Iran

The simple summary:

As the video says, the country is shutting down the flow of information, clamping down on the internet — that alone would tell me that something nasty has been going down in the government there. Information should flow freely, and I’ve run across one set of instructions for setting up a proxy server under Windows, and one for Linux. I run neither…does anyone have similar instructions for BSD or Mac OS X Unix?

Otherwise, feel free to talk about the new source of chaos in the Middle East.

Dirty rotten scammers

A reader wrote in to say his mother was being victimized by a putative religious organization called Elite Activity Resurrected. It has to be seen to be believed. It’s all dressed up in egalitarian pieties about ending world poverty, but when you look at the actual operation, it’s a remarkably blatant con game.

The World’s first Interdenominational Belief System on the Internet!

Poverty is our Adversary!

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty.” — Martin Luther King Jr., April 4, 1967.

“Learn to do right! Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.” — Isaiah 1:17.

Aww, that sounds so noble. But here’s how it works:

Our models of abundance are designed specifically to anchor the belief that giving opens the way to receiving. Once you choose to participate in any Elite Activity model, you enter the cycle of abundance from the outer circle and give unconditionally without consideration to the participant in the inner circle. When you do this with the proper intent, and follow the guidelines, you will eventually reach ‘the inner circle’. This is where other participants give their unconditional gifts to you, and you experience the power of ‘Many giving to one’.

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And here’s a kind of ‘review’, if by that we mean ‘uncritical endorsement of fraud’.

You are first “invited” to join the Elite Resurrected gifting program by a current member and then on the out-most ring in which place your “gift” (starting at $100), a monetary amount to the person that has made it to the center. You then “invite” at least two people that want to share in the giving during the second phase (the person that originally invited you will help you in this.). During the “Empowering” phase you help the people that you invited and once you successfully fulfill that part you move into the inner circle where you receive your gifts. There, it says, you will be able to receive 4 “gifts” (a total of $400) before being “invited” to join a new cycle at $250. You can still receive 2 more “gifts” at the center of the $100, after which time you will be recycled back to another $100 circle to make your way to the center once again.

Can you say “PYRAMID SCHEME!”, boys and girls? Sure, I knew you could. This is criminal activity; the only people whose poverty is going to be diminished are the members of the inner circle, and they’re going to make out like bandits. They are bandits!

Alert the police. They have a list of upcoming gatherings in places like Little River SC, Litchfield Park AZ, Houston TX, and lots of events in Mexico. I think having the local bunco squad paying a call on these thieves would add a welcome bit of festivity to their gatherings. They are vermin preying on fears of the economically disadvantaged.

Oh, no! I don’t get this journal!

The latest issue of Zebrafish, a specialty journal to which my university does not subscribe, is dedicated entirely to using zebrafish in education. I want it. I want the whole issue. Unfortunately, the publisher wants to charge me $29 per article to get the PDFs, which is not going to happen. Anyone out there with an institutional subscription want to help me out? If you don’t feel like sending me the whole collection, I’m particularly interested in the articles by Bagatto, D’Costa, McKeown, and Schmoldt.

Now watch, my mailbox is going to be flooded, isn’t it? Once upon a time, I could make these kinds of requests and get a moderate response, but nowadays…well, at least you know how badly I want these papers.

I got the papers! Thanks very much all, you can stop sending them to me now. Much appreciated, now I have to go read for a while.

Big love among the ostracods

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How can anyone resist an article titled “Sexual Intercourse Involving Giant Sperm in Cretaceous Ostracode”? You can’t, I tell you. It’s like a giant brain magnet, you open the journal to the index, and there’s that title, and you must read it before you can even consider continuing on to anything else.

Some organisms have evolved immensely long sperm tails — Drosophila bifurca, for instance, has sperm cells that are about 60mm long, or 20 times longer than the length of the entire adult body. The excessively long sperm tail is obviously not a structure that has evolved for better swimming; instead, it is thought to act as a tangled barrier in the female reproductive tract to prevent other males from fertilizing the female, and there is also some very interesting evidence that sperm coevolves with the female reproductive tract, so some sexual selection at the level of the gametes is going on.

