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New Research on Gender and Humor

I'm not one to publish new empirical research at a blog, but this is a good chance to do so. As it happens, whilst scrambling to put together syllabi for the new semester, one finds the need to take a break at some point during the week. I thought an investigation into the frequent query, "Why Is It How Come There Are Never Any Women Published in The New Yorker's Shouts and Murmurs Section?" would be in order. The bad news is, my well-deserved break from work didn't last very long. It turns out that by searching the well-indexed set of New Yorker DVDs one can find quite easily and…

George Lucas applies for our internship position.

So here's a thought experiment. Part of the challenge of scientific literacy is finding the audience, or maybe better to say, to create the audience. In particular, the attracting the audience that doesn't normally read things like ScienceBlogs, or subscribes to the New Scientist, etc, etc. So, let me ask "if we could get anybody to intern for us at the World's Fair, and if we're trying to be strategic about it, who should we court?" In any event, here's our first applicant (from our previous ad) and the apparent pros and cons of such a hire. - - - Applicant's Name: George Lucas Birthdate…

Well How's About That? Happy Birthday to The World's Fair

You know, it's the rat race, and you're going a million miles an hour, and with all that domestic strife and international strife and strife in the domestic-foreign middle, and you know, strife, you don't even have time to remember it's your blog's birthday. Now I have to deal with the fallout. I didn't get the blog anything. And since I'm posting this *at* the self-same blog, I can't go on and make up some hackneyed story about how that was intentional, and I was gonna wait for the weekend, or I thought we weren't doing the acknowledge-your-birthday thing anymore, or whatever. Blog will…

Things I really don't get: AIDS denialists (plus a bit about Oprah)

This is more a hat tip to a great article by the New Yorker's Michael Specter. In a recent issue, his piece "The Denialists" was published and it does a great job of providing the exasperating context to what is really a sad state of affairs in countries like South Africa. Zeblon Gwala is a 50-year-old South African who sells ubhejane, an untested herbal remedy he claims will cure AIDS. On a typical day, as many as 100 people come to his clinic. Ubhejane has been endorsed by South African President Thabo Mbeki's health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, and by Herbert Vilakazi, the head of…

Darwin's Delay: aka I've got a few alternate theories

Recently, I read an interesting piece on something known as "Darwin's Delay." Briefly, this is a mystery which queried why it took 20 odd years for Darwin to take his theory of evolution from his own private musings in the late 1830's, to its publication as the Origin of Species in 1859. Essentially, the buzz right now, is that a Darwin historian, Dr. John van Wyhe out of Cambridge, has been making a case that the reason wasn't due to Darwin fearing reaction to his work, but simply because he was,.. well... kinda busy. Most historians argue that Darwin kept the theory secret because he was…

The Mysteries of Iris R. Adsel. Captions needed.

MOVING DAY THELMA AND LOUISE THE PEACH TREE A couple of photos have really caught my eye lately. You know, the sort that would seem a bit surreal, or perhaps the word "unlikely" in this day and age of progress is better. Anyway, they reminded me a lot of a great book I have called "The Mysteries of Harris Burdick" by Chris Van Allsburg. Chris is a noted children's book author, and you're probably more aware of him than you would realize. His wonderful books are essentially responsible for a number of films you've probably seen (or haven't seen), including the The Polar Express,…

Defining the Candy Hierarchy (Halloween Experiment Debriefing #1)

Although there were some intra-family disputes about what belongs where, we did derive a basic candy hierachy, and I do think it is basically sound. This taxonomy is based on years of research and debate, on thorough testing and re-testing, on statistical comparison and quality measurement, on focus group testing, and on a series of FTIR scans that reveal various hydrocarbon peaks and whatnot. In other words, this is sound science. Here's what we've found, with uncertainties acknowledged: TOP TIER (not suprisingly, exclusively chocolate-based) Milly Way --- Snickers --- Peanut M&M's…

Not sure if it's the best science show, but it's a good one (plus a bit about why ducks always have the best lines)

The question humming around ScienceBlogs at this particular moment is about Science TV, so I thought I would pipe up for one of me and my kid's current favourite shows: Peep and the Big Wide World. This is maybe a little different from other Sb responses since mine is very much directed towards your 6 and under set. But, you know, I like the show so much that I even made mention of it in the very first piece for the Science Creative Quarterly: On most mornings, somewhere in the landscape of children's television, you can hear Taj Mahal singing and Joan Cusack narrating - not about sharing…

