Family trip to Wee Jasper

Today we went on a day trip to Wee Jasper to visit Carey's Cave, one of the largest accessible cave systems on the continent. Photos below the fold.

People saying interesting things about creationism

Rejecting evolution expresses more than an inability to think critically; it relies on a fundamentally paranoid worldview. Think what the world would have to be like for evolution to be false. Almost every scientist on earth would have to be engaged in a fraud so complex and extensive it involved every field from archaeology, paleontology, geology and genetics to biology, chemistry and physics. And yet this massive concatenation of lies and delusion is so full of obvious holes that a pastor with a Bible-college degree or a homeschooling parent with no degree at all can see right through it.
    Katha Pollitt

(The same goes for many other conspiracy theories and denialisms, by the way.)

The fact remains that the human body is pretty much of a disaster from the standpoint of basic engineering. We'd better hope we're the result of a long, haphazard evolutionary process, because any designer responsible for human anatomy has an awful lot of explaining to do.
    Jason Rosenhouse

Creationists like terms like "different view" or "alternate view", because those sound much nicer than "wrong". I would love to be able to present my bank with a book entitled "Five Minus Three: A Different View", in which, through rhetorical wordplay, ad hominem attacks, and general ramblings, convince them that five minus three is in fact FOUR, and that my checking account should be retroactively adjusted accordingly.
    Bryan Lambert

Boxing Day trip to Deua National Park

Yesterday we made a family trip to the Marble Arch Walk in Deua National Park in New South Wales; pictures below the fold.

Happy holidays!

Got this from another blog, but unfortunately I don't remember where and when. Blogging is going to be sporadic until the new year.

Botany picture #17: Silene otites

Silene otites (Caryophyllaceae) from Eastern Germany, 2006. Not the most impressive carnation you will ever see, but that is just the point. Species like these are under-appreciated, and it pays to have an eye for the less obvious ones.

Botany picture #16: Monotropa uniflora

Monotropa uniflora, Canada, 2012. These plants are entirely without chlorophyll and so, in contrast to most plants, they cannot get their energy from photosynthesis. Instead, they parasitize on mycorrhizal fungi in the forest floor. Due to this aberrant lifestyle and its herbaceous habit, Monotropa was traditionally placed in a separate family, but it is now considered part of the heath family Ericaceae.

Open access publishing

I am still not entirely sure what I should think of open access publishing of scientific research. Don't get me wrong, I am not at all fond of the traditional system which, in case a non-scientist reads this, works like this:

1. Jane and Joe Taxpayer fund a researcher's salary and their research costs.
2. The researcher submits a manuscript presenting their results to a journal, where it is peer reviewed by qualified colleagues. This quality control is done for free, as a service to the scientific community, with the understanding that other colleagues will in turn referee the referees' own manuscripts sometime.
3. If the manuscript is accepted by the journal, it is handed over to a commercial publisher. That publisher sends it to some underpaid chaps usually in India who typeset it into the journal format.
4. The final paper is then printed and placed behind a paywall on the internet. If your (taxpayer funded) university library wants to provide access to the published results of the (taxpayer funded) research, it has to fork over a hefty fee to the commercial publisher. If a (taxpayer funded) research institute wants its staff to be able to access the results of the (taxpayer funded) study online, it has to fork over a hefty fee to the commercial publisher. Note also that Jane and Joe Taxpayer cannot read the research papers they funded unless they happen to be staff members at an institution that is forking over aforementioned fees.
5. At the end of the year, the shareholders of the publishing company buy themselves a second yacht or another villa at the coast. Seriously, this is not about paying a reasonable price for good quality, this business is so obscenely profitable that the term "market failure" springs to mind.

The problems are obvious, and the last few years have seen a strong movement in science trying to make scientific publishing more open and to pry it from the hands of a small number of publishing houses. This movement reaches from a grassroots campaign to boycott the publishing company Elsevier to the government of the United Kingdom, and accordingly diverse are the reforms that are suggested: