When we last left the never-ending thread, the subject was cooking. Eat this!
One thing that annoys me in these shows is the completely uncritical acceptance of a culture's primitive beliefs in sympathetic magic. It's meat, people. It's got no powers other than the basic, material ones of providing nutrients.
More like this
No.
However, there is never a shortage of crankery from Mike Adams who asserts Microwave ovens destroy the nutritional value of your food. There may be too much idiocy here to address but let's get started.
The rise of widespread nutritional deficiencies in the western world correlates almost…
File this under You Can't Make Stuff Like This Up.
Just when I think People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) can't get any more zany or ridiculous in its never-ending battle against meat eating, it comes up with a gem like sending a request to the jail where a cannibal killer is being…
As someone who's spent a lot of time in a University setting, one of the thing that often shocks me is the number of vegans that are out there. Why is it shocking? Because you need meat for proper nutrition. Now, I thought this was common knowledge, that humans are omnivores and that eating other…
Last week, we watched Evolve: Eyes on the History Channel; tonight, shall we watch the next episode, Evolve: Guts, together? Tune in shortly!
A disgusting beginning: competitive eaters? Bleh. It's a basic introduction to mammalian digestive physiology — I can tell we're going to get lots of Big…
It's a rule of thumb here to give someone new a chance, so what might have been genuine curiosity is not taken to be malicious.
For the person above, now it could be that they were just curious as to something they had heard, or it could be someone who is looking for some justification for their sexist views. It's best to give them the benefit of the doubt at least initially, hence "the 3-comment rule"
Walton, it's not a rule, it's but "A suggestion for the comments" by PZ.
Ah, John thanks, I had been looking for that !!
And actually, looking through that thread, Pygmy Loris/Monado/Chimpy/Ichthyic/Owlmirror/Kristine/Ron Sullivan were all there in 2006 !!
I know what you mean.
Why ?
I agree that there are some first comments where it doesn't apply (eg a new commenter called Evolutionisascam asks the why are there still monkeys question).
But for many cases, I think it's a fair rule.
For instance, I think it applies to the nelly-s comment above.
I I have always been extremely good at understanding and rehabilitating pet dogs and cats with emotional issues. I don't know if this rises to the level of the sort of thing you're thinking about, but here are some anecdotal examples.
When I was a teenager, we adopted a little cocker spaniel bitch. Sandy was so timorous around men that when she met my father (also good with dogs), she peed herself and shook. Patient and careful handling got her to where she would accept him and look up to him, but she would hide whenever another man came to the house. As my brothers grew, she became more and more scared of them, even though she had no reason to fear them. Not a phobia, I suppose, and I'm sure that somewhere in the past she had been abused by a man, but if she had been a human, she would have reason to see a professional to work out her fear issues. She had a puppy who we raised and who turned out to be smart, devoted, and well-adjusted, so the available evidence is for trauma and against a heritable disorder.
I have three cats. My vet (one of the directors of the Winn Feline Foundation) told me that their studies show that female cats inherit their personality traits from their fathers. In the case of my kitty Ink, I had occasion to meet her father (unmistakably so) when we came to pick her up as a kitten, and though he was feral, he was so social that he investigated us as we approached the house. He was obviously an arrogant and dominating cat with an ingratiating manner, and his kitten is the same, always bossing my other (larger) cats around and giving me just enough affection to "keep me in line," so to speak. She is quite manipulative, though I would not say she is unhealthy.
My other two cats have issues that I would identify as possible mental problems. Snark, an ordinary domestic shorthair, was picked up as a half-drowned eight-week-old in a driving rainstorm, huddled next to his dead mother behind a dumpster. Since then Snark has had issues dealing with water in a normal way. He cannot be bathed in even an inch of water in a dishpan because he howls with great fear and desperation, and bites if the water touches his face. Whenever I take a shower, he sits outside the tub and whines. He approaches his water dish cautiously and makes ritualized motions and sounds that, if directed at another cat, would be postures of defensive aggression. A slowly dripping faucet seems to be relatively nonthreatening. Snark also appears to suffer from short fear episodes every few weeks where he huddles against the wall and moans for a few minutes. He is not physically ill. After an episode, he will come to me and bury his face in my side and purr; this is the only time he ever does purr.
Smoky is a Maine Coon rescue. Maine Coons are one of the most intelligent breeds, as well as the largest, and Smoky is certainly both. When I got him he was depressed and in need of constant reassurance and cuddling. He has a history of being picked on by other cats. His mannerisms are childish; he often tries to nurse on Ink, who is half his size, and she gets irritated (ear and tail flicks and stiff, resistant "body language") and tries to walk away, then he gets upset (insistent meows) and they spat. He has a cute but irritating habit of tapping me with his outstretched claws as far up as he can reach (my shoulder, when I am seated at the computer) when he thinks he needs something, which is every half hour when he isn't asleep. Despite his insecurity and attitude problems, Smoky is a good cat and has gotten much better over the past few years.
Actually they are all good cats and dogs. None of them were destructive or wild. All of them learned to behave properly (I have zero scratches in my upholstered furniture and we have no litter box "accidents").
Could cats and dogs have things organically wrong with their brains that affect behavior? Certainly. I've known dogs who could not, even as puppies, be socialized or taught to control their elimination. I've known retarded cats, and weeks-old kittens with bizarre behaviors. My vet says that many diseases and disorders affect behavior. I guess my take on all of this is that if you can define how cats and dogs act as "personality" and "behavior" and "socialization," it is legitimate to ascribe some "emotion" and "thought" to them as well.
This does not mean I'm going to run off and join PETA. Cats and dogs are not humans; at best they share certain characteristics with us in a way that we are best positioned to recognize easily and respond to. That is why they "make good pets." Animals that do not make good pets are those that share fewer characteristics with us, or that we find more difficult to understand.
A new, cloudless day, two new gaps in the fossil record!!!
Meet Sanajeh, the intermediate-mouthed snake (open-access pdf) from the end of the Cretaceous.
Today there are narrow-mouthed snakes, which can't swallow anything larger than their heads, and there are wide-mouthed snakes (Macrostomata); the latter have amazingly mobile skulls, including mobile palate bones for pulling themselves over prey (the palate bears teeth as usual). Sanajeh provides an intermediate: the mobile palate is present, but the mouth can't be made very wide. The 3.5-m-long skeleton was found together with sauropod dinosaur eggs; the snake wasn't able to swallow the spherical eggs, so it probably waited for the 0.5-m-long hatchlings to come out. Check out fig. 2.
Close relatives of Sanajeh have been known for a long time, but only from incomplete remains, especially no snout/palate bones. Too bad they died out a few tens of thousands of years ago (Australia had the last ones).
<increasing heart rate>
<slight opening of mouth; hissing sound at every inhalation>
Aspirine? Sold over here in pharmacies in huge amounts – the fizzing tablets I bought have 500 mg aspirine each.
<pushes tablets into tubes of Internet>
(...Paracetamol? WTF. That's an industrial-strength one. Do Americans seriously take paracetamol against a simple headache!?!)
Feynmaniac and a_ray_in_dilbert_space as usual.
:-)
WTF.
Beliefs?
Theory-based knowledge as opposed to knowledge-based theory!?!
...Ignore me, I'm getting holy wrath again.
I laughed so hard...
What does it mean?
It does sound good to say "fuck" in Mandarin: cào, with a very loudly aspirated [tsʰ] at the beginning, and an inbuilt exclamation mark (that's the "`" part). It being a verb, it's not used alone, but rather you say "I fuck" when you're not content with the general situation: wǒ cào.
Sure, why not?
Although, of course, this applies:
I suppose a careful diagnosis is needed. 1 in 5 sounds a bit much.
Gene regulation, for instance. There's a gene on the Y chromosome that switches the transcription of genes on other chromosomes on... it gets a lot more complicated, but that gene (SRY, "sex-determining region on the Y chromosome") is one well-understood example.
Importantly, however, if Darwin really claimed we humans are getting more dimorphic over time, he was wrong. Not only is it not happening, we are also considerably less dimorphic than chimps, gorillas, or orang-utans.
Well, what is self-awareness in the first place.
If one wants evidence that animals can suffer mental illness you need only look to the behaviour some wild animals exhibit when held in captivity.
What? Over here we call it Tylenol, and we used to call it Panadol, and we call it all sorts of things, if you're referring to acetaminophen. It's so common over here I can spell it without looking it up. It's basically the default pain reliever. We give it to infants for minor fever. I take it because aspirin, ibuprofen, and ketoprofen irritate my stomach.
Your reaction does, however, explain the concern of a pharmacist in Langenhagen when I asked her for some for slight post-surgical pain (I was feeling it a little after a long work day). She asked me if I was sure I knew what it was and if I had ever taken it before.
Well, Amanda Palmer's gone down a few notches and still sinking. Not that I'm surprised, but I expected better of her. Also, "technically" doesn't mean what she thinks it means.
Reading the post you're responding to, and your own, I'm strangely reminded of some old Dilbert cartoon. For some reason, the titular character is in some weirdly sadistic training session in which he is required not to flip out on a guy brought in expressly to say some spectacularly stupid shit... He is finding this extremely difficult, as said stupid shit builds up extremely rapidly. In the last panel, we see him holding his head, apparently experiencing pain due to the sheer effort involved...
... 'kay, so actually, like a lot of Dilbert, it was really only vaguely funny at best. But it did contain the word 'Yugo', which is one of those oddly intrinsically funny words--sorta like 'bagel' and 'rutabaga'... So it worked okay, on balance, I guess.
(/*Anyway, my point is, I feel your pain. There is something slightly sadistic to those with functioning forebrains about the three-comment rule. And, more to the point, if we had a proper method of measuring stupid, and could set that as the shenanigans threshold instead, that comment would easily have passed it on its own, I'm sure.)
