I just discovered that someone found my site by searching the Network for the phrase “positive thoughts more powerful than negative.”
Nope.
Sorry, they aren’t.
But I do have a blueberry bread recipe.
Continue reading Positive Thoughts
Category Archives: Wobosphere fun
Where am I in the Inferno?
The Dante’s Inferno Test has banished you to the Sixth Level of Hell – The City of Dis!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:
| Level | Score |
|---|---|
| Purgatory (Repenting Believers) | Very Low |
| Level 1 – Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers) | High |
| Level 2 (Lustful) | Moderate |
| Level 3 (Gluttonous) | Moderate |
| Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious) | Low |
| Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy) | Low |
| Level 6 – The City of Dis (Heretics) | Very High |
| Level 7 (Violent) | Very High |
| Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers) | High |
| Level 9 – Cocytus (Treacherous) | Low |
Take the Dante Inferno Hell Test
Funny, I didn’t think I was that violent (and I took the non-violent option on the only questions I can think are relevant). I guess this means I won’t be joining Dave Bacon in Limbo. Lucky schmuck — he doesn’t even have to deal with the unbaptized infants anymore.
At least I won’t have to spend eternity in the tenth circle, Corpadverticus.
Teh Edj of Evilushun
Credit and blame go to Robster, FCD.
For extensive coverage on Michael Behe’s new book, The Edge of Evolution, see this link repository.
Square One on Infinity
While you’re reading the Ninth Carnival of Mathematics, you’ll need the appropriate background music. It’s the Jets! (Woo-ooo-ooo-ooo Oo-ooh!)
Oh, sweet lady Isis, I’m dating myself in too many ways:
It’s actually. . . kind of catchy. In a very early-Nineties way.
Other moderately strange math videos can be found here.
All ur hogs R belong 2 us
(Because the memes of yesteryear are ever so sweet, even ‘pon the jaded palates of today.)
I was distressed to see Cecilia fall for the giant hog story. The pictures, supposedly of an 11-year-old boy posing with the carcass of a giant pig he killed near Delta, Alabama, are almost certainly fakes. They bear all the earmarks of forced perspective illusions, and in some cases suggest Photoshop trickery as well.
Why can’t the Boston Globe, Yahoo News or CNN look at the lousy focus and say the pictures are clumsy forgeries? Are news organizations now obligated to run uncritical coverage of every tall tale that gets a little attention? (I once caught a fish this big. . .) Facts matter, people!
I am quite frustrated at my inability to find words spiteful enough to capture the distaste I feel for this bunkum. Fortunately, the idioms of the Internet are there to rescue me:
Continue reading All ur hogs R belong 2 us
More on Lolcode
Language Log has now picked up on lolcode. Mark Liberman writes,
So far, no one seems to have taken up the challenge to create an object-oriented lolcode (“lolcode++”?) or a functional lolcode (“lolcaml”?), but I’m not certain of my ability to track memetic evolution as we approach the lolsingularity.
I have little to add to this, except that I just realized what a stack-based lolcode should be called:
Continue reading More on Lolcode
Whoa
A while back, I installed the wp-slimstat plugin to track the statistics of who’s visiting Science After Sunclipse. It offers some interesting forms of entertainment. For example, I now understand why the denizens of the Blagnet occasionally post the search strings which lead people to their sites. “louann brizendine bio” surprised me, but it was a pleasant surprise, since I was writing about the bad science in her book The Female Brain. Anytime a debunking is visible, I’m happy. (I’m a little boggled that my post appeared on the first page of the Google hit parade, even beating out Language Log. This might be a carnival effect.)
My disgruntled rant about Michael Behe’s The Edge of Evolution (it’s in the bookstores now) is currently #11 for “michael behe evolution edge“. First page would be nice. . . . but since I lead the pack for “science response to edge of evolution“, I’m pretty satisfied.
If you’re looking for a treatment of Behe’s work which is slightly less snarky than my own rant, see TalkOrigins.org’s illuminating discussion of Irreducible Complexity and Michael Behe. The documents linked therein demonstrate beyond a doubt that the concepts he has used so far are plagued with wrongness, and nothing I’ve seen so far indicates that The Edge of Evolution has anything more to offer. (I picked it up in the bookstore last weekend, but I didn’t read every page. I don’t need to eat the whole egg to know that it’s rotten. If people are absolutely desperate, and if the folks at ScienceBlogs and the Panda’s Thumb don’t beat me to it, I’ll try to avoid gagging long enough to write a review. But really, I’ve got good books and real science to talk about, too!)
Somebody was curious about “PROCESS OF TRANSLATION OF CARTOONS MOVIES“, and moreover they were searching from the Ukraine. (I said “cartoon” here and “process of translation” here.) The one which truly warms my blackened, Bose-Einstein-condensated heart is, however, the following:
Continue reading Whoa
LOL-foo
Creation “Science” “Museum”
Well, yet another monument to human stupidity has opened its doors to the paying public. It reminds me of the Mencken character in Inherit the Wind: “Darwin was wrong — man is still an ape, and his creed is still a totem pole.”
Ken Ham’s Creation Museum has provoked the reality-based community to put fingers to keys. PZ Myers has collected their writings, providing a long, long list of links and excerpts. The National Center for Science Education has also collected reactions to Ken Ham’s museum.
