Scienceblogs doesn’t want to hear from you

It’s nothing personal. For much of this morning, they’re going to be moving the database to a new server, and they’re going to shut off write access to it. That means you won’t be able to write comments on any of the articles on scienceblogs for about 3 hours, from 9-12ET today.

Don’t panic.

This is one step they’re taking to improve performance and make those annoying “internal server errors” and double-posts a thing of the past.

D’oh! Coturnix, who must be more aware of the time than I am, tells me that comments will be off from 9-12pm today. Never underestimate how late a programmer will sleep in; I just assumed 9am was plenty late for someone to get up, have coffee, read the newspaper, write a couple of pages, make a trip to the grocery store, and go in and take care of the lab animals—which was what I got done before 9—and that all that stuff would have been gotten out of the way by lunchtime.

Telegraphic kookiness

Time for another edition of “I get email”! Below the fold you’ll find a comprehensive example of the kind of exhortation I get all the time—this one is a long list of assertions that god is right, science is wrong, all transmitted in short sentences that aren’t in any particular order.

No, I didn’t reply to this one. He’s got 41 numbered points that he claims refute evolution, everything from “male nipples arouse women” to claims that Jupiter couldn’t form because gasses expand, and then there’s Pascal’s wager and lots of bible quotes. It’s a very silly list, don’t strain yourself over it.

[Read more…]

Town on stilts

Worried that global warming will submerge your real estate? Here’s the solution the town of Galveston hit upon after they were devastated by a hurricane in 1900: the entire town was hoisted up on stilts, and new fill placed underneath. The photographs are amazing—it was an impressive engineering project, and it was all done with manual labor.

It’s also a little bit familiar. In my old home town, you could date the houses by their construction: the older ones were all built up on foundations that raised the floor a couple of feet off the ground, because the town was on a flood plain—my parents had photos of people canoeing down the streets when the Green River rose above its banks. There the solution was to build a dam on the river and control it that way, and that’s when the newer houses could have these peculiar things called basements.

Damming the ocean is a rather bigger problem.

Et tu, New Zealand?

They’re popping up everywhere, and now in
New Zealand:

A Trust which teaches schoolchildren about evolutionary and creationist views of the universe wants to build a $30 million dinosaur park and museum, probably on the Coromandel Peninsula.

The Dinosaurs Aotearoa Museum Trust is working with Wellington’s Weta Workshop, which created characters for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, to create life-sized dinosaurs in a 40ha theme park.

Founders Darren and Jackie Bush run a Wellington business called Dinosaurs Rock which runs programmes about dinosaurs and geology for schools, giving children both the scientific theory of evolution and the biblical view that the world was created by God in seven days about 6000 years ago.

May they all go bankrupt.

Return of the Son of the Bride of Haeckel

The Discovery Institute is so relieved — they finally found a textbook that includes a reworked version of Haeckel’s figure. Casey Luskin is very excited. I’m a little disappointed, though: apparently, nobody at the Discovery Institute reads Pharyngula. I posted a quick summary in September of 2003 that went through several textbooks, and showed a couple of examples where redrawn versions of Haeckel’s diagram were used. More recently, I posted a fairly exhaustive survey by Patrick Frank of the use of that diagram since 1923, which showed that it was rare, and that the concept of recapitulation was uniformly criticized. Really, guys, the horse of recapitulationism is dead. Biologists riddled it with bullets in the 19th century, and have periodically kicked it a few times to be sure. For Intelligent Design creationists to show up over a century later and flog the crumbling bones of a long extinguished horse and crow victory is awfully silly.

So how can you still find any vestiges of Haeckel’s work in textbooks?

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Swish and swagger?

Laura Sessions Stepp is wondering what it means to be manly, and of course she has to resort to the cultural phenomenon of the last 30 minutes, Pirates of the Caribbean 3, and has invented an overwrought story that modern men are all confused by this swishy style personified by Captain Jack Sparrow — the fey sway, the frilly shirt, the lace on the wrist — and that all this business of empowering women is so stressful to young men.

I’m sorry, it’s too ridiculous for words. The only people who could possibly pull off that pirate style are Johnny Depp and Prince.* And I think it’s quite reasonable that women should be assertive and laugh away any fellow thinks the right pastels and properly gilded accessories will cause them to swoon into his arms.

i-1976964670f68c56393e5321a72e6724-real_men.jpg
Real Men: Ragetti, Gibbs, and Pintel

Besides, I saw the movie, and know who the real masculine role models are. Grubby fellows who only occasionally shave and who have extraordinarily poor dental hygiene and a tendency to belch and wipe the excess rum off their faces with their sleeves. I swear, the fashionistas ought to be looking at these guys for fashion trends. This is where it’s at, bros.

It’s what I settle for, anyway.

At least until a few more years pass and biotechnology progresses so I can aspire to the full tentacle look, that is.

(via Grammar.police and Zeno)

*OK, not entirely true. Connlann can pull it off—but then, he inherited his looks from his mom and his attitude from his dad.