My Favoritest Animal Ever!

Like most people, as a child I had a favorite animal that I was passionate about. I would get excited about anything that had even a tangential connection to dolphins, and I often felt that being one would be much more fun that being a human. Watching this video made me feel like I was ten years old again:

A Whole New World

I'm still not sure what to make of the presidential debate (a draw?), so instead I'd rather share something posted by a friend on facebook. It's good to be reminded that amazing beauty does exist in this messed-up world.

Introverts and separations

The realization that my summer is rapidly drawing to a close has resulted in a lot of aimless wandering through the goody-filled halls of the Internet, and today I came across an old article from The Atlantic that does a better job of expressing what it means to be an introvert than anything else I've ever read on the subject. Now if only there were a way to make extroverts realize how true it is...

I've also been following the horrified responses to recently upheld law in South Dakota that forces doctors to read a scripted statement (which was written by the legislature and has an only tangential relationship to science and reality). Even before you get to the free speech problems and the garbage science it is based on, the statement has a serious problem with basic logical coherence. As pointed out in the Human Nature blog on Slate, if a fetus is "a whole, separate, unique, living human being" then nobody needs to worry about getting an abortion, which the state defines as "the use of any means to intentionally terminate the pregnancy of a woman known to be pregnant with knowledge that the termination with those means will, with reasonable likelihood, cause the death of the fetus." If the fetus is already whole and separate, then who could think that there's a reasonable likelihood that removing it from the womb would cause its death?

Learning from movies

This afternoon I went to see WALL-E, and I was quite pleased that it managed to live up to the elevated expectations that I had as result of all the good reviews and positive word of mouth. To make a movie about a trash robot, and to do it without any dialogue for 90% of the movie is an unimaginably bold move for a Hollywood film of any sort, but Pixar has proven their brilliance once again by crafting a touching and thoughtful film that is a stellar example craftsmanship in cinema.

It's not giving anything away to say that it has a surprisingly subversive message about how our wasteful consumer culture is destroying both the planet and the human race. The movie makes its point seamlessly, without any blunt didacticism, and it's hard to imagine a more compelling way to communicate concepts of conservation and good stewardship of the Earth. Unfortunately, the power of the film's impact on me made it that much more depressing to see that it did not penetrate the minds of my fellow movie patrons, who engaged in the typical movie theater behavior of leaving all of their scattered trash behind for someone else to clean up. If a film like WALL-E couldn't get people to change their behavior, it leaves me with little hope that we'll be able to achieve a happy ending of our own.

Blaaa! I am a colossal squid from the sea!

A thousand pounds of 26 foot long squidtastic awesomeness. With eyes the size of beach balls!

Science gets head-butted

One of the highlights of my visit to New York was the American Museum of Natural History, which was amazing for both its size and the quality of its collections. Some of my fondest memories from my childhood are of wandering through the Natural History Museum here in Denver (recently renamed the Denver Museum of Nature & Science), and my experience in New York was quite similar but on a much larger scale.

As I've gotten older, I've gotten into the habit of carrying a notebook with me when I go to museums, and I find that in addition to the actual items on display, the informational panels describing them are often a rich source of inspiration for my own writing. As I was exploring the dinosaurs and occasionally noting little gems of interest, I came across something that reminded me just far-reaching the conservative war on science has become.
It was a standard informational panel explaining the different theories about how pachycephalosaurs might have used their thick skull-caps, starting with the theory that they would have used them to establish dominance by butting heads like bighorn sheep, followed by an explanation that more recent research had indicated that their neck vertebra were too fragile for them to survive head-to-head combat and that they may instead have established dominance by butting a rival in the flanks. What saddened me was that underneath that information there was added placard reminding people in the familiar language of the anti-evolution movement that we cannot be sure about anything when it comes to extinct animals because those theories cannot be tested. It's sad enough that there are people who cannot tolerate scientific progress if it might threaten their fragile beliefs, but to see that sort of language creeping into such an important scientific institution raises frightening questions about the place of intellectual development in this country.