Squid on ice

Don’t rush to get tickets to New Zealand just yet—the colossal squid is frozen in a block of ice, and they don’t plan to even start thawing it for another year (there aren’t any other reasons to visit NZ than to see the squid, right?).

To minimise handling of the precious specimen, the colossal squid will probably have its temperature raised, over days, in the tank in which it will finally be “fixed”.

“We don’t want to move it too much,” says Marshall.

“When a thing like that is in the water, it’s neutrally buoyant.

“But, of course, when you get it out of the water, you’ve got a big lump of weight and you could try lifting it and your hands would go right through.

“Already it’s got puncture marks from the net.”

Once un-frozen, the creature will be fixed, or embalmed, and then a long-term preservative will be used.

“What I mean by a fixing tank is a tank that you lay it out in, in a natural position, and you then make all the adjustments – align all the arms, pack out the body and all of that. Then you have it in a, say, 5% formalin solution.

“It will require the biggest tank of anything we’ve got.”

Basically, we’re not going to know any more details for a good long while.

Go back to Lake Wobegon, Garrison Keillor

Garrison Keillor has done it again: he’s written another insipid article loaded with casual bigotry, this time against gays. I’m pleased to see that Dan Savage has savaged him, so I don’t need to go on at length.

However, this really isn’t the first time Keillor has done this—he has a history of unthinking stereotyping and rejection of gays and atheists. He’s an excellent example of why, when I see the Religious Right and the Religious Left, I don’t think the problem is the Right or Left…it’s the Religious.

My criticism of Keillor from 2005 is below the fold. Not only does he reject atheism and homosexuality, but he does so on the most trivial grounds—gay people want to get married to economize on their wardrobe? It’s nuts.

[Read more…]

Order of the Molly for March 2007

Last month, I tried a new motivational tactic to reward good commenting, allowing you to nominate and select one of the commenters here for the Order of the Molly award, acknowledging excellence in commenting. Kristine Harley and Scott Hatfield won that recognition that time around. I said it was going to be a monthly phenomenon, and what do you know, another month has come by, and it’s time to do it again.

This is an important award, I’ll have you know. As Kristine noticed, it got some people worked up — John A. Davison is going on at some length about it, although, to be perfectly honest, he only seems to be talking to himself and his little friend, Martin. Still, it is amusing.

Anyway, this is easy. You can see the previous thread for examples, but all you have to do is name some commenter whose contributions you enjoy, and maybe say a word or two to convince others that your choice is worthy. I’ll count up all the mentions on Sunday, and declare a winner then. Don’t turn this into a serious competition, though—it really is intended to just celebrate the good ‘uns, and there will be more opportunities to recognize people in the future.

The lovely stalk-eyed fly

i-373987800622f8573a9a77812379d111-stalk_sphyrocephala.jpg
Sphyrocephala beccarii

Here is a spectacularly pretty and weird animal: stalk-eyed flies of the family Diopsidae. There are about 160 species in this group that exhibit this extreme morphology, with the eyes and the antennae displaced laterally on stalks. They often (but not always) are sexually dimorphic, with males having more exaggerated stalks—the longer stalks also make them clumsy in flight, so this is a pattern with considerable cost, and is thought to be the product of sexual selection. The Sphyrocephala to the right is not even an extreme example. Read on to see some genuinely bizarre flies and a little bit about the development of this structure.

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I hear Pete Stark eats babies, too

Wow. Pete Stark has been raked over the coals by the Christian Seniors organization—what a wicked man he must be.

“It is sad but not surprising that the current Congress has produced this historic first—one of its members has denied God,” said CSA Executive Director James Lafferty. “The liberals in Congress want to throttle any school child who bows his or her head in prayer, but they want to establish a right for liberals to bash Christians and berate God around the clock.

Well, you know there is a real shortage of schoolchildren to throttle. If we liberals went at it at the pace we wanted, we’d be knee deep in dead children. We’ve been exercising restraint in our child-throttling initiatives for years in order to preserve the supply.

