Apparently, it’s a religious holiday called Passover, which refers to some horrible, awful series of afflictions a god visited on some unfortunate people, but passed over some others, so the survivors celebrate. It seems terribly mean-spirited to me. Anyway, here’s something “fun”: Passover-themed gifts. In this case, a collection of plagues for children. A bag of plagues, plague fingerpuppets, chocolate plagues — there’s a frog in that one. Which made me think of…

Well, except for the grain silos, that is, but I don’t need to go in those. New York is a whole different story, though. This story about elevators is informative, because it tells you all about the construction and safety features, takes a tour of the Otis company, and even talks about the psychology of spacing oneself in a crowded elevator…but the part that will stick with you is the saga of poor Nicholas White, who was forgotten in a stuck elevator for 41 hours over one weekend — trapped in a small box for almost two days with absolutely nothing to do. I think I’d go insane.

Almost as painful: he was observed on time-lapse security cameras. Now you too can watch a man suffer extreme boredom and frustration. If this were a psychology experiment, it would never get past the review board, that’s for sure.

(via Kottke)

There has been a recent upsurge in email coming my way. Some of it is very complimentary, thank you very much to all who have written in to say nice things about the blog, and some of it is extremely nasty (no thank you, I’m not interested in being sent to hell right now), but others … others are just weird.

[Read more…]

(via My Confined Space)

This is kind of sad, actually. It’s a slick website from a guy in Utah who claims to have discovered pre-Cambrian dragons. Browse around his gallery, and it’s clear that what he’s got are pictures of random rocks, and that he’s seeing shapes in them like one sees shapes in the clouds. He reminds me of Ed Conrad.

His name is Mike Hallett, so of course this period of gigantic dragons is called the Hallettstoneion. He has also written a book, which has to be seen to be believed. I swear, I think it’s actually written in crayon. Here’s a sample, in case you’d really rather not download a 40MB pdf.

Ouch. I hope his family gets the poor man some help.

I am feeling a growing sense of incredulity as I read the latest babble from Susan Mazur. She was the one who reported on this upcoming meeting at Altenberg with an excess of hyperbole and a truly misleading inflation of the importance of that event. It sounds interesting in that a small group of respectable, credible scientists are gathering (along with a few who would most charitably be called crackpots), but it’s not that unusual — meetings happen all the time, the people participating in this event go to meetings all the time, and it’s simply different but routine.

I get the impression that Mazur is journalist with no sense of proportion and a rather distressing lack of skepticism. This meeting will not revolutionize science. If we’re lucky, a few good ideas will emerge from it. More likely, some people will have a good time, they’ll learn a few things, and they’ll fly back to work and we won’t hear about it ever again.

Mazur desperately needs a tranquilizer, because she has struck again with another exceptionally silly article on this non-story, Theory of Form to Evolution Center Stage. It’s a disjointed mess, this amazingly rambling collection of credulous nonsense that mixes up entirely reasonable statements from some participants with flakiness from a few notorious weirdos, with no sense that she’s even trying to distinguish the two.

I’m not even going to try to wade into the chaos. Let’s just bring up a few points that involve me.

University of Torono biochemist Larry Moran, who runs a popular website called Sandwalk, which considers itself the rival to SEED blogger PZ Myers’ Pharyngula, asked me: “Why was Doug Futuyma not invited?”

Larry is my rival? That isn’t how it works — this is not a zero-sum game. There is no competition. It’s rather symptomatic of Mazur’s whole approach that everything is viewed as a conflict between everything else.

And this is just funny:

Pivar is the independent scientist whose work has been skewered on the blogosphere for not being a complete theory of evolution.

No, no, no — wrong on every count. Pivar is a wealthy art collector who makes millions selling septic tanks — he is not a scientist. Nobody (well, other than creationists, that is) argues against theories because they’re incomplete; every theory is incomplete. I don’t even know what a complete theory would look like. No, Pivar got mocked because his theory is divorced from reality, built on fantasies instead of evidence. So far, the only person who seems to take Pivar at all seriously is Mazur.

Pivar says he has in fact taken the advice of NASA minerologist Robert Hazen and early on approached mainstream evo publishers. He has been repeatedly rejected he says, but continues to fight on, making the point that he’s the only one with a model.

Pivar recently offered a research grant to Massimo Pigliucci and his lab to study his Engines of Evolution book, following an exchange of emails with Pigliucci over several months.

Pigliucci said he considered the gesture “bribery” and refused the offer, adding that he does not share Pivar’s enthusiasm about his theory of form.

That’s putting mildly, I suspect.

Mazur gets even wackier and more dishonest in this article: Richard Dawkins Renounces Darwinism As Religion And Embraces Form. I hear Dawkins has also stopped beating his wife. Anyway, all she got him to say is that there’s good stuff in developmental biology that complements evolutionary biology, and from that obvious and sensible conclusion she spins a bizarre thesis that he has somehow been converted from a religious view.

Spare me. I often gripe about bad journalism, but this is some of the worst … and I fear that she might actually be on the same side of the political fence as I am. Beware the left-leaning incompetents — they have the potential to be as awful as the incompetents on the right.

People patent the strangest things … like this Jesus doll.

The doll is provided with electrically conductive nails which when inserted through apertures in the hands of the doll, mount the doll to a provided cross and close an electrical circuit which illuminates the cross.

Cool. I’ll go one better. Let’s add another circuit in the side of the doll, with a little spear…and when you pierce his side, his eyes blink and his head spins around and pops off. It would be only slightly more tacky.

What is it with this anti-beard sentiment? Here’s an article that wonders why so many scientists have beards, with several amusing stories.

But anti-beard arguments also ran rife in pre-Victorian times: Beards trapped food and the stuff you spewed out when you sneezed. At a stretch, they could even go as far as to catch fire and trap vermin, some argued. This all came to a head in 1907, with a rather remarkable experiment. A French scientist took one bearded and one clean shaven man from the streets of Paris and asked each of them to kiss a woman, whose lips were previously swabbed with antiseptic. After each smooth, her lips were swabbed and the the cultures were smeared on agar. The hairy kiss, it turned out, was by far the more microbial-ly diverse.

That anecdote answers the question right there. Overgrown nerds experience very little risk of ever having to kiss French women on the streets of Paris, so there is very little selection against beard growth. Hey, if I had some likelihood of sweeping strange women into my arms, I might shave, too … and brush my teeth more than once a week, and take a shower more often than once a month, habits atypical of us hairy, dirty, microbe-rich men.

(via Pure Pedantry)