Dance Magers

Hollywood really wanted to make I Am Legend 2, starring Will Smith. Even though he died in the first one. Fortunately, this never happened — but producer and writer Akiva Goldsman was happy to share the many failed ideas they had for an I Am Legend prequel and/or sequel. Warning: These ideas are all totally batshit insane.

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Inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry, Aled Lewis cross-stitched "The Coruscant Tapestry," a 30'x13" visual retelling of the six Star Wars films with Aurebesh script surrounding the borders.

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Disney hasn't yet released the final season of its urban fantasy series Gargoyles on DVD, but it has made nearly every episode of the cartoon available online. There goes the rest of our week.

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What if video game legend Sonic the Hedgehog existed in the real world? It would probably look something like this. And this is disgusting.

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Not long ago, fingerprints were the cutting edge of biometric profiling. Today, the use of biosignatures to identify individuals has expanded to include everything from iris and facial scans right through to DNA profiling and even the unique shape of a person's ass. Here's what you need to know about how companies and governments are tracking your biometrics.

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A female tiger has strayed from the confines of India's Corbett Tiger Reserve — and she's developed a taste for human meat. The big cat, who's prowling an area spanning 80 miles, has started attacking humans because she's not able to find enough natural prey.

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41-year old John R. Morales used to play McGruff the Crime Dog. That was many moons ago. Apparently since then he started a massive pot growing operation and was just sentenced to 16 years in the slammer for the results of a raid on his home in 2011. And that, my friends, is why you never want to get your home raided. Even if you have nothing to hide, the cops aren't going to wipe their feet before kicking your door down and tracking mud all over the carpet.

When police raided his house, they seized 1,000 marijuana plants and 9,000 rounds of ammunition for an assortment of 27 weapons -- including a grenade launcher After three years, Morales, 41, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 16 years in jail Monday. Even though Morales said he was nonviolent, U.S. District Judge Vanessa Gilmore said, "Everything I read about you makes you seem like a scary person."

Who would have ever guessed?! The man in the crime fighting dog costume was actually some sort of drug growing kingpin! It was the perfect disguise. Turns out McGruff wasn't taking a bite out of crime after all, just high and eating junkfood. You ever smashed up a bunch of Oreos in a glass of milk then put it in the freezer for awhile? The trick is not getting so high you forget about it. Thanks again to ChaosLex, who, for two tips in a row, gets to take the D.A.R.E. bear home for the weekend.

This one does exactly what it says on the tin, folks. And yes, it is the best thing.

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Here's a fun game that October Jones plays when he's on the train: 1) Pick another passenger. 2) Choose a fictional character that you think matches the passenger or their attire. 3) Sketch that character's head on a sticky note. 4) Ignore the stares from everyone else as you chuckle to yourself.

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Philosopher John Wilkins has responded to yesterday’s post about conflicts between evolution and religion. Sadly, he so grossly distorts what I said that I don’t think he has replied very effectively.

John quotes only a single short excerpt from my lengthy post:

So, after all, that, let us return to Plait’s argument. He tells us that the problem is too many people perceiving evolution as a threat to their religious beliefs. Indeed, but why do they perceive it that way? Is it a failure of messaging on the part of scientists? Is it because Richard Dawkins or P. Z. Myers make snide remarks about religion? No, those are not the reasons.

It is because these people have noticed all the same problems the scholars of Darwin’s time were writing about. It is because evolution really does conflict with their religious beliefs, but not because of an overly idiosyncratic interpretation of one part of the Bible. It is because the version of evolution that so worried the religious scholars of Darwin’s time, that of a savage, non-teleological process that produced humanity only as an afterthought, is precisely the version that has triumphed among modern scientists. And it is because the objections raised to that version of evolution in the nineteenth century have not lost any of their force today.

After a lengthy discussion, he passes judgement on what I said:

This is very like what Darwin said in the Variation: science addresses how things occur by natural law, not by God’s direct intervention. And note that this rather modern view is seven centuries before the Origin. So it is at best rather anachronistic to assert that “religion” could not adopt evolution, when the intellectual resources were not only there in theology, but were in fact the “default” opinion even since the “One Truth doctrine” had been asserted against the Occasionalists and Averroes in the middle ages. It is therefore somewhat disingenuous for Jason and Larry to assert that religion necessarily contradicts Darwinian evolution. The use of this notion has even become the standard Catholic approach to the issue. (Italics in original).

