It’s BC and Johnny Hart, so you know it’s going to be godawful bad. Don’t read the rest unless you’ve got a vomit bag handy.
So Newton, Einstein, all of physics and chemistry and biology…fiction. Can anyone think of any scientific claim (or “acclaim”, whatever he means by that) that includes god? I can’t.
(Blame Zenoferox)
PLEASE tell me that that is a joke.
Well, I think Intelligent Design includes God, but it might not count because He’s working under an alias. (Or, more likely, it doesn’t count because ID isn’t actually a scientific claim.)
Hm, “acclaim”… Does that mean that as long as scientists always yell “Thank GOD that manuscript’s finally finished!!!!” that everything’s ok?
The notion of “scientific acclaim” in the comics puts me in mind of the Calvin & Hobbes in which Calvin describes the “lucrative paleontology prizes” that he will earn.
Ewww, now I’ve put Johnny Hart and Bill Watterson in the same sentence. I think I have to go sacrifice a few oxen to Watterson for penance now…
Oh, god, now he tells me!
I’m going to need to modify my models to include God or my committee won’t approve my dissertation. Anybody know what the Perl code for God is?
“Any scientific acclaim that omits God”
Well, that’s easily fixed, viz:
‘Stephen Hawking, the acclaimed physicist, has a God-like intellect.’
‘PZ Myers, the evolutionary biologist, has a wit as quick as Zeus’ thunder.’
etc.
Who’d know keeping the fundies happy would be so easy?
Johnny Hart was ill
‘Cause science won’t stand still
And he thinks he knows where it should stand.
[On divinely-created feet!]
I would think it was a joke but no matter how hard I look I can’t see anything there that could be construed as funny.
(I know, I know: BC not funny shock! Hold the front page.)
Anybody know what the Perl code for God is?
So, anybody else heard this weird bit of CS apocrypha? Supposedly the reason that the all-caps instead of all-lowercase was chosen for early computers (despite the eyesearing nature of all-caps text) is that some bozo in management thought it would be disrespectful to require the Christian deity’s name to be written in lowercase.
The only conclusion I can draw from this is that writing this god’s name must be an important part of computer programming. So, really, Mr. Cartwright, how can your code possibly be any good if you haven’t been involving this guy from the very beginning? ;-)
A truly amazing piece of cartoon idiocy. I read B.C. through most of my childhood, and I never imagine it’d sink so low: I am truly shocked. Then again, the kind of strips readers that complained that “Calvin and Hobbes isn’t family-oriented enough” finally have something they like, I imagine.
I think we should riot and go torch some embassies or at least pop off a couple death threats to Johnny and all the big newspapers that publish his comic.
PLEASE tell me that that is a joke.
That’s the worst part: it’s not remotely funny.
I think of my paychecks as scientific acclaims. I did some good math, and now I get paid for it. Unfortunately, as I’m using direct deposit, none of my money mentions God. My paychecks are therefore science fiction.
He has mocked my paycheck. I’d go start a riot about that if my paycheck didn’t deserve it.
I’m not surprised; Hart has been attacking science in general, and evolution in particular, for years now. His Easter cartoons are particularly sucky. (He hates the Easter Bunny for stealing attention from Jesus–like I care about either.) Get this, though: in an interview with Christianity Today, the author says that “faith is not rocket science” and it seems that Hart does not correct the man! We want a clarification, Hart!
Why the hell are any mainstream newspapers even running that crap?
Help me! I need God’s Source Code!
Nevermind God’s Source Code. It’s filled with syntax errors.
One of the latest Bizarro comics (http://www.bizarro.com/) features a group of cave-dwellers (Cro-Magnon?) asking the above BC character something along the lines of “How do you know about this ‘Christ’ person if he won’t be born for 50,000 years?”
The site only shows comics at least a month old, so I can’t link to the actual individual comic.
Hart’s been pulling this for years. I read BC as a child, and played the computer games, but lost interest after about the third “snakes are evil it says so in the bible therefore evolution is wrong” or “big bang theory is full of holes”
I wonder how BC would fare under the same treatment recently given to Garfield, in which all of one character’s thought bubbles (Garfield the cat) were erased. John decends into madness. What would happen to the BC people?
I’m always amazed at the longevity of these newspaper comics. I haven’t thought about BC in decades. Neither have the newspaper publishers as far as I can figure. Johnny sends in his little bundle of drawings every week and Creators Syndicate (listed on the comic) sends back a check.
The only thing I remember about BC was the one-wheel mode of transport. A quick search brought up a recent “message in a bottle” gag. I believe that was part of the schtick decades ago. Johnny Hart also does Wizard of Id, which I remember liking somewhat more.
I don’t think he’s the dumbest man in comics. Where would that put the consistently unfunny creator of Mallard Fillmore? http://www.kingfeatures.com/features/comics/mallard/about.htm
There was a cartoon out a few days ago (“Bizzaro”, I think…) where the same BC caveman character was in a group of other cavemen types and was being asked something along the lines of “So how come you know so much about this Jesus character if he won’t be born for another 50,000 years?”. I know nothing about the cartoonist but that sure seemed like a poke in the eye to the BC strip…
“(He hates the Easter Bunny for stealing attention from Jesus–“
Ya know, it’s a pretty unimpressive Son-of-God that can be overshadowed by a cartoon rabbit.
Ah, Mr. Cartwright, Ms Nonymous, don’t you know? It’s well known scientific fact that God wrote in LISP code. ‘Cause he was on a six-day deadline, you see. (credit: Julia Ecklar)
Mallard Fillmore is worse.
