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Somehow small animals are always cuter than their larger counterparts. Enter the Mini-Moo!
CBC – LONDON – A minuscule cow with a taste for contemporary music has been named the world’s smallest by the Guinness World Records book.
Guinness says the sheep-sized bovine from the West Yorkshire region of northern England measures roughly 33 inches (84 centimetres) from hind to foot.
The 11-year-old cow is named Swallow and her owner, Caroline Ryder, said she would spend Thursday either grazing with her herd or listening to BBC radio in her cowshed.
Swallow is a Dexter cow, a breed known for its diminutive stature, but is small even by Dexter standards.
She already has nine regular-sized calves and is pregnant with her 10th. Guinness said her youngest calf has already grown larger than she is.
I wonder if they are as good as sheep for keeping a lawn in order? :)
I am going to use the discussion points found on RichardDawkins.net as the basis of this feature.
Calilasseia is the author of the post and deserves many rich accolades for assembling so much useful information in one spot. This constitutes an open thread of sorts, please leave your opinions and observations in the comment section.
Enjoy!
[19] The tiresome “design” argument.
Let’s get this straight here. This is nothing more than the resurrection of the Paley’s watchmaker zombie, which stinks even more after 150 years of rotting in the grave than it did when Paley first erected it. Aside from the fact that this argument fails spectacularly because artefacts arising from known manufacturing processes are qualitatively different from the rest of the world, and said artefacts are not self-replicating entities, the entire “design” argument fails for one very important reason. Propagandists for mythology have never presented a proper, rigorous means of testing for “design”, and for that matter, don’t even understand what is needed in order to provide genuine evidence for “design”. The fatuous “it looks designed to me, therefore my magic man did it” argument will, once again, receive the piranha treatment if you make the mistake of deploying it here (see [1] above). Make no mistake, this is nothing more than the typical supernaturalist elevation of ignorance to the level of a metaphysic. The “design” argument consists of nothing more than “I can’t imagine how a natural process could have achieved X, therefore no natural process could have achieved X, therefore magic man did it”. Learn once and for all that reality is not only under no obligation whatsoever to pander to this sort of ignorance and wishful thinking, all too frequently, it sticks the middle finger to said ignorance and wishful thinking.
Now, I’m going to be kind here, and explain what is needed, in order to have genuine evidence for “design”. You need ALL of the following four criteria satisfied, namely:
[19.1] That there exists a detailed, rigorous, robust methodology for segregating entities into the “designed” and “not designed” classes (“It looks designed, therefore magic man” isn’t good enough);
[19.2] That the methodology cited in [19.1] above has been tested upon entities of known provenance, and found to be reliable via said direct empirical test;
[19.3] That the methodology cited in [19.1] above, and determined to be reliable in [19.2] above, is accompanied by a rigorous demonstration of its applicability to specific classes of entity of interest;
[19.4] That the methodology cited in [19.1] above, determined to be reliable in [19.2] above, and determined to be applicable to the requisite class of entities in [19.3] above, yields an unambiguous answer of “designed” for the entities to which it is applied.
Unless you have ALL FOUR of the above criteria fulfilled, you have NO evidence for “design”. Don’t even bother trying to claim otherwise until you’ve spent at least a decade or so devising the rigorous and robust methodology specified as an essential requirement in [19.1] above, because the critical thinkers will know you’re lying. To give you an idea of the magnitude of the task at hand, just fulfilling [19.1] above would constitute a major scientific achievement, and by the time you got to [19.4], you would be in Nobel-winning territory. That is, of course, if you fulfilled [19.1] to [19.3] above properly. If you ever made it to [19.4], your name would be indelibly stamped upon history. The idea that some random poster on the Internet is going to achieve this with nothing more than blind acceptance of mythological assertion to guide him is, needless to say, regarded here as a complete non-starter.
Steven Harper is all about the guns. Harper wants to repeal the long gun registry. He is also all about the mandatory minimum sentences for crimes involving guns too. Sound like a conflict of interest, not if you happen to be a conservative politician.
“Prime Minister Stephen Harper says the federal long-gun registry will someday be scrapped, regardless of what happens to a Tory backbencher’s bill on the issue when Parliament returns next week”
Way to go Steve, your dedication to non-issues is impressive. The LGR is vitally important to Canada’s national interest and well being.
“He again denounced the registry, which was introduced by the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien in 1995, as a “large-scale operation that targeted the wrong people” — including hunters, farmers, outdoorsmen and women, as well as police officers “who understand the reality of these communities.”
“These people will never accept this registry because they know it is ineffective and wasteful, and the party I lead will not rest until the day it is abolished,” Harper said to applause”
Wow. I am surprised his message was not proceeded with a “this speech is for my conservative rural base…”
“Layton also called on Harper to compromise on the registry and work with opposition parties to address the concerns of some rural Canadians over the registry without sacrificing public safety.”
Compromise, in a minority government situation? What exactly is Mr.Layton smoking? Reasonable debate on a contentious issue? Unheard of, at least in this particular instance of Conservative Party minority governance.
