“The best road maps to human bodies lie in the bodies of other animals.”
– Neil Shubin

Your Inner Fish

There’s a fascination to tearing apart an old house, tracing its history through what you find hidden behind the plaster. Electrical wires and pipes will run up to the attic and across, instead of taking a direct route through a wall, or worse, run up the outside of the house to enter a second-story bathroom. Awkward plaster intrusions will run between ceilings and walls, where air ducts were added after the house was built. Lead and asbestos hide under new layers of paint and insulation made from safer alternatives. Doors are shaved into rhombus shapes so they can fit into doorframes no longer rectangular from decades of shifting. Bad wall and floor joists are sistered up with new ones for seemingly redundant support. Other times, you just stare at the work of some carpenter long gone and ask yourself, “What on Earth were they thinking?”

The human body is like an old house. Our ancient ancestors started out with one design, a multi-celled organism, which morphed into animals with faces, which morphed into animals with legs and heads, which morphed into animals on two legs and big brains. The end result is a body that has nerves doing loop-de-loos through our body, running absurdly obtuse routes from our central nervous system to the areas of the body they service, holes pushed through muscles to make way for the male’s external sex organs, leaving a weak spot prone to hernias, and flexible throat muscles good for speech, but leave us prone to choking and sleep apnea.

Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish is a comprehensive exploration of all our human evolutionary traits, and traces them to our ancient ancestors. I was a bit self-conscious reading this book in public. What would you think of someone intently reading a book titled “Your Inner Fish?” You’d wonder what psychiatrist recommended it, so you could avoid using them.

The book’s title is misleading in scope. This is not just a book about our inner fish, but our inner shark, inner worm, inner moth, sponge, single-celled organism. Haeckel’s Phylogeny Recapitulates Ontology may not be true, to the endless delight of Creationists, but understanding why it isn’t true opens the doors to understanding how different species can all start out looking the same as embryos and yet their organs develop into different specializations.

Several of my grade school teachers would explain the human appendix as once aiding in the digesting of raw meat, like cave people supposedly did. This was wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. Wrong on soooooo many levels. All my teachers had to do was look inside modern animals with functional appendixes to understand how wrong they were. That’s how we know our ancestors’ appendixes were for digesting cellulose found in plants. Comparative Anatomy is indispensable to understanding why our bodies work the way they do.

Shubin draws this fact out through recounting his adventures in fossil hunting, which sound so interesting that they made me want to go on finds myself. He describes fascinating experiments where biologists patch tissue from one animal embryo to another, producing growths that reveal the purpose of different genes, or scientists evolving algae from single-cell to multi-celluar life in the lab by introducing single-cell predators to their environment, or tying a hair around a newt embryo to cause it to grow into twins.

Shubin’s down-to-Earth, hand-on explorations make this book a gateway for laypeople to the biological sciences. The thrill of fossil-hunting, extracting DNA with common kitchen ingredients, or simply looking at the biology of other animals and appreciating how we relate to them make this book a keeper. It will change the way you look at everything in the Animal Kingdom.

Spent yesterday setting up a wordpress.org blog and transferring everything I’ve written on wordpress.com over to it, AND IT WAS SO EASY!!!

It’s about an afternoon’s worth of work. WordPress.com lets you export all your blog content to an XML file, which you have to cut down to several 2MB XML files and upload one by one. The import will copy all your images over from your wordpress.com blog, and it preserves comments, categories, tags, etc.

Once everything was imported, it was a matter of installing the necessary widgets to show my flickr photos, twittering, etc. There was also some setting-tweaking to get wordpress to use descriptive links with slugs and set up the dashboard, and I did have to run through all my blogposts and re-embed the videos, since wp.com has it’s own odd way of embedding to prevent users from installing malicious code in their blogs.

The biggest hitch was when I finally transferred my domain name to the wordpress.org site. I had failed to change the settings in wp.org to use ideonexus.com, which was causing wordpress to crash. Luckily, bluehost.com technical support does weekend hours, and directed me on how to fix it. Sorry to everyone for the blog being down between 3AM and 11AM today.

WordPress.org is a lot like WordPress.com, but with some very important enhancements, like the freedom to add Digg, Stumble, and Reddit links to posts, put javascript demonstrations in posts, metadata support, put adverts on the site, and install site-traffic monitoring services with more granularity.

