Weirdness
pharyngula | March 6, 2007There's money to be made in crap. Who would have thought MySpace was so profitable?
Rupert Murdoch has told an industry conference that MySpace make $25 million per month on advertising."It's extraordinary, the advertising has gone from basically nothing to, on a net basis, $25 million a month and growing every month — almost 30 per cent every quarter," he told the Digital Hollywood conference, in New York.
There's an evolutionary lesson in there, I think. The part of MySpace that represents what people want and value — the social networking, the easy customization — is a tiny fraction of…
pharyngula | March 5, 2007
My score on The Cowboy-Ninja-Pirate-Knight Test:
a Pirate
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style="font-size:12pt">(You scored 3 Honor, 4 Justice, 4 Adventure, and 13 Individuality!)
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Arr matey. You may believe in honor, and justice, and you certainly have a sense of adventure. But mostly, you play by your own rules. Your code is your own and you are flexible in most situations. Dress flamboyant and look into a parrot. I think you'll do fine.
Link: The Cowboy-Ninja-Pirate-Knight Test
(OkCupid Free Online Dating)
(via Cowboy Tikistitch)
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…
pharyngula | March 4, 2007A reader sent me this link, thinking I might find it funny. Why, yes I do.
Does anyone get Nick Magazine for their kids? We received the March issue in the mail yesterday & I find one of the cartoons to be very inappropriate for kids (m, warning potentially offensive)
It's a lame cartoon, but then that's what we might expect from a kiddie magazine. It's also offensive because it portrays a horribly incorrect pattern of arm development in a cephalopod—it's not sequential as drawn. The arms emerge during early embryonic development, as you can see here in this photo of a Euprymna embryo…
pharyngula | March 2, 2007This would be really unfair and unkind to my wife, so I've decided to live forever instead.
You'll die from a Heart Attack during Sex.
Your a lover not a fighter but sadly, in the act of making love your heart will stop. But what a way to go.
'How will you die?' at QuizGalaxy.com
(via Unhindered by talent)
pharyngula | March 1, 2007God's money is no good.
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.
I blame the televangelists. They're skilled at cleaning out the savings of old folks, and while they were vacuuming up social security checks, they probably siphoned off every penny He had.
Don't worry about Him, though -- he's still got a lot of equity in gilt furniture and old…
pharyngula | February 27, 2007Because cell phones are godless, evil tools of Satan and the secular world. It makes me want to run out and buy 3 or 4.
(via Improbable Research)
pharyngula | February 25, 2007So these media people are making a movie about some tombs discovered in Jerusalem—bearing the names Jesua, son of Joseph, Mary, Mary, Mathew, Jofa and Judah, son of Jesua—and getting all this hype about discovering the final resting place of the family of the spiritual founder of Christianity. I'm more than a little dubious; they prattle unconvincingly about their evidence.
But film-makers Cameron and Jacobovici claim to have amassed evidence through DNA tests, archeological evidence and Biblical studies, that the 10 coffins belong to Jesus and his family.
Wait, DNA tests? What did they do,…
pharyngula | February 23, 2007
Tsk, tsk, Zeno…you've got a lot to learn about blackmail. First of all, you threaten to release the photos to the press and family and then ask for the money to prevent that from happening; you don't get the pictures published everywhere first.
Secondly, the photos have to look something like me. OK, there is a dim resemblance in the one on the left, but I have an alibi—I was nowhere near New Zealand at the time. The one on the right is clearly very old from the costume, which is from my days in our band* back in the 1970s, before I married my wife. And she knows about the relationship. And…
pharyngula | February 23, 2007My wife is going to be upset at this—we're going to have to have a couple more kids, just so I have an excuse to take advantage of the Geologic and Paleontologic Cook Book. It's got recipes for Ammonites in a Blanket, Cephalopod Celery, a Cheese and Bugles Coral Reer, an Edible Devonian Marine Ecosystem (I've always wanted to eat a whole ecosystem), Trilobite Cookies, and much more. This is wonderfully kid-oriented…too bad my kiddies are all turning into serious-minded old adults.
