Interesting Stuff Thread

robindch

What Dr Seuss actually wrote:

joseph brand

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsZy8CfE6C0

Dades

Picard you legend.

(Was great on Graham Norton a few weeks back...)

muppeteer

Dades wrote: »

Picard you legend.

(Was great on Graham Norton a few weeks back...)

Many many moons ago I was asked what a humanist was. Having only recently applied the label to myself I didn't have an answer that wouldn't take a rambling 5 minuets to explain.
So I resorted to using the example of Jean Luc Picard as being a humanist in a humanist society.
Seemed to help to get the explanation across:)

Added an article that suggests the Star Trek universe as a kind of atheistic/rational mythology.http://sidmennt.is/2006/08/16/every-religion-has-a-mythology/

Though I'm starting to think The Culture does it better.

robindch

dmw07 wrote: »

A bit premature alright. Must have been afraid the americans would release a documentary showing grainy footage of them reaching the lake first ;-)

Valery reaches for the vodka:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16907998

sephir0th

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00nzs13

Sarky

This lightning strike has been doing the rounds on Google+. It's amazing to compare this with shoddy grainy footage you'd get from a nature documentary ten years ago. Oh how technology has come along...

Cossax

May be a repost, I haven't gone through 127 pages buuuuuut

Delirium

Earliest human paintings dated at 42,000 years old in a Spanish cave.

According to new radiocarbon dating tests, these are the first paintings ever made by humans. They are seals painted more than 42,000 years ago, located in the Cave of Nerja, in Málaga, Spain. And they may turn our idea of humanity upside down.

Until now, paleontologists thought that the oldest art was created during the Aurignacian period, by modern humans. But these are way older, way more primitive than the ones in Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, the 32,000-year-old paintings featured in Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

According to the latest dating of the charcoal found next to the paintings—used either to make the paintings or illuminate them—these seals may have been made more than 42,300 years ago. In fact, they may be as old as 43,500 years.

It’s a mindblowing academic discovery, according to project leader José Luis Sanchidrián, professor at the University of Córdoba, one that can revolutionise our understanding of our history, culture and evolution:

Our latest discoveries show that neanderthals decorated their bodies with paint and had an aesthetic sense, and that’s a scientific revolution because, until now, [we] homo sapiens have attributed our selves every achievement, showing [the neanderthals] almost like monkeys.

We thought art history was only part of us, that our sensibility was “an intimate part of ourselves, the sapiens, because we think we are the thinkers.” This discovery, if confirmed with further testing, proves this sapiens-centric idea wrong.

According to Sanchidrían, all the available scientific data shows that these pictures could only have been made by Homo Neanderthalensis instead of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, something completely unthinkable until this finding. “The charcoals were next to the seals, which doesn’t have any parallelism in paleolithic art” said the professor, “and we knew that neanderthals ate seals.” And there is no proof of homo sapiens in this part of the Iberian Peninsula.

Researchers think that this cave was one of the last points in Europe in which neanderthals—who lived from 120,000 to 35,000 years ago—sought refuge, escaping the push of the Cro-Magnon, the first earliest homo sapiens.

Source

robindch

sephir0th wrote: »

Clever Chimp:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00nzs13

That's not just clever, that f*cking amazing.

recedite

We've had Rain Man, now we have Rain Chimp.

muppeteer

Australia removes tax credits if you don't have your child immunized.

sonicthebadger*

robindch wrote: »

You might laugh. Others don't:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iPIXq_jGMQ

I know people who think this is true

This sounds like the announcer speaking over the tannoy at a GAA match.

Liamario

robindch wrote: »

You might laugh. Others don't:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iPIXq_jGMQ

I know people who think this is true

What's the actual story behind the sound. He plays it on the radio with no source and no evidence of where it came from. No proof that it wasn't edited together (there is definitely some sort of looping going on). Apart from the fact that it may well be an innocent drilling sound.

joseph brand

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNdZGaDcUaU

Debate in National University of Ireland Galway on Thursday Feb 9 2012, between Michael Nugent, chairperson Atheist Ireland, and Adnan Rashid, Islamic Education and Research Academy.

