This is ridiculous. Black Jack, Missouri has a city ordinance that prohibits more than three people from living together in the same house if they are unrelated by blood, marriage or adoption. Wait… did I read that right? I did. WTF??? From Reuters:

Olivia Shelltrack and Fondray Loving and their children moved from Minnesota to Missouri earlier this year, buying a five-bedroom home in the tiny community outside St. Louis.

Shelltrack and Loving have lived together about 13 years and have two children together, along with a 15-year-old daughter of Shelltrack’s from a previous relationship.

Black Jack, a town of about 7,000 that prides itself on a city Web site for its "character and stability," refused to grant the couple and their children an occupancy permit for their home because they do not meet the definition of "family" as set forth by the city, the complaint alleges.

The full story is here and here.

Putting aside for the moment the complete obnoxiousness of legislating who can live together, I have a couple questions…

1. Don’t they meet the criteria anyway? The dad is related to two of the kids. The mom is related to three of the kids. All of the kids are related to each other. There’s no way you can pull three people out of the group and not have at least two of them be related to each other by blood.
2. If that isn’t enough, my next question is… why is this couple not considered to be related? I don’t know about elsewhere, but the family court in New York State considers you to be family if you are "related by blood, marriage, or child in common." They have two kids together! That makes them family.

It just makes me crazy that this family that has been together for THIRTEEN YEARS is being told they aren’t "family" when I’m sure there are plenty people in that town that fit their narrow definition of family but aren’t nearly as stable!!!

(PS Don’t miss out on the blog birthday party going on in the previous post. Everyone is invited!)

This is very cool. Scientists are using x-rays of fossils to piece together full images of what prehistoric organisms looked like and how they developed!

Paleontologists have been using acid to dissolve the embryo fossils out of rocks for about a decade, focusing on specimens from the time about 500 million years ago when multicellular animals began to proliferate. Tons of rock must be dissolved to retrieve a few hundred embryos, none of which are more than a fraction of a millimeter across.

Until now, Donoghue said, the specimens have mostly been treated as "curios of fossilization."

Using the new technique, he and his colleagues have been able to create cutaways, cross-sections and, by stringing together images of embryos at different stages of development, virtual time-lapse sequences of the animals’ metamorphosis.

The rest of the story can be found here.

One question though, for the people who don’t believe in evolution (not that anyone like that would be reading my blog, so this is rhetorical I guess)… if God snapped his fingers and “creation” started with the Garden of Eden, why did he plant all this evidence to the contrary? To confuse us? To keep us busy? What?

Playing with Google Earth today - “flying” from place to place that I’ve placemarked (home, dog run, where T is right now, work, my folks house, my sis, etc.) - reminded me of A Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan. Rereading it just now, it seemed so on point regarding so many discussions going on in the blogosphere about war, politics, religion and more.

Here’s the excerpt that I have printed out and lying around to reread occasionally.

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

–Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

One of these days, I’m going to start writing the religion/theology/morality/political posts that are bouncing around in my head. My feelings about all of these things are all mixed in with my (scant) knowledge of science in general and astrophysics in particular. Maybe soon. We’ll see.

[photo and excerpt text via The Planetary Society]

I’m sorry, but I just can’t get enough of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Back in July I read an AP article about teachers being forced to teach creationism in the public schools as an alternative to evolution and I sent my sister an email that said:

I’ve decided to start a movement to make public schools teach that the earth is carried through the sky on the back of a great turtle. I will explain that this is what I believe and therefore it should receive as much academic validation as their nutty idea that the earth is round and suspended in space, circling the sun, with nothing to hold it up or make it move! I mean, that’s just crazy! Right? There must be something out there carrying us around, regardless of what scientific research and calculations tell us.

Surely if schools are being made to teach creationism, they’ll have to teach this too. My turtle belief is just as valid and has just as much proof to back it up.

While we’re at it, maybe we should make Palm Reading a required course.

And, today, I found out about Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, so I’ve decided to become a Pastafarian.

Ramen.