Get Cynical

Eel Feather writes:

Now, I hope this won’t turn into a cat vs. dog thing,
because damnit, as much as I love dogs (and basically
feel fairly impartial towards cats), that’d just be
too much of a contrary reaction, you know?

This is Gus (Augusta). She’s a Jack Russell Terrorist.
She’s a raving mad, mean, lean killing machine. I like
this picture especially, because it sorta symbolizes
what dogs are like — you know, not cool. Cats are
cool. Dogs are dorks. You can’t take pictures of
dorks, because they run around like idiots all the
time.

Hunter was kind enough to send in a picture of his cat Keiko. Thanks Hunter!

Or better known as Xian Fantasyland:

PETERSBURG, Ky. — The entrance gates here are topped with metallic Stegosauruses. The grounds include a giant tyrannosaur standing amid the trees, and a stone-lined lobby sports varied sauropods. It could be like any other natural history museum, luring families with the promise of immense fossils and dinosaur adventures.

But step a little farther into the entrance hall, and you come upon a pastoral scene undreamt of by any natural history museum. Two prehistoric children play near a burbling waterfall, thoroughly at home in the natural world. Dinosaurs cavort nearby, their animatronic mechanisms turning them into alluring companions, their gaping mouths seeming not threatening, but almost welcoming, as an Apatosaurus munches on leaves a few yards away.

What is this, then? A reproduction of a childhood fantasy in which dinosaurs are friends of inquisitive youngsters? The kind of fantasy that doesn’t care that human beings and these prefossilized thunder-lizards are usually thought to have been separated by millions of years? No, this really is meant to be more like one of those literal dioramas of the traditional natural history museum, an imagining of a real habitat, with plant life and landscape reproduced in meticulous detail.

For here at the $27 million Creation Museum, which opens on May 28 (just a short drive from the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport), this pastoral scene is a glimpse of the world just after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, in which dinosaurs are still apparently as herbivorous as humans, and all are enjoying a little calm in the days after the fall.

It also serves as a vivid introduction to the sheer weirdness and daring of this museum created by the Answers in Genesis ministry that combines displays of extraordinary nautilus shell fossils and biblical tableaus, celebrations of natural wonders and allusions to human sin. Evolution gets its continual comeuppance, while biblical revelations are treated as gospel.

Outside the museum scientists may assert that the universe is billions of years old, that fossils are the remains of animals living hundreds of millions of years ago, and that life’s diversity is the result of evolution by natural selection. But inside the museum the Earth is barely 6,000 years old, dinosaurs were created on the sixth day, and Jesus is the savior who will one day repair the trauma of man’s fall.

A fan made trailer for Lost if it was made into a movie. BTW, I gave up on Lost earlier this season. I’ve heard that it improved during the second half of season three but I’m still skeptical.

Natural selection in antibiotic resistant bacteria.

As the cost of sequencing goes down, a lot of once-crazy experiments become feasible. There’s a good case in point this week in the preprint section of PNAS. A team of researchers looked at a single patient undergoing treatment with vancomycin for a serious infection. (Just saying “vancomycin” makes the “serious infection” part redundant, since it’s often the last resort). They periodically isolated Staphylococcus aureus bacteria from the patient’s blood during the course of the treatment to look at how resistance to the antibiotic developed.

Fine, fine – except the way they watched the process was to sequence the whole genome of each bacterial isolate. What they found were a total of 35 mutations, which developed sequentially as the treatment continued (and the levels of resistance rose). Here’s natural selection, operating in real time, under the strongest magnifying glass available. And it’s in the service of a potentially serious problem, since resistant bacteria are no joke. (Reading between the lines of the PNAS abstract, for example, it appears that the patient involved in this study may well not have survived).

(via Reddit)

From Wikipedia:

Claudette Colvin (born September 5, 1939) is a African American woman from Alabama. In 1955, at the age of 15, she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white person, in violation of local law. Her arrest preceded civil rights activist Rosa Parks’ (on December 1, 1955) by nine months.

At the time, Colvin was a student at Booker T. Washington High School. Colvin’s family didn’t own a car, so she relied on the city’s gold-and-green buses to get to school. On March 2, 1955, she boarded a public bus and, shortly thereafter, refused to give up her seat to a white man. Colvin was coming home from school that day when she got on a Capital Heights bus downtown at the same place Parks boarded another bus months later. Colvin was sitting about two seats from the emergency exit when four whites boarded and the driver ordered her, along with three other black passengers, to get up. She refused and was removed from the bus by two police officers, who took her to jail.

“The bus was getting crowded and I remember him (the bus driver) looking through the rear view mirror asking her to get up out of her seat, which she didn’t,” said a classmate at the time, Annie Larkins Price. “She didn’t say anything. She just continued looking out the window. She decided on that day that she wasn’t going to move.”

Price testified on Colvin’s behalf in the juvenile court case, where Colvin was convicted of violating the segregation law and assault. “There was no assault,” Price said.

Colvin had been handcuffed, arrested and forcibly removed from the bus. She screamed that her constitutional rights were being violated. At the time, Colvin was active in the NAACP’s Youth Council, and she was actually being advised by Rosa Parks.

From Computerworld.com:

Those in search of eternal life need look no further than the computer industry. Here, last gasps are rarely taken, as aging systems crank away in back rooms across the U.S., not unlike 1970s reruns on Nickelodeon’s TV Land. So while it may not be exactly easy for Novell NetWare engineers and OS/2 administrators to find employers who require their services, it’s very difficult to declare these skills — or any computer skill, really — dead.

In fact, the harder you try to declare a technology dead, it seems, the more you turn up evidence of its continuing existence. Nevertheless, after speaking with several industry stalwarts, we’ve compiled a list of skills and technologies that, while not dead, can perhaps be said to be in the process of dying.

(via Bad Astronomy Blog)