Weirdness
pharyngula | July 19, 2010I'm sure it was a moment of epiphany. Person in charge of an MRI takes avantage of an idle moment in the parade of patients to have lunch. Pulls a banana out of a brown paper bag. Looks at banana. Looks at MRI. Looks at banana. Looks at MRI. And the rest is history.
Give it time to load, and if you've got a slow connection, you might not want to bother; these are all animated images of 2-D slices scanned through MRIs of fruit and vegetables. The artichoke is my favorite.
pharyngula | July 19, 2010Is anyone going to Comic-Con? You've probably heard that the Phelps gang will be picketing it (IMPORTANT: you know Phelps is a litigious con-man who baits people so he can sue them, right?), so you may have to pick a god to annoy them. Here's a list of appropriate comic book gods and goddesses. Praise Thor, piss off Phelps.
Although I would think being an atheist would be even more effective. For that, here's a list of atheist comic book characters. It's short, and unfortunately, most of them aren't very memorable.
There is, apparently, a comic book called The Atheist. I've never seen it, but…
pharyngula | July 18, 2010Never, ever emulate the stories from Disney cartoons.
(via Evolving Thoughts)
pharyngula | July 17, 2010It's just one of those freakish religious practices I cannot comprehend, this strange "anointing" of heads and objects with oil. Why? Does their god just like his targets greased up? It's especially inappropriate when a teacher regularly rubs magic lubricants onto her students.
A Norfolk teacher has resigned after it was discovered she was rubbing "holy oil" on students and their desks during school, a Norfolk Public Schools spokesperson said.
How stupid. Everyone knows that, in order to be effective, the proper way to bless the students is to decapitate a chicken at the lectern, and then…
pharyngula | July 16, 2010There are two very good reasons.
Because rodents are pee-sniffing preverts. Eww.
Because every post about Republicans or the Vatican is about rodents, so we've already got more than enough of that around here. Double eww. Or W.
The Friday Cephalopod will magically appear at some point today. Because they're beautiful.
pharyngula | July 16, 2010This is going to be hilarious: Comic-con is next week in San Diego, and the professional attention whores at Fred Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church are going to picket it.
The destruction of this nation is imminent — so start calling on Batman and Superman now, see if they can pull you from the mess that you have created with all your silly idolatry.
I don't know why they've chosen Comic-con; maybe it's because the attendees are mostly able to tell the difference between fantasy and reality, a grave sin to Phelps.
You know what would be really funny? Fred Phelps reading the Sunday funny pages…
pharyngula | July 15, 2010I don't know if I can bear to watch this.
Throughout the trailer, all I could think about was the creature's gastro-intestinal arrangement. It's got a mouth at both ends. All the heroes have to do is let it keep eating, and since it can't excrete, it'll eventually explode.
(via Deep Sea News)
pharyngula | July 14, 2010We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And here is a website that tells you everything that will happen…in the Future!
You may be excited to know that we have a specific date for the imminent demise of Christianity: 2240. It's all based on this very scientific graph.
Yes, my friends, in the future we will be able to predict complex sociological phenomena from a short sample of data by fitting it to a straight line. We cannot do this today without gagging, but in the Future, it will be easy!
My friends, there is so much more…
pharyngula | July 14, 2010The biggest consumer of porn in the US is Utah, and hotels report increased viewing of porn during religious conventions. Could there be a relationship between religiosity and private viewing of porn? Here's another datum: use google to look at searches for pornographic terms world-wide.
Google ranks Pakistan No.1 in the world in searches for pornographic terms, outranking every other country in searches per person for certain sex-related content, FOXNews.com said.
Pakistan has ranked No.1 in searches per-person for "horse sex" since 2004, "donkey sex" since 2007, "rape pictures" between…
pharyngula | July 13, 2010Schools often block access to parts of the internet, which is fine, if only to focus students' attention a little bit. It is not fine when they discriminate, like Indianapolis public schools, which block on religious views other than the Abrahamic religions. Their rules, though, mention something I did not know.
