Dinosaur flatulence

Popular science reporting is so egregiously bad these days that, for the most part, I just roll my eyes and let things slide, but every once in a while, I come across a story that is so heinous I have to say something.  This bit of douchery for instance: Dinosaurs a gas, gas, gas, scientists say.

Doctors Ruxton and Wilkinson would have us believe that dinosaurs farted out so much methane that it effected a climate change that ended up killing them off.  Two things are immediately obvious in this article.  First, we are not told what Doctors Ruxton and Wilkinson are actually doctors of.  Second, there is no reference to the journal article where, one assumes, this work is to be published.  Perhaps, this is just sloppy reporting and, for the sake of argument, I'll assume this is the case.  But a story that does not establish credentials and reference the original literature is automatically suspect.

But, let's assume this is just sloppy reporting and accept what we are being told.  Fine...even then, this story has so many things wrong with it, it's hard to know where to start criticizing.  The doctors reference an argentinosaurus and point out that it would have produced "thousands of liters of methane per day".  Let's assume that the good doctors recognized that a reptile metabolism is much, much slower than a mammal's and scaled their methane production rates appropriately.  We don't know as we have no original literature to reference back to.

But, now we come to the really mind-blowing part of this story:

Ruxton and his co-researcher David Wilkinson, of Liverpool John Moores University, designed a mathematical model to work out how much methane the animals, thought to have numbered in their billions, would have generated during the Mesozoic era, from 250 million to 65 million years ago.

"Thought to have numbered in their billions..."  Where in the name of all holy fuck did the number "billions" come from?  The planet is very marginally able to support a few billions of 150 pound (plus or minus) human beings and Doctors Ruxton and Wilkinson tell us that there were billions of 90-ton reptiles roaming the planet during the Cretaceous.  Seriously?  No, really...are these guys saying this with a straight face?

The "billions" of giant sauropods number is so patently absurd that any person with brain function has to call, "bullshit" on this nonsense.  However, let me make on additional comment.  Methane is reduced carbon, which is why we combine it with oxygen and burn it.  When it is released in the atmosphere, its greenhouse effect is transient, because it tends to break down relatively quickly when exposed to oxygen and the sun's ultraviolet radiation.  Methane emissions from dinosaurs over the course of tens of millions of years are just not a vehicle for climate change.

If shame exists in the scientific community anymore, the unnamed "Canadian science website" that published this silliness should be ashamed of itself.

Bad vacation choices, Part something-something...

In this year's Bad Vacation Choice awards, Large Animal category, we may have a winner: Man photographs cheetahs attacking wife.

Before we get to the "large animal" part of the story, let me get one thing out of the way:  Squirrely's Rule of Marriage #23 - When cheetahs are attacking your wife, you may want to put down the goddamned camera and, I don't know, like maybe, TRY TO FUCKING SAVE HER!!

Just sayin'...

Having addressed that, back to the large animals.  Apparently, it is possible to go to this game preserve in South Africa and get your picture taken while standing next to "pet" cheetahs.  Yeah...and Sea World should let tourists swim with their "pet" sharks.  Here's the thing:  I've had pet cats for most of my life.  I like cats.  I like their independence.  I even like their aggravating "What? Were you talkin' to me?" attitude.  However, I completely understand the one-sided nature of my relationship to my cats.  Cats don't give a fuck and haven't given a fuck since ever.  When the Duke hops up in my lap while I'm reading the paper in the morning, he's not being friendly, he's cold.  When Duke's sister, the very aptly named Morgana le Fey, pokes me with her paw at 4am every morning, it means she's hungry and is checking to see if I'm dead.  When Admiral Halsey starts rubbing against my leg, he's not being friendly either.  He's hungry and figures I'll either feed him or he can get me to trip and kill myself.  Halsey's good either way.

To cats, humans are animals that are too big to eat (while we're alive anyway), but are convenient to have around to provide food, open doors, clean up the disgusting messes they make, and other, similar services.  Let's face it, the Tribe of Tiger has been around for most of the Cenozoic and, after 60 million years, the cat brain is pretty much hard-wired to kill things and, even today, there are parts of the world where humans are still very much on the cat menu of dietary choices.  As Siegfried and Roy discovered several years back, there is no such thing as a "pet" cat.  Inside even the fattest, laziest domestic kitty cat, the kill switch is always a hair breadth from being engaged.  Timbuk 3 has very succinctly summed up the situation with cats:

"Cats will be cats, and cats will be cruel
Cats can be callous, and cats can be cool
Cats will be cats, remember these words
Cats will be cats, and cats eat birds
Cats will be cats, and cats eat birds"

...or humans as the case may be.

