Don’t you love seeing how science is done?

I have a few fossil molluscs from the Devonian — they’re fairly common orthocerids, these cone-shaped shells that once housed mighty ancient cephalopods. Mine are small, but some of these shells get to be 5 or more meters long. We have to imagine big eyes and swarms of arms writhing out of the broad end of the cone, because those squishy bits don’t fossilize well. Well, not just imagine, because we do have data that lets us reasonably infer what the animal looked like. Here’s an excellent post that describes how this kind of reconstruction of Endoceras was done.

That’s not guesswork. Using trace fossils and phylogenetic bracketing and assembling bits of evidence from multiple specimens, you can make an informed estimation of the main features of the animal.

And it is awesome. Bring ’em back.

A truce?

I got an odd request in email. Someone named jeffreydavidmorris wants me to take down an old post.

Hello can you please kindly remove despite ‘the law’ and request of removal re: privacy, misc – https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2017/02/11/i-have-concluded-that-i-am-a-natural-boob-magnet/.

I would appreciate it please, thank you. I’m not trying to be the bad guy here a truce if anything please.

This was 2 or 3 years ago, and I did not remember this fellow — I get so much of this nonsense. Normally, I’d consider this request, but then I looked back at what prompted the original post…and oh yeah, that guy was a major pest. He had to remind me. So…no.

Also, telling me that this was a “truce”, as if we have been battling back and forth, is annoying. I’ve had him blocked for years, haven’t engaged with him since that one post. Apparently he’s been seething over it for some time, but really, all that is doing him harm is publication of his own lunatic words.

Is Raif Badawi dead?

Raif Badawi is the Saudi blogger, atheist, and critic of the Saudi theocracy who was jailed and lashed, and who is currently in a horrible Saudi prison. He has been in communication with his family, though, with daily phone calls, until recently — Badawi has suddenly gone silent.

Jailed Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, currently serving a 10 year prison sentence for criticizing the Saudi Arabian regime online, has not been heard from in more than a month, leaving his family fearful for his well-being, and unsure if he is still alive.

The last time Badawi’s family heard from him was on Jan. 14, his family’s spokesperson Elham Manea tells TIME. Since then, his daily phone calls from prison have suddenly and inexplicably stopped. Last week, prison authorities told Badawi’s wife, Ensaf Haidar, that he does not want to speak with her, Manea says.

People are fearing the worst.

This will not change our relationship to an unabashedly evil regime, although it should. The US has too many powerful people who profit off the oil, and no small number of ordinary citizens who are fine with torturing and murdering atheists and people who dare to criticize the government.

Funding news!

Yes, I’ve got so much economic anxiety nowadays that I’m imagining voting for Trump. It’s the irrational solution. Good thing I’m not that irrational, so don’t worry, I’m voting for either Sanders or Warren, probably the former.

The rational solutions:

  • I’ll plug our Defense vs. Carrier SLAPP suit gofundme again.
  • I’ll remind you that we’re having a celebration of our victory on YouTube on Sunday, 23 February, at 6pm. There might be some begging for donations then, as well as ragging on Carrier.
  • I’ll mention the Pharyngula Patreon. By popular request, I’ve added a $1/month tier for people who can’t afford more than a small tip. I appreciate every penny! We’ve gotten over 100 patrons, which is great.
  • A couple of blogs here, like Affinity and stderr, have run occasional auctions to contribute to our defense fund. Right now, Affinity is giving away this lovely knife in return for the highest donation.
    Strangely, many of these kinds of auctions involve extremely sharp edged weapons.
  • If you can’t afford a regular donation but want to make a one-time contribution, there’s always paypal.me/pzmyers to toss me a few bucks.

Don’t worry if you can’t afford anything now — there is no degree of economic anxiety that will convince me to vote for Trump.

Unseemly gloating on Sunday!

