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Eric over at that brilliant invertablog, The Other 95%, is hosting the next edition of Linnaeus' Legacy. It is a blog carnival about taxonomy, biodiversity and systematics. The current edition is at A DC Birding Blog. You have 1 week to get in those submissions! Go here to submit.

Almost every grad student struggles with the difficulty of explaining your dissertation topic to strangers (not to mention friends and family) without launching into an hour long lecture on the topic. One enterprising geographer has come up with a unique solution to the problem: write a comic book.

Ju Hui Judy Han at UC Berkely participated in the 24 hour comic day in 2006. The challenge was to write 24 pages in 24 hours. She chose to write about her dissertation. The result can be downloaded here (PDF) or viewed online.

I love the idea of saying, the next time someone asks you about your dissertation: “Here, read my comic book.”

(via Konrad Lawson on Twitter)

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The pope has condemned this silly sculpture as blasphemous, and German Catholics are trying to get it removed from display.

They can't be serious, can they? It's kitschy and funny. But really, they're unhappy about this.

The Vatican wrote a letter of support in the pope's name to Franz Pahl, president of the regional government who opposed the sculpture.

"Surely this is not a work of art but a blashphemy and a disgusting piece of trash that upsets many people," Pahl told Reuters by telephone as the museum board was meeting.

The Vatican letter said that the work "wounds the religious sentiments of so many people who see in the cross the symbol of God's love".

Pahl, whose province is heavily Catholic, was so outraged by the sculpture of the pop-eyed amphibian that he went on a hunger strike to demand its removal and had to be taken to hospital during the summer.

So wait…now doing anything with two sticks stuck together at right angles is going to be an affront to "God's love"? I have been told over and over again by pompous wackaloons that I'm on the shock-jock trajectory, compelled to try and top my outrages against religion in an ever-upward spiral of offense, and that it's going to be really hard to top cracker abuse. However, it looks like you can piss off the pope just by playing around with a couple of popsicle sticks.

Thanks to the latest issue (no. 240) of Fortean Times I've just learnt of the remarkable case whereby an unlucky Canada goose Branta canadensis was, allegedly, hit by a meteoroid (Anon. 2008). The story goes that Derbyshire postman Adrian Mannion was 'having a morning cuppa with his wife Fiona' (I'm not quite sure what a cuppa is, but assume it's a sexual act of some sort) when a rock fell, from space, onto their driveway. It was followed by the goose, which hit the roof of their car. This story was reported in that most reliable of sources, The Sun newspaper, back in February (it's here). Their report includes photos, one of which shows Fiona holding a rock (it really doesn't look like a meteorite, not that I'm an expert), and another which purports to show the unfortunate goose [shown here]. The goose may not have been killed by the meteorite, but while lying in the driveway it was carried off and dispatched by a fox.

N. T. Wrong is back and telling us of The Lost Treasure of Ugarit, the first film of the Jack Hunter series. Run over to the Wrong site and learn more about the movie. He points out the rather strange string of letters seen near the end of the trailer. The "Ugaritic" morphs into "Jack Hunter." And I'm okay with the "Hunter" part. But I'm more than a little confused by the "Jack."

[If you see squares, rectangles or something else that doesn't look right, please install the Charis SIL font.]

Bishop Wrong originally read it ʿgṯ?ḫ? hʾunṭʾir and worried that two of the letters are "new to the Ugaritic alphabet after 3200 years." But now he reads it as I do, ʿgṯśġ hunṭʾir. Since the good Bishop adopted my suggest, made in a comment to his post, this post is quite irrelevant. But, I'll post it anyway, because I don't have anything else for today and I put a lot of work into it. It did give me an occasion to look at a rather strange and largely incompetent rendering of the Ugaritic alphabet.

I still don't know jack about "Jack." The bottom edge of KTU 5.4 has a sign like . KTU 5.4 is an abecedary and the last letter is in the canonical Ugarit alphabet is ś. Here is Virolleaud's, 199, drawing of the tablet.

I couldn't find a picture that was much help. The sign in question is on the bottom edge and is seen below the surface of the tablet in the drawing. I suppose they thought that no one but someone with truly abnormal interests would be interested. Like the sign in the trailer, our student scribe wrote the sign with four vertical wedges one on top of the other. But this is likely some kind of error. He or she made four wedges where we would normally expect three several other times on this tablet. Despite the fact that the student scribe wrote this letter on the bottom edge of the tablet, there can be little doubt that he intended a ś. For the record, the ś is normally written and one can see the general family resemblance. In some ways, our scribe made the letter look somewhat more like the Akkadian ZU sign than the normal ś. But then, the alphabetic letter may not have come from the Akkadian ZU sign at all.

As to the letter than I read ġ, this seems to be a slight variant on a more common variant of the Ugaritic ġ sign. I'll leave this as an exercise to the truly abnormal reader. Hint: take a look at the ġs in KTU1.24.

Now why would the producers of The Lost Treasure of Ugarit use such strange variant forms and from differing tablets at that? I have no idea. Perhaps they choose ascetically appealing forms from a font list with variants like those provided by Logos.