Another look at Sharia law...

In yet another example of Sharia law barbarity, Saudi Arabia recently beheaded a woman for being a witch, after a trial that, it's presumed, looked a lot like this.  However, buried in Uri Friedman's story on this bit of Islamic pleasantry was a reference to "an Eritrean national [who] was imprisoned and lashed hundreds of times for "charlatanry"..."  Wow, I thought, maybe there are some aspects of Sharia law we could learn from; these charlatanry provisions, for example.  Imagine if the FBI formed an Anti-Charlatanry Unit, charged with rooting out and expunging charlatanry wherever it existed.  Why, I would personally turn in 535 members of Congress, the entire management groups of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Department of Education, and the Department of Energy, the entire Nevada State legislature, and the Clark County School Board.  Oh, yes...the Special Charlatanry Prosecutor would have a full docket.

Don't get me wrong...I consider Sharia law a barbaric anachronism that should have died at the Battle of Lepanto (Lesson: Mess with capitalists and you'll get your ass kicked, Islam), but "charlatanry" laws...think about it.

The wussification of America continues...

What do you get when you raise a generation of kids in playgrounds covered with foam rubber?  Cowboys wearing helmets and body armor, that's what...

The National Finals Rodeo is in town and the Las Vegas Sun, which normally alternates between acting like the UNLV student newspaper and the Nevada Democratic Party newsletter, is all rodeo, all the time.  Today's edition even includes a column by a stripper - I could not make this shit up - who admits that cowboys are actually very nice in spite of the fact that they are all - gasp! - Republicans.

I digress...

Bull riders wearing helmets and body armor...W.T.F??  Sure...riding bare-back on an evil-tempered, 2000 pound animal, who by the way, has strap cinched around his gut to make him even more grumpy, is a dangerous gig.  But isn't that the point?  Don't get me wrong here.  I am not the sort that goes to rodeos and roots for the bulls (Bullfights, yes, but not rodeos).  It seems to me that part of the challenge of bull riding is overcoming a perfectly rational, perfectly understandable fear and engaging in something that "normal" humans can't even conceive of doing.  Part of the reason we watch bull riding is, not so much to observe the skills involved, but to sit there and marvel that there are people who even do things like that.  When you remove the risk and, consequently, remove some of the "fear factor," you somehow diminish the sport.

Mountaineering has gotten to a point where essentially anyone with enough money and free time can get to the top of Mount Everest.  That being the case, where is the challenge and the subsequent sense of accomplishment?  It would seem that bull-riding is heading to where anyone with enough body armor will be able to hop on a bull.  Hell, as soon as my Master Chief Spartan body suit, complete with regenerating electromagnetic armor and shield lock feature, shows up, I'll probably give it a shot.

But maybe that's just me...

Butch up...

I put this up on Twitter this afternoon.  The University of California at Davis, the media, and the Occupy Wall Street crowd are all up in arms that the UCD police pepper-sprayed some of the OWS protestors there.  Maybe the cops over-reacted, maybe they felt legitimately threatened, who knows?  But at the end of the day this was pepper spray.  Pepper spray.  A chemical considered so non-lethal that anyone can walk in off the street and buy some.  Please.

Okay, protestor wannabees, let's talk about protests.  Tienanmen Square was a protest.  I wrote about it in one of my first blogs.  The protest at Tienanmen Square was so effective that the Chinese government had to call out their army, send tanks into the square, and start killing people.  Killing...as in dead.  You were sprayed with pepper spray.  Think about that.  What happened in Tienanmen Square was, literally, world changing.  It put the most populous country in the world on a course that, in a few years, changed it from a third world backwater to what will be the dominant economy in the world within the next ten years.  You, on the other hand, just got pepper-sprayed and roundly ignored.

Your little encampments are being tolerated because you're threatening no one.  Certainly not Wall Street, the banks, or "evil" corporations, who are ignoring you because they have the law on their side.  The "law" that exists because it is supported by the power of the government, which oddly, you seem to have no issues with.

If you want to to take your "movement" beyond the exercise in quasi-intellectual masturbation that it has become to a legitimate protest, make sure you are protesting against the right things to the people who are really responsible...and when the police start using bullets instead of pepper-spray, you'll know you're on the right track.