Mark your calendars! This Sunday, 23 February, at 6pm Central time, the victorious defendants in that ridiculous SLAPP suit will be gathering on YouTube to serve tea and mock the silly plaintiff and just generally have a good time celebrating getting out from under the legal action (if not the legal debt). We’ll spill the inside dirt on the ugly affair and laugh and maybe get a little bit inebriated and also try to answer people’s questions about the whole mess.

You can join in the chat, too — we’ll post links to the live YouTube event later, here and on The Orbit and maybe on the Skepticon blog, and encourage everyone to chime in with your comments. Even the haters…it’s always nice of you to show up and get giggled over.

It’ll look just like that.

Bloomberg just lost the rural vote

And mine, but that goes without saying. He declared that any idiot can be a farmer.

I might think that agriculture has a little too much influence on our elections, but that is unadulterated nonsense. Farming is difficult, and it requires a great deal of gray matter, and always has. Evaluating soils and weather and making decisions about what to plant and when is hard enough, but it also requires sound economic judgment, which you’d think Bloomberg would appreciate. Farming is a sophisticated enterprise, far more than some yokel digging a hole and putting a seed in.

Trump has screwed over farmers throughout his reign, and we could count on at least some of them defecting to the Democrats, at least as long as we don’t nominate Bloomberg. Is there any portion of the electorate that wants that guy, other than the billionaires and Wall Street bankers?

Guess who has another day of interviewing candidates?

I do, that’s who. With the first one you feel some sympathy for the candidates, who get a long grueling day of non-stop meetings and conversations and questions, but ’round about the third one, you begin to wonder who is suffering more in this process. It’s going to be another late night for me.

Also, I’ve got to escape to get a haircut. Today will be impossible, tomorrow is a heavy teaching day, maybe Wednesday? It’s rather annoying when work takes over and makes it nearly impossible to take care of basic grooming tasks. Well, the candidate is just going to have to get the impression that “shaggy” is the standard style at UM Morris. Except that I sure hope he learns our style standards from the other committee members, not me.

Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book

You really don’t want to find your name in it. It’s his aspirational list of who a creepy rich pedophile thinks are the important people in his world.

While we await subpoenas and depositions—if they ever come remains to be seen—there is a road map of sorts in the form of Epstein’s so-called “little black book,” 92 pages of names, emails, and phone numbers of people Epstein knew, or wanted to know, but in any event had detailed information about. Wall Street people comprise a significant amount of the entries. “He was a kind of wholesale collector of people, including people he didn’t know,” one of the Wall Street guys in the black book tells me. “I guarantee you that 90% of the people whose names are in his book, he’s not in their book. Many of these people don’t even know him.”

What the book tells us is that Epstein knew, or aspired to know, some of the biggest names on Wall Street and in Washington. Sure there are the Trumps—Donald, Ivana, and Ivanka—and Bill Clinton’s surrogate Doug Band in the book. But once you get past their names, there is the horde of Wall Street executives. The contact book is dated for sure, replete as it is with misspellings and incorrect or superseded phone numbers, emails, and addresses. It remains something of an enigma: What was the book’s purpose? “I don’t think it means anything,” the Wall Street executive continues. “…I didn’t really know Jeffrey. He was like Boo Radley in the corner of the room. After I met him, he became Jeffrey Epstein, he had no interest in me. He knew right out of the box who the players were, the people who would stay out all night, people who had interests in extracurricular objectives, and who the hitters were. That wasn’t me.”

That unnamed Wall Street executive has the words we’re going to hear a lot of in the future: I didn’t know him. He didn’t know me. I don’t think it means anything. Right. Except that it does mean something. It means you were a wealthy plutocrat who came into the orbit of a man who was looking for an angle on rich people everywhere. You are a member of the looter class.

So, also on the list of greedy people we find David Koch, Mike Bloomberg, Steve Forbes, Conrad Black, etc., etc., etc. You don’t need to be a super-brilliant detective to see a pattern in the names.

I am confident that I am not in the book.