Uh oh, I may not be legal

Posted on July 9, 2012 by Troy Britain

To be filed under “Better Know Your Blogger”:

The archaeological dig being conducted by my mother at my parents house continues. Unfortunately this time she has unearthed evidence that I may not be a properly licensed Dinosaur Hunter (at least in the state of Utah)!

It seems that while I got the license itself (when I was 10 years old), it was never properly filled out:

The address has been redacted, but missing from the original is the signature of the Deputy Lizard Warden of the time, Al E. Oup. This could be a problem next time I’m in Utah!

Deputy Warden Oup (or Oop as it is more properly spelled) with one of his charges.

I had totally forgotten about this fun bit of tourist ephemera, which as it turns out, they still give out at Dinosaurland in Vernal, UT. In fact you can download a copy of the much fancier current Dinosaur Hunting Lic. from their website. Though I notice that the current Deputy Lizard Warden is now given as being “Al O’saurus” (obviously the Al E. Oup joke is for a past generation). But at least it comes pre-signed to spare future dinosaur hunters the legal difficulties that I am apparently going to have to endure.

Here’s a fun game kids, how many typographical and/or scientific errors can you find in the license?

In which I yell at everyone on the interwebs

Posted on June 20, 2012 by Troy Britain

A Facebook friend posted a link to a YouTube video titled “Top Ten Creationist Arguments” by The Thinking Atheist. I had seen it before, it’s slickly produced and OK as far as it goes (though I would have a different list of 10 creationists arguments) but that’s not what got me going. In the video TTA gives a quote from the late Stephen Jay Gould:

This caught my eye because I have been researching stuff to do with philosophy of science, i.e. the testability of evolutionary theory and the difference between the so called experimental sciences and historical sciences. In particular I thought I had remembered reading a essay by Gould on the subject and I thought this quote might give me a lead on it. The problem is TTA doesn’t give a source for the quote. “No problem”, I thought, “I’ll just Google it and it should be a snap to find the source.” Bzzzt! Wrong. Oh if you Google the quote you’ll get a gillion links but none* of them give the source of the quote!

After a half and hour or so of Google mining I finally found a site that gave the source as Gould’s Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995), but it provided no page number! So I pulled my copy off the shelf, blew the dust off the top (damn dust) and checked the index for references to creationism.

There were a couple and while Gould did say something like this in one part of the book referenced, it wasn’t an exact quote. Finally I went to Amazon.com and found that they allowed one to search the contents of the book, and at last I got the information I was looking for.

The quote appears on page 397 (of the 1st hardback edition) and is not one of the places listed in the index for the term creationism. Here it is with some context:

One tangential point before I leave this elegant study [a genetic study of certain crabs, see below – T.B.]. Creationists critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all (see the next essay for a fuller discussion of this important issue). This claim is rhetorical nonsense. How could one ask for a better test, based on a very risky prediction, than this? The counterintuitive link between king and hermit crabs was postulated on the basis of classical evidence from morphology (the arguments detailed previously in this essay as points 1-3). This prediction was then tested by the completely independent data set of DNA sequence comparisons — and confirmed in spades, with even closer propinquity than suspected between king crab and hermit crab lines.

I regard this story of king and hermit crabs as one of the most elegant I have learned of late in evolutionary biology–a lovely combination of a fascinating and counterintuitive tale; a multifaceted, rigorous and convincing pile of supporting data; and a lesson of intriguing generality (the difference between genealogical propinquity and any functional meaning of similarity–and the overriding importance of propinquity). (Gould 1995, p. 397, emphasis mine)

Great, curiosity satisfied!

So please, please, please, people, don’t just throw quote around willy-nilly. Give proper references. [I’ll make an exception for T-shirts, but that’s it!]

OK, I got that out of my system, end pedantic rant.

[* I didn’t look at every single Google result so this is a rhetorical “none”.]

Reference

Gould, Stephen Jay (1995) Dinosaur in a Haystack, Harmony Books, NY, 1st hardback edition

An ex-pigeon

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Troy Britain

However it is not merely a pigeon that has shuffled off its mortal coil, tis a late pigeon that was once studied by Charles Darwin (Natural History Museum at Tring, Hertfordshire, England), making its image being shared here a matter of course. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

[Hat tip to Michael Barton at The Dispersal of Darwin.]

The Annual Orange County Freethought Alliance Conference

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Troy Britain

I will be attending the Third Annual Orange County Freethought Alliance Conference this weekend and am looking forward to meeting people whose work I have admired (Aron Ra, Mr. Deity) as well as getting a chance to see friends and colleagues I’ve met in the past (Michael Shermer, Barbara Forrest). And on off chance any of my readers are attending, I hope to get a change to met you to. Just look for the guy with long hair and a goatee, that isn’t Aron Ra (see his pic below).

Hopefully I’ll have some photographic evidence of event to share with everyone next week.

Is that what it takes?