Yummy Ethanol: To Drink or to Drive

Archer-Daniels-Midland CEO Patricia Woertz blasted ethanol for use in fuesl when she was with Chevron (7 years ago). Now she's acquired a taste for it, as the new CEO of ADM (supermarket to the world). The New York Times reports in "A Bet on Ethanol, With a Convert at the Helm." Let's see, let's see, what are my options here... "Delicious irony?" No, not quite direct enough. "Yummy mix-up?" That's probably worse. Could get lewd, but I won't try that. How's about, "Corny Consequences Abound: For ADM, and, worse yet, For Bad Blog Lines." Well clearly self-defeating there. "Cornrows…

New Research on Lameness, Yes; But Where's the Research on Losers?

This groundbreaking report--"Marion duPont Scott Equine Medical Center offers new treatment for lameness"-- just out, is riveting. And I think this says it all: "Lameness is a condition that affects many [people] and this therapy is a very promising alternative to traditional treatments." I can't believe this work hasn't already spun through the blogosphere. Briefly put, scientists have been working on treatments for lameness. "Lameness, which is recognized as an abnormality in the way [we] move or stand," the researchers note, "is typically associated with a painful musculosekeletal…

Leaked Climate Change Documents

Around ScienceBlogs, people who don't accept global warming as a real phenomena tend to get called denialists. In the interests of full disclosure, I should admit that I'm not a denialist but rather a global warming defeatist. Doesn't matter how bad or not CO2 is, ain't nothin' gonna stop it. People will not give up electricity and transportation in the developed world (nor should they), and people in the developing world will not be give up the quest for developed-world living conditions (nor should they). As such it's either massive and immediate worldwide switches to nuclear power and…

Seeing Laser Beams

Ok, see counselor Troi firing her phaser? You see this kind of thing all the time on film in scifi. Whether it's Star Trek, Star Wars, or pretty much anything else, energy beams fired from future weapons are visible. Usually someone will point out that in fact laser beams are not visible in this manner. To see light, it has to reach your eyes. This is clearly not possible when all the light is actually traveling down the beam path. You can see this in action with laser pointers - only the spot where the light hits and diffusely reflects is visible. The path is not. Writers of TV shows…

Graduate School vs. Work

One of my fellow ScienceBloggers, ScienceWoman, has made a few waves by saying the following: I am against accommodating our full-time worker, part-time graduate student students by moving a significant number of our classes to evening hours. There I said it. I don't want to make life easier for someone who is working very hard to get through her education while supporting herself in full-time employment. She allows that this sounds harsh, but gives some good reasons for her opinion as a professor of -ology. (She doesn't say which science, but presumably we can eliminate the physical sciences…

Class Day & and Induction Quiz

Today was my first day teaching recitation for the summer session Physics 202, the algebra-based second half of intro physics. Physics 202 focuses mostly on electricity and magnetism, where the first course (Physics 201) was mostly classical mechanics. The summer semester is split into halves for university-wide administrative reasons that are somewhat obscure. The gist of it for me is that I'm only the TA for the second half, replacing the previous guy. As it happens my first topic was electromagnetic inductance, and after going through inductance, mutual inductance, energy in an inductor…

T-Rex and Detective Work

Ryan North of the exceptionally brilliant and somewhat esoteric Dinosaur Comics penned a comic a while back about the possibility of being the perfect detective by using physics. Quoth T-Rex in the strip: Someone in the room says something to another person, and then they both leave. Assuming you know exactly how they moved when they left (and therefore how they displaced the air!) then any remaining displacement is due to sound waves. By looking at the location of air molecules in the empty room, you can reconstruct what was said in the past! Of course there's the minor engineering hurdle…

Rainpower

It was a dark and stormy night. Well, it was day. And it wasn't all that dark either, but it was very stormy. Yes, in College Station today it was pretty miserably wet and so was everyone on campus. Even if you had an umbrella. Not actually very glorious. Well, I thought, I wonder if you could do something with all this rain? Maybe generate electricity? Unlikely, because it's a pretty obvious idea and were it practical surely someone would have tried it. But it can't hurt to run the numbers for ourselves. The physics building at Texas A&M is five stories high, and at a very rough…

Sunday Function

Let's start with a pretty simple function. It's not this week's official Sunday Function, but we'll use it to get there. Take the number 1, divide it by x. Pretty easy. Now imagine putting a dot at the point x = 1 on the x axis, and draw a line straight up from there to the curve formed by the graph of the function. Then do the same thing for another point on the x axis (with x > 1). Shade in the area in between the lines. Ok, that might be a little hard to visualize if you've never done it before. Let me pick the other number to be x = 4, and I'll actually put the picture below…

The physics of... Pink Floyd?

