Late night weird story dump

Aaargh, grading. I’ve been ripping through student papers and exams all afternoon and evening, so I’m reduced to flinging out quick impressions of stuff people have sent me lately. I’m sure you can find something in this collection to discuss.

  • This is a novel solution to the energy problem…oh, wait. Did I say “novel”? I meant stupid. It’s a group praying at the gas pump for lower prices.

    “Lord, come down in a mighty way and strengthen us so that we can bring down these high gas prices,” Twyman said to a chorus of “amens”.

    “Prayer is the answer to every problem in life… We call on God to intervene in the lives of the selfish, greedy people who are keeping these prices high,” Twyman said on the gas station forecourt in a neighborhood of Washington that, like many of its residents, has seen better days.”Lord, the prices at this pump have gone up since last week. We know that you are able, that you have all the power in the world,” he prayed, before former beauty queen Rashida Jolley led the group in a modified version of the spiritual, “We Shall Overcome”.”We’ll have lower gas prices, we’ll have lower gas prices…” they sang.

  • Here’s a video of an 18-month old kid “preaching”, with his dumb-as-dirt parents egging him on. Funny thing; the kid is howling gibberish, but he’s got the mannerisms of a pulpit-pounding preacher down cold, and he makes more sense than most Christians.

  • A woman throws a tantrum because the new-found Christianity of her husband means…no sex. It’s all hilarious until someone throws a dog.

  • This is a bit chilling: Active Duty Missionary. It’s a program to recruit soldiers to proselytize, in between shooting people.

  • Jeff Dorchin doesn’t like Ben Stein.

    I mean, the historical ignorance he displays, his dismissal of centuries of European anti-Semitism, his blindness to the role of religion in genocides of peoples long before Darwin was even a twinkle in a lucky zygote’s chromosomes – these all betray the numbskullery of the notion of blaming the Holocaust on Darwin. But it’s the hypocrisy of Ben Stein, like that of his hero Nixon calling the murdered students at Kent State “thugs,” that makes the whole thing so breathtaking, heartbreaking and mind-blowing.

    I think I like Jeff Dorchin.

  • Berlinski and Derbyshire duke it out. Two things really annoy me: 1) Fans of Expelled who berate critics who haven’t seen the movie. I’m sorry, but you lost the privilege to complain when I got thrown out of the theater (and I still haven’t seen the stupid thing). 2) Liars who defend the movie by claiming to read my mind, and getting it all wrong. Berlinski claims I regret my appearance; this is not true. I’m happy to state my opinions, even in a bad flop of a movie. He also claims I “sit before the camera in solemn stupefaction” — which is very peculiar. I have seen the clip where I’m talking, and no stupefaction is evident, nor was it felt at the time of the interview.

    I don’t think a guy whose interview was performed while lying on his back with his knees waving in the camera foreground gets to accuse others of looking stupid on film, I’m afraid.

Time for some sleep. Then I plunge back into the grading pile tomorrow.

Squish

That’s the sound you should hear when Joe Felsenstein takes on an idiotic claim by Sal Cordova. Would you believe that Cordova claims that Kimura and Ohta’s classic 1971 paper “shatters the modern synthesis”? That’s what he claims, on the basis of his poor understanding of the mathematics of population genetics, which is ridiculous on the face of it. So it’s very satisfying to see one of the big guns of population genetics take him down with one brief explanation: contrary to Cordova, the principle he’s describing confirms the effectiveness of natural selection.

Just to help everyone follow along, here’s the simple explanation. As Kimura and Ohta explained, most mutations, even advantageous ones, do not go to fixation in a population, and are lost. Slimy Sal just reports only that much, and declares the end of evolution, to huzzahs from his equally ignorant cronies. What he ignores, and what Felsenstein explains, is that 1) the frequency of fixation of advantageous alleles will be much, much greater than for neutral or deleterious alleles, and 2) that there are many mutations being generated — so natural selection is an effective filter.

It’s a kind of mathematical quote mine, where Cordova only tells a tiny part of the story and leaves out the important bit that destroys his thesis.

I can’t believe in Florida anymore

OK, Florida, this has gone far enough. You’ve been dallying with creationism, and I’ve read enough Hiaasen novels (who knew those were non-fiction?) to see that there are many screws loose down there, but this is getting ridiculous. Look at this reason for firing a teacher.

