Sean

Cats Do Control Humans, Study Finds

seanc130@hotmail.com — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:44:45 GMT

http://www.livescience.com/animals/090713-cats-cry.html

Well, duh!

In fact, it is genuinely and fairly widely accepted among scientists who study such things that we never really domesticated cats at all -- they essentially domesticated us. Seriously! The generally accepted scenario is that wild cats were originally attracted to human settlements, during the period of early agriculture, by the rodents that infested their food stores, the trash heaps on their outskirts, and other such easy sources of food -- so they basically invited themselves in, adapting themselves to the human world by choice. Only afterwards, when humans began to realise that the cats helped them control pests like mice and snakes, did they attempt to turn them into pets, taking them all the way into their homes and starting to feed them outright. I personally suspect that this was part of the cats' plan all along. #8^)>

Unlike with dogs, where humans purposefully went out and collected them and bred them for specific purposes, the cats always had more control over their relationship with us than we did. And they've always remained to some degree wild and untameable, as demonstrated by the huge populations in some cities of abandoned, feral cats who do quite well surviving on their own. And the fact that the various breeds of cat are so incredibly much less different from one another than those of dogs (try to imagine a spectrum of cats like the cat-chihuahua, the cat-poodle, the bullcat, and the cat-rotweiller!) probably has no small amount to do with they fact that, unlike dogs, they were never really purposefully bred by humans to serve special, useful purposes -- they were basically just accepted as companions after they invited themselves in, loved less for what they could be made to do than for what they already did of their own free will. (It also has to do with the fact that cats didn't really enter the human world until after agriculture had begun, a long time after dogs were domesticated.)

I have an anthology of essays and stories called, Of Cats and Men. The first selection is 'On Being Kept by a Cat', by Elmer Davis, which includes the following relevant opening passage, which is one of my favourite things ever written about cats:

*****

The lamented Freddie Mortimer of the New York Times was once moved to scorn by an item among the Lost and Found notices -- an advertisement for a lost cat whose collar bore the inscription, "This is So-and-so's cat." Nothing, Mortimer contended, could be less accurate; the only identification that could be inscribed on any cat's collar would be "This is this cat's cat."

Madame Michelet (quoted by the learned Van Vechten, whose The Tiger in the House is practically the Golden Bough of cat lore) once computed that she had owned a hundred cats. "Say rather," her husband corrected, "that a hundred cats have owned you." Possibly he was jealous of the creatures who had usurped his rightful place as the domestic pet, but anybody with much feline experience knows he was right -- especially people who do not keep servants, and must refuse invitations for weekends because somebody has to stay at home to take care of the member of the family who cannot open ice-box doors. To the question often asked by the inexpert, "Do you keep a cat?" the proper answer is "No, a cat keeps me."

It is true that the courts have held that a cat is property, an opinion not concurred in by certain resort hotels which will take a cat for a dollar a day European plan; they make no charge for your trunk. This seems to be one of the many instances in which business is more realistic than the law; the theory that a cat is property must be set down as one of those splendid flights of wishful thinking in which judges occasionally indulge. It would be pleasant to believe that somebody who is broke and looking for a job has equal power in contracting for wages with a prospective employer, so the courts have often held that this is so; it would be agreeable to a judge who is not used to having his injunctions disregarded to believe that the most independent of all creatures is subject to human control. But the doctrine breaks down under analysis.

Scholarly and subtle men have written much of late about the distinctions between various kinds of property. There are consumption goods -- clothes, for instance -- which we all possess; and there are the means of production which are owned by the capitalists, but owned in different ways. I am, in economic terminology, a handicraft artisan owning my own means of production -- a typewriter, with which I earn my living; I am also on an infinitesimal scale a capitalist. But my "ownership" of, say, 1/435,000th part of the General Motors Corporation does not enable me to do anything with that tiny fraction of a great institution except to sell it if I choose. Henry Ford owns and uses the Ford Motor Company as I own and use my typewriter; but all I "own" in General Motors is a claim on a little of its profits, if men over whose actions I have no control manage it well enough to make a profit.

Obviously, the cat who for some years has made his home with my family falls into none of what I must apologize for calling these categories of property. He is not consumption goods but a consumer, and a fairly heavy consumer at that; nor does he produce anything except an intense satisfaction in those who associate with him. Nothing else of utility to human beings, at least; he makes what a cat doubtless regards as profits, and seems to think I have a claim on a share of them. Whenever he kills a mouse in the apartment, or a snake at his summer home in the country, he proudly brings it back to the family, perhaps supposing that we might like to eat some of it. But even then I stand in much the same economic relation to him as to Mr. Alfred P. Sloan [the president and chairman of General Motors at the time].

Reverse the situation, and the true property relation becomes apparent. I am to the cat what my typewriter is to me, or the Ford Motor Company to Henry Ford -- his means of production; in the course of time he will eat up all the money I get for these observations. If he is not my sole proprietor, at least he owns enough stock in me to make his wishes influential; and as for the members of the family who do most of the work of caring for him he seems to regard them as his employees. If they do not work for him as and when he wants them to work he expresses his opinion -- though more politely than Mr. Tom Girdler [the CEO of Republic Steel during the police massacre of striking workers in 1937] expresses his opinion in a similar situation.

This economic analysis of course does not apply to the alley cat, the free-lance cat who earns his living by his own exertions without exploiting the labor of others. But the house cat, the pet cat, so far from being property, is a capitalist, a member of the owner class, even if he catches a mouse now and then for sport. His mousing is comparable to the farming practiced by retired gentlemen of wealth, who do for amusement what their ancestors did because they had to.

*****

Also, a brief tangentially related note: In the June 2009 issue of Scientific American, there was an article about new findings on the origin and history of the housecat. Traditionally, it's been believed that the first cats to fully domesticate humans were those in Egypt about 3600 years ago, but new genetic and archaeological evidence indicates the process actually began much earlier, about 10 000 years ago, in the Fertile Crescent, essentially at the very beginning of human agriculture.

But the most interesting nugget in the article for me was that, although housecats first became common in Europe about 2000 years ago, during the spread of the Roman Empire, they seem to have somehow made their way to the British Isles even earlier, around 2100 years ago, before the Romans could have brought them there.

Scientists consider this to be an unsolved mystery, but for me, it simply serves as confirmation of my hypothesis -- developed after many years of experiences of cats mysteriously vanishing only to turn up again in the oddest and most unexpected places in the house, or even outside -- that cats in fact have the ability to teleport freely if they so desire.

'I get no respect, I tell ya, no respect!'

seanc130@hotmail.com — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 01:34:55 GMT

Today, I bought the Collector's Edition DVD of Jurassic Park III (along with Jaws -- and at only five dollars each!).

For those of you who don't really remember the movie, or never even noticed this, there's one scene -- it's at the part where they dig the cel phone out of the huge pile of Spinosaurus shit -- where a Ceratosaurus briefly appears.

Now, this moment always struck me as freakin' bizarre. This ceratosaur walks up, the kid[*] yells, 'Look out!', and we think he's going to attack. But instead, he basically stands there staring at everyone for about ten seconds, then wanders off, never to be seen again. (I guess it's because he was afraid of the Spinosaurus smell coming from the fæces.)

WTF? Couldn't they have him do something? The first time I saw it, I thought I hallucinated it, he was just there and gone so fast. It was like, 'Did I just see a ceratosaur, or did I drop acid earlier and forget?' He pretty much gets the least screen time of any dinosaur in all 3 movies, and is so completely superfluous and unimportant to the plot that even the moment he does get seems almost more like an insult than anything. The only way I even knew it was a ceratosaur is because I've been studying dinosaurs in thorough detail since I was a child, and can recognise a decent number of semi-obscure genera on sight.

Have you ever watched Whose Line Is It Anyway? (the American version)? At the beginning of every episode, Drew makes a joke about how it's 'the show where everything's made up and the points don't matter. That's right, the points don't matter. Just like ...' [insert humourous reference to something that doesn't matter]. Well, a few years back I came up with my own idea for a joke they should have used: 'That's right, the points don't matter. Just like the Ceratosaurus in Jurassic Park III.'

Well, anyway, I just watched a thing on the Special Features of the DVD called 'The New Dinosaurs of Jurassic Park III'. It's a brief discussion of some of the new genera they put in that weren't in the first two movies. They discuss the Spinosaurus. They discuss the Pteranodon. They discuss the Corythosaurus. They discuss the Ankylosaurus. They even discuss the newly updated, modified raptors, which are technically not even 'new dinosaurs'.

Then, at the very end of the segment, they quickly show the ceratosaur's momentary appearance. Meanwhile, they ... COMPLETELY FAIL TO EVEN MENTION HIM!!! Instead, they're doing some kind of general concluding voiceover over the shot.

Tempe almighty, as if it's not bad enough that everyone ignores him during his actual appearance in the movie. They also have to completely ignore him in the 'New Dinosaurs' segment -- even though he's a new frickin' dinosaur!! And he's the only new one they don't mention during the segment!! And they don't say a word about him even though they're showing you his picture!!

Now I'm watching the 'Making of' feature, and at one point, some guy is mentioning some of the dinosaurs he enjoyed making, while we see snippets of them from the movie. He mentions Brachiosaurus, Ankylosaurus, and several others. Then the clip of the ceratosaur comes up again. And guess what? HE doesn't mention it, either!!!!

They just keep ignoring him every time he appears! Three times they do this! Jeez, just spit on a guy after you knock him to the ground and kick him in the ribs, why don't you?

Ceratosaurus gets no respect, I tell ya -- no respect!!

(They did finally mention him in the commentary track, during his scene.)

[*] By the way, am I the only one who thinks that the kid in this film looks like a young John Lennon?

