Marine invertebrate temptations

People, don’t do this to me. I’ve got all this work I’ve got to get done so that I’m free to go on a date this evening, and you keep sending me these distractions. Like, for instance, this link to a collection of Marine Invertebrate Video and Film Stock Footage. Cephalopods and nudibranchs and crustaceans and salps, all categorized (there’s even an invertebrate mating category! With 421 clips! It’s free porn!) and with thousands of high resolution videos. The previews are all free, but you can also license HD video of these beautiful action shots.

I will be disciplined, though. I’m closing the web page. I will get my writing done. I will put these links here though, so I can later return to “Brain coral spawning” and “Moray tears arms from octopus” and “Flamboyant cuttlefish feeding” and “Siphonophore With Extending Tenacles”.

Back to work.

Maybe there’s time for “Pelagic Tunicate In The Twilight Zone”?

No. Work. Get things done.

Oh, but I want…!

If you’ve ever been tempted to visit the Big Valley Creation Science Museum…

…don’t bother.

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A reader sent me a link to his photo set from the BVCSM, and I’m afraid all you’ll find there is the Wall O’ Text approach to instruction. You know what that is: print out a page from Answers in Genesis, blow it up real big, and slap it on a wall … instant museum!

There is one amusing revelation — creationists sometimes have the wackiest ideas — and it made me laugh.

Did you know that ALL dinosaur footprint fossils found are pointing in the same direction?! This is IRREFUTABLE PROOF of the dinosaurs running from a global flood!

Creation Logic 101: you don’t need any! And now that you know everything that’s entertaining about the place, you won’t need to pay out $5 to some nut in a small town in Alberta, Canada to see it. Go to the Royal Tyrrell instead.

Actually, the funniest comment I’ve seen in a while is a testimonial proudly displayed at the top of the BVCSM website:

“I spent more time in this museum than I did in the Smithsonian”

The picture at the top of this article is the Big Valley Creation Science Museum: a small remodeled ranch house. This is the Smithsonian Institution: 19 museums and 9 research institutions, and over 100 million objects in their collections. That statement above is a testimonial to the delusions of the creationists, nothing more.

Ladders and cranes everywhere!

There is a painful assumption of progress in many interpretations of evolution — and sometimes it’s by people who ought to know better. T. Ryan Gregory finds a ghastly example of a figure that, by cherry-picking the data and doing a little suggestive ordering of the presentation, makes it look like there’s a correlation between the amount of non-coding DNA and organismal complexity. Fortunately, he counters it with a much more useful chart (that I’m definitely stealing for the next time I teach genetics) with no such bias.

And then Larry Moran tops Gregory with an even worse figure. I don’t quite understand it; maybe this distortion of the evidence to support progress, increasing molecular complexity, and the superiority of humans has roots in misunderstandings before my time, because my genetics and cell biology instructors in the 1970s sure didn’t promote this nonsense then. We were told even in those ancient days that the C-value paradox wasn’t a problem if you didn’t try to shoehorn mammals into a position at the pinnacle of evolution.

Maybe I just had really good professors. Thanks, Arthur Whiteley and Larry Sandler!

A conduit for good works, untainted by foolish faith

Atheists don’t get credit if we give to religious charities. We don’t get credit if we give to simply secular causes. Now, though, we’ve got a new explicitly godless charity that works to improve education and knowledge of science: the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. It’s my kind of place — and best of all, money going there isn’t going to be mistaken for support for ignorance and superstition.

Read the announcement. It’s cleared all the legal hurdles in both the US and Great Britain and has been granted charitable, tax-exempt status, and is going to be my favored choice of a charity from now on.

Here I go…

… like a lamb to the slaughter.

I guess I’m one of the last of PZ’s sacrificial students. As you may have gathered from my clever alias my name is Katie and I’m a senior biology major. I’ve actually known PZ for a number of years–I’m a Morris native and went to high school with his son, Connlann. When I was thirteen I met Connlann in an upper level math class (something esoteric called “algebra”) and learned that Connlann’s dad was a biologist (cool!) and an atheist (he puts people to sleep before surgery??) I soon adopted him as my personal biological encyclopedia and would pester PZ with questions of science any chance I got. When I decided to stay in Morris for college, PZ became my academic advisor and I’ve been harassing him for knowledge ever since.

This year I am applying to medical school and busy preparing my senior seminar on hypothermic treatments in preserving brain cells in cardiac arrest patients. This new treatment is already in use in some hospitals across the country and completely revolutionizing the way we manage cardiac arrest victims. If you’ve come across studies on this in the literature, I’d appreciate your input. I’m especially interested in research on the way brain cells die. Apparently cells that have been oxygen deprived commit apoptosis even after re-oxygenation. For some reason, induced hypothermia after or during resuscitation increases brain cell viability.

Well that’s all I’ve got. Now go ahead. Eviscerate me (bleat!).

Hey folks

Hello. I’m a student in PZMyers’ Neurobiology course. I’ve never blogged before, but hey, there’s a first for everything I guess. My major is Biology. My strengths are ideas and problem solving; weaknesses include porcrastination. When I’m not in class, I enjoy swimming, swing dancing, and Rock & Roll.

I don’t really have any reason for taking neurobiology over any other bio elective I just figured that it would be fun. I’ve found that I have more interest in studying the micro level over the macro level. If I decide that I like neuro, maybe I’ll look into a grad program with neuro, though I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

I’ll catch you all later.

A Very new kid on the block!

Hello again, it has not even been a day yet, but I feel that I should quick post something. Some of the comments from my previous blog have pointed out interesting ideas as to the correlation between protein folding and memory storage.

Proteins inside neurons would work well in storing and possibly managing information, but they don’t work quickly enough and I suppose it would be fairly difficult to research proteins in the hundreds of thousands of specialized neurons. I was also informed that much of the “protein hypothesis” is old news that was torpedoed in the 60’s for the “synapse hypothesis” due to lack of technology to model such interactions. However, the “protein hypothesis” has reared its head once again in recent years and (I feel) is worth looking into further, although it may still be hard to conceptualize. Also, it was pretty insulting to say that little research has been done in this field and that Allan Pack is the sole researcher still working on this. Many researchers are still busy working away on this subject (don’t believe everything MPR tells ya’).

I haven’t had a chance to read some of the research recommended to me yet as I am still just a kid (a fact that some have pointedly stated to me, thanks for the insight) and still have a life before graduate school (i.e. I run Cross Country, talk to girls, and watch movies outside of studying). Continue to post further links on this please! I will do my best to be more to the point (shorter blogs) spell correctly (sorry Myers) and stop feeding you heathens further fuel for the spiritual flames of damnation :P (I’m a Christian, get over it!). Thanks for the comments, continue to inform me on how I can do a better job at this.

This is the last time I’ll say it and will truly stick to science after this, but I can’t resist, God bless!
~Bright Lights