Kansas Outlaws Evolution, “No Species Exempt”

The Onion with breaking news in this report:

The sweeping new law prohibits all living beings within state borders from being born with random genetic mutations that could make them better suited to evade predators, secure a mate, or, adapt to a changing environment. In addition, it bars any sexual reproduction, battles for survival, or instances of pure happenstance that might lead, after several generations, to a more well-adapted species or subspecies.

Comprehensive approach. They’ve certainly done their homework.

To enforce the law, Kansas state police will be trained to investigate and apprehend organisms who exhibit suspected signs of evolutionary behavior, such as natural selection or speciation. Plans are underway to track and monitor DNA strands in every Kansan life form for even the slightest change in allele frequencies.

Your cell-phone may soon include DNA analysis capabilities. And surely things like used chewing gum will be treated as essential personal identity information.

Anti-evolutionists such as Hellenbaum have long accused microorganisms of popularizing “an otherwise obscure, agonizingly slow, and hard-to-understand” biological process. “These repeat offenders are at the root of the problem,” Hellenbaum said. “We have the fossil records to prove it.”

Oh, nice dig Onion!

“No species is exempt,” said Marcus Holloway, a state police spokesman. “Whether you’re a human being or a fruit fly—if we detect one homologous chromosome trying to cross over during the process of meiosis, you will be punished to the full extent of the law.”

Although the full impact of the new law will likely not be felt for approximately 10 million years, most Kansans say they are relieved that the ban went into effect this week, claiming that evolution may have gone too far already.

Hilarious stuff. When you read the whole article, note the sage point (pun not intended) about protests from Agribusiness leaders who depend on evolutionary science for genetic modification of crops.

Cheat to win

This past summer I mentioned a bracelet called “Live Wrong” that parodied Lance Armstrong’s “Live Strong”. I just noticed The Onion has revisited this idea, with another funny version called the Floyd Landis “Cheat to Win” bracelet. In true Onion style, you can buy your own on their online store for just $2.99…also, in related Onion news:

TAMPA PALMS, FL — Avid sports-memorabilia collector Michael Bowen was arrested Tuesday after attempting to raise the value of his Wade Boggs rookie card by killing Wade Boggs.

And if that doesn’t have you shedding a tear, this story might:

Thousands More Dead In Continuing Iraq Victory […] “Victory deaths are at a higher level than we had anticipated, yes,” Gen. George Casey, Jr. said at a press conference shortly after the figures were released. “But one of the crucial lessons of our Vietnam experience is that a victory, in order to remain victorious, can’t be abandoned halfway through, or in the case of Iraq, one-eighth of the way through.” […] President Bush has consistently warned that if we hand over victory to local forces right away, there’s a risk that victory may worsen, as Iraqis won’t be able to contend with the guerrilla attacks and improvised explosive devices that claim the lives of dozens of the victorious every day.

Epitaph to Boatswain

by George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (1788 – 1824)

Near this spot
Are deposited the Remains
Of one
Who possessed Beauty
Without Vanity,
Strength without Insolence,
Courage without Ferocity,
And all the Virtues of Man
Without his Vices.

The Price, which would be unmeaning flattery
If inscribed over Human Ashes,
Is but a just tribute to the Memory of
“Boatswain,� a Dog
Who was born at Newfoundland,
May, 1803,
And died in Newstead Abbey,
Nov. 18, 1808.

When some proud son of man returns to earth,
Unknown by glory, but upheld by birth,
The sculptor’s art exhausts the pomp of woe,
And stories urns record that rests below.
When all is done, upon the tomb is seen,
Not what he was, but what he should have been.
But the poor dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is still his master’s own,
Who labors, fights, lives, breathes for him alone,
Unhonored falls, unnoticed all his worth,
Denied in heaven the soul he held on earth –
While man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven,
And claims himself a sole exclusive heaven.

Oh man! thou feeble tenant of an hour,
Debased by slavery, or corrupt by power –
Who knows thee well must quit thee with disgust,
Degraded mass of animated dust!
Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,
Thy smiles hypocrisy, thy words deceit!
By nature vile, ennoble but by name,
Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame.
Ye, who perchance behold this simple urn,
Pass on – it honors none you wish to mourn.
To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one – and here he lies.

Byron was accused of all kinds of disloyalty and subversive acts (e.g. his adoption of a pet bear when he was told as a student at Trinity that pet dogs were not allowed), but he clearly found solace and perhaps even a more essential and honest companionship with his animals. Perhaps it was because they were less likely to counter his words with their own.

Single Points of Failure

Single points of failure pop up in the strangest of places. I’ll never forget the day when a colleague noticed a lonely single orange (fiber) cable coming out of a giant disk array. We were working in a data processing facility where the world’s largest computer manufacturers dropped off their latest-greatest technology for us to evaluate and bang on. The manufacturer was so impressed that he noticed an oversight on their part that they flew him out several times to meet with their engineers and review their designs in person. Sometimes seeing the obvious stuff makes you the expert.

In a similar vein, I was just reading a post in alt.folklore.urban that claims a US Navy Vessel was almost completely disabled when Inertial Navigation Systems (INS) went offline:

For close to a week and a half an Aegis class destroyer ended up piloted through shallow extreme-Northern Arabian Gulf waters by a combination of extremely cautious steering, celestial navigation, dead reckoning, and the occasional check by landmarks if we got too close to an oil platform.

[…]

More nerve-wracking for the rest of us was the fact that all our weapons systems with the exception of the Phalanx Close-In Weapons System are dependent on the INS for levelling information, the failure of which turned them into so much useless scrap. Those of us dealing with our one offensive weapons system, Tomahawk, regarded it as a grand vacation during which we didn’t have to notify the entire chain of command up to CentCom that we would be down for routine maintenance.

I’d be surprised if they don’t regularly practice running the ships on reduced navigability or impaired systems, but with today’s rapid-development and release industries it seems more prudent then ever to double-check for redundancy, in case of failure.