Weirdness
pharyngula | April 21, 2009Once, religion gave us Bach and the Sistine Chapel. That was then; now religion gives us…
Holy Flash Abuse, Batman! You have to see the intro page for the International Congress of Churches & Ministers to believe it. Somebody had way too much coffee.
If your religious kitsch preferences are more old school, try crafting a god box.
A God box is an object of intense beauty used for manifesting goodness in your life. You can buy it or build it. You can adorn it with faux finishes, faux lapis, strings soaked in glue, making loops, like spaghetti rococco, then paint it, varnish it, maybe…
pharyngula | April 21, 2009Yeah, crazy people write to me, too.
Hello dear Ladies and Gentlemen!
I would like inform you that Scarlett Johansson “actress” actually is a clone from original person Scarlett Galabekian last name, who has nothing with acting career,
surname Galabekian, because of adoption happened in 1992. Clones was created illegally by using stolen biological material. Original person is very nice (not d**n sexy), most important - CHRISTIAN young lady! I'll tell you more, those clones (it's not only one) made in GERMANY - world leader manufacturer of humans clones, it is in Ludwigshafen am Rhein,…
pharyngula | April 20, 2009For some reason, I find this hilarious — it's an exercise in applying the mathematics of population ecology to the dynamics of human-vampire interactions. It's the real deal, the actual kinds of math used by those wacky evolution and ecology nerds, all built around some estimates of the rates of vampire siring measured against the rates that Buffy-style vampire slayers take them out. Here's the kind of thing you'll see in the document:
I like it. In case you're wondering, Buffy's Sunnyvale reaches a stable equilibrium with a population of about 36,000 humans and 18 vampires.
(Hmm. I posted…
pharyngula | April 20, 2009If anyone is in the Roseville area tomorrow, somewhere near Northwestern College, you might have an entertaining time if you drop in on a meeting of the Twin Cities Creation Science Association. I can't even imagine what they're going to say in this one.
God's Design in Weather
Weather is more talked about
than any other topic. God has
arranged the weather system on
the earth. There are patterns to
this weather. How does a tornado
form? What causes hurricanes?
Why aren't raindrops larger?
Science is about finding patterns
and then predicting what will
happen. The study of weather
allows us…
pharyngula | April 20, 2009Jerry Coyne carries out an amusing exercise in reasoning like an evolutionary psychologist: why does human semen taste bad? It turns out that it is really easy to invent all kinds of entirely reasonable rationalizations for it: in particular, it's to promote ejaculation in the orifice that is more likely to result in pregnancy, since women can't get pregnant by way of their stomach. It's all deductively logical, but built on premises floating in thin air, with no empirical foundation at all…the usual flaw on which evolutionary psychology fails.
It does open up all kinds of angels-dancing-upon…
pharyngula | April 18, 2009Perhaps you remember the PCR song from Bio-Rad…or perhaps you tried hard to purge that from your memory. Then Eppendorf upped the ante with a pipettor love song. Now Greg Laden finds another pop tribute to PCR from Bio-Rad. The genre? Disco. By all that's good and rational, not disco.
Two can fight this war against good taste. How about a big hair rock ballad to a tissue culture cell monitoring system?
That one needs an encore.
Little known fact: most molecular biologists dress exactly like that in the lab.
pharyngula | April 16, 2009The governor of Texas is ranting about seceding from the United States.
Speaking to an energetic and angry tea party crowd in Austin Wednesday evening, the Lone Star State governor suggested secession may happen in the future should the federal government not change its fiscal polices.
"There's a lot of different scenarios," Perry said. "We've got a great union. There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that. But Texas is a very unique place, and we're a pretty independent…
pharyngula | April 16, 2009As I'm sure many of you are aware, one of the more superficially off-putting elements of the Catholic church is to walk into one of their buildings and see it decorated with images of writhing, tortured men in loin cloths — it's like stepping into a S&M fantasy, and I'm really not into that (not that there's anything wrong with it, of course, if that's your thing…). If the walls were draped with these, though, my reflexive rejection of the whole idea of church attendance might be softened.
I still wouldn't pay any attention to the liturgy or the sermon or the hymns, though.
