Shine on, you crazy diamond

i-49890d78349e1a337d639f208eaba93d-syd.jpg

Syd Barrett is dead.

Trip to heave and ho, up down, to and fro’
you have no word
trip, trip to a dream dragon
hide your wings in a ghost tower
sails cackling at every plate we break
cracked by scattered needles
the little minute gong
coughs and clears his throat
madam you see before you stand
hey ho, never be still
the old original favorite grand
grasshoppers green Herbarian band
and the tune they play is “In Us Confide”
so trip to heave and ho, up down, to and fro’
you have no word
Please leave us here
close our eyes to the octopus ride!
Isn’t it good to be lost in the wood
isn’t it bad so quiet there, in the wood
meant even less to me than I thought
with a honey plough of yellow prickly seeds
clover honey pots and mystic shining feed…
well, the madcap laughed at the man on the border
hey ho, huff the Talbot
“Cheat” he cried shouting kangaroo
it’s true in their tree they cried
Please leave us here
close our eyes to the octopus ride!
The madcap laughed at the man on the border
hey ho, huff the Talbot
the winds they blew and the leaves did wag
they’ll never put me in their bag
the seas will reach and always seep
so high you go, so low you creep
the wind it blows in tropical heat
the drones they throng on mossy seats
the squeaking door will always squeak
two up, two down we’ll never meet
so merrily trip forgo my side
Please leave us here
close our eyes to the octopus ride!

He was…unique.

Mosquito love songs

It’s July in Minnesota, and you know what that means: bugs. Clouds of bugs. Some people complain, but I generally rationalize a large population of fecund invertebrates as simply a sign of a healthy ecosystem, so yeah, we’ve got bugs, but it’s good for us.

Except for those mosquitoes. It’s hard to think charitably of some invertebrates when you’re lying in bed at night and you hear…that…high-pitched whine rising as the nearly invisible little blood-sucker buzzes by your exposed flesh. Now, in a discovery calculated to increase my irritation, I learn that the little bastards are singing a love song as they hover about, looking for an opportunity to stab me and suck my blood. “Come to me, come to me, mon chéri,” they sing, “after I gorge myself on ze fat, torpid hu-man (and daintily spit up a little backwash into his capillaries), we shall make sweet, sweet love in the moonlight and zen I shall lay a thousand eggs, and our progeny shall feast on his children!” (Sorry, but now whenever I hear them they’ve also got a silly Pepe LePew French accent.)

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Octopedantry

Eh. It’s a mannered debate about the plural of “octopus”. Honestly, I think fretting about whether the root is Latin or Greek and the ending of the plural form matches is a waste of time—we’re speaking English. What matters is that it is understood, and what the convention is. So let’s ask the scientists who study octo-whatsises!

Searching PubMed for the various forms of “octopus” gives the following numbers of references:

Octopus: 1,608
Octopuses: 592
Octopods: 16
Octopi: 6
Octopodes: 0
Octopedes: 0

I’m sticking with octopuses, the form hallowed by informed usage. I won’t spit in your eye if you call them octopi. I suspect the only people who would call them octopedes are skulking about on the humanities side of campus.

Lighting a fire under the president

George W Bush hasn’t vetoed a single bill in all these long, long years of his presidency. Guess what issue might finally convince him to move?

He’s willing to veto any expansion of stem cell research.

That’s our George. Science isn’t part of his base, so he’ll willingly throw that away to make the church-based ignoramuses happy. Zygotes must be spared! It’s the ones that have been born that can be used as cannon fodder.

Schadenfreude, coming through

Hard to believe, but check out the source this anti-choicer uses to back up his essay on the callous horror of abortion.

The Onion.

Satire and irony are now officially dead.

The author has a new post up—he still doesn’t get it. He’s still babbling about the fictional author of the Onion piece getting all those abortions.

It’s a marvel. There really are people that stupid out there.

(via Curly Tales of War Pigs)

A good start

Mark Isaak has opened a discussion on The Panda’s Thumb about The Larger Issue of Bad Religion. It’s good to discuss the problem of religion, but my main complaint is the attempt to separate ‘good religion’ from ‘bad religion’, and suggesting that we should be lauding those ‘good religionists’ to win them over to our side. Unfortunately, we don’t have a criterion to distinguish the two, and I fear that if we did define them, those practitioners of ‘good religion’ would be vanishingly small, and not particularly strongly associated with any particular sect.

I’d suggest that ‘good religion’ is merely something called a religion, which has stripped away everything relating to superstition and any concrete concept of a deity, but then everyone would call them godless atheists anyway and we’d be right back where we started.

Please, O Mighty Press, heed our prayer

Revere and Tara make fun of a silly guest commentary from a very silly man who thinks them evilutionists are cheating by using the term “mutation”—that changes in the virulence of a disease are examples of a “population shift,” which has nothing to do with evolution.

Just a note to any journalists or newspaper editors who might read this: the Panda’s Thumb has a useful list of scientists and other defenders of evolution who are willing—no, overjoyed—to vet these kinds of strange anti-scientific tirades. We’re also willing to help with any pro-science articles you might be moved to write. It’s kind of sad that this list is sitting there, and we rarely hear from any responsible journalists; I think I’ve had 3 calls in a year and a half. What’s the problem, is it just easier to take the press releases the Discovery Institute pushes at you, without bothering with that difficult job of actually questioning any of it?

Folk genetics

Carel Brest van Kempen has extracted a few fascinating quotes from an old book he has. It’s titled Creative and Sexual Science, by a phrenologist and physiologist from 1870, and it contains some wonderful old examples of folk genetics.

President Bush would be pleased:

“Human and animal hybrids are denounced most terribly in the Bible; obviously because the mixing up of man with beast, or one beast species with another, deteriorates. Universal amalgamation would be disastrous.”

Although, unfortunately, he then goes on to use this as an argument against miscegenation.

Another lesson is that you shouldn’t deny pregnant women anything, or their longing will mark their child.

“A woman, some months before the birth of her child, longed for strawberries, which she could not obtain. Fearing that this might mark her child, and having heard that it would be marked where she then touched herself, she touched her hip. Before the child was born she predicted that it would have a mark resembling a strawberry, and be found on its hip, all of which proved to be true.”

Don’t let them see horrible things, either.

“Mrs. Lee, of London, Ont., saw Burly executed from her window; who, in swinging off, broke the rope, and fell with his face all black and blue from being choked. This horrid sight caused her to feel awfully; and her son, born three months afterwards, whenever anything occurs to excite his fears, becomes black and blue in the face, an instance of which the Author witnessed.”

And…uh-oh. Maybe George W. Bush won’t be so thrilled with this part.

“A child in Boston bears so striking a resemblance to a monkey, as to be observed by all. Its mother visited a menagerie while pregnant with it, when a monkey jumped on her shoulders.”

I think Carel needs to get busy and transcribe the whole thing onto the web. I know I’ll find these examples useful when I teach genetics this spring.