Facepalm Alert, Bill Donohue's latest press releasewhining :
OBAMA AIDES HOST CATHOLIC BASHERS
If President Obama does not want to go to church, that is his business. But it is the business of the American people, most all of whom are believers, to know where the president and his administration stand with regards to their concerns. It is not likely that this outreach to anti-religious activists—many of whom would crush Christianity if they could—will do anything to calm the fears of people of faith. Indeed, it will only alienate them even further.
Poor little people of faith who fear the big bad atheists who want to crush Christianity. I'm going to praycry for them :
HIIIII-HIIIII-SNIF-SNIF
(that's the french version of crying)
I don't spend much of my time considering evolution in humans 1) because I find humans to be a sadly boring organisms (only two interacting genomes, no persistent embryonic tissue, and a completely milquetoast breeding system), and 2) because claims of evolution in modern humans are often retarded, such as that being discussed here. Sexual dimorphism aside: Human populations are so panmictic that selection pressures would have to be immensely strong to allow any new variant to spread with any efficiency, AND the strength of selection would have to be uniform across human populations.
If your stomach gets irritated, that's obviously a good reason, and surgery isn't the same as a headache, but over here the default against headache is aspirin, and most people don't ever take any other pain reliever. Interesting cultural difference.
They host Catholic bashers? They host bashers who are Catholic?
Oh, they host Catholic-bashers…
They do host Catholic bashers, too, I bet. Just not at the same time.
<thumbs up>
HIIIII? I only know OUIIIIIIN !!! That sounds a lot better. Nobody cries "ee".
... I'm just posting this comment to say that I'm passing on the probably six billion vaguely Benny Hill-esque punchlines this line offers only because I'm a better person than that.
(/Not much, no. But a little, at least.)
To be honest, I rather avoid painkillers for headaches. I'm so prone to them that I'm afraid I'd eventually just start popping painkillers on a daily basis "just in case".
Catholics? Check out this article about Catholics:
Study: Female Students More Promiscuous at Catholic Colleges.
I can't resist asking: already up or <shudder> still up at 9 in the morning?
I only take aspirin for extreme or long-lasting headaches, which aren't common (for instance when I have the flu). I tend to sleep instead (…which I'd do anyway, but… well).
From there:
Being on the Internet, I've heard about the stereotype, but… how does this work? It doesn't make any sense for there to be a difference by a factor of 4.
This, on the other hand, doesn't surprise me at all, except that I think Hill has cause and effect mixed up.
It seems like they didn't use it in Firefly (AFAICT). In Firefly Mandarin and English are used in space because China and the US were the ones who settled it. I guess in the future Chinese is used for obscenities much in the same way as in English where (generally) German based words are considered more vulgar than the Latin/French derived equivalent (due to historical reasons). Considering all the poor Hispanics in the US I still think Spanish will become a major source of vulgarity for American English (funny, since its a Romance language). There already are some examples, like cojones or huevos.
Case in point: I'm probably having a mild headache right now, because of the weather or so. I didn't notice, because I thought I'm just being tired, which in fact I am, additionally.
:-)
I'm strangely relieved, but only because I've always hated her voice. She's a horrible singer. I'm sorry, I'm sorry!!!!!!! She and Gwen Stefani. Blech.
Isn't this lovely? A wannabe murderous monster tries to hide behind charges of the alleged racism of his critics. It also seems that a concern troll can run their own blog.
As for obscenity, this person shows gay scat porn as examples of 'typical gay porn' at churches in order to gain support for his murderous desire. But you better be fucking civil to his PhD!
the headache send me to bed extra-early, so already up, this time.
Students of Catholic Universities who themselves aren't all that Catholic are probably from strict religious families and have their first taste of freedom when entering college. so they go completely overboard, where kids from less strict upbringings have a more measured response to college-freedoms.
Jadehawk, OM, #518:
That's about how I am as well. I'm not sure if they're actually migraines, but they're usually not so unbearably painful that I simply must find a painkiller right away. They are usually coupled with nausea and sensitive to light and sound. If it gets bad enough, and something is readily available, I Otherwise, I just suffer through it.
* * *
By the way, Jadehawk, I hope I didn't put you in a bad mood. I get what you're saying now (#354 helped), and I just think about music differently. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
I'm more inclined to think about music, rather than have it playing in background without paying attention. It's almost certainly due to my experiences and training as a musician, but I do feel like I get some "knowledge" when listening to music (new, or old from a different performer or in a different context). What exactly that is probably depends on the situation. I recognize melodies, harmonies and rhythms I've heard before, etc. I already have knowledge of music and about music, so whatever new stuff I hear adds to that and refers back to it. To some extent everyone does this, but perhaps some aren't entirely aware of it.
Anyway, except for responding to what I interpreted as an incorrect factual claim (triggering my SIWOTI syndrome), I just like to write about music and could do it endlessly, even longer than the endless thread itself. My apologies if anyone finds it excessively boring or annoying.
Janine, you should see what the wannabe murderer wrote here:
Uh oh, I accidentally deleted some important words...
Mr T:
Oh, not at all. Keep it up. It's one of my vices, too.
Gyeong Hwa Pak, I do not want to sound overly critical but when you quote, you should provide a link. But it is obvious where you got that.
I have to laugh. Why does he call having a blog a good thing? Plenty of sub literate pissants operate their own blogs. But it takes a special person who uses their blog to advocate for the imprisoning and killing of ten to twenty percent of the population.
... oddly enough, I'd delete different ones:
(/I keed. I keed. I'd actually say I'm actually sorta cautious, too, 'bout overusing anything, whether over-the-counter or prescription. My philosophy is not so much just 'suck it up' so much as 'kay... let's count some costs and benefits, here'... but anyway.)
I normally do. Must be too early.
Even Orac is calling out the Colgate Twins for data on their unsubstantiated claims (this time in response to Kirshenbaum opining on how Science Blogs are getting so mean and possibly without value now):
Emphasis mine.
Mr T: I have a friend who is a percussion professor, and I like to get him talking about music...Music is a weird thing in that every one is familiar with it on some level, but some people just know a whole lot more than others. Like you, my friend is not an ambient music guy...he either listens or he turns it off. There was a day when we were sitting in my office drinking coffee, and he slowly faded from a conversation that he had more or less initiated...as if he had become entranced. When I finally got his attention he told me that he was listening to my coffee maker, and that he really enjoyed the sounds of puffs of steam that come at the end of the process. We sat and listened for a little while...pretty rad, in my book.
One of my favorite things about academics is that I am guaranteed to be surrounded by people who know a lot about diverse and interesting things, and who don't take sound for granted.
Also, Dania: Faith No More rawks! Ever hear their cover of War Pigs?
Oh yeah... Mr. T: The point was keep writing. I think what you have to say is interesting, submoronic as I am about such things.
Arghhh....apparently Bilbo has replaced Kw*k as the InterDungeon star. Honestly, do they go out of their way to recruit Pharyngula rejects?
Hey now, leave me out of this!
(... Also, look on the bright side: it keeps me off the streets.)
Somewhat more seriously, re Ssempa's porn show, and his threat/offer to take it to parliament, did he?
I'm just wondering because I'd like to read the transcript. Especially the opposition questions:
'The honourable member for X province would like to know: where and how did Mr. Ssempa find this material?...'
(/...And what is Mr. Ssempa doing Friday evening? A few of us on this side of the house could bring him along on our regular thing... Our feeling is he may find it liberating...)
It was inevitable the way they used attacking PZ to crank up blog traffic. People who could put up with the echo chamber that they try to foster would stay, and they are not challenged since people are more interested in being "right" than being "correct" (and the people that cared about rigor and supporting arguments through honest debate were turned off by Mooney's sleazy behavior). And the Pharyngula rejects are nothing if not self-righteous. They fit right in, as long as they're willing to agree with the host and bash New Atheists. You see Mabus and Davison occasionally there, among others. I stopped following the blog some time ago, but have been poking my head in since the Templeton thing out of morbid curiousity. They still haven't added "Templeton Fellow" to the intro blurb for the blog.
In a typical example of great timing, I posted the URL for the San Francisco falconcam on the day they changed it. Here's
the new one .
There's one in San Jose too.
…argh… sorry, I've read about this effect (more in the context of fundie protestants, but still), it's immediately intuitively obvious, and yet I forgot about it, not having ever witnessed it firsthand. It's a very quiet day, and I'm preparing an illustration (a time-calibrated phylogenetic tree) for the next manuscript, which is very meditative work.
I love it! It's one of the few times on here that a subject comes up in an area I actually feel confident talking about. Your thoughts and analysis is appreciated, at least by me, what is your musical background anyway? Do you teach?
Thanks to those of you who've pointed out a couple of things I hadn't known--first, that because males only have one x chromosome whatever's on that is what they get, and second that sexual dimorphism isn't expressed in genes per se, but rather is more a result of male hormones (I think I got that right). To those of you who immediately labelled me stupid or sexist for not knowing something and wanting to understand enough about how sexual dimorphism works to dispute the contention that women are 'evolving' to be more feminine (as a feminist, and a very non-'feminine' woman, I found this difficult to swallow, but didn't know enough to refute it), I found this very discouraging and de-motivating. And to the one of you who called me a 'drive-by' [presumably a drive-by stupid sexist troll], I figured I ought to at least comment once more to refute that.
Oooh bad grammar. Bad bad grammar. Apologies.
That's a migraine all right.
I get them maybe 6-8 times a year, not often enough to make preventative meds worth it IMO. My physician prescribed some huge pills with acetaminophen, caffeine, and a short-acting barbiturate. Problem is the "nausea" I get involves vomiting every 20 minutes or so, so oral meds don't help much. Only thing I can do is lie down in the dark and wait for sleep. I lose a whole day. It sucks.
