I WANT A REVENGE

Man.

2010-10-29T05:50:00.002+01:00

I'm writing this at five in the morning, because I want to write it down while it's still fresh in my mind (and also because the chances of me going back to sleep for a while are nil).

I had a dream that I was at my parents' house. My sister was there, watching re-runs of The X-Files, and after a while, an episode came on that I recognised as my favourite (although in reality the programme I watched in the dream bore only a passing resemblance to my actual favourite episode). "Oh, you have to watch this one!" I said to my sister. "It's really scary."

So we sat and watched. It was scary; scarier than I remembered. A guy was being abducted by aliens, and they looked real, and the effects were superb. I watched the first ten minutes or so, then, as a break from watching this weirdly terrifying programme, got up and went out into the back room of the house, where I discovered my Mum also watching the same show on a smaller TV. Well, she used to love The X-Files, I remember. I ask her if she's enjoying it and she says she is.

I return to the living room to ask my sister the same question. She's gone. The TV is performing to an empty room. I go back out to the back room to ask my Mum where she might have gone, but my Mum is gone too. I run upstairs, but the house is empty. What the--

I wake up. I'm in bed in my flat. I lay in the dark feeling shaken up, both because of the frighteningly real X-Files episode my brain had decided to invent for me and the sudden disappearance of my family. My hot water bottle is still reassuringly warm, so it must still be the middle of the night sometime. I reflect that my flat does contain some odd noises sometimes - the boiler clanks, the fridge clicks, and so on. There is a quiet mechanical squeaking coming from somewhere, but I don't pay much attention to it.

There are subdued voices in the hallway outside; my neighbours are about. They're up late. And then somebody opens my door, the door that I'm normally careful to lock before I go to bed. Two or three people come in that I don't recognise and look around at the darkened room in confusion. Somebody spots me in bed and says in a hushed voice, "guys! We've got the wrong room!" The light from the hallway illuminating the embarrassment on their faces at their faux pas, the strangers, who I presume to be friends of my neighbours, retreat from the room to leave me in peace.

I get out of bed. Bloody neighbours. They haven't even shut the door properly behind them. I close it and bolt it, wondering how I managed to leave it unlocked. Normally the door locks itself, and then I take the extra measure of drawing the bolt across, because I don't like the idea of the landlord letting himself in if he feels like visiting when I'm having a lie-in. So the door is usually double-locked when I go to bed, and I don't know why it's currently not. I decide that I need a cup of tea and meander round the corner into the kitchen. And freeze.

The kitchen windows are wide open.

They were locked tight when I went to bed. From the inside. I know for a fact that I haven't opened them for at least a week. Somebody has somehow been in my flat and opened my doors and windows. Have... have I been burgled, or something? I look around. Oh, shit. The laptop is gone. The DVD player is gone. The George Foreman grill is gone. There are conspicuous spaces on desks and counter-tops where things should have been. Maaaaaan. I do not need this.

Wait a second.

The laptop is there - it has been pushed neatly under the TV stand. I'm fairly sure I don't remember doing that. I look around. The DVD player is in its box, under the bed. The George Foreman is on top of a kitchen cupboard. What is going on? Has somebody broken in just to tidy all my valuables away? I walk around to the other room to see if anything else has been taken or rearranged, and discover the source of the mechanical squeaking - it's just the hamsters, running around in their wheel. To be fair, I completely forgot I had hamsters; they came with the flat (my landlord had assured me that they had enough food and so on in their cage to survive happily without my intervention for quite some time). They seem to be unperturbed by all the flat weirdness, insofar as you can perturb a hamster in the first place.

What am I talking about? I don't own any bloody hamsters--

I wake up. I'm in bed in my flat, thinking about alien abductions, disappearing family members, spring cleaning burglars and nonexistent pet rodents. My hot water bottle is still warm... and then I realise that I was able, in the last dream, to remember that the hot water bottle should have been warm, and feel that it was appropriately pleasant and reassuring. Ergo, the hot water bottle cannot be trusted as a measure of whether or not one is still dreaming. I've already had one dream-within-a-dream - I don't want any more. I don't want this to turn out like Inception.

I pinch myself. Ow. Okay. I'm awake.

I lay in the darkness reflecting that I've always been prone to weird second-order nightmares - by which I mean all of my scary dreams usually involve me watching something horrifying on TV or in a film. It's pretty rare that I personally be involved with any murderers, monsters and so on. It probably shows a lack of dream-time imagination, to be honest. But I've also always had an irrational fear of alien abductions, since I was a kid. It was never a monster under the bed or a witch in the wardrobe: I'd read so many UFO books that I'd made myself terribly afraid that one night they'd come for me, they'd paralyse me with their tractor beam and they'd take me away, and my parents would neither help nor believe me. I've almost totally outgrown it now, of course, and I find the whole idea pretty silly and unlikely. But when you've just woken up from a compound bad dream and are lying in the dark by yourself, it's all too easy to regress. And just as I'm lying here reassuring myself that I am definitely not in a dream this time... my windows suddenly, and without a sound, fill with light.

Shit.

Is this why I was dreaming about aliens? Are they here? Did I know? My rational brain fights to suppress the childish fear (it's probably one of my neighbours turning on the outside light and popping out for a ciggie in the garden). No, it can't be - I would have heard the back door open. There is nobody in the garden. Okay, so... it must be light from one of the other flats.

Upstairs, a toilet flushes. The light goes out.

You know what? I think I'll go and update my blog...

On The Subject Of Dinosaurs

2010-10-19T21:32:00.011+01:00

I recently finished re-reading Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park and The Lost World, for what must be the hojillionth time, and they, coupled with a recent visit to London's Natural History Museum, have prompted me to do a lot of thinking lately about one of my favourite subjects: dinosaurs.

The thing that bothers me is that I keep seeing the same dinosaurs pop up all the time. We know of over nine hundred different dinosaur species (assuming that most of them are proper seperate species and not us just getting confused), but say the word 'dinosaurs' to anybody and the first thing they think is "T.rex! Triceratops! Stegosaurus! Velociraptor! Diplodocus!" and so on. And that's all you see on TV, in movies, and in dinosaur books - the old favourites, the prehistoric celebrities. Nobody cared about velociraptors before Jurassic Park, and now they're everywhere, on Primeval, in Land Before Time 3, countless video games, yadda yadda yadda. The irony is that real-life raptors are nowhere near as exciting as the sexed-up JP versions anyway, but I'm not going to bang on about that (for once).

Dinosaurs are not storybook creatures or movie monsters. They are not just things that you shoot when you're playing Turok. They are the subject of real scientific study and classification, and what we know about them changes all the time. To pick some examples of dinosaurs from every kid's dinosaur book, we no longer think that triceratops looks like it does in the classic drawings - it turns out that what we thought was a seperate dinosaur, torosaurus, is actually just a grown-up triceratops. And brachiosaurus brancai, an animal known to every dino-loving child, has been found to be so different from the lesser-known brachiosaurus altithorax that we've had to reclassify it as 'giraffatitan brancai' (unfortunately, the Principle of Priority drawn up by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature states that the first recorded name ever given to a new species is the one that sticks, even one as stupid as that. Someone thump the man who thought up 'giraffatitan', please). The famous dinosaurs are the boring ones anyway. Honestly! Tyrannosaurus rex - which incidentally should always be shortened to 'T.rex' (full stop, lower-case 'r') and not 'T-Rex' - is not the greatest meat-eater that ever lived. Size estimates fluctuate, but both gigantosaurus and mapusaurus are thought to have been larger and meaner, and carcharodontosaurus was bigger as well (although it had a brain cavity half the size of a tyrannosaur's, so although it was huge, it can't have been hard to outsmart...). Stegosaurus is a little more interesting, because there's the puzzle of what the back plates were for, but... there are better mysteries than this with which we can entertain ourselves.

I love dinosaur mysteries - if we look to some of the lesser-known riddles, we can find some amazing things. For example, I would imagine most of my British readers will be familiar with the diplodocus skeleton in the lobby of the Natural History Museum, and rightly consider it massive, but if we believe the nineteenth-century paleontologist Edward Cope (which we should, as he has an amazing reputation and discovered a whopping fifty-six dinosaur species in his lifetime), it was completely dwarfed by a relative. Amphicoelias fragillimus is known from a single bone, one solitary vertebra which has since been lost, but which is known from Cope's notes and drawings to be insanely friggin' massive. This was an animal that would have been sixty metres long: a grown man would be face-to-face with the top of its ankles at best. And sixty metres, by the way, would make it twice the length of a blue whale. Can you imagine that? If they put that in the Museum lobby, the tail would probably trail halfway up the staircase. You could just about fit one in Canterbury Bus Station, but it wouldn't be able to turn around. It's ridiculous.

