And now is definitely time for the latter. I’m leaving for the upper Texas coast, to catch spring migration in all it’s glory. I shall return Sunday evening.

With a cold front that just swept through Texas reaching the coast last night, I may be arriving a day late. (When birds heading north meet strong winds blowing against them, they “fallout” by the thousands into the first land they find. If they have a strong tailwind, they’ll keep going inland past the coast. What’s good for the birders is bad for the birds, and vice versa.)

I will of course have plenty of pictures upon my return. You should do the same. Whether birding’s your thing or not, get outside and enjoy spring!

I had the oddest experience today. Coming home from school, I saw an older Asian women, traditionally dressed in a skirt with a scarf over her head. She was at the edge of a front yard, scooping water with a bowl out of the gutter and into a bucket… There are very few Asian people in this west Texas town. To see a women gathering water in this way is a first.

When I came home, my apartment once again was without water. For reasons unfathomable to me, they seem to have it turned off every few weeks for maintenance of some kind or another.

Oh well. I have a bowl.

I’ve got two posts I promise to write. The first on systems biology from a talk I attended by Leroy Hood. The second on interspecific territoriality and convergent evolution. School and birding have kept me busy.

In the meantime, I’ve got a good picture to share.

While walking down a trail this weekend, birding at in Friedrich Park on the edge of San Antonio, my mother-in-law screamed and jumped back. A 3 to 4 foot Black Rat Snake (Elaphe obsoleta obsoleta) sat stretched out across the trail.

I had to convince the snake that I wouldn’t stop chasing him until he allowed me some pictures, but once I’d won that battle, he sat still for surprisingly long time.

Mary J. Blige deserves the Christian quote of the week.

Mary J. Blige says she has found religion, but she makes no apologies for her earthly materialism. In fact, she says God has willed her to wear bling.

“My God is a God who wants me to have things,” the singer tells May’s Blender magazine. “He wants me to bling. He wants me to be the hottest thing on the block. I don’t know what kind of God the rest of y’all are serving, but the God I serve says, ‘Mary, you need to be the hottest thing this year, and I’m gonna make sure you’re doing that’.”

Yes, yes, I know. We can all point to examples of highly prominent celebrities as horrid representatives of Christianity.

The problem is, I think that deep down, this attitude has permeated our churches. We’re still smart enough to recognize we shouldn’t open our mouths and say something this ridiculous, but deep down, we’ve come to accept this line of thinking. God has given me money. God wants me to be happy with that money.

I know a few people which are quite wealthy that live amazing Christian lives. You know how to tell when a good Christian is so loaded with money they don’t know what to do with it all? That’s just it — you can’t tell. I’m humbled and deeply thankful for those I know who quietly go about using their money for true good. They live in modest houses, they drive modest cars, and their good deeds don’t get much praise. They’re not doing it so that people will loudly thank them for it.

But as I “come of age,” to the time where I have to start deciding what I’ll spend money on, and what I’ll consider wasteful, I’m struck that the church has just kind of accepted Hummers as an appropriate vehicle to make it to the building on a Sunday morning. I’m struck by the fact that when we run out of room in our houses, we find it perfectly acceptable to build new ones (or at least new rooms). Somehow those radical words of Jesus, where he satirically spoke of building bigger barns to hold the extra grain have been lost upon us. At the very time we have smaller families, the average house is burgeoning in size, with apparently no end in sight.

We all have material possessions. I’m not criticizing that. We all need a place to live and a way to get around.

I’m just struck by the fact that Blige’s quote above doesn’t even sound that wacky when I really think about what our actions say about our beliefs.

It’s depressing.

Seems that the flying spaghetti monster came under attack in Kansas on a recent tour of a middle school by state board members.

A science teacher dared to the hang a picture of His Noodliness and a Doonsebury cartoon (I can only assume it’s this one) and this offended a couple of state board members who voted science out of Kansas.

When Connie Morris, a vigorous supporter of rewriting science in Kansas, asked the principle to remove the sign, another board member, Sue Gamble, took the approach of smaller government.

“I advised the principal that Morris has no authority,” she said. “I told him to deal with his staff as he saw fit, not by what a state board member says.”

It seems that in Kansas some don’t just want to rewrite science, they want their science teachers to like it too.

And yes, today I just happen to be wearing my FSM shirt.

I mentioned my great pleasure with the word humuhumunukunukuapuaa, the fish that Hawaii may once again give their blessing to.

Well now my father just sent me a sound file on how to actually say the word.

Now that’s awesome.

I came across a video of Kirk Cameron (yes, that Kirk Cameron) and Ray Comfort. Together, they produce videos and run a distasteful evangelical website called The Way of the Master, which sounds suspicously like a bad Kung Fu movie.

