So, I’ve decided to try Twitter.

Why? Because a few people have been banging on about it. Stephen Fry is a heavy user, Charlie Brooker uses, and talks about it in his latest column, the Skepchicks are doing it, and VJack over at Atheist Revolution has talked about it as being a way to interact with other bloggers and bring traffic to your own blog (I know, I should post more if I’m going to worry about that!).

So I’ve signed up for a twitter account. If you look carefully, you’ll see I’ve embedded an RSS feed of my twitter updates in the sidebar to the right. So you can follow me here, or become a ‘follower’ on twitter itself. I’ve had to call myself ‘artificialhab’, as it won’t give me enough characters for my full title!

I’m trying twhirl as a desktop client, and twibble on my mobile phone. Apart from the lack of cross-platform synchronisation (oh Newsgator, how you have spoiled me) these seem to be fine

I’m am still unsure what the point is – I’ll let you know if I figure it out.

As usual, I will probably tire of it at some point…

I have a good excuse for not blogging this week: there was strange powdery white stuff falling out of the sky!

I awoke on Monday morning, to be greeted with this:

I went into shock and have barely been able to function all week: Just like the whole of the rest of Britain.

Airports closed, public transport ground to a halt (including parts of the London Underground – no, don’t ask me), schools closed, shops (if they opened at all) all closed early, and everyone, it seemed, just had to leave work early in order to get home (I received an hilarious email from facilities staff saying that the canteen was closed due to the adverse weather)……. it was (still is, in some parts) chaos. I hear that we have now run out of salt for gritting the roads.

I could do little more than huddle in a corner, sobbing, until the strange white stuff went away. There’ll probably be more. I don’t know if I’ll be able to cope.

I hear that there are countries where this kind of thing happens for long periods of time. I don’t understand how they can possibly have a functioning society.

No doubt many of you will be familiar with the atheist bus ads around Britain and the fuss kicked up by a few whining Christians.

Let’s not forget that they were a response to religious bus ads giving links to sites which bang on about eternal torment for non-believers.

Well, now they’ve started responding with ads of their own, specifically responding to the atheist bus campaign. These bus ads will be gracing the streets of London:

Main observation: they’re rubbish. Plus the first one is insulting (I know, it’s a quote from their special book, but that doesn’t make it fine)

Then there’s the ‘Jesus bus’ campaign (I wonder if they’d appreciate my suggestion that they should call it the ‘Jebus campaign’).

Urgh.

Check out the ‘Atheists’ page on their website. It’s brilliant. Actually the whole site is a comedy goldmine.

By getting a large number of people to back up an argument, one can convince themselves that what they are doing is right.

Well, I couldn’t agree with you more…..wait…..you were talking about us, weren’t you? There goes another irony meter. Also:

The person that started this organisation does not believe in atheists.

Er, wtf?

Their original suggestion for bus ads was: “There probably is a god. Now stop worrying and love each other”.

There seems to be a serious omission from these ads.

Fixed it for them.

The atheist ads were reported to the Advertising Standards Agency by some Christians, including professional idiot Stephen Green. The ASA ruled in favour of the ads. I wonder what the ASA will make of ‘there definitely is a god’ and ‘the fool hath said in his heart there is no god’. Hmmmm.

I also have to wonder if non-religious bus drivers will be allowed to opt out of doing their jobs (presumably not).

Ah, the fetid stench of religious hypocrisy.

Finally, I have to wonder if this escalation in the bus wars means it’s time to roll out my suggested slogan: “There’s no god. Now stop wasting everyone’s time with your superstitious bullshit”.

UPDATE: got this link through twitter from Tim Minchin, who was passing it on from Ben Goldacre. It allows you to generate your own bus slogans. Endless fun.

From the journals:

Welcome to the first Weekly Science Roundup. These regular posts will consist of quick summaries of interesting papers, articles, and blog posts which I encounter during the preceding week (sometimes they may have been published earlier). The number of items that I mention will vary, and there will be an obvious bias towards biology (especially marine ecology), but I will try to keep things broad!

Hopefully, these should appear on a weekly basis (!) and initially I’ll try and post each edition on Sunday.

