ideonexus.com

Every year Green Sea Turtles travel 1,300 miles across the Atlantic Ocean from their nesting grounds in the middle of the South Atlantic to their feeding grounds on the Brazilian Coast. Why do the turtles undertake this incredibly taxing journey each year?

135 million years ago, South America and Africa were a single super-continent called Gondwanaland. At this time, the turtles probably inhabited a small bay or sea, nesting on one side and feeding on the other.

Over time, a process known as plate tectonics split the continents apart at about the same rate your fingernails grow. The change was imperceptible to the turtles, who traveled a few inches farther each year out of habit until, millions of years later, they were migrating the incredible distances they traverse today.

Doesn’t the epic nature of this tale, crossing oceans of time, distance, and generations of turtles, just tickle the imagination delightfully? Isn’t this an absolutely fantastic hypothesis?

It’s also completely discredited¹. We know this because the fossil evidence and geological timelines don’t match up. Sea Turtles didn’t evolve that way. Please don’t go around spreading this scientific urban legend.

The Biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, once said, “The tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” It seems like what science knows is always changing, and indeed this is the case. Every day new articles appear in peer-review journals disproving formerly established paradigms, rendering what we assumed were facts into falsehoods.

Just look at a decade’s worth of news articles on health and nutrition to see the wealth of contradictory information that field of research produces. Eat a low-fat diet. No, wait, eat a low-carb diet. Eat how many servings of meat? Dairy?

Many people characterize the mercurial nature of scientific knowledge as a weakness. Science is unstable, they argue, it claims to know the truth, but the truth doesn’t change. The fact that scientific knowledge is perpetually evolving is actually its greatest virtue, because scientists know how to admit when they are wrong.

The famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking published ground-breaking theories on Black Holes. Today we refer to the x-rays Black Holes emit as “Hawking Radiation” in his honor. In July 2004 Hawking acknowledge he was in error about a characteristic of black holes for 30 years.

The Biologist Richard Dawkins regularly tells the story of when he was an undergraduate at Oxford. A respected elder statesman of the Zoology Department there believed and taught that the Golgi Apparatus was not real. One day a visiting lecturer came and presented convincing evidence that the Golgi Apparatus was real. At the end of the lecture, Dawkins tells us, the elder statesman “strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said–with passion–’My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.’ We clapped our hands red”²

Western Civilization once thought the Earth was the center of the Universe and that the stars, moon, and sun orbited around it. Then Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and other astronomers developed the theory of a Heliocentric (sun-centered) Universe. Today we know the sun orbits the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and our galaxy moves through the Universe as well. Because Science has the power to admit when its wrong, it has the power to grow and improve. Our understanding of reality grows and improves with it.

Daniel Dennet, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, New York, 1995. (footnote on p245)

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, United Kingdom, 2006.

Fish Specimens in Jars

I have a morbid fascination with animals preserved in jars, and that’s what drew me into the Natures Explorers exhibit; however, it was not the Cabinet of Curiosities I expected to find. Instead, I met with an exhibit about the lives of those who assemble such cabinets and the history behind the practice of Naturalism.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

Saw Beowulf Friday night, not a classic tale I’m particularly fond of, but I was curious about this being the first attempt to make a film with as-real-as-possible human characters since Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within belly-flopped in 2001 (not counting mixture CGI/live action films like The Matrix, which also failed).

The film still failed overcome my Uncanny Valley response; however, it was far superior to Final Fantasy. This realism was probably because this film used motion-capture technology to model the characters on live actors, like Disney cartoon films. This allowed film makers to turn Ray Winstone into a young, athletic action hero.

Ray Winstone and Anthony Hopkins in Beowulf

As for the story itself, since Beowulf was passed down as an oral tradition for a long time before finally being committed to written text (like the Christian Gospels), it falls prey to the broken telephone effect (this is also why the gospels contradict one another). This means film makers are free to put their own spin on their adaptations. However a magnificent flop at the box office, The 13th Warrior was one such adaptation, crafting a plausible story about a battle between Vikings and primitive cannibals that could become Beowulf through decades of retelling and embellishment.

This film takes similar liberties, but preserves the fantastic elements. If you intend to see this version, I recommend familiarizing yourself with a synopsis of the tale in order to appreciate how it diverges from the original and why.

I’ve started twittering.

I’m not ready to have this thing start texting my phone just yet, despite the fact that I can set it up so that my houseplants can text me when they need water. I’m sure my cats would love this service too, “Ryan! Come home and let us (in/out) of the house! Bring treats!”

Anyways. I tried texting my daily activities, but it felt kinda big-brother. So I’m just gonna use it to post interesting quotes I hear/read and interesting ideas I and other people have that can be condensed into 140 characters, and haikus. I’ve subscribed to all my friends’ feeds that I’m aware of, so please shoot me a line if I’ve missed someone. : )

The RSS Feed can be found here, but you can also see it in the sidebar. I replaced the Geeking Out rss feed since it was mostly redundant.

My father, former head of the Microbiology Department at ODU, responded to an e-mail my hippie brother sent out about the recent Prozac debunking:

I seriously doubt that the PLOS Journal of Medicine, which I’ve never heard of in all my 35 years in the field, has any merit. If it even does exist, then I doubt that it is a refereed Journal which requires no less than three outside reviewers to substantiate the data, the statistics and the conclusions. While one cannot dispute the placebo effect, I wonder why this article was not submitted to a more prestigious journal.

Attention people who work at the Public Library of Science: You need to do a better job of getting the word out.

Attention Academia: You need get more involved with new media.

That is all.

Whenever I type “Ryan Somma” into google. There’s the bit of JavaScript code I wrote to strip characters from a string variable. There’s my Waterway 5k stats. There are court dockets from my divorce and the time I was sued for a million dollars. There’s also the “Rare Ryan Somma Sighting!” picture of me on a camping-trip adventure with some friends, and, most unusual of all, a high score from an Atari game “Frogs and Flies” I played a few times in college with some friends.

This is known as “egosurfing” or “egogoogling” or “being an ego-maniac.” I’ve even set up a service with Google to e-mail me whenever a new web site with my name appears on the Internet. I will be e-mailed soon after posting this.

My name Google’s really well. I’m the only “Ryan Somma” in cyberspace. That’s something you prospective parents should keep in mind when naming your children. Common names make it nearly impossible to egogoogle. Don’t condemn your kids to a life of online anonymity with an undistinguished name like “John Smith” or “Mary Jane.”

Whenever I meet a prospective mate, I always run a quick google-check to find out more about her. What kind of music, movies, and books does she list as favorites on her MySpace or FaceBook pages? What gift ideas can I get from her Amazon.com wish list? Are there any pictures of her on Flickr? Is there anyone stalking her on Google?

Most prospective ladies I meet google me also. Then they find out just how obnoxiously nerdy I am, and thus I don’t get many second-dates.

My unabashed pride in my geekdom prevents me from changing, but even if I wanted to portray myself in a more sexy, stylish, martinis “shaken not stirred” persona online, it’s too late. My geeky past is already irretrievably out there.

Thanks to the wonders of Google’s cached pages feature, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and other services, everything on the Internet is collected and archived for posterity and redundancy. Every angry rant, embarrassing photo, and incriminating blog entry is stored away on a server farm accessible to anyone with Internet access and the know-how to find it for months and even years after you’ve deleted it.

The White House discovered this fact when it quietly made changes to old articles on its website to cover up embarrassing statements made in the past. The blogs had a field day linking to Google’s cached version of the pages, ridiculing the White House’s failed cover-ups (The White House has since taken steps to block caching).

So here’s your warning kids: MySpace is forever.

When you post that photo of yourself passed out drunk on the floor, your face covered in permanent marker your friends have so helpfully scribbled on you, with the caption, “Dude! Too many beer bongs!” to your myspace profile, that photo is permanently archived, safely waiting to appear in your opponent’s political campaign ads when you run for public office, at your divorce hearing as character evidence, or in your performance appraisal when you’re seeking a promotion to the position “Vice President of Cool.”

The Information Age puts us all in the public eye. Everything we say, every picture we post, and hundreds, even thousands of web surfers, see every video we stream. It’s more important than ever that we turn on our minds before engaging our mouths. I know I have more than my fair share of stupid, reactionary things I wish I could take back online.