@ neddy-s
Thanks for posting again then to clarify. I hope you stick around because you'll learn a lot more about those things (or at least I have). When I first posted here I got a similar reaction for being genuinely ignorant of some things and a little bit naive. I was a little vitamin/homeopathy woo oriented, for instance. I was also in a bit of a bad place emotionally because of some personal troubles. Of course when I started posting here I was also very young! But it's been worth it to participate over the years, and recently I've done so a lot more.
People can be prickly but it's only because there are really a lot of people who come by and ask things like that just to provoke or try to justify their weird ideas.
Neddy-S, ever hear of an internet search engine called Google? You type in search parameters, like say "human+sexual+dimorphism" (minus the quotes), and a wealth of information suddenly is available. Some of it is written by experts in the field. You can even refine the search as you discover new information.
Your comment about women becoming more subservient did sound a bit sexist. Considering the plasticity of the human brain, and the need for cultural learning, it would be hard to assess if the the traits your mentioned are actually being selected for, or are just cultural artifacts.
Neddy-s,
I'm glad you got the info here to refute these kinds of claims. Anytime you here stories of how selection is acting in humans, you should be very wary. The popular media tend to sensationalize very tentative findings, and evolutionary psychology is a very, very fuzzy discipline.
I agree--I have been learning a lot on this site; I've been reading it pretty regularly for a few months. But now that I've had personal exposure to the community, it's really leaving a bad taste in my mouth, which is unfortunate for me as I don't think I'll be able to continue to read it any more without having negative feelings. There comes a point when you're learning about something that just reading about it is insufficient, and you actually want to ask specific questions to people who can assess what you need to know and help you along, but it's difficult to do that in a specialised field you're not involved in yourself and where you don't know anyone who is (I've actually tried discussing this issue with my biology teacher and with a woman I met at a conference who said she was an expert in genetics--I said I'd been thinking about it for a while!--but neither really seemed to grasp what it was I was trying to figure out, partially probably because I'm not knowledgeable enough to express my question(s) clearly). But I think I'm just going to have to accept my logistical limitations and stop here unless someday I happen to actually befriend a geneticist.
neddy-s: the neverending thread is indeed the place for any and all questions, but especially as you're first establishing a persona it's good to add in some background. Some of us are fairly quick on the trigger finger because there have been an awful lot of people who come in trying for a fight. Not as many since registration got stabilized, but still a few here and there. You didn't mean to, but your phrasing stumbled upon the same construction that a lot of fairly nasty characters use to "just ask a question" when they are really trying to insinuate eugenic arguments. People are happy to help; you just happened to word your first comment the wrong way (like accidentally wearing the wrong color in the wrong part of town) and without enough surrounding info (you had looked it up, you're leaning towards one answer or the other, this is how it came up wrt your situation, etc.) to be clear what was going on.
And just as another explanation (no excuse, just explanation), huge numbers of us have been seriously on edge lately due to a lot of internet misunderstandings and are just generally more pissy than usual.
Antiochus Epiphanes
Well, that's almost ambient music right there, though probably not in the sense you meant. Record it, replicate it, transform it, add reverb tails longer than your attention span, and put it on iTunes. Instant Eno.
Neddy-s
Have to agree with you on some of the comments being off-putting. This is not the place for thin skins.
Welcome to the Jungle.
But I have not found a care-bear forum with as much information.
I actually have a conjecture (less than a theory you know) that pz set up pharyngula discussions as an experiment for testing the relative survivability of aggressive web-species. Grrrrr.
Anyway, you dimorphism question has lots of things going on. Some already mentioned but another would be that the brutishness of males and the grace of females could be from the same gene and just expressed differently due to different 'expression' genes that are sex linked. It just gets more complicated the more you find out. And don't just pick out the male hormones. The female ones are just as powerful.
I think the submissive thing has some real historical troubles too...would seem, at least in the Western world, that any pressure on selecting submissiveness has lessened rather than increased, recently anyway. And then you have the trouble of no longer isolating populations. Time for another Amish study I guess, since human breeding experiments are notoriously difficult to manage and get funded. (hehe)
Anyway good luck. I would think that people here would remember how much BAD evolutionary information is out there and hold their fire a bit but this is the internet.
But just so you don't get the idea that they are picking on you specifically - when I tell folks about the culture here I tell them about the thread where everyone was told that a little naive was going to stop by and ask questions and people were tossing F-bombs about - probably while she was typing her intro....ah, good times.
No! No! She's wit' da Crips, I tells ya! Get out the lead pipes!
...'Kay, seriously, as one of those who did more than sorta go off on that, my apologies. As Carlie put it, yes, some of us are a bit twitchy, of late. I'll go take some antispasmodics, be right back.
(/I'd also like to blame the fact that winter seems to be ending, here, already, and it hardly just began, and this really, really makes me cranky. Anyway, again, apologies.)
We give it to infants for minor fever.
Yep. It started sometime in the early '80s (at least, that's when I recall the big push starting), with a co-relation between aspirin and Reye's Syndrome being found in kids; I think they still advise against giving aspirin to anyone under about 18 without a doctor's advice.
I am like the worst at taking my own good advice to myself:
I'm willing to accept these unreferenced assertions, I guess (I know, I know, Anthro 101. Never took it).
And I am not in any way defending any particular racial classification, nor even the classical concept of race. OK?
But.
I can look out into my classroom of 100 students, and for almost all of them I can infer (with varying degrees of precision) the geographical origin of (at least some of) their ancestors. I really can; so can you.
This is not about black, white, brown, and yellow (a set of terminology, btw, that I find really unfortunate).
It's about sub-Saharan Africa, south Asia, east Asia, southern Europe, northern Europe, etc.
I can (most of the time) tell Italian from Irish. I can often tell Korean from Japanese from Vietnamese and East African from West African. South America from North American, etc. And be right most of the time, just by looking at someone's face.
How can I (and everybody else) do this?
A: Because there really are phenotypic features that vary geographically in a regular and predictable way.
This can only mean that there is also underlying genetic diversity that varies geographically in a regular and predictable way.
(I am not drawing bright lines between "races" here; I acknowledge clines and exceptions and ambiguous cases, but they are exceptions that prove the general rule.)
This kind of geographical variation can only have arisen under circumstances of limited (not zero; limited) gene flow.
I can't think of any reason why such circumstances shouldn't affect other loci as well, producing clustered geographic variation.
I can't see how any of this could possibly be controversial in the absence of ideological preconceptions.
But I am ready, willing, and able to be educated to the contrary if I am wrong. (More than bald assertion would be necessary though.)
-------------------
The first part makes no sense. Women only express the genes of one of their X-somes in each cell. This keeps the gene dosage the same for both sexes.
This is true for all dimorphic vertebrates afaik. Of course, estrogen also has effects. For both, the hormone + nuclear receptor act as a transcription factor, turning certain genes on or off.
The term "troll" means something. It does not mean "somebody who annoys me" and it does not mean "somebody who disagrees with me". The questioner has shown no sign of trolling, just naivete. That's no crime.
(confirmed @# 543)
I find that a lot of people don't even understand what I mean by "listening to music". I mean doing that and only that: concentrating and focusing. A lot of folks seem to do that only when they are trying to get the lyrics.
Yes, I am the most elitist of all musical elitists. *shrug* At least I'm relatively eclectically elitist.
"There are only two kinds of music in this world: Good music, and the other kind."
-(from memory; often credited to Duke Ellington but Louis Armstrong sez it in Burns' Jazz documentary)
*last comment for a while; gotta grade. Will catch up, uh, tomorrow night? Watch that portcullis, now.*
Blockquote FAIL. *sigh* That should have been:
Yadda yadda.
Carlie @ 251 (sorry to be so late in this, but there are too many interesting conversations here for me to keep up to date on all of them)
my daughter got a lovely corset at Pennsic last year. She periodically has back aches, and wears her corset under her regular clothes sometimes to give herself additional support. The corset maker where she got hers had some in larger sizes, and said that he could make them to fit as needed - would you like me to look up his contact information for you?
Becca - thanks for the info! One of my friends also goes to Pennsic every year, so I can probably get the info from her (and then put it on my list of "things to buy when I have money").
Rorschahc waaaay back @# 291
..I was actually planning on throwing strips of bacon and just generally baring my breasts at Carl Weiland every time he opened his dimwitted mouth.
...
And here I just spent lunch saying that there was no way in Hell I'd get on a plane for more than 24 hours.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqNaCB2GXBA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOICrM65OvI
For the first time, I am linking to a music video for the video. Here is This Too Shall Pass by OK Go. You are going to see this everywhere, I have already seen it on a couple of blogs. You might as well see it now. Come on, everybody loves Rube Goldberg.
Following up on Paul #534, PZ whomps troll ass at The Intersection just after Orac's comment (link) and then returns later to call out Kirshenbaum. Now, excuse me while I stand back and watch bilbo's head throw sparks as it spins in self-righteous fury.
I would like to boast that I got bitten by a deadly spider on the weekend ( a redback ).The bite itself was excruciating for a few hours but rather than waste everyone's time at the A & E I rang my doc who basically told me the symptoms and if they started to manifest themselves to get to the hospital. Apparently normal healthy adults will usually get a bit sick but be ok and the anti venom can make you sicker than the bite. Apart from some profuse sweating, slightly elevated pulse (90 ish) and a bad headache I was as right as rain the next day. Except now the bite site is devloping cellutitis ( I think- nothing like a bit of self diagnosis I say) so I'm off the see the doc this morning. It's as itchy as all hell and driving me nuts.
Janine, I just got finished watching that right before I came here! Hemant Mehta just posted it as well.