In full early-90s nostalgia mode, you skate down the street in your roller blades. Your thrill at the excitement of the open road distracts you, and one foot goes off the pavement into the soggy soil beside the road. That foot immediately slows down due to the drag and as a result of the difference in speed between the foot on the road and the foot on the dirt steers you right off the road where I hope you don't hurt yourself. Refraction is the same thing, but with light. Pass from one medium to another in which light travels at a different speed, and the light will bend. Students grumble…

Wanderlust

In the comments of yesterday's post about the output of the sun, Carl Brannen brought up a good point: By the way, in comparing your audience to cows and compost heaps is there some sort of message here? It's been 25 years or so but I recall that there was a certain time of year around which I'd pretty much had my fill of grad school. The worst was towards the end of the 3rd quarter of a 3 quarter year. About that time, the Santa Anna winds reverse. The result is a wanderlust breeze off the ocean. Aw Carl, you and the rest of my readers rock. I only mean that in terms of power output, the…

And the Cow Jumped Over the Moon

Poking around on the internet looking for interesting problems to assign the students I'm about to have this semester, I came across this one: How much energy must a 450 kg cow expend in jumping over the moon? Fig. 1: Buzz Cowdrin? Now hints and solutions are available on the linked site, so what I'd like to do is just talk conceptually for a moment. Leaving aside for the moment the derivation of the equation, it will turn out that the energy required for a cow (or anything else) to reach a particular elevation is given by a particular potential energy equation: G is the universal…

Pressure and Car Tires

Doing a lot of driving this week, and since the interstates I'm driving (I-49 and I-10) are deathly boring, I have a lot of time to think. Being a physics nerd, I do a lot of thinking about physics. This trip the physics thing I'm thinking about is tire pressure. Fig 1. A car. From the Wikipedia article "car". Research! Tire pressure made a brief blip during the news a while back when it as a contributor to engine efficiency made a side appearance in the presidential election in regard to global warming. Climate gets done to death around here though, so let's talk about pressure as what…

Freeman Dyson: Climate change skeptic du jour

Freeman Dyson is on the cover of yesterday's New York Times Magazine. Inside a baseball writer (a very good baseball writer, but still) gives the man an opportunity to explain why he doesn't believe climate change is something to worry about. Others have lamented the attention devoted by the nation's leading newspaper to the thoughts of someone who has no expertise in the field. I share Chris Mooney's reservations about the writer's understanding of the way scientific skepticism is supposed to work. But Dyson cannot be easily dismissed if for no other reason than he has proven himself to be…

Darwin Darwin Darwin

I must confess to being pleasantly surprised by the amount of attention Charles Darwin is drawing on this, the 200th anniversary of his birth. And although anything I contribute is almost certain to be redundant, I feel obliged to chime in. So: Yes, Darwin was brilliant. One of the top scientific minds of all time. A man with few peers. Someone everyone agrees belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Science along with Newton, Einstein and some fourth character (about whom there can be no agreement). Was he a saint? No. But then, no one is a saint. Has popular culture unecessarily conflated…

All you ever wanted to know about the Global Carbon Budget but were afraid to ask

Some of the world's top climatologists, under the collective title of the Global Carbon Project, have released what is widely considered the definitive accounting of the greenhouse-gas emissions situation. And the news is, as you might expect, not good. Nature's Climate Feedback bloggers sum it up as "We're all doomed." The full report is a lot to swallow, but here's what policy makers and anyone thinking of casting a vote in either the Canadian election next month or the American election in November should know: Anthropogenic CO2 emissions are growing x4 faster since 2000 than during the…

Reduction in Suicide Rates Since the Introduction of Prozac

PLoS Medicine is reporting a paper that compares the declining suicide rate in the US to the increasing number of prozac prescriptions since the drug's introduction in 1988. They find that the two are very well correlated: The steady decline in suicide rates for both men and women is associated with an increasing number of fluoxetine prescriptions from 2,469,000 in 1988 to 33,320,000 in 2002. A cross-correlation analysis of fluoxetine use and suicide rates in the period 1988-2002 shows a significant negative correlation: rs = â0.92, p < 0.001. Granted (as many of you will likely point…