Then there's one of my personal favourites, therizinosaurus. Known only from a couple of limb bones and some claws and other odd bits, we don't know too much about it, but what we do know is pretty weird. It appears to be a much larger relative of alxasaurus and beipiaosaurus, which are already a bit odd, but the hand claws we've got are a metre long each. Just think about that a second. We've got some artist's impressions that must be about right, but they look... well, see for yourself. Weirder, it must have been a vegetarian, or at worst an insect-muncher, certainly not a carnivore - it's built all wrong. But what are the ridiculous Edward Scissorhands claws for? It just doesn't add up. I can only assume we're getting something fundamentally wrong, like with Gideon Mantell famously putting the iguanodon's thumb bone on its nose (incidentally, those of you who live in Kent or went to college with me may be interested to know that one of the earliest iguanodon skeletons ever found was dug out of a quarry in Maidstone in 1834, a fact celebrated by the addition of a very funky-looking iguanodon to the Borough of Maidstone's coat of arms). I guess we're not going to know, until (if) more evidence turns up.

There are plenty of other weird and fruity dinosaurs to be had. Take a look at masiakasaurus knopfleri, so named because the research team who found it happened to be Dire Straits fans. Look at its front teeth! Weeeeird. And we're finding more weirdies all the time - check out concavenator corcovatus, the discovery of which was published barely over a month ago. Any guesses what that thing on its back is for? Me neither.

The point I'm making is that I'm bored of bloody iguanodon, velociraptor, stegosaurus and co. They're not the only dinosaurs in the universe, and they're not the most interesting by any stretch. They're not the biggest, or the fastest, or the most crazy-looking. They're just the ones we found first, and they've got better PR. It gets to the point that if you read enough dinosaur books and watch enough films, you start to imagine that if you went back in time to the prehistoric era you'd see triceratopses (triceratopi?) on parade, and a diplodocus going past on a bicycle.

I'll shut up now.

You're Stink

2009-05-17T11:04:00.002+01:00

I love cryptozoologists. Whenever I feel the need to tear into somebody stupid, Google and Youtube provide cryptozoologists in droves. Internet, I love you. But what, you may ask, is a cryptozoologist? Cryptozoology, despite its name, is not so much a zoological science as an insult to all forms of it. You know those guys you see on American documentaries who are doing “important” “scientific” “research” to determine the existence of Bigfoot, modern-day dinosaurs, yetis et al? Those are cryptozoologists, and idiots.

I’ve spent the last hour amusing myself on the website of one American gentleman who, in addition to believing that dinosaurs have existed alongside man and that they persist in living to this day, also takes this to be a reinforcement of his staunch Biblical worldview that the theory of evolution is dead wrong. This is great – he’s like a two-for-one sale on idiots. He even tries to justify this with scientific proof, which is hilarious. I’ll throw you the link, but you won’t read it because it’s rather boring. Instead, I’m simply going to pull some of his more choice quotes out and respond to them.

“In 1953 Stanley Miller performed an experiment which rocked the world! He showed that passing a spark through a chosen mixture of gasses will form some amino acids, the building blocks of proteins which are the main ingredients of living cells. With no more basis than this, biology textbooks taught us that amino acids became concentrated in a primordial "ORGANIC SOUP" then linked together to form proteins, the principle ingredients of living cells. The proteins, it was claimed, got together with DNA to form cells. God was given no part in the creation of life.
Amino acids, however, will not "link together" to form proteins! Living cells are the only places in nature where proteins are made because they contain the information to put amino acids in the right order for each individual protein, and have tiny machines that link them together. No proteins ever form in nature outside of already living cells. Never!
As you read each piece of evidence, ask yourself, "Which view does this evidence support? Did life begin by itself in organic soup, or did God create life?”

The above passage is the opening argument of a three-page discourse titled ‘Evolution Destroyed’. Okay, first of all, even if the ‘evidence’ presented wasn’t ridiculous, this would still be one of the worst arguments against evolution I’ve ever heard, namely because the theory of evolution doesn’t have anything to do with the actual origin of life and is concerned with how existing species develop between generations. It doesn’t matter to the theory of evolution how life got started: all that’s required for it to be true is that a variety of animals do now exist. Look out of your window! Therefore the idea that this three-page rant ‘destroys evolution’ is ridiculous from the very first paragraph, but I’ll continue to investigate the writer’s total idiocy for my own amusement.

It amazes me that this revolutionary thinker believes that he is onto something by writing rebuttals to 1950’s science textbooks. Wake up, stupid! Amino acids will readily link together to form proteins, and since Miller’s early experiments, scientists have indeed managed to synthesise a whopping seventeen of the twenty necessary proteins in exactly the manner that you claim is impossible. His next point is that “the idea that RNA, rather than proteins, formed in primordial soup, is also false.” No, not necessarily. Evidently someone hasn’t told him about ribozymes, RNA molecules that – despite his insistence to the contrary – can actually catalyse the assembly of proteins. Hilariously, his argument then takes a bizarre turn with some bewildering logic, if I can even call it that. Starting with the idea that ‘the DNA of a bacterium contains as much information as a 1000 page book’, he then embarks on a peculiar linguistic crusade which seems to consist of saying that if DNA contains ‘information’, and information is something that, the dictionary says, is ‘knowledge communicated or received’, it therefore requires intelligence to exist and so the origin of life must have been caused by an intelligent Creator! Well, I guess that solves that! You heard it correctly, folks – the dictionary says that God created DNA. What a tool.