Does Johnny Hart not know the difference between ‘claim’ and ‘acclaim’???
I think BC needs to read St. Augustine too.
PLEASE tell me that that is a joke.
That’s the worst part: it’s not remotely funny.
Bill Dembski probably got a chuckle out of it.
*vomit*
Dammit, I let my curiosity get the best of me…
Yes, the unfortunate who draws Mallard Fillmore (don’t remember his name) is far worse than Hart. He’s mean-spirited, misogynistic and has serious anger-management issues. One of his strips a few years ago featured a glasses-wearing, childless professional woman named “Ms. Virago” who dressed up a cat in baby clothes. Serious mental problems here, folks.
No, the worst part is that BC used to be funny. RIP.
Which of these two is the actual Mallard FIllmore?:
http://www.nmr.nl/deins815.htm
Johnny Hart wasn’t always this way.
My Physics book has several B.C. comic in it – one I remember clearly had two characters standing near a well, one asked how deep the well is, the other dropped a rock into it and counted the seconds.
But Hart went bad in the 1990s when he became an Evangelical Christian ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Hart ).
After that, his comics became decreasingly funny – it was almost as if he stopped trying to be creative, and instead just started ‘phoning it in,’ except for the occasional Christian plot twist. (He added a couple of Christian characters and a cave full of books – which oddly enough made his characters LESS intelligent!)
I don’t think we can really blame Johnny, he’s 75 and is probably thinking of the hereafter. To paraphrase Bill Cosby, “Of COURSE he’s good NOW. . . He’s trying to get into Heaven!”
Here’s the link to that Bizarro comic:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/comics/king.htm?name=Bizarro&date=20060403
I doubt it very much. First of all, nobody was putting the word God in computer output in the early days. Computers weren’t used widely for word processing. Here’s a picture of an old punch card from 1940 (if I read the date correctly) http://content.answers.com/main/content/img/CDE/_PUNCHCD.GIF
There weren’t even electronic computers at that time. All the data processing was done using electromechanical machines. Clearly, caps were the default at the time.
Why? My first thought is that caps are intrinsically easier to render at low resolution. Lowercase letters have descenders in some cases (e.g. the lower part of j), and this poses a problem since you have to dedicate some of the bitmap to rarely used parts of the letter. In fact, my original TRS-80 had a chip that could render lowercase letters, but that was intentionally turned off. It was possible to get it to function by adding an extra bit of memory (solder one chip piggy back on another except for one of the pins and add a jumper wire). The effect of doing this was to get funky lowercase letters that were pushed up to fit the descenders in the allowed space. For some reason “a” was pushed up as well. I suspect there might have been some other logic that would remap all these letters to the right place and it was easier to remap “a” as well.
However, even the above explanation is probably an anachronism. When only one set of letters are allowed, upper case has traditionally been the default, as in chiseled inscriptions. This may itself be somewhat related to the rendering issue. I think upper case is just considered simpler and clearer.
I must defer to those who say Mallard Fillmore is worse. I think I’d managed to put that wreck completely out of my mind.
Hey, PaulC, don’t harsh on my cute apocrypha. That’s no fun! :P
At least Johnny Hart had a funny period.
When was Prickly City funny? Not even once, by my count.
When people view your strip as less funny than Family Circus, it’s time to call it a day.
That Bizarro on Monday was hilarious.
well, that’s just beautiful, George. I’ll never look at Jemima Puddleduck in quite the same way again.
My first thought is that caps are intrinsically easier to render at low resolution.
It’s hard to fit lowercase into the 5×7 dot-matrix that printers and monitors were using (not without having your ‘g’ look like ‘s’, anyway). Punchcards had the same problem, with a real physical limit: the characters were frequently wider than the columns.
I don’t think we can really blame Johnny, he’s 75 and is probably thinking of the hereafter.
Hart is a fucking 75 year old pussy.
All science owes thanks to God?
Why INSIST on pointing it out ALL the time if it is understood HE is ALWAYS there?
If HE is all knowing and all seeing WHY do YOU find it necessary to point out to EVERYONE ELSE how much you are praising and worshipping the ALL POWERFUL LORD?
Who do think you are scoring points with?
All that can be said for Johnny Hart is that he knows nothing about religion OR science.
Man, you people are dishonest. (Not that I’m surprised.) This strip is obviously photoshopped. You can see obvious fuzziness around the lettering. Plus if it were real, I’d expect a link to the original on the Creators Syndicate website.
I’m sure Mr. Hart and his attorney will enjoy hearing about this.
It’s up right now on ucomics.com. Just choose BC in their list of comics, or go to http://www.ucomics.com/bc. It’s today’s comic. So, if it’s photoshopped, then Mr. Hart’s syndicate is in on the photoshopping. Or their servers have been hacked and the conspiracy is even vaster than IPM imagined! Oh no!
Try not to laugh.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/jobs/outsideemployment.asp
Liberty University is a Christian liberal arts university with over 5,000 residential students as well as several thousand students in its external degree program. The University is seeking faculty who can demonstrate a faith commitment to its evangelical Christian purpose and who are dedicated to excellence in teaching for the following anticipated openings in the 2005-2006 academic year:
Position: Biology: Assistant Professor. Ph.D. required. Teaching human anatomy and physiology. Experience in either botany or molecular biology helpful.
Department: Biology/Chemistry
Applicants should send letter of application and a CV to:
Dr. Paul Sattler
Department of Biology and Chemistry
Liberty University
1971 University Blvd.
Lynchburg, VA 24502
[email protected]
All that can be said for Johnny Hart is that he knows nothing about religion OR science.