Gbear

muppeteer wrote: »

Australia removes tax credits if you don't have your child immunized.

More governments need to take this kind of line. This march of the scientifically illiterate putting lives in jeopardy has to stop.

joseph brand

I wish to recommend a movie, which is well suited to this forum.

'Inherit The Wind'. Starring Spencer Tracy and Gene Kelly.

Inherit the Wind is a dramatization of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 when a biology teacher was arrested and challenged a law passed by the Tennessee State legislature making it a crime to teach anything other than the account of creation as set down in the Book of Genesis. Dick York is the biology teacher here, renamed Bertram Cates for the play and the film version of that play.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053946/

A small clip from youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_DQUAuNUvw

Go on. Spoil yourself!

fitz0

muppeteer wrote: »

Australia removes tax credits if you don't have your child immunized.

When that woman talks about the financial incentive taking away from a decision based on science I wonder what her objection to immunization is. The science is there to support vaccination, so if she was basing her decision on the science, it is highly likely she would have vaccinated her kids.

And on the subject of the Michael Nugent debate, I missed that one but was at the debate last Tuesday between himself and Hamza Tzortzis in DIT. It was a fairly good debate until it descended into passage quoting and some frankly ludicrous statements from a Pakistani doctor about atheistic incest and penile cancer. I thought Michael handled himself rather well, spoke quite eloquently as did Hamza in his opening statement. Although Hamza let his argument slide in the responses and in his empty bet over a womans worth in the Quran. Hope to see another debate like it soon.

recedite

fitz0 wrote: »

some frankly ludicrous statements from a Pakistani doctor about atheistic incest and penile cancer.

Is this guy working in one of our hospitals?
In theory he could be correct; If atheists have no moral compass, they are likely to indulge in bestiality and incest. And if they refuse to remove their fetid foreskins, that could in turn lead to their penises dropping off with the cancer, at least for the male atheists.

fitz0

I don't know, I hope not. He stood up and and made some outrageous claims that circumcision means no cancer, that there are no HIV or STDs in the muslim world and the aforementioned incest bit. He even (in the spirit of earlier wagers on the night) offered €1000 to anyone there who would marry their sister or brother. Very odd indeed.

recedite

LOL :pac:

Turtwig

Here's my weekly evolution column, which appears Monday Feb 13 in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

On Star Trek, the aliens often look so human that crew members fall in love with them. But in real life, scientists in the field known as astrobiology can’t be sure alien life would even be carbon-based like us, or use DNA to carry a genetic code.

Some insight now is coming from earthly labs, where scientists are building alternative kinds of genetic codes, and showing how they can evolve.

Whether life could be built with an alien biochemistry was among the more interesting questions that came up during a public event with famed biologist Richard Dawkins and physicist Lawrence Krauss, author of the book The Physics of Star Trek.

Dawkins saw the question as a biological equivalent of one posed by Einstein: Did God have any choice in making the universe? Not that Einstein believed in a biblical God, as the famously atheistic Dawkins was quick to point out.

Dawkins noted that most of the species that ever existed are now extinct. The way carbon-based life works on Earth is downright wasteful, he said. “Any decent engineer would have sent it back to the shop.”

The event, which drew more than 3,000 people, was held at Arizona State University in Tempe. Dawkins didn’t lecture but instead took part in an onstage discussion with Krauss, who runs a multidisciplinary program there on the origins of humanity, life, and the cosmos.

Krauss — while not going so far as to say alien chicks would be hot — did say the laws of physics and chemistry might favor carbon-based life resembling ours.

Dawkins said he was inclined to think life could exist in more diverse forms, as long as it included some kind of code-carrying system equivalent to DNA, copying itself with high fidelity. Such genetic material is critical for Darwinian evolution, which, to Dawkins and many others, is the defining characteristic of life.

Perhaps it wasn’t a complete coincidence that at the same university, biochemist John Chaput was creating an alternative version of DNA, called TNA, and had last month published the first evidence that the stuff can undergo Darwinian evolution.

Chaput, who works at ASU’s Biodesign Institute, said Dawkins is correct to emphasize the need for genetic material — something that can carry a code. All known life does this with DNA and RNA.

