God and Science

 

Reverently Burgled from I Am your God

God and His Own Existence

Reverently burgled from I Am your God

God is Fragile

Burgled from I Am your God

God and Fragility

Reverently burgled from God

God and Science

Reverently burgled from I Am your God

Some Thoughts On Our Existence

Tim Minchin (not to be confused with noted Climate Denier and all-round arsehole, Senator Nick Minchin) has the sort of rant I have to my mirror the morning after.

I am one with Calvin who once told Hobbes, “Well, remember what you said, because in a day or two, I’ll have a witty and blistering retort! You’ll be devastated THEN!”

This is that response!

Thank you, Trucie @NorwichRocks

And thank you also to whoever mentioned this on Twitter.

Go Christopher Hitchens.

How Solar Power Works

Burgled from Fake Science

Intelligent Design wins! (now stand by for details)

This Could Be Revolting

I found this pair of young ladies over on Metro’s blog.

It may be best not to watch this video.  In fact I am sure it would be a very bad idea.

I’m warning you all that that which has been seen cannot be unseen.

Belle De Jour Unmasked

So the ultimate lady blogger of mystery has been unmasked. The writer of “The Diary of a London Call Girl” has revealed all.

I first discovered her just after I began blogging. In that pre-dawn semi-darkness between Usenet and true blogging. One of my usenet acquaintances, long since disappeared into the past, had her on her blog roll. In the course of checking all the entries on this, the first blogroll I had found, Belle de Jour stood out.

Not for the subject, which was titillating and fascinating it its own right, but for the quality of the writing which was that deceptively simple readable style which is so very difficult to achieve. For several months I was a regular reader of her work. For the writing, of course. Not that there were any pictures on Belle de Jour’s daintily scurrilous blog

Always there was the wondering about the identity of this obviously highly paid escort worker. She had been blogging for a number of years and had already had one book of her posts published out in the real world. Another book was in the pipeline and there was talk of a TV series. All about the life of this well hidden author.

My blogging confidence grew, I stopped visiting her, even removed her from my own blogroll and she faded into my past as so many cyber people do. The TV series eventuated and interest in her identity grew.  Until this past week.

Reading the BBC News I found that, about to be unmasked by a tabloid, she had stepped in ahead of time and spilled all to one of the weekend broadsheets, thus positioning herself invulnerably upmarket, where she will undoubtedly stay.

Just who is she?

She is Brooke Magnanti, 34, Florida State U graduate student of informatics, epidemiology and forensic science. Brooke moved to England to study as a postgraduate student and between 2003 and late 2004 she wrote anonymous blogs under the title Diary Of A London Call Girl. Brooke is now a research scientist in Bristol.

The report in the Daily Mail suggests that in the perfect literary world of Belle de Jour, Brooke insists she thoroughly enjoyed her naughty sideline as a high-class escort girl. Others, though, might now be considering that her ability to compartmentalise her parallel lives as research scientist, student girlfriend, college oarswoman and London escort girl was, at best, emotionally distant and at worst glacially cold.

Read more here and here

Censored Nude Camel Toes and Beavers

Every day I check the statistics on my blog. Just the total visitors. After all I am not a fanatic.

Much.

But occasionally I look at the other statistics WordPress provides. It is interesting (to me) to see what brings people to my blog.

So here are the ten most viewed articles on the archive over the past 30 days.

Pornography, Censorship and Art. Same old, Same old!

The Best Camel Toe Picture Ever Taken

Nude Gymnastics and Swimming

Second Best Camel Toe Picture Ever Taken

Shaving Her Beaver

Nine Inch Nails Meets Harry Potter

The Seven Dwarves

Blonde Chick with a Nice Pussy

What Is The Speed Of Light?

It is fascinating that top of the list is a serious article although I realise it has only gained popularity because Google decided to use the image of a young girl from that post as their top image for a search on “Bill Henson”.

