humor
evolvingthoughts | June 14, 2006This, to a Mac OS X user, seems strangely apposite. It appeared in The Monthly, June 2006.
Windows is Shutting Down
Windows is shutting down, and grammar are
On their last leg. So what am we to do?
A letter of complaint go just so far,
Proving the only one in step are you.
Better, perhaps, to simply let it goes.
A sentence have to be screwed pretty bad
Before they gets to where you doesnt knows
The meaning what it must of meant to had.
The meteor have hit. Extinction spread,
But evolution do not stop for that.
A mutant languages rise from the dead
And all them rules is suddenly old hat.
Too…
mikethemadbiologist | June 14, 2006
(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
You might think that Press Secretary Tony Snow (left) and White Advisor Dan Bartlett (right) are decked out like this because Iraq is so dangerous that they have to wear this on the way to the U.S. embassy. But you would be wrong. It's simply that these guys are on the cutting edge of fashion, and you're just too dorky to know that.
I can't wait to see what the Fuggers would do with this...
oracknows | June 14, 2006I've heard of physicians using themselves as guinea pigs for their own research before, but this is ridiculous.
Yesterday, my copy of General Surgery News arrived at my office. As I was whiffling through it to see if there were any articles worth reading, I came across a tale of a Japanese doctor who was truly dedicated to his research, so much so that that I had to hand it to him. Well, sort of.
Yes, on p. 22 of the June issue of General Surgery News (sadly, not yet online as of this writing, so you'll have to take my word for this--or check up on me in a couple of weeks when they'll…
pharyngula | June 13, 2006Hey, I'm not being pretentious, I'm merely paying due diligence to privacy and security issues.
(via Apostropher)
oracknows | June 12, 2006Well, it didn't take The Spoof long to comment on the Andrew Wakefield affair. Choice bits:
While on holiday in the US in 1997 he was introduced to a creationist nutter called Professor Hugh Fudenberg who claimed to cure autistic children by giving them samples of his own bone marrow.
And, my favorite:
Wakefield was recruited for a sum not less than the publicly reported thrity peices of silver and began being tutored in Fudenberg's "transfer factor technology" - the secret key to mastering miracle cures for childhood autism syndrome.
This theory was based on a curious supposition that…
mikethemadbiologist | June 12, 2006Sadly, one of my most widely read posts from the old site was a post where I used Gizoogle to transliat' Ann Coulter (it's the only possible way to read the Blond Banshee). But I bow in worship to Jonathan at A Tiny Revolution who translates liberal chickenhawk Peter Beinart:
For years Peter "Pe-Nart" Beinart has attempted to speak in complete gibberish. And he's gotten close--70% gibberish, 86% gibberish, 93% gibberish. But it's only in a recent Q & A with Kevin Drum about Beinart's book The Good Fight that he's reached his goal of 100% (reg. req.):
Jihadism sits at the center of a…
pharyngula | June 12, 2006Mooney gets written up in the Las Vegas Sun. Here's what I get in the same article:
Friday's panel included a Minnesota biology professor…
Yeah, that's it.
Someday, I will be famous enough to warrant actually mentioning my name! They'll misspell it, but still…
evolvingthoughts | June 10, 2006So, Janet posed the meme (or something with the same name) to enable us newbies to introduce ourselves. And because I'm a follower, not a leader, I have to offer up my predilections to you all.
3 reasons you blog about science:
1. Because it's interesting, dammit!
2. Because science is the single most effective way the human race has come up with to gain knowledge, and I want to talk about it, as I can't do it.
3. To avoid real work.
Point at which you would stop blogging:
When it interrupts real work too much. So far it only interrupts sleep and family life.
1 thing you frequently…
clock | June 10, 2006Shamelessly stolen from Cyberspace Rendezvous:
In pharmacology, all drugs have two names, a trade name and generic name.
For example, the trade name of Tylenol also has a generic name of Acetaminophen. Aleve is also called Naproxen.
Amoxil is also call Amoxicillin and Advil is also called Ibuprofen.
