Palaeos lost?

Palaeos is gone! There is a brief note about being unable to support it any longer, and then poof, it’s offline. Martin Brazeau has a comment on it’s value; you can still see fragments of this great resource in google’s cache, but even that will fade too soon.

This is troubling, and it’s one of the worrisome aspects of using the net—there’s no sense of permanence. It would be good if someone were to step forward and at least archive all of the pages, but the essential feature of the Palaeos site was that it was continually maintained and updated to reflect current information, and that’s not something that can be supported without the dedication of much time and effort by someone knowledgeable in the subject.

Harris on Collins

I get the impression that Sam Harris didn’t like Francis Collins’ book:

If one wonders how beguiled, self-deceived and carefree in the service of fallacy a scientist can be in the United States in the 21st century, “The Language of God” provides the answer. The only thing that mitigates the harm this book will do to the stature of science in the United States is that it will be mostly read by people for whom science has little stature already. Viewed from abroad, “The Language of God” will be seen as another reason to wonder about the fate of American society. Indeed, it is rare that one sees the thumbprint of historical contingency so visible on the lens of intellectual discourse. This is an American book, attesting to American ignorance, written for Americans who believe that ignorance is stronger than death. Reading it should provoke feelings of collective guilt in any sensitive secularist. We should be ashamed that this book was written in our own time.

Just out of curiousity, has anyone seen a positive review of this book? The closest thing to it I’ve seen is David Klinghoffer’s, which is an interesting example of conflicted evasion: he tries so hard to praise Collins’ piety, but at the same time, Collins rips into ID…and Klinghoffer is a Discovery Institute fellow. His response is to get all soppy about the religion, but at the end to recommend some other book that tangles up religion and science, presumably without any ID bashing.

I’ve said it a few times now: I’m with Harris. Collins’ thinking is very unimpressive and embarrassingly shallow, and yet he’s trading on his reputation as a scientist to evangelize for theological nonsense. Personally, I think he’s setting back the idea of reconciling faith and reason a few centuries—I just don’t see how you can read his tripe without seeing it as clear evidence that religion rots your brain.

Dinosaur lungs

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Next time you’re cutting up a fresh bird, try looking for the lungs. They’re about where you’d expect them to be, but they’re nestled up dorsally against the ribs and vertebrae, and they’re surprisingly small. If you think about it, the the thorax of a bird is a fairly rigid box, with that large sternal keel up front and short ribs—it’s a wonder that they are able to get enough air from those tiny organs with relatively little capability for expanding and contracting the chest.

How they do it is an amazing story. Birds have a radically effective respiratory system that works rather differently than ours, with multiple adaptations working together to improve their ability to take in oxygen. There is also a growing body of evidence that dinosaurs also shared many of these adaptations, tightening their link to birds and also making them potentially even more fierce—they were big, they were active, and their lungs were turbocharged.

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Fish courtship and sex

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I’ve been a bit sex-obsessed lately. No, no, not that way—it’s all innocent, and the objects of my obsessions are all fish.

A little background explanation: one of my current research projects is on the genetics of behavior. This is a difficult area, because behavior is incredibly complex with multiple levels of causation, and one has to be very careful when trying to tease apart all the tangled factors that contribute to it. It takes numbers and lots of controls to sort out the various contributors to a behavior.

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The internet never forgets

I feel a little bit sorry for Joel Borofsky, Dembski’s ‘research’ assistant. Over at Inoculated Mind, Karl Mogel has excavated Borofsky’s tawdry history on them thar IntarWubs. I’d forgive him some of the earlier illiterate, whiny stuff—he started at a very young age, at about the same age as my daughter (who seems to be able to use the internet without sounding like a doofus, though)—but he doesn’t seem to have improved with age.

PowerPointing our way to disaster

Neddie Jingo has an appalling example of the kind of presentation used to promote our strategic plan in Iraq. Go take a look and weep—it’s one of those meaningless godawful PowerPoint-style assemblages of boxes and arrows. You know what I mean: a nightmare of chartjunk that distracts everyone into contemplating the relationships of graphical abstractions on a screen rather than actually dealing with the substance behind them.

I’m actually very impressed that he managed to also put together a paragraph actually explaining what the graphic is supposed to mean, and that the paragraph makes sense…and exposes the deficiencies in the plan.

Once upon a time, it took a fair amount of effort to put together a slide for a presentation. It involved photography—that stuff with film—and you had to plan well ahead and put it together with some care. You had to think about what you were going to include. And when you put all that work and planning into each slide, once it was projected on the wall, you spent a good bit of time carefully explaining it to your audience. The slide was an illustration of some data, and the interpretation and explanation was done with the words you used to accompany it.

Now what I see with PowerPoint is a proliferation of graphical noise and short bullet points, accompanying by a steady bloating of the number of slides shown. An image is no longer a piece of real-world data, but something the speaker flashes up as a substitute for saying anything. As the Neddie Jingo example shows, it can be a flying piece of fantasy with no substance behind it at all…but string enough of those together and you can zip through a pretense of a talk without actually having to say anything.

One measure of a good talk to my mind is being able to imagine the video projector failing, and the speaker still being able to communicate a sensible idea to the audience. PowerPoint isn’t the point of your talk, it’s a convenience, a crutch, a tool for making some data visible. Nothing more.

Although it does look like it can also be a weapon of mass distraction when misused by the military.