Jim Kakalios says the new Watchmen movie is going to be good…and we can trust Jim.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Jim Kakalios says the new Watchmen movie is going to be good…and we can trust Jim.
I don’t know how he can abide them, but August Berkshire of Minnesota Atheists will be appearing on KKMS talk radio, the Twin Cities refuge for fundagelical reality-deniers. Listen in at 5pm Central (in about two hours), if you can bear it. I can’t.
They gave a gang of Discovery Institute hacks a free run to publish their delusions (bad). Then, under protest, they gave Jerry Coyne an opportunity to rebut (good). Now, after all that, they add another, final word to the whole mess…and guess who they published?
Perhaps you newbies to Pharyngula have never heard of the fellow, but he’s a wacky evolution denialist who got obsessed with me several years ago, and dunned me with email. (Actually, I think he might be one of the first kooks to inspire my “I get email” series.)
He’s got one note that he plays repeatedly and discordantly: evolution doesn’t matter. It’s a scam. Biologists just made it all up. You don’t need to use evolutionary theory to explain anything. Nothing has changed in his Forbes article, except that he must be on his meds now: he’s dialed back the crazy shrillness, but he’s still whining about the same silly point.
WIll Forbes get the message? They had to go to the Discovery Institute to find their initial mob of loons, and now to reply to Coyne (with a mass of irrelevancies, of course), they had to really scrape deep in the bottom of the barrel. Perhaps next they’ll give some space to Ray Comfort, or the Time Cube guy.
Ray Comfort desperately wants to debate Richard Dawkins, and has even offered to pay him $10,000. Dawkins has a counter-offer: he’ll do it for $100,000, to be donated to the RDF. Comfort has now upped the ante to $20,000. It’s not enough.
I would encourage teams of creationist philanthropists to get together, scrape up the $100K, and pass it along to Comfort, who will then deposit it in the coffers of the Richard Dawkins Foundation. Not only would creationists have finally done something productive and contributed to the promulgation of reason for once, but the spectacle of this debate would be a source of endless hilarity for years to come.
Richard does have a few other requests: that Comfort reprise his banana argument, and that the event would have to be recorded by the RDF team, for the enlightenment of the world. It’s not too much to ask.
Do I really need to see these old reminders that some of our politicians are idiots? Here’s a quote from Governor Mark Sanford of South* Carolina:
Well I think that it’s just, and science is more and more documenting this, is that there are real “chinks” in the armor of evolution being the only way we came about. The idea of there being a, you know, a little mud hole and two mosquitoes get together and the next thing you know you have a human being… is completely at odds with, you know, one of the laws of thermodynamics which is the law of, of … in essence, destruction.
I know, it’s the South, the domain of knuckle-dragging bibliolators. So guess who said this a little more recently, in reference to Sarah Palin’s pro-creationist comments?
I saw her comments on it yesterday, and I thought they were appropriate, which is, you know, let’s — if there are competing theories, and they are credible, her view of it was, according to the comments in the newspaper, allow them all to be presented or allow them both to be presented so students could be exposed to both or more and have a chance to be exposed to the various theories and make up their own minds…
In the scientific community, it seems like intelligent design is dismissed — not entirely, there are a lot of scientists who would make the case that it is appropriate to be taught and appropriate to be demonstrated, but in terms of the curriculum in the schools in Minnesota, we’ve taken the approach that that’s a local decision.
Yes, that’s our very own Governor Tim Pawlenty, of the eminently Yankee state of Minnesota. Shrivels the cockles of my heart, he does.
The latest nonsense from Sanford: he is refusing to use the money in Obama’s stimulus package to help the economically afflicted people of his state; instead, he offers prayers. That is the very definition of the uselessness of right-wing Republicans.
* Location clarified at the urgent request of many embarrassed North Carolinians.
Damn you heathen! Your book learnin’ has done warped your mind. You shall not be invited next time I sacrifice a goat.
This is a photograph of Macropinna microstoma, also called barreleyes. It has a very peculiar optical arrangement. When you first look at this photo, you may think the two small ovals above and behind its mouth are the eyes, and that it looks rather sad…wrong. Those are its nostrils. The eyes are actually the two strange fluorescent green objects that look like they are imbedded in its transparent, dome-like head.
It gets the name “barreleyes” because it’s are cylindrical, rather than spherical; this is an adaptation for better light collection in the dim depths where it lives, using very large lenses but not building a giant spherical eye to compensate. It’s ore like a telescope than a wide-angle camera. Here’s what a single eye in a side view looks like — the lens (L) is what is glowing so greenly in the photos.
As if that weren’t weird enough, the animal has a completely transparent skull cap, and the eyes swivel about within the skull to look out through that translucent cranium. In the two pictures below, the animal is first looking straight up through its head (the eyes are in the same orientation as in the diagram above), and in the right frame it has rotated the binocular-shaped eyes forward to look ahead.
Nature is always coming up with something stranger than we would imagine, and Macropinna is a perfect example. Apparently, the function of this arrangement is to give the animal a sensitive light detector for tracking its prey, bioluminescent jellyfish, and at the same time to shield the eyes from the stinging tentacles of the jelly while it’s eating it.
Robison BH, Reisenbichler KR (2008) Macropinna microstoma and the Paradox of Its Tubular Eyes. Copeia 2008(4):780-784.
I guess I’m out then. Except…this is the internet! We can all pretend to be Young Australian Skeptics, and no one will know any better!
“G’day, mate, doesn’t Jess Origliasso have lovely bosoms?” (← my cunning imitation of a young Australian)
