I guess it would be too much to expect people to think up new ways of stupid

I recently read that in Georgia a woman is leading yet another attempt to ban the Harry Potter books from libraries. And of course, she admits to not having actually read them.

These books are helping to mainstream witchcraft. These books are dangerous and harmful to our children.

And no less than the Chief excorcist of the Vatican (how's that for a twenty-first century job title?) said:

There is no doubt that the signature of the Prince of Darkness is clearly within these books.

Even though I should be used to christians getting their underoos in a twist over just about anything, the Potter business has always been dismaying to me. And then it occured to me:

These people actually believe in witchcraft.

Update: She lost, Harry won (Shakespeare's Sister).

Update and bump to June 30th: She's appealing to the Georgia State Board of Education - Harry Potter and the Half-Brained Dumbass:

I hate it when mouth-breathing fuckwits try to make the rest of the planet as offensively stupid as they are.

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Six Flamingos

This changes my mind about flamingos. I always found them slightly ridiculous, but these birds are gorgeous. Click for a larger view.

Credit to Hedwig the Owl at ScienceBlogs.

Harriet

The giant Galapagos tortoise Harriet has died at 176 years old.

Harriet, originally called Harry due to an error that it took a century to correct, is believed to have been collected by Charles Darwin on the Beagle voyage in 1830, and eventually found her way from the UK to a zoo in Queensland, Austraia.

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Harry

From Respectful Insolence:

...I've found another reason to love the Harry Potter books. British geneticists Jeffrey M. Craig, Renee Dow, and Mary Ann Aitken examined the chromosomal basis of being a wizard or a muggle, suggesting that wizarding ability is inherited in a Mendelian fashion as a recessive.

The letter, published in the journal Nature argued:

Wizards or witches can be of any race, and may be the offspring of a wizard and a witch, the offspring of two muggles ('muggle-born'), or of mixed ancestry ('half-blood').

This suggests that wizarding ability is inherited in a mendelian fashion, with the wizard allele (W) being recessive to the muggle allele (M). According to this hypothesis, all wizards and witches therefore have two copies of the wizard allele (WW). Harry's friends Ron Weasley and Neville Longbottom and his arch-enemy Draco Malfoy are 'pure-blood' wizards: WW with WW ancestors for generations back. Harry's friend Hermione is a powerful muggle-born witch (WW with WM parents). Their classmate Seamus is a half-blood wizard, the son of a witch and a muggle (WW with one WW and one WM parent).

Now, getting your name anywhere in Nature is a major item on you CV, so, continuing with tongue in cheek, more scientists chimed in:

What about Neville's apparently poor wizarding skills? These cannot be explained by incomplete penetrance, as Craig and colleagues suggest. In incomplete penetrance, individuals either display the trait or not: they do not display an intermediate degree of the trait. Poor wizarding skills might be indicative of variable expressivity of an allele. However, both variable expressivity and incomplete penetrance are associated with dominant alleles. If the wizarding allele were dominant, rather than recessive as suggested, wizarding children such as Hermione could not be born to non-wizarding parents.

Wev. That was fun. But there's more in the comments, another better reason to love Harry Potter - not that it has lessons of biology, but that it gets religous underoos in a knot:

Magic is only a superficial reason why the Christian Right hates Harry Potter ...

Rowling's heroes and heroines think for themselves, and do not rely for their success on narrow application to a bigoted creed. In fact, the bureaucracy against which Harry finds himself ranged in the later books (quite apart from Voldemort) is itself quite like the insensitive, power-hungry, obedience-demanding institution that is... er... well, you fill in the gaps.

"Harry Potter" preaches independence of thought and makes children aware that a dominant authority which claims to be acting for the common good is not necessarily right - it thus questions the power base of the Religious Right, both in the secular and the ecclesiastical sense. No wonder it is despised.

More geography fun

I was having fun with geography here recently, and now ran across another cool game - The Geography Challenge.

You get to represent your own country and play a game where you identify random countries from a world map.

The navigation takes a bit of getting used to, so your scores will probably improve with retries - mine did.

I scored six, eight, seven out of ten. I was pretty much doomed if anything in South America or the Pacific Island nations came up.

If you care, an easy way (for me, at least) to learn this stuff is to play around here, and open up another tab (you do use Firefox, don't you?) to Wikipedia or the CIA Factbook and find one factoid you can associate with the country in question. Having some other associated fact in the brain makes it stick better.

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How to make a bat

One of the interesting things about bats is that they appear fully-formed early in the fossil record, perhaps giving comfort to creationists. But aside from the fact that small, soft-boned animals wouldn't fossilize well, there has been a suspicion among the evolution-minded to suspect that bats evolved rapidly.

Instead the picture is both more complex and more satisfying. The relations between genes (the genotype) and the resulting critter (the phenotype) have much to do with regulatory mechanisms and especially how these come into play during development of the embryo.

PZ Myers illustrates this in relation to one my favorite animals in How to make a bat.

