Go, squid, go!

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We can learn from nature:

Inspired by the sleek and efficient propulsion of squid, jellyfish and other cephalopods, a University of Colorado at Boulder researcher has designed a new generation of compact vortex generators that could make it easier for scientists to maneuver and dock underwater vehicles at low speeds and with greater precision.

In addition, the technology — seemingly inspired by the plots of two classic sci-fi films — may soon allow doctors to guide tiny capsules with jet thrusters through the human digestive tract, enabling them to diagnose disease and dispense medications.

(The two films, by the way, are Fantastic Voyage and Inner Space; I think only the former classifies as an SF classic.)

While the details are awfully thin, there are more pictures and movies online. Hint—don’t waste your time with the mpgs, they only show the titles; you’ll have to watch the ugly wmv files.

Reason #8 to vote for Pharyngula

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People, you aren’t doing your part. Yesterday, I had an almost 600 vote lead over the star-gazing bone-bag; this morning, it has narrowed rapidly to little more than 200. At this rate, he’s going to catch up and pass me today, and then the suppression of the majority invertebrates will continue to be perpetuated by this wicked chordatecentric minority. Vote, vote, vote!

How is he accomplishing these gains? There’s the kitten factor, of course: by laying on the cute, he mobilizes the shallow masses who like superficial, pretty fluff (not my constituency, obviously). In his latest missive, he also engages in most egregious flattery.

I also know I have the most honest, wonderful, and — let’s face it — best-looking readers in the observable Universe (and that includes the depths of the ocean), so I know you’ll help out in this time of need.

Consider the flip side of that comment, though: he has also called you readers and supporters of Pharyngula dishonest, horrible, and ugly. How can you vote for someone who abuses you all so? Don’t you want to see him crushed?

Another factor is that he seems to be mobilizing his minions, asking them to display a truly hideous banner and urging their readers to vote for his blog. Well, two can play that game. Here are some tasteful banners/badges featuring Iridoteuthis or Wonderpus you can put on your blog if you voted for Pharyngula: use them freely, and tell all your friends to join in.

Copy and paste this code into your website for the small badge:

<div style="width:90; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2006.weblogawards.org/2006/12/best_science_blog.php"><img alt="pharyngula badge" title="Vote for Pharyngula in the Weblog Awards" src="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/upload/2006/12/pharyngula_rules.jpg" width="88" height="33" /></a><br /><span style="font-size: 10px"><a href="http://2006.weblogawards.org/2006/12/best_science_blog.php">Vote</a> <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/">Pharyngula</a>!</span></div>

Copy and paste this code into your website for the larger banner:

<div style="width:290; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2006.weblogawards.org/2006/12/best_science_blog.php"><img alt="pharyngula banner" title="Vote for Pharyngula in the Weblog Awards" src="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/upload/2006/12/pharyngula_rules_lg.jpg" width="280" height="72" /></a><br /><span style="font-size: 14px"><a href="http://2006.weblogawards.org/2006/12/best_science_blog.php">Vote</a> for <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/">Pharyngula</a>!</span></div>

If you prefer, you can use the compelling hypnotic power of the Wonderpus to force your readers to vote for me. Obey the Wonderpus!

<div style="width:290; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2006.weblogawards.org/2006/12/best_science_blog.php"><img alt="hypno_pharyngula.jpg" src="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/upload/2006/12/hypno_pharyngula.jpg" width="300" height="80" /></a><br /><span style="font-size: 14px"><a href="http://2006.weblogawards.org/2006/12/best_science_blog.php">Vote</a> for <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/">Pharyngula</a>!</span></div>

Vote for Pharyngula (and remember, you can vote every day!). Unless you like ugly banners and being insulted.

P.S. Oh, yeah, and vote for Anyone But Althouse in the Best Centrist Blog category. I’m pushing for The Moderate Voice.

Socializing them right into the hate camp

Ah, the pleasures of living in a small town in Red America: the high schools are fertile fields for fostering hate, and now it’s facilitated by technology, like Facebook, that allows them to sow it far and wide. My daughter is on a rampage right now, upset because her erstwhile peers at the high school have been putting their bigotry proudly on display. There is currently some ferocious babble going on in a Morris Area High School facebook site, and here’s one of the more outrageous comments:

Okay this is really random but it has to deal with the comment about homosexuality issue that Sibley brought up. Honestly why must our country keep discussing this issue. We all know it’s wrong and that it just shouldn’t be that way. If you want to go with the same sex move somewhere else. Please before we ship yah off. Honestly just get rid of them and then we won’t have this issue. Just ship them to Canada. But yah homosexuality is just wrong so just say no and get over it. It’s never gonna be right so yah!!

