It’s been too long, hasn’t it? I’ve got friends asking me to write again, friends that are hilariously cajoling me into writing again, and absolute nutjobs that leave the craziest comments on old posts.

This latter comment is especially hilarious for it’s illiterate ramblings against evolution, repetition of the belief that no one is required to pay income taxes, and then a sudden divergence into the necessity of vitamins and seed eating to prevent cancer. The list of seeds we should eat are apple, peach, and apricot seeds, which as any good biologist can tell you are filled with cyanide. If you’re skipping the fruit and going straight for the seeds, it doesn’t take but a handful at once to provide a lethal dose. But hey, you don’t get cancer! I especially liked the National Cancer Institute’s description of a drug name Laetrile based on these seed products. “Laetrile has shown little anticancer effect in laboratory studies, animal studies, or human studies. The side effects of laetrile are like the symptoms of cyanide poisoning.”

Yes, it’s been too long since I’ve blogged.

Why did I stop blogging?

The short and sweet answer is that I suddenly got tired of it. It felt more like a chore than it did fun. As the amount of time I poured into school skyrocketed (and so did the amount of writing for school), it was hard to enjoy blogging.

I’m also completely done with these eternal debates about evolution and creationism. At least online anyway. Like the above comments shows, the number of people who froth at the mouth and show up to leave comments far outweighs those interested in learning how science works. We live in the age of Google. In 30 seconds you can get more information about a subject than you can read in 30 days. An understanding of evolution and how it works is not lacking because of a lack of information. Therefore, I’m much more interested in having real conversions with people, face to face, who actually want to learn how things work, not just argue. The time I’ve spent at church talking with people about it on a number of occasions is just so much more fulfilling than blogging about it.

I also face the problem of being a fairly good but extremely slow writer. One story in particular illustrates this better than anything. Not long after we got married, my wife was working on this very lengthy paper for a class. She called me in to ask for help with wording a single sentence. I spent 30 minutes and finally came up with wording that we both liked. So out of 10 pages, I wrote one sentence. When she got the paper back (with a good grade of course), the professor had underline that single sentence and written in the margins, “Nicely worded!” (I’ll smile about that for the rest of my life). But the problem you see is that I can’t spend that long writing a post to Ocellated. There’s not enough hours in the day.

So What Comes Next?

I didn’t want to post again until I really knew what I wanted to say. I think where I am right now is that I would love to post about science. There’s just too many cool little things that I learn to not share them with anyone. And I have fun whenever I can taking pictures, so there’s no better medium than the web for sharing the fruits of that labor.

I promise nothing. I certainly won’t be posting every day. Maybe once a week. Maybe once a month. We’ll just have to see how it goes. But I’d definitely like to get back to talking about science, birds in particular, and I’ve got a few papers that are worth sharing due to their general “cool factor.”

I can’t just leave you with nothing

So for all three of you still checking the blog, I’ll leave you with a few pictures. I have been busy working at photography when I have the time, and I’ve posted many of these quite some time ago, but never wrote a post announcing them. Here’s a list of the recent galleries. Some of the pictures are of course better than others.

• San Antonio Lakes, 12-27-06
• Marfa, TX 12-18 to 12-19-06
• Christmas Bird Counts 2006
• San Angelo State Park, 12-8 to 12-10-06
• OH Ivie Reservoir, 12-2-06
• Forth Worth Nature Center, 11-25-06
• San Angelo Birding, Nov. 2006
• S Tx Birding Festival 2006
• Davis Mountains and Lake Balmorhea, 10-2006

The trip to Marfa, TX (which is in deep southwest TX north of Big Bend National Park, was probably one of the most enjoyable though. I managed to get a couple of incredible pictures of a juvenile Red-tailed Hawk.

There’s more in that album too. And speaking of pictures, I’ve got lots more to process from recent trips which I’ll be posting shortly.

Okay, this one’s just creepy. I posted the Mentos / Diet Coke thing yesterday. Today, I awake to find that JM O’Donnell, over at Immunoblogging has posted this, two days earlier.

