Nah, I haven’t bothered to listen to the Luskin/Egnor podcast from the Discovery Institute—I trust Orac’s summary enough that I know it’s a load of the same arrogant, clueless BS he was spinning here a while back.
Three girls have been suspended from school because, during a reading of an excerpt from the Vagina Monologues, they used the word—get ready to be shocked—”vagina”.
Obviously, the girls should have consulted this list for a euphemism.
This guy looks like he’d be fun to have do a show…
Fark is having an octopus photoshop contest — most of the entries make me go “eh”, but there are a few nice ones.
Phil Plait thinks this could be a symbol of rapprochement between the brilliant analysts of the natural world at Pharyngula and those slack-jawed people who stare dully at the sky at Bad Astronomy. (I kid, astronomers probably think a little bit now and then, too.)
Newsweek has a story about the capture of the colossal squid, and it sounds like a) there will be video footage released next month, and b) the boat captain made a good bit of money off of it.
Dolan, the Ministry of Fisheries observer, remembers being surprised at how docile and sluggish the squid was. “It really didn’t put up much of a fight,” he says. “Its tentacles were moving back and forth, but that’s about it. It certainly wasn’t grabbing crew members and pulling them back into the sea.”
As it happens, Bennett had brought along a video camera in order to film a small documentary about Antarctic toothfishing for a New Zealand TV station (that’s Chilean sea bass to you and me). He was able to capture a good bit of footage of the squid being hauled in. Bennett confirms that a production company in Auckland bought the footage, though he declines to specify what he was paid. An official with the Ministry of Fisheries told NEWSWEEK that offers to buy the footage had been pouring in and that some were “longer than a telephone number.” Bennett said that a documentary featuring the coveted footage should be released sometime in April.
We also learn about the future fate of the specimen.
Once aboard, the squid was lowered into the ship’s cargo hold and put on ice for the next two weeks as Bennett and his crew chugged 1,700 miles back to the southern coast of New Zealand. The squid remains frozen solid as preparations are being made to hand it over to the Museum of New Zealand in Wellington. That should happen on March 11, O’Shea says. But first, museum officials have to figure out how to store the thing. “The problem is we haven’t seen it yet,” says museum spokesperson Jane Keig. “We need to get it here to see how we’ll preserve it.”
That won’t be easy, says O’Shea. “We’re dealing with a 450-kilogram frozen lump of flesh. We’ve got to have a specially designed tank constructed.” O’Shea estimates that it could take up to four days for the squid to completely thaw out, a delicate process that will leave him and his colleagues only a small time frame in which to take samples and examine it. Still, those precious minutes could prove more valuable than years worth of colossal squid research. “The scientific value is enormous. It’ll more than double our knowledge,” says O’Shea, who hopes the research will shed light on the species’ hunting and mating behavior, its age and its intelligence (which O’Shea already suspects to be fairly negligible). The brain of a 275-kilogram giant squid is only about 20 grams and shaped like a doughnut, he says, “There’s not a lot of comprehension going on up there.” Might the colossal squid be brighter than its smaller cousin? “Doubtful,” says O’Shea. “In all likelihood, it’s one of the stupidest creatures in the sea.”
Now that’s just mean.
Despite being in Japanese, you’ll be able to figure out what’s going on: this Tremoctopus, when threatened, unfurls a membranous webbing and swims away, trailing it behind like a cape to distract predators.
Since David Honig pointed out this one perfect picture, I had to put it up top.
That says it all, doesn’t it?
There’s not a lot of substance to this short video, but it is a last chance to see shots of Kent Hovind’s Dinosaur Adventure Land in Pensacola, Florida. It was shut down at the time it was photographed — the poor man refused to get building permits, so county authorities closed his little ‘theme park’ — and now that he’s in jail, I imagine it will all wither away into shabby, weathered plywood and cockroach-infested abandoned shacks. At least, we hope so.
Here’s an interesting opportunity: Lynn Margulis, the controversial scientist, is going on a ‘blog tour’ to promote her new imprint of science books called Sciencewriters Books. What does that mean? She’s going to hang out for a little while on a few blogs and chat and answer questions. If you’ve wanted to have a conversation with the author of the endosymbiont theory and critic of neo-Darwinian theory, here’s your chance.
The tour will kick off on Monday, 12 March, at Pharyngula. She’ll be sending me a short article that I’ll post that morning, and we’ll collect comments and questions. Later that afternoon or evening, she’ll browse through those comments and answer the ones she finds interesting.
In addition, she’ll be available in the Pharyngula chat room (channel #pharyngula on irc.zirc.org; if you don’t have an IRC client, that link will let you use your browser to join in) from 12:00-1:30pm ET.
So mark it on your calendars: an online conversation with Lynn Margulis, next Monday, 12 March, at Pharyngula.
