FlamingText

Today in Science

The big news story right now that the has the whole internet abuzz is this one:
The entertainment industry was still reeling today at the revelation of a homosexual in their midst, as George Takei, the beloved helmsman Sulu from the original Star Trek series, revealed in this week's edition of Los Angeles magazine Frontiers that he is gay. Co-stars William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, both of whom are reputedly still alive, were unavailable for comment.
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Researchers discover dyslexia gene: Up to 20% of dyslexia may be traced to an error on the sixth chromosome, on a gene known as DCDC2. Or CDCD2. Scientists aren't sure which.

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Biomimetics! At the University of Surrey, a team of robotics researchers headed by Dr Alex Ellery envision exploring distant planets with robotic flying squirrels.

Wait, did I just type that? I swear, sometimes this thing works like a ouija board; I don't know what's gonna come out until it's right there staring back at me in black and white. Nope, there it is: Robotic Flying Squirrels. Well I'll be damned.

Now that the generation of kids who grew up watching animé are old enough to secure jobs as big-shot roboticists, it's only natural that we are hearing their first public statements touting the practical advantages of exploring space using robots patterned after wasps, ants, eels and yes, flying squirrels. They claim it has something to do with "efficient use of energy." It has nothing, repeat nothing whatsoever to do with making wicked-cool looking robots to send into space!

That's just a side benefit.

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As part of the ongoing project to clone every animal that is considered edible and/or adorable, Italian researchers have produced a litter of 14 cloned piglets. This brings the list of successfully cloned mammals to: sheep, mice, cattle, goats, horses, rabbits, cats, pigs, mules and dogs. Next up: Baby seals!

The Vacuum Shop

  The bus I take to and from work goes right by this little vacuum cleaner repair shop that's run out of a converted residence, a little whitewashed shack with red and blue trim. On the corner that faces the intersection there's a matching four-foot high red white and blue cinderblock wall and sitting on top of that wall are all these brightly colored vacuum cleaners that have been done up to look like happy, smiling vacuum cleaner robots. Out front there's a big old-school neon sign with a blinking arrow pointing down the road towards the Hacienda Motel, which is three blocks away. I've seen the Hacienda Motel and it pretty much looks exactly like what you'd expect with that name. I've never checked whether or not they rent rooms by the hour but they do advertise monthly rates so I guess people live there.

  Anyway, aside from the incongruous Hacienda sign, the vacuum shop has this marquee with a different message on either side. They change regularly. It always has some sort of biblical quote on it, followed by the phrase "free bibles." So I guess if you bring your vacuum in to get it serviced they throw in a bible at no extra charge.

The quotes look like this:
THEY WHO FEAR GOD WILL BE GLAD FREE BIBLES INSIDE

or

PSALM 119 THE WORD OF GOD IS TASTE AND SEE! FREE BIBLES INSIDE

or

PSALM 119 GODS WORD OR MONEY CHOOSE WISELY FREE BIBLES INSIDE.

Yesterday it was

BLESSED ARE THE UNDEFILED FREE BIBLES INSIDE.

Which I had to admit was pretty good. I mean, it's not exactly Burma Shave, but I enjoyed it nevertheless. I make it a habit to check the marquee every day, on my way in to work in the morning and when I go home at night, to see what's on there. Nature may abhor a vacuum, but the Lord loves 'em.

The Case For Intelligent Design

  This is a virus. Its name is Variola Major, and it’s the virus responsible for the more deadly strain of smallpox. (The less deadly version is called Variola Minor.) It is a living organism and therefore one of God’s creatures. Like all of His creations, it is a miracle of perfect design. Behold!

  Prior to its eradication it was one of the deadliest diseases known to man. It has proven extremely adaptable, and over the course of millenia has wiped out millions upon millions of victims on every populated continent on Earth. The mortality rate for smallpox is approximately 30%, although in some cases rates in previously unexposed populations run much higher. The last known "wild" case was reported in 1977, following an intensive international campaign of containment and vaccination overseen by the World Health Organization.

  There are deadlier viruses than smallpox. For example, ebola virus outbreaks have been known to have mortality rates as high as 90%. Such high mortality rates tend to limit a disease’s spread because viruses that kill off their host populations die out with the host population (ebola has the additional limitation that it is not spread through casual contact.) Viruses that leave victims alive long enough to infect others insure that they will reach a broader population of hosts, and viruses that leave a portion of victims alive long enough to spawn the next generation of hosts live longer still. When a pathogen with the right combination of high virulence, sufficiently long gestation to insure broad transmission, and less-than-total mortality meets a mobile population capable of carrying the disease to uninfected populations, the conditions for a potential pandemic are created.

