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Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
PZ Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.
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Category: Kooks
Posted on: April 5, 2006 4:03 PM, by PZ Myers
It's BC and Johnny Hart, so you know it's going to be godawful bad. Don't read the rest unless you've got a vomit bag handy.
So Newton, Einstein, all of physics and chemistry and biology…fiction. Can anyone think of any scientific claim (or "acclaim", whatever he means by that) that includes god? I can't.
(Blame Zenoferox)
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Comments
PLEASE tell me that that is a joke.
Posted by: MtMan900 | April 5, 2006 4:08 PM
Well, I think Intelligent Design includes God, but it might not count because He's working under an alias. (Or, more likely, it doesn't count because ID isn't actually a scientific claim.)
Posted by: Zeno | April 5, 2006 4:12 PM
Hm, "acclaim"... Does that mean that as long as scientists always yell "Thank GOD that manuscript's finally finished!!!!" that everything's ok?
The notion of "scientific acclaim" in the comics puts me in mind of the Calvin & Hobbes in which Calvin describes the "lucrative paleontology prizes" that he will earn.
Ewww, now I've put Johnny Hart and Bill Watterson in the same sentence. I think I have to go sacrifice a few oxen to Watterson for penance now...
Posted by: Carlie | April 5, 2006 4:15 PM
Oh, god, now he tells me!
I'm going to need to modify my models to include God or my committee won't approve my dissertation. Anybody know what the Perl code for God is?
Posted by: Reed A. Cartwright | April 5, 2006 4:16 PM
"Any scientific acclaim that omits God"
Well, that's easily fixed, viz:
'Stephen Hawking, the acclaimed physicist, has a God-like intellect.'
'PZ Myers, the evolutionary biologist, has a wit as quick as Zeus' thunder.'
etc.
Who'd know keeping the fundies happy would be so easy?
Posted by: Urinated State of America | April 5, 2006 4:20 PM
Johnny Hart was ill
'Cause science won't stand still
And he thinks he knows where it should stand.
[On divinely-created feet!]
Posted by: Sean Foley | April 5, 2006 4:21 PM
I would think it was a joke but no matter how hard I look I can't see anything there that could be construed as funny.
(I know, I know: BC not funny shock! Hold the front page.)
Posted by: james | April 5, 2006 4:25 PM
Anybody know what the Perl code for God is?
So, anybody else heard this weird bit of CS apocrypha? Supposedly the reason that the all-caps instead of all-lowercase was chosen for early computers (despite the eyesearing nature of all-caps text) is that some bozo in management thought it would be disrespectful to require the Christian deity's name to be written in lowercase.
The only conclusion I can draw from this is that writing this god's name must be an important part of computer programming. So, really, Mr. Cartwright, how can your code possibly be any good if you haven't been involving this guy from the very beginning? ;-)
Posted by: Anne Nonymous | April 5, 2006 4:25 PM
A truly amazing piece of cartoon idiocy. I read B.C. through most of my childhood, and I never imagine it'd sink so low: I am truly shocked. Then again, the kind of strips readers that complained that "Calvin and Hobbes isn't family-oriented enough" finally have something they like, I imagine.
Posted by: Dr. X | April 5, 2006 4:27 PM
I think we should riot and go torch some embassies or at least pop off a couple death threats to Johnny and all the big newspapers that publish his comic.
Posted by: Matt | April 5, 2006 4:27 PM
PLEASE tell me that that is a joke.
That's the worst part: it's not remotely funny.
Posted by: Grumpy | April 5, 2006 4:31 PM
I think of my paychecks as scientific acclaims. I did some good math, and now I get paid for it. Unfortunately, as I'm using direct deposit, none of my money mentions God. My paychecks are therefore science fiction.
He has mocked my paycheck. I'd go start a riot about that if my paycheck didn't deserve it.
