Atomic Nerds

…you hear the term “female ejaculation” on the history channel. Also known during this period as the “Hey, look at us! We have historical BOOBS” channel.

From a commercial overheard while fixing the critters’ dinner:

“Ever wish you had SONIC hearing?!”

ETA: God damn it, my memory sucks.

As long as I’m going to continue having nothing of substance to say, I might as well try the snark-drive-by model of whatever random thought happens to be floating between my ears.

That said, here’s one of my huge linguistic pet peeves, to be found anywhere that teeth are mentioned, usually in the context of some other species: Your incisors are not your canines, and your canines are not your incisors. Okay? Your incisors can be found as the four teeth up front in your upper and lower jaws. They are flattish and come to a chisel-shaped edge. They are for chopping things. When you try to bite a piece off of food, unless it’s tough or gristly and needs gnawing or twisting, you use your incisors to do it. Your canine teeth, on the other hand, are pointy and tent-peg shaped and can be found immediately to the right and left of your incisors. They are for tearing things.

Since herbivores tend to take bites that involve chopping and carnivores tend to take bites that involve tearing, herbivores have big, strong incisors and smaller, less pointy canines, and carnivores have big, strong canines and smaller, pointier incisors. Humans, as omnivores, have teeth that are intermediate but tend to favor the herbivore model overall: our incisors are bigger and our canines are not nearly as large and pointy as the average carnivore’s.

The fundamental problem that arises here is with writers who writing certain kinds of stories- about animal characters, maybe, or possibly about vampires or werewolves. A favorite descriptive tactic here is for a character who should have big, scary pointy teeth to smile menacingly, so that those teeth can be exposed and do their job of impressing. The writer, being an expert on writing rather than on dentition, will then half the time reach for the name he remembers as being attached to the big teeth, which is kind of scary-sounding and generally SEEMS like it should belong to the pointy teeth… and the image promptly fixed in the mind of the reader who DOES know what the proper terms are is forever after of Buggy the Buck-Toothed Vampire, no matter how menacing he is in any other passage.

I hate this. And now so do you.

So in the true spirit of a bored blogger with nothing of substance to write about, I am choosing to write about what I do with my time when I can’t really be arsed for one reason or another to do something actually productive, whether sheer apathy or being too sick to concentrate.

If I’m just looking for something to do online when I don’t have time for something I can’t duck in and out of in tabs for, probably my number-one pastime is the good old-fashioned wikiwander. Sometimes it’s wikipedia, but I’d probably be an even meaner Trivial Pursuit opponent if it weren’t almost always the Tropes Wiki, a compendium of the various tools of the storyteller, and really, the entire structure and execution of fiction itself. I’m deeply and perpetually fascinated by all of this, and the big bonus is that once you figure out the sorts of tropes that tend to be attached to things you like, it’s a GREAT way to get recommendations for the next book, movie, TV series, or webcomic you should try- for example, I’m nearly guaranteed to like anything that gets listed under Deconstructor Fleet.

I’m also, for some reason, a massive sucker for advice columns. Savage Love is a long-time favorite, though it’s definitely NSFW- it’s a love, sex, and relationship advice column. Dan leans WELL to my left and I can get pretty fed up with him when he essentially suspends advice-giving to rant about some political topic, but the column overall is well worth it, if only to see what people ask about when they’re aware that absolutely anything that isn’t blatantly a prank will be given a serious answer. It also reinforces my impression that absolutely everybody, whether they’re straight and deeply vanilla or gay and into group nose-fucking or whatever, has pretty much the same kinds of relationship problems.

Amy Alkon is another recent find, which is kind of retarded since she’s apparently a darling of the right side of the blogosphere and I really have no excuse for having missed her up till now. Regardless, I’ve been methodically chewing through her old advice-column archives in that compulsive “just one more click” kind of way. Ironically, while I agree with her politics a hell of a lot more than I do Dan’s, I tend to more often be with Dan in the “nature of men and women” department- Amy tends a bit too much to the just-so school of the evolutionary psychology of men and women for my taste. I’m pretty sure a woman asking a man out isn’t ALWAYS a sign that he has no balls and she’s desperate, for example. Either way, it’s fascinating to see how often they’d be writing essentially the same advice for the same letter writers- though I think Dan is far more likely to direct somebody to the most appropriate sex toy outlet or fetish site.

When I’m sick, as net-addicted as I am, off goes the computers and under the covers with me. I love to read and there’s tons of TV and movies I like just as well, but if I’m ill I simply don’t have the available brain-resources to cope with them; if something satisfies and entertains me when I’m well, chances are it’s way too damn smart or complex for me to follow while sick. So, if I’m just too damn tired and out of it to turn pages, the TV goes on to: sitcoms. Doogie Howser reruns were always a favorite, and Night Court is great too. VH1: I Love Every Decade I’ve Ever Survived, Best Unit of Time Ever!. Action movies: Indiana Jones would be too clever for me, but fortunately I’ve seen all of them so many times that I don’t have to follow them anymore. James Bond is pretty much out, though- I don’t like Bond as much as Indy and finding a reason to care he’s going to shoot or fuck someone is just too hard. As for books, it’s P.G. Wodehouse and cheap mysteries for me all the way- the very best kind are the ones where the mystery itself isn’t actually important, the book exists for the protagonists to snark at each other and the world. Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels are perhaps the ur-example of the subgenre I mean.

And you all?

Thanks to a tip from a friend, I’ve got some nice low-hanging fruit to take a good swipe at on an otherwise crummy day. Yes, it’s my old friends the creationists come to play again! What wacky hi-jinx are they up to now?

Why, they’ve come to campaign at the University of New Mexico!

These are hip, fresh, new creationists out of movements aimed specifically at evangelizing college students, so you can expect them to have a kickin’, cutting-edge approach. What, exactly, are they doing?

Chalk drawings have appeared all over campus asking this question, prompting more than 1,200 hits on RUAMonkey.com.

The Web site features a video of about 20 people wearing monkey masks and dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” on the steps leading into Smith Plaza.

Well, that’s sort of… abstract.

As for whether I’m a monkey, well, that depends. If you’re asking about my position in the taxonomic scheme of things, I’m a hominid, and those brachiating little bastards don’t bear much relation to me as of millions of years ago. If you’re asking me musically, however, then I am indeed a monkey. A brass monkey. A FUNKY monkey. That was what you were going for, right?

The mysterious artwork and bare-bones Web site are part of an effort by Calvary Chapel and Renovate Campus Ministries to publicize a creationism-themed event in mid-February.

Renovate members wished not to disclose the name and date of the event.

So, you don’t want them to attend, you just want to make sure your target audience is thoroughly confused. Do I have that right?

“I think people are really skeptical on our view of how we were made,” said Candice Cunningham, a freshman and member of Renovate. “So coming right out and saying it … kind of turns people off, so I think advertising this way engages people more.”

As it turns out, I have it EXACTLY right. Here is a marketing hint: if you have to go to such lengths to make sure your advertising is almost certain not to make people associate the ad with your product, in this case creationism… your product might not be very good. I’m just sayin’.

Carlson said he was inspired by a similar stunt performed by entrepreneur Marc Ecko in which a retired 747 airplane was painted to look like Air Force One before being covered in graffiti artwork.