“Larry” refers to Larry Moran, who quoted me favorably in his own post on this subject.

John says it is disingenuous of me to assert that religion necessarily contradicts Darwinian evolution. But not only did I assert no such thing, I didn’t even say anything that could plausibly be misinterpreted to mean that.

Go look again at the part of my post that Wilkins quoted. How could I have been more clear that I was not talking about religion or religious people in general, but was instead talking specifically about those people who do have religious objections to evolution? And where did I say anything about necessary contradictions? I referred to “conflicts” between their religious beliefs and evolution. A conflict is not at all the same thing as a contradiction, and my reference to “their” religious beliefs makes it very clear that I was not making any kind of universal statement about religion in general.

In the post I was responding to, Phil Plait said this:

The people who are attacking evolution are doing so because they think evolution is attacking their beliefs.

But unless they are the narrowest of fundamentalists, this simply is not true.

My point was that this is flatly untrue. If you were uncertain that this was my point, I invite you to reread the title of the post. There are many people who are not fundamentalists who nonetheless have specifically religious problems with evolution. I think this is important, because it shows that people like Plait just completely misunderstand the nature of the problem. When he suggests that scientists only need to change their messaging, and that we just need to tell people that no one but hardcore fundamentalists has a problem with evolution, he simply is not taking seriously the actual objections that actual people actually raise.

Far from refuting anything I said, John’s post is a good illustration of my point. He devotes much of his post to a highly abstract and academic discussion about the difference between primary and secondary causes noting, correctly but trivially, that there is nothing anti-religious in suggesting that God might achieve his ends through secondary causes. But who said otherwise, and what does that have to do with any of the conflicts I raised? The issue isn’t secondary causes in the abstract, but the specific secondary cause of Darwinian natural selection. The issue isn’t whether God could, in principle, employ secondary causes. It is whether Darwinian natural selection specifically is the sort of cause He would employ.

I invite John to go to an ID conference, lecture the attendees about different types of causation, and then see how far he gets. His audience will inform him that he is not even addressing anything they care about.

It gets worse. Though I find it incredible, John actually wrote this:

It is true that much of the debate about Darwin in the latter half of the 19th century was focused on God’s agency and purpose. However, usually the folk doing the debating were public intellectuals rather than theologians. Often they defended a theological perspective that was at best questionable even within their own tradition (as Dewey said, we do not solve philosophical problems, we get over them. This is uneven and cyclical even within a doctrinal community).

He just made that up. Just to stick to the people I specifically quoted, Charles Hodge cannot be dismissed as a mere public intellectual. He was one of the most prominent theologians of his time, and he surely understood the difference between primary and secondary causation. The objections he raised in What is Darwinism? cannot be refuted with John’s preferred style of abstract handwaving. Moreover, his views were all but unanimously held by Protestant intellectuals of the time, as noted in the statement I quoted from historian Frederick Gregory. The view of virtually all Catholic authorities of the time were along similar lines. And most of the contributors to The Fundamentals were prominent scholars. They cannot be dismissed as casually as John would like.

In the final section of his post, John asks:

So when we read this comment by Jason, I am left wondering what the reference class of the term “religion” is for him and Larry, and others.

He then lectures me about the different forms of religion:

To aver that religion is necessarily opposed to evolutionary theory, when there are so many instances of it not being, is a category error. Jason and Larry might reject the idea that this view is “religion” as they understand it. That would be to put the folk definition in a privileged position, when even the scientists who study the phenomenon do not. But allow that these philosophically minded views are part of religion, at least historically, and you find the claim untenable.

What we need to do is to specify the degree of religion that finds evolution impossible to reconcile with belief, for there surely is some, and a lot of it. I think of a particular religion as a series of concentric circles. At the most broad, one’s religion is label and a set of rituals (including statements of belief) that includes anything that falls under that rubric. “Christian” includes folk beliefs in demons and spirits as well as theologically refined views like Drummond’s or Aquinas’. But folk religion is rarely what the more educated people think, and so the superstitions of religion fall away as you move inwards. The average educated believer knows that somehow religion and evolution are not at odds, but they probably do not know how, and take it on faith the two are consistent. More refined thinkers find ways to reconcile the secondary causation of science and the primary causation of God. A few theologians, not all by any means, give the arguments; the extent of their approach is restricted, but logically coherent.