Don't tell me you agree with me / When I saw you kickin' dirt in my eye

seanc130@hotmail.com — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:28:51 GMT

Let me get this out of the way first: I am not trying to disrespect the dead. My subject is purely the general attitudes of our society. I am not expressing any particular opinion as to what those attitudes 'should' be; I am merely pointing out their inconsistency.

I have been very, very surprised by the big deal that is being made all over the country over the death of Michael Jackson. It's as if he were some great, inspiring figure that everyone loved and is devastated over the loss of.

Yes, he was a really big deal for a while back in the 1980s and early 1990s, when he got the 'King of Pop' moniker that has been repeated ad nauseam all over the place over the past few days. But tell the truth: before his death, when was the last time you ever heard anyone admit to even liking Jackson, let alone being a huge fan?

Now maybe it's just that I have been around the wrong people, but for me, the answer to that question has to be something like a decade and a half!

Until all this, Jackson seemed to me to essentially serve no other purpose for our society anymore than to be the butt of jokes and a target for contempt. He was held up as essentially the archetype of a pop star who got famous way too young, basically sending his life careening off the tracks and turning him into a freak with serious psychological problems. People talked about his nose collapsing from too many dozens of plastic surgeries. They angrily discussed him irresponsibly dangling his baby over a 4-story hotel railing. They engaged in gallows humour about his allegedly too-close relationship with young boys, for which he went on trial twice, in 1993-1994 and 2003-2005. (One I heard a while back: 'How is Michael Jackson like Sears? They both have boys' pants half off.' Remember, I'm not condoning, merely reporting what I heard.) They joked about how over time he, as I heard it expressed several times, 'turned from a black man into a white woman'. They saw him as such a freak that when he married Lisa Marie Presley, he felt the need to go out of his way to announce to the newspapers that yes, they actually had sex once in a while.

Nothing but jokes, making fun, mocking, maybe a little feeling sorry for him, and basically treating him like one of those celebrity train-wrecks that the tabloids just eat up, with each story more sensational and outrageous than the last. I couldn't for the life of me tell you when exactly his last hit came out, but looking it up, it seems to me as if his success as a musician has been plummeting since about 1997 (at least until this past year). I think the last song of his that I've even heard enough times to recognise was 1991's 'Black or White'.

Now, I'm not saying he deserved all this. Maybe he was innocent of the child molestation thing. I think there's no doubt that the emotional and physical abuse by his father in his childhood, combined with the pressures of too-early fame, caused him serious, deep mental problems, but can that really be considered his fault? Of course, the skin-lightening thing was because of vitiligo, although all those plastic surgeries really were unnecessary, bizarre, and ridiculous (supposedly he had body dysmorphic disorder as well). He did have a positive effect on a lot of people during the '80s and '90s, with all the charities he supported and his positive, anti-bigotry statements and songs. (One thing I will not forgive him for, though: Stealing his friend Paul McCartney's songs right out from under him. I mean, really, WTF was up with that? Certainly Paul was greatly hurt by it, and severed their friendship afterward.)

But whether he deserved it or not isn't the point. The point is, it happened. And now, just because he's dead, all of a sudden everyone loves him and misses him and can't stop talking about his wonderful 'legacy'?? It's almost as hypocritical as all the swooning over Richard Nixon when he died. This is a pattern in modern culture, or at least certainly in the US: we treat people like punching bags for years and years, then they die, and all of a sudden everyone loves them and is devastated.

What a load of bollocks! If you really cared about the man, you would have said so when he was still alive. This doesn't say anything, either positive or negative, about Jackson himself, but it says a lot about the rest of us, and it ain't too good.

The time is gone, the song is over ... thought I'd something more to say.

'Man has no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity' --Ecclesiastes 3:19

seanc130@hotmail.com — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:35:06 GMT

The other day, I read about a series of experiments that once again thoroughly demolishes the outdated, egotistical notion that the human brain and the intelligence it produces is something qualitatively special and completely unique, as opposed to simply being an extreme development of features already present throughout the animal republic.[1]

Every feature that anthropocentric folks have claimed to be 'uniquely human' has in fact turned out to appear to at least some primitive degree in other species, right down to chimps and gorillas who use sign language (and would probably talk out loud if they had the physical vocal apparatus to do so). But now, there's overwhelming, definitive experimental evidence that even the highest intellectual functions are present not only in apes and other primates, but in dinosaurs -- specifically, corvid birds, who have demonstrated intelligence not only equal to primates, but actually superior in some ways!

The Corvidae is the family of birds that includes crows, ravens, rooks, jackdaws, jays, magpies, and nutcrackers. (Also treepies and choughs, whatever the fuck those are.) The recent experiments demonstrate conclusively that at least some corvids have a number of higher intellectual qualities formerly thought to be restricted to humans and other primates:

   -Causal thinking. They 'understand how to make and use tools, and to predict others' actions'.[2]

   -Flexibility. They can 'generalise rules from acquired knowledge and apply them to new situations or stimuli'.

   -Imagination. They can 'rehearse situations and solve problems mentally before taking action'.

   -Mental time travel. They can 'use prior experiences to consider the past and predict future conditions'.

   -Theory of mind. They not only recognise other individual corvids, they 'understand [their] motivations and goals'.

I will now discuss the details of these experiments in an LJ-cut section.

Experiment 1: 'Jays Remember Sell-By Dates'
Nicola Clayton, professor of comparative cognition at the University of Cambridge, and Anthony Dickinson, professor of comparative psychology at Cambridge, were studying scrub-jays who, like many corvids, regularly cache (hide) food for use later. Some scientists claimed that the jays did not actually remember where they cached individual bits of food, but instead merely found them again by chance. Clayton and Dickinson thought otherwise.

So, in a ground-breaking experiment published in 1998, they 'gave the scrub-jays two types of food: peanuts, which keep a long time, and insect larvae, which quickly decay. After giving the birds time to hide all the items, they moved them to another area for a period of four hours to five days before allowing them to return to the test area. The results showed that time made all the difference in what the birds dug up. When they had been absent just four hours, the jays favored the larvae, but when five days had gone by, they went for the peanuts instead. The birds seemed to remember both where things were and if they were still good to eat.'

Thus they showed that the jays probably had episodic memory: they could remember specific past events. Not only did they remember exactly where they had hidden things, they remembered which things they had hidden in which place!

This sort of mental ability was previously considered to be absolutely restricted to humans (and maybe a few other primates). 'Almost no such work had been done with other animals because no one had expected to find anything' -- a typical example of the irrationally biased attitude of those who champion the idea that human intelligence is completely unique, without even bothering to actually look at other animals and examine whether they have some of the same mental capabilities.

Experiment 2: 'Planning for the Future'
In 2007, Clayton and Dickinson, along with Caroline Raby and Dean Alexis (also from Cambridge), conducted another experiment in which they 'had a jay check into a "bird hotel" with three rooms that it was free to explore for the day. In the evening, the bird fell asleep and the researchers moved it to one of two rooms. If the bird awoke in room 1, breakfast was already set out for it, but in room 2, it would go hungry for several hours before getting fed. Then the researchers changed the experimental conditions so that the birds had the opportunity to cache food before nightfall. The result: the jays cached three times as much food in room 2 as in room 1, without knowing which room they would wake up in.'

In other words, the jays knew from past experience that in the morning -- that is, the future -- they would be waking up in one of the two rooms. They also knew from past experience that they'd get food immediately in room 1, but not in room 2. So, based on this past experience, they cached most of their food in room 2, knowing that that would be where they would most need it in the future.

So much for monkeys stockpiling rocks in a zoo to throw at visitors later! It is no longer possible to glibly claim that the ability to call on past experience in order to plan for the future is surely unique to primates.

Experiment 3: 'Ravens Protect Themselves from Theft'
This experiment was conducted (the article doesn't say when) by Bernd Heinrich of the University of Vermont and Thomas Bugnyar of the University of Vienna[3]. They 'let a raven hide food while two other ravens remained in separate enclosures nearby. One enclosure was blocked so that one raven could not see out; the other was free to watch the bird hide the food. When the scientists opened the enclosure and let the two ravens out to join the third, the cacher took much more care with its food when it was approached by the raven that had been watching, while it let the other raven walk around freely -- even when it came near the hiding place. At the same time, the raven that had been watching took pains to disguise its knowledge.'

This one demonstrates even more convincingly than Experiment 1 that the birds had episodic memory: the cacher remembered that one raven had been watching him but the other had not, while the spy remembered where the cacher had hidden the food. Not only that, but the cacher knew that the spy remembered, and went out of his way to prevent it from approaching the hiding place, while the spy knew that the cacher knew, and went out of his way to try to hide his intentions and seem innocent. Thus the experiment also demonstrates theory of mind: each raven knew what the other was thinking, and what she or he wanted to do.

Study 4: 'It Takes One to Know One'
This one, published in 2007, is not really an experiment so much as an observational study. It also involves caching and thievery, and was done by Nicola Clayton (from Experiments 1 and 2). 'She observed western scrub-jays caching food both when they were watched by other scrub-jays and when they were alone. She found that jays that had stolen food in the past re-hid food when they were watched by other jays. But birds that didn't have a history of thieving food didn't move the food to another hiding spot, even when they had been watched caching it. In other words, it takes a thief to know a thief.'

This one again demonstrates theory of mind -- the birds will 'alter their behavior by predicting or interpreting what they believed another bird was thinking'. It cannot be said that the re-hiding is purely an instinctual, hardwired response to the presence of another bird watching, because only those birds who were thieves and thus suspicious of others did it, while for those who were -- dare I say 'naïve'? -- it just did not occur to them to be suspicious. Thus the action (or lack thereof) truly was based on an individual's mental theory of what the other bird might be thinking.

