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Wunderpus photogenicus

Wonderpus is a spectacular cephalopod that has appeared a few times on the Friday Cephalopod. How can you forget an octopus with this kind of psychedelic color? Wunderpus photogenicus Now a reader has sent me a link to the formal taxonomic description of Wunderpus photogenicus, and we can get more details on this beautiful animal. A taxonomic paper is more than a couple of gosh-wow pictures and the announcement of a spiffy name — it's a fairly detailed description of as much as is known about the species, with special attention paid to the technical features that distinguish this species from…

Rowe on "Gay Studies" Curricula

Jon Rowe has a really, really good post on the subject of "gay studies" programs and currricula. As many of you may know, the religious right is up in arms at the moment about a bill in the California legislature that would require schools to teach "the contributions of people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender to the economic, political, and social development of California and the United States of America.'' I find myself in almost total agreement with him that, while we shouldn't do anything like demanding "equal time", the fact is that gays have had an extraordinarily…

Science Story: Impossible Conditions

(When I launched the Advent Calendar of Science Stories series back in December, I had a few things in mind, but wasn’t sure I’d get through 24 days. In the end, I had more than enough material, and in fact didn’t end up using a few of my original ideas. So I’ll do a few additional posts, on an occasional basis, to use up a bit more of the leftover bits from Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist…) While we mostly think of science being done in comfortable institutes if not gleaming laboratories, one of the most impressive and inspiring things about science is that people can and do carry…

How to Make a Real Shooting Star!

"I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time." -Jack London Most of you have seen a shooting star before, also known as a meteor. They happen most frequently during (surprise) meteor showers, but occasionally (and sparsely) during other times of the year. Whenever a small bit of astronomical dust from outer space runs into the atmosphere -- even though it may be no bigger than a grain of sand -- it burns up in the…

All the Junk in Our Solar System

My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles. --Children everywhere, up until very recently Taking a look at the new ring discovered around Saturn made me realize something. Most of us don't realize how full of crap our Solar System is. I don't mean planets, or moons, or comets or asteroids, although there are certainly plenty to go around. A brief recap of what happened around Saturn first. Saturn has seven glorious, inner rings that we're familiar with, that make it a magnificent sight for skywatchers everywhere. If you look closely at this image, you will see a few white dots in…

It Figures: The Historical Aesthetics of Scientific Publishing

Steve Hsu has a post comparing his hand-drawn diagrams to computer-generated ones that a journal asked for instead: He's got a pretty decent case that the hand-drawn versions are better. Though a bit more work with the graphics software could make the computer ones better. This reminded me, though, of something I've always found interesting about scientific publishing, namely the evolution in the use of figures through the years. Whenever I need to do literature searching, I always suspect you could guess the approximate date of a paper's publication by looking at the figures. If you go back…

The Ten Commandments and the Constitution - Again

Pat Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice is asking the Supreme Court to overrule an appeals court decision in Ohio that removed postings of the Ten Commandments from 4 schools in that state. In a WorldNutDaily article about the appeal, the following quote appears: "It is an undisputable fact that the Ten Commandments played a significant role in the development of our legal system in this country," said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the ACLJ, in a statement. Since it has come up yet again, I'm going to reprint a post that I made in December on this subject, examining the ten…

Through the Wormhole

The Science Channel debuted a new show last night, Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, with the premier apparently designed by committee to piss off as many Internet types as possible. The overall theme was "Is there a creator?" and it featured physicist-turned-Anglican-priest John Polkinghorne talking about fine-tuning but no atheist rebuttal. It spent a good ten minutes on Garrett Lisi and his E8 theory, making it sound a whole lot more complete than it is. And it got this aggressively stupid review in the Times: Oh, let's face it: it was hard to concentrate on the first half of the…

Where have all the ducklings gone??

