Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

At first, I read the news from National Geographic about pilot whales with excitement. The article described a new scientific study as finding that pilot whales are the “cheetahs of the sea”, reaching surprising speeds in their deep water dives.

That surprising speed? 28.8 feet per second. That sounds fast, until I did the conversion into miles per hour: 19.6 miles per hour. Cheetahs are purported to go about 70 miles per hour. The pilot whale isn’t even close.

Yes, I know that water is much thicker than air. However, pilot whales could use advantages of underwater locomotion, such as buoyancy, that would more than compensate for that.

The underwater crustacean the mantis shrimp gets much closer to the cheetah, moving its smashing claw at a literally striking 51.1 miles per hour.

Think that doesn’t count, just because it’s the claw moving, and not the whole animal? Well then, I suggest you go out on a fishing vessel and pick up the first mantis shrimp they haul in with their nets. Go ahead and try to hold it in your hands, and then see what you think of its speed.

Hidden in the murky estuaries of the River Thames, the central corridor of power in the British Empire, a secret has been kept for years – a secret that now has been revealed: Seahorses.

New Scientist tells us: “About five short-snouted seahorses (Hippocampus hippocampus) have been spotted during routine conservation surveys over the last year or so, leading scientists to think they have probably established a resident population. The news has been kept secret until now.”

Why were the seahorses kept a secret, and why are we hearing about this now?

People like to think of seahorses as a friendly sort of creature, what with its slow swimming habits, its big round tummy, and its gently grasping tail. Friendly? Have you ever talked to a seahorse? No. Seahorses don’t talk to people. You know why? They don’t know English.

There has never been a seahorse that has lived in an English-speaking country that has bothered to learn to speak English. Does that remind you of anyone? It should: Illegal immigrants.

So, now we learn that these seahorses (unnaturally mixing land animals and ocean animals) have “established a resident population”. Residents, but not citizens. It kind of reminds me of George W. Bush’s idea of “guest workers” – except the stinking little seahorses aren’t doing any work. They’re just swimming around slowly in the River Thames, not contributing to society, but having babies (that the fathers are expected to take care of while the mother goes out and has a good time) and then expecting the government to take care of it all.

“Conserve my habitat!” they would say, if they could speak English. Well, what have the seahorses done to conserve their own habitat?

They think that they can come in and just set up their little river camps, driving down property values, without going through Customs? Where is their respect for the law?

Of course, some people would say that the seahorses don’t know about the law. Well, ignorance of the law is no excuse.

I think it’s worse than that. Just consider what Al Quaida could do with a group like this. They don’t have anything to do but seethe with resentment against the success of the English people. They’ve managed to learn how to cross borders without being protected, and they’ve been kept secret by the government.

These malcontents on the River Thames look like a classic terrorist sleeper cell to me, and given the government’s involvement, it looks like an inside job to me.

But now the secrecy has been lifted. Do you know why? Parliament has just passed a law that gives special protections to the seahorses, so that they can go about with their little nefarious schemes without bothering to hide anymore. They’ve been made untouchable.

Why is that law coming into effect now, in 2008? Is this some kind of October surprise, in April, designed to tip the American presidential election toward a certain candidate? The coincidence in timing is difficult to ignore.

I am so sick and tired of hearing people say that the sky is falling, and talk about global warming as if it is actually taking place. Why do they keep suppressing the truth? Why won’t they let the public hear about the real scientific measurements that are taking place?

There is an alternative hypothesis that the liberal media never talks about: The Solar Hypothesis. The Solar Hypothesis acknowledges that there was a period of warming, but observes that temperatures in many places on Earth are now actually cooling! It’s true! It’s happening right now, and if you don’t believe me, then I challenge you to start observing temperatures yourself instead of just accepting what Al Gore is telling you.

The Solar Hypothesis holds that there are cycles of warming and cooling of the Earth’s atmosphere, but that these cycles of warming and cooling happen because of differences in the intensity of energy from the Sun as it hits the Earth, not because of human pollution.

The truth that Al Gore doesn’t want you to know is that temperatures all across the United States have been getting cooler for a long time now – for months, since late August last year.

Will there be a warming trend after this cooling trend is done? Sure. That’s only natural. In fact, scientists who adhere to the Solar Hypothesis predict that there will be a short warming trend starting sometime soon and extending to the end of July, all across the Northern Hemisphere.

But, right now, there is a cooling trend, not global warming! This cooling trend is part of a cycle, which real scientists understand. It gets warmer, and colder, and warmer again. Nothing to worry about.

This morning, for example, there was a region-wide warming trend, and maybe that’s what the global warming econuts are all worried about. But, there is a current cooling trend. The Solar Hypothesis predicts this, noting that the effect of the sun is getting weaker right now, and is weakening all the time. At 6:05, as I write this, the temperature is about 45 degrees, but by the end of the night, it could well be below freezing!

Take that, Al Gore. How is that global warming? The temperature is getting colder, you envirofascist!

Never mind what the scientific establishment says about this study and that study. You know, you can get research to say anything you want to. You can trust me because I’m asking you to think logically, and I trust your intelligence, unlike those pointy headed university welfare cases.

Just look around you and think. While you slept last night, dreaming the Green dreams that the Earth Firsters put into your head, the USA was getting colder, not warmer! Well, how could it be getting cooler if there is global warming?

You know the answer. It can’t! Global warming is a hoax.

For the benefit of readers who don’t know me: Wink!

I have to admit that I’m a bit confused about all the news articles talking about a “new” discovery about the eyes of mantis shrimp (stomatopods). The articles talk excitedly about the discovery that the eyes and brain of the mantis shrimp can perceive shifts in polarized light in meaningful ways.

I hate to put a damper on mantis shrimp research, but wasn’t this already known. Back in October, I wrote here, “The stomatopod’s cornea is bisected by a few rows of special sensors that detect color and polarized light.” That mantis shrimp use

Well, maybe this offers something new: “The researchers describe the anatomical basis for stomatopods’ remarkable vision in detail and show that these structures are stimulated when circular polarized light shines into them. They also offer behavioral proof of the stomatopods’ ability by training them to associate either left-handed or right-handed circular polarized light (L-CPL or R-CPL) with a food reward.”

Maybe the precise understanding of the anatomical structure in stomatopod eyes is new. Maybe. However, it was my impression that these things had also already been researched. I’d love to hear from some stomatopod experts out there to set me straight.

Thanks to The Great Beyond for debunking a conspiracy theory that’s been making the rounds on the Internet lately. Some people have been saying that a new particle accelerator will create an exotic subatomic particle that will spawn a black hole that will swallow the Earth, or maybe even unravel the fabric of the entire universe.

That’s crazy, of course. After all, there are things in the universe that can accelerate particles at much greater speeds, and in much greater mass, than any puny human machine.

There are more important things to worry about, like the tuatara.

You probably don’t know what a tuatara is, do you? There’s a reason for that. Government officials have decided that it would be unwise to give appropriate publicity to the tuatara problem. They don’t want to see riots and the hoarding of goods.

Another article over at Nature explains the crisis, however, for those who care to know.

The tuatara, once belittled as a kind of primitive lizard, is actually outcompeting humanity, and will soon take over the planet.

“New Zealand scientists who analysed DNA harvested from fossils up to 8,750 years old now report that tuatara seem to do one thing remarkably fast: evolution. In a paper published this month in Trends in Genetics, the researchers show that the rate of molecular evolution in the reptile is among the fastest yet observed for any vertebrate.”

So, first we understand that tuataras are evolving at a greater rate than any other animal with a backbone.

Second, consider global climate change. It’s become plain that humans are adapting too slowly to climate change. Specifically, humanity cannot adapt its technology quickly enough to prevent disastrous consequences.

If human beings cannot provide the adaptation to deal with global climate change, who can? Apparently, the tuataras. They evolve faster than any other vertebrate, after all, and evolution is all about adaptation.

It will be the tuataras who develop clean energy technology, not humans.

Just think of what the tuataras will be able to do with their advanced technology. They’ll be able to do things that we humans never could do.

And just what have humans been unable to do with their technology? Let’s return to the subject we started with: The failure of human engineers to design a particle accelerator with sufficient power to trigger the creation of a black hole.

We’ve already established that tuataras have the power to develop technology that is beyond anything that humans can imagine… and just what kind of technology have humans imagined? Particle accelerators that can trigger black holes, or even the unraveling of the fabric of the cosmos, that’s what. That’s exactly what the tuataras are working on, and they’re the species to get it done.

Government officials may be unwilling to speak about this threat, but I will issue this warning: If you see a tuatara at your local hardware store, call the police.

This has nothing to do with the mantis shrimp directly, but it does have to do with life in the sea, and so I thought I’d drop a little plug for it. A little plug… hmm. I’ll hold onto that for a second.

I was going to call this a little squid, and it does belong to the Decapodiformes, the group that includes squid and cuttlefish. However, this animal is not exactly a squid, and it isn’t a cuttlefish either. It’s a round squiggly dot known by the scientific name Stoloteuthis leucoptera. If we had to give its group of cephalopods a name, we might call them, scientifically, the sepiolids.

Scientific names lack something when it comes to the imagination, however. We don’t all spend time in wood-paneled lounges at the headquarters of the British Geographical Society.

So, I’d like to hear people’s ideas for a common name for this little animal. Personally, I’d like to see the genus it belongs to given the common name of “little plugs”. This one in particular might be called the stumpy plug.

You can find out more about this animal at the tree of life.

A spaceship sent from Earth to explore the planet Mercury has discovered a giant spider living there. The creature is 40 kilometers wide.

Scientists writing for the magazine New Scientist (what happened to the old scientist, I’d like to know) admit that they categorize the meeting of the spaceship and the spider was a “close encounter”. Yet, trying to be coy, so as not to provoke panic among Earthlings, the scientists merely called the spider a “strange spider-shaped feature”.

Well, let’s think now. What is most shaped like a spider? Answer: A spider! Clearly, the most obvious explanation for this “spider-shaped feature” is that it’s a spider.

Besides, the name of the Earth spaceship that was sent to Mercury was Messenger. Any fool can understand that one does not send a messenger to a place where it is believed that there is no one to hear a message. Scientists, it seems, have known about the giant spider living on Mercury for some time, and they have reason to believe that the Mercury spider is intelligent enough to understand out language.

What else can this giant spider do? Travel through outer space, perhaps?

The bad news: There is not believed to be very much for spiders to eat on the planet Mercury. That goes double for a giant spider.

Earth, on the other hand, is filled with food – enough to feed even a giant 40-kilometer spider for years.

We can expect that giant spider from Mercury to visit the Earth soon, and we should expect it to be very hungry.

Prepare your underground shelter now.

In the summer of the North, Greenland lost record amounts of ice last year, and the Arctic Ocean’s summer ice cap was reduced to a small size never seen before. Now it’s the summer of the South, and the same activity is being seen in Antarctica, which is losing its ice at a rate almost as fast as Greenland. The rate of ice loss, according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has increased by 75 percent over the last ten years because glaciers are speeding up in their flow to the Antarctic seas. That happens when water from the melting ice lubricates the bottom of the glacier, easing its flow over the ground beneath.

The team’s results do not include data from 2007, the second-warmest year on record. Eric Rignot, who led the study, comments, “Ice sheets are responding faster to climate warming than anticipated.”

Tonight I was researching various topics on paganism and ancient revivalism when I came across a Wikipedia article about a group of pagans in Greece who were trying to gain equal rights in the eyes of the Greek government. It seems that prior to 2006, all religions except Christianity, Judaism and Islam had been banned. An Athenian court seems to have overruled that.

The story regarding this can be found here (I may post a separate diary entry about this later).

When I read about their desire to be allowed to worship in the Parthenon, I looked it up on Wikipedia for clarification. The article listed pollution hazards and I found myself curious enough to read on. It seems that acid rain from the growth of Athens and the exhaust from cars has caused irreparable damage to the sculptures in the Parthenon.

Pollution is a bad thing, not only for the harm it does to ourselves and our environment but for the harm it does to our history. When historical landmarks and wonders of the ancient world are threatened by our pollution, isn’t it time to do something?

I see this and then I see conservatives calling for less restraints put on pollution control and I find it hard to believe that they could be so caviler and arrogant not to see the harm that is already happening. Is there nothing at all more important than grabbing for that extra dollar?

Stomatopods are often described as vicious creatures – for doing the same sort of things that human beings do, smashing and stabbing. Is there a tender side to the mantis shrimp, as well?

Yes, as a matter of fact, mantis shrimp do have a tender spot, under their invertebrate exoskeletons. There are some species of mantis shrimps that practice monogamy.

That’s no small feat for a mantis shrimp, because they tend to be very territorial animals, even in dealing with members of the opposite sex in their own species. Researchers have found that stomatopods need to find a way to selectively turn off their territoriality in order to pursue a more stable strategy for the continuation of the species. Is there a lesson for humans, that family values are strongest when the instinct to establish security over territory is overcome? I’ll leave the final decision to the political scientists, but there is some benefit to consider, I’m tempted to say, in the role of peaceful coexistence for the survival of the species.

Lest we take the anthropomorphic path too far, and declare mantis shrimps to be models of monogamous family values in a progressive sense of open territoriality, it’s important to remember that there are more species of mantis shrimps that are non-monogamous than that are monogamous. Most stomatopods love them and leave them, the better not to get bashed the morning after.