PAPER: “State warns Floridians to watch for giant African land snails”

Man, what a disappointment! With a headline like that I want to see shaky home video footage of local yokels running and screaming while 50-ft. tall snails ooze menacingly down the interstates running through the Everglades.

Okay, so it turns out that the so-called “giant” African land snails are kind of giant, relative to other snails. They’re eight inches long. And there is a reason to avoid them (they carry a parasite that can give you meningitis), but I’m still disappointed. I wanted to see pictures out of a Ray Harryhausen film or something! You just can’t use a headline that juicy if you aren’t going to deliver the goods.

giantsnailsI guess if I want to see giant snails menacing people, I’ll have to go rent The Monster That Challenged The World, which actually only challenged a small part of Southern California near San Diego after errupting from the Salton Sea–an accidentally-created artificial lake less than a hundred years old that nevertheless is home in the movie to giant snails that have been hibernating for millions of years.

An interesting tidbit about real-world snails: My sister is a biologist who works for the government, and one of her former assignments was going out in the field and doing a population survey of the local snail population. She and her team were supposed to collect a particular kind of snail and count how many there were in a zone. The trouble is, the species that they were assigned to count looks very much like another kind of snail that is a PREDATOR. Yes! That’s right! There are predator snails who will hunt down and the other snails that they look like! According to my sister, the predator snails were a real frustration because if you collected one by mistake you’d look down at your collecting pad later and see that there was a slow-motion snail-i-cidal attack underway, with a predator bearing down on one of the grazers at full speed and trying to eat it, which could–like–throw your snail count off or something.

Vatican Astro-Geek Gives Interview!

Br_Guy_Consolmagno2Can you see this man wearing Spock ears at a Trek convention?

You might!

He’s a self-confessed sci-fi fan who works for the Vatican. In fact, he’s the Vatican’s “curator of meteorites.” Dr. Guy Consolmagno also recently gave an interview with Astrobiology Magazine in which he discussed all manner of interesting things (and apparently frustrated the less-than-fully-friendly-to-Christianity interviewer who talked to him).

Many folks don’t know it, but the Vatican’s interest in astronomy has continued down to today and the Holy See has a number of astronomers on its payroll. It also maintains an observatory that’s basically in my back yard (well, in the state of Arizona, anyway).

In the interview, Consolmagno talks about the Vatican astronomy program and is refreshingly open about it, and is willing to kick back as good as he gets kicked. A curialista he ain’t. Consider these exchanges:

Interviewer: And why does the Vatican fund this research?

Consolmagno: There’s a political reason. It’s a simple one, that they want the world to know that the Church isn’t afraid of science, that they like science, that science is great, this is our way of seeing how God created the universe, and they want to make as strong a statement as possible that truth doesn’t contradict truth, that if you have faith, then you’re not going to ever be afraid of what science is going to come up with. Because it’s true.

And the one time in history that they screwed up on this, the Galileo affair, the Church was wrong. And we’ve admitted it was wrong. How many times has science abused the Church? How often have you heard a scientist apologize to the Church? . . .

Consolmagno: One of the nice things about being paid by the Vatican is that I don’t have to worry about NASA politics. I don’t have to write grant proposals. I don’t have to find out what’s the flavor of the month this month. I can do anything I want.

Interviewer: You don’t have to worry about Vatican politics?

Consolmagno: Nope. They barely know we exist. My instructions when I arrived there were: do good science, period.

He also seems to know how to have a good time:

Interviewer: What do you hope to get out of being here at the Astrobiology Science Conference?

Consolmagno: Oh, having a good time. And, fundamentally, that’s why we do science, because it’s really enjoyable. . . .

In addition, in some way, I’m waving the Church flag. Just by walking around with this badge that says “Vatican Observatory,” I’m reminding people that, yes, there is indeed a religious aspect, and indeed, an ethical aspect to science.

Consolmagno has a good sense of humor, and it shows in the article. He’s got a number of interesting and thoughtful things to say, including addressing the perennial question of what the Chuch would think if we had proof of extraterrestrial intelligence.