Experiment 5: 'Crows Can Remember Foes'
This one was done by John Marzluff of the University of Washington and his colleagues. 'During the initial stage of the study, two researchers wore identical caveman masks and straw hats when they captured and banded seven wild crows. It is thought that the crows associated the mask with a "dangerous" experience. In later experiments, each time anyone wearing the caveman mask entered the area, the crows got agitated and scolded them. When the researchers wore neutral masks that the crows did not associate with being captured and banded, or when they wore no mask at all, the crows did not scold them. And when the researchers wore the masks upside-down, the birds not only scolded them but turned their own heads upside-down, perhaps in order to correctly identify the face.'

Again, episodic memory, mental time travel, and maybe a little theory of mind, as well as the ability to recognise and distinguish different human facial features, even when those features were altered in an attempt to confuse them (turning the mask upside-down, wearing a hat). And note especially that all of this is in wild crows, not lab animals.

Experiment 6: 'Birds Can Think Conceptually'
This one was published in 2008 by Russell Gray of the University of Auckland. New Caledonian crows 'had to use sticks to extract food from a clear plastic tube. The bottom of the tube had two holes, one on each side of the morsel, and the researchers alternately closed one side or the other with a stopper that trapped the food. The crows quickly learned to avoid the hole with the stopper. The real challenge came when the scientists exchanged the tube for a box that looked different but operated on the same principle. All of the crows immediately extracted the food from the right space. The results confirm that the birds were able to understand the concept of "hole" and transfer it to a new situation -- a challenge that defeated even chimpanzees.'

The first example of an intellectual task in which the birds actually did better than nonhuman apes. Mental flexibility, the ability to apply previously learned concepts to completely new situations, abstract thought -- are we starting to see a pattern here? Corvids are FUCKING SMART.

Experiment 7: 'Magpies Pass the Mirror Test'
'Psychologist Helmut Prior of Goethe University in Frankfurt ...[3], with colleagues from Ruhr University in Bochum, carried out the mirror test with five magpies. They attached colored marks to the birds' plumage and then put them in front of a mirror. The birds reacted by trying to pull the marks off themselves. When a mark was used that was the same color as the magpies' feathers, the birds ignored it. The researchers say these behaviors indicate that the birds realized they were seeing themselves in the mirror.'

Previously, the only animals that were known to be able to recognise themselves in a mirror were 'apes, dolphins, elephants, and humans older than about 18 months'[4]. These magpies were the first non-mammals to pass the test.

Experiment 8: 'A Society of Toolmongers'
I have previously -- a long time ago -- posted in this journal about the tool-using abilities of the Egyptian vulture, Neophron percnopterus (which, oddly enough, were also mentioned in a totally different section of the magazine with this article, for no apparent reason). New Caledonian crows, in addition, are known to 'use sticks, sometimes fashioning them into hooks, to harvest grubs and insects out of cracks and holes too small for their beaks. And other New Caledonian crows use the barbed leaves of the pandanus palm for the same purpose. Both tools are more advanced than those used by chimpanzees to fish for termites'. But there's even more to the tool-using capabilities of our avian dinosaur friends.

'Russell Gray, an animal-cognition expert at the University of Auckland ...[3], and graduate student Alex Taylor have carried out a series of experiments that showed that crows can solve a type of tool-based problem that has stumped all animals except humans, apes and some monkeys[5] (some of these studies are disputed, however). In 2007, they demonstrated that although some animals can use tools to obtain food, crows use tools to get other tools. In the experiment, crows needed a long stick to fish a piece of food out of a hole. But they only had a short stick. The one they needed was behind a grid of bars. Four of seven crows successfully retrieved the tools and food in the right order on the first try. All seven were able to do it if given enough chances.'

Once again: planning for the future, mental flexibility, causal thinking, et cetera ceteraque. You know, it's almost embarrassing how thoroughly all these birds have discredited the 'only primates have higher intelligence' crowd.

Experiment 9: 'Ravens Create Hypotheses'
Our last experiment today was done by Bugnyar and Heinrich (of Experiment 3 fame). They 'tested ravens' inventiveness by letting the birds watch them suspend a piece of meat on a string from a bar. None of the ravens had ever encountered anything like this before, but in a short time, five of the six figured out how to get the meat. They roosted on the bar and pulled in the string with their beaks. The task required a complicated series of actions carried out in the right order: reach down, grip the string with the beak, pull the string up a few inches and step on it to hold it in place, let go with the beak, grasp the string again a bit lower, and repeat.'

That's pretty impressive already, demonstrating once again advanced mental abilities like planning for the future, extrapolating from and generalising past experience in order to deal with completely new situations, and performing complex, multi-step tool manipulations. But that's not even the main part of the experiment yet!

'The researchers then gave the ravens a challenge to test their ability to form a hypothesis. This time they hung meat so that the birds, contrary to all intuition, would have to pull down on the string to raise the meat. All five birds from the first test quickly figured out how it worked and solved the challenge. The bird that had failed the first challenge, and others that hadn't been exposed to it, couldn't solve this test at all.'

The failure of the birds who hadn't solved the first test proves that those who solved the second test did do so based on generalisation of previous experience and the flexible application of abstract concepts to new situations, not just some sort of instinct. But that's not even the best part!

'Impressively, some of the birds solved the problem just by looking at the setup for a few minutes; they flew directly to the bar and reeled the meat in. The actions indicate that the birds can create and test hypotheses in their brains before arriving at the right solution -- evidence of enormous mental muscles.'

So these birds not only have the ability to recal past experiences and adapt them for use in unfamiliar situations, but they can actually mentally imagine a number of solutions to a problem in their head, figure out which one is most likely to work, and immediately execute the solution without hesitation. They not only have high intelligence, they have imagination!!

In summary, so much for the 'superiority' of mammals. Dinosaurs not only were the most successful land vertebrates of all time, and not only still rule the skies to the exclusion of all other vertebrates except bats, but at least some of them have higher intelligence to a degree that matches or even exceeds that of primates.

The next time someone calls you a 'birdbrain', thank them for the compliment. And the next time you hear someone use the word 'dinosaur' to refer to something inefficient, outdated, primitive, extinct, and/or stupid, please forcefully set them straight.

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[1] I say 'animal republic' rather than 'animal kingdom' because, really ... figureheads in Sweden and Britain notwithstanding, aren't we long past the stupid mediæval idea of kings and royalty? 'Kings' and 'kingdoms' belong in færie tales told to 3-year-old children, not the real world. A king is nothing more than some dude with way too much power for one man, way too high an opinion of his own importance, and a congenital sense of entitlement that turns him into a sheltered, spoiled child who demands that everyone else bow to him. In the modern world, we call this sort of thing 'narcissistic personality disorder' and treat it with heavy therapy and drugs.

Besides, who would the king (or queen) of the animal kingdom be? And no, it is NOT the lion. If T. rex were still alive, maybe. But there ain't no one running things today.

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[2] This and all following quotations are taken from the article in which I read about all this:

Anonymous. 2009. Not your average bird brain. Science Illustrated: Jul/Aug 2009.

(I have no idea who the hell the author is, because apparently this magazine doesn't bother to give credits as to which author wrote which article. WTF is up with THAT???)

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[3] In the article, they actually had the gall to explicitly say in which countries Vienna, Frankfurt, and Auckland are located. I have removed these specifications, because if you don't know where these cities are, you need to look them the hell up and learn, you uncultured American heathen!!

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[4] Note that this list -- 'Apes ... and humans' -- is partly redundant, since humans are apes.

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[5] Again, redundant! 'Humans, apes and some monkeys'? Humans ARE apes, dammit! (For that matter, technically, apes are also monkeys, at least by a formal cladistic definition.) It drives me frickin' nuts when people say 'humans and apes', as if they're two separate categories. It's like saying 'birds and animals', or 'water and liquids', or 'George Bush and incompetent knuckleheads'.

Lucky thing he was long dead by the time 'The Dinosaur Dictionary' came out ...

seanc130@hotmail.com — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:45:15 GMT

Random sharing of something that amuses me. Go!

In October 1888, two fossilised fragments were discovered in the Aachenian deposits of Moresnet, between Belgium and Germany, by a professor and doctor of natural science named Gerard Smets. Smets examined the materials and determined them to be from the jaw of a bipedal hadrosaur[*] about 4 to 5 metres long, with possible dermal spines. He named the specimen Aachenosaurus multidens, and claimed that his identification was based on thorough examination by eye, magnifying glass, and microscope.

Shortly afterward, Louis Dollo, the well-known Iguanodon expert (he was in charge of the excavation and study at the still famous Bernissart site), reexamined Aachenosaurus and determined that in fact it was not a dinosaur at all, but two pieces of petrified wood!

In response, Smets at first defended and reiterated his original interpretation, but shortly it was found by a neutral commission that Dollo was correct: the 'Aachenosaurus' that Smets had conjured up in such detail through such 'thorough' examination was, in reality, nothing more than a couple of fragments of petrified wood. This whole affair so embarrassed Smets that he completely withdrew from his scientific career, never to be heard from again.

But the thing that really amuses me is that, since 'Aachenosaurus' starts with two A's, it's the aardvark of the dinosaur world -- which means that it is the VERY FIRST entry on almost EVERY list of dinosaur names ever written since 1888!

Can you imagine if the most embarrassing mistake of your life was, like, the first word in the dictionary, so that for all the rest of eternity, anyone who looked up anything saw it right there at the beginning, sticking out like a sore Iguanodon's thumb?

D'oh!!!

Poor guy ...

[*] For those who don't know, the common term for a hadrosaur is 'duck-billed dinosaur' -- a term which I hate for several reasons. One is that 'hadrosaur' is so much shorter and simpler, and I tend to think that if you can't learn the meaning of such a simple word without translating it into third-grade colloquialisms, then you are just not ready yet to be reading about science to begin with. Another is that their bills were very different from a duck's: they were hard, sharp-edged, powerful, horny beaks used to efficiently slice through tough plants. They had some similarities, in general shape, to a duck's bill, but in other details they were more like, say, a turtle's, and of course in other ways they were totally unique.