But wait! I'm immature enough for a whole family of kids all on my own! I also do the cooking…I think we're…
pharyngula | February 22, 2007I've been following that thread on Conservapedia, and I've seen what you scalliwags have been up to, littering the poor site with humorous edits and then coming over here and tittering about it. You do realize that Conservapedia's entries required the indentured labor of 58 homeschooled children who were forced to give up their educations in order to slavishly transcribe paragraphs of their textbooks into wiki articles, don't you? What you so casually deface is the sweat-stained, blood-spotted outpourings of tiny, stunted hands and tiny, stunted brains. You should be ashamed!
Besides, it…
pharyngula | February 21, 2007We have to follow where the evidence leads us, and we finally find an important function for the adult appendix: as a reserve ammunition pouch.
Though it may look vaguely like a hand grenade, the solid white structure in the X-ray is actually someone's appendix, visible only because it is full of shotgun pellets -- so full, in fact, that it is stretched to about three times its normal size.
The patient, a 73-year-old Inuit woman at Norton Sound Regional Hospital in Nome, had probably been swallowing the pellets inadvertently for decades, in the meat of ducks and geese shot by local hunters…
pharyngula | February 21, 2007I'm sure some of you will soon be bragging about how your Squid Quotient is higher than mine.
Your Squid Quotient = 158.25
Interpreting your results: An average Squid Quotient is around 100. A SQ of 100 means you have a normal affinity for squid. A SQ above 100 means you have an attraction or fondness for squid. Below 100 means that you should probably stay away from the deep ocean.
pharyngula | February 20, 2007The great unanswered question: How many condoms can you put on a penis at once? These people make a gallant effort to discover the answer, but are stymied when they run out of condoms…after slipping 625 of them on.
Then, unfortunately, there's the step where they use a hacksaw to remove them…
(via ZayZayEm)
pharyngula | February 19, 2007Gonad.
Testicle. Testes. Seminiferous tubule. Vas deferens. Prostate.
Penis. Corpora cavernosa. Urethra.
Urethra, urethra, urethra.
Ovary. Fallopian tube. Cervix. Uterus. Vagina. Labia majora and minora. Skene's and Bartholin's glands. Wolffian and Mullerian ducts.
Pudenda!
Pubococcygeal. Pelvic floor. Orifice.
Skin.
Scrotum.
pharyngula | February 19, 2007
Cool: here's a duck with four hindlimbs.
I have to gripe about the description, though:
A rare mutation has left eight-day-old Stumpy with two extra legs behind the two he moves around on. … The mutation is rare but cases have been recorded across the world.
No, no, no. This is almost certainly not the result of a mutation, and it's one of my pet peeves when the media makes this wrong assumption, that every change in a newborn is the product of a genetic change. This is the result of a developmental error, not a genetic one, most likely caused by a fusion of two embryos in a single egg.
(…
pharyngula | February 15, 2007At least that's the case according to some bad movie geology.
This is what happens when movies get made with no dogs involved—all the common sense is stripped right out of them.
pharyngula | February 13, 2007
And there's a whole page of delectable fantasies where that came from!
pharyngula | February 12, 2007You may notice a few of us SciBloggers sporting a few new badges today.
Here's my collection.
You'll have to read all about the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique to figure out what they all mean. This isn't an exclusive club, of course—feel free to decorate your blog with your hard-earned science activity badges.
pharyngula | February 10, 2007Since so many call me a bad guy, let's see where I fall on the Super Villain scale.
Your results:You are Mr. Freeze
Mr. Freeze
71%
Dr. Doom
54%
The Joker
51%
Magneto
51%
Apocalypse
47%
Lex Luthor
46%
Venom
42%
Poison Ivy
41%
Mystique
32%
Green Goblin
28%
Two-Face
28%
Riddler
25%
Kingpin
21%
Dark Phoenix
18%
Juggernaut
16%
Catwoman
8%
You are cold and you think everyone else should be also, literally.
Click here to take the Supervillain Personality Quiz
(via ZayZayEm the Joker)