Not only had I not seen his post, I hadn’t even seen this video until last night, when a commenter left a link to it on yesterday’s post… Someone should investigate the possibility that we were twins, separated at birth. There could be a huge conspiracy going on.

Still, either Ocellated or Immunoblogging needs to go back to elementary school for a refresher on the rudimentary principles of math. Everyone’s family with the commutative property of addition, yes?

Adding 1 + 2, is the same as adding 2 + 1.

Well, in my case, Mentos + Diet Coke = Fun. But when Mr. O’Donnell does the math, he gets Diet Coke + Mentos = Awesome. Someone is clearly wrong.

What do you get when you take The Fresh Maker ® and The Real Thing ® and put them together?

My wife and I heard about this recently on the popular show Myth Busters, and after seeing it, we had to try it out.

Lucky for me, I had a professor that needed a 3 liter bottle. After stopping at four different stores to secure a package of Mentos, the experiment was ready. A biology party was the perfect setting.

So what does it look like?

Here’s a closeup of that same shot:

Also, I’ve added a series of photos in the gallery showing the progression as the eruption occurred. The whole thing is extremely fast. It’s over within one to two seconds.

So how does it work?

Upon adding three or four Mentos to the Diet Coke, what happens is that virtually all of the carbon dioxide is released from the Diet Coke in an extremely short amount of time. The resulting pressure forces the liquid out of the bottle with surprising force, resulting in the geyser.

More specifically, the tiny holes on the surface of the Mentos serve as a nucleation site, facilitating the rapid formation and release of tiny bubbles of CO2.

Wikipedia has an article on the subject, with more detailed information on the science behind it.

It’s fun, it’s cheap, you should try it. Just not inside.

There’s an article up on Fox News by John Gibson that’s just striking for it’s tone. It’s not the kind of ignorance that one just stumbles across in life. No, it’s the kind of ignorance that one must work really hard to cultivate, waking up each morning to seek out opportunities to display this level of stupidity. His grasp of ignorance is almost masterful.

Now scientists say Pluto isn’t a planet. It isn’t big enough. It’s something, but not a planet exactly.

My attitude is: Who says?

It’s been a planet my entire life. I learned that in the third grade. Might be the only thing I remember from the third grade.

It’s the cold one, the farthest from the sun and, yes, it’s the small one.

But no, you can’t unmake Pluto as a planet.

Long ago I learned it was a planet and I see no reason to unlearn it. Why should I? [emphasis mine]

Somebody somewhere, some mysterious person who answers to no one and seems to have dictatorial power sets new standards for planets and all of a sudden one of the original nine is dropped?

Now as a disclaimer, I don’t particularly care how the solar system is classified. I would like scientists to be consistent, and use all the information at hand (which naturally changes as the years go by). I trust that they do nothing less, though no doubt it’s a contentious process. (See here on why that’s a good thing). In short, I won’t get my undies in a twist if we’ve got 8, 12, or 30 planets.

But John Gibson’s point of not having to unlearn something just because he’s learned it is about the stupidest thing I’ve ever read. Where would that line of thinking take us? We would have ignored bacteria as the cause of ulcers. Reducing stress and staying away from spicy foods would still be the way doctors handled it. After all, that’s what many of them learned in school. Why should they unlearn it just because some stupid scientists come up with a different idea?

How about marriage. Anybody “learn” how to do something that just didn’t seem to work? Why should you have to unlearn it just because a different approach works better?

Religion. I learned some cool stuff as a kid. I think I’ll put the good book away and forgo church. I already know what I need to. Why should I revisit it again?

His attack on scientists (answering to no one with dictatorial power) is also breathtaking for it’s gross mischaracterization and slander. Whatever the politics and contention of planetary classification, I’m quite sure there’s no planetary physicist in an underground bunker stroking a white cat and smoking a pipe, deciding one day to use his unbounded power to blight Pluto.

Is there any area in life where we shouldn’t learn with a touch of humility, with the acknowledgment that we might be wrong and that new information might change the way we understand something?

Oops. I just thought of one… Apparently being a journalist for Fox News.

