Curl up and die already, HuffPo

Jebus, but I despise that fluffy, superficial, Newagey site run by the flibbertigibbet Ariana. I will not be linking to it, but if you must, you can just search for this recent article: “Darwin May Have Been WRONG, New Study Argues”. I don’t recommend it. It sucks. Read the title, and you’ve already got the false sensationalism of the whole story down cold.

It’s actually an old and familiar story that doesn’t upset any applecarts at all. There is a well-known concept in evolutionary theory of an adaptive radiation: a lineage acquires a new trait (birds evolve flight, for instance), or an extinction removes all competition and creates an opportunity for expansion (the dinosaurs are wiped out and mammals expand rapidly into vacant niches), and presto, new species and diversity abounds. For a really obvious example of this phenomenon, look to Darwin’s finches: one or a few species are storm-blown to an isolated chain of islands, and they gradually speciate to take on many roles.

See? No shock, no strike against evolution, or even against Darwin’s version of evolution. To claim otherwise is simply stupid.

Now the paper in question seeks to quantify the expansion of taxonomic diversity with the appearance of large-scale ecological opportunities, and concludes that competition and refinement by natural selection has not been the major driver of diversification, but that reason we have thousands of species of mammals and even more species of birds is more a consequence of chance and opportunity than strong competition. It’s a reasonable result, but not cause for a revolution; lots of us have been advocating for the importance of chance in evolution for many years, and it’s unsurprising that non-selective mechanisms of evolution will generate new diversity from a single species in an open, competition free field.

Bugger the awful Huffpo. One of the scientists, Sarda Sahney, has a nice blog with a sensible discussion of the paper. Read that instead.

A fistful of stents

Here’s my status right now, for those who have been wondering.

First of all, I’m not dead yet. Let’s get that out of the way.

Yesterday morning was the big event here in hospital-land: I was to get an angiogram, this procedure where they thread wires up your femoral artery to you heart and start poking around with dyes and things to figure out what’s going on. You’re conscious, mostly, through the procedure, so thought I’d live-blog it, if I could, but it turns out they don’t want you monkeying around with anything while the doctors are examining you from the inside out, and there were going to be occasional sprays of x-rays, and I was going to be on some mind-altering drugs. So I resolved to use my keen scientific mind to observe and report back later on what it was like.

They wheeled me in and a nice nurse named Phil leaned over me and told me he was going to put some drugs in my IV that would make me drowsy, which was silly — it was 8am, I was wide awake — but he gave them to me anyway. Then someone else appeared on my right side and shaved my pubic hair. Not everything — he left me a short wide rectangular patch for a landing strip that looked like Hitler’s mustache…and then I noticed that Hitler had a very large nose and two big pink hairy eyeballs, and that kept me amused for about 10 minutes. I think that was my last lucid thought. (Well, it seemed lucid at the time.)

The Jawas came in. They might have been doctors, but they were all covered in robes and hoods and speaking animatedly in some language that wasn’t Englisth — it was very buzzy and abrupt. They didn’t talk to me anyway, but sometimes told Phil things that he would translate for me. They descended on my right thigh and proceeded to build an airlock so they could crawl inside and party on my left ventricle. I tried to tell them that the Left Ventricle was not some trendy nightclub — it’s just a storage unit where I keep my Jesus-shaped hole — but I think what came out of my mouth was a kind of mumbly moan in Ewok, and everone knows Jawas don’t understand Ewok.

And giant cameras just glided by majestically on motorized trackways above my head.

It hurt quite a bit, in a very remote, distracted, distant way, especially then the anaconda in my leg writhed awkwardly, but I was mostly unperturbed. I actually fell asleep a few times.

Then Phil’s giant head floated into view — I think it was mounted on one of the camera tracks—and he announced, “Good news! No cabbage for you!”, which was very cheering, since I don’t particularly care for cabbage. And then the Jawas stomped on my heart for another hour or so. While I napped.

