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Happy Blogiversary to Orac!

One of the blogosphere's best known skeptics hit a milestone today. Orac at Respectful Insolence has now been fighting ignorance for five years. That's like, oh, about 30 in blog years. Why don't you go over there and wish him a happy blogiversary. He deserves it. Folks like Orac who publicly call out quacks get a lot of online and real-life harassment. It's nice to get well-wishers coming by once in a while.

The Most Influential Female Atheist of 2010

Jen McCreight is running an online poll to determine the most influential female atheist of the year. Uh-oh. You'd think she'd learn. But given that the results will be utterly meaningless, it's still useful — there's quite a long list of good XX godless folk, and commenters keep mentioning more that were left out. Go there to see the depth and diversity of atheism, even if you don't vote.

Flex your graphic design skills

The National Center for Science Education is looking for a new logo. The nation's premier force standing up for accurate science education has decided that their old logo lacks pizzazz. They want to enlist the vast online evolutionist cabal and naturally select the very finest ideas. Send your intelligently designed logo to them by August 10, and do read the guidelines in the link. The successful designer gets pretty fancy swag.

Floyd Landis, Again

The defense is now presenting its case. I've sifted through Landis' online powerpoint, and I'm not that impressed. For starters, he still maintains that his abnormal testosterone ratio was simply a matter of too much whiskey. Sure. And while he makes a decent case that the carbon isotope test wasn't perfect, he doesn't show how the minor flaws might have conjured up a positive result. I still think this is the most plausable scenario.

The fountains of Etna

Over the weekend, Mt. Etna (Italy) had some spectacular Strombolian fire-fountaining. Lucky for us, Marco Fulle and a group went up to the summit on Friday (the 13th) and got some great pictures of the current (ongoing) eruption which have been posted on Stromboli Online. Sounds like the eruption has been increasing in the past week, so it could be a busy summer in the Aeolian Island of Italy.

Battling misinformed consent: How should we respond to the anti-vaccine movement?

As Vaccine Awareness Week, originally proclaimed by Joe Mercola and Barbara Loe Fisher to spread pseudoscience about vaccines far and wide and then coopted by me and several other bloggers to counter that pseudoscience, draws to a close, I was wondering what to write about. After all, from my perspective, on the anti-vaccine side Vaccine Awareness Week had been a major fizzle. Joe Mercola had posted a series of nonsensical articles about vaccines, as expected, but Barbara Loe Fisher appeared to have sat this one out, having posted nothing. Well, not quite. More like almost nothing. I noticed…

A Good Summary of How That New Fangled Money Works (with Two Minor Disagreements)

We typically don't think of money as technology, but money is very different than it used to be. Over at the Agonist, Bolo has two very good posts about the implications of having a fiat, non-gold standard currency, and in doing so, he gives a very good summary of modern monetary theory ('MMT') that is accessible to non-economists (Bill Mitchell and James Galbraith are great, but they aren't good explainers to a 'lay' audience; it's frustrating). For me, this is the key implication of MMT (italics mine): 1) The total amount of money is not constrained by some fixed amount of gold. Instead…

The Foster Parent Diet

Given that January is the season for regretting excesses and making new starts, I thought I'd offer Sharon's patented formula for losing 10lbs fast - absolutely guaranteed to take off the weight like lightning.; Day 1: Spend most of the day getting ready for a weekend event - running errands, shopping at local markets, prepping to prepare lunch for 20+ people. Run into friends and acquaintances and chat about the upcoming event. 3pm Day 1: Get a call from your caseworker announcing that she has four children, 4, 3, 2 and 1 in need of an emergency placement - can you take them RIGHT NOW?…

Predictably Irrational, behavioral economics in 13 chapters

I first encountered Dan Ariely on the radio show Marketplace, where he offers up little nuggets of research data from the new field of behavioral economics. Because of the individual scale of the research many of Ariely's findings have some personal finance implications. Consider the pain of paying. This is the finding that when people pay with credit as opposed to cash for dinner, they are willing to spend more. Why? Because credit cards decouple the psychic "pain" of payment from the specific act. The act of deferring reduces our pain at the damage done, and allows consumption with less…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Beatrice Lugger