Or, more exactly, where are they all going to go during the next two or three months? I'm sitting here between a large frozen lake and a small "pond" (connected to the lake with a channel) that has patches of open water on it. (The melting on the pond is probably because the bioactivity at the bottom of the pond increases water temperature.) There is a pair of mallards on the pond, and I expect that in a few weeks there will be two or three mallards and three or for mergansers, all females, and each with between six and 12 or so ducklings. These 60 ducklings will initially hang out only…

The Giants' Shoulders # 8

"The Giants' Shoulders" is a monthly science blogging event, in which authors are invited to submit posts on "classic" scientific papers. Information about the carnival can be found here. The last Giants' was hosted at The Questionable Authority, here. The next issue will be hosted at The Evilutionary Biologist: All Science, All The Time, which resided here. Since this is Darwin Month in Darwin Year and almost, indeed, Darwin Day, we start with ... Paleontology. We'll get to Darwin at the end. Early palaentologists and the Giant killer lungfish from Hell as well as the Revenge of…

Love letter from the Whittemore Peterson Institute

Today I spent the day driving home-- one of my best friends since the seventh grade is getting married this weekend. Look forward to pics of me in a 'beautiful' hot-pink bridesmades dress soon... Anyway, since I was on the road all day, I of course wasnt connected to the internet. So I just got a minute to check my email and found: yo pig. post my shit. or are you scared? Posted by: ron lassof | June 22, 2011 1:11 PM So I wandered over to the trashbin, expecting to find a signature XMRV nut 'comment': an OCD collection of links and copypastes from those links, thus trapped in the spam trap…

Science Immersion

During my 'debate' with Creationist Charles Jackson, he let loose lots of funny accusations like "People like you are why kids think science is boring!" heh. See, Chuck wanted kids to 'debate' Creationism in science class, and I wanted kids to, you know, learn in science in science class. If you the kids dont have a basal level of science literacy, they werent really 'debating' Evilution vs Creationism-- they were parroting talking points they had learned from their elders (both sides). Science is a foreign language, and you have to learn the words first. We do need to make this as…

Physics for Dragons

One of our poetry contest winners has been reading his proof copy of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, and posted some comments. Actually, it was posted last week, but I was at Worldcon, and not dealing with much of anything else. The comments are pretty positive, but he asks a couple of questions along the way, and I figured I should respond to those here. So, below the fold are Adrian's questions and my responses: I don't get what's so weird about the Quantum Eraser, other than things that are already weird in simpler double-slit experiments in any case. Once you've accepted that a photon…

Hot cross-species toad sex

Hybrids are sort-of a mystery in evolutionary biology. In the strictest sense, they shouldn't exist because the offspring are often sterile or reproductively impaired. It is to a species evolutionary benefit to limit the number of hybrid offspring in most cases, so biologists often attribute hybrids to mistakes on the animal's part. The animal mistook a similar species for one of its own. However, Karin Pfennig, publishing in Science, shows that under some circumstances animal's will choose to mate across-species. Pfennig looked at two species of frogs from the American Southwest: Spea…

Evolution and religion debate in a broader context

The Economist has a great article summarizing all the ways in which the debate between evolution and religion has gone global. It also does a good job of analyzing the different strains within the American debate, depicting it as much less monolithic: Even in the United States, defenders of evolution teaching do not see their battle as won. There was widespread dismay in their ranks in February when John McCain, a Republican presidential candidate, accepted an invitation (albeit to talk about geopolitics, not science) from the Discovery Institute. And some opponents of intelligent design…

The cutaneous rabbit illusion hops out of the body

IF a rapid series of taps are applied first to your wrist and then to your elbow, you will experience a perceptual illusion, in which phantom sensations are felt along the skin connecting the two points that were actually touched. This feels as if a tiny rabbit is hopping along your skin from the wrist to the elbow, and is therefore referred to as the "cutaneous rabbit". The illusion indicates that our perceptions of sensory inputs do not enter conscious awareness until after the integration of events occuring within a certain time window, and that the sensory events taking place at a certain…

Fabricating Reality: You Can't Fool Your Blind Spot

Right now, you're blind at one particular part of your visual field - because you have no photoreceptors at the location on your retina where the optic nerve begins its journey to visual cortex. Normally, you're unaware of this blind spot because of perceptual "filling-in" - a mechanism by which your brain actively fabricates the perceptual data it's missing. But this isn't the only case where cognition manufactures perception. In the case of the Kanizsa triangle, you will sense the presence of a full triangle although none truly exists. In other words, your brain has fabricated "illusory…

