Nonsense
laelaps | September 27, 2008moar funny picturesEliza and Madeline, two kittens I fostered over the summer. (They have good homes now.)Given my fondness for cats, I guess the result of this quiz isn't all that surprising, either [hat-tip to John];
Your result for The Which Discworld Character Am I Test...
DEATH
You scored 98 intelligence, 48 morality, and 48 physical strength!
YOU ARE SMART, SAVVY, AND KNOW WHAT DEDICATION TO THE JOB IS...MOST OF THE TIME. YOU ENJOY YOUR WORK, AND EVEN HELP OUT OTHER ANTHROPOMORPHIC PERSONIFICATIONS FROM TIME TO TIME. RECENTLY, YOU'VE LEARNED WHEN TO BEND THE RULES, MUCH TO THE DEATH…
laelaps | September 5, 2008According to the highly reputable and fact-oriented periodical The Onion, a stain resembling Charles Darwin has appeared on the Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee. You may recall that Dayton was the site of the famous 1925 "Scopes Monkey Trial" (no, it did not involve the evolution of mint-flavored primates), although I would say that St. Darwin has appeared to us over 75 years too late. Nevertheless, even the prophet Tim White has apparently visited the site;
Thousands of pilgrims from as far away as Berkeley's paleoanthropology department have flocked to the site to lay wreaths of…
laelaps | September 3, 2008
Fun with stock footage and a blue screen, from Shark Attack 3.After watching the first episode of Jurassic Fight Club I felt that the show deserved some amount of praise, but I was utterly flabbergasted by the latest episode ("Deep Sea Killers"). (You can see the full episodes yourself, for a limited time, here.)
The new episode featured the famous "mega-tooth" shark, Carcharocles megalodon, popularly called "Megalodon." During the entirety of the episode I don't think the genus name of the shark is ever mentioned; it is always referred to as "Megalodon" (and once as "Meg"). As was mentioned…
laelaps | August 27, 2008The guys over at Deep Sea News have been mercilessly teasing their readers for quite a while now, promising that they're got some absolutely astounding news to report sometime today. Amongst all the teasers they provided one hint; footage of a space shuttle lifting off.
What could the clue mean? I think that the DSN guys have arranged for the first space flight piloted entirely by super-intelligent squid. You knew it would have to happen eventually. I could be wrong, though, so I guess we will all just have to wait until the announcement is made.
Update: As promised, all has been revealed...
laelaps | August 20, 2008Greg Laden already beat me to it, but the alleged Bigfoot in a freezer has (as predicted) turned out to be a hoax. The three men involved in the hoax, Matt Whitton, Rick Dyer, and "professional Bigfoot hunter" (i.e. B.S. artist) Tom Biscardi, have admitted as much, although both Whitton and Dyer were nowhere to be found when scheduled to provide a written statement.
It's a shame, really, especially since some of the most compelling Sasquatch footage ever seen has just come to my attention;
laelaps | August 18, 2008I typically don't pay attention to Dinesh D'Souza. As far as I can tell he is little more than a pundit, someone who manages to write books so full of various orders of fallacies that my head would probably explode if I tried to read any of his titles cover-to-cover (in fact, such a tragedy nearly befell me when I read the chapter on evolution in What's So Great About Christianity?). John Pieret has commented on some asinine assertions D'Souza has made in a recent interview, though, and I thought I would take this opportunity to jump in.
D'Souza's statements offer plenty to argue about, but I…
laelaps | August 15, 2008Remember that freezer chock full o' Bigfoot I mentioned yesterday? Well today the men who claim to have found the body of the sought after mythical beast held a press conference in which the results from the first round of DNA testing were presented. Of the three samples tested one came back inconclusive, one had "traces of human DNA," and a third had "traces of opossum DNA" according to news reports. The actual body, first seen in shadowy and low-resolution images this week, was not presented.
