Weirdness
pharyngula | July 26, 2007This will not stand. It's a site called Octopus Faith, and it's a promotion for a Christian women's speaker, and her premise is analogizing faith to an octopus.
Every octopus is an atheist, though … they told me so personally. And they are not amused.
pharyngula | July 25, 2007Next time GrrlScientist comes to visit, we're going to have to record what she says early in the morning, and then play it back ten times faster — I have a suspicion that we'll hear birdsong.
At least, that's the way this video art installation by Marcus Coates works. He had people sing strange little nonsense tunes (you can hear one here) that, when played back at a greater speed, recreated the songs of wild British birds. Why, if GrrlScientist had only talked a little faster, I'm sure the whole house would have sounded like an exotic tropical island inhabited by parrots!
pharyngula | July 24, 2007The Weekly World News, source of many an idle moment's entertainment while waiting in the grocery store checkout line, is about to become an ex-tabloid. Bat boy will be homeless. Ed Anger will have no outlet for his rage. Fox News will have no competition.
American Journalism has lost a shining beacon, an ideal to which it could have aspired.
(via Decorabilia)
pharyngula | July 24, 2007A correspondent just reminded me of this classic paper from the literature—it's the only contemporary scientific work I know of that managed to combine a discussion of the induction of a tissue by TGF-β and BMP proteins with a discussion of the Hebrew noun tzela to suggest that the book of Genesis wasn't talking about thoracic ribs at all. All us sneering atheist professors who've had to exhibit human skeletons to show the creationists in our classrooms that men are not missing a rib apparently should have been pointing a little lower — where humans are missing a bone.
This comment on the…
pharyngula | July 24, 2007Having read Mooney's Storm World last week, I can't be too disturbed by this bit of news: the pizza man who is fanatically devoted to the pope, Tom Monaghan, is opening his new planned town dedicated to Catholic values next Saturday. There will be no porn or contraceptives available in town, but I hear there will be a whole clinic dedicated to pediatric proctology on Main Street.
Anyway, the town is Ave Maria, Florida. Mooney's book points out that one of the looming problems from catastrophic storms and global warming is man-made, the growing investment in valuable infrastructure and…
pharyngula | July 20, 2007The Countess dropped me a note to say I might get a laugh out of this list of the 100 Unsexiest Men of 2007, and I had a brief, horror-stricken thought that the reason was because I was on it. That's the only reason I read the whole thing.
Dick Cheney is only at 77? There's something wrong there.
pharyngula | July 20, 2007
Look at this: now the Intelligent Design creationists are branching out into pirate fashion. They're everywhere!
pharyngula | July 19, 2007OK, this is the final straw. The Intelligent Design creationists send out press releases, they peddle textbooks in our classrooms, they publish dishonest books of pseudoscience, and now … and now, they've come out with a popular magazine.
I'd complain some more but I'm afraid they'd kick sand in my face and beat me up.
(via ERV)
pharyngula | July 19, 2007This is irrational, an intrusion into my privacy, rude, and beneath me, but I have been tagged with another meme by the behavioral ecology blog. I am to take this test of my personality defects, post the results, and pass it on.
These are not personality defects. How can you call perfection "defective"?
Haughty Intellectual
You are 100% Rational, 14% Extroverted, 0% Brutal, and 57% Arrogant.
You are the Haughty Intellectual. You are a very rational person, emphasizing logic over emotion, and you are also rather arrogant and self-aggrandizing. You probably think of yourself as an…
pharyngula | July 18, 2007A Yale student, David Light, was arrested after firing a gun a few times inside his fraternity house. The reaction of some students was noteworthy.
"He's a perfectly normal person," he said. "He's not a crazy guy. To be honest … things always get blown out of proportion when it comes to arrests with firearms."
Not a crazy guy?