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Beatrice Lugger, the founding editor of ScienceBlogs Germany, to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and…

Update on redhead "hoax"

Yesterday I posted on the resurrection of the "redheads going extinct" meme (as I noted, this story seems to cycle every few years). The current source is National Geographic Magazine, which doesn't have the "article" online. I went to the bookstore and checked out the September 2007 issue, and a write up does exist about the redheads going extinct. Unlike the secondary sources it isn't as sensationalist, and makes more than a passing nod to the Hardy-Weinberg logic from which the inference is derived. That being said, the write up in National Geographic Magazine simply recycles older…

Kaitlin Thaney moves on... [Common Knowledge]

I tend to want to make posts on Creative Commons related topics at the CC blog, but this is essentially a personal post, and I also want to have it as widely read in our community as possible. Today is Kaitlin Thaney's last day at CC. She's been working for us on the Science Commons project for a long time - starting part time in mid 2006, full time in early 2007 - and she's been an absolutely essential part of our success over the years. I first met Kaitlin because she was interning, while finishing at Northeastern, for a joint MIT-Microsoft project called iCampus. She started showing up at…

The Trump War on Science: What Can the US Learn From Canada's Experience?

Sarah Boon's post yesterday, The War on Science: Can the US Learn From Canada?, is an excellent answer to a very popular topic on Twitter yesterday. With the Trump government seemingly determined to roll back decades of environmental protections and at the same time make sure no body in government talks about it, everyone wants to know what advice the Canadian science community might have for our cousins to the south. Read Sarah's post to for an excellent first answer to that question. In the four days since Trump’s inauguration, however, it has become increasingly clear that Trump is…

Seattle cabs are naturally gassed

As they say, there's nothing like travel to learn new and unexpected things. Especially from cab drivers. One of my ScienceBlog Sibs, Shelly, spends time talking with cabbies about earwax, but I seem to invite other kinds of lectures. Often times, my driver are Sikhs. So perhaps you can guess the topics. Can I have Indian religious holidays, for twenty, Alex? And other times I learn about the challenges of adapting to life in the U.S. But not yesterday. After a short plane hop over the mountains, I got to listen to a cab time lecture on clean energy. We were having a nice chat…

Tweetlinks, 10-10-09

Follow me on Twitter to get these, and more, in something closer to Real Time: Struggling Museum Now Allowing Patrons To Touch Paintings A Harvard Skirmish in the Copyright Wars - 'Do your lecture notes violate your prof's copyright?' 60 people ready to discuss ScienceOnline2010 on FriendFeed Why Obama deserved the Nobel Peace Prize PLoS ONE in the NYT twice this week: Aerial View: Albatrosses Following a Killer Whale and Paper Challenges Ideas About 'Early Bird' Dinosaur The era of objectivity is over - 'Pro journalism didn't self-correct. It doubled down on neutrality' The psychology of…

Teaching Carnival and Tar Heel Tavern - call for submissions

I really need to start using one of those online calendars, like Google calendar or something....I have, again, signed up to host two carnivals on the same day! This probably means that both will have to be done the "regular" way without too much creativity. Ah, well! So, next Sunday, October 1st, I will be hosting the 13th edition of the Teaching Carnival, the blog carnival devoted to Higher Ed, teaching at the college level, and the life in Academia. So, if you are either giving or receiving instruction of any kind in college or beyond, and have a story to tell, let me know by Saturday,…

My picks from ScienceDaily

More Flight Than Fancy?: Scientists from the universities of Exeter and Cambridge have turned a textbook example of sexual selection on its head and shown that females may be more astute at choosing a mate than previously thought. New research, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and published online on 5 April in Current Biology, shows that differences in the lengths of the long tail feathers possessed by male barn swallows are more about aerodynamics than being attractive. Female barn swallows favour mates with longer tails and the prominent male tail 'streamers' that extend beyond the tail…

Legionnaires' Disease Linked with Wiper Fluid

By Anthony Robbins On 14 June 2010 stories appeared on the BBC and AFP. Google news displayed 70 story links. The European Journal of Epidemiology had published the research article online on 8 June. The very nice study strongly suggests that about 20% of sporadic cases of Legionnaire's disease in England and Wales may be caused by bacteria in windscreen wiper fluid. The exposure can be eliminated easily by adding "screenwash." It appears that the Legionella bacteria (Legionella pneumophila) can thrive in the warmed water that is held for the windshield washer system, often located in the…

Mushu the dragon eats a large toy lizard. Toy lizard passes through digestive tract. Mushu lives!

