Deep thoughts and silliness

This “whale pwns bird” video has been making ripples in the Twitterverse:

(Via the Deep Sea News crew)

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[Thanks to some odd bug in the software, this was listed as “unpublished”, so I hit “Publish”. Obviously it was published, because it had 2 comment on it. But it does seem timely, int the light of this BBC report
Last week was Vappu, when Finns celebrate the coming of Spring. They do this in the traditional way, of drinking too much and going for a picnic the following day. But spring is only just arriving. Although the temperatures have risen and the snow has (finally) melted, and we still waiting for summer to start.

The last of the snow, now gone.

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Uh oh. Now I have some inkling of what Orac goes through. Which is an oblique way of apologising for the length and tone of this post.
A couple of years ago Jerry Fodor (a psychologist philosopher of mind) wrote a piece in the London Review of Books arguing that evolution was wrong. I had some fun with it, back on my old blog. Now he and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini have a whole book called What Darwin Got Wrong, and New Scientist has given them a platform to outline their argument. Fodor & Piattelli-Palmarini raise what they see as problems with evolution, but they basically reveal their own ignorance of the subject.
Unfortunately it looks like Fodor’s thinking hasn’t evolved in the last two years, and I could just lightly edit what I wrote before to critique their latest piece. But that would be boring.

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It’s a meme! Steffi wanted to know our answers to several questions and even my better half has joined in, so I don’t want to feel left out.
But first, the obligatory pet photo –

Did you really mean to put us up?

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This is really a post advertising a couple of carnivals, but it contains a rather important result. Below is a parsimony tree of URLs for entries to the 20th Carnival of Evolution, where the blogs with mutliple entries are marked in different colours.

As you can see if you look carefully enough, Bjørn Østman’s blog is paraphyletic (that means the red branches that are from his blog don’t form their own group). This suggests that Bjørn’s blog has speciated into Darwin’s Bulldogs. No sign of a missing link, though.

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There are about 24 hours left until the deadline for submissions to the 20th Carnival of Evolution. The new edition of CoE will go up on Monday, February 1st. So get your posts on evolution featured on the one place everyone goes to for the best blogging on evolution.
The next edition will be hosted by Psi Wavefunction on Skeptic Wonder. Let’s show the world that evolution isn’t dead just because 2009 has passed.
If you have a post (or several posts) that are suitable, use this online form to submit them.

My better half thinks this needs a caption too: a LOLproto-bird?

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It’s Friday afternoon, so here’s an excuse to look like you’re thinking hard.
This picture has been all over the science news -“for reasons best explained by GrrlScientist”:http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/2010/01/orange_stripey_dinosaurs_fossi.php

Artwork by Chuang Zhao and Lida Xing
But it needs a better caption than anyone else has come up with. Your task, folks, is to provide that caption. And to make it look like you’re working hard whilst doing it.

It’s coming soon. The next edition of the science carnival Scientia Pro Publica (which is slightly more popular than Scientia Pwns Publica) will appear next Monday at Kind of Curious.

If you’ve written something about science, nature and medicine in the last couple of weeks, or if you’re read something about those subjects that you liked and which you think is suitable for the public, submit it to the carnival! You can use this automatic form. Make sure you include the URL or “permalink”, the essay title and 2-3 sentence summary as a handy hint about what the post is about.
If you want to see what previous issues of Scientia Pro Publica looked like just follow the link.
Getting in carnivals like this is a great way of showing getting hits. First one to break the Nature server wins a prize.

This is an issue I can get behind:

No, not the Topology for All.

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