Easy day, Let's make fun of Creationists!

Should Evolutionists be allowed to vote?

"The facts warrent the violent expulsion of
all evolutionists from civilized society. I am quite serious that
their danger to society is so great that, in a sane society, they
would be, at a minimum, denied a vote in the administration of
the society, as well as any job where they might influence immature
humans, e.g., scout, or youth, leader, teacher and, obviously,
professor."

Donald in Mathmagic Land

Part 1:


Part 2:


Part 3:


Special thanks to Felicia Chávez for the suggestion.

Ernst Haeckel: Art Forms in Nature

Last week, I took a trip down to San Francisco to visit my brother. While there we tried to see the major sights of the area, and this included a trip to the Monte Ray Aquarium. It was fun, and there were lots of neat animals, but in the gift shop I picked up a book by Ernst Haeckel, called "Art Forms in Nature". I had heard of the scientist before, he is frequently used in those poorly made creationist arguments, so I was intrigued to see his work.

I thought it was beautiful and amazing. Not only is it a great scientific cataloging of marine life, but the pictures are wonderful works of art in their own right. He manages to combine organic details with an almost mathematical attention to symmetry and form. I found it fascinating, and have included some plates from the book for you to look at:

Circles

Zombie Crabs!

Today I would like to bring your attention to a pretty amazing, cool, and disgusting creature. I am talking about the fascinating Sacculina Carcini.

The female creature inserts itself into a host crab and grows throughout the body and parts of itself emerge underneath the crab(See picture on the right)

When a male Sacculina Carcini mates with it(through an opening the female creates in the hosts body) the host crabs body is filled with million of eggs. The crab itself is still alive, and in fact, somehow, it's behavior is altered, where it cares for the eggs as if they were it's own young!

Somehow this parasitic creature makes the host behave how it desires! Not only does it change it's behavior, but if the host crab is a male crab, it alters it's host physically to appear as a female crab, to help it care for it's own young.

Neat stuff, here are some links if you want to read up on it.

• Do Parasites Rule the World?
• Information from the University of Hong Kong
  

Superstitious Garbage

A Girl with no face.

My name is Ofelia Heras. Im 16 yearsold. Im a murderer. I have no face.When you look at me youll dieimmediately.You have 900 seconds torepost this or I will visit you tonight.

All misspellings and grammatical errors preserved.

I really dislike this stuff. I know it's stupid, and everyone knows it's stupid, but then why do I see it so often? Do people really rationally think it's dumb, but repost it, "Just in case"? Personally I have invited the retribution of the girl with no face(unless this post counts), Clowns with bloody knives, Old Women with sharp teeth, as well as countless curses to my love life. Nothing has ever come of it. I have recited bloody mary to the bathroom mirror, Broken mirrors, and personally invited the wrath of god. Oh, let's not forget, I point out rainbows every time I see them.

So I would like to declare myself the tester of superstitions. If anyone wants to test a curse, have someone spend a night in a haunted house, or anything that they might be a little cautious about doing themselves, but is not something to be rationally worried about, I am happy to try! I would love to show nothing happens, and if it does happen, I would be happy just to find that out(no matter how horrible it was).

Would anyone like to buy a paper declaring my soul is sold to them for five bucks?

Giant Squid being dissected today.

The largest giant squid carcass ever found will be examined and dissected today! You can read about it at National Geographic and even watch it live via web cam here! Isn't the internet great!

As for myself, I cannot watch it live from work, but I might check it out later. I have the feeling I won't get much from it, perhaps I will read the summary after they have figured it all out.

Powers of Ten

Collision Detection Lessons

Excellent Book!

Yesterday I picked up the book: "Real Time Collision Detection", by Christopher Ericson at Borders. It is amazingly detailed. Pretty much every primitive collision algorithm is detailed. In addition it covers fun concepts like BSP trees, grids,hierarchical grids, closest point problems, and optimizations. Also of great help were the sections on discrete movement vs continuous movement in games.

It might be something of an overkill for Just Another Story, but it's nice to have a detailed reference for these things. Also I already found a few issues with how I was addressing the problem of general collision detection in that project. I am going to read through this book a few times, and come up with a design for the phyics component of the game.