Uh, did that last thread fill up awfully fast? It was like strange creatures ripping up through the floorboards and shredding the populace, which is how the rest of the web sees us, anyway.
I guess I need to make like Doug McClure and get these crazy comments under control.
link in the last thread doesn’t actually go here, it links to itself.
Why? Won’t? You? Die?
Just learn from HuffPo and LGF, and you can wipe out whole categories of comments and of commenters.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Does anyone have the count on this thing?
Hey Mistress of Abuse, I just got a letter from a distant cousin disowning me, because she heard I had become a non believer. HAW!
Gee, Patricia, at times like that I always remember Bette Midler’s motto:
Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.
I guess it is just as well you are a distant cousin. And seeing that it took so long for that relative to respond to such recent news, you have not spoken much.
BWAHAHAHAHA!
Patricia – PLEASE tell me the secret! I need to be disowned so bad right now.
JC
Why, yes:
17359
Wow Patricia, it’s like acknowledging your relationship to them is a threat to their beliefs. Actually, I remember faux news released a segment that revealed (prepare to clutch your pearls and gasp people) that some of your relative might be gay! The horror of it all!
Otrame, joke them if they can’t take a fuck.
Rorschach,
Your last YouTube link on the previous incarnation of the thread was hilarious. (Awww, Hitler wants to see Andy.) I hope it gets a mention on the Tonight Show.
We need a song. This seems appropriate for the clip PZ posted:
I love a good home movie.
We’re still a horror? Great work people.
Gasp, Patricia disowned? Well, she still has us and the pullets, although the latter might think she is a goddess…
I’m sensing some thread fatigue.
I told my cousin that the Chaplin of the VA was having a memorial for my husband and *invited* me to go (official letter), that I am livid, and my husband would be as well.
For that I am disowned as an ungrateful non believer that’s going to hell. Yeah right, boo hoo.
Sorry Jack, that option probably isn’t one you have, but I’m sure between all of us here that have been disowned we can come up with something for you.
The brains of those things are on the outside. Just rip out the motor cortex and they’re done.
yes
Yep, Nerd you’re right, the Patrol does worship me. But they are a demanding ‘flock’. Unlike gawd, I have to deliver the goods for my cluckheads or no eggs.
New game show, Are You More Responsible Then A Deity?.
Loved that video. Once again, we see that any solution to the world’s troubles always involves guns and flaming gasoline.
Janine…humm, you may have something there.
hey did SB just fixed the google commenting?
Egads Patricia! That is downright hateful of your cousins. Yet another way that religion poisons everything.
btw, the Anastomosing Thread post was in fact the quickest subThread in Thread history, @ 4.20 d.
Well Janine, since Yahweh appears to be a spoiled untoilet trained equivalent of a two-year-old brat, most of us would do better than him….
@Sven: Some asshat embedded too many videos and couldn’t STFU.
Don’t know who that could be. I noticed nothing untoward, and some interesting stuff going on.
@Nerd: Sometimes my ass doubles as headgear. ;-)
Aratina – Unfortunately the old sow has most of the family fortune. So getting disowned will hurt in the end. But I refuse to apologize for being furious that a religious service is being held, my husbands name included, and I have no say in it.
JNOV has been fully assimilated.
although it’s sort of an organic machine.
We are Pharyngula. Resistance is futile.
Could have been worse. Could have been taken into the body of christ. *shiver*
Hey, Patricia,
Is the memorial service JUST for your hubby or is it a group thing? If it were just for him you could show up and throw a royal hissy fit, the way Pat Tillman’s brother did. It was wonderfully obscene, and naturally the press did not cover it, but you can read it on the interwebs.
BTW, does PZ receive lucre from the never ending threads? If so , I think they should go on forever.
I thiiiink you mean Troy McClure, who you might know from such films as The Contrabulous Fabtraption of Professor Horatio Hufnagel, and Three Men and a Bunsen Burner.
Resistance is not futile. Resistance is Ω
Ω, Ω on the range!
Now about the musical goosebumps. What we call “goosebumps” (“gooseflesh,” I believe, for some a youse furners) is the effect on skin of the contraction of the arrectores pilorum, which are small strands of smooth muscle tissue attached to each hair follicle. In most mammals, including our more hirsute ancestors, contraction of these muscles fluffs up the fur and increases insulation or sends a social or defensive signal. Think of a pissed-off cat (image chosen for SC).
That last bit is interesting here, because contraction of these tiny muscles is stimulated by motor neurons of the sympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system.
Now full-on activity of the sympathetic NS is better known as the fight-or-flight response. Epinephrine (aka adrenaline) and its sister the neurotransmitter norepinephrine get the body ready to fight for life or run like hell.
But the same neurons also provoke similar responses to other stimuli…the increased heartrate, ventilation, and perspiration of sex for example. Or the increased heartrate, ventilation, and perspiration (and altered patterns of bloodflow) of physical exercise. Also blood-pressure regulation, etc.
OK, but probably because of the signal-transmission function, the sympathetic NS is also stimulated by emotions (generally believed to live in the limbic system). And that’s what is happening when certain musical passages or chord sequences give you goosebumps–happens to me, too (I find Miles Davis, Pat Metheny, and Jerry Garcia, and occasionally Bela Fleck, and also Debussy and Ravel, and oh yeah Bill Evans, to do it to me most consistently.)
I wrote a couple of term papers for college psych courses on the links between music and emotion. Way too many years ago to remember, but I do know that there are a number of good correlations known (e.g., descending 2nds and sadness).
Uh-oh, I better volt for my bed before the puns start.
Lee – No, it is a group memorial for all the veterans that died in October at the local VA hospital. However, they are just assuming that my husband, and all the others are christians. I specifically told this chaplin that we were atheists, and that prayers, preaching and any such bullshit would upset my husband greatly and tax his strength. They never quit, even at the very end the doctors sent in a priest and a chaplin, the excuse (lie) – we are here not to preach, but to help.
I cannot complain about the care my husband received, it was great. But the religious bullshit needs serious reform.
ahh the classich D&D solution:
Go Get The Lamp Oil!!
Things used to be so much more tranquil for Doug McClure when he was playing the part of Trampas on The Virginian on television (broadcast in color!). His subsequent career will be remembered mostly for inspiring the character of Troy McClure on The Simpsons.
That’s something, at least.
Agi – I assume you are referring to the first rule of adventuring: When in doubt, set something on fire.
Sven – OK Mr. Smarty Pants, is that goose flesh thing the same thing that makes nipples go “high beam” in the cold?
er, unless the nipples are wrapped in bacon. This is Pharyngula.
“New game show, Are You More Responsible Then A Deity?”
Now that’s just silly. You have to be able to lose a gameshow.
Patricia,
I feel for you. It’s not as if the chaplains don’t have people who want to see them. When my wife’s grandfather was dying, it was hard to get them to drop by even once a day. The daily conversation got harder after some of the cousins told the chaplain that my wife and I are atheists. It became something like “Yes, we’re atheists. Yes, I think your religion is stupid and even harmful, but this is not about what we want, this is about what that dying man wants, and he wants to see you.”
jeez, like my fantasy life isn’t already rich enough
But *ahem* yeah, same thing…if you’re cold or turned on, the sympathetic NS will erect your nipples along with your mostly non-existent pelage.
(and the reason for that link is evolutionary: mammary glands are modified sweat glands, and sweat glands are mostly associate with hair follicles and are similarly stimulated by the sympathetic NS…now that I think about it, I would bet money that the muscles of the nipples are derived from the arrectores pilorum.
Scrolling, typing, pasting:
Split the screen, (Firefox) open a duplicate tab, type into the comment box in one tab, scroll the other. Format with add-on BBCodeXtra.
I use a shell program over notepad called 101 Clips that stores 60 different copied clips which can be edited and otherwise done to in ways I haven’t learned yet.
BS
As far as milk goes, you might give up drinking it forever if you saw what comes out of the clarifier at the processing plant.
BS
Bacon wrapped nipples? Mmmmmm…..
Miki Z – Thank you. Yes, there were many veterans that wanted to see the priests and chaplins. My bitch is that they are assuming religious belief, holding the service without asking me, inviting ME to attend, and sending me an official letter that this is going to happen.
The schedule is for February, so I do have time to send a letter of complaint to the head chaplin. After that I do intend to send a letter to the VA explaining to them that there are atheists in foxholes.
I’m sorry your wife had to deal with a stupid chaplin. It’s funny how they either pour their crap all over us, or don’t show up. I don’t know which is worse.
A new thread, a time for yours truly to correct an error; I got the boundary between North America and the North Atlantic wrong. The North Atlantic is not subducting under North America.
I came to this conclusion after reading the AAPG Inversion PDF Josh pointed me too. There’s also the Roy Schlische 1 PDF, but I ran out of ink for my printer and I prefer to read hard copy. Reading the literature works!
I thing I learned from the two works is that the eastern US is a geologically jumbled mess. Faults of all sorts, earth movements in various directions. Serves as a good example of why tectonic activity is never as clean and straight forward as the popular accounts show.
The lesson to take here is, the plates are crumbling. Most obviously at the edges, but as we can see from the eastern United States, well inside as well.
The PDF also showed me that while the North Atlantic is not subducting under North America at the moment, it is possible for that to happen. But, for subduction to occur in this case the rifting in the Basin and Range Province (I’m going to call it the Mohave Rift from now on) would have to increase substantially. Since the Mohave Rift shows no signs of increased activity, the current situation in eastern North America will continue as is.
