Month: August 2009

Disaster Porn

Jason Thibeault2 Comments

Phil Plait, as usual, calls it like it is — the upcoming movie 2012, which was built to capitalize on credulous folks’ sincere magical-thinking-based beliefs that a Mayan clock “rollover” is equivalent to the end of the world, is nothing more than disaster porn. Worse, it’s like a disaster porn movie from the 70s, in the same vein as The Towering Inferno, only with a ginormous budget.

So some enterprising individuals remixed the trailer footage we have available to us and built it to look exactly as it would if it were indeed from the 1970s.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW2qxFkcLM0

Bloody genius.

Oh, and how do you figure this American take on a worldwide calamity will play itself out and still have a pseudo-hopeful ending? Why, with a space-ark, of course!

I admit I’ll probably watch this. I’ll be gritting my teeth through the whole thing, but the special effects look spectacular. Anyway, who doesn’t want to turn off their brains and watch a good porn movie now and then?

Disaster Porn
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Sunday Atheist Readings

Jason Thibeault, , , 2 Comments

Here’s a collection of interesting links found on the interweb tubes, most of which I’ve discovered by following the Twitter feed for #atheism. A bunch of them have come from elsewhere in the blogosphere, but there’s so damn many on my reading list that I figured I might as well just post them all and let you figure out their origins. Frankly I’ve already lost track.

There’s a ton of stuff to read here… grab some coffee (since atheists, and especially atheist goats, can’t live without coffee!), take your time, and enjoy!

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Sunday Atheist Readings

Some quick sciencey links

Jason Thibeault,

I’ve got way too many tabs open (again), so by way of cleaning some up, I’ll share these links with my beloved readers.

The Space Shuttle Endeavour successfully touched down on Friday from its mission to the ISS. Well done, folks! Especially Canadian flight engineer Julie Payette.

Scientists have bombarded aluminum with x-ray radiation, causing it turn transparent. That’s great news — now we can build whale tanks in our spaceships’ cargo bays.

The Huffington Post’s war on medical science rages on, and Orac corresponds from the front lines.

An older article on MSNBC from February shows seven examples of observed speciation with some very pretty animal pictures. Too bad they can’t be zoomed.

The new camera on Hubble managed to take a snap of Jupiter’s new comet scar, despite not being fully tested and calibrated yet. Can’t wait to see the fully-calibrated pictures.

More links coming in a separate post — a proper blog entry on Poe’s Law hopefully later tonight, and scheduled to go up tomorrow is some Sunday Atheist reading.

Some quick sciencey links

How Zdenny can avoid a permanent ban on this blog

Jason Thibeault, , 47 Comments

Read this, Zdenny, and read it very carefully.

This is my blog, and yet, I see nothing but YOU, everywhere, as the first post in my every thread. You comment three or four times in a row, answering none of the counterclaims, merely asserting again and again that your epistemological views are absolute truth and everyone else is deluded or wrong without a shred of evidence to back it up. You are the very definition of a troll. Your comments add nothing, they repeat themselves ad nauseum, and you are not an active participant, merely a foil to be kicked around repeatedly. You act as an infestation on my blog, jumping from one topic to the next, spewing venom and hatred in the guise of absolute love and impeccable morals, and yet, I see no evidence that you’re even a person, when your comments could as easily have been posted by a machine. You show a fundamental lack of critical thought and reasoning ability with those parts of your brain having apparently been surgically excised to make more room for Jesus. And today, you have tried my patience to the breaking point.

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How Zdenny can avoid a permanent ban on this blog