We must protect the students!

Administrators at London South Bank University have taken steps to protect the religious sensibilities of their student body, banning blasphemous portrayals of deities and important religious figures. Followers of those beliefs can’t possibly be expected to deal with ridicule, so the offensive portrayals must be taken down.

You might be wondering whose image is being redacted. Mohammed? Jesus? Buddha? L. Ron Hubbard?

Nope. A flyer that committed sacrilege by using the holy figure of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has been prohibited.

I can understand how Pastafarians might be up in arms over any portrayal of a tangle of noodles and a pair of meatballs — we have an Italian restaurant in Morris, and sometimes I too am shocked when I see a plate that has spontaneously ordered itself into a perfect simulacrum of the one true god. It’s why I’m always careful to segregate the pasta from the meatballs, to make sure no untoward activity takes place on the plate. Also, because as we all know, while meatballs are particularly blessed, pasta must always know its place as inferior and subservient (it’s so pliant, and always so seductive).

I am pleased to report, however, that London South Bank University did exactly the right thing in silencing those heretics emphasizing the silliness of the divine. It’s just as well, too, or Pastafarians around the world might have been motivated to riot. Or set sail to live a pirate’s life, with a yo-ho-ho.

Oh, wait. I have just been informed that the Pastafarians weren’t complaining, it was other religious groups trying to suppress the expression of other beliefs.

Never mind.

Cthulhu’s Minions: Evil Gods for Atheists

After I botched it last night, the Lovecraftians have regrouped and we will be having Cthulhu panel at FtBCon 2. It’s tonight, at 10pm Central (in about 2 hours). Confirmed: Michael Davis, Robert Price, Toren Atkinson, and me. A few others have been invited and might show up. If you’re desperately excited about shambling horrors from the outer darkness and really, really want to join in, email me, maybe I’ll squeeze you in. Also, we might need sacrifices.

And…here we are.

“Spiritually wounded on the battlefield of the great war”

You’ll never guess what that is a euphemism for in this creepy video from the Mormon church.

Yep, it’s all about masturbation, wrought with an excessive metaphor that protecting your friends from pornography and self-gratification is exactly the same as running around with guns to rescue wounded soldiers on the battlefield. I think the problem here isn’t that young men masturbate, but that old authorities are telling them that they’re evil and helping Nazis win the war for Satan when they do what comes naturally.

Be sure not to miss the end, when the two guys who have confided in each other about their sins give each other hot, smoky looks across a room.

Also, I’ve gotta say, when youtube pops up a collection of recommended videos to watch after this one, I blushed…I had no idea that you could find those kinds of R-rated videos there. This production from the Mormon church is only going to help people find more porn!

(via Carrie Poppy, that perv.)

Funny Looking Rock found on Mars!

When last we heard from Rhawn Joseph, he was playing with photoshop and trying to sell off his online journal, the Journal of Cosmology. The Journal of Cosmology has been plugging away, claiming to have found bacteria in meteorites and then diatoms in meteorites — give them a blurry, vague photo of some shapeless blob, and they’ll claim it looks just like something biological on Earth. Either that, or they’ll photoshop my head on to it.

Rhawn Joseph’s latest struggle: he’s suing NASA for suppressing evidence of life on Mars. His evidence is this pair of photos taken by the Mars Opportunity rover, 12 days apart, and released by NASA.

sol3540

Look! There’s a rock in the later picture that wasn’t there earlier! How did it get there? NASA’s explanations were first, speculation that it could be a meteorite, but now they seem to think that it was most likely flicked by the rover itself, as it was making a turn. That sounds reasonable to me.

But not to Rhawn Joseph! We’re missing the most obvious “fact” of all, that what appeared in the later photo was no rock at all, but a mushroom. He demands that NASA investigate thoroughly, using the power of a legal writ.