“For a whole week, they didn’t tell anybody, and the president thought it was real,” Carlson said. “Everybody thought it was a real deal. It was just a really cool thing. That was basically my whole intent behind it.”

In order to introduce a new line of urban clothing that’s designed to look as though someone has graffiti’d the wearer, Ecko pulls a publicity stunt featuring graffiti all over something well-known that is not normally covered with graffiti. You don’t have to associate the ad with the product beforehand, but it makes a big impression afterward, especially with the confusion over the apparent defacement of a national symbol, which people care about.

Obviously, people will care every bit as much about chalk on campus sidewalks and the mystery of the twenty idiots dancing to Michael Jackson associated with it and will be so won over by the pitch that they will no longer care they are being sold creationism rather than ugly clothing that will nonetheless, based on trends, make you cool in some quarters.

Carlson said that the theme of the campus-wide artwork was timed to coincide with national Darwin Week.

“Basically, Darwin Day is coming up, and Darwin’s whole idea is that we came from monkeys, so that’s where it all came from,” he said.

Yes. That was exactly Darwin’s whole idea, distilled to a single sentence of laser truth. Every college student knows this. And there is absolutely no way this could possibly backfire due to science students at this event who have managed to read the campus newspaper and figure out it’s a creationist publicity stunt. Though, according to Stingray, given the Daily Lobo, this “confuse ‘em into submission” angle may have a hidden ally.

Carlson said people have had varying interpretations of the project.

“People had different ideas, like some people thought that it was some sort of Obama thing, which it totally isn’t,” he said. “That was odd.”

No, it wasn’t odd. It was people making a wild guess based on the last cryptic thing they were pitched by the self-consciously hip. It’s also a really clear sign that you did an awesome job of disguising your intentions. High-five yourself, dude.

So, what will THE EVENT be? Speculations? My current bet is a coordinated poop-flinging team barricading the biology department.

Normally, when people talk about or play with the concept of someone being half male and half female, they’re either talking about (nonfictional) intersexed genitalia, or (fictional) an individual with a fully working set of both. They don’t usually mean that literally- someone split half and half down the middle, male on one side and female on the other. That seems more fantastic than even the two-sets-of-genitals idea.

Reality is stranger than fiction.

While everyone is familiar with the bright red male cardinals, those who don’t bird-watch often don’t realize that only half of all cardinals are red like that- the females are a rather drab grey color with a few red accents here and there. Except in the case of this cardinal*, which is quite literally half of each. The bird is a gynandromorph.

Now, this is where what was intended to be a fun science post turns into a brief accounting of my personal descent into embryology hell with perhaps a side of fun science post for people who are not me. (Embryology was… not my strongest suit in school.) As a warning for those who are shaky on science, this is not going to be one of my more readable posts; I’ve simplified and explained as much as I can, but there’s a reason embryology in general is such a bear of a subject.

See, when I looked up what seems to be the web-standard explanation of gynandromorphy- which I had honestly never heard of before that cardinal picture started its journey around the interweb of geeky birdwatchers, it comes up as a nice, neat explanation- for arthropods.

Once you get into the taxonomic Kingdom Animalia, the next taxonomic line before we get into phylums is based on embryological development: how an embryo of a given organism develops depends on whether it is a deuterostome or a protostome. While there are several distinctions between the way the two types of organisms develop- for example, whether the very first opening created by the very first cell cleavage is destined to become your mouth or your anus**- the important one for this discussion is that protostome cell cleavages are determinate, and deuterostome cleavages are indeterminate. A deuterostome cell can still become pretty much any kind of cell up until much later developmental events, whereas the protostome cell’s fate is narrowed down cell division by cell division from the very first one. The first division determines the right and left sides in a protostome cell; if you were to then separate the two, they’d die, because from the first division on each one is essentially half an organism. In a deuterostome, they would still have the potential to develop into two complete organisms. This is why identical twins are possible for humans and other deuterostomes- that indeterminate system of development becomes important when the developing mass of cells splits completely apart instead of folding normally. You’d never get identical insects or starfish through the same mechanism- the different developmental system wouldn’t allow it.

Arthropods are protostomes, and the two other places I can find examples of gynandromorphy are arthropods; in Lepidopterans- moths and butterflies- and crustaceans (crabs and lobster). While I don’t know how crab and lobster sex chromosomes work and attempting to find out netted me the seductive promise of spending another hour driving myself slowly insane, I’m going to assume they work pretty much as Lepidopteran sex chromosomes do and involve a pair of different chromosomes whose combination determines sex, and in which getting only one of the most “necessary” one- in Lepidopterans and mammals, X, in birds Z***- is not lethal but instead produces a male or female as a sort of default setting. For humans and other mammals, XX produces a female, XY a male, and X-nothing an infertile female. For Lepidopterans, XY produces a female, XX a male, and X-nothing a female.

The way you can get an X-nothing (and a corresponding XXX or XYY) is during a “non-disjunction event”. During cellular division, just before the actual divide, the two complete copies of DNA- all the chromosomes- are lined up and attached to each other. During a non-disjunction event, rather than properly coming apart before each cell goes its separate way, the two copies of a particular chromosome will stay stuck together and leave the other cell missing a chromosome. This is usually fatal to the cell with the missing chromosome and carries various potential consequences (including a total lack of them) for the cell with an extra one. In the case of extra or missing sex chromosomes, results vary- just having one X or an XYY is nonfatal for mammals and Lepidopterans, but just a single Y is fatal.

So, a gynandromorph is therefore (according to all I’ve been able to read) what happens when a non-disjunction event involving the sex chromosomes happen during the earliest cell divisions in an organism with determinate cell development. Since that first division determined left and right sides, if the non-disjunction event occurred then, the result would be an organism that was male (for a butterfly, XXX) on one side and female (X-nothing) on the other- a bilateral gynandromorph. (It’s possible for the same accident to happen a few cell divisions later, and in an insect that’s called a mosaic gynandromorph. They have one side that is clearly one sex and are a mosaic of both on the other, like this:

…However, I’ve never seen pictures or reports of any gynandromorphic bird that was a mosaic rather than bilateral.

Anyway, the problem I’m having is this: birds aren’t protostomes, like crabs and butterflies. They’re deuterostomes like the rest of the vertebrates. I know their early cell development is indeterminate rather than determinate because the same thing that leads to identical twins in mammals can happen in bird development- that’s what’s happenes when you get a double-yolked egg. The “twin” almost never survives because there’s simply not room within an eggshell for two embryos to develop fully, but the same basic event has happened, and can’t happen if the earliest cell divisions are determinate.

So how the hell do bilateral bird gynandromorphs develop, then? When another deuterostomate animal has a chromosomal non-disjunction event during early cell development like that, the results are a complete mosaic****; instead of being split down the side like that, the critter is outwardly male- and normal to all appearances- but its cells are a jumble of X, XY, and XYY, with the X-only cells being essentially female cells.

Why wouldn’t exactly the same thing happen to birds after an early non-disjunction event? If there’s another mechanism that produces gynandromorphs that I’m not aware of, why do birds seem to be the only deuterostomes affected? If it’s something about the unique development that embryos of land-based egg-laying creatures go through to deal with the yolk, then why don’t reptiles seem to produce these individuals? They’re rare, but not THAT rare, and there are plenty of reptiles with enough sexual dimorphism to produce a visible effect.

