humor
grrlscientist | December 25, 2007tags: kissing under the mistletoe, holidaze, humor, streaming video
I love christmas, so Merry Christmas. I hope you enjoy your holidays as much as is portrayed in this video! [0:29]
evolvingthoughts | December 24, 2007
OK, so today is Christmas day, December 25. On this day* a man was born who changed the world. He affected a growing tradition that has left no part of the world untouched, for good or ill. He revealed the workings of the universe. He spent his life teaching us to understand ourselves, and was constantly predicting the end of the earth, based on revelation. His piercing gaze made many quail before him, and he suffered hypocrisy not at all, but was generous with those of good faith. He fought his Adversary unceasingly, and is remembered also for his ideas about coins.
The reason for the…
oracknows | December 24, 2007It's Christmas Eve, and nothing says Christmas like Santa Claus. And nothing says Christmas quite as much as the terrified reactions of some little children when they see Santa Claus and realize that they're Scared of Santa.
There are lots more where these two pictures came from here, here, and here.
Merry Christmas!
sporte | December 24, 2007This 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.
I was wrong.
When my husband was finishing graduate school, he brought home some agar plates that he had streaked, with different Streptomyces species, so that he could photograph them…
grrlscientist | December 24, 2007I was looking through my unread emails and found a list of modern euphemisms, which was sent to me by a reader of mine. Since many of you reading today are at work, but wishing to be elsewhere, and probably won't get much done today as a result, I thought that today would be the perfect day to post this for you to enjoy.
404:
Someone who's clueless. From the World Wide Web error message "404 Not Found," meaning that the requested document could not be located. "Don't bother asking him ... he's 404, man."
Adminisphere:
The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and…
oracknows | December 23, 2007Getting it right once again (click on the image for the whole comic)...
I've been meaning to do a piece about Head On, but I think I've decided that it's just too ridiculous to bother with, and that's saying something. After all, this is the blog that regularly posts pictures of a giant enema bottle.
sporte | December 23, 2007You're not likely to see the Twisted Chipmunk Christmas Song on the big screen this weekend.
But, if you liked White Trash Christmas, you'll enjoy this irreverent holiday video.
From the Seattle animators, formerly known as ToonedIn, now Global Wonder Entertainment.
omnibrain | December 23, 2007The answer is a resounding sorta. Scientists at Harvard have done that calculations and found that "the aerodynamics of a flexible, rippling sheet moving through a fluid" ... should make it "possible to make one that will stay aloft in air." However,
No such carpet is going to ferry people around, though. The researchers say that to stay afloat in air, a sheet measuring about 10 centimetres long and 0.1 millimetres thick would need to vibrate at about 10 hertz with an amplitude of about 0.25 millimetres. Making a heavier carpet 'fly' is not forbidden by the laws of physics. But the…
clock | December 22, 2007First: the difference between theory and practice.
Second: the theory.
Third: still to come, I hope, a YouTube video of Steinn demonstrating the practice of parallel parking.
clock | December 22, 2007...this much?
This is the source of the very funny bacon flowchart, discovered by Dr.Bacon.
grrlscientist | December 22, 2007You may not realize this, but "us SciBlings" do occasionally talk to each other behind the scenes, and one thing that we like to talk about is .. you! One of my commenters on the previous thread wrote something that has made me laugh most of the evening, so I shared this comment with my fellow SciBlings and they loved it too. So now, inspired by my anonymous commenter, two of us are having a little contest.
What do you think Noah's Ark looked like with six (or is it eleven?) species of giraffes on board? Please show us in a picture because as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.…
pharyngula | December 22, 2007Sunset approaches, so I have to go outside and do the evening chant to the Old Dark Ones and I just don't have time to deal with this colossal wanker, Roland S. Martin. He's a commentator on CNN (why, oh why, can't we have better media?) It's a crazy whine that demands a return to "traditional values", whatever those are, and complaining a backlash against Christianity. I like that dimbulbs like Martin are feeling pressured — it's about time stupid ideas were feeling the heat.
Anyway, the sacred rites of the Festival of Snata Kluahz summon me, so I'll leave Greg Laden the joy of the ritual…
sporte | December 22, 2007White Trash Christmas.
This is the perfect antidote to the Frosty, Rudolph, and The Little Drummer Boy overdose.
From the Seattle animators, formerly known as ToonedIn, now Global Wonder Entertainment.
mikethemadbiologist | December 22, 2007By way of Dave Neiwert comes this hysterical mash up of the movie 300 and the anti-immigrant right:
j7uy5 | December 21, 2007The
href="http://anerroroccurredwhileprocessingthisdirective.com/moviegen/">Movie
Generator just takes a database of various actors and ideas,
and combines them at random:
Hollywood's out of ideas. I'm
just here to help out.
Vin Diesel stars in the heart-warming role of President,
Abraham
Lincoln. With Kate Winslet playing his object of affection, the story
follows his eccentric, but often humorous path to fame. With John
Travolta playing his loathed enemy and determined to undermine his work.
That sounds like something Travola would do.
mikethemadbiologist | December 21, 2007It's a couple years old, but good science never goes bad. Here's the abstract:
Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These…
mementomori | December 21, 2007"7 Medical Myths Even Doctors Believe"
Uh oh...I hate it when they raise serious questions about the strength of my medical training. Go ahead and give me the list and I'll confess as to whether or not I fell for these myths; if fact, how do I know that I'm not in the right? Aren't doctors known for their stubbornness? So there! Anyway, go ahead.
1. We use only 10 percent of our brains.
Disagree. Based on the intellectual prowess manifested by our country's top role models I say no more than 3% of neurons available for duty are ever put into action.
2. You should drink at least eight…
j7uy5 | December 21, 2007My colleagues, et alia, have been
writing (
href="http://johnrlott.blogspot.com/2007/12/steroids-for-academics.html">1
href="http://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience/2007/12/the_ethics_of_performance_enha.php">2
href="http://scienceblogs.com/retrospectacle/2007/12/cognitive_enhancers_in_academi.php">3
href="http://drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2007/11/14/doping-is-a-okay-according-to-nature/">4
href="http://sunaddict86.blogspot.com/2007/12/performance-enhancing-drugsfor-brain.html">5
href="http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2007/12/altered_mates_drugs.html">6
href="http…
hrynyshyn | December 21, 2007From the master of doom and gloom, James Howard Kunstler, comes this attempt to simultaneous amuse and depress:
pharyngula | December 20, 2007I must speak up in favor of religion. It's not fair that it should be discriminated against and oppressed. I am disturbed by a case in which our federal government is impeding an individual's right to worship as he pleases.
An inmate is suing the Utah Department of Corrections for denying him his right to practice an ancient Nordic religion while behind bars.
Michael Polk is serving time for aggravated assault and robbery. He filed a lawsuit against corrections officials in federal court, accusing them of denying him religious items that he says are necessary to practice the Asatru religion…