At last, we have a president who can give a Vulcan salutation.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
At last, we have a president who can give a Vulcan salutation.
This is big news, a first in the history of that institution! The student who led the LU College Democrats, the student club that was shut down by the administration because apparently, anything other than Republican Wingnuttia is the antithesis of the conservative Christian ideals they hope to promote, has written a letter describing the important lessons he learned at Liberty.
That lesson, of course, is to get the hell out and go to a different university.
Give them time, and with a little hard work, maybe the rest of the student body there can master that important skill, too.
Apologies for the short notice, but today at noon, there will be a march to show solidarity with the people of Iran. Meet at Hennepin and West Lake in Uptown for a peaceful gathering and march.
He’s going to be lecturing in Phoenix at the end of August on “Why Ben Stein is wrong about science and history“, which really should win some sort of prize for one of the one of the most obvious titles ever. He’s going to have to talk for days to cover the topic adequately, so pack a lunch.
Wish I could go. It should be entertaining, in a Mike-Tyson-battles-PeeWee-Herman sort of way!
It’s a pleasant Friday afternoon, so you’ve got nothing better to do than listen to some tedious apologetic drivel, right? Terry Eagleton is interviewed on Canadian radio, and he repeats the same boring noise he droned out in his book. For all the times the atheists are accused of sneering at the stupidity of their opponents, it’s galling that pretentious defenders of the faith like Eagleton get a free pass: his entire interview consists of smug gibes at the smugness of Dawkins and Hitchens, dismissals of their ideas as ignorant and dishonest.
And of course he doesn’t say one clear thing about religion. Well, he does claim that the idea of god as an entity is something that no theologian believes in — that there has been a long and sophisticated debate about something or other, which he can’t define clearly, but that it sure hasn’t been about whether god exists, and he acts as if the question doesn’t even make sense. Probably because he can’t even begin to answer it. When he’s confronted with a question about whether believing in god is like believing in fairies, he simply insists that those are two very different questions, without explaining how. They just are. Therefore, anyone who asks for some reason to believe is simply stupid, afflicted with crude old Enlightenment values (which he uses as a kind of insult).
The telling point, though, comes at the end. The interviewer asks whether Eagleton prays. It’s a simple question; you can answer yes, or no. If I were asked that, I’d be able to say no without a moment’s hesitation, since it’s a simple question about what a person does, requiring no philosophical maundering. Can you guess what Eagleton’s reply might have been?
No answer at all. He laughs, and claims it’s too long and hard to answer. And mumbles on and on, and the interviewer is clearly getting exasperated at his evasiveness. It’s an astonishing performance, the Courtier’s Reply brought to life in a half-hour teleplay in which the courtier is even more vapid and even more serious than I could have imagined.
(via The Accidental Weblog)
The simple summary:
As the video says, the country is shutting down the flow of information, clamping down on the internet — that alone would tell me that something nasty has been going down in the government there. Information should flow freely, and I’ve run across one set of instructions for setting up a proxy server under Windows, and one for Linux. I run neither…does anyone have similar instructions for BSD or Mac OS X Unix?
Otherwise, feel free to talk about the new source of chaos in the Middle East.
A reader wrote in to say his mother was being victimized by a putative religious organization called Elite Activity Resurrected. It has to be seen to be believed. It’s all dressed up in egalitarian pieties about ending world poverty, but when you look at the actual operation, it’s a remarkably blatant con game.
The World’s first Interdenominational Belief System on the Internet!
Poverty is our Adversary!
“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty.” — Martin Luther King Jr., April 4, 1967.
“Learn to do right! Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.” — Isaiah 1:17.
Aww, that sounds so noble. But here’s how it works:
Our models of abundance are designed specifically to anchor the belief that giving opens the way to receiving. Once you choose to participate in any Elite Activity model, you enter the cycle of abundance from the outer circle and give unconditionally without consideration to the participant in the inner circle. When you do this with the proper intent, and follow the guidelines, you will eventually reach ‘the inner circle’. This is where other participants give their unconditional gifts to you, and you experience the power of ‘Many giving to one’.
And here’s a kind of ‘review’, if by that we mean ‘uncritical endorsement of fraud’.
