Clever Micah

Why, this must be the smartest dog in the universe.

Her husband decided to ask their 4-year-old dog another question, the square root of 25. Micah tapped his paw five times.

To prove this wasn’t a fluke, the couple and a friend tossed out more math than teachers during exam time. Micah consistently pawed the correct answers, appearing to solve such problems as square root division, finding the numerators and denominators of fractions, multiplying and dividing, even basic algebra.

“He can calculate problems given in English, Spanish, French and German,” Cindy Tuten said.

[Read more…]

Novel requirements for a college athletics program

The situation isn’t at all funny—a female volleyball coach was made miserable and discriminated against because of her sexual preferences, and there seems to have been (and probably still is) a nasty culture of male privilege in Fresno State athletics—but this piece of testimony against the associate AD, Randy Welniak, was just icing on the cake.

The one that sticks out was when Randy took me behind closed doors and said he had just learned of a situation where he just found out why Lindy was such a bitch. That he just learned she not only was a lesbian. She was an atheist.

Uh-oh. Multiple societal norms are being violated! Clearly, not believing in an invisible man in the sky and having no desire to be penetrated by a penis makes her not only incapable of showing people how to hit a ball over a net, but evil, a corrupting influence that must be purged from the athletic department. How can a women’s team hope to win if they don’t pray for victory and if their vaginas have not been bathed in blessed semen?

(via Monkey Trials)

That’s rather blatant

I guess I’d always thought Wingnut Daily would at least put up a pretense of rationality (it’s a paper-thin pretense, obviously, draped over a great massive lump of lunacy), but no—they’ve just published a hoary old heap of old-school creationist apologetics. It’s all about Barry Setterfield’s long-disproven claim that the speed of light has been detectably decreasing in recent history. This is completely bogus: here’s a short refutation, or you can go for the longer dismantlement. This stuff is over 25 years old, and it’s pure garbage…but that’s no obstacle to being eternally perpetuated in the great Church of Scientific Ignorance.

Image test

I’ve been getting complaints that images aren’t showing up at all to some readers. This is strange, because there isn’t anything at all special about the html we’re using to display images. Anyway, just to rule out some possibilities, here are a few random images. If you’ve been having problems viewing images, and if you can see any of these, let me know in the comments which ones. If you haven’t had any problems, just ignore this post.

Please note that images #4 and #5 should be on the far right side.

#1:
i-6e98c951775d041678b24be75574c8f5-buhraynz.gif
#2:
i-d16ce196806920cc6bc2649abe751b09-dinoguppy.gif

#3:
i-634272a86ce8069af8c6c676320ec089-leviathun.gif

#4:
i-f806e620b349190274dd56534c04430a-flegs.gif

#5:
i-8dfee8a8e519e675b7bb9733ae63b2e7-supaderrishusoctapus.gif

Change is coming, you might as well embrace it

Mark Morford is wonderfully excited about the prospects for biological research, and I don’t blame him. Consider what the world was like in 1900 and how physics and engineering changed it by 2000; from horse-and-buggy and steam locomotive to interstates and jet planes, from telegraph to world-wide communication networks. We’re going to see a revolution of that magnitude in the coming century, too, and you can expect biology and medicine to be at the forefront. Well, maybe. As Morford writes, the alternative is to

…hold tight to the leaky life raft of inflexible ideology (hello, organized religion), to rules and laws and codes of conduct written by the fearful, for the fearful, to live in constant low-level dread of all the extraordinary changes and radical rethinkings of what it means to be human or animal or male or female or hetero or homo or any other swell little label you thought was solid and trustworthy but which is increasingly proven to be blurry and unpredictable and just a little dangerous.

We know which side GW Bush and the Republican party are on: with the knuckle-draggers and antique hierarchies of organized religion. Our president has vetoed a bill to support stem cell research. This is remarkable: he has only vetoed three bills in his entire presidency, and two of them have been with the intent of killing stem cell research. Just as remarkably, our representatives in congress haven’t been able to muster the numbers to override that veto. Imagine if the American government had voted to censure the Wright brothers and to outlaw the internal combustion engine at the turn of the last century, or if they’d decided to condemn the kinds of radical and dangerous physics being pursued at places like Princeton and Chicago. It wouldn’t have changed a thing about the natural world, or the discoveries that were made; it might have slowed the pace a bit, but the changes would still have come from England and France and Germany and Japan and the Soviet Union … the biggest difference would be that the United States would be an irrelevant backwater.

That’s what the Republicans are doing to this country right now: damning us to a future as a backward, corrupt mess, a big, blundering headache for the world. In 2100, will the rest of the planet see us in the same way Turkey was seen in 1900?

I’m rated WHAT??!?

Some people were annoyed that I included a link yesterday that led to a silly story that used strippers as an example of good marketing, that also included a photo of a woman in lingerie. It was very mild stuff, and I’m not going to apologize for that; the worst thing at the link was the sexism, and I will say that I do not endorse that at all. Sometimes I will talk about sex here, and although I’m not going to start sprinkling the articles with coarse and exploitive porn, I’m also not going to be shy about the frank talk.

Then Cocktail Party Physics had to ruin my self-image as an unabashed libertine by mentioning this site that you can run your blog through and get a rating. I’m afraid Pharyngula is …

What's My Blog Rated? From Mingle2 - Online Dating

Mingle2 – Online Dating

I feel so Disneyesque now.

Get your own research, creationists!

One of those annoying habits creationists organizations have is the appropriation of legitimate scientific research to ‘support’ their claims. They almost never do, actually—the creationists have to misrepresent the science, and often they even offer interpretations flatly contradicted by the contents of the paper. For an excellent example, here’s the author of a paper on ERVs complaining that Reason To Believe’s use of her work was unjustified.

I eventually decided to reclaim my research from the people who have consistently tried to distort the science to support their own agenda. I checked a few months ago and found my paper in the RTB archives. I emailed the website’s creators, explained that they had misunderstood the meaning of my paper, that it actually provided evidence in support of evolution, and politely asked if they could please remove it from their site. I repeated my request a couple of times. I never received more than a bland message in reply saying that they would look into it.

She has also posted a summary of her work that shows she was testing evolutionary predictions, and that the evidence fit the predictions of evolutionary biology, not the ones Reason To Believe (an old-earth creationist group) wanted.

You know, I’ve seen a fair number of creationists misrepresenting scientist’s work to fit their conclusions, but I’ve never seen the reverse, where a scientist grabs some creationist’s hard-earned data and claims it supports evolution. I wonder why?

Oh … I forgot. It’s because the creationists don’t have any data! Silly me.