No time for anything substantive lately, though thoughts on the ZSL caecilian meeting coming up soon. Meanwhile, here's another short article in the 'over-enthusiastic swallowing' series: note that the articles aren't all about cases where animals choke to death. Some of them concern cases where the animals swallow insanely large objects, and still live to tell the tale. This time round, we look at the case of Mushu, a pet Central bearded dragon Pogona vitticeps, who was noted by her 7-year-old owner (Finley Collins) as having something unusual protruding from her vent. Finley was (according…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Oldest Gecko Fossil Ever Found, Entombed In Amber: Scientists from Oregon State University and the Natural History Museum in London have announced the discovery of the oldest known fossil of a gecko, with body parts that are forever preserved in life-like form after 100 million years of being entombed in amber. Black-footed Ferrets Sired By Dead Males Via Frozen Sperm: Two black-footed ferrets at the Smithsonian's National Zoo have each given birth to a kit that was sired by males who died in 1999 and 2000. These endangered ferrets--part of a multi-institutional breeding and reintroduction…

Two More Avian Anatomy Books -- Free Downloads

tags: online books, ornithology, birds, anatomyAvian Anatomy books A reader of mine sent me the links to two more avian anatomy books that are available for download from FlipDrive. How long these two downloads will last is anyone's guess, though. But I know that my overseas readers, particularly those two of you who are working on your dissertations, will be interested in these. Both books are important additions to your bookshelf, for different reasons. One book is in full color and both books are more up-to-date than the Baumel book I made available to you for download earlier (However,…

Archaeological Namesakes

I've been publishing stuff in Fornvännen since 1994. But making a vanity search in the journal's on-line version, I found that I am not the first Rund??ist in Fornvännen's history. My family name was mentioned once in those pages before I showed up. In 1935, Bengt Hildebrand published a bibliographical essay in Fornvännen titled (and I translate), "Notes on the bibliography of Swedish numismatics and archaeological historiography". It covers writings about coins and the history of archaeology. And on page 285 we find mention of one G.H. Rundquist who had published a "Catalogue of the coin…

Andrew Marr is a Tosser

See the Grauniad for the proof. But ZOMG now I've proved him right so I must be wrong. <pfft!> - that is me disappearing in a pile of logical smoke. More seriously: yes, vast numbers of blogs are full of junk, and probably rude aggressive junk (though I don't know this from personal experience, since I don't bother read those). Most (measured by volume) of journalism is junk too - it is just that in general it is fairly polite, well-written junk. At least in the UK the most obviously trash stuff gets conveniently dumped in the Sun, Mirror, Mail and so on. But there is plenty of rubbish…

ISCID RIP?

Remember the ISCID? That's the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design. From their website: he International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID) is a cross-disciplinary professional society that investigates complex systems apart from external programmatic constraints like materialism, naturalism, or reductionism. The society provides a forum for formulating, testing, and disseminating research on complex systems through critique, peer review, and publication. Its aim is to pursue the theoretical development, empirical application, and philosophical…

Physics Blogging Round-Up: Football, Harmonic Oscillation, Parallel Worlds, Citizen Science, and Optics

I was out of town last week, and doing talk prep leading up to that, so it's been a little while since my last collection of Forbes links. Here's the latest from over there: -- Football Physics: The Forces Behind Those Big Hits: A look at force, momentum, and acceleration in tackling. -- The Science Of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: What Is Quantum Harmonic Oscillation? A question on Twitter provides an excuse to use some video of The Pip bouncing on playground equipment to discuss the physics of the harmonic oscillator in both classical and quantum forms. -- The Science Of Alternate Worlds: The…

"Why is the penis shaped like that anyway?"