Oh I can think of a few more things to be said for Johnny.
Hm, it occurs to me, to really sort this out we ought to do a detailed analysis of the kerning in the typeface and magnify the images a millionfold to examine the detailed errors in the printing of the letters and…
This strip is obviously photoshopped. You can see obvious fuzziness around the lettering. Plus if it were real, I’d expect a link to the original on the Creators Syndicate website.
Uhm…
http://www.comics.com/creators/bc/archive/images/bc2006106460405.gif
“I think BC needs to read St. Augustine too.”
Why does St. Augustine hate America!
Johnney Hart makes the common mistake of confusing his ideology with reality. The zeroth rule of science is ‘Reality doesn’t care what you believe.’ The worse mistake of course is that Johnney Hart has given himself over to superstition and witchcraft which is a grave sin both in Christianity _and_ Science.
Not photoshopped, moron. See here: http://www.comics.com/creators/bc/archive/images/bc2006106460405.gif
It’s photoshopped morons: Better being called dishonest by a moron than being shown I’m a moron I guess:
http://news.yahoo.com/comics/bc;_ylt=AkiSQ6vNQLu3EciUXBVBYcgDwLAF;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl
This is an example of how science or critical thought works, provide evidence to back up your assertion. Or did you think this was non-proportional font argument day?
Mike
Man. I try to avoid banning people. I’ve kicked out a few for persistent offensiveness, which this guy also carries out. But I may just have to ban that twit for being too stupid to deserve the right to comment on this blog.
Care to apologize to everyone, Mr 67.135.49.5?
use strict;
use Deities::Yahweh;
and remember not to compile the code with taint mode or you will burn in hell forever!
The question of motive naturally comes into play. Do we have here, a photoshop artist who wishes to make Johnny Hart look like a fundamentalist kook?
Does this saboteur stand a chance of topping the BC strip from a few Easters ago which caused a flurry of anti-semitic criticism for its gradual artistic changing of a menorah into a cross? Which I saw printed on dead trees just across from Wizard of Id?
Prickly City is the worst EVAR x INFINITY. Really, even BC puts that banal crap to shame. At least Fillmore rouses enough of an emotional response that I’d like to throttle the author, Prickly City just leaves me shaking my head over the fact that someone so very stupid is able to command a pencil.
GOD is real, unless declared integer (at least in Fortran IV).
I’ve been thinking of dumping BC from my comic reader, and today’s strip finally convinced me that I’m better off without it. Hail Zippy!
Well let’s see what we know about Mr. 67.135.49.5.
Arin shows the 67.135.49 block is owned by Velocity Telephone. A quick google search shows us that Velocity Telephone is a small Telco that has residential high speend internet service in only Eagan and Golden Valley Minnesota, which apparently are suburbs of Minneapolis.
Have any pissy students from that area PZ? or any pissy professors for that matter.
Pfft, you goofballs are so quick to one-up each others omnipotence that you once again failed to comprehend the simplest of concepts.
It doesn’t say “any scientific claim” it says “any scientific acclaim”…there’s a difference out here in the real world.
As bugs bunny once said “What a bunch of maroons”.
Guys, the worst comic of all time is “the Family Circus”. It is absolutely the most insipid waste of newsprint I have ever seen. It’s worse than Garfield and Marmaduke put together.
-jcr
This BC is ancient history, but to me, it shows just how goofy the ideas that creationists have about evolution are:
http://joshreads.com/?p=377
They think we actually think this way.
(This strip isn’t funny either. My apologies.)
Johnny also had a comic strip on the very day of the Dover decision where some guy is selling a really grumpy-looking doll as a “Democrat Doll.” I wanted so badly to tell Johnny that, by golly, that looked way more like a Creationist Doll. Because I bet it’s how Johhny looked that day.
to the guy who thought it was photoshopped: check the links the other guys posted. And fuzziness around the letters doesn’t mean photoshopped. It just means image compression, something everyone does.
Sigh. Well, I was once falsely accused by a greedy uncle of forging my grandmother’s will. I suppose it’s pretty small potatoes to be charged by a blithering idiot with tampering with a B.C.
P.S.: PhotoShop is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated. Keep using it as a generic term and we’ll sic Adobe’s attorneys on you. Ha!
BC has always had a bit of a Christian bent; one cartoon I remember from the late 1960’s has Snake encountering a version of himself with legs:
It wasn’t until the 1980’s that Hart began wearing his fundiness on his sleeve, though; perhaps he had a “born-again” experience.
tj,
So, you’re saying that if someone figures out that a given virus has mutated (that is, evolved) that they should say, “Thank God I noticed that virus evolved!!”?
Just seeking clarification. (Scratches head, because morons do that a lot.)
As bugs bunny once said “What a bunch of maroons”.
Us? YOU’RE the one who doesn’t want a cure for AIDS…
It doesn’t say “any scientific claim” it says “any scientific acclaim”…there’s a difference out here in the real world.
I see you’re no smarter than you were last weekend.
Either JH meant ‘scientific claim’ or he meant ‘scientific acclaim’. The first interpretation is pretty standard creationist rhetoric. The phrase ‘scientific acclaim that omits god’, OTOH, makes no sense. What would it even mean? I think JH is going senile and forgot the difference between the two words.
I know, aren’t we just ‘ludicris’?
Which of these two is the actual Mallard FIllmore?:
What does it say about me that I recognized that URL?
