Maybe we should sic Edward Tufte on ’em—Feministing found some amazing posters that purport to explain everything with the power of overwrought metaphor and cluttered, confusing cartoons. It just draws your eye in with the awesomeness of its arbitrariness.
So contraception is the source of single-parent families and infanticide? The stalk of divorce leads to the flower of abortion? The leaves of adultery and pre-marital sex use sunlight and carbon dioxide to make the sugar of sexual chaos that is stored in the root of coitus interruptus? Watch out, kids, if you blow on the puffball of euthansia, you’ll spread the seeds of a thousand new sex weeds! Now go in the house and wash the lust and hedonism off your hands.
It just doesn’t make sense.
I realized, though, that anybody can slap random labels on a random diagram to send meaningless messages out. Even me. So here you go, a fun and informative diagram that will help you understand all kinds of curious relationships in the world around you.
Please, use this information wisely and be sure to let it guide your life…to a brighter, healthier future, rich with the well-earned fruits of ying tong iddle I po.
But what if I LIKE promoters, enhancers, and transcription factors?
Yeah? And do you like SATAN, too?
It was very savvy of you to spot the threat to Our Way Of Life from the poutine-eaters. They, you know, speak French! And right here in North America where only speaking Amurrican should be allowed! How is this possible? As shown in the digram the UN clearly must be involved somehow in this plot…
I like how close “Squid” is to “Pornography”. Hentae non summus?
I think you’re missing the the numerous miRNA mechanisms regulating Satanic expression. And don’t forget the Cthulistic splice variants!
Is it just me, or are the leaves of pre-marital sex and adultery leading to…well, nothing? So those are OK, then?
Hmmm. Dandelions don’t need fertilisation to reproduce. I’m not really sure what this means, but I’m sure there’s something amusing in there.
Bob
P.S. Ying tong iddle I po? I never realised you were that cultured. Did Wilkins sub
convert you?Hey, I was a Goon fan in my teens, long before I heard of Wilkins.
Next, I suppose, you’ll be walking backwards for Cephalopodmas…
There’s some weird anti-dandelion stuff going on in wingerland. Wasn’t that long ago that someone published a kid’s book comparing Hispanics to dandelions and enthusing over the idea of sterilizing them from the Holy Front Lawn of Purity and Whiteness…
I’m reminded of the time I asked a cigarette vendor for directions to a bus station in Spain. She gave long and complicated directions in rapid-fire Spanish which I could follow but had trouble keeping straight and then drew a diagram with a point and two lines joined at a 45 degree angle. As far as I could tell the map had no relationship to her verbal directions but I took it. Later I wrote “Mi Plan de Vida” on the top and kept it as a guide to all my future decisions in life.
Next, I suppose, you’ll be walking backwards for Cephalopodmas…
“sex weeds”… I’m not sure what that is, but I definitely want some!
OEJ
I’m reminded of the time I asked a cigarette vendor for directions to a bus station in Spain. She gave long and complicated directions in rapid-fire Spanish which I could follow but had trouble keeping straight and then drew a diagram with a point and two lines joined at a 45 degree angle. As far as I could tell the map had no relationship to her verbal directions but I took it. Later I wrote “Mi Plan de Vida” on the top and kept it as a guide to all my future decisions in life.
Sorry! Commenting hiccups.
I wonder what my IT administrator is going to say when he finds dandy_sex.jpg in my logs.
I think there’s a few more blobs you can still name though – perhaps “creationism” and “Michael Behe” should be in there somewhere.
How long will it take before PZ’s version gets copied onto some wingnut website and promoted as real?
The votes are in on premarital sex. Apparently it wins by about 95%.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/12/19/premarital.sex.ap/index.html
PZ,
your diagram is great, but you left off “MUSTARD”. Until this is rectified, it won’t be taken seriously.