Posted by: Dustin | April 5, 2006 4:35 PM
I'm not surprised; Hart has been attacking science in general, and evolution in particular, for years now. His Easter cartoons are particularly sucky. (He hates the Easter Bunny for stealing attention from Jesus--like I care about either.) Get this, though: in an interview with Christianity Today, the author says that "faith is not rocket science" and it seems that Hart does not correct the man! We want a clarification, Hart!
Posted by: Kristine | April 5, 2006 4:43 PM
Why the hell are any mainstream newspapers even running that crap?
Posted by: craig | April 5, 2006 4:47 PM
Help me! I need God's Source Code!
Posted by: Reed A. Cartwright | April 5, 2006 4:48 PM
Nevermind God's Source Code. It's filled with syntax errors.
Posted by: yorktank | April 5, 2006 4:56 PM
One of the latest Bizarro comics (http://www.bizarro.com/) features a group of cave-dwellers (Cro-Magnon?) asking the above BC character something along the lines of "How do you know about this 'Christ' person if he won't be born for 50,000 years?"
The site only shows comics at least a month old, so I can't link to the actual individual comic.
Hart's been pulling this for years. I read BC as a child, and played the computer games, but lost interest after about the third "snakes are evil it says so in the bible therefore evolution is wrong" or "big bang theory is full of holes"
I wonder how BC would fare under the same treatment recently given to Garfield, in which all of one character's thought bubbles (Garfield the cat) were erased. John decends into madness. What would happen to the BC people?
Posted by: The Brummell | April 5, 2006 4:56 PM
I'm always amazed at the longevity of these newspaper comics. I haven't thought about BC in decades. Neither have the newspaper publishers as far as I can figure. Johnny sends in his little bundle of drawings every week and Creators Syndicate (listed on the comic) sends back a check.
The only thing I remember about BC was the one-wheel mode of transport. A quick search brought up a recent "message in a bottle" gag. I believe that was part of the schtick decades ago. Johnny Hart also does Wizard of Id, which I remember liking somewhat more.
I don't think he's the dumbest man in comics. Where would that put the consistently unfunny creator of Mallard Fillmore? http://www.kingfeatures.com/features/comics/mallard/about.htm
Posted by: PaulC | April 5, 2006 4:56 PM
There was a cartoon out a few days ago ("Bizzaro", I think...) where the same BC caveman character was in a group of other cavemen types and was being asked something along the lines of "So how come you know so much about this Jesus character if he won't be born for another 50,000 years?". I know nothing about the cartoonist but that sure seemed like a poke in the eye to the BC strip...
Posted by: Garry | April 5, 2006 5:01 PM
"(He hates the Easter Bunny for stealing attention from Jesus--"
Ya know, it's a pretty unimpressive Son-of-God that can be overshadowed by a cartoon rabbit.
Posted by: craig | April 5, 2006 5:04 PM
Ah, Mr. Cartwright, Ms Nonymous, don't you know? It's well known scientific fact that God wrote in LISP code. 'Cause he was on a six-day deadline, you see. (credit: Julia Ecklar)
Posted by: iGollum | April 5, 2006 5:04 PM
Mallard Fillmore is worse.
Does Johnny Hart not know the difference between 'claim' and 'acclaim'???
Posted by: george cauldron | April 5, 2006 5:06 PM
I think BC needs to read St. Augustine too.
Posted by: LBBP | April 5, 2006 5:06 PM
PLEASE tell me that that is a joke.
That's the worst part: it's not remotely funny.
Bill Dembski probably got a chuckle out of it.
Posted by: george cauldron | April 5, 2006 5:07 PM
*vomit*
Dammit, I let my curiosity get the best of me...
Posted by: Ali | April 5, 2006 5:09 PM
Yes, the unfortunate who draws Mallard Fillmore (don't remember his name) is far worse than Hart. He's mean-spirited, misogynistic and has serious anger-management issues. One of his strips a few years ago featured a glasses-wearing, childless professional woman named "Ms. Virago" who dressed up a cat in baby clothes. Serious mental problems here, folks.
Posted by: Madam Pomfrey | April 5, 2006 5:11 PM
No, the worst part is that BC used to be funny. RIP.
Posted by: Andrew Wade | April 5, 2006 5:13 PM
Which of these two is the actual Mallard FIllmore?:
http://www.nmr.nl/deins815.htm
Posted by: george cauldron | April 5, 2006 5:14 PM
Johnny Hart wasn't always this way.
My Physics book has several B.C. comic in it - one I remember clearly had two characters standing near a well, one asked how deep the well is, the other dropped a rock into it and counted the seconds.
But Hart went bad in the 1990s when he became an Evangelical Christian ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Hart ).
After that, his comics became decreasingly funny - it was almost as if he stopped trying to be creative, and instead just started 'phoning it in,' except for the occasional Christian plot twist. (He added a couple of Christian characters and a cave full of books - which oddly enough made his characters LESS intelligent!)
I don't think we can really blame Johnny, he's 75 and is probably thinking of the hereafter. To paraphrase Bill Cosby, "Of COURSE he's good NOW. . . He's trying to get into Heaven!"
Posted by: Calladus | April 5, 2006 5:16 PM
Here's the link to that Bizarro comic:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/comics/king.htm?name=Bizarro&date=20060403
Posted by: Judas | April 5, 2006 5:17 PM
I doubt it very much. First of all, nobody was putting the word God in computer output in the early days. Computers weren't used widely for word processing. Here's a picture of an old punch card from 1940 (if I read the date correctly) http://content.answers.com/main/content/img/CDE/_PUNCHCD.GIF
There weren't even electronic computers at that time. All the data processing was done using electromechanical machines. Clearly, caps were the default at the time.
Why? My first thought is that caps are intrinsically easier to render at low resolution. Lowercase letters have descenders in some cases (e.g. the lower part of j), and this poses a problem since you have to dedicate some of the bitmap to rarely used parts of the letter. In fact, my original TRS-80 had a chip that could render lowercase letters, but that was intentionally turned off. It was possible to get it to function by adding an extra bit of memory (solder one chip piggy back on another except for one of the pins and add a jumper wire). The effect of doing this was to get funky lowercase letters that were pushed up to fit the descenders in the allowed space. For some reason "a" was pushed up as well. I suspect there might have been some other logic that would remap all these letters to the right place and it was easier to remap "a" as well.
However, even the above explanation is probably an anachronism. When only one set of letters are allowed, upper case has traditionally been the default, as in chiseled inscriptions. This may itself be somewhat related to the rendering issue. I think upper case is just considered simpler and clearer.
Posted by: PaulC | April 5, 2006 5:23 PM
I must defer to those who say Mallard Fillmore is worse. I think I'd managed to put that wreck completely out of my mind.
Posted by: PZ Myers | April 5, 2006 5:25 PM
Hey, PaulC, don't harsh on my cute apocrypha. That's no fun! :P
Posted by: Anne Nonymous | April 5, 2006 5:26 PM
At least Johnny Hart had a funny period.
When was Prickly City funny? Not even once, by my count.
When people view your strip as less funny than Family Circus, it's time to call it a day.
That Bizarro on Monday was hilarious.
Posted by: MikeM | April 5, 2006 5:28 PM
well, that's just beautiful, George. I'll never look at Jemima Puddleduck in quite the same way again.
Posted by: RavenT | April 5, 2006 5:28 PM
My first thought is that caps are intrinsically easier to render at low resolution.
It's hard to fit lowercase into the 5x7 dot-matrix that printers and monitors were using (not without having your 'g' look like 's', anyway). Punchcards had the same problem, with a real physical limit: the characters were frequently wider than the columns.
Posted by: P J Evans | April 5, 2006 5:29 PM
I don't think we can really blame Johnny, he's 75 and is probably thinking of the hereafter.
Hart is a fucking 75 year old pussy.
Posted by: Great White Wonder | April 5, 2006 5:36 PM
All science owes thanks to God?