Ask a Scienceblogger, June 9th

Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why? I guess if I had to go back and do it all again, I would have gone through with being a physicist. When I got to college I knew that I was just destined to be a physicist because that was the subject that I liked the best in high school. Little did I know at the time that college level physics is a hell of a lot more difficult than computing the trajectory of spherical cows. This question doesn't quite apply to me though because I am still…

Behe, Intelligent Design, and “Folk Science”

Over at Quintessence of Dust, Steve Matheson raises some good points about Behe. Steve's argument boils down to the following: "Behe's fans say that he's a nice guy, and that the evolutionists are "crucifying" him. Both claims seem to be true, but they can't hide some serious problems with his conduct as a scientist." These problems are ... A. "Behe exudes an arrogant contempt for the scientific community, exemplified by his neglect of peer review." B. "I find many of Behe's responses to his critics to be suspiciously misleading, and I believe this provides a clue as to why he does not allow…

Gell-Mann on Conventional Wisdom

Via Asymptotia, an interview with Murray Gell-Mann (who just turned 80. Happy Birthday Murray!) I particularly like the comments at the end of the article: Battles of new ideas against conventional wisdom are common in science, aren't they? It's very interesting how these certain negative principles get embedded in science sometimes. Most challenges to scientific orthodoxy are wrong. A lot of them are crank. But it happens from time to time that a challenge to scientific orthodoxy is actually right. And the people who make that challenge face a terrible situation. Getting heard, getting…

Pearl Harbor Day

This is a href="http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=41500">high-resolution photo of Pearl Harbor (click to enlarge). When I saw that it had been posted to the NASA Earth Observatory, I wondered -- momentarily -- why they would post a photo of Pearl Harbor. Then I remembered: December 7th. style="display: inline;"> My father was 14 on 7 December 1941. He studied in high school, got good grades, and enlisted when he turned 18. Didn't think about it. There was nothing to think.  Every able-bodied young man did it, unless there was a compelling reason to do otherwise. He…

Also, the sharks are smarter than Eric Hovind

The news a few weeks ago was that hybrid sharks had been found off the coast of Australia. They looked like tropical Australian black-tip sharks, but genetic testing revealed that they'd hybridized with the common black-tip, which has a wider range; these hybrid black-tips were similarly extending their range and living in colder waters. This is an excellent example of evolution: it's a population shifting its range, correlated with an observation of novel genetic attributes. This is exactly the kind of gradual transition that we'd expect to be compatible with evolutionary theory. Unless you'…

Gang Mentality

I spend a lot of time working with gang kids.  One of the amusing things, is to see some of these kids strutting around, feeling like a million bucks, because they are so smart.  In actuality, they have IQs in the 90-100 range.  But the rest of their crew is down in the 70-80 range.  Such is the life of a genius. style="display: inline;"> href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2009/10/21/the_warning.jpg"> Tonight I watched the PBS Frontline special, href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/view/">The Warning.  It's about the warning that href="http://en.…

Housing Influenza Patients In Tents

Revere has an alarming post about one potential problem.  This could occur if there is a serious influenza pandemic: href="http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2009/05/swine_flu_breaking_the_acute_c.php">Swine flu: breaking the acute care system [H]hospitals and emergency departments have been shrinking, while their patient populations have been growing. The Institute of Medicine calculated in 2006 that ER visits rose by 26% between 1992 and 2003, from 89.8 million to 114 million in a year, while 425 emergency departments and 703 hospitals closed and the number of hospital beds in use…

Framing Science Moves to Big Think, Relaunches as the Age of Engagement Examining Communication, Culture, and Public Affairs

Today I move to my new home at Big Think http://bigthink.com/blogs/age-of-engagement [Follow the blog via its RSS feed, on Twitter, and on Facebook.] Over the past four years at Scienceblogs, I have had the wonderful opportunity to be part of a blogging network that includes dozens of talented writers and thinkers. Current and former Sciblings such as Deb Blum, Ed Brayton, Benjamin Cohen, Bora, Sheril Kirshenbaum, Jonah Lehrer, Chris Mooney, David Ng, Randy Olson, Chad Orzel, Jessica Palmer, Christina Pikas, Janet Stemwedel, and Carl Zimmer have inspired my writing and introduced me to…

Blue Ribbon Panel: Where Does Science End and Policy Begin?