In search of pragmatism and mixed methods

I took classes on qualitative research and naturalistic research methods from researchers who follow the constructivist paradigm rather closely and who don't really believe in mixed methods research. I took statistics classes from professors who are friendly towards naturalistic methods, but who only use quantitative methods.  Other professors around me use some mixed methods, some rhetorical/critical methods, some large scale quantitative methods, (and then there's SNA)... All of these paradigms have related epistemologies*. The practitioners of naturalistic methods, in particular, are often…

The money is all green, anyway

This retracted article is proof that there is a diversity crisis in Silicon Valley. Forbes has removed a contributor piece titled "There Is No Diversity Crisis in Silicon Valley" after being hit with a barrage of criticism from readers, including many leading the tech industry's movement to hire more women, Hispanics and African-Americans. The article, authored by journalist Brian S. Hall, argued that the healthy revenue streams and stock prices of companies like Apple, Google and Facebook were proof that the tech industry is doing well and has no reason to go out of its way to include more…

Strategically communicating science

The latest issue of the journal Science includes a policy forum piece written by Sciencebloggers Chris Mooney (The Intersection) and Matt Nisbet (Framing Science). In the article, they argue that scientists do not, for the most part, use effective communications strategies when trying to defend science. Both Chris and Matt anticipate that this view is likely to be somewhat controversial, and that it is likely to spark a vigorous debate. I think that they are probably right about this, and not just because their article includes at least one paragraph that is likely to set PZ off faster than…

Science book #2: About silliness and running amok with a scientific theme - "Your Disgusting Head" by Haggis-On Whey

In Norway, you say "buse." As a geneticist, I am a lot more familiar with the concept of snot than one might suspect. And although this may appear to be a sort of an odd soundbite, it can be quickly explained by the simple fact that pure genomic DNA, isolated from any and all variety of nature's participants, will actually take on the appearance of the stuff you might see dripping out of an infant's nose. I even call it "boogery," which delights me to no end as an educator who is privilege enough to impart such wisdom to audiences ranging from scientific Heads of Departments to priests to…

This is your brain ... on violent video games

[originally posted on April 20, 2006] If you're older than about 20, you'll probably recognize the image to the left from an anti-drug campaign from the 1980s. The image was supposed to represent the effects of drugs on the human brain. While the effectiveness of the campaign is debatable, the fact that it now seems a quaint relic of a bygone era begs the question: are we repeating the same mistakes in the war on violent video games? While there are many correlational studies and even some experiments showing the relationship between playing violent video games and aggressive behavior, there…

This is your brain ... on violent video games

If you're older than about 20, you'll probably recognize the image to the left from an anti-drug campaign from the 1980s. The image was supposed to represent the effects of drugs on the human brain. While the effectiveness of the campaign is debatable, the fact that it now seems a quaint relic of a bygone era begs the question: are we repeating the same mistakes in the war on violent video games? While there are many correlational studies and even some experiments showing the relationship between playing violent video games and aggressive behavior, there have been comparatively few…

Le Trouble de la Personnalité Limite

(Note: if the accent marks look weird, set your browser to view character encoding as Unicode (UTF-8)) One of the problems with the href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders">Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is that there is no clear rationale for the division of problems into Axis I vs. Axis II disorders.  It is assumed, sometimes, that Axis I disorders are "biological" and Axis II disorders are "psychological."   Legend has it that the division arose directly from the conflict between psychodynamically-oriented…

Have e-books killed tree-books?

Have e-books killed tree-books? I hope not - I love hefting a brand-new book in my hand and letting the pages fan open. It's sensual and anticipation-laden, like opening a bottle of good wine. But perhaps science writer and blogger Carl Zimmer is hedging his bets on the future of paper books: he's released his latest collection, Brain Cuttings, exclusively for Kindle, iPad, and other mobile devices. I clicked over to read an excerpt, and this was the first passage I saw: Let's say you transfer your mind into a computer--not all at once but gradually, having electrodes inserted into your…

I support blasphemy

A columnist in the Cincinnati Post, Kevin Eigelbach, has a few words for Answers in Genesis. He got a letter from them asking for money to protect the Bible from the wicked secularists who want people to think critically about its contents. Ham fears that one day we'll find stickers inside our Bibles that tell us the Bible is fictional. A friend of his found one in a Gideon Bible in Salt Lake City. The sticker says the Bible contains religious stories regarding the origin of living things. They are theories, not facts, it says. "This material should be approached with an open mind, and a…

