Another day, another talking head video. Sorry, this one is mostly just me talking at a camera — I’m too bogged down in work to make it fancy (classes start next week, which rhymes with “eeeeeeek”).
You really can just ignore it and go straight to Joe Felsenstein’s book, Theoretical Evolutionary Genetics. It’s mathier and more detailed.
No, you are not. Not even close. Go read about our reality.
It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.
Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.
But, you say, you don’t want to be depressed. That’s fine, but the only acceptable alternative emotion is fury. Get out and do something about it then.
People are dying of the flu — young, fit, healthy people.
But days after Christmas, Kyler Baughman was worse — coughing and running a fever, his family told the news station. They said he went to a nearby hospital in western Pennsylvania and, from there, was flown to UPMC Presbyterian in Pittsburgh.
Soon after, on Dec. 28, Kyler died of “organ failure due to septic shock caused by influenza,” his mother told WPXI.
I’m also hearing about friends suffering with this unpleasant disease for a week or 10 days. The flu vaccine is not 100% effective, but if it can reduce the odds, you should get it.
This video is packed with useful information about biochemistry and metabolism. I’m thinking all of my cell bio students should be able to understand it, and it puts a lot of the cell metabolism stuff they learned in an applied context — I might have to use it next time I teach the course.
If you thought bathrooms were dangerous, you’re going to be terrified by transsexual sharks.
Many fish are switch-hitters: they have the ability to change from male to female, or vice versa, when it’s convenient for reproduction. Not so for sharks and rays, which develop either male or female organs before birth. But off the coast of Taiwan, fishers discovered a shark with a fully developed set of male and female reproductive organs. The animal is one of only a handful of such sharks ever documented, and the first of its species.
Actually, I suspect these sharks would be more tolerant and more interesting than the bro-sharks with their toxic masculinity.
But wait, even bro-sharks just want to be left alone.
This lovely specimen was highlighted in an article titled Octopuses are taking over our oceans and, yes, it’s time to panic. I don’t get it. It’s about a survey of cephalopods worldwide showing an increase in their numbers. Doesn’t that mean it’s time to celebrate? What is the author’s problem?
I’m reporting his name to our new overlords at the first opportunity.
I’m tinkering with videos again.
I intended to put this up last weekend, but something funny happened: I realized the first version was incredibly boring. I’m not quite in the rhythm of this video game; my first draft started with the same points, but then I started…adding…to it. Oh, this part needs further explanation: scribble up a paragraph of deeper content. Ooops, better qualify this part. Here’s an interesting aside; let’s digress for a bit. I recorded my words, and it was about a half hour long, and then I had to edit it, and it just hit me as pedantic and tedious and not at all in sync with the medium.
So I threw it all away. Extracted a few of the punchier bits, and made a 5 minute summary. It works better. Not perfect, but it’s all part of the process of learning.
Cryptozoologists like to claim that you can’t prove a negative. I respond that 1) scientists don’t deal in proof, and 2) of course, given a specific claim, you certainly can provide evidence that it’s false. If someone is going to make a claim, the onus is on them to provide sufficient specific criteria for the evaluation of that claim.
Here’s an excellent example of how it’s done: Craig McClain dismantles the assertion that the giant shark Megalodon exists. This is a very thorough, point-by-point dissection of the evidence that we should have if there actually were an 18-meter long monster shark prowling our oceans. The evidence shows that, sadly, they all went extinct between 2 and 3 million years ago.
You could make the same sorts of arguments against the existence of a giant hairy ape living in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, or against the Tree Octopus. The True Believers never seem to be dissuaded, though.
It’s hard to make those kinds of arguments against a giant cosmic god, though. Those True Believers have cunningly engineered the properties of their cryptid to be nebulous and evasive; Megalodon at least had specific parameters and predictable properties that allows one to make predictions about what you should see if they existed. Gods have none of that.
Maybe this is a new species: the Frilled Giant Pacific Octopus, which is very similar to the unfrilled and familiar Giant Pacific Octopus.
Note the little bumps called papillae around the eyes — it’s an octopus with eyelashes.
I expect you all to party a little harder on Sunday night for the Frilled Giant Pacific Octopus.