But there is no need to speculate about how I understand the term “religion” in this context. This is something I have written about so often and at such length, that I’m not sure how John missed it. For example, in this post I wrote:

Now, the first question to ask of any book claiming to reconcile science and religion is, “What sort of religion are we talking about?” Even if we confine ourselves just to Christianity, there is quite a spectrum to consider. The sort of religion promoted by the young-Earthers is obviously incompatible with science, but they don’t get to define Christianity for everyone. By contrast, the very liberal versions promoted by people like John Shelby Spong can easily be reconciled with science, but only at the cost of discarding almost every major point of Christian theology. Go that route if you wish, but some will complain that you are thereby left with a version of Christianity that is scarcely distinguishable from secular humanism. The really interesting discussion takes place between those extremes.

Do I not have reason to feel John has misrepresented me?

Most of John’s argument here, though, is just so much condescending twaddle. The mind reels at the arrogance of suggesting that the community of Christians can be divided into those who adhere to folk notions about demons and spirits on the one hand, and the educated folks who understand, if only at an intuitive level, that evolution does not conflict with Christianity. There’s a reason that scholars have to write at book length in their attempts to defuse all the points of conflict between evolution and Christianity. The many, many people who simply find their arguments unpersuasive cannot be honestly dismissed as just uneducated folk religionists.

Let me close by noting how I summarized my views at the end of Among the Creationists. (The reference to “Ruse’s question” is to the title of his book Can a Darwininan Be a Christian?)

Though I have made my own sympathies perfectly clear, I do not propose to give a definitive answer to Ruse’s question. Instead I ask simply that we recognize it as a matter of opinion and not of fact. How you answer depends on what you believe is central to Christian faith and on what you consider it plausible to believe.

Ruse continued with, “Is the Darwinian obligated to be a Christian? No, but try to be understanding of those who are.” I would ask that the same understanding be extended to those who find the reconciliation too difficult to manage. Once you have acknowledged that evolution forces a profound rethinking of traditional faith — and how can you not? — why is it unreasonable to conclude our reappraisal with the finding that one of the two systems must simply give way?

There can be no question that John has attributed to me a view I have specifically abjured on many occasions, and which I came nowhere near expressing in the post under discussion. He owes me an apology.

Worse, though, is that his entire argument suffers from the ivory tower pomposity that so often afflicts discussions of this topic. His arguments are completely divorced from the concerns of actual people, and his tone is incredibly condescending towards anyone not up on the latest developments in professional theology.

“That which you create in beauty and goodness and truth lives on for all time to come.” -Denis Waitley

It’s been another spectacular week here in the Universe, and I’m pleased to take on another one of your wonderful questions in yet another Ask Ethan column! (Keep sending in your questions and suggestions if you have them.) This week’s question comes from Robert Scott, and it’s one of the simplest yet also the most puzzling:

I love looking at the beautiful long-exposure pictures of the Milky Way on the internet.  I also love pictures of galaxies.  One of my favorites is of Andromeda. I’ve read somewhere that it is quite large in the sky, but its arms are dim.

Here’s the question: why do I NEVER see the Andromeda galaxy in long-exposure Milky Way pictures?

Here’s what he’s talking about.

By taking a large number of long-exposure images of the night sky, either with a very large-aperture lens or an incredibly sensitive CCD-array camera (or both), you can get a good sampling of a very large section of the night sky, which you can then stitch together into a panoramic composite. The result is a beautiful, deep-sky exposure image of the sky, often including the Milky Way as a major target.

On the other hand, there’s the Andromeda Galaxy, even larger than the Milky Way and our closest major galactic neighbor at a distance of just over 2 million light-years from us.

This galaxy actually takes up a relatively large section of our night sky, as it appears maybe four-to-six times the size of the full Moon with your naked eye, depending on how much or how little light pollution there is in your skies when you see it.

Yet, despite being relatively close to the plane of the Milky Way in the night sky, you’re very unlikely to see it in the same photograph as a Milky Way panorama. You’re far more likely, in fact, to see two other galaxies that are much smaller and less significant!