It’s the real reason we’re pissed off at the Republicans. Here we’ve got this new resource of pious children to throttle in Iraq, and they just squander it by throwing bombs at the place. It’s a damned waste, the kind of impersonal mass destruction that only benefits the greedy child-killers at the top of the corporate food chain; we liberals believe everyone should get the therapeutic benefit of killing good godly babies. That’s really the difference between us, isn’t it?

“It is time for religious members of Congress to push back. A simple declaration of a belief in God by members of Congress on the House floor will be greatly informative for the American people. Members who wish to expand could use the ‘special orders’ portion of the House calendar to elaborate but a simple “I believe in God” will suffice.

I predict a stampede for the steps of the legislature and Fox News cameras. An invitation to a public display of piety? Oh, boy!

“Congressman Stark’s statement is a very sad benchmark for America. It could be the moment which defines the decline of our country or it could be the spark which marks an important day. That would be the day that religious Americans stood-up to the liberal bullies who are so determined to use the power of government to silence prayer and every other religious expression of free speech.

You know, Pete Stark only admitted to being a Unitarian and not believing in a deity. He is not a fire-breathing atheist, but here he is being accused of wanting to throttle children, suppress free speech, and destroy America — things which neither he nor a truly evil godless fellow like myself has any desire to do. Keep this in mind next time you quiver in trepidation at the rhetoric of those angry New Atheists. We’re not going to bring down the wrath of the Religious Right on you, all it takes is any freethought of any kind.

Bruce Sterling writes an obituary for blogs

Write faster, everyone, you don’t have much time. Bruce Sterling gives blogs only ten more years.

“There are 55 million blogs and some of them have got to be good,” Sterling said, during a speech here at the SXSW conference in reference to the slogan on blog search site technorati.com. “Well, no, actually. They don’t.”

“I don’t think there will be that many of them around in 10 years. I think they are a passing thing.”

I think he’s right, and he’s wrong. This idea of self-publishing and babbling on the net isn’t going to go away—I expect it’ll be going on in some form or another as long as we’ve got a network to play on.

Otherwise, though, sure, something is going to change, it always does. I wouldn’t mind some radical new change that would allow us to jettison the ugly term “blog”, but I think Sterling is being a poor judge of human nature if he thinks us primates will stop chattering at each other, even if the quality of our communications never rise to his standards of “good”.

“Spirituality”? Another word for lies and empty noise

If you go to the main ScienceBlogs page, you’ll discover that the Buzz for the day is this little gem, triggered by one of our newbie bloggers:

Spirituality and Science

Over the last few hundred years, science has provided a mind-boggling richness of answers about the workings of the universe. For many people the importance of religion, at least as an explainer of the natural world, has shifted. Is it possible to believe what science teaches us about nature, and also be a person of faith? A Galactic Interactions post about being a Christian and a scientist has ignited an explosive debate.

Appropriately enough, the latest Templeton Prize has just been awarded. $1.5 million for this rubbish:

Professor Taylor has written extensively on the sense of self and how it is defined by morals and what one considers good. People operate in the register of spiritual issues, he said, and to separate those from the humanities and social sciences leads to flawed conclusions.

“The deafness of many philosophers, social scientists and historians to the spiritual dimension can be remarkable,” Professor Taylor said in remarks prepared for delivery at the announcement of the prize at the Church Center for the United Nations in New York this morning. This is damaging because it “affects the culture of the media and educated public opinion in general.”

There’s also much more at the Templeton Prize site. He blathers on and on about “spiritual thinking” and a “spiritual domain” without ever telling us what the heck it is, although it does seem to be all tied up in believing in a religion, any religion. So, someone tell me, how am I supposed to hear this “spiritual dimension”? What is it supposed to mean?

Near as I can tell, it means making up vague nonsense about special values only religious people can have, and getting a cool million five for insisting on it. What a sweet scam, and what a useless lot of hot air.

(via Butterflies and Wheels)