Even wingnuts respond to culture shock

Wow, I'm impressed: The J Train finds a small guttering flicker of reason on WingNutDaily. It's an article by a conservative Christian opposing public prayer at football games—he'd been in Hawai'i, where he'd been shocked to discover that pre-game prayers were given by Buddhist monks, and he found himself an uncomfortable minority in a sea of people following some strange religion (hmmm…does anybody else know what that's like?) It's actually funny to read. He's plainly horrified that he'd have to be in the presence of someone reciting a pagan prayer! He doesn't quite get the response right,…

Sunflower Sunday (aka Friday Fractal LIV)

If we look at the natural world around us, fractals abound. Sometimes, not. This is the greatest puzzle to me... not that fractals appear in nature, but the fact that not everything is a fractal. Working on this week’s layered set (which took a while, mostly due to unrelated circumstances) I found myself questioning that inconsistency. As I try to imitate some iterative, aperiodic pattern with my computer, I often find myself layering one fractal on top of another, to match the foreground and background (i.e., tree and sky, or clouds and land.) Sometimes, I’ll use more than a couple. This…

Quran apologists are ridiculous

Yet again, another defender of Islam hangs the truth of his holy book on the scientific accuracy of the text. It's amazing how defensive these fundies get over the possibility that the author was merely transmitting the guesswork of the time, and like any scientific hypothesis, stands a risk of being shown to be wrong by later work. In this case, the apologists are confronted with a verse from the Quran, which they happily translate literally as (Man is) created from gushing water (which) comes out from between the backbone and the ribs. I think the Arabs of the 7th century knew exactly where…

Oldest Wall Painting

A very early example of painting inside a built structure is being reported from Syria. A Repost Geometric polychromic painting on the interior of a built wall in a structure occupied by Hunter-Gatherers, about 11,000 years ago, in Syria. [source] It looks like modern art, but this painting could hardly be older. Archaeologists discovered the painted pattern of black, white, and red among the ruins of an 11,000-year-old house in northern Syria--making it the oldest wall painting ever discovered. Researchers uncovered the prehistoric artwork while excavating the dwelling near the Euphrates…

Oil Spills for Dummies

So, at a Sunday news briefing, British Petroleum's CEO, Tony Hayward, announced that there are no underwater plumes of oil resulting from the April accident at the company's Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Why? Well, first BP's testing hasn't found any such evidence. And second, Hayward reminds us that, you know, oil floats. Or if we didn't get that: "Oil has a specific gravity that's about half that of water. It wants to get to the surface because of the difference in specific gravity." Let's give the man this: there is definitely oil floating on the surface…

The worst argument against global warming gets worserer

Louis Hissink has responded to my post on the worst argument against global warming, ever: Well yes Tim, the Holy See seemed to need to recalibrate the calendar, and in Medieval times, no one was observing the heavens for the simple fact that telescopes had not yet been invented. And you didn't think he would be able to top his argument about climate change that was inconsistent with the existence of seasons. This is an argument about astronomy that assumes that you can't see stars without a telescope. Wait, there's more: What has not occurred to Quiggin,…

Sunday Sacrilege: Prometheus’ sin

Why are science and religion in conflict? Because changing ideas and new knowledge are sacrilegious. This display from Ken Ham's Creation "Museum" says it all: the ultimate source of knowledge is "God's Word", the Bible. They have an old book with the whole story laid out, literally, as the creationists like to claim, and by their definition, all observations of the natural world must be accommodated to it. In contrast stands human reason, which dares to contradict the Bible, dares to show great truths not encompassed by the Bible stories, and most horribly, proposes an alternate, better…

Chilean earthquake fallout: MSNBC implies nature is "out of control"

Screen capture of the MSNBC website on February 27, 2010 at ~5:30 PM eastern time. Most of you have probably already heard about the magnitude 8.8 earthquake that struck today off the coast of Chile. This becomes one of the most powerful earthquakes on record and so far, the death toll has been relatively low - in the hundreds - especially compared to the horrific disaster of the Haiti earthquake from earlier this year. My thoughts go out to all in Chile recovering from the earthquake. However, I am a little appalled at some of the coverage I've seen for this earthquake. MSNBC has become the…