At the same time, sperm morphology is extremely diverse, and seems to evolve very rapidly. Perhaps these mega-sperm are a transient fad? Not all species of Drosophila exhibit the phenomenon, and those that do vary considerably from species to species. What we’d like to know is if there are any lineages that maintain these patterns of giant sperm over long periods of evolutionary time…so what do we need to do? We need to go spelunking for sperm in fossils!

That’s what this short letter in Science is about: the authors looked at ostracodes, a class of tiny crustacea that invests heavily in reproduction. About a third of their volume is their reproductive system, with males building giant (relative to their size) sperm pumps, and females having large seminal receptacles for sperm storage. The individual sperm are also large, often longer than the body length of the adult, and are also aflagellate — no flagellar tail at all, just a long, threadlike cell body. You can tell if a female ostracod is a virgin just by looking at those seminal receptacles, since they inflate hugely with all the giant sperm tucked inside.

So, if you look at the large orange blobs, the seminal receptacles, in this 3-D scan of a fossil female ostracod (bottom right of this image), you can tell that she was inseminated before she died, and that her mate had very large sperm. Her condition was also very similar to that of modern ostracodes (bottom left).

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(Click for larger image)
Partial reconstruction of E. virens (extant) and H. micropapillosa (fossil). Anterior is to the left. Orange structures indicate central tubes of Zenker organs in males or seminal receptacles in females; brown, esophagus; turquoise, mandible; purple, upper lip; pink, lower lip; green, valves; and gray scales, whole-body reconstruction. All scale bars indicate 100 µm. (A) Lateral view of male E. virens with several organs included for comparison. (B) Male H. micropapillosa in lateral view with several organs in context of whole-body reconstruction. (C and D) Ventral views of several organs including tubes of Zenker organs of male H. micropapillosa. (E) Lateral view of female E. virens with several organs included for comparison. (F) Female H. micropapillosa in lateral view with several organs in context of whole-body reconstruction, including seminal receptacles.

So, the conclusion is that boinking with giant sperm is an enduring property of at least some lineages: they’ve been going at it for a hundred million years. The authors also suggest that this kind of technique could be useful for measuring sexual selection by assessing pre-mating parental investment in fossil invertebrates.

Matzke-Karasz R, Smith RJ, Symonova R, Miller CG, Tafforeau P (2009) Sexual Intercourse Involving Giant Sperm in Cretaceous Ostracode. Science 324(5934):1535.

Miller GT, Pitnick S (2002) Sperm-Female Coevolution in Drosophila. Science 298(5596):1230-1233.

A revealing review

Barbara Bradley Hagerty has lately been polluting NPR with a series of superficial fluff pieces on religion — I’ve just groaned and turned the radio off when she comes on. She also has a book out, Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality, and just the title is sufficient to tell you it’s noise to avoid. If that’s not enough, though, you can also read a revealing review of the book.

That is why the work of a religion writer is different than that of a science reporter or a sportswriter. Most journalists — or at least most good journalists — are supposed to question everything. They are supposed to write about facts.

Religion writers, on the other hand, could care less about the facts – or at least about the basic facts. They write about faith, not facts.

Heh. Yes. Exactly.

And the conclusion of her book?

Nevertheless, Hagerty concludes by erring on the side of amorphous belief, concluding that “the language of our genes, the chemistry of our bodies, and the wiring of our brains – these are the handiwork of One who longs to be known.”

If he longs to be known, why not just come out and say howdy? Is this god shy or something? Otherwise, this is just the standard Intelligent Design creationist malarkey: something that is complex has the appearance of design because a) people conflate complexity with intent, and b) people have brains that have evolved to explain the world in terms of agency, therefore it must be designed by an intelligent agent for a purpose.

It’s a good review. It convinced me that I don’t need to read the book, ever.