If you’re one of those readers that understands embryology better than I do, an answer before I finish going round the bend would be deeply appreciated.

*Credit for the photo goes to Jim Frink, and I found the thing through Minnesota Bird Nerd.

**I find it cosmically fitting that humans, along with all other vertebrates, begin as assholes.

***Yes, birds have totally different sex chromosomes, W and Z. ZW is female, ZZ is male.

****I’ve talked about mosaics before.

“I have content, but not the time to write it up” is getting old, I know, but it’s still true. Stingray’s work has turned into a stampede of drama llamas, and while technically he’s the only one with a problem, the phone ringing all the time and a background soundtrack of profanity are bad for the Zen I require to write. By the time said work problems had ceased for the day, it was time for workout, dinner, and oh hey look it’s eight thirty already.

*sigh*

So as is traditional, have a link. This time it’s to a very lengthy article, but I’m sure you can maintain attention span for all ten pages, because it’s about sex- specifically, what sexologists have been doing lately on the differences between male and female sexuality. Here’s a hint: it explains a little better why so many more women seem to be bisexual or willing to behave that way than men, among other things… and it starts off with bonobo porn. Smexy!

Obama hasn’t been officially President for more than a few days yet, and there’s already something I’m really, really sick of hearing about: how Americans now need to “put aside their petty grievances” (his words) and focus on our “commonalities, not our divisions” so that we can “work together”. Sounds pretty good, certainly very hope-n-changeriffic, but I’ve got a question.

Which of the major political differences in America of the last eight years- or hell, let’s call it the last sixteen, it’s not like Republicans and Democrats were playing stickball together every recess then- were “petty grievances”? Was it the war in Iraq, or our response to 9/11 in general? Was the massive tug of war between hawks and doves, between those who wanted to aggressively confront a slippery enemy and those who wanted to show restraint and handle the whole thing with as little smashy-smashy as possible akin to a squabble around the family dinner table? How about Guantanamo and torture? Were those no-big-deal issues? Liberty or safety- eh, six of one, half a dozen of the other, I guess. Or hey, let’s talk social issues- I suppose at the end of the day it really doesn’t matter all that much to anyone whether gay people can have legally recognized marriages, or whether abortion is murder or a simple gynecological procedure. Let’s work on the important things, like the economy.

So, we can all- liberals and conservatives- readily agree that the way to help the economy is to aimlessly spend a trilion dollars of money we don’t have and probably won’t really be able to reasonably expect to recoup from our grandchildren, right? There are no philosophical conflicts here whatsoever, and anybody who disagrees is obviously playing churlish little partisan games- because there’s nothing of substance to honestly argue about here, surely.

Look, it’s not just Obama, although he’s certainly the current standard-bearer for this weaselly pap masquerading as a political philosophy. Saying “shut the fuck up and do things our way and everything will be just fine” but couching it as bipartisan cheerleading has been a favorite refuge for political scoundrels for decades, and if I did some digging I’d probably be able to unearth it in Athens. But when said standard-bearer goes around saying the leadership of the other party should quit listening to the voices that reflect their core principles* in order to get along with his administration, that home truth gets a little harder to hide in rhetoric.

*I’m not a fan of Rush. If I wanted to be shouted at for hours on end, I’d join the military and get paid for it. But he’s such an influential voice on the right for a reason.

While not, to my knowledge, a blog troll, I am just your average white suburbanite slob. I’m fond of the ladies, and I do enjoy oggling a nice pair of well-shaped hooters. Sweater kittens. Lady lumps. They’re all good, and like Ron White said, once you’ve seen one pair…. you pretty much want to see the rest of ‘em.

That said, Playboy isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. It sucks. It fails. It should be treated as a gaudy tie at a funeral.

Starting first on the, er, meat and potatoes, let’s take a look at the, um, well I guess “females” is about the most applicable term. In days gone by, the ladies who graced the pages of Playboy were just that, more or less: ladies. They brought individuality, from Marylin Monroe to Bettie Page the fine female physiques presented were diverse of form and interesting to the eye. Today the only notable difference is hair color, and with some of the models, I’d be willing to bet that was just an afterthought done in Photoshop. The airbrushing applied to each successive shoot before LabRat and I decided that reading the additive list to the toilet paper would be more interesting than reading Playboy whilst going about lavatory activities was so thick, I’m reasonably sure that I could’ve posed passably. Add to this that each model appeared to need a hot meal considerably more desperately than they needed a hot date, and it didn’t leave a favorable impression of what went on at a Playboy shoot. I can see it now…

“All right, congratulations on becoming a Playmate. Here’s your standard issue navel ring.. *ka-CHUNK* we’ll just fix that pubic hair *RIIIIP* and now I’ve got this paint roller for your makeup and we’ll be all set. Oh, and make sure your expression always says that sex is the least interesting thing ever. If possible, sleep with your eyes open.”

Honestly, most of the models had the facial range of “bored” to “drowsy” to “possibly a RealDoll.” I had more erotic stimuli one time when I clipped my toenail and it kinda sorta looked like a mudflap girl if you squinted real hard and were blind drunk.

What’s that? Oh, absolutely! I read it for the articles too! Let’s take a look at this one. “Al Franken Isn’t Liberal Enough”* Wait, what the fuck? Seriously? As it turns out, yes. They were serious. Given their obvious dependency on the 1st amendment, it also struck me as more than a tad filled to the brim with bullshittery that when pressed on their disdain for the 2nd Amendment the response was something along the lines of “Sticks and stones will break my bones. Unlike guns, words have never caused innocent deaths, so we will continue to support reasonable gun control measures.” I guess nobody at Playboy ever read the words “When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” Then again, given the recycled jokes on the centerfold (I honestly read variations on most of those in “Boy’s Life” when I was 11), I’m not sure anybody there but Hef has a pulse in the first place, and his is just a bad reaction to the Viagra IV. That the rest of the editorial section is so amazingly, unabashedly, unfilteredly (yes, that’s a word now because I say it is) of the opinion that anybody to the political right of Chairman Mao doesn’t like sex really puts a nail in things. I could forgive the RealDoll foldout if they’d give it a rest with the monthly updates on “HAY LOOK THESE REPUBLICANS HAD NAUGHTY SEX AND ARE IN TROUBLE LOL!” Dems caught with their zippers open were of course discreetly ignored.

I’ll grant a pass to the horribly overpriced kitsch in the Mantrack section. No harm in a bit of envy to the product set geared to those with vastly more money than brains. What I will not condone, however, is the textile abortion that comprises the fashion section of the magazine. I have no idea how anybody could consider the garments described and depicted therein as a good idea without the use of enough drugs to make Hunter Thompson say “Damn, maybe you should cut back.” My hand on a stack of 1911s, the only way I would ever be seen in anything like the crap they try to pass off as what we should be wearing is if I was dead, and if I was in them dead, I would rise up and consume the feeble brains of whoever put me in them before destroying the rest of civilization in a fit of zombie rage.

This concludes your daily dose of Stingray Picks Low Hanging Fruit. Hope you enjoyed.

Oh, and Pam Anderson looks like a fucking saddlebag. Why the hell they keep putting her diseased ass in there is beyond me.