Geoengineering and the ocean

The Wonkroom's Brad Johnson takes on USA Today's Dan Vergano over geoengineering. Geoengineering is the idea that we could combat global warming by pumping sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, thus blocking some solar radiation and keeping things cooler. Vergano is a sharp science writer and his take is hardly boosterish, but Johnson dings him for having: failed to accurately interpret the scientific literature. The only risks he has depicted â ones that involve the potential deaths of millions if not billions of people â are the âknownâ ones, the ones easily modeled by imperfect…

Maximizing Mastication: Chewing Gum To Enhance Cognition

Children assigned to chew sugar-free gum purportedly score 3% higher on standardized tests of math skills (as widely reported in the press). But is this just one of the 5% of all possible untrue hypotheses statistically guaranteed to have some significant result in its favor (in fact, it's worse than that)? Is the effect due to some other aspect of gum chewing (as Michael Posner asks)? Or might there be a real effect here of chewing (i.e., "mastication"), and if so, how can you use it to your maximum advantage? What we know - and what we don't - about gum and cognition To cut to the chase…

How to review intelligent design: defending Hacking

Jason Rosenhouse, of Evolutionblog, has posted a rather snarky review of a book review by the historian and philosopher Ian Hacking that was published in The Nation. Jason titled his comment "How not to defend evolution". Here's my take on it. Jason thinks that Hacking was pretentious, that he was not careful in his use of language, and that he was wordy. The essay was 4600 words long. Jason's response is 1520 words of part one of a two parter. Hmm... The problem as I see it lies in the attitude of the sciences (and yes, I include mathematics amongst that tribe) to the humanities, and…

Vaccines and autism: Same as it ever was

If there's one thing I've learned during the last seven years about the antivaccine crowd invested in the idea that vaccines cause autism, it's that it reacts with extreme hostility to any sort of studies that cast doubt upon their pet idea that vaccines cause autism. That's somewhat understandable, given how much of their identity so many members of the antivaccine movement have invested in their idea, but not all studies that fail to support the central dogma of the antivaccine movement (i.e., that vaccines cause autism and are in general evil) are created equal, at least not with respect…

Who made the giant Jurassic sea-floor gutters?

I have to admit that I don't find trace fossils - the vast majority of which are footprints - that interesting. But some trace fossils are very neat and provide excellent information on behaviour and lifestyle. Examples include pterosaur take-off traces, the trackway of the little theropod that does an abrupt about-turn and runs back the way it came, and the Myotragus tracks that show how individuals had to stagger and battle through wet sediment in order to escape alive. Particularly fun are giant mystery traces: the ones made by large animals doing unusual things... yet what these large…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

Let's check all seven PLoS journals tonight.... As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Molecular Phylogenetics of the Genus Neoconocephalus (Orthoptera, Tettigoniidae) and the Evolution of Temperate Life Histories: The katydid genus Neoconocephalus (25+ species) has a prominent acoustic…

Fukushima Update: Radioactive Fish, Conflicts of Interest, and Filtered Vents

On March 11th, 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant complex suffered damage from an earthquake and ensuing tsunami that caused multiple nuclear reactor core meltdowns and melt-throughs, explosions, and major releases of radioactive material into the air and the sea. In addition to the reactor meltdowns and melt-throughs spent fuel storage tanks were also damaged and probably contributed to the release. It took about a year for the plant to reach a condition that was stable enough that we stopped checking it every day to see if new bad things were happening. Heroic efforts were…

I know you are, but what am I?

Denialism. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. The story might be apocryphal, and it might not even be true, but it's often used as a metaphor. I'm referring to the "boiling frog" story. Basically, the idea is supposedly based on an observation that a frog, when placed in a pot of hot water, will immediately jump out. However, or so the story goes, if the frog is placed in room temperature water and the water is heated gradually enough, the frog won't notice and will eventually boil to death without trying to escape. The metaphor, of course, is designed…

The Apocalypse really is happening and the Rapture went off without a hitch

It's all just a matter of calibration. Let me 'splain. One day I was driving along a suburban street with the sun low on the horizon and the windows covered in rain drops from a sudden sun-shower moments earlier, insufficiently caffeinated and distracted by something. That's when I saw a large black dog transmogrify into a lawn mower. No, seriously, I really did see this. It reminded me of the time I saw a giant UFO over Boston Harbor (details here: The Night I Was Almost Abducted by Aliens in Boston). What happened with the dog was this: The distraction was a set of children and other…

The Autism Omnibus: When you don't have scientific evidence, tug on the heartstrings!