Addendum: Come to think of it ... birds are a subgroup of dinosaurs, so wouldn't 'duck-billed dinosaur' actually mean just ... a duck?

In the right-wing world, what colour is the sky, and what is it made of? Chocolate? Arsenic?

seanc130@hotmail.com — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:51:41 GMT

I saw a commercial the other day, obviously brought to us by the Committee for Mindless Knee-Jerk Right-Wing Republican Reactionary Slogans That Completely Miss the Point of the Issue and Don't Even Actually Mean Anything If You Examine Them for More than Two Nanoseconds® [*], that bemoaned the coming of a national universal health care system by whining and blubbering about how this will take away people's 'Choice'® in health care.

Where do these people buy their crack? Because obviously, their dealer is cutting it with some kind of powdered form of PURE MOTHERFUCKING HUMAN PSYCHOSIS.

How completely detached from reality and child-eatingly insane does one have to be to think that the important issue when it comes to health care is 'Choice'®?

Really?? Choice®?? In 2007, more than 45 million people in the United States (15,3% of the population) had NO health insurance whatsoever. (The number has been steadily increasing since 2000, so it's almost certainly even higher now -- especially with the wholesale collapse of the decayed, corrupt infrastructure of capitalism over the last few years, leading to rampant unemployment.) Something like 17 million of them live in households with annual incomes over 50 000 $ -- if even they can't get insurance, what the hell are everyone else's chances? (Nota bene: 'everyone else' constitutes about 55% of the population!) And some 5 million people are considered 'uninsurable' because of preexisting conditions, so they're just fucking screwed, left to die in a ditch by the side of the road in the name of HMO profit.

On top of all that, even those who ARE insured face a constant battle against their insurance companies, which will search for any fucking lame excuse they can come up with to get out of paying for anything and everything. Their entire structure is based on profit, so they have every economic incentive in the world to cover as little as they possibly fucking can. So even most people with insurance end up having to empty their own pockets if they ever need any genuinely big medical care, like say if they have a bad accident, or come down with a chronic disease -- and oh, Tempe help those who already have a chronic disease, since, as mentioned above, they can't even GET insurance. (So the people who most desperately need it are the ones who have the least chance of getting it. Nice, huh?)

And so ... Choice®? You're gonna go with Choice® as your pick for the REALLY IMPORTANT issue??

WAKE THE FUCK UP!

Most people right now have NO choice when it comes to health care. At least a universal government system would give them ONE choice. Is the Right completely unaware of the obscure and shocking fact that one is greater than zero?

No, of course not. They just. Don't. CARE. They know full well that most people would be greatly helped by universal health care. That's exactly what they don't want! Because they don't give a shit about most people -- only those with enough wealth and privilege to get into their exclusive club, where they play the stock market for fun, golf three days a week, spend a hundred dollars a day on primo cocaine, blow their noses with monogrammed silk hankies, fire thousands of people whenever the whim strikes them, and generally live high on the hog with all that money they parasitically usurped from other people's labour. Right now, they can get any health care they want -- they have Choice®. And that sets them apart from the rest of us, who can't get shit in the way of health care. The reason they have such a hard-on for Choice® is because they have it, and everyone else doesn't. If the field got evened out, they would no longer be able to flaunt that special privilege over everyone else. So the last thing they want is what's good for the overwhelming majority of the population. They want what's bad for the overwhelming majority of the population -- but good for them, so they can perpetuate the diseased class structure of our society, where 80% of the people break their backs working for peanuts while the other 20% reap all the rewards (videlicit, 90% of all the world's resources).

That's all conservatism is about: maintaining your special privileged position against all the assaults of those lowly poor people who want things like 'fairness' and 'justice'. Fairness and justice just ain't in the short-term economic interests of the ruling class.

It's in the long-term interests of everyone, of course, but the very inherent nature of capitalist society forces them toward those short-term interests, whether they like it or not. You see, it's not just a case of snobbish individuals who get personal pleasure out of looking down on the rabble. Surely there's plenty of that, but it's not the fundamental issue. The fundamental issue is the class structure of society, which drives even those members of the ruling class who are intelligent, liberal, and well-meaning to ultimately do what is good for the class. If they don't, the rest of the ruling class eats them alive and spits them out back into the working class with everyone else. It's not about individual choices, it's about inexorable economic forces in society that no one individual can truly resist. That's why we can't 'reform' the system by weeding out all the 'bad apples' -- because what makes the apples bad is the deep-seated rot in the tree itself. Pick off all the apples you please; more bad ones will always grow in their place, and will then spread the rot even to the 'good' apples. The only answer is to TAKE A FUCKING CHAINSAW TO THE TREE!

[*] The same people who brought us Activist Judges®, Reverse Discrimination®, Big Government®, Making Our Country Less Safe®, The War on Christmas®, Assault on Traditional Marriage and Family Values®, Obama Is a Socialist®, Evolution Is Just a Theory®, and ... the complete and utter implosion of the global economy.

I'll take 'Things That Drive Me up the Fucking Wall' for 200 $, Alex

seanc130@hotmail.com — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 04:47:00 GMT

This Southern colloquialism is one of the most annoying phrases ever uttered in the history of the galaxy.

What is 'mash the button'?

YOU DON'T 'MASH' A BUTTON! YOU FUCKING PRESS A BUTTON! LEARN ENGLISH!

Have you seen this short elf in a green tunic and floppy hat who's always carrying a sword?

seanc130@hotmail.com — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 21:07:04 GMT

Am I the only one who feels almost that it should be illegal to use the phrase 'missing link' to describe any new fossil primate discovery?

If you haven't heard about the recent description of 'Ida' (Darwinius masillae), then just spend a few seconds on Google and you'll find enough occurrences of the phrase 'missing link' to make you violently ill.

Don't get me wrong -- the fossil itself is awesome. Ida was extraordinarily well-preserved, right down to the stomach contents, and gives us a great opportunity to learn much more about the Eocene world than we knew before. And if she is indeed close to the origin of anthropoids (monkeys and apes, including the ape known as Homo sapiens), to where they first branched away from the so-called 'prosimians' (lemurs, lorises, tarsiers, and such), then that's an important discovery.

But first of all, the latter conclusion is NOT yet verified by peer review and professional consensus. In fact, a number of experts have severely criticised the idea. In fact, it is a minority opinion that adapoids, the group that Ida belongs to, were close to the origin of anthropoids; most still believe we (anthropoids) arose instead from an entirely different group, and they have other fossils to support their conclusion -- other fossils that the authors of the original paper on Ida failed to even consider in their rush to declare Ida a 'missing link'. The evidence for this idea is fairly weak, flawed, and controversial, and takes attention away from what is really important about the fossil -- its incredibly thorough preservation and level of detail -- in order to hype up an overzealous media campaign to flog and advertise it as a 'missing link' in human evolution.

Second of all, the entire 'missing link' idea is so horrifically overused that it has reached the point where the claim is essentially meaningless. Practically every single damn primate discovery gets hailed as a 'missing link'! When Darwin wrote, Neandertals were the 'missing link'. When Java Man (Homo erectus) was discovered in 1891, he became the 'missing link'. When Homo habilis was discovered in 1962, that became the 'missing link'. When Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) was discovered in 1974, she became the 'missing link'. When Ardipithecus ramidus was discovered in 1992, that became the 'missing link'. When Orrorin tugenensis was discovered in 2000, that became the 'missing link'. When Sahelanthropus tchadensis was discovered in 2001, that became the 'missing link'.

Every freaking hominin discovery is hailed as the 'missing link'! And now Ida, who isn't even a hominin; she isn't even a monkey yet!!

I'm just tired of hearing about 'missing links'! There is no such thing -- just new discoveries, each of which has its own unique story to tell and its own unique place in the evolutionary tree.

And Ida's place -- even if you accept the dubious claims of the describers -- is near the origin of monkeys, not humans. Yes, monkeys evolved into apes (among other things), and apes evolved into humans (among other things). But the first monkeys did not sit around going, 'Gee, we should start trying to become apes so we can become people!' They were just being monkeys. It's pure chance that one among their many descendants happens to be humans. Evolution is not directed in a specific direction -- it responds to contingencies in the environment, and branches out in many different ways at once.

It's bad enough that every single freakin' new discovery of a hominin inevitably gets saddled with the tired old 'missing link' designation. Now we're even going to start applying it to things that aren't even monkeys yet???? Gaaaah!! Blech!!

If Ida has something to do with the origin of monkeys, more power to her. That's cool, and interesting, and adds to our knowledge. But trumpeting her across all the headlines as a 'missing link' to humans -- even ignoring the overuse of the meaningless 'missing link' phrase -- is nothing but a sensationalistic distraction from what she can really teach us. It promotes the idiotic idea so many people still have that humans are the be-all and end-all of evolution, and everything is to be thought about in the light of us. Even if she is an ancestor of anthropoids, Ida doesn't have a damn thing to do with humans! She has to do with prosimians and monkeys. That's the sort of knowledge she can lead us to. She teaches us nothing whatsoever about humans, except in the loosest sense that she can teach us more about primates in general.

Even if 'missing link' meant anything anymore, it would still be grossly and irresponsibly applied in this case. Its use takes all the attention away from the fossil's real significance in order to trump up the egocentric delusion humans have that things are only really important insofar as they relate to us.

The same thing drives a similar (though slightly less extreme) obsession with 'missing links' around the origin of every major group humans belong to -- the first primates, the first mammals, the first synapsids, the first reptiles, the first tetrapods, the first vertebrates ... any time some new fossil is discovered that bears even remotely on the origins of any such group, it becomes the latest 'missing link', and everyone obsesses over how it's 'our earliest ancestor' -- which is never accurate, because our actual earliest ancestor was a single-celled prokaryote that lived over 3 billion years ago. The first tetrapods are the earliest freaking tetrapods, not the 'earliest human ancestors'. There are millions of different animals besides us that are descended from them. That humans just happen to be one of them is of essentially no scientific importance whatsoever.