Why do they hate the theory of relativity?

I know that most of the kooks can’t abide the theory of evolution, and I can understand their motives a little bit — it directly contradicts common beliefs about who they are. But why all the hatin’ on the Big Bang and on relativity (and on the other hand, why do the crazies love quanta so)? Here’s another example of a book that continues the refrain.

UNCOMMON KNOWLEDGE: New Science of GRAVITY, LIGHT, the Origin of LIFE, and the MIND of Man

This book builds on the works of Arp, Bauval, Childress, Collins, Cremo and Thompson, Dunn, Felix, Hancock, Hapgood, Joseph, LaViolette, McTaggart, Pye, Radin, Rux, Sheldrake, Sitchin, Van Flandern, Von Däniken, and others who question common knowledge

  • to develop a theory of nearly everything, without Relativity,

  • that explains what science, history, and religion have not.

Discover scientific evidence and new theory that:

  • The universe is not expanding from a Big Bang.

  • The Theory of Relativity is not valid; light is not a speed limit.

  • Define how the ether produces gravity and electromagnetism.

  • The ether consists of subatomic “spheritons” that travel faster than light.

  • Light-conducting spheritons are Dark Matter; Dark Energy does not exist.

  • Explain that life came to Earth from another known planet every 60 million years.

  • All 20 Egyptian pyramids had similar industrial functions.

  • The Sphinx and Great pyramid were built in 62,100 BC.

  • The water for Noah’s Flood in 10,800 BC is in plain sight.

  • Identify the origin of our biblical God and the science of Universal Intelligence.

  • Explain how spheritons store and transfer the memories of man and God.

  • Explain how spheritons may enable paranormal mental capabilities.

I don’t know all of the authors in his list of influences, but the ones I do are stark raving lunatics…but I wouldn’t need to know that to see from his list of phenomena that he fits into that category very well.

Netroots Nation dives into inanity

Netroots Nation, the big lefty political/blogging meeting, is organizing sessions for their conference in August. Unfortunately, they seem have given up on the idea of a secular nation, because this one session on A New Progressive Vision for Church and State has a bizarre description.

The old liberal vision of a total separation of religion from politics has been discredited. Despite growing secularization, a secular progressive majority is still impossible, and a new two-part approach is needed–one that first admits that there is no political wall of separation. Voters must be allowed, without criticism, to propose policies based on religious belief. But, when government speaks and acts, messages must be universal. The burden is on religious believers, therefore, to explain public references like “under God” in universal terms. For example, the word “God” can refer to the ceaseless creativity of the universe and the objective validity of human rights. Promoting and accepting religious images as universal will help heal culture-war divisions and promote the formation of a broad-based progressive coalition.

That makes no sense at all. Separation of church and state certainly isn’t discredited — if anything, the experience of the last few years makes it more important than ever. Voters can already propose policies based on religion, and they do, unfortunately…but whoever wrote this thinks there should be no criticism? That’s insane. This is a progressive organization that is proposing that we shouldn’t even criticize religious intrusion into government.

And then look what they do: they redefine “god” into a waffling, meaningless placeholder for anything anyone wants!

I’d like to know who came up with this garbage — it reeks of the Jim Wallis/Amy Sullivan camp of liberal theocrats, although neither is actually on the panel.

Dawkins’ fleas are joined by the New Atheists’ flies

It’s been a rough few weeks for the accommodationists — they keep raising the same tired old complaints, poorly, and with little flair or reason or persuasive rhetoric, and they keep getting swatted down by those rascally loud “New Atheists. Excuse me if I’m starting to feel a bit cocky, but I’m still waiting for either an interesting or somewhat persuasive argument against our position. In fact, if you want to know exactly how I feel, here’s the video.

(PETA is not happy about this, which tells you just how ridiculous that organization is.)

It’s nice to be able to take them out so easily, but we can’t feel too great a sense of accomplishment…they’re just buzzy little flies.