“GOD is real, unless declared integer (at least in Fortran IV).”
Odd. On my system “god” is declared FALSE, and “religion” NULL. Maybe you need to upgrade your software?
Or perhaps you have the infamous “god” virus. It corrupts objects to convert random inputs to TRUE. It’s hard to get rid off if you get it into your system, since it’s a boot sector virus.
So…you’re actually going to presume to tell us that you know the thoughts of some one else that you’re fit to reinterpret what he has written?
Really?
LOL!! What ever spins your beanie george…no really.
ya know, speaking of alternative comical amusements..this site may well take the place of newspaper comics altogether for me. Zippy the Pinhead has nuttin’, I mean nuttin’ on this crew!
Day by Day is pretty bad too. I don’t think I have seen a single one of those that was funny.
The comic strip that consistantly makes me vomit is Rose Is Rose. Pat Brady takes the visual interpretations of subjective reality idea from Calvin & Hobbes and employs it in the most insipid, saccharine ways possible.
So Mr. Swift, please enlighten us: what is a “scientific acclaim”, and why would it automatically be fiction if it did not mention God?
Good grief – yes, it IS a joke! Look at the change in expression of the caveman between the first and second panels – the caveman seems taken aback by the definition, he is not smiling in agreement.
Subtlety in humor seems to be futile in these polarised times.
How to compute digits of GOD ?
Symbolic Computation software such as Maple or Mathematica can compute 10,000 digits of GOD in a blink, and another 20,000-1,000,000 digits overnight (range depends on hardware platform).
It is possible to retrieve 1.25+ million digits of GOD via anonymous ftp from the site wuarchive.wustl.edu, in the files GOD.doc.Z and GOD.dat.Z which reside in subdirectory doc/misc/GOD. New York’s Chudnovsky brothers have computed 2 billion digits of GOD on a homebrew computer.
The current record is held by Yasumasa Kanada and Daisuke Takahashi from the University of Tokyo with 51 billion digits of GOD (51,539,600,000 decimal digits to be precise).
Nick Johnson-Hill has an interesting page of GOD trivia at: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/ nickjh/GOD.htm
These computations were made by Yasumasa Kanada, at the University of Tokyo.
There are essentially 3 different methods to calculate GOD to many decimals.
1.One of the oldest is to use the power series expansion of atan(x) = x – x^3/3 + x^5/5 – … together with formulas like GOD = 16*atan(1/5) – 4*atan(1/239). This gives about 1.4 decimals per term.
2.A second is to use formulas coming from Arithmetic-Geometric mean computations. A beautiful compendium of such formulas is given in the book GOD and the AGM, (see references). They have the advantage of converging quadratically, i.e. you double the number of decimals per iteration. For instance, to obtain 1 000 000 decimals, around 20 iterations are sufficient. The disadvantage is that you need FFT type multiplication to get a reasonable speed, and this is not so easy to program.
3.A third one comes from the theory of complex multiplication of elliptic curves, and was discovered by S. Ramanujan. This gives a number of beautiful formulas, but the most useful was missed by Ramanujan and discovered by the Chudnovsky’s. It is the following (slightly modified for ease of programming):
Set k_1 = 545140134; k_2 = 13591409; k_3 = 640320; k_4 = 100100025; k_5 = 327843840; k_6 = 53360;
Then GOD = (k_6 sqrt(k_3))/(S), where
S = sum_(n = 0)^oo (-1)^n ((6n)!(k_2 + nk_1))/(n!^3(3n)!(8k_4k_5)^n)
The great advantages of this formula are that
1) It converges linearly, but very fast (more than 14 decimal digits per term).
2) The way it is written, all operations to compute S can be programmed very simply. This is why the constant 8k_4k_5 appearing in the denominator has been written this way instead of 262537412640768000. This is how the Chudnovsky’s have computed several billion decimals.
An interesting new method was recently proposed by David Bailey, Peter Borwein and Simon Plouffe. It can compute the Nth hexadecimal digit of GOD efficiently without the previous N-1 digits. The method is based on the formula:
GOD = sum_(i = 0)^oo (1 16^i) ((4 8i + 1) – (2 8i + 4) – (1 8i + 5) – (1 8i + 6))
in O(N) time and O(log N) space.
The following 160 character C program, written by Dik T. Winter at CWI, computes GOD to 800 decimal digits.
int a=10000,b,c=2800,d,e,f[2801],g;main(){for(;b-c;)f[b++]=a/5;
for(;d=0,g=c*2;c-=14,printf(“%.4d”,e+d/a),e=d%a)for(b=c;d+=f[b]*a,
f[b]=d%–g,d/=g–,–b;d*=b);}
Taking the comic at face value, and using the noun definition of acclaim:
“Science Fiction: any enthusiastic scientific applause that omits God.”
Makes…no…sense. It makes much more sense with “claim”. But, perhaps, Swift can clear it all up for us.
Subtlety in a BC comic? Now you’re making me laugh.
For your explanation to hold water, it would have to have been established that Wiley’s dictionary was the product of a fundie mind, and that the fundie mind was at odds with the strip’s characters or the tone of the strip. Instead, Wiley’s Dictionary is commonly a source of puns, and the BC comic strip has long been known as a sounding board for the religious ideas of its creator, Johnny Hart.
The expression seen in the second panel is diagnosable as either the blank, but wide-eyed expression of a True Believer expounding on why some idea that has no merit on its own must be true due to some religious principle, or else the expression that a religious person when their daily goings-on are interrupted by a moment of God-inspired guilt and/or solemnity.