People still have this outdated idea of evolution as a straight ladder, where every step up brings you to the next more 'advanced' group, with humans on top. This view of the history of life is an archaic leftover of pre-Darwinian attitudes, and a dangerous misconception that leads to untold public misunderstanding of evolution, and of science in general. Looking for any excuse to trumpet about the latest 'missing link' in all the headlines only feeds into this backward anthropocentric view of biology, and it confuses and distracts people from the genuine scientific significance of new discoveries -- which usually doesn't have a damn thing to do with humans.

Cheesus Lives, Too!!

seanc130@hotmail.com — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:34:29 GMT

I've never been able to understand by what kind of bizarre, absurd illogic people identify mysterious 'faces' in inanimate objects as Jesus, or the Virgin Mary, or whatever their favourite saint is. Talk about seeing whatever the hell you want to see, bravely inventing your own 'truth' in complete defiance of that annoying party-pooper known as 'reality'!

Take the famous grilled cheese sandwich that was sold on eBay in 2004. (Please.) The story is best told by Diana Duyser, the sandwich's former owner, in one of the most spectacularly long run-on sentences ever written (those who are pained by blatant murder of the grammar of the English language had best avert their eyes):

I made this sandwich 10 years ago, when I took a bite out of it, I saw a face looking up at me, It was Virgin Mary starring back at me, I was in total shock, I would like to point out there is no mold or disingration, The item has not been preserved or anything, It has been keep in a plastic case, not a special one that seals out air or potiental mold or bacteria, it is like a miracle, It has just preserved itself which in itself I consider a miracle, people ask me if I have had blessings since she has been in my home, I do feel I have, I have won $70,000 (total) on different occasions at the casino near by my house, I would like all bidders to know that this item is not intended for consumption, it is intended for collectable purposes only

I have not found any statement by her explaining just what 'disingration' is (perhaps it refers to former ingrates who have come to be grateful?), what it means for something to have 'been keep', or why she apparently has a deep-seated fear and hatred of that obscure punctuation mark known as the 'period' (or 'full stop', for you Brits out there).

(Before you dwell on how this woman is no doubt one of the most psychologically unsound -- or just plain daft -- folks you have ever heard of, keep in mind that, believe it or not, she is actually not the craziest person in this story. For Richard Rowe, the CEO of online casino GoldenPalace.com, finally won the item by bidding 28 000 $. That's right, TWENTY-EIGHT THOUSAND DOLLARS. For a fucking TEN-YEAR-OLD GRILLED CHEESE SANDWICH WITH A BITE TAKEN OUT OF IT. It doesn't get any nuttier than that, folks.)

Now take a look at a good close-up picture of the sandwich at the centre of all this.

If one had no critical thinking skills whatsoever, and absolutely no grasp of the simple concept that the surface of bread has randomly distributed higher and lower regions that will brown to different degrees when grilled, I suppose one might be able to convince oneself to seriously believe that there is a face there. But the thing that really drives me crazy about this nonsense is that, even granting the presence of a face, there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WHATSOEVER about it that specifically identifies it as the Virgin Mary! It might just as easily be seen as the face of Morgan Freeman, or Bob Dylan, or Nancy Pelosi, or a grey alien, or ANYTHING else in the Universe that has a face! It has NO distinguishing characteristics WHATSOEVER to identify it as ANY specific face out of all the faces that have ever existed in the history of the Universe! Hell (if you'll pardon the reference to eternal damnation), for that matter, it could just as easily be Jesus.

The ONE AND ONLY reason to identify it specifically as the Virgin Mary is a predisposition to hyperreligiosity and a personal obsession with that particular religious figure. In other words, it has nothing to do with any characteristic of the sandwich itself, and everything to do with the preexisting beliefs and prejudices of the person who's looking at it. It is truly a perfect example of how human beings have a tremendous hard-wired tendency[*] to see imaginary patterns where none exist, and then to build up whole worldviews and religions based on these nonexistent patterns.

([*] When we were still out living in the open on the African savannah, those who saw imaginary tigers where only a chance occurrence of light and shadow in the trees actually existed survived much longer than those who only saw randomness where there was actually a tiger hiding. Thus, the tendency to see nonexistent patterns in randomness became, through natural selection, an inbred biological characteristic of the human brain. The only way to overcome this tendency is to exercise rational and sceptical thought, and not automatically assume that everything you think you see (or 'sense') is really there. If more people understood this basic truth, I'm firmly convinced that the popularity of all religions would significantly wither.)

But in any event, there are pleasing signs of the growth of at least somewhat more rational and less superstitious thought in our society. I just read about another instance of a supposed religiously significant face in a food item: Dan and Sara Bell, a Texas couple, found a Cheeto that, quote, 'bears an incredible resemblance to Jesus'. They are calling it --I shit you not -- 'Cheesus', and trying to sell it on eBay. But in a refreshing sign of a pragmatic, realistic attitude toward such inherently absurd events, the couple said that they were just putting it on eBay in order to see how much money they could get for it, and Dan was quoted as saying, 'If it's only 25 cents, we're just going to eat it.'

Jebus Lives!!!!!!!

seanc130@hotmail.com — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:46:41 GMT

If I weren't so lazy, I'd be seriously considering a career in guerrilla culture-warrior vandalism. There are just SO MANY damn advertisements and shit out there that are just begging to be creatively defaced in a way that exposes their dishonesty, hypocrisy, and, often, downright mockable idiocy.

Someone recently put up a big billboard near where I live that makes no freakin' sense whatsoever. It shows a lifeguard on a beach saying, 'Porn Burns!' and a frog saying, 'Then Stay Cool!', with the words 'Cause & Concern' in the corner.

That's IT. There is NOTHING else on there. Not a single word.

The only thing I can figure is that 'Cause & Concern' is some kind of nutball religious right-wing group trying to campaign against the 'evils' of pornography. If so, someone should tell them that THEIR DAMN BILLBOARD MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE!!!!!!!

No -- on second thought, don't tell them. That way, if I ever figure out how to get up there with a big marker, I'll have a chance to tell them myself by crossing out what the frog is saying and replacing it with 'Then Don't Rub So Hard! Use Lubrication!'

It's also too bad I don't know how to make decorative licence-plate-type thingies. I saw one on the front of a car this morning that had a drawing of Jesus's head (that's the white Jesus, of course -- the imaginary one that never existed, yet somehow manages to be in almost ALL the pictures) with his crown of thorns on, and across his face in big letters it said, 'Still Savin' Lives!'

I just wanted to put another one on top of it -- the less well-selling but far more accurate Jesus that says, 'Still Lettin' Millions of Innocent Children Needlessly Starve to Death While the Wealthiest 20% of the Population Greedily Hoards 90% of the World's Resources, Most of Which They'll Never Even Use!'

The mind not only boggles, it also Yahtzees and Unos.

seanc130@hotmail.com — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:53:25 GMT

Who is it who keeps continuing to give Dick Cheney a microphone and a camera to express his 'views' (id est, megalomaniacal delusions and self-serving propaganda)?

And why are they still allowed to roam free? If anyone should be locked away in Guantánamo, it's people who still take this 'man' (id est, sinister ideologue, tyrannical despot, and champion of utter irrationality and bass-ackwards mediæval dogma) seriously!

Who in the hell still gives the slightest bit of a single molecule of a crap about what this guy has to say? If he had any less credibility left, the moment he shook hands with anyone the slightest bit trustworthy and rational, they would instantly annihilate each other and give off all their mass energy in the form of two gamma rays.

Stop putting this man on television!! He has NOTHING useful or worthwhile to say about ANYTHING!!

Tyrannosaurus : scavenger :: horse : unicorn

seanc130@hotmail.com — Tue, 19 May 2009 18:47:59 GMT

'I am amazed and perplexed at continuing claims that the big theropods were not true predators, but scavengers instead. ... In the optimistic hope of putting the scavenging myth to rest, let me present the facts. Tyrannosaurus rex did not have 6- to 8-inch [15- to 20-cm] serrated teeth and an arc of D-cross-sectioned teeth set in a massive, powerful skull just to consume rotting carcasses! These were killing tools.'

-- Gregory S Paul (Predatory Dinosaurs of the World, 1988)

*********

With all due respect to a great man and great scientist, John R Horner's 'Tyrannosaurus was a scavenger' hypothesis is about as ridiculous as a crack-smoking armadillo that lives in an inkjet printer, and rides an upside-down unicycle with a swastika in the carpool lane to its job at CIA headquarters, where it serves as a psychic lawnmower.

How is T.rex not a scavenger? Let me count the ways ...

*********

Horner: She had weak eyes and a small optic lobe, but a gigantic olfactory lobe and a fantastic sense of smell. Predators need good eyes to catch their prey. Scavengers need a great nose to find carcasses.

Rebuttal: Most predators, in fact, hunt primarily by smell. This is fairly common knowledge, and basic biology. Besides, if Rex didn't have good eyes, then exactly why would she have the most advanced and pronounced stereoscopic vision of all large theropods? Why on earth would she need to see in 3-D, if all she ever had to look at was motionless corpses -- did they have Magic Eye puzzles stapled to them?

Nonsense. Her eyes, her nose, and her ears were all conspicuously directed straight forward, in an ideal position to focus in and help aim her mouth directly at active, fleeing prey right in front of her. These forward-oriented sensory adaptations simply make no sense whatsoever for an animal that only eats things that are already dead.

*********

Horner: Rex had tiny arms. Predators need good arms to grab onto their prey. They can't just attack with their mouths -- it would be like trying to catch a chicken with your arms tied behind your back.