Somehow, I…
pharyngula | April 16, 2009Here's a fine idea to benefit the public: an exchange progrram called Fiction for Fiction in which people can trade in their tired old religious texts for novels. It seems a little unfair, though: they're offering great novels in exchange. Wouldn't it be better to trade them some tatty old cheap pulp for the Bible? I think exchanging Gor novels for the Bible would be thematically appropriate. (Trading porn for bibles is also a good idea). The one big problem with these schemes, though, is that the organizers are going to end up with a big stack of even more crappy books than they started with…
pharyngula | April 10, 2009You have to watch this weird and engrossing video about Robert White, the neurosurgeon whose goal was to achieve a total body transplant. He's the guy who was doing the monkey head transplants: cutting the head off one monkey, and sewing it onto the body of another…and it's hard to get more Herbert West than that.
I'm afraid the freakiest part of the video for me, though, was that he has a reserved table at the local McDonalds.
pharyngula | April 9, 2009This looks like fun, but it's a bit of drive for me: Steven Schlozman will be giving a talk on the neuropsychology of zombies. He's talking about levels of activity in the brain and modeling of behavior, which could be interesting — fantasy and horror can be useful tools to get people interested in digging deeper into biology.
Where I always get stuck in any scientific examination of the entirely imaginary phenomenon of zombies, however, is the biochemistry and physiology. They just can't work. They're using meat to generate motion, but the properties of meat that can cause contraction/…
pharyngula | April 8, 2009God blessed a Chinese woman with twin baby boys, each one ensouled at the instant of fertilization with personhood and a personal divine fate. At their birth, though, the doctors callously ended one proud male life…and they've probably got the poor fellow pickled in a jar somewhere. Here's a photo of the pair.
That is a baby. The odd blob on his back? That's his brother, a nicely formed penis growing and thriving there. This is a case of fetus in fetu, in which a mass of cells, either an absorbed twin or a large teratoma (a surprisingly well differentiated, but abnormal, fragment of…
pharyngula | April 8, 2009
If your taste runs more to birds, there are some interesting chimeric jays as well.
pharyngula | April 7, 2009It's a full-sized statue of a buxom pirate on display at an antique shop in Girardville, Pennsylvania. It would look fabulous by the doorway to my house.
This is not just an infatuation with pirates or cleavage, however. This pirate is special. A Catholic priest in Girardville was so irritated at it that he cursed the statue.
Father Commolly commanded the owners to remove it.
"He pointed to the statue and very dictatorially and said, 'I curse you. I curse this place. I want to see this destroyed. I want her destroyed,'" said pirate owner Peggy Kanigoski.
The madman! With one stroke, he…
pharyngula | April 6, 2009I've had a few bad books foisted off on me, but so far they've all been by theists (there was one with angels that I'm trying to scour from my memory), but I guess it had to happen: an atheist wrote a very bad book. Read the review. You'll never be able to think about Captain Marvel in the same way ever again.
pharyngula | April 6, 2009I was all set to mock the silly arachnophobes who got all squeamish over this morning's spider picture — how can a mere picture cause that kind of fear, anyway? — and then I saw this article on cleaning the Space Needle in Seattle, with all these photos of people dangling from ropes while wielding pressure sprayers.
Suddenly, I am more sympathetic.
(via Jay Lake)
pharyngula | April 5, 2009There's a new entry in the Urban Dictionary: pz envy.
The jealousy expressed by an atheist who's not quite as famous, popular, or controversial as PZ Myers. "
Unknown Atheist Blogger felt some serious pz envy when she realized she didn't have enough followers to crash a poll."
Bob: Man, I only got one piece of hate mail last month, but Pharyngula mocked 42 letters this past week!
Jane: Oh, enough of your pz envy!
Clearly, I'm going to have to run out and trademark my name before it becomes commodified by its ubiquitous usage in other contexts.
pharyngula | April 3, 2009This recent xkcd should have you all reaching for your calculators.
I had to look up the population density in my area…it's 18. Not 18 thousand, just 18. When I plug that number into the formula, I got a value of 4,500 meters, almost 3 miles. The parents of our students will find that a reassuring statistic, I hope.
Of course, the formula lacks a temporal component — that mean distance is going to vary with a circadian rhythm, I would think, with peaks in the evening and early morning hours. Rather than a static number, it should be a function that measures a kind of hourly flux, with all…
pharyngula | April 3, 2009I mean, really, giant steam-powered robotic octopods rising from the deep to take over the world? How many people fantasize about that?
Although, if it were me, I wouldn't be focusing so much on the wicked biped with the gun trying to frustrate the steam-o-pod.