Priorities

A great comic from The Oatmeal, which I don't think I need to add anything to. See the rest of it below the fold or the whole thing here.

A nice little tour of the space station

Phil Plait posted the video below at his blog Bad Astronomy today, and I quite enjoyed it. It's not overly technical but also not too vague or over-glossing. It manages to strike a nice balance that provides an interesting overview of life on the station. I found the whole thing quite charming.

Plait mentions expecting to only watch a couple minutes of it, and similarly I almost didn't watch it at all. I spent countless hours as a child poring over illustrations of spacecraft and space stations, and so my first thought was that it would be nothing new, so why bother with it? But as soon as I started watching I was glad for it. It turns out it's actually been quite a while since I considered the simple wonder of being in space. Lately my thoughts toward space exploration have been centered on putting people back on the Moon, with Mars following soon after, and anything short of that seeming like a waste. But this video brought back a reverence for any sort of space travel that I'd forgotten. My dreams of being an astronaut are far behind me, but watching this video brought back some childhood fascination—trying to imagine weightlessness while hanging upside-down from the jungle gym and all that. I still wish we were making better progress toward the Moon and Mars, but seeing the size and details of the station and watching the presenter flit about in microgravity put an old sort of smile back on my face.

While watching the Geminid meteor shower the other night I related a similar account of renewed appreciation to my viewing buddy. I told her how for a while I came to disregard the night sky due to its inherent humanocentrism. The constellations are hugely arbitrary, and from any other vantage point outside our planet's orbit would be unrecognizable, owing to their distribution through three-dimensional space. And by my thinking, why focus on a happenstance arrangement of local dots when there are such grander concepts pervading space? There are billions and billions of entire galaxies out there, and while our stars do little but twinkle, elsewhere there's cosmic drama as stars are being born and dying violent deaths. But in the past couple years I've come back around to appreciate the naked eye's view from Earth. I still can't be bothered to commit all the constellations to memory, but I'm once again awe-struck when I look up on a clear night. First by the pure beauty of it, and also by the ponderings of the immense scales of distance and time involved that captivated me as a child. And instead of resenting the arbitrary nature of our point-of-view, I've come to embrace it a bit. You can probably blame Sagan for my newfound regard for our unique position in the universe, and if you haven't seen it already (or even if you have) I wholeheartedly recommend the video of Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot" remarks found on the "Wisdom" tab on this blog. :)

Cephalopods because why not

Look on and despair. (Image source)

I'll ramble on about my love for cephalopods at the slightest provocation. They are, after all, the most-excellent of the invertebrates. Now I know there are some pretty fervent fans of beetles out there, and I'll admit their diversity of forms and downright beauty are impressive. And I personally know someone who studies the nudibranchs who would probably be aghast at my proclamation, and I can certainly see where he's coming from. But while both those groups are undeniably amazing in form, cephalopods are still the supreme creatures without backbones.

Why? Well, what it basically comes down to is that I don't worry about beetles or sea slugs taking over the world. For cephalopods I have no such peace of mind.

First of all, we'll never see them coming. Many of them have an incredible capacity to blend in to the environment. Some might call them "the chameleons of the sea," but frankly that's insulting because compared to cephalopods, chameleons are amateurs. Unlike what you might see in cartoons (or faked YouTube videos), chameleons cannot perfectly mimic whatever color or pattern is near them. While some species can indeed change color and while it is useful for camouflage (mainly in the ranges of green and brown), they certainly can't replicate complex patterns and the primary use of the ability is to convey emotional state. (Many of the videos you'll find online involve holding one up to a mirror so that it's fooled into thinking there's a rival in its presence, triggering the response.)

The good (or terrifying) news is that there actually are creatures who almost live up to that fictional prowess of chameleons, and which actually surpass it in some ways. Cephalopods such as cuttlefish and octopuses can indeed change their coloring to mimic their surroundings, and do a decent job of replicating complicated and artificial patterns:

As you can see, they go above-and-beyond chameleons both in the accuracy and subtlety of their colors and in the fact that they can actually change the shape and texture of their skin to blend in more completely. Here's a short clip of an octopus blending in amazingly well before being spooked.

Some go even further, and imitate the shapes and behaviors of other living things:

As though I needed any more reasons to like Sweden

Sweden's got a supportive social structure, a very happy population with a high percentage of non-religion (and even the Church of Sweden is progressive enough that it performs same-sex marriages), and, of course, it gave the world Swedish swing rap.

