Weirdness
pharyngula | January 22, 2011Last night before bed, I downloaded and started to read a light piece of fluffy fiction, one of these urban fantasy novels that are so popular right now. I won't name it because I really just want to complain about a phenomenon I'm seeing a lot of in this whole genre, as much as I've read, anyway.
The driving conflict of this story is supposed to be the horror of the undead: the protagonist is both tainted with the curse of partial undeadness and trying to protect friends from being similarly afflicted. This is a reasonable premise for a fantasy novel, and could make for a good story.
However…
pharyngula | January 21, 2011Some gomer has set up a website about prayer with a subsection dedicated to an experiment: they're going to pray for PZ Myers. They're rather vague about what they're praying for, which I guess is tactically useful, since if I stay healthy or drop dead they can then claim success either way. I'm also going to confound their experiment since I'm going to tell everyone to not Pray4PZ, and since their site traffic is so minuscule, I'm going to overwhelm their results.
They also have a post titled "Can PZ Myers be reasoned with?", which is amusing — I guess the prayer effort wasn't doing much, so…
pharyngula | January 20, 2011So it's almost Valentine's Day, that schmaltzy holiday dedicated to commercializing love. I was sent a list of science-themed Valentine's Day cards, and I was shocked and disappointed. They're all freakin' physicists! Physicists know nothing of love; they're like atheists that way. Come on, Herophilus, Erasistratus, Galen, Avicenna, Servetus, Harvey…they're obvious.
Oh, all right, physicists are all dorks anyway. Go ahead and get your beloved a goofy card with some math nerd on it. I'll go down to the butcher shop and get mine a token she won't soon forget.
Sure, I know the meaning of love.…
pharyngula | January 20, 2011Gosh. I hope no one looking for Ken Ham's Ark Encounter accidentally types arkencounters.com.
(Warning! Obnoxious autoplay video! Warning! Dinosaur porn! Warning!)
pharyngula | January 19, 2011It's the 50 Most Loathsome Americans of 2010, from the Buffalo Beast. It's epically brutal.
pharyngula | January 19, 2011
Well? Don't just sit there! You have to go give meaning to Jesus' sacrifice!
pharyngula | January 17, 2011The spring semester starts tomorrow, and this term I'm teaching three classes: one I'm familiar with, one I haven't taught in four years, and another one I've never taught. It's going to be a busy busy busy term.
But then I had an idea. If I could just lecture like this…
…then I could probably finish off the whole semester's teaching load this week. The students won't mind, will they?
pharyngula | January 16, 2011
Don't worry about what it means. It just came to me in a dream last night, so I wrote it down. I often have very odd dreams.
Al, Bill, Chuck, and Dave have a weekly Gourmand's Club, and this week Al has baked a perfect and delicious cherry pie. However, Bill has invited a friend, Ed, to join them, creating a group of five and creating some difficulty in dividing the pie fairly. As their guest, they've given Ed the knife and asked him to do the honors. How should Ed handle the situation? Assume everyone is equally hungry and that the pie is perfectly circular with a uniform distribution of…
pharyngula | January 14, 2011Phil and Kaja Foglio, the creators of Girl Genius, are giving away fabulous computer wallpapers for a donation this week. It's a squid attack!
As much as I like Agatha Heterodyne, I still see this as a representation of her last moments, just before the bespectacled squid gulps her down.
pharyngula | January 9, 2011That guy Dawkins. I put up a few posts about beer, and what does he do? Sends me this picture.
pharyngula | January 6, 2011I know you've been wondering about the answer to these questions: Does Poop Smell in Heaven? How about before the Fall? Now you can get answers.
The answers are:
Nobody poops in heaven.
If you're a young earth creationist, nobody may have pooped during creation week, but if they did, it didn't stink.
If you are a theistic evolutionist, then poop did smell.
All I can infer from that is that the more godly and fundamentalist you are, the more likely you are to be constipated.
pharyngula | January 4, 2011Standing in line to swap fluids and disease by swilling from the same cup was going to get someone in trouble, eventually — and now it's happened. Catholics in New York have been exposed to hepatitis A through sharing Jesus' blood.
All the practitioners have been asked to get tested and vaccinated right away.
There is no word on who broke the ugly news to Jesus, but you just know that guy is like a major vector for all kinds of nastiness, so he's probably used to it by now.
pharyngula | January 4, 2011Science finally enters the 21st century with ZOMGSCIENCE.NET. Got a short attention span? Are you conditioned by blipverts to need your information jazzed up loud with big bold all-caps headlines and profanity? Is this article too long and subdued for you? Then you should read ZOMGSCIENCE.
pharyngula | December 22, 2010
Maybe someone will be offended by that, though. They need to take a lesson from Bill Donohue, who has a simple solution to any conflict between religions: everyone should convert to Catholicism. He calls that "inclusion". I don't think he knows what the word means.
Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com
pharyngula | December 22, 2010I just got a copy of this paper in my email, straight from Santa Claes, and it's a good thing, because when I checked our library didn't have a subscription to PNAS NorthPole. I think it was sent to me because I've been such a good boy this year (oh, you didn't get one? We've found the naughty children, then!)
They've associated a 7-character amino acid sequence (for instance, FALALAA or NAVIDAD) with a common Christmas carol ("Deck the Halls" or "Feliz Navidad"), and searched GenBank for all instances, and they're calling this the Carolome. I know, that's all Jonathan Eisen wanted for…
pharyngula | December 19, 2010Somebody is angling for an Ig-Nobel, I think. Apparently, it's a Danish myth that you can absorb alcohol through your feet, so soaking your feet in a tub of spirits is a way to get drunk (they also mention that soaking your feet in beet juice will make your urine red, but they didn't test that one, unfortunately). So the hypothesis that one can get drunk through your feet was thoroughly tested.
The participants abstained from consuming alcohol 24 hours before the experiment. The evening before the experiment they rubbed their feet with a loofah to remove skin debris. On the day of the…
pharyngula | December 18, 2010"We reject Satan and all his works and all his empty promises"
The horror, the horror. The war has spread to Jutland, where a rogue priest is rounding up elves and hanging them from the church eaves.
You bastards! They were so innocent and jolly! Now who's going to make all the toys for Christmas?
pharyngula | December 16, 2010The City Church of San Diego has a website with a fill-in-the-blank statement you're supposed to complete, and they're actually displaying the results, after they've been approved…and it looks like they've been reasonably liberal in their approvals. Help 'em out. Tell them what JESUS IS ______.
I said, "a myth", but I also saw "a Jewish zombie" and "Placebo" and "very upset that you called him gay" appearing on the page.
pharyngula | December 15, 2010Color me unsurprised. They are lovely young men and I'm sure many others here will enjoy the show.
pharyngula | December 15, 2010A reader from Austria sent in a photo of a very special nativity scene. None of it is on my diet, but I thought maybe a few readers would appreciate it, and maybe even be inspired to recreate it in their holiday celebrations.
Is this another salvo in the War on Christmas? Or does reverence for bacon mean it's actually acceptable?
Oh, no! It's a trend!