One of the splendid people I met in Denver told me about her attendance at a bizarre lecture a few months ago — and she sent me a link to her summary. If you want to experience a second hand glimmering of Native American woo, with UFOs, magic origins, transparent white people, anti-evolution, and quantum physics, there you go.
I rather like the growing bans on smoking in bars and restaurants — it makes them much more pleasant places for those of us who’d rather not inhale poisons from acrid, burning weeds involuntarily. But maybe an exception should be made from places where the burning and inhaling of plant matter is the whole intent of visiting, as is being discovered in the Netherlands.
Millions of people flock to Amsterdam’s “coffee shops” every year to legally buy cannabis and hashish over the counter and to smoke it without fear of arrest, as long as they are on the premises.
But the new law bans tobacco inside café and restaurants, meaning cannabis users are now forced to light up potent and heady pipes and joints loaded with pure marijuana.
So now visitors are getting toasted on extra-potent weed.
Hey, is this just a publicity stunt for the new “Harold and Kumar” movie?
That would look good as a bumpersticker on my car, if only I still had any room on the back of my car for bumperstickers.
What? How could Orac pass this story by?
A monument to the enema, a procedure many people would rather not think about, has been unveiled at a spa in the southern Russian city of Zheleznovodsk.
The bronze syringe bulb, which weighs 800 pounds and is held by three angels, was unveiled at the Mashuk-Akva Term spa, the spa’s director said Thursday.
“There is no kitsch or obscenity, it is a successful work of art,” Alexander Kharchenko told The Associated Press. “An enema is almost a symbol of our region.”
In related news, the head of the Zheleznovodsk Chamber of Commerce and Tourism Bureau committed suicide today…
So, what does the promotion of jazz have to do with HP Lovecraft? (This isn’t a raven and a writing desk non-connection — there really is a link.)
I guess most of us missed a bizarre poster at the Evolution 2008 meetings tonight. It was basically a paper titled The Evidently Imminent Phyletic Transition of Homo sapiens into Homo militarensis (the military hominid), by Richard H. Lambertsen. It’s garbage from the first page, I’m afraid, in which the author tries to demonstrate that there must be direction and intent in the evolution of life, and that “Earth’s largest blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus)
swimming at peak velocity most precisely represents the
central tendency of evolution.” This is followed by many pages of oddball math in which the author cites Einstein, Feynman, and himself quite often.
And then it gets weird.
The science of LAMBERTSEN and HINTZ
(2004) and LAMBERTSEN (2007) holds that the
key morphological innovation enabling maximization of free will in the organic domain was a
novel craniomandibular articulation (the MMA).
The MMA trigger enables high dEk/dt events to
be accomplished with precision. Furthermore,
the cosmological constraint confirmed implies
that maximization of free will by means of trigger
action will lead to self-destruction.
Get that? A novel jaw mechanism in whales is the pinnacle of free will.
And then it gets weirder.
Noting the apparent chiral kinematical
symmetry between the MMA and the specialized
trapeziometacarpal, or “saddle” joint of the
hominid thumb, LAMBERTSEN (2007) therefore
warned…“[In view of that apparent chiral] symmetry we now
must expect trigger actions referable to extremely
powerful individuals that do not lead to self-
destruction, but instead cause the wanton
destruction of others. This is to say that there has
been a paradigm shift in the realization of individual
power. The means to that power is different. The
direction of evolutionary change is not. It thus is to
be expected that aged individuals suffering the
effects of senescence will use the more vigorous
young to achieve their base intention… that mentally
adept if egregious individuals of age will exploit
skillfully the combined naiveté and strength of near
juveniles.”
Because there is a resemblance in the shape of hominid thumbs and whale jaw joints, people are going to do bad things. This is then confirmed by Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
This is literally insane stuff. That interpretation is confirmed by the end of the paper, which contains a series of questions addressed to George W. Bush, including a demand to know if he was the one who sent a sniper to his house at 2:00pm on 28 January, and whether he personally stole Lambertsen’s driver’s license. There was also a bizarre incident in which Lambertsen was arrested for disrupting a flight.
This is just sad. Lambertsen actually does have some scientific qualifications, and has published respectable papers on baleen whales, and you can see buried in this one a foundation of serious work on whale anatomy and physiology. He clearly needs psychiatric help now, though.
Alas, it just goes to show that having something presented at a science conference does not necessarily imply that it is scientific, or even sensible. Keep this in mind when you see the creationists striving to get a single paper published…
And please, I hope somebody gets Lambertsen the help he needs. He isn’t an evil man or a stupid man — he’s got something organically wrong with his brain, I fear, and needs psychiatric intervention.
Somebody must have mistaken us for the local insane asylum, because my mailbox this afternoon is full of weird stuff. Could it be…could it be…Friday the 13th?
A suggestion for Vox Day: he should debate Jesus’ General!
This one is kind of sad. A loon who thinks 9/11 was an American conspiracy has gone on a hunger strike, for the nebulous goal of getting a meeting with John McCain (The fool! McCain was in on it!) His wife and friends are rather distressed. Kooks aren’t just for laughs; there are people behind them who are hurt by their behavior.
