Mary gets around

i-3077e8694c70cce0542ac4f9dbaff9d6-MaryMRI.jpeg

Pareidolia is putting the Virgin Mary in all sorts of strange places. The latest: in the MRI of a woman’s brain. She’s trying to sell it off on eBay, of course.

It’s a silly illusion, but as I looked at it, I had an epiphany. It’s a body part. There’s a little nubbin for a head beneath a hood, with fleshy veils representing Mary’s robes below that.

You know, there’s another anatomical region on women that looks like that…

So, when is someone going to start selling gynecological photos on eBay? Can we defend explicit porn as religious iconography?

By the way, there is a poll associated with this story: “Do you see the Virgin Mary in this MRI?” No is ahead with 49% of the vote so far.

Hungarian phrasebook sketch comes to life

Whenever I see a magazine with Chinese calligraphy on the cover, which I cannot read at all, I have to wonder if it means something strange, like
“My nipples explode with delight“. The journal of the Max Planck Research Institute was hit by this little problem: they used some lovely Chinese calligraphy on their cover without looking up the meaning.

i-b28e5a61545d1f5f5a97d5b194c5e1ea-maxplanck.jpeg

Translation:

With high salaries, we have cordially invited for an extended series of matinées

KK and Jiamei as directors, who will personally lead jade-like girls in the spring of youth,

Beauties from the north who have a distinguished air of elegance and allure,

Young housewives having figures that will turn you on;

Their enchanting and coquettish performance will begin within the next few days.

Whoops. Max Planck Forschung apparently ran an ad for a Chinese brothel or strip club on their cover. At least they didn’t get it as a tattoo, and have reissued the magazine with a new cover.

Semantics is cold comfort when it comes to humanity

Mike Huckabee is a smug little hypocrite who tries to defend his opposition to gay marriage by arguing that a) it’s traditional (never mind that marriage has changed greatly since biblical times), b) it’s natural and necessary for procreation (ignoring the fact that a childless marriage is still regarded as a marriage), and c) that you can’t redefine the magic word “marriage” (yeah, like language never evolves). Jon Stewart makes him squirm over his position.

This wretched ignoramus will be running for president again in 2012, you know it. I know I’ll be struggling to suppress nausea when he does.

War on Christmas heats up with vigorous action on multiple fronts

The Muslims have entered the fray now —
one crazy lawyer, Anjem Choudary, is calling Christmas evil. How can we godless top that?

The very concept of Christmas contradicts and conflicts with the foundation of Islam. Every Muslim has a responsibility to protect his family from the misguidance of Christmas, because its observance will lead to hellfire. Protect your Paradise from being taken away – protect yourself and your family from Christmas.

Have no fear. We can say something much, much worse. Here’s an elementary school teacher who told her class that Santa wasn’t real. The reaction from the parents is amusing.

My lad was nearly in tears and so was everyone else in the class – especially as it was so close to Christmas. I thought it was wrong.

He was distraught about it. He’s only seven-years-old and it’s part of the magic of Christmas to him.

We told him that she did not believe in Father Christmas because of her religion and he’s fine now.

I found it shocking. She has done it maliciously.

So, seven years old … I wonder how many of them actually bought that Santa nonsense at all? Looks like some smart-aleck kids saw a ploy to disrupt class, make a teacher suffer, and get extra-special sympathy from their parents.

Copy Number Variants are not evidence of design

i-e88a953e59c2ce6c5e2ac4568c7f0c36-rb.png

The Institute for Creation Research has a charming little magazine called “Acts & Facts” that prints examples of their “research” — which usually means misreading some scientific paper and distorting it to make a fallacious case for a literal interpretation of the bible. Here’s a classic example: Chimps and People Show ‘Architectural’ Genetic Design, by Brian Thomas, M.S. (Note: this is not the peer-reviewed research paper implied by the logo to the left — that comes later.) The paper is a weird gloss on recent work on CNVs, or copy number variants. Mr Thomas makes a standard creationist inference that I have to hold up for public ridicule.

[Read more…]

For the nerd who isn’t very bright

i-62094e9f35db8e6e9d63214a1ea08749-ark.jpeg

Oh, boy — get out the model airplane glue and little bottles of paint: you can build a model of Noah’s Ark! And it’s only $74! (The price of plastic models has sure gone up since I used to buy them with my lawn mowing money).

