But analyzing it takes all the funny out of the joke!

Lots of you have been mailing me this comic today, 9 Chickweed Lane, because it contains a bizarre proof of god. I know, it’s supposed to be funny, but let’s take it seriously just for a moment.

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To summarize the argument: Darwin’s theory predicts a progressive increase in human intelligence, refuting the Christian account; people are stupid; therefore, Darwin is refuted; therefore, god exists.

I assume the humor in the comic lies in the blatant illogic of the silly rationale the pompous ass in the blue overalls is bloviating (I hope…I don’t read this one very often, so I don’t know if the artist is one of those pontificating nitwits who really believes his captions [see Dilbert; see Poe’s Law]). But anyway, every step of his reasoning is wrong. Evolution does not predict a progressive pattern to our intelligence. The Christian account is an unsupported assertion instead of a description of the natural world, and many people interpret it in many different ways which do not necessarily preclude the observed natural distribution of intelligence. People are actually smarter than most, if not all, other species — compare us to cockroaches, for instance. Therefore, neither Darwin nor his strawman Darwin are refuted. Even if it were, though, disproving evolution does not mean one among many possible other alternative theories are proven.

OK, I’m done. Stop taking it seriously. You may now resume laughing at the arrogant fool in the comic strip.

What’s the opposite of a didgeridoo?

Apparently, it’s an eppendorf pipette. If you aren’t a science nerd, an eppendorf pipette is one of the ubiquitous tools of molecular biology — it’s a calibrated gadget for dispensing minute quantities of liquids.

Eppendorf is now selling an automated pipettor called epMotion … and judging by the promotional video and music, it’s also intended to raise estrogen levels. Don’t watch it unless you want to be emasculated!

(The tune is rather catchy. I’m suddenly in the mood to cuddle.)

epMotion Song

Pipetting all those well-plates, baby, sends your thumbs into overdrive
And spending long nights in the lab makes it hard for your love to thrive

What you need is automation, girl, something easy as 1 2 3
So put down that pipette, honey, I got something that will set you free

And it’s called epMotion (whisper: ’cause you deserve something really great)
Girl you need epMotion (whisper: yeah girl it’s time to automate)
It’s got to be epMotion (whisper: no more pipetting late at night)
Only for you epMotion (whisper: girl this time we got it right)

DNA
RNA
Proteins
Cell Cultures
Less reagents
Faster workflow
Saves you money
Well, well, well

And it’s called epMotion (whisper: ’cause you deserve something really great)
Girl you need epMotion (whisper: yeah girl it’s time to automate)
It’s got to be epMotion (whisper: no more pipetting late at night)
Only for you epMotion (whisper: girl this time we got it right)

Didgeridoos are not for you, little girl

Harper Collins is about to release a children’s book called The Daring Book for Girls(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) in Australia. It contains a very short section on how to play a didgeridoo — and wouldn’t you know it, someone is offended.

But the general manager of the Victorian Aboriginal Education Association, Dr Mark Rose, says the publishers have committed a major faux pas by including a didgeridoo lesson for girls.

Dr Rose says the didgeridoo is a man’s instrument and touching it could make girls infertile, and has called for the book to be pulped.

I think Dr Rose has confused aboriginal belief with reality. The didgeridoo is a long piece of hollow painted wood. Go ahead, girls, you can touch it and it won’t hurt you, no matter how much someone claims its magic powers will do weird things to your gonads.

I would think that he could, possibly, make a case for cultural insensitivity if it were true that it would the book violated native taboos, but even that wouldn’t be grounds for demanding that the book be destroyed — it would just mean that members of a culture that rigidly defines women’s roles would not be buying the book. But this Rose kook goes further — he’s not just saying it violates a tradition, he is arguing that it literally has magic powers. What next, will Catholics start claiming that pieces of bread literally turn into pieces of a god? That would be ridiculous.

“I would say from an Indigenous perspective, an extreme mistake, but part of a general ignorance that mainstream Australia has about Aboriginal culture,” he said.

“We know very clearly that there is a range of consequences for females touching a didgeridoo, it’s men’s business, and in the girls book, instructions on how to use it, for us it is an extreme cultural indiscretion.”