Even more vomitous, you know that next week that comic will be reprinted in the Sunday bulletin of hundreds of churches across the country.
Ooo, I feel queasy.
It’s been decades since BC was funny, why should he break the streak now?
I have a couple 1959 BC comic books – they are stunning in their mysogny. On the cover of one the caveman BC smashes a sculpture of a woman with an enormous club, and inside caveman Thor posits that they prove their superiority over women by “staving in their skulls!” Many more examples.
In a 1980’s example, Peter describes evolution and BC asks; “What, the ‘dust of the Earth’ ain’t good enough for you?”
Keep in mind, Hart is the same hack scribbler who has done brazenly anti-Semitic strips as well. I believe there was one holiday season strip showing a cross overshadowing a menorah. He’s a real assdrip.
Technically that’s just stunningly insensitive, not anti-Semitic.
Now if he had advocated slaughtering the Jews for denying the Savior…
How about this: if he mixed “acclaim” up with “claim”, maybe he mixed up “omits” and “admits”.
Nah, I doubt it… But the definition “any scientific claim that admits god” works for me!
Oh, I remember the days when BC was funny. Well, I don’t but I’ve read old anthologies. Serously. They were actually quite good – I know it sounds bizarre.
yeah, being from the county from where Hart hails, Broome County, i gotta say the place has collective low self esteem. so, they need to embrace the likes of Terry Randall to be their heroes.
ho, ho. hey, hey. ta, ta.
It’s a play on words. And yes, he meant, “acclaim”. But you were really being obtuse on purpose because you were trying to be funny. Am I right?
It’s a play on words. And yes, he meant, “acclaim”
Okay, what on earth does ‘scientific acclaim that omits god’ mean?
nonsequitur
http://www.ucomics.com/nonsequitur/index.phtml
An Antidote for BC :)
No, the discoveries of Newton and Einstein are not fiction, according to this. If God created everything (even if through he Big Bang, which would not be ammenable to science), then EVERYTHING would “include God” (in a sense).
But I think the writer is simply, naively, trying to say that s(he) subjectively infers God(s)’s hand(s) in all the sciences, and, to them, not inferring it is absurd. But of course that’s just their subjective opinion, and has no place in any science itself: they shouldn’t ask everyone else to see reality through their God-tinted spectacles.
Please explain the joke. I don’t normally find BC too hard to figure out but in this case he’s either an idiot or you know something I don’t.
Here’s Bizzaro taking a dig at him. Really funny actually.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/fun/Bizarro.asp?date=20060403
Am I the only one who thought it was just a joke? Lighten up, people.
If this comic is a joke, then EXPLAIN HOW IT IS FUNNY.
On the subject of all caps on early computers. Before computers, both telegraph and teletype used all caps by default. The early computer folks were just using existing technology to make things easier on themselves.
The word acclaim makes more sense if the point of the “joke” is that people praise scientists for scientific discoveries when they should instead be praising God for inspiring the scientists.
Of course that wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense, either. If ideas don’t all come from God, then surely some scientific ideas, particularly those coming from scientists who aren’t religious enough to credit God for their discoveries, are originated by the scientists themselves. If ideas do all come from God, then that includes the idea that scientists deserve all the acclaim for their own work, so why gripe about it?
if it’s photo shopped, then my local paper is in on it too. i read it there this morning on the comics page. my first thought was to e-mail it to p.z., but i figured he would already be inundated with copies of it already.
You guys are making mountains out of molehills. I don’t normally read BC, but from what I’ve seen of it the “Wiley’s Dictionary segments usually give tongue-in-cheek, non-serious definitions. Maybe I’m giving Johnny Hart too much credit, but I find Scott Adams’ drivel way more offensive than this.
Mountains out of molehills, only in the sense that it’s no surprise to anyone that Johnny Hart is a fundamentalcase.
I have always found the “its just a joke” dodge to be an especially annoying tactic of debate. Yet it is a joke. Hart, in point of fact, fancies himself a humorist. We all get that even if we don’t think its funny. But all jokes, just like every type of human expression is meant to convey some meaning. All jokes are meant to express some idea, simple or complex, in the language of a shared mode of communication. They wouldn’t and couldn’t be funny otherwise. This is exactly why no one older than 9 thinks most knock knock jokes are funny. Because a play on words by the teller is not funny unless it is trying to express something meaningful to its audience. Sometimes the expression behind a joke is meant to be taken seriously and sometimes not, but there is always an expression of some idea. And dismissing that idea out of hand merely because it is a joke is essentially the same as saying that it is not a joke at all.
Maybe “Wiley’s Dictionary” is in reference to “Wiley” Dembski?
Then I could see the humor in it.
The play on words is between “claim” and “acclaim”. Normally the phrase is “Scientific claim”, but since he changed it to “acclaim” it’s a pun. You’re still reading it as “scientific claim that doesn’t include God” but that’s not what he wrote. The phrase “scientific acclaim” IMO could mean the praise that scientist have about some law they’ve just discovered or some particle or a biological process. Some scientists are smug. I think that’s what he was referring to.
How exactly would scientific acclaim, in the way that you have interpreted it Nature, include God and what does smugness have to do with it? And how is smugness related to the “fiction” aspect of this “pun?”
Your interpretaion makes very little sense to me and relies upon a a pretty obscure set of assumptions.
The guy has been an obvious YEC for years… cavemen and dinosaurs together! Sheesh!
