The Humboldts are rising!

The LA Times has a cool story about the growing population of Humboldt squid off the Southern California coast — tens of millions of the big beasts, and they aren’t shy.

The frenzy built and Kerstitch, as the lone diver shooting still photographs and with no bright movie lights to deter the predators, was set upon.

A squid grabbed his right swim fin and pulled downward. He kicked it away but another grabbed his head. The cactus-like tentacles found his neck, the only part of his body not covered with neoprene.

He bashed the squid with his dive light, far less bright than the movie lights, and it let go, but it swiped both the light and the gold chain he’d been wearing.

Another squid wrapped its tentacles around his face and chest. Kerstitch dug his fingers into its clammy body.

It slid down and around his waist and pulled him downward in pulsing bursts. Then it suddenly let go, but made off with his compression meter.

For whatever reason, the attack ceased and Kerstitch got to the surface dazed and oozing blood from neck wounds, thankful to be alive.

It sounds like the squid was just mugging him for some bling.

William Dembski: all class and perspicacity

Richard Dawkins has a huge list of well-wishers, but William Dembski is unhappy — he sent a birthday greeting, and rushed to complain on Uncommon Descent that it wasn’t posted. Alas, it was, and we can all see what an insincere and sarcastic and snide comment he sent. Richard Hughes gets a gold star for his comment:

If you can’t find your name in an alphabetical list, you might want to stop looking for evidence for god in bacterial flagellum.

Nigerian universities: clean up your act

Nigeria is experiencing an unimaginable horror for this academic: widespread sexual harassment of women students. It’s injust, it’s a corruption of the student-teacher relationship, and it harms their country, that half their potential leaders are abused and blocked from progress.

For years, sexual harassment has been rampant in Nigeria’s universities, but until recently very little was done about it. From Associated Press interviews with officials and 12 female college students, a pattern emerges of women being held back and denied passing grades for rebuffing teachers’ advances, and of being advised by other teachers to give in quietly.

Crippling a young person’s potential and denying them access to knowledge ought to be regarded as a serious crime—these ‘teachers’ are really just felons and rapists.

(via Salon)

AC Grayling on the growing resentment of and towards religion

Juicy stuff from AC Grayling, who writes on the futility of faith and why we’re all getting a bit peevish:

Religion has lost respectability as a result of the atrocities committed in its name, because of its clamouring for an undue slice of the pie, and for its efforts to impose its views on others.

Where politeness once restrained non-religious folk from expressing their true feelings about religion, both politeness and restraint have been banished by the confrontational face that faith now turns to the modern world.

This, then, is why there is an acerbic quarrel going on between religion and non-religion today, and it does not look as if it will end soon.

It does have a bit of an “it’s all their fault” tone, but I think it’s fair. The religious may have felt threatened first, since secular progress was leaving them behind, but the only side damning the other is that of religion.

I get mail

One sure way to get your Important Message to me is to use the good old US Mail (although my email is much snappier now, thanks to previous suggestions), and sometimes I do get the strangest stuff. This time, it was a formal looking letter from an organization called “Campaign for the Children.” How can you possibly turn away a letter from someone who is for the children? You can’t, of course. Then once I started reading … well, this doesn’t seem to be a campaign for children after all.

[Read more…]

Are you going to believe someone who thinks with his feet?

Chuck Norris convinced me before that the bruised and jellied blob bobbing about in his cranium isn’t working so well anymore, but this video of Norris advocating a bible-based public school curriculum is the final kicker.

He’s fronting for an organization that’s trying to smuggle bogus history and religious propaganda into our schools. It’s a shame—after playing a hero for so many years on TV, he’s fading away in the real world as one of the bad guys.

Busy busy busy

There are a couple of events going on here in Morris this week that I’ll be participating in, and that any of you in the region might find worth seeing. First, tonight:

Everyone is cordially invited to the last session of

THE 31st
MIDWEST PHILOSOPHY COLLOQUIUM

Personal Identity

Eric T. Olson

(Professor of Philosophy, University of Sheffield, UK)

Will present

“When Do We Begin and End?”

Monday, March 26, 7:30 p.m., Newman Catholic Center
306 East 4th Street, Morris

The gradual nature of development from fertilization to birth and beyond leaves it uncertain when we come into being; advances in medical technology leave it increasingly uncertain when we cease to exist. Many philosophers have tried to answer these questions. Professor Olson will argue that most of these answers are wrong, and that a simpler answer follows from the apparent fact that we are biological organisms.

Then, tomorrow night (Tuesday, 27 March, 6:00 at the Common Cup Coffee House), it’s time for Café Scientifique!

“So… what am I looking at?”

Kristin Kearns

An introduction to the celestial objects
visible through the UMM 16-inch telescope.

An observing session at the University’s telescope might begin with a view of the Moon and some of the more photogenic planets then, as the sky darkens, move on to a wide variety of stellar views, from planetary nebulae to globular clusters and maybe even a supernova remnant. On a clear, moonless night the telescope may probe even deeper into the darkness to find galaxies beyond our own. Whether you’ve looked through a telescope or just always wanted to, this talk will fill in the details behind the images. I’ll discuss the physical nature and cosmic context of those “smoke rings” and “cotton balls” you see in the eyepiece.

If the skies are clear, Kristin will also open up the UMM Observatory to the public after the talk, so you can come on down and see some stars.

You might as well just come on out here and spend a few days in town.

A defense of the Blasphemy Challenge

Greta Christina has an excellent and lengthy defense of the idea behind the Blasphemy Challenge— that exercise on YouTube that received a lot of criticism from certain quarters because it wasn’t serious or respectful enough. She gets it exactly right: that was the point, to show that religion receives a lot of unwarranted deference. If you’re one of those people who got irate because the challenge mocked and ridiculed religion, thanks for making the case for us: your irritation is what was being pointed to as part of the problem.

Happy Birthday, Richard Dawkins!

Go on over to his place and leave a birthday greeting, and be sure to check out the multimedia collection of good wishes.

We wondered what we could do to express our appreciation, and had a hard time figuring out what would be appropriate … until a student asked to borrow one of my copies of The God Delusion because he couldn’t find one anywhere in town. Instead of giving Dawkins a present directly, the Myers family is donating a copy of his book to the local library, where we hope some receptive minds will discover it.