humor
j7uy5 | March 10, 2007What
would happen if Tux went to a famous portrait artist to get a
makeover?
href="http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/modigliani/">Modigliani
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botticelli">Botticelli
This was done using the method
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2006/07/patches_modiglianized.php">described
previously.
evolvingthoughts | March 10, 2007
As I have mentioned before, I started reading dystopias at eight. This naturally led to my reading science fiction or SF (never scifi) and the third book was, as I have said, Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, in the Wellsian tradition.
But it wasn't all literary. Dreck. I craved dreck! As someone once said, it's time to get SF out of the universities, and back in the gutter where it belongs. So I was intrigued by this list of best SF of the last 50 years, at tikistitch, via Pharyngula. The titles I have read are in bold.
The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years…
grrlscientist | March 9, 2007This streaming video (below the fold) boldly declares that you ain't no monkey's great grandson, by Ron Zimmerman.
.
tags: streaming video, evolution, creationism
evolvingthoughts | March 8, 2007
PZ Mghserx hits the big 50, the youngster. And there's a poetry fest going on at his blog (for values of "poetry" that includes all Vogonesque contributions). I wrote this, but I thought I'd add it here, with typos corrected.
The Myers Biological Song:
You are the very model of a modern biological
You've information vegetable, animal and logical
You know the ways of genomes and can list developmentical
From zygote to fifth instar you can tell if it's pharyngical.
You're very well acquainted too with things creatonistical
And understand the politics of matters atheistical
About…
grrlscientist | March 8, 2007GrrlScientist Note: Tomorrow is PZ's birthday so I thought I would share this paper with him and all of you, just as a reminder of the time when he ranted about his family cat's bad behavior. I think Midnight's bad manners are the result of PZ's beard. Don't believe me? Here's proof!
Feline Reactions to Bearded Men
by Catherine Maloney, Fairfield University, Fairfield, Connecticut; Sarah J. Lichtblau, University of Illinois, Champaign, Illinois; Nadya Karpook, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida; Carolyn Chou, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Anthony Arena-…
ksharpe | March 7, 2007...because Jessica Hagy, author of the indispensable fun-with-charts-and-graphs blog Indexed, has landed a book deal.
We expect it will be full of gems like this:
Image: Indexed.
integrityofscience | March 7, 2007It's been more than 3 weeks, 6 flights, 4 states, 2 presentations, 1 AAAS meeting, 1 new nephew, and more than 1500 new e-mail messages since our last post. Sorry 'bout the lapse. It's a busy time in the world of scientific integrity, but we hope to be back up to pace shortly.
In the meantime, here's a nugget from last week's This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow. You can view the full cartoon over at Working for Change. It's a little ham-fisted, sure, but we love our weekly Tom Tomorrow fix, and we'll take his rants on science politicization any way we can get them.
Given all predicted hub…
omnibrain | March 7, 2007
This guys brain is sorta having an out of body experience...
In any case, The March 6 issue of the journal Neurology has an article in it entitled, Out-of-body experience and arousal. where they found
that some people's brains already may be predisposed to these sorts of experiences. They found that an out-of-body experience is statistically as likely to occur during a near death experience as it is to occur during the transition between wakefulness and sleep. Nelson suggests that phenomena in the brain's arousal system, which regulates different states of consciousness including REM sleep…
pharyngula | March 7, 2007For everything from the intermittent masturbator to the mass murderer, FaithBrokers has a package for you.
ksharpe | March 6, 2007"When I was in high school, I remember friends who were jealous that my parents knew math and science," writes Janet Stemwedel of ScienceBlogs' Adventures in Ethics and Science, over at the current issue of the Science Creative Quarterly,
since obviously that meant I could ask them for help with my homework. What my friends didn't know was that my parents treated the most straightforward question as an invitation to a freewheeling Socratic dialogue of no less than 30 minutes. While I would have been happy just to finish my assignment with time to watch some TV, my parents wanted me to…
grrlscientist | March 6, 2007You can't call yourself a thinktank if all your ideas are stupid ... Bill Maher explores this idea a little further in this streaming video.
evolvingthoughts | March 6, 2007Janet started a meme, which started the whole world meming...
Ten weird things about me? Hell everything about me is weird.
1. My first full novel read was Brave New World. I was eight.
2. As a kid I wrote to all the Soviet as well as the American space centres looking for information. I'm sure there's an intelligence file on me aged 12 somewhere. I kept a card index of all cosmonauts and astronauts. I probably knew more than the FBI.
3. My first introduction to philosophy was Søren Kierkegaard. I read nearly all his works. I regained sanity about my mid-20s.
4. That was while I was doing a…
evolvingthoughts | March 5, 2007
You know that "Wow" ad for Vista, where you see them watch Alan Shepard in Freedom 7 launch on B&W TV and go "wow"? NASA Watch points out that Shepard launched on the Navy's Redstone, not the Air Force's Atlas. Wow. They are that careless. Well I know it's the advertising agency, and by definition they really are that stupid, but Microsoft might like to have checked.
As NASA Watch says, one more reason to use a Mac...
oracknows | March 4, 2007
I'm not sure if the group above, Clowns for Christ, Inc. (complete with Gideon the Parrot, Precious the Super Dog, and illustrated Bible messages, songs, and clown tricks), is the group responsible for the training videos that I posted yesterday. If it's not, though, apparently clowning for Christ is more widespread than I thought, because Googling "Clowns for Christ" or "Clowns for Jesus" brought up a lot of hits, including:
Clown Ministry
Clowns for Christ (a different group)
Clowning4Christ
Christ the Rebel Clown (which led to The Rebel Clown Army, which bills itself as wanting "to…