Plus BlueHost is infinitely better than my previous host, where all my other domains reside and will be transferring from. I regularly had to call them and give tech-support in order to get my sites working. “Okay. Now click on ‘Control Panel.’ Now click on ‘Administrative Tools.’ There should be an item called ‘ODBC.’ See that? Okay…”

I’m sure there are still bugs. I know comments entered yesterday afternoon did not get backed up, which I apologize for. If there are any major issues, please let me know. : )

This antique was my favorite object on display in the Museum’s “Underground” exhibit. A card from William Hidden (1853-1918), a mineralogist sent to North Carolina by Thomas Edison to look for platinum, and for whom the gem is named.

See the complete flickr set here.

Tonight at 8:00 pm is Earth Hour 2008, brainchild of Australia’s World Wildlife Fund. The idea is to turn off all your lights between the hours of 8 and 9 pm your local time. People all over the world are taking part, and even cities are shutting down lights around their landmarks and government buildings. Let’s get ready to do some looting!!!

Ha! Ha! Kidding. Kidding. I’ve signed up to take part as a symbolic gesture. The astronomer in me romanticizes the idea of a massive intentional blackout rolling across our planet’s time zones. Light pollution is a serious problem, but there won’t be enough participation in Elizabeth City to bring the stars back, and the event takes place too early for truly dark skies.

Maybe I’ll spend the hour reading a book by LED light, or is that cheating? How about if I read that book by the light of my cell phone. Technically that’s not a light, but the battery was charged before and after the Earth Hour, so I’m using the same electricity. I own an oil lamp. That’s not an electric light, but isn’t that a much less efficient use of energy?

I wish the WWF was a little bit clearer about this. The spirit of the event is obviously to save electricity, but people like me sit in front of our computers in the dark anyway. If I turn off my computer, then I’m just sitting in the dark, when I could be blogging about LEDs, Solar Panels, Wind Energy, and all the other innovations that will really get us out of this mess.

Sitting in the dark like stone age humans isn’t the best strategy for working our way through Global Warming, innovation is. We need to innovate our way out of this problem, overcome the oil-industry tax breaks and corporate special interests that are preventing us from evolving technologically so they can keep us reliant on their antiquated patents.

I’ll turn off my lights for the hour tonight, but I have a sinking feeling that this plays into skeptics’ arguments that environmentalism wants to deprive us of all our modern innovations, when the reality is that we would prefer technology to evolve onto better things.

I’m quoted in Fran Malloy’s ABC Science article Internet connectivity about social networking and it’s effects on culture:

“A genuine science community is emerging online,” says science blogger Ryan Somma author of ‘ideonexus’. He argues that social networking also increases scientists’ accessibility to the public and accelerates the dissemination of new research.

This is a bit awkward, seeing as how I recently knocked on the ABC for hosting science quacks.

Here’s a cool spin on a game you probably haven’t played since you solved it in elementary school. You and another player take turns naming numbers one through nine. Each number may only be used once. The player who collects any three numbers that add up to 15 wins. If all numbers are used up without someone getting 15, the game is a draw.

Once two players have figured out all the strategies to winning the game, it becomes easy, and imperative, to prevent the opponent from winning. Just like Tic-Tac-Toe, two experienced players will have games that always end in a draw, which is important for teaching an advanced Artificial Intelligence why nobody wins playing Global Thermo-Nuclear Warfare–sorry, had a flashback to the 1983 movie War Games there.

In the research paper The Game of JAM: An Isomorph of Tic-Tac-Toe, John A. Michon notes how this game promotes a different way of thinking about a classic problem (he refers to this game as “Number Scrabble”):

Although the games are mathematically equivalent, they are likely to differ psychologically, because they require different sorts of information. Number Scrabble is a numerical game requiring addition and subtraction of numbers, whereas Tic-Tac-Toe requires a spatial representation, which can only be disposed of with some difficulty, even by fairly experienced players.

Tic-Tac-Toe and the Numerical version are Mathematically equivalent, and we can plot this out visually. In the table below, all rows, columns, and diagonals add up to 15.