Yes, I got stubborn on this subject. I’m human, and we tend to get passionate regarding certain matters. When presented with evidence I, after some procrastinating, gave due consideration, I decided correcting my mistake was the thing to do. I hope other people can learn something from this.
A search on the two PDFs should locate them on the web for you. The second deals with a specific section of the boundary between the West North Pacific/North American sub-plates, but serves as a good example of what is going on between the two.
I’m now off to compose my next quasi post in this thread. Expect comments on other quasi posts and comments in this thread as well.
What? Wait… I have non-existent pelage ?
Would that be located in the corset or the pantalettes?
Inquiring minds are breathless…!
mostly nonexistent…mostly.
I am not a fan of shaving in most cases, though I do shave my own neck.
Patricia, #51
A bad habit we all have, assuming that things are as we think they should be. And then we insist things must be a certain way even when evidence appears showing us we are wrong. AGW denial depends on this behavior, as does racism.
In the long run, when it comes to our deaths what matters is being able to say farewell to those close to us. At the very least to having somebody to say good bye to. I hope you have family and friends with you when you expire.
Blind Squirrel (#48)
That doesn’t sound like it has any advantages over alt tabbing between a text editor and webpage. Just curious, though, what do you use to split the screen? I’d use that for other things.
JNOV @773
Mucous, actually
BS
mythusmage – I don’t know what AGW denial is.
Sven – aw now this does get titillating. Shaving nearest the stock tie or the petticoats? I’m still in the dark about pelage.
However, my thick cut hickory smoked bacon is at the ready.
A. Noyd
Split browser, the add-on.
Sure it is an advantage, both the page and the edit box are visible at the same time. No tabbing between anything.
BS
Go to my website. It’s all science-y and stuff.
For the Sake of Science.
Mythusmage – I will have family and friends around me when I expire. I know the graveyard where I will be buried with my forefathers and mothers. My husbands and mine tombstone is already carved. Have you planned ahead?
Gawd didn’t pay for my family plot, did he pay for yours? Gawd didn’t pay for my tombstone, did he pay for yours?
Gawd gave me nothing. My grandpa paid for my plot in 1927, how about you? Fuck god.
And now to something completely different :
Italy to open first prison for transgender inmates
I am now prepared to predict that Teh Thread will exceed 20000 comments before its first anniversary on Feruary 24, 2010.
Details here.
Oo, hey, Rorschach! Did you see my must-read recommomendation for you on the last subThread? Beat the Reaper, Josh Bazell. Trust me on this.
Seen it, didnt see the book in the local Dymocks, might have to order it from Amazon, thanks for the tip !!
Actually, i ought to recommend it to everybody. It’s Christopher Moltisanti enters the Witness Protection Program and goes to med school, as told by Tarantino.
Goodnight Sweethearts.
Not “Humanoids from the Deep”!!!
Worst…Movie…Ever!
Blind Squirrel (#59)
I’m sure it’s an advantage over doing it all in the same tab, but not over what I do already. Interesting learning how others feel most comfortable writing up posts, though. I wonder how many write out all their tags the long way instead of using an addon or a program. I prefer the former because it minimizes mouse use. Amazingly, I haven’t ever screwed up a link. Yet.
Haiti has been devastated by a 7.0 earthquake. Many collapsed buildings (including U.N. headquarters there and the hospital in Port-au-Prince. Extensive coverage on Rachel Maddow tonight.
Links to relief organizations
In a poignant plea for help from the international community, the Haitian ambassador said tonight on Rachel Maddow’s show that we should send our money to relief organizations who already have people and infrastructure on the ground. Not known yet if the airport is usable; CNN reports the control tower is down. I can’t find any mention of shipping/docks/water ingress.
I took a look at the organizations available, and I’ve chosen Direct Relief International; they seem to have a fairly robust infrastructure in-country (4 hospitals, several clinics, supply chain in place already). They bring supplies in by container ship; two of these arrived earlier today. Greg Laden has independently sussed this org out too and is also recommending it.
My other idea for a choice, Doctors Without Borders, reports damage to their medical facility and injuries to patients and staff.
Time to get out the debit/credit cards, folks. Haitians have had enough to bear without this catastrophe. The loss of life is going to be heartbreaking; we’ve got to help get supplies in to help the survivors and miniminize the death toll as much as humanly possible.
Or at least a good candidate for the title.
Patricia @# 51: The schedule is for February, so I do have time to send a letter of complaint to the head chaplin.
This is my nominee for Best Freudian Typo Evah. It inspires movies in my head that are beyond wonderful.
If only they really were like that, moustache, twirly cane and all, I’d want a Chaplin at my side when I die.
Leigh, donations given. Furthermore, going to help try setting up a fundraiser to help the relief.
Several moons back a commenter here said:
I don’t remember who it was, but I thought you’d like to know I’m using it in my statement of purpose for grad school applications. If you want to claim it, I’ll attribute it to you. Otherwise it’s going down as anonymous.
So because of this here are a few Bad Religion vids :
American Jesus
New Dark Ages
Generator
Huge spiders crawling out of the sewers!
Cockroaches that spell out words on the wall!
and now. . . Movies with Troy McClure!
The
Horror
The
Horror.
here ends my contribution to the unending thread.
know gods, no peace.
PZ, it’s high time you wrote a cron job to make new open threads for you when necessary.
I’m starting to look more friendly on the idea of a chatroom, since this is what this is, in essence LOL.
The thread has evolved !!
Fun with punctuation:
Fuck, God — Kent Hovind, to God on being denied release
Fuck.
God — How to Consummate a Marriage, a new novel by God.
fuck…… God — first hallucination of a prophet
FuckGod — porn star tattoo
fuck god — atheist expression of disgust with religion
Fuck! God! — Megachurch preacher, on dying and meeting God
Evolution — Langenscheidt Dictionary of Creationism
I’m pretty sure I’d be more worried if it wasn’t getting clarified out of the finished product. I bake bread without any thought to the bugs, mice and hares ground into the process.
And I refused to throw out the sugar the cat decided to spread all over the floor.
Ahh, the joys of insomnia. I was fucking around with my Twitter app’s nearby tweets function and came across this little gem not too far from me: “My number one new years resolution was to trust God with everything….that one is biting me in the butt heaps, 2 weeks in.”
Gosh, I wonder why that’s not turning out so good for her.
Everyone knows you pray to God and tweet to the Devil.
There is a reason why milk is pasteurized and it’s not to make it worse for you. – ‘Tis Himself
Also to JNOV.
My grandfather was a professional gardener, who became junior partner in a TB sanatorium, growing vegetables for the patients. This was in the 1920s-30s. There was a lot of TB about, because people drank unpasteurised milk. The cows producing it would have been grass-fed most of the year, and would certainly not have been in feedlots. TB declined drastically after the introduction of pasteurisation. (Incidentally, I buy “organic” milk and milk products, not for health reasons but for animal welfare ones.)
JNOV, I’m afraid the first site you linked to (I haven’t looked at the other) looks to me like classic food-crank stuff, and also appears to be motivated by commercial self-interest. To mention just two points:
1) Modern diets are indeed bad in some respects, but nonetheless, life expectancy is at an all-time high, so the effect is evidently not large.
2) The site makes much of the evils of soy, but oddly enough Japan has both very high consumption of soy, and the highest life expectancy in the world (excluding tiny countries such as Andorra).
From Hell’s heart I comment at thee.
Just to reinforce Leigh Williams w.r.t. the Haitian earthquake. In the UK, the major relief organisations usually collaborate in an appeal after such events, so I’ll wait to see if this happens before giving, to ensure the money is used for the intended purpose.
Hey guys, career advice!
http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/2010/100107/full/nj7277-125a.html
Uh oh.
Has this guy ever SEEN a faculty member?
Aaargh. Science fail.
Falco–Jeanny live in Frankfurt 1986
Blagojevich: ‘I’m blacker than Barack Obama’
That made me laugh out loud. This just made me sad:
Hi, Patricia.
I know what you mean about the assumptions that clergy make about their role in someone’s death. My father died somewhat unexpectedly recently and we held a memorial gathering a month or so after his death. My mother is somewhat religious so I was happy enough to hold the service in her church since these things are primarily to comfort the bereaved. We did ask, however, that the priest not say anything during the service since he didn’t know my father at all (unlike my mother, he had a healthy distrust for anything religious, but would probably never have gone so far as to call himself an atheist). My siblings and I did an amusing (I hope) and positive eulogy, and the plan was to do one prayer and a couple hymns, and that’s it.
But, oh no. The officiating minister just had to get his 2 cents in. He interrupted the service to say his bit. Of course he didn’t even pronounce my father’s name correctly, and then proceeded to waffle on about God’s plan for my father’s life, and other similarly absurd nonsense. I suppose I should have expected this from him, but it still pissed me off big time.
Some poll fun while we wait for the next creationist outrage.
http://bringbackjohnny.wordpress.com/
Enjoy.
Patricia #30, that makes it so much worse, almost like a hazing if you were to have acquiesced.
I don’t understand why theists feel that we must respect and comply with their beliefs yet rarely do they respect our beliefs when we don’t even ask them to join us in our godlessness. When we tell them our private feelings on the subject, they get all upset like we are attacking them, but do they ever stop and think that maybe it irks us just as much to hear about their god and all the woo that goes with it? Especially when they force it on us as in your case.
