I would approve of CNN firing all their reporters and replacing them with Jay Smooth

Also, the NY Times.

Jay is going to be stretched awfully thin trying to cover everything. Maybe they can also hire Roy Edroso and Heather Parton and Peter Daou and Charles Pierce and god just about anyone other than the mewling mob of sycophants and know-nothings and febrile desperate panderers they’ve all got in the media nowadays. Are they every one diving to join Breitbart in the flaming dumpster of irresponsibility or something?

I’m with Mano on this one. I am sick of this election, and I am particularly sick of our gutless, spineless, brainless media. They are jellyfish. Except jellyfish have a nerve net and maybe a tiny bit of self-respect.

Eyeballs are funny things

This optical illusion is making the rounds. There are twelve black dots located at some of the vertices. Can you seem them all?< ?p>

opticalillusion

You can’t see them all at once, at least: focus on one, and all the others disappear. This is not at all surprising — the central area of maximum resolution in your eye is very tiny, and your peripheral vision simply isn’t very good.

What did intrigue me, though, is that if I focus on a central intersection I can see two dots at once, one to either side of the intersection I’m looking at. However, I can’t simultaneously see two dots on the vertical plane.

I think this means I’d be particularly susceptible to drop bear attacks.

‘The age of the earth has become a strangely toxic issue’

There are spit-takes galore in this video of Stephen Meyer, but don’t worry, he’s so slow and tedious and pompous that you’ll see them coming way ahead of time.

He confesses that the “intelligent design community” (you know, that dying horse that twitches occasionally) has avoided the issue because it has become strangely toxic within Christianity, and then he meanders on about how you can come to either a young earth or an old earth conclusion just by how you look at the evidence, which is very much a Ken Ham/Answers in Genesis sort of perspective.

But don’t worry, he and Ken will still be in opposition. He later admits to being an Old Earth creationist, with the peculiar reservation that he thinks the paleontologists/anthropologists are all wrong, and that humans were spontaneously created by god much more recently than is believed.

But he thinks the age of the earth is a tertiary issue, and The first issue is the reality of god — is god real or imaginary?. I think it’s clear that they have no evidence for a god of any kind, especially the twitchy nasty Christian patriarch he believes in, but it’s strange to argue that the age of the earth is unimportant. It’s a fundamental question: do you accept physical, scientific evidence, or don’t you? The age of the earth is really a relatively simple, straightforward question which has a largely indisputable answer that is supported by multiple lines of hard evidence. If you can’t agree on a basic physical parameter of our world, measured with multiple techniques to a high degree of confidence, you aren’t even speaking the same language.

I’d also say that if you think you can argue that Homo sapiens is only tens of thousands of years old, you’re talking gibberish.

But the real lesson of this video is that Stephen Meyer is a very silly man. I had a tough time listening to all 10 minutes of it because it’s just Meyer giving a stupid answer to a stupid question, and he is unbelievably long-winded, pedantic, and full of himself (a tone he can sustain for a painfully long time, as attested by those horrid doorstops that he has written). What really annoyed me beyond his drone, though, was that when he finally gives up the microphone, he immediately takes it back to praise, of all people, Lee Fucking Strobel, one of the worst, most dishonest, most unconvincing Christian apologists out there. I know atheists who left Christianity after reading that guy’s schlock nonsense. And here’s tedious superficial Meyer claiming he’s persuasive.

Old Earth creationists are just as ridiculous as Young Earth creationists

The oldest evidence for microbial life has been found in Greenland, with fossilized 3.7 billion year old stromatolites (layered bacterial colonies) found in the rocks. Here’s what they look like:

stroms

And here’s the abstract of the paper:

Biological activity is a major factor in Earth’s chemical cycles, including facilitating CO2 sequestration and providing climate feedbacks. Thus a key question in Earth’s evolution is when did life arise and impact hydrosphere–atmosphere–lithosphere chemical cycles? Until now, evidence for the oldest life on Earth focused on debated stable isotopic signatures of 3,800–3,700 million year (Myr)-old metamorphosed sedimentary rocks and minerals from the Isua supracrustal belt (ISB), southwest Greenland. Here we report evidence for ancient life from a newly exposed outcrop of 3,700-Myr-old metacarbonate rocks in the ISB that contain 1–4-cm-high stromatolites—macroscopically layered structures produced by microbial communities. The ISB stromatolites grew in a shallow marine environment, as indicated by seawater-like rare-earth element plus yttrium trace element signatures of the metacarbonates, and by interlayered detrital sedimentary rocks with cross-lamination and storm-wave generated breccias. The ISB stromatolites predate by 220 Myr the previous most convincing and generally accepted multidisciplinary evidence for oldest life remains in the 3,480-Myr-old Dresser Formation of the Pilbara Craton, Australia. The presence of the ISB stromatolites demonstrates the establishment of shallow marine carbonate production with biotic CO2 sequestration by 3,700 million years ago (Ma), near the start of Earth’s sedimentary record. A sophistication of life by 3,700 Ma is in accord with genetic molecular clock studies placing life’s origin in the Hadean eon (>4,000 Ma).