You are first “invited” to join the Elite Resurrected gifting program by a current member and then on the out-most ring in which place your “gift” (starting at $100), a monetary amount to the person that has made it to the center. You then “invite” at least two people that want to share in the giving during the second phase (the person that originally invited you will help you in this.). During the “Empowering” phase you help the people that you invited and once you successfully fulfill that part you move into the inner circle where you receive your gifts. There, it says, you will be able to receive 4 “gifts” (a total of $400) before being “invited” to join a new cycle at $250. You can still receive 2 more “gifts” at the center of the $100, after which time you will be recycled back to another $100 circle to make your way to the center once again.
Can you say “PYRAMID SCHEME!”, boys and girls? Sure, I knew you could. This is criminal activity; the only people whose poverty is going to be diminished are the members of the inner circle, and they’re going to make out like bandits. They are bandits!
Alert the police. They have a list of upcoming gatherings in places like Little River SC, Litchfield Park AZ, Houston TX, and lots of events in Mexico. I think having the local bunco squad paying a call on these thieves would add a welcome bit of festivity to their gatherings. They are vermin preying on fears of the economically disadvantaged.
The latest issue of Zebrafish, a specialty journal to which my university does not subscribe, is dedicated entirely to using zebrafish in education. I want it. I want the whole issue. Unfortunately, the publisher wants to charge me $29 per article to get the PDFs, which is not going to happen. Anyone out there with an institutional subscription want to help me out? If you don’t feel like sending me the whole collection, I’m particularly interested in the articles by Bagatto, D’Costa, McKeown, and Schmoldt.
Now watch, my mailbox is going to be flooded, isn’t it? Once upon a time, I could make these kinds of requests and get a moderate response, but nowadays…well, at least you know how badly I want these papers.
I got the papers! Thanks very much all, you can stop sending them to me now. Much appreciated, now I have to go read for a while.
How can anyone resist an article titled “Sexual Intercourse Involving Giant Sperm in Cretaceous Ostracode”? You can’t, I tell you. It’s like a giant brain magnet, you open the journal to the index, and there’s that title, and you must read it before you can even consider continuing on to anything else.
Some organisms have evolved immensely long sperm tails — Drosophila bifurca, for instance, has sperm cells that are about 60mm long, or 20 times longer than the length of the entire adult body. The excessively long sperm tail is obviously not a structure that has evolved for better swimming; instead, it is thought to act as a tangled barrier in the female reproductive tract to prevent other males from fertilizing the female, and there is also some very interesting evidence that sperm coevolves with the female reproductive tract, so some sexual selection at the level of the gametes is going on.
At the same time, sperm morphology is extremely diverse, and seems to evolve very rapidly. Perhaps these mega-sperm are a transient fad? Not all species of Drosophila exhibit the phenomenon, and those that do vary considerably from species to species. What we’d like to know is if there are any lineages that maintain these patterns of giant sperm over long periods of evolutionary time…so what do we need to do? We need to go spelunking for sperm in fossils!
That’s what this short letter in Science is about: the authors looked at ostracodes, a class of tiny crustacea that invests heavily in reproduction. About a third of their volume is their reproductive system, with males building giant (relative to their size) sperm pumps, and females having large seminal receptacles for sperm storage. The individual sperm are also large, often longer than the body length of the adult, and are also aflagellate — no flagellar tail at all, just a long, threadlike cell body. You can tell if a female ostracod is a virgin just by looking at those seminal receptacles, since they inflate hugely with all the giant sperm tucked inside.
So, if you look at the large orange blobs, the seminal receptacles, in this 3-D scan of a fossil female ostracod (bottom right of this image), you can tell that she was inseminated before she died, and that her mate had very large sperm. Her condition was also very similar to that of modern ostracodes (bottom left).
So, the conclusion is that boinking with giant sperm is an enduring property of at least some lineages: they’ve been going at it for a hundred million years. The authors also suggest that this kind of technique could be useful for measuring sexual selection by assessing pre-mating parental investment in fossil invertebrates.
Matzke-Karasz R, Smith RJ, Symonova R, Miller CG, Tafforeau P (2009) Sexual Intercourse Involving Giant Sperm in Cretaceous Ostracode. Science 324(5934):1535.
Miller GT, Pitnick S (2002) Sperm-Female Coevolution in Drosophila. Science 298(5596):1230-1233.