The BiPartisan Policy Center has announced a Blue Ribbon panel that will issue recommendations intended to inform Obama's call for a Memorandum on Scientific Integrity. Importantly, the panel will study and address an important theme that continues to re-occur in the so-called "science wars": what is the dividing line between where science ends and policymaking begins? Or as I blogged earlier today, what is the demarcation between the first and second premise in compelling policy action? From the press release to the interim report issued today: The report's premise is that "a critical goal…

Obama Invents Citizen Centered Government Communication

A model for government agencies and science organizations to replicate. From a Politico article on Obama's campaign pledge to use technology to enhance transparency, responsiveness, and citizen engagement: The transition period between Election Day and Obama's swearing-in was just 76 days long, but in that time, it's fair to say that the Obama transition -- and in particular its website, Change.gov -- has made a serious down payment on these promises. Consider all the salient features of this dynamic, responsive and refreshingly open government website: ⢠Its central feature is a blog,…

The Republican solution

Oh, my. The situation is dire. Texas is in big trouble. TO ALL TO WHOM THESE PRESENTS SHALL COME: WHEREAS, the state of Texas is in the midst of an exceptional drought, with some parts of the state receiving no significant rainfall for almost three months, matching rainfall deficit records dating back to the 1930s; and WHEREAS, a combination of higher than normal temperatures, low precipitation and low relative humidity has caused an extreme fire danger over most of the State, sparking more than 8,000 wildfires which have cost several lives, engulfed more than 1.8 million acres of land…

Reagan & Sagan: Parallels in Communication

Were Ronald Reagan and Carl Sagan the dominant communicators of the 1980s? Watching this past week the PBS American Experience biopic on Reagan reinforced in my mind the parallels between the president and the astronomer that I have mentioned at this blog before and during Q&A at talks. The Great Communicator and the Showman for Science coined the dominant metaphors of the 1980s, Reagan referring to the Soviet Union as the "Evil Empire" and Sagan re-casting the strategic arms race in terms of "nuclear winter." In the years before cable television fragmented Americans into ever smaller…

Partisan Gaps Over Evolution and Estimates on Atheism

A Gallup survey out this week reveals a wide partisan gap in perceptions of evolution. Specifically, 60% of Republicans say humans were created in their present form by God 10,000 years ago, a belief shared by only 40% of independents and 38% of Democrats. These Gallup findings are the latest to underscore an emerging partisan divide on controversial areas of science. With many prominent Republicans continuing to dispute climate change, Democrats in recent elections making stem cell research part of their campaign strategy, GOP primary candidates openly doubting evolution, and Hillary…

Some Exit Poll Data on Expelled

Dallas Morning News runs this profile of Premise Media CEO A. Logan Craft. The feature spotlights the results of theater exit data collected by Premise and sheds additional light on the range of impacts I discussed earlier today. Just like with polls released by political candidates or advocacy groups, these figures are to be interpreted with caution. But of interest from the article is that Premise is looking at the theater run as at least a six week experiment, with this past weekend being a big test. (The film earned another $1.4 million.) Also, given the selective nature of the audience…

Little Change in Public Concern over Global Warming

As I have argued in talks and articles over the past year, the communication challenge on global warming is to create the public opinion environment where meaningful policy action can take place. This means shaping public perceptions so that global warming is considered a top tier political priority. Until Congressional members start to see the issue showing up in polls as a perceived priority and until they start to hear more of a diverse public voice on the matter, Congress will have little incentive to make the tough political choices and trade-offs that are needed. The communication…

Why Gore Should Not Endorse

Speculation mounts as to whether Gore will endorse either Obama or Clinton in the Democratic Primary race. My suggestion would be that he stay out of election politics in 2008, except to try to raise the profile of climate change in a non-partisan way. As I describe in this column and in several public radio interviews, public opinion is little changed today from the time of the release of Inconvenient Truth, despite the massive publicity success of the film and the sharp increase in news coverage of climate change. The reason is that Gore's success has been a double edged sword. Attention…

Framing Science Talk Tuesday at UC Berkeley

I will be spending next week (my spring break) in San Francisco as an Osher Fellow at the Exploratorium science museum. While in the Bay Area, Chris Mooney will be flying up from LA to join me Tuesday evening at UC Berkeley for our latest in the Speaking Science 2.0 tour. Details are below. (We are expecting a pretty sizable turn out for the event, so make sure you arrive early. The auditorium holds roughly 150 people.) Speaking Science 2.0: A New Paradigm in Public Engagement A conversation with Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet Tuesday, March 11, 2008 5:00 pm-6:30 pm Location: 155 Dwinelle…

Introducing the Science Scout Badges Free Market Economy (or SSBFME - another worthy acronym)

@dnghub Twitter Feed Original article can be found at our Science Scout site. - - - (Acronyms used: SSBFME = Science Scout Badges Free Market Economy) So... It's been a few years since the Science Scouts were born, and (at last count) we have received over 300 emails from various Indian or Chinese Embroidery companies looking to "offer their badge making services." Finally, we're now of mind to finally lay out a game plan for the selling and obtaining of these Science Scout badges, physically. And basically, we're going with the free market model - specifically the SSBFME. In other words, if…

Types of Biological Modification - the Breakfast of Champions cartoon version.