Now I’m not trying to succumb to hyperbole, but the video just might be the worst video on evolution I’ve ever seen. It is both humerously bad, but more than that, it’s deceitful, filled with outright lies.

Their idea of showing evolution to be a weak and unfounded theory is to go out and interview people on the street who support the theory, but aren’t educated in it. They splice up the clips to make people look their dumbest and with a straight face present these people as representative of anyone who would accept evolution. As Ed Brayton puts it,

This is a bit like going to an art school and asking them how the internal combustion engine works, edit it down to all the responses where people say things about it based on ignorance, and then saying, “See, it should be obvious that the internal combustion engine is impossible.”

The video only gets worse when they attempt to prove that humans couldn’t have evolved from apes by taking an orangutang to a restaurant and showing that he can’t order off a menu or behave logically. Then they call airlines to see if they can buy a ticket for the ape, and triumphantly declare evolution as impossible when the airlines refuse to sell them a ticket.

But my blood boils when they start telling 100%, verifiable, absolute lies.

Lucy? They tell us that all experts agree she was a 3 foot chimpanzee. An absolute lie. If by expert they mean anthropoligists who study these things, then they can’t find a single person who believes this, much less the entire field of anthropology.

Neanderthals? A old man with arthritis. A complete fallacy.

They quoted Sir Arthur Keith, a British anthropologist as saying in a forward to the 100th anniversary of On the Origin of Species:

Evolution is unproved and unprovable. We believe it only because the only alternative is special creation which is unthinkable.

The whole thing’s a lie, a quote the man never said. He died four years prior to the 100 year anniversary of The Origin.

Perhaps I am dangerously naive and idealistic. I could have sworn that Christians were supposed to be people who actually cared about the truth. If these people need to make a video that advocates for a literal reading of Genesis, a young earth, etc, then they should do it honestly. They should honestly say that they believe in a literal reading of Genesis as a matter of faith.

The logical consequence of that of course is saying that our evidence for an old universe, old earth, and evolution are not trustworthy — that the evidence itself is something built into the fabric of life giving the appearance as something it’s not. I would clearly disagree with that position and speak out against it, but at the very least it is an honest proclamation of their faith.

As is it now, these people are contemptible. There’s no dancing around what they’ve done. When 30 seconds of googling can demonstrate that they’re lying, they have not put forth even the most basic of efforts to care about the truth.

In the video, they ask people if they’ve ever broken any of the 10 commandments. It’s their beautiful way of telling people they deserve death and should burn in hell, unless of course they renounce evolution and come to know Jesus Christ as Kirk and Ray assuredly sell him.

For people who like using the Bible as their code of ethics, they should know precisely what the Christian position on lying is.

Don’t do it.

(and a hattip is due Ed Brayton, from whom I found the video)

Just when I thought Tiktaalik (tic-TAH-lick) was becoming my favorite word I learn that Hawaii may once again make humuhumunukunukuapuaa the state fish, this time permanently.

Update: Here’s how to say it.

While answering emails and working this morning, I listened to an interview by the noted physicist Richard Feynman. He speaks of the pleasure of learning things.

He starts out by insulting artists, talks about his fathers profound influence on his appreciation for science, reflects on his involvement at Los Alamos building the atomic bomb, speaks of his digust with bestowing honor on people (including his own honors) and the way we do it, makes some really cool analogies to studying the world and formulating laws compared to observing a game of chess with its rules involved, throws in a lenghty discussion of physics, and talks about teaching science to his son by telling stories of walking into a dogs nose. He admits that he’s baffled on how to teach science.

He ends with a discussion of religious beliefs. He gentle, he’s graceful, and he’s godless. While I ultimately don’t share his conclusions, I find his reflections interesting and can identify with different points.

And if you crank up your speakers really loud in the first part of the clip, when Feynman is drawing a picture of a woman, you can just barely maked out Western Scrub Jays callling in the background. True birders don’t just watch movies or interviews. They listen to what’s calling in the background.

(via Pharyngula)

Here’s a great story I didn’t have time to blog about when it broke earlier this month. One of the more famous and notorious of the young earth creationists is back in trouble with the law. Kent Hovind’s theme park, Dinosaur Adventure Land, “Where Dinosaurs and the Bible Meet,” is in danger of being torn down by the state.

Hovind is screaming religious persecution, as he did when he refused to pay taxes and the IRS raided his house. (You see, taxes aren’t a part of his religious beliefs).

The new flap over his theme park is occuring because no one obtained a building permit from the county.

Members of Hovind’s organization found county officials quite unsympathetic to their plight. County Commisioner Mike Whitehead has the quote of the day:

Scripture also says ‘Render unto Caesar what Caesar demands.’ And right now, Caesar demands a building permit.