A second round of DNA tests have been promised, but maybe it's just a stalling tactic. While the…
laelaps | August 14, 2008Leave it to Faux (oops, I mean FOX) News to be the first to get on the cryptozoological bandwagon. According to the media outlet the body of Bigfoot has been revealed and is awaiting a battery of tests to confirm it's authenticity. It looks like a hoax to me, but here's the credulous "news" coverage;
That's right; the body is said to have come from Georgia, not any of the Pacific Northwest haunts normally associated with the legend. (The American south has their own tradition of Bigfoot tales, although Sasquatch is usually called the "Skunk Ape" there.) You can make a decent model anywhere,…
laelaps | August 11, 2008see more pwn and owned picturesGrowing up I spent a fair amount of time watching cheesy b-movies, mostly "revenge of nature" stuff. There was the walking commentary on the a-bomb known as Godzilla, the parable about dumping biomedical waste in Alligator, a mercury-created walking salami in The Prophecy, and many others, but the take home message was always "Don't mess with Nature." It's usually a rehash of the misunderstood Frankenstein mythos, offending "Mother Nature" instead of breaking the boundaries of "what God intended," and the atrocious film The Happening being only the latest…
laelaps | July 22, 2008... a ring-tailed lemur;
I found Chris Mooney's latest piece about Sizzle so aggravatingly condescending that I was set to pen a lengthy, ill-temptered response. I thought better of it, especially since it is clear that any negative comments or criticisms about the film will be ignored. (Instead you're just getting a shorter ill-tempered one and a photo.)
Apparently anyone who didn't like the film is a boring, humorless soul who can only find joy in endless streams of scientific data. The notion is absurd, but that's what's coming from the Sizzle soapbox, Randy Olson telling audiences that…
laelaps | July 17, 2008
Nine reasons not to date a Tyrannosaurus rex.
Also check out Zach's post refuting Jack Horner's hypothesis that Tyrannosaurus was an obligate scavenger. The piece was inspired by the new symposium book Tyrannosaurus rex, The Tyrant King; I can't wait to get my claws on a copy of my own (but I should finish Rex Appeal and Tyrannosaurus Sue first).
Now if only that anxiously awaited technical book about "Jane" would come out...
[Hat-tip to Thomas Holtz]
laelaps | July 10, 2008They don't make commercials like this anymore. There's probably a good reason for that;
laelaps | July 10, 2008Although creationists try hard to be media-savvy, relying on rhetoric to make their arguments, I can't help but laugh at who qualifies as a star in creationist circles. While documentaries about evolution often feature people like Liam Neeson and Kenneth Branagh, z-listers like Kirk Cameron and Ben Stein are the best creationists can get, apparently. Apparently Charlton Heston did his part for the creationist cause, too, as I discovered while surfing YouTube this morning;
A planet where apes evolved from men dinosaurs lived with humans? According to the "scientists," yes, even though the…
laelaps | July 8, 2008ElizaMadelineWhy start off the day with pictures of the kittens rather than a juicy science post? I think this explains it well enough;
more cat pictures
laelaps | July 2, 2008Michael Bolton and I share the same birth date, February 26th (he being considerably older than I, of course). Who is better? It's an absurd question (I opted out of comparing myself to Johnny Cash and Victor Hugo; I know when I'm beat), especially since it's like comparing apples and lawnmowers. The ever-respectable, serious journalists over at Newsweek have decided to do just that, though, setting Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln (who were born on the same day, February 12, 1809) up for a no-holds-barred deathmatch to see who would come out on top. Ok, maybe it's not that over-hyped but…
laelaps | June 30, 2008A few months ago I was enjoying a pleasant evening with a few friends when the topic of evolution came up, more specifically the work of Stephen Jay Gould. One of the people in the room asked "Who's he?" and before I could respond someone else did, commenting "Well, he showed that Darwin was wrong." I can't lie, I'm surprised I didn't exclaim "WHAT?!" (although I did think as much). I quickly jumped in and explained how this was not so, explaining in words what Gould illustrated with a coral branch in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. While Gould is famous for his arguments with "ultra-…
laelaps | June 26, 2008If you like bad b-movies featuring clunky cgi dinosaurs it has been a good summer so far. First there was gratuitous silliness of Aztec Rex;
Close on it's tail, though, is 100 Million B.C. (not to be confused with the recent big-screen cheese fest 10,000 B.C. or the classic One Million Years B.C.). The film looks like someone dropped a couple of seasons of Stargate, a copy of The Lost World, a few issues of The War That Time Forgot, and Michael Gross in a blender and hit "Gooify";