... Organisms function as wholes, and changes in one property trivially induce concordant changes in other properties. Tug on one element, changing it's orientation or size, and during embryogenesis any adjacent elements make compensatory adjustments, so that the resultant form flows, fits, and looks organic.

I've always suffered from the tug a mistaken notion of the relation between genetics and the resulting organism. Like the idea that there is a gene for eye color, for example. This notion is popular and springs from a sort-of common-sense simplification. But it's wrong:

This isn't that surprising a feature of development, though, unless you have the mistaken idea that the genome encodes a blueprint of morphology. It doesn't; what it contains is a description of interacting agents that work together in a process to produce a complex result. Changes in genes and regulatory elements can essentially produce changes in rules of development, rather than crudely specifying blocks of morphology.

The article goes on to show how a change regulatory genes and the proteins they encode for can radically change the length of digits in the paw of a developing embryo. Much of the rest of the morphology follows along. Or how to make a bat.

Speaking of bat limbs. I once had the treat of watching a bat walk. They do so quite gracefully, I can tell you, especially when you consider that they are ambulating on feet and thumbs. Here's some video of one climbing:


YouTube Flash, about 30 seconds.

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Roy Orbison and k.d. lang

Crying

YouTube Flash, 3'37"
Via Crooks and Liars.


[March update and video rescue:

About four.

]

Paper maker adds new zoo poo to roo poo

From the Australian Broadcast Corporation:

After having worldwide success with a paper made from kangaroo poo, a company in north-western Tasmania has signed up with Sydney's Taronga Zoo to make use of its elephant waste.

The company's Joanna Gair says the first elephant dung delivery was in a fine paper-making state by the time it arrived in the post.

"It had been in transit for just over a week so it was fairly ripe by the time that we'd received it," she said.

Turns out that dung-based paper is a big industry. You can find a load of it online.

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Geography fun

Here's a site with great Flash-based geography games.

Try Africa.


I can't link directly, but scroll down to Countries, Level 1, then for more of a challenge, skip the "regions" category in favor of "All of Africa" in the drop-down box.

I score in the 90s, but have this Zimbabwe/Zambia block (always get them wrong).

U.S. States


This one is tough - you drag states onto the map. The placed states disappear, so you get little help from outlines.

Kansas always defeats me on this one.

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The end

Flash video, about two minutes.
STFU.

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Boys kissing

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More bunnies

The Oregon Zoo is working to save the threatened pygmy rabbit, the smallest of the North American Leporidae. Seventeen have been newly born and another fifty are expected soon.

This fall the tiny rabbits will be released back into the wild.

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You don't want to know

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Hi, I like you, too

Eating trees is good

Liopleurodon teeth

Thank you, Amy. Elend and Nate.

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Missing Links

From Dispatches From The Culture Wars:

In the creation/evolution debate, the religious right loves to argue about missing links; in the debate over gay marriage, they seem to specialize in arguments with missing links. ... What is the causal link between allowing gays to marry and "marriage" (they always use the word as though it was an actual physical entity) being "destroyed" or "weakened" or "gravely damaged"?

I love this meme that says gays are out to destroy marriage - by getting married. You know, if you want to destroy marriage, getting married is a piss poor way of doing it...

(In France, he's known as Sam le pirate.)

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Dino News

Dwarf Dinosaur

From Aferensis, news of a dwarf sauropod species that is a cousin to the brachiosaurs, the largest animals ever to have lived.

These dwarf dinosaurs were slightly longer and heavier than a car, [palaeontologist Martin] Sander said. They stopped growing when they reached 6 metres (20 feet]) in length and a ton in body mass, he estimated. Their brachiosaur cousins, by contrast, were up to 45 metres (148 feet) long and weighed 80 tons, as much as a small town of over 1,000 inhabitants.

Europasaurus holgeri is named to honor the amateur (how cool is that?) discoverer of the fossils.

More about Europasaurus here.

Largest Armored Dinosaur

From Living the Scientific Life comes news of he largest armored dinosaur.

The biggest armored dinosaur to be discovered so far was recently found in southern Utah, in a rugged badland just south of Green River.

"It's built like a tank,"... "It will be the largest, heaviest armored dinosaur found on the planet so far."

Estimated to be 25-30 feet long and to weigh 6 tons, this newly discovered animal was adorned with spikes and bony plates along its back and sides, similar to another armored dinosaur that was also found in Utah. But its relatively diminutive cousin, Gastonia burgei is merely one-half as long and one-third as heavy as this still-unnamed creature.

Today's Bible Verses

I'm in!

No one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord.

-Deuteronomy 23:1 NRSV.

Hey, you brought it up.

49-48

Hate the homos week ends

We will soon return to science, pirates and bunnies.

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6/6/6

See the devil, Sally. See, see.
Cast him out. Cast, cast.
Dick and Sally cast out.

I just had to observe the day.

Watch The Excorcist re-enacted in thirty seconds by bunnies.
Flash video, 0' 30" (duh) from Angry Alien.

Bet You Click "Replay"

YouTube Flash, 0' 10"