NASA has taken a great interest in such possible alternative code-carriers. In late 2010 the space agency claimed that scientists had forced bacteria to substitute arsenic for phosphorus in its DNA. Despite the fanfare, the team never presented adequate evidence that alternative life really existed, said chemist Steve Benner of the Florida-based Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution.

And when biochemist Rosemary Redfield of the University of British Columbia tried to replicate this, she discovered that the bacteria failed to grow when fed arsenic and no phosphorus.

Benner said the original arsenic life paper admitted to a small amount of phosphorus contamination. From the start, he said, he thought the contamination was fooling the team into thinking the organism was using arsenic the way we use phosphorus.

Benner said this new TNA work is just as exciting and relevant to astrobiology as the arsenic bacteria would have been if it had been proved.

This alternative genetic material is like RNA in that it’s single-stranded and it carries a chemical code with four different units. But the backbone that holds it together has a different structure, incorporating a sugar called threose where RNA has a sugar called ribose.

Threose is found in meteorites, said Chaput, suggesting it can form spontaneously in the absence of life. It’s also simpler than RNA, making it a reasonable candidate for a precursor to our current genetic material.

The existence of a precursor fits with the widely held view that life didn’t start out as complex as even the simplest microbes today. Instead, the simplest known living things evolved from yet simpler life that no longer exists.

Chaput showed that, like RNA, TNA can undergo Darwinian evolution. In theory, then, life elsewhere could use TNA as its genetic code, and if early life on Earth used it, TNA-based life could evolve into DNA-based life.

To demonstrate TNA evolution, he used selection to prompt the molecules to do a fairly simple task — to stick to a specific protein. This is what so-called receptors do in our bodies. He continued to select those TNA molecules that best stuck to the protein until he had a decent receptor.

TNA evolution worked the same way as in DNA, with accidental mutations leading to variation, and natural selection amplifying those variants that are best at surviving and reproducing themselves. He published the results last month in the journal Nature Chemistry.

That suggests the possibility of TNA-based life elsewhere, said Benner. It’s also possible, he said, that arsenic-using DNA would be stable, say, under the frigid conditions of Saturn’s moon Titan.

So now we have TNA as well as PNA, GNA, FNA and code-carrying molecules that use six or 12 characters rather than the usual four. With these increasing possibilities known, Benner sides more closely with Dawkins on the question of life forms with alternative chemistries.

Our life is not the best of all possible forms, Benner said, but a product of chance, our biochemistry hinging on which molecules happened to bump into each other. God did have alternatives, in other words, but perhaps no power to choose which one would evolve to create works like Star Trek.

Contact staff writer Faye Flam at 215-854-4977, fflam@phillynews.com, on her blog at www.philly.com/evolution, or @fayeflam on Twitter.

Source.

The sooner we get TNA or some other genetic material to produce life completely different to that which we know the better. Hopefully it'd be better designed than God's piece of crap handiwork too.

Sarky

Hey, I'm pretty well designed.

So the ladies tell me, anyway >_>

Mark Hamill

Potholer54 debunks the recent media articles on how the Himalayas hasn't lost ice over the last 10 years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJSA0iZ_xeA

If you can't watch the video:
None of those reporting the paper actually read it (shock horror :rolleyes:)
It does say that over an 8 year period the high altitude glaciers in the Himalayas did not show an over all loss in ice, however low altitude glaciers everywhere did show loss, to the tune of 150 billion tonnes of ice each year.

Potholer does the crocoduck award and other creationist debunking videos, but his videos on general science, global warming and particularly a recent one on media spin* are very good.

*That particular video is an edited version for UK and Ireland. In the original, he had a clip of a channel 4 documentary, where he pointed out how they completely misrepresented some scientists as in favour of an hypothesis they were actually against. Channel 4 claimed copyright infringement, the jerks, so the original is blocked here.

Turtwig

Mark Hamill wrote: »

Potholer54 debunks the recent media articles on how the Himalayas hasn't lost ice over the last 10 years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO1QBTG6EXs

If you can't watch the video:

Err the Legend of Zelda rap?

:pac:

Mark Hamill

Jernal wrote: »

Err the Legend of Zelda rap?

