Whoa, Oglaf had a very insightful panel today. As you can tell from the fact that I’ve blurred out part of that first panel and have cut out most of the comic, it is most definitely not safe for work — it takes place at a sex competition — but that last line is wonderful.
Sex exists by replicating itself but not for anything.
How romantic! I just learned that “the word mistletoe is a compound Old English word combining ‘mistel’ (which means “dung”) and ‘tan’ (which means twig) because it looks a bit like bird poop on a stick”.
In case you’re curious, JE Brandenburg, the fellow who claims to have evidence of nuclear war between intelligent aliens on Mars, is commenting at length on my article criticizing his silly hypothesis. His arguments so far are 1) he’s a physicist, 2) there are radioactive deposits on Mars, 3) there was once lots of water and oxygen on Mars, 4) the mediocrity principle and the Fermi paradox, therefore…aliens.
There is a grossly dishonest graph of climate change effects going around — it attempts to minimize temperature changes and uncouple CO2 from the effects. Fortunately, RealClimate does a good job of tearing it apart, all neatly summarized here:
New pictures of the surface of Mars, taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. They’re interesting — what looks like water eroded canyons, very familiar, and exotically odd things like cones of snow produced by windblown eruptions of geysers.
Last night, they tried to turn conservation into a Japanese game show, with a ‘documentary’ about a scientist being swallowed alive…for Science!. I didn’t watch it — I was grading papers, as I will be doing 25 hours a day for the next two weeks, I think — but the reviews are scathing.
Also, master of molluscan anatomy, and clever tool user. This paper, Homo erectus at Trinil on Java used shells for tool production and engraving, by Joordens et al. tells an interesting story from some mundane artifacts made half a million years ago.
An interesting post on The Trouble with Jim Watson. Watson and biology are victims of a successful paradigm — you could still argue that that paradigm is partly Watson’s fault! — and you can’t really kick Watson unless you also take a few swings at how molecular genetics has produced a skewed, simplistic, and deterministic view of how life operates.
The trouble with Watson, then, is not how aberrant he is, but how conventional. He is no more—but no less—than an embodiment of late twentieth-century biomedicine. He exemplifies how a near-exclusive focus on the genetic basis of human behavior and social problems tends to sclerose them into a biologically determinist status quo. How that process occurs seems to me eminently worth observing and thinking about. Watson is an enigmatic character. He has managed his image carefully, if not always shrewdly. It is impossible to know what he “really thinks” on most issues, but I do believe this much: he believes that his main sin has been excessive honesty. He thinks he is simply saying what most people are afraid to say.
Unfortunately, he may be right.