  Obviously there is a delicate balance of qualities that a pathogen must possess to make it a good candidate to be a Scourge of Mankind. The common cold infects a lot of people but kills very few of them, whereas Ebola kills most of its victims but remains extremely rare. Smallpox, as plagues go, is perfect. Surely the chance of such a finely-tuned self-replicating microscopic killing machine coming about by pure chance is too much to be believed, akin to a tornado whipping through an auto-parts store and producing a 1968 Thunderbird. Or something. No, none but the most blinkered and closed-minded secularist could possibly gaze upon the elegant fusion of form and function represented in Variola Major and fail to see the hand of a divine Architect of Life.

Glossary of important science-type terms:
Pandemic: A global epidemic. See also “scourge” or “wrath of G_d.”
Zoonosis: Cross-species transmission of infectious agents. All modern diseases of this type can be traced to Noah's Ark.

Mutation: A peculiar belief often associated with Darwinism which states that organisms "change" or "adapt" over successive generations through random variations in genes that result in "adaptive" or "maladaptive" traits, with those traits that increase an organism's survival chances being more likely to be passed on to subsequent generations, thus over time becoming the new norm. Like all science of a counter-biblical nature, it is based on a theory in crisis, namely that species "change", "evolve", or "go extinct."

Next
The Appendix: Useless 'Evolutionary Leftover' or misunderstood Organic Prayer Antenna?

On the other hand...

In response to yet another discussion of society's unfair standards of beauty:

"If people really stopped looking at superficial, external beauty and started focusing on inner beauty, we’d all be complaining because we got passed over for somebody with a prettier soul."

The Reverend

  So I performed a wedding for my friends Paul and JP on the weekend last, which was a first for me. I was pretty nervous about it but it seemed to go okay. Anyway, a few people have asked me for the transcript of my speech at the top (the "sermon," as it were) so I've posted it here. I thought it also might serve to balance out the rash of negativity in this blog, what with all the stories of smurfocide and penguins being forced into prostitution and all.

  If you are looking for proof that I can occasionally sound positive about something, this might be as close as you'll get. If, however, the idea of hearing a guy who's not really a minister (well, okay, legally I am) give a not-really sermon while carefully avoiding any telltale signs of specific religious belief sounds like a drag to you, you might want to skip this. I will, however, leave you with the joke that this whole affair brought to mind, and which has always been a favorite of mine:

What do you get when you cross a Unitarian with a Jehovah's Witness? Somebody who knocks on your door to talk to you about... nothing in particular.

Enjoy! I'll be back to my regular negativity soon, I promise.

   We are gathered here to celebrate the union of Paul and JP and the expression of their love for each other.

  There are those who see love as a mystical quantity, a holy grail shining down on the drab grey corners of this world like a star from its lofty firmament. To these people love is something from a dream, something to be quested after, longed for, idealized, and like any ideal never quite reached. But those people have completely missed the point. Because love is real.

  That rose-colored glasses view of love that threatens to drown it in a suffocating glaze of good intentions and saccharine sentiment produces a love that is too flimsy, too Disney, too much of the cinema-fairy-tale-into-the-sunset happy ending to be of much use to a couple making their way in the real world where life keeps right on going, spooling out long past the last glowing happily-ever-after of the closing credits. Not a one-time event that settles everything, arriving in the third act to save the day, love is instead an underlying theme, a motif borne out in a thousand tiny events played out again and again against the canvas of each and every new day.

  Down here in the real world of deadlines and bills and flat tires and unexpected rain a friendly face asking “how was your day?”, sharing an inside joke, holding your hand in line at the grocery store means a lot more than the grand romantic gestures our movies and books and pop songs would have us believe represent the very essence of True Love. Because when something is kept up on a pedestal it tends to gather dust; nothing is so useless as the thing too precious to be touched. To be sure, a holy grail is a fine thing, but a comfortable pair of shoes will take you a lot farther in this world. So I urge you as you go forward in your lives together to take that grail down from its pedestal and have your coffee in it every morning. Keep it familiar, keep it close at hand; it will never let you down.

  Because Love is real, and it lives with us down here in the trenches, down in the mud, down where we need it, even as it allows us to look up and dream of what could be. It is not the kind of gift that rains down on us from above, but the kind of gift that blooms out from the inside, bursting forth and climbing skyward. Everything of the divine that there is in us springs from these simple acts of genuine, real love.

And love IS real, thank God.

One more reason why drugs have become redundant

The Smurfs of War.
The UNICEF spokesman points out that the intention of the ads was to shock people, and pictures of actual children suffering don't work nearly as well for that as pictures of suffering Smurfs. That fact is in and of itself pretty disturbing. I just hope nobody applies this same logic to muppets, because I do not need the therapy bills for THAT.