There’s more there—way too much more—and there are lots of kids who are blindly supporting that kind of statement. They say “it’s wrong” and that’s enough: their brains shut down, they’ve got nothing to back it up, and they just repeat the “just wrong” mantra over and over again, spicing it up with eliminationist calls to get rid of them. “So yah!!” sums up their reasoning perfectly.

Where do these kids pick up this kind of bigotry? From their parents and churches, of course, but also, the schools out here have been collaborators in a conspiracy of silence. A year ago last Spring, we had a perfect example: the university put on a play about tolerance and diversity, and regional schools boycotted the event, and the reaction to the Vagina Monologues has been similarly backwards. There are no processes in place to teach kids something more than their tradition-based dogmatic ignorance: the schools have given up, some of the churches encourage it, and whole families wallow in this level of stupidity.

And the kid who says we should ship all the gays to Canada? He’s student body president at the high school. He’s a member of the popular clique.

Reason #7 to vote for Pharyngula

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Yeah, I’m thinking of the kittens. I’m thinking real hard.

I was going to say, “Because if you don’t vote for me, I’m feeding the kittens to the Kraken,” but then I realized that the kind of people who’d vote for me would probably want me to feed the kittens to the Kraken. And then I realized it didn’t matter how anyone voted, because I was going to feed the kittens to the Kraken anyway. So what the heck. Kittens. Kraken. Kraken Chow. That’s the way it is. As the kittens must accept their fate, so must Phil.

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Vote for Pharyngula (and remember, you can vote every day!). Because the kittens won’t be spared whether you do or don’t.

P.S. I’m sure Respectful Insolence would love to have the endorsement of a kitty-grinding blog for Best Medical/Health Issues Blog. I’m holding out for the promise of a Hitler Zombie/EneMan crossover, though.

Last gasp of my development course

Today, I gave my final lecture in developmental biology this term. We have one more class session which will be a final discussion, but I’m done yapping at them. Since I can’t possibly teach them everything, I offered some suggestions on what to read next, if they’re really interested in developmental biology. They’ve gotten the fundamentals of the dominant way of looking at development now, that good ol’ molecular genetics centered modern field of evo-devo, but I specifically wanted to suggest a few titles to shake them up a little bit and start thinking differently.

  • For the student who is interested in the field, but doesn’t feel that development is necessarily their discipline, I recommended Richard Lewontin’s The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It’s short, it’s easy, and it’s a good counterweight to the usual gene-happy approach we see in developmental biology.

  • Since we are a liberal arts university, and we value a philosophical approach in addition to the usual bluntly pragmatic tactics we follow in the sciences, I also recommended one work of philosophy: The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Susan Oyama. That one is not an easy read, except maybe to the more academically minded. I mentioned that Developmental Systems Theory does not have the powerful research program that is making evo-devo so successful, but it’s still a usefully different way of thinking about the world.

  • If any of my students wanted to go on to grad school in developmental biology, and hoped to make it a profession, I had to tell them that they are required to read D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It’s old, it’s a little bit weird, but it’s still a major touchstone in the discipline.

  • Lastly, I told them that there was one more book they had to read if they wanted to consider a career in development: Developmental Plasticity and Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mary Jane West-Eberhard. If I were a young graduate student in the field right now, I think I could just open that book to a random page and find an interesting and challenging research problem right there. I might have to flip through a few dozen pages before I found one that wasn’t impossibly hard, but hey, it’s one of those books that fills you in on the array of issues that people are worrying over at the edge of the science.

I don’t think any of these would be a good foundation for an undergraduate course (either Thompson or West-Eberhard or Oyama would probably have a lethal effect on the brain of any unprepared student trying to plow through them), but they’d be great mind-stretchers for any student planning to move on.

So all my lecturing is done for the term, and all that’s left are monstrous piles of grading that will grow ominously in the next week and a half even as I struggle to keep up, and then I can try to polish it all off by Cephalopodmas.