On the left of this image, you might notice the large and small Magellanic clouds, respectively. Despite being much smaller than Andromeda (containing only a few percent the number of stars), these two objects actually appear larger in the night sky (from the Southern Hemisphere) due to the fact that they’re only about 170,000 light years away!

They’re also displaced a little bit more than Andromeda is from our galactic plane, making them easier to view, not harder. You see, the way our eyes work, even something that’s brighter is more likely to be lost by our eyes against a more luminous background; contrast plays a big role in what we perceive.

You’ll very easily notice the large Magellanic cloud at the lower right of this image of the Milky Way, but do you notice a much smaller, fainter “smear” at the lower left of the Milky Way?

Barely, right?

That’s Andromeda.

But when you see a whole-sky panorama like this, the quest for Andromeda is really like looking for a needle in the haystack of the bright night sky. Yes, you might be able to find it, but only if you know exactly what you’re looking for!

Despite being around three degrees across on the night sky, that’s only maybe 1-2% of a typical panoramic image, or the amount you’d see if you held up the white part of your pinkie finger’s nail at arm’s length. That’s the scale of the Andromeda galaxy you’re looking for.

Yet it’s very muck there, visible on the very left edge of this image. The fact that it’s so close to the Milky Way actually works against our eyes, but this will turn out to be a boon in the far future.

You see, Andromeda and the Milky Way are getting closer, and as the billions of years tick by, it will become far more prominent in our night sky!

Today, unfortunately, all we have is the upper-left-corner panel: what Andromeda looks like today.

It’s beautiful, and it’s real, but it’s sadly quite tiny against the vast expanse of our galaxy, which is why it looks so much better when the Milky Way is cropped.

Astrophotographers can take great care to bring out both the detail in a section of the Milky Way and also highlight the Andromeda galaxy, and compositions designed to do just that can be utterly spectacular. This is especially true because Andromeda happens to be located extremely close (in angular proximity) to the North American Nebula in the night sky!

The lesson is, if you know where to look in panoramas, you can often find Andromeda hiding in large panoramas of the night sky, but it takes a lot of experience to know where that location is. (See the lower right, below.)

Either that, or you’ll want a tremendously large and high-resolution image, and then you can hunt for a spectacular view of Andromeda at your leisure. Because it doesn’t change in the night sky, the best full-scale panorama I’ve found is actually from some 30 years ago, and I’m happy to share it with you here!

And if you were able to find it, on the right just about one screen up from the bottom, you’ve learned how to find Andromeda in-or-near panoramas of the Milky Way!

Thanks for joining me for another Ask Ethan; I’m still working with ScienceBlogs on some of the details I was hoping to have hashed out last week, but I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, enjoy the wonders of the Universe, and I’ll see you over at Medium the rest of the days!

Brown dwarfs are not quite stars and not quite planets. They are much larger than gas giant planets but fall just short of being large enough to trigger hydrogen fusion. Thus the name "brown dwarf," because they are dark bodies, not generating enough energy to glow like a star.

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A day long awaited by the enormous latent audience for RPG gaming/hip hop crossovers has finally arrived: Ice-T has recorded a D&D audiobook.

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The Big Lebowski: it's an important part of every person's life. And to celebrate The Dude, this is a short video from Late Night with Jimmy Fallon of Tara Lipinski performing a Big Lebowski themed routine without ever spilling her White Russian (likely just non-fat milk). That's some serious talent -- I can barely sit on a bar stool without spilling my beer and here she is skating around with a drink like it's nothing. The routine is only a minute long though, so it's not exactly Olympic material. "Yeah, well, yaknow -- that's just like, your opinion, man." I see what you did there, and I'll allow it. You know how many times I've started watching the Big Lebowski after coming home from a night of partying? At least a hundred. And you know how many times I've actually finished it? Maybe one out of ten. I get the sleepies. "You take bong hits till you pass out." I GET THE SLEEPIES. Keep going for the video, along with the original number from the movie. Thanks to Rob, who agrees if she'd been holding a bowling ball in the other hand, that would have really been something.

