Architeuthis peezeemyers

...has been discovered lurking somewhere in Lake Superior. It is the first species of squid known to reside in the Midwest.

Catch footage of it here, along with one of its three offspring:




Spore may not be strictly an evolution game, but it features it as a theme. Spore is about the biological pressures on a species. Check out the Creature Creator.

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On gay marriage

A comic that briefly summarizes my sentiments about the homophobic troglodytes who want to ban it.

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A short history of human civilization

Contains some gore and genitals. May not want to maximize this if at work.

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My friend Mr. Plush Neuron is happy

Because Obama has won the primary and he is way more electable than Hillary. He is very pro-science, mostly (except for his apparent non-opposition to the mercury militia).

This bodes well.

(As an aside, if anyone wants to get me a plush neuron from www.giantmicrobes.com, I will be quite happy about your gifting of such plush object)

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On sanity

My friend Chris has a great post on sanity. My take on his post is that sanity is an entirely subjective thing and that what is really needed is maturity, which a great many adults do not have.

Most of you who read this have probably gathered by now that I think about 99% of people are insane, and in this particular little post I'm going to talk about it.

Insanity, that is.

What seems to pass for insanity these days is a number of things: limited perspective, bias, mob mentality, and any number of other stupid things which make people idiots but are unfortunately part of humanity.

For example, the Scientologists - make no mistake, they are a cult, and I think Anonymous is the best thing that has ever happened to the poor people they abuse - have fooled a whole lot of people into joining them. Most low-level Scientologists, what the Scientologists would call 'non-OT' or 'OT-I' or 'OT-II', don't know anything about the organization and simply say what the organization tells them to say. They are labeled insane frequently, and indeed, they act kooky, but one has to consider the fact that they're under a very complex form of control and that their problem is one of ignorance and being belittled and hoodwinked by Midget Miscavige and his cabal.

By the way, folks, go to the sites www.enturbulation.org, www.xenu.net, www.whyaretheydead.net, and www.youfoundthecard.com - I absolutely implore you, educate yourselves about the abuse that these people perpetrate. They're worse than the fundies, in many respects, and I didn't even think that was possible until I learned about what THESE assholes do. This atheist blogger says 'Go Anonymous!'

Also, politicians tend to be full of it. Chris's post has a lot on this.

Evolutionarily, humans are social animals. Our brains, particularly our limbic systems, are wired for certain behaviors. Mob mentality arises from this, since it is evolutionarily advantageous for a group to act the same way in certain situations, and so is a child listening unconditionally to its parents, since more often than not, parents have their child's best interest in mind. Religion arose out of humanity's discomfort with the unknown; atheism is the provenance of we who are more comfortable with it and prefer accuracy. I do not know about whether there are neural correlates to being susceptible or not susceptible to herd behavior, but the differences are usually extremely pronounced.

I wonder if we could postulate about the 'evolvedness' of human brains - are the more logical brains more advanced on the evolutionary spectrum? Greta Christina made a post about atheist morality vs. theist morality that makes a good point - our morality is largely hard-wired by evolution.

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