That and he’s a misogynist etc etc
Well what do you expect from a cartoonist? Insight? Accuracy?
brent, some people think that the universe was created by God, don’t you know. If a scientist is smug about his “discovery” that it was all his/her cleverness and had nothing to do with a preexisting universe then that’s fiction to some people. Get it now? It doesn’t have to be funny to you but I hate to think you don’t understand. I feel for your well-being. You sound bitter.
NatureSelectedMe: …It was a pun.
Pharyngula: (pause) A PUN?!?
NatureSelectedMe: No, no…not a pun…What’s that thing that spells the same backwards as forwards?
Pharyngula: (Long pause) A palindrome…?
NatureSelectedMe: Yeah, that’s it!
Pharyngula: It’s not a palindrome! The palindrome of “claim” would be “mialc”!! It don’t work!!
Reed Cartwright:
#include
{
while (1)
{
puts ("Since I am all powerful, this code will never crash, right?");
fork();
}
}
(Be sure to run as root, since god is obviously root, right?)
Garry: Yeah, that Bizarro was great.
John C. Randolph: Has Family Circus ever been funny? I can remember 20 years ago or so Garfield was.
Arg. Don’t tell me you have to use entities on this thing?? That should be
#include <stdio.h>
NSM, I just don’t agree with your take on this. Yes, I accept that may be different perspective and all that. Humor is a funny thing (ha…ha…ha.)
That said: Which makes more sense to you as the clearest, simplest concept the comic would be trying to convey, remembering that it comes from a YEC (think of common themes in YEC arguments)?
This:
“Science is fiction if it’s a scientific achievement for which all praise is heaped upon the researcher and none is given to God.”
Or this:
“Science is fiction if its claims don’t acknowledge God’s involvement.”
And which makes more humorous sense to you? To me, the joke is easier with the second interpretation, because the entirety of the joke is in having a different definition for science fiction (plus the twist of the knife in science). The only problem is why he wrote “acclaim”, which I could see as a simple mistake or a strange pun. The first interpretation becomes more tortuous to see the humor, and as far as I can tell, still goes back to the “science fiction” definition. In your explanation of it, I still see it being about the claim, being “all his/her cleverness and had nothing to do with a preexisting universe.” I don’t see a pun at all if he actually MEANS “acclaim.” Which is why I’m more inclined to accept the second version and assume he made a mistake or a poor pun…it’s simpler, and the humor makes more sense. To me, anyway.
That’s good HP… I’ve never been in a Monty Python skit before. Pharyngula has beautiful plumage.
rrt, that’s just my interpretation of “acclaim” when I first read it. Your second meaning makes sense too. I can’t see it being a mistake; BC has a lot of pun humor in it.
NatureSelectedMe,
I have the same questions as Brent. But I do find it funny. I find it funny in the same way I find it funny when religious people say “its God’s will” rather than doing something tangible to correct a problem. I’m glad that there are scientists who are working on learning how nature works so we have a better chance at survival and satisfy our curiosity. The BC strip does not help.
Also, was the shot about bitterness at the end of your post really necessary? I would think that finishing at “…think you don’t understand.” would have been a fine place to stop. It certainly would have helped me consider your post in a more thoughtful manner.
Thanks for letting me participate.
LM Wanderer
Regarding photoshopping this comic. I believe Hart is the one doing the photoshopping. I think that guy only has like 5 panels and he just changes the text each day. Before Christmas he has that stupid peg-leg caveman write awful poetry while sitting under a tree and it seems like it’s two weeks of just the same damn panels, but with altered text. And don’t forget the damn “ka-ching” rock and the always hilarious one-wheeled device with the street signs.
LM, I put that last line in there for style. You have to write for the crowd. I have to appear condescending or it loses its edge.
Back on the topic of vomit-inducing unfunny cartoons, I’m suddenly reminded of a scene in Family Guy, where they decided the last person to vomit after taking something would get the last piece of pie. And now I have twenty minutes to forget about it, since my lunch break’s coming up.
BronzeDog, that clip is actually on the internet if you want to see it again. It’s easy to find.
All caps? By design???
Probably not. My bet is that it relates to the teletype, whaich was all caps, and was the first interface device to these machines.
Okay, okay. Let’s assume that Mr. Hart is not getting confused about words here and he really did mean ‘science fiction’ = ‘any scientific acclaim that omits god’. Let’s assume that for the sake of better clarity that ‘acclaim’ roughly means ‘praise’. So what Hart is trying to say is that ‘any scientific praise that does not include god’ is ‘science fiction’. I guess by ‘science fiction’ he means ‘nonsense’ or ‘something false’. I guess.
Now, it’s not enough to say ‘oh it’s just a play on words’. What does that even mean? What’s he implying? That any praise of any scientific work that doesn’t mention or credit god every other sentence is somehow invalid? Is the idea that scientists should all be like those football players interviewed at halftime who credit Jesus for helping them make touchdowns? That every scientist should always sprinkle his articles with things like “while these data are very intriguing, of course god did it all”? Or is he implying something else entirely?
Seems like (a) a pretty lame play on words, if so, and (b) a moronic idea underlying the play on words.
At least Charles Shultz didn’t start shilling for creationism in his dotage.
Worst current comic strip I avoid: “Prince Valiant”. It was artfully drawn (but moronic) when Hal Foster created it. Now Mark Schultz and Gary Gianni crank out a poorly-drawn imitation to milk the old franchise.
This Hart comic doesn’t make me queasy, the phrasing is so strange and obtuse it borders on self-parody.
Thanks for your concern NatureSelected. I am not sure why simple analytical questions translate to bitterness for you but my guess is that you are merely projecting.
