Author: Josh Witten

http://www.thefinchandpea.com

Legitimate anxiety

I’m not even going to pretend that you care about my opinion on the Rebecca Watson/Elevator Guy/Stef McGraw debacle. If you feel that Rebecca did not have a right to feel uncomfortable or speak out about it, then you should go read Greg Laden and John Rennie, while I weep for your soul.

I have been particularly troubled by the suggestion that female anxiety over being in an elevator alone with a strange man late at night is of a piece with the anxiety of a white person who finds themselves at an urban bus stop surrounded by black people and then approached by one. The suggestion is that the anxiety felt is the product of negative stereotypes. J. Earl Davis makes some good points in his article on this issue, but this comparison is not one of them. All analogies eventually break down. This one does not even get out of the starting gate. Continue reading “Legitimate anxiety”

Funny in 1986

This is the first panel of the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip published on 7 July 1986:

What do you think the odds are that this would have made it into the papers in 2011? And, if it did, can you imagine the letters to the editor?

Giant swarming schools of squid cause zombie apocalypse

I hope this will help. I have one thing left to do at work today and I cannot get to it until I vent about this headline from boingboing:

Giant schools of swarming squid surround fish photographer

I guarantee that William Strunk, Jr.’s zombie is crawling out of its grave right now in pursuit of Xeni Jardin‘s BRAAAAIIINNNSSSS!*

Just to make me happy (and delay the zombie apocalypse), let’s get rid of the words that are strongly implied by other words in this title. Continue reading “Giant swarming schools of squid cause zombie apocalypse”

Let’s talk it out

I can understand why some people don’t want to have public and detailed discussion about community standards about the appropriateness of an incident, rather than just gossip about it. They wind up looking like total assholes.

Raptorex debate continues

In a previous post about Raptorex kriegsteini I expounded upon Jack Horner’s suggestion that Raptorex is not an example of the Tyranosaur body pattern evolving before gigantic size. Now, Horner and colleagues have published the data behind their critiques in PLoS One:

The recently described small-bodied tyrannosaurid Raptorex kreigsteini is exceptional as its discovery proposes that many of the distinctive anatomical traits of derived tyrannosaurids were acquired in the Early Cretaceous, before the evolution of large body size. . .These findings are consistent with the original sale description of LH PV18 as a juvenile Tarbosaurus from the Upper Cretaceous of Mongolia. Consequently, we suggest that there is currently no evidence to support the conclusion that tyrannosaurid skeletal design first evolved in the Early Cretaceous at small body size.

Fowler DW, Woodward HN, Freedman EA, Larson PL, Horner JR, 2011 Reanalysis of “Raptorex kriegsteini”: A Juvenile Tyrannosaurid Dinosaur from Mongolia. PLoS ONE 6(6): e21376. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0021376