Reference:

'Pristine' Amazonian Region Hosted Large, Urban Civilization:

The paper also argues that the size and scale of the settlements in the southern Amazon in North Central Brazil means that what many scientists have considered virgin tropical forests are in fact heavily influenced by historic human activity. Not only that, but the settlements - consisting of networks of walled towns and smaller villages, each organized around a central plaza - suggest future solutions for supporting the indigenous population in Brazil's state of Mato Grosso and other regions of the Amazon, the paper says.

Preliminary interpretations of these data were reported several years ago in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Mann's argument is simple: demographic collapse in the face of Eurasian pathogens wiped away 90% of the inhabitants of the New World within about 1 century of "First Contact." And thus ensued a process of the "re-wilding" of vast swaths of the New World. So the woodlands of the North Central United States which the white settlers cut down as they moved west of the Appalachians, or the virgin forests of the Willamette Valley which the pioneers encountered, were relatively recent ecosystems which arose in the vacuum of the collapse of local native populations due to epidemics introduced originally by Spaniards and other Europeans. An important point to remember here is that these epidemics preceded the white settlement in many areas by decades or centuries, so the European experience of the native populations was only in the wake of the massive social chaos unleashed by plague. Imagine if the Chinese encountered Europe first during the Black Death; but on orders of magnitude greater scale (the Black Death killed a larger minority of Europeans, Eurasian pathogens likely exterminated whole peoples).

Secondarily, the possibility that many regions of the Amazon were de-humanized recently should remind us that H. sapiens are part of nature. The heuristic whereby humanity is perceived to be above, beyond and distinct from the natural world may be useful in some contexts, but in the broad historical sense we are just another animal. I am one who suspects that H. sapiens were responsible for many megafaunal extinctions as a necessary if not sufficient cause, but after these initial contacts obviously the local ecology entered into a dynamic symbiosis with human populations. It is false to say that Mother Nature is wiser than humanity, because we are subsets of Mother Nature!

A reader of this blog was outed by a moron posting as "Mark" on the Age of Autism blog. I will not link to the outing, nor will I link to Age of Autism. I have, however, kept a nice screen shot of the page, just in case someone over there has an attack of conscience, and I will also comment on the observation that "outing" its enemies is a favorite technique of cranks in general. However, it seems to be a particular favorite of antivaccine cranks. So is hypocrisy, it would appear. After all, "Mark" did not post under his full name but only under his first name, while he thinks nothing of outing commenters who don't use their full name. Worse, Kim Stagliano also says he's one of the editors of AoA, which makes me wonder if he's Mark Blaxill. She also disingenuously says that each editor has "full autonomy" to moderate how he or she sees fit. In other words, it's not AoA policy to out critics they don't like, but it is AoA policy if one of its editors feels inclined to do so, if you know what I mean. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Plausible deniability and all that, you know.

Indeed, "outing" its enemies is such a staple of antivaccinationist behavior, that I consider it standard operating procedure for them. They do it gleefully and gloatingly. They're obsessed with "outing" anonymous bloggers and commenters and won't hesitate to do it if they get the opportunity. I've been on the receiving end before, beginning nearly three years ago (the first time an antivaccinationist "outed" me). I will admit that the first time I was "outed" it was not by an antivaccinationist but rather a full-fledged cancer quack named William O'Neill of the Canadian Cancer Research Group, but the antivaccinationists followed a mere four months later. Heck, this year I was even "honored" by having J.B. Handley himself out me in a long, spittle-flecked tirade. He seems to think it would somehow intimidate me or shut me up. If anything, it made me angry. Indeed, you may notice that of late I've adopted a much more take-no-prisoners approach with antivaccinationists, although all these stories about the resurgence of vaccine-preventable disease have played a much bigger role in the hardening of my attitude recently than Handley's childish rant a few months ago did.

In wondering why the mercury militia is so obsessed with anonymous bloggers, I've come to the conclusion that it's the paranoid conspiracy-mongering at the heart of their beliefs that leads to their obsession. They honestly believe that anyone they can't identify must be a pharma plant sent to wreak havoc upon the Brave And Bold Antivaccine Autism Warriors Who Know The Real Truth About Vaccines. It simply doesn't occur to them and they can't imagine that there might be a perfectly legitimate reason that has nothing to do with being an astroturf agent for someone to decide to comment or blog under a pseudonym.

....by releasing them from a mink farm. This is what happens when you set animals free without regard to the consequences.

Now whether you think raising and killing animals for their fur is immoral or not, it takes a special kind of mind to cogitate that an appropriate solution is to spontaneously decrease the mink population by getting them killed.

Welcome to Mink Psychology 101: Remedial Minktation -- mink raised on a farm don't know anything about how the world works. When you let 6,000 of them out of their cages and 500 of them manage to escape out of the open farm gate, should anybody be shocked that a dozen of them died either because they were hit by cars, or simply from the sheer stress of a Mink Stampede?

By the way, 200 of the escapees still haven't been caught.

Then again, maybe the animal rights nutters are the ones who don't know how the world works. Accordingly, I feel compelled to create a new post category in their honor: "Rocket Surgery"

Hat Tip: Foundation for Biomedical Research E-Clips service

There has been a lot of cool and very exciting astronomy news lately that I want to share with you in one big gulp. First up is news about a new massive object discovered at the edge of the solar system. True to astronomers' tradition of coming up with cuddly names, the object is called 2006 [...]

CDC: In 2006, 37% of U.S. high schools pushed junk food such as candy and fatty chips. But that's down from 53% of schools in 2004.