This is the only god I would worship, anyway

Since everyone is having fun with the good/evil quiz, let’s up the ante: what kind of god or goddess are you? The questions are very dada-esque, which is appropriate, since godhood doesn’t make any sense anyway.

Which God or Goddess are you like?

Your Result: You are your own God or Goddess
 

Sorry to say, i have no answer that fits you. You are your very own person, and you like to do things your own way. You have stumped me this time, but i will soon make a quiz that will have your answer, just you wait…
Budha
 
The Christian God
 
Jesus
 
Satan
 
Goddess Bast
 
Goddess Sekhemet
 
God Zeus
 
Which God or Goddess are you like?
Make Your Own Quiz

I’m rather disappointed that my Zeus score is so low. I could throw lightning bolts and impregnate lovely mortal women! Give me a chance!

(via Salad is Slaughter)

Morbid tales to engage the student body

Greg Laden puts an interesting twist on the question of how many hominin fossils we have: the question should be, “how did they die?”. We seem to have evolved from a species that was primarily a prey item on predators’ grocery list, to one that succumbed most often to disease, to one where mortality was driven by violence (and now, at least in our prosperous corner of the world, where senescence exacerbated by sloth and gluttony is the common cause of death.)

He’s right. The cool questions our students ought to be getting excited about have nothing to do with the nonsense the Discovery Institute wants them to discuss.

I’m going to have to scrutinize transfer student transcripts more carefully

Would you believe a Nebraska community college is offering a course in creationism … and awarding science credits for it? If any McCook Community College students tried to transfer to my university, I’d argue that any who took that course ought to get negative credits because we’d have to assign additional corrective work to scour the garbage out of their brain.

The course is offered as a physics class. I’m getting a bit fed up with the arrogance of some physicists and engineers, could you please police your own? I can’t imagine a biology faculty member trying to create a course that taught his or her own idiosyncratic vision of physics, one that defied the expertise of their physics colleagues, but some physicists and engineers seem more than willing to declare biology to be all wrong.

Women’s health? Or women’s suppression?

One of my favorite blogs around is The Well-Timed Period, and it’s unfortunate that it doesn’t get more attention: it’s greatest strength also militates against it achieving widespread popularity (which is more a flaw in how the internet and blogs work than with the blog itself). It’s so beautifully focused — it’s all reproductive health all the time.

For example, Ema mentions that Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) has been playing legalistic games to hold up the use of RU-486. He makes claims like this:

The reported risk of death associated with RU-486 is ten times greater the risk associated with surgical abortions. The death rate associated with surgical abortion is one in a million. By contrast, the reported risk of death associated with RU-486 is higher than one in 100,000.

If you’d been reading W-TP, you’d know that DeMint is playing fast and loose with the facts. The risk of death from an abortion before 8 weeks is about 1 in a million, but the death rate from a surgical abortion is about 1 in 140,000, and the risks are increasingly greater the later in the term the operation is carried out (there’s a reason doctors want the option to do what the press calls “partial birth abortions”—late term abortions are much more dangerous for the mother, and procedures that reduce the threat ought to be welcomed). You’d also know that he has left out an important and highly relevant statistic that puts it all in perspective: the risk of death from normal pregnancy and delivery is 1 in 8700. It’s a little weird to think that we put my beloved wife at risk of a 0.01% probability of dying 3 times just to spawn those ungrateful kids, but then again, her commute to work is more dangerous than that.

Statistics are strange things. Phrase them with the right twist, and you’ll be convinced that you ought to spend the rest of your life in your basement, surrounded by pillows; DeMint has twisted them outrageously to misrepresent his motives. If he were really interested in women’s health and safety, he’d be working to support universal health care, for instance — there are a lot of women who are poor and pregnant and at great risk, and responsible reproductive health ought to be among the first of our representatives’ concerns. The biggest lie in his press release is the implication that this is about women’s health; it’s not. It’s about limiting women’s choices and reproductive freedom.

It’s an honor, of sorts

She beat Brownback. She trounced Tancredo. She even clobbered Coburn. America’s Holiest Congressperson is Minnesota’s own Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN).

Bachmann, an Evangelical Lutheran, and self-professed “fool for Christ,” ran for Congress because God—and her husband—wanted her to. The representative publicly credited her campaign to her submission to her husband, who was channeling God’s wishes for her.

Prior to this higher calling, Bachmann earned a law degree from Coburn, an affiliate of Oral Roberts University, and helped found a charter school where she reportedly worked to prevent the Disney movie Aladdin from being shown, because it supposedly promoted paganism. Then, as a Minnesota state senator, Bachmann launched a crusade to outlaw gay marriage that turned into a highly publicized spectacle replete with restroom run-ins with angry lesbians and grainy photos suggesting that Bachmann was “spying” on a gay rights rally while crouching behind a bush.

Tireless in her pursuit, Bachmann has even gone so far as to be active in efforts to “rehabilitate” people who “suffer from ‘same-sex attractions,’ and once articulated the merits of being “hot for Jesus Christ.”

The magazine also has a list of our Ten Dumbest Congressperson — couldn’t they have saved some space by consolidating the two lists?

Apocryphal elements

If you’re trying to come up with names for an exotic element with amazing properties for that comic book, fantasy novel, or role-playing game you’re writing, here’s a list of apocryphal elements (there’s also a similar list with more details). These are all genuine false alarms from the world of science, guaranteed to have been generated from the twisted minds of actual chemists and physicists.

We really need elements called Ultimium and Extremium. Neokosmium isn’t bad, either.