Friday Cephalopod: Where am I going to put a 300 gallon salt water aquarium?

This is a new one: an octopus farm. Kanaloa Octopus Farm is open for business — for $200, you can get your very own pet octopus.

octopus_cyanea

Unfortunately, they’re caught in a chicken-and-egg problem. You should not encourage the capture of cephalopods in the wild, so it’s a great idea to have a breeding program to provide animals for aquarists. But they’re still in the process of building up their stocks, so they’re selling their smaller wild-caught octopuses, which isn’t so good.

Need I point out that you also should not buy an octopus unless you have the facilities and experience to care for them properly? I have a bit of experience with fresh-water aquarium management, which counts for diddly for raising marine species; keeping cephalopods happy also requires a lot of space and a large volume of clean salt water.

This is not like that time you won a goldfish at the arcade at the county fair when you were a kid, and you plunked it into a bowl of tap water and found it dead the next day. Well, actually, it’s a lot like that last phrase.

You’ve got two choices if you want to understand the Bundy land grab

shane

This is a very familiar situation, and if you want to puzzle out what’s actually going on, I recommend you do one or both of these things:

Maybe you’ve already seen Shane, so I’ll just refresh your memory. A cattle baron tries to take over huge tracts of land by driving out settlers and small farmers; Jack Palance is the bad guy, working for the greedy cattlemen, terrorizing the farmers, who have Alan Ladd defending them. It’s the old range war story that has driven a lot of Westerns. You could also watch Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider, or any of dozens of movies with that theme. Why, just last night I watched a Danish Western, The Salvation, which recycled that story: Mads Mikkelsen is the Danish settler in America, who just wants to build a little farm with his family, when he is victimized by a brutal campaign to destroy a town so rich people can seize the oil-rich lands there (this, of course, prompts prolonged violence, unfortunately, but that’s another familiar trope in these movies).

It happened and is happening all across the West. There are all these open spaces, and a few people decide that they own ALL of it, and that no one else gets to use it. Their demands are usually couched in terms of privatizing public lands, so our Libertarian-leaning compatriots just love it. Also loving it are the few rich beneficiaries of the heavily subsidized use of public lands.

Or instead of a fictionalized old movie, you could read Clarke’s article for the non-fictional details.

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Why a “moonshot to cure cancer” is doomed to failure

A few days ago, David Bowie died of cancer. This morning I learned that the actor Alan Rickman has died of cancer. You all know the rule of threes, right? It has been satisfied, because in his state of the union address Barack Obama announced that he was going to kill American biological research, with cancer. OK, maybe that’s a little strong: he was more devious about it. He announced a “moonshot” to cure cancer. It’s the same thing.

US President Barack Obama isn’t going quietly. He began his final year in office by announcing a “moonshot” to cure cancer in his State of the Union address to Congress on 12 January.

The effort will be led by vice-president Joe Biden, whose son Beau died of brain cancer last year.

“For the loved ones we’ve all lost, for the family we can still save, let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all,” Obama said in a soaring speech that otherwise offered few new proposals. Instead, the president spent most of the address looking back at his accomplishments over roughly seven years in office.

It’s not the “cancer” part of the proposal that is bad; it’s a terrible disease, and we should more to combat it. It’s two other words: “moonshot” and “cure”.

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Uh-oh — this is a bad drinking game

Matt Taibbi has announced the official Republican debate drinking game. He claims to have tuned it so it isn’t instant death to play, but looking it over, it still looks pretty lethal.

I will not be watching the debate — my brain simply cannot take it. I’ll probably go out to a movie, or charge into the lab to tinker for a few hours instead. Unfortunately, my wife is going through a phase where she’s fascinated with really bad arguments, so she’s already planning to sit through it all. Should I hide the good liquor, or just plan on coming home with a stomach pump?

That’s not a thesis, it’s a junkheap

pile-of-trash

Well, cool. You can download Judy Wilyman’s anti-vaccination thesis from the University of Wollongong and read it yourself. So click, click, wait a second, and…

YAAAARGH! My eyes! I thought the social sciences side of the academic world would possibly have higher standards for writing than the science side, but no…it’s awful. This should have been shredded, and Wilyman told to go back and start all over.

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The University of Wollongong just degraded the value of their degrees

The university has accepted the Ph.D. dissertation of Judy Wilyman, which is plum full of rancid bollocks. She’s an anti-vaxxer, and apparently her advisor had no problems with a thesis that basically lied about the science and promoted bizarre conspiracy theories.

wilyman

Look at that first line. There is no stringent monitoring of adverse events or evaluation of the effectiveness of vaccines in the population that would provide meaningful data on their effects in the population. Has she never heard of this science called epidemiology? Does she know what a Phase IV clinical trial is? This stuff is assessed out the wazoo. It’s the analysis of effectiveness and side effects that allows doctors to recommend dosages and schedules.

But it seems the social sciences department at UOW doesn’t believe in statistics or science at all. And most appallingly, the university is supporting this crap.

UOW ensures research is undertaken according to strict ethical and quality standards and supports researchers’ academic freedom of thought and expression, he said.

UOW does not restrict the subjects into which research may be undertaken just because they involve public controversy or because individuals or groups oppose the topic or the findings.

I can believe they have quality standards, but this is an admission that those standards are disgracefully low.

I would agree that research shouldn’t be restricted because it’s controversial. That’s not the case here. The problem with Wilyman’s research is that it is wrong, and that it violates the apparently non-existent standards at UOW for truth and accuracy.

they spend and waste their money on all this hateful stuff

That’s a direct quote from the militant idiot in Oregon. He’s very upset that people are sending them dildos — someone spent $17.90 to ship a sex toy as commentary to them. But in the category of spending and wasting money, I’d like to know how much he has spent on military-style weapons.

But what bugs me most in the video is the first line: So we went and picked up some mail. Really? These armed assholes have seized control of a bit of federal property…and they’re treated so lightly that they’re driving back and forth into town to pick up their mail and go to restaurants? What kind of takeover and siege is this? I can agree that some restraint is a good idea — please don’t charge in with tanks and guns blazing — but come on. When the criminals come into town to have a burger at McDonald’s and pick up their butt plugs at the post office, arrest them.