Weirdness
pharyngula | September 21, 2009Uh, gang? It's the wee hours of the morning of 22 September in Jerusalem. That means, if you are reading this, you are not one of the elect who was raptured. Oops.
I checked the site that predicted the rapture to see if it had been updated with excuses…and it hadn't. Obviously, this means the author was raptured! Well, cool!
This does have a down side. We're about to enter seven years of tribulation. Stock up on firearms, cocaine, and explosives while you can, you'll be needing them.
There is an up side, though. Have any Christian friends or neighbors? Go knock on their door. If no one…
pharyngula | September 20, 2009Everyone: start partying. You don't have much time left. THE WORLD ENDS TOMORROW.
You might be tempted to go read the evidence on that page, but trust me, there is no time to waste — you really need to get frolicking now, because so little time is left. Besides, if you look at the colors and funny fonts and ugly layout of that page, your eyes will start bleeding and you might experience cerebral hemorrhaging…and do you really want to spend the last day of your life in the emergency room?
OK, you're all skeptics. You need data. Here it is: proof positive that the Rapture will occur on 21…
pharyngula | September 19, 2009Those darned Christians are always ruining our fun. Now we're getting preemptive finger-wagging: we have been warned that sex with robots is always wrong. The author is afraid we're going to someday run out and buy life-like android sex slaves, and then humanity will go extinct…because of course we'd all prefer to have sex with a perfect Christian woman an obedient, unquestioning, subservient machine.
(Shhh. While he's busy looking for androids to cluck over, don't let him know that the sex machines are already here. They aren't humanoid at all. They tend to have shapes that vary from simple…
pharyngula | September 19, 2009I am shackled to my laptop, writing, writing, writing for a while as all of my body but brain, eyes, and fingers atrophy, so I'm going to have to send you off elsewhere to find your jollies. Gary Farber has compiled a fine collection of short, strange science links…well, some are only tangentially science, but they're weird, anyway.
Someday, when my work is done, I must make the pilgrimage to Darwin, Minnesota, to see the world's largest ball of twine.
pharyngula | September 16, 2009You can now buy scents on the web that are inspired by HP Lovecraft. For instance, you could get Cthulhu: "A creeping, wet, slithering scent, dripping with seaweed, oceanic plants and dark, unfathomable waters."
But what if you already smell like that all the time?
(via io9)
pharyngula | September 16, 2009Look at the interesting snake found in China — it's got a leg.
How can this happen? Genes are pleiotropic — they tend to have lots of different functions. The genes involved in making a limb are also expressed in other places; for instance, the Hox genes that specify identity along the length of the body are also reused in specifying identity along the length of the limb. What that means is that when the snake evolved limblessness, it didn't do so by simply throwing away a collection of leg genes — it couldn't, not without also destroying genes that functioned in generating its body plan.…
pharyngula | September 15, 2009Breaking news: the evidence is all publicly available, plain as day.
(Oh, man, bad flashbacks…anyone else remember Reagan's weird fascination with alien invaders uniting all of humanity? That dude was stone cold nuts. Brrrr.)
pharyngula | September 15, 2009Perhaps there is a god…how else do we explain this lovely miracle? We don't have to stop there, either — there are also these to explain. Of course, the god revealed by these wonders seems to be a bit of a libertine, so he's probably not Abrahamic at all. But definitely a fun guy.
pharyngula | September 14, 2009We just have to make the practice of sky burial popular! Maybe this photo set of a Tibetan funeral will help. (WARNING! Those photos show a large flock of vultures stripping a human body of flesh, with the assistance of some helpful Tibetans who break up the larger bones with hatchets. Don't click on the link if you are at all squeamish.)
Boy, those are some happy vultures. I think I'd like to bring a little joy into the life a few carrion-feeders after I die, too.
Ooops, another warning: I'd looked at it with an adblocker, so I hadn't noticed the very in-your-face porn ads on the page, so…
pharyngula | September 10, 2009Someone needs to start an organization with this name just so they can use this logo that I got from Glynn Lane:
Students could join, and then they could all run out and get these t-shirts:
Unfortunately, there's pretty much nothing we could do to be even creepier than that other, better known Campus Crusade for some guy.
pharyngula | September 10, 2009A very devout Catholic was trapped on an elevator for a while, and after it was working again, rushed to church to thank God. Then, something unfortunate happened:
He seems to have embraced a stone pillar on which the stone altar was perched and it fell on him, killing him instantly. We have found his fingerprints on the pillar. We are now investigating the case further.
Now, you see, if he'd rushed off to thank the elevator repairman, that wouldn't have happened. Given his bad luck, the repairman might have been a demented homicidal maniac who would have clubbed him to death with a spanner…
pharyngula | September 10, 2009Speaking of being underwhelmed by the arguments, we've actually got people arguing for the existence of fairies and bigfoot. They even say they've got evidence: here's the Croydon photo:
Looks like an ugly flash artifact of an insect caught in flight.
Some guy in Kentucky had a video camera set up to monitor his backyard, and it caught this frame of a purported Bigfoot:
I have no idea what that blurry blob is…somehow, whenever one of these mysterious creatures is seen, the lucky witness is always either a really awful photographer or is using garbage equipment.
There are some real mysteries…
pharyngula | September 8, 2009I never wear it to class, though. Maybe students would fear and respect me more if I did.
pharyngula | September 8, 2009Bob Henderson, the creator of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, gets interviewed. He must not be a True Prophet, however, since he apparently isn't getting rich or acquiring obscene amounts of power.
pharyngula | September 5, 2009Hey, those other people get their Jesus in a pita, their Hebrew blessings from croaking fish, and Allah in their sliced fruit, so it's about time we got something. How about a fifteen foot tall A in a geological anomaly?
Sean Murphy sent me this; you can find it in Boulder Canyon up Sugarloaf Road, in Colorado. I don't expect to hear in the news that the Colorado atheists are all lined up there with candles and anointing oil, OK, or I'll be very disappointed in you. It's just a rock.
pharyngula | September 3, 2009A full English fried breakfast served in a cocktail glass made out of bacon.
pharyngula | August 29, 2009Several readers have alerted me to this artful cover from Play magazine.
Why must the videogames always be about the nasty wicked violence? Put away the weapon, young lady! The mysterious creature only wants to play.
But it does remind me…Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus is on TV in about an hour and a half, and I need to get ready. What snacks are appropriate for such a movie? The traditional popcorn and soft drink? Or is this more of a large jug of cheap hootch sort of event? And should I start drinking now, or wait for the absurdities to start?
pharyngula | August 27, 2009One of the claims to fame of midwestern fairs is the food — usually deep fried, and on a stick. Minnesotans must be expressing their inner Thai.
In Thailand, food I have eaten on a stick includes squid, squid tentacles, insects, jellyfish, quail eggs, and every part of a water buffalo including spleen, kidney and testicles.
Squid eggs…onna stick? I'd go for that.
I might pass on the water buffalo testicles on a stick, though.