The third of July was Bake Jesus Day, and many examples were sent in. All I can say is — most of that stuff looks nasty. Tortured bleeding guy on a stick is not the best key ingredient for a cook off, and not even Iron Chef could pull it off.
I was so excited about this lead.
A famous Newfoundland sea monster will soon occupy a space normally reserved for Canada’s Queen.
I was even more excited when I saw a picture of the Newfie beast:
That’ll teach that dingleberry Charles — bypassed by a giant squid, soon to be ruler of all Britannia.
It was a major letdown to discover the details.
Glover’s Harbour’s giant roadside squid statue has been chosen to appear on a new Canadian stamp.
A fellow can still dream, though. Someone needs to drop a hint to Queen Elizabeth that a giant aquatic mollusc would do a better job on the throne than that dullard she birthed.
You know how New Scientist published that horrible magazine cover that said “DARWIN WAS WRONG” in big letters, which we now get to hear about all the time at school board meetings as every authority-happy creationist waves it around and announces that they were right all along? I want a copy of the July issue of the Portuguese edition of Playboy for the same reason.
Jesus is on the cover of the July Playboy, sitting on a bed, holding a scantily clad female. The title of Saramago’s book is engraved into the headboard of the bed.
The other explicit images in the magazine show Jesus watching a lesbian sex scene, standing next to a street prostitute, and looking over the shoulder of a half naked woman reminiscent of a Catholic school girl.
This is purely for pedagogical purposes, of course. For any other purposes I’d want the weird bearded guy airbrushed out of the picture.
If only blogging were like pro basketball…
I’m very, very sorry. You know that little malware incident the other day? We’ve discovered what the nasty thing did: it’s infected us here at scienceblogs, and there’s an epidemic sweeping through the team. Symptoms are cold-heartedness, decay, lack of affect, deadness, corruption, sudden surges of frenzied aggression, and cannibalistic impulses.
That’s right. We’re all turning into New Atheists. Or zombies. One or the other, it’s hard to tell the difference.
Clearly, I have an advantage here, since there’s actually little change in my condition. I did feel a pressing desire to disembowel someone, but snarled a little at Henry Gee and tweaked the style sheet for the site to a set of colors that will ravage all the readers’ tender eyeballs and brains, and felt fully satisfied — my appetites are unchanged. Tasteless, vicious savagery is always what you get here.
Look around the other blogs over the course of the day — they’re all going to experience the effects of this weird infection at different times. Report back with zombie sightings, if you’d like. Or whatever. I don’t care any more. There’s only the hunger.
Hmmm…the Trophy Wife is curled up all innocent and unsuspecting in bed right now…
You’ve all been wondering, I’m sure, what a vampire penis looks like. We don’t have a picture of one, since Twilight is still the domain of yearningly sexless (we hope!) tweens who are infatuated with the idea of love and sex, just not the reality, but one exploiter has come out with a Twilight vibrator. It’s lavenderish and bumpy and grossly overpriced, if you don’t really want to click on the link. It’s not clear if it sparkles; if not, they missed a good marketing angle.
It’s also not clear who it is for. Don’t you have to be rather repressed to find anything at all attractive about that series?
(By the way, if you want a more chilling picture of vampire sexuality in fiction, look into Let the Right One In, either the movie or book. Creepiest vampire story since Stoker. Plus, nobody will ever try to sell you an Eli vibrator. Ever.)
It’s strange how the people who most advocate sympathy and rapprochement with religion are blind to what religious people really think. Here’s another case where Josh Rosenau complains that I misunderstand what the faithful were trying to do with their prayers for the Gulf…and then goes on to do exactly as I said the apologists should stop doing. He ignores the religious part of these prayer events. He says, as if it is refuting anything I say, that prayer reduces stress, has positive physiological effects, brings communities together, etc., etc., etc. It’s utterly clueless, and in a bizarre, twisted way, thoroughly disrespectful of religious thought, which I kind of admire, but doesn’t fit well with his message.
You know why people go off in groups and pray to God to stop the oil spill? Because they really hope that God will miraculously stop the oil spill.
Is that so hard to understand?
Josh babbles on about how people go to church for the daycare or the socializing or the activities, and that their “gatherings are about how the community will survive the crisis they’re facing more than they’re about prayer”. Condescending much, Josh? Do you ever talk to religious people? Because no, many of them are quite sincere in their faith and actually do believe their God does something. If I walked down to the local fundie church and suggested to members of the congregation that they were really there just for the coffee and cake, they’d give me that pitying look and tell me I really don’t understand church.
And do you imagine that atheists don’t believe that community is important? We know it is. We’d like to build communities that don’t rely on superstition and lies to function, though. We’re also honest enough to state that we think believers are wrong without trying to pretend that they don’t really believe.
My detestation of that patronizing attitude was prompted by a link I was sent to another appeal for prayer to help the Gulf. This one is more Newagey than Christian, but it’s the same sentiment: Magic incantations to a supernatural entity will fix everything.
A way for us to help heal the Gulf
Yesterday we received a letter from Dr. Masaru Emoto, who many of you will recognize as the scientist from Japan who has done research and publications about the characteristics of water. Among other things, his research reveals that water physically responds to emotions.Right now, most of us have the predominantly angry emotion when we consider what is happening in the Gulf. And while certainly we are justified in that emotion, we may be of greater assistance to our planet and its life forms, if we sincerely, powerfully and humbly pray the prayer that Dr. Emoto himself has proposed.
“I send the energy of love and gratitude to the water and all the living creatures in the Gulf of Mexico and its surroundings. To the whales, dolphins, pelicans, fish, shellfish, plankton, coral, algae, and all living creatures . . . I am sorry. Please forgive us. Thank you. I love you. “
We are passing this request to people who we believe might be willing to participate in this prayer, to set an intention of love and healing that is so large, so overwhelming that we can perform a miracle in the Gulf of Mexico.
We are not powerless. We are powerful. Our united energy, speaking this prayer daily … multiple times daily … can literally shift the balance of destruction that is happening. We don’t have to know how, we just have to recognize that the power of love is greater than any power active in the Universe today.
Please join us in often repeating this healing prayer of Dr. Emoto’s. And feel free to copy and send it around the planet. Let’s take charge, and do our own clean up!
David Anselmo
Glenwood Springs
Love is greater than any other power? I don’t think love is even stronger than gravity, which is the weakest of the four fundamental forces. If Mr Anselmo trips, all his love won’t keep him from falling flat on his face.
But, you know, I’m still pretty sure that he earnestly believes the fol-de-rol he’s written down, and that he’s not just scribbling up such absurdities because it helps with his blood pressure. I’ll grant him that much.
Just in case, next time I flush, I’ll have a little chat with the toilet bowl and let the water know I’m rooting for it, before I flush and send it off to the Mississippi and down to the Gulf. It’ll ease my stress even if the waste water is otherwise inattentive. That should make Josh happy.
But I can’t. I am quite possibly the worst dancer in our galaxy (notice the nod to my self-esteem: I can acknowledge that there might be an entity worse at dancing somewhere in the universe). But still, this announcement spoke to my inner Balanchine.
Who said scientists can’t dance? The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is proud to announce the third annual “Dance Your Ph.D.” interpretative dance video contest. The contest, which is open to anyone with a Ph.D. or pursuing a Ph.D. in a science-related field, asks scientists to transform their research into an interpretive dance. Winners of each of the four categories (physics, chemistry, biology, and social sciences) will receive $500, then compete head-to-head for an additional $500 grand prize for best overall dance. Submissions are due by September 1, 2010. All winning dances will be screened at the Imagine Science Film Festival in New York City in mid-October, where the best overall dance will be determined by a panel of judges and the audience. A more detailed description of the rules and how to enter can be found at http://gonzolabs.org/dance/.
True confession: I once upon a time, 25 years ago, considered doing part of my thesis defense with interpretive dance, but decided that my profound lack of talent and the impracticality of bringing together a dance troupe on short notice made it impossible. I cobbled together an animation instead — on an Apple II. In lo-res graphics mode. Don’t laugh, it was a simpler time.
My thesis was basically an analysis of the construction of the motor circuitry of the zebrafish spinal cord. I was particularly interested in how descending outputs from the hindbrain, especially the Mauthner cell, connected to the segmental motoneurons of spinal cord. You see, we knew that if you stimulated the Mauthner cell, it sent a signal down the nervous system that made all the body muscles on one side contract abruptly, causing the animal to make a fast bend that was part of its escape response.
What I did was work out the anatomy of the cord, identifying two classes of motoneurons: the very large primary motoneurons, 3 per segment, which innervated large blocks of muscle, and smaller secondary motoneurons, which innervated smaller groups of muscle fibers. Then I determined that the Mauthner axon seemed to only contact the primary motoneurons; I also, with Judith Eisen, used fluorescent probes to mark motoneurons and watch them grow out over time. Those developmental studies and the anatomy of the cord — new fibers are layered onto the outside, so there’s a time-series laid out in space from deep cord (early) to superficial fibers (late) — led me to a choreographic model of development.
The Mauthner and primary motoneurons grew first, but the Mauthner had a long way to go, so in each segment primary motoneurons sent out growth cones, then the Mauthner axon arrived, and then after it had passed by, the secondary motoneurons sent out their growth cones. It was all in the timing (although my work in those ancient days could not rule out the possibility of specific molecular cues in addition). So the dance was obvious. Here’s what I would have done, given time and resources and complete shamelessness.
Picture a football field. Gathered on one sideline in clumps ten yards apart are groups of dancers. One in each group represents the primary motoneuron, and is dressed in brilliant blue. The others, in bright green, are the secondary motoneurons.
At the goal line is a single dancer in red, representing the Mauthner growth cone. At the start of the dance, she moves alone, trailing a red ribbon representing the axon behind, heading towards the opposite goal line. Since she’s a growth cone, the dynamic leading edge of a developing axon, she should be flamboyant and exploratory, reaching out all around her as she moves across the field.
As Mauthner starts, the primary motoneurons all wake up and send out their growth cones — they shouldn’t do it at precisely the same time or in any order, but asynchronously. The should move across the field in exactly the same pattern, however, trailing their blue ribbons behind them. Primary motoneuron growth cones are initially huge and expansive, so the blue dancers should be outdoing the Mauthner cell as they move.
Mauthner, as she crosses each blue ribbon, should pause and stroke the ribbon, and then tie her red ribbon to the blue, indicating the formation of a synapse. And then she moves on to the next and the next and next.
The secondary motoneurons rest quietly while all this is going on, but after Mauthner passes them, they should also jump up and start moving across the field, passing over the red ribbon but clinging to the blue, eventually diverging from it to explore their own little patches of the field.
It woulda been beautiful.
I missed my chance, though, for lack of talent and ambition. Don’t miss your opportunity: if you’ve got an idea, go for it, just so you don’t end up a gray-haired old geezer moaning about how he should have created some art, once.
Call me when he’s built a Lego laser printer.
The neighbors probably really hate this guy.