I’m sure you already have many resources on hand to fight back on this, but just in case, the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers has information regarding military chaplains that may be useful.
Blind Squirrel:
That’s why we prefer raw milk over the industrial variety. But even raw milk from healthy pastured cows registers on the Yuck ScaleTM when you see what’s left over after it’s been processed through a cream separator.
But this is true for much of the food we eat. Once we were offered some home cured ham. The ham was black and decomposed looking on the outside and there were maggots… yes, maggots, sequestered within the outer layer of the meat. But past that was the pinkest, most succulent pork we’ve ever tasted.
Another time we butchered a cow and later ate slivers of raw liver, heart, and kidney, lightly seasoned with sea salt. It was delectable, like beef sushi.
And then there’s aged cheese and meats which are respectively moldy and in the early stages of decomposition.
Industrial produce comes coated, and in the case of some leafy vegetables, infused with pesticides (including some organics), and if you eat in almost any type of restaurant, do so with the understanding that the probability of your food having been mishandled in a non-hygienic and yucky way, is very high.
The yuck factor of any food is relative.
Not exactly bacon though, was it? Sorry, doesn’t count.
KnockGoats:
Somewhat agree, but we think that while life expectancy levels are up, quality of life expectancy levels are down, due in large part to complex lifestyle issues involving income, education, and diet.
Our understanding is that we (US) consume more soy than the Japanese because soy is a major additive/ingredient in much of the food we eat, while the Japanese still use soy primarily as a condiment.
The other possible issue with foods labeled “soy” is that they often come accompanied by a host of non-food additives. Consider Tofurkey. It may be that it isn’t so much the soy, but that a lot of soy food is devoid of real nutritional content or maybe we’re unable to make use of the nutritional components in the food because the food is relatively artificial.
MetzO’Magic:
Not exactly bacon though, was it?
Sadly, no.
Worst talk show host: Arsenio Hall
Worst movie actor: George Clooney
That must have been some rare exotic curing process. I’ve never heard of a ham curing process that results in a layer of rotting maggot infested meat. I know there are some exotic rare methods of preparing meat that involve rotting, but “curing” of meats came about as a means of avoiding just that kind of thing.
Partners in Health, Paul Farmer’s organization, has also been working in Haiti for decades:
http://www.pih.org/home.html
Quick notes (have to take sick cat to the vet — will write more thoughtful comments later):
@Sven, Nerd and Patricia: Yes, I am part of the borg — will watch PF video ASAP. LOVE THEM! Thanks for the welcome, folks!
@Sven again: Love Bela — will read more about music and goosebumps ASAP
@Blind Squirrel: Yes, and if they have mastitis that hasn’t been beaten by WBCs, some comes out as straight up puss before it becomes mucus (I know you guys will correct me, but I believe mucus is the end stage excretion of WBCs getting the job done, but puss is the by-product of active
WBC activity.
@Knockgoats: Yes, the page is definitely biased, but it was the best I could come up with in a limited amount of time. If anyone is interested in dicsussing raw milk further, I’ll do some real research of the intertubez kind (not the laboratory kind) with links to (hopefully) more impartial information. And, yes, I don’t buy their soy bashing at all. Anectodally, when I was a vegetarian and hung out with like-minded hippy dippies, some vegan dudes had ED, possibly linked to the pseudo-estrogeneric (is that a word?) effects of soy? Don’t know. Will dig further, considering that historically soy is such a huge part of some peoples’ diet, the soy bashing sets off my woo meter big time.
Any chance of recourse to litigation using the Human Rights Act?
Legion,
we think that while life expectancy levels are up, quality of life expectancy levels are down, due in large part to complex lifestyle issues involving income, education, and diet.
[citation needed]
Moreover, life expectancy is a much “harder” figure than anything to do with quality of life: whether someone has died or not is unambiguous.
Our understanding is that we (US) consume more soy than the Japanese because soy is a major additive/ingredient in much of the food we eat, while the Japanese still use soy primarily as a condiment.
Yes, looks like you might be right on this – thanks.
World Soy Consumption 2005.
However, the figures given are, presumably, for total soy consumption, which would mostly be for cattle feed. High figures for Brazil and Argentina support this interpretation. A brief trawl of medical literature suggests soy may have both bad effects (on osteoporosis) and good ones (on cardiovascular health and certain types of cancer).
On the topic of raw milk: PalMD thinks it’s a spectacularly bad idea.
-kuckucksblume
JNOV,
The main issue with raw milk, I think, is the risk of TB. Bovine TB (caused by Mycobacterium bovis) can be distinguished from human TB (caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis), was common in the UK before pasteurisation, and remains a threat in countries where it is not routine: see for example Bovine tuberculosis: an old disease but a new threat to Africa.
Patricia, #58
AGW = Anthropogenic Global Warming.
Later Patricia,
The way things stand the state gets to crisp my corpse and dump the ashes in the ocean. Unless they change to spreading the ashes of the indigent deceased on the foliage around the county administration building. Either way I won’t be there to complain about it. Even if I was around and could be heard I wouldn’t complain. I’m not using it, so why would its fate bother me?
Hahahahaaa; The Onion wins again:
Gay Teen Worried he might be Christian
Luke @ 90
Owch. A couple of years ago my father died, one upshot of that was that I found out that my folks were more religious then I had ever realised! As they didn’t have a congregation we arranged for a vicar through the funeral directors. It was a bit weird – I read the eulogy, family arranged the music & etc, and the vicar got briefed on a few nice things to say about the guy that he was cremating but had never actually met. It all went very well, really nice service, until the very end where for some reason ‘My Way’ got played (not in the plan) which gave us all a massive WTF moment but was pretty funny. Are you supposed to laugh at funerals?
That was that with the whole god situation until it came to the legal stuff when I refused to swear on the bible (the default in legal matters in the UK). My mother was a bit confused but was cool after hearing my reasoning – I’m not going to swear on something that I don’t believe in about something that I do – but I seemed to have lost a good friend over this. Told her about it & she freaked. Weird. Who wudda thunk it?
Unless we’re talking about cats or etc, it’s pus.
From National Geographic, The Cost of Care
The graph tells us a lot. The biggest thing is the huge discrepancy between the money Americans pay for medical care, and the life span of the average person. But also note the odd points.
Mexico for instance, where there is no universal care, and people pay just $800 or so for medicine a year. And yet the life span compares favorable with Hungary and the Slovak Republic.
Then you have Japan, which has universal care, and where the average Japanese visits the doctor 12 or more times a year.
As a matter of fact, other than Sweden and Australia those nations where people pay more than the average for medical treatment don’t seem to be getting more than their money’s worth.
The big lack here is a breakdown between the cost for medical care itself, and the cost of infrastructure. Overhead, paperwork, employees, insurance, supplies, etc. How much does the threat of litigation add to costs? How much the paperwork required by government agencies or private insurance? Medicare and Medicaid both short change doctors and pharmacies, the short fall being passed on to paying customers. How much does that add to the cost for the individual client?
And why the enormous disparity between the average number of doctor visits per year between the US and Japan? We basically discourage doctor visits, what are the Japanese doing to encourage them?
Mark my words, you really want to see medical reform, institute loser pays in civil suits.
Typical. God damn clergy anyway.
Last year I attended the memorial service for a recently deceased colleague. The preacher was practically smacking his lips over the opportunity to harangue a bunch of effete academicians (professors are usually ungodly, right?) and make us see the divine light of Jesus. It was sad and pathetic. In honor of our late colleague (who was, in fact, a believer), we put up with it to get to the eulogies from family members and friends. Those, by the way, were genuine and touching and worthwhile. The smug preacher stood to one side during those tributes, never realizing how much more authentic those were to us. He may have suspected later, when we flocked to shake hands and commiserate with the friends and family of the deceased, but gave the Bible-thumper a wide berth. Even the believers did not seem to be pumping the preacher’s hand and telling him what a wonderful job he had done (though there’s always a few in every crowd who eat up that junk — obviously not the minister’s target audience in this instance).
Re: musical goosebumps and related emotional responses…
a_ray_in_dilbert_space, #753 from the previous Thread incarnation:
I’m not fond of the “transcends the physical” and “it ain’t physics” language. I’m not used to having my woo-meter spike when reading one of a_ray’s comments. ;) Anyway, I think it is physics, just not physics (or physiology) that we understand very well at this point.
Sorry, at the moment I don’t have time to look up some references… One interesting tidbit I wanted to mention about the psychology of music is that when we hear a note or notes, the same set of neurons will fire. As I understand it, these neurons respond to specific pitches by themselves firing at the same frequency as the pitch. I don’t think this is even close to how we process visual information (presumably our neurons couldn’t fire as fast as the frequencies of visible light, and there are probably lots of even better reasons). Of course, the experience isn’t as simple as our brains mapping down a sequence of pitches — there’s also a huge amount of processing, analyzing, remembering, etc.
My point is just that it makes some sense that individuals usually have similar reactions to a specific melody or chord progression, because it’s not simply a matter of you consciously remembering that you’ve heard it before. It’s also not only consciously thinking about what it means or how it makes you feel that causes some transcendent emotional experience. Neurons that respond to pitch simply do what they do, the same way, every time. If a sound or sequence of sounds generate a wave of emotion or brain activity; then (all other things being equal, which never really happens) it is likely to do the same thing again next time, because at the very least one small group of neurons will be firing almost exactly how they were before.
