Those fatty McFatFat atheists!

Well isn’t this perfect timing? Right after JT Eberhard and I start our little weight loss battle, Conservapedia’s new front page topic is “Atheism & Obesity.” I wonder if LoseIt! will let me log the calories I burnt laughing at their absurd logic. It basically boils down to “We hate atheists and fail at debating their philosophy, so we’ll point out that they’re fat doo doo heads instead.”

Okay, they don’t explicitly say “fat doo doo heads.” Their logic is more like this:

1. Here are five atheists. Two died decades ago, but that’s probably because they were so FAT.
2. Don’t they look overweight? I mean, we don’t have their height, or weight, or body fat percentages, or cholesterol levels, or anything of biological significance, but they sure do look like fatties, don’t they?
3. What? You can provide examples of fat religious people and of thin atheists? Shhhhhhhh!
4. And you know why atheists don’t get married as much? Because the men are all fat slobs. Sorry, ladies (though you’re fat slobs too).
5. And didn’t you know fatties are stupid too? Science says so. No, not that evilutionist science, because they’re fatties too. The good kind of science that we can twist… I mean, interpret to fit our own views.
6. Therefore atheists are wrong and God exists. Specifically the Christian God. QED

I don’t want to waste too much time debunking the intellectual void that is Conservapedia, but let me just leave this here:Curious, curious indeed… With Conservapedia logic, correlation implies causation, therefore religious people are the true fatties! Neener neener! …Well, except Mormons, who are apparently fit machines, obviously making Mormonism the correct religion. Isn’t using fatphobia as a debate tool fun?!

Though maybe they’re right. Maybe as I shed the pounds I’ll become more and more religious! If you want to support this science experiment, or just show your support for healthy atheists, you can pledge a donation here.

Oh, how things change

I rediscovered my old Xanga blog the other day. Most of my entries are from age 13 to 15*, so it’s both painful and hilarious to read. For example, I found a post where I was whining about fashion – nothing new there, I suppose, but I loved this line from 2003 (bolded):

None of the clothes I like fit me anyways. At least in the junior department, which is were all the nice stuff is. I’m not like, overweight, but everything there is just so tight that is looks crappy. Like, if I lost 10 pounds it would be perfect. All the jeans are too short even when they’re in the Long style (curse you, height!) and all the shirts seem to be built for girls who are like AA cups >_< I’m not even what you would consider busty and they don’t fit me. Stupid fashion.

…lolololol

God, how was I complaining about fitting into things when I was barely a B cup? If only Young Jen knew how much more annoying it would get to find well fitted shirts.

If you want to read more…well, don’t bother looking for it. I have it friends-locked. No one needs to be subjected to that many Japanese emoticons and personality quizzes.

*I later switched to Livejournal for most of high school and part of college, then finally set up Blag Hag publicly on Blogger. If my trend of upgrading blogging platform continues, I’ll switch to WordPress right when something more awesome surpasses it.

For my ginger friends

Even though the science is wrong*, I still laughed:*Zach presents sexual antagonism as having a lower chance of reproducing, but if you do reproduce, your daughters will be high quality so it makes up for your lower quality. But that’s not right. It’s that his sisters are so high quality, it doesn’t matter that he’ll never reproduce, because they’ll more than make up for it. His parents wouldn’t care that he’s an evolutionary dead end, since the sisters are pulling his weight in terms of grandchildren. Of course, never getting laid while watching your sisters fend off endless suitors doesn’t sound too great either, so the joke stands.

Though I’ve been attracted to three red-headed guys, so maybe Zach’s theory is bunk. Hmmm, his wife is also an evolutionary biologist. What does it all mean?!

Overheard at the post office

It’s hard to convey tone through text, but keep in mind both of these guys were light hearted in this conversation:

Guy: I need some stamps, what kind do you have?
Employee: Well, we have the bells, the holiday ones, and then the godless ones.
Guy: Godless ones?
Employee: Yep! *shows him some holiday stamps with pine cones and other nature-y things on them*
Guy: I guess I’ll take two of the godless-
Employee: Two heathen stamps!
Guy: -and two of the overly religious ones.
Employee: Shhh, we’re not allowed to say that.

I giggled. Definitely a “No Jen, you’re not in Indiana anymore” moment.

That and the fact that a young woman wearing a cross necklace happily helped me stuff 21 copies of The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas into envelopes as I was frantically trying to get in before closing. Hooray for Seattle.

Google can now filter by "reading level"

This is a really neat advanced search feature just released by Google! You can now filter by “reading level,” including within posts for a certain site. How do they determine what’s considered Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced?

The feature is based primarily on statistical models we built with the help of teachers. We paid teachers to classify pages for different reading levels, and then took their classifications to build a statistical model. With this model, we can compare the words on any webpage with the words in the model to classify reading levels. We also use data from Google Scholar, since most of the articles in Scholar are advanced.

Okay, I’m sure that’s not a perfect method, but it’s still nifty. For example, nature.com comes up very advanced:

I wonder what my blog looks like?Oh…um… well, I’m sure that’s just a result of blogging in general, right? We’re all a bit more informal around here.
…Well, PZ does a lot more reviews of scientific articles than me, I’m sure that helps his score. Surely I must be better than something like
…

I’m going to interpret this as “I write in a way that’s easily accessible to the general public,” rather than “I write like a goddamn moron.”*

*I should note that my ex-boyfriend pointed all of this out to me, along with this. I think this is payback for my quip about engineers being bad in bed. Internet karma, indeed.

Google can now filter by “reading level”

This is a really neat advanced search feature just released by Google! You can now filter by “reading level,” including within posts for a certain site. How do they determine what’s considered Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced?

The feature is based primarily on statistical models we built with the help of teachers. We paid teachers to classify pages for different reading levels, and then took their classifications to build a statistical model. With this model, we can compare the words on any webpage with the words in the model to classify reading levels. We also use data from Google Scholar, since most of the articles in Scholar are advanced.

Okay, I’m sure that’s not a perfect method, but it’s still nifty. For example, nature.com comes up very advanced:
I wonder what my blog looks like?Oh…um… well, I’m sure that’s just a result of blogging in general, right? We’re all a bit more informal around here.
…Well, PZ does a lot more reviews of scientific articles than me, I’m sure that helps his score. Surely I must be better than something like
…

I’m going to interpret this as “I write in a way that’s easily accessible to the general public,” rather than “I write like a goddamn moron.”*

*I should note that my ex-boyfriend pointed all of this out to me, along with this. I think this is payback for my quip about engineers being bad in bed. Internet karma, indeed.

Having sex like a scientist

What does that even mean? According to this person asking Dan Savage for sex advice, having sex like a scientist is not so good:

He’s a scientist, and he has sex like a scientist. He’s not a good kisser, but worse, he flies through foreplay like its his weekend chore list, and goes straight to the fucking as quick as he can. He’s a voracious bottom, which should work out for me, but in the end, I’m always left finishing off alone. He always comes within minutes, and the whole time does nothing sexy, does nothing to help me along. In fact he does lots of stuff that turns me off. I’ve never lost hard-ons during sex until I was with him. I might as well be a cucumber glued to a body pillow, he’d have about the same interaction.

That’s what this person thinks having sex like a scientist is like?! Man, I’m hurt.

Not that professions necessarily affect your sex lives, but this doesn’t even make sense. Science is effectively based on making observations, experimenting, gathering data, and then correcting your theories through further experimentation. Not to mention reading the literature before setting up any experiments. Sounds like a recipe for a great sex life to me.

Now, engineers, on the other hand…