Desperate Penguin Housewives

"A kiss may be grand but it won't pay the rental
on your humble flat, or help you at the automat."

  Yes, square-cut or pear-shaped, these rocks don't lose their shape -- when Marilyn sang those lines in "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" the rocks to which she was referring were diamonds, but in the world of Adelie penguins it's just plain old rocks that are a girl's best friend. Pebble-sized nesting rocks, to be specific. In their nesting grounds amid the frozen wastes of Antarctica, a warm season can spell disaster for the pending generation of hatchlings, flooding the nest with frigid water and drowning them before they ever leave the shell. A solid foundation of rocks helps lift the eggs above the perilous slurry of ice-melt and guano that in warm years threatens to swamp the nests, but of course with as many as a half-million penguins vying for space in locations such as Ross Island, such rocks can be hard to come by. Following the universal economic law of supply and demand, this drives the market value of nesting rocks up and up, leading some enterprising penguin females to resort to devious methods of acquiring the precious stones. Namely, turning tricks.

  As famously documented in this summer’s surprise hit movie March of the Penguins, mother and father penguins must work cooperatively to ensure the survival of their brood in the harsh conditions of Antarctica, prompting some conservative pundits to applaud the movie for its positive portrayal of monogamy and traditional family values. One partner must guard the nest and sit on the eggs while the other forages for food and for those precious nest-building rocks. But, as observed by University of Sheffield zoologist Fiona Hunter and others in extensive field studies, there is more than one way to line a nest. Hunter found that a small percentage of rock-hungry females circumvented the dangers and tedium of the traditional methods of rock-gathering, which involve either wandering far and wide in search of unclaimed rocks (boring!) or stealing them from the neighbors (fun, but dangerous!) and instead opted to engage in a form of sexual commerce once thought to be the exclusive domain of humans. A female would approach an unmated male occupying a nest lined with stones (presumably constructed as an enticement to eligible females) and initiate courtship behavior, standing a ways off from the male and giving him the eye. The male would respond with the traditional sidelong glance and bowed head before moving off the nest and allowing her to take her place there. Once so ensconced, she would lay face down on the nest, signaling her readiness to mate. The male would then mount her. After the deed was done, the female picked up a stone with her beak and went back to her own nest, in some cases returning as many as ten times to pick up additional stones after the initial transaction, unimpeded in these further sorties by the sated male.

  Now, I may not be an economist or a Republican, but I like to think I understand the basic idea of supply and demand. To whit, when increased demand encounters a static supply it drives the economic value of the supply side of the equation upwards. And since, thanks to global climate trends (notice I didn’t say “global warming?” I don’t want to venture onto the thin, thin ice of junk science here, people. Let’s just say “the opposite of global cooling”), the arctic and Antarctic ice shelves have been melting away at a rate that climatologists tend to describe in terms such as “Holy crap!” and “Wasn’t there a whole ice-cap here just a year or two ago?”, there are likely to be more unseasonably warm years for the penguins’ Antarctic nesting grounds, ergo more market demand for nest rocks to elevate the Adelie eggs above the ice-melt and guano trickling down onto their eggs, that means greater economic pressure for female penguins to resort to selling their bodies in exchange for precious, precious rocks that help secure a greater chance of survival for their helpless fertilized eggs. That’s right. Mark my words. Global climate change will drive more and more penguin wives into prostitution.

Hey kids! Did you know that one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gases is automobile emissions? It’s true! And did you also know that the more fuel an automobile burns, the more greenhouse gases it releases? That means that the Ford OverCompensator 4-Wheel Drive SUV parked out in your driveway warms up the atmosphere as much as two sedans, three motorcycles, or four scooters would traveling the same distance! And the warmer the Earth gets, the more penguin mommies are going to be forced to trade sexual favors for rocks! Isn’t that terrible?

Kids, you know that voice you use when you really, really really want something and Mommy and Daddy won't get it for you? You know the voice I’m talking about – the one you use when you’re in the store and they’re acting like they’re not going to buy you that plush stuffed penguin that you asked for but then you realize that they just need proper motivation and so you use that special high-pitched voice and ask for it several times in a row, getting a little bit louder every time until finally they break down and just give you what you want so you’ll stop? Right, that voice. That’s the voice I want you to use when you ask this question, while sitting down to dinner tonight at the dinner table:

“Daddy, why do you have to drive that giant car to work every day even though you’re the only one in the car and big cars like yours warm up the planet and force penguin mommies to do it with penguins who aren’t their husbands just so they can get some rocks? Why, Daddy, why? Why???”

Then start crying. I know your parents call this “whining,” but it’s for a good cause. Penguins! Cute, lovable, monogamous penguins!

Take that, Michael Medved! Oh, and by the way, nice mustache.