Ben Goldacre found an exciting job ad. Unfortunately, he’s completely unqualified for the position, which is probably why he mocks it. It’s fear, yeah, that’s the ticket, he laughs at it because he’s afraid.
Hang on a minute…I don’t qualify for the job, either! I haven’t got the vaguest clue about how one goes about sub-molecular harmonic frequencies using ultimatonic field patterning instruments. I don’t even meet the vegetarian requirement.
Oh, well, then…mock away, everyone!
Gayle Haggard, wife of meth-snorting fan of gay prostitutes Ted Haggard has just had a press conference in which she announces that Ted Haggard is completely heterosexual…to which I can only reply with this song.
Mrs Haggard also says “Our sexuality is conditioned, and we can be conditioned in any number of ways,” which I think is partly true, but I also think is a bit disturbing. It can’t be a boost to Gayle Haggard’s self-esteem to think that her husband needed the Clockwork Orange treatment in order to find her sexually attractive, and to stop his eye from wandering to the willowy young man with needle tracks in his arm living on a street corner in the bad part of town.
There’s also a poll with the story.
Do you think a gay person really can be ‘cured’?
Yes – It is a choice a person makes. 13%
No – It is how a person is born. 79%
Not sure. 7%
I don’t care for the simple-minded dichotomy — I think your sexuality is a product of both unavoidable predispositions and early experience — but I detest that “you choose your sexual preferences” line. No, you don’t. I suspect that not one person in the history of humanity has ever reached early adolescence and made a conscious decision about what stimuli trigger a little hormonal surge.
There was another poll out there that I studiously ignored, because I was on it: Which miracle do you think Americans would most support? One of the possible answers was “PZ Myers publicly converts from atheism to follow the One True God.”
I think it was a very poor choice, because one of the ways that could happen, which would require no miracle at all, is brain damage. Alas, I have won. Now I have to be a little concerned that devout Christians will be after me with a baseball bat.
So here’s an important caveat: traumatic brain injury or organic deterioration do not count. You’re going to have to convert me with reason, logic, and evidence in order for my conversion to count as a miracle. And trust me, since Christians don’t have any of those, it really would be a miracle.
Oh, wait. Is the One True God the Flying Spaghetti Monster, though? There’s a chance there.
Because prisons ban Dungeons & Dragons.
Prison officials instigated the Dungeons & Dragons ban among concerns that playing the game promoted gang-related activity and was a threat to security.
Yeah, it might inspire them to carve a magic wand out of a bar of soap, and pew-pew prison guards with magic missiles.
Hey, can we get prisons to ban religion because it similarly promotes fantasy thinking and organizes people into groups, aka “gangs”? Bible study could be a gateway to organized crime, you know.
You can buy communion wafers on Amazon, which is no surprise. Amazon will also tell you what other customers bought when they ordered their communion wafers.
I…I…don’t understand! I get a brainlock when I try to put these things together, I’m afraid.
I’m sexy.
Well, that was unexpected. I think my name was tossed in there for comic relief.
Some of you may have noticed the lack of updates here yesterday. I must apologize; I was in a crisis and having a bit of a breakdown. You see, everyone was sending me the latest xkcd comic, which was kind of like the God Equation, except that I have a deep and abiding faith in Randall Munroe, praise be unto him, amen, and knew he wouldn’t get the math wrong. At first I laughed, but then as the implications began to sink in, I realized I was in deep metaphysical trouble.
You see, the width of the English channel is variable: it’s going to vary by small, chance amounts as waves shift grains of sand and erode away bits of rock, and it’s going to have a larger cyclic component to its variation that correlates with the tides. Initially I figured this would simply have some kind of reciprocal relationship with Prius gas mileage, but then I noticed that it was the official EPA measurement of that parameter, which is only going to change quarterly or yearly. Which means that either a fundamental constant, the Planck energy constant, or the pressure of the earth’s core is fluctuating. Physics is in trouble. This could invalidate radiometric dating methods, and Munroe has failed to mention our other peril: if Prius gas mileage gets too high, perhaps the pressure at the Earth’s core will increase…until the planet explodes.
Then I realized that we evilutionists have claimed that the English channel has not always existed — during the last ice age, the value of the denominator in that term would have been zero. This cannot be. Either evilution or math is wrong, and since evilution is dependent on mathematics, I’m going to have to say the math can’t be wrong. And note, please: the end of the last glacial period was approximately 10,000 years ago, quite close to the approximate time of Creation as argued by some followers of the Holy Bible.
This represents a proof by division by zero error for a Young Earth.
It also means that we have to completely rethink our picture of what human life was like ten thousand years ago. All the textbooks now natter on about making baskets and flint knapping, but do any of them mention that cavemen would have also been getting phenomenal gas mileage in their hybrids?
Furthermore, the revelation that a fundamental mathematical constant like pi is the product of English geography does sort of mean that England does have divine status, and we rebellious colonists have been in a state of sin for a few centuries. It also makes Japanese industrial culture a centerpoint of the universe.
So I had to spend yesterday rebooting my philosophical premises. It took a while, but I’m now a Young Earth Otaku Tory. The blog will have to change its focus a bit; I hope you don’t mind.
I was just trying to get through the email I neglected yesterday, and then someone sent me a bomb through the web: a link that gave me sympathetic heart pains and some ghastly flashbacks.
Behold, the Bacon-Chicken-Narwhal!
I couldn’t eat that. I have a cardiovascular system, and I need it to stay alive, unlike some people. That was the first cruelty, the provocation of delicious temptation. The second cruelty is the word “narwhal”, which triggers this painful memory.
I’ve got 5 hours or so of driving on windswept empty roads through some of the flattest prairie around, and now I’m going to have that in my head the whole time.
Oh, lord, I am convinced. Look at this fossil; it’s a perfect human footprint, with a dinosaur track right on top of it! The people who found it promise that it’s not a fake, they’ve actually done a CAT scan of the rock to show that it is genuine, somehow. This will revolutionize paleontology and shake up the entire field of evolution!
It’s also available for the taking on ebay. Only $5, and more than 10 of them are in stock.
It’s a bit pricey, but worth it for something that would get me an easy publication in Nature. I wonder…I’ve got a gross of nails from the True Cross here that I’ve been selling for the same price, maybe they’d take one in trade?
They’ve gone too far. It was bad enough that the creationists treat science with such contempt, but now…the fundy kooks hate science fiction, too!
Science fiction is intimately associated with Darwinian evolution. Sagan and Asimov, for example, were prominent evolutionary scientists. Sci-fi arose in the late 19th and early 20th century as a product of an evolutionary worldview that denies the Almighty Creator. In fact, evolution IS the pre-eminent science fiction. Beware!
Hey! Sagan was a physicist, and Asimov was a chemist; of the other evil science fiction authors listed, Heinlein, Clarke, Vonnegut, and Roddenberry, not one is a biologist! I think I’m offended.