So when I came across this page is was just icing on the cake—and I once again find myself wishing the world would follow Sweden's example. Top Toy, their branch of Toys 'R Us, put out a holiday catalog that doesn't divide its toys as strongly along gender lines. Boys are shown playing with dolls, girls are shown playing with guns. It's heartening to see people willing to let children be who they want to, rather than who adults think they should be. Now if only the toy companies themselves could follow suit and produce toys with more gender-neutral designs and color schemes (there are some good examples of it below, such as most of the kitchen sets and the Nerf guns, but I can't help but think that a boy would be more likely to play with that dollhouse if it weren't so hideously pink).

Our brain is biased toward dichotomies but in the real world very few things fit neatly into two discrete categories, especially human beings. Unfortunately a lot of our cultural norms are built upon such dichotomies, so I always enjoy seeing one dismantled like it is here. The site I linked to above seems to have compiled the images from articles here and here, and I've included the rest below the fold. Enjoy. :) (Click any image for a slightly larger version.)

It's been far too quiet around here

This song always seems to flow right up inside me and makes me drop what I'm doing for a moment of carefree contentedness. Good stuff. :D

Clearing some cobwebs

I really have no idea if there's anyone that reads this blog regularly, but if you're such a person, this post is for you.

What was originally a small gap due to my stubborn refusal to post anything else until I'd finished my Why I'm an atheist series turned into 9-month-or-so void after I started working 60 hours a week again in the spring. So, sorry about that, if you were some poor soul awaiting updates from me. :P But I finally made a new post the other day, and hopefully I'll keep it going.

What originally delayed me was the post that now appears as "Moment of Science: Evolution & Natural Selection," which started as a part of the aforementioned series. Trying to write a concise and fluid summary of evolutionary concepts took me some time, but I'm pretty happy with the result. And admitting that it didn't really fit into the series proper and retitling it has broken my silly fixation with doing the atheism posts contiguously—so while I'd still like to finish them up fairly soon, I may start posting some other things in the meantime (including this).

At the moment it looks like there will probably be five of the atheism posts in total, though it could wind up being six. (I originally saw it being only two posts, but I kept wanting to elaborate on points and it's metastasized out of control.) I'm currently going back over number 3 while working on number 4. The third one is a bit unfocused, I think, and depending on what I do with the fourth, I may go back and revise the third a bit. Once all of them are finished, I plan to go back and add images so that they're perhaps a little more palatable than they are in their current form of relentless walls of text. :P

You may be familiar with the Crash Course videos on YouTube, and since the first two series just ended, I though I might do a write-up of my impressions of them, for which I might recruit the help of my good friend who is a history-person, so that could be fun.

If you do happen to be someone who has taken a liking to this blog and checks up on it from time to time, please feel free to let me know you exist, either in the comments or by email. I'm aware of a few folks that I know from the real world who've said they've enjoyed posts, but as far as I know, no strangers read this blog regularly. If you fit that category I'd love to know it, and it would certainly encourage me to post more often. :)

Moment of Science: Evolution & Natural Selection

Part 4 of my Why I'm an atheist series involves refuting the claims of the so-called Intelligent Design movement. While writing it I realized that it would be necessary to make sure we're all on the same page regarding the ideas of evolution and natural selection. Summarizing these concepts was taking up a larger and larger portion of the post, so I decided to split the effort off into its own post here. Originally the title of this post included it in the atheism series (as betrayed by its url), but I've since decided that it would probably be less confusing as a standalone post, given that it does not deal directly with my irreligiousness.

Let's get something straight right off the bat: the terms “evolution” and “natural selection” are NOT synonyms. The first is an observed phenomenon, and the second is an explanation for it. Simply put, biological evolution describes changes among generations of livings things; natural selection is a mechanism for how those changes come about.

More specifically, evolution is the idea that the countless species we see around us today arrived at their current states through a gradual progression of forms. This stands opposed to assertions such as the Biblical creation, which state that all modern species were created instantaneously in their current forms. With today's evidence, the fact that life on Earth has evolved through successive forms over billions of years is essentially undeniable if one approaches it with intellectual honesty. The claims of the Old Testament (or those of any other religious text that describes all life having arisen more-or-less at once) just do not line up with the world we perceive around us.