Rebuttal: Um ... ever heard of something called a 'shark'? Or a 'crocodile'? Or an 'eagle'? Or a 'snake'? Amazingly enough, these obscure creatures seem to get along just fine killing prey with -- look, ma! -- no hands.

In any event, despite their puny size relative to her body, Rex's arms were actually longer than a human's, very thick-boned, and powerfully muscled -- it's estimated that her biceps muscles alone could dead-lift a weight of up to 200 kg. They would have had no problem holding onto struggling prey.

*********

Horner: Rex's huge legs were built for walking, not running. Predators need to move fast to catch their prey; scavengers don't.

Rebuttal: Actually, the leg bone ratios, highly flexed knee, curved femur, lengthened foot, and powerful muscles of Rex's hind limbs show all the indications of being designed for speed. The most similarly proportioned and constructed dinosaurian legs were those of the ornithomimids, or 'ostrich mimics' -- which are almost universally accepted to be quite fast runners, like the ostriches of today. (In fact, Rex's legs and feet are so similar to those of the ornithomimids that some believe they are sister groups with a very close common ancestry -- the tyrannosaurs and ornithomimids have been classed together in a single group, the Arctometatarsalia, by some authorities. I am sceptical of the idea, actually -- I think it's a case of convergent evolution -- but it does go to show that the physical similarities are indeed profound.)

Rex's legs are more robust and the thighs somewhat longer relative to the shins than in the ornithomimids, but these differences are easily explained by the biomechanical principles of scaling -- the larger the animal, the stouter the legs have to be to hold up its weight. For an animal of her size, Rex has legs basically equivalent to what ostriches and ornithomimids have for animals of their size. Yes, her femur is slightly longer than her tibia and fibula, but when you include the foot -- as one must when talking about an animal that walked digitigrade (on her toes, not her ankles) -- her lower leg is in the same proportion to her upper leg as a racehorse's. In addition, her large size and consequently longer legs allowed for a much greater stride length than in smaller animals, which would have made her fast by default even if she didn't have equally powerful legs.

But let's say she was fairly slow, for the sake of argument. So what? Plenty of predators -- crocodiles, for example -- aren't built for running. That's because they usually catch their prey by ambush -- they only need a brief, sudden burst of speed over a very short range. The construction of Rex's head suggests she hunted in a similar fashion, sneaking up and quickly ambushing prey, gouging out a huge chunk of flesh, and then retreating to let the victim go into shock and bleed to death, after which she could move in and finish her meal in safety and comfort. (Sharks also often operate this way.) She simply did not need to run at high speed over long distances, if she hunted by ambush. Besides which, most of the herbivores she preyed on were undoubtedly even slower than the slowest seriously posited speeds of Rex.

*********

Horner: Although tyrannosaur tooth marks have been found on the bones of herbivores, there is no definitive evidence to prove that the Rex is what actually killed them.

Rebuttal: True, so far as it goes. But there is definitive evidence that some of the marks were made while the animals were still alive -- there are documented cases of tyrannosaur tooth marks that had partially healed, demonstrating that the victim survived the attack. Generally, corpses do not heal from injuries that weren't inflicted until after they were already dead. (Keep in mind that zombie movies are fictional.)

*********

Horner: Large size and ugliness would have been very useful to Rex as a scavenger, allowing her to scare away rivals and claim carcasses.

Rebuttal: First of all, as for ugliness ... I see no evidence of it whatsoever. Everything about Rex screams grace, poise, power, agility, and beauty. There's a reason that she's the most beloved and illustrated of dinosaurs. I suppose aesthetics are somewhat in the eye of the beholder, but I certainly don't think you'll find many scientists who are willing to back up the idea that Rex was 'ugly'. It's a baseless assertion out of nowhere.

As for the other issue ... A far more reasonable explanation for her great size is that it was necessary for her to hunt the most common prey animal of her time and place -- Triceratops. Trikes were by far the most common and important herbivores in the area at that time, and were nearly as big as Rex herself. We know of no other predator at the time even remotely large and powerful enough to regularly hunt them. Trikes had huge horns and neck-protecting frills. While these probably served for sexual display, it is also highly likely that they were used defensively -- such long, sharp horns and thick bony armor would be fairly ridiculous overkill otherwise. In any event, there's no doubt they were very powerful, and well capable of defending themselves. So something was clearly actively hunting them -- something that they needed to defend themselves against. If it wasn't Rex, then what the hell was it?

Occam's razor -- the fewer the assumptions needed to convincingly explain all the facts, the better. Rex as a predator explains the evolution of large size in both herself and the trikes, as well as the great jaws and teeth of the former and the horns and frills of the latter: there was a Cretaceous arms race going on, in which the ceratopsians got bigger, meaner, and more heavily armed to defend themselves, as tyrannosaurs got bigger, meaner, and more heavily armed to kill the ceratopsians. Rex as a scavenger means we have to come up with a completely different, separate explanation for each of these qualities of the two species. It just makes no scientific sense to complicate things so, when the simpler explanation makes perfect sense and sufficiently explains everything at once.

'Triceratops was horrendously big, fast, and agile, and it was well-armed with beak and horns. Hunting it required an equally gigantic, faster, and even more formidably armed predator. Just how formidable only became clear to me as I did the illustration of T. rex biting Triceratops .... I had to measure things out, and was appalled to find that the tyrannosaur could bite out a wound a yard [1 m] long, and well over a foot [30 cm] deep and wide. This would have wrecked the entire upper thigh of Triceratops, and cut down to the femur. Some "scavenger"!'
--GS Paul (PDW)

***********

Horner: Rex's teeth, which are the only known in a dinosaur capable of not only slicing meat but of crushing bone, would have been very useful for getting the most out of consuming a rotting carcass.

Rebuttal: Um, yes. It would also be equally useful for getting the most out of consuming prey she killed herself.

One might as well build a cannon for the purpose of shooting over beer cans, as evolve a mouth like Rex's for nothing more than stealing dead carcasses. Rex had some of the most powerful jaws and teeth of any land-dwelling carnivore that ever lived on this planet. And those teeth were exquisitely designed to carve and rip out chunks of flesh huge enough to cripple an elephant-sized trike. And all this evolved so she could do nothing more than munch on soft, rotting corpses, already killed by someone else????

Come on now! Don't be ridiculous. Talk about overkill! It makes absolutely zero sense that a mere scavenger would have found any evolutionary advantage in having such mind-bogglingly powerful jaws and teeth. I must once again invoke Occam's razor. If it looks like a powerful killer, feels like a powerful killer, bites like a powerful killer, and has a head perfectly adapted in every way for powerful killing, which is more likely? That it's a powerful killer ... or that it just eats soft, pre-killed, rotten meat, and merely pretends to be a powerful killer so it can scare others away from a corpse?

One might as well argue for Bertrand Russell's magical outer-space orbiting teapot. Sure, it can't be absolutely proved it doesn't exist, but there is not a single bit of reason to give any credence to it whatsoever. There is no evidence for it that can't be explained more simply and elegantly without it.

*********

Final, general rebuttal: The final and most devastating argument is simple. There is, as far as is known to science, not a single demonstrated instance of a land-dwelling carnivore that lives exclusively by scavenging. It's simply not possible to find adequate nutrition by only stealing carcasses. Hyenas are often called 'scavengers', but in point of fact even they kill most of their prey themselves.

Yes, any carnivore will take advantage of a found carcass if it can -- it would be foolish not to. But the only known animals that can possibly survive by scavenging alone are those that can fly and soar, like vultures. They are the only ones that can cover enough area with a small enough expenditure of energy to find enough corpses to fuel their metabolisms. And when you throw in the tremendous body size of Rex, the problem only becomes many times more acute -- it's just plain physically impossible to find enough pre-killed corpses to give adequate nutrition to such a huge animal.

The idea of a land-dwelling pure scavenger is as imaginary and unrealistic as a flying unicorn that speaks perfect Swahili. Such a thing simply does not exist, and there is no evidence that it ever has.

Riddle me this, Batman

seanc130@hotmail.com — Sat, 09 May 2009 10:49:00 GMT

When Cadborosaurus reproduces, does it lay creme eggs?

Is that a dinosaur? No! Is that a dinosaur? No! Is that a dinosaur? No!...... This park sucks!

seanc130@hotmail.com — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 03:00:47 GMT

Physics for Everyone

Physicist Leonard Susskind teaches the basics of modern physics for
intelligent people, who are not college students or academics. The lectures
will teach you about classical mechanics, relativity, and quantum theory at
a level that pretty much any smart person can understand, with little
prerequisite knowledge. You just have to be familiar with very basic
calculus, like derivatives and integrals. Nothing more is assumed.

Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but ...

seanc130@hotmail.com — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 04:14:10 GMT

You know, I'm hardly a modest person, at least when it comes to my evaluation of my own intelligence and the strength of my convictions.

As self-congratulatory and haughty as I know it is, sometimes I can't help but feel like most people are oblivious sheep, and I'm one of the few who actually bothers to look up and notice that the nice shiny building we're all being led into has a big neon sign that says 'Slaughterhouse'.

I often have trouble not being too arrogant. So it takes a HELL of a lot of arrogance to impress me. It's a rare gift when someone can outdo me in this area.

And yet, there's a certain class of people out there -- unfortunately, many of them scientists -- who continue to manage to outdo me so well in the condescending feigned omniscience area, it consistently boggles my mind.

The other day I watched an episode of Nova about Microraptor gui, the feathered, four-winged, gliding dromaeosaur recently discovered in Liaoning, considered perhaps the most important fossil specimen since Archaeopteryx lithographica for unraveling the mystery of how dinosaurs first developed flight and became birds.

Part of the show featured infamous palaeo-ornithologist Larry Martin, who for years has been one of only about two prominent scientists who continues, against all evidence and reason, to refuse to believe that birds are the direct descendants of theropod dinosaurs. They showed clips from an old episode from years back, where Martin is quoted as saying that, because bird flight almost certainly began in the trees, and dinosaurs could not climb trees, then ipso facto birds cannot possibly be dinosaurs.