Male chimpanzees form enduring social bonds

A ten year study of a large group of chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, Uganda, has found that male chimpanzees form enduring social relationships which are not consistent with some recent suggestions that primates in general only form short-term bonds to serve their immediate needs. Some pairs of males showed strong social bonds, spending above average amounts of time together over periods of several years, and such pairs often showed a greater degree of equality in their grooming behaviour. These interactions were affected by kinship; males who shared a genetic mother formed longer lasting and more equitable bonds. However, unrelated males still formed strong bonds, with individual males typically having at least one long-lived association, some of which lasted the entire length of the study period.

J. C. Mitani, Male chimpanzees form enduring and equitable social bonds, Animal Behaviour (2009), DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2008.11.021

Harvesting for human usage drives rapid phenotypic change in wild populations

Many species are heavily harvested by humans for food or other purposes. This pressure results in a variety of negative effects, among which are changes in morphological traits (such as size), and life history traits (such as age/size at first reproduction). On average individuals in a population become smaller and breed earlier as the larger and later reproducing individuals are consistently removed from the environment in large numbers. Since larger, later maturing individuals often have greater reproductive success over their lifetimes, this exacerbates ongoing declines in population size. An analysis of data on these trait changes in several exploited populations has compared them with those occurring in populations affected by natural perturbations (such as Galapagos finches hit by droughts) and found that changes driven by human exploitation are greater in extent, and – critically – occurring over much shorter timescales.

C. T. Darimont, S. M. Carlson, M. T. Kinnison, P. C. Paquet, T. E. Reimchen and C. C. Wilmers, Human predators outpace other agents of trait change in the wild, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2009), doi: 10.1073/pnas.0809235106

Camouflage requires corresponding behaviour in order to be truly effective

While it might seem a trivial observation that camouflage is only really effective when you keep still, there is little rigorous data on the association between crypsis and behaviour – and how the interaction between these two factors affects the risk of predation. Experiments involving three-spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus) feeding on insect larvae, verified that the effectiveness of cryptic colouration was dependent upon how much the prey moved around. Motionless and cryptic prey were seldom eaten – while moving about rendered their camouflage ineffective (in comparison motion had little, if any, effect on how likely non-camouflaged prey were to be eaten). Cryptic colouration is a common anti-predator defence – but is only really effective in conjunction with suitable behaviour, indicating that such behaviour must co-evolve with the morphological adaptations.

C. C. Ioannou and J. Krause, Interactions between background matching and motion during visual detection can explain why cryptic animals keep still, Biology Letters (2009), doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2008.0758

From the blogosphere:

Hold the front page: Tree of life not an actual tree

New Scientist provoked the ire of several science bloggers this week, with the front page declaring “Darwin was wrong”. This was accompanied by an article explaining why the ‘Tree of Life’ analogy is flawed in several respects. Who knew? PZ Myers of Pharyngula was not impressed, Larry Moran at the Sandwalk blog went into a bit more detail about his problems with the headline, and Jason Rosenhouse of EvolutionBlog was fairly scathing in his assessment of the content of the article – “the article has only the yawn-worthy old-news that horizontal gene transfer among single-celled organisms means that the metaphor of a tree of life must be modified”.

Hello again all you aspiring underwater chefs!

Don’t you just love the delicious taste of cuttlefish? Mmmm. Don’t know about you, but for me that nasty ink really ruins the soft, tasty flesh – and let’s not even get started on the bone. Yuck!

Well folks, today I’m going to show you a quick an easy way of preparing a cuttlefish, for a fast and nutritious snack. And you won’t need any cooking equipment…. or even any functional arms. All you need is a sturdy snout.

First you’re going to need to get hold of a nice juicy cuttle. I recommend the Spencer Gulf, off South Australia, where they come together in huge numbers for a bit of you-know-what, every year from May to August. You should have no trouble seeking out a slightly *ahem* worn out individual. First you need to get them out onto open sand – I’m sure you can all manage that part! Next you need to dispatch your lunch as quickly as possible. Position yourself above the cuttle, pointing your body vertically down. Now, there’s a bit of a knack to this next part, so you might need to practice, but what you need to do is drive yourself down, hard, using a tail beat, and add a bit of a twist. This kills them instantly.