I doodle a bit, and sometimes, it has this Breakfast of Champions look to it - which to be frank is deliberate, since I think it's a great visual style, especially for the purpose of teaching. Anyway, since, I'm playing around with my relatively new flickr account (mainly set up so that I can start to organize my slides properly on my popperfont site), here's a video of a few goofy slides that highlights a variety of biological "modifications" that can occur. Full narrative below the fold by the way. Again, the point is that the resultant organism can be different due to nuances at…

The Economics of Bubbles

The WSJ has a fascinating article on the economics of bubbles and why it might be rational to support a bubble until it bursts: Bubbles often keep inflating despite cautions such as Mr. Greenspan's famous warning of "irrational exuberance." Tech stocks rose for more than three years after he said that, in late 1996. Markus Brunnermeier, 39, thinks he understands why this happens. Growing up near Munich, Germany, he expected to become a carpenter like his father. A building slump dissuaded him, and after stints in a tax office and the army he enrolled at the University of Regensburg. He had…

Weeds in the Sidewalk Show Rapid Evolution

Don't believe in evolution? Just look to the weeds in the sidewalk: Like other members of its family, Crepis sancta produces two types of seeds. Heavy seeds fall into the grass below the plant, whereas lighter seeds with feathery tails drift in the wind to new habitats. Ecologists have long known that plants in patchy habitats, such as islands, for example, produce more heavy seeds than light seeds, presumably because wind-swept seeds tend to get lost in the ocean. But controlling for environmental changes has been difficult. A good study system turned up in Pierre-Olivier Cheptou's backyard…

In Breast-related News...

This falls into the rather broad category of things I will post but about which I will not comment. This is in part because I think the results are relatively self-explanatory. Maybe it is because I am a big prude. But mostly it is just because I am not touching this. No way...not with a ten-foot pole... (Just visualize me trying to decide whether I should put a photo of cleavage in this post.) Anyway, here is your brief synopsis of breast-related news: ABC details an interview with Elisabeth Squires, author of Boobs: A Guide to Your Girls, wherein she discusses appropriate cleavage for…

Working blue

Stop writing to me about Mairson and Grossman. I have no respect for their opinions at all. Grossman is the religion columnist at USA Today; Mairson is some disgruntled ex-employee of National Geographic who has appointed himself guardian of all propriety of anyone associated with NatGeo. Grossman is wondering "if the august Society would try to rein in Myers, just let him quietly bear the coveted NGS brand or whether Myers would high tail it out from under editorial control." Mairson is concerned about my "profanity-laced diatribes and my lack of "civil discourse about religion". Bugger 'em…

"Teh Invisible Man giv me cheezburger"

This is just excellent - the Bible in LOLcatese. Favorite extract - Job 1. 1. In teh land of Uz wuz a man calded Job. Teh man was goodz, afraid of teh Invisible Man and evilz. 2. Teh man hadz seven sunz and tree doters, 3. And lots of sheepz and camlez and rinoceruseses and servnts, srsly. 4. His sunz tok turns mading cookies, and they all eated them. 5. And Job wuz liek "Oh noes! Wut if cookies were sin? Gota prey, just in cased." 6. Teh ayngles wented to seez Invisible Man, and Saitin wented 2. 7. Invisible Man axt Saitin, "Wher u wuz?" Saitin saied "Oh, hai. I’z wuz in ur earth,…

Saturday Football

Unranked ASU is playing #14 Oregon. I was supposed to be at the game, but had to attend to family business instead. At the half it is 24-3 for the Ducks, despite ASU having nearly five minutes extra possession, less penalties, and less turnovers. We don't have a quarterback (Carpenter is 5 for 14, 29 yards, 1 int), Zach Miller is being ignored once again (1 catch for 3 yards), and Ryan Torain (15 carries for 81 yards) is the only player that seems to be making any real effort for the Sun Devils. Some, eh, highlights: Carpenter has been sacked five times so far. ASU 0-for-8 on third down…