As an addendum can I just say that even though I survived the experience until the next day the bitch who bit me did not. Having said that I appreciate she was only doing what she does as a defence and I've still got her in a little bottle of alcohol to show off to people. I had a moment where I seriously thought about having her encased in something and made into a necklace but I decided that was a little Angelina Jolie even for me.
Someone needs a better spider pit.
;-)
Get better. And remember, spiders are your friends…
aratina cage, thanks for the update. That's some beautifully ignorant stuff there. It's amazing how some people absolutely can't differentiate between "bad words" and "deliberately inflammatory assaults on character". And the two guys over there are going on and on about PZ flunky suckups, when one glance at the Dawkins thread clearly shows many longtime commenters ripping PZ to shreds over his position on it.
BoS - :( Hope the drugs work soon and well.
My position on spiders is that they're fine in the wild, but once they cross my threshold they have relinquished all rights to live. Some I do let stay, but they need to know it's still my call.
Shelob.
Unfortunately we have plagues of them in this area at this time of year but when it starts to get cooler they bugger off. The females are very territorial but don't wander very far from their web so you almnost have to stick your hand in it to get bitten. Having said that they LOVE to nest in places such as swing sets, under the seats of the kids bikes etc etc and you quite literally have to check everything over every single day. Tragically for the spiders I have to kill them if I see them for the kid's sake ( whilst I was ok it can be a very different matter for a little human).
I was at my son's soccer game and I'd taken a fold up chair from the shed and sat on it without checking first. My daughter came up to me and was cuddling me with her stomach at my thigh level and I felt pain. At first I thought it was her zipper caught on me but when I pushed her away I saw this thing biting me. I'm so incredibly glad it bit me and not her on her stomach.
Glad to hear you're OK, Bride of Shrek, OM! When I told Sven he should love spiders, I admit I was forgetting the kinds you get in Oz. Does anywhere else have really dangerous ones? (IIRC, tarantulas aren't, and James Bond was being a real wuss.)
Bride of Shrek, what an experience! I hope all goes well at the doctor's office.
Looking at the Wikipedia photo of a redback, I'm reminded how awful I felt last summer when I accidentally cut the leg off a very large black widow (the first wild one I'd ever seen) while trying to move her from my doorway with a shovel. I'm very jumpy around spiders and kill them as a reflex if they get on me, but I felt sick to my stomach watching her bleed profusely all the same. I did manage to move her away from the house after that using much more care.
I know, everything they say is such a joke. And on the flip-side of what you said, I don't think PZ has ever really held back on chastising us as the blog owner, either, when he feels the need.
neddy-s: consider that people reacted unkindly because you sounded like an anti-feminist. There are worse reasons to be unkind.
aratina cage of the OM,
Most spiders can manage well enough with as few as six legs; don't know about black widows specifically.
Neddie:
Rorschach, this article is about how dogs, due to their specialization for human packs, make the same error that human babies make regarding object permanence, while wolves do not make the error. The error is interesting, but relevant to your question is the fact that both dogs and wolves have object permanence. How could they have object permanence, without minds?
I just got home and I'm having a little laughing fit. The people commenting on that idiotic post at the Multi-Car Pile-Up seem to be engaging in some amusing oneupmanship involving which implements (and in which condition) they were told to violate themselves with here. And then bilbo admits he was trolling here, acknowledging that he's in fact trolling there now.
Too much.
Thanks for the info, Knockgoats. I didn't know if it would be life-threatening for her or not, but it was traumatic enough just to watch her bleed all over the wall trying to walk and then, realizing her leg had been hacked apart, coddling her blood-spurting stump in between bouts of panic trying to escape from the area. I felt like Freddy Krueger for a moment after that.
How do you do with this?
http://www.pbs.org/race/002_SortingPeople/002_00-home.htm
The term "troll" means something. It does not mean "somebody who annoys me" and it does not mean "somebody who disagrees with me". The questioner has shown no sign of trolling, just naivete. That's no crime.
Sven, dear sweet one. If that was how I used the term 'troll', how often would I have called you one. Neddie, stumbled in , making a very clumsy argument, in a style that looked trollish. No apologies from me. She needs to clarify, which, to her credit, she did.
(No Longer A)Bride, is there anything there that is not poisonous? (Please note, I am half kidding here.)
well, for starters I think spiders are venomous, not poisonous (but then, I've never known anyone who tried to eat one of those, either)
that said, I think the correct answer to that is "some of the sheep"
Late with this but why not Lemon Marmalade?
Lemon marmalade on toasted wholewheat with salted butter and hot tea.
As a newbie, I'm not too sure about the constant bacon references, however, I was reminded of Bacon Butties with HP sauce at 2 am from the taxi drivers stand next to neptune's statue.
A good memory
I for one CAN NOT spot people's race to save my life and just don't try. That being said it cracks me up when in all certain company of some certain race when some one begins venting some kind of race anxiety and every once in a while if it is the right race they will nervously look over and say "Hey, (my name here), you're not (x-race) are you?" Which is funny as hell if you could see me.
Just heard on the radio of some 60kyear old Engraved Ostrich shells found in South Africa.
For disambiguation, that's 60,000 years old, NOT 6,000.
Seriously? All "races"? Or are you pulling a Stephen Colbert?
Noticing differences in race and culture is not always a bad thing or a sign of racism.
Frankly I'm interested in people's race and what cultural differences may or may not be a product of a difference in their race from mine. I enjoy learning about people's lives that grew up differently than myself. Now granted, someone's race doesn't mean there is a difference, but it might. And variety is the spice of life (yes that's cheesy).
I personally don't think being aware of race or differences in culture is a bad thing. I mean I didn't grow up in New Orleans but damn if it isn't one of my favorite places on earth and a large reason for that is the African American culture there.
But I also grew up in the South with all that comes along with it race being something you are always aware of. Luckily I grew up in a very liberal family that enforced the celebrate the differences ideal.
Aargh, I just broke my self-imposed 'don't post on blogs dominated by complete tools with no idea' rule and added to the Intersection pile-up about blog civility.
Damn SIWOTI. Still, if I don't go back there I won't have to read the bleating responses.
Ok, thought this would be a good spot to post this. My sister in law is going to this church, at first she called it a cult, and was saying how people were speaking in tongues, and laying on hands etc; freaked her out. Now 2 weeks later she is saying she cant get enough of the place and loves all the people in there.
My other half is an atheist and flipped out on her a little bit recently when her sister was all geared up to be indoctrinated into this church, and asking for her friends and family to support her endeavers of going to some program they have set up for making people spiritual leaders in their church.
So during the flipping out phase my wife decided to go to a link on her facebook to this church's facebook site.
They have specks of light on several pictures, and they are claiming they were orbs caused by the holy spirit.
I have a few pictures of it on my blog, but if you want to go to the site and see for yourself and get a good laugh go to this link...
/rant
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Concord-NC/FIRE-Church/212497910331#!/pho…
Becca, would you please also send me the info for the corsetmaker? My username at gmail.com will get to me. Thank you.
About looking like your race... it is a running gag in my father's family to say that I'm really the daughter of the Irish milkman. They say this to each other, and fall all over themselves laughing, because I apparently look so typically Jewish-Hungarian that the lame joke strikes them as utterly hilarious, and because of the priceless ticked-off look on my face when my brain works through enough Hungarian to realize that yes, they are telling that stupid joke again. :)
Killer Bud, I'm sorry about your sister-in-law. I hope she gets enough of that crap quickly and comes unharmed back out the other side.
My mother, when she was alive, belonged to a Holy Roller, speaking in tongues, Deep South cult church. She would try to make me go with her fairly often. My brother goes to one of those overly large charismatic Southern Baptist churches. It is hard, when you are an atheist and a member of your immediate family importunes you to go to church with them, and sooner or later your sis-in-law is going to try to insist that you or your wife attend with her, if she hasn't already started.
With my brother, I can say, "Hey, Mike, I might go sometime with you, but this morning I just don't feel comfortable with it." Mom didn't care whether I was comfortable or not; she meant for me to go. The only way I got out of it was to leave the house early on church days and not come back until the danger was past. The only battle I lost was the one where Mom's preacher invited me to sing the offertory solo that morning. I am a choir slut, haha.
No, I'm not saying I can't have any idea. But in general no, not really. I suck at it. I'm not trying to be OTT PC or anything. It's just that say I see light brown skin, slightly narrow eyes, curly black hair, a thin nose... I can't put these together really well to say that person is x race or y race.
Some people in my family have brown/olive skin, black hair, high cheekbones, long noses, dark eyes. They're European. My coworker is paler than me with light brown hair. She's Pakistani.
Hispanic people can appear black, black people may not be African-American, too... many... variables.
I work with people of so many different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and most people are a mixture of racial types too. I'm all for listening and learning about people and where they're from, their families, history, I find it interesting. Now if some one has sort of Asian features and is speaking in Japanese I have a better guess that maybe that person *is* Japanese, but for all I know they may be half Laotian. Here in the US we'd say they're the same race. They wouldn't.
And if a person has one white parent and one Japanese parent what race are they? What if they look more european than asian? Are they still Japanese? I don't know. It's too hard to keep up with. I just let people tell me what they are if they feel like talking about it. It's easier, say, if you're talking to some one and they say "I'm from Hyderabad."
I need to just... vent.
I don't know this girl personally, but a family member does. http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local-beat/Chelsea-Kings-Body-Found-860…
She went missing last week and a body was found today. All the comments on the articles and support groups are people offering prayers, and saying things like "I pray that the Good Lord will cover them, hold them, and help them through this very difficult time."
Now, I understand that people feel helpless and heartbroken, I am terribly saddened by this news as well. But to me, praying to a god that would let this happen (if he did indeed exist) is just sick and awful to me. It just makes me so angry that this terrible thing happened, but that peoples' faith just seems to get stronger when this stuff happens confuses the hell out of me.