*”The Truth About Al Franken: Don’t Call Him A Liberal Stooge – He’s Really A Conservative” – May 2007, P. 37

Wracking my brain has produced a lot more wracking than recognizable brain products, so in the name of getting SOME kind of content up today, here’s a bit of a stew of things I’ve come across that don’t really merit their own post.

Thanks to Steve (read the rest of the post, by the way, there’s at least one other link that got some really funny faces out of me), I appear to have been nearly the last person on the web to have discovered the Dogs In Elk story. What is the dogs in elk story? It is EXACTLY WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE, that’s what. It’s a series of message board posts from a long-suffering owner suffering a dilemma, and it begins:

Okay – I know how to take meat away from a dog. How do I take a dog away from meat? This is not, unfortunately, a joke.

…And gets progressively more hilarious from there. For those of you who’ve never really heard a dog sing for the fun of it or scream in indignation, the involved dogs are a New Guinea Singing Dog and a Basenji. Basenjis are one of the few AKC recognized breeds that are still allowed to import breeding stock from hunting tribes in Africa, and are among the most primitive (and unique) of modern domestic dogs; as for the Singing Dog, it’s really not so much “domesticated” as it is “tame”, and there was some lively debate as to whether they should be counted as their own species or as a sort of northern dingo. Suffice it to say these guys ain’t spaniels, and this is somewhat important to the story.

In the department of hilarious stories, someone on the dog forum I hang out on recently posted a link to a story I used to have filed away but lost somewhere in an upgrade, the tale of the Horror of Blimps, as retold by a denizen of the Straight Dope forums. There is only quite a small blimp involved, but suffice it to say it’s a demonstration of why a skilled writer makes the difference between a short and boring story and one that, like this one, I still can’t read aloud without pauses for helpless crackups.

Via Snarkybytes, a writer’s litany of commonly made gun mistakes. He appears to have film in mind as well as (if not more than) books, and he hits the highlights, but he leaves several out that drive me pretty much insane:

1. Shooting off a lock with a pistol. This does not work, writers! At best it just fuses the lock and creates a problem that you now have no choice to deal with by any means other than bolt cutters. Ludicrously common.

2. The “buzzsaw” .22 round. It’s entirely too common in shows and movies that like to THINK they know better to describe the .22 as acting like a “buzzsaw” in that it continues bouncing around after it enters a body and tears shit up, more than a round with more power, that would “just go through” would. Needless to say with this crowd, but, no. A low-power round of .22 pretty much just enters and stops. Sometimes bullets do bounce, but this has a lot more to do with luck than anything else. While it’s true that a .22 round to the head is a favored method for assassins and execution-style killings, that has a lot more to do with .22s being easy to conceal, easily silenced, and making a relatively small noise regardless than it does with any magic bullet-bouncing*.

3. Fully automatic weapons fired from the hip are the most dangerous weapons in existence. In almost any given movie where the bad guys pounce on the good guy or guys, they’ll leap out, produce a scary black rifle, and proceed to fire an endless stream of bullets at everything and everyone. This leads to, depending on how many important characters are in the scene, everyone dead. In real life, this has the effect of making people take cover, but you’re out of ammunition in about twenty seconds and if anyone was actually hit it’s more due to luck than anything else. Babylon 5 won my heart forever by having a scene in which some would-be assassins try this… and are promptly and resoundingly Kilt Dead by their intended target, who simply takes cover and shoots them one at a time with a pistol he actually aims.

4. Wall-o-energy firing. Bullets may be traveling with enough force to penetrate your body and fuck you up in various ways, but they do not travel with enough force to fling you across the fucking room, or even any significant distance backward. If you want someone to go flying, just hit ‘em with a car, okay?

5. Not all cover is created equal. A car, unless it’s an armored car specifically designed to resit bullets- and in the case of some bulletproof glasses, it’s not necessarily bulletproof when put up against a high-powered rifle- is NOT cover. A table in a bar is really definitely extremely not cover, and neither is a couch, a bookcase, a normal wall, a door, or virtually any other thing the hero ducks behind.

6. Oh crap! Jam! Better throw it away, it will NEVER WORK AGAIN.

7. Fatal gunshot wound equals fatal INSTANTLY. Generally speaking, with a fatal bullet wound, you die because there is either no more brain or because blood is no longer reaching the brain. Flopping over because the victim’s head has just become spread over a ten-meter radius is acceptable- flopping over immediately dead because it hit center of mass, not so much. Even if the heart is literally exploded in the chest, the woundee can still run/fight/whatever until the appropriate oxygen lack kicks in**.

I’m sure y’all can think of others…

*“In contact wounds of the head from the .22 Short cartridge, there are generally no skull fractures, except perhaps of the orbital plates. The bullet rarely exits the cerebral cavity. Internal ricocheting with such a round is extermely common.” – Gunshot Wounds – Practical Aspects of Firearms, Ballistics, and Forensic Techniques 2nd Edition, Vincent J.M. Di Maio, p.162. This one isolated and obviously uncommon set of conditions is quite possibly the entire origination of the deadly .22 Buzzsaw.

**“Experiments have shown that an individual can remain conscious for at least 10 to 15 sec. after complete occlusion of the carotid arteries. Thus if no blood is pumped to the brain because of a massive gunshot wound of the heart, an individual can remain conscious and function, e.g., run, for at least 10 sec before collapsing.” Same source, p. 254, emphasis mine. Just because you shot the bad guy doesn’t mean you’re out of the woods yet.

The last time LabRat let bitey off the leash, it prompted Tam to ponder

This ties in nicely with one of my favorite questions I ponder while chewing pencils to splinters, which is “Why do fuckwits love conspiracy theories?”

Commenter MarkHB opined in reply

Glib answer: It saves them having to think.

Well, not quite so much, I suspect. Now, take all of the following with a large pillar of salt. LabRat is the bio-geek of the household, so calling anything I’m about to say an oversimplified generalization is a bit like saying a man struck by lightning is feeling a bit under the weather, but the problem as I see it is that they can’t help but think.

When your computer doesn’t have anything to do, the processor can throttle down. It doesn’t need to be grinding away very hard just to run a screen saver. The brain, however, is not like this. When the brain has unallocated processing capacity, it pretty much has to find something to do. It finds a book to read. It loads Halo and tosses sticky grenades onto Brutes. It writes a web browser plugin to make thumbnailing images easier. It writes a blog. It follows TV shows obsessively and creates fandoms. No matter what it is with that free time, it does something. Since you can’t just install seti@home on the wetware between your ears, that means it’s up to the individual to find some way to use those spare brain cycles. Some people try to just throttle down the processor, trying to achieve a perfectly empty mind through meditation, but about the point where the mind is good and empty, some stray thought pops in. Probably something along the lines of “Wow, that cow looks like I feel right now all the time. I bet there isn’t a stray thought in there messing up his day. That cow has it all figured out!” And then that leads to silliness like the notion that you had lived before and since you once ate a cow you were cosmically screwed until you atone for having lunch off the critter that’s got it all figured out, and then… sorry, kinda got off on a tangent there*.

There are plenty of great outlets for these spare cycles, too. Smart folks redefine physics, or write best-selling novels. Then there are not so great outlets, like gay incestuous male-pregnancy Harry Potter fanfic, or more to the current point, conspiracy theories.