Snow: When I wrote my latest comment, it had just started snowing, covering everything in a few mm of snow. :-) By noon today, most of that was gone again. :-(
Bread: Brought some from Austria that is so good I haven’t been able to find it on teh intarwebz so far. Has to be eaten with lots of butter because it’s so spicy! (That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.)
Haiti: To cut a very long story short, the Caribbean Plate moves east.
Raw milk: That site treats raw milk, uncontaminated milk, whole milk, healthy cows, happy cows, and probably a few other things as a single undivided package. That’s where the mistake lies. It argues for the advantages of one and pretends to argue for the advantages of another.
Yes, skimming milk is utterly stupid (except maybe if it’s Swiss milk with 3.8 % fat). But that says nothing whatsoever about pasteurization!
Soy milk tastes ghastly.
What morons.
#107
Sorry you had an unhappy experience at such a time.
On “legal matters in the UK”. I was called for Jury Service after I retired. I checked what was required and told the Usher (who keeps an eye on jurors and their needs) that I wished to affirm. Threw him for a bit but caused no problems. They are used to it (or they should be).
http://www.hmcourts-service.gov.uk/infoabout/jury_service/oath_taking.htm
It is my understanding that the same applies for any legal oath-taking (Scottish Law may be different but I doubt it).
It’s interesting that Jesus told His followers not to swear on anything. Some Christians follow that: most don’t.
I don’t know if it’s been touched and I don’t have time to read the whole thread but
Raw Milk / Unpasturized cheese for the win.
Wow…apparently the infamous creationist Venomfangx has accused someone on Youtube of a being a pedophile for asking a woman in her 20’s to show her breast. He then asked his supporters to report him.
Also, his family apparently is really suffering from his actions.
His own father issued this statement: “Shawn is harmless and does not have a hurtful bone in his body, he is just brain washed. This young, impressionable, socially rejected person has had his mind hijacked by Kent Hovind and his kind. His parents deplore losing him to this way of thinking. It is sad and pathetic that he has followers who actually believe his ramblings and encourage him.”
JNOV:
Yes,pus comes from sick cows, mucous from healthy cows. Hope your sick puss gets better. Mine is a bright spot in my life.
To clarify (heh), I drink a lot of milk.
BS
I’m on the organ donor registry: when I’m dead, I want them to use as much of what remains as possible. After that, I don’t care. I’ve told my husband and girlfriend to do whatever comforts them: donate the body to charity, bury it, cremate it, makes no different to me. If one or both of them will find it comforting to have a gravesite or memorial to visit, that’s fine: it’ll be one last thing I can give them.
Similarly, they know I’m an atheist, but if it comforts her to say kaddish, there’s no harm in that: pattern and ritual can be useful in sad or stressful times. (This, of course, assumes they outlive me, which is far from certain.)
Alright, we need to gay-bait some more mormons. On that note, The Onion has a fun story turning the “Christianity is a choice” concept on its head.
@ Patricia
That is just unbelievable. Your husband passed away – your family should be rallying to support and comfort you, not cut you off because they believe you’re bound for hell and will suck them down to the eternal abyss with you. What is wrong with these people? Screw ’em.
@ Luke #90
I was only 14 at my dad’s funeral and I still get steamed remembering the way it was conducted. My dad came from a Catholic family but church was never a priority for him – until he met my stepmother, Sundays for us meant a trip to the diner for brunch, followed by a visit to our local bookstore. And even after that, we only went to mass because she wanted to. He died 8 months after they got married. My dad had never been religious and hadn’t bought into the whole exclusivity of the upperclass Filipinos my stepmother socialized with and he had always said that he wanted his funeral to be a party with people sharing memories of him and passing around some of his best cornball jokes, which is about the opposite of what we ended up with. Of course, my stepmom insisted on having the funeral officiated by a Filipino priest from the Church who had met my dad at most a couple of times. He proceeded to pontificate about how important Catholicism was to Filipinos and how even though “other people” could find “our displays of emotion” at funerals overwraught and intense (which is one way of putting it – putting on a public display for attention is how I’d describe it as there was a lot of wailing and weeping from a very specific group of funeral attendees), it was only because “our grief of loss was overshadowed by our joy our loved one has fulfilled God’s plan and is now one with him in Christ.”
I wasn’t an overly emotive kid to begin with, but I’m pretty sure my refusal to make a spectacle of my grief in public was also my way of giving the big fat finger to the particular strain of ethnic identity & religious smug superiority being personified by that priest.
It was also unbelievably insulting to the MANY friends my dad had who were neither Filipino nor Christian. Among my dad’s friends who got up afterward to share their love for him were a Japanese Buddhist, an Iraqi Muslim, and a Hindu – and not one of them mentioned their religion unless it had to do with a specific memory of my dad. Neither religion nor ethnicity had ever been a priority for him – his base criteria for friendship boiled down to: must make me laugh. I think it’s safe to say that my stepmom did not endear herself to any of these people because of that moment.
v.rosenzweig: I’m with you as regards to the disposition of my cadaver with the exception of burial. My last gift to humanity will be that I do not tie up a piece of land however small or unproductive for eternity.
BS
Darrell E:
You might be right about the terminology. “Cure” might not be the correct word. We have read about some cultures, like the Innuit, who purposely allowed fish to rot before eating it. They considered it a delicacy. And it was common in the days before irresponsible animal husbandry made raw milk a vector for disease, it was common to allow the milk to “spoil” as in sour, before using it.
KnockGoats:
The threat of what???
I exaggerate when I say “only Americans ever get the idea of going to court about anything but an outright crime”, but… not much.
Patricia says: “Sven – OK Mr. Smarty Pants, is that goose flesh thing the same thing that makes nipples go “high beam” in the cold?”
Didn’t Ray Comfort say that was part of God’s Intelligent Design to distract menfolk from coming up with ideas like evolution?
This is all fundamentally correct and, yes, very cool.
Now think about listening to a symphony orchestra. Thousands and thousands of sensory neurons all along the cochlea are firing bursts of impulses at specific frequencies that mirror the frequencies of the very sounds (air-pressure waves) they are transducing. On up the line, your auditory cortex puts all those raw signals back together somehow so that you consciously perceive Beethoven in all its complex glory. But now focus–you can hone in and listen/pay attention to just the oboe…now just the tympani…and now (if you’re a good and well-practiced listener) just the second-violins. Now pull back and experience the whole again…amazing that you can do that!
The mind boggles at trying to grok the mind.
Hooray, we got a logo for Google! Funnily, however, TypePad isn’t being recognized right now, and the default person-with-speech-bubble is displayed…
If you don’t mean the calorie-containing stuff, what do you mean by “nutrient”?
All this is very interesting, but I’m too busy obsessing on the thought that those critters are in fact aborted fetuses sent to exact Gawd’s revenge.
A Turing machine cannot simulate itself.
“You cannot terminate yourself.”
– Terminator 3 (ugh)
Legion,
Your citation does not show that quality of life expectancy (however you define it – I assumed you meant “Quality of Life Years” expectancy) has gone down, which was what you suggested earlier.
Regarding the “soy bashing” I’m going to add my two cents.
This I have to give unsupported, as I am only quoting my thyroid internist, but according to her, soy in asia is generally only used as a condiment and mostly in its fermented states – tempeh, miso, and natto. The fermentation apparently neutralizes the natural toxins and goitrogens. She told me to read lables and stay well away from any soy because of my hypothyroid condition; the exception being soy lecithin, and oil which are largely harmless.
For those who would like citations, here are a few that are not behind paywalls: (lets see if i can get the markup right…)
Ishizuki, Y. et al., “The effects on the thyroid gland of soybeans administered experimentally in healthy subjects”, Nippon Naibunpi Gakkai Zasshi (1991) 767:622-629.
“In 1991, Japanese researchers reported that consumption of as little as 30 grams or two tablespoons of soybeans per day for only one month resulted in a significant increase in thyroid-stimulating hormone. Goiter and hypothyroidism appeared in some of the subjects and many complained of constipation, fatigue and lethargy, even though their intake of iodine was adequate.”
link
Divi, R.L. et al., “Anti-thyroid isoflavones from the soybean”, Biochemical Pharmacology (1997) 54:1087-1096.
link
Kimura, S. et al., “Development of malignant goiter by defatted soybean with iodine-free diet in rats”, Gann. (1976) 67:763-765
link
Dramatic synergism between excess soybean intake and iodine deficiency on the development of rat thyroid hyperplasia
link
Soy associated with lower sperm counts
“Soy food and isoflavone intake in relation to semen quality parameters among men from an infertility clinic”
link
White, Lon, “Association of High Midlife Tofu Consumption with Accelerated Brain Aging”, Plenary Session #8: Cognitive Function, The Third International Soy Symposium, November 1999, Program, p. 26.
Brain Aging and Midlife Tofu Consumption
link
**Shameless blogwhoring alert**
Yes, I am having a puss/pus problem. Apologies — you will find almost every single thing I type rife with typos and misspellings.
For an update on my sick puss who had issues with pus, please feel free to click here.
The Baltimore Pharyngula Fans group now has 53 members.