The Autism Omnibus is now officially under way, having begun with the first test case, that of Cedillo v. Secretary of Health and Human Services. The Omnibus proceeding is the culmination of the legal cases brought to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program by nearly 5,000 families who "feel" that their children's autism was in fact caused by vaccines. Most, but not all, of the plaintiffs blame the mercury in the thimerosal in childhood vaccines, despite there being no good evidence to support such a link, so much so that both David Kirby, whose book Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and…

Quoth Mark "not a doctor, not a scientist" Blaxill: "Help, help, Andy Wakefield's being repressed!"

Help! Help! I'm being repressed. Somehow, that is the image I have gotten in the three weeks since the very last shred of Andrew Wakefield's facade of scientific respectability tumbled. As you may recall, at the end of January, the British General Medical Council found Andrew Wakefield, the man whose trial lawyer-funded, breathtakingly incompetent, and quite possibly fraudulent study in 1998 launched the most recent iteration of the anti-vaccine movement, not to mention a thousand (actually, many more) autism quacks, guilty of gross research misconduct, characterizing him as "irresponsible…

Homeopathy for breast cancer surgery? Isn't it bad enough that the patient has cancer and needs a mastectomy?

I like to refer to homeopathy as The One Quackery To Rule Them All, so much so that I almost always call it that within the first two paragraphs of any post I write about some tasty bit of homeopathy pseudoscience. It's also a wonderful tool for teaching critical thinking because it's easy to explain and people grasp intuitively why homeopathy is pseudoscience when it's explained properly to them. Basically, it's because of homeopathy's two laws. The first is the Law Similars, which states that, relieve a symptom, you must use something that causes the symptom. It's nonsense. There's no…

Coming to terms with the female orgasm

Why is it so hard to understand a commonplace thing like orgasms? I think I know why science does not understand the female orgasm. It is because science excels when it breaks free of context, history, human complexities and anthropology, but when a topic requires one to grasp context, history, human complexities and anthropology, then science, especially the hard sciences, can fall short. Also, the nature of the female orgasm is a comparative question, but human sexuality is highly (but not entirely) derived; It is difficult to make a sensible graph or table comparing aspects of sexuality…

Tiny frogs and giant spiders: the best of friends

The recent discovery that some Asian microhylid frogs frequent the dung piles of elephants has gotten these obscure little anurans into the news, possibly for the first time ever. Microhylids - or narrow-mouthed frogs - are not exactly the superstars of the frog world: they're only really familiar to specialists, despite the fact that (as of June 2009) they contain over 450 species distributed across Africa, Madagascar, the Americas, and Asia. However, some more recent research on the group shows that, like so many animals, they're really quite interesting once you get to know them... You…

The Poincare Conjecture

Tuesday's New York Times had this lengthy article about progress on one of the great open problems in mathematics: Poincare's conjecture. Actually, it looks increasingly likely that the problem is no longer open: Three years ago, a Russian mathematician by the name of Grigory Perelman, a k a Grisha, in St. Petersburg, announced that he had solved a famous and intractable mathematical problem, known as the Poincaré conjecture, about the nature of space. After posting a few short papers on the Internet and making a whirlwind lecture tour of the United States, Dr. Perelman disappeared back…

The comparison to jabberwocky is inevitable

Lots of people have been sending me this paper by Erik Andrulis, and most of you have done so with eyebrows raised, pointing out that it's bizarre and unbelievable; some of you wrote asking whether it was believable, at which point my eyebrows went up. Come on people: when you see one grand cosmic explanation that is summarized with cartoons, which the author claims explains everything from the behavior of subatomic particles to the formation of the moon, shouldn't you immediately sense crankery? It's also getting cited all over the place, from World of Warcraft fan sites to the Discovery…