I applaud Language Log’s bold new policy

Bravo! A blog about language gets, as you might expect, a few fairly repetitive responses to common issues, and Language Log gets lots of unimaginative comments about ending a sentence with a preposition…and they’ve reached the limits of their patience.

Unable to bear any longer the tedious work of seeking out all the instances of these two dopey comment types and deleting them, I have decided that from now on I will hunt down the relevant commenters and kill them.

I realize that it is unusual for a popular science blog to launch upon a policy of killing its own readers. That is why I thought an explicit warning should go up on the site first. This is that warning.

Since there is now a precedent, I will happily follow suit. I have a few peeves of my own that I think will have to be treated with the death penalty to all offenders.

  • The man waiting for rescue from a flood “joke”. No, I will not repeat it. And remember, if you try to repeat it in the comments, it is now a killing offense. (If you really need to know what it is, it’s in my book.)

  • Any statement about how science is just another religion.

  • In any thread about the problems women face in our culture, any man who starts crying about his poor butchered foreskin will join it in the biological waste disposal.

  • Any claim that atheists ignore the ‘sophisticated’ claims of theists without telling us exactly what those brilliant neglected arguments are.

There will certainly be others added to this list, because I am capricious and vindictive.

Geoffrey Pullum has contracted out the termination job to two of his staffers, Luca and Enzo. I do not employ “people” with sufficient autonomy to have warranted names, but instead will be dispatching the faceless (literally) molluscan horde to take care of the condemned. A suggestion: if you receive a death sentence, head for the nearest seacoast and wait for the tentacles to arise; they’re savage, quick, and painless. Trying to hide in landlocked areas means you’ll be taken care of by the snails and slugs, which means execution by slow, painful radulation.

We all know who makes the best Mad Scientists

I initially thought this was a fine graph, charting the fields of research of mad scientists over time, since it did accurately conclude that biologists rocked that niche, but then I looked closer, and they shortchanged us. For some entirely arbitrary reason, they split mad biologists into “biology”, “biotechnology”, and “neuroscience”…but those are simply subdisciplines of biology! You don’t see mad physicists split into “physics”, “lasers”, and “whatever else physicists do”, now do you? I see what they were doing: they were trying to minimize the appearance of our overwhelming dominance!

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So, Annalee Newitz, Stephanie Fox, Kelly Faircloth, and Mary Ratliff…you sought to belittle mad biologists, eh? I shall plot my vengeance. Do not be surprised if some night you wake up to find giant mutant cockroaches laying eggs in your ears, or your brain transplanted into the body of a hagfish, or strange infections writing incantations to Cthulhu in rashes on your body, or tentacles emerging out of your shower drain.

I’m beginning to suspect that Zach Weiner has issues with biologists

He’s done it again. It’s another comic that mocks biologists. It’s entirely true, but that’s beside the point — he’s exposing us! And yes, I know that he’s married to a parasitologist, which just means he’s been given direct insight into the mind of a biologist and will be using that information against us.

This could be trouble. Weiner shouldn’t be surprised if he’s walkin’ down the street sometime and a gang in labcoats whispers up behind him in their Priuses and pelts him with viscera. We’re a dangerous bunch, you know.