This is the $230 14k gold plated 'Lucky Bones' necklace designed and sold by Onch Movement. Now listen: Valentine's Day is literally right around the corner and I want you to buy this for me. I pour my heart and soul out to you constantly, and I deserve a little something in return. In this case, a 14k gold necklace of two dinosaur skeletons boning. So what if they're not the same species! If I was a dinosaur I'd be trying to sex all the other species too. Hell, I'm NOT a dinosaur and I still want to. Sometimes I really do feel like I was born too late. Like, 200-million years too late (or ~10,000 years if you're into the whole young earth creationism view). So, how are you guys gonna do this -- all chip in a buck and buy it for me? There's also a $155 silvery metal one, but I don't want that one, I WANT THE GOLD -- GIVE ME THE GOLD, I WANT THE GOLD. "Could be a crackhead that got hold of the wrong stuff!" What are you doing? "Aren't we quoting the Alabama Leprechaun video?" No, I was quoting the Alabama Leprechaun video, YOU were sitting there reading with your mouth closed. You know what that's called? THE WAY I LIKE IT. Keep going for another shot of this one and two of the silvery one. Thanks to Kris, who made it quite clear he was not going to buy it for me. Wonderful, it looks like I'll be spending another Valentine's Day with a broken heart (and refrigerator full of beer).

The big debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham was tonight. Click here for the video. The whole thing is close to three hours, so get comfortable if you want to watch it all.

I was watching it live, but about two-thirds of the way through I kept losing the signal. I would reload the page, but then I’d get an error message twenty seconds later. So I gave up. They were just starting the “questions from the audience” phase, and I was not optimistic that that would be worth wading through. P. Z. Myers has the live blog if you want the abridged version. I mostly agree with his comments.

Overall I though it went well for the good guys. After five minute opening statements, each side gave a thirty-minute presentation with Ham going first. This was where Nye shined. He was excellent, both in style and in substance. In clear, eloquent language he pointed to fact after fact that spoke against young-Earth creationism and in favor of real science. I especially liked his section about the absurdity of taking the Noah story literally.

Against this litany of facts, Ham had little to offer. His own presentation mentioned a few scientific points at the beginning, and trotted out a handful of bona fide scientists who share his strange views, but mostly it was all religion and the Bible. He delivered a competent and polished presentation, but he faces a serious problem in a venue such as this. His standard talking points, which involve endlessly repeating, “Were you there?” and pointing over and over again to the Bible, just are not going to fly outside of his small community of fellow travelers. Even people who are not steeped in this issue can see that a person who constantly goes on about the Bible is not really interested in doing science. If you are forced to argue that somehow the natural laws we see operating in the present were magically different in the past, then you are not going to be persuasive to anyone who is not already in your camp.

At any rate, once they got away from their prepared remarks and got involved in rebuttals and counter-rebuttals, things went better for Ham. You really have to marinate in creationist BS for a while before you are prepared to refute it on the fly. Nye just didn’t have that background. At several points I found myself wishing it was, say, Ken Miller or Nick Matzke up there.

Nye was good, and I would not be surprised if even some in the creationist audience found some food for thought. Ham spoke ably to the people who already support him, forthrightly expressed his views, and did not make a fool of himself, so I’d say he also had a good night.

But I do think there was a clear loser in the debate: the intelligent design crowd. This was the biggest event in the evolution vs. creationism battle in quite some time, and it was good ol’ young-Earth creationism that was on display. Once you factor in the extensive online audience and the other media coverage, the message everyone will have received is that anti-evolutionism is just equivalent to Bible-thumping obscurantism. This was precisely the notion ID was invented to dispel. Seeing Ham drone on and on about the Bible, to the point of defending the plausibility of Noah’s ark for heaven’s sake, must have had the ID folks seething. It’s one of the endearing features of YEC’s that they make no attempt to hide their religious motivations. This is why they drive the ID folks crazy.

Nye took a lot of flak for agreeing to this debate. As I understand it, this was basically a fundraiser for the Creation Museum, so I do fault Nye for participating under those terms. On the general question of debating creationists, however, I’m not as opposed to it as other folks on my side of this issue.

There are certainly a lot of good reasons for not debating creationists. It takes a tremendous amount of time and effort to prepare properly for such an event. It has to be remembered that most creationists are entirely unscrupulous in presenting utterly bogus arguments with nerve and confidence. (There was quite a bit of this in Ham’s presentation.) It is far easier to spout nonsense than it is to refute it. On top of that, debate is a difficult skill to master, and it is one that academics and scientists in particular are often not so good at. All of our training is directed towards making everything seem complex and nuanced. It goes against our natures to deliver oversimplified but basically correct responses to asinine creationist talking points. But that is what is needed in a debate format.