As for dandelions, the metaphor of Teh Sex as a dandelion is about right, because the odds of being able to eradicate either of them is essentially zero. Better to find a way to get along with them peacefully.
Now pardon me while I put on a condom and pick some salid greens.
You’ve got a problem in the diagram. I was an atheist before I worked for Greenpeace. It goes Atheism, Greenpeace, Vegetarianism, Marxism.
s/salid/salad/ grr.
On that “One More Soul” site:
“Eric Scheidler’s testimony is that of a man who reluctantly agreed to stop using contraception and to try Natural Family Planning in his marriage.”
Then there’s a picture of him with his seven kids. Natural family planning = planning to overpopulate the world.
http://www.omsoul.com/MeetEricScheidler.php
Interesting that you have conflated squid with pornography.
I knew it. I just knew it…
I’m pretty sure I conflated squid with RNA Polymerase…which is even worse.
Uh-oh. Looks like I’m well on my way to atheism, which is an odd thing for an atheist like me to admit. I’ve been having lots of sushi and soy lately and next week I’m going to Montreal – the first place I ever had poutine.
The randomly-generated Gould quote in the left margin was, once again, beautifully apropos:
But wait… I thought contraceptives were the root of the evil dandelion?
And my kid’s favorite thing to do is puff dandelion at full-blown dandelions. Should I send him to Jesus Camp to rid him of his obvious latent atheistic tendencies?
OK… so because ‘conflate’ seems to be the word du jour of late, and because I didn’t know its definition, I looked it up in OED and now I understand why it is used with such abandon here:
from L. conflare, con- ‘together’ + flare ‘to blow’.
I guess this would certainly be classified somewhere in the dandelion diagram, as opposed to the rose diagram.
Brilliant! Do you have a high resolution version of this picture? I’d like to hang it up on the door to my office… (with appropriate credit of course)
Puff dandelion = euthanasia. Send him to Jesus Camp before he starts smothering old people with pillows.
please, please, please make a more hi-res version available so that I can put it into one of my talks (will full and proper acredidation, of course).
Ivan
Well, one could argue that poutine is irreducibly complex.
On the other hand, evolutionarily speaking, it only takes a few point mutations to get from “poutine” to “poontang”. So take your pick.
(I realize this makes no sense. I’m having a bad day.)
Dandelions usually self-fertilize…
Dandelions usually self-fertilize…
So, given that these people have been scientifically proven to lack an irony bone, exactly how long do you think it’s going to take for your diagram to show up on some fundie site?
Feministing has a link to a pdf of the original.
Puff Dandelion? Is he one o’ them rappers?
I’m turned on by transcription factors…..but I’m repressed by microRNAs!!!
Oh, wait…or do you mean my diagram? Sorry, that’s all I’ve got — it was a quickie.
If there’s much demand I could fairly easily generate another copy with 2 or 3 times the resolution.
Wait a minute? Vaccination leads to atheism? I don’t think so; most of the vaccinated in this country are Christians.
Squid on the other hand, or maybe squid combined with vaccination….
I always suspected that Marxism had a direct effect on the Screen Actors Guild. That’s Hollywood and tht’s pure EVIL!!!
Obviously, the whole complex has to be activated by exposure to weird food products before the DEMOCRAT PARTY can use the public school’s promotion of vaccination to produce soulless, godless, amoral kiddies.
Learn to read a simple diagram, will ya?
Hmm,
It’s interesting what was left out of the dandelion.
Apparently homosexuality is completely unrelated to ‘Sexual Chaos’?
Maybe it’s a different weed altogether, and dandelions can only be used to represent hetrosexual relationships which don’t meet the prejudices of the posters creator. And where are the wife-beaters or child molesters?
Maybe they are on the begonia of proper relationships.
Lesbianism is, of course, properly represented with a big fat Georgia O’Keefe orchid. Mmmmm, labial.
RedMolly wrote, “Lesbianism is, of course, properly represented with a big fat Georgia O’Keefe orchid. Mmmmm, labial.”
