I’ve got a little habit of checking in on the video footage from Fagradalsfjall now and then, and to my surprise I noticed that this one is from a friend, who went to Iceland without me. I’ll forgive him this time for his skill in getting his drone within 25m of the crater.
It looks like boiling, flowing water. Glowing red intensely hot flowing water.
Sheesh. You have one conversation with one of these slimy wankers, and they never let it go. I’ve been getting harangued constantly by this fanatic, Nadir, who is now sending me ultimatums.
retract your statement before it is too late
Hi PZ –
A major Islamic channel has asked me to
document your flip-flop, under the spotlight
of investigation, you answered in the negative
to the question of scientific errors in the Quran.
We have it ALL ON TAPE. Only upon knowing
about the Islamic promotion, you flip flopped.
This latest statement was NOT motivated by
the objective pursuit of science, but rather polemics.Regarding your NEW scientific error claim:
The Quran does NOT state that embryos were poofed into existence
with bones and flesh fully formed. If you think that anyone is going to
go for this, you are sadly mistaken. This is nothing more than a dishonest
malicious and nefarious interpretation being imposed upon the text. And you will be exposed.IF you think, there is any fool out there who will buy into this, you are mistaken.
Retract this statement by this afternoon on your blog.
Ooooh. A major Islamic channel is going to talk about me.
I did not “flip flop” on anything, nor was I under any illusions that I was not talking to a group of Islamists. It was rather obvious. They were not undercover, and were quite open about their perspective.
What he thinks is a new scientific error claim was merely recognition of their own post hoc rationalizations. One group of Muslims is telling me that there’s a clear sequential progression in development, with bones first, then muscles, and then when I point out that isn’t true, they try to tell me they’re formed at the same time, even though the text in the Quran states a sequence.
I really don’t care. It’s two fucking sentences in a holy book. Don’t try to tell me there’s some deep insight into embryology there; it’s a couple of broad guesses by people who didn’t have microscopes or any knowledge of even cell theory, so I’m going to reject any suggestion that it’s scientifically accurate.
I know — everyone is sending me this story about the vast billowing waves of spider silk in Australia. It’s always Australia, they get all the attention because of the magnitude of the spider webs, but really, it’s fairly common behavior. I’ve seen smaller scale examples right here in the good ol’ USA.
For example, last weekend I was poking around my brother Jim’s yard down near Ocean Shores, Washington, and I opened up a small shed, and behold: the entire ceiling was one vast fluffy blanket of cobweb, dotted with little spiders everywhere. It was beautiful. It looked a lot like those Australian seas of spider silk, only smaller and less transient.
I took a picture of one of the multitude of inhabitants. I think it’s probably some species of Theridion.
Here’s an interesting chart (although, portraying pandemics as spiky spheres is a bad choice — people are not good at visualizing relative volumes, and putting those volumes in a perspective that reduces the size of older one is a terrible idea) showing various afflictions on the human species over time.
The Black Death was the big one, but look at HIV — it’s amazing how our culture diminished the significance of that one, pretending it wasn’t happening even as its victims were dying in hospitals, and as prominent figures fell to it.
Smallpox coulda been a contender for the biggest plague of them all, but humans invented something that stopped it in its tracks: vaccination. If only people recognized the importance of that today…
It felt good. The Morris Theater has re-opened after a long pandemic hiatus, so I actually went to a movie! I love just going to a movie theater, and I’ve missed it.
In case you are concerned because the pandemic is not over yet, I was sensible about it. I’m vaccinated, I wore my mask while interacting with the box office clerk, and, well, this is Morris. I was the only person in the theater! I would like to complain to the management that they could have stayed open all through the past year if they had only allowed one person, me, to attend each showing.
Oh, the movie? Cruella. If I’d had a lot of choices, it’s not one I would have picked, but well, this is Morris. You take what is offered. It was an OK bit of fluff, it’s main virtue is that it gave two Emmas (Stone and Thompson) an opportunity to chew the scenery as over-the-top villains. I like them both as actors, so I’m not going to complain that they got paid to have some indulgent fun.
I also have low expectations for summer movies. The previews were a blur of car chases, superheroes, and random explosions.
I find I’m only able to read it in short bursts, so it’s taken me a while to finish it. Stollznow’s On the Offensive: Prejudice in Language Past and Present is a catalog of slurs. It’s fascinating, but every page is basically, here’s a hurtful horrible word. Here’s where it came from. Here’s why it’s so awful. Here’s the context where it’s sometimes used in a non-awful way. So sure, you’ll get a few pages of thoughtful discussion of the various permutations of the n-word, which is useful to know, but it’s sort of exhausting as well.
It’s organized by category, so it’s easy to get your surfeit of racism on one day, and sexism the next, and ableism after that. The chapter on ageism was personally useful, at least. It provides a guide in how to address me.
