A Rube Goldberg machine, the “Does-nothing-o-matic.”

Male antelopes get so harrassed for sex they eventually just want to curl up with a good book.

Females are fertile for a single day only. The topi antelope (Damaliscus lunatus jimela) come together once a year, for just over a month to mate.

Dr Bro-Jorgensen said: “It is not uncommon to see males collapsing with exhaustion as the demands of the females get too much for them.”

He observed that each female would mate, on average, with four males, while some reached 12 different partners. And each individual would be mated with approximately 11 times, although one pair was observed together on 36 occasions.

Guerrilla dadaist urban planners at work. More like this please.

Cute video: “Genetically Modified World.”

But I thought all new technology was awesome and should be rushed to market or it would stifle innovation. Or something.

The jellyfish appear to be gaining on us.

…which is also the home of their two children. As noted here.

It was around that same time in early summer that the owner of the lawn service company we had used for some time was walking around the house, surveying the garden. By chance, he noticed something very strange. I was writing at my desk, on our lower level when John knocked on the glass door and gestured at me to come out on the deck. I stepped outside and looked up to where he was pointing. Several of the enormous bolts that held the upper deck to the side of the house were inexplicably missing. It was not as if they had fallen out: there were none on the ground. Our upper deck is probably fifty feet above the ground and a collapse would be fatal. It didn’t make sense–we had built the deck the year before and used a reputable local firm that had done other projects for us. I called Joel, the owner of the firm, and asked him to come out. The next day he took a close look at the support beams and bolts and was as alarmed as John had been; he told us to stay off the decks until they were fixed. Joel was at a loss to explain the missing bolts; he trusted his workers and couldn’t imagine that they had forgotten to put in several large, important bolts. It was all unnerving. As the saying goes, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they aren’t out to get you.”

I find it easier to believe it was sabotage than to believe there’s no thugs in the Bush administration capable of such a thing.

Full disclosure: Allen had a chance meeting with Joe Wilson aboard an airplane and I am posting this photo without Allen’s permission.

More JFK Assassination: Peter Dale Scott on correspondences between the JFK assassination and 9/11. It’s an hour long and sort of arcane, but worth it for conspiracy nerds like me. Peter Dale Scott is tha bomb.

In honor of the anniversary of the JFK assassination, which I have missed by one day, I offer these links to JFK assassination researcher Jim Fetzer. Here is what you might call his homepage and this is a link to an excellent, important article he wrote called “Reasoning About Assassinations.”

I consider Jim Fetzer a friend since interviewing him about the JFK assassination for the Gonzo Science book - coincidentally the very same day that Paul Wellstone died - a somber and surreal bonding experience. I witnessed Fetzer correctly predicting there would be no black box on the plane. That counts: he made a testable prediction that bore fruit. Fetzer also helped us flesh out the first couple of “AREA 61″ UFO Conventions we did by agreeing to provide juicy conspiracy lectures that really added to the “X-Files” flavor we were looking for. Thank you Jim for all that you did for us - a true Gonzo Scientist.

Say what you will about Jim Fetzer. I certainly don’t believe everything he has to say. For instance we here at Gonzo Science are squishy about 9/11 conspiracy in general and various others. However, I think Fetzer is by and large spot-on about the JFK assassination, although I lack the technical knowledge to fairly evaluate all of what some of his experts are saying.

The thing that makes him matter though, and the reason why we interviewed him for the Gonzo Science book, is that he uses all the tools in the skeptics’ critical-thinking toolbox - his PhD is in History and Philosophy of Science for Chrissake. And yet he comes to conclusions at variance with skeptics who champion the same toolbox. Jim Fetzer is a highly-skilled critical thinker who concludes that JFK was victim of a conspiracy. He has marshalled scientific experts to argue the case. Yes he is controversial. But more than anyone else in the JFK field, his work shows that the conspiracy crowd can lay claim to some genuine scientific support and scientific reasoning - i.e. the conspiracy crowd is not just a bunch of idiots.

The relevance to the Gonzo Science project in general is that Jim Fetzer’s JFK work specifically mirrors the case for many theories outside the scientific mainstream. Fetzer is one of many scientific thinkers who uses the tools of science to come to the opposite conclusion of many scientists. We see it over and over: Halton Arp vs. Big Astronomy, Brian Goodwin vs. Richard Dawkins in biology, the EPA vs. itself… This is one of our central concerns here: how to resolve the truth in a science vs science situation. The gonzo answer is to do your own research.

According to this analysis of various sources, we are screwed. This gets a ‘conspiracy’ tag on account of various hijinks like the hijacking the military by evangelical bigots and whackjobs, and then the inevitable consequences like that little incident where six nuclear warheads got mysteriously loaded onto a B-29. I am wearing a very messy pair of adult diapers right now.