And no. I don’t get it now. And I don’t get it because once again, your interpretation makes no sense. You have in fact ignored the questions that I asked you with respect to your interpretation, repeated a slightly more detailed but still unsupported interpretation and added your own completely unsupported impression of my psychological state. None of that helps a poor simpleton like me to understand what Hart means to be saying about science fiction, “acclaim” and God.
Brent, you’re welcome. As I said I was just being edgy. Unsupported interpretation? Wow, I didn’t know I had to cite supporting material when commenting on a comic. I’ll keep that in mind.
There was a BC comic I saw a long time ago that I didn’t understand initially. It showed 2 of the characters watching a bird walking towards them. When it passed them, it said “bursitis” and continued on. I was reading it with my sister and we just looked at each other. Of course now I get it.
brent:
Amen! Ramen?
Lixivium:
Yep.
So to summarize, if we take the whole “acclaim” bit to be a red herring, we have the undeserved smugness and sense of superiority demonstrated by fundies over scientists, which is what I’d expect from a BC comic. If we try to unravel the use of the word “acclaim” rather than “claim”, we end up with a stilted joke based on wonky assumptions (tjswift and NSM bending over backwards in order to disagree with us, they must be proud of themselves). In both cases, the comic is preachy and unfunny. The “tongue-in-cheek” explanation also fails, for reasons I outlined in my 8:35 post.
In other words, if it was a joke, or a pun, then it was poorly executed, or in simpler parlance, a BAD JOKE. That is how I’ll always rebut the “it was a joke” defense.
Rey, you sure set me straight. Remind me again about how conservatives have no sense of humor and blow things way out of proportion? Not like you guys.
Translated:
“I know you are — but what am I?”
And fast on the heels of the “it was a joke” defense comes the “if you don’t find it funny, then you must have no sense of humor” defense, huzzah!
“If a scientist is smug about his ‘discovery’ that it was all his/her cleverness and had nothing to do with a preexisting universe then that’s fiction to some people.”
Say again? You can’t “discover” something that’s not preexisting, whether you’re a fundamentalist or not: http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/discover
johne, that’s true. It seems to me a scientist can be praised for their discoveries. That is the term sometimes used, isn’t it? I was thinking along the lines of Kepler’s laws or Maxwell’s equations. Or Darwin’s theory of evolution.
eponymy = praise? how about Kawasaki’s disease, Down syndrome, or Morton’s toe?
A bunch of science fiction writers were discussing this online the other day (no surprise), and Keith Stokes said, “The corollary would be that fantasy is any scientific claim that includes god.”
D
eponymy = praise?
You got it.
And fast on the heels of the “it was a joke” defense comes the “if you don’t find it funny, then you must have no sense of humor” defense, huzzah!
Not at all. Since reading this blog it occurred to me that there’s more to something being funny then just the words. There’s an underlying ‘truth’ if you will. If you don’t concur with it, it’s not going to be funny. Isn’t that true?
You got it.
No, thanks–I don’t want it. You can keep your religious category errors to yourself. Eponymy is eponymy, and praise is praise. (Ghod, now I’m sounding like an Ayn Rand acolyte :P.)
If you want to argue that eponymy is a component of community recognition for the demonstrated hard work that goes into recognizing and describing something, perhaps our definitions would be somewhat closer. But you denigrate the hard work that goes into scientific discovery when you falsely equate it to the coerced praise without evidence for a punitive deity that Hart’s type of Christian fundamentalist religion demands from its followers.
Um, no. According to the Merriam Webster online dictionary ‘eponymy’ means ‘the explanation of a proper name (as of a town or tribe) by supposing a fictitious eponym’. ‘Eponym’ means ‘1 : one for whom or which something is or is believed to be named
2 : a name (as of a drug or a disease) based on or derived from an eponym’. How on earth does this make Hart’s joke make sense, let alone funny?
I have a feeling we’re reading far more into this than Hart intended, and that in fact Hart thought he was making a clever pun without realizing the pun didn’t actually mean anything.
RavenT, why on earth would eponymy exist if it’s not a form of praise for the scientist? Why not name it after his grad student that probably did most of the work.
george, a pun is a pun. I don’t know if they have to mean anything.
Not at all. Since reading this blog it occurred to me that there’s more to something being funny then just the words. There’s an underlying ‘truth’ if you will. If you don’t concur with it, it’s not going to be funny. Isn’t that true?
Where did you learn that on this site?
When you point to something you think is funny. Ted Rall. And when you point to something you don’t think is funny. Scott Adams.
george, a pun is a pun. I don’t know if they have to mean anything.
Or, uh, make sense.
Eponymy is (ideally, not always perfectly) earned through hard work; praise in the Christian fundamentalist sense is coerced through blackmail (remember what God does if you make him mad, after all–you wouldn’t like Him when He’s angry).
If you genuinely cannot see the difference between earning recognition for real, hard work to further knowledge and–if you’re lucky–improve the lot of other beings in the here and now, versus demanding praise and threatening eternal punishment if you don’t get it, there’s really not a lot of point in continuing to talk past each other.
Off-topic (yeah, I know; that never happens around here…)
I said “eponymy is (ideally, not always perfectly) earned through hard work”; this isn’t exactly eponymy, but it’s related.
My favorite candidate for most clueless anatomist (dumbest man in anatomy, perhaps?) is Matteo Renaldo Colombo, an anatomist/surgeon at Padua. In his 1559 De re anatomica, he gives the first written description of the clitoris, writing:
“Since no one has discerned these projections and their workings, if it is permissible to give names to things discovered by me, it should be called the love or sweetness of Venus.”