Dr Rose says the consequences for a girl touching a didgeridoo can be quite extreme.

“It would vary in the places where it is, infertility would be the start of it ranging to other consequences,” he said.

“I won’t even let my daughter touch one…. as cultural respect. And we know it’s men’s business.

“In our times there are men’s business and women’s business, and the didgeridoo is definitely a men’s business ceremonial tool.”

Heh heh. He said “ceremonial tool.” I know who’s playing the tool here.

(via Josh Reviews Everything)

The recent bigfoot flap…a little late

I’ve spent my evening curled up with a wracking cough and nasty pains in places I didn’t know I could hurt — I think I sprained my diaphragm — and while stumbling dumbly through the web, I belatedly found the story of the recent Georgia bigfoot. I know, it’s last week’s news, but I’m feeling a little addled.

Anyway, it brought back old memories. Way back when I was a teenager, I used to build balsa wood model airplanes in my grandparents’ attic. It was a good deal: my family didn’t have to deal with the smell, I didn’t have to worry about my brothers and sisters stomping on a delicate wing, and Grandma would bring me cookies and milk. There was also a stack of my grandfather’s manly men magazines to browse while I was waiting for that last coat of dope to dry. I don’t know if the genre is still around today, but in the 60s and 70s, at least, there were these magazines like Argosy and Saga that were full of manly stories of manly fellows braving dangers and hunting and exploring, with the occasional woman in a bikini lolling on the beach as the manly frogmen fought vicious sharks, and such like. One of the stories I recall most vividly was the Minnesota Iceman, which the article claimed was the most amazing evidence for the existence of bigfoot ever. There were several accompanying photographs of the poor guy in full color, frozen in a defensive pose, one arm thrown up over his head, with a bright splash of red over one eye, where he had been purportedly shot.

It made an impression. I recall reading up on cryptozoology quite a bit after that, trying to figure out whether it was real or not. I regretfully came to the conclusion eventually that it was a complete fraud, largely because I couldn’t find any legitimate scientific sources that had anything to say about it, and even in my teens I knew that Argosy was not a credible source of scientific information. Curiously, I now learn that creationists haven’t figured that out; Answers in Genesis uses the Minnesota Iceman as an example of scientific fakery ala Piltdown Man, accusing “experienced zoologists and scientific journals” of going out on a limb for a bogus missing link. At least now I can place their scientific expertise as somewhere significantly below mine…at the age of 15.

The Minnesota Iceman was a fake by a disreputable carnie. What about the Georgia Bigfoot? The lesson learned there is that people have gotten stupider since the 1960s. This bigfoot corpse was a graceless fake that was exposed within hours by the clever dicks at the JREF, and was concocted and promoted by a pair of blustering oafs named Rick Dyer and Matt Whitton, who have taken the unfortunate Southern redneck stereotype and amplified it into an embarrassment. It’s a rubber suit stuffed with dead animal parts. If I’d seen the photos of this thing at an impressionable age, I would not have been at all impressed — they were pathetic. The most thorough (if rather rambling) account is at a bigfoot site, and it’s damning. The creators weren’t just con-artists, they were stupid, incompetent con-artists…and people still fell for it. That’s the most depressing part of this story. The frauds don’t even have to try anymore, and the suckers line up to give them their money.

They’re joking, right?

The pope has condemned this silly sculpture as blasphemous, and German Catholics are trying to get it removed from display.

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They can’t be serious, can they? It’s kitschy and funny. But really, they’re unhappy about this.

The Vatican wrote a letter of support in the pope’s name to Franz Pahl, president of the regional government who opposed the sculpture.

“Surely this is not a work of art but a blashphemy and a disgusting piece of trash that upsets many people,” Pahl told Reuters by telephone as the museum board was meeting.

The Vatican letter said that the work “wounds the religious sentiments of so many people who see in the cross the symbol of God’s love”.

Pahl, whose province is heavily Catholic, was so outraged by the sculpture of the pop-eyed amphibian that he went on a hunger strike to demand its removal and had to be taken to hospital during the summer.