Plaing Tic-Tac-Toe on this grid is the same as playing the numerical version. You can find a shockwave demonstration of this principle to play for yourself. This website calls the game Add Fast.

Taking the number five opens up four paths to victory. The numbers {1, 3, 7, 9} each open another path. {2, 4, 6, 8} are the least valuable strategically.

This seems like a cool game to play with your kids. When they get good at it, show them the relationship to Tic-Tac-Toe. Or you can learn the number-grid, and amaze your friends by kicking their butts at this game.

“It is easy to lie with statistics; it is easier to lie without them.” – Frederick Mosteller

Global Cooling Trend Close-Up of Last Decade

Yesterday I posted this image of what climatologists are claiming is evidence of warming in the last decade, and explained how it actually shows a cooling trend; however, it has come to my attention that the methodology I used, while completely legitimate in a completely fallacious sense, did violate the scientific principle of Occam’s Razor, which states that the simplest explanation is the most likely.

The problem with this graph is that there are way too many dots on it, making it too complex. A much simpler graph, with fewer dots, would clear things up and show how the world has actually cooled in the last decade.

Global Cooling Trend Simplified Close-Up of Last Decade Simplified

See? Isn’t that cleaner? Easier to understand? Occam’s Razor baby. That’s right. This is what those Global Warming cooks don’t want you to see. How about we apply this principle to the whole last century of temperature data?

Global Cooling Trend over the Last Century

Warming Versus Cooling

Where’s your warming now Al Gore? Huh? As we can see from this graph, most of this century has been on a cooling trend. Take all those shaded parts that I’ve so helpfully shaded and all the non-shaded parts that I’ve so helpfully not shaded and put them on a statistical bar graph thing like you see in power point, and look what you get. You get this pic over here to the right, with the red cooling bar being much much bigger, like three times much much bigger than the warming bar.

How can anyone look at this concrete visual data and not see Global Warming’s a crock?

Here’s more on Dr. Marohasy’s global cooling assertions.

A recent article that appeared in The Australian, Climate facts to warm to, has the transcript of an important interview with Dr. Jennifer Marohasy a biologist, free market advocate, and Global Warming skeptic.

When asked “Is the Earth still warming?” Dr. Marohasy replied:

No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you’d expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years.

Surprising right? Why haven’t all those Global Warming Climatologists been talking about this? Especially, as Dr. Marohasy points out, they don’t deny it:

The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognizes that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued…

We can clearly see this plateau here:

In case you can’t see it, here’s a zoom in of the last ten years to the right. You can see the obvious cooling trend. Notice the way the red median line looks like it sorta wants to curve just a little bit there? If you use your imagination, you can clearly visualize this red line actually pointing in the opposite direction.

Go ahead. Just imagine that. Imagine this picture upside down. That’s what Dr. Marohasy is talking about. Why are Climatologists at the IPCC ignoring this important fact being imagined in the brains of climate skeptics? Why? Why is the IPCC and MSM refusing to cover this important visualization research?

And what about the NASA Aqua satellite, which has been collecting data since 2002 on Earth’s atmospheric temperatures, water cycles, and sea-ice levels? Dr. Marohasy brings up the satellite’s research several times, but NASA only publishes the data that supports their preconceived notions of global warming, like melting Arctic Ice and global temperatures. There’s a lot of data supporting this cooling trend that Dr. Marohasy has so much faith-based evidence for, and the fact that NASA doesn’t have it on their website, just further proves how real it is. NASA is trying our faith.

And what about the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri’s blatant acknowledgement about the recent temperature stall? Here’s some damning highlights from the article:

Last year was among the six warmest years since records began in the 1850s and the British Met Office said last week that 2008 will be the coolest year since 2000, partly because of a La Nina event that cuts water temperatures in the Pacific.

“We are in a minor La Nina period which shows a little cooling in the Pacific Ocean,” Delju told Reuters. “The decade from 1998 to 2007 is the warmest on record and the whole trend is still continuing.”

The record year for world temperatures was 1998, ahead of 2005, according to WMO data. Among recent signs of the effects of warming, Arctic sea ice shrank last year to a record low. (emphasis mine)

“2008 will be the coolest year since 2000,” got that? Let me italicize, underline, and follow it with some exclamation marks just in case you missed it: “2008 will be the coolest year since 2000!!!”