Researcher and science writer Jesse Bering delights in being provocative. From the description of his new book, Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?: And Other Reflections on Being Human: Why do testicles hang the way they do? Is there an adaptive function to the female orgasm? What does it feel like to want to kill yourself? Does “free will” really exist? And why is the penis shaped like that anyway? In Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?, the research psychologist and award-winning columnist Jesse Bering features more than thirty of his most popular essays from Scientific American and Slate,…

Birka Graves On-Line

Ulf Bodin and his team at the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm have built a really, really sweet database and search interface for Hjalmar Stolpe's Birka graves. Between 1871 and 1895, Stolpe dug about 1100 graves in the cemeteries surrounding the Viking Period town of Birka on an island in Lake Mälaren near Stockholm. His painstaking fieldwork and documentation ensured that the Birka record will always be one of the standard databases for Viking studies. And now it's all on-line and searchable! A massively useful research tool. This morning I attended Anna Linderholm's viva/…

Elusive Randomness

Computers are built to preserve information, not to be creative, and certainly not to be random. Therefore it is a problem to get a really random number into a computer when you need one. A common source, looking at the hundredth of seconds in the computer's clock, is not all that good as it leads to predictability if you pull two numbers from the hat with a recurrent time interval between them. You really need to link the computer to something non-digital if you want real randomness. A legendary 80s science fiction computer game, Elite, used pseudo-randomness to generate its world. The game…

links for 2008-12-02

Schneier on Security: Lessons from Mumbai "If there's any lesson in these attacks, it's not to focus too much on the specifics of the attacks. " (tags: news society security blogs) Does the broken windows theory hold online? "Does the aesthetic appearance of a blog affect what's written by the site's commenters?" (tags: culture internet blogs psychology society) Good Math, Bad Math : Public Key Cryptography using RSA How to encrypt and decrypt with RSA, with a worked example. (tags: math science blogs computing) Follow the Leader :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for…

Links for 2010-07-14

Can I build an ansible to communicate across the cosmos? "In this week's Ask a Physicist, we answer a question that's on everyone's mind: Can we use quantum entanglement to make a mockery of the speed of light, and create intergalactic communications devices like Le Guin's "ansible"?" (tags: science physics quantum sf education blogs io9) Confessions of a Community College Dean: When Technology Doesn't Help "In most industries, new technology is adopted because it's expected to lower costs and/or improve productivity (which lowers costs over time). It doesn't always succeed, of course,…

links for 2009-05-08

Evolution and the Second Law | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine "Without even addressing the question of how âlifeâ should be defined, we can ask what sounds like a subsequent question: does life make thermodynamic sense? The answer, before you get too excited, is âyes.â But the opposite has been claimed â not by any respectable scientists, but by creationists looking to discredit Darwinian natural selection as the correct explanation for the evolution of life on Earth. One of their arguments relies on a misunderstanding of the Second Law, which they read as âentropy always increases,â…

Move Over, Schrödinger's Cat

A couple of quick book-related items that I can't resist posting, even while on vacation: First, the sales rank cracked the top 500 on Amazon last night, peaking at 396. I don't know if this is just a matter of relative sales volume being low, or what, but it's a huge kick all the same. For the moment, it's the top seller in the Physics category, and #35 in Science as a whole. Statistical fluctuation or not, that's very cool. Even better is this excellent online review from New Scientist: Talking quantum physics with a dog may seem a tad eccentric, but Orzel's new book is a true delight to…

Kev Leitch (LeftBrainRightBrain) live-twitters his vasectomy

With tears in my eyes and my head bowed in deep respect, I share with you the account of Kevin Leitch's vasectomy via Twitter: http://twitter.com/kevleitch Kev is an autism and manic depression advocate in West Midlands, UK, who blogs at LeftBrainRightBrain and was one of my earliest followers on Twitter. (P.S. you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/abelpharmboy) All Twittering in response, which includes Kev's own tweets, can be found using the hashtag, #kevsnip. I first learned of his plans via Twitter but he also posted his scheme here. I am largely credited with the first…

Science in the Media: Rude or Ailing Health?