UPDATE: About that B-29 … The “American Conservative” magazine is calling it the “Mystery of Minot” - turns out there’s a cluster of suicides and fatal automobile accidents among airmen of that unit. Hm.

Evel Knievel night at Gonzo Science, pt 4.

Evel Knievel night at Gonzo Science pt. 3

Evel Knievel night at Gonzo Science pt.2

It’s Evel Knievel night here at Gonzo Science. Thank you Allen for finding this stuff.

Holy shit, this is cool - NASA animation of catastrophic space collision. I am watching this over and over.

They’ve found the fossilized claw of an 8-foot sea scorpion.

The size of the beast suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were much larger in the past than previously thought, the team says.

Curious how this seems to support the expanding earth hypothesis, since a smaller prehistoric earth would have less gravity and enable gigantism. Hm.

Allen found this. These archers could shoot the pecker off a billygoat at 100 yards.

Of course in the comic book world, you’d have to be able to shoot this good while running, jumping, flipping and dodging bullets.

Science Guys should maybe know not to marry someone after only three months of dating. Luckily, the wedding certificate was returned as invalid. That’s when it ended, until he caught her one night, dressed in black, spraying a toxic solvent on the food growing in his backyard garden.

Long may strident hypocrisy reign. This story’s particularly juicy because some ex-members describe the place as a cult.

The archbishop, his brother and the church are being sued by former church employee Mona Brewer, who says Earl Paulk manipulated her into an affair from 1989 to 2003 by telling her it was her only path to salvation. Earl Paulk admitted to the affair in front of the church last January.

In a 2006 deposition stemming from the lawsuit, the archbishop said under oath that the only woman he had ever had sex with outside of his marriage was Brewer. But the paternity test said otherwise. 

Awesome Charismatic megachurch goodness! I love this shit so much I am re-changing the “Whackjobs” category back to “Religious Whackjobs.” Also seems to deserve the “Conspiracies” category since the archbishop has lied under oath to protect the fact that he’d slept with his brother’s wife - and I can only imagine she didn’t pipe up and correct the record.

It’s the hypocrisy.

Feminists 1; Chauvinists 0.

For that special weirdo in your life.

Amazon.

Barnes & Noble.

Also, if you know anyone who might like this rock n’ roll, you can buy the CD here.

Dinosaur bone lies on museum shelf, presumably in the basement somewhere, for 113 years. Student stumbles across it and realizes it represents a whole new family of dinosaurs. Imagine what a Manhattan Project of world museum basement excavation could uncover.

As an aside I will mention that I got this idea from a book by Immanuel Velikovsky, who got a few things right…

How many of these damn studies do we need?

Hilarious.

Amazing. The comet in the sky right now has expanded its head so dramatically with ejected dust that it rivals the sun in size. This makes it the current holder of the title Largest Object in the Solar System (the sun is still way more massive). All from a rock a couple miles across. Still no tail to speak of yet either.

Take note if you click through and read the article: the astronomers are crapping their pants.

A little Filipino knife fighting: the hideous geometry of being filleted alive like a fish.

Link.

I should also mention that I have spoken with two regional commercial beekeepers, neither of whom have suffered Colony Collapse Disorder, but both of whom are struggling with the health of their bees. When asked about the cause of their bees’ declining health, one of them says she’s been fighting this losing battle for several years, and that the mites are still an issue, but she also feels it’s several other unidentified factors. Her bees failed to make almost any honey this season. She said the drought conditions up here didn’t help, but that it was really dry 10 years ago and there was plenty of honey that year, so … (shrug).
The other beekeeper felt it had more to do with a new class of pesticides that interferes with insects’ ability to return home. That and beekeepers working their bees harder and harder - ie driving them all over hell and yon to pollinate crops, which takes its toll. His bees are definitely feeling the hurt but they’re still making enough honey to sell.

So sick of this.

You can’t make this stuff up:

Females hold their eggs in their mouths and incubate them there after fertilisation – a behaviour that is thought to have evolved to protect the eggs from predators.

As soon as a female has spawned her eggs, she collects them up in her mouth. Normally, sperm released into the water by a male nearby will then fertilise the eggs.

But males of certain cichlid species in east Africa have evolved a way to increase the odds that females take up their sperm. Oval yellow markings resembling the eggs are found on the anal or pelvic fins. When a female approaches the male, she thinks she sees an egg on its fin, so tries to vacuum it up in her mouth – and get a mouthful of sperm from the canny male in the process.

And science has pinpointed the gene that makes the females more likely to do this. Write your own punchline.

well, from 1886. but this one was shot. looks kinda scary, like i’m not sure i would want it in my tent. picture here http://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/articles/2007/11/15/news/000monster.txt