Christmas morning

Ah, Christmas morning…with teenagers. Their natural sloth wars with their desire for the Christmas loot, and they compromise by getting up at 10:00 rather than noon—so it means that I get to sleep in and everything is calm.

Although I do confess to now and then missing the little guys pounding on the bedroom door at 5am and jumping up and down and squealing. Maybe if I started giving out better presents, like this:

i-5981e25f216e058af3e51bef3616c1e8-lio_xmas.jpg

I’m going to get a cup of coffee and put my feet up for a while — may you all have an equally placid, non-frantic Christmas morning.

A merry god-free christmas to you all!

Yes! This atheist family committed atrocities in preparation for the holiday. Here’s the gang undermining the true meaning of Christmas by decorating a tree while experiencing a complete absence of any sense of the sacred.

i-c892fc51e551cfbfe74a04893ec8b4a8-xmas_tree_2006.jpg

That’s Skatje in the coat and hat (it really isn’t that cold in here, unless it’s the chill from our icy hearts), Alaric adjusting the stand (or, perhaps, bowing to the darkness), and Connlann looking fairly normal, although of course his wicked soul does not appear in a photograph.

That’s not an angel on top; it’s a white Father Christmas figure that I think looks a bit like Gandalf, so it’s OK.

Now look at this: some of our friends sent over Cephalopodmas cookies! I’ve already eaten the one on top (it was Cthulhicious!), and I’ve been trying to prevent the kids from devouring the others. The rest have to be left by the fireplace as an offering to the Old Ones — they will be so thrilled when they get up in the morning and discover they’ve all disappeared, slurped up by the Great Tentacle.*

i-861c51e74132d611b06643462ab2c38d-cephmas_cookies.jpg

Many thanks to the Glasruds for indulging our quaint religious beliefs.

Tomorrow we’ll be doing other traditional godless activities: getting up early to open presents around the tree, cooking a feast for friends and families, consuming large quantities of turkey and cranberry sauce and lefse, and just generally having a good time.

Oh, and if you’re interested in some good Christmas music, try these ominous carols. Translating them into a minor key does wonders for them.

*Sacrilege! I just checked the platter, and somebody has consumed many of them. I wonder which one will be eaten last?

The Courtier’s Reply

There’s a common refrain in the criticisms of Dawkins’ The God Delusion(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) that I’ve taken to categorizing with my own private title—it’s so common, to the point of near-unanimous universality, that I’ve decided to share it with you all, along with a little backstory that will help you to understand the name.

I call it the Courtier’s Reply. It refers to the aftermath of a fable.

I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship. He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor’s boots, nor does he give a moment’s consideration to Bellini’s masterwork, On the Luminescence of the Emperor’s Feathered Hat. We have entire schools dedicated to writing learned treatises on the beauty of the Emperor’s raiment, and every major newspaper runs a section dedicated to imperial fashion; Dawkins cavalierly dismisses them all. He even laughs at the highly popular and most persuasive arguments of his fellow countryman, Lord D. T. Mawkscribbler, who famously pointed out that the Emperor would not wear common cotton, nor uncomfortable polyester, but must, I say must, wear undergarments of the finest silk.

Dawkins arrogantly ignores all these deep philosophical ponderings to crudely accuse the Emperor of nudity.

Personally, I suspect that perhaps the Emperor might not be fully clothed — how else to explain the apparent sloth of the staff at the palace laundry — but, well, everyone else does seem to go on about his clothes, and this Dawkins fellow is such a rude upstart who lacks the wit of my elegant circumlocutions, that, while unable to deal with the substance of his accusations, I should at least chide him for his very bad form.

Until Dawkins has trained in the shops of Paris and Milan, until he has learned to tell the difference between a ruffled flounce and a puffy pantaloon, we should all pretend he has not spoken out against the Emperor’s taste. His training in biology may give him the ability to recognize dangling genitalia when he sees it, but it has not taught him the proper appreciation of Imaginary Fabrics.