@destlund: I’m devoting Saturday to Mormon Asshattery w/r/t GLBTQ folks. Here’s the plan: I’m going to have a post go up every half hour starting a 7AM EDT, and those posts that deal with GLBTQ exmormons telling their own stories, those posts will go up every 15 minutes. This is the tentative line up:
1. Morning dose of Boop (my sick cat I rescued) and an outline and brief description of the day’s posts
2. Background on LDS doctrine w/r/t heaven, the CK, etc. and why GLBTQ folks who do not consummate hetero temple marriages will not get into the CK
3. Pressure to marry someone of the opposite sex even if you’re out to the bishop (an exmormon’s account of this pressure)
4. Notable quotes about GLBTQ folks from church leaders
5. Excommunication for being gay
6. A comparison of the process of acceptance of sexual identity and the process of leaving Mormonism
7. Evergreen, past and present – BYU aversion torture
8. Mormon theology vs. science (specifically “reparative therapy”)
9. Prop 8 and other political meddling
10. Church-induced suicide and violence
11. Personal stories posted by GLBTQ exmormons
Rev. #114,
I second that.
There is a major drama now unfolding in France. One of my favourite cheese is camembert, and one of the most consumed here in France, particularly amongst the soft cheese type. Until a few years ago, it used to be easy and affordable to buy a decent raw milk camembert in the supermarkets. But recently, because of harmonization pressure from the European Union and the incessant drive towards maximum profit by the big supermarket brands who have been lobbying to include pasteurised milk camembert into the controlled certification (AOC) in the name of food security, raw milk camembert has become some kind of luxury product, prices have more than doubled in just a few years which means the majority can’t afford it any longer.
Knockgoats:
Your citation does not show that quality of life expectancy (however you define it – I assumed you meant “Quality of Life Years” expectancy) has gone down, which was what you suggested earlier.
That’s correct. I was using the citations to support my premise that an increase in breast cancer, caused, in part, by an increase in excess weight gain (caused primarily by poor diet) reduces one’s quality of life.
Quality of life is — to paraphrase that great philosopher, Donald Rumsfeld — the life one wishes to have, versus the life one has. So a life with breast cancer would count as a lower quality of life then a life free of cancer.
One odd quirk of how we look at the success of modern medical science is our emphasis on life, from a quantitative perspective, and the accompanying deemphasis on the relative quality of life, or how fulfilling, happy, etc our lives are.
It seems the general consensus is that, being alive, no matter how miserably sick one might be, always trumps being dead. But I tend to think that the concept of the quality of our lives counts for far more than what we have traditionally thought.
This may be why the definition of “quality of life” is a bit fuzzy and why there aren’t a lot of studies (at least as far as I can see) that focus on quality of life vs. quantity of years.
David M.
LOL. Point taken. What I meant, in the casual vernacular of web forum posts, is that a diet of sugar, for instance, while calorically dense, would be considered by most nutritionists as nutritionally poor.
blockquote error in post 133. This text should be quoted:
To those who hate soy milk — I do, too. The only stuff I find slightly palatable are Soy Dream’s chocolate soy milk (well-chilled, it’s actually pretty good) and Silk’s Vanilla soy milk mixed in coffee. O/W, blech and blargh!
There was an episode of Top Gear / The F Word where Gordon Ramsey challenged James May to eat some “Rotten Shark” from Iceland. Apparently they bury the shark in the sand on the beach and let it rot for a period of time and then serve it raw with very strong vodka. The challenge is to not vomit after eating it. May succeeded, Ramsey did not.
That’s no problem around here. We simply blame them on Rev BDC, who generally takes the rap with good humor. But if the typos are funny you might still get razzed.
Camembert Electrique:
SteveM @ #136
Yeah, that’s extreme. Wouldn’t do it myself, unless I was starving, or getting paid big bucks to do it on TV. Yeah, I’m that shallow.
I do know a guy who likes to sample unusual fare, such as grasshoppers, groundhogs, and squirrels.
On an unrelated note, Yahoo News is reporting:
The Pope met with the woman who knocked him down and forgave her… just before she headbutted him and kicked him in the groin.
OK, that last bit was just wishful thinking.
I like vanilla soymilk on my faux Cheerios in the morning.
You can train infants to drink soy milk straight up, no flavorings. (why you would do this is an entirely different question.) I wouldn’t have believed this except I met a few latter in life and they were gargling the stuff and claimed to like it.
BS
Oh, yeah, what I forgot… I haven’t tried to use Ctrl+F in meatspace yet. Ctrl+Z on the other hand…
Mr T., In my mind, if you can’t write down an equation or otherwise model it, it ain’t physics. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a physical explanation (I think it does.). So, in this case, I consider it biology–particularly the biology that is sufficiently common between Beethoven and me that is so similar that I can almost feel what he felt when he composed Moonlight Sonata.
It is the ability of music to evoke feelings in the 3 pounds of tissue between our ears that I think is astounding.
This is a test (I’m signing in with my google account.) Nothing to see here. Move along.
testing, testing,
post with links did not submit. Post?
I’m trying to sign in with OpenID so my user name is hyperlinked to my blog, cuz I’m a blogwhore like that. But OpenID hates me. Feh and meh. I’ve got more pressing problems.
Hmm. Removed html to see if it posts now. Apologies if it eventually reposts or something.
Regarding the “soy bashing” I’m going to add my two cents. It is my (unsupported) understanding that soy in asia is generally only used as a condiment and mostly in its fermented states – tempeh, miso, and natto. The fermentation apparently neutralizes the natural toxins and goitrogens. Soy lecithin, and soy oil, however, are largely harmless.
For some citations, here are a few that are not behind paywalls:
Ishizuki, Y. et al., “The effects on the thyroid gland of soybeans administered experimentally in healthy subjects”, Nippon Naibunpi Gakkai Zasshi (1991) 767:622-629.
“In 1991, Japanese researchers reported that consumption of as little as 30 grams or two tablespoons of soybeans per day for only one month resulted in a significant increase in thyroid-stimulating hormone. Goiter and hypothyroidism appeared in some of the subjects and many complained of constipation, fatigue and lethargy, even though their intake of iodine was adequate.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1868922
Divi, R.L. et al., “Anti-thyroid isoflavones from the soybean”, Biochemical Pharmacology (1997) 54:1087-1096.
http://www.cababstractsplus.org/abstracts/Abstract.aspx?AcNo=19981400820
Kimura, S. et al., “Development of malignant goiter by defatted soybean with iodine-free diet in rats”, Gann. (1976) 67:763-765
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1035180
Dramatic synergism between excess soybean intake and iodine deficiency on the development of rat thyroid hyperplasia
http://carcin.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/21/4/707
Soy associated with lower sperm counts
“Soy food and isoflavone intake in relation to semen quality parameters among men from an infertility clinic”
http://humrep.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/den243v1
White, Lon, “Association of High Midlife Tofu Consumption with Accelerated Brain Aging”, Plenary Session #8: Cognitive Function, The Third International Soy Symposium, November 1999, Program, p. 26.
Brain Aging and Midlife Tofu Consumption
http://www.jacn.org/cgi/content/full/19/2/242
JNOV, click your screen name right above the comment text box. It allows you to change your Movable Type profile where you can put in a URL to your blog.
Sadly, my screen name isn’t hyperlinked for me — I’ll just go to Moveable Type and work it out there.
Thanks!
::dopeslaps self:: Oh, NOW I see it! Gracias!
@140
not mine I couldn’t. And I tried. we wound up having to use a specialty formula (she’s adopted) that cost twice what even soy formulas or soy milk did.
Becca: It doesn’t make sense to me either. Don’t infants have a good sense of taste and aren’t they picky eaters? I never reproduced.(that I know of)
BS
A. Noyd @ 706(previous incarnation of this thread),
And your point is…?
The text editor windows are per text-entry box. Multiple tabs aren’t an issue, multiple windows aren’t an issue, and multiple text-entry boxes in a tab/window aren’t an issue. You can have multiple editors / text-entry sessions concurrently.
Furthermore, you don’t have to use an editor for every text-entry box. For the extensions I listed, you have to explicitly choose to invoke your preferred text editor if you want to use it to create/edit the text for each text-entry box.
Since the text editor is an independent program in a different window, you can freely scroll the FireFox tabs/window (plurla) all you want. You do not have to keep scrolling up-and-down.
The different extensions behave slightly differently, and the above should be seen as general statements about the common behavior. Also, I myself never use M$ ShiteWare, so whilst I understand the described behavior is also true-ish on Windoze and Vastlybad, I myself can only confirm it on Unix systems (such as, but not limited to, Linux/X11).
that usually means stuff like proteins, vitamins, minerals etc.; IOW all the stuff we need from food that isn’t specifically raw energy.
So there’s nutrient-dense, foods (foods that pack more nutrients per calorie), and calorie-dense foods (ones that just pack a lot of calories, and virtually no other nutritional content)
@Alan B, 113:
I’m surprised the usher was even thrown. I did jury service in the UK about three years ago (oddly enough, I’ve been called to do it again in a couple of weeks) and fully half the jurors affirmed rather than swore.
JNOV,
;) Sorry, I was going on the assumption that you were still logged in with Movable Type. Glad you got it working! (You should have been here a few months ago when it was a stupendous feat to get your screen name properly hyperlinked with Movable Type.)
blf (#151)
I misunderstood you. I thought you were talking about an in-browser text editor extension. I guess I don’t see what the particular benefit is with what you’re talking about (assuming I’ve got it right now) beyond avoiding the trivial step of copying and pasting over to the text entry box.