Posted on April 28, 2012 by Troy Britain

Now I have no illusions about my blog being another Pharyngula or anything but with at least a couple hundred views a day, from around the world, you’d think I’d be getting few more comments.

Where are all the would-be “creation scientists” eager to show me the error of my ways? Here I am writing post after post spanking the heck out of their intellectual leaders and rather than reasoned defenses or even primal screams of rage I get:

Fine, let’s try Chuck & Beans advice:

inteligent design ain’t science!

Now I know this might seem like little more than a blatant cry for attention (which of course it is) but I am honestly curious about the seeming lack of comments around here. Is there a ‘visits per day’ threshold that one has to cross in order to overcome some sort of comment inertia? Has there been any research on this?

Oh, and hat tip to Scott Weitzenhoffer for the cartoon.

A lizardy day

Posted on April 23, 2012 by Troy Britain

The weather was nice today (Sunday 4-22-12); sunny but not too hot, so I spent a couple hours over at my parents’ house today wandering around the yard looking for critters like I used to do when I was kid. Only this time I was armed with a camera instead of a jar or coffee can, intending to capture images rather than bodies. My target was the host of lizards that have taken up residence in my parents’ yard; specifically Western fence lizards (Sceloporus occidentalis).

When I was a kid used to find all sorts of invertebrates, miscellaneous insects (of course), solifugids (“sun” or “wind scorpions”) and one time I even found a tarantula (probably a Aphonopelma; I damn near stepped on it while running through the back yard).

As for vertebrates I often found Slender salamanders (Batrachoseps) and the feisty Southern alligator lizard (Elgaria) but never any fence lizards. To find them I had to hike three quarters of a mile or so to an undeveloped area dominated by a rocky hill (a modest pluton locally known to us a “Lionshead”) where they were fairly abundant amongst boulders of decomposing granite.

This is not the case anymore.

I had noticed on previous visits that the fence lizards were around my parents’ yard but today I realized that the place was absolutely crawling with them. I have no idea what has changed in the environment that has led to an expansion of their range, from the hills and undeveloped areas to the middle of the suburbs, but personally I’m glad of it.

At first they played a little hard to get. It was already afternoon and while it wasn’t really hot it was warm so their metabolizes were no doubt running at nearly at mammalian levels. So they would dash for cover before I got too close.

This little one was hiding behind some old window screens at the back of the garage. It had a larger companion who was missing part of its tail, however I couldn’t get a picture of it. Read on»

Holy crap, I’ve been demotivated!

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Troy Britain

That is I’ve been incorporated into a demotivational poster! It seems someone (picardo85?) over in the atheist section of reddit snagged my picture from the title explanation page of this blog along with an unattributed version of Scott Weitzenhoffer’s pigeonchess quote and combined them into a demotivational against Christians:

I have mixed feelings about this. While I have opinions about religion I tend to stay out of that debate and focus on issues involving science and attacks on science (creationism/antievolutionism), so having my image used (without my permission btw), as part of an attack Christians as a whole is a bit disconcerting.

On the other hand, having my image become part of a larger internet meme is somewhat amusing. Another funny thing came in the comment thread for the image on reddit:

If the pigeon represents the christians, why’s it playing chess with Jesus?

To which someone else responded:

It looks like Alan Moore to me…

Ha! Inserted into an internet meme, thought to look like the Messiah and/or the author of Watchmen and V for Vendetta all in one thread? Nice!

Seriously though, do I really look that much like Moore?

[I swear I already had this picture on my hard drive before I saw the one of Moore above.]

Doing my part for the war on Christmas…

Posted on December 5, 2011 by Troy Britain

…By putting up Christmas lights on the house while wearing my ‘Blasphemy is a blast for me‘ t-shirt:

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

[More shirts can be found at Evo-T’s.]

Halloween 2011 (retrospective)

Posted on December 5, 2011 by Troy Britain

Behind as usual, my Halloween review.

As with pretty much everything else in life lately I was feeling rather unmotivated about Halloween this year, especially, my thinking went, given the fact that Halloween fell on a Monday. I figured there wouldn’t by much trick-or-treat traffic in our already low traffic area, so I was not really planning to do much in the way of decorating.

However my motivation was restored by a trip to the annual LA Live Steamers Halloween Ghost Train in Griffith Park (Los Angeles). One of our tenants, ‘Pineapple’, works for the railroad and volunteers for various railroad activities and charities and knowing my fondness for all things Halloween he invited me to be amongst the friends and family of that get to ride the first couple of Ghost Trains for the evening (the Saturday before Halloween).

On my way down to Griffith Park I wanted to make a stop at a favorite used book store in Pasadena, Archives Books (a theological bookstore with a ‘healthy’ selection of creationist books) but I got a bit lost on some side streets and ended up getting a rare glimpse of the Ghostbusters mobile (I’m sure Halloween is a busy time of year for them):

Read on »