Evolve: Sex

Playlist

Doesn't work well on my system, not sure why.

Minutia of the Day: Black-eyed Susan girl.

The most famous political ad of all time is the Daisy Girl ad put out by Johnson in 1964. The ad was actually titled "Peace, Little Girl" as the name Daisy Girl probably wouldn't have occurred to the makers of the ad because the flower in question is actually a Black-eyed Susan. At least according to Birgitte Olsen the woman (then girl) in the ad.

OLSEN: I don't remember that. To me it was a big field with daisies, you know? Actually, I remember it not being daisies, but Lazy Susans (Editor's Note: We assume that Ms. Olsen meant to say "Black Eyed Susans"), you know—the yellow with the...

CONELRAD: But everyone called it the Daisy ad.

OLSEN: Yea. I always wondered about that later because I remembered distinctly what kind of flower it was (laughs).

You can actually also count the pedals if you ignore the girl counting, I counted 11.







Also, her sister (Annette) was Susan Spotless. Every litter bit hurts.

So now in political discussions about the ad, you can have something so obscure to mention that you clearly have analyzed every little bit of minutia about the ad... you must be brilliant. Now all you need are friends who bring up 60s political ads.

My life's plan.

1) Learn everything.
2) ???
3) Profit.


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Religions can hurt you if it's in their religion to do so, Texas Court Says

Apparently a woman who was repeatedly attacked by her congregation who swore she was possessed by demons and performed an exorcism on her, injuring her repeatedly and causing her post traumatic stress disorder gets a pass because saying they are wrong causes too much entanglement with religion.

Laura Schubert testified in 2002 that she was cut and bruised and later experienced hallucinations after the church members' actions in 1996, when she was 17. Schubert said she was pinned to the floor for hours and received carpet burns during the exorcism, the Austin American-Statesman reported. She also said the incident led her to mutilate herself and attempt suicide. She eventually sought psychiatric help.

I'm sorry, but religions don't get different laws. They get the exact same laws everybody else has to play by. The government can't go out of their way to dick with religions or give them a helping hand. They can however protect the citizenry from having their underaged daughters pinned to the floor as they shout to be let go. Applying this same kind of logic we should say that 9/11 was tragic but perfectly legal. You have a first amendment right to steal an airplane and fly it into a building killing thousands because you feel it is a central tenet of your faith that everybody should be ready to lay down their lives in the name of Islam. The supreme court had better reverse this nonsense because holy crap that is retarded. Sorry our faith says we get to violate underaged girls! Oh, okay.

Beware the Jews, they might just go into a town and kill all the men and children and keep the virgins for themselves. Preventing them from doing this sort of genocidal raid laid out in the OT repeatedly would needlessly entangle religion and government. -- Are you kidding me?

They get the same laws as everybody else, that's kidnapping and assault on a minor!

John McCain Was In Cone Of Silence.

If you've never seen Get Smart then you'd know the Cone of Silence is a common joke where the cone doesn't do anything. It leaks soundwaves like a sieve. So in the Saddleback church forum where the candidates discussed their love of pixies. The point of cone of silence is to allow everybody to hear em.

There's some pretty strong and fun suggestions that McCain had a heads up on the questions. Which is a great talking point if you want to gloss over the fact that he was in a very pro-McCain situation and not want to focus on the subjects of the debate. Which to Obama was just to state repeatedly that he was Christian.

We prefer catastrophe.

We face an energy crisis. We need to deal with it or we'll face catastrophe! Oh.. that sounds nice.

The History of The Devil

Worth a watch...

Carl Sagan: The Awe of Religion and the Smallness of Gods

In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed"? Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way." - Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot.

In case you're stupid and think McCain is the lesser of two evils

Germination of Oil Age

Plant sprouting like all processes of work requires energy. The energy comes stored in the seed which has a bit of fat (oil) which helps the seed to grow to the surface at which point it starts photosynthesizing light which allows it to grow into a large mature plant.

This is a great metaphor for the oil age. We exploited energy from coal, oil, natural gas, which was simply trapped under ground and created initially by photosynthesis millions of years ago. Whereas at some point that bit of cheap no-work-to-get energy goes away and we really need to start making our own.

-- Great metaphor, crappy point, worse post.

Evolve: Jaws

Part 2.
Part 3.
Part 4.
Part 5.
Part 6.

Evolve: Eyes

Part 2.
Part 3.
Part 4.
Part 5.

Should link up on the Youtube side of things.

Tachyon Neutrinos

As everybody knows tachyons is a general term for particles which travel faster than the speed of light. Whereas neutrinos are elementary particles, lack an electric charge, are able to pass through ordinary matter almost undisturbed and are thus extremely difficult to detect. About 50 trillion passed through your body in the last second.

I wish to propose what may seem to be an astounding theory. I believe that there is only one neutrino in the entire universe and it just goes really really fast.

Discuss.

How Archaeology Killed The Bible

In case you wanted to know most of the acceptable claims of the Bible are notably false.

The Genius of Darwin Part 2

Best Damned Race Ever

Just one of those things from the Olympics worth watching a few times.

Men's Relay Swimming.

I'm not convinced: Neandertals still might have interbred

The nail in the coffin of theory that Neandertals interbred with modern humans is typically the mitochondrial DNA which typically shows that Neandertals broke off of the human family tree prior to modern humans. We typically use 100,000 years as a demarcation for human, although in reality our ancestors have always been the same species as far as you go back even if that species is a type of fish or worm. Deciding when during an evolution to say this is a new species is an arbitrary point. Anyhow it seems on pretty good authority that Neandertals last shared a common ancestor with humans 660,000 years ago, so they certainly aren't an ancestor but a near cousin (in the same sense that the tree out my window is a distant cousin). Mitochondrial DNA (as you well know because you're smart (if not you will be)) is passed from mother to child along a material line all the way back to the mitochondrial eve (scientists need to stop calling shit Adam or Eve they make for really bad names).

Now this seems pretty clear that no genetic material was passed around between the neandertal population and the human population when the human population left Africa for Europe, right? Well, I'm not convinced. Neandertals were strong, really strong, Arnold Schwarzenegger Mr. Universe strong and this holds true for the women as well. In order to get our mitochondrial DNA to show signs of Neandertal interbreeding we need to posit that a man had sex with a fairly ugly brow face woman capable of breaking him in half and that from that union somehow the kid got taken care of from the human side (even though mommy would raise him) and that from that there is a *direct* maternal line going back at least 15,000 years and these one of these individuals wasn't picked up by a small sampling of the human population.

1) Neandertal men + human women = much more likely.
2) Sample size might be too small to find mRNA traces within human population.
3) The traces might have just been lost.

I don't mean this to sound like special pleading by any extent, rather I just don't find mitochondrial DNA to be a nail in the coffin. We really might have had plenty of interbreding with the local population and bear no signs within our mitochondrial DNA.

The Genius Of Darwin

I really love these little programs Dawkins puts out. Program 1 of 3. (Others out in due time).

Suddenly Phil Plait > P.Z. Myers.

Phil Plait is the new president of the JREF.

Plait has always been really close but still sub-PZ for a large part, so much for that.

Somebody get me a T-47 snowspeeder and a rope.

It walks and carries stuff. It will lead to doom. Also, it looks pretty cool. Keep the rope handy.