A. Noyd @ 155, I misunderstood you.
Yes, and I now see why. In my original post I said “… the editor pops up (containing the current text, if any, in the box)” which is certainly not clear that the text editor runs in an independent window. Sorry!
You may be correct in that what it mostly avoids is copy-and-paste. For some people, or in some circumstances, this can be significant. As one example, I intensely dislike using the mouse. I prefer keyboarding, especially when working with text (so yes, I’m one of those people who find so-called WYSIWYG programs very difficult to use). I do not find copy-and-paste “trivial”. If I recall correctly, the subject came up because someone else also didn’t like to copy-and-paste much. And copying-and-pasting large amounts of text can be a problem for various reasons.
One of the extensions I mentioned, Mozex, is a far more general purpose thingy than just this text editor to do text-entry trick. (The other one I mentioned, It’s-All-Text, is basically a one trick pony.)
Wait, now we’re dissing ham because it’s not bacon? That’s it, this baconimperialism has gone too far. Get back to me when there’s sauna cured bacon.
the snow has melted; the bread is stale, sugary and disgustingly fluffy; and the idiots from FedEx were too lazy to walk up to my apartment, so $90 worth of tea was stolen because they left the box downstairs in the entrance way where everybody could take it
today sux.
In reference to the New Jersey vote against gay marriage rights, many of you know from my past comments on this issue, that NOM (National Organization for Marriage) was the largest single contributor to the campaigns in California, Washington State, Iowa, Maine, and New Jersey. NOM is sometimes hidden behind a PAC that is formed for a campaign, and then they show up on the PAC’s filings as the largest contributor to the PAC. But so far, NOM has not been pushed enough to reveal their donors. PACs reveal their donors, NOM does not.
NOM was ordered to reveal their donors in Maine, and responded with a suit that questioned the constitutionality of Maine’s election laws. Now they’re fighting the trial in California with some of the same tactics. They are trying to question the validity of the trial itself. And they’re using the same lawyers they used in Washington State, Maine, etc. Remember the mormon guy, Bopp, who worked for Mitt Romney? Well he is now busy filing lawsuits all over the USA to prevent anyone from finding out that NOM is still partially funded by mormons (not just money, but services).
The mormons produce most of those awful ads that equate gay marriage with the downfall of civilization and with forced gay recruitment of children within the school systems.
Video of the Mormon pollster, Gary Lawrence, who was hired by NOM to ramp up press coverage, also reveals his tactics in dealing with critics of mormon temple construction. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J7t–UfyVw
Here’s Gary Lawrence writing about Prop 8:
Luckily, Gary Lawrence and his ilk have a problem, gay mormons. Matthew is gay and is the son of Gary Lawrence, 67, who is the “State LDS Grassroots Director” for the state of California.
Lawrence Research earned at least $500,00 off the California Prop 8 campaign alone (sources vary on the amount). Here’s the “MormonGate” list from queersunited.blogspot.com of mormons
allegedly reimbursed by the yes on 8 campaign.
And here’s Matthew Lawrence quitting the mormon church:
http://www.calitics.com/diary/7520/
What I’d like to see is a mass exodus from the LDS Church in New Jersey. New Jersey mormons leaving the church publicly would make news.
The other thing I’d really like to see is for at least one of these states that have been negatively affected by NOM anti-gay campaigns successful in getting to NOM to reveal it’s donors.
From New Jersey, a personal view of the negative impact of anti-gay campaigns: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNW3mNFC3D4
David Marjanovic, #122
An old friend of mine, the late Gary Gygax, was sued once by his old company, TSR Inc, for publishing a roleplaying game. The case lasted about two years and ended when TSR Inc made an offer to settle out of court, paying remuneration in the 7 figures in return for the rights to the game itself. According to Gary, most of what he received in the agreement went to pay his lawyers. The same thing happened to his publisher, GDW Inc, while TSR had a hefty sum to pay their lawyers. This at a time when both GDW and TSR were having money troubles and deep in debt.
GDW flat out folded — Frank Chadwick, the owner, paid off the debt through hard work — while TSR was later purchased at a bargain price by Wizards of the Coast.
TSR basically said they were in the wrong, yet it was TSR, GDW, and Gary Gygax who ended up getting penalized for the decision of TSR’s president, Lorraine Williams, to sue GDW and Gary Gygax for publishing Gary’s RPG.
This is not an atypical case in American jurisprudence.
Now I don’t know the situation in other countries, but I very much doubt it’s as bad as this.
Civil suits are expensive for all parties. By the time a case is settled what the winning parties owe in legal fees can reduce any moneys awarded to a fraction of what they were originally. The whole system has other problems, but the cost of litigation is the big one.
Malpractice insurance in expensive because of the problems with the American civil court system, and human perception. People are seen as irrationally litigious, ready to sue at the throb of an infected incision. Doctors on the other hand are conditioned to produce the “cornered cur response” as I’ve just named it. Which is where a person accused of a wrong doing becomes hostile and belligerent, refusing to accept the possibility he has done wrong. His fellows join him in a sort of lab coat wall. In short, our adversarial system lends itself to mindless confrontation where fact finding and negotiation flies out the door. Obstinacy has hurt a lot of people in the United States.
So physicians in the U.S. practice “cover your ass” medicine, ordering tests and procedures that more often than not prove useless, redundant, or actually harmful. Then there is the tendency of people to become defensive, even hostile, when they learn they might be wrong. This being a salient feature of AGW deniers and creationists. Hell, the scientific literature is chock full of scientists defending a mistake to an absurd point. Just look at the 19th century biologists who rejected the Theory of Evolution in the face of overwhelming evidence. Science is 10% making discoveries, and 90% convincing skeptics you have made a valid discovery.
I apologize for going on so long, but you hit one of my hot buttons, the refusal of too many people to admit to error and correct it.
#153
Jury Service is an interesting experience, is it not?
Our Usher was the kind of man who wanted everything tidy. Quick, efficient, nothing out of the ordinary. Stand up, sit down, don’t keep the Court waiting – regular Sergeant Major! To be fair, when we threw problems at him he responded well but we were clearly taking him beyond what he expected of a well behaved jury. [Tough]
Like handing him questions for the Judge. We had several places where we felt we weren’t getting the answers to questions we needed answered so we sent them up via the Usher to the Judge for his consideration. Each time the Judge read them, agreed with us and then asked the exact question on our behalf, even pointing out that the witness should address the answer directly to us as if he/she had been asked the question by us.
This is allowed, indeed encouraged, in English courts:
Legion:
Um, food is just chemicals; it matters not a whit to the body where they come from, only what they are.
Not unless producers are breaking the law, it doesn’t — there may be traces left, well below toxic levels.
As for ‘infused’, that sets my bullshit-meter off.
stupid phrasing, but the meaning is somewhat correct. for example, there was an e-coli outbreak from spinach because the e-coli was inside the plant, not just on the outside where it could be washed off. don’t know about the chemistry, but the same could be true for pesticides that were absorbed with the water, just like the e-coli were.
Tully @43:
Nonononono! The first rule of adventuring is: Always loot the bodies! The one about setting things on fire is number two. (And number three is, Of course it’s trapped!
(Aaaand, I see I’m back to the pesky green strip, again. Millenium hand and shrimp!)
No no no! The second rule is pillage first, then burn.
BS
Gary Gygax was a friend of yours, mythusmage? I shall sleep with envy tonight.
And the real first rule of adventuring: when in doubt, shoot an arrow at it.
Wow.
Are you sure it wasn’t just thrown away because everything bulky that lies around, no matter in what state it is, must be trash? (Or blown up by the police because everything bulky lying around in public must be a bomb?)
Concerning the bread, I’m sorry. Only bacon can be stuffed through teh intart00bz.
Don’t make that sound like such an insignificant affair! :-D Even I know who Gygax is, and that that RPG is none less than Dungeons & Dragons! Once you rake in the megabucks, anyone who can claim to have a copyright on the stuff you sell will sue you. That much is normal. (See also: J. “K.” Rowling, Larry Potter, and the muggles.)
All two or three of them…?
Sven DiMilo #139
I have my Cheerios™ the way God intended them to be eaten, with shredded baby on top. :-P
Wow, that was some bad clip. After .43 seconds the monster appears; then, at about 3.20 a monster attacks the bimbo in the kissing booth. She’s had 3 minutes to get away, but, instead she… SCREAMS!!
In fact, most of the extras seem to run around in circles screaming. Eight minutes of screaming while anyone sensible would run for their lives.
I am glad I missed this movie when it came out. The entire thing must have been awful.
Ahhhhhhh!!!!! Ahhhhh!!!!
who’s gonna throw out a neatly labeled large box clearly marked FedEx? Especially in an area where junk gets picked off the road if it even looks remotely useful?
Alan B,
I received a summons for jury duty just today. I have to appear at 7:30 AM February 2nd in New Haven Federal District Court (a mere 50 miles from my house, in a city I don’t know at all well). At least when the state calls me for jury duty the court is in the next town.
The one time I was on a jury we found the defendant not guilty. It was obvious the guy had done something, but it was not obvious the guy had done what the state accused him of doing. During the deliberations one juror suggested the foreman say: “We find the defendant not guilty and admonish him never to do it again.”
