When being below average is a sign of exceptional talent. Well worth a read, no baseball knowledge required.

HT: DF

There’s a new movie just starting to do the rounds called ‘Expelled’. It’s a stunning behind-the-scenes expose of how scientists are essentially nazis who think good Christian folk are intellectually no better than shaved monkeys. It’s possible I may have over-simplified a little there, but not by much. It features science luminaries such as Richard Dawkins talking about science and creationism. You may be surprised to learn that the interviewees on the ‘pro-science’ side were initially told it was going to be a balanced examination of the conflict between science and religion. If you were surprised then you may need to familiarize yourself some more with the tactics of the creationist movement.

Anyway, one of the people who tried to get into what appears to have been a private screening of the movie was PZ Myers, a biologist from Morris, MN who is a stern opponent of creationism. His rhetoric knows no bounds, but physically he is every inch the gentleman professor that cliche demands, and immeasurably unlikely to cause a ruckus in public. He wasn’t trying to sneak in, didn’t hide who he was in any way, and was peaceable at all times.

Nonetheless he was removed from the line at the movie theater when waiting to get into the movie, at the request of the producer and, subsequently, the theater manager. I object to banning people in this way because of ideological objections, but it was a private screening so they were entirely within their rights so to do (they got a policeman involved, however, which seems plain wrong). Myers left peaceably, stopping only to tell his family where he would be.

Now for the ironies. The first is that Myers is actually in the movie, and is even thanked at the end for his contribution. That alone would be rich enough, but it pales in comparison to the fact that the rest of Myers’ party was allowed in. Along with his wife and daughter were Richard Dawkins and the entire staff of the Richard Dawkins Foundation. They were not, it appears, too impressed with the film.

Via Neatorama, here’s a summary of the five scariest bugs in the world. I can’t encourage you to watch the videos, because I couldn’t get to the end of any of them:

It’s the size of your thumb and it can spray flesh-melting poison. We really wish we were making that up for, you know, dramatic effect because goddamn, what a terrible thing a three-inch acid-shooting hornet would be, you know? Oh, hey, did we mention it shoots it into your eyes? Or that the poison also has a pheromone cocktail in it that’ll call every hornet in the hive to come over and sting you until you are no longer alive?

Joe Kittinger holds the record for the highest parachute jump*. In 1960 he ascended to 103,800 feet under a balloon before jumping, in the process also setting the record for highest balloon ascent.

I was watching a documentary that mentioned this, and highlighted a factoid that hadn’t occurred to me before. Kittinger was so high up that approximately 99% of the Earth’s atmosphere was below him, and for the first part of his trip what he was falling through wasn’t a great deal thicker than space. On the ground it’s esy to cycle at a speed that sends the wind rushing past your ears, but for the first part of his jump it was basically silent, because there was hardly any wind to rush. I would say that it must have been quite unnerving, except that with the whole plummeting towards the earth at 600 miles per hour with a malfunctioning glove thing going on the lack of noise might not have been a major factor.

(*I’ve heard claims that other military parachutists have since gone higher, but have seen no evidence).

I’ve seen a couple of documentaries recently that mention Ocean Sunfish, seriously huge fish prone to parasitic infection. They deal with this by going to special cleaning stations where smaller fish pick the parasites off. So ordered is this behaviour that the sunfish line up and wait their turn for a cleaning. As impressive as that is, I’ve just learned that if they have a particularly irksome parasite they’ll swim to the surface and find a seagull that can use its beak to dig out the problem. I just love evolution.