I also have a terrible time telling ethnicities, mainly because I haven't been exposed enough to people I know are one or the other (my hometown is 97% white). I can't tell various southeast Asian groups from each other, nor different African groups, and I'm lucky if I can get the general part of the continent right with Europeans. It's just a lack of meeting people of specific ethnic groups combined with not wanting to ask about the backgrounds of the ones I do meet, so I've never developed the skill.
To be fair, the posters on Interection do tend to use less abusive language than we (and I include myself that - and quite proudly) do here - but they're far less intellectually honest (and often far less honest full stop; McCarthy - if he's still there - being a good example) and way too deferential to religious claptrap.
Give me the no-bullshit biker bar over the polite, appeasement-please tea-room any day.
Oh, on the contrary. "Methinks they doth protest too much." I would hardly think they would be so keen on trotting out the old pious reassurances if they didn't badly need to reassure themselves.
badgersdaughter @ 589 - done.
SaraJ, for those that believe, it is considered a virtue to hold on to your faith when your situation is bad. But I am so far removed from when I had faith, I cannot understand why some people find comfort. Instead, I just have my rage at those people who commit murders.
Sven,
No. What you're recognizing are the centers of overlapping clines. Clinal variation does not depend on limited gene flow to develop; it is dependent on clinal variation in environmental influence.
I know you're not talking specifically about skin color, but I'm going to use it as an example because it's well known and easy to observe. There are very clear clines in skin pigmentation. This is not a result of limited gene flow, but because UV radiation gradually changes with latitude. Children with dark skin will simply not survive very well in northern latitudes regardless of how much gene flow there is from more darkly pigmented populations. The children die (or have limited survival) because they cannot synthesize vitamin D. Some of the populations with the highest rates of rickets are Pakistanis in the UK, and women forced to wear burquas in the geographic area from the Middle East to Pakistan. As a consequence of differential survival, more northerly populations will have lighter skin on average, even if the population has a regular source for alleles coding more more pigmentation. Natural selection is creating these clines, not restricted gene flow. So if you took a random sample of say, 1000 people, from around the world and lined them up according to skin pigmentation, there would be a gradual shift from dark to light regardless of the amount of gene flow for any particular population.
For more on variation in things like craniometrics, you could read this issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Some forms of human variation are more geography specific, but again there are no clear boundaries between populations. Sure you can tell a Brit from an Italian, but it's much more difficult when you take people from adjacent populations between say, London and Rome, and try to say clearly where the Northern European phenotype ends and the Mediterranean phenotype begins.
Books that are useful include:
Reflections of Our Past by John Relethford
"Race" is a Four Letter Word by C. Loring Brace
the textbook I used for class:
Mielke JH, Konigsberg LW, Relethford JH (eds). 2005. Human Biological Variation. Oxford University Press.
SaraJ @ 593 lamented
I hear ya, where was their gawd when that girl needed help? No fuckin' where to be found as usuall!
We had a tradedy in the family recently, where was gawd when my family member needed, really needed and could of used some of that all knowing, loving forgiving help?
*crickets*
But prayers after the fact---ohhh, so impressive! Oh, NOT!
Pardon my bad attitude you prayers, I am not amused.
I'm not sure how good that explanation was, it's so much easier to explain what I'm talking about with visual aides. I'm totally dependent on a chalkboard/whiteboard when I'm teaching this to students!
I got a text message from a puppy over the weekend.
Case closed. :)
Seriously, though, has anyone defined "mind" for the pursposes of that discussion?
I've linked to this
http://video.pbs.org/video/1200128615/
before, but I thought the part (last segment: "Shared Goals") about how other primates don't understand pointing but dogs do was super interesting.
Grrr. CM&SK have cultivated a nice crop of trolling goons over there. They seem obsessed with the violations that get you banned here--and don't seem to realize that the rules have nothing to do with whether you're on my side or not. Bilbo is a moron, but this "Philip Jr" guy is just lying non-stop to advance his thesis that I'm discriminating.I had to post this over there.
J.J. Ramsey is a major loser, too. He's written me in the past a few times, asking to be un-banned. No apologies for sneering at my daughter (not that I'd be in a mood to accept them, anyway), and always this whining that he only did it once. Which isn't true: he made the one post about it here, but then I found him complaining about Skatje on other sites, too. So bye-bye, J.J., and no, you're never coming back.
Dr Rory's Internet Practice is open :
Anaphylactic reactions to the antivenom are quite rare, and it works like a charm with female redback bites, usually takes all pain away within minutes.If you still have local sweating, aches and pains and systemic signs, get the stuff.
@ 510,
Yup, same here.Never works for my headaches, and never works for anyone's pain I think, but everyone eats it, including patients in hospital.Most common drug to O/D on btw, because you can buy 100 for 5 bucks or so, and thats plenty to stuff up your liver for good, if untreated.Not a good way to go, I should add.Had 2 girls in their 20s go on the transplant list last year after Panadol O/D.
SGBM @ 577,
thatnks for the link, will go and check it out.
Janine, thanks for responding. I'm just incredibly saddened by this girl's death and pretty angry as well so my emotions and thoughts are all in a jumble. Reading the comments from all the prayers is just making me angrier... why believe in a being that would let this horrible thing happen to (by all accounts) a kind and good 17 year old girl?
Ol'Greg
I'm with you. My son is 'A person of colour' (his term). Our family name is fairly uncommon away from Somerset and Bristol, but branches of my family are from Corsica, (with Italian surnames) and Switzerland.
Somerset was raided by the Vikings, occupied by the Romans and is on the edge of the 'Celtic Fringe'. My home city is a seaport and was a major centre of the slave trade with all that that implies.
I've been told that I 'look Mediterranean' whatever that means.
I think I share the Rev's interest in other people's perception of their origins but I find it very difficult to initiate a conversation about this, probably because I have gained some dim, flickering understanding of the racism that my son has endured.
I'm afraid that I fall back on the 'We're all Africans' line.
Killer Bud, sorry to hear about your sister-in-law, but I don't get what they are going on about with the pictures. Those orbs are obviously lights dangling from the ceiling. I can clearly see the string holding up the left and right lights in the first photo.
No, Homo sapiens is ecotypic.
In related news: the origin of polar bears!
Pygmy Loris
Ref rickets in UK Pakistanis.
IIRC there is an an influence from Chapati flour
but my memory on this is vague.
I understand your frustration about the lack of visual aids. I find it almost impossible to explain some points without pencil and paper. It causes Miss M no end of annoyed amusment.
Both levels of gene flow* and a selection gradient may contribute to clinal variation, and both could be taken into account. I think Sven's point was that gene flow can actually overcome the effects of local selection if the rate of migration of an allele into a population is greater than the selection coefficient removing it--obviously restricting gene flow allows local selection pressure to change allele frequencies with greater efficacy**. Obviously in this case, the frequency of an allele along some transect will be dependent not on a selection gradient, but on the distance from the source population.
*The tension-zone model of hybrid swarm maintenance actually predicts a steep cline while selection against hybrids (F1 and F2) is uniform.
**Now that I think about it, this is doubly true due to the Wahlund effect...increase in homozygosity following population subdivision...trait heritability is greater in populations with excess homozygosity.
From last night:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-march-1-2010/the-uninformant
And he had Neil deGrasse Tyson!)
And once again:
http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/
Antiochus Epiphanes,
Except that's not at all how he phrased it. He said:
in reference to the variation that allows him to pick out Italian, Northern European, etc. students in a class.
Yes, genetically isolated populations are more likely to be distinct, but populations with lots of gene flow can still be distinct if selection pressures are strong enough. Malarial regions of Africa have high frequencies of the sickle-cell allele not because of limited gene flow, but because endemic malaria is a rather serious selection factor.
:-o
It's of course true that lots of genes show geographic variation in allele patterns. It's just that each of these genes has its own variation; they don't covary much. Skin color and blood groups are orthogonal to each other in this respect...
You take this into account when you look at people to determine where they're from: using only skin color or only eye shape or whatever would give very vague results.
I always try to get the lyrics. :-) Remember when Walton posted the national anthem of South Africa? I can now sing the whole thing.
Aaaaah, famous. Gets played every demonstration. (And I participated in a number of those while studying in Vienna... I'll just say "right-right coalition government".)
As music it's rather crappy (though it's a lot easiert to listen to than some other Ärzte stuff!!!). The lyrics, however, are impressive. Chorus: "It's not your fault that the world is as it is, it would just be your fault if it stays that way."
Reminds me of the fact that most of the abovementioned demonstrations were never mentioned on TV.
Again, ugly as music. In fact, that guy shouts so loud he fails to hit his own ugly tune. It would almost have more impact as a poem without music.
(...Of course, in that case, even fewer people would, well, listen. Wenn wir den Krieg gewonnen hätten, / mit Wogenprall und Sturmgebraus, / dann wäre Deutschland nicht zu retten / und gliche einem Irrenhaus – Erich Kästner after WWI. What happened? WWII.)
<yaaaaawn>
So what. It's Australia. ;-)
:-D :-D :-D
Seriously, it's great to see you can take such pain with such humor.
I want the (rofl) smiley from Skype.
I'm not aware of any reports of poison in a spider other than in the venom glands.
LOL! X-D
And the drop-bears. They don't need to be poisonous. :-)
Okaaaaay...
I do like tea, though :-)
SC OM: Nice link. I read several of the articles (more later) and enjoyed them, especially the one by Lewontin.
posting those two was my minor attempt at venting my frustration at people who, when told about problems, pretend they don't exist and I'm just making stuff up, or alternatively do the "not my fault, therefore not my problem, and you're mean for trying to make me feel guilty about it. so i'll just ignore you" thing.
makes me feel like any attempt at talking to people about important stuff is completely pointless :-(
SC, OM,
Oh yeah! I need to bookmark that site. I talk about Lewontin every time I teach this stuff and we used Marks's Human Biodiversity in one of my undergrad classes on anthropological genetics.