If anyone's in London or thereabouts on the 31st of March, come and see me and a few other science journalists discuss the state of science in the media at City University. The discussion follows a recent government report, entitled Science in the Media: Securing the Future. The report declared that science coverage (in the UK, at least) was in "rude health", while is somewhat different to the picture that others have painted. I'll be discussing the report as well as, presumably, other matters about science journalism along with a panel of veteran UK journalists. I assume that I have been…

ICQIT 2009

Any quantum people in the area of Japan in early December might be interested in ICQIT 2009. Submission deadline fast approaching (Sep 30): The International Conference on Quantum Information and Technology ICQIT2009 will be held at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, Japan from 2nd to 5th December 2009. ICQIT2009 focuses on the following topics: QKD and quantum networks, Large Scale QIP and architecture design. Quantum Information Theory Quantum Algorithms Measurement Based QIP Optical QIP Implementations, Solid State QIP implementations, SQUID systems ICQIT2009 is now open for…

Happenings in the Quantum World: August 7, 2008

Summer school in November, Quantum crypto is to legit to quit, quantum Pagerank, and no prayer in quantum prayer. An email about a summer school in Australia: Dear Colleagues Please forgive us if you receive this multiple times... We would like to circulate notice of the inaugural 2008 Asher Peres International Summer School in Physics which will take place in Chowder Bay, Sydney Harbor, from 17-22 November 2008 in memory of Professor Asher Peres The 2008 school is entitled: From Qubits to Black Holes and is organised jointly between Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia), and the Technion…

Collaborative Wikis and Research

Over at Machine Learning (Theory), the Learner points to a Scientific American article on Science 2.0 which discusses various efforts in bringing scientists into the 21st century, and scientists reluctance to openly discuss their research in progress in public forums. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I started blogging about my own research. First of all, I'm pretty sure it would bore a large number of people into a deep comatose sleep from which they would never emerge. On the other hand, I'm not a very smart guy, so exposing my work to the vast power of the intertube's collective…

Tracking Framing Effects in the McCain Climate Ad

As I wrote last week, in John McCain's recent television ad focusing on global warming, he frames his position as a pragmatic "middle way" approach between the two extremes of denying there is a problem and resorting to heavy taxation and regulation. The ad even ends by offering up the complementary frames that global warming is in fact a national security problem and involves a moral duty to future generations. Perhaps most notably, the ad opens by using imagery of more intense hurricanes, a "pandora's box" framing that has led to claims of alarmism directed at advocates such as Al Gore. So…

In Wisconsin, An Offline Discussion About Expelled Strategy

You don't have to be a social scientist to recognize that the distribution of opinion among people who comment at Scienceblogs is very different from the perspective found among the wider science community and even among leaders in the atheist movement. The reality of this perceptual gap was reinforced for me over the last two days as I gave the latest round of Framing Science talks at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. At the two campus presentations, roughly 150 faculty and students turned out to share in a very thoughtful and inspiring discussion about new directions in science…

Systers Pass-It-On Grants

Say you are a woman in computing. Maybe you're struggling to get through school. Maybe you're trying to start up a mentoring program, or have a great project idea, or are facing a career transition. And maybe you need some funds to get your project/schooling/transition off the ground, or at least help it along. There's a program that might be of assistance.... The Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology, and the Systers Online Community, sponsor a program called Pass-It-On Grants. The idea behind the grants is to develop a network of women, who provide financial assistance to their…

NOW can we all agree on using less oil?

It turns out that some really smart people at the University of Wisconsin have discovered a way to make sugar into gasoline, diesel, or even jet fuel. This discovery means that just about any plant can be turned into fuel - not ethanol, which would require designing and mass producing vehicles capable of using it. The fuel created by these scientists can be used as-is in the cars we already own. The new technology creates "a conventional fuel that happens to be made from sustainable sources," according to lead chemical engineer of the research James Dumesic. OK - how great is this? We are…

Slippery Ground: SSRI-Study Fallout Spreads

The ripples from the PLOS Medicine antidepressants-don't-work study by Kirsch et alia, which I covered below, just keep spreading. Those who want to follow it can do well by visiting or bookmarking this search I did (an ingenious Google News search for "Kirsch SSRI"). It seems to be tracking the press coverage pretty well. Note that the heavier and higher-profile coverage comes mainly from UK. As far as I can tell, none of the top 3 or 4 US papers have yet covered it. This blog search should help as well. Some of the more notable responses since yesterday: Science weighs in. The Times…

Euro-update 5: What to do when you've got nothing you HAVE to do

Here in Tuscany, the Munger family has rented a vacation house for a couple of weeks. Typically the day's biggest event is preparing dinner. Otherwise we generally just lounge around the house, admire the view, read, or converse over a glass of wine. Today we thought we needed a project, so Nora and I decided to try and make our own Sudoku puzzle. It's actually more difficult than you might think. You can't just randomly fill in squares in a grid to make a Sudoku puzzle that works. Then it's another challenge to create a set of clues that will result in one unique solution. After several…

Casual Fridays: What's an appropriate email sign-off?

