Weirdness
pharyngula | August 7, 2015Taxidermy is art, and art can be disquieting. I think Kate Clark is doing some amazing art here.
pharyngula | June 28, 2014The zombie plague was a dud. When the first cases emerged, scattered around the globe, everyone knew exactly how to put them down: destroy the brain. The world had been so saturated with zombie comic books, zombie TV shows, zombie novels, and zombie movies in the greatest, if unplanned, public health information program ever, that the responses to the outbreaks was always swift and thorough. In fact, most civilian casualties were caused not by the zombies themselves, but by the way everyone had been conditioned by the media to respond to lumbering, moaning, disheveled humanoid forms with…
pharyngula | January 30, 2014When last we heard from Rhawn Joseph, he was playing with photoshop and trying to sell off his online journal, the Journal of Cosmology. The Journal of Cosmology has been plugging away, claiming to have found bacteria in meteorites and then diatoms in meteorites — give them a blurry, vague photo of some shapeless blob, and they'll claim it looks just like something biological on Earth. Either that, or they'll photoshop my head on to it.
Rhawn Joseph's latest struggle: he's suing NASA for suppressing evidence of life on Mars. His evidence is this pair of photos taken by the Mars Opportunity…
pharyngula | February 13, 2013Melba Ketchum issued a press release announcing that she had sequenced Sasquatch DNA. That was back in November.
It stalled out at that point. It turns out the paper couldn't get past peer review, and no one was going to publish it. We're all heartbroken, I know.
But now she has overcome all the obstacles, and it's finally in print! You can read the abstract.
One hundred eleven samples of blood, tissue, hair, and other types of specimens were studied, characterized and hypothesized to be obtained from elusive hominins in North America commonly referred to as Sasquatch. DNA was extracted and…
pharyngula | January 2, 2013[We are fortunate to have this transcript, taken by a company stenographer, from one of the early efforts of the resistance to instruct an army company in tactics. Although we now have more sophisticated technologies to hold these invaders in check, it is instructive too see how the American military in the 1950s struggled to cope with an unusual enemy, a struggle that was described in an excellent documentary produced by Warner Bros.]
Men — and ladies — the purpose of this briefing is to instruct you in the basic anatomy of the enemy. We have lost many soldiers to the assumption that these…
pharyngula | August 24, 2012The mirror test is a well known indicator for some degree of self-awareness: surreptitiously mark an animal's face, show it a mirror, and see if it recognizes that the reflected image is of itself by whether it reaches up to touch or remove the mark. We see that behavior and infer that the animal has some knowledge of itself and can recognize that the mirror image is not another animal.
But now robots are being specifically programmed to pass the mirror test.
Ow. It makes my brain hurt.
So this is a computer that has no other indicators of consciousness or awareness or autonomous "thought" (…
pharyngula | July 9, 2012No.
One other event I participated in was a "debate" with an ancient alien theorist. It was very peculiar, as you might guess. The way this came about was that Scotty Roberts, the alien astronaut fan, proposed a session on his wacky speculations, and the conference organizers didn't want such lunacy to sail through without a word, so they asked some of the people on the science & skepticism track to engage. Greg Laden and I agreed to sit on a panel with him and another person, with Desiree Schell to moderate. And then I just kind of ignored the prospect until the day of.
Greg Laden met in…
pharyngula | June 27, 2012It's sad that NOAA even had to issue this statement.
But are mermaids real? No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found
Are there any government agencies that would like to take a stand on elves, leprechauns, pixies, and Bigfoot?
pharyngula | June 18, 2012
All I want to know is…who instigated this unholy coupling? Was it the dolphin getting kinky? Was it the octopus feeling amorous? Or was it possibly a mutually agreed-upon exploration of new sexual frontiers?
pharyngula | June 14, 2012Just the title was enough to make me squeamish: Penetration of the Oral Mucosa by Parasite-Like Sperm Bags of Squid: A Case Report in a Korean Woman. It seems the woman thought she was getting dinner; the squid saw a last chance to reproduce. As is common with these kinds of misunderstandings, neither got what they wanted.
We report a case of oral stings by spermatophores of the squid Todarodes pacificus. A 63-yr-old Korean woman experienced severe pain in her oral cavity immediately after eating a portion of parboiled squid along with its internal organs. She did not swallow the portion, but…
pharyngula | June 14, 2012Jerry Gretzinger has a project, one that never ends. What started as a little doodle has grown into a sprawling, detailed map that is maintained and expanded by following rules — rules that increase complexity organically, using chance.
It's cool and strange at the same time.
Jerry's Map from Jerry Gretzinger on Vimeo.
Gretzinger also has a blog.
pharyngula | February 14, 2012It truly does, and someone has caught us out and published a stunning exposé that reveals the horrible, awful behavior that our goddess, Nature, endorses. You must read "God Hates Checkered Whiptail Lizards!!!" and weep. This is but one page of a devastating revelation.
(Also on FtB)
pharyngula | January 30, 2012Ah, the 19th century…when mad scientists were really mad, and not only that, they were popular at parties. In 1818, Dr Ure and Professor Jeffray obtained the freshly killed corpse of Matthew Clydesdale, only an hour from the hangman's noose, and proceeded to experiment on it with a battery in the Glasgow University anatomy theater before a crowd of spectators. In my youth, I had to settle for recent roadkill, a 9 volt battery, and a dark basement, all by my lonesome — my jealousy is acute.
Here is a small portion of the account of that day's fun.
The supra-orbital nerve was laid bare in the…
pharyngula | January 19, 2012There is a shifting pattern of spam email that I get. A while back, it was practically non-stop gay porn; I commented on this a while back, and laughed it off, which apparently annoyed the people who'd been sending it to me. I think they expected me to be stressed and conflicted and angry at getting photographs of muscular young men with large penises, but really…it doesn't bother me at all. So lately the supply of hunky naked men posing in my in-box has all but dried up.
Instead, my previous criticisms have prompted a flood of commercial spam from middle eastern sites, and the malicious…
pharyngula | January 9, 2012Could be trouble: the other apes are learning how to make fire, and you know where that ended up with us.
(via sci-ence)
(Also on FtB)
pharyngula | December 7, 2011Have fun and go visit the Missing Universe Museum online. You will feel as if you are finally getting close to the bottom of human stupidity.
Every page promotes this argument:
If you don't believe God created all living things, male and female, in 6 days....
How many millions of years was it between the first male and the first female?
It's idiotic when Ray Comfort says it, and it's just as inane when whoever put this website together says it.
I had to stop and close the web page at the sight of this, their argument against vestigial organs. You see, if evolution were actually true, and…
pharyngula | November 29, 2011These canny engineers have at last realized that the proper model for robots is biological, and have built a soft-bodied walking robot. The future belongs to inflatable technology!
Have no fear. They're mostly benign.
(Also on FtB)
pharyngula | November 21, 2011Inspired by Skepticon, several of the speakers at that event have been redrawn as ponies.
Is the next step…furries?
(Also on FtB)
pharyngula | November 7, 2011See? Sometimes cute things can cheer me up.
Oooh, and I wanna give you all the souls you want, you adorable little slime-beast.
(Also on FtB)
pharyngula | September 22, 2011You've probably seen that placeholder text for websites in progress — piles of nonsense Latin that's just there to represent sample text. Now there's something better: the Samuel L. Ipsum generator. Next time you're designing a website for a church or pre-school, use this program to build up some random text for your demonstration.
(via Stupid Evil Bastard)
(Also on FtB)