I currently have 4 different kinds of tea, and at least another 5 of "tea" to pick from. :-p
I have no idea if this will post, but it is too good not to dig into. Phanyngu-quotes that make Philip Jr. sad:
Pygmy Loris: Right you are...Sven said that "only" limited gene flow could result in a cline. Clearly a strong selection gradient could do that as well, even if gene flow were positively gushing alleles all over the place.
Of course not.
X-D
Beware
Now the ignoramuses are crowing that the number of posts tagged with "science" is lower than the number tagged with "religion", so see, PZ doesn't write about science as much as he does about religion!!!
It never even enters their teensy little minds that it would be stupid to tag every post with science in it as "science", since that kind of defeats the purpose of tagging (I'm going to tag every single post on my blog with the same tag!), and the dozen or so OTHER CATEGORIES THAT ARE SCIENCE TOPICS should be added to their total. That made me mad enough to post it over there, and now I feel dirty.
aratina cage #618,
That third one - 'Go fuck yourself, you useless shit-eating cumstain' - is mine. Woo-hoo!
Considering it was that über-moron pissant 'professor' dendy I was directing it towards, I actually consider that to be restrained.
wow, impressive. not a single one of the insults listed there was a random and unprovoked gratuitous insult. especially the all-caps one and the bellows one are not what Philip tries to make them look like
what a dishonest little shit.
I'm familiar with that phenomenon, from people who believed for years that I had no sense of taste nor any other sense in my mouth and that I would therefore eat anything if I didn't see it, over people who believed my dust allergy could be overcome by just washing the bedsheets and stuff occasionally (never mind the dust in the rest of the room, in the mattress, in the pillow, in the blanket... or the washing powder), to people who believe nobody needs more than 8 h of sleep per day... and those are just the examples I can think of at 2 at night because they involve(d) me personally.
:-9
I do have (small amounts of) several, but almost never find the time to cook and drink any. Some are souvenirs from conferences long past...
I'm developing a new fondness for the " X-D " smiley.
I am amused that many of those flights of hyperbole were responses to people whining about profanity.
Be careful with that. Tylenol works well for me, even in a moderate dose, not only for minor pain like a sinus headache, but also for moderately severe pain resulting from surgery or dental work. When I had my right kidney removed, the surgeon (an EXCELLENT surgeon, by the way) made a foot-long incision so he could get in there and make sure every last bit of the infection was cleared out. I was in intensive care two days with IV fentanyl, a normal hospital room four more days with a patient-controlled IV, and released with two weeks worth of (IIRC) Vicodin. I took the Vicodin for two days then switched to extra-strength timed-release Tylenol. I was just scared I would become addicted to the opioids. Yeah, I wasn't absolutely pain free, but I was OK.
Still laughing at the "rusty chainsaw" one.
These insults are nothing compared to those levied against the moderator at the Dawkins forum...such as this gem:
Wowbagger: useless shit-eating cumstain has its appeal, but just seems pedestrian by comparison.
My point: We must do better. We must not rest on our laurels, nor drag ass in the fourth quarter, nor [insert sports metaphor here] when apparently all of the blogosphere is counting on us to be the crudest and most profane.
Gee, whining about tone. Receiving "tone" in return. Sounds about right.
Yeah, however I think they're pretty much like those Christians who smile and say 'God bless you' while calling homosexuality a perversion. They are saying bad things about others, they are just being "nice" about it. I too prefer here where people tend to be more honest.
WowbaggerOM, me too. Besides, we all know the purrfesser loved every minute he got to spend with us. The only one I feel bad about is the last one directed at astrounit because I went off on him once, too, but even that one was meant as a joke, I think (it's absurd; I still laughed).
Karol. He wants to use responses to Karol as an example. OK, then. Hey, maybe Karol will start posting there soon.
Yeah, that's my impression from reading the comments there. There's plenty of divisive comments and antagonism, it's really no different from anywhere else. Yet they take that holier-than-thou attitude about it.
lol
If you look at the dungeon page it seems some have tried to set up an anti-PZ/Pharnygula blogs. Where others have failed the C&K twins have succeeded (and I use that word loosely). I'm guessing right now somebody is happy that we're now focusing on Colgate twins and not Dawkins or Laden.
Intersection commenters do not define inflammatory behavior the way that I do. They seem like the sort of people who tried to have me kicked out of my HS for the day because I wore a trenchcoat to school. It was raining and I had to take the bus. But in a post Columbine world you *know* that people who wear trenchcoats only wear them because they want to randomly shoot people at their high school. Much like people who swear in *any* circumstance while speaking obviously are engaging in inflammatory behavior. It's one of those things like "insubordinate" isn't it.
You know suddenly it strikes me as funny that they are saying we all kowtow to PZ while complaining that we don't kowtow to their idea of proper speech in all circumstances.
Ah well, fucknuts, shitburgers and side of piss-sticks for me!
Hi All
Just got from the doc. Got some antiobiotics ( Augmentin Duo Forte) some topical cream for the wound (Paraderm Plus) and a tetanus shot ( because I'm a silly bint and couldn't remember when my last one was). All good and should clear up quickly. Worst part is he marked around the redness area with a sharpie and cause I'm wearing a skirt I look all pre-schooler with markings on my thigh.
It is at this point I point out to the anti-free healthcare brigade that all of this service was FREE. (well bulk billed which mean the doc sends the $ 87.00 bill directly to the government ).
At least on here, if you're being a fuckstick then you're going to be called out as such. Act like a pompous self-righteous twat and expect to be called out as one.
Sometimes I get the impression that they think it okay to punch someone in the gut and steal their wallet - just as long as you have a smile on your face while you do it. This pretence of civility, it's a masquerade where the fear is more that the mask will slip than of what people do while wearing the mask.
When posting here, I couldn't care less that I'm going to be called an arsehole. I'm worried about whether my argument will hold, how it's going to be ripped apart and whether or not the justifications I have used to rationalise my position are indeed justified. And that's how it should be, it holds me to a higher standard than simply being civil about things. Maybe this place could be more civil, but I'll take it as it is. It's not perfect, but it works.
Interesting - although my last comment at the Intersection (mentioned earlier) went right through with a link and everything, and I've commented there before (although not often), the one I just posted is now "awaiting moderation". And it has no links. I wonder if it's personal, or if they periodically wipe comment email logs and have the moderation trigger set up for the second comment rather than the first. If it doesn't go through there, this is what I wrote:
(Directed at me, after I explained that comparing the "science" tag to the "godless" tag was stupid:)
I really don’t need to – the tags are an ok broad proxy for topic, as long as you categorize them properly. Add up all of the tags that are science-based and compare to the ones that are religion-based.
Genetics 86
Neurobiology 74
Nutrition 1
Science 830
Cephalopods 457
Development 213
Environment 108
Evolution 429
Fossils 106
Galapagos 12
Molecular biology 137
Reproduction 144
Science Philosophy 4
Communicating science 136
That’s about 2737 posts.
Religion 728
Godlessness 975
That’s 1703 posts. I guess you could include the “stupidity” and “kooks” category, but that’s if you assume that those terms accurately describe religion. Still only takes you to 2466, less than the science categories. Carnivals (239) and Creationism (1776) span both.
There really isn’t any call to say that there are more posts bashing religion than there are on science. It shows a misunderstanding of how tags are used, a misunderstanding of math, and in large part an enormous misunderstanding of the intersection of religion and science in this country. Fundamentalists have made it impossible to talk about some areas of science (e.g. evolution) without bashing them by default, since simply stating that evolution is true is a declaration that they are wrong.
I've got a comment sitting in moderation over there where I point out the context of my abuse of dendy. We'll have to wait and see whether or not it'll have any effect on the fainting-couch residents over there.
What they don't seem to realise is that such comments tend to only occur after the polite responses have had no effect - they only see someone being called a fucking clown shoe before getting the vapours over it and leaving without seeing what came before.
That they also don't seem to understand the concept of rhetoric - i.e. that suggestions of physical acts of self-harm or (as I put it in my post over there) physiologically-difficult acts of self-gratification may not actually be meant to suggest the person should physically go and perform that act - is kind of bemusing.
I hope that post goes through but I've never gotten an "awaiting moderation" and actually had a post go through on this blog so I don't know if it's the same over there. BTW, I'm not saying my post was being consciously deleted... just that "awaiting moderation" from what I've seen means "lost somewhere."
That post is brilliant though.
Antiochus Epiphanes, #535:
Yet most have strong opinions about it. They may not know the theory behind it, but will nevertheless tell you, in some detail and with a surprising amount of certainty, why a song sucks. In fact, knowing theory might even reduce this tendency.
It's about like someone saying, "Why study English? I already speak good. *spit*" Then, they recommend a book or delve into some bizarre form of literary criticism. There is little use in debating such things or gently informing someone about their appalling ignorance. This is not to suggest that you shouldn't have such opinions, but please (hypothetical dumbass I'm addressing) don't feel so fucking justified about it if you can't even spell a C major chord. Do we have a deal?
In my experience at least, talking about music theory, musicology, etc., to the general public is not recommended. (Actually, I avoid discussing anything remotely "intellectual" with people I don't already know are capable of having the conversation.) If it doesn't bore them to tears, they are insulted by what they consider music snobbery and elitism. I even know quite a few classically-trained musicians who don't like to think about or discuss theory, which to me has always been baffling as it would greatly enhance their performing abilities.
