Dinosaurs May Have Been a Fluffy Lot

Dinosaurs May Have Been a Fluffy Lot
(Times Online)

Gareth Dyke, a paleontologist of University College Dublin, will tell the BA Festival of Science being held in the city that most such creatures were coated with delicate feathery plumage that could even have been multi-colored. Fossil evidence that such dinosaurs were feathered is now “irrefutable.”

[…]

The feathered finds include an early tyrannosaur, a likely ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex, two small flying dinosaurs and five other predators. Feathers are thought to have evolved first to keep dinosaurs warm and only later as an aid to flight.

Being Poor

Being Poor
(John Scalzi)

Being poor is knowing how hard it is to stop being poor.

Being poor is seeing how few options you have.

Being poor is running in place.

Being poor is people wondering why you didn’t leave.

Being poor is always having to say you’re sorry. Being poor is to be pushed out from a bus and ridiculed because you didn’t have enough for the fare, your supposed stop was past, and you thought the conductor wouldn’t notice. OK, that isn’t being poor, that’s just being out of pocket money. I am not trivializing, just trying to empathize. I am a spoilt sonofabitch and not qualified to opine.

The comment thread makes for compelling reading.

2005’s Top Toy

It Sees, it Hears and it’s Tipped as 2005’s Top Toy
(The Guardian)

He’s also the first robot who will sit down and watch TV with you. Because he’s sensitive to colors, he likes The Simpsons because he likes blue primaries such as Marge Simpson’s hair.

Soon, it’ll appreciate Futurama for its robot wit.

Joke is on Religion

Joke is on Religion as Christians Laugh at Themselves
(Times Online)

Simon Jenkins, the editor of ShipofFools, said: “There is a lot of talk about religious offence but not enough specific discussion on the boundaries. Ridiculing some religious beliefs, criticizing absurd religious practices and offending religious people was a way of life for Old Testament prophets. It’s not a freedom so much as a responsibility.”

The Jesus joke at the end was my favorite during last Christmas. It went down well with a few Born Again folk too.

Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are

Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are
(The Guardian)

One—and some serious planetary scientists and astronomers back this theory—is that we really could be alone: that life itself is rare and intelligent life probably confined to one planet. Not so, say others: the raw materials for life as we know it are being manufactured by exploding stars and carried by icy comets all over the solar system and—since the Copernican principle says there is nothing special about the Earth—by extension, everywhere. Which brings us back to Fermi. Where is everyone? Life must be common, even if communities are light years apart.

Life may indeed be common elsewhere, but I’d reckon sentience—and by extension, technology—would be an extremely rare occurrence. Exceedingly, exceptionally rare. You don’t find remnants of troodontid architecture or deinonychus nuclear installations, and their ilk had hundreds of millions of years to play around. It’s possible something might turn up, but that’s groundless speculation on my part (dino discotheque remains, not prime numbers from space). Humans got lucky. Or maybe it’s just the monolith. In any case, despite the seeming odds, it doesn’t hurt to listen to the great beyond.

Previously …

One Side Can Be Wrong

One Side Can Be Wrong
Dawkins & Coyne (The Guardian)

There is no evidence in favor of intelligent design: only alleged gaps in the completeness of the evolutionary account, coupled with the “default” fallacy we have identified. And, while it is inevitably true that there are incompletenesses in evolutionary science, the positive evidence for the fact of evolution is truly massive, made up of hundreds of thousands of mutually corroborating observations. These come from areas such as geology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, ethology, biogeography, embryology and—increasingly nowadays—molecular genetics.

There are some genuine “arguments worth having” mentioned at the end.

I know I’m late; I’m catching up.

The Revised Birthday Suit

The Revised Birthday Suit
(New York Times)

“For centuries, humans have equated hairiness with beasts and hairlessness with beauty and femininity,” said Nancy Etcoff, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School who is the author of Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty. “There’s also an erotic, sexual component to hairlessness because your skin is more sensitive when it’s more exposed. Women today are emulating porn stars who have no pubic hair, and I think men like it.”

Speak for yourself, woman!