There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.

Londoners might soon notice the slogan above on local buses: the Atheist Bus campaign starts today, with the purpose of raising money to promote atheism as a positive force in the culture and to encourage people to stop wasting time and effort in silly superstitions. Urban England seems like a strange place to start such a campaign; rural America needs it more, although the costs would be significantly greater, as they’d have to cover the replacement cost of all the buses that were set on fire.

You can donate, too. The campaign opened just today, and their goal was to raise £5500 — I’m amused to see that they reached that goal by 10am the very first morning, and now have £17000, and the number keeps going up.

Against mob rule and pandering to ignorance

Keith Olbermann rips into a certain “unstable congresswoman from Minnesota,” Rush Limbaugh, the politics of divisiveness, the McCain campaign, and places the ultimate responsibility on John McCain himself, and demands that he address the smears and bigotry of his supporters. It is great stuff.

I have to say that I am personally more than a bit tired of the yahoos on the right constantly telling me that I’m not a real American and that I hate my country.

And of course Jon Stewart charges in, too.

A step closer to efficient solar power?

I have to confess that the title of this paper, The remarkable influence of M2δ to thienyl π conjugation in oligothiophenes incorporating MM quadruple bonds, is Greek to me, that the abstract was impenetrable, and the paper itself was thoroughly incomprehensible. I’m a biologist, not a chemist or materials engineer! Fortunately, there are a couple of summaries that simplify the explanation enough that I can understand the gist of it, and it’s cool stuff. Researchers have made a new material that promises to greatly increase the efficiency of solar cells. It works by collecting photons over a wider spectrum of wavelengths and by using both fluorescence and phosphorescence to create an electron flow, allowing it to both collect more energy per unit area and facilitating the production of current.

This is promising news, and also illustrates why we need to fund basic research — these are the kinds of discoveries that can’t be simply planned and forced into existence, but require the liberty of the research enterprise to explore new ideas freely.

Don’t get too excited just yet, though. The research has uncovered useful properties of a combination of molecules that have only been tested in minute quantities. It remains to be seen if it can be scaled up efficiently, if it can be made cost-effective, and whether it can be simply made to work at a practical level. It’s still an exciting idea — they’re talking about nearly 100% efficiency.

Californians, it’s your turn

There is currently a proposal before Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to rip through desert wilderness in your state to put powerlines. Chris Clarke makes the case against it; you don’t have much time to respond, so phone or email your protests IMMEDIATELY. Let the state government know that there is a dedicated bloc of environmentally aware voters in the state who are not going to sacrifice what makes California a state worth living in for power company profits.

Texas voters, watch this

This video contains a nice breakdown of exactly who the wackaloons on the Texas Board of Education are, and will help you figure out who to vote for in the upcoming elections.

I always find it astonishing that Don McLeroy and Terri Leo actually have positions of responsibility in the Texas educational system. The system is really messed up down there, have you noticed?

Well, maybe it is exactly like their brains

Reader wombat found a fascinating site in response to the creationist debate in Kentucky, led by Dr. Ben Scripture. It’s an utterly bizarre page about a petrified human brain, and it is typical creationist tripe. They have gathered a collection of “authorities”, where they make much of their pedigrees (don’t blame me, the “Dr. X, Ph.D.” is the redundant formula they use on the site.)

  • Dr. Suzanne Vincent, Ph.D., a neuroanatomist(!) at Oral Roberts University
  • Dr. Ross Anderson, Ph.D. of The Masters College
  • Dr. Bedros Daghlian, M.D., a retired doctor
  • Dr. Ben Scripture, Ph.D. in biology
  • Dr. Travis Shipley, Ph.D. in theology (snort!)
  • Dr. Frederick Trexler, Ph.D. in geology and Physics

The photos show these people and others gushing over this lump of rock, with testimonials like:

  • “It is scientifically impossible for this to not be a brain”
  • “Clearly, this is the brain stem and spinal cord, see it wrapped around there? Everything right where it is supposed to be.”
  • “Dr. Daghlian checked microscopically, and confirmed residue to appear cellular.”
  • “…I spent several years in medicine before obtaining my Doctorate in Theology. When I reviewed the x-rays of the rock and different brains, I chose incorrectly which was which!”

After all that, you’d expect to find some remarkable degree of similarity, wouldn’t you? It convinced a neuroanatomist, after all, and surely all those people with their fancy degrees couldn’t be fooled. But then they show us a close-up photo of this “brain”.

i-2f90ec1de3c8dc5a40606cf32adb8777-rock.jpg

They’ve got to be kidding. That’s a lumpy rock. It’s no brain; I’ve seen a lot of brains in my time, from fish to frogs to lizards to birds to all kinds of mammals, and that looks nothing like any of them. Here, in case you haven’t seen one, is a photo of a human brain:

i-4e6f102486f62016c6635c3833d18540-brain.jpg

This is the Ed Conrad effect. Hand some ignorant people a random lump of rock, tell them it’s a fossil, and their imaginations will do the rest. There is no excuse for these “experts”, though — the author of the page claims that “It has been examined and determined to be a petrified human brain by many people with high degrees in several different fields of study and occupation.” That just goes to show that even the most qualified people in creation ‘science’ have to be flaming idiots.

Creationists gaming Kentucky

Northern Kentucky University is going to have a mock trial on teh creation/evolution debate. They say the intent is to legitimately explore the issue.

“It is part of the mission of the Scripps Howard Center to conduct public forums,” said Mark Neikirk, the Center’s executive director. “I’ve heard President Votruba state many times that a college campus should be a safe place for difficult conversations.” Neikirk said that while the evolution/creation science debate is a difficult and polarizing topic, the mock trial format is designed to provide structure for a civil, informative exploration of the public policy questions raised by the debate.

I have to call bullshit on that. What this really is is an attempt to contrive a debate between science and superstition in which the superstition side gets to pretend they have equal status. And, of course, science issues are not settled in a courtroom, ever.

Worst of all, though, is the way they’re planning to resolve the issues.

The first 200 people in attendance will have an opportunity to serve as jurors, using small remote control clickers to register their opinions both before and after the trial. At the conclusion of the proceeding, they will decide the case.

Yeah, right…in Kentucky. The local churches will bus in a mob, retired godbots with nothing else to do will get in line early, and they’ll all have predetermined (and blessedly ignorant) views of the outcome before they get started. The theological lackwit they have babbling the case for the supernatural can come in half-drunk and still count on ‘victory’. This fight has been thrown before it even gets started.

Here’s something you can do. Write to the president of NKU, James Votruba, and let him know that this is a joke of an event that only brings embarrassment to his university.

Sometimes ink is just ink

At first, I was a bit disappointed in this result, but then I realized it’s actually rather interesting in a negative sense. Investigators tested the effects of squid ink on other squid; the entirely reasonable idea being that it could contain an alarm pheromone that would have the function of alerting neighboring squid in the school of trouble. It works — adding ink to a tank of Caribbean reef squid sends them scurrying away.

However, when they removed the pigments from the ink and added that, the squid couldn’t care less. That says there is no chemical signal, only a visual signal.

That makes sense, I suppose — oceans are big and would dilute any chemical signal fairly rapidly, so pheromones would only work well over a fairly short range (although some fish certainly do have extremely sensitive olfactory senses, so it could be done). Still, Aplysia eject some potent chemical signals with their secretions, which work when directly squirted into the face of a predator, so there was a chance the cephalopods might have evolved something similar.