Watch the communal spawning of squid off the California coast.
It’s the last thing they do: one huge orgy of mating, and then they collapse, spent and dying.
Warning: this is an extremely disturbing video. It’s of an unpleasant and rather personal surgery, in which a man had a can of perfumed body spray stuck in a certain orifice, requiring a medical extraction. The circumstances and the graphic operation are distressing enough, but what’s most horrifying are the medical staff — the room is packed with non-essential personnel who are laughing uproariously and mocking the patient, and of course, there’s the other inappropriate circumstance, that someone taped this and then uploaded it to youtube. Keep that in mind if you’re ever hospitalized in the Philippines, and find yourself in Vicente Sotto Memorial Hospital; you may leave to discover your privates are now public.
The hospital seems to be responding in the appropriate way, with censure and warnings, and there is a possibility some of those involved may lose their licenses. I can’t say as much for the Catholic church in the Philippines — the archbishop is blaming the victim, instead.
The whole thing is a ghastly breach of medical ethics, and the church is compounding the problem…but isn’t that supposed to be one of those mythical virtues of religion, that they have a hotline to morality?
The colossal squid that was caught last year is in the process of being thawed prior to a public dissection. The Te Papa Museum of New Zealand is pulling out all the stops and are going to have webcams recording every step of the process — the schedule of events is online. I’ll be watching.
This is an extremely cool thing to do, and a mark of respect for this magnificent animal — I wish I could have this sort of dismantlement done to me after I’m dead. Both my fans and my critics would enjoy it, but on the downside, my family would probably be a bit distressed, and to be honest, human cadavers are cheap and common and nowhere near as interesting as a dead colossal squid.
Remember: Atheists Talk radio will be on in a few hours, at 9am Central, from Minnesota Atheists. I have no idea what the subject will be today — it shall be a surprise.
For a guy who has been dead for 126 years, he’s pretty lively. You must see the result of a contest to caption a photo of Darwin’s statue and the odious Ben Stein: trust me, Stein gets less than he deserves.
You just can’t keep a brilliant man down. Charles Darwin also has a blog.
This is a very cool video of an octopus opening a bottle. It’s entirely in Finnish, but you don’t need to know the language to understand what is going on.
John Lynch has a list of so-called pretentious books — books that are often listed as unread. Wilkins has followed up with his own. It’s a curious list, though; the only ones I’d definitely call pretentious are anything by Rand, and maybe the books by Hawthorne (an author I find unpleasantly bad).
I think we already did this list last fall, however.
I think he’s due, but he’s not the only one. It’s like our entire army is being turned into a pocket theocracy.
When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending.
But minutes into the talk, the officer, Maj. Freddy J. Welborn, began to berate Specialist Hall and another soldier about atheism, Specialist Hall wrote in a sworn statement. “People like you are not holding up the Constitution and are going against what the founding fathers, who were Christians, wanted for America!” Major Welborn said, according to the statement.
Major Welborn told the soldiers he might bar them from re-enlistment and bring charges against them, according to the statement.
Ugh. Threats from a commanding officer over what our soldiers believe? Not that anyone will chastise him; the conversion of our military into a goon squad for the believers is coming along too far for that.
But Mikey Weinstein, a retired Air Force judge advocate general and founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, said the official statistics masked the great number of those who do not report violations for fear of retribution. Since the Air Force Academy scandal began in 2004, Mr. Weinstein said, he has been contacted by more than 5,500 service members and, occasionally, military families about incidents of religious discrimination. He said 96 percent of the complainants were Christians, and the majority of those were Protestants.
Complaints include prayers “in Jesus’ name” at mandatory functions, which violates military regulations, and officers proselytizing subordinates to be “born again.” After getting the complainants’ unit and command information, Mr. Weinstein said, he calls his contacts in the military to try to correct the situation.
“Religion is inextricably intertwined with their jobs,” Mr. Weinstein said. “You’re promoted by who you pray with.”
“Promoted by who you pray with”…that’s scary. We’ve got selection going on in the armed forces for uniformity of religious belief, and worst of all, it’s for the kind of religious belief endorsed by loud Christianist wackaloons.
Birmingham, Alabama apparently has a serious crime problem. That’s bad news, but to compound it all, they’ve got a mayor who is a fecking idjit. Mayor Larry Langford has a plan to deal with crime.
Maybe you think it’s spring — I don’t, I just looked out through ice-glazed windows at half a foot of new snow — and you’re thinking about the garden. Here’s an idea: you don’t need to take a trip to the Galapagos to study evolution, you can do it right in your backyard. The New York Botanical Garden is opening a new exhibit, called Darwin’s Garden.
In all, the tour is 33 stops, spread throughout about half of the garden’s 250 acres. Visitors who enter the exhibition through the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory will encounter a replica of a room in Darwin’s house, designed so they can look through the window, as he did, to a profusion of plants and bright flowers: hollyhocks, flax and of course primroses, what Todd Forrest, the garden’s vice president for horticulture, calls “a typical British garden.” On a table stands a tray holding quills, brushes, sealing wax and tweezers, the kinds of simple tools Darwin used to conduct his world-shaking research.
Brilliant! Evolution is not something that requires exotic, out of the way locales and weird, obscure organisms to study — it’s everywhere.
