(From TONMO, on a page about raising captive cuttlefish)

(via Australian Geographic)

Wait, good old days? I think I meant now.

The Louisville Area Christian Educator Support (LACES) organization had a conference, where Bryce Hibbard, principal of Southern High School (a public school!) was one of the speakers. He first tries to claim that teaching creationism in the school was perfectly legitimate.

Hibbard and other speakers told the teachers present that it was perfectly acceptable under Kentucky law to teach biblical creationism in addition to evolution in science classes, and he suggested future meetings with biology teachers to craft curriculum.

“I taught biology for 20 years in this state and didn’t know that if evolution is part of the curriculum, that I could have been teaching creation,” Hibbard said. “I thought I was sneaky if I had the kids … present it. So it was presented in my classroom by the kids, but I could have been doing it and didn’t know that.”

So not only does he think it’s OK to teach creationism in science class, but confesses that he’s spent 20 years intentionally subverting the law.

But look what else this same guy said at the same conference:

Addressing a common theme of the night — the kids who aren’t taken to church, and therefore “have no hope” — Hibbard told the crowd they should be missionaries to students, planting the seed of Christ.

“We’re in the greatest mission field,” Hibbard said. “At one point I was told, ‘You should be a youth minister,’ and someone said, ‘No, you’re in the greatest mission field there is, stay in the public school.’”

Huh. Teachers and administrators in a public school who regard their students as targets for evangelical conversion. That sounds illegal, unconstitutional, and a violation of the public trust to me. Can we have him arrested, or fired at least? Anyone out there a victim of the shitty education provided by Southern High School want to bring a case against this goober?

There’s more.

When asked if such biblical lessons in science class — taking time away from learning actual science — would stunt the academic growth of students, Hibbard replied that it would not, as creationism is “just another theory.”

“Certainly, that’s what (creationism) is,” Hibbard said. “A theory is a scientific understanding of what we know today. So evolution is a theory. Creation is a theory. Intelligent design is a theory. The theory of relativity is a theory. Yeah.”

This incompetent was teaching biology? For shame.

Maybe the video will help make sense of it all.

(via ZooBorns)

How else is Google Maps going to get coverage of the 70% of the planet underwater?

(via Cephalove)

Jebus. Anyone remember that abomination, I, Robot? How about I Am Legend? I steer clear of these movies with a high concept and a big name star, because usually what you find is that the story is a concoction by committee with an agenda solely to recoup the costs and make lots of money…so we get buzzwords and nods to high-minded causes and the usual action-adventure pap. Just looking at the trailer, I’m getting pissed off: it’s supposed to be a pro-environmentalism movie, and what’s it about? A guy running around in the wilderness fighting off the hostile wildlife.

Anyway, I got one of those generic invitations to help reassure the world that it’s a good science movie. Here’s part of what I was sent:

On May 31st, Columbia Pictures is releasing what is perhaps the biggest movie of the summer, After Earth, starring Will Smith, directed by M. Night Shyamalan.

No. Just no. Shyamalan is a hack. Why do people keep handing him big money and big projects?

There are a lot of science parallels to this film, and I write to see if you or a colleague might be interested in interviewing one of After Earth’s top filmmakers and or a scientist associated herein.

Famous futurist Ray Kurzweil

Jesus fuck. Kurzweil is a consultant? Pill-popping techno-geek with an immortality fetish and no understanding of biology at all is the consultant on a movie with a supposed environmental message? WHY?

explored with Will, his son Jaden Smith, and Elon Musk, how science fact meets science fiction in After Earth, and tghis can be seen here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RocpHuJWolc. As well, XPRIZE has teamed up with Sony to launch an unprecedented robotics challenge (information attached). What’s more, NASA plans to disseminate a lesson plan to teachers based on the scientific implications of After Earth, as seen here http://www.lifeafterearthscience.com/.

OK, I checked out the lesson plan. It’s not bad, but it has nothing to do with the movie — it’s all about biodiversity and cycles and climate change and that sort of thing, by a respectable author of biology textbooks. It’s a merkin to cover the toxic crap that will be in the movie.

In After Earth, earth has devolved, in a sense, to a more primordial state, forcing mankind to leave. One thousand years after this exodus, the planet has built up defense mechanisms so as to prevent the return of its previous human inhabitants. It might be said that nature reacted this way because it perceived humans as a threat to its survival.