Why INSIST on pointing it out ALL the time if it is understood HE is ALWAYS there?
If HE is all knowing and all seeing WHY do YOU find it necessary to point out to EVERYONE ELSE how much you are praising and worshipping the ALL POWERFUL LORD?
Who do think you are scoring points with?
Posted by: owlbear1 | April 5, 2006 5:47 PM
All that can be said for Johnny Hart is that he knows nothing about religion OR science.
Posted by: BrianT | April 5, 2006 5:49 PM
Man, you people are dishonest. (Not that I'm surprised.) This strip is obviously photoshopped. You can see obvious fuzziness around the lettering. Plus if it were real, I'd expect a link to the original on the Creators Syndicate website.
I'm sure Mr. Hart and his attorney will enjoy hearing about this.
Posted by: It's Photoshopped, Morons | April 5, 2006 6:01 PM
It's up right now on ucomics.com. Just choose BC in their list of comics, or go to http://www.ucomics.com/bc. It's today's comic. So, if it's photoshopped, then Mr. Hart's syndicate is in on the photoshopping. Or their servers have been hacked and the conspiracy is even vaster than IPM imagined! Oh no!
Posted by: Anne Nonymous | April 5, 2006 6:11 PM
Try not to laugh.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/jobs/outsideemployment.asp
Liberty University is a Christian liberal arts university with over 5,000 residential students as well as several thousand students in its external degree program. The University is seeking faculty who can demonstrate a faith commitment to its evangelical Christian purpose and who are dedicated to excellence in teaching for the following anticipated openings in the 2005-2006 academic year:
Position: Biology: Assistant Professor. Ph.D. required. Teaching human anatomy and physiology. Experience in either botany or molecular biology helpful.
Department: Biology/Chemistry
Applicants should send letter of application and a CV to:
Dr. Paul Sattler
Department of Biology and Chemistry
Liberty University
1971 University Blvd.
Lynchburg, VA 24502
pwsattle@liberty.edu
Posted by: Great White Wonder | April 5, 2006 6:11 PM
All that can be said for Johnny Hart is that he knows nothing about religion OR science.
Oh I can think of a few more things to be said for Johnny.
Posted by: Great White Wonder | April 5, 2006 6:13 PM
Hm, it occurs to me, to really sort this out we ought to do a detailed analysis of the kerning in the typeface and magnify the images a millionfold to examine the detailed errors in the printing of the letters and...
Posted by: Anne Nonymous | April 5, 2006 6:13 PM
This strip is obviously photoshopped. You can see obvious fuzziness around the lettering. Plus if it were real, I'd expect a link to the original on the Creators Syndicate website.
Uhm...
http://www.comics.com/creators/bc/archive/images/bc2006106460405.gif
Posted by: Calladus | April 5, 2006 6:15 PM
"I think BC needs to read St. Augustine too."
Why does St. Augustine hate America!
Johnney Hart makes the common mistake of confusing his ideology with reality. The zeroth rule of science is 'Reality doesn't care what you believe.' The worse mistake of course is that Johnney Hart has given himself over to superstition and witchcraft which is a grave sin both in Christianity _and_ Science.
Posted by: gibbon | April 5, 2006 6:16 PM
Not photoshopped, moron. See here: http://www.comics.com/creators/bc/archive/images/bc2006106460405.gif
Posted by: wheatdogg | April 5, 2006 6:19 PM
It's photoshopped morons: Better being called dishonest by a moron than being shown I'm a moron I guess:
http://news.yahoo.com/comics/bc;_ylt=AkiSQ6vNQLu3EciUXBVBYcgDwLAF;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl
This is an example of how science or critical thought works, provide evidence to back up your assertion. Or did you think this was non-proportional font argument day?
Mike
Posted by: mgr | April 5, 2006 6:20 PM
Care to apologize to everyone, Mr 67.135.49.5?