In Re RHAWN JOSEPH’S PETITION FOR A WRIT OF MANDAMUS COMPELLING NASA TO PERFORM A DUTY TO THOROUGHLY SCIENTIFICALLY EXAMINE AND INVESTIGATE A PUTATIVE BIOLOGICAL ORGANISM ON MARS IDENTIFIED/DISCOVERED BY PETITIONER AND REFERRED TO BY NASA AS: “UNLIKE ANYTHING WE HAVE SEEN BEFORE.”

How can you doubt it? He has since published his results in a “scientific journal” — his own online website — complete with side-by-side photos of the Martian Funny-Looking-Rock and earthly apothecia.

Apothecia

The “mysterious” bowl-like structure which appeared on Mars does not resemble a rock or a meteor, but a lichen fungus which on Earth is known as “Apothecia.” A magnification of the structure Sol 3540 reveals the presence of numerous “paraphyses” which are spore producing organs of Apothecium. On Earth Apothecia are commonly observed on rocks, tree limbs, or growing on the ground next to open road. Related species are known by a variety of names, such as Eastern Speckled Shield Lichen (Punctellia Bolliana). The term “shield lichen” is applied to a variety of foliose lichens. An important characteristic is their bowl-shaped growth with brown inner surfaces. These bowl shaped structures are “apothecia” and appear basically identical to the “mystery” structure depicted in Sol 3540 but which NASA wishes the public to believe is a rock or meteor which suddenly sprouted on this slab of Martian real estate.

In case you missed the similarity, here’s a photo of the Mars FLR with big red arrows and bold text pointing to the “paraphyses” — you know, just in case the visual similarity might not be as strong as Joseph claims.

paraphyses

Joseph says that if you “magnify” the image the similarities to the paraphyses of apothecia are even more apparent, which is kind of amusing: you can’t magnify the raw pixel data. All the information you get is right there. You can make it larger, but that’s not at all the same as increasing resolution.

I have used all the powers bestowed upon me with my Ph.D. to squint even harder than Rhawn Joseph at that rock, and I’m sorry, it’s a rock. It’s not a fungus or a lichen or a Happy Meal toy or Rhawn Joseph’s lost marbles, and if you look at the raw image rather than one that Joseph has pseudocolored to tint it green, it doesn’t look particularly biological.

Also, NASA already seems quite happy to investigate further.

Mr Squyres said scientists believe the rock, named "Pinnacle Island," got there when the aging rover did a pirouette turn in the dusty Martian soil and knocked loose a chunk of bedrock that rolled a short distance downhill.

"We think that in the process of that wheel moving across the ground, we kind of flicked it, kind of tiddly winked it out of the ground and it moved to the location where we see it," Mr Squyres said.

Still, scientists have not found the divet the rock would have left behind. They think it is hidden beneath one of the rover’s solar arrays.

The Opportunity team plans to manuever the robotic vehicle around a bit more to see if they can find the spot from which the rock emerged.

As to why it is such an unusual color [it’s a darker red than the surface], Mr Squyres said it may be that humans are witnessing a surface that has not been exposed in a very, very long time.

"It appears that it may have flipped itself upside down," he said.

"If that is the case, what we are seeing is we are seeing the surface, the underside of a rock, that hasn’t seen the Martian atmosphere for perhaps billions of years."

Already, an analysis of the rock with the Opportunity’s spectrometer has shown a "strange composition, different from anything we have seen before," he told reporters.

The rock has a lot of sulphur, along with very high concentrations of manganese and magnesium.

"We are still working this out. We are making measurements right now. This is an ongoing story of discovery," he said.

Ah, but I think you see the real problem: NASA has used data from other instruments on the rover to come to a conclusion that differs from Rhawn Joseph’s far-fetched speculation of Martian mushrooms.

I’ve seen this argument somewhere before

I think they ripped it off from a theology textbook, simply changing the name of the mystery in question: You Can't Prove There's No Cannibal Rat Ship.

Except, of course, there is a possibility that the Cannibal Rat Ship exists, and there are at least verifiable records that a ship called the Lyubov Orlova once existed. The theologians don’t even have that much of a glimmering of likelihood.