Makes you wonder why Nero Wolfe loved them so much. ;)
Ivan FULL SIZED IMAGE?–the root page with a direct link is http://www.omsoul.com, someone had already pasted a link on family unplanning that follows from this root too.
My girlfriend emailed Answers in Genesis and they told her to drop out of college for not being a Christian. They also found her school mailing address and sent her a book full of illustrations like these, including one of a homosexual abortion tree.
That certainly looks like a dandelion. What a pretty flower, and what a pretty metaphor! Or is it an allegory? Or perhaps as Dr Myers implies we’re to interpret it literally. Dandelions as the Word of God on chaotic sex? Dandelions as the Word of God for getting up in the middle of the night for a piss we already know, but chaotic sex, who would have thought it?
[Here’s something for you organic gardeners. This isn’t an allegory. For quite a few years my plot was overrun by dandelions. I used to dig them out religiously, so to speak, but to no avail. Eventually, because the leaves are quite edible (although they do have some diuretic effects as noted above) I thought I’d try growing them as a crop. The crop failed and they’ve not come back, apart from the odd one or two. I didn’t know about the chaotic sex thing then or I might have tried harder. The same thing happened with the horsetails (Equisetum) which grew in such numbers on my father-in-law’s plot that we were planning to harvest them and market them as organic pan-scourers. They just packed up and went away. A curious example of Sod’s Law, perhaps, and not replicable. But just maybe that’s the answer to Japanese knotweed and giant hogweed, and the like, if only a use could be found for them.]
While anti-fluoridation paranoia has traditionally been associated with Birchers and other groups on the far right, in the last couple of decades progressives have dominated the anti-fluoridation movement. Have a look at organizations represented in the board and founders of the Fluoride Action Network: Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, The Ecologist….
http://www.fluoridealert.org/about-fan.htm
The same is true of the anti-vaccination movement. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s pieces on thimerosal in Rolling Stone and the Huffington Post is one example. The widespread antipathy to vaccination in more progressive Western Europe is another.
Measles parties in the United Kingdom
http://www.immunizationinfo.org/exposure_parties_detail.cfv
If there’s much demand I could fairly easily generate another copy with 2 or 3 times the resolution.
Yes, please! You don’t know how long the people have waited for a SCIENTIFIC explanation of tentacle pr0n.
Simply hilarious. I had a big laugh from that second diagram. Keep up the good work!
Okay, fairly usual fundie stuff, but why is artificial reproductive technologies on there? I’d have thought they’d appreciate IVF and similar fertility treatments that bring yet more babies into the world?
There’s a nice diagram by Tom “Science Made Stupid” Weller at the bottom of the page
http://www.besse.at/sms/matter.html under the heading “Relativity”.
Perhaps most people here already know or suspect this, but the “pro-life” movement will not be satisfied with banning abortion. A large segment of it (including the entire Roman Catholic cohort) wants to outlaw contraception as well. The usual cant phrase is “the contraceptive mentality.” When discussed on Catholic Radio, the argument goes likes this: If you already accept that it’s all right to frustrate God’s will by using birth control pills and condoms, then you’re all too ready in the case of failure (i.e., pregnancy) to consider abortion. It therefore follows that contraception is one of the root causes of abortion. Since abortion is murder, contraception is akin to soliciting for murder.
You got that? Not only is God a puny deity who can’t cope with latex or hormones, but contraception is just one small step removed from murder.
Welcome to the culture wars. The anti-abortion forces will get only more extreme (I see this in the literature passed out at mass whenever I’m with my folks during major holidays) and they continue to be frustrated (such as in South Dakota) and their focus is much broader than just abortion.
They’ve got it all backwards. The way to stop sexual chaos is through PRACTICE.
It is rather ironic that they chose a dandelion to illustrate the evils of sex. Aren’t dandelions apomictic? They can reproduce without sex using the plant equivalent of parthenogenesis.