[Read more…]

Evolution caught in a movie

It’s a standing joke that creationists demand a complete time-lapse recording of evolution before they’re going to believe it. Joke no more: we’ve got one. It’s a movie of bacteria evolving antibiotic resistance. I don’t even need to explain it, because the video explains everything that’s going on.

Different old joke now: But they’re still just bacteria.

Also, you should be horrified by the power of evolution. It took 11 days for the bacterial population to evolve resistance to a lethal, thousand-fold increase in antibiotic concentration.

Engineering porn

While I’m sure many engineers also found the paint-mixing porn I posted earlier soothing and pleasurable, the diversity of human experience also allows for other stimulants. Like this, the world’s largest engine.

wartsila_engine

The height of a four-story building, the Wärtsilä RT-flex96C is a two-stroke turbocharged low-speed diesel engine designed by the Finnish manufacturer Wärtsilä.

It is designed for large container ships that run on heavy fuel oil. Its largest 14-cylinder version is 13.5 metres (44 ft) high, 26.59 m (87 ft) long, weighs over 2,300 tonnes, and produces 80,080 kilowatts (107,390 hp). The engine is the largest reciprocating engine in the world.

Jesus. There are videos of assembly. Can we call this developmental engineering?

Let’s start one up.

And watch long, slow, lingering videos of the engine in operation. Nothing really happens, but the sound… my future industrial rock band, which I’m calling Wärtsilä (it even has the necessary umlauts!), won’t have a drummer, but we’ll just haul around one of these engines on tour to be the percussion section.

Whew. I need to cool down. Maybe I’ll go watch some paint-mixing videos or something.

North Dakota … a petty, vengeful state

standingrockprotest

After the United States government declared that the North Dakota pipeline should be halted and basically rebuked the process that allowed it to be built, the state of North Dakota has lashed out and issued an arrest warrant for Amy Goodman. Like a good journalist, she’s always annoying the authorities, and now some officious dimbulb in power in that very conservative state has decided, after the fabulous press they got from siccing attack dogs on Indian children, that harassing the journalist who caught their viciousness on video is the right person to punish.

Why can’t Amy Goodman be more like Matt Lauer or Wolf Blitzer, and suck up to the powers-that-be? Maybe it’s because she’s one of the few journalists still doing their goddamn job.

North Dakota also issued arrest warrants for Jill Stein (vandalism: she spray-painted a bulldozer) and Cody Charles Hall (for being an organizer of the protest).

You go right ahead, North Dakota, and make yourself look even worse.

By the way, the last time Amy Goodman got arrested here in Minnesota, it did not go well for the authoritarian thugs.

Trump’s “charities”

You have got to read this investigation into the Trump Foundation. It’s a great big scam. Trump has not built up an endowment, he has no employees, and all he does is beg his cronies to put money into it that he can dole out to generate the appearance that he does charitable giving…or worse, that he can use to buy himself extravagant gifts. If there is going to be any criminal investigation of a political candidate, he ought to be the target.

The Donald J. Trump Foundation is not like other charities. An investigation of the foundation — including examinations of 17 years of tax filings and interviews with more than 200 individuals or groups listed as donors or beneficiaries — found that it collects and spends money in a very unusual manner.

For one thing, nearly all of its money comes from people other than Trump. In tax records, the last gift from Trump was in 2008. Since then, all of the donations have been other people’s money — an arrangement that experts say is almost unheard of for a family foundation.

Trump then takes that money and generally does with it as he pleases. In many cases, he passes it on to other charities, which often are under the impression that it is Trump’s own money.

But, you know, I read the whole thing as an indictment of Trump’s venality and corruption, and I realized that he is so corrupt that he probably reads it as praise for his great business sense. Except for one paragraph. I bet this is the one thing that will burn.

The most money it has ever reported having was $3.2 million at the end of 2009. At last count, that total had shrunk to $1.3 million. By comparison, Oprah Winfrey — who is worth $1.5 billion less than Trump, according to a Forbes magazine estimate — has a foundation with $242 million in the bank. At the end of 2014, the Clinton Foundation had $440 million in assets.

The worst thing you can say to Donald Trump: he’s small, cheap, and poor.

If you don’t believe me, here’s Donald Trump on 11 September 2001.

Only parenthetically in the middle of the 10-minute conversation did Trump turn to a favorite topic-size. 40 Wall Street, he said, referring to his 71-story building blocks away from the now-collapsed twin towers, actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest-and then, when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second-tallest. And now it’s the tallest.

There weren’t any videos of Muslims celebrating the fall of the twin towers, but there was one orange capitalist barely containing his glee at a rival building getting knocked down.