Thanks to the advances humans have made over the last several thousand years, modern life does not require the same skillset it once did for a reasonable definition of success. In the dark ages, you might need to know how to till a field, how to mend a plow, animal husbandry, basic veterinary skills, a fair bit of what passed for modern medicine then for when the horse kicked you and broke your arm, cooking, brewing (since the water wasn’t drinkable), and any long laundry list of other things. This didn’t leave a lot of spare brain cycles for the average folk outside the day’s task. Roughly enough to come up with “It’s the witch’s fault!” when something really horrible went wrong. Nowdays, none of that is necessary for your average low-end cubicle dweller (who I’m fairly confident is the usual suspect in cooking up notions like some of the wilder ideas about what happened on 9/11 – I could be wrong though). If your cat gets sick, you take it to the vet. If your dishwasher breaks, you call someone else to fix it. If the sink backs up, you call the building super, or a plumber. Flat tire? Triple A. Computer problem? Geek Squad**. Dinner? Pizza or Chinese? There’s even water delivery available if the kitchen tap is too tricky. Over a large enough segment of, say, big city apartment dwellers who aren’t supposed to do most of their own maintenance without calling for help, and who do something nice and boring for a paycheck, that’s a pretty damn big pool of brain cycles looking for an outlet.

Also worth noting, humans are flat out wired for storytelling. In The Science of Discworld II: The Globe, Pratchett, Stewart, and Cohen lay out a pretty good case that storytelling (even stories as simple as “Ugg spear animal. Ugg’s tribe not hungry.”) is the primary reason we’re on top of the food chain, rather than equally clever critters such as chimps, bonobos, or dolphins. The urge to tell a story is right down at the very core of that wide-ranging species broadly marked “human.” In earlier days, the stories were different. “The volcano exploded because beings more powerful than us were angry.” Ok, maybe not so different from “The towers fell because politicians more powerful than us had an agenda,” but still. Those stories stuck then because that was operating off best available evidence, more or less. Now, when you say “fire had never before melted steel,” it’s fairly trivial for anyone with more than a passing familiarity with reality to say “Well, actually….”

So when you take all these conditions, bored people, people who aren’t very bright, and people who are wired to tell stories, things start to bubble up. When you combine that with the other portion of MarkHB’s comment,

Long answer: If there’s a big, hooscary Gubment conspiracy going on with Marlboro-smoking men giving FBI agents babies and space-cancer from back rooms before wiring up large buildings with demo charges knowing the terrists are going to attack…

….then it’s The Conspiracy’s fault that they’re living on welfare and keep getting fired for browsing conspiracy theory websites at work all day.

Then all of a sudden that story becomes much more important and real to the teller. And when the story becomes that important, preserving the story becomes necessarily important, leading to wonderfully creative dismissals of the science established by the spare brain cycles of the less-bored.

Seems to me that fuckwits love conspiracy theories simply because they gotta. But that doesn’t mean we should stop mocking them.

*Yes, I know that’s not the real version. But it’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
**Neatly servicing the non tech savvy and gullible groups at once.

Do we have ideas for stuff to post? For once, yes!

However, today has been… bad for me, worse for my other half. So once again, jam tomorrow, random small thingie for today.

Today’s link: Nostalgia Critic. I’m having a weird sense of deja vu about this one, like I’ve either linked him before or I merely thought about doing it and then linked something else instead, so if this is a rerun, well, he has new stuff up. Anyway, it’s yet another “Gen Yer rants on Youtube” thingie, but this guy is actually pretty good, especially if you grew up on the same pap I did. Particularly recommended rants/reviews: Family Double Dare, the Masters of the Universe movie, and Captain Planet.

Everybody’s talking about how cold it is this winter. Since I don’t want to be left out, I gotta join in. It’s frickin’ awful out there! LabRat and I spent the day outside splitting firewood, since that stuff is cheaper than gas for the furnace, and it was so cold…

I actually had to wear a shirt!

Can someone help me find the right load for wooly mammoths? What’s best in a fast rifle for rampaging sabre-tooth tiger attacks? I’m pretty sure they’re only minutes away!

“Remind me next time we’re at the hardware store that I need to pick up a new fire control group for the toilet. The valve on this one keeps going out of battery and running.”
“…A new what?”
“A new valve assembly. You know, the flushy-bit?”
“You called it a fire control group.”
“….Well it is!”
“*fits of snickering*”

Out on the theoretical frontiers of biology operate the game theorists, whose major occupation in science is constructing mathematical models to demonstrate that X or Y given scenario in sociobiology- that area of biology that covers how certain social behaviors increase or decrease fitness and therefore might be subject to natural selection in some fashion- is mathematically possible or impossible. Because they have to describe massively complex systems with ridiculous numbers of variables and lots of emergent behaviors, the models have to be pretty stripped down and simple- spherical race horses aren’t just accepted, they’re the rule. Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium accurately represents no population of organisms that lives or has ever lived, but instead exists to prove mathematically that genetic polymorphisms are stable over time absent any other pressures on a given allele no matter how rare the allele. Like Hardy-Weinberg, the models of the biological game theorists exist to demonstrate that certain strategies have demonstrable effects and certain choices are objectively more fitness-enhancing depending upon the organism’s starting conditions. The models don’t have to be direct analogues of reality, they just have to prove that the strategic choices HAVE a significant effect. If someone later comes along and demonstrates that a variable not included in the spherical-horse assumptions destroys the model altogether, then so much the worse for the model, but it least provides a starting point for more detailed and useful research.

So, let’s consider a hypothetical* journal article by a pair of such theorists that, unlike 99.5% of what they do, somehow contained something that attracted attention as being newsworthy to the general public. Let’s further assume that this article was about mate choice, and that it constructed a model meant to apply to any species that reproduced sexually, featured female mate choice as the predominant determinator of what matings do and don’t happen, and didn’t have big “event” breeding where mate choice must be settled on within a very short period of time. Let us further assume that the model was then used to demonstrate mathematically that a female’s fitness interests were maximized if she waited a bit before mating to test the male, because if the male was “high-quality” his best interests were to mate with the best female he could find even if that meant waiting for awhile, but if he was “low-quality”, his best interests were to quickly break off before she figured out he wasn’t worth it and find a female that would allow mating sooner. Can you guess, after listening to the theorists explain their research, what a journalist might then turn around and report?

If you guessed that it would be headlined something like “Refusing to have sex on the first date increases the chance of finding a good man”, come on up and take your kewpie doll.

Journals have learned that it’s good practice for a number of reasons to relax their normal “subscriber only” access to online editions when an article in a particular issue gets wide attention, inside the community of that specific kind of research or out of it, and the Journal of Theoretical Biology proves to be no different. Since we have access to the original publication, we can actually clap a pair of eyeballs on it and see what the article ACTUALLY said.

We consider a male and a female in a courtship encounter over continuous time. Both parties pay participation costs per unit time. The game ends when either one or other of the parties quits or the female accepts the male as a mate.

Translation: Wasted time and energy matter, as both are finite for the male and female alike. Time and energy is what’s lost for both if either quits and what’s invested by the male if it ends in a mating and for the female if it ends in a mating that was worth the pregnancy.

We assume that there is a binary variable which determines whether the male is a “good” or “bad” type from the female’s point of view, according to either his condition or his willingness to care for the young after mating.