Substitute teacher Jim Piculas does a 30-second magic trick where a toothpick disappears then reappears.

But after performing it in front of a classroom at Rushe Middle School in Land ‘O Lakes, Piculas said his job did a disappearing act of its own.

“I get a call the middle of the day from head of supervisor of substitute teachers. He says, ‘Jim, we have a huge issue, you can’t take any more assignments you need to come in right away,'” he said.

When Piculas went in,he learned his little magic trick cast a spell and went much farther than he’d hoped.

“I said, ‘Well Pat, can you explain this to me?’ ‘You’ve been accused of wizardry,’ [he said]. Wizardry?” he asked.

I’m calling Poe’s Law on the whole state of Florida. That place is entirely made up, isn’t it? I’ve been to Miami several times, but now I’m beginning to suspect that it’s actually a giant theme park set up on one of the Caribbean islands. It’s not really there.

I should have been clued in by the amusingly penile shape of the state drooping off our southern shores. That’s made-up, isn’t it? Right from the geography, it’s got to be one big joke a bunch of 16th century Spaniards were pulling on the whole rest of the world.

Well, the joke is over. It’s finally gone too far. No one could possibly be as loony as these fictitious (I’m sure) school administrators. Can we get around to correcting the maps and pulling those phony senators and representatives out of the federal government now?

Nice photo

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“The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life” (‘My New Order’, Adolf Hitler, Proclamation of the German Nation at Berlin, February 1, 1933)

Funny…those words could be taken straight from just about any American religious right web site in 2008, and they’d fit right in.

Last week of classes!

We are entering into the final week of classes here at UMM, when all of the administrative work for me reaches a horrible, cataclysmic crescendo with piles of exams and papers pouring in starting today. This would be a very poor time for a creationist spammer to try to cause trouble, because I’m going to be very pissy for a while, and blood might be spilled.

One cheery bit of news that means I might not be quite as vicious as I would otherwise: I’ve been invited to take a cruise to the Galapagos! Of course I’m going. It will be a fine tonic before I start next year’s classes. And there are actually three cabins still available on the trip, so if you want to join us in an educational jaunt, and if you have a large bucket of disposable cash, you can come with us!

Do you want to play a game?

Yeesh — I don’t think this game is going to take the world by storm. It’s calledCrevoScope, and it’s a “text-based massively multiplayer game”, which somehow is supposed to simulate the evolution-creationism debate, without actually requiring players to learn or know anything. It’s got some weird mechanics which I haven’t puzzled out in any detail at all, but apparently you can acquire “knowledge” by clicking on a “library” link — you don’t actually learn anything, a number for your character goes up — and then you get to go “debate” someone, and somehow the various scores help determine whether you “win” or not. It doesn’t make much sense to me, and I don’t think I’m motivated to put any time into it.

Especially since I took a look at the level of the discussion going on. Would you believe this is an argument someone made in all seriousness to disprove evolution?

Fact 1: History and Science has proven that some native African tribes eat monkeys as a prime source of food. There is bone evidence and filmed and video prof as well. Along with the bones of monkeys are human remains. So the body that science says is prof of evolution is just bones of monkeys that some tribe eat along side there bones.

Fact 2: Evolution teaches all life on earth came from one source. The primordial soup they call it if thats true would we not have DNA of all life on earth even if its a small percentage of it.

Fact 3: Darwin was a man that gave birth to this evolution theory. Were many people in the science community say is fact. Darwin himself have written a science manuscript stating that evolution is not possible just before his death.

I’m always astounded that every time I meet a creationist and hear their argument, they always manage to sink even lower than anything I’d previously heard. That sounds like a logical impossibility, unless perhaps creationist brains are in a universal state of implosion.

An Iron Man open thread

By now, many of you have probably seen the latest super-hero summer blockbuster, so the time is right for opening up a discussion.

I thought it was excellent and loads of fun, although the irony did not escape me that it was about a conscienceless weapons merchant who has an epiphany about the tragic consequences of his industry, and decides to end his contribution to the bloodshed…so he goes home to build a new, super-powerful personal weapons system that allows him to beat up bad guys. Whatever you do, don’t think deeply about this movie! It’s just some good acting, excellent special effects, and a fast-paced series of events wrapped around an unbelievable fantasy premise.

Anyway, beware: I’m not saying anything that isn’t well-known here, but our amoral godless commenters might reveal a few spoilers.