Julius Caesar, Your Library Card Has Been REVOKED!

libraryofalexandiaIf you’re any kind of a history buff–or if you’ve watched Carl Sagan’s Cosmos–you know about the famed Library of Alexandria, the most famous center of learning in the ancient world.

The site of the library has been lost for going on two millennia, but–turns out–it’s been found!

At least so says Dr. Zahi Hawass, curator of the Giza Plateau in Egypt, and a team of archaeologists from Poland.

Dr. Hawass is kind of a character. I’ve been following his career for a number of years, and the man seems to consider himself a kind of modern, Egyptian Indiana Jones. His antics when giving interviews can be a real hoot, but he’s not a flake when it comes to archaeology.

In fact, it is his job to reign in the nuttiness of a lot of what passes as Egyptology in certain circles. You know, they people they patterened the early, goofus version of Dr. Daniel Jackson off of. (*Cough*Robert Bauval . . . *Cough*Graham Hancock . . . ).

In other words: If Hawass says they’ve found the Library of Alexandria, they probably have.

Wicked awesome!

Hopefully, they’ll be able to find out the answers to some of the mysteries connected with the library, like how it was finally destroyed. There is considerable confusion on this point. The story linked above notes that it may have been destroyed by Julius Caesar, that’s far from certain, and there is evidence that the library survived after Caesar’s time (though it may have been rebuilt after he burned Alexandria)–see the wikipedia link, above.

What would be even cooler would be if they found a few of the works the library had in its possession but which have been lost to subsequent history.

I’d just hate to be the person who has to pay the library fine on those!

For The Repose of the Soul Of David Reimer

I was really sorry to hear about this. David Reimer has died. I read about David a while back. He had an amazing and disturbing story (which I’ll get to in a minute). He leaves behind a wife and two adopted children.

The children are adopted because of something that happened to him very early in life. He was the victim of a botched circumcision, following which

His parents consulted the famous sex researcher John Money, who had maintained that “Nature is a political strategy of those committed to maintaining the status quo of sex differences.” He advised them to let the doctors [give the child a sex change operation], and they raised him as a girl without telling him what happened. I [secular humanist author Steven Pinker] learned about the case as an undergraduate in the 1970s, when it was offered as proof that babies are born neuter and acquire gender from the way they are raised. A New York Times article from the era reported that Brenda (nee Bruce) “has been sailing contentedly through childhood as a genuine girl.” The facts were suppressed until 1997, when it was revealed that from a young age Brenda felt she was a boy trapped in a girl’s body and gender role. She ripped off frilly dresses, rejected dolls in favor of guns, preferred to play with boys. . . . At fourteen she was so miserable that she decided either to live her life as a male or to end it, and her father finally told her the truth. She underwent a new set of operations, assumed a male identity [and the name David], and today is happily married to a woman [The Blank Slate, 349].

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of his story. He committed suicide after a failed investment cost him a great deal of money (warning: the obituary contains an explicit description of what happened to him earlier in life).

What a tragedy.

He was the victim of a horrible accident that was then immeasurably compounded by a criminally irresponsible sexuality “expert,” forced to lead a life contrary to the nature he genuinely had been given by God, and used as an instrument for advancing an absurd agenda to rationalize the sins of some and add confusion and error to the lives and belief systems of others.

That’s over now. Let’s pray for his soul.

. . . On The Other Hand

I’m a big supporter of the War on Terror, but sometimes will mistakes will be made. Sometimes they will be comical. Like this one:

The Google Terrrorist

It was the lead item on the government’s daily threat matrix one day last April. Don Emilio Fulci described by an FBI tipster as a reclusive but evil millionaire, had formed a terrorist group that was planning chemical attacks against London and Washington, D.C. That day even FBI director Robert Mueller was briefed on the Fulci matter. But as the day went on without incident, a White House staffer had a brainstorm: He Googled Fulci. His findings: Fulci is the crime boss in the popular video game Headhunter. “Stand down,” came the order from embarrassed national security types [Source].