For ease of modeling and so that the model applies across many species we have assumed that goodness and badness are literally as simple as that.

This variable is not directly observable by the female, but has fitness consequences for her: she gets a positive fitness payoff from mating with a “good” male but a negative fitness payoff from mating with a “bad” male. We assume also that a “good” male has a higher ratio of fitness benefit from mating to fitness cost per unit time of courtship than a “bad” male.

The male gets a fitness payoff either way, but since the bad male has a lower chance of mating with any given female, his opportunity costs are greater if he waits around too long, so he’ll quit sooner.

There’s more in the abstract, but it essentially goes on to say “the math is sound within evolutionary guidelines and this is how this fits with other theories and research into mate choice”. So, to sum, the assumptions made are:

1. The male always wants to mate with the female. No other quality of hers is relevant.
2. The female’s stake in it is always her future fitness interests. (I.e. sex is never a desirable end in itself to the female, pregnancy always is.)
3. The goodness or badness of a male is a single binary trait that can be accurately evaluated solely by length of courtship.

Surely there could be no possible conditions here that aren’t thoroughly broken by the human dating experience! The journalist doesn’t think so, as his lede before he goes on to quote the two researchers (who are careful to keep it within the boundaries of what their model actually does and could do) demonstrates:

A new study shows that refusing to sleep with a partner on the first date could be one of the keys to making a successful match.

Researchers used a mathematical model to show that more reliable men were willing to wait longer before having sex for the first time.

By contrast, less suitable men were not as likely to continue dating.

Males turns into men, good turns into “reliable”, the period of courtship gets contracted to “first date”- the better to start working out which date exactly is the correct one to surrender the “prize” for his investment, presumably. “The model is a starting point for future research” turns into “it has now been scientifically proven that sleeping with someone on the first date is bad”.

Which, if a guy wouldn’t keep dating you if you didn’t put out at the earliest opportunity, then yeah, that’s probably a bit of a bad sign right there. And it’s not a good idea to try and make men more interested by sleeping with them. But if you really need to be told that, then you have far further to go along the learning curve of “making a successful match” than anything short of therapy can help with. Humans are the most advanced social species on the planet; we’ve radically diverse in temperament, ability, goals, culture- and perhaps most importantly, all the cheater/cooperator arms races that may have begun as early as colonies of single-celled organisms and continue all the way up to Survivor. If you try to sort out your love life with game theory, you’re almost certainly going to get gamed by someone whose tactics are sophisticated enough to be unmodelable. (Which only requires being more advanced than a moth.)

Also, journalists reporting on science are approximately as reliable as neolithic hunter-gatherers reporting on a space shuttle launch, so when and if you can, find the full text of the original article.

*Not really.

My chosen method for coping with being shorted a few hours of sleep and being far more in a state of mind for a nap than tackling the sprawling subject of the current state of theory and research into the transition from “lively chemistry” to “recognizable life” was drinking Pepsi Max until I felt more alert. Well, now I’m alert. I’m so alert I suddenly really, really identify with this kid:

Well, as anyone that I currently owe e-mail to knows (hi!) I haven’t been so good at keeping my promises this week, so you get a rant instead.

You know what I’m fed up to my tits with? Hearing people with every expectation of being taken seriously say that X or Y thing- this is usually science, but it can be any subject under the sun- is bullshit because why (extremely simple question) then, HUH? What about THAT, Mister Internet Smarty Person? If the question were something like “So how do you reconcile the results of this experiment published last week with current thinking in regards to optimal foraging theory?”, that would be one thing, but it NEVER FUCKING IS. It’s always something that the questioner could have answered for himself just by driving himself to the goddamn library, or even summoning the strength and determined willpower required to type something into motherfucking Ask Jeeves, like, and this is just choosing an example completely and utterly at random*, how do vaccinations work? But, no; God for-felching-bid that the brave crusader for truth against a world of evil scientists- who keep all their knowledge locked in their secret vault thousands of miles below the Earth’s crust and only appear once a year to report that the sun will rise again- ever interrupt his gormless glide through life to actually try and obtain any scrap of knowledge that might possibly violate his dearly beloved current beliefs, which he presumably acquired more or less by accident when he tripped and fell face-first on a book. It is the responsibility of YOU, agents of the highly exclusive Science Illuminati and keepers of all Earth’s knowledge, to answer his “challenge”, because the burden of proof obviously falls on the person making the claim that has been accepted basic knowledge in a field for the last two hundred years.

Why in the name of the holy hole of Freyja do people expect NOT to get bitch-slapped for this, and why are they so overwhelmed by shock and wounded pride when it happens? Do they really and sincerely believe that they have magically and without any effort or study whatsoever stumbled across the secret of the whole conspiracy against the Common Man? Is thinking so alien an experience to them that noticing a small inconsistency in their coloring-book mental image of the world such a massive and painful mental grind that they think they’ve done something momentous? CONGRATULATIONS CITIZEN, BY NOTING THAT IT IS MATHEMATICALLY NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE FOR A COMPLETE BACTERIUM TO ASSEMBLE ITSELF BY PURE CHANCE OUT OF STERILE SALINE SOLUTION YOU HAVE SHATTERED THE FOUNDATIONS OF BIOLOGY! A WINNER IS YOU! I fucking knew awarding PhDs to the college students that could pick their nose the fastest was a bad long-term strategy for science, but thankfully good old American natural know-how has triumphed over the folly of academia. REAL smart people know that “books” and “journals” and “effort” are for chumps and intuit the foundations of reality and every nuance of the most arcane skill as easily as they breathe.

What really burns me to a blackened and acrylamide-filled crisp is how often these people are doing it to defend some point of theology, on which they base their entire morality. Don’t worry, I’m sure your God or Gods are totally fucking cool with you slandering huge numbers of other people as evil stupid liars because you can’t be arsed to read anything other than the one or ones you’ve determined to be absolutely and fully doctrinally consistent with the one you tripped and smashed your eyeballs on so long ago. (Or the Cliff’s notes. I’ve heard those go quicker and don’t overheat your brain cell quite so much.) I’m sure the fact that there’s nothing like that except a bunch of crap about dishonesty and spite being bad things- I bet the translator skipped a footnote. I bet he was an agent of those bastards with the knowledge vault! Those fuckers are everywhere!

Don’t worry, Brave Crusader of Extremely Light Reading. If there’s one thing you can ever be sure of, it’s that God will never, ever require you to leave your comfort zone. It’s all there in the book. Oh, all right. Page fifteen of the Cliff’s notes.

*Not really.

LabRat’s big bio post she promised is turning out to have way more meat to sort through than she expected, so after a shitty day at work she opted to punt to me for content for today. Rather than offer up Standard Internet Tech Rant #4 (“I hate my users so damn much”), I’ll just perform my own punt for a little of whatever grabs me that I can work through without the urge to stab and stab again until the stupid stops.

