Come to think of it, I did have a gannet appear in my toast yesterday

A wildlife photographer gets a lucky break and captures an aerial photo of a flock of flamingos that’ has spontaneously assembled into a rough wading-bird shape. Cool enough, a nice example of pareidolia in wildlife form, and then the photographer has to go and ruin it:

“The reaction to this photo has been remarkable. Some people have actually said that the image is divine intervention and proof that there is a God.”

That’s a pretty remarkable reaction right there, first crediting the Ultimate Patriarch for a happy accident and then distancing yourself from it, FoxNews style, with the “some people say.”

I don’t stampede my herd of pronghorn through your cathedral, guy. Please keep your God out of my Wonders of Nature.

Death Valley and Temperature Records

Death Valley, January 2005

Death Valley on a much cooler day in January 2005, with Pleistocene Lake Manly reemergent at Badwater.

I say more about this over at KCET, but I’ve found it kind of surprising that today’s barrage of coverage of the World Meteorological Organization’s official dethroning of the 1936 El Azizia, Libya temperature record didn’t mention this fascinating work that came out a few months back.

The short version of today’s news: a global group of meteorologists, including Libyan scientist, Khalid El Fadli, climate director of the Libyan National Meteorological Center, went over the old records that secured El Azizia’s spot in fifth-grade geography texts as the site of the world’s highest recorded temperature. That much-memorized datum, an air temperature peak of 136°F (or 58°C for those of you in civilized countries) 90 years ago today on September 13, 1922, turns out to have been an artifact of difficult-to-read equipment combined a newbie weather technician working at an Italian Army post. The peak actual temperature that day was likely 7°C cooler, putting it well within the range of normal hellishly hot for the neighborhood I just moved out of. That puts Death Valley’s July 10, 1913 reading of  134°F/56.7°C back in the first place spot it ought to have enjoyed for the last 90 years.

El Fadli, by the way, had to go underground for a bit during the revolution. His colleagues lauded him today for taking risks to get this study done, and we wouldn’t have had this info without his taking significant personal risks as Qaddafi’s regime went through its death throes.

The thing is that those official records have a bit of built-in sampling error: namely, they derive from the places where we’ve managed to maintain weather stations for long enough to keep records. The WMO has more than 11,000 weather stations worldwide, but “worldwide” is a big place, and that works out to an average of one weather station for every 13,000 square kilometers of land surface. Admittedly, much of the really underrepresented land surface is in Antarctica, where it’s unlikely any high air temperature records will be set anytime soon. But that’s still a lot of potentially hot land not being monitored, in the deserts of Asia, Africa, and even the Sonoran Desert in North America.

The research that made the press a few months back involved measuring Land Skin Temperature (LST), which I’d embarrassingly typoed as “Land Sin Temperature” at KCET until just now, via infrared satellite monitoring of the Earth’s surface by way of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometers on two NASA satellites. The researchers, led by Steve Running of the University of Montana, found a number of places well away from the nearest WMO-approved weather station that had astonishingly high surface temperatures. The record? A dark and gravelly spot in Iran’s Lut Desert, where on one particularly warm day in 2005 the LST reached 159.3°F/70.7°C. The place on Earth with the second-hottest LST was an unspecified spot in the bush in Queensland, which will no doubt delight the Strines in the crowd. That temperature: 156.7°F/69.3°C. The Turpan Basin in Xinjiang, China took third place at 152.2°F /66.8°C.

Of course air temperature and LST are different animals. The WMO requires that air temperature measurement be taken 1.2-2 meters off the ground in the shade, which means comparing air temps and LST is kind of comparing apples with the sun-baked soil at the base of the apple tree. Think walking barefoot on the beach on a nice day with air temperatures in the 80s. Differences of 50°F between air temperature and LST aren’t unheard of. And until we plant a WMO-approved weather station out on the Lut Desert, we probably won’t have a good idea how those temperatures compare with Death Valley’s.

But we do know one thing: when Running’s team listed the places on Earth with the hottest Land Skin Temperatures, Death Valley didn’t make the list. So the hottest place on Earth, according to the news today, probably isn’t. It’s just the hottest one for which we have a recorded air temperature. Which doesn’t make as snappy a headline. But that’s okay: the California Desert still has that 767 straight days without rain at Bagdad, about 40 miles north of where I’me sitting right now. It’s at most in second place after the Atacama Desert, which has some places where rain’s never been recorded, ever. But we’re’ good at being in second place around here.

