Monstrous

A gunman walked into a midnight showing of the new Batman movie, threw some smoke bombs, and started shooting. 14 are dead, 50+ are wounded, and the killer has been arrested.

I don’t even…

What gets me is the necessary lack of empathy of any kind for the victims, and the futility of it all. Does murdering the defenseless reduce these psychos sense of helplessness? Does it give them a feeling of power? Because all I see is a coward, a weakling, a loser…and one who has just made his own life significantly worse.

Why I am an atheist – Dave H

When I was nine or ten I asked my Dad what caused the universe and he bought me Carl Sagan’s book Cosmos. It was a wonderful book that answered some questions and got me wondering about a whole lot more. Sagan conveyed the majesty of the real world(s), the world(s) we can observe, with such dazzling eloquence that I could not help but embark immediately on a lifelong journey of discovering the  secrets of the cosmos through the books, TV programmes, and (eventually) blogs of astronomers and cosmologists.  It was only natural that my interest should then extend to all of science (and so eventually lead me to Pharyngula).

[Read more…]

Are you an English major looking for work?

I know, you all are. But here’s a job opportunity for a godless, well organized editor.

Atheist Alliance International (AAI, atheistalliance.org) will be launching a new magazine in 2013 and we are looking for an Editor to plan and implement a fresh layout and format! AAI has gone through many changes in the last year or so – including its re-launch as a genuinely global organisation in 2011 and the adoption of new branding earlier this year. Now we are contemplating another major change and we want to find the right person to work with us to restructure and re-launch AAI’s flagship magazine.

This is a contract, self-managed position that involves securing content for each issue, cover design and management of advertising and production.

Secular World magazine is currently published quarterly and available to AAI Members only, but AAI would like to consider broadening publication options to a range of electronic media. Based on quarterly publication the Editor will be paid US$1,250 per issue plus a share of any advertising revenue secured by the Editor and a share of external sales revenue. AAI is willing to discuss the elements of the payment package with applicants.

This is why I could never be an anthropologist

Somedays, it’s just awful to have the mind of a 12 year old boy. So I’m reading this serious and interesting paper on Neandertals, and learn something new.

Two particular characteristics have received considerable attention; pronounced humeral diaphysis strength asymmetry and anteroposteriorly strengthened humeral diaphyseal shape. In particular, humeral bilateral asymmetry for cross-sectional area, and torsional and average bending rigidity, appear exceptionally high in Neandertals (averaging 24–57%) compared to skeletal samples of modern Holocene H. sapiens (averaging 5–14%).

That’s science-speak for “Neandertals had massively muscular right arms compared to their left.” And my mind went right into the gutter.

Anthropologists had their own less juvenile explanations: their strong right arms were a response to extreme muscular activity of repetitive thrusting (ack, back into the gutter) with long, heavy spears (slap me hard.) The paper, though, analyzed muscular activity in experimental subjects who made spear thrusts while hooked up to loads of instrumentation, and discovered that, contrary to their expectations, it was the left arm, the off hand, that carried the largest load in stabilizing the thrust. So that hypothesis simply doesn’t work.

So they tested an alternative explanation, and it wasn’t the first one that leapt to my mind. One of the most common kinds of tools found at Neandertal sites are scrapers —if you’re using hides for clothing and shelter, there is a lot of processing involved — prolonged, repetitive scraping motions while stripping excess flesh from the underside of skins. I imagine scraping a mammoth skin is a huge endeavor that does involve a lot of work. They reviewed ethnographic studies, and discovered that processing a single cow hide, for instance, takes 6-10 hours of work. So they hooked up their test subjects to instruments and measured muscle activity during scraping…and it matches, generating forces that could lead to a build-up of muscle and bone in the right arm.

Unfortunately for my adolescent Neandertal wanking hypothesis, though, the comparison probably doesn’t hold up. Even the most obsessive individual is going to be hard up to maintain 6-10 hours of constant activity. Rats, I guess I’m not going to be making a novel contribution to anthropology. Besides, I imagine this guess was made many times before, and for some reason never made it into print.

Shaw CN, Hofmann CL, Petraglia MD, Stock JT, Gottschall JS (2012) Neandertal Humeri May Reflect Adaptation to Scraping Tasks, but Not Spear Thrusting. PLoS ONE 7(7): e40349. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0040349.

Chickens or summer camp?

I’m supposed to be raising money for Camp Quest — I’m competing against a team of tiny, gnome-like little people — and they’re actually edging ahead of me. But now a distraction has come up.

Kasese Humanist Primary School is trying to raise money for a chicken coop, so they can get eggs to feed the kids. Aargh…defeat little pests in competition, or feed hungry children in a humanist school?

You knew what had to win. If you can, donate to Kasese Humanist Primary School. We’ll crush our opponents later, after the kids have had their breakfast.

Gotcha!

This is an account from Connie Schultz’s facebook page, so I’ll put the whole thing here for you fb-haters.

Email from conservative blogger, dated July 9, 2012:

Dear Ms. Shultz,

We are doing an expose on journalists in the elite media who socialize with elected officials they are assigned to cover. We have found numerous photos of you with Sen. Sherrod Brown. In one of them, you appear to be hugging him.

Care to comment?

An exposé! Of the elite media! And he’s got the photographic evidence! It sounds so Breitbartian. And the followup is a classic Breitbartian pratfall.

Response, dated July 10, 2012:

Dear Mr. [Name Deleted]:

I am surprised you did not find a photo of me kissing U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown so hard he passes out from lack of oxygen. He’s really cute.

He’s also my husband.

You know that, right?

Connie Schultz.

I’m sure this will make headlines at the Drudge Report or the Daily Caller or The Blaze or some similar right-wing schlock factory.

Burzynski is still bilking dying children

And credulous newspapers are helping that quack. The latest case is a little girl in Ireland with a disfiguring and deadly rhabdomyosarcoma who is trying to raise money to get the useless and totally fraudulent Burzynski antineoplaston treatment … and this article makes the good point that newspapers are helping to defraud sick people. Both the Irish Times and the Irish Independent reported on the poor girl’s struggle, and they called the fake treatment “pioneering” or “advanced”.

Each uncritical article published about clinics like the Burzynski clinic amounts to free advertising for a treatment which is at best, as yet unproven, and at worst, much more damaging than it is claimed. Though articles about individual patients and families must tread a careful line between criticism of the clinic and the feelings of those involved, the current standard of reporting on these clinics ultimately helps no one. It’s time to stop hiding the controversy, and sweeping it under the carpet. Patients deserve information, not infomercials.

It’s a shame. If you google Burzynski, the first page is full of bullshit promoting the fake treatment — one thing his clinic is good at is SEO — but still, there’s quackwatch and Orac and Larry Moran buried in the muddle, pointing out that this is flaming quackery. You’d think a reasonably intelligent journalist would notice that there’s some controversy here. And even better, you’d expect a reasonably intelligent journalist to pick up a phone, call an oncologist, and ask what they thought of antineoplaston therapy.

But they don’t.

And Burzynski gets free advertising for his $200,000 urine treatments.

Zimmerman hides behind his convenient deity

You knew this was not going to go well, just from the names of the two principals. George Zimmerman is interviewed by Sean Hannity. And it did not.

Zimmerman claims to be sorry that he murdered Trayvon Martin, but also refuses to accept responsibility. And he’s got someone else to blame.

I feel like it was all God’s plan.

So that’s why Hannity was the one to interview him: they needed someone with the conscience of a hyena and the intellect of an insect because anyone else would have puked all over him upon hearing that cliche.

So God plans to use racist assholes to kill black teenagers? At last, we have confirmation that God is a white Republican.