I’m afraid that when I read H. Allen Orr’s criticism of The God Delusion in the NY Review of Books, all that popped into my head was a two-word rebuttal: Courtier’s Reply. You would be amazed at how many of the anti-Dawkins arguments can be filed away under that category.

That’s all you’ll get from me on Orr’s complaint—it’s another Courtier’s Reply. If you want a more detailed dissection, Jason Rosenhouse provides it.

About that last mysterious “Blank post”

You may be wondering what that strange “Blank post” was all about. The science blogging crew has been having a discussion about the “Most active” box you can find in the right sidebar, and RPM challenged me that I could put up an empty post titled “Blank post” and it would get 10-20 comments. I proved him wrong—it got over 30 comments in less than an hour and a half. That’s just wicked, people.

i-18456425bb7ad60cbb499c60f8095959-blankpost.gif

It also made the #1 most active post on scienceblogs. Man, my job just got a lot easier…who needs to write anything?

I think my case is made. Using traffic activity to determine what links you’ll put up is a perfect example of a positive feedback loop, and it’s also why ranking systems like Technorati that base your position in the hierarchy on how many links are made to you or how much traffic you get contribute to the perpetuation of that same hierarchy. It stabilizes rankings and can mean that the best are hindered from rising to the top, and cushions slackers so they can coast. Despite the fact that I’m benefiting from this, I don’t like it; here I am with my socialist leanings, wearing a top hat and monocle and reaping my ill-gotten harvest with no effort.

So I’ll throw it out to you. What information would be most useful to you in that box, that would also be easy to implement, and that would subvert the dominant paradigm by distributing links more liberally?

P.S. This blank post idea is interesting, but no, I hadn’t heard of it until it was brought up in the blank post thread.

Cheaters usually don’t prosper

Check out this heartwarming tale of a Republican staffer who tried to retroactively get his GPA adjusted by hackers—he got caught, his pathetic attempts to cheat publicly aired, and now he has been fired.

The really sad thing is that GPAs aren’t that big a deal. They make a difference if you are trying to get into a post-bac academic program, but seriously…we all know you can be a dithering incompetent at school and get into business and government.

Oh, and the university this bozo wanted to hack? Texas Christian. Icing on the cake.

Doushantuo embryos dethroned?

Almost ten years ago, there was a spectacular fossil discovery in China: microfossils, tiny organisms preserved by phosphatization, that revealed amazing levels of fine detail. These specimens were identified as early animal embryos on the basis of a number of properties.

  • The cells were dimpled and shaped by adjoining cells, suggesting a flexible membrane—not a cell wall. This rules out algae, fungi, and plants.
  • The number of cells within each specimen was usually a power of 2. This is something we typically see in cleaving embryos, the sequence from 1 to 2 to 4 to 8 to 16 cells.
  • They were big. Typical somatic cells in animals are 5-10 µm in diameter, but ova can be a millimeter or more in diameter, and individual blastomeres (the cells in the cleavage stage embryo) can be several hundred µm across. These cells and the whole assemblage were in that size range.
  • The individual cells were uniform in size, as seen in many cleavage stage embryos, and contained organelles arranged in a consistent pattern.
  • They were often found encapsulated in a thin membrane, similar to the protective membrane around embryos.

There are some concerns about the interpretation, though. One troubling aspect of their distribution is that they are all only in the cleavage stage: we don’t see any gastrulas, the stage at which embryonic cells undergo shape changes and begin to move in a specific, directed manner. Studies of taphonomy (analyses of the processes that lead to fossilization) have shown that these later stages are particularly difficult to preserve, which potentially explains why we’re seeing a biased sample. Another unusual bias in the sample is that all of the embryos exhibit that regularity of division that produces equal-sized blastomeres—yet many invertebrate embryos have early asymmetric cleavages that produce recognizable, stereotyped distributions of cells. That asymmetry could be a feature that evolved late, but at the same time, some of the fossils were described as resembling molluscan trefoil embryos. Why aren’t the examples of early asymmetry translated into a later asymmetry?

Now there’s another reason to question the identity of the Doushantuo microfossils: they may be bacterial.

[Read more…]