God Bless the FreeRepublic for notifying their fanatically conservative base of this important development, who then flooded the blogosphere with this news the MSM was so blatantly ignoring, even getting the story on the front page of Digg by fanatically clicking on that “Digg It” button over and over and over again. Thanks to their activism, all those thoughtless sheep who believe the empirical evidence of Global Warming might get a clue.

I also appreciated the way these same activists got an offensive political cartoon posted to Digg under “General Sciences:”

Science is way too liberal in the way it doesn’t push conservative talking points. This cartoon will go a long way towards demonstrating what conservatives can contribute to collegiate scientific discourse.

Also featured on the radio show hosting Dr. Marohasy, was someone arguing that low fat diets cause diabetes and heart disease. I always knew all those servings of fruit and vegetables was just a liberal ploy to effeminate American men.

Chris Mooney has an important article online about how scientists debating fringe groups like Creationists and AGW deniers in many ways actually hurts our causes.

Sure enough, one of the Expelled trailers features the following quotation from Oxford evolutionary biologist and atheism apostle Richard Dawkins: “If people think God is interesting, the onus is on them to show that there is anything there to talk about. Otherwise they should just shut up about it.” And then in comes Ben Stein to play the rebel, the Galileo, against this oppressive scientific orthodoxy, against “Big Science” that tells the little guy to “shut up.” How’s that for enabling? (Link mine.)

A very astute observation of Dittohead reasoning. The fact that science does not have any peer-reviewed publications supporting the existence of god or disproving AGW Theory is only proof, in their minds, that the vast liberal conspiracy is in full effect, suppressing the “facts” they so desperately need to be true in order to prop-up their pre-defined ideological assumptions.

With Dittoheads–and that is who we are talking about primarily–debate is always a futile effort. How do you argue with someone who doesn’t even share the same factual foundation as the rest of the world? People who dismiss peer-reviewed research as liberal bias, who rationalize away hard facts as subjective, and take the absence of media and scientific coverage as support for their positions?

Mooney’s recommends science bloggers start ignoring the cranks as the best strategy for marginalizing them. I agree, but would also like to offer another tactic that I personally adhere to and one I think other bloggers should adopt: stop treating these cranks with respect.

The problem isn’t that science bloggers are pointing out the irrationality, lack of scientific evidence, and blatant rhetorical abuses of the Cranks. The problem is that they are doing so in a competent, fairly respectable, and dignified manner. That’s what makes the cranks feel legitimized.

When John Coleman can get up in front of an audience of AGW skeptics and argue that other people should sue Al Gore for his warnings about Global Warming, without having the spine to sue Al Gore himself, and he says this with a straight face, it’s time for bloggers to drop the academic tone and start laughing these people out of the room. Absurd statements like this prove that John Coleman is a spineless dweeb. He deserves a spanking and a “Dunce” cap, not a measured, respectful response.

First-tier bloggers like Mooney, Nisbet, PZ Meyers, etc shouldn’t stoop to this level, and neither should second tier science bloggers. It’s important legitimate science remain above the fray. Scientists are the keepers of data integrity, and I agree with Mooney that it’s best if they simply start ignoring the cranks.

Leave it to the third/fourth-tier bloggers like myself to openly ridicule these dimbulbs, as I personally have done here, here, here, here, and here. These are just my way of marginalizing what has become and increasingly silly cluster of conspiracy odd-balls.

Wildlife-Friendly Backyard

At the museum’s center is a huge recreation of North Carolina’s many ecosystems, filled with both living and taxidermied animals. One of my favorite side displays was on how to build an eco-friendly yard that invites, feeds, and shelter’s wildlife.

The Four Fundamentals of Wildlife-Friendly Landscapes:

1. Offer a year-round food supply along with a variety of feeders. Native plants that seasonally produce seeds, berries, nuts, and flower nectar are ideal.
2. Provide water for drinking and bathing. Watering holes can be a simple shallow saucer on the ground or an elaborate minipond.
3. Provide a place to rest and escape predators. Evergreen shrubs and thick vegetation lend protection to wildlife–as do rock and brush piles.
4. Create nesting spots; some animals have specific needs. Add birdhouses and leave dead trees standing when possible.

Complete Flickr set here.