Elderly person and elderly people are commonly used as polite terms. As a noun, elder has positive connotations and suggests seniority rather than being old. The word implies a sense of dignity and respect, and even power, influence, and authority, in phrases such as our elders and betters, elders of the tribe, the village elder, and elder brethren. (Ironically, in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, elder is the lowest ranking in the priesthood and typically refers to younger men.) In early English, elder was the comparative of old, while eldest was the superlative form (i.e., old, elder, eldest), so elder was equivalent to modern day older. The comparative adjectives older and elder are generally perceived as more polite than the unmarked adjectives old or elderly. While elder has retained positive connotations, elderly has now acquired ageist associations. Older is relative; everyone is older than someone else, so it has become the preferred term that is used in phrases such as older person, older people, older adults, or older Americans, as a general descriptor for people in later life.
Unfortunately, I lived in Salt Lake City for too long, and the Mormons, as usual, ruined everything. “Elder Myers” is a name that would be embossed on a plastic tag over the pocket of a starched white shirt on a beardless guy wearing a black tie, not me. I guess you’re just going to have to address me as that cranky geezer.
Oh, hey, geezer isn’t in the book, but silly old fart is.
I’ve seen versions of this illustration before, but usually only the first three panels. Adding the fourth is a revelation.
I always took the fence for granted. Of course there has to be a fence. How else could we have a stupid barrier we have to struggle to overcome?
I have mixed feelings about this article about wolf behavior. It goes out of its way to cast its subject, a specific wolf called Twenty-one, as a heroic leader and kind of a male ideal: fierce but gentle, always victorious in battle but merciful to the vanquished, playful and affectionate with his cubs. It’s a lovely story, but I wondered how much the author was reading into the wolf’s behavior, and whether it was actually doing a disservice to the nature of the wolf. Then I read this, about the consequences of sparing a rival:
Wolves can’t foresee such plot twists any more than people can. But evolution does. Its calculus integrates long averages. By sparing the Casanova wolf, Twenty-one actually helped assure himself more surviving descendants. And in evolution, surviving descendants are the only currency that matters.
Yeah, I don’t think Twenty-one had been reading Hamilton about inclusive fitness in his spare time, and awareness of evolution is a recent (and often resisted) human phenomenon, so I’d suspect that there was more proximate thinking involved than long-term strategic consideration of Casanova’s potential contribution to the survival of Twenty-one’s offspring. I know, the author is saying that Twenty-one couldn’t foresee that, but then why throw in all this stuff about evolution? That would matter if we were discussing the successes of Twenty-one’s progeny, but this article doesn’t.
There’s a lot of stuff in the story that is all about imbuing this one wolf with the attributes of a human mythological ideal. They come right out and admit it.
“And if ever there was a perfect wolf,” Rick says, “it was Twenty-one. He was like a fictional character. But he was real.”
This is why scientists strive for a measure of objectivity in observing animal behavior. There’s always the potential for reading into it something that is not there, or missing something that drives the animal’s behavior that is not present in the observer’s species. Or being selective and untrustworthy in your observations because you want to preserve the Myth of Twenty-one. It’s the Great Man version of history written into the story of a wolf pack, and just as I don’t trust that model in people, I don’t trust it in wolves, either.
But then again…
The second most common cause of wolf death in the Rockies is getting killed by other wolves. (Getting killed by humans is first.) Twenty-one distinguished himself in two ways: He never lost a fight, and he never killed a vanquished wolf.
The story is about the Yellowstone wolves who live in a protected reserve, yet it’s full of incidents of wolves being illegally shot and humans are the primary cause of death in wolves, who almost always die violently. Maybe a little anthropomorphizing is necessary to get humans to be a bit less stupidly destructive.
In hospitals across the country, doctors are noticing an unsurprising phenomenon: the people who are getting admitted to critical care are all unvaccinated.
The trend appears to be occurring at hospitals nationwide.
“I haven’t had anyone that’s been fully vaccinated become critically ill,” said Dr. Josh Denson, a pulmonary medicine and critical care physician at Tulane University Medical Center in New Orleans.
It’s been the same for Dr. Ken Lyn-Kew, a pulmonologist in the critical care department at Denver’s National Jewish Health: “None of our ICU patients has been vaccinated.”
Unvaccinated children, too, seem to be at increased risk for severe illness.
“In our local hospitals, the kids that are getting sick are the ones that are not vaccinated,” said Dr. Natasha Burgert, a pediatrician in Overland Park, Kansas, and a national spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics.
I saw the strangest thing on a television in Washington state: I watched Biden make his announcement that the US was going to ship 500 million vaccine doses to economically disadvantaged countries, then cut to commercial — the state is giving out all kinds of incentives to get people to come in for the COVID vaccine, like automatically entering your name into a lottery with a $250,000 prize.
I don’t get it. Not dying is not enough of a reward?
I’m trying to pretend I didn’t.
The ol’ Firebrand Atheist is now reduced to antivaxxer/conspiracy theory apologetics.
