Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
The Republican-led government shutdown has also shut down the NSF.
National Science Foundation: Pretty Much Screwed. The NSF is the organization in charge of doling out government dollars to valuable scientific research that could cure fatal diseases, improve quality of life, or create new amazing things. Lest you forget, the MRI machine, voice control, multitouch displays, the internet, GPS, and many, many more advances were funded all or in part by the NSF. This isn’t frivolous. This is important work that will grind to a halt. The NSF will stop making payments to researchers, and government-funded programs the researchers need, like websites and document downloads, will not be operational.
They’ve also sent NASA and all of their active projects off on a vacation.
That now includes the Mars rover Curiosity, which has been shut down, taking a furlough in safe mode like 97 percent (!) of NASA employees. (Safe mode, which Curiosity has gone into for technical glitches before, means it won’t be completely turned off, but won’t be collecting new data, either.) More or less everyone who isn’t working on keeping the International Space Station astronauts safe will be receiving an unexpected vacation.
And have you seen the banner on PubMed?
Due to the lapse in government funding, PubMed is being maintained with minimal staffing. Information will be updated to the extent possible, and the agency will attempt to respond to urgent operational inquiries.
Updates regarding government operating status and resumption of normal operations can be found at http://www.usa.gov.
Thanks, you bastard shit-sucking dumbass Republicans!
Oh, and how about the USDA?
Due to the lapse in federal government funding, this website is not available.
After funding has been restored, please allow some time for this website to become available again.
This is embarrassing.
Taslima has the news: experts in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland are proposing a complete ban on circumcisions of all types. Unfortunately, it’s a little premature to say it will happen: what we have right now is a group of ombudsmen for children, paediatricians, and paediatric surgeons passing a resolution at a meeting. There is no law yet.
But it certainly makes sense. Hacking up babies’ crotches is perverse and bizarre and unnecessary.
via NatGeo
I’m in Austin, Texas this weekend, hanging out with Matt Dillahunty and Beth Presswood, and it’s bats, bats, bats all day long. I’m giving a talk about bat evolution this afternoon (theme: so what if there aren’t many fossils?), and then we’re going on a bat cruise to watch the swarm of Mexican (don’t tell the Republicans) Free Tailed Bats launch themselves into the twilight skies. Also, somewhere in there will be Texas barbecue. I don’t think that will have much bat in it.
While I’m distracted, watch the pretty bats fly.
It has come to pass that we are working with the Stevens Community Humane Society again, which means that they have foisted another hell-beast cat upon us to house.
This is she.
She is a young beast, all black with a white patch on her chest. She is very curious and there has been a little problem with getting her to sit still — she’s got our whole house to explore so she’s rushing about all the time. She will occasionally jump on me with her claws and bump her head against my chin while making curious throbbing noises — I think it’s the sound of the millstones of Hell grinding souls to a pulp, or something.
We’ve been closing the bedroom doors tightly at night to prevent her nefarious pouncing — I think she has evil plans — but by day, we might have to collude. My cunning brain and her predatory energy…we could take over the world, if one of us doesn’t stab the other in the back.
I am calling her Satanique. The humane society gave her the name Ivy, which you might prefer if you’d rather cloak her true nature. If you’d like to break up our wicked partnership before our plans reach fruition, or if you think you need a partner in crime of your very own, contact the Stevens Community Humane Society. Tell them you want the black-furred agent code-named Ivy that is holed up in the Myers safehouse. They might be able to arrange something.
The Daily Mail? Really?
I don’t know whether this is a good thing, or a bad thing, but at least he’s agreeing for a different reason. On the question of whether we’ll someday be able to download brains into a computer, I’ve said no for largely procedural reasons: there is no way to capture the state of all the complex molecules (and the simple ions, either) of the brain in any kind of snapshot, and the excuses of the download proponents are ludicrously ignorant of even the current state of biology. John Wilkins says no for a different and interesting reasons: a simulation (and that’s all a computer version of a person could be) is not the thing itself. The map is not the territory. So even surrendering the idea of a high-fidelity transfer and saying that you’ll just develop a model of a brain doesn’t get you anywhere close to solving the problem of immortalizing “me” in a machine.
Sorry, trans-humanists. I can believe that there can be a post-humanity, but it won’t include us, so I don’t know why you aspire to it. I can sort of imagine an earth transformed by human activities into a warmer, wetter, even more oceanic place that allows more squid to flourish, and it’s even a somewhat attractive future, but it’s not a human transformation.
