This thread is for talking about whatever doesn’t fit into the other categories. Caine is your curator.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
This thread is for talking about whatever doesn’t fit into the other categories. Caine is your curator.
You want to do something, but you’re pinned down by your job? Atheists, you can always donate to Foundation Beyond Belief. They do good work. Or pick any progressive cause; the ACLU is another good cause, as is Planned Parenthood. Do what you can!
This great dead beast greets me every morning — it’s a cast of a Triceratops skull mounted across the atrium from my lab. It’s impressively large.
One thing has always bugged me about it, though. See that tiny hole directly under the horns? That’s the eye socket. It has a beady-eyed look, like mere eyeballs were an afterthought to long pointy sharp horns.
But then you go forward from there, and what you see is this massive cavity where the nostrils would go. It’s freakin’ huge. You could fit both hands in there, and it goes all the way through the skull. I’m a moderately gracile human being with a skeleton that’s delicate and fragile compared to a dinosaur’s, and I don’t have a giant gap in my facial bones that you could punch through without smashing up a few bones.
What’s up with that, I’ve always wondered. There must have been some impressive fleshy tissue in there, associated with olfaction? Or thermoregulation? Or what? Someone really needs to get right on that time machine idea.
Darren Naish has a far out, speculative, wild hypothesis: those giant meat holes contained colorful inflatable nose balloons for sexual display, because dinosaurs were weird.
I don’t know. It kind of detracts from the majestic dignity of the animal to imagine it puffing out what would look like a gaudy snot bubble to appeal to a mate. What self-respecting beast would do that?
Next thing you know, these paleo guys will be dressing dinosaurs up in flamboyant plumage. No dignity left at all.
Do you like your activism sprinkled with saucy four letter words? Here’s the site for you. It’s actually very good — it first asks what your priorities are, then what you can contribute, and then makes recommendations for further opportunities to explore what you can do. It just does it very rudely, but then, these are rude times.
Get ready, world, scientists are going to use CRISPR/Cas9 on human patients for the first time, extracting a population of cells, modifying their genomes, amplifying them in tissue culture, and then injecting the modified cells back into the human host. It’s being done in China, where the ethical constraints are a bit more loose, which isn’t always good…but in this case, it sounds like a good, safe (as safe as experimental therapies can be) approach.
They intend to use CRISPR/Cas9 to knock out the PD-1 gene in immune system cells. PD-1 is a cell surface molecule on T-cells that inhibits the cells, and acts as a constraint on immune system activity. The “PD” is short for “Programmed Death”, and what it does is compel the cells to commit suicide when stimulated — so if immune system cells get a bit overzealous and go on a rampage attacking healthy cells, they can be switched off. The immune system has multiple checkpoints to prevent it from going rogue, and this procedure will remove one of them. By knocking out the PD-1 gene, the scientists are creating particularly unrestrained cells that they hope will do a more effective job killing cancer cells, because cancer cells are known to use the signaling mechanisms that tell the immune system to die.
Are there drawbacks and risks? There are always drawbacks and risks. This technique is a variation on an existing pharmaceutical approach, which uses drugs that inhibit PD-1 in cancer patients, so we know a bit about its effects — it’s just that taking out the whole gene with CRISPR/Cas9 is a dramatically thorough way of demolishing the molecule. But we do have some drugs, like Nivolumab and Pembrolizumab, that target PD-1 already and are in clinical trials. We’ve also experimentally knocked out the gene in mice.
So, we have an idea of what could go wrong, and in the immortal words of Dr House, it’s lupus. Or lupus-like effects. By jacking up the immune system and removing one restraint on its activity, you can get complex system-wide problems, which Dr House will tell you are pretty hard to treat, but at least they’re not as severe as terminal cancer. They are also editing a terminal cell type — it’s not going to proliferate — so eventually, we hope after they’ve killed cancer cells, the injected cells will die of natural causes and the effect will fade away.
This is not a treatment that affects the germ cell line, so these patients, if they survive, will not be passing on an edited gene to their offspring. It’s also got to be a rather expensive therapy that has to be customized for each new patient, so it’s not going to be routine. It is a first step into the exciting world of genetically modifying humans, though.
One of the things that has made me angry are fake news sites that try to make people angry. I’ve been blocking lots of these places, but still, people circumvent my blocks by independently sending me links to the lie of the day, and it’s more than a little annoying. Melissa Zimdars has been doing something about it, though: she has begun compiling a long list of all the fake news/”satire” sites out there. Do check that list before you get annoyed at some fresh horror in the world — it’s entirely possible that it’s completely imaginary.
It has a long way to go to even approximate completeness, unfortunately, because new ones keep cropping up. It’s got some well known and infamous sites on the list, like Breitbart and everything Alex Jones has cobbled up, but it’s missing some, like the Drudge Report, and it can’t possibly cover all the dishonest wackaloons on the web — I’m currently getting flooded with crap from constitution.com, for instance, which seems to be trying to make a name for itself with histrionic conservativism.
But there has also been Snopes, which, for example, takes apart a lying claim that liberals are beating up innocent people from a site called christiantimesnewspaper.com. That’s not on the Zimdars list.
The bottom line is that you can’t rely on lists of baddies. You have to use critical thinking. Zimdars provides some good general rules to follow.
- Avoid websites that end in “lo” ex: Newslo (above). These sites take pieces of accurate information and then packaging that information with other false or misleading “facts” (sometimes for the purposes of satire or comedy).
- Watch out for websites that end in “.com.co” as they are often fake versions of real news sources.
- Watch out if known/reputable news sites are not also reporting on the story. Sometimes lack of coverage is the result of corporate media bias and other factors, but there should typically be more than one source reporting on a topic or event.
- Odd domain names generally equal odd and rarely truthful news.
- Lack of author attribution may, but not always, signify that the news story is suspect and requires verification.
- Some news organizations are also letting bloggers post under the banner of particular news brands; however, many of these posts do not go through the same editing process (ex: BuzzFeed Community Posts, Kinja blogs, Forbes blogs).
- Check the “About Us” tab on websites or look up the website on Snopes or Wikipedia for more information about the source.
- Bad web design and use of ALL CAPS can also be a sign that the source you’re looking at should be verified and/or read in conjunction with other sources.
- If the story makes you REALLY ANGRY it’s probably a good idea to keep reading about the topic via other sources to make sure the story you read wasn’t purposefully trying to make you angry (with potentially misleading or false information) in order to generate shares and ad revenue.
- It’s always best to read multiple sources of information to get a variety of viewpoints and media frames. Some sources not yet included in this list (although their practices at times may qualify them for addition), such as The Daily Kos, The Huffington Post, and Fox News, vacillate between providing important, legitimate, problematic, and/or hyperbolic news coverage, requiring readers and viewers to verify and contextualize information with other sources.
It’s always good to think when reading!
You know I filter the comments here and have a fairly extensive block list — it’s necessary. Especially now. You wouldn’t believe the crap people are trying to post here now, emboldened by this recent election. I’ll just put one particularly ugly example from someone calling himself sinceretrupsupporter
below the fold. You might want to skip it. I find it useful to remind myself from time to time what we’re fighting.
The American Astronomical Society is apparently led by craven suck-ups who don’t believe in standing up for science. They removed a post that was critical of the incoming Trump administration, making bogus arguments about how they are a non-political organization. I’m sorry, but you’re a science organization, and when an anti-science goon comes into office, you decide to hide under your desks rather than opposing him? What use is such an organization? If you refuse to take a stand when your members are under threat, when you actively silence criticism, you become a collaborator. And if you think bowing to the overlords of ignorance will shelter you from their ire, you haven’t thought things through.
We’ve got a Trump coming in who wants to wreck the economy and build a wall and is already complaining about those protesting college kids. You think if you scuttle to do his bidding that that will protect you from the inevitable cuts to science programs, the starving of our universities, discrimination against our students? Have you noticed that his administration is going to be managed by a raving racist and anti-semite? Does the fact that the vice president is going to be a theocrat who thinks the universe is only a few thousand years old trouble you at all?
The AAS has censored one of their own, but it’s not going to help them, because here is Sarah Tuttle’s piece. She’s saying what our scientific institutions ought to all be saying, although they probably won’t.
To those of you preaching appeasement and patience: No. We know what that looks like. We are better students of history. I am not afraid to stand up to protect the existence of those who society has pushed to the margins. I am not afraid to stand up to protect myself.
Everyone needs to rise up, and if our institutions, from the AAS to the Democratic party, are unable to share our outrage and help, then it’s time to throw down their leadership and replace them with people who are conscious of the real threat now facing this country…and facing science.
I’ve been grading furiously, still plowing through newly accumulated piles. Who knew that all this work wouldn’t get done if I took the weekend off?
Wait a minute…how did I end up in a job that has me working nights and weekends all the time for a lower middle class salary? There are times I wonder about that. Maybe it has something to do with being so unaware that I willingly allow work to pile up, and just accept it as normal.
Such charming people, those Trumpkins. Here’s a coffee shop owner who raged about Clinton:
“Before last week’s election, Heafner shared an image of Trump in the White House, with a caption that read, ‘If Trump wins the election, it’ll be the first time in history that a billionaire moves into public housing vacated by a black family.’
In an earlier post about Hillary Clinton, he wrote, ‘She needs f*cked with a bat! Right up her liberal f*cking ass!’”
The day before the election, when Heafner apparently thought Trump was going to lose, he posted this message: ‘The Coffee Tavern will never recognize a murdering whore for president!! Don’t like it, keep the fuck out!! We don’t tolerate scum!!!’”
Racist and misogynist…but now that people complained and threatened to boycott his shop, he’s singing a different tune.
“The people that know me know I’m not like that,” Heafner said in an interview after the incident. “I just hope that this community can overlook the stupid comments I made.”
Nope, sorry, that is what you are like, and now we do know you. Don’t worry about your business: this is America. The decent people might avoid your place, but you can always draw in the white power crowd. Enjoy your new company!
Here’s another example of a cowardly bully. This deplorable Trumpkin started an argument with a Clinton supporter in a bar and was separated from them, which you’d think would solve the problem. Then, after the “gentleman” paid up and was leaving
“The guy came back almost running, and he started pushing some customer and the high-chair next to him with the baby because he couldn’t reach the girl,” the manager told the Brooklyn Paper. “Then he punched the girl.”
…
Drost said staffers and locals chased after the man and eventually caught up to him. Leon told the Paper that the man yelled “You don’t know who I am!” before jumping into his car and driving off. The NYPD spokesman said the assailant escaped in a white car, and that no arrests were made. Love said it took at least 10 minutes for cops to arrive.
These are going to be the chickenshit years, aren’t they?
