Traces of a Triassic Kraken?

At first I thought this discovery was really cool, because I love the idea of ancient giant cephalopods creating art and us finding the works now. But then, reality sinks in: that’s a genuinely, flamboyantly extravagant claim, and the evidence better be really, really solid. And it’s not. It’s actually rather pathetic.

It consists of the discovery of ichthyosaur vertebrae lying in a flattened array. They look like this.


Photo shows shonisaur vertebral disks arranged in curious linear patters with almost geometric regularity. The arranged vertebrae resemble the pattern of sucker discs on a cephalopod tentacle, with each vertebra strongly resembling a coleoid sucker.

Wait, what? That’s it?

[Read more…]

Petty internet blackmail

I have to mention two strange examples of internet thuggery.

I hosted a Thunderf00t video the other day in which he outed his own identity, in response to attempts by a youtuber named DawahFilms to extort him with threats of revealing him. It was a nice way to short circuit a threat. I keep hearing from people complaining, though, that Thunderf00t is the bad guy here, which I find completely baffling. Notice: he revealed his own name, not something about DawahFilms.

I have now received email from DawahFilms arguing his case. He’s not very good at this, because it contained this argument:

I am neither a person who threatens death on people for their “free speech” or “criticism” (in fact Ive made videos condemning such behavior) nor am I out to “hurt” Dr. Mason, but instead wished to report him to his university for his unethical behavior and treatment of me.

That looks like a confession to me. I really don’t care if Thunderf00t said rude things about Islam or about defenders of superstition on the internet or youtube; but when people try to threaten their critics’ livelihood, as DawahFilms wants to do, I’m not at all sympathetic. Especially when they’re so weirdly oblivious that they can claim that they don’t want to “hurt” someone, and that they just wish to report him to his employer, all in one sentence.

The second case involves a colleague at UMTC, Bill Gleason, who is getting harrassed by one of the dumbest local ideologues it has ever been my displeasure to encounter online. I’m talking about Thomas Swift, aka TJSwift, AKA Swiftee, a far right, illiterate crank who tainted Pharyngula for a while, until he was banned.

You cannot imagine how stupid TJSwift is. He’s not a master of rhetoric; he struggles with spelling, and punctuation, and grammar, and can barely compose a tweet. So instead, he resorts to scribbling crude cartoons in MS Paint. He also has no artistic ability; these things are the kind of crude caricatures one might find scratched into the walls of a filthy toilet stall in a run-down gas station. To make them mildly recognizable, he pastes in digitized photos of people’s faces. Otherwise, though, they are incoherent, sloppy, pointless scrawls.

I saw some of the examples Gleason posted, and recognized the style immediately. I was getting a collection of these sent to me a year or two ago, emailed under a pseudonym, and containing little more than the kind of pornographic imagery you’d expect of 9 year old, talentless, angry idiot — cartoons of me having sex with a dog (or a cow, or a beige blob…something unrecognizable), for instance.

The real surprise, though, is that this frothing nutcase is allied with some of the most prominent conservative bloggers in Minnesota, Powerline and Mitch Berg. This is how low the Right has sunk.

Traces of a Triassic Kraken?

At first I thought this discovery was really cool, because I love the idea of ancient giant cephalopods creating art and us finding the works now. But then, reality sinks in: that’s a genuinely, flamboyantly extravagant claim, and the evidence better be really, really solid. And it’s not. It’s actually rather pathetic.

It consists of the discovery of ichthyosaur vertebrae lying in a flattened array. They look like this.

i-08915103555b433da4ec5af02502d78a-shonisaur.jpeg
Photo shows shonisaur vertebral disks arranged in curious linear patters with almost geometric regularity. The arranged vertebrae resemble the pattern of sucker discs on a cephalopod tentacle, with each vertebra strongly resembling a coleoid sucker.

Wait, what? That’s it?

This work was presented at a meeting of the GSA under the title “Triassic kraken: the Berlin ichthyosaur death assemblage interpreted as a giant cephalopod midden “, with this argument:

“It became very clear that something very odd was going on there,” said McMenamin. “It was a very odd configuration of bones.”

