stupidity
tlambert | March 6, 2007From episode 2 of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Narrator: The Encyclopaedia Galactica defines a robot as "a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man". The Marketing Division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as "your plastic pal who's fun to be with!"
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy defines the Marketing Division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes", with a footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome applications for anyone interested in taking…
pharyngula | March 4, 2007Last week, I promised I'd watch this documentary about the "lost tomb of Jesus" because it was being advertised here on Pharyngula. Promise fulfilled, but the ghastly program was two hours long—two hours of nothing but fluff. I've put a bit of a summary of the whole show below the fold, but I'm afraid there's nothing very persuasive about any of it, and it was stretched out to a hopelessly tedious length.
8:00-8:30
We learn that there were some ossuaries pulled out of a tomb in 1980. The names scrawled on them: Jesus bar Joseph, Jose, Mary, Matthew. They really didn't have to drag that out…
retrospectacle | March 1, 2007PZ notes a cataclysmic event: a bank actually turned down a $50,000 check written by the Almighty!
Kevin Russell found out it's not easy trying to cash a check from God. The 21-year-old man was arrested Monday after he tried to cash a check for $50,000 at the Chase Bank in Hobart that was signed "King Savior, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Servant," Hobart police Detective Jeff White said.
Perhaps even more hilarious is the fact that the man had more checks signed by God (including one for $100,000)...you know, just in case the teller actually fell for the first check.
However, God himself…
retrospectacle | February 27, 2007A "study" conducted for computing firm Hewlett Packard warned of a rise in "infomania", with people becoming addicted to email and text messages and this impacting (what else?) their IQ. This came in 2006, but I just stumbled upon it today and became predicably irate at yet another example of terrible science reporting.
The study, carried out at the Institute of Psychiatry, found excessive use of technology reduced workers' intelligence.
Those distracted by incoming email and phone calls saw a 10-point fall in their IQ - more than twice that found in studies of the impact of smoking…
pharyngula | February 23, 2007Sometimes it's the little things that are the most revealing, that expose the bankruptcy of an idea. For instance, this story from a Florida school where the principal and teachers cast a magic spell.
It had been a hard Friday at Brooksville Elementary School, with lots of misbehavior that didn't bode well for the start of state testing the following week.
So the principal and a few staff members appealed to a higher power.
They prayed and blessed their students' desks with prayer oil.
While the Christian prayers and anointing took place after school hours on Friday, Feb. 2, the oil was…
pharyngula | February 22, 2007
See that guy over on the right? The well-fed fellow doing the salute?
That's Jesus.
Not just a guy named Jesus, but the Son of God. The Messiah. The literal second coming of the Savior. King of kings, Lord of lords, yadda yadda yadda, and he swears he isn't a False Christ.
That's what he says, anyway. And apparently he's got a substantial number of followers who believe him.
Thanks, Liberal Debutante, for disillusioning me further. Jebus, but people can be awfully stupid, especially when religion is involved..
pharyngula | February 21, 2007At least, I hope so. The "conservapedia" is supposed to be an alternative to Wikipedia that removes the biases—although one would think the creators would be clever enough to realize that even the name announces that Conservapedia is planning to openly embrace a particular political bias. Unfortunately, that bias seems to be more towards stupidity than anything else.
In fact, reading through it leads me to wonder if it isn't actually a parody site. Some people are getting the same impression of Overwhelming Evidence, the Intelligent Design site that was set up to cater to the teen crowd, but…
pharyngula | February 19, 2007Somebody shoot me now. The Washington Post tallies up congressional votes, and in an astounding display of technological mastery, allows you to sort and display them by the congressperson's astrological sign. If you've ever wondered whether Scorpios were more likely to vote for highway appropriations than are Virgos, now you can find out.
I really want to know what the conversations the editors or publishers had about this decision were like. I'm thinking they were getting worried about how idiotic and cowardly the press has been looking lately, so someone decided to do something bold and…
tlambert | February 6, 2007There's pathological denial and there's super-duper-pathological denial.
In comments to my post at On Line Opinion OLO editor Graham Young has now written 20 comments denying that Peiser admitted to making multiple errors.
This Media Watch report?
"And when we pressed him to provide the names of the articles, he eventually conceded - there was only one."
Apparently Young reckons that's a fabrication, though for some reason Peiser hasn't called them on it.
Over at his own blog, Young seems to have perfected the art of denial. After he wrote this post insinuating that the IPCC was up to no…
pharyngula | February 6, 2007Man, this Keith Henson character is a fearsome dude. He was convicted of a crime, fled the state, has been on the lam for 6 years, and was finally caught and thrown in jail, with bail initially set at half a million dollars. What heinous act won him such a nefarious reputation?
He posted a joke on usenet. A joke that made fun of a religion.
Henson was convicted in 2001 under a California law (Sec. 422.6) that criminalizes any threat to interfere with someone else's "free exercise" of religion. One Usenet post that was introduced at his trial included jokes about sending a "Tom Cruise" missile…
pharyngula | February 3, 2007Here's a tragic story: a teacher convicted.
