Weirdness
pharyngula | June 26, 2011This is moderately weird: it's a periodic table of atheists, and I've been assigned an atomic number of 4, which makes me a rare, brittle, and highly toxic metal with a high melting point. Does anyone else look at these charts and try to draw inferences from chemical properties to the individual?
pharyngula | June 25, 2011He's written a wonderfully clear rejection of the Singularity nonsense. He's right on, 100%.
pharyngula | June 24, 2011I need to buy a few dozen of these shirts to prop up my self-esteem.
Probably a better question, but one that does my self-esteem no good at all, is to ask what they heck they're for? I know they're not actually for me — is there a place called PZ?
pharyngula | June 24, 2011Minnesota has the lowest frequency of searches for "free gay porn" in all 50 states? Is it because we all already know exactly where to find it, so we don't bother googling for it, or is it because we're too busy snuggling up to keep warm all winter?
And why are Alabamans looking for god on the internet?
Come to think of it, I've never searched google for either "god" or "free gay porn". I might be missing something.
(via Calamities of Nature)
pharyngula | June 23, 2011It's true, I couldn't predict most of these entries, but I totally guessed the general subject of the #1 entry correctly, so that's got to count for something.
pharyngula | June 17, 2011Swim away! Don't antagonize the shark!
You should also be afraid because the ocean is apparently full of literate predators.
pharyngula | June 16, 2011I was told by several people that AVN was quite happy with me, which caused me some consternation. The Australian Vaccination Network? That horrible anti-science group that campaigns against giving children protection from disease? Oh, no, what have I done wrong?
But then, as it turns out, to most of the world AVN stands for Adult Video News, the big organization that reviews and markets pornography and gives awards to sexy movies. I was so relieved! That's so much better. Anyway, They praise me fulsomely in an article which is only safe for work if you have a good ad-blocker on your browser…
pharyngula | June 15, 2011If you've ever read a comic book, you know the conventions: men must be immensely muscular, women must be full-breasted and wasp-waisted (and we're not even talking Rob Liefeld here). Furthermore, the superhero costume for women must expose as much skin as possible: bare midriff almost always, low cut top, and the buttocks must be exposed. So in addition to an unnatural physique, the women must strut about in costumes that would look revealing in a strip club.
Megan Rosalarian Gedris is turning that all around. She's redrawing comics featuring those slinky sexy women and putting the male…
pharyngula | June 14, 2011OK, I saw this strange video, and my first thought was that this had to have some sex and porn applications. And then I felt ashamed of myself.
pharyngula | June 12, 2011Some of you may recall that I signed up to learn about DNA Activation and 12-strand DNA about two months ago. They have since been sending me email messages almost every day, steadily ramping up the weirdness with each new one.
"More weird," you say? Weirder than manipulating invisible DNA waves to achieve immortality and use 100% of my brain, you ask? Yes.
I haven't sent them any money. I think they're desperately flailing about to find the hook that will open my wallet. Here's the latest missive.
We see all the evil and disaster on mother earth and wonder or ask why does this happen???…
pharyngula | June 11, 2011That's the primary lesson I'm taking from this bizarre Anthony Weiner affair: it's personal and private, and whenever it's made public, it simply makes all the participants look silly. It's definitely not an intellectual process, as this reading of his steamy exchanges reveals.
I don't endorse Weiner's behavior at all, but still, it makes me want to see Maher's pillow talk revealed and expressed in public. Just to be mean.
pharyngula | June 10, 2011Last night at the Cheltenham Science Festival, I attended a Q&A between Robin Ince and Alan Moore; Robin had stumbled onto the easiest job in the universe, because all you have to do is tickle Moore a little bit and deep rumbly and heavily accented weirdness comes pouring out. Much of the talk was about Moore's belief in magic — in a science festival, you say? Yes, and it actually made a lot of sense.
Moore has an affinity for a 2nd century oracular sock puppet, but he doesn't worship it. He believes in magic, but he doesn't believe in the supernatural. He also doesn't like religion. I…
pharyngula | June 5, 2011I wonder if I can get hair extensions to just leap immediately to "wizard".
pharyngula | June 5, 2011It's the Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group. "Occlupanid", in case you weren't familiar with the lingo, is the taxonomic term for bread ties, those little plastic clips used to close up plastic bread sacks. There is more than you ever wanted to know about bread ties at that link.
It's actually rather thought provoking: it's an entire classification scheme for a trivial industrial widget.
pharyngula | June 1, 2011I was sent a link to Bund Katholischer Ärzte (the Federation of Catholic Doctors), which, if you can get past the goofy name that already promises much hilarity, has an interesting agenda.
They are against homosexuality. It causes "suffering" and should be treated.
But their treatments are spiritual and homeopathic.
I don't know whether to damn them, laugh at them, or encourage them to go on praying for gay people while giving them sips of pure clean water.
pharyngula | May 26, 2011No. I can't watch any of them. I was sent a link to The 13 Creepiest Christian Education Videos for Kids, and … hideous clowns and rapping puppets … and OBEY … oh, jebus, the children. Think of the children.
pharyngula | May 25, 2011It's Towel Day. I've got mine right here next to the computer. Incredibly useful things, towels.
Just in case you are unaware of the importance of your towel, take it away, Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars…
pharyngula | May 20, 2011This is only for the thoughtful, responsible fundagelical fanatics, obviously.
pharyngula | May 18, 2011Author Annie Jacobsen has a new book that finally reveals the truly true truth about the so-called UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico. And here is the answer: Roswell Martians May Have Been Deformed Nazi Kids Sent by Stalin.
It explains so much.
The craft, she writes, wasn't an alien spaceship, as many have since theorized, nor was it a weather balloon, as the U.S. military alleged in its clumsy cover story. It was, according to Jacobsen, a Nazi-inspired Soviet spy plane with Cyrillic letters embossed on the hull, crewed by malformed adolescents, two of whom survived the crash.
Stalin used…