translation) that Armentia is an atheist and doesn’t have kind words for the church.
Armentia is promptly fired after less than a week. Commenters in the same Catholic site congratulate (google translation) COPE and wonder how the hell he was hired in the first place.
It sounds like Catholic Spain isn’t quite ready for an uncompromising atheist.
They must be devolving into dinosaurs (no, not really)! Great tits normally live on a diet of seeds and insects, but when those resources are scarce, they’ll fly into caves and kill and eat bats. They don’t do it unless they’re really hungry — they prefer bugs and bacon, as do we all — so the interesting thing about is that these birds can push the boundary of what is expected of their species.
Follow the link, it has a short movie of a tit picking up a bat carcass and flying off to a branch to tear at it. Appetizing!