I digress, however. I’m not here to debunk crazy origin-of-life theories but to make fun of cryptozoological beliefs, so here we go with the real meat and taters of the website. On dinosaurs and the great Flood that Noah faced: ‘most dinosaurs sank to the bottom, while the birds and lighter animals stayed near the surface of the mud and water.’ Yeah, I guess that does explain how elephants made it and tiny dinosaurs like procompsognathus didn’t. Or then there’s ‘ask yourself, does the following sighting resemble a sea-going dinosaur?’ No, because there’s no such thing as a sea-going dinosaur. You’d think a guy who devotes his life to discovering modern-day dinosaurs might know a little something about them, wouldn’t you? Or, on the subject of dinosaur extinction: ‘there is no evidence that they all went extinct.’ What, apart from the thousands of dead dinosaur remains we keep finding and the fact that there aren’t any walking around today? He then raises a tired old argument by stating that evolutionists believe that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs, but there isn’t much evidence for it, so therefore evolutionists are wrong. There are many things you could say in response to that – for example that the ‘meteor extinction’ theory is still a hotly debated and controversial scientific issue and therefore not at all indicative of what every evolutionist believes (and in fact is looking, in the light of the very latest studies, to be a rather wobbly theory indeed). Not that I can see any link between believing the theory of evolution to be true, and therefore concluding that a meteorite killed the dinosaurs. In fact, the only thing an evolutionist would probably have to offer on the subject of dinosaurs would be that dinosaurs probably evolved into birds, another point that seems to have passed this gentleman’s notice entirely.

The most irritating argument, though, is the old chestnut that, hey, because we thought the coelacanth was extinct, and then we found one, doesn’t that mean it’s just as likely that a pteranodon or a tyrannosaur will come bursting out of a jungle somewhere whilst onlookers cry “well bugger me, that’s the theory of evolution up the spout”? No – it really doesn’t. Look: we found a coelacanth in 1938, and since then have found tons of the things all over the world. In fact we even found a second species of it in Indonesia a decade ago. It is very clearly not actually extinct. It is not so clear, however, that dinosaurs are still alive, and I think the point should be made that dinosaurs are probably a lot harder to hide than a fish that lives 600 feet below sea level. In addition, this guy doesn’t seem to realise that the coelacanth you find today is not the exact same fish you found 65 million years ago, a fact that has twofold implications for his argument. The first is that even if a species of velociraptor, for example, had managed to survive somewhere, the passage of time would have caused that animal to evolve into something you mightn’t even recognise – such as oh I don’t know, a bird maybe. The second implication is simpler; in mentioning the coelacanth, he’s inadvertently provided evidence for the theory of evolution, not of Creationism.

I don’t know why Creationists always think that evolution seems unlikely because some animals don’t seem to change much over a set period, whilst others develop radically. To them it seems to be a dealbreaker that turtles and crocodiles and sharks are comparatively unchanged since prehistoric times, when in the same time a dinosaur can turn into a bird or a rodent can turn into a whale. After the extinction of the dinosaurs, by the way, it took about fifteen million years for mammals to make it to the sea and become whales and so on. Fifteen million years! The whole point about evolution is that it takes unimaginable swathes of time to happen. Slight variations from generation to generation occur as the animals are subject to the stimulus of their environment, and if those stimuli don’t much change, neither do the animals. Crocodiles can get by today just as well as they did two hundred million years ago (but they haven’t stayed exactly the same! The leg structure of, for example, a Triassic protosuchian was totally different to that of a modern crocodile, and there are theories that early crocodiles may have stood on their hind legs. Anybody in doubt as to the evolutionary changes crocodiles have undergone would do well to look at this recent article on About.com and tell me if that thing looks anything like the creatures we have lazing around in the Nile today. Not to mention the trifling fact that sarcosuchus – a Cretaceous crocodile – grew to lengths of forty feet long. That means that if you stood it upright on its tail, it would be twice the height of a giraffe and then some). Still think that crocodiles haven't evolved?

I have a theory myself: I think that people who scoff at the theory of evolution actually don’t understand the first thing about it, and if they took the time to actually read up a bit, they would discover that their canny objections are actually based on a straw man born of ignorance.