I’ve been interested in the world of pseudo-science for a long time, ever since reading Chariots of the Gods as a young boy, and then realizing what a load of bullocks the whole thing was. What’s amazing to me is that by age twelve or so, I managed to figure it out, but that some people never outgrow this childish view of the world. It even continues on in the public discourse as such absurd notions as creationism and intelligent design.

So recently, I’ve added a few blogs to my bloglines subscription, and it is paying off nicely. Witness this terrific article about “Fossil-Fossils” found in De-Naz-In Wilderness in New Mexico. It’s a very informal but interesting view into the fossils that simply are weathering out in the Bisti Badlands, which include fossils which have in some sense been fossilized twice: creatures that have died are fossilized, then weather out millions of years later, only to be re-fossilized in a different strata layer. It’s kind of hard to keep a straight face while trying to believe that all fossils are the result of Noah’s flood six thousand years ago, but it’s doubly hard to do so when you see this fossils.

That is, if you understand what they are.

Or mean.

Which kind of leaves creationists out in the cold.

A great blog, really.

The Intelligent Designer’s Prayer, courtesy of the Panda’s Thumb.

Our Intelligent Designer,
Who art in the unspecified-good-place,
Unknown be Thy name.
Thy flagella spin, Thy mousetraps snap,
On Earth, as it is in the
Unspecified-good-place.
Give us each day our unchecked apologetic.
And forgive us our invidious comparisons,
As we smite those iniquitous Darwinists
With rhetoric.
And lead us not into encounters with people
Who ask us to state our theory,
But deliver us from biologists
Who know what we’re up to.
For Thine is the irreducible complexity,
And the wiggly parts of bacterial bottoms,
And the inapplicable theorems,
Now and forever.

Amen.

Also check out the comments for a similar prayer to the Noodly One.

New Scientist is running an article which suggests that stray stem cells from a growing fetus may colonize in the mother and repair damage to the mother’s brain.

This seems only fair, given the amount of brain damage that a child will inflict on his or her parents over their lifetime. 🙂

It is all very tentative research, but pretty interesting nonetheless.

My tagline for this blog is “there is much pleasure in useless knowledge”. What knowledge could be more useless than trying to understand why spaghetti breaks into more than two pieces when bent? Apparently this problem has been considered interesting by no greater physics luminary than Richard Feynman. Cool.

Discovery Channel Canada has a cool video about Wally Wallington, a gentlemen from Michigan whose hobby is trying to duplicate the construction efforts of the ancient Egyptians. He believes that the Pyramids at Giza could have been constructed with a much smaller crew than previously imagined. Check out the very cool video at the bottom of this page to see him raise a massive block and stand it on end by himself.

While sorting through some books that I had stacked on my floor, I found ::amazon(“0071373233”, “Homemade Lightning”):: on my shelf. Building a Wimhurst static machine would be a cool project. Searching around the web, I found this great page on Electrostatic Machines which has lots of cool information.

The brain is a bizarre little meat computer. As proof witness this current article from nature.com:

Quian Quiroga also found that a lone neuron in one subject responded selectively to various pictures of the actress Halle Berry – as well as drawings of her and her name written down. Other cells were found to respond to images of characters in The Simpsons or members of The Beatles.

I’ve long complained that my aging 40+ year old brain has a signficant portion of its volume dedicated to remembering quotes from The Simpsons, to the detriment of other topics of greater significance and/or utility. Perhaps the situation isn’t as dire as I would have thought.

Link courtesy of Craig.

NASA does churn out some fairly interesting snapshots from their Mars missions, and this is no exception. The Mars Orbiter Camera onboard the Mars Global Surveyor snapped a picture of the Mars Odyssey as it went zipping by in orbit. Because the camera acquires images line by line, it actually appears twice in a single frame. Each image is about 7.5 seconds and 31 miles apart.

As Tom says, very spooky.

Motion Induced Blindness

Run, Bat, Run!

The natural world still has many surprises left for us.