Recently I have suffered from a serious case of Real Life and thus had little brain-power to spare for the blogosphere. Autumn means the garden (of my parents) needs attention, and I have also begun preparing for a course in systematic zoology* that will start in November. Given that I have a tendency to suffer from seasonal affective disorder during the darker months I have resolved to do as much studying before the course even starts as I possibly can.

I’m not abandoning the blog and have some topics lined up for it; a review of God is Not Great among other things. There, I said it, so now it has to happen!

Other fun stuff that has been happening lately is the ongoing preparations for the official founding of the Swedish Humanist Youth Organisation, as I assume it will be called internationally. I am no longer a central component of this project but I do constitute a link between the youth organisation and the “mothership” (I’m a board member of the Swedish Humanist Association). The humanist movement is growing in Sweden and involving the younger generation (that is, my own) in this project seems like a natural step on the way to truly becoming a force to be reckoned with in society.

* Magnus of My Cup of Tea pointed out the rather tautological nature of this name. Isn’t science normally supposed to be systematic? In Swedish, the course is called “Zoologisk systematik” (zoological systematics, or systematics of zoology), which obviously is rather clearer. On a similar note, I once took a course called Organism biology…

autumn, humanism, swedish humanist association, humanisterna

A blogging and scientific experiment.

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is …”.

Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

*You can leave them exactly as is.

*You can delete any one question.

*You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…:, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.

*You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.

*You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the “parent” blog you got them from, e.g. Life before death, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

The best epic novel in SF/Fantasy is:
Robin Hobb’s trilogies.

The best romantic movie in drama is:
Sliding Doors (1998).

The best sexy song in alternative pop is:
Cocoon by Björk.

The best cult novel in fantasy is:
Small Gods by Pratchett.

My great grandparent is Pharyngula.
My grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My parent is The Flying Trilobite

I call upon the following to continue this scientific experiment:

Aardvarchaeology

Bob - Popper’s Troll-Man Thing

Anders Rasmussen

Friendly Atheist

Halfway There

Deep Thoughts

Anyone else who wants to play out this science experiment, please do, and let me know!

meme, pharyngula mutating genre meme

Today is International Cephalopod Awareness Day. So I’m making sure everyone’s aware that octopuses are supposed to have suckers. Please pay no heed to the image on the right (the full version of which you may see if you click on it). Also, any resemblance to any hypothetical deities is obviously absolutely incidental. ETA: The octopus is loosely based on Wunderpus and Mimic octopus. Loosely!

While creating this image I’ve been thinking of what kind of role cephalopods play in my life. The answer is, unfortunately, not a big one. Sweden doesn’t really have a lot of them. However, they do sometimes turn up in discussions with people who believe God created Man as the crown of all creation.

Why? Because their retina is the right way around, as compared to the vertebrate eye. When light travels into a human eye, it has to pass through a layer of blood vessels and nerve cells before it finally reaches the photosensitive cells. While this doesn’t degrade the image received all that much, some light scattering does happen. Also, as a result of the nerves being in front of the photoreceptors, they have to at one point plunge through the retina to create the optic nerve to the brain. This creates the oh-so-famous blind spot.

The cephalopod eye, which develops differently but is remarkably similar to its vertebrate counterpart, has the photosensitive cells pointing towards the light instead of away from it. No blind spot, that is. A much more logically constructed eye - the way a designer would have made it.

So, my question to believers is obviously: Does your god like octopuses more than men? Maybe they were supposed to rule the earth…

cephalopods, octopus, nautilus, eye, evolution

This year’s Ig Nobel Prizes have been handed out, to the usual fun and weird selection of research. Read about it on MSNBC.

I especially like the idea of a “Spanish scientists who found that rats sometimes could not distinguish between Japanese spoken backwards and Dutch spoken backwards.” That’s almost up there with having locusts watch Star Wars.

For more fun reading, check out Wikipedia’s list of Ig Nobel Prize winners.

ig nobel prize, mad science

The hallmark of a die-hard atheist might be to find the arguments for Google being a god much more convincing than arguments for other, supernatural gods.

I keep wondering though at the people who feel the need to send hate mail. The FSM receives similar reactions. Why is it that some people find joke religions so threatening?

(Hat tip to Friendly Atheist.)

google, the church of google, religion, fsm

Lars Vilks has received the dubious honour of being caricatured by an Egyptian artist (hat tip to Allotetraploid). He has, as was to be expected, responded by praising the drawings and asking for more. The artist in question, one Ashraf Hamdi, seems to get increasingly frustrated with Vilks’ refusal to act insulted. In a response to a comment, Hamdi says:

just wanna Mr. lars to know that we have cartoonist able to draw too using the same terms. wanna him to feel HIS TERMS about FREEDOM of EXPRESSION .

Umm… ok? Vilks, like the rest of us up here in this godforsaken country, has grown up with freedom of expression. He knows what it means. It’s not going to offend him.

If you think there are things in this world that absolutely may not be insulted in any way, you’re not going to last long in the modern world. That’s the whole problem with many people’s religious views: They assume some things are holy, and they expect the rest of the world to care. Which obviously isn’t going to happen.

What’s worse, there appears to be a fair number of secularists who actually think we should entertain these ideas and refrain from wounding people’s feelings. Instead we should strike up a dialogue, show respect and tolerance. Sure, those are (arguably) nice sentiments. The problem is that the kind of people who honestly think that drawing caricatures (or indeed any pictures) of Mohammed should be forbidden won’t ever listen to your carefully phrased, non-offensive dialogue. They have made up their minds about what’s holy.

The people who are open to dialogue are not the ones who protest against blasphemy.

lars vilks, mohammad caricature, islam, freedom of expression, freedom of speech