Weirdness
pharyngula | August 26, 2009If you've got cable, you'll want to tune in to the "SyFy" (yeesh, could they have made it a little dorkier?) channel for…Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus!!!. Who ever said television was a great wasteland? That's quality entertainment!
That's this Saturday evening. We're all nerds together here, I know you don't have anything better to do.
pharyngula | August 24, 2009Speaking of cartoon renderings of yours truly, I've been Simpsonized.
Wait a minute…my archnemesis is Ben Stein? Don't I even get a challenge? My greatest foe is a guy with the superpower of being boring. Finding out that Moist was my enemy would be a step up.
pharyngula | August 20, 2009We have excuses to party every day: today, H.P. Lovecraft would be 129 119 years old. He'd be pretty darned rugose and squamous if he were still alive!
pharyngula | August 19, 2009DingoJack sent me this — made me snort my beverage, you cruel fiends.
(Click for larger image)
pharyngula | August 16, 2009When we Americans need a little reassurance that we aren't Number Last (or reminders that it could get worse), all we have to do is look to Turkey. A Turkish television show had a 'debate' that attempted to disprove evolution, in which the audience was treated to some serious intellectual problems.
They called in the question which evolution created angel and daemon, how felicities in the heaven evolved, how the snake came into existence out of the baton as well as the bird out of mud. The creationists tried to disprove evolution theory with these questions.
I give up. They're right.…
pharyngula | August 15, 2009This video is so blatantly insane that I'm half-convinced it's all a put-on…but on the other hand, I've talked with people who actually are this oblivious.
See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.
pharyngula | August 12, 2009Wouldn't you know it, even the omniscient lord of the cosmos can't spell my name right. There may be an upside to this, though: when St Peter at the gates goes flipping through his big book of naughty deeds, he won't be able to find me, and will just wave me on through to continue my rabble rousing.
pharyngula | July 31, 2009We are often told that religion is a different way of knowing, that it can provide us with a different perspective and different information. I have not believed this at all, because no one has ever been able to give me an example of actual, useful information obtained from a religion, that could not have been generated by a reality-based approach.
Until now.
This is a question that I had never even considered before; it was unexpected and surprising. I think I've finally experienced an insightful religious question.
Are you allowed to eat a mermaid?
Apparently, the Koran or some of its…
pharyngula | July 31, 2009Jesus in a pita, Madonna in bird poop, gods speaking through the arrangement of viscera…we're used to ridiculous religious pattern seeking. A reader, Mike Barnes, wrote in to tell me about a scientist who has been playing the same game: Francis Collins sees DNA in stained glass windows.
Collins showed two images--a stained-glass rose window often seen in Christian churches, and an eerily similar graphic that he described as "looking down the barrel" of DNA's double helix.
"I'm not trying to say that there's something inherently religious" in the DNA image, Collins emphasized. "But, I think…
pharyngula | July 29, 2009Heresy is so easy to do, you don't even have to try. My wife is off helping kids at Camp Quest, which is, apparently, a horrible, awful, evil act. Just ask the Jebus-lovers of Rapture Ready, who were recently all agog at the opening of a godless summer camp in England. Here are a few of their reactions, stripped of the animated smiley faces and garish signatures they like over there.
Poor kids! What will they sing about?
Give peace a chance?!?
They could sing about sex and drugs and rock and roll, I suppose…but songs about peace sound like they'd be very nice. Why would a Christian find…
pharyngula | July 25, 2009I'd never heard of Roger W. Babson before, but maybe some of you at east coast colleges have seen one of his monuments. He was an eccentric millionaire who founded the Gravity Research Foundation and donated money for anti-gravity research. He gave money to colleges that would accept one of his granite monuments to "remind students of the blessings forthcoming when science determines what gravity is, how it works, and how it may be controlled." It was his obsession. Apparently, his concern traces back to one event:
Babson, born in 1875, was a self-made millionaire who founded three colleges…
pharyngula | July 23, 2009There is a site called ScienceBlog, at scienceblog.com. Note that it is a little different from scienceblogs.com — it lacks the "s". There are a few other differences, too: it's a site that simply reprints press releases. Send 'em anything, and they'll spit it back up on the web for you.
One such example is a press release titled Life on Earth came from other planets. It purports to be a summary of a peer-reviewed, published research paper.
This one:
"Life on Earth Came From Other Planets," by R. Joseph, Ph.D. Cosmology, Vol 1. 2009.
There are a few funny things about this article. The…
pharyngula | July 22, 2009Scarcely do I mention that Texas goes recruiting in Minnesota for kooks, but I learn that John Charles Wilson is running for governor of Minnesota.
Wilson's Edgertonite National Party is based on the Lauraist religion, a movement he created that believes Laura Ingalls Wilder is God and that the Lauraist homeland will occupy an area within a 240-mile radius of Minneapolis.
"A new nation, to be called Edgerton, with its capital at Minneapolis, should be created on the land from approximately Hibbing to Des Moines, and from Fargo to Madison," says Wilson's campaign Web site.
Communism is the…
pharyngula | July 18, 2009Oh, I believe! What else could this be?
It's the one on the left. The medium: bird poop on a pickup truck.
This is even better than Piss Christ!
pharyngula | July 14, 2009The military has plans for a new kind of drone robot that will wander the wastelands of future battlefields, scooping up organic debris — such as dead bodies — and burning them to fuel their advance. The call it an EATR: Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot.
It's kind of sweet, in a morbid way. It recycles! It uses renewable energy! Put a gun on it, and it could even harvest its own fuel as it mows its way through the enemy's cities!
To be perfectly fair, though, the company building it doesn't talk about using bodies for energy, but is more about generic biomass. Bodies are probably…
pharyngula | July 14, 2009Then you need to turn to the non-scientists for some refreshing expressions of unity. Or not.
A New Age magazine in Minnesota is under new management, and the editor wants to exercise some "quality control": astrology, fairies, life-force energy, and spiritual quests are OK. Channeling and paganism are out. This has annoyed the so-open-minded-their-brains-have-fallen-out crowd.
Other New Age leaders are appalled.
"He is excluding channeling? Yikes. Or pagans? He should not be doing that," said Kathy McGee, editor of the Washington-state-based magazine New Age Retailer.
"New Age is an…
pharyngula | July 11, 2009There are intelligent true believers, deluded as they are, but there also a few of them out there who will simply take your breath away with statements of such pretentious stupidity that you wonder how they manage to tie their shoes in the morning. Case in point: David Klinghoffer. If you're already familiar with him, you won't be surprised at this. He's written an essay in which he takes to task the concept of convergent evolution, as espoused by Ken Miller and Simon Conway Morris. I don't care much for the way Miller and Conway Morris use the idea myself, but Klinghoffer's argument…man. You…
pharyngula | July 10, 2009You all recall Ray's amusing video in which he praises the 'design' of the banana, with it's pop-top for easy opening. Well, somebody watched how banana-opening experts, monkeys, peel bananas, and we've been doing it all wrong.
I just tried it, and it works. It's a revelation, and my life is changed forever. Praise be unto the wise monkey!