Make Yourself At Home

My favorite forum is out of commission for the time being so I’ve invited some Pastafarians over to visit my blog while we all impatiently wander the internet, mentally or literally biting our fingernails until a solution is found. In an effort to be a good host, I’ve decided to put more effort into my posts.

I came across this press release via my favorite science news site, EurekAlert, about carbon nanotubes and how they have now been used to detect the entire spectrum of visible light. The next time someone says the eyeball must have been Intelligently Designed, remember this quote: ‘“In our eyes the neuron is in front of the retinal molecule, so the light has to transmit through the neuron to hit the molecule,” says Sandia researcher Xinjian Zhou. “We placed the nanotube transistor behind the molecule—a more efficient design.”’

I also read this piece in which fish are supposedly shown to experience something that ‘sounds an awful lot like how we experience pain.’

I’m a little too tired to really think about this but it just seems to me that this guy is projecting. Garner says: ‘They acted with defensive behaviors, indicating wariness, or fear and anxiety.’ But he doesn’t explain how he knows that these ‘defensive behaviors’ indicate ‘wariness, or fear and anxiety’ as opposed to the defensive behaviors of other fish. I don’t want to pay the money to buy the paper he and his associates wrote, but what I’ve seen so far just doesn’t lead me to the same conclusions.

And then there’s this great underdog story in which a clockmaker (just kidding, Andrei) says, We don’t need no stinkin’ Collider! I’ve got your extra Z-bosons right here!