Friday Cephalopod: Half a billion years of making me happy

Maybe it doesn’t look like much, and maybe it’s tiny at only 1.5cm long, but this is a 522 million year old cephalopod shell, found in Newfoundland.

To be fair, the investigators are cautious, only tentatively calling it a cephalopod…but it’s an oval shell with a siphuncle. None of the squishy bits are preserved, unfortunately, but it’s enough to suggest that this is a cephalopod, especially since it’s at about the right time period predicted.

One sad thing about it is that we still feel a need to issue a disclaimer when commenting on it.

“Cephalopods are really different from other mollusks,” Vecchione said. Still, “we do know that they’re mollusks, they’re not from outer space like some people have said.”

Yeah, those assholes from the Panspermia Mafia, Wickramasinghe etc., have really tainted the public perception of cephalopods.

Shut up, Meyer, your schtick is getting old

As usual, Stephen Meyer tries to claim that only intelligence can generate information. My usual response to that is a combination of…

  • But that’s the point of contention! You can’t use your premise as evidence that your premise is true!
  • OK, smart guy, have you examined every single piece of information in the universe to back up your claim that information always comes from an intelligent source?

But this is also a very good response. We have direct, observed, experimental evidence that information can arise from non-intelligent, natural processes.

This is the thing that bugs me about Meyer. He claims to be a philosopher, yet all of his books, every long-winded one of them, rests on a logical fallacy, his unsupported claim that all information is a product of intelligent design, and that therefore all information is a product of intelligent design.

ICR has added “annoying” to their repertoire of “stupid”

…yet.

The Institute for Creation Research has a series of videos titled “That’s A Fact”, each one under 2 minutes long, with funky background music and physically painful kinetic transitions. No, really, it hurt my eyes to watch this one — the gimmick is a screen full of words in random orientations, and the camera zooms around to highlight the word the narrator says, and just the esthetics broke me. And then there’s the content…hoo boy.

For instance, here’s one titled “evolving bacteria”. For instance, in a 20 year study of E. coli…scientists looked at 40,000 generations of bacteria, and confirmed that the bacteria did not evolve into anything other than E. coli. That’s it. That’s all. Lenski set up this experiment to see bacteria evolve into a cat, didn’t see any evilution at all, and therefore proved that macroevolution is a myth. Apparently, Lenski writes all these papers that just say “Nope, still not a cat in any test tube”.

Sorry, guys, the Lenski long-term evolution experiment did not propose to evolve something other than E. coli (it would have been surprising if it did, and would have sent everyone scurrying off to rewrite the textbooks, calling evolutionary theory into question), and it did demonstrate evolutionary changes.

Hey, ICR, do you even know what the word “evolve” means?

The Giuliani crime family is doing their best to convince me that lizard people exist

I’m not saying David Icke was right, but Rudy’s son Andrew is running for governor of New York, and he too is something of a sick freak. Would you believe he’s talking about his baby daughter here?

She “made a promise to me on the first day, right? My wife was sleeping, and I’m holding her [my daughter] in my arms. And I get emotional thinking about it, but she made a promise with me. She shook my hand and I said, ‘I’m the only boyfriend till you’re 25 years old, shake hands.’

“Shook my hand. So I have changed the diapers. I have looked under the hood. She’s a woman. I’m gonna be the last guy in a long time that looks under the hood right there. But guess what? She was born a woman and she’s gonna stay a woman, it’s that simple.”

A spokesperson for Andrew Giuliani told The Daily Beast, “while Andrew does not claim to be a biologist, he can tell the difference between a male and a female.”

So he’s possessive and controlling — I hate to break the news to you, Andy ol’ boy, but in less than 16 years she’s going to be talking about boys (or maybe girls) with her friends, and pining for a prom date who isn’t her creepy old man. At some point, she’s also going to get on the internet and discover her dad was talking about peeking “under the hood” when she was 4 months old — or worse, her peers at school learn this — and you will learn about the revenge of a daughter you’ve made cringe.

TERFs are experts in anatomy

I bet you didn’t know that everyone is transgender. No exceptions. At a glance, these discerning experts in what constitutes a real woman can spot them with their TERF vision.

It’s nice that the Restroom Police aren’t going to have to check out your genitals. Now they’ll determine which facility you get to use by your interocular distance, and the length of your neck and thighs.

Uh-oh. I just realized, I remember the 1970s, and I had so many friends who had Farah Fawcett posters in their bedrooms. I had no idea all those teenage boys were actually gay! And all the girls with that feathered hairstyle — all trans!

The anatomy is all wrong!

I am offended.

OK, you’ve grafted a vaguely arthropod-like head onto a human body, but you should at least look at a spider before drawing one. The mouthparts are a nonsensical gemisch. And those claws! Come on, lazybones. Try.

I’m not going to get into what breasts do for a spider-girl. Ectopic silk glands?