Weirdness
pharyngula | July 8, 2009The Canadian prime minister was caught on video pocketing a cracker, and of course the media are in a tizzy over this silly and inconsequential nonsense.
I have a suggestion. Send it to me, Mr Harper. I'm one of the few experts in this world at professional cracker disposal.
pharyngula | July 6, 2009I know! He's dead! But that's one corpse that you know isn't going to rest easily.
First, the ghouls are out in force. "psychic" ghoul James Van Praagh says he's been having conversations with Jackson's ghost; ghoul enabler Oprah Winfrey has quickly snatched him up to appear on her show and make the entire country disgusted.
Sylvia Browne, quick to gnaw the scraps off the bones, now claims that she has been chatting with the dead guy. Coming in second means she gets the consolation prize of appearing on the Montel Williams show.
There is now a video circulating about that claims to have…
pharyngula | July 6, 2009I don't think I'd trust this Latvian money-lender to stay in business for long — he's giving small loans and asking for your soul as the only collateral. He doesn't employ collection agents, using only fear and superstition to get people to pay him back, which might work for a little while…but only until the atheists show up. Sure, I'll take a loan for $500, and hey, I think I'll just default and let you keep the collateral. If you only want to trust me for $1.98, that's fine, I'll take it and you can have my soul for as long as you want.
There's also a poll with the story: Would you use your…
pharyngula | July 6, 2009While I was off at the Lindau Nobel meeting, hanging out with mere Nobel prize winners and scientists and enthusiastic graduate students, I seem to have missed my chance to hang out with fairies and angels.
About 250 people came to the Methow Valley June 26 through 28 from as far away as Europe and Hawaii to participate in the ninth annual Fairy and Human Relations Congress, an outdoor festival in a secluded mountain meadow called Skalitude.
Hey, I know where that is — near Twisp (a wonderful name for a fairy congress), Washington, and very lovely place. And they were gathered for such a…
pharyngula | July 5, 2009Once upon a time, people like Thomas Jefferson would take scissors to their bibles to produce a customized versions that better represented their beliefs. It is now the 21st century; all you need is an internet connection and a little comfort with the Unix command line to tweak the bible into any state you want, and who wouldn't want the HPL edition of the Unholy Bible. Abdul Alhazred would have loved this.
pharyngula | July 5, 2009Our respectability among juvenile fans of Harry Potter may have just gone up a notch: Daniel Radcliffe has cheerfully declared himself to be an atheist.
I'm an atheist, but I'm very relaxed about it. I don't preach my atheism, but I have a huge amount of respect for people like Richard Dawkins who do. Anything he does on television, I will watch.
I understand that this same segment of society has also found a heightened interest in the works of playwrights like Peter Schaffer, so we know the Harry Potter effect can help. If only Radcliffe had an excuse to take his clothes off for atheism…
Of…
pharyngula | July 4, 2009Awesome.
Note, however, that it reiterates that odd theme of one-eyed squid that we see all over the place.
(via Michael Barton)
pharyngula | July 4, 2009What a crazy idea for a game show: a Turkish program is looking for 10 atheists to compete for the chance to be converted. What next, a show with healthy contestants competing for the chance to be infected with a disease, and the winner gets a long hospital stay?
The game show producers give their bias away when they announce "We don't approve of anyone being an atheist". They're also planning to have a team of theologians to screen out religious people pretending to be godless so they can get a free trip to the holy site of their choice.
Well, I'm not a fake atheist, but I'm wondering what…
pharyngula | July 3, 2009Because it would end embarrassing mistakes like this one.
A group of teenagers misunderstood a woman's screams during sex and, thinking they were stopping an assault, beat a 25-year-old man in her bedroom, police said.
Multiple tragedies here: not only was an innocent man beat up, but now everyone at school is so going to know those teenagers are like total virgins.
pharyngula | July 2, 2009Everyone is sending me this video of a strange pulsing blob found in a North Carolina sewer inspection. It is officially creepy and disgusting, and someone from the SciFi channel is racing to make creature feature about it right now, I'm sure.
