How to pick up women, according to the Bible

Are you an atheist who’s had dating problems? No wonder! Didn’t you know all the dating advice you need is in the Bible? Why, here are some obvious suggestions for finding a woman that you probably never thought of because of your blaspheming ways:

2) “Lay hold on” a virgin who is not betrothed to another man, and have sex with her, but afterwards pay her father a sum of money. Then she’s yours. (Deut. 22:28-29)

4) Find a man with seven daughters, and impress him by watering his flock.–Moses (Ex. 2:16-21)

5) Purchase a piece of property, and get a woman as part of the deal.–Boaz (Ruth 4:5-10)

6) Go to a party and hide. When the women come out to dance, grab one and carry her off to be your wife.–Benjaminites (Judges 21:19-25)

You can read the rest of these woman-finding tips here. As for finding a man… sorry, the Bible doesn’t give many more tips other than “sit and wait until a man buys/rapes you.” Don’t we have it easy, ladies?!

This is post 10 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

The atheist blogger drinking game

I was trying to come up with various new ways that people could pledge for Blogathon. Money based on word count or insightful posts is nice, but not particularly amusing. If Blogathon is to be truly entertaining, I think it should be participatory. That’s why I’m suggesting a drinking game!

…I just graduated from college, deal with it.

I’ll get us started. Please suggest new rules in the comments. They can be specific to a certain blog (House rules!) or apply to blogs in general. I’ll give alcoholic quantities here, but feel free to exchange them for monetary amounts if you wish to use them to donate to Blogathon.

The Atheist Blogger Drinking Game

Take a drink whenever…
…the blogger uses a synonym for atheist (“godless,” “heathen,” “infidel”)
…the blogger links to another atheist blog
…there’s a joke about eating babies (use caution when reading Friendly Atheist)
…a troll appears in the comments
…a famous atheist is name-dropped

Finish your drink whenever…
…there’s a story that praises religious people for doing something awesome (that isn’t sarcastic)
…the blogger accidentally links to a Poe

Finish everything in the house whenever…
…the blogger converts to a religion other than Pastafarianism

10am CST may be a bit early to start, but hey, it’s Happy Hour somewhere, right?

…And of course I’m not trying to get people inebriated to make them more likely to donate money. Pssshhhh, what do you think I am, some godless heathen?

This is post 6 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Are you a Harry Potter fan? And a skeptic? I command you to go bookmark this fanfiction and read it immediately (well, immediately after blogathon is over). It’s called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. It’s set in an alternate universe where Harry’s adoptive father is an Oxford professor, and thus Harry is extremely well trained as a skeptical thinker.

I know what you’re thinking. “Come on, fanfiction, Jen? Didn’t you graduate middle school years ago?” But trust me – if you’re one of those people who liked to over analyze the Harry Potter universe, you have to read this fic. I’ve spent many geeky hours pondering the possible genetic inheritance pattern of magical ability. Or how horrible the English and critical thinking skills of wizards and witches must be if they stopped their traditional education at age 11. If you haven’t thought these things, you will now. For example, here’s a snippet of Harry pondering about the economy of the Wizarding World:

So not only is the wizarding economy almost completely decoupled from the Muggle economy, no one here has ever heard of arbitrage. The larger Muggle economy had a fluctuating trading range of gold to silver, so every time the Muggle gold-to-silver ratio got more than 5% away from the weight of seventeen Sickles to one Galleon, either gold or silver should have drained from the wizarding economy until it became impossible to maintain the exchange rate. Bring in a ton of silver, change to Sickles (and pay 5%), change the Sickles for Galleons, take the gold to the Muggle world, exchange it for more silver than you started with, and repeat.

Wasn’t the Muggle gold to silver ratio somewhere around fifty to one? Harry didn’t think it was seventeen, anyway. And it looked like the silver coins were actually smaller than the gold coins.

Then again, Harry was standing in a bank that literally stored your money in vaults full of gold coins guarded by dragons, where you had to go in and take out coins out of your vault whenever you wanted to spend money. The finer points of arbitraging away market inefficiencies might well be lost on them. He’d been tempted to make some sort of snide remark about the crudity of their financial system…

But the sad thing is, their way is probably better.

On the other hand, one competent hedge fundie could probably own the whole wizarding world within a week. Harry filed away this notion in case he ever ran out of money, or had a week free.

Not only is it hilarious, but it’s also full of such good information that it works as a primer to skeptical thinking. Read until Chapter 5 to give it a chance, and if you don’t like it by 10, give up. It’s a quick read, but dangerously addictive.

Thanks to Jesse Galef for showing me this right before Blogathon, thus ruining many hours of productivity for me.

This is post3 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

I should not be allowed to drive bloggers

I’m back from the Secular Student Alliance conference! I apologize again for the dearth of blog posts. I was itching to blog the whole time, but I didn’t have the time or the internet access. Lucky for you that in just a couple days, I’ll be pooping out 49 blog posts in a single day! Hopefully that will more than make up for my absence. But since I made the mistake of checking my email before flopping into bed, here’s one funny story you get from the trip.