I’m not sure just why an image lifted from “Looks Just Like” has jumped up into sixth spot or why three innocuous cartoons are in the list.

The entry which leaves me shaking my head is at number 10. Out of 3,399 posts on the archive (this is post No. 3,400) a serious – well, sort of -  post on science rates this highly. It doesn’t seem to fit with the other nine which could be grouped as “Sex, Celebrity and Censorship”.

Butterfly Wings in Space

I visit the NASA Photo website quite often and am always impressed by the images we can see from their telescopes.

Most of the time, while I am awed and amazed, I decide against using an image on the archive because it is just “wow”.

Occasionally there is the “WOW” image.
This is one such.

SOURCE:- NASA/ESA/Hubble SM4 ERO

Cauldrons of gas resembling butterfly wings and heated to more than 20,000 degrees Celsius tear across space at nearly 1,000,000km/h (fast enough to travel from Earth to the moon in 24 minutes). A dying star that was once about five times the mass of the Sun has ejected its envelope of gases and is unleashing a stream of ultraviolet radiation that is making the cast-off material glow. Photo released September 9, 2009.

Sex and Evolution

The Kimberley and Pilbara regions of North West Australia are proving to be a treasure trove for scientists.

A team led by John Long, a paleontologist at the Museum Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, identified embryos in extinct, jawed fish from a group called Arthrodira, the predominant members of the class Placodermi. Placoderms were bony, heavily armored fish that lived about 380 million years ago, and were “the dominant form of vertebrate life on the planet for 70 million years,” Long said.

In 2008, Long’s group identified embryos in a pair of fish fossils from a deposit in the Gogo formation in Kimberley, Australia. Those fish were part of a group called ptyctodontids, which made up only a tiny portion of the Placodermi class. The discovery pushed back the origin of internal fertilization by 200 million years. The findings prompted the group to look for signs of internal fertilization in other Placoderm fossils from hundreds of samples in collections around the world.

They reexamined Gogo fossils from the Arthrodira group. In two of the fossils’ body cavities were smaller fish, originally presumed to be a well-preserved meal. But based on the position of the tiny fish and the similarity to the ptyctondontid finds, the group concluded that the tiny arthrodire fish were actually embryos. “Finding that first embryo was the key, the Rosetta stone for knowing what to look for,” Long said.

Next,  boys being boys, (hat tip to all the female scientists out there who would be far too decorous to commit the following bad taste) they had to work out just HOW these early matings took place.

Then they had to show us.

Note the silly grin on the male’s face before followed by a confused look after.  Perhaps males of most species have not evolved that much!

Also note the female superior position and the fact that she does all the work.

Information, images and many of the words gleaned from The Scientist.

With thanks to an unevolved EaGle who gave me the incentive to post this proof of evolutionary development.

The Bible

thanks, Phil

Australian Beaver; Exposed

The archive in a desperate ploy to gain additional hits insists on calling the Platypus “Australian Beaver“.

And a video showing a nude, egg-laying, venomous, duck-billed Australian Beaver in action and cavorting in the water is downright irresistible!

Of course it could be called an Australian Duck or the Australian Mole (Now there is a thought)

Anyway back to Australian Beaver.

There are a lot of people who are interested in Australian Beaver and some of them have been doing DNA testing on the cute little critter with the poisonous hind claws! Hmmm – another male fantasy being massaged!

Dr Chris Poonting, of the MRC Functional Genetics Unit at the University of Oxford, UK, is one of more than 100 researchers from the US, UK and Australia, who took part in the study. He said the platypus was chosen because of its unusual features.

The animal comes from an early branch of the mammal family, and like mammals it is covered in fur and produces milk. However, it lays eggs like a reptile. This unique mixture of features is reflected in its DNA. The genome sequence, which is published in the journal Nature, holds clues to how humans and other mammals first evolved.

The Australian Beaver is so strange that it was considered a hoax when sent from Australia to European researchers in the 19th Century.

With thanks to the multilingually DNAed Herr G eagLe