First of all, the different degrees of etching on the bones suggested that the shonisaurs were not all killed and buried at the same time. It also looked like the bones had been purposefully rearranged. That it got him thinking about a particular modern predator that is known for just this sort of intelligent manipulation of bones.

“Modern octopus will do this,” McMenamin said. What if there was an ancient, very large sort of octopus, like the kraken of mythology. “I think that these things were captured by the kraken and taken to the midden and the cephalopod would take them apart.”

In the fossil bed, some of the shonisaur vertebral disks are arranged in curious linear patterns with almost geometric regularity, McMenamin explained.The proposed Triassic kraken, which could have been the most intelligent invertebrate ever, arranged the vertebral discs in double line patterns, with individual pieces nesting in a fitted fashion as if they were part of a puzzle.

Even more creepy: The arranged vertebrae resemble the pattern of sucker discs on a cephalopod tentacle, with each vertebra strongly resembling a coleoid sucker. In other words, the vertebral disc “pavement” seen at the state park may represent the earliest known self portrait.

Let me explain something here. This “Triassic kraken” has not been found; no fossils, no remains at all, no evidence of its existence. It is postulated to have been large enough to hunt and kill ichthyosaurs, which is remarkable—comparison to modern giant squid is invalid, since they are prey, not predator. This fossil bed is being over-interpreted as a trace fossil, with the bones arranged by intent, by an intelligent cephalopod, which they have not seen. Furthermore, a line of discs is being seen as a picture of a cephalopod tentacle, classic pareidolia. This is trivial: dump a pile of Necco wafers on a table, and I’ll see a picture of squid suckers. This is a whole series of tenuous and unlikely speculations stacked together to make an ultimately ridiculous hypothesis.

After I read the abstract and realization settled in that this was nonsense, something else was nagging me. That name, McMenamin — I’d heard it somewhere before. A little search, and there it was: I’ve encountered him tangentially before. He’s the geologist who so effulgently endorsed the imaginative pattern-spotting of Stuart Pivar. He also claims “that mariners of ancient Carthage made it to America long before Eriksson and Columbus, some time around 350 BC.”

I think I would concur with the idea that Mark McMenamin is exceptionally imaginative.

(Also on FtB)

Why I am an atheist – Radek Szyroki

The world as explained by science is so beautiful it makes me weep. Literally. When I think about these tiny jiggling particles that constitute everything, when I gaze into the sky and see the vastness of the Cosmos, when I sit in my chair, smoke a pipe and consider life on Earth and try to wrap my head around the unimaginably complex processes that allowed me to form as a human being and now ponder life itself, when I try to imagine and appreciate how much we have accomplished, when I see the shrouded realm of what we do not yet know my eyes brim with tears of emotion, my heart leaps with expectation and wonder. I am so grateful that I am privileged enough to live in times of great scientific understanding and in social circumstances that exposed me to all this information. It is marvellous. It is profound.

When I hear anyone proposing an invisible being whose existence denies the weight of all the things I hold dearest, I feel like I have been slapped in the face. Any concept of god steals away the world’s beauty and wonder and mints it into a mere cog in some strange machinery. It is outrageous to me and most offensive. It beslimes the greatness of human discovery and I will have none of it.

There are also moral reasons for my disbelief. I have a firm conviction that only the morality that emerges from a deep intrinsic need to do good is worthwhile. The opposed, religious morality of punishment and reward I find unwholesome, dishonest and infantile. I do not consider people who behave acceptably because they fear eternal punishment moral. They are petty and cowardly at best. I believe in humankind, I believe that a vast majority of us have enough sense to be decent human beings without some whiplash constantly ringing in our ears.

All of these ideas might be easily explained to the readers of this blog, but are virtually incommunicable in Poland, which is still vastly Catholic. There are a lot of young people who do not care too deeply about religion, do not go to any church and simply do not concern themselves with those issues but when the time comes they get church-approved marriages, baptize their children and demand a Catholic funeral. People who take a stand against religion are as rare as comets. People who share my strong feelings about science and morality are even less frequent. This is sad and disheartening. To not be understood by fellow atheists does not feel great.