:pac:

Er yes, its subtle but if you listen to the lyrics, you can't deny that global warming exists! :pac::D

Turtwig

Mark Hamill wrote: »

Er yes, its subtle but if you listen to the lyrics, you can't deny that global warming exists! :pac::D

Ahh I see you were mirroring the common misdirection that the media were displaying when reporting the melting ice.

muppeteer

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2010/02/01/ncbi-rofl-thats-one-miraculous-conception/:confused

Oral conception. Impregnation via the proximal gastrointestinal tract in a patient with an aplastic distal vagina. Case report.

[Ed. note: There is no abstract, so we're including most of the original article below. It's a bit long, but trust us--it's worth the read!]

“Case report:
The patient was a 15-year-old girl employed in a local bar. She was admitted to hospital after a knife fight involving her, a former lover and a new boyfriend. Who stabbed whom was not quite clear but all three participants in the small war were admitted with knife injuries.

The girl had some minor lacerations of the left hand and a single stab-wound in the upper abdomen. Under general anaesthesia, laparotomy was performed through an upper midline abdominal incision to reveal two holes in the stomach. These two wounds had resulted from the single stab-wound through the abdominal wall. The two defects were repaired in two layers. The stomach was noted empty at the time of surgery and no gastric contents were seen in the abdomen. Nevertheless, the abdominal cavity was lavaged with normal saline before closure. The condition of the patient improved rapidly following routine postoperative care and she was discharged home after 10 days.

Precisely 278 days later the patient was admitted again to hospital with acute, intermittent abdominal pain. Abdominal examination revealed a term pregnancy with a cephalic fetal presentation. The uterus was contracting regularly and the fetal heart was heard. Inspection of the vulva showed no vagina, only a shallow skin dimple was present below the external urethral meatus and between the labia minora. An emergency lower segment caesarean section was performed under spinal anaesthesia and a live male infant weighing 2800 g was born…

…While closing the abdominal wall, curiosity could not be contained any longer and the patient was interviewed with the help of a sympathetic nursing sister. The whole story did not become completely clear during that day but, with some subsequent inquiries, the whole saga emerged.

The patient was well aware of the fact that she had no vagina and she had started oral experiments after disappointing attempts at conventional intercourse. Just before she was stabbed in the abdomen she had practised fellatio with her new boyfriend and was caught in the act by her former lover. The fight with knives ensued. She had never had a period and there was no trace of lochia after the caesarean section. She had been worried about the increase in her abdominal size but could not believe she was pregnant although it had crossed her mind more often as her girth increased and as people around her suggested that she was pregnant. She did recall several episodes of lower abdominal pain during the previous year. The young mother, her family, and the likely father adapted themselves rapidly to the new situation and some cattle changed hands to prove that there were no hard feelings.

Comments
A plausible explanation for this pregnancy is that spermatozoa gained access to the reproductive organs via the injured gastrointestinal tract. It is known that spermatozoa do not survive long in an environment with a low pH (Jeffcoate1975), but it is also known that saliva has a high pH and that a starved person does not produce acid under normal circumstances (Bernards & Bouman 1976). It is likely that the patient became pregnant with her first or nearly first ovulation otherwise one would expect that inspissated blood in the uterus and salpinges would have made fertilization difficult. The fact that the son resembled the father excludes an even more miraculous conception.”

recedite

^^^ One thing still puzzles me about that article though; Who got the cattle?

Turtwig

This is pretty big if true. I dunno how verified the documents are but in all honesty it was kind of obvious this was going on - Heartland was notorious for this sh1t. I just didn't think we'd ever see leaked/insider proof of it. Still these may not be genuine.

The Guardian wrote:

The inner workings of a libertarian thinktank working to discredit the established science on climate change have been exposed by a leak of confidential documents detailing its strategy and fundraising networks.

DeSmogBlog, which broke the story, said it had received the confidential documents from an "insider" at the Heartland Institute, which is based in Chicago. The blog monitors industry efforts to discredit climate science.

The scheme includes spending $100,000 on commissioning an alternative curriculum for schoolchildren that will cast doubt on global warming.