Dandelions are the botanical equivalent of masturbating monks who can carry fetuses to term. Is that the image that the fundies are seeking? Bizarre, if I say so myself.
Well, PZ, you forgot to put Pokemon in that diagram. Pokemon promotes atheism!!!! Ash Ketchum, the main character in that show is atheist. It should be one of those transcription factors.
Gotta catch’em!!!
On your illustration, PZ, I see the soy, but I don’t find the homosexuality that goes with it. Do you have a revision coming out?
I didn’t like poutine, so I did not object. But they’ll take away my sushi when they pry my cold, wasabi-overdosed fingers from it.
most of the vaccinated in this country are Christians.
Hmm. Maybe those “vaccines lead to brain damage” types have a point.
Then I presume you know that BBC radio 7 broadcasts the Goons every Monday? Go to “Listen Again” and enjoy. There are some fine comedy shows broadcast there – look out for “I’m Sorry, I Haven’t A Clue”, “The Million Pound Radio Show”, “Old Harry’s Game” and lots of other stuff.
What I want to know is how “Sterilization” at soil level can then lead to above ground abortion, devastated children, and infanticide? It doesn’t even make sense internally.
Anybody know how to make dandelion wine?
I, for one, am just happy that someone out there has finally spoken out against the scourge of “individuality,” which contraceptives (particularly lunelle and spermacides) apparently draw from the soil.
“What I want to know is how “Sterilization” at soil level can then lead to above ground abortion, devastated children, and infanticide? It doesn’t even make sense internally.”
The soil Mandrake, they’re contaminating the soil with flouride!
What is this obsession with Marx? I imagine that 99.999% of USA’ians (And us Brits) would have trouble telling you want he wrote and why.
Also, over here, whilst the Fluoridation has been taken up by some lefties, and theres always been anti-technology types who dont want vaccines, much of the anti-measles vaccine stuff has been peddled by the impeccably barking right wing Daily Mail and its ilk.
My atheism preceded my Marxism, not the other way around.
There are a small number of “Christian socialists”, even “Christian Marxists”, but they’re just weird.
And to be fair, there are a goodly number of right-ish Libertarian-voting, REASON magazine-reading atheists out there, too. And Xtian Fundies hate THEM too.
Guthrie, I’m reminded of a study where Americans were shown a copy of the Bill of Rights…I think it was the 1950s, or so…and asked if they would sign a petition endorsing it. An alarmingly large number of respondents didn’t recognize the Bill of Rights (e.g. the first 10 Amendments to the US Constitution), and also would not sign it, expressing suspicions that it was some kind of “commie propoganda”, etc. I doubt things have gotten better in the years since then as far as public awareness of the average man or woman on the street.
I find it rather amusing that your quickie relabelled diagram is orders of magnitude clearer, neater, and better-produced than the one it’s parodying.
I guess that practice makes perfect, in diagramming as well as in SEXUAL CHAOS.
(I’m a bit disturbed to find that my cytoplasm consists of fluoridated water, though.)
I initially saw the picture of the dandelion with CONTRACEPTION on the roots, and for a brief instant I had a feeling of joy because I thought some biologist had finally found a way to kill the damn things in my lawn.
Then I read and saw it was just bollocks from the anti-thinking lobby.
What a let-down
but, but, but i love dandelions
just what you need in early spring something that pops up and says “hi there, im yellow”…real wake-uper there
and there is nothing that signifies healthy lawn better than a weedy one
come to think of it …..arent dandelions all clones?
Gav,
I’m nowhere near being a gardener and don’t have any useful/interesting botanical knowledge, but reading about how trying to actively cultivate dandelions led to the demise of said dandelions gave me the following thought.
Natural selection (with maybe some other evolutionary processes) led to the emergence of a highly successful species of dandelion that has adapted features to survive almost all manner of man-made hostilities. The species had become so successful in adapting that it has most likely come to the point of REQUIRING a man-made hostile environment to survive.
