humor
grrlscientist | July 6, 2007tags: iPhone, humor, streaming video
This hilarious video shows what can happen when you count your chickens before they've hatched, so to say. It also has a nice soundtrack. [3:41]
j7uy5 | July 5, 2007The
href="http://www.allerca.com/">Allerca
hypoallergenic cat...
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/images/Alerca_kittens.jpg">
is a
hot commodity right now. The company claims a 15-month
waiting list for the $4,000 pets. They supposedly have many
virtues:
An
ALLERCA GD cat's personality is very sweet and
affectionate, thanks in part to our unique socialization program.
Customer who now own GD cats report that they make great
family pets and are wonderful with children.
"GD"
stands for "genetic divergence," in case
you were wondering.
Their breeding program…
evolvingthoughts | July 4, 2007
Back from the drinking sessionconference, with many good thoughts.
One in particular is due to the talk by Aiden Lyons at ANU on probability and evolution - after more than two decades trying to figure it out, I had to wait for a grad student to put it all neatly into perspective. His argument that there are at least three if not four senses or interpretations of probability and chance in evolution that - apart from anything else - prevents fitness being tautological, raises many more questions, but that is the nature of good papers.
Another, in no particular succession, is whether we…
mikethemadbiologist | July 2, 2007...this is why you should be nice to your employees. Talk show banshee Nancy Grace got punked by her own producer (the last third still has me giggling). I'm guessing the producer has another job lined up and decided to give Grace a 'goodbye present':
That's just nasty. CNN at its finest. Now, if only David Broder could get the same treatment....
mikethemadbiologist | July 1, 2007You might have heard about the FDA detention of Chinese seafood because it contains antibiotic residues. I'll have more to say about that later, but there's another food advisory that puzzles me:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is warning consumers not to eat Veggie Booty flavor of snack food, marketed by Robert's American Gourmet, due to possible contamination with Salmonella Wandsworth, bacteria that cause gastrointestinal illness.
Why would you eat food called Veggie Booty? What was your first clue that this might be a bad idea?
Veggie Booty.
mementomori | June 29, 2007During my internal medicine residency one of the surgical residents at our hospital got into the habit of addressing us by the moniker "Swami," as in "This guy's going down the tubes - better get the Swamis to see him." As is the case with most jokes, this term of endearment soon came into widespread use. Whenever a surgical patient mysteriously developed chest pain, or liver failure, or anything short of a leaky carburator the alarm was sounded: "Call the Swamis," which meant the doctors who know everything but can do little but surround the afflicted's bed and chant in unison, or upon…
oracknows | June 29, 2007I love these old ads. Remember, keep fresh batteries in your house or you might poison your baby!
The tag line sounds almost like the reaction of an antivaccination loon to the polio vaccine.
oracknows | June 29, 2007Here's something I've wanted to try for a while now. It'll either be wildly successful and popular, along the lines of You Might Be an Altie If..., or it'll be an utter failure, sinking into oblivion. Which one it ends up being will be up to you, O faithful readers of Your Friday Dose of Woo. The beauty of blogging, of course, is that if it fails next week I can pretend that it never happened and move on to (hopefully) greener pastures, my utter humiliation at publishing crap quickly forgotten, except, of course, living forever on the web.There are two other reasons that today is the perfect…
omnibrain | June 29, 2007Are you a politician or currently considering a run for office?
Do you agree with Richard Nixon that drugs are "public enemy number one in the United States"?
Are you worried that smoking marijuana makes you insane, turns you into a violent criminal or causes death?
Do you worry daily about why prohibition failed?
Do you think the War on Drugs is a great idea?
Are you stressed out about these things and need an easy way out? Incarcerex may be for you!
Take a look at this great spoof from drugpolicy.org!
Does your politician suffer from Chronic Re-Election Paranoia (CREEP)? Do you think our…
pharyngula | June 29, 2007removed at the request of Gary Larson
Figure from Bride of the Far Side(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Gary Larson.
pharyngula | June 28, 2007Sorry, Rev. BigDumbChimp: you asked if Faith Converter 1.1 for Mac was any good. It's a gimmick program that will take a chunk of text or a web page and supposedly convert it to be compatible with a specific religion. It's a nice use of the Mac Webkit and so forth, but otherwise, it's just a program to do an automated global search and replace of certain terms. It's marginally amusing, not something I'll every use again, and you can get the full joke just from the promotional web page.
clock | June 27, 2007Everyone always blogs about Bush...
After all, Bush is such an easy target - there is not a day that he or some of his buddies do not do something outrageously bad. And with the Media covering it as if it was OK, where else can one voice outrage if not on blogs.
So, it is refreshing to see people, for once, blogging about something else, for instance about bush...
Ooops, not the Burning Bush...
And not this kind of bush either....
But bush in the sense of "hair" you know....
No, not that hair...
No, not that hair either, this is a science blog, after all....
But, this kind of hair and…
pharyngula | June 26, 2007The Union of Concerned Scientists has a poll right now — pick your favorite cartoon about the politicization of science. You've got 12 to choose from.
grrlscientist | June 26, 2007tags: hell, humor, streaming video
This streaming video is Rowan Atkinson's sketch about the Devil Welcoming People to Hell [3:04]
oracknows | June 24, 2007I can't argue with this:
An embodiment of the mystery, danger and freedom of the music itself, the crotch has occupied a central role in a stirring rock performance.
Of course, the crotch today remains a valuable weapon in the rock arsenal, as exemplified by the current wave of tight pants bands rehashing the Kinks/The Who sound of the 60s and 70s. More and more women are also mobilizing their crotches as well for the good of the rock. Take Peaches, for example. In recent years, the famed Electroclash chanteuse has turned her crotch into something of a cottage industry for photos, song lyrics…
sporte | June 22, 2007What happens when a biologist tries to talk with the IT group? Needless to say, they don't speak the same language.
Reposted from the archives.
Imagine this. You've been sequencing DNA for a few years now, perhaps ESTs, or something else, and storing files on your local network. Your system administrator makes backup files for you and all is well.
But one day you learn about interesting results that other people are getting by assembling sequence data themselves and you decide to try it, too.
Watch out! You are about to descend into bioinformatics hell.
Soon you learn that the assembly…