The six-person jury Friday … convicted Amero, 40, of Windham of four counts of risk of injury to a minor, or impairing the morals of a child. It took them less than two hours to decide the verdict. She faces a sentence of up to 40 years in prison.
Her crime? A computer in her classroom got caught in a porn spam pop-up loop (you know what they are, especially if you're using that awful MS Internet Explorer—windows automatically open to spam sites as fast as you can close them). It's easily fixed by using a decent browser or resetting the computer or…
tlambert | February 3, 2007
I must be really important because Glenn Reynolds has made a specious attack on me based on something I wrote, not in a post, but in a comment on another blog. I wrote that the sea level projections in the draft AR4 report were similar to those in the previous report. Reynolds:
Number problems for Tim Lambert? Color me unsurprised.
He links to Tim Blair, who cleverly quotes me like this:
Lambert looks for a way out: "I didn't say the numbers were the same, merely similar." The numbers in question are ... 59 and 88.
No, those aren't the numbers in question. Blair left out my next sentence…
pharyngula | February 2, 2007
Maybe I should plan on steering clear of the place—they do seem a little trigger-happy. The must-reads of the day are Bruce Schneier and Teresa Nielsen Hayden on the ridiculous over-reaction of the mayor and police in Boston to a trivial (if obnoxious) ad campaign.
pharyngula | January 30, 2007We went round and round on this well over a year ago. Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, wrote a shallow and ignorant argument that sort of shilly-shallied over a pro-creationist argument; I pointed out how stupid his reasoning was. The response was insane; criticize Adams, and his horde of Dilbert fans will descend on you like a cloud of pea-brained locusts. Adams took a stab at the subject again, proposing that at least we ought to teach it as an alternative to evolution, an old and tiresome argument that I thoroughly despise. Basically, Adams just outed himself as a feeble hack making tepid…
tlambert | January 29, 2007There's denial and there's pathological denial.
In comments to my post at On Line Opinion OLO editor Graham Young has continued to deny that Peiser admitted to making multiple errors. The latest bit of denial:
"To say he concedes, when you know he doesn't, is not only "deeply dishonest", but blatantly so"
This is despite Young emailing Peiser to verify the accuracy of this Media Watch report:
"And when we pressed him to provide the names of the articles, he eventually conceded - there was only one."
pharyngula | January 24, 2007Grrr. This story pisses me off beyond all reason. It's a trumped up contretemps generated by one of our local Minnesota Republican hacks, griping about a UM faculty member using her campus email.
A University of Minnesota professor has come under fire for sending a message using her university e-mail account to help comedian Al Franken with his likely U.S. Senate candidacy.
Sally Kenney, director of the Center on Women and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, sent an e-mail last week from a "umn.edu" address to an undisclosed number of…
pharyngula | January 17, 2007I thought this sad case of a woman dying of water intoxication was the result of mere ignorance, but it turns out it was an act of willful, criminal stupidity.
In an online recording of the show, the DJs can be heard making comments joking about people dying from water intoxication, even discussing a case in Northern California two years ago in which student Matthew Carrington, 21, died after drinking too much water during a fraternity pledge.
One of the DJs even admitted they maybe should have done some research before the contest.
One female caller, who identified herself as Eva, also…
tlambert | January 9, 2007
Remember, the piñata is only deployed when Blair produces another nugget of stupid after being beaten with a clue stick.
So let's look at the nuggets we got from Blair this time:
Chinatown seems not to have been burned down recently.
racists generally comment behind people's backs
Lambert is citing an American conservative who's never been to Sydney -- and who can't spell a simple three-letter surname.
Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald printed five letters from Sydneysiders who found Ker's story credible. I agree with them -- Sydney is a tolerant place, but that doesn't mean…
tlambert | January 7, 2007American student Kunthea Ker wrote how she was verbally abused at Sydney's New Year fireworks because of who she was. Tim Blair's response? He accuses her of lying.
Her story:
We [her family] are American but we are also Asian, and the crowd seemed full of people making racist, disparaging comments about Asians - not only within our hearing but to our faces.
When we found a spot to sit, one woman remarked loudly that she didn't want to sit next to Asians. Another man shouted at us "I hate Chinese!" We are not Chinese. ...
Finally, as the fireworks began, a young man tried to push past us to…
pharyngula | December 31, 2006Maybe it's a bad, bad idea for a community to have an open-access electronic bulletin board, because it sure is a great tool for exposing the ugly underbelly of the group. Kearny, NJ has had its moment of fame, with the story of the history teacher babbling nonsense to his class, and
Jim Lippard has found some troubling stuff on the Kearny bulletin board. Paul LaClair, the father of the young man who recorded his teacher's rambling BS, posted a
review and complaint about the community's failure to support good teaching, and what's bothersome are the replies. A few are supportive, but some are…