Cats. Must. DIE!

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Every once in a while, a reader sends me a link to something I’ve already dealt with (and that’s OK, I don’t expect everyone to have committed the entirety of the Pharyngula database to memory), but it’s a link to something so dang weird it’s worth reposting. In this case, I was sent a link to a page that purports to describe the beliefs of some Jehovah’s Witnesses about cats, where among many other jaw-dropping arguments, it gives us this jewel:

Indeed, modern studies of classification of cats, while not necessarily being reliable as they may be based on the discredited ‘theory’ of evolution, strongly associate felines with serpents (despite some external differences in physiology and morphology, which confuse those who do not study these matters deeply).

The consensus of the previous discussion was that the site is probably a satire, although it hews so close to the insanity of the actual religion that it’s hard to tell. It’s still funny either way, though. It’s also a good excuse to quote one of my favorite fantasy authors, Tanith Lee.

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Curing malaria by helping mosquitos

Here’s a clever (I think) observation in the efforts to eradicate malaria: the mosquitos that transmit malaria are also infected with the disease-causing parasite, so maybe if we cure malaria in mosquitos, it will end one intermediate step in the transmission chain. It sounds like a crazy idea, but recent experiments suggest that it might just work. It’s got the advantage of allowing the use of transgenic techniques on the mosquito population, where you don’t have to worry about patient’s rights or whether a few of your experimental subjects will die during the procedure, and you can just let the untreated population wither away and die, and no one can complain. There are a few other ethical concerns, however.

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Arrrmageddon!

In a good pirate movie, you need flamboyant excess, so I guess it’s not surprising that the final installment in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is going to have every pirate in the world in a final climactic battle.

It’s going to give every pirate fan an arrrrgasm, I think.

Bad Astronaut

Perhaps you thought Lisa Nowak, the pampers-wearing jealous lover, was enough of a stain on the reputation of astronauts. Here’s another one, though, to give you more excuses to kick them off their pedestal: There’s going to be a “Back to Genesis” conference sponsored by the Institute for Creation Research in Colorado Springs, and among the luminaries in attendance will be Russell Humphreys, Henry Morris III, and this fellow:

Col. Jeffrey Williams, U.S. Army, is a NASA astronaut with graduate degrees in aeronautical engineering and strategic studies. Col. Williams has been with NASA since 1987 and has served twice on the International Space Station, including the recent Expedition 13 project in conjunction with Russian cosmonauts.

The ICR is a Young Earth Creationist institution that preaches an absolutely literal interpretation of the Bible. How nice that one astronaut is trading on his association with NASA to support such nonsense — I don’t think there’s any doubt that Nowak was deranged, and it seems to me that Williams is equally looney. This hasn’t been a good couple of months for NASA’s image.

Tech assistance, please: help me with mail!

I’ve finally had it with my mail software. I need advice on what I can do.

Here’s the situation: Mac OS X (that’s not going to change), the standard Mac Mail program, everything up-to-date with the latest versions. I’ve got about 20 folders set up in Mail, with filters to automatically redirect incoming mail to sensible places — student email gets top priority, for instance, a couple of listservs get their mail shuffled off to a convenient holding pen, mail from family members gets its own place, etc. Spam is currently not a problem; I’ve set up all my email accounts to forward through gmail, where the spam gets held up and eventually discarded, and I never even have to look at it.

I get a lot of email, even without spam. Every three months or so, I toss everything out of email and into a new OS folder just for archiving purposes, and reset everything to a mostly clean slate. It’s been a couple of months now, and I’ve got roughly 100,000 messages in Mail. I know. It’s unreal. Why all these people want to send me mail, I don’t know, but there it is.

Now here’s the problem: Mail can’t handle it. The software just gets slower and slower and s l o w e r, until, like now, it’s at the point where I get a message that I’ve got incoming mail, I click on the folder where it’s stored, and I can go fix a pot of coffee while Mail struggles and strains to just display the gorram list of messages. If I look at the processes, Mail is eating 80-90% of the CPU time for several minutes to show me one folder full of messages. And don’t tell me to just throw out all the accumulated mail: I’ve tried. I’m trying right now. I said to myself, OK, this folder with 10,000 messages in it? Goodbye. I selected all, hit delete, and waited — for two hours. Now it’s in Mail’s trash folder. I select “empty trash” and … wait another two hours.

Mac Mail is no good if you are trying to cope with a lot of email. It’s dead, dead, dead as far as I’m concerned. I’ve begun to actively hate Mail — it’s my daily enemy.

So someone tell me what nice, sensible GUI mail reader is out there for Mac OS X that is actually intelligent about managing large volumes. Gmail is nice, but I want something that will let me deal with mail offline.

Post it here, though. Please, please don’t email me suggestions, unless you really want to make me cry.

The Michael Egnor Report

Coturnix is organizing an informative google bomb — if you look up Michael Egnor on the web, what should you find? How about lots and lots of critics?

It seems only fair. Teach the controversy!

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If the DI wants to use him as a nice figurehead, it seems like a good idea to make sure that any reporter doing some quick background on the guy discovers that he is not a reputable spokesman for evolution, no matter how estimable his record as a neurosurgeon may be.

With reluctance, me

So, Mike Haubrich stopped by my office yesterday, and during the conversation he mentioned that there was a video of me on the Seed site … with some trepidation, I took a look, and there it is: it’s my short presentation at the Inspiration Festival last fall. Ouch. I just cringe to see and hear myself, but in the spirit of being forthright and honest and exposing my flaws complete and without censorship, there I am. At least I really, really like developmental biology.

This is not an opening volley to trigger Atrios, the Editors, and TBogg to start hurling appalling YouTube videos across the net at each other. Or you, either.

Orr vs. Dennett/Dawkins

H. Allen Orr and Daniel Dennett are tearing into each other something fierce over at Edge, and it’s all over Orr’s dismissive review of Dawkins’ The God Delusion. It’s a bit splintery and sharp, but the core of Orr’s complaint, I think, is that he’s unimpressed with Dawkins’ ‘Ultimate 747’ argument, which is basically that postulating an immensely complicated being to explain the creation of an immensely complicated universe doesn’t actually explain anything and is self-refuting — if you need an intelligent superbeing to create anything complex, then the superbeing itself is an even greater problem for your explanation.

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Yes! There are new ads here!

In order to help pay for the tremendous amounts of bandwidth Pharyngula and its Sciblings are sucking off the internet, there are new video ads inserted below the first article on each page. They are a kind of visual noise, but they aren’t supposed to slow down access—they should only load significant quantities of data if you click on them. If you are experiencing technical difficulties, leave a message here and I’ll pass the word on to the tech people.

In case you’ve got got ad blocking software installed, I’ll mention that it is a movie for Dupont fire retardants that features a very chipper, slender blonde woman. Dupont saves lives with chemical, materials, and energy solutions. (That was much less painful than a fancy video ad, wasn’t it? I know, I’m not as pretty as Amanda Congdon … but I’m more sciencey).