Now, there were already several huge gaping errors in the logic of this position back when he first expressed it. One would be the fact that, to my knowledge, he never produced any sort of genuine scientific evidence whatsoever to back up his bald assertion that no theropods could possibly climb trees. He provided neither any comprehensive anatomical study of known theropods that demonstrated they couldn't climb, nor any reasonable theoretical argument as to why -- even if that were true -- there couldn't be some other as-yet-unknown arboreal theropods. He merely declared by fiat that 'dinosaurs ... apparently couldn't get up in trees', as if it must be true simply because he said it was.

Another would be that he never provided a good reason why anyone should think that the early pre-dinosaurian archosaurs, which he posits as the 'real' bird ancestors, could climb trees, any better (or worse) than theropods. In fact, I don't think he ever even named a specific group among these animals that anyone could examine and directly compare to birds and theropods, in order to confirm or deny that they were more likely to be the bird ancestors than theropods are -- just a vague, omnibus assertion that it was basically 'something other than a dinosaur'.

A third one would be that he claims the dinosaur-bird theory is some sort of irrational sacred dogma, and the reason dinosaurologists subscribe to it is because they find emotional satisfaction and pleasure in the idea, and they violently attack anyone who dares question it -- he says that 'it's like taking away Christmas'. In fact, the reason dinosaurologists unanimously support the idea is because there is a huge body of overwhelming and indisputable evidence behind it. And, tellingly, Martin conveniently never considers the possibility that it is he who is clinging to an irrational dogma for emotional reasons. It's no coincidence that Martin is a bird expert -- many of the early opponents of the dinosaur-bird theory were ornithologists. So is Alan Feduccia, the other well-known continuing opponent of the idea. Dinosaurologists may have a tendency to want birds to be dinosaurs, because it makes dinosaurs cooler. But ornithologists have (or used to have -- I think Martin and Feduccia are the only ones left who still refuse to face facts) an equal and opposite tendency to not want birds to be dinosaurs, because it 'reduces' birds from the separate special Class Aves they used to be to a subbranch of theropods. It is blatantly dishonest and infuriating for Martin to launch these ad hominems against dinosaur experts, while refusing to acknowledge his personal and emotional investment in the issue.

Yet another -- and the most fatal -- would be that he's completely failed to provide any alternative explanation whatsoever for the hundreds of detailed, advanced anatomical characteristics that are indisputably known to be shared by birds and theropods, but appear in no other known group of animals, alive or dead. He conveniently simply never mentions it, instead pounding away at some one little detail or other that he twists to support his 'theory'. As if some one tiny mysterious not-yet-completely-explained fact about, say, Archaeopteryx's tail, or whatever ('facts' which, by the way, usually fail to even be verified as genuinely true by anyone else who examines his 'evidence'), outweighs all the mountains and mountains and MOUNTAINS of hard data collected over the past few decades by hundreds of scientists, all consistently and overwhelmingly supporting the theropod-bird connection time and time again.

It's the same nonsense engaged in by the anti-evolutionists: 'If scientists can't yet explain every single detail of how the human eye evolved, then evolutionary theory must be nonsense! I don't care if there is a huge body of irrefutable data painstakingly collected over hundreds of years that unanimously supports it, or if it simply and logically explains and predicts countless indisputable facts about every aspect of life on Earth, or if there is no legitimate alternative theory anywhere that can explain even a tiny fraction as much as it does!' Mystery is used as an excuse to ignore what is known. Instead of saying, 'We don't know yet how evolution did this -- let's work on trying to figure it out!', they say, 'It must be impossible for evolution to do this, because I can't think of a way it could!' It's the worst kind of pseudoscientific fallacy, and an example of tremendous egotism and feigned omniscience by ignorant ideologues who are so tunnel-visioned, so devoted to their pet belief, that they utterly fail to see the big picture. They're afraid to look at the real facts, because if they did, their irrational belief could not possibly sustain itself.

But on the show the other day, Martin really crossed the line into pure pseudoscientific nonsense, as far as I'm concerned. Thus far his arguments have been deeply flawed and annoyingly stubborn, but at least you could respect the guy for sticking to his guns and prodding dinosaurologists into defending their position better. But after they showed the clip of him saying birds can't be dinosaurs because 'dinosaurs ... apparently can't get up in trees', they cut to him talking about the discovery of Microraptor, which is almost certainly nothing other than ... guess what ... a theropod that climbed trees! He asked for it; he got it. But what was his response? An admission that he was wrong in at least one part of his argument? A concession that he must come up with additional, better arguments and evidence if his viewpoint is to remain tenable?

Nope. His response was, basically, 'Well, it's obvious Microraptor climbed trees. Since theropods can't climb trees, this proves that Microraptor isn't a theropod'[!!!!] I have no idea what the hell else he thinks it's supposed to be, or how anyone is supposed to take this assertion seriously when everyone else who has looked at the fossils has no doubt whatsoever that it's not only a theropod, but specifically a dromaeosaur. And then he broke the arrogance meter entirely by claiming that, because it's not a theropod, Microraptor proves HIM right!! He actually said, 'This is the death of the dinosaur origin of birds'!!!!

So, let's recap. (1) Larry Martin says that because theropods couldn't climb trees, they can't be the ancestors of birds. (2) A species of theropod that unquestionably climbs trees is discovered -- hard, irrefutable evidence that he was just plain WRONG. (3) Martin responds by saying, 'No! I don't care what everyone else says! I DECLARE that this is not a theropod, and therefore, it actually proves I was RIGHT all along!'[!!!!!!]

This is supposed to be 'science'? Balderdash! It's nothing but pure, childish, stubborn refusal to face facts and admit mistakes. It's pure 'I reject your reality and substitute my own!' (with apologies to Adam Savage). That a professional scientist and prominent curator of a museum could spout such nonsense is frightening.

The worst thing, though, is that Martin is hardly a lone example. People like this are everywhere.

They're the same people who continue to assert (as someone did on another show I just watched a little while ago) that alien abduction experiences are nothing more than simple sleep paralysis -- while utterly failing to mention (or even be aware of) the fact that a large percentage of such experiences occur when people are wide awake and driving their cars.

They're the same people who claim that the Stalinist Soviet Union was a 'Communist state', despite the reams of well-documented facts demonstrating that it only came into existence by murdering all the genuine communists, dissolving the soviets, and overturning nearly every single accomplishment of the revolution -- and that the very concept of a single, lone state successfully developing communism didn't even exist until Stalin invented it out of whole cloth in the 1930s, on the basis of no rational justification whatsoever other than just because he said so.

They're the same people who still insist that human intelligence is qualitatively different from that of all other life forms, despite the fact that every single quality they've put forward as being 'unique' -- self-consciousness, language, plan-making, tool use, social complexity -- keeps getting discovered and documented in other species.

These people just keep moving the goalposts. They say, 'This thing does not exist, this idea is simply untrue.' Science looks into the facts and says, 'Well, actually, here's verified evidence that it DOES exist.' They say, 'Oh, well, I just don't believe you. But even if it's true, you still can't explain THIS.' Science looks into it again and says, 'Well, actually, here's a completely plausible explanation for that.' They say, 'Oh, well, I still don't believe you, and even if I did you still can't explain THIS.' Science says, 'Well, actually, that was already explained decades ago. You just happen to be ignorant of it.' They stick their fingers in their ears and say, 'La la la la, I can't heeeeeeaaaaaar you' and change the subject to some other argument.

And unfortunately, a great number of these people are scientists. It's no wonder that so many people mistrust science, seeing it as a dogmatic religion based on a narrow and egotistical viewpoint, when they hear scientists arrogantly proclaiming things like, 'All UFOs are either weather phenomena or conventional aircraft; if there were really something unconventional going on here, there would be some kind of physical evidence' -- scientists who almost always have no actual knowledge of the phenomenon, and have never bothered to even cursorily examine the literature. If they did, they would know that in fact there ARE actually hundreds, maybe thousands of cases with documented physical evidence!!! (Look up the Lonnie Zamora case in Socorro, New Mexico. Or the Cash-Landrum radiation poisoning case. Or the 'star map' drawn by Betty Hill of a group of stars that was exactly accurate, though the stars hadn't even been discovered yet when she drew it. Just for starters.) Not to mention a significant number of extremely well-documented cases, buttressed by multiple and often highly reliable eyewitnesses, for which no one has EVER been able to provide a conventional explanation (Kecksburg, Shag Harbour, Rendlesham Forest, Travis Walton, the list goes on and on).

Yet these arrogant scientists, pretending to omniscience, haughtily tell people, 'You couldn't possibly have seen what you saw with your own eyes. I have no experience with this phenomenon, and it threatens my view of myself as already knowing about everything that's possible; therefore it simply cannot be true. If I can't find a conventional explanation for all the facts, then those "facts" must be lies or mistakes. I know better than the people who were actually there, and no amount of corroborating testimony will change my mind. They all must be either crazy or stupid.'

Stanton Friedman pegs these people's tactics exactly (http://www.v-j-enterprises.com/sfchlng.html):

1 What people don't know, we won't tell them. ('It's not common knowledge that there are numerous scientific studies and verified physical evidence backing up the reality of this thing; therefore, we will simply not mention these things. Instead, we'll stick to our talking points, and make the same tired and irrelevant old arguments over and over again.')

2 Don't bother me with the facts; my mind is made up.

3 If you can't attack the data, attack the people.

4 Do your research by proclamation, not by actual investigation. It's much easier, and no one will know the difference, anyway.

This is a pernicious disease among so many people today. And especially so among scientists, because when an arrogant and dogmatic dismissal of something one knows nothing about is presented as a 'scientific' viewpoint, both the process of science and its public image are irreparably harmed.