One of the most frustrating parts of attempting to discuss White Male Privilege (WMP) with oh say white males is the 
denial of the fact that it exists and it is an intrinsic characteristic woven into the fabric of our society. It is nice when another study is done (adding to the large body of work) to show its existence and how thoroughly embedded it is in our culture. A big hat-tip to Sociological Images for the leg work (which I am reposting it its entirety) in condensing the study originally found on Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
In a post at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Steve Rendall and Zachary Tomanelli investigated the racial breakdown of the book reviewers and authors in two important book review venues, the New York Times Book Review and C-SPAN’s After Words. They found that the vast majority of both reviewers and authors were white males.
“Overall, 95% of the authors and 96% of the reviewers were non-Latino white (compared to 65% of the population).
Women accounted for between 13 and 31% of the authors and reviewers:
This is some hard data showing that white men’s ideas are made more accessible than the ideas of others, likely translating into greater influence on social discourse and public policy. These individuals certainly don’t all say the same thing, nor do they necessarily articulate ideas that benefit white men, but a greater diversity of perspectives would certainly enrich our discourse.”
It is really hard to argue against the substantive data collected about the influence of WMP on our culture and how it conditions us to think and act. As the quoted material says, just imagine if more people were able to influence our culture how much more rich and diverse our culture would be.
The furour brought about by threatening to burn the koran has made it all the way to youtube as Thunderf00t has recently had to deal with assertions he is ‘bigot’ and endorses genocide for the nations of Islam. Of course, he was misconstrued and most likely misunderstood by the people in question. The key part of Thunderf00t’s message is simply this: We cannot take a step back from our rights to free speech (a cornerstone of civilized society)when they cause a violent reaction in the Islamic world. It is they who have the erroneous expectation that they have the right to apply their religious laws to the rest of the world. Once the centre of learning and advanced civilization the nations of Islam allowed the radical fundamentalists to plunge their world into a backward state of being resembling the Dark Ages (thank you christianity) of old.
When I rail against religion is precisely because of its threat to modernity and civilization. Religious thought is antithetical to most human rights, free speech and progress.
Thunderf00t comes to similar conclusions in his video, but of course multi modally thanks to the wonder known as youtube.
Theoretical Physics is always just so darn useful according to the CBC:
“A geometric “atlas” of the internet has been created in an effort to preserve it in the coming decades.
U.S., Spanish and Cypriot researchers say they have discovered what they call a negatively curved space hidden beneath the surface of the internet known as a “latent, hyperbolic” geometry.
This discovery has enabled them to create a new way of mapping the internet, a process they believe will help it to operate in the future.
“We compare routing in the internet today to using a hypothetical road atlas, which is really just a long encoded list of road intersections and connections that would require drivers to pore through each line to plot a course to their destination …,” Dmitri Krioukov, principal investigator of the project, said in a release.
I’m a little fuzzy on ‘negative parabolic space’ but the abstract from the journal is actually quite helpful.
“The Internet infrastructure is severely stressed. Rapidly growing overheads associated with the primary function of the Internet—routing information packets between any two computers in the world—cause concerns among Internet experts that the existing Internet routing architecture may not sustain even another decade. In this paper, we present a method to map the Internet to a hyperbolic space.”
So, if the intertoobz fail, we’ll at least know why.
We are going to go pave Afghanistan with the blood and bones of Canadian soldiers; will the nebulous goal of “stability” be sufficient to pacify their families as they grieve? Will the inevitable deaths of innocent Afghanis be justified by bringing stability to the region? Consider the very nature of the war in Afghanistan where there are only a few “front lines” and the enemy has the capacity to strike anywhere at almost anytime. Is this what we bring and justify our presence in Afghanistan for?
“Coalition forces in Afghanistan will go on the offensive this fall, says Lt.-Gen. Marc Lessard, the commander of Canadian troops overseas.
His comments to reporters in Kandahar on Saturday echoed those made by British Maj.-Gen. Nick Carter, commander of coalition troops in southern Afghanistan, who said up to 32,000 Afghan and coalition soldiers will try to clear 500 to 800 insurgents from around Kandahar city before December.
Lessard described the coalition push as “massive activities.” The attacks will be followed by development projects and efforts to strengthen the local governments.”
We have heard this so many times over the tenure of our stay in Afghanistan. But better to have nebulous strategy to match our nebulous goals, one would suppose.
“He [Lessard] said the Taliban had taken the initiative over the summer and it had been “a tough go” for the coalition. “There was a lot more enemy presence and a lot more activity.”
The coalition consolidated its position, Lessard said. “There was no more expansion. We didn’t have the troops.”
But now the Taliban initiative has been stopped. “That’s good, but that’s not good enough,” he said, so the coalition is taking the offensive.”
And re-win the hearts and minds of the people? Who do you side with if you are an Afghani citizen? The corrupt Kharzi regime backed by imperial powers that will be leaving the country soon or with the Taliban who will be there with certainty (being that it is their country after all)?
“With the 150-plus killed, the hundreds of seriously injured, from our Canadian point of view, that’s our legacy.”
Poignant and prescient words from Lieutenant-General Marc Lessard. I’m usually happy when blog posts write themselves, but in this instance, there is nothing to cheer about.
Moe over at Whatever Works has a great post about Afghanistan and the morass that passes as the status quo.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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