Apparently many have gotten the mistaken impression that knowing stuff about music somehow detracts from its value. Meanwhile, fine arts education funding is abysmal. I've read and heard from music teachers that the arts are some of the first programs to be cut from school curricula, although I haven't payed close attention to trends in the last few years. I chalk it up to a generally anti-intellectual culture in the U.S., which I'm sure at least the scientists and teachers among us would recognize. Hence my sincere apology above, even though I resent feeling obligated to do so (not obligated here at Pharyngula, thanks to many intelligent commenters, but the offer stands because it's not a music blog).
Yes, sir, in my book that is also "pretty rad". I know the entranced-for-no-apparent-reason look very well. While in conversation, if it isn't some other noise, inflections in a person's voice are often one of the main contributors to my seeming to be a total space cadet, even though I'm trying hard to pay attention (apparently a bit too hard or at least to the wrong input).
Ol'Greg, #542:
I need to remain anonymous, so forgive me for being vague. I started out on saxophone; but I also play other woodwinds, piano, guitar, and whichever vibrating bodies are placed in front of me. (And yes, ladies, I am available.) I tried out teaching/private lessons for a while after graduating from college, but didn't enjoy it. Nowadays, what I do in music is primarily composing/arranging, but of course that doesn't pay the bills. So, by day I'm a mild-mannered office administrator. It's boring (with lots of paper-pushing, number-crunching and people-talking) and likewise doesn't pay the bills.
Wow, this suddenly turned into a lot of words.
/music rant off
Wow, bilbo is a moron (okay I already knew that).
dildo seems to have as good a grasp of irony as Alanis Morrissette.
I probably should've said something more like "figurative dumbass" or perhaps "proverbial dumbass". /self-pedantry
Moments ago, on American Idol:
Judges [collectively, in sum]: You blew.
Jermaine: What should I sing next week? I'll listen to you.
Simon Cowell: I'm not sure you're going to be here next week.
Jermaine [paraphrasing somewhat]: Oh, I will. I know God.
[Cowell rolls eyes]
Jermaine: I know God. He's my homie [maybe?].
Simon Cowell (to audience): Don't even bother with the phone lines, then.
:P
Sorry, I have to interrupt to bring you the latest installment in science and nature are fucking awesome.
Ummm... 6 out of 20...
(I can haz do-over?)
Seriously, this doesn't surprise me much. In my defense, I think, however, this slightly exaggerates my patheticness at this...
Insofar as if you were to ask me to group, say, Asian *or* Amerindian (I often confuse these, especially if the Amerindian are Inuit), vs. Black vs. Other Than Those Two, I suspect I could probably handle it a bit better, at least...
I mean, I think I could... I'd probably mangle up any Australian Aborigines in with the African Blacks, tho', if you were so cruel as to throw some of those in, too...
(/As to spotting various European subtypes, seriously, fucking forget it. If you're not conveniently wearing your traditional regional costumes, you all look the same to me. And never mind that actually, that particular 'you' includes me.)
Carlie: Way cool, but the phenomena of iron oxide precipitation from anoxic ground water is not that uncommon. There are large "iron bogs" in Northern Minnesota. Even in Southern MN ground water needs to be treated to remove iron, else ones clothing will be stained in the wash.
BS
Yeah, but iron stains from sulfur-eating bacteria that have been reproductively isolated for 2 million years? That's one cool iron stain.
I left a post (awaiting moderation) on The Intersection noting that a couple of days ago, on the last richarddawkins.net thread, PZ and I had an argument. Plus I used some naughty words like "*assh*ol*e." I wasn't banned.
AJ Milne,
Inuit are not Amerindian. The Inuit migration to the Americas is more recent than the Amerindian migration.
I got 10 out of 20.
The Hispanic/Latino category is problematic since one can fall into that group and at the same time be considered white, black, etc. It's also possible be "mixed". To be fair to them they do say they are using the definition of the US federal government. The government "requires that multiple responses be collapsed into one for reporting" and that have followed that example. I also wonder these test subjects were chosen randomly.
Feynmaniac,
It's more than that. Hispanic is not a "race" on the US census, but an ethnicity. If you check Hispanic, you still have to choose a race. This is why there's always an asterisk next to Hispanic in charts and graphs based on US census data that reads "Hispanics can be of any race."
Anyway, I got 12 right, but I don't think the little test is fair because the website is talking about race on the US census and like I said, even the census doesn't consider Hispanic a race.
Gah. I don't think I can take any more of the Intersection. The current crowd seem to think that writing abusive words on a blog is tantamount to actually wanting a person to suffer harm - and my pointing this out is somehow hypocritical because they're both overreactions.
What a limpid pool of stupid that place is.
@650: Well, I got whined at for not being "polite" in that thread, and I didn't even call anyone a suppurating body part yet.
The irony being that actually reading the comments at The Intersection actually causes harm. ;)
I admit to not caring overmuch for strong language; my pearl necklace broke and scattered pearls all over the floor, and a fainting couch just won't fit in my office. But I much prefer the sometimes rough-and-tumble discussions here to the genteel hypocrisy I see over at The Intersection. at least over here, I *learn* things.
What I tried to explain to the vapour-stricken monocle-droppers over there was that, for the most part, any extreme profanity tends to result from frustration at the recipient either not engaging, or when they are engaging in deliberate flame-baiting or no-go behaviour like racism, sexism or homophobia.
Trying to explain that to the people who lap-up posts taken out of context - or, as was the case in that current thread, phrases taken out of context - has proven impossible. They dislike Pharyngula and Pharyngulites and choose to hear what they want to hear.
woman, even if they made you pay that in cash, it would have been a bargain! for $87, they wouldn't even let me past the front desk around here :-(
oh, and I only got 4 right on that race test. apparently, all americans look more or less white to me :-/
#582, being pedantic (not that there's anything wrong with that, sez the sometime editor) and btw accurate: well, for starters I think spiders are venomous, not poisonous (but then, I've never known anyone who tried to eat one of those, either)
Might be tasty. Though scorpions probably have more meat on 'em.
Glad you're on the mend, BofS. When I've had to take Augmentin I've found it useful to knock back a shotglass of acidophilus culture liquid two-three times a day for the sake of my touchy guts.
I got that tip from my allergist, sometime employer, and Irish head-buttin' friend of many years, who died of cancer last week. I'm still in shock. I saw her last month. Jeezisbloodyfuckinchrist, as my sainted mother didn't quite ever say.
I'll tell you something about getting old that maybe no one else has, you young'uns: The worst thing, worse than losing strength and agility and not being able to take a two-mile walk for granted, worse than looking over that cliff yet again at your own mortality, worse than losing your optimism when you thought you'd lost it ten times already, is all those people you miss because they died first.
Ron Sullivan
http://toad.faultline.org
Tell me about it. When I was making $200 a week to live on it cost $80 just to see a doctor, and then whatever tests, and then whatever any medicine cost.
As a result I never went to the doctor. As a result some fairly minor problems became not so minor. As a result I went into massive debt. As a result I had to quit school for a while. As a result I delayed my potential for getting a better job. As a result I got stuck in that cycle because I had to pay off the debt. As a result I really want to see *gasp* more socialized medicine.
Ron,
My condolences for your loss.
I'm still young, but my grandparents' generation on all but one side of the family is gone. Both of my mother's parents and all of their siblings are dead. My dad's mother and most of her siblings are dead. Only Dad's father's family are still here. My parents' generation is starting to pass away too. I know that as I get older more and more of my family and friends will die. I think this is one of the reasons I can't imagine living to be over 100. The constant parade of funerals would simply become too depressing.
Even with all this bashing of Chris Mooney and The Intersection, he's doing alright with Point Of Inquiry - it's still worth listening to even if he's still finding his feet as a host.
@Wowbagger:
They'll never get it. These are people who don't understand the difference between hyperbole on a blog, and actual exhortations to people to literally kill themselves. You'd think we were all standing on the Golden Gate bridge urging suicidal people to jump. They're so hung up - in a Pavlovian way - on Certain Bad Words that they can't parse what's really going on. They shoot their emotional load all over "profane" commenters, never recognizing what the targets of the "abuse" did to deserve it. What a twisted moral compass it takes to shriek at someone for cussing while ignoring the dehumanizing homophobia, sexism, or deliberately dishonest word games that brought it on (as you pointed out).
That's one thing that frustrated me about the late, lamented Dawkins forums. I saw many instances of contributors who were severely provoked by prejudiced remarks (always couched, insincerely, as "merely scientific curiosity") lose their shit and tell someone to fuck off, only to get a warning while the original provocateur got a free pass. As just one example, one can only take so many smarmy commenters pretending to be sincerely questioning the roots of sexuality - by implying that gay people can't be trusted to report their sexuality is not a choice, cuz where's the evidence, that's just your subjective report, right? - before real people can't take any more dehumanization without losing their tempers.
Watching the provoked get slapped for a technical infringement (personal attack) while truly loathsome commenters got off scot-free by adhering to the letter of the user agreement really galled me. I had a great respect for the mods there, don't get me wrong. But something broke down in the implementation of the "no personal attacks" rule too often, and the result seemed very unjust.
Seems to me the same thing goes on with the Intersection commenters who have unlimited moral outrage about "tone," but very little bad to say about dishonest, stupid, or hateful content.
Hello, my lovelies. The maddeningly handsome Blake, he of Registered Cardio Sonographer fame, finally sent me a CD of the Carotid Duplex test. The ultrasound he sent to me is one long movie, about 70 MB, which is too big to post. However, I did excerpt several screen grabs and I posted those as Pulsing Arteries on my blog.
So ... I may not have chosen the best excerpts from the movie. Maybe someone with more knowledge, like Rorschach, can tell me what I should be looking for.
Ron @660
Well said. My condolences for your loss. Sounds like your friend is one well worth missing, and well worth honoring.
