Swaggery swag swag

I know you’re poor. You’re planning to go to the Reason Rally by hopping a freight and camping under a freeway overpass; you can’t afford no pricey t-shirt. But how will we know that you are One of Us? Get a button, they’re cheap. Now available in the Pharyngula store is a selection of handy catchphrases in button form: Cupcake, The People’s Republic of Pharyngula, Raptor Jesus, and Your Concern is Noted.

Wait…you can’t afford a t-shirt, where are you going to stick these buttons? Now I’m picturing a mob of half-naked bloody-chested ferocious godless heathens descending on the media screaming, “Your concern is noted!” It will make good TV.

We planned it that way

It worked. Read Greta, Cuttlefish, Stephanie, Ophelia, Jason, Jen, JT, Sikivu, and Maryam, to name just a few, and you’ll see that our cunning scheme to assemble a network that was a flaming hotbed of decent human beings has come to fruition.

I did have an initial plan to use our time and effort to build a skull-shaped lair in a volcano on a tropical island instead, but I guess I’m glad we went with this one first.

The Free Will thread

Some people on the open thread, which is mainly about socializing, are complaining that it’s been taken over with tedious philosophizing about free will. There’s an easy solution: here’s a new thread just for anybody to talk about free will. Stick it here.

Myself, I don’t believe in free will — I think it’s an obsolete concept that confuses rather than clarifies, and would rather stay out of it.

Massimo Pigliucci has principles

He was given the opportunity to suckle at the teat of the Templeton Foundation, and he turned them down.

A few weeks ago I got an email from my book agent. She had been approached by an editor at a well known academic publishing house with a project she thought I would be interested in. Sometime later I met with the editor in question, a genial person with whom I clearly had quite a few interests in common. Nonetheless, a few days later I decided to turn down the offer and pursue other projects. The reason: the book, which would have been part of a series, was going to be produced as a joint venture by the academic press in question and the John Templeton Foundation.

In short, my reason for declining the book project is that I simply don’t like having my name associated with right wing and/or libertarian organizations like the JTF, the American Enterprise Institute or the Institute for American Values.

More scientists ought to join him in refusing to prop up the Templeton’s mystical agenda.

Anti-caturday post

There is actually a cat in this video. Notice, though, that it only appears briefly in the beginning, looks bored, and apathetically wanders off screen. Why? Because the rest of the video features something far more exciting and bizarre than a mere cat: it’s all about zombie fish, their brains infected with trematode parasites. The cat knows that it cannot compete, unless it goes off and gets its brain tainted with some freaky strange parasite to give it some character.

Another interesting thing about it is that this video is an attempt to get funding for science research. If you feel like promoting more research into how to infect brains and make zombies, donate!

(Also on FtB)

Grace under pressure

The BBC is running an interview with Dame Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, and it’s very good. Bell-Burnell is the woman who discovered pulsars, and until I heard this interview, I hadn’t realized how it was done.

Yeah, there weren’t computers available so the reams of data came out on strip chart – paper chart – and the configuration produced a hundred foot a day and I ran it for six months, which gave me about three miles of paper, which I had to analyse by hand. I would go through the charts and I would log where I saw what I thought were quasars and I also saw that there were chunks of manmade interference – artificial interference. But just occasionally, one time out of five or one time out of 10, when we looked at a particular bit of sky there was this additional signal that didn’t look exactly like a quasar, didn’t look exactly like low level interference, occupied about a quarter inch of the chart.

So…spotting periodic quarter inch blips scattered on 3 miles of paper. I don’t want to hear any of you students complaining about your daily grind any more!

Unfortunately, she was robbed: she discovered pulsars, it was her persistence that got her advisor to take the observations seriously, after initially dismissing the whole idea — and guess who won the Nobel in 1974 for the discovery? Her advisor, and not Jocelyn Bell-Burnell. She does not complain, however; those were the facts of life.

I think at that time science was perceived as being done by men, senior men, maybe with a whole fleet of minions under him who did his bidding and weren’t expected to think. I believe the Nobel Prize committee didn’t even know I existed.

And then the newspapers covered pulsars, and called her the “girl”…

Oh yes and worse than that what were my vital statistics and how tall was I and you know – chest, waist and hip measurements please and all that kind of thing. They did not know what to do with a young female scientist, you were a young female, you were page three, you weren’t a scientist.

Apparently, it was also the custom when she was a student in Glasgow for the men to stamp their feet and wolf-whistle whenever a woman walked into a lecture hall, and she of course was the only woman in the entire physics program at the time.

None of this could possibly have influenced the career decisions of an entire generation of women, I’m sure.

(Also on FtB)