First, an “Only in Los Alamos” moment. Thanks to aforementioned shitty day, cooking was growing increasingly unlikely as dinnertime drew near. Since LR indulged me recently to scratch an itch I’d had for hot wings, it was my turn to indulge her, so we went to the local Greek place. Since Los Alamos restaurants live or die by the lunch crowd from the national labs, dinner services are… spotty at best. This particular place is normally a tomb after about 6:30, but tonight there were actually a few people in there. Sitting a few tables away from us was a pair of older gents. Not doddering old, but certainly not spring chickens either. Since the joint was still pretty empty, and LabRat and I aren’t the garrulous and noisy types when we eat out, bits of their conversation kept drifting over. A few of the more choice bits included “But that was back when you could actually find someone with a working understanding of rotational momentum,” “Right, but if you get 10^20 neutrons you still won’t be able to measure anything significant!” and “Well yeah, you can pulse it all you want, but until you get the proper wavelength the energy field is going to be trivial!” Betcha don’t hear that kind of side chatter at your local pub!

Next up, a quick reach into the history wagon. Way back when we were first starting this whole blog project up, I put up a review of the Sog Twitch XL. Since there were one or two things in there that have changed with time and use, and for some reason “sog twitch xl review” is still one of the more frequent terms cropping up in our sitemeter logs for some reason, I figured I should at some point throw some sort of update on it. Not really enough for a full post, but it’ll do to stretch this one out, by crackey! In the original review, I opined that the thumbstuds on the blade were next to useless. The spring assist on it was too tight to lever the blade open without the use of either both hands, or the thumb-spur on the back. The spring finally did loosen up some, to where it is possible to use the studs without it seeming more likely to open my thumb on a partially-opened blade than anything else, but I still think the thumbstuds are overall useless. The spring is still tight enough, even with more than a year of regular use, to make thumb slicing seem a little too probable, and really, the spur is just plain easier to manipulate. If they’d either moved the studs forward on the blade a little for more leverage, or left them off entirely, that would’ve done the trick. Also, the safety does tend to engage itself more often than I’d like just in the course of riding around in a pocket, but so far I’ve never had to deal with a charging cape buffalo with only my trusty pocketknife that suddenly wouldn’t open, so still not a huge deal. Otherwise, still a great knife.

Hey, speaking of sitemeter, let’s see if they’ve got something good to pad a bit. Mining those search terms works pretty well for other folks after all. Hmm…”roseholme cottage” Nope, sorry. Try one of these two lovely ladies. This is Nerd Ranch, Roseholme is a time zone or two over.

“view from the porch blog-=tam” Ok, what the hell. Did Tam haax0r my blog and take over or something? Sheesh.

“dealing with pushy men” I’m partial to 124gr at about 1100fps, but your mileage may vary. 230gr at 850ish is popular, and it’s damn hard to argue with 240gr at about 1200fps if you’ve got the wrists for it.

“new mexican californian texan drink same twice” A Texan, a Californian, and a New Mexican are sitting in a bar having some drinks. The Texan finishes his drink, smashes the glass, and says “In Texas, we’ve got so much money from oil we never drink from the same glass twice!” The Californian finishes his drink, and smashes the bottle of wine he poured it from. “In California, we’ve got so many grapes we never drink from the same bottle twice!” Finally the New Mexican finishes his drink, and shoots the Texan and Californian. “In New Mexico, we’ve got so damn many Texans and Californians we never drink with the same ones twice!”

“google crom problems” His definitions of just and mighty flames has been getting a little strict lately.

Finally, just to make sure there’s a little hate in here for everyone, please familiarize yourself with this sign. I could spew profanity over that increasingly popular little demonstration that folks weren’t paying attention in English class, but it won’t do any good. The dumbasses most frequently guilty tend to prefer digging themselves into deeper and deeper holes rather than say “Oh, I have made a mistake in proper use of the language. I will remedy this in the future,” and then call me a Nazi for getting worked up about grammar and spelling in a medium of communication entirely based on grammar and spelling. Fuckers.

G’night everybody!

About a year ago (give or take), I offered up my opinion on the changing reaction to tattoos in the U.S. Courtesy of Peter at Bayou Renaissance Man, an article has come to my attention about tattooing in Asia.

Ok, that’s kind of misleading. “Tattooing in Asia” could cover anything from the extremely meaning-specific Russian prison tattooing that borders on being a written language to the Yakuza tattooing of Japan to the Maori tribesmen to modern US style tattooing that happens to be taking place in Asian countries*. More specifically, this is focused around the Pacific Rim, and the expo under observation was in Singapore. The upshot is basically what I outlined in last year’s post: tattooing is becoming more socially acceptable as more young people get them and age with them. The interesting thing is that this is happening in cultures that have not traditionally been tattoo-friendly, at least not without some Serious Baggage attached to the process. The Maori are obviously fine with ink, for example, but their designs are so ritualized and cultural that you’re not going to see someone walking around with Tweety Bird on a shoulder in that neck of the woods. Even the Japanese are loosening up, though I understand it’s still fairly common to see “No Tattoos” signs at places like bath houses. Naturally, the big holdout is the world’s official stick-in-the-mud, hardcore Islam:

Tattoos are still frowned upon in more conservative parts of Asia, such as predominantly Muslim communities in northern Malaysia, said Eric Kueh, 27, a tattoo artist with 71st Skin Slavery in Kuching, Malaysia.

“Some of my older relatives give me a hard time,” said Kueh, whose right leg is covered in tattoos. “But for the younger generation, it’s not a big deal.”

Hmm. I may have to amend my triangle of suck. Maybe a pyramid of suck so I can bring booze in too. Anyway, back on topic. As with the muslim folks, there’s plenty of people still in this country that disapprove, rather heartily in some cases, but the numbers are dwindling. Even in such unlikely places as the National Labs here, there is very little stigma to walking around with ink. Hell, my doctor, who regularly works with old people just as part of being a doctor, is looking into acquiring some.

Also, since it is basically spinal reflex to observe that some folks are wishy-washy, there’s now on the market a type of tattoo ink that comes out entirely in just one lasering. Go for it, you commitment-phobes! Let your freak flags fly until the wind changes!

*We recently caught a fairly well done piece on the History Channel called Ancient Ink. The upshot is the host went around the world to check out various tattoo styles from the most ancient (such as thread coated with ash being sewn through the skin) to the modern machines and everything in between. When visiting Japan to learn about the hand-poke/hand-stick style, modern machine-artists in Japan did note that getting random English words and imagery is as popular there as getting random Japanese stuff is here. Well I thought it was funny.

My latest line of speculation has led into something that resembles more an impenetrable jungle with endless criss-crossing game trails than it has an organized information highway, so I don’t have much to write down at the moment except to take note of a few interesting things that have cropped up recently.

One of the ways in which you can tell a creationist mouthing someone else’s outdated and ill-informed attack line rather than a person genuinely interested in the earliest origins of life is if they lead off their discussion of abiogenesis- literally, life from nonlife, the murky zone in between chemistry and biology- with anything about DNA. While DNA may be the all-star self-replicating molecule and repository of information of pretty much all life on earth that we all agree IS life, with RNA a mere replicatory handmaiden, most everybody seriously working on the issue now believes that the earliest life was RNA-based rather than DNA-based. RNA isn’t as stable as DNA, but it solves a number of problems for a DNA origin because it’s also MUCH more flexible in the number of functions it can perform.