Now your meal isn’t trying to get away, you need to prepare it. Presentation is everything! First: that ink. Lift the cuttle up into the water column and then beat it with your snout – this forces the ink out. Repeat until there’s not so much ink coming out, and now you’re ready to deal with the bone.

Bring your cleaned cephalopod back down to the sea bed and place it on its back. Push it along the sand….and…hey presto! Rubbing it on the seabed strips the skin off the back and that annoying bone just pops out.

After that you’re left with a wholesome and tasty snack. Prepared in next to no time!

Below is our special cut-out-and-keep quick reference card, so you don’t forget how to prep your cuttle.

Happy Hunting!

6 easy steps to a tasty snack!

Julian Finn, Tom Tregenza, Mark Norman (2009). Preparing the Perfect Cuttlefish Meal: Complex Prey Handling by Dolphins PLoS ONE, 4 (1) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0004217

Since I recently posted about my intentions to blog ‘better’ in 2009, you may be wondering about why I haven’t posted since then…. actually, this time I have an excuse.

I’ve not had time. Seriously. As soon as we got into 2009 I had barely enough time to get my shit together before heading up to Scotland to process some of my field samples. While I’m at the lab I don’t have internet access, except for checking emails on my phone. I can use my phone and laptop together to get online properly, but this is where the time factor has come in – this is only the second time in over a week that I’ve been able to get online long enough to be able to post something.

I came up last Tuesday night, intending to get ahead on my sample preparation so I wasn’t rushed off my feet during this week. There were a couple of nagging issues with my car (nothing serious, but I didn’t want to put another 1000 miles on the clock before sorting them out) so I borrowed my dad’s car.

My dad’s car broke on the way up.

Luckily it was able to limp the rest of the way, and I made it up here OK. But it meant that I wasted much of the three days I had set aside for sample prep, sorting out the car (as an aside, if you’re ever stuck with a broken SAAB in the Glasgow area, I can recommend Schoneville SAAB – they sorted me out quickly, efficiently and not too expensively, all things considered). The lab isn’t open on weekends, so I’ve spent every day this week working like hell to keep ahead of the mass spectrometer and its prodigious appetite for my samples. I’ve been in for more than 12 hours a day, every day. Getting back, hungry and knackered, to my accommodation after 9 o’clock every night is not conducive to blogging. I think I’ve won, now – I have all the samples I need for the rest of my time here sorted out, so I can get on the internet and try and catch up with things, while the mass spectrometer hums away contentedly behind me, turning my bits of ground up crab into data. I might even get out of here before 1800 today!

Sadly my first couple of ‘weekly science roundups’ for 2009 have been the major casualties, I’ll start those properly at the end of next week, once I’m back in Southampton and all is back to normal (if you can call any aspects of my situation ‘normal’). I should be driving back down this weekend, probably on Sunday. Musical entertainments for the drive home are provided by John Williams (the film composer, not the classical guitarist or the marine biologist from my school) – I purchased the soundtracks to all four Indiana Jones films in Glasgow this weekend, which should provide sufficient distraction to prevent me from becoming enraged by tuning in to BBC Radio 4 (every time I switch that station on some idiot starts pissing me off, or so it seems). With a nice new clutch on my dad’s car, the trip should be wonderful. Unless it pisses it down with rain or snows in my face (both are possible).

Happy new year, everyone!

Many people choose this time of year to come up with their own ‘New Year’s Resolutions’ – plans for how to improve their life over the coming year. Most of these plans end up being forgotten and ignored after a few weeks. It’s going to be an interesting year (basically, I need to finish my PhD) and I won’t bore you with my personal plans, but I have some specific intensions with regard to this blog.

Over the past year my posting has been pretty sporadic, and while I keep resolving to post more consistently, it never seems to happen. The start of a new year, arbitrary as it might seem, represents as good a time as any to try to get organised, and take this whole thing a bit more seriously.

Firstly I’m going to try and get back to my original intentions and post more details on artificial habitats, in order to provide a background to the biology of artificial habitats. This will also help me get my thought in order for writing my thesis. But I also want to introduce a few new ‘features’.

