Weirdness
pharyngula | August 15, 2006Creationists often bring up Piltdown Man* as an example of an evolutionary fraud, and claim that it was the foundation of huge volumes of research. It was a fraud, and it did linger unpleasantly in the scientific literature for far too long, but you'd be hard pressed to find a serious work of science that used it any more. Until now. That genius of the modern era, L. Ron Hubbard, cited Piltdown in Scientology: A History of Man.
*By the way, if you haven't been reading Richard Harter's World, you should. It's a sort of antediluvian blog, with none of the conventions we've grown accustomed to,…
pharyngula | August 13, 2006Martin Rundkvist has discovered a peculiar little paper. It's titled "Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism", and here's part of the abstract:
Background Drawing on the work of the late French philosophers Deleuze and
Guattari, the objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement
in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards
to scientific knowledge. As such, we assert that the evidence-based movement in health
sciences constitutes a good example of microfascism at play in…
pharyngula | August 13, 2006Forget those visions of holy virgins or Mother Teresa in a bun or Jesus in a chalupa—guess who appeared in a smoky cloud over the Atlantic?
pharyngula | August 11, 2006This could be a new feature here, rather like RaptureReady's Rapture Index. I'm collecting omens and portents of the coming of our imminent doom at the hands suckers of the Tentacled Great Old Ones. It's a race: will the cephalopods beat Jesus? A distinct edge goes to the squiddies—at least they're real.
As mentioned earlier, cephalopods are turning up in our nation's rivers and highways.
Martin Rundkvist reports that the Swedish Research Council's new outreach magazine is called…Tentakel.
Majikthise reveals that the cephalopods have conquered the Moon. (Oh, and here's a much prettier…
pharyngula | August 9, 2006Penguins on the freeway—that must have been an interesting sight. A truck overturned in Texas, releasing the animals, and several were taken out by passing cars.
The good news is that there was also an octopus in the truck, and it came through the accident unharmed. I'd kind of like to know the details of that one.
CNN is also reporting some roadkill in Connecticut. I never cared for the sanctimonious git so I'm less concerned about that one.
pharyngula | August 9, 2006Here's an idea: a young woman takes a picture of herself every day, and assembles it into a movie. It's off to an interesting start, but she's at a developmental stage where the changes aren't happening very rapidly, so she pretty much looks the same at the beginning as at the end.
pharyngula | August 8, 2006
Apparently, everything is sectarian. Now I learn that Windows is the Christian OS, to my vast relief. I'll stick with my secular humanist Mac OS X, with its Darwin core and its demonic platypus mascot.
pharyngula | August 8, 2006Shelley has something for people with a tentacle fetish. Are there any of those around here?
pharyngula | August 8, 2006Any New Jersey readers out there? Anyone from Seaside Heights?
Why didn't you tell me?
I had to find out about this exciting event in the grocery store checkout line. I was most interested to learn that it ravaged the shore line during a recent storm, but seems to have put most of its effort into destroying a church.
Hmmm. I didn't do it, officer.
pharyngula | August 6, 2006Here are a few miscellaneous cephalopod-related things people have sent me lately.
Here's a squid kokigami template, and assembly instructions. I confess: I was wondering what the heck it was for, until I read further. Oh. My.
Good hygiene and kokigami go well together.
A town in Japan is building a giant robotic squid. Hmmm…I should combine this with kokigami; "hello, dear, have I got a surprise for you!"
The text is about mosquitos, but it's illustrated with a nice drawing of an octopod.
The car of the future has tentacles.
pharyngula | August 6, 2006
Even if you have a formless, gnawing dread that he might actually win, at least he'll split the Republican vote.
(via Tild~)
pharyngula | August 4, 2006Hang on, people, don't look below the fold if you are easily offended. I'm including a horrific photo that was shown on a magazine cover, one that elicited the following reactions from readers:
"I was SHOCKED"
"I was offended and it made my husband very uncomfortable when I left the magazine on the coffee table"
"Gross, I am sick"
"I had to rip off the cover since I didn't want it laying around the house"
Are you ready for this?
Here's the hideous cover in question. Hide the horses! Call in a hazmat team to scrub that image away! Would you believe 25% of that magazine's readers were…
pharyngula | August 4, 2006This Neonbubble site is strange and baffling, and now they've gone and blown my cover with this biography of a former student.
Her high intelligence and keen insight caught the eye of her Biology professor, PZ Myers, who informed the U.S. Military as the terms of his continued freedom dictated. Gia was abducted and experimented upon for a number of years in an attempt to delve into the secrets within her mind.
I suppose I could be turning over my promising students to top secret government agencies, but I don't remember this Gia Milinovich. They must be erasing my memories! The bastards!
pharyngula | August 4, 2006Jim Lippard has dug up a bizarre animated summary of Mormon theology that was put together by some other religious group to debunk them. I know that at least some bits and pieces of the cartoon are accurate, but I can't judge the whole thing—I can tell you that religion looks pretty ridiculous when you explain its basic tenets with cheesy animation. Can we get a whole set of these made for Catholicism, Islam, Lutheranism, the Baptists, etc.?
I don't think it would cost much. From the look of the Mormon story, maybe $9.99 each.
Here's a picture of Mormon heaven.
Looks just like Utah.
jlynch | August 2, 2006I just have to share this comment from this thread:
Actually, it is atheism that is the problem...more specifically, the attempt to make man (or at least some men through the power of the state) God.
Then, when the idea of experimentation on humans, made acceptable by beginning with human embryos defined as not being human at all, is more and more accepted, cloning, combination of human and animal DNA and other perversions can be utilized on a grand scale to create a race of slaves governed by eugenically superior Supermen.
Nietzsche's syphillitic atheistic ramblings made real by the power of…
jlynch | July 28, 2006You may want to turn your volume down ...
Somebody needs to up the dosage.
(Yeah, I know. It's probably a fake, but it's still funny in a "look at the monkey" kind of way)
pharyngula | July 28, 2006
Isn't that a sweet little old lady? I guess the sign offended a few people, though, and they turned her in to the police.
Insisting that the sign was simply a lark, Mrs Grove said yesterday that she had never received any complaints about it. But police ordered her to take it down and her details were taken. Once the officers left she hung the sign back up.
I like that last bit—what a simple no-nonsense response to bureaucratic BS.
She said: "it's been there for more than 30 years and all the people who live nearby are used to it. I couldn't believe it. I've never had any complaints with…