Sites that promote and provide information on religions such as Wicca, Witchcraft or Satanism. Occult Practices, atheistic views, voodoo rituals or other forms of mysticism, [...] the use of spells, incantations, curses, and magic powers. This category includes sites which discuss or…
pharyngula | July 12, 2010Jean Stevens was a lonely old lady with an unpleasant obsession. She dug up her dead twin sister and husband and kept the corpses in her house, dressing them up and offering them tea and talking to them. That's a little disturbing, but mostly harmless — except that you can't help but think that she'd be a lot happier with living company.
But here's the annoying part. They just had to interview a psychiatrist about it (that's actually a good idea), but then they got a singularly cluelless one.
Dr. Helen Lavretsky, a psychiatry professor at UCLA who researches how the elderly view death and…
pharyngula | July 11, 2010Every story should occasionally take a break from the clumsy metazoan action to plunge into the biochemistry of gut bacteria. Every novel could be improved this way!
pharyngula | July 10, 2010The third of July was Bake Jesus Day, and many examples were sent in. All I can say is — most of that stuff looks nasty. Tortured bleeding guy on a stick is not the best key ingredient for a cook off, and not even Iron Chef could pull it off.
pharyngula | July 9, 2010I was so excited about this lead.
A famous Newfoundland sea monster will soon occupy a space normally reserved for Canada's Queen.
I was even more excited when I saw a picture of the Newfie beast:
That'll teach that dingleberry Charles — bypassed by a giant squid, soon to be ruler of all Britannia.
It was a major letdown to discover the details.
Glover's Harbour's giant roadside squid statue has been chosen to appear on a new Canadian stamp.
A fellow can still dream, though. Someone needs to drop a hint to Queen Elizabeth that a giant aquatic mollusc would do a better job on the throne…
pharyngula | July 8, 2010You know how New Scientist published that horrible magazine cover that said "DARWIN WAS WRONG" in big letters, which we now get to hear about all the time at school board meetings as every authority-happy creationist waves it around and announces that they were right all along? I want a copy of the July issue of the Portuguese edition of Playboy for the same reason.
Jesus is on the cover of the July Playboy, sitting on a bed, holding a scantily clad female. The title of Saramago's book is engraved into the headboard of the bed.
The other explicit images in the magazine show Jesus watching…
pharyngula | June 30, 2010I'm very, very sorry. You know that little malware incident the other day? We've discovered what the nasty thing did: it's infected us here at scienceblogs, and there's an epidemic sweeping through the team. Symptoms are cold-heartedness, decay, lack of affect, deadness, corruption, sudden surges of frenzied aggression, and cannibalistic impulses.
That's right. We're all turning into New Atheists. Or zombies. One or the other, it's hard to tell the difference.
Clearly, I have an advantage here, since there's actually little change in my condition. I did feel a pressing desire to disembowel…
pharyngula | June 30, 2010You've all been wondering, I'm sure, what a vampire penis looks like. We don't have a picture of one, since Twilight is still the domain of yearningly sexless (we hope!) tweens who are infatuated with the idea of love and sex, just not the reality, but one exploiter has come out with a Twilight vibrator. It's lavenderish and bumpy and grossly overpriced, if you don't really want to click on the link. It's not clear if it sparkles; if not, they missed a good marketing angle.
It's also not clear who it is for. Don't you have to be rather repressed to find anything at all attractive about that…
pharyngula | June 29, 2010It's strange how the people who most advocate sympathy and rapprochement with religion are blind to what religious people really think. Here's another case where Josh Rosenau complains that I misunderstand what the faithful were trying to do with their prayers for the Gulf…and then goes on to do exactly as I said the apologists should stop doing. He ignores the religious part of these prayer events. He says, as if it is refuting anything I say, that prayer reduces stress, has positive physiological effects, brings communities together, etc., etc., etc. It's utterly clueless, and in a bizarre…