Note also: he’s a professor of religious studies. There’s a sign of lunacy right there — professors are nuts.
I know. Nowadays you can just say the name and you know it’s something stupid. This it’s misrepresenting Obama’s taxation plans, and there it gets a little unreal. Both Stein and Obama are chattering away as if an income of $250,000/year is just barely getting out of the middle class. What does that make me? I’m earning nowhere near that amount!
Here’s another funny name for you: Yomin Postelnik. This fellow has a long-winded proof of the existence of God that is little more than concatenated baloney. Be careful: if you criticize him, he’ll start sneaking around, editing your wikipedia page and threatening to sue you.
Europe isn’t free of superstition yet, that’s for sure. German Catholics have been carrying out exorcisms, with the blessing of the church.
Engel told DPA that church officials commisioned exorcisms – a ritual to drive out evil spirits – only after examination by pastoral counselors and psychiatrists had found the affected people to be free of mental illness. Paderborn officials received 18 serious requests since 1999 for exorcism from people who believed themselves to be possessed by the devil, he said.
So, what, exactly, are these mentally healthy people doing to warrant calling in the local witch doctor to cast a magic spell on them?
Over the years, I’ve developed a rough classification system for creationist screeds. One of the most common is the ‘deluded parrot’, in which the writer just repeats the same tiresome old canards we’ve heard a thousand times before: “If man evolved from monkeys, then why are there still monkeys?” is a common example. Then there are the ‘malevolent vermin’, which you don’t see much of on the web — because they usually write profanity-laced threats to my personal email, and are quick to gloat over my prospective tenure in hell. The ‘pious aunties’ aren’t quite so vicious, but they are shocked, shocked I tell you, to discover there are people who don’t worship Jesus with every breath, and they write letters that tend to end with the standard phrase, “I will pray for you.”
And then there are these precious few where you read them, and the text is incoherent and fractured, like the writer has stripped the gears of his brain and every once in a while some random thought goes spinning wildly, and everything is out of sync everywhere. These are people who make no sense. I was sent this classic example, a bizarre example where the author no doubt thinks he’s making a profound point, but there has to be some really crazy logic at work here.
Evolution explains designer
Evolution versus creation is a false dichotomy. Evolution as a viable mechanism causing the ascent of man also explains the existence of the creator.
If man could evolve to his present status physically, culturally and technologically within the age of this planet (approximately 4.5 billion years), then obviously the technology required to build species entirely of one’s own choosing could be developed within the age of the universe.
Considering the amount of time that has elapsed, which is endless, and the quantity of appropriate locations for life to evolve, also endless, a coincidence of impossible magnitude would be required for us to be the first intelligent designers.
The dichotomy is stubbornly maintained by those who fight for freedom from the morality of Christians. It is also stubbornly maintained by those who fight for freedom from the result of the immorality of the atheists, who believe they will have to answer to no one.
Uninterrupted evolution reaches a climax when an intelligent designer evolves. At that point the designer easily outpaces random natural selection because of the deliberate nature of intelligent design. The Christian has more confidence in evolution and technology than atheists have.
JIM GRIEB
Brutus, Mich.
So, can anyone translate this? Somehow, I think he’s promoting Christianity, but how he got there from his starting point isn’t clear. It’s probably something quantum.
Yisrayl Hawkins predicted that the world will end on 12 June. He’s in Texas, so I presume he was using Central Time…and since it is now the early hours of 13 June here, I guess we can safely say that we dodged a bullet. Whew. I was getting worried. Hawkins, after all, is an expert prophet, well practiced in predicting the end of the world — he has done it twice before.
Of course, if the world did end, I hope you left some messages for your loved ones, or sent me your power of attorney, or something.
Several people have written to me expressing their concern over the recent publication of this paper:
Evidence for Intelligent Design in Gastrointestinal Endocrinology: Identification of Novel Cholecystokinin/Gastrin-Like Peptides in the Nematode Caenorhabditis elegans.
Greeley GH Jr, Endocrinology. 2008 Jun;149(6):3184-6.
Oh, no! Have the creationists scored a coup and snuck propaganda into a legitimate science journal? Have no fear. This is a short review paper by an editor describing some work on cholecystokinin phylogeny. Some of you old-school physiology types may recall that a colloquial term for this class of hormones is “brain-gut peptides” — molecules that are expressed in both the gut and the central nervous system (and many other places). CCK is produced in the endocrine cells of the upper small intestine and in neurons in the brain, apparently prompting a weak joke linking intelligence and gastrointestinal hormones. It is not pro-ID at all. It even says, “the work of Janssen and
co-workers elegantly defends the hypothesis that the mammalian CCK/gastrin-CCK1R/2R signaling system is an ancient signaling system with counterparts throughout the evolutionary tree.”
Turn off the sirens and return to your homes. All is well. It’s just another false positive in the literature for Intelligent Design.