Later, after the cotton swabbing drained out of my cranium, I realized it was very good news. The threat hanging over me was an angiogram followed by chest-cracking and open heart surgery and prolonged pain, but the clever doctors had looked me over and decided they could patch me up with set of stents instead of that elaborate bypass surgery. Yay, doctors! It’s the difference between 8 weeks of ouchy hurty messy convalescence and less than two weeks of taking it easy.

The last fun bit was when they had to strip the hoses from my thigh, which involved a quick yank and then a doctor with very large strong hands holding my naked thigh in a death grip for half an hour. I tell you, that’s a very awkward situation for small talk.

So, I might be getting out today. They’re doing more tests, checking out my kidneys (which had a lot of extra work to do clearing out the contrast dye). Right now, my life consists of lying abed while a pretty nurse comes by every hour and says, “I need to see your groin!”, whips off my skimpy robe, and coos about how good it looks. I think she’s probably talking about my bloody wound, not anything else (and I hope it’s not because she’s a fan of Adolf Hitler caricatures!)

But soon enough I’ll be off to resting at home, beginning the cardio therapy the doctor will no doubt be putting me on, and back to classes and writing. Expect blogging to be on the light side, though, while I catch up on rest and other pressing projects that were interrupted by this surprise event.

Episode XCV: The Hospital Thread

This may be the last update of the non-terminal thread for a while — I’m going to get beat up by some doctors today, and there are too many steps involved in thread closure and new thread creation and template updating to hand this job off to Mary. So the ol’ portcullis may stay up for a while.

A hard day of knives and needles demands a more inspiring video than usual to get it going…so here’s Stephen Fry with some advice I’ll be taking to heart.

(Current totals: 10,888 entries with 1,101,198 comments.)

I’m doomed now

I’m in big trouble. My wife is sending me pictures of cute puppy dogs to make me feel better.

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Where’s the slime? The chitin? The tentacles? How is this supposed to cheer me up?

Anyway, I’ve been trapped in the hospital overnight, and this morning they promise to finally give me the really good drugs and turn me into a vegetable for a few hours while they stick knives in my heart, which will be a welcome relief from the excruciating boredom. Then I get to wake up to the pain, which won’t be fun at all. At any rate, this is the scary morning, and the rest is recuperation — I’ll let you all know once I’m semi-functional again. Maybe this afternoon. Maybe tomorrow.

That’s not a heart! It’s a flailing Engine of Destruction!

My day began well enough. I’d gotten up early, got some writing done, and was headed into the office to do some prep work for classes, which start this week. My phone rang just as I had my key in the office door — which was cutting it close. My office is an AT&T dead zone, and a few more seconds and I would have been in blissful obliviousness for the rest of the day. It was my doctor’s assistant. I will paraphrase her words slightly.

“We just got the results of your tests from last week. Your heart is a shriveled black lump starved of charity, decency, charm, and kindness,” she said, “a gristly godless clot of marginally functional fibers. You need to go back to Abbott for more tests, and the doctors want to crack your chest and marvel at you.”

“So what else is new? My students are used to that and expect me to be lashing them with fear and pain starting Wednesday…and my black heart is an asset to this job,” I said. “Maybe I can pop in for these tests this weekend. Any chest-cracking can wait for the end of the term and Christmas break, when I wouldn’t be using my heart anyway.”

“No,” she said, “now.”

And I waffled and weaseled and tried to argue with her that this could not be, I had a great deal of work to do right now, and I couldn’t possibly just drop out at the start of the term, and besides, I felt fine. And I bickered, and she exasperatedly told me no way, and I bargained, and then she said, “Here. I’m putting the doctor on.” And the doctor spoke with the voice of Doom and the terrifying tone of I-hold-your-life-in-my-hands-you-dope and she quoth (paraphrased somewhat): 

“YOU ARE GOING TO DIE SUDDENLY, ABRUPTLY, WITHOUT WARNING UNLESS WE FIX YOU RIGHT NOW. GO. NOW. DO NOT ARGUE WITH ME.”