I have realized that I should not drive bloggers.

Not because I hate bloggers or I’m a horrible driver or something. God just hates atheist bloggers in transit, apparently. When I had to pick up PZ from the airport, his flight arrived horribly late and I felt like I was going to kill both of us speeding off to our event. When I had to drive Greta Christina to Chicago, it was during a nasty blizzard, where we passed many cars in ditches.

And now I had a driving adventure with Hemant.

Hemant was nice enough to pick up me and my friend Mark on his way to Columbus, OH since we’re fairly close to him. Half way into the six hour drive we decided to switch so he could nap as a passenger, instead of behind the wheel. He pulls over and we trade places.

Me: Man, your side of the car is really hot.
Hemant: Huh, I was just going to say the same thing about your side.

A couple minutes go by and we realize the air conditioning magically broke right when we pulled over. Not the end of the world, but definitely unpleasant since it was in the 90s and humid. Thankfully we were all sweating like crazy, so I didn’t have to worry about my individual stinkiness.

I drive for a bit more. Hemant’s already sleeping.

Mark: Do you smell smoke?
Me: …Yeah.

In retrospect this should have been a red flag, but it smelled so similar to cigarettes we thought we were just driving by a particularly stinky area. Eventually it goes away, and I figure I’ll start to be worried if I see flames shoot out from under the hood.

We’re all dying from the heat, but the zoo is in sight. We’re just stuck waiting to turn at the light, and then we’re in the parking lot. Except there’s just one problem.

Me: Um, Hemant, nothing happens when I press the gas pedal.
Everyone: [insert explitives of your choice here]

Eventually after much restarting, the car decides to live again. I make it to the parking lot, trying not to ever come to a full stop. This was especially interesting when I needed to pay for parking and I’m trying to exchange money without coming to a full stop. We decide to just park the car, go to the zoo with the rest of the group, and deal with it later.

Dealing with it later = Realizing the car doesn’t start at all.

Thankfully my friend Mike was there with his own car and called AAA for us. So we spent the rest of the afternoon following a tow truck and scheming how we could possibly get back to Chicago without Hemant’s car. Eventually we found out his car could be fixed, and we were able to get back to Chicagoland in one piece.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about Hemant’s wallet.

I’m starting to think this is compelling evidence for the existence of a God who hates atheist bloggers – not enough to strike them down, but just enough to annoy them with horrible driving experiences. Hopefully I never have to drive Richard Dawkins around – I can’t imagine what major catastrophe would happen then.

lol modern art

Yesterday I went to the Art Institute of Chicago with my parents, aunt, and uncle. I love the Art Institute. Between many art class field trips and my mom being an art teacher, I’ve been there so many times that I no longer need a map to navigate it. Definitely in the double digits. But they had built a whole new modern art wing since the last time I visited, so I was excited to check that out.

Oh boy.

Now, I probably have more of an appreciation for modern art than your average person. Up until my senior year of high school, I thought I was going to be an artist, not a scientist. I’ve taken many advanced classes, won art awards, yadda yadda. There is plenty of modern art I really enjoy, including some crazy abstract/weird/symbolic stuff.

But man, I just don’t get some modern art. Seriously, what the hell?That is an old oversized car mat someone bent and pinned. And it is now hanging in the Art Institute of Chicago. WTF. And this wasn’t the weirdest stuff. There was a black canvas, a pile of rocks, a painting of a date, a video of an electric guitar being drug through grass…

I’m sorry, but just because you were the first person to think to do something doesn’t make it good art. Nor does writing up some flowery bullshit post-hoc explanation of what deep symbolism your piece has. Gah, artist pet peeve.

Some of the stuff there looked comparable or even worse than stuff I did as a toddler. For example, The First Part of the Return from Parnassus by Cy Twombly:

“Cy Twombly’s famously inimitable art is tensely balanced between expressively abstract and suggestively pictorial impulses. His work originated under the auspices of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s and early 1950s and advanced uniquely along lines afforded by its freedoms. Twombly’s entire enterprise is characterized by unruly marks—stammering, energetic, and raw—that merge drawing, painting, writing, and symbolic glyphs. Scrawled, overwritten, erased, or willfully misspelled, words cite people, places, events, and stories nominally derived from Greco-Roman culture and history, especially literature, poetry, and myth.”

…And here’s the watercolor hanging in my bathroom that I did at age 3:Let’s have a contest.

Write the best summary you can of my piece that would make it worthy of an art museum. “Best” can either be most humorous, most deep, most similar to the BS descriptions we’re used to hearing. This is art, I’m not going to make strict rules!

The one I like the most will get a quick sketch by me of something of their choice. I’ll post my favorites in a couple of days.

The rumors aren’t true!

Of course I’m not replacing PZ at ScienceBlogs! It’s like the person writing this article completely fabricated the whole thing. Journalism today, sheesh.

I mean, just think of the logistics. What would I post photos of every Friday, types of kangaroo rats? An army of adorable rodents doesn’t have the same power as an army of cephalopods. And would I have to grow a beard? See, it just doesn’t make sense.

Well, except for the last paragraph. That’s totally true.