On the Internet, we are all part of a very small town where everybody lives right next door to everybody else. That’s why they call it a Global Village.

You heard me. When some selfish numbnuts corporation or collusion of businesses and politics or just plain-old short-sighted human beings drive some species to extinction, that infringes on my rights.

Namely, my right to eat that species.

I’ve eaten bear, deer, oysters, ostrich, frogs, turtles, rabbit, pheasant, squid, alligator, octopus, fish, snails, clams, snakes, a variety fish eggs, birds eggs, crustaceans, and numerous other animals I was unaware of found in Chinese groceries or accidentally eaten, like the ants that got into my protein powder that one time and I was too cheap to throw it out.

But you know what I’ve always wanted to try? Passenger pigeon. Apparently, passenger pigeons tasted really really yummy and there were tons of them flocking about North America, decimating forests wherever they landed, but I’ll never find out how yummy they were. You know why? Because people living here in the early 1900s selfishly killed and ate them all. This was the LARGEST BIRD POPULATION IN NORTH AMERICA at the time, and these fat-ass ignorant hicks ATE EVERY LAST #$%&ING ONE OF THEM!!!

F.U. Lost generation. History should rename you the “Fat Selfish Piggy Generation.” Jerks.

It’s not fair that I don’t get to eat passenger pigeon. It’s also not fair that my kids won’t get to eat tuna sushi, since ever-elevating environmental mercury levels will eventually render all tuna inedible. All so President George Bush the II’s friends can keep dumping mercury into the environment and spend the cost savings on solid-gold toilet seats and air-conditioned doghouses.

Then there’s the Dodo, apparently it wasn’t yummy at all. It was just dumb, and fun to kill because dumb sailors liked to bonk living things with clubs and feed them to dogs and rats. There must have been something really satisfying about bonking Dodos on the head with clubs, but I’ll never know, because those stupid sailors selfishly bonked them all for their own amusement. I bet that if the dodos were alive today, studies would show that they make great stress relievers.¹

Until the 1950s the Gros Michel banana was the banana of choice for the world. It was really tasty, vastly superior to the comparatively tasteless cavendish bananas we eat today. The Gros Michel was wiped out by a fungus. They still exist, but cannot be grown for sale any longer. Generation X will never know how yummy Gros Michel bananas were.

Recently I found out that Cavendish Bananas Could Disappear in 5-10 Years thanks to the same fungus that wiped out the Gros Michel. A fungus is also killing all the frogs, a fungus propagating because of global warming. Frog legs taste good. I get them every time I’m at the Chinese buffet, but my children won’t get to eat frogs because the Baby Boomers thought it was more important for Exxon Mobil to rake in profits the world has never seen before.

Passenger pigeons, whales, eventually tuna all seafood, frogs, and bananas, our menus are shrinking with each decade. Just like the menus of the Eastern Islanders shrank on their way to extinction. From digging through their garbage dumps, we see a dietary digression: first the big livestock are eaten, then they turn to nibbling on rats, then they turn to digging up corpses to cannibalize, and finally starve to death.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We got buffalo and alligators back on the menu. Let’s get the other species back on there too. I hope that one day I’ll be able to sit down to a guilt-free meal of blue whale with my children because the species was allowed to make a comeback.

If you don’t care about environmentalism for the sake of saving the Earth, then care about it for the sake of having variety when you go out to eat.

¹ This is an exaggeration made for comedic effect. There was some dodo-bonking going on by sailors, but mostly the dodos were wiped out by all the invasive species, like rats and dogs, the sailors brought with them.

Related Articles

The Tragedy of the Commons Explained with Smurfs

“The lady doth protest too much.”
- Queen Gertrude, Hamlet Act 3, scene 2, 222–230

Eliot Spitzer was an outspoken prosecutor of prostitution, and now we know this hypocrite dirtbag is guilty of indulging in what he believes should be a crime.

As I have argued before that prostitution should be legal. Sex is legal, making money is legal, sex for money should be legal. It is the illegality of prostitution that exploits and victimizes women, not the act itself. Legalized prostitutions would be safe, federally regulated, and taxed like mad.

Spitzer’s crime is two-fold. First he criminalizes women who sell sexual services, and then he exploits them by feeding into the market demand for those services.