Funnily enough, I just picked up a paperback copy of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (2001), from a friend who’s jettisoning her fiction before moving to California, sunny land of graduate schools. In this novel, Gaiman presents his own theory of American roadside attractions:
Continue reading Creation “Science” “Museum”
LOLCreationists
The most recent post at Hoofnagle and Hoofnagle’s Denialism Blag is quite, ahem, interesting.
Continue reading LOLCreationists
Sometimes, My Culture Makes Me Happy
The first Google hit for the word “preacher” is the Wikipedia article on the comic book series about the hick-town Texan preacher who fuses with the nigh-omnipotent bastard offspring of an angel and a demon and then goes on a quest with his gun-toting girlfriend and a hard-drinking Irish vampire in order to hold God accountable for abandoning the world.
Dear Messrs. Ellis, Ennis and Gaiman: can we please do the same with God? (You’re almost there with Lucifer.)
I was actually pointed to Preacher via two sources: a drunk bloke in an Irish bar full of expatriates in Lyon, and the webcomic Unshelved. Funny how the world works, ain’t it?
Now, off to get myself some cookies and finish reading Hector Avalos’s Fighting Words.
Lolquarks
From Snakes on a Blog. Other possibilities naturally suggest themselves: “I has a spin” (or “scalar cat can has no spin!”). If anyone can make a picture appropriate for the caption “SO(3) Cat can has double covur,” I’ll award you the first-ever Sunclipse Group Theory Popularization Medal.
For earlier entries in this genre, see Science-Themed Lolcats.
Blagnet vs. Lit-Crit
The Columbia Journalism Review‘s daily section offers this, ahem, interesting perspective on the difference between blag-writing and book reviewing. It comes from Richard Schickel, who reviews movies for Time and occasionally books for the LA Times.
Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author’s (or filmmaker’s or painter’s) entire body of work, among other qualities.
Mm-hmm. Refresh my memory: is this called “begging the question” or “assuming the answer”? Why can’t a middle-aged, pony-tailed white male sitting in his boxer shorts and writing for free have the same historical knowledge as a middle-aged, tweed-jacketed professor of TwenCen Literature? The expertise of the latter comes from reading books — primary, secondary and n-ary sources — and discussing with other people both more and less knowledgeable than he. What in blazes requires this to happen within the Sacred Halls of Academia and nowhere else? (One fun thing about the Wobosphere is that academic politics is turned inside-out, and the spats which once occurred in slow motion across books and journals can now happen in real time for all to see.)
Quality is a multi-dimensional thing, and all types of writing are distributed widely along these many axes. There are good books with bad parts, bad books with interesting pages, dumb books by smart people — and the same holds true for blogs and pages within Wikipedia. Live with it. (Another fun thing about the Wobosphere is that examples of all these genera can be found and compared.)
I swear. Some people make a hat of ivy and wear it like a crown of thorns.
If Schickel were a weaver of theological arguments rather than a book critic, he’d be offering us a Courtier’s Reply.
Sunday Inspirational Anecdote
Monado just linked to my post on science-themed lolcats, so I popped over there and checked out the recent posts, among which I found a wonderful little story about a five-year-old who saved her mother’s life. It comes from “Firegirl,” an emergency medical technician, and is reprinted at Science Notes with her permission.
A 5-year old little girl called 911 to come help her mother. When we got on scene, firefighers were already there and the little girl came bouncing out to greet us with a cheery, “HI! My mommy fell down in the kitchen!” She didn’t seem concerned, really, which is a nice change from the kids who cry and worry. In fact, she turned out to be incredibly helpful, beyond the initial 911 call. She lead my partner and I into the kitchen where “Mommy” had apparently been fixing a pizza for her children (the girl and her six year old brother) when she collapsed. Mom was breathing fine but she kept lapsing in and out of consciousness and couldn’t really give us much information on what was going on.
I was pulling on a pair of gloves and the little girl said, “My mommy has some of those! See!” and pointed to a box of non-latex gloves sitting on a sideboard. Good thing she pointed those out! We all pulled off our latex gloves and replaced them with the ones on the sideboard. (We left her a fresh box out of our ambo as well.) When the girl asked why we did that I explained that we needed to wear “Mommy’s special gloves” because our gloves could make her sick. She nodded and said, “’cause she’s ‘lergic, right?” I was impressed and said yes, that was why. […]
Read the rest (tabbed browsing is your friend!).
I could draw a whole bunch of obvious morals about the importance of factual knowledge, the value of an informed citizenry, the incredible ability of children to learn and so forth, but I think the story speaks pretty well for itself.
Friday Intellectual Property Infringement
It’s a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon from an Italian animation student! Watch before it goes away:
This might be a good time to mention the Firefox VideoDownloader plugin and the fact that mplayer can play FLV files.
Tip o’ the G.R.O.S.S. chapeau to Warren Ellis.
Science-Themed Lolcats (Updated!)
All right, I’ve resisted long enough. Sean Carroll has now officially asked if Cosmic Variance should host a physics-themed lolcat contest. My answer:
You’re going to regret this.
Continue reading Science-Themed Lolcats (Updated!)