In other words, by trying to give your dandelions a more hospitable environment to grow in, you ironically (I am using this word right?) removed the very thing that actually was hospitable to them, your hostility.
I can think of two ways this would work. One is that the dandelions depended upon a hostile (in your opinion, not their’s) action to propagate themselves. Maybe hacking them into itsy-bitsy pieces allowed them to spread further to the surrounding soil and establish some sort of dominance in the area? (I have no clue if what I’m saying makes sense.)
The other way is that the hostile (to you, not them) environment had been keeping out other plant/bug/fungus/microbial species from competing against the dandelions for the resources of your garden. Something else may now be in your now-dandelion-free garden, dominating the area so much as to exclude the dandelion species from it.
Well, that’s just me and my pseudo-educated (read: half-a$$ed) explanation as to what may have happened. Of course, all of it is uninformed and unresearched speculation and wouldn’t help much at all at this point. Just wanted to say what I thought.
Some “Dandelions” – Compositiae are quite large, and useful.
Try looking up Chicorium intibius – very pretty blue flowers, grows (here) to about 2 metres tall, seeds which are loved by the tits and goldfinches – and you can EAT the blanched leaf-bases ……
I agree with Some Guy. I find it interesting that one of the ‘evils’ is individualism. And I thought we were all special.
I’m not an expert, just a gardener, but that’s one of the ways of getting rid of dandelions in your lawn. Plus just about any other weed except clover. Regrettably, this includes violets, which I love, and I don’t mind the occasional dandelion either. They’re pretty.
Throw out the Scott’s Turf Builder Plus Any Other Crud They Throw In There. Use Milorganite or any other organic fertilizer you can find (it really doesn’t matter. Milorganite is easy to get here). Use alfalfa meal as a fertilizer. Never aerate, let the now-burgeoning bacteria and worms do it for you. Mow long, and mulch the clippings (I use a RoboMower, but anything does fine). Dethatch with common table sugar if you have to–and doing it organically, you probably won’t ever have to.
Very rapidly, the grass flourishes and the weeds do not. Healthy insect and bacterial populations show up everywhere. You don’t need to worry about pets and children on the lawn–most of what you’re using you can and do eat. Joy and laughter abound. That kind of thing.
Morph
Another vote for a high-res version of our inimitable host’s diagram. I just know I’m going to wind up putting it on a t-shirt for myself at some point..
Gav:
This might depend on soil and dandelion variety, but growing up I had the pleasure to remove dandelions from lawns and gravel tracks. It worked, but we needed a special edged tool that went deep (~ 10 cm) before cutting the main root. If one did it right, the next year there were only a few stragglers.
Not in detail, but I’ve seen preparations and tasted results of an aromatic and longlived dessert wine of very slightly shredded flowers. AFAIK most of the sugar came from sliced figs, the rest from refined sugar and IIRC the boiling pot also had a few sliced oranges. Proportions and cook time I don’t know, but my impression was that after boil and cool it was as ordinary wine making.
Gav:
This might depend on soil and dandelion variety, but growing up I had the pleasure to remove dandelions from lawns and gravel tracks. It worked, but we needed a special edged tool that went deep (~ 10 cm) before cutting the main root. If one did it right, the next year there were only a few stragglers.
Not in detail, but I’ve seen preparations and tasted results of an aromatic and longlived dessert wine of very slightly shredded flowers. AFAIK most of the sugar came from sliced figs, the rest from refined sugar and IIRC the boiling pot also had a few sliced oranges. Proportions and cook time I don’t know, but my impression was that after boil and cool it was as ordinary wine making.
I like to watch the rabbits and woodchucks (and their little ones in the spring) as they graze on the dandelions.
The goldfinches perch on the heads and eat the little black seeds before they blow away.
…you don’t say… ;P
Very nice! thumbs up!