Noooooo! It’s another paradox!
This is a Cthulhu birthday cake, but it’s entirely vegan! This is just not right. A Cthulhu cake has to be made of various meats stacked in alien geometries and in a state of corruption and decay, topped with ichor icing.
(Hillary is out to get me because I haven’t reviewed her book yet. Insanity doesn’t make it easier!)
I look at this and feel so conflicted.
Ick, it’s a nativity scene. But it’s got cute squid in it! It’s so christian! With squid! Nativity! But squid!
It’s like it was designed to drive me insane.
It is best to wait until the person you are quote-mining is dead or senile, lest they notice what you’ve done and make a public dismissal. Denyse O’Leary seems to have forgotten this, and tried to use a paper by Brian Leiter — Brian Leiter! — to argue for the irrelevancy of evolution. Leiter seems to be neither dead nor senile, as he has noticed.
Sometimes the spectacle in the comments can be as fun as the articles. Here are a couple of examples loons trying to address the criticisms directed at their ideas on a couple of blogs.
Larry Moran attended a lecture by a creationist, Kirk Durston. The creationist pulled the usual stunt: cite a few of the multitude of science papers out there, and misrepresent it to support his fallacious claims. Not even Larry is able to have all those papers right there in his forebrain, which allows Durston to briefly pretend to be the voice of authority. Of course, later Larry looks it up and points out the misrepresentations. The fun part is that Durston joins the thread to argue. Durston also objects to having his argument for an omnipotent Intelligent Designer called a “god”.
There’s more fun along the same lines at Scientia Natura: Shalini has a geocentrist on the line. This is hilarious.
What’s particularly amusing is how much alike Durston and the anonymous geocentrist sound: both are completely convinced that the scientific evidence actually supports their ludicrous positions.
So do I, although I favor more squid, less girl.
(Should be work-safe, since any nudity is tasteful, and human-animal chimeras aren’t that offensive, are they? Besides, you should be at home, loosening your belt and letting that nice feast settle.)
I’ve got to go baste. If you aren’t similarly occupied, you could browse these fine carnivals.
Carnival of the Liberals #52, celebrating AU’s 60th anniversary!
Four Stone Hearth #28 (and they need more hosts)
You aren’t watching football, are you?
As fellow Minnesotan Greg Laden warns, we’re getting a visit from another dishonest hack of the Discovery Institute, John West. On Friday, 30 November, at 7:00 in Room 155, Nicholson Hall on the UM campus. I may just have to stop by. He’s going to be babbling about an extended argumentum ad consequentiam: “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: The Disturbing Legacy of America’s Eugenics Crusade”. Yeah, once again, we’re going to be told that reality is dehumanizing.
One thing that greatly peeves me is the sponsoring organization. This is a parasitic religious organization that sucks leechlike on academia: the MacLaurin Institute. I despise those guys. They were also responsible for bringing Behe to talk on campus — that kind of rot is what they bring to the university.
I do like the honesty of their motto, though. Here comes John West, representative of the ‘secular’ Discovery Institute, under the imprimatur of an organization with the goal of…
Bringing God into the marketplace of ideas by
communicating the Christian worldview
with its transforming potential.
Right. Bringing lies to our students certainly does have transforming potential, only I wouldn’t be proud of it.
I did not drop off the face of the earth in the last 3/4 of a day — I joined the 47 million Americans who spend the day before Thanksgiving in an annual familial migration. I had to drive Daughter #1 and her sweetie-pie to Buffalo, Minnesota; then drive to Minneapolis to pick up Son #2, who’d had a long day on a bus from Madison, Wisconsin; then back to Buffalo to pick up Daughter #1 sans sweetie-pie; then to St Cloud to pick up Son #1; and finally, back home to Morris. For a time there I had my entire genetic output in a small car with me, in the snow, on a freeway (and I think all 47 million traveling Americans were on I94 between Minneapolis and Monticello for a time), and I was thinking that this whole family get-together thing was an opportunity for a major Darwinian catastrophe.
We made it safely back in the wee hours of the morning, fortunately. Now today I spend preparing mass quanitities of protein and carbohydrate to pack into the gaping, peeping maws of the younglings, which does make Darwinian sense, at least.
I hope you are all out reinforcing the social and familial linkages that enhance your inclusive fitness today, as well.
Some observations on working with zebrafish:
Their vision isn’t as reliable as I thought. They would try like there’s no tomorrow to swim through the Plexiglas wall when there’s a hold only a few inches over. If I want to continue my experiments without having an aneurysm, I’ll have to make a few changes.
1 – The walls will have to be marked up opaque so that the fish don’t keep trying to swim through them.
2 – Since they have trouble navigating the single chamber, I’ll have to use plastic sheets to funnel them toward the door.
3 – I have a new set of tests to run. Is it the food that draws the fish into the food chamber, or is it the pheromones of the “social reward” of other fish that is repulsing the fish away. Once I get back to school after Thanksgiving, looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me.
If you’ve been following Lio lately, you know he has a new arthropod friend, rescued from the dinner pot.
Unfortunately, Lio missed the big news.
The fossil record has yielded various gigantic arthropods, in contrast to their diminutive proportions today. The recent discovery of a 46cm long claw (chelicera) of the pterygotid eurypterid (‘sea scorpion’) Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, from the Early Devonian Willwerath Lagerstätte of Germany, reveals that this form attained a body length of approximately 2.5m–almost half a metre longer than previous estimates of the group, and the largest arthropod ever to have evolved. Gigantism in Late Palaeozoic arthropods is generally attributed to elevated atmospheric oxygen levels, but while this may be applicable to Carboniferous terrestrial taxa, gigantism among aquatic taxa is much more widespread and may be attributed to other extrinsic factors, including environmental resources, predation and competition. A phylogenetic analysis of the pterygotid clade reveals that Jaekelopterus is sister-taxon to the genus Acutiramus, and is among the most derived members of the pterygotids, in contrast to earlier suggestions.
This isn’t some casual graspy sort of claw, either—it’s a great spiky wicked looking claw, with pointy daggery bits sticking out that make it look like some medieval weapon of terror.
This is a much more Lio-like creature than the dainty little bug in the cartoon. I wouldn’t mind having one of these for a pet myself! It’s too bad they’ve all been dead for 390 million years.
Braddy SJ, Poschmann M, Tetlie OE (2007) Giant claw reveals the largest ever arthropod. Biology Letters doi:10.1098/rsbl.2007.0491.