Well, in the department of “if you can’t do it in a test tube with a Bunsen burner, then it doesn’t count”, now it counts. (Naturally, trawling around, I haven’t seen this sway a single creationist except to declare it proof you need an intelligence to do it- can’t win for losing, can the lab-coats…) Suffice it to say that a group of scientists managed to set up a group of RNA… things… that were not only indefinitely self-replicating, but also began to, for lack of a better word, evolve. They developed new tricks, and some groups of replicators began to dominate others that had better tricks. You’ll note the article and the scientists are both quick to stress this isn’t life, and it’s… not… exactly? This is, in a major way, an artifact of the aforementioned grey area between chemistry and life inherent- like the grey area between variety and species, between colony and organism, or for that matter fetus or infant. The continuums of science are a stone bitch like that- they don’t yield readily to neat categorization.

Speaking of things that are difficult to categorize, and of the problems for the RNA-world model- specifically, how the RNA world became the DNA world- someone has proposed a scenario that solves a number of problems at once: virus-mediated evolution at the very beginning of life. One of the reasons the RNA world hypothesis was ever even entertained was viruses; they broke the “DNA dogma” of once upon a time that RNA only ever comes from DNA. Not in retroviruses, it doesn’t- they are RNA-based… um… organisms, creatures, packets of self-replicating pain… that quite happily synthesize DNA from RNA. (Viruses are regarded as not really alive because they need a host to replicate and don’t actually do ANYTHING other than that, although they do that one thing very well and are incredibly genetically diverse.) Forterre- the scientist putting forth the idea- noticed that DNA replication is accomplished with different enzymes in viruses, eukaryotic cells, bacterial cells, and archaebacterial cells- and given the tendency of viruses to cut and paste portions of genomes willy-nilly from and into their hosts, wondered if they weren’t the original vectors of the spread of DNA. While RNA replication is a better short-term edge for early life, DNA would provide not only stability, but far greater protection from viral attack- the double helix is much harder to crack open. Read the whole article for more- including more context.

Hey kids! It’s Fiskin’ time! Today’s victim: a British atheist who is apparently so wrapped up in making fun of Christian hostility to evolutionary theory that he forgot to study it at some point and winds up at the same or worse level of biological literacy than Michael Behe. He does have a handful of valid points- but it’s kind of hard to give him credit when he’s so intent on drowning us all in his own smug. Let’s follow along! Whee!

What creationists really hate is that we emerged by accident

1. Really? I thought what they really hated was that evolutionary theory doesn’t give them something concrete to point to and say with objective, irrefutable authority: “God did this and there’s absolutely no doubt about it. BOW IN AWE.”

2. Only by the loosest possible definition of “accident”.

But they’re lucky Darwin isn’t forced on us the way religion has been, otherwise the national anthem would start: “Our Gracious Queen will be saved or not according to a series of factors that are sod-all to do with God,” and once a week school assemblies would start with everyone singing:

“All things biological/ All matter sweet or frightening/ Are Godless, real and logical/ See — where’s the bleeding lightning?”

One gets the impression he thinks this is somewhat of a pity. Need I even point out that evolutionary theory has absolutely nothing to do with theology or metaphysics except that part of it that happens to contradict the precisely literal interpretations of religious creation accounts? (As do many, MANY other aspects of science, really.) Darwin died an atheist, but it wasn’t his understanding of the natural world that stripped him of his faith, it was the repeated pointless tragedies in his life- such as the deaths of three of his children of accident or illness before they hit puberty. Even if you accepted the premise that evolutionary theory invalidates all religion because they lose their “literal authority”, even I would say there’s a bit more to life than biology.

So they must have been created whole, as they are now, without changing. But this ignores the beauty of Darwin’s discovery, which is that species change not because they’re on a march towards perfection but by accident.

Excellent! You’ve managed to avoid a common misconception dating from Victorian misunderstanding of genetics that held evolution as an inevitable march toward wait what?

Survival of the fittest means those accidentally matching the requirements of a new situation, not the creatures most prone to winning a scrap.

ACCIDENTALLY? I recently burned nearly three thousand words on the subject of how the entire trick of life itself- evolution included- involves EXPLOITING chance, not stumbling through the eons with whatever feckless creatures of the moment that happen to luck into surviving. It’s true enough that fitness doesn’t mean the strongest- although it can certainly involve it- but fitness doesn’t mean being a lottery winner and nothing more, either. Fitness’s most literal definition is having the most children- or even just close kin, such as your brother or sister’s children- survive to reproduce themselves. That involves some small amount of luck in having to have the best alleles for a given situation or in not stumbling into a “rocks fall, everyone dies” event, but it has a lot MORE to do with being… strong, or smart, or fast, or just astoundingly good at scoring mates. Parental care- putting some kind of investment into young- is such a successful evolutionary strategy that massive numbers of species on this planet now depend on the hard work of their parents to have ANY chance of survival whatsoever, which is why rehabilitating an orphaned or tamed animal to the wild is such a massive pain in the ass. That’s not ACCIDENT. It’s a planet-wide self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing effort- and much of it is passing on (in very rudimentary cultural fashion) learned behavior- NOT the luck of the allele.

Otherwise by now the only hamsters to survive would be those ones who could pick up the wheel and smash it over their mate’s head, and the only surviving parrots would be the ones squawking: “Who wants some? Who wants some?”

Actually, the biggest evolutionary strength of the hamster is being able to reproduce like a little fuzzy machine (which is a lot of work), and the parrot’s is to be clever enough to exploit many different types of opportunity and food sources. There’s more than one way to have an edge- and the really ironic thing here is that the evolutionary edge that MANY different species have accumulated in various ways, from rats to coyotes to crows to cockroaches to our own beautiful selves, is to be extremely adaptable to changing situations, in the form of being an efficient generalist. To be nearly immune to accident in the form of a major environmental change, in other words.

And this dominance of the accidental is the most damning argument against intelligent design, because if all species were designed, it was hardly done by someone intelligent. If it was, how do you account for the parasitic wasp that lays eggs on its prey so they hatch and eat its victim while it’s still alive?

That’s quite an intelligent design from the perspective from the wasp, who has just secured a high-value food source for its babies- and there’s that parental care again, albeit in an early and rather impersonal form. What it isn’t is NICE. Neither biologists nor the religious say nature is nice, though some religions say it used to be.

What’s really sad here is that it’s NOT that hard to find examples of truly jury-rigged and generally bad design in nature that happens to be good enough to serve their owners into the next epoch.

More to the point, why are your most sensitive nerves at the end of your toe, where they’re most likely to get walloped?

So you watch where you’re fucking going so you don’t wallop them hard enough to break those relatively small and snappable bones.

Why are men’s testicles in such a vulnerable location, ay? Bloody vindictive design that is.

Because the body temperature optimal for keeping your mammalian self humming along so well aren’t optimal for spermatogenesis, where that much heat tends to damage the process. Cold-blooded animals get to keep theirs internally. If you’d asked why spermatogenesis works like that, on the other hand…

Why do dogs do the squashiest, most unpleasant turds that hide in the grass and spread themselves in the indentations on the bottom of your shoe, but don’t start smelling until you get indoors and then render the place uninhabitable until you’ve left every window open for a month? Why, why, why?

WHYYYYYYY OH WHYYYYY WOULD GOD EVER MAKE MY LIFE INCONVENIENT, DIFFICULT, OR UNCOMFORTABLE?! WHYYY?

Come on intelligent design people, the questions you have to answer have barely begun.

This is true. Why not step aside and let someone who has more than the most shallow possible knowledge of science or religion ask them?