humor
sporte | November 27, 2008If you're not cooking today, why not experiment? Here's something fun you can do with Mentos and Diet Coke - and for those of you who think these experiments are too messy, you can still watch the movie.
Enjoy the music in the video, then go outside, and enjoy the show. Later, go to EepyBird.com and learn about the science behind the fountain effect.
technorati tags: Mentos and Diet Coke, chemistry, science you can do at home
grrlscientist | November 27, 2008This amusing essay is making the rounds on the intertubes (as usual) this year, so I had to share it with you.
Ingredients:
Turkey
Stuffing
Sweet Potatoes
Mashed Potatoes with Gravy
Green Beans
Cranberry Sauce
Hot rolls and Butter
Relish tray
Pumpkin Pie with Whipped Cream
Hot Coffee
Instructions:
Get up early in the morning and have a cup of coffee. It's going to be a long day, so place your parrot on a perch nearby to keep you company while you prepare the meal.
Remove parrot from kitchen counter and return him to perch.
Prepare stuffing, and remove parrot from edge of stuffing bowl and…
grrlscientist | November 27, 2008tags: Thanksgiving holiday, Snoopy, Chales M Schulz, humor, comedy, streaming video
If you are like me, you do not have a television, so you are missing all the special holiday programming. This sweet video is a late one created by the late, great Charles M. Schulz about celebrating Thanksgiving on a ping-pong table. Of course, it includes really fine jazz as background music -- does anyone know who wrote and performed the background music and how I can get it? [20:18].
If that video was deleted by YouTube, this one probably survived, because it is a condensed version [4:55];
oracknows | November 27, 2008Continuing the theme from yesterday one last time this week and bringing our long disused blog mascot front and center, I wish all my readers a happy Thanksgiving!
grrlscientist | November 27, 2008tags: Thanksgiving Turkey, I Will Survive, Gloria Gaynor, humor, satire, streaming video
While you are sitting around, licking your chops while watching your mother do all the cooking, this amusing streaming video reveals that your turkey was busy too: this is a Thanksgiving turkey's response to overfed Americans everywhere [1:14].
oracknows | November 26, 2008...EneMan thinks he's "too sexy":
Unfortunately, someone else is claiming EneMan as her mascot:
We can't have that. Remember, EneMan has been this blogs mascot since December 2004. Maybe he's getting restless because he hasn't been featured very often the last couple of years. I wonder if I should remedy that...
mikethemadbiologist | November 25, 2008I've written before about the scourge of turkeys that are terrorizing the greater Boston area. One thing I've noticed is that the turkeys have gone missing this year. Apparently, one such turkey named "Sully" (by turkey-loving sympathizers) that established an enclave in South Boston is nowhere to be found:
Sully reportedly arrived in the neighborhood more than six months ago with a half-dozen other turkeys, but they all left and he stayed behind and set up a territory in the area around Dorchester Heights. His fame was immediate - There's a wild turkey! Living in Southie! - but the more he…
oracknows | November 24, 2008
There are times when I see a quote by someone who is clearly extremely intelligent, but the quote is so utterly dumb, so devoid of any evidence that a single functioning neuron was behind it, that I can only shake my head in disbelief. Thanks to Dr. Val, Dr. Wes, and Walter Olson, I've found one more such quote. It's by a trial lawyer named Gerry Spence, who was awarded the CAOC Lifetime Achievement Award and bestowed this gem of brain-sucking stupidity on the assembled throng of lawyers attending the awards ceremony:
"We have to redefine who we are: We are the most important people in…
j7uy5 | November 24, 2008
It is not obvious what
href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/haly/223020107/in/pool-stickfiguresinperil/">this
sign is intended to depict, or why. It almost has
to be a photoshop job (?).
sporte | November 23, 2008This wasn't in the lab, but it was an accident, and it was funny later on.
Normally, I wouldn't think twice about storing bacterial cultures in a refrigerator. After all, bacteria on a petri plate, inside of a plastic bag, are kind of stuck. They can't get out of the plates, and even if they did, they certainly can't crawl out of a plastic bag.
I thought soil bacteria, on agar plates, were mostly harmless.
Reposted from DigitalBio's greatest hits.
Technorati Tags: humor, bacteria, taste, funny, tasting, food, Streptomyces
When my husband was finishing graduate school, he brought home some…
evolvingthoughts | November 21, 2008
Phil Plait linked to this guy, Louis CK, on why it's alright for the world to go back into the dark ages, but I rather like this one, in which it becomes clear that philosophers are, after all, just persistent two year olds:
pharyngula | November 20, 2008The Mormons have this arrogant practice of posthumous baptism — one of the motivations for their huge genealogical libraries is to help them go through the old records, find the names of dead people, and 'convert' them to Mormonism. It's silly and pointless, but it can also be insensitive and offensive, such as when they start baptizing Jews killed in the Holocaust.
So here's brilliant reversal: convert dead Mormons to…homosexuality. I love the idea. It really doesn't matter what their sexual orientation in life was, it doesn't even matter if they were raging homophobes…death changes a lot of…
evolvingthoughts | November 20, 2008
... has it still happened? Anyway, the BBC, bless 'em, has had philosopher David Bain pose four philosophical questions to mark the epistemologically problematic day:
1. Should we kill healthy people for their organs?
2. Are you the same person who started reading this article?
3. Is that really a computer screen in front of you?
4. Did you really choose to read this article?
Or in more traditional terms: Utilitarian ethics, personal identity, perception and illusion, and free will and determinism. Sneaky. Get 'em in with a condundrum and then pervert the minds of those who stay to…
oracknows | November 20, 2008
PROLOGUE
LOCATION: The Liberator, cruising through space.
GAN: Are you sure it's fully switched on?
ORAC: Of course I'm properly switched on. Having depressed the activator button what else would you expect?
CALLY: It's his voice.
BLAKE: It's exactly as though Ensor were speaking.
ORAC: Surely it is obvious even to the meanest intelligence that during my development I would naturally become endowed with aspects of my creator's personality.
AVON: The more endearing aspects by the sound of it.
ORAC: Possibly. However similarities between myself and Ensor are entirely superficial. My mental…
grrlscientist | November 19, 2008tags: cartoon, humor, funny, pets, cats
Image: XKCD.
I am staying with a cat named Jack in Helsinki, and of course, this means I am redicovering something about cats I'd forgotten, but this phenomenon is well-established scientifically, as you can see from the graph above.
evolvingthoughts | November 19, 2008
From here via here via here, 99 things I have or haven't done.
1. Started your own blog
2. Slept under the stars
3. Played in a band
4. Visited Hawaii
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than you can afford to charity
7. Been to Disneyland/world
8. Climbed a mountain
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sang a solo
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched a lightning storm at sea
14. Taught yourself an art from scratch
15. Adopted a child
16. Had food poisoning
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown your own vegetables
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
20. Slept on an…