Posted by: PZ Myers | April 5, 2006 6:33 PM
use strict;
use Deities::Yahweh;
and remember not to compile the code with taint mode or you will burn in hell forever!
Posted by: No More Mr. Nice Guy! | April 5, 2006 6:42 PM
The question of motive naturally comes into play. Do we have here, a photoshop artist who wishes to make Johnny Hart look like a fundamentalist kook?
Does this saboteur stand a chance of topping the BC strip from a few Easters ago which caused a flurry of anti-semitic criticism for its gradual artistic changing of a menorah into a cross? Which I saw printed on dead trees just across from Wizard of Id?
Posted by: Rey | April 5, 2006 6:42 PM
Prickly City is the worst EVAR x INFINITY. Really, even BC puts that banal crap to shame. At least Fillmore rouses enough of an emotional response that I'd like to throttle the author, Prickly City just leaves me shaking my head over the fact that someone so very stupid is able to command a pencil.
Posted by: Dustin | April 5, 2006 6:49 PM
GOD is real, unless declared integer (at least in Fortran IV).
Posted by: bad Jim | April 5, 2006 6:59 PM
I've been thinking of dumping BC from my comic reader, and today's strip finally convinced me that I'm better off without it. Hail Zippy!
Posted by: Swany | April 5, 2006 6:59 PM
Well let's see what we know about Mr. 67.135.49.5.
Arin shows the 67.135.49 block is owned by Velocity Telephone. A quick google search shows us that Velocity Telephone is a small Telco that has residential high speend internet service in only Eagan and Golden Valley Minnesota, which apparently are suburbs of Minneapolis.
Have any pissy students from that area PZ? or any pissy professors for that matter.
Posted by: alaric | April 5, 2006 7:04 PM
Pfft, you goofballs are so quick to one-up each others omnipotence that you once again failed to comprehend the simplest of concepts.
It doesn't say "any scientific claim" it says "any scientific acclaim"...there's a difference out here in the real world.
As bugs bunny once said "What a bunch of maroons".
Posted by: tjswift | April 5, 2006 7:04 PM
Guys, the worst comic of all time is "the Family Circus". It is absolutely the most insipid waste of newsprint I have ever seen. It's worse than Garfield and Marmaduke put together.
-jcr
Posted by: John C. Randolph | April 5, 2006 7:05 PM
This BC is ancient history, but to me, it shows just how goofy the ideas that creationists have about evolution are:
http://joshreads.com/?p=377
They think we actually think this way.
(This strip isn't funny either. My apologies.)
Johnny also had a comic strip on the very day of the Dover decision where some guy is selling a really grumpy-looking doll as a "Democrat Doll." I wanted so badly to tell Johnny that, by golly, that looked way more like a Creationist Doll. Because I bet it's how Johhny looked that day.
Posted by: MikeM | April 5, 2006 7:07 PM
to the guy who thought it was photoshopped: check the links the other guys posted. And fuzziness around the letters doesn't mean photoshopped. It just means image compression, something everyone does.
Posted by: Aliera | April 5, 2006 7:07 PM
Sigh. Well, I was once falsely accused by a greedy uncle of forging my grandmother's will. I suppose it's pretty small potatoes to be charged by a blithering idiot with tampering with a B.C.
P.S.: PhotoShop is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated. Keep using it as a generic term and we'll sic Adobe's attorneys on you. Ha!
Posted by: Zeno | April 5, 2006 7:10 PM
BC has always had a bit of a Christian bent; one cartoon I remember from the late 1960's has Snake encountering a version of himself with legs:
It wasn't until the 1980's that Hart began wearing his fundiness on his sleeve, though; perhaps he had a "born-again" experience.
Posted by: idlemind | April 5, 2006 7:12 PM
tj,
So, you're saying that if someone figures out that a given virus has mutated (that is, evolved) that they should say, "Thank God I noticed that virus evolved!!"?
Just seeking clarification. (Scratches head, because morons do that a lot.)
Posted by: MikeM | April 5, 2006 7:27 PM
As bugs bunny once said "What a bunch of maroons".
Us? YOU'RE the one who doesn't want a cure for AIDS...
Posted by: george cauldron | April 5, 2006 7:32 PM
It doesn't say "any scientific claim" it says "any scientific acclaim"...there's a difference out here in the real world.
I see you're no smarter than you were last weekend.
Either JH meant 'scientific claim' or he meant 'scientific acclaim'. The first interpretation is pretty standard creationist rhetoric. The phrase 'scientific acclaim that omits god', OTOH, makes no sense. What would it even mean? I think JH is going senile and forgot the difference between the two words.
I know, aren't we just 'ludicris'?
Posted by: george cauldron | April 5, 2006 7:35 PM
Which of these two is the actual Mallard FIllmore?:
What does it say about me that I recognized that URL?
Posted by: Graculus | April 5, 2006 7:42 PM
"GOD is real, unless declared integer (at least in Fortran IV)."
Odd. On my system "god" is declared FALSE, and "religion" NULL. Maybe you need to upgrade your software?
Or perhaps you have the infamous "god" virus. It corrupts objects to convert random inputs to TRUE. It's hard to get rid off if you get it into your system, since it's a boot sector virus.
Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson | April 5, 2006 7:44 PM
So...you're actually going to presume to tell us that you know the thoughts of some one else that you're fit to reinterpret what he has written?
Really?
LOL!! What ever spins your beanie george...no really.
Posted by: tjswift | April 5, 2006 7:49 PM
ya know, speaking of alternative comical amusements..this site may well take the place of newspaper comics altogether for me. Zippy the Pinhead has nuttin', I mean nuttin' on this crew!
Posted by: tjswift | April 5, 2006 7:52 PM
Day by Day is pretty bad too. I don't think I have seen a single one of those that was funny.
Posted by: John | April 5, 2006 7:58 PM
The comic strip that consistantly makes me vomit is Rose Is Rose. Pat Brady takes the visual interpretations of subjective reality idea from Calvin & Hobbes and employs it in the most insipid, saccharine ways possible.
So Mr. Swift, please enlighten us: what is a "scientific acclaim", and why would it automatically be fiction if it did not mention God?
Posted by: Rey | April 5, 2006 8:08 PM
Good grief - yes, it IS a joke! Look at the change in expression of the caveman between the first and second panels - the caveman seems taken aback by the definition, he is not smiling in agreement.
Subtlety in humor seems to be futile in these polarised times.
Posted by: Leenibus | April 5, 2006 8:18 PM
How to compute digits of GOD ?
Symbolic Computation software such as Maple or Mathematica can compute 10,000 digits of GOD in a blink, and another 20,000-1,000,000 digits overnight (range depends on hardware platform).
It is possible to retrieve 1.25+ million digits of GOD via anonymous ftp from the site wuarchive.wustl.edu, in the files GOD.doc.Z and GOD.dat.Z which reside in subdirectory doc/misc/GOD. New York's Chudnovsky brothers have computed 2 billion digits of GOD on a homebrew computer.
The current record is held by Yasumasa Kanada and Daisuke Takahashi from the University of Tokyo with 51 billion digits of GOD (51,539,600,000 decimal digits to be precise).
Nick Johnson-Hill has an interesting page of GOD trivia at: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/ nickjh/GOD.htm
These computations were made by Yasumasa Kanada, at the University of Tokyo.
There are essentially 3 different methods to calculate GOD to many decimals.
1.One of the oldest is to use the power series expansion of atan(x) = x - x^3/3 + x^5/5 - ... together with formulas like GOD = 16*atan(1/5) - 4*atan(1/239). This gives about 1.4 decimals per term.
2.A second is to use formulas coming from Arithmetic-Geometric mean computations. A beautiful compendium of such formulas is given in the book GOD and the AGM, (see references). They have the advantage of converging quadratically, i.e. you double the number of decimals per iteration. For instance, to obtain 1 000 000 decimals, around 20 iterations are sufficient. The disadvantage is that you need FFT type multiplication to get a reasonable speed, and this is not so easy to program.
3.A third one comes from the theory of complex multiplication of elliptic curves, and was discovered by S. Ramanujan. This gives a number of beautiful formulas, but the most useful was missed by Ramanujan and discovered by the Chudnovsky's. It is the following (slightly modified for ease of programming):
Set k_1 = 545140134; k_2 = 13591409; k_3 = 640320; k_4 = 100100025; k_5 = 327843840; k_6 = 53360;
Then GOD = (k_6 sqrt(k_3))/(S), where
S = sum_(n = 0)^oo (-1)^n ((6n)!(k_2 + nk_1))/(n!^3(3n)!(8k_4k_5)^n)
The great advantages of this formula are that
1) It converges linearly, but very fast (more than 14 decimal digits per term).
2) The way it is written, all operations to compute S can be programmed very simply. This is why the constant 8k_4k_5 appearing in the denominator has been written this way instead of 262537412640768000. This is how the Chudnovsky's have computed several billion decimals.
An interesting new method was recently proposed by David Bailey, Peter Borwein and Simon Plouffe. It can compute the Nth hexadecimal digit of GOD efficiently without the previous N-1 digits. The method is based on the formula:
GOD = sum_(i = 0)^oo (1 16^i) ((4 8i + 1) - (2 8i + 4) - (1 8i + 5) - (1 8i + 6))
in O(N) time and O(log N) space.
The following 160 character C program, written by Dik T. Winter at CWI, computes GOD to 800 decimal digits.
int a=10000,b,c=2800,d,e,f[2801],g;main(){for(;b-c;)f[b++]=a/5;
for(;d=0,g=c*2;c-=14,printf("%.4d",e+d/a),e=d%a)for(b=c;d+=f[b]*a,
f[b]=d%--g,d/=g--,--b;d*=b);}
Posted by: Norman Costa | April 5, 2006 8:20 PM
Taking the comic at face value, and using the noun definition of acclaim:
"Science Fiction: any enthusiastic scientific applause that omits God."
Makes...no...sense. It makes much more sense with "claim". But, perhaps, Swift can clear it all up for us.
Posted by: Jason | April 5, 2006 8:32 PM
Subtlety in a BC comic? Now you're making me laugh.
For your explanation to hold water, it would have to have been established that Wiley's dictionary was the product of a fundie mind, and that the fundie mind was at odds with the strip's characters or the tone of the strip. Instead, Wiley's Dictionary is commonly a source of puns, and the BC comic strip has long been known as a sounding board for the religious ideas of its creator, Johnny Hart.
The expression seen in the second panel is diagnosable as either the blank, but wide-eyed expression of a True Believer expounding on why some idea that has no merit on its own must be true due to some religious principle, or else the expression that a religious person when their daily goings-on are interrupted by a moment of God-inspired guilt and/or solemnity.
Posted by: Rey | April 5, 2006 8:35 PM
Even more vomitous, you know that next week that comic will be reprinted in the Sunday bulletin of hundreds of churches across the country.
Ooo, I feel queasy.
Posted by: Carlie | April 5, 2006 8:41 PM
It's been decades since BC was funny, why should he break the streak now?
Posted by: Moses | April 5, 2006 8:55 PM
I have a couple 1959 BC comic books - they are stunning in their mysogny. On the cover of one the caveman BC smashes a sculpture of a woman with an enormous club, and inside caveman Thor posits that they prove their superiority over women by "staving in their skulls!" Many more examples.
In a 1980's example, Peter describes evolution and BC asks; "What, the 'dust of the Earth' ain't good enough for you?"
Posted by: decrepitoldfool | April 5, 2006 9:04 PM
Keep in mind, Hart is the same hack scribbler who has done brazenly anti-Semitic strips as well. I believe there was one holiday season strip showing a cross overshadowing a menorah. He's a real assdrip.
Posted by: Martin | April 5, 2006 9:10 PM
Technically that's just stunningly insensitive, not anti-Semitic.
Now if he had advocated slaughtering the Jews for denying the Savior...
Posted by: Caledonian | April 5, 2006 9:18 PM
How about this: if he mixed "acclaim" up with "claim", maybe he mixed up "omits" and "admits".
Nah, I doubt it... But the definition "any scientific claim that admits god" works for me!
Posted by: lobsterlily | April 5, 2006 10:05 PM
Oh, I remember the days when BC was funny. Well, I don't but I've read old anthologies. Serously. They were actually quite good - I know it sounds bizarre.
Posted by: Kadin | April 5, 2006 10:15 PM
yeah, being from the county from where Hart hails, Broome County, i gotta say the place has collective low self esteem. so, they need to embrace the likes of Terry Randall to be their heroes.
ho, ho. hey, hey. ta, ta.
Posted by: ekzept | April 5, 2006 10:39 PM
It's a play on words. And yes, he meant, "acclaim". But you were really being obtuse on purpose because you were trying to be funny. Am I right?
Posted by: NatureSelectedMe | April 5, 2006 10:48 PM
It's a play on words. And yes, he meant, "acclaim"
Okay, what on earth does 'scientific acclaim that omits god' mean?
Posted by: george cauldron | April 5, 2006 10:53 PM
nonsequitur
http://www.ucomics.com/nonsequitur/index.phtml
An Antidote for BC :)
Posted by: Gilgamesh | April 5, 2006 10:55 PM
No, the discoveries of Newton and Einstein are not fiction, according to this. If God created everything (even if through he Big Bang, which would not be ammenable to science), then EVERYTHING would "include God" (in a sense).
But I think the writer is simply, naively, trying to say that s(he) subjectively infers God(s)'s hand(s) in all the sciences, and, to them, not inferring it is absurd. But of course that's just their subjective opinion, and has no place in any science itself: they shouldn't ask everyone else to see reality through their God-tinted spectacles.
Posted by: Pete K | April 5, 2006 11:36 PM
Please explain the joke. I don't normally find BC too hard to figure out but in this case he's either an idiot or you know something I don't.
Posted by: bmurray | April 5, 2006 11:45 PM
Here's Bizzaro taking a dig at him. Really funny actually.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/fun/Bizarro.asp?date=20060403
Posted by: Joel Stanford | April 5, 2006 11:57 PM
Am I the only one who thought it was just a joke? Lighten up, people.
Posted by: Lixivium | April 6, 2006 12:10 AM
If this comic is a joke, then EXPLAIN HOW IT IS FUNNY.
Posted by: Rey | April 6, 2006 12:22 AM
On the subject of all caps on early computers. Before computers, both telegraph and teletype used all caps by default. The early computer folks were just using existing technology to make things easier on themselves.
Posted by: chezjake | April 6, 2006 12:38 AM
The word acclaim makes more sense if the point of the "joke" is that people praise scientists for scientific discoveries when they should instead be praising God for inspiring the scientists.
Of course that wouldn't make a whole lot of sense, either. If ideas don't all come from God, then surely some scientific ideas, particularly those coming from scientists who aren't religious enough to credit God for their discoveries, are originated by the scientists themselves. If ideas do all come from God, then that includes the idea that scientists deserve all the acclaim for their own work, so why gripe about it?
Posted by: Roy S | April 6, 2006 12:41 AM
if it's photo shopped, then my local paper is in on it too. i read it there this morning on the comics page. my first thought was to e-mail it to p.z., but i figured he would already be inundated with copies of it already.
Posted by: vairitas | April 6, 2006 1:23 AM
You guys are making mountains out of molehills. I don't normally read BC, but from what I've seen of it the "Wiley's Dictionary segments usually give tongue-in-cheek, non-serious definitions. Maybe I'm giving Johnny Hart too much cre