Oh, I think they understand perfectly; it's just that they are so intellectually dishonest that they'll resort to repeated nonsensical appeals to emotion.
There's a chorus of bleaters over there now all dabbing at their moistened eyes and comforting each other about how mean the Pharyngulites are, not realising that they're trivialising real acts of violence by claiming that having had someone here tell them to go fuck themselves with a farm implement is just as bad as actually being physically assaulted.
Batshit crazy isn't strong enough a description.
What? I've downloaded. . .that were bigger than 70 MB and they only last like 15 to 25 min. lol
I do hope it will pass though. :)
Ol'Gregg @661
Tell me fucking about it! I'm pretty much in the downward spiral thanks to medical costs right now -- and it would be so very much worse without a little help from my friends, without a bunch of help from Pharynguloids. Turns out I can't see my doctor for less than $160, and any associated tests cost about ten times that. A bunch of aging Republican Senators currently standing in the way of universal health care for U.S. citizens should live in my shoes.
Health providers in California recently announced increases in premiums that range from 25 to 75 percent, with most people facing increases of about 40 percent. The insurers explained that, in a down economy, more healthy people were dropping their health insurance because they couldn't afford it. This leaves the insurers serving only the very ill or the chronically ill. Talk about a vicious and self-defeating spiral.
Obviously, dudes, you need to have a broad-based health care system that serves everyone so that you can spread the cost. If you have everyone in the system, it will actually cost less per person.
Never let reality get in the way of calculated outrage.
It makes sense though, if you can keep pointing to a pariah as a negative influence, it means you don't have to actually produce any meaningful results. If crops fail, there's always a black sheep you can burn as a witch instead of thinking "hey, maybe my moral actions are not linked to the survival of our food source".
Or the shoes of newly arrived immigrants, day laborers, recently graduated college students, ethnic minorities who are subject of systematic discrimination. But we all know that the GOP could care less about your suffering Lynna, so as long as they can keep another penny in there big fat privileged pockets. Yup they get to see the doctor at very little cost to them, while folks like you have to pay $160 for a visit and folks like me have to pay $150 for medications (That I only need for like a month) using money I need fir school. And somehow, they'll say it's our fault.
(All their talk about not letting the government “control” healthcare is rather ironic since their historic stance was to have the government control the healthcare of women anyway.)
Lynna,
But then how will one know if one is superior to another person? I mean if just anyone can get health care, it won't mean as much to those who have it. /sarcasm
I'm going to repeat something I've said in the health care debates before. It is completely inconsequential to me that universal health care would cost less. This is a moral issue, not an economic one. Regardless of the cost, everyone deserves basic health care. How can anyone say someone deserves to suffer and/or die because they can't afford to see a doctor or buy medicine or afford an apendectomy, etc? What kind of person can really think that?
BTW, thanks for posting the pictures. They're really cool. :)
They are cool, aren't they! The movie is even more fun. If I had something like Final Cut Pro, I'd chop a little piece out of the movie and post that too.
I wonder if I need to go back to see Blake again, just so we can watch the movie together. /wicked Lynna
Lynna,
I think you really need to have Blake review the video with you. It would probably be easier to see the video with the lights turned down. Perhaps you two should get comfortable on a couch or something ;)
Yeah, there's this Republican piece of shit, Jim Bunning, who was single handly delaying a vote on unemployment benefits because of his supposed concern for budget balance. Where the fuck was this concern when the bailouts were being given? He also had the fuckin' audacity to complain about missing a basketball game because of HIS obstruction!!!
I guess if this was the InterDungeon the complaint would be about my swearing and not about that fucking moron's actions.
Lynna,
I had a quick look at the scan pics( I'm at work). I used to do those tests, fully accredited for vascular ultrasound back home, but not over here, so I dont get to do them anymore, I liked it !
Them's some fine arteries you have there, and with normal flow velocities and Doppler flow curves, also not much arteriosclerosis(the white reflexes along the vessel's inner walls).
All this talk about the other blog trainwreck has me almost curious to check it out.
But not quite.
On distinguishing people by appearance only, Ariane Sherine - she of the Atheist Bus Campaign - has the answer.
What I like about Pharyngula, is that it is a place on the internet where something seldom happens, it is a place where stupidity doesn't triumph.
Bertrand Russel wrote, in one of his American Essays (1931-1935) "The Triumph of Stupidity" :
Perhaps this is what some of the people over at the Intersection dislike about Pharyngula, that intelligence here is effective because it is cocksure and combined with a moral fervour that is usually lacking in most other places on the internet. A moral fervour to systematically combat the Dunning-Kruger effect that would otherwise prevail.
I have tried to make myself more sensitive about using violent metaphors in conversation, because I've become convinced that although they're "just words", using them casually tends to slide the window to minimalizing the concepts they refer to, and therefore making violence itself more of an accepted everyday thing. (such as using the term "rape" to refer to getting one's feelings hurt).
HOWEVER, notice that all of the examples the Intersection Vapor (I'm referring to that collection of commenters as a "vapor") refer to are quite specifically suggesting that the person in question do such acts to themselves. That's not fantastic (for me), but that's a loophole I can live with - it's a different category altogether than suggesting that it would be good for a person to have violence done unto them. And most of the insults involve an activity of self-pleasure, if modified by other rusty implements. I personally wouldn't go any further than telling someone to fuck off or go fuck themselves (indicating that they are incapable of decent conversation and therefore should just go play by themselves in the corner), but I'm fairly certain that even that would be pointed at as being terribly mean and awful and so on.
It's the same argument they have against New Atheism (barf) altogether - any statement of disagreement is a horrible insult and therefore shouldn't be made. Oh no, you can't say God is a terrible god! That's so mean and such a turnoff! Oh no, you can't say that people should imagine no religion, either - that's offensive! Oh no, you can't say that people can be good without God, that's rude! And so on, and so on.
I've really tried to tone down my language in recent months, figured it would be better to lose the swearing to see if it actually helped.
The thing is, I see a place for both 'kinds' of blog - the nice, polite 'if we gently ask religion nicely maybe it'll stop riding roughshod over science eventually' approach as well as the 'fuck off; we're not taking your woo-soaked bullshit for even one more second - you assclowns' attitude we've got here.
It's the hypocrisy - the criticise us for doing to religion exactly what they're doing to us now - that bothers me. They're against attacking people openly - as long as the people they're not attacking are religious; atheists they don't agree with, on the other hand, get the royal screw-job.
At least were consistently grouchy toward everyone...
It's late/early and I'm feeling whimsical. Anybody wanna fiddle around?
Having said what I like about Pharyngula (#678), I'll say what I dislike.
I dislike that the cocksure intelligence and the moral fervour that I think are necessary sometimes translates into harsh language and a tone that can be off-putting to newcommers. I dislike when I or others are sometimes unnecessarily harsh.
What I like about Pharyngula far outweighs what I dislike, and I realise it is difficult to expect to have one without the other. But I think we can always try to tone down the unnecessary harsh language and see if we can keep Pharyngula as efficient as before in not letting stupidity triumph.
I've also tried to tone down my aggressive language - or, more accurately, save it for the most appropriate recipients; the outburst that got cited by the Vapor Squad was directed toward a particularly vapid troll (Dendy) who'd been wasting everyone's time for days beforehand.
And I'd do it again. Few things irk me more than inanity, homophobic idiocy and a refusal to engage.
But there's no way I'd be saying that to anyone who was simply disagreeing with me, and I've made plenty of even-handed posts meeting that description - probably far more than those I'd describe as vitriolic.
But that's the thing about intellectually dishonest cherry-picking - you can present things completely out of context.
However, while the faitheists might let up if we cut out the casual cursing, the woo-soaked won't; as noted upthread, that atheists have the temerity to not believe in their ridiculous god - and the audacity to want to be heard saying so - is enough for them to cry persecution.
The furor over the atheist billboards being a good example. I dare say if they were to say something as straightforward as 'Other atheists exist - don't be afraid' would be considered inflammatory.
<facepalm> That was reported months ago, and I completely forgot about it! I forgot about that fascinating anoxic ecosystem! ARGH!
...of which, it seems, there were at least two. At any rate, the Na-Dené languages and the Yeniseian languages are probably sister-groups.
Gotta run.
Pretty much.
Catching up with the never-ending thread.
@Josh: I have had chitlins. We had "Soul Food" day one day in the dorm when I was in college I understand the taste depends on the preparation. The ones I had were very spicy (the cooks used a LOT of pepper...) and had a singular smell, as mentioned above...rather hard to describe. I wouldn't say they were something I would search out to eat, but, on the other hand, if they are the only thing available I would eat them again.
Yep, those who aren't like them should keep quiet so as not to offend them. Or worse yet, make them think. After all, thinking is hard work.
I started to lurk here first because of my interest in science and my desire to stave off senility by keepng mentally active. I didn't think I would learn so much else!
I was born about the same time as the NHS and so, on a day to day basis, I didn't give it any mind.
Many of the comments here make me realise HOW FUCKING LUCKY I AM.
Thank you all for that.
Snake eats titanosaur dinosaur!
Read all about it!!
Even dinosaurs were afraid of snakes!!!
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/21/20100303/tsc-dinosaur-eating-snake-discover…
(and in the current edition of PLoS Biology (but currently it is Feb 2010 and does not contain the article - no doubt this will change))
As you would expect it's not quite so exciting - we are not talking adult sauropod. It is interesting, however.
Alan B, nice find. I saw that last night but didn't think to post it. That makes it possible that predation of the hatchlings was problem for species survival.
And for your WTF moment today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Udc_R36pVCU
I would point out to Walton that criminal libel was only ceased to part of English and Welsh law in January this year.
You people. GO SPEW YOUR FILTH ELSEWHERE!!!