It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt...and that's how it should be.

Driving in to work today, I found myself stopped at a light next to a large step van belonging to TotTurf, which purports to supply "playground safety surfacing."  What. The. Fuck.  Have we come to a point where we've become so wussiefied that we have to cover the world with foam rubber to protect "the children"??

Warning!  Geezer rant sequence initiating in 3, 2, 1...

When I was growing up, we had playgrounds and those playgrounds were made of galvanized steel pipe and surfaced variously with concrete, asphalt, gravel, or just plain dirt.  By today's standards these places were safety nightmares.  Kids fell down and they bled, kids jumped, fell, or were pushed off these abominations and they broke bones, bruises and lacerations were so common we didn't even think about them...and note:  We usually only played at these playgrounds under adult supervision.  Why, you may ask?  Quite simply, by our standards of "fun," playgrounds were just plain boring.  Left to our own devices, we had far better ways of entertaining ourselves...like playing with fire.  This was back in the days when people burned their garbage and everyone had a "incinerator" (generally, an old oil drum) in their back yard.  Burning garbage was one of my brother's and my "chores."  Heh.  Little did our parents know that we would have burned all that stuff, and more, without being told.  But trust me, we were absolutely zealous about getting every last bit of combustion out of every last bit of garbage.  Poking the fire with sticks was required, flames leaping 10 feet in the air, a goal, and showers of sparks, a source of joy.  Setting parts of the garden on fire in our zeal only added to our entertainment as it required a scramble to get the hose to put the fire out.  Good times.  As I type this, I am looking down at a scar the size of a quarter, acquired when my brother flung a flaming, molten piece of plastic at me in one attempt of ours to maximize the spark generation rate.

The town I grew up in was in a transition from rural to suburban and our house backed up to a cattle ranch...and not just any cattle, it was a Brahma bull ranch that raised bulls for the rodeo.  The primary fixture in the pasture behind our house was Black Dempsey, an enormous, retired rodeo bull who, it was rumored, had actually killed a few rodeo clowns, or so the story went.  Black Dempsey presided over a harem of a few dozen cows, who exceeded even him in bad temper when calves were around.  Of course, the pasture was strictly off-limits and the penalties for disobeying parental dictates were threatened to be particularly fearsome - this, in a day and age when corporal punishment was a daily occurrence.  Naturally, we never passed up a chance to climb the fence and mingle with the livestock.  I suspect my brother and I escaped goring and/or stomping solely for two reasons:  1) Small boys can easily hide in 3 foot high field grass and 2) Our half springer spaniel/half cocker spaniel dog was an absolutely fearless cow chaser, in spite of his ridiculously short legs.  Good times.

Within walking distance of our house, there was a landlocked piece of undeveloped and wooded property that was bounded on one side by Little Cottonwood Creek (known simply as "the Crick" in the local lexicon).  Of course, there were as many parental edicts against going anywhere near "the Crick" as there there were involving the bull pasture.  So what to do with 4 acres or so of forest?  BB guns wars, of course.  These were highly organized, if infrequent, events with pre-chosen teams and agreed upon starting times and starting points.  I marvel even now that several dozen 12 year old boys were able to put these events together in complete secrecy.  A BB gun war involved, as one might expect, showing up with a BB gun - I had to borrow one - with whatever protective gear you might deem necessary and running about "the Grove" as it was called, shooting the other team.  No rules and we didn't keep score.  We would fight until we ran out of ammunition or were completely exhausted, which generally didn't take too long as a heavy winter coat was standard body armor and these wars were always in the summer.  In retrospect, this was all appallingly dangerous, but we never had any injuries outside of returning home sporting a few telltale round bruises.  Good times.

I really feel sorry for the kids whose concept of "fun" involves a foam rubber covered swingset.

More bad vacation ideas...

In my on-going efforts to stay abreast of bad vacation choices, even incipient ones, I have come across this story: Take a Volcano Vacation.  Well, sure...who doesn't have a hankerin' to see molten lava spewing hundreds of feet into the air?  However, let's review this "tempting" offer:

1. It's in the Congo.
2. It's Nyiragongo, referred to by Forbes as "the world's deadliest volcano."
3. It's an actively erupting volcano.
4. Armed escorts are required.
5. Reread #4: Armed escorts are required.

But, not to worry..."experts" say that it is perfectly "safe."

Developing...