Mine was the long road to atheism. I was always driven by curiosity and a desperate craving for truth. As a young man I thought I found my answers in religion but I became quickly disillusioned when I understood that religion only poses more questions and gives no sensible answers in return. I tried many things, many belief systems, many philosophical approaches and I found that all the answers are improbably simple. I just have to rely on the facts, without fairy tales, false hopes and wishful thinking. And if I could not find hard facts to answer my questions, I became courageous enough to accept that I did not know. Not knowing is not particularly worse than knowing, if you have your reason in place and solid grounding — it just propels you to ask questions and try to find out, it kindles a desire to know everything there is to know. And my greatest wish is that we eventually do.

Radek Szyroki
Poland

(I put out a simple call for your explanations for why you’re an atheist, and I’m still inundated with submissions. This will be a daily feature on Pharyngula.)

Rain

This used to happen every time I visited the Oregon high desert, too: walk into a place that is reliably dry, and it would start raining on me. I come to Houston, Texas, in a drought, and the deluge comes.

So yes, it’s pouring here, and Texans don’t know what to do with this strange wet stuff falling out of the sky. My plane is greatly delayed. All planes are delayed. It’s a snarled up mess.

I’m trying to get through to my wife, who’s on the way to pick me up, and of course she’s not answering the phone. in case she sees this, GET A HOTEL ROOM IN MINNEAPOLIS, I won’t be home until the wee hours.

My students will be devastated. I won’t make it in time for my 8am class, and they’ll have to sleep in.

Why I am an atheist – Heather Dalgleish

I am an atheist, in short, because I am a rationalist and a scientist. I am an atheist because of reason – because of a simple love of the power of reasoning and rational thinking to bring real clarity, resolution and a grasp of the closest thing you really will get to get to real ‘truth’ while living out your lives on this pale blue dot. (Or indeed while living anywhere else in the cosmos – to any readers tuning in from the International Space Station, Mars, Europa, or wherever.)

I don’t believe in gods for much the same reason that I don’t believe in fairies, bogeymen, ghosts, lucky gems, leprechauns, Santa or the Easter Bunny. There isn’t a shred of convincing evidence for the existence of any of them, plenty of evidence that they are grossly surplus to requirements for explaining any phenomenon, and that proposing them just creates more problems than it solves.

There just isn’t a good reason for believing in any supernatural being, and plenty of good reasons for not believing. Theists who are otherwise rational and who fail to grasp that conclusion are simply not being fully honest with themselves, and failing to challenge their ideas on the subject of gods with the same robustness as they would challenge other ideas. And I speak with experience, as someone who once was that theist.

Indeed, the whole concept of ‘god’ or ‘gods’ is so ill-defined that asking me if I believe in ‘god’ is like asking me if I believe in floogamaloops. I don’t know what floogamaloops are, and neither do you. I don’t know what exactly gods would be like, and neither do you. Or rather, everybody has their own personal idea of what ‘god’ is – varying vastly from person to person, region to region and time to time. To some, god is simply energy, and you can find it in a lump of coal – which is at any rate an interesting insight into the power of wishful thinking, and the tragic lengths some people will go to to cling desperately and shamelessly to this strange ‘god’ notion.

Do you believe immunoglobulin M exists? I do. And I can tell you what it is – and it will be roughly the same definition that any person who knows about the subject will give you. And I could hand you to someone more competent than myself who could give you the robust evidence for the existence of immunoglobulin M, and take you through graceful laboratory techniques that isolate the molecule and allow us to say things about its size, structure and function. The great thing about it actually existing, and having a testable definition, is that it will pass through the fire of reason, and you don’t have to take it on faith. Of course it also helps that IgM is a mere molecule that lacks the capacity to be a passive-aggressive bastard that wants to hide its existence from you, reveal itself occasionally through arbitrary phenomena such as weeping statues and faces in toast, and otherwise must insist on being taken purely on faith – which are common themes on the subject of gods – but let’s not complicate things further.