Evil Symbiosis (... ?)

seanc130@hotmail.com — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 00:04:28 GMT

Misery is like a mitochondrion
I tried to engulf and digest it within myself
But it survived, staying inside
Becoming a permanent part of my cells
Though it still has its own separate set of DNA
And an agenda that doesn't quite fit in with mine.

My green lady has clearly abandoned me
Just as all my other lovers left long ago
All I have left is the imaginary part
Of my love life's complex wave function
And fun seems long ago to've become
The victim of complete destructive interference.

I often feel I've been left adrift
On an endless sea of entropy
Covalently triple-bonded to my own dark side
Like a lone antithesis, no thesis to conflict with
The dialectical equivalent of a magnetic monopole
And I don't even get the satisfaction
Of destroying myself in a
Particle-antiparticle annihilation reaction.

But even freaks like Carnotaurus and Oviraptor
Had bodies mostly the same as the 'normal' theropods
Nature is usually quite parsimonious
And sticks close to what has come before
Even when it tries out a new experiment.

When I start to feel as if life's not worth living
As if I'm all alone
I listen to the words of my predecessors
My other selves
And I start to remember something important.

I don't believe in original sin
But I do believe in biology.

All eukaryotes have mitochondria
No different from mine
We can't live without them
As a matter of fact
Most of the energy we use to do anything worthwhile
Comes from them.

For better or worse
That's just life.

And it has been for
Hundreds of millions of years.

Who am I to complain?

Damn, I feel old.

seanc130@hotmail.com — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:08:54 GMT

Jeez -- in exactly 4 years from today, I'll be fuckin' 30! I won't even be able to trust myself anymore!

Anyway, I love researching other notable events that happened on 30th January -- though, of course, none of them were quite as great a moment in history as my birth. Here's my latest list of the ones I find interesting:

1649 - King Charles I of England is beheaded, initiating the Interregnum.

1826 - The Menai Bridge between Wales and the Isle of Anglesey, considered the first modern suspension bridge, is opened.

1835 - In the first assassination attempt on a US president, Andrew Jackson is attacked by Richard Lawrence, a mentally ill man who believes himself to be the rightful King of England, and who blames Jackson for his father's death (despite the fact that Jackson and his father had probably never even been on the same continent). Both Lawrence's guns misfire, and Jackson helps subdue him by beating him with his (Jackson's) cane.

1836 - Betsy Ross (the flag-sewing lady) dies.

1847 - Yerba Buena, California is renamed San Francisco.

1862 - The first American ironclad ship, the USS Monitor, is launched.

1882 - Franklin D Roosevelt is born.

1911 - The world's first airplane rescue at sea occurs near Havana, Cuba.

1922 - Comedian Dick Martin is born.

1930 - Actor Gene Hackman is born.

1933 - Adolf Hitler is sworn in as Chancellor of Germany.

1937 - Actress Vanessa Redgrave is born.

1941 - Dick Cheney is born.[1]

1942 - Jefferson Airplane vocalist Marty Balin is born. (Who, I just find out, suffered from mild autism as a child!)

1948 - Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi is assassinated. Also, Orville Wright (the airplane guy) dies.

1951 - Musician Phil Collins and Actor Charles S Dutton are born.

1958 - Brett Butler (the comedian) is born.

1962 - Mary Kay Letourneau is born.[2] Also, a collapsing pyramid kills two Flying Wallendas.

1968 - The Tet Offensive is launched in Vietnam.

1969 - The Beatles have their last public performance together, on the rooftop of the Apple Building.

1972 - Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland.

1980 - Actor Wilmer Valderrama is born.

1982 - Musician Lightnin' Hopkins dies.

1991 - Nobel-prize winning physicist John Bardeen dies.

2003 - Belgium is the second country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage.

2006 - Coretta Scott King dies.

[1] Gaaah, I just found this one out ... just remember, folks, I'm not responsible for either this or the Hitler one. Or the Gandhi one. Or Bloody Sunday. I am, however, responsible for Charles I and the Tet Offensive.

[2] Just found this one out, too ... LOL. There were many times when I was a schoolchild that I wished I knew someone like her ...

In two days, I turn 26 years old.

seanc130@hotmail.com — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 15:03:51 GMT

I'm not posting this for attention. I'm posting to remind myself. The other day, I literally forgot for a minute whether I was about to turn 26, or I was already 26.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

seanc130@hotmail.com — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 18:35:20 GMT

I just started watching 'Cave Dwellers' again, after pausing to make my last entry. And seconds after that riff, they make *another*, unrelated riff that mentions Lee Harvey Oswald!!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!!!!!!!!!!!!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

! !!

!

Holy motherfuck!

seanc130@hotmail.com — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 18:29:43 GMT

Dude. The most bizarre and ridiculous thing just happened.

I was just watching a 2-hour documentary on the JFK assassination. I finished it just a few minutes ago. Among other things, it featured computer recreations based on the Zapruder film, which were analysed in detail, frame-by-frame.

Then I went to YouTube to watch some MST3K -- specifically, 'Cave Dwellers'. Mere moments into the beginning of the movie, when they're showing those weird blurry clips behind the credits, Crow busts out with this:

'Now look here, you can actually see the driver turn and shoot Kennedy!'

My head almost freaking exploded.

I mean, dude, I've seen a lot of incredible synchronicities in my time, but this one cakes the take. I think there were fewer than about *3 minutes* between when I finished the show and when I heard the riff.

Any Colour You Like

seanc130@hotmail.com — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 20:48:54 GMT

(Ha ha! Two Floyd references in a row! Awesome!)

Does everyone else see colours on this thing, like it says you're supposed to?

http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/col_benham/index.html

I don't see a damn thing besides black and white, no matter how fast or slow I make it go. I spent like half an hour the other night playing with it, and got nothing. Am I just defective, or what?

(Shut up! I mean my eyes, wise guy!)

So far I can see all the other illusions I've looked at on this site (http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/index.html) -- just that one doesn't seem to work.

And if the cloud bursts thunder in your ear / You shout and no one seems to hear

seanc130@hotmail.com — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 22:42:06 GMT

Go outside tonight and look up!

Not only is Luna[1] full tonight, it's at its perigee[2], making it appear the largest in the sky it will be all year.

I read this earlier today, and I thought, 'Oh, that's cool', but it didn't sound all that impressive ... until I went out just now and actually saw it. I was stunned at how huge and bright and perfectly round it is. I mean, fuck, that's BIG and BRIGHT!

[1] For the culturally deprived, this is the correct name for what crass ordinary folk often call 'the moon'. The word 'moon', of course, actually refers to any number of (generally round) satellites orbiting a planet (or Pluto, or even an asteroid, in at least one case), so saying 'the moon' is like saying 'the moron' -- it could refer to any one of countless bodies.

[2] I am not going to tell you what 'perigee' means. Look it up, you lazy bastard!

Ha ha! I'm HYSTERICAL!

seanc130@hotmail.com — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 19:15:30 GMT

Recently I was watching a videotaped university physics lecture, and they were discussing hysteresis in ferromagnetic materials.

Now, when you start off with no net magnetisation in the material, and then expose it to an external magnetic field, you first get a curve (on the M-versus-H graph) that goes up from the origin to the saturation point, where all the atomic dipoles are aligned so that the material can't get any more magnetic. Then, as you reduce the external field, the magnetisation goes down, but not all the way -- when you get all the way down to zero, there's still a remanent flux density. So it doesn't follow the same original curve back down to the origin, but instead goes into the S-shaped loop curve you can see illustrated on that Wikipedia page. That first, initial curve is called the 'virgin' curve, since it only happens the first time, when you start out with no dipole alignment, and is never returned to, no matter how many times you raise and lower the external field.

Anyway, so in this lecture, the professor asked his students if there was any way to 'make it a virgin again'. This provoked laughter. But my immediate, instinctive answer, unfortunately, occurred only to me and not anyone on the videotape: 'Is there any way you can make the hysteresis curve a virgin again? Well ... give it a hysterectomy!'

Yeah, I know it doesn't really make much sense medically. But I still found it amusing, and dammit, this is MY journal, and I decide what is and is not funny here!

(The correct answer, for the curious and unaware, is 'either bang the material with a hammer or heat it up, thereby randomising the alignment of the atomic dipoles again'. But that's not nearly as interesting an answer as 'Give it a hysterectomy'.)

BTW, this happened before my dental surgery, so it can't be blamed on the drugs. Yes, this really is my natural sense of humour. Be very afraid ...

The Tooth Is Out There

seanc130@hotmail.com — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 19:58:33 GMT

I just got back from having literally ALL of the teeth in the right side of my mouth pulled out. Everything from the canines back. Surgery 1 of 3 in the quest to finally rid me of all these rotten, splintered, green, stinky bastards.

I feel pretty good right at this instant, for two reasons. One, I am so happy to finally be getting rid of this burden.

The second reason, you ask? Well, let's put it this way: I almost wish right now that I believed in God, so I could thank Her for inventing opiates.

Apparently, even with the proper glasses, you can't always see everything clearly...

seanc130@hotmail.com — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 04:37:49 GMT

I was just in the store, and found myself having the following conversation with myself:

'Hey, they've got some kind of special line set up over there. Hmm, what does that sign say?'

'"DONUT EATER"??? What the hell is that supposed to mean?? Is it some kind of contest? Can I enter and win a box of donuts? That would be awesome!'

[after getting closer] 'Oh shit ... it says "DO NOT ENTER"!!! *laughing out loud* Donut Eater. WTF? *more laughing*'

I was looking at the wrong end of the line. It was just for post-holiday refunds and exchanges.

Dammit, now I really really want a chocolate donut. Nay -- a Boston Creme!! Those were always my favourite. Mmmmmmmm ... *Homer Simpson drool*