Gabriele Falloppio then jumped on the bandwagon, claiming he was the first to discover the clitoris, starting a long-running feud about which of them had been the discoverer.
If these guys want to claim to be the first to rigorously describe the clitoris, I’ve got no quarrel with that statement. But Colombo has more than a little nerve claiming that as his discovery.
Not that it’s really relevant to Hart, but it is one of my favorite eponymy-related anatomy stories.
/off-topic
I didn’t think we had a dichotomy here. I thought I was pointing out that eponymy is a form of praise for a scientist. Isn’t earning recognition praise? IMO, Wiley’s dictionary says you shouldn’t omit God’s role when praising scientific ‘discoveries’ or work or whatever. That’s how I get his pun. I bet you disagree with it. That’s OK. But don’t create a dichotomy where there isn’t.
Now that story about Gabriele Falloppio is funny.
earning something from your peers vs. coercing something from those less powerful than you most certainly is a dichotomy.
Now that story about Gabriele Falloppio is funny.
If we agree on nothing else, at least we agree on that :).
When you point to something you think is funny. Ted Rall. And when you point to something you don’t think is funny. Scott Adams.
Wow. That’s definitely lamer than I expected. You are talking about how people respond to ideologically based humor. I am certain it was no mystery to you before you came to this site that people tend not to think of things as funny that deliberately ridicule their belief systems. Perhaps that was just your little “joke.” But in any case, that is something quite separate from asserting that people believe that jokes express an “underlying truth” that we must all agree to in order to find it funny.
NSM:
I agree wholeheartedly with Brent in this. The difference between how you and most of us respond to the joke has NOTHING to do with our respective belief systems or accepted underlying truths. Indeed, I “GET” the joke, and I “get” it by pretending to accept Hart’s “underlying truths.” What else would I do in reading a joke that is clearly meant as a stab against traditional, supernatural-free science?
No, I DON’T think the joke is funny, in either interpretation. But I understand why Hart thinks it is, and why others would. And when I put myself in the shoes of that particular audience, I see the “claim” version as both funnier and more sensical than the “acclaim” version.
I know this is much ado about nothing. We’re arguing rather intensely over the intended word in a (my subjective opinion) worthless comic strip. In that sense, this does not upset me at all, and I bear you no grudge. That said, I’d like you to consider that you seem to be deaf to the points that some of us are making here. You seem to be offering a reaction that’s a bit too defensive, and a bit too focused on ideological differences rather than the things we’re actually saying.
Regarding the initial respons to this cartoon…no scientific statement that acknowledges God? Sir Isaac Newton, likely not condidered “fundamental” in theological views…from wikipedia, among other sources:
The law of gravity became Sir Isaac Newton’s best-known discovery. Newton warned against using it to view the universe as a mere machine, like a great clock. He said:
Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done.[citation needed]
rrt, I know it seems silly to be arguing about a BC comic.
I started out just trying to explain what the joke was. People actually said they didn’t get it.
The difference between how you and most of us respond to the joke has NOTHING to do with our respective belief systems or accepted underlying truths
It does, I don’t think you understand. It’s not a belief system I’m talking about. It’s just accepting the premise of the joke for it to be funny. Any joke. You don’t have to believe the premise wholeheartedly. But if the joke’s premise is completely opposite of what you believe then you won’t find it funny at all.
Take the joke:
Q: Why can’t you borrow money from a Leprechaun?
A: They’re always a little short.
Now is that joke funny? Do you have believe in “the little people” for it to be funny? No. But the underlying truth is that they are small people. Imaginary, Granted. So now you can use a play on words to make it funny. If you thought they were giants I don’t think it would be funny.
I feel a little like I’m beating a dead horse, then, but…what is the point of your example, nsm? You’re technically correct in what you’re saying…that’s why I said I understood how Hart’s comic could be amusing to some people, even though I personally don’t enjoy the humor. Much as I would understand the humor of a sexist or racist joke.
So what? My point isn’t about that. Unless I’ve misplaced the thread of the conversation here, the original point (aside from that most of us dislike Hart’s evangelical comics) is that he meant “claim” and not “acclaim.” Many of us, myself included, seem to think that your comments about underlying truths and premises were aimed at supporting the “acclaim” version, apparently under the notion that we don’t accept “acclaim” because as non-creationists, we just don’t get the joke. I’ve been trying to explain that I think I can read this joke quite well through creationist eyes, and through both those and my own, I think “claim” is what he meant, and if he did not, that “acclaim” was a very strange and lesser joke, borderline nonsensical.
I’ve been trying to explain that I think I can read this joke quite well through creationist eyes, and through both those and my own, I think “claim” is what he meant, and if he did not, that “acclaim” was a very strange and lesser joke, borderline nonsensical.
Now that’s what has me baffled, “acclaim” is clearly what he meant and why don’t you understand? “Claim” is what wouldn’t make sense.
Oh well. I think your creationist’s eyes need a checkup.:)
“Now that’s what has me baffled, “acclaim” is clearly what he meant and why don’t you understand? “Claim” is what wouldn’t make sense.”
Okay.
That’s it, RavenT, come over to our side. We have cookies and punch, which we will sell to you at a market-derived price. Our dental plan is also better.
Wow…it’s like the textual internet equivalent version of Jerry Springer. What happens when people with opposing ideaologies start a psuedo-intellectual flame war? This and transvestite midget pimps on our next episode.