The Beagle Project Shop

Small, little read science blog Pharyngula alerts us to exciting news: the Beagle Project now has a shop to raise funds so that a replica Beagle can sail in Charles Darwin’s anniversary year of 2009.

Man in court for sex with a?

Bicycle.

BBC Natural History Unit to be cut by 1/3.

Reports the Independent. The section of the BBC responsible for the some of the finest wildlife programming ever to grace our screens. If true (you never know with newspapers), this alone is grounds for that bunch of maggot-eating vandals in the Department for Culture Media and Sport to be dragged into the streets and painful, odiferous indignities inflicted on them.  Funnels.  Grubs.  Handfulls of ragworm down ministerial trousers.  Vile, unappreciative, talentless, envious gobshites.

A Prince among men…

man jailed for three years for urinating over dying woman.

Why does the phrase ‘flogged within an inch of his life’ leap unbidden into my mind?

Meanwhile in our more innocent corner of the North, the local headline is: ‘Wayward cow tramples woman’.  This from the paper which brought you the headlines: ‘Seagull flies amok in gift shop’, and my all-time favourite ‘Man faces fish in trousers charge.’

My all-time second favourite understated headline has to be ‘Dundee man drowns at sea’.  The event? The sinking of the Titanic.

Piscology now! Comments.

In comments on Piscology Now! Rachael asks:

Isn’t the point of evolution that over a very long amount of time things evolve in a way to become the “fittest” (in the sense of “survival of the fittest”… Coelacanth fossil’s were found of them from so long ago that people thought they were extinct. But they aren’t extinct and yet are exactly the same as the fossil’s show them. Where’s the evoluation [sic] in that?

The point is, Coelacanths have survived for at least 410 million years because they have evolved:
1. The Coelacanths alive today are not the same species as the known fossils. Unless you think God knitted new species through the eons - in which case I’m wasting my time - those lobe-fins did evolve to adapt to the inevitable changes of food, habitat and disease in the last 410 million years.

2. There are two known living species of Coelacanth, so from a common ancestor they have specified - evolved if you like.

When it comes to doing what Coelacanths do they are the fittest, no point in ‘becoming’ a salmon or a cod when their general Coelacanthyness has served them very well for longer than the dinosaurs lived. If they are subject to new seletive pressures - a change of food availability, cave prices go up and they need a new home, a new disease comes along, a section of the population ends up in a subtly different bit of sea with different conditions from home, that is when the process of evolution kicks in with noticable results - those fish with traits which help them survive in the face of new pressure succeed, breed and pass it on.

The Coelacanth story is a good one:
1. Fossils found, no living specimens, extinction assumed.
2. Living specimens caught, science joyfully updates data, the sum of knowledge is added to.
3. Occasionally, a lucky bod such as I gets to look upon a rare, rare specimen and one’s sense of wonder and curiosity is increased. Here you go, have a wonder:
Latimeria chalumnae from the spirit room of the Darwin Centre, Natural History Museum, London © Lunartalks 2007

North Yorkshire Social Services’ spawn*…

and their suggestions for the better imprisonment - sorry management - of an adult with multiple disabilities in their own home.

1. Bolts on internal doors denying said adult access to fire exits at night.

2. Lock wheelchair away at night so she has to crawl to the toilet. Dignified.

Both needless to say did not get past the ‘imbecile suggestion in defiance of fire regs and human rights’ stage. It appears I am not alone in my dismay at the general lack of quality in social workers: Chicken Yoghurt writes:

I have relatives who are foster carers. They’ve been doing it for around fifteen years. They could tell you stories about what happens to unwanted children in this country that would turn your hair white. God knows the stories make me want to take a horsewhip to some of the social workers involved.

Yep, I have about 15 years experience of them, too. I think horsewhipping is about right. For a first offence.

* a £5 million a year turnover charity to which care of adults with disabilities has been contracted.

Smacking ban:

Ministers rule it out.

So all the Special Houses they go to for relaxation after hours in Parliament can stay open.

Nick Clegg

should be winning my vote (Yorkshire MP, a liberal of the right stamp) for leader  of the Lib Dem Party but a couple of reports and pics have made me suck my recently scaled and polished and therefore aching teeth.

1. He admires Martin Luther.  That’ll be the Martin Luther who wrote in support of stabbing and slaying revolting peasants?

‘If the peasant is in open rebellion, then he is outside the law of God.  Rebellion beings with it a land full of murderers and bloodshed, makes widows and orphans and turns everything upside down like a great disaster.  Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly remembering that nothing can be more hurtful or devilish than a rebel.  It is just as when one must kill a mad dog; if you don’t strike him, he will strike you, and the whole land with you.

M. Luther, against the murderous and theiving horse of peasants, 1525

Luther’s 1543 pamphlet On the Jews and their lies is hardly an admirable sentiment in the mouth of an historical figure to be admired, either. Not very liberal, Nick.

2. Pic with Mother Theresa’s Sisters of Charity.  (The pic changes with each visit). No.

By and large, I don’t support people who admire the justifiers of mass murder (Luther’s enthusiastic support for genocide costing 100,000 ish lives in the 30 years war might not have come to Nick’s attention, in which case I apologise) and those who think death surrounded by nuns and prayers is preferable to a life free of poverty and disease.

Note to both Nick and Chris Huhne: be wary of Gandhi, too.  He wrote approvingly of Hitler.

Hier ich stehe, ich cann nicht anders.

More monkeys, please!

Thank you to my irony correspondent for bringing this to my attention. In tragic few, a chap has been killed by marauding monkeys. The proposed remedy: train up a band of bigger, arsier (as a pose to tarsier) monkeys to duff up and move off the small simian assassins. An ill-thought out stab at biological control, methinks, and soon we’ll be bombing Iran’s suspected killer gorilla breeding facilities at Natanz.

Bugger Hindu sensibilities, shoot the monkeys. We don’t want Gaia to get the idea that we won’t retaliate if she turns against us like this.

But at least in death the victim of mortal monkey business gained the solace of immortality of a kind by being Pharyngulad.

God, you’re not a twat, you’re just not there.

(Related:  Holy Piss! and God, you’re a twat. Hence the title of this post.)

I stood in a beautiful old North Yorkshire church today, autumn sunlight streaming in through the stained glass, dappling the sandstone and organ pipes with blurred mosaics of colour. A good man lay dead in the simple coffin, a man we needed around, not a man who should have died aged 47.

He was a scientist who devoted his working life to helping developing countries keep food crops free of pests, he supported a dozen children through education in Africa and India and here at home he was a friend and liberal political colleague of the sort who gave me hope. His profession involved travelling, but he was prepared to forgo his new passport if it required the ID card our repressive government is about to insist on.

He was brilliant in mind, in spirit and in generosity. BA, B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D., a true polymath and respected researcher and scientist, he was also hugely happy doing carpentry at home, pounding the streets with us delivering leaflets and talking to people about their political worries. Locally he worried about civil liberties, stood for the council, internationally he felt the key to development was getting girls and women into education.

He was a good man, deserved his three score years and ten and frankly this world is worse off for his not getting it. People in developing countries will die because of his passing.

So I stood in that church today. I sang the hymns, revelled in the beauty of all three, but listened to the priest with revulsion: he was a good, kind, gentle and sincere man. But the words he spoke were vile. God of love, of compassion, of the resurrection . Around me bereaved family and friends wept.

It was a beautiful building filled with light and grieving people, but there was no God to listen to the words. Afterwards, several believers struggled to reconcile their faith with the early death of a good man. They couldn’t.

The world is a worse place without him.