I have no idea what it is, but the explanations that it is a colony of either tubifex worms or bryozoans sounds reasonable. I want to see a sample of that thing put under a microscope.
You are now free to make jokes about <despised NC figure>'s colonoscopy exam in the comments.
The best explanation so far is from Deep Sea News: they're almost…
pharyngula | June 26, 2009Wouldn't it be fun to rap on your neighbors' doors and hand out this tract?
pharyngula | June 26, 2009Whirled Nut Daily has announced that the Ark of the Covenant has been discovered and is going to be unveiled in Rome! I urge any of my Italian readers to close your eyes and don't look, because we all know what will happen when the Ark is opened.
You know this is serious—WND even illustrates their very scholarly article with a photo taken from the Indiana Jones movie.
pharyngula | June 18, 2009I know that most of the kooks can't abide the theory of evolution, and I can understand their motives a little bit — it directly contradicts common beliefs about who they are. But why all the hatin' on the Big Bang and on relativity (and on the other hand, why do the crazies love quanta so)? Here's another example of a book that continues the refrain.
UNCOMMON KNOWLEDGE: New Science of GRAVITY, LIGHT, the Origin of LIFE, and the MIND of Man
This book builds on the works of Arp, Bauval, Childress, Collins, Cremo and Thompson, Dunn, Felix, Hancock, Hapgood, Joseph, LaViolette, McTaggart, Pye,…
pharyngula | June 17, 2009
I was recently sent a strange article for comment…well, not that recently. It's 51 pages long, so I've kind of dragged my heels over it all. I have finally finished it, though, and it is weird.
There is a significant tradition in developmental biology that is currently a bit out of fashion: some names for it are formalism or structuralism. It's the idea that forms arise from the application of simple physical properties to tissues, and that it would be possible to describe an organism in some way by a set of parameters plugged into a mathematical formula. It's an interesting idea, it has a…
pharyngula | June 17, 2009On my very own planet of the hats, I would have to wear this lovely pink number.
That is a hat that the Squid Pope would wear with pride. It's not quite as terrifying as my cthulhu mask, though, which is what the Squid Inquisitor would wear…but then, I can wear many hats.
pharyngula | June 16, 2009You've all heard of the Drake Equation, a little exercise in rough estimation which attempts to approximate the number of intelligent, technological species in our galaxy. Here it is, if you haven't:
N=R* x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L
R* is the average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy
fp is the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne is the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fl is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point
fi is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop…
pharyngula | June 15, 2009This is going too far. As you probably know, Apple has run a long series of ads where they personify computers: the Mac is the young, cool, hip dude, while the PC is the stodgy old loser. It has been a very successful campaign, and various other companies have tried to copy it or defuse it. But sometimes they are too slavishly following the concept and lose any credibility or any awards for creativity. Latest case: OpenBSD proposes a series of ads with their own personified operating systems. It's never going to happen — they can't afford the talent they want to use — and it's also too…
pharyngula | June 11, 2009Once again, Texas leads the way in absurdities. One kook has decided he doesn't like to say hello, and has convinced the whole county to go along with him. Can you guess why?
In this friendly little ranching town, "hello" is wearing out its welcome. And Leonso Canales Jr. is happy as heck.
At his urging, the Kleberg County commissioners on Monday unanimously designated "heaven-o" as the county's official greeting. The reason: "hello" contains the word "hell."
For some reason, I now really want Michelle Obama to visit the Hellespont to collect seashells and read Percy Shelley, just so it…
pharyngula | June 10, 2009Would you believe the aliens are on the way?
The words 'Nous ne sommes pas seuls' or 'We are not alone' will be somberly pronounced this week by a senior Government official of the nation that brought the world 'Liberté, égalité, fraternité'. France is set to concede that it is aware of an alien presence on earth by no later than Friday.
Paris has chosen follow the lead of maverick UFO nation Brazil and resist US pressure to continue delaying disclosure until America feels it is ready for the event.
It is believed that a telephone hot-line has been set up in Paris to deal with queries…