A recent New York Times article suggests that signing off an email message with "Best" is an indication that a relationship is cooling down. Businessman Chad Troutwine claims that using "Best" to sign off is more like a brush-off: Mr. Troutwine is not alone in thinking that an e-mail sender who writes "Best," then a name, is offering something close to a brush-off. He said he chooses his own business sign-offs in a descending order of cordiality, from "Warmest regards" to "All the best" to a curt "Sincerely." There's naturally been a lot of casual conversation about this article online, so we…

Answering a "Burning" Question: How do UTI-causing Bacteria Stick to Bladder Cells?

In news that may shake the cranberry juice industry to its core, new atomic-level "snapshots" reveal how bacteria such as E. coli produce and secrete sticky appendages called pili, which help the microbes attach to and infect human bladder cells. These crystal structures -- produced at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) at Brookhaven Lab and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France -- unravel a complex choreography of protein-protein interactions that will aid in the design of new antibacterial drugs. Finding ways to interfere with pili formation could help…

Watch Oligodendrocytes Move in Vivo!

If you remember back from when I was at the Society for Neuroscience, I saw a talk by Bruce Appel where he showed videos of oligodendrocytes migrating and myelinating in the zebrafish. Oligodendrocytes are the myelin forming cell in the central nervous system of vertebrates -- the cells that coat axons in a sheet of fat called myelin that helps the axons conduct action potentials more quickly. At a point in oligodendrocyte development the oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs) have to migrate out from the ventral part of the spine to cover the axons in the spinal cord. However, this…

Flipping through the uncanniest of books

This little video from Abebooks is the closest I've ever gotten to flipping through a copy of the Codex Seraphinianus. What a truly weird book. I particularly love it when the staid narrator reveals his "favorite" illustration - a roller skater murdered by a monstrous pen. What?! The Codex reminds me of If You're Afraid of the Dark, Remember the Night Rainbow by Cooper Edens. My mom had a copy and I used to flip through it as a child, confused and not a little disturbed. I still took things too literally to appreciate the visual non sequiturs, combined with the nonsensical text ("If you…

Science blogging event in London

If you're in London, you might be interested in this event, which has been organised by the Royal Institution in collaboration with Nature Network: Blogging science Dr Ben Goldacre, Dr Jennifer Rohn, Ed Yong Thursday 28 February 2008 7.00pm-8.30pm What is it like to work in a lab? What's the latest science news? How can you tell good science from quackery? The answers to all these questions can be found in blogs, and in this event you'll meet the people who are writing them. There are literally tens of millions of blogs online. Some read like personal diaries, while others are built round…

Lillybridge II: 20th Century Photo Essay, continued

While the world changes around us, does regular, ordinary life change as well? The Lillybridge Collection shows simple, ordinary life, 100 years ago. From that simplicity, personality emerges. Charles S. Lillybridge didn't bother to seek the rich and the famous. Rather, he preferred his neighbors, ordinary people, living in a shanty town off of the South Platte River. By 1910, Denver was a growing city, constructing five story buildings. Instead of seeking these marvels of the day--many now long gone--Lillybridge sought out the young and the old, the working stiffs, the grandmothers, and the…

Move over Ken Ham: Museum of the Aquatic Ape now open

Alternative museums are all the rage these days, from the million-dollar animatronics of the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum to the quaint if ramshackle Genesis Expo in Portsmouth, UK. Lying somewhere between the two is The Museum of the Aquatic Ape, a virtual repository of all your alternative evolution needs. The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis is a fringe evolutionary theory that claims many of our distinct human traits (subcutaneous fat, lack of hair, etc) are best explained by a period of semi-aquatic living. So far it has gained little, if any, traction on the minds of evolutionary…