We have a small front porch, and the delivery people used to open the door and plop the packages inside. Since nobody could usually see them from the street, they were fairly secure. The last five years or so things have changed, and the packages tend to be left outside the porch, visible from the street. So I’ve had packages sent to me at work. I’m not the only one doing that.
yeah, my boyfriend did that when he ordered a box of grass-fed, dry-aged beef* (also because his work has a walk-in freezer and there’s always someone there to put the delivery in that freezer). I don’t have the option, since I work from home (delivery guy claims he rung, but I didn’t hear anything), so now I’m trying to convince the tea company to at least add the option for sign-on-delivery to their orders.
*yum yum
Jadehawk, if your boyfriend’s place of employment doesn’t mind, have your packages sent there in care of him.
not gonna happen. his isn’t the sort of place that values its employees. he could get away with it once, and only because he’s friendly with all relevant staff, but it’s not a permanent solution, since sooner or later the actual store manager would notice.
Now, Jadehawk, didn’t God just send an earthquake to Haiti precisely to remind you that things like snow, bread, tea, and Haitians aren’t important?
…Seriously, though, the tea thing does suck. If it helps, a story: Someone stole some CDs that had been delivered to a friend of mine once and left outside her door in her apartment complex. But they didn’t just take the box. They opened it and only took the ones they wanted, leaving behind the opened package and the music not worthy of stealing. To add insult to injury.
Come to think of it, I suspect Sven or Janine…
:P
Jadehawk, sorry to hear that. My place may be bad enough to work for, but some things they just look the other way one, like personal packages. Maybe because some in local management have their stuff sent there, and we have UPS/FedEx deliveries daily.
We no longer have this issue (our apartment building has locked electronic drop boxes for packages), but when living in California we notified UPS that they were not allowed to leave packages on the doorstep if there was no answer. It resulted in a few times driving to their facility to pick them up, but because I worked at home that was rarely necessary.
Science education saving lives, again. Sometimes in the most unexpected places:
http://www.the33tv.com/news/kdaf-southwest-diabetes-student-paper-story,0,3358982.story
A few nitpicks for a_ray_in_dilbert_space, #142:
If it could in principle be written down in an equation or modeled, it is physics in my mind. Perhaps there’s some doubt whether it could possibly be done, but I’m not aware of any reason why not.
Are you saying you consider it biology because “you can’t write down an equation”, or because biology is not reducible to physics, or what?
Also, one can almost feel what Beethoven felt when he heard Moonlight Sonata. I think what he felt while he composed it can not be experienced by anyone else, ever. Even with hearing and other sensory experiences, the “almost” has to be stressed for quite a lot, not just because of differences between performances but also differences between individuals. To take an extreme example, I have no idea what synesthetes like Messiaen or Rimsky-Korsakov heard/saw/felt when they experienced music. I’m not sure that I would want to either. ;)
Agreed. It blows my
mind3 pounds of tissue between my ears every time I think about it.Sorry, Jadehawk. :( I accidentally got a FedEx guy fired last year for leaving a computer sitting in our driveway. I called to complain that we HAD in fact asked for signed delivery, and it turned out that he had signed for us thinking that we’d rather have it quickly than have to go back to the dropoff center to pick it up after a non-delivery. Turned into a real mess.
oh, carlie, that sounds like such a clusterfuck!
anyway, I’ve got severely mixed feelings about this now. I’m severely pissed that the tea got lost, and at first I just wanted to yell a lot and demand that someone, anyone give me my money back.
And if I could get my money back from FedEx, I would.
Except of course it doesn’t work like that. If I demand money, it’ll come out of the delivery-guy’s pocket, not out of the company-accounts. And I’m not willing to punish the guy (who even came by earlier to apologize) for technically not doing anything wrong: after all, it is FedEx policy to leave the stuff in the entrance hall. It’s just that most delivery guys know better than to leave stuff where it’s easy to get at, so they do usually get into the apartment complex somehow and drop it off at the apartment door. But this is going an extra-mile, and I can’t seriously demand that from someone who is undertrained, underpaid, and overworked (and new on the job, I suspect).
grr. I guess I’ll have to eat the $90; guess I’ll have to figure out a way to complain about that policy without getting the delivery guy in any more trouble.
Ah ha! Finally! A positive aspect to living in a mormon community. Nobody steals my packages.
We do have crime, but it’s usually minor and low-level. I have an unlocked box outside my door that is for packages.
Before I moved into this house, I stored some items in the garage. My backpack and two water jugs were stolen from the garage while I was away for less than an hour. Had to have been the neighbors, perhaps their kids? Nothing ever found, nothing proven. Since then, I’ve only had one occasion to call the police, and that was when some idiot farm boys shot me with a frozen paint-ball round. Apparently they freeze them because then they hurt more during paint-ball games. It was a drive-by shooting, with the farm boys in a shit-brown pickup that was possibly shit-brown because it was covered with cow or horse manure.
:-p
that package thing is weird though. I mean, I stopped locking my car after moving to ND, and on several occasions I’ve accidentally left out my bike without locking it, too (and no, it’s not a Huffy :-p ); and nothing ever happens. But for some reason, mail of any sort seems to be in a special category, and does get stolen. WTF?
Sorry, Jadehawk. I didn’t mean to gloat. We of the NOT-rich folk cannot afford to lose $90 packages.
I assure you that there are plenty of downsides to living in a mormon community, enough to more than o’er balance package safety. :-)
oh, I didn’t take it as gloating. it was funny, but it did make me think about why everything else is relatively safe, but packages and even occasional mail isn’t.
And technically I can’t afford to lose $90 either, but it was for a luxury good, and I’m not going to demand it out of the pocket of someone even more poor than me.
Mr. T, Don’t worry. I’m not going woo, merely waxing poetic–and being a physicist, do it poorly. When I say it’s not physics–it means the techniques used by physicists wouldn’t be much use in discovering the mechanism of the phenomenon–and that biology might be.
I do believe that music is a form of nonverbal communication that operates at an emotional and nonverbal level. I don’t think that’s all that controversial, or you wouldn’t have tone poems.
Jadehawk says, “and the idiots from FedEx were too lazy to walk up to my apartment, so $90 worth of tea was stolen because they left the box downstairs in the entrance way”
Damn, that does suck. I never understood tea until I went to Sri Lanka, but the tea there is so amazing I am now a devote. My wife and I brought back several kilograms of tea–no really it was!!!–in November. At $15 per kg for the highest quality, it’s a bargain. If you come to DC for the Unity convention, I promise you a cup!
This is interesting, Ted Olson, a conservative, explains whey he is on the team of lawyers that is currently in court trying to invalidate California’s Proposition 8.
There’s a good video at the link, plus some useful text… useful for replying to conservatives who are irrational about the gay marriage issue. Excerpt:
I saw Olson talking about this same issue on Rachel Maddow, contrasting the conservative position of “conserving marriage (for everyone)” against the non-conservative position of “getting government out of the marriage business”, which is one of the things Judge Walker asked him about as a possible solution.
It is nice that you’re thinking of the delivery person, Jadehawk. With mine it turned out that they were just looking for one good reason to fire him, but I kept going back and forth between feeling guilty that he had just been trying to be nice, but then thinking what if something had happened to it before we got home, and forgery is a pretty big deal, but he was trying to make it easier on us, etc. and around again. And then the thing was, he knew where I lived, right? And came by to ask me to write/call his boss. Multiple times. Once with a pre-written letter that he wanted me to sign absolving him of any blame. I did the best I could to let his boss know what was going on (and wrote my own letter after kindly refusing his), but it got pretty creepy and I still feel bad about it.
Fixed. :D
I understand and totally agree that phenomena like that are better understood in terms of biology.
I knew you weren’t going woo. I suppose I’ve just been away for a family funeral the past several days, which has meant that lately I’ve spent way too much energy suppressing my instinct to correct people (Catholics: enough said?). I just had some semantic quibbles. You know, they never seem to end — that’s The Trouble with Quibbles.
Chekov: I was making a little joke, sir.
Spock: Extremely little, Ensign.
Tone poems (and programmatic music generally) are an interesting topic all on their own, but I wouldn’t say they’re representative of all music. It may depend on what one considers “nonverbal communication”…. I don’t think all music should be considered “communication”, because not all music actually has a meaning (intellectual or emotional content) being communicated. I prefer a definition more like “organized sound”, but even I will admit that could use a bit of poetic waxing.
Music is “air sculpture.”
I think the phrase “New Jersey Mormons” is funny.
And now, on the guitar tip:
Alan B, #161
I’m not eligible for jury duty because of my mental health. What I related in 153 was what I was told about by Gary himself, plus what others involved in the case passed on. There are other stories out there much like that one. And those Americans who have served time on the jury have sometimes related their experiences, which by and large agree with Gary’s
BTW, after nearly two years TSR vs. Gygax et al was just about to go to trial.
I’m surprised you got to ask questions. Over here such tend to be discouraged. Too much time and trouble it seems. Here we seem to be all too willing to let the lawyers drag things out, but go to the trouble of getting the jury up to speed? I don’t know how jury selection works in Anglestan, but over here the lawyers, prosecution and defense, seem to focus on selecting on those people daft and dense enough to fall for the crap they dish out.
Sanction, #166
For awhile at least. We lost contact because I was having a crisis. Then Gary died before I could get back in touch.
BTW, I have an Al Gore number of 1. I worked with Gary Gygax an a few projects, Gary worked with Al Gore on The Simpsons.
David Marjanovic, #167
The game in this case was Dangerous Journeys. Specifically, Dangerous Journeys: Mythus. A game and game system designed after Gary left TSR. They had no claim on it whatsoever.