And that’s why I’m an atheist. My own atheism is a simple consequence of my reasoning – just one result of my mind thinking rationally – one result of many opinions I’ve landed on through reason. And I also know that it’s a stance that some people reach through routes other than reason. Some people are atheists just because they are. Buddhists are atheists, Raelians are atheists – literally anyone who doesn’t believe in gods gets to legitimately call themselves an atheist – no matter how bizarre or outlandish their beliefs and worldviews may be outside of that particular aspect of their thinking. So atheism isn’t important or particularly worthy or noble to me just in and of itself – the process that gave rise to it in my case is. I am an atheist because I am a rationalist – an honest and thorough rationalist – and my rationalism is much, much more important to me than my atheism could ever hope to be.

My atheism is but a small bud sprouting from the scientific thinking that lets me appreciate the real world, the real universe, as it actually is, in every other aspect of my life. Atheism should be one of those things you arrive at in any honest quest for truth – but it’s not an ends in itself. And science, reason, rational thinking and sceptical enquiry are the best tools devised for uncovering reality.

There are of course “other ways of knowing” – it’s just they’re complete bollocks. Beyond laughable in the shadow of empirical science. ‘Intuition’, ‘gut feeling’ and ‘just knowing’ are alternative ways of knowing things, in much the same way that having sex standing up is an alternative form of contraception. Find me a person who could uncover the structure of the atom, of light, of the complexity of life through “other ways of knowing”. It’s exasperating, ridiculous and sad that adult humans can even utter those kinds of opinions with a straight face. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry – and I don’t care if they’re offended by that. They should be. They don’t deserve to be cushioned from having their beliefs poked and prodded – and frankly, they really don’t know what they’re missing by not learning to love sceptical interrogation, the thrill of the culmination of arriving at a real, intellectually satisfying conclusion, instead of evading awkward questions, putting their fingers in their ears and playing the faith card to shield their cherished beliefs.

Faith is by definition belief without evidence – it’s pulling things out of your ass; it’s clinging to things that you might well know are faintly ridiculous; it’s putting up barriers to honest enquiry; it can be used as an impediment to curiosity and intellect, and it is simply the most ridiculous method of discovering or knowing anything about reality. It’s not a virtue – and it shouldn’t be a virtue in wider society any more than it would be in a court of law.

Some atheists of course ‘respect’ such nonsense – but that is just yet another reason why atheism is not an ends in itself to me. It’s all about the process of rationality, reasoning and sceptical curiosity that if pursued boldly should necessarily give rise to atheism, and have much, much broader and deeper ramifications than just mere atheism alone.

Heather Dalgleish
Scotland

(I put out a simple call for your explanations for why you’re an atheist, and in a single day I got almost 100 essays. I think we have a new regular feature here. I’m going to just work through them and post one a day, so if you sent one in, be patient…we’ll get around to it eventually.)

Hitch isn’t done yet

Christopher Hitchens was granted the Richard Dawkins Award tonight at the Texas Freethought Convention. He was looking frail and thin, his voice was husky, but he was amazingly strong. He gave a wonderful, fiery, eloquent acceptance speech, and then he took questions for almost an hour — and he was willing to go on longer and seemed grateful for an opportunity to talk to the public again. He was fierce, courageous, and well-spoken as always, and kept the audience awed and inspired the whole time.

I’m actually optimistic that we’ll see him again in Melbourne for the Global Atheist Convention. I’ll put his talk up as soon as I see it appear on youtube, as I’m sure it will soon enough.

Outing Thunderf00t

Thunderf00t has been getting threats from an angry Muslim who has been taking a shotgun approach to threaten and extort, and has actually been tossing around documents labeling his brother as Thunderf00t. So he has decided to give up his pseudonymity and reveal his actual identity: say hello to Phil Mason.

I guess he can’t be threatened with having his real name revealed now.