The New Haven Register reported Tuesday on its Web site that the weapons seized from Light's residence included a .50-caliber rifle, AR-15 assault weapon, a Russian M-91 infantry rifle, a 12-gauge shotgun, various pistols and bomb-making materials, including a large…
pharyngula | July 17, 2007As I mentioned before in my review of Stuart Pivar's LifeCode: The Theory of Biological Self Organization, I'm actually sympathetic to the ideas of developmental structuralism. This is the concept that physical, mechanical, and chemical properties make a significant and underappreciated contribution to the acquisition of organismal form; genes are not enough, do not carry a complete specification, and what we have to consider is interactions between genes, environment, and cytoplasm. Good stuff, all of it — and I'd like to see more work done on the subject. In my review, though, I had to…
pharyngula | July 16, 2007Weirdness comes in waves, I guess. Both Karmen and Kevin are talking about strange road signs. I've got a sign to top them.
This is a sign … of the Apocalypse!!!
Wait…not enough exclamation points or emphasis. A SIGN OF THE APOCALYPSE!!!!!
I'm not kidding, man. Seriously. According to Rapture Ready, scantily clad men in snug spandex and waving big purple sticks is one of the signs of the End Times. It says so in the Bible.
I'm not sure why, but I think Kevin might especially appreciate the symbology here.
pharyngula | July 16, 2007This may sound like pro-religion news, but it's really not: Wal-Mart is going to sell Jesus action figures.
Maybe it is spreading religious mythology through cheap general stores, but it is also the commodification of a religious hero…so it's devaluing Jesus.
The other thing to consider is what perverse little kids do with their dolls. Get Barbie and Ken alone in the bedroom, and swooosh, off come the clothes, here come the interesting poses, and ooooh, Ken, can my friend Midge come and play, too? Now Jesus gets to join in the action.
I hope the Jesus action figure is anatomically accurate,…
pharyngula | July 15, 2007I never did trust those astronomers. Now I learn that they have been conspiring to keep us stupid.
pharyngula | July 14, 2007This is turning up all over the place — at Brad DeLong's, Crooked Timber, and this pair is from Cosmic Variance — it's the most sublimely, awesomely, wickedly stupid example of fudging a curve ever. The two graphs below have exactly the same data points, and the only difference is the curve that was 'fit' to the distribution. Which one looks plausible to you?
The one on the left looks sensible and simple, and looks like it was actually drawn with some consideration of the data. The one on the right … not so much. I have no idea how anyone could think that particular curve belongs in there.…
pharyngula | July 12, 2007
UFO 'studies' have come a long way since the days of Billy Meier, when you could just throw a pie plate or a hubcap into the air and take a polaroid, and presto … proof of flying saucers! Now in these days of Photoshop and CGI, you can get much more elaborate and realistic images — none of those silver blurs anymore. DJ Chubakka introduced me to a weird world of modern UFO enthusiasts.
Nowadays you can read the markings right off the hulls of the spaceships.
The hot new fad in the LGM crowd is "drone" sightings — weirdly intricate objects that float in close and maneuver strangely and pause…
pharyngula | July 9, 2007The Modulator informs me that there are 20 blogging commandments. Then I discover how to create your own religion in 10 easy steps. It figures that it's twice as easy to create a religion as it is to create a successful blog.
So if I'd pursued that other avocation, I'd be pope by now? Or at least the leader of a globe-spanning cult? But I repeat myself.
pharyngula | July 4, 2007Since I brought up the hype for this Diesel fashion show, Phil has revealed that you can now watch it on the web.
It's some kind of holographic light show on a fashion runway. I don't know what the point of all the skinny people wandering around in clothes might have been, though. It didn't make me want to buy any clothes, but a battery of lasers is looking more and more attractive.
pharyngula | July 2, 2007There's a rather unsurprising study that shows babies can "lie" at a very early age, deceiving their parents with fake cries as early as six months (any parents out there? You know this is trivial—kids pop out of the birth canal as greedy, selfish little beasts who will do anything to cajole their way into your heart.) Now look at how a fundie blog spins the story: it's sin! It confirms what the Bible tells us, that we are born into sin! And then the author asks, "What stories (humorous, preferably) can you share about how your children demonstrate they, too, are sinful from birth?"
It will…