The Tribulation flops

If you’ve been wondering how it would turn out, the first review of the Left Behind video game is online. It doesn’t get any thumbs up.

Don’t mock Left Behind: Eternal Forces because it’s a Christian game. Mock it because it’s a very bad game. The real-time strategy/adventure game from Left Behind Games based on the best-selling series of novels from Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins will even let down born-again types who expect the Rapture to beam them up to heaven any day now. Nobody has enough faith to endure a game with such a hokey story, terrible mission design, serious problems with the interface and graphics, and loads of crippling bugs.

Now you see, this is what happens when you hire exorcists instead of programmers to do your debugging.

(via The Atheist Experience)

Juvenile science fiction recommendations?

I got a request from Hillary Rettig: those gift-giving holidays (you know, Cephalopodmas and some other religion-tainted days) are coming up, and as we are all pale, text-focused people here, she thought the Pharynguloid hive mind would be the perfect place to gather recommendations for books to infect young brains with the imaginative side of science. So, please, post your recommendations for juvenile science fiction right here. Everything from the classics to the very latest stuff is welcome.

Animations of urogenital development

I found these on youtube, a couple of nice cartoony animations of the development of the urogenital system. This is one of the weirder modules in organogenesis, I think; many strange things go on that are relics of ancestral states. We actually build three pairs of kidneys—pronephros, mesonephros, and metanephros—and throw each one away in succession, except the last. Both sexes form paramesonephric (or Müllerian) ducts, in blue in the animation, and these form the core of the female plumbing, but again, males basically throw it away and use a more primitive duct (the mesonephric or Wolffian ducts, in green). It’s a bizarre way to construct an organ, but what’s going on is that we have two systems, excretion and reproduction, tied together in ways that constrain the other’s development, and each is building on elements of the other.

It’s in French, but that shouldn’t slow anyone down. It’s easy to figure out what “paramesonephrique” must refer to, for instance.

Males:

Females:

Look at it as voluntarily flagging their impairment

Now Phil is trying to kill me—he sent me this link with a knowing smirk, plainly telling me that he knew it would raise my blood pressure. People, think this stuff through: if I were found dead in my chair, one clawlike hand clutching my chest, my face in a rictus of agony, and there on the computer screen in front of me was an email chortling over giving me apoplexy, the police would come calling, and they wouldn’t be cheerful. My family, amoral godless atheists all, would probably put out a hit on you via the Infidel Mafia. Be more careful!

As you can tell, though, I survived this episode. Basically, it’s a small, studied insult, just one more piled up on many: in Alabama, getting a license plate with “God Bless America” stamped into it has no extra cost, but various specialty plates (such as those for some veterans) will require a few bucks extra.

It’s stupid, but I can’t respond with much more than a resigned sigh. For one thing, it’s Alabama (sorry, Blue Gal, but if I got upset every time Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, etc., insulted my intelligence and that of every sensible person north and south of the Mason-Dixon line, I’d be exhausted); secondly, looking at the standard plate choices, I see it as similar to the choice between an ordinary plate, and a disability plate. People who pick the “God Bless America” plate are merely notifying other drivers that their car is being piloted by someone with a different kind of disability.

Poor things. Maybe they could be privileged with special spots in their church parking lots, too.

Comical innumeracy alert!

Well, hooray! I was going to jump onto this awesome example of flagrantly stupid creationist innumeracy, but I’d been putting it off (oh, my grading. My grading. It tears at me with talons like razors). This guy mangles recent measurements of human variation, making comments like this: “previous concepts that all humans were 99.9% alike were blown apart by the research conducted on 270 people of various races that confirmed that 2,900 genes could vary within people, making over a million combinations possible.” I mean, seriously, how ignorant do you have to be to think that the possibility of variation in many genes somehow means the nucleotide sequences can’t still be highly similar, or even sillier, to be impressed at the possibility of a million genetic variations in a human population of billions? Maybe in his day job this propagandists sets ransom demands for Dr. Evil.

Fortunately, untangling mathematical misconceptions is Mark Chu-Carroll’s destiny in life, and he polished this one off today. Go read that. I’m going to read a few more student essays.