It was not possible to immediately verify the authenticity of the documents. "There is nothing I can tell you," Jim Lakely, Heartland's communications director, said in a telephone interview. "We are investigating what we have seen on the internet and we will have more to say in the morning." Lakely made no attempt to deny the veracity of information contained in the documents.

The Heartland Institute, founded in 1984, has built a reputation over the years for providing a forum for climate change deniers. But it is especially known for hosting a series of lavish conferences of climate science doubters at expensive hotels at New York's Time Square as well as in Washington DC.

If authentic the documents provide an intriguing glimpse at the fundraising and political priorities of one of the most powerful and vocal groups working to discredit the established science on climate change and so block any chance of policies to reduce global warming pollution.

"It's a rare glimpse behind the wall of a key climate denial organisation," Kert Davies, director of research for Greenpeace, said in a telephone interview. "It's more than just a gotcha to have these documents. It shows there is a co-ordinated effort to have an alternative reality on the climate science in order to have an impact on the policy."

The Valentine's Day exposé of Heartland is reminscent to a certain extent of the hacking of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit in 2009. Those documents helped sink the UN's climate summit later that year.

In this instance, however, the Heartland documents are policy statements – not private email correspondence. Desmogblog said they came from an insider at Heartland and were not the result of a hack.

The documents posted on Desmog's website include confidential memos of Heartland's climate science denial strategy, its 2012 budget and fundraising plan, and minutes from a recent board meeting.

The fundraising plan suggests Heartland is hoping for a banner year, projecting it will raise $7.7m in 2012, up 70% from last year.

The papers indicate that discrediting established climate science remains a core mission of the organisation, which has received support from a network of wealthy individuals – including the Koch oil billionaires as well as corporations such as Microsoft and RJR Tobacco.

The documents confirm what environmental groups such as Greenpeace have long suspected: that Heartland itself is a major source of funding to a network of experts and bloggers who have been prominent in the campaign to discredit established science.

Heartland is anxious to retain its hold over mainstream media outlets, fretting in the documents about how Forbes magazine is publishing prominent climate scientists such as Peter Gleick. "This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out," Heartland documents warn.

But the cache raises an equal number of questions – such as the identify of an anonymous donor that has been a mainstay of Heartland. The unnamed donor, who contributed $4.6m in 2008, has since scaled back contributions. Even so, the donor's $979,000 contribution in 2011 accounted for 20% of Heartland's overall budget, the fundraising plan says

According to the fundraising document Heartland hopes to bump that up to $1.25m in 2012 [click for PDF].

The importance of one or two wealthy individuals to Heartland's operations is underscored by a line in the fundraising document noting that a foundation connected to the oil billionaire Charles Koch had returned as a donor after a lengthy hiatus with a gift of $200,000 in 2011. "We expect to ramp up their level of support in 2012 and gain access to the network of philanthropists they work with," the document said.

Heartland hopes to cash in on its vocal support for the controversial mining method known as fracking, the document suggests.

Heartland operates on a range of issues besides the environment. But discrediting the science of climate change remains a key mission. The group spends $300,000 on salaries for a team of experts working to undermine the findings of the UN climate body, the IPCC.

It plans to expand that this year by paying a former US department of energy employee to write an alternative curriculum for schoolchildren that will cast doubt on global warming. The fundraising plan notes the anonymous donor has set aside $100,000 for the project.

The documents suggest several prominent voices in the campaign to deny established climate science are recipients of Heartland funding.

They include, according to the documents, a number of contrarian climate experts. "At the moment, this funding goes primarily to Craig Idso ($11,600 per month), Fred Singer ($5,000 per month, plus expenses), Robert Carter ($1,667 per month), and a number of other individuals, but we will consider expanding it, if funding can be found," the documents say.

Heartland also hopes to expand that network in 2012 by raising around $90,000 for a project on temperature stations by the well-known blogger Anthony Watts.

Whether these funding arrangements actually exist cannot be verified. However, Heartland's website notes that Idso, Singer, and Carter were commissioned to write a report for the organisation.

The strategy memo as published by DeSmogBlog mentions "cultivating" as a potential ally Andrew Revkin, a respected journalist who enjoys a huge following at the New York Times DothEarth blog.

source.