Weekly Science roundups: From this point on, I intend to post short weekly roundups – basically mentioning two or three papers that have come to my attention over the preceding week. The nature of the reading that I do means that there will be a heavy bias towards biology (and marine biology in particular), but this is no bad thing in my view. I won’t attempt detailed commentary of analysis of the papers, just brief reports on what the articles are about.

That’s not to say that I won’t continue to post more detailed discussions on papers which really catch my interest, and I’m aiming to try to do between two and three of these per month – but not at any defined intervals.

Book reviews: I’m also going to post occasional book reviews, as I progress thought the stack of books which is accumulating on top of my bookcase. These will comprise a mix of mainly scientific non-fiction and science fiction, but there will be exceptions.

I’m going to try and publish a series of essays which I’m calling Rules of Engagement – a series of loosely linked discussions of my thoughts on approaches to discussion (with particular reference to discussions about religion).

And yes, there will still be rants and ravings.

Let’s see how well I get on with turning these intentions into realities!

Hope you all have a good year.

I don’t normally do this kind of thing, but everyone else seems to be doing it, and it’ll take little effort, so here goes. The Friendly Atheist got it started back during the week. Go there if you’re not already familiar with the rules.

1. Participated in the Blasphemy Challenge.
2. Met at least one of the “Four Horsemen” (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris) in person. – Dawkins was at the 8 Lessons and Carols show, but I couldn’t say I actually met him.
3. Created an atheist blog. – er, duh.
   
4. Used the Flying Spaghetti Monster in a religious debate with someone. – I used it to parody their arguments. They didn’t see the irony.
   
5. Gotten offended when someone called you an agnostic.
6. Been unable to watch Growing Pains reruns because of Kirk Cameron.
7. Own more Bibles than most Christians you know.
8. Have at least one Bible with your personal annotations regarding contradictions, disturbing parts, etc.
9. Have come out as an atheist to your family. – not a problem at all, although my mum was surprised for some bizarre reason when I joined an atheist group, mainly because I think she misunderstood what an atheist is. I set her straight. Anyway, if they’d had a problem with it, I would have been angry and disappointed and probably would have given them a hard time.
   
10. Attended a campus or off-campus atheist gathering.
    
11. Are a member of an organized atheist/Humanist/etc. organization. – several. The NSS, the Rationalist Association, The AHS (a new national group for non-religious student societies), and of course the Southampton University Atheist Society
    
12. Had a Humanist wedding ceremony.
13. Donated money to an atheist organization.
    
14. Have a bookshelf dedicated solely to Richard Dawkins. – come on, that would be a pretty small bookshelf, he hasn’t written that many books.
15. Lost the friendship of someone you know because of your non-theism.
16. Tried to argue or have a discussion with someone who stopped you on the street to proselytize.
17. Had to hide your atheist beliefs on a first date because you didn’t want to scare him/her away. – date?
    
18. Own a stockpile of atheist paraphernalia (bumper stickers, buttons, shirts, etc).
    
19. Attended a protest that involved religion.
20. Attended an atheist conference. – kind of, I attended a meeting of the founding societies of the AHS, which was, technically, a conference
    
21. Subscribe to Pat Condell’s YouTube channel.
22. Started an atheist group in your area or school.
23. Successfully “de-converted” someone to atheism.
24. Have already made plans to donate your body to science after you die.
25. Told someone you’re an atheist only because you wanted to see the person’s reaction.
26. Had to think twice before screaming “Oh God!” during sex. Or you said something else in its place. – sex?
27. Lost a job because of your atheism. – job?
28. Formed a bond with someone specifically because of your mutual atheism (meeting this person at a local gathering or conference doesn’t count). – I guess all the friends I have made through the university atheist society don’t count, then, and presumably neither does living in a fully godless house.
29. Have crossed “In God We Trust” off of — or put a pro-church-state-separation stamp on — dollar bills.
30. Refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. – not really relevant in the UK!
31. Said “Gesundheit!” (or nothing at all) after someone sneezed because you didn’t want to say “Bless you!” – also have to work hard not to swear at people who say ‘bless you’ when I sneeze
    
32. Have ever chosen not to clasp your hands together out of fear someone might think you’re praying.
33. Have turned on Christian TV because you needed something entertaining to watch. – and promptly regretted it
    
34. Are a 2^nd or 3^rd (or more) generation atheist. – I think so, though they’d probably avoid the label. Which probably means they don’t count.
    