Things to do on Sunday in Minneapolis

Come to a book reading! the Minnesota Atheists are sponsoring a reading at the Southdale Libary at 2pm from our anthology, Atheist Voices of Minnesota: an Anthology of Personal Stories. I’ll be reading from my chapter, and a heap o’ other people will read their godless stories, and then afterwards we’re heading over to Q Cumbers Restaurant for a healthy meal of fresh salads and fruit and various other things (use your imagination).

It will be fabulous. And it will be the most exciting thing happening in Minnesota all day long! You must come!

Recommendations for cannibals?

Oh, please dear Gauss, not more of this hyper-adaptive crap.

It appears that men’s preference for more curvy women has quite a lot to do with the fact that curvy figures historically have possessed more of the healthy omega-3 fatry acid DHA, which is essential for proper brain development in children.

An article in the August 2012 issue of Psychology Today explains that men “know” something significant about women’s bodies that women don’t. And it all has to do with nature’s mandate to produce children with great survival skills. In fact, women are usually more like men’s ideals than they realize, and losing weight to meet the standard set by the fashion and modeling industries may not make them any more attractive to men.

Well, gosh then…if I were still trying to raise my kids and feed them a healthy diet, I guess I now know which of the herd to cull out and put on the dinner plate! At least, that’s where the first paragraph was leading me.

Look: if you are a woman eating a reasonable diet, if you aren’t abusing yourself with an eating disorder on either end of the spectrum, your kids will probably be fine. If you’re getting standard dietary supplements, vitamins and cofactors, that are routine in almost all standard pregnancy care situations (but unfortunately not routine for the poorest of the poor), your fetus is getting what it needs no matter whether you are slender or curvy. There is a broad range of tolerance here.

Also, in a normal, healthy relationship, men should not and are not judging you by either a conscious or unconscious assessment of how much DHA is available in your blood supply — if they are looking at you like a cut of meat rather than as a fellow human being who would make a good partner in living, you really don’t want to associate with them.

And this — this bullshit — is rank idiocy.

American children rank 31st out of 64 nations in tests of academic ability. The highest scores are in places like Japan, where women have slender hourglass figures and have four times the amount of DHA in their blood.

So…much…wrong. Not only the racism of categorizing an entire nation of women as possessing “slender hourglass figures”, but reducing academic ability to the product of your mother’s sexual desirability and biochemistry…jebus, let’s forget about tests and ability and background education and just let the children of MILFs into Hahvahd.

Also, guess who he cites as the source of this splendid information about men’s ability to assay DHA levels with a glance? Psychology Today. What, not Cosmo?

Repudiation

Dear Ron Lindsay:

I have to take exception to one small part of your recent post.

Greta Christina and PZ Myers have recently suggested that is it not necessarily a bad thing to be divisive. True, it is not necessarily a bad thing. It depends on what one is separating oneself from.

In her blog post, Greta Christina responded to the charge that the Atheism Plus initiative is divisive by claiming that the secular community is divided already. As evidence for this claim, she offered several deplorable incidents and actions, principally involving hate-filled threats and comments to women, many of which would be familiar to anyone active in the movement. She then asked rhetorically why such vile conduct has not been called “divisive.”

But if hate-filled comments and threats to women have not been expressly called divisive, it’s because such conduct does not threaten to divide the movement. It has already been repudiated, both implicitly and explicitly, by many, if not most, of the organizations in the movement.

[Read more…]

Let’s not get confused

The television series by Tom Holland that was censored in the UK is a serious, respectful look at the history of Islam.

The movie that has provoked riots and murder in Egypt and Libya is a ghastly bit of hackwork associated with Terry Jones, the fanatical Christian pastor from Florida. Follow that link to see a clip: it’s incredibly bad. It’s got terrible acting, inconsistent and bad fake accents, white actors in blackface (poorly applied blackface, even), beards straight out of Monty Python, sloppy greenscreen work, and it goes out of its way to portray major figures in Islam as gloating gay parodies and pedophiles. It doesn’t just criticize Islam (and when it does, it does so with painful ignorance); it criticizes ethnicities, sexual orientations, and nations wholesale. It is simply a calculated, ugly insult with no redeeming qualities at all.

It does not justify rioting or killing people. But let’s not mistake what it is: the movie is the work of a group of incompetent fundamentalist Christian assholes pissing on entire cultures.

Oops, not just Christian assholes. As noted in the article:

the film was in fact directed and produced by “an Israeli-American California real-estate developer who called it a political effort to call attention to the hypocrisies of Islam.”

It seems to have called attention to the hypocrisies and vileness of the Judeo-Christian Right.