Those are all good reasons, but there is also a very commonly expressed bad reason. It is sometimes said that by debating creationists you legitimize them. The analogy is often made to holocaust denial. Just by standing on a stage with them you are suggesting that there is a serious point at issue. Creationism, like holocaust denial, is so indefensible on the merits and is so blatantly a cover for other unsavory views (fundamentalist religion in the case of creationism and anti-semitism in the case of holocaust denial) that you should not even acknowledge them as worthy opponents.

Point taken, but I am not convinced. I certainly agree that one should not debate with holocaust deniers, but you have to go to some pretty dark corners of the internet to find anyone who endorses that view. Holocaust denial is so publicly unacceptable that any serious scholar who engaged them really would be helping to legitimize something reprehensible.

That is not the case with creationism. It is already such a socially acceptable view, even socially dominant in some areas, that I’m not so worried about making it seem more legitimate. It is evolution, and science generally, that needs to get the word out. Creationists have no trouble injecting their poison into the public discourse, and they have a lot of superficially plausible arguments to make. Scientists willing to take on the grim task of offering folks an alternative view should not automatically be excoriated for doing so.

So I applaud Nye for taking on this challenge, even though I have some issues with the specific format of this event. An audience full of creationists, as this one was, is precisely the kind we want to address.

A recent study published in Ecology and Evolution shows that polar bear diets are more adaptable than previously thought.

Researchers Linda Gormezano and Robert Rockwell analyzed the feces from polar bears (Ursus maritimus) in the western Hudson Bay area and compared their findings to a similar report from 40 years ago. The study was conducted during the ice-free season when polar bears usually hunt seals to build their annual fat reserves. Since ice is melting more rapidly, less time is available for the bears to hunt their preferred prey. What is a polar bear to do? Become less selective.

The recent analyses of polar bear feces show the animals are consuming increasingly available land resources due to the changing climate. Bird remains were found in 29% of the samples analyzed, comprised mainly of snow geese whereas eggs were found in 4.4% of the samples. The most commonly found mammalian remains were caribou (10.1%), seals (6.5%) and other polar bears (5.1%). They also discovered the occasional, but rare, remains of small mammals (rodents and hares). Polar bear feces also contained significant vegetation mainly in the form of grasses and marine algae.

In comparison to 40 years ago, polar bears are consuming fewer small mammals and more polar bears (presumably through cannibalism). The frequency of bird and seal remains has not changed. Interestingly, caribou and eggs appear to be new resources for polar bears as no evidence for their consumption was seen in the prior study. As for vegetation, while consumption of berries and mosses has not changed, polar bears are now consuming more Lyme grass and mushrooms with less marine algae and other grasses found in their feces.

Sources:
LiveScience

Gormezano LJ, Rockwell RF. What to eat now? Shifts in polar bear diet during the ice-free season in western Hudson Bay. Ecology and Evolution. 3(10): 3509-3523, 2013.

The three major Axis powers — Germany, Japan, and Italy — committed a host of catastrophic errors during the war. But some of these miscalculations were considerably worse than others. Here are the most significant blunders made by the Axis during WWII.

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Meet the $169 ORA vibrator from luxury sex toy manufacturer LELO. It looks like fun. LOTS of fun. Thank God it's rechargeable because there aren't enough batteries in the world to fulfill my desires. "It's for women." I WILL MAKE IT WORK.

LELO Ora is an external vibrator that simulates the same pleasureable feelings of oral sex. Similar to an oral sex simulator, Ora delivers swirling strokes, fast flicks and vibrations to stimulate the clitoris and the area around the clitoris. A turbo or INTENSE setting delivers 30% more power along with 10 rotation and vibration patterns. Super smooth, rechargeable and waterproof. Discover for yourself if LELO Ora is better than the real thing.

Did I mention you get free clitoral arousal oil with your order? Because you do. Is it drinkable? One blogger plans on finding out! That blogger isn't me though, just so we're clear. I learned my lesson from banana flavored lube. It didn't taste anything like bananas! Plus it was weird having a penis in my mouth. Keep going for a product shot, explanation of movement, and video. Thanks to Stacey, who keeps me up to date on the latest and greatest sex toys. It's an important job.