The FDA has been looking for a generic name for Viagra. After careful consideration by a team of government experts, it recently announced that it has settled on the generic name of Mycoxafloppin.
Also considered were Mycoxafailin, Mydixadrupin, Mydixarizin, Dixafix, and of course, Ibepokin.…
scientificactivist | June 10, 2006Conservatives in America have become pretty adept at shrugging off worries about global warming, and when it comes to evolution, well, they have their own ideas about how that works. However, this headline from National Geographic might cause some circuits to blow:
"Global Warming Is Spurring Evolution, Study Says"
Wow, what a catch-22! They can continue to ignore global warming but risk causing the body of evidence in favor of evolution to grow even faster, thus making it more difficult to sneak religious ideas in classrooms. On the other hand, if they try to reverse climate change, they'…
oracknows | June 10, 2006I'm probably going to catch some crap for this one, but it's kind of amusing. So what the heck? From Australia:
Officials think the "Mandy" singer's music will keep teens from hanging out and revving their engines in parking lots.
Officials in Rockdale, Australia will pump the music of Barry Manilow through speakers in their town to keep hooligan kids from loitering and revving their car engines in neighborhood parking lots. They hope that the "daggy" (slang for unhip) music will send kids fleeing. "Based on reports...daggy music is one way to make the hoons leave an area because they can't…
oracknows | June 10, 2006I've probably never mentioned it before, buy I'm 1/4 Lithuanian. Here's something one of my cousins sent me to make me "proud" of that heritage:
VILNIUS, Lithuania - Lithuanian police were so astonished by a breath test that registered 18 times the legal alcohol limit, they thought their device must be broken. It wasn't.
Police said Tuesday 41-year-old Vidmantas Sungaila registered 7.27 grams per liter of alcohol in his blood repeatedly on different devices after he was pulled over Saturday for driving his truck down the center of a two-lane highway 60 miles from the capital, Vilnius.…
tsmith | June 8, 2006Busy today, so I've just now had a chance to glance through the blog carnivals I mentioned earlier. Via The Skeptics' Circle comes A Creationist FAQ from the Science Creative Quarterly. Too funny:
Q: What about the fossil evidence?
A: The real fossils are university professors writing papers for each other.
***
Q: What is a kind?
A: A kind is cards of the same rank. Thus 4 aces and a king are four of a kind, but four spades and a heart are not.
I think this was highlighted somewhere previously (they note it's republished from Aug. 2005), but it's still funny.
pharyngula | June 6, 2006
Do cephalopods confound the search for essential truths, or do they enhance it?
tsmith | June 6, 2006You may recall the exploding Mentos and diet coke experiment I mentioned awhile back. Wanna see some people with way too much time on their hands take it to the extreme? Check it out at EepyBird.com.
Hat tip to Burt Humburg
tsmith | June 6, 2006Once again, I'm wrong. I said yesterday that HIV deniers accused scientists of thinking of Robert Gallo as a deity. Silly, silly me--my mistake. Turns out he's just a high preist:
We point to this phenomenon of how easily religious belief triumphs over the most irrefutable evidence to the contrary, in order to challenge all critics of HIV/AIDS to answer this question:
How does this kind of thought-resistant religiosity differ in the slightest from the twenty year adherence of believers in HIV to their favored dogma in the face of similar overwhelming evidence against the belief?
We suggest…
evolvingthoughts | June 5, 2006
I was bemoaning to Paul Griffiths and Sahotra Sarkar, admittedly over a beer, that unlike them (they are both birdwatchers), I lacked a special organism I could be expert about. This is a grievous fault in a philosopher of biology, so we wondered what I could choose as my "target organisms". Sahotra suggested I name and describe creationists (well, actually he suggested he would, but I'm stealing this from him) as a species. It's important to do this, so that when we describe the behavior of these creatures (pun intended) in the wild, we know exactly what we are discussing. One wouldn't want…
evolvingthoughts | June 5, 2006
Diseases are threatening the production of chocolate. What will I do to stave off Nietzschean despair? There's always beer, I guess...