(Hat tip to John Hawks on the quote)

Liang Bua 1’s asymmetrical skull

In 2004, scientists announced the discovery of a new species of small hominid which lived on the island of Flores (Indonesia), which they dubbed Homo floresiensis. The media, ever the bastions of scientific truth and accuracy, immediately popularized the discovery by calling H. floresiensis hobbits.

Recently however, a debate has flared up on what H. floresiensis really is. In particular, one of the specimens has a very asymmetrical skull which some scientists are now claiming is the result of disease. Other features of the skull, which were originally reported to be distinct from modern day humans, are now being challenged as falling within the range of modern day and prehistoric humans from that region of the world.

I don’t have anything to add to that discussion. Anthropology and human evolution are hardly my area of specialty. For a quick read about the situation though, MSNBC has the details. For a thorough but technical account, John Hawks’ anthropology blog provides (as always) a great deal of information on the controversy.

Here’s what I find so terribly interesting about the whole thing. It’s a beautiful example of how science works! Some scientists find some data, put the pieces together, go through the process of peer review, and publish a claim — “hobbits” on Flores! Some other scientists review their data, find that they may be a better explanation than “hobbits on Flores” and publish a rebuttal. A skirmish begins. People take sides and scientists take their best shots at each other in trying to explain these finds. Egos are perhaps bruised and battered along the way, but in the end, what we learn about these fossils is far more robust because of the scrutiny they receive.

In short, this is a beautiful example of science at work. This controversy and debate is not a sign that there’s something terribly wrong with science or the original researchers, but rather it’s exactly what healthy science is supposed to do.

Yet, I would bet everything I own on the predictable creationist rejection of this find. Whatever the consensus comes to be, creationists will use this debate, this robust discussion, to say to their followers, isn’t science sick. Science is damned if they get it wrong — that the fossils turn out not be a new species, H. floresiensis — because creationists will forever use it as an example of incompetence. But even worse, if science decides that H. floresiensis really is deserving of classification as a unique species, creationists will point to the controversy as proof that we’re wrong.

Does anyone doubt this? When creationists commonly go back 80 and 100 years to point to controversies or hoaxes (piltdown man, Nebraska man, etc) that existed in the past, and completely ignore that science has long ago fixed its mistakes, I have no doubt they’ll do exactly the same with H. floresiensis.

It’s really sad to me. At it’s highest levels, it’s incredibly dishonest — which is something that creationist leaders should know better than. For the most part though, it’s simply a matter of ignorance. Many people don’t understand how science works. They don’t understand that the controversy is a good thing, not a bad thing.

This debate on how exactly to classify H. floresiensis is a great teaching moment for those willing to learn. We should all sit back and be content to see what happens. Whatever direction it takes, the answers, as well as the process, will lead us closer to the truth.

A study reported by National Geographic News places the U.S. near the very end of a shameful list.

Yes, only Turkey rejects evolution more than the United States.

The reasons are what you’d expect — religion — but even I was surprised by the low percentage. Only 14% of U.S. adults thought that evolution was “definitely true.” Oh, I could rant and rave about the way evolution is a theory with every bit as much footing as our other theories in science. I could point out that science seeks truth with a lower case t, not ultimate meaning. I could point out the utility of science, and that the 86% of U.S. evolution rejectors already turn to evolution when they seek medical care, and that in our lifetimes, our knowledge of evolution and its application to medicine will increasingly deepen. Indeed, the article makes this point for me.

Third, the study found that adults with some understanding of genetics are more likely to have a positive attitude toward evolution.

I could do all these things, but as they say, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.

National Geographic also offers a great solution to this problem. An excellent article by David Quammen titled Was Darwin Wrong? which appeared in the print edition of the November 2004 magazine. (Alas, the online version lacks the pretty pictures.)

I also offer my own solution. It’s meager, and perhaps a little incomplete. (I could add more to it while condensing it some to make it tighter). But I like to think it’s not bad. My old article on the basics of evolution. Though I’m but a humble grad student, the U.S. would do well to read it. At least 86 percent of them would.