This injection molded plastic model kit measures over 18 1/2″ long and includes 3 separate interior decks with embossed wood texture and many details including ramps and animal cages and corrals. The kit offers several building options. Modelers may display the Ark in cross section to reveal the internal decks or in the full-hull version. Additional building options include: constructing the Ark with or without the deck cabin and a choice to include the “moon pool” (an open center well allowing access to water and waste disposal). This deluxe kit also includes a figure of Noah and 8 pairs of animals!

Cute. Check out these details:

  • Museum-quality replica
  • Highly detailed tooling
  • Accurately scaled to the cubit

Wait…what kind of museum would show this silly thing? Can we also get a museum-quality replica of, say, the Millennium Falcon?

And this talk of detail and accuracy bugs me. Here are the complete, total, unedited specifications for Noah’s Ark, straight from the book of Genesis. This is really all it says about it; it isn’t as if it even includes photos or movies or piles of glurge from George Lucas.

14Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.

   15And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits.

   16A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it.

Where’s the moon pool, the cabin, the details? All we know is that it will fit within a 300x50x30 cubit box (and cubits are very sloppily defined), and it has one window and one door on the side. It seems to leave a lot of room for interpretation. In fact, this seems like an opportunity for some Big Daddy Roth-style customization — it really needs a big rat fink mounted on the prow.

New thread for Ken Ham’s old whines

Ken Ham of the Creation “Museum” linked to an old thread from June, prompting a sudden influx of dull-witted creationists regurgitating old canards. Normally I wouldn’t mind — the poor dullards don’t get much outlet on the creationist sites, which typically prohibit any kind of expression from their flocks — but in this case we’ve also got lots of fierce godless evolutionists who see an opportunity to sharpen their claws. That means the old thread is at a roiling boil and is now over 1300 comments, which is a bit excessive.

I’m closing that thread and inviting them to come here to carry on the discussion.

If you need a topic to prime the pump, how about conversing about the combination of charlatanry and ignorance that are needed to be a prominent creationist?

Target-rich polling environment

AOL is running several polls on Bush’s recent statements — they seem more shocked by the fact that he didn’t believe the bible was literally true than that he doubted evolution. Anyway, have fun, but keep in mind that these are polls that are heavily trafficked so we probably won’t make that big a dent…but let’s shift ’em our way as much as we can.

Here are the four polls and their results so far:

Do you believe the Bible is literally true?
No 50%
Yes 50%

How close are George W. Bush’s views on religion to your views?
Not at all 41%
Somewhat 36%
Very 13%
Not sure 10%

Which explanation about the origins of life on Earth do you believe in?
Creationism 47%
Evolution 34%
Intelligent design 13%
None of the above 6%

Do you think Bush’s religious views affected his policies as president?
Yes, and that bothered me 39%
Yes, and that’s fine 35%
No 26%

If you would like an easier poll to roll over, here’s another on a different site:

What’s Your View of Evolution and Creationism?
God created heaven, the Earth and all life in six days. Evolution explains nothing. 4% (10 votes)

Evolution and creationism are compatible. 20% (46 votes)

Evolution makes creationism very unlikely. 11% (24 votes)

Evolution explains life. Creationism is just a primitive story. 65% (146 votes)

It’s a science site rather than AOL, which explains why the results so far are much more sensible.

A brilliant new strategy!

I’ve been wrong. I’ve argued that destroying America’s educational infrastructure and promoting stupid ideas like creationism will inevitably erode our country’s competitive standing in the world marketplace. I’ve always thought the only way to correct that was to improve public education — but there’s an alternative. Make other countries stupider!

Romania’s withdrawal of the theory of evolution from the school curriculum could be evidence of a growing conservative tendency in teaching. Evolution has been removed from the school curriculum in a move which, pressure groups argue, distorts children’s understanding of how the world came into being.

Meanwhile, religious studies classes continue to tell Romanian children that God made the world in seven days.

It puts this well-known chart in perspective. You might think that we ought to be struggling to climb the ladder and move from second to the last to the top by working hard and doing better than those other countries, but no — all we have to do is export some of our poisonous stupidity to other nations, and watch them fall below us.

i-8c975f25c5d780788a3298e7e6e49a95-public_acceptance_of_evolut.gif

We did it with Turkey — they borrowed heavily from teams of creationist “arkeologists” who visited their country to search for a big boat dumped on Mt Ararat by a world wide flood. Romania is next — in a few years, we’ll be third from the bottom without even working at it.

I bet it would be easy to knock tiny Iceland off its perch. A little free television programming, a faith-based initiative to send teams of televangelists on tour, a few Mormon and Jehovah’s Witnesses in missionary squads…yeah, it would be far easier to destroy their brains than to improve our own.