Last month, I got a chuckle out of this silver lining from a New Republic article: The liberals who rant about genetically modified food may be pushing a point of view that is objectively as crazy as believing carbon emissions are not causing global warming; but liberals are still more likely (and willing) to get their news from places that tell them the truth. Others, such as the The Economist, have lately noted the hypocrisy of greens, in particular those who stand up for climate science but

This is the series of prototype Star Wars character rings designed by J.A.P. in the late 90's to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the franchise. So you can't get them anymore. Sucks too because I really had my eye on that Rancor. Could you imagine having a pet Rancor? That would be SO SWEET. At least until some Jedi @$$hole comes along and kills it. WTF, that's like a feeder mouse killing your ball python. Keep going for 15 more. Thanks to PYY, who was more than a little disappointed there was no Han.

You see the hauntingly beautiful pictures of the fallen grandeur of abandoned buildings, and you think, "I want to see those for myself." But watch out. Some of the world's most fascinating modern ruins are also the most hazardous. Here are some abandoned sites that you could risk life and limb to visit.

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Nowadays, when you go see a big movie, you assume everything is going to be computer animation and greenscreen, and nothing is real. But a lot of the biggest, craziest movie stunts, past and present, have been entirely practical. Here are some of the most complicated stunt sequences that were created in reality.

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Note: Turn your volume down before playing the videos. This is the helmet-cam footage from 25-year old James Lee, a skydiver who accidentally got struck by another skydiver and knocked unconscious during freefall. Thankfully, a couple of the other jumpers noticed and came to his rescue by pulling his chute. After it was deployed, he regained consciousness and managed to land safely. Wow, could you imagine waking up IN THE AIR? That's terrifying. Right up there with waking up chained underwater or in a coffin. Keep going for two videos, the first a shorter, edited version. The second a full-length version. Thanks to SARAH!, who apparently yells her name, which I'm okay with.

Antivaccinationists irritate me, for reasons that should be obvious to regular readers. The reason is that vaccine-preventable diseases can kill. Contrary to the beliefs of many nonvaccinating parents, who downplay these diseases as being not particularly dangerous, they are dangerous. Of these, one of more dangerous vaccine-preventable diseases is pertussis. That’s why a story that popped up in my Facebook feed disturbed me so. Unsurprisingly, it’s on that other wretched hive of scum and quackery (with respect to vaccines), Mothering.com:

So, my almost ten month old started coughing and after a while, we suspected that it was whooping cough. When his cough suddenly changed from normal to not normal, we took him to our ped (which is pro-vax but isn’t pushy about it.) and he gave him some antibiotics in hopes it would help the cough.

My boy handles it really well. He gets really red, but he breathes through it and immediately after he’s like I want to play!

My husband is having a really hard time with this. REALLY HARD. The only thing he asked for our boy to get was pertussis because it is so scary! I resisted, since I’m the one that did all the research and while I showed him he just deferred to me, even though I urged him to do his own research so exactly this issue wouldn’t happen. We aren’t a team in it together anymore. He’s like “we should have vaccinated him, I asked for just ONE shot out of all of them” and then I reiterated ‘the its a cocktail’ info and he’s like then why do ALL of these doctors, all these highly educated people, think that they are beneficial? Is there some great conspiracy by ALL doctors?

This is child abuse, pure and simple. Because the mother mistakenly believes that vaccines are harmful and that pertussis isn’t such a big deal, she didn’t vaccinate, and the result is that her son is suffering as a result. Clearly in denial of the severity of pertussis, she tells herself that he’s “handling it really well,” but then describes how he “gets really red” and “breathes through it.” Those of you out there who have ever had a cough so severe that it’s hard to breathe know how terrifying it can be. I’ve experienced it myself for—thankfully—brief periods of time. It’s terrifying. If it’s terrifying to an adult to have a cough so bad that he can’t catch his breath, how much more terrifying is it to a ten month old child?

To get a further idea of the self-absorption of the mother and her utter cluelessness with respect to pertussis, check out this passage:

Anyways. So he’s upset and I’m devastated that my boy is sick but I’m just kind of like, this is biology. This is natural. He’s going to be sick and we will deal with it and get help from our doctors and maybe even our hospital if it comes to that. He’ll get better and his immune system will be stronger. I hate watching him cough and knowing there is nothing I can do but at the same time I can’t protect him from everything. He has to live in this world and deal with germs. I won’t put him in a bubble.