35. Have “atheism” listed on your Facebook or dating profile — and not a euphemistic variant. – I tend to add an appropriate adjective which I regularly change. Something like ‘arrogant’, ‘intolerant’,’ angry’. Right now I am a ‘Swashbuckling Atheist’ in honour of Alister McGrath describing Richard Dawkins as having a ’swashbuckling’ style.
36. Attended an atheist’s funeral (i.e. a non-religious service).
    
37. Subscribe to an freethought magazine (e.g. Free Inquiry, Sceptic) – New Humanist, though at times I’m unsure if freethought is the right term
    
38. Have been interviewed by a reporter because of your atheism.
39. Written a letter-to-the-editor about an issue related to your non-belief in God.
    
40. Gave a friend or acquaintance a New Atheist book as a gift.
41. Wear pro-atheist clothing in public.
    
42. Have invited Mormons/Jehovah’s Witnesses into your house specifically because you wanted to argue with them. – no, mainly I want them to fuck off
43. Have been physically threatened (or beaten up) because you didn’t believe in God.
44. Receive Google Alerts on “atheism” (or variants).
45. Received fewer Christmas presents than expected because people assumed you didn’t celebrate it.
46. Visited The Creation Museum or saw Ben Stein’s Expelled just so you could keep tabs on the “enemy.” – I have been to the ‘Genesis Expo’, the UK’s hilariously low-budget and crappy answer to the Creation Museum (though it’s actually much older than the shiny American exhibit), and I chose to count that.
    
47. Refuse to tell anyone what your “sign” is… because it doesn’t matter at all.
48. Are on a mailing list for a Christian organization just so you can see what they’re up to… – no, not that that prevents them putting crap through the door. Also, the previous occupants of my house were nuns (what with it being an ex-convent and everything), and we’re constantly bombarded with pro-life bullshit.
49. Have kept your eyes open while you watched others around you pray.
    
50. Avoid even Unitarian churches because they’re too close to religion for you.
    

Well, that’s 19, which is rubbish. Stupid list, anyway.

Yesterday (Thursday 18^th) was my birthday. What better way to celebrate than attending a godless Christmas show in London (along with a visit to the Natural History Museum and over 4 hours of walking around London)!

Comedian Robin Ince was inspired by an encounter with the delightful Stephen Green, who accused him of hating Christmas or somesuch, to organise a special Christmas show for non-religious people to come together in celebration of rationality, science…. and just for a good old laugh. The list of participating comedians, scientists and musicians was impressive. He called the show ‘9 Lessons and Carols For Godless People’ – referring to a traditional Christian service called (have you guessed yet?) ‘Nine Lessons and Carols’.

Given the line-up, it sounded like it was not an event to be missed, but tickets sold out fast….. very fast. I – in spite of my lack of a sufficiently objective basis for my morality – had decided to see if other people wanted tickets so I could book a whole bunch of them. Alas, this resulted in my missing the chance to get tickets for myself.

However, the unprecedented demand prompted them to put on another show, the night before, this time calling it ‘8 Lessons and Carols for Godless People’, and this time I was ready, as was one of my housemates. In the end we needn’t have panicked, as they put on a third show, on this coming Sunday, in a much larger venue, the Hammersmith Apollo. Details continue below the fold, just on the off-chance that you’re going to the Sunday showing and don’t want know too much about what you’ve got in store!

After an extended hiatus in my blogging, I’m back. Although I have written words to that effect before.

So why the break? In all honesty, I don’t have a good justification for the lack of posting over the last three months. It hasn’t just been the blogging that’s suffered; I haven’t visited a lot of my regular internet haunts for almost as long. I couldn’t really claim to be too busy, I guess I just haven’t had the motivation. In addition, I began to get pretty bored of the whole religion argument, and some of the accompanying discussions. It’s not that my views had changed, I just became fed up of all the lame arguments and infuriating events – and strangest of all they were failing to provoke the customary anger, just a sense of numbing inevitability.

That’s over. The anger is creeping back, essentially over the last couple of days, hence the return. I’ll get to why in a subsequent post.

So what have I been up to?