Dawkins and Paxman

Hey, this is a pretty good interview of Richard Dawkins by Jeremy Paxman. I don’t know much about this Paxman fellow, but he asks hard, sharp questions, yet still gives Dawkins plenty of time to answer them. That’s good interviewing technique, I think.

I’m not too impressed with the spartan set, putting them both in plain uncomfortable-looking chairs set all alone in an empty, echoing room…but it does put the focus on the words. They should have saved a few more pennies and just done audio.

(via Father Dan)

A zebrafish timelapse recording

At my talk on Tuesday, the centerpiece was a short movie of zebrafish development—I was trying to show just how amazingly cool the process was. People seemed to like that part of the show, at least, so I thought I’d try to figure out this YouTube doohickey and upload it for general viewing. So here it is, a timelapse recording of about 18 hours of zebrafish embryology compressed into 48 seconds:

I’ve got more, and my students will be making videos of their own soon enough, so maybe I’ll try uploading some other stuff soon. I’m discovering that YouTube is a little tricky about the aspect ratio, and the conversions do add some distracting compression artifacts to the movie…I may have to tinker quite a bit to get a more satisfactory image.

Note to self: set aside time for jail, September 2008

The odious Ken Mehlman has announced that that mob of pigs, scoundrels, and theocrats will be slouching into Minneapolis on September 1-4, 2008. Anyone else care to join me in the protest lines that week?

When we get tired of yelling obscenities and imprecations at the parasites, we can always duck into the Science Museum of Minnesota, just down the street, for revitalization. Or we could just hang out in the SMM the whole time and take visiting Rethuglicans on tours of the dinosaur exhibit, and watch them stroke out and gasp for breath.

Wells: “Darwinism is Doomed” because we keep making progress

There are days when I simply cannot believe how dishonest the scoundrels at the Discovery Institute can be. This is one of them. I just read an essay by Jonathan Wells that is an appalling piece of anti-scientific propaganda, an extremely squirrely twisting of some science news. It’s called “Why Darwinism is doomed”, and trust me, if you read it, your opinion of Wells will drop another notch. And here you thought it was already in the gutter!

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I consider myself an adventurous eater, BUT…

I have to draw the line somewhere.

The dish in front of me is grey and shiny.

“Russian dog,” says my waitress Nancy.

“Big dog,” I reply.

“Yes,” she says. “Big dog’s penis…”

We are in a cosy restaurant in a dark street in Beijing but my appetite seems to have gone for a stroll outside.

Nancy has brought out a whole selection of delicacies.

They are draped awkwardly across a huge platter, with a crocodile carved out of a carrot as the centrepiece.

Nestling beside the dog’s penis are its clammy testicles, and beside that a giant salami-shaped object.

“Donkey,” says Nancy. “Good for the skin…”

I’m sorry, but butchering random animals, sometimes endangered animals, for the purpose of consuming arbitrary small bits of their anatomy because of a perceived magical benefit…no, thanks. Besides, if driving a big car is a sign of a tiny penis, I suspect anyone caught needing to consume a tiger’s erectile organ is deeply inadequate, not just in the crotch, but the brain as well.

A devil’s catechism

My review of Dawkins’ The God Delusion(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) (currently at #4 on Amazon’s bestseller list!) is in the latest issue of Seed, which showed up at my door while I was flying out East. They changed my suggested title, which I’ve at least used on this article, in favor of the simpler “Bad Religion”. You could always buy the magazine to read it, but I’ll give you a little taste of what I thought.

Oh, yeah…Seed does that nice plus of having an artist render a portrait of the author, so there’s also a picture, artfully ruggedized and made much more attractive than I am in reality. Not that I’m complaining.

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Squid Hox genes

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It’s April (not anymore—it’s September as I repost this), it’s Minnesota, and it’s snowing here (not yet, but soon enough). On days like this (who am I fooling? Every day!), my thoughts turn to spicy, garlicky delicacies and warm, sunny days on a lovely tropical reef—it’s a squiddy day, in other words, and I’ve got a double-dose of squidblogging on this Friday afternoon, with one article on the vampire squid, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, and this one, on squid evolution and cephalopod Hox genes.

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