The naturalistic fallacy strikes again. I suppose that to this mother it would be completely natural if her son were to die of pertussis because she didn’t want to vaccinate. Or if he were to get a secondary pneumonia and end up in the hospital on antibiotics or even on a ventilator. I have a message for this mother: Nature doesn’t care about you. What’s “natural” isn’t necessarily best. Before vaccines and modern medicine, huge numbers of babies never made it to adulthood because diseases like pertussis and other vaccine-preventable diseases. His immune system might not even be “stronger” after this. Even “naturally” acquired immunity to pertussis due to the disease is not necessarily lifelong.

I feel for the husband. I really do. First of all, he was at least semi-reasonable about vaccines because he wanted his son to get at least the pertussis vaccine. He sounds as though he was not antivaccine but that he didn’t really want to fight with his wife over it even though he clealry realized that certain vaccines, at least, are very important. His wife refused, and, not wanting to make waves, he foolishly went along, probably knowing that he was endangering his son. Now his son is suffering, and so is he. No wonder he’s having a hard time! He’s clearly regretting his decision. Worse, because he’s the stay-at-home dad he has to watch his son cough up a lung every day while the mother is off working. He is seeing firsthand all day every day the consequences of his wife’s decision, and he’s the one who has to deal with it far more than she does. He should really tell her that he’s not doing it anymore, that it’s her fault that the child has pertussis, and that she needs to take some time off of work and take care of the child. The mother keeps harping about togetherness and how they should “work it out together”; yet she isn’t helping. She’s off at work, leaving him to deal with a sick child that is the direct result of her irresponsible behavior.

On the other hand, as much as I hate to concede this, one of the commenters has a point when she says:

While I feel for your husband (and I really do! ) you asked him to research things so you could make a decision together…and he didn’t. Being mad after he abdicated responsability isn’t overly appropriate.

Yes, the husband did abdicate responsibility by letting his antivaccine loon of a wife run the show with respect to vaccinating their son. Indeed, I rather suspect that he knows her viewpoint is pure quackery but capitulated because he didn’t want to fight and was simply trying to get his wife to compromise on the one vaccine he thought to be the most important. Not surprisingly, because she is an antivaccine loon, she wouldn’t even throw him that little bone. In this, the father rather reminds me of Dr. Oz, who, as you might recall, admitted that his wife, a reiki master who is antivaccine, runs the show with vaccines, the result of which was that they did not receive the flu vaccine. Of course, the person the husband is mad at is probably himself for doing exactly that. What he could do to make up for it is to stop being such a wimp and confront his wife, demanding that once the child recovers (and, hopefully, he will recover) he receive all his vaccines to bring him back on schedule. Otherwise, the same thing is disturbingly likely to happen again with any number of other childhood diseases.

Meanwhile, the commenters on Mothering.com seem to think that vitamin C can be used to treat pertussis. Commenter after commenter expounds upon the benefits of vitamin C for shortening the course of pertussis, even though there is no evidence to suggest that it can. Advice takes the form of brain dead suggestions like this:

Get some sodium ascorbate from the healthfood store and give it to him in some water and/or OJ, until he gets loose stools – then you have reached his bowel tolerance. This can and will cut the severity of the illness.

This commenter then claims that, because the DTaP is not 100% effective the child might have gotten pertussis anyway, a sentiment echoed later in the comment thread:

I hope you find something your little man likes, and I hope he feels better soon! You can show your husband examples of fully vaccinated kids contracting pertussis, and maybe that would help him during this stressful time.

The stupid, it burns.

Ultimately, the moderator shut down the comment thread. Sadly, it was not because of the levels of antivaccine views, quackery, and pseudoscience being suggested to the mother. Instead, it was because people from outside the impenetrable cozy antivaccine bubble of Mothering.com were trying to bring some actual science into the thread. This is completely unsurprising, as Mothering.com makes it very explicit that they are not there to “debate” but rather to support whatever dangerous quackery any mother wants to use on her child, particularly if it involves not vaccinating. I’m only surprised it took the moderator so long to protect the Mothering.com denizens from anything resembling reason, science, or medicine.

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