Jadehawk,
My delivery story involves a book I’d gotten for free for helping playtest it. (Long story) The UPS man couldn’t deliver it for some reason (just had to have a signature even though the instructions said clearly, “No signature required”), so UPS wound up sending it back. Since then whenever possible I’ve specified USPS delivery.
It helps that I live in an apartment building with one access point. You have to get into the building to reach the apartment you want, and access to the building is gated. That’s right, this SSI recipient lives in a gated community. :)
“Air sculpture” — that’s poetic enough for me, Sven. I’m tempted to start “dancing about architecture”, but now would not be the right time…
It’s time to rock the Pharyngula Concertgebouw with some fuckin’ Stravinsky ballets!
Petrushka (1/4)
Rite of Spring (1/5)
Apollo: 1. Birth of Apollo, 2. Variation of Apollo (it’s a shame I can’t find the whole thing on the interwebs, just a few excerpts hither and thither)
Sven, New Jersey Mormons are different from Utah mormons. All the mormons say so, anyway. Sounds like a premise for a sitcom.
The trial in California that aims to overturn Prop 8 has provided has a little walk back in time:
yeah, the US Postal Service has the best track record in actually getting stuff to where it’s supposed to be going.
Thanks for the link Aratina.
I missed Pat Tillmans brother pitching a hissy fit. Dammit.
I served jury duty once; got put on a jury and elected foreman, and we found a ne’er-do-well guilty as charged.
At the time I lived in LA County, and “my” trial was one floor below the simultaneous OJ Simpson trial at the County Courthouse downtown. Reporters and media types left and right, the whole thing, and all kinds of metal detectors and ID checks etc.
In our courtroom, however, things were more farcical. The charge: DUI. The circumstances: two guys were trying to push a dead pickup backwards in the middle lane (of 5) of Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. All of them drunk as hell, and LA’s Finest on the scene saw fit to arrest the poor third guy at the wheel.
Neither the accused nor any of the witnesses called spoke any English. Neither the PD lawyer trying his very first case (I swear this is all true) nor the sub-Assistant AG (a sharply dressed young man who seemed to be trying out his inner Johnny Cochran) spoke any Spanish; nor did the judge. So every…fucking…question, no matter who asked it, was asked in English, translated to Spanish, answered in Spanish, and the answer translated to English. The judge paid very little attention to the proceedings, obviously doing paperwork and consulting with the clerk during testimony. In cross-examining the cop, the noob defense lawyer asked if they had a weekly quota of arrests they had to make, and the judge got pissed off. The defense called the accused’s brother Flavio, who claimed to have been the designated driver that night (having sat in the truck for 3 h while the other guys fiesta’d) and to have been at the wheel when the federales showed up, not his brother Juan at all, why, the policemen must be mistaken…bald-facedly lying up, down, obviously, and ridiculously, even in translation.
Yet the first informal sense-of-the-jury vote I called when we were finally convened was like 7-5, based on nothing but instinctive distrust of the police, especialy in light of the OJ thing dominating LA media at the time. I couldn’t believe it. I had to talk through every clear step of logic, every contradiction (something I wasn’t interested in doing, particularly)…finally, when there was just one more stubborn holdout, we sent a message to the judge aking “now what?”…the judge answered that we’d have to come back on Monday morning, and who wanted to do that; couldn’t we just finish up now, please? And finally the holdout caved.
Not that I felt great about it, it all being so trivial and (IMO) a huge waste of everybody involved’s time, but the law was phrased clearly and the poor dude at the wheel was legally responsible for controlling the truck’s motion, and he was hammered, and he got his fucking brother in to lie for him in court…anyway.
That’s my jury-duty story.
Mr T:
Heh. I know Don Green, the principal trumpet (the blond/balding one).
Nice recording. It’s gonna be interesting to see what Dudamel can do with that band.
This is fun, too:
Short Ride in a Fast Machine
A symphonic trumpeter once told me that playing this is “like having a war on my face.” The recording doesn’t really capture how painful it is for the brass.
@193
Metheny’s Orchestrion tour is supposed to be in town in May, but I have to be elsewhere. That looks like it’s going to be…interesting.
More guitar, kind of abstract, from Bill Frisell
Epikt, are those Berliners playing rotary-valve trumpets of some sort?
Yeah, Metheny’s doing a 21st-Century player-piano thing…sounds good so far, though, for robot music.
Then there’s not-music — but remarkable nonetheless!
http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2007/11/ultraclap.html
As was prophesied by the ancient Mayan Saints in their now-worthless calendars, in 2012 Gustavo Dudamel will begin a 1000-year reign over Disney’s Magic Kingdom, at the end of which will be the Final Judgment. He’s making a list, and checking it twice — gonna find out who’s naughty and nice.
But seriously, I saw him conduct Mahler 1 and Adams’ “City Noir” on a PBS special a couple months ago. I really love that performance of the Mahler.
Steve Reich – Clapping Music
Sven DiMilo, my jury duty experience turned out quite differently from yours.
A young adult had been arrested late at night on his own property for “attempting to flee” in his vehicle when the cops flashed their lights responding to a domestic disturbance call. They then found a previously opened but recapped bottle of liquor in the cab of the truck and determined on location that the young man was drunk.
Because of a masterful defense by a hired attorney, we jurors got to watch the strapping young male arresting officer try to carry out his very own grueling sobriety test in the courtroom, and he failed at it miserably. Several of us took copious notes and we deliberated for over an hour about the waffling from witnesses on both sides, but with the first informal vote to see where we all stood it was a surprisingly unanimous “within reasonable doubt”. It didn’t take much longer to return a “not guilty” verdict.
I was glad to find myself among a group of fair minded people (we even had great demographics from young to old, nearly equal number of women and men, and several people of minority status by race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation), and I think we all felt pretty good about the outcome even though the process took a whole day to complete. Best of all, not once were we asked to swear to any deities.
Sven DiMilo:
I thought so at first, given the way they were holding the horns, but I thought I saw a brief close-up of a conventional horn late in the vid.
I remember Metheny talking about using a computer in the band. He said something along the lines of, “I think of the computer as just another band member. He doesn’t say much, but his time is great.”
Mr T:
I heard a couple recordings of his youth orchestra in Venezuela. Very, very good for a bunch of kids. If a young and charismatic guy like that can’t trigger more interest in classical music, we might as well start the wake.
and on a more amusing note, Raptard tries to convert atheist, gets her ass smoothly handed to her :-)
and another hilarious christian site, with handy guidelines as to how to try to convert different types of people: http://www.dare2share.org/worldviews/
note the mohawk on the Satanist :-D
also, they actually suggest to use Pascal’s Wager (by name, no less!) on agnostics *facepalm*
The thread on rr is great.
Priceless — that feeling is the realization that you’re uneducated and narrow-minded… it just needs an aha moment.
Haven’t posted those for a year I think…:-)
Across the Universe-With a little help from my friends
Across the Universe-It won’t be long
Across the Universe-Hold me tight
Across the Universe-If I fell
@mythusmage, 194:
“Jury selection” seems to be an exclusively USA-ian phenomenon. Here in the UK it’s random: where I was, in a building with a number of courts, a hundred-odd people are summoned at once and wait together, then 25-ish are brought into a particular court at random, given basic details and asked if there’s a reason they can’t serve on that jury, then 12 are picked again at random from those who are left.
The idea that lawyers could have any impact on that process seems to be me to be against all notions of justice.
That’s not to say our process is perfect: it is still too easy to get out of jury duty altogether, by claiming that your job will suffer if you’re not around, with the result that juries are far too biased towards the lower end of the educational scale.
Plus we have the issue that the government is trying to cut down the right to a jury trial, because they’re too expensive – this week the first-ever fraud trial without a jury began.
—
DanielR (who can’t seem to fix his Google login – the nickname is correctly set in Google itself, so I don’t know what else to do).
I was listening to Point Of Inquiry today, the episode with Michael Behe. Man, that’s some really bad special pleading. [paraphrasing] “Design is default because we are trying to explain apparent design, so there’s no need for us to talk mechanisms because if we can’t explain apparent design through non-intelligent forces, then it falls back to design.”
Special pleading makes my brain hurt!
To this whole “jury” discussion :
It would seem utterly ludicrous to anyone outside countries who have this system, that 12 laypeople, with thier own prejudices, intellectual limitations and personal circumstances, forced to appear to judge a legal case should be able to arrive at any kind of fair judgment.
But then again, nothing has changed since “12 angry men” demonstrated exactly that over 50 years ago.
Ideally in the American criminal justice system, the 12 laypeople are there as determiners of fact where they only decide whether a particular set of facts has been established beyond “reasonable doubt”. I’m not sure it works any better than professional jurors would work, but it’s not clear it works worse.
The civil jury trials, on the other hand, do often seem to suffer from having a lay jury. Not only is the standard of proof different — “preponderance of evidence” — but the questions of fact are often much more complicated. IANAL — some of the details may be skewed by my perceptions.
I can’t beleive I’m so late. i’ll never catch up now :-( Anyway; from my local paper;
Worst movie: Avatar
Worst talk show: Mike Douglas
386xsx @221, interesting.
If offered the choice, you’d watch Battlefield Earth rather than Avatar?
Wow. You’re weird.
Worst play: Hamlet
If offered the choice, you’d watch Battlefield Earth rather than Avatar