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?

I started early with this paleo stuff

Posted on June 25, 2012 by Troy Britain

I finally had a chance this weekend to pick through some of my mother’s family photo collection and found a few pictures of myself that are prophetic about what my lifelong interests would be. They are from one of the family camping trips we took, traveling all over the American Southwest. During this trip, circa 1975, we went to Dinosaur National Monument in Utah/Colorado.

First is a picture of me (10 years old) with the famous Stegosaurus statue that greets visitors outside the Quarry Exhibit Hall. You can tell by the look on my face that I was having a terrible time.

Now admittedly the color they had originally painted this statue (a brownish green scheme) was a little dull, though we have no way of knowing what color Stegosaurus actually was. But the current paint job on the statue seems a little bizarre to me.

And here we have a shot of me inside the Quarry Exhibit Hall, being much more serious in the presence of the astonishing number of dinosaur fossils exposed in the Carnegie Dinosaur Quarry.

Ah, memories…

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

My Weekend at the O.C. Freethought Alliance Conference

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Troy Britain

The Orange County Freethought Alliance Conference (3rd Annual) is “in the can” and I had a blast. I went as part of a contingent from my local Atheist, Agnostic & Skeptics Meetup group, which had purchased a table at the event. The table was right up front next to the speakers table, all the people in our group were great and there were lots of interesting talks presented! I got to meet lots of new people and say hi to familiar friends and colleagues.

Here are a few of the new people:

Dave Silverman, president of the American Atheists who was famously challenged by Bill O’Reilly to explain how every day the tides go in and go out with “never a miscommunication”.

Aron Ra, a very popular YouTube anti-creationist and veteran of the talk.origins newsgroup. I had three people think I was him, before he arrived, though I’m not sure why. Considering how many things we share in common, it is somewhat surprising it took this long for us to run into each other.

And last but actually First the Lord Himself…

Mr. Deity, AKA “El“, AKA the very funny Brian Keith Dalton. If you don’t know who Mr. Deity is, go right now to his YouTube channel and start with episode one. See also the official Mr. Deity website.

The end of the conference came late Sunday afternoon just as a partial solar eclipse started and the organizers had two telescopes set up with special filters to allow us to safely view it. One of the scopes just showed the sun as a white disk with the moon cutting into it but the other actually allowed you to just make out the filaments of the many loops, flares and prominences in the corona of the sun. I have seen many pictures and films of these phenomena before but this was the first time I actually saw them with my own eyes. Incredible.

A NASA photograph showing solar prominences etc.

Once again I have a really great time and all the people I talked to, especially those at our table were a lot of fun. Thanks to Aaron for organizing our contingent and to the other members of our group for being such good company! My only regret is I got a bit distracted and got out of there kind of quickly at the end and didn’t get a chance to say a proper goodbye to them or to my friend and colleague Barbara Forrest (who was one of the speakers). Hopefully I’ll get to see them all again soon.

If you’re interested you can watch a streaming video or buy a DVD of the event from the O. C. Freethought Alliance (look for the guy in a black t-shirt with the long hair near the front) and if you live in the area consider attending the 4th Annual O. C. Freethought Alliance Conference in 2013. You just might see me there in person.

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»

Camouflage

Posted on March 11, 2012 by Troy Britain

I was looking through some “old” pictures I had taken and ran across this excellent example of crypsis:

Can you see me?

Photo taken in Joshua Tree National Park (California), six years ago tomorrow (3-12-2006).

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: