Episode CLXXXVIX: You're all gonna die

The CIA has been helping the Libyan rebels for weeks. Obama refuses to comment.

Gaddafi's minister of the interior has fled to the UK.

Japan will not enlarge the evacuation zone around Fukushima. Probably that's because it's already too late.

Proboscis monkeys ruminate.

Molecular biologists often use dyes to make proteins visible in cells. By binding proteins, these dyes can stabilize their folding... extending the lifespan of Caenorhabditis elegans and promising to at least slow down Alzheimer's. German news feature here. â Curcuma, not mentioned here, is said to have the same effects.

The world's oldest buttercup (in a broad sense) was found in the place with all the feathered Early Cretaceous dinosaurs.

We had so-called minestrone: carrots, celeriac, green onions, white cabbage, garlic, potatoes, caraway, pepper, oregano, rosemary, thyme, salt, and a tiny amount of Ras el-Hanout couscous spice. Edible for me when put through a blender; tastes good. :-)

Have I ever mentioned that Geneviève Bujold is fucking haawt? (I like women my own age, I've always liked women my own age, and she is hawwt!!!)

Does that make me a sexist or a misogynist? I don't think so. YMMV.

It doesn't... but why do you bring it up out of the blue? ~:-|

it's supposed to say "etc ad infinitatem", which may still be wrong,

It's not. A simple "ad infinitum" would have been enough, though. :-)

but less so than what I originally wrong

:-D This is actually full of win.

and opinions based on Internet research is what?, way more accurate than acually being there and living it. Your comments justify my opinion that some people are happy to live vicariously through the Internet, without being willing to subject themselves to the actual experience.
Sorry, I know exactly how I sound

If you really did, why didn't you just go to bed and let us wait? We can wait.

And, really, "" â that's an insult to your own intelligence. Jadehawk showed you peer-reviewed scientific papers with lots of statistics in them, and you imply they must just be random opinions because scientific journals are available on the Internet these days?

Seriously?

And David M, thanks for the hugs! ^.^

^_^

But some image has to be on the obverse of our coins.

"Has to"?

Come on.

1-⬠coins of the world

Ok, just signing in to say that I want a colorful t-shirt which says "I don't believe in qualia". The back can say "I'm a color scientist".

Fuck yeah.

*clenched-tentacle salute*

The point is that, while "privilege" has a specific meaning in sociology and social theory, it is not the ordinary meaning.

(I don't like words being abused.)

Translation: you're confused when words have different ranges of meaning in different areas, and you don't like being confused.

I suggest you adapt to these circumstances. Won't be terribly easy â I recognize my own Asperger symptoms in you â, but it'll be worth it.

I am myself as best as I can be whilst coping with local social restrictions, and so can anyone else be, to be more precise.

Wow, precision isn't really your strong suit, is it? I've barfed up oatmeal less vague than that.

It all becomes crystal-clear, and tautologically true, if you assume that John means "to be oneself" literally â as in "not part of the same Bose/Einstein condensate as anyone else".

...Yes, that was intentional what I just did there.

So, who's coming?

I can't possibly plan that far ahead.

I'm thinking of t-shirts with (something along the lines of) 'Team Pharyngula' on them.

Would need some reference to herding of cats...

Or just "The Pharyngula Horde"?

Mr. LePageâs aides said the mural was not neutral and made employers feel uncomfortable when they entered the Labor Departmentâs lobby.

FFS! It's not supposed to be neutral! That's why there are separate Labor and Economy departments!!!

...There are, aren't there? I don't know of cases where the same department was charged with the contradictory interests of both, other than Nazi Germany and Austria's right-right coalition government (conservatives/xenophobes) of 2000â2006.

I really love marzipan.

Who doesn't. :-9

*** GRAMMAR POLICE WARNING: ***

That's not grammar, it's politeness, you sick fuck.

Hals- und Beinbrauch!

-bruch.

From Yiddish hazloche "good luck" and broche "blessing".

In recent years, I've tried to avoid the conclusion that this is my story, but this has increasingly become unsustainable. I fear one day - one 24-hour period - of consciousness of even the most minor and tenuous happiness

*blink*

You've been hiding that well, you know. I used to think you're close to the happy end of the spectrum of people. Now I feel even more clueless, and that makes me fear what else you're hiding, and what everyone else is hiding...

*hugs and chocolate*

"Death anxiety prompts people to believe in intelligent design, reject evolution": research

So... physorg.com is too stupid to actually link to the paper.

It's in PLoS ONE! That means it's only on the Internet, and there's no paywall around it! There simply is no excuse not to link to it.

This new title of the neverendingthread just HAS to be spoken thus:

Or... oh shit, already 4 links in this comment.

Then there's when The Doctor goes to Pompeii and realizes he's the one who made the volcano explode, but he has to do it to keep the rock aliens from taking over the world.

...d'accord...

FYI the Google Doodle today is teh awsomes

200th birthday of Robert "Burner" Bunsen! :-)

Pretending that the word Faith doesn't have more than one definition isn't just being irritating, it's also opening you up to a potential sideswipe from an accommodationist or a Christian scientist who successfully compartmentalized. One of those definitions is plain old ordinary trust, not trust in pixies. The one to watch out for is trust in pixies, but the other definitions can be used in rhetorical shell games. Bearing in mind how language can work tends to help with those.

All this really stands out the more languages you know. English has three words, belief, faith and trust, where German has only two; there's no equivalent to faith, and religious faith is covered by "belief".

Similarly, just the other way around, you have no idea how glad I am that the word mind exists. German has no such thing and uses "spirit", I kid you not.

While I acknowledge the possibility of the 'butterfly' effect, I postulate a dampening force which would mitigate it over time. I justify this because my experience with all other events which propagate through time, e.g. electromagnetic waves, also dampen as they propagate. So a non-dampening impact of historical events seems less likely to me than a dampening affect.

That's not an analogy, that's just bad poetry.

Electromagnetic waves don't dampen. If they head off in different directions, their density (luminosity) decreases with distance, but a laser in a vacuum can shine unchanged to the other side of the universe. In matter, they don't lose energy on their own either, they're absorbed and reemitted with losses.

What you can postulate is that, given the right kinds of society, a sufficiently large society sooner or later will end up discovering "everything", just not necessarily in the same order, let alone at the same speed â like in a Civilization game. Supporting evidence is that we finally have surpassed the precision of the Mayan calendar, the literacy rates of ancient Rome*, and the sanitation of the Indus culture, we have solved Zeno's Paradox twice over, and Iowa is now catching up with the moral progress of the Hittite empire at the end of the Bronze Age *snark oozing off this comment like radiating lava through the basement of Fukushima 3*. But even this is something I'd be careful with unless given really long timespans.

* Nec nare nec litteras novisti â "you neither know how to swim nor the letters" â "you're a complete and utter moron".