I was over at Pharyngula just now, and I saw this adorable picture as part of PZ Myers’ war pitting adorable cephalopods against dumb kittys. I saw this picture, and figured I should caption it.
Jim
I MAKED A LOLCTOPUS
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Category Archives: animals
Sasquatches!
Let me begin by saying that there is no such thing as Sasquatch. This should be reasonably obvious to any thinking person, and yet I continue to see articles and Discovery Channel programming about how maybe just maybe there really is a Sasquatch. What concerns me is the fact that they are once again trying to promote this silly idea with supposedly legitimate science.
What if, the lunatics say, a real Sasquatch was actually a species of ape we haven’t encountered yet? Or mightn’t it be a member of a species such as Neandertal man that we thought was eradicated but still lives on? Or what if it was just a regular human who in some way was born genetically discombobulated, and lives like a wild man in the wilderness? Or maybe it’s a regular person who is becoming a shaman in the wild?
Well, then we would all be truly stunned.
Veterinarian Woo
Last night, I was working from home. I was focused on what I was doing, occasionally glancing up at the TV. And then I saw a lump of the ridiculous. I believe it was on Daily Planet, but I could be wrong. I checked the Discovery Channel’s listing of daily planet episodes, but at the time I checked it only went up to March 9th’s episode two days ago, so I cannot be certain if that was what I was watching. At any rate, along came a terrific load of woo that I would be remiss if I didn’t comment on.
A veterinarian at some zoo was showing off how they, much like the medical community, were integrating alternative medicine into their practice. In the example I looked up to see, she was sticking a camel with acupuncture needles as treatment for, if memory serves, arthritis. I have searched this morning to see if I could find the video, but at present I have not found it. What I have found are other examples of veterinary acupuncture, including an item that may or may not be an older version of this same vet named Dr. Barbara Royal (I don’t know if it was her on the show or not) performing acupuncture on a camel named Jewel. I had never heard of this, but it turns out that it is in no way new. If you search “veterinary acupuncture” on youtube, you get a handful of incredible claims such as this one which features Dr. Karen Becker explaining animal acupuncture, brought to you by the Lord of the Woo-Dance, Dr. Joe Mercola’s healthy pets site.
Timeless Love
Romeo and Juliet… King Arthur and Gwenhwyfar… Helen of Troy and that guy who slaughtered all those people to get her back again… Adam and Eve… It seems like all the stories of timeless love really are nothing more than stories. When I was an ugly, nerdy kid, I would hear these stories (or in the case of Romeo and Juliet, eviscerate them line by line in a high school English class in what must have been an attempt to ensure that nobody would ever find a shred of beauty in Shakespeare’s words ever again) and wonder sadly what was wrong with me that I couldn’t even get a date.
Well, times have changed. I now find myself an ugly, nerdy adult blissfully trapped in a timeless love with a ridiculously wonderful woman whom I refer to on this blog solely as The Lovely Lady because I don’t need you creeps creeping on her. And today I saw a picture that makes me think that timeless love is possible. All it takes is enough amber.
Dolphinspeak
I love dolphins. They’re neat. Their physiology is interesting and tells a fascinating tale of returning to the seas, they have blow-holes (who doesn’t love blow-holes??), and they seem smart. They are also real jerks from what I understand, practicing things like gang rape and murder for fun, and that makes them far more interesting a species. It also lets me be smug to hippies who tell me that we should be more like the sweet and loving dolphin.
I’ve always been impressed with the intelligence displayed by dolphins, who if I’m not mistaken (and this is me remembering something I had heard and not citing specific sources, so it might be crap) have a similar brain to body mass as humans and crows. The cool waterpark shows we put them in seem patronizing when you think about just how amazing these creatures are. And now they have a new thing to brag about.
The Legs Of The Whales
I had a rather interesting conversation with someone close to me last night who I have always known to be one of the faithful. She explained that she had finally come to a point in her life where she believed in a loving and actively involved creator, but that the particular dogmas of her faith had long since fallen flat with her, and that she looked at so much of the theology as ridiculous rubbish. This made me happy. However, she then expressed that she similarly couldn’t believe other stories, like how we came from apes. This made me sad.
The near-perfect lack of understanding of evolution held by the masses frustrates me, because the lack of understanding leaves doubt in their minds. It was this same frustration that led to Boy Infidel and I starting this blog; reason is beautiful, and ignorance is unfortunate, and we wanted to do all in our power to promote the rational.
The Eyes Have It
(The usual caveat applies to this piece. I am not an expert on the eye, and have at best a layman’s understanding. This is not a post that will contain absolute factual bloop-a-dee-doo about the eye, so inaccuracies they are to be expected, and if you know better than I about anything I say here, by all means please correct me in the comments. The inspiration for this posting was reading the section on Tarsiers in Richard Dawkins’ delightful The Ancestor’s Tale, which if you are intrigued by evolution and fascinated by the tree of life, I highly suggest you read.)
The more you learn about eyes, the more you realize just how cool we are. Eyes are just essentially packages of these weird thingies that respond to electromagnetic waves, and the brain takes note of which thingies are reacting and creates for us a representation of that electromagnetic input in what we determine is color. Because we generally have blue, green, and red thingies, meaning receptors that react to the waves at frequencies that we associate in our brains with those colors, we see the world in shades of those three. We don’t (as a rule) have thingies that react to extremely long waves like radio waves, and we don’t have thingies that react to extremely short waves like ultraviolet, and so we simply don’t see those colors.
Those Darned Crows
I’ve mentioned before how impressive I think crows are. From all that I’ve seen, they appear to be evolving an intellect that is impressive to say the least. Of course, there are some key words in that statement, the most important one is “appear”. It is possible that crows have always had this kind of intelligence and it isn’t something that is evolving before our eyes.
Tool use is an important factor in how we assess animal intellect, and this Wired article talks about yet another possible example of tool use being shown by a group of New Caledonian crows. It’s fascinating stuff in my opinion, and a logical step that would lead from the initial tool use we have seen.
The Ark Park – God Gave Us Dominion, So The Animals Will Do What They’re Told
I don’t know if Ark Park is the actual proposed name, but there has been some uproar around the Answers in Genesis plan to make a giant theme park in Kentucky devoted to promoting the truths of Creationism. I have stayed largely silent on the topic because I do not have much to add to the conversation. I agree that it is ridiculous to spend $37 million taxpayer dollars on a calamity of this nature. It would be a strange choice to spend that kind of money on a private theme park, but adding in the religious overtones really makes this a tacky decision.
But Bug Girl at the Skepchicks blog has a really great point that I felt was worth sharing around the care of the animals they will have at the theme park. Read it.
Stripey Kitty! Spotty Kitty!
I’m NOT one of the LOLCAT masses. Oh, I get the jokes and have made some on several occasions when circumstances were suitable, and I’ve quoted parts of the Lolcat Bible when trying to be insulting to Creationists. But I don’t spend hours finding OMG SEW KEWT pictures of cats, and I don’t devote posts on this site to kittehs. That’s not a condemnation of others who do; I love Cute Animal Fridays on Skepchick, Caturdays on Why Evolution Is True, and Mary’s Monday Metazoan posts on Pharyngula. I just usually don’t bother.
However, this kitteh story is worth sharing because it’s interesting science. Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True blog has this fantastic article about some research that has been done on cat coat patterns. I thought I’d share it and hope that some of you read it, fall in love with the adorable pictures, and learn a little something about evolutionary theory. As it happens, today I started in (finally) on Dr. Coyne’s book and am already enjoying the bejeebus out of it, so buy the thing and support excellent scientific writing. Better that than more books by Hovind.
Jim