So wait…now doing anything with two sticks stuck together at right angles is going to be an affront to “God’s love”? I have been told over and over again by pompous wackaloons that I’m on the shock-jock trajectory, compelled to try and top my outrages against religion in an ever-upward spiral of offense, and that it’s going to be really hard to top cracker abuse. However, it looks like you can piss off the pope just by playing around with a couple of popsicle sticks.

Pareidolia poll

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Two things I find absurd are people who see Jesus in random patterns, and internet polls that try to impose patterns in noise. Here’s something that does both: a moth was found with speckles that are supposed to look like Jesus.

“His hair right here and you can see the mustache and the beard and there’s a little slit right there that looks like His mouth and when he would move the mouth would open so it looked like he was trying to talk to you.”

Kirk Harper spotted the moth on an RV trailer Monday, and right away could tell it was unique.

“I immediately thought it looked like Jesus and that was what was so cool cause you’ve seen His face in grilled cheese sandwiches and windows and things but on a moth’s back…we thought that was pretty neat.”

Just to top off the silliness, the story comes with a poll to ask if you see a face. Yeah, I do — it’s Charles Manson.

Crossing the line

Once upon a time, Charles Darwin crossed the equator in the Beagle, and he received the traditional hazing:

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We have crossed the Equator. I have undergone the disagreeable sensation operation of being shaved. About 9 oclock this morning we poor “griffins” two and thirty in number, were put altogether on the lower deck. The hatchways were battened down, so we were in the dark and very hot. Presently four of Neptunes constables came to us, and one by one led us up on deck. I was the first and escaped easily: I nevertheless found this watery ordeal sufficiently disagreeable. Before coming up, the constable blindfolded me and thus lead along, buckets of water were thundered all around; I was then placed on a plank, which could be easily tilted up into a large bath of water. They then lathered my face and mouth with pitch and paint, and scraped some of it off with a piece of roughened iron hoop, a signal being given I was tilted head over heels into the water, where two men received me and ducked me. At last, glad enough, I escaped, most of the others were treated much worse, dirty mixtures being put in their mouths and rubbed on their faces. The whole ship was a shower bath: and water was flying about in every direction: of course not one person, even the Captain, got clear of being wet through.

On our cruise to the Galápagos, we also got a much, much milder version of the hazing, a night with King Neptune, who chose a queen (Susan Hurst in this case), and then made a few of us do very silly things. The movie below has pirates with charming Ecuadorian accents, King Neptune, and absurd rituals, but the real highlight of this video, though, is getting to see Phil Plait do the mating dance of the blue-footed booby (about 6’30” in).

For extortion purposes, I do have a higher resolution copy of this video. Maybe it should make an appearance at the next TAM…mwahahahahaha!

To the clever dicks who think they are annoying me

One of the chores I got done this afternoon, after a much needed nap, was to go through the mail that accumulated during our long absence. Part of that job is sorting out the pile of magazines that I did not subscribe to, but that some people out there think they can sign me up for and annoy me — but which, since I did not authorize any payment, and which are usually sent to me under some sloppy permutation of my name, I simply never pay for, and eventually the publisher gets tired of sending me without recompense and the subscription fades away.

It’s a weird mix: lots of conservative political rags which get tossed into the recycling bin with barely a glance, and the rest is a mishmash of odd stuff that the sender seems to think says something about me. Out magazine I sort of understand — they want to imply that I’m gay, which they think I’d take as an insult because they do — but the yummy cover photo of Neil Patrick Harris and the nice interview inside just made me think there would be some perks to being gay. American Rider, though, is a strange choice. Am I supposed to be a leather-wearing Harley rider, too? It’s a very Tom of Finland combination, but sorry, ultimately uninteresting to me. Body+Soul is a better choice for something that would irritate, but it’s so dang silly that I can only laugh.

So I hate to say it since I am getting a giggle out of these random piles of glossy paper in my mailbox, but could you please stop wasting your time? The only people being hurt by this action are the mail carriers who have enough of a burden to haul every day, and possibly the publishers who might lose a little money on the printing (but might gain a little more ad revenue from the temporary addition to their subscriber rolls).

And planet Earth. Think of the Earth, man.