humor
pharyngula | September 20, 2007A few people in this thread were suggesting we needed a creationist bingo card — Skeptico obliged earlier this month.
You need a couple of randomized versions of this, but you'll still have the problem that people all over the auditorium will be shouting "Bingo!" five minutes into the talk, and by the end, you'll have to give everyone a prize.
j7uy5 | September 19, 2007
One of the essential skills a medical student has to
learn is the ability to take a list of symptoms, exam findings, and lab
results and determine which diagnosis is consistent with that
data. For example, when seeing a patient like the gorgeous
and brilliant woman pictured above, you should immediately think that
this patient may in fact be a pirate. If so, she should be
quickly referred to the Comprehensive Pirate Clinic. (There
the pirate specialists can manage issues like scurvy, splinters from
planks, prosthesis fitting, and deck-swabbing-related repetitive-motion
injuries.) …
mementomori | September 18, 2007Things Overheard in a Hospital Cafeteria:
1. "I don't know what he was talking about - it wasn't that cold in the hall."
2. "Say, what does 'S.O.S.' mean on the menu?"
3. "The doc says whitening her teeth may not be enough to get her a modeling job."
4. "I wonder why he asked you to bring him a pack of cigarettes?"
5. "He sure seemed in a rush to be discharged, didn't he?"
6. "She said she was still constipated so I gave her an extra dose."
7. "I'm running way behind today - I hope my patients aren't in a hurry."
8. "Did you hear they're opening a medical spa inside of a Wal-mart?"
9…
pharyngula | September 17, 2007Or I would, if I actually had a land squid.
Does anyone know where I could pick up one of those babies? Petco, Petsmart?
pharyngula | September 17, 2007This would be something like Reason #5,422.
Another reason is that there's no such thing as "Talk Like a Ninja Day". (Psssst…19 September. Arrrr.)
omnibrain | September 17, 2007A ground breaking new study from Florida State University has determined that we look at attractive people! Who woulda thought!
But really:
In a series of three experiments, Maner and his colleagues found that the study participants, all heterosexual men and women, fixated on highly attractive people within the first half of a second of seeing them. Single folks ogled the opposite sex, of course, but those in committed relationships also checked people out, with one major difference: They were more interested in beautiful people of the same sex.
Ok.. for reals.. It is a pretty interesting…
sporte | September 16, 2007Can you tell the difference between the sort of person who would write a programming language and a serial killer?
It's getting close to Halloween so this is a good time to test your powers of detection.
Malevole has a lovely survey that asks if you can tell whether a person is a famous computer scientist or famous for another reason.
I'm interested in whether biologists as a group are able to tell the difference.
If you'd like to play:
1. Go take Malvole's survey first,
2. Then come back here and take mine.
It won't take much time and I'll post the results up in a couple of weeks.
pharyngula | September 15, 2007Man, everyone is sending me this comic and saying it reminds them of me. I don't know why.
Just for the record, I would never shoot a dog. I know how to use an IV and some barbituates to painlessly euthanize them. But I wouldn't. That's only your theory.
pharyngula | September 14, 2007You can guess who will be the better robot in this battle of circularity.
omnibrain | September 14, 2007Since it's short.... here's the entire snipit from The Onion:
BETHESDA, MD--After an extensive six-month study using an electroencephalogram and a finger, researchers at the National Institutes of Health have discovered the section of the human brain that responds unfavorably to poking.
"We found a direct link between this negative effect and our finger pressing on a particular area of the brain," said neuroscientist Matthew Redman Monday, who conducted the study on 12 healthy participants. "After analyzing our data and testing and retesting our subjects, we finally identified this region as…
mikethemadbiologist | September 13, 2007Genomicron has a great satirical post about how to write a bad science story. It's worth a read. So, I ask you, readers, which of these ten journalistic 'sins' is the worst:
http://genomicron.blogspot.com/2007/09/anatomy-of-bad-science-story.html
1. Choose your subject matter to be as amenable to sensationalism as possible.
2. Use a catchy headline, especially if it will undermine the story's credibility.
3. Overstate the significance and novelty of the work.
4. Distort the history of the field and oversimplify the views of scientists.
5. Remember that controversy sells, and everyone loves…
evolvingthoughts | September 13, 2007
As a silverback, I am always intrigued when you humans start to debate our nature, or put us in silly films (not that the one with Sigourney was silly - any film she's in is fine by me. We don't get much film out here in the wild, anyway). But, courtesy of Jason Grossman, alpaca farmer extraordinaire, here is one of the funniest argumenta ad Google I have ever seen. It proves that because we are all Sigourney Weaver, you humans ought to be vegetarians. I'm sure Jason, who moonlights as a philosopher in his spare time at the ANU, will be able to use this for his critical reasoning classes.
grrlscientist | September 11, 2007tags: streaming video, humor, blog carnivals
A new blog carnival for me is the Carnival of Funny Videos. They just published their 10 September edition for you to enjoy. If you would like to watch a bunch of humorous streaming videos, then this is the place to go!
pharyngula | September 11, 2007There's an obvious design fla* in this experiment reported in the LA Times. The researchers ran a simple experiment *here the subjects *ere sho*n a series of letters, and they *ere supposed to tap a key *hen they sa* one, but not the another. The subjects *ere classified by their political vie*s, from left-*ing to right-*ing, and a correlation *as discovered: students *ith liberal vie*s had more brain activity and made fe*er mistakes than conservatives. This fits *ell *ith my biases, but I *ouldn't *ant to s*ear to the trust*orthiness of the *ork. There *as a very poor choice in the design.…
pharyngula | September 11, 2007We won't get to hear Kathy Griffin's Emmy award speech — it's being censored. Here's what she said:
In her speech, Griffin said that "a lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus."
She went on to hold up her Emmy, make an off-color remark about Christ and proclaim, "This award is my god now!"
The off-color remark was to say, "Suck it, Jesus."
I thought it was funny. If I ever win an Emmy (do you have to be on TV to win that, or something?), I hope to remember to say something similar. It is, of course,…
evolvingthoughts | September 11, 2007
Ifnormation: what everybody thinks they know, if they don't think too much...
scientificactivist | September 10, 2007The following email was recently sent out to members of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford:
Sometime between last Wednesday, 5th, and yesterday Sunday 9th, about
two and a half tons of lead roofing was stripped from the top of the
building on the outside of the deer park (at the southern, Holywell St
junction end, near the small tower in our wall) on Longwall St. This is
the Conservation Studio library, owned by Merton.
If you saw anything, such as a lorry loading up, please let me know and
I will pass on the information to Merton who are in contact with the Police.
A few thoughts…
pharyngula | September 9, 2007This is the truest and most heart-warming song on the interwebs. We know that if you aren't a geek or a nerd you secretly envy us.