“Devolved”? “Primordial state”? Look at the trailer. It’s a lush planet thick with plant and animal life, nothing to force people out. Except, of course, the bizarre hint that there are rapid — really rapid — weather changes (I won’t call it “climate”), in which you can be running through a temperate forest and suddenly a tree will freeze. Yeah, right. As for the teleological rationale, just gag it, goofballs.

Given the backing behind it, the extravagantly expensive Will Smith, the fact that he’s using it as a vehicle to give his son star billing, the horrible director, and the hints of bad science in the trailer, I’m going to call this one right now: it’s going to suck. It will be shiny and glossy and have lots of CGI, but it will suck hard.

I saw Iron Man 3 last night, and let me just say…I am so tired of SF movies that resolve all of their conflicts with a big battle with the baddies, preferably featuring huge explosions and impossible physics. This one is going to up the ante with idiot biology added to the profit-making mix.

They asked if I wanted to interview any of the scientists or writers involved. I don’t think so.

Although a conversation with Ray Kurzweil could be…fun.

It’s going to be a good season, I can tell already. It’s finals week, so I’ll still have an abrupt pile of grading to do on Thursday, but otherwise, my teaching obligations are done for the semester. Now I’m trapped, trapped I tell you, in Morris for almost (I do have two quick trips to Europe planned) the entire summer with a collection of administrative responsibilities, but the good part of that is that I have ambitious plans for what I’ll be doing in the lab. I’m also going to be living the good life.

So this morning I slept in to 7:00. I know, it’s slothful of me, but I have the freedom to indulge myself a little bit now and then. After I got up, I took a nice brisk walk downtown, did some shopping, stocked up on some fresh vegetables, and once I got home, chopped them up and set them to soak in a tasty marinade. I’ll roast them up for dinner tonight.

Then I started reading up an accumulated mass of papers that’ll give me some implementation ideas for the work I have planned.

I’ll have a student working with me, and we’ve got a couple of projects in the works.

1. There’s some boring scut work to be done: lab cleanup, clearing out old reagents from the refrigerator, making up new stock solutions. Don’t be disillusioned, but part of the research life is janitorial…so much dishwashing.

2. My grand plan requires an expansion of my fish colony to include multiple genetic strains, so we’re going to be scrubbing tanks, sterilizing surfaces, setting up new tanks with boring feeder fish to get the nitrogen cycle going and condition the water, getting the brine shrimp hatchery (live fish food!) thriving, all that sort of stuff that qualifies you to be a clerk in a pet store.

3. Once all the tanks are bubbling away happily, we’re getting some new strains from the zebrafish stock center. Then it’s a few months of nursing them along, collecting eggs, propagating new generations and raising them to adulthood to get the whole colony self-sustaining, and to prepare for crosses to produce hybrid strains. After all this, my student will be well-trained to be a hobbyist aquarist.

4. Concurrently, we’ll be doing some real science on the embryos we get, analyzing their behavior quantitatively to identify consistent differences between strains, and also in response to different environmental stresses. This is going to require a bit of computer work and — oh, no! — basic math to develop image analysis protocols. That’s what I’ve been reading about; I’ve done some of this in the past on an obsolete software system, so I’m going to have to piece together some custom bits to make it all work. I’ve been reading about Fourier analysis and power spectra all morning, and I’m kinda jazzed. Math! Computers! Embryos! Science!

5. The dream is that once we’ve found some subtle differences between different strains, we can start doing crosses to dissect out and isolate the genetic components, if any, of the behavior. That’s going to take a couple of generations of crosses, which means that if I’m lucky we’ll get those results next year, or at worst, the year after. Behavioral Genetics! Yay! Long generation times! Boo!

It’s step #4 that’ll give us some quick quantitative results, I hope, and maybe something presentable at a meeting or even publishable. It’s all going to be preliminary and descriptive, but that’s what you need to do to establish a foundation for experiments.

Unfortunately for you, I won’t be blogging about any of the details of the work this summer — I’ve been scooped before when I foolishly posted protocols on the web, and especially when you have a very small lab with limited humanpower to throw at a problem, that costs. But I might just occasionally say a few general things about the kinds of analyses we’re doing.

Or I could talk about the moldy stuff we throw out of the refrigerator. That’s probably safe.

You know, if she starts sending me cats, I’m just gonna blow up. Me posting cats? That would be one of the signs of the End Times, along with the Last Trump and deluges of blood and whores riding dragons.

(via NatGeo)