No, the Patriots aren’t magically controlling coin tosses

They shouldn't be. Image from USA Today.

They shouldn’t be.
Image from USA Today.

Citing a CBS article, Uncommon Descent complains “No design inference allowed on coin flips.” As I’ve come to expect from them, it’s pretty hard to parse a coherent argument out of the article, but I’ll bet it has something to do with 747s and tornadoes (say what you want about Evolution News and Views; at least you can follow their arguments). So it’s not clear what design inference they think we should draw from the New England Patriots winning 19 of 25 coin flips, nor who is being prevented from drawing it.

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Best rejection letter ever, or science urban legend?

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek by Jan Verkolje. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek by Jan Verkolje. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

Trying to find some background on Van Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of Volvox, I came across the following on Wikipedia:

Despite the initial success of Van Leeuwenhoek’s relationship with the Royal Society, this relationship was soon severely strained. In 1676, his credibility was questioned when he sent the Royal Society a copy of his first observations of microscopic single-celled organisms. Previously, the existence of single-celled organisms was entirely unknown. Thus, even with his established reputation with the Royal Society as a reliable observer, his observations of microscopic life were initially met with both skepticism and open ridicule.[12]

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Chlamy song

Posts may be thin this week. I am preparing a talk for AbSciCon and a manuscript that’s due Monday. Saturday morning, I will board the Empire Builder in Whitefish for a 30-hour ride to Chicago (no doubt some of the manuscript will be written on the train).

Meanwhile, here’s a song about Chlamydomonas (skip to 1:05 if you don’t want to hear the intro).

Volvox, the…game?

The Steam Greenlight Community has announced the development of Volvox (warning: autoplay video), a puzzle game with the goal of building “the first pluricellular beings.” Written by three students and former students of Italy’s Politecnico di Milano, the game features triangular cells called Trimoebas that roll around under the player’s control and gain abilities as the game progresses. The team, which forms Neotenia, Ltd., won the Italian national competition and is a semifinalist for the 2015 Microsoft Imagine Cup. The first fifteen levels are available as a free Unity WebGL Demo (takes a while to load).
The game reminds me a bit of Lemmings or Lode Runner in its simplicity and focus on solving deceptively simple tasks. It looks good, with a sort of hand-drawn, colored pencil, pastel look. Each trimoeba has an eye that mostly follows the mouse pointer, although they get bored and start looking around if it doesn’t move for a few seconds. Powers (at least those that exist in the demo) are indicated by the affected side of the triangle being colored; for example, blue sides can’t be stuck in glue. The documentation is a little thin right now, and it took me a while to figure out what was expected on the second level.

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