“Yes’m,” I said.

And so I now find myself on the road to Minneapolis under the care of the TrophyWife™, who will have to be renamed AmbulanceDriver™ or perhaps MistressOfMercy™, for an appointment with knives and pain. This was not the day I woke up for. This was not my plan for the Fall of 2010, but then, reality does have a way of dicking up our comfortable expectations.

There may be an interruption in the blogging for a wee bit.

If I’m supposed to be traveling your way in the next month or so, there will probably be a change of plans. I’ll be in touch with people next week when I know more about my course of suffering for the next little while.

Meanwhile, relax, chill, don’t panic, and most importantly, don’t waste your time with prayers. Ever.

I’ll be back while convalescing, and will be even more heartfully cranky than ever.

Zombies are street legal in Minneapolis

A few years ago, a group of people dressed up as zombies for a protest march and got arrested for it.

When arrested at the intersection of Hennepin Avenue and 6th Street N., most of them had thick white powder and fake blood on their faces and dark makeup around their eyes. They were walking in a stiff, lurching fashion and carrying four bags of sound equipment to amplify music from an iPod when they were arrested by police who said they were carrying equipment that simulated “weapons of mass destruction.”

I know. We’re all on edge with the imminent threat of the zombie apocalypse, and it’s perhaps understandable that a police force under constant siege by the undead might be a little overzealous at the sight of live people simulating zombiehood, but still…we have laws, and the police should abide by them. Minnesota courts agree, and the seven fake zombies have been awarded $165,000 for their unjustifiable arrest.

Now, on to the pressing and important questions: are the police required to read their Miranda rights to real zombies before shooting them in the head?

I also wonder what sociological consequences this will have. Will our streets soon be full of lurching, reeking, groaning corpses? Southern California gets panhandlers, and wouldn’t you know it, Minnesota gets zombies.

An interesting thread tangent

The indefatigable Kurzweil threads do occasionally spawn some interesting discussion, and the latest has gone down a few odd byways thanks to this comment by Cerberus:

Creating a robotic brain to “download your consciousness” into or the “I’ll make a clone version of myself with all my memories” sci-fi fiction immortality ideas are kinda false immortalities.

It’s at best, assuming a complete successful procedure a process of ending one’s consciousness so that a puppet version of yourself can emulate your life possibly for all eternity.

Great, but what does that do for real you?

Real you is just as dead and gone and unable to be a part of and appreciate what your puppet is doing in its absence. I’m sure this has been repeatedly addressed in the various thread wars during my absence, but it seems kind of stupid.

I’d love to extend lifespans, I’d love to live forever if that was possible, but as long as we’re talking fantasies, asking for the power to fart sparkly flying unicorns seems less stupid than asking for a robot facsimile to live forever on your behalf.

I mean, if you’re going to be all cult about this, pick something that wouldn’t be completely contrary to your intended desire if you got it.

I would imagine that any ‘brain scan’ (the currently hypothesized method du jour for turning an organic brain into a digital analog in a computer) that broke it down to a sufficiently complete description of the whole state of the brain, would have to be destructive — you’d have to submit yourself to an imaginary technology that would rapidly peel you apart, molecule by molecule, to create a precisely specified copy. That’s death. That’s being disintegrated.

Now if there were a complementary technology that allowed a complete reassembly of a previously recorded state into a physical form, that would be interesting, and I’d argue that the perceived continuity of consciousness would mean you’d be disintegrated and reintegrated, and there’d be no perception of death, but there’d be no point to it unless it were used as some kind of transporter device ala Star Trek, or a way to store a person long term without the corpsicle problem.

But then, Star Trek always let me down — if they could do that, they should have made a few dozen copies of Captain Kirk and sent them out to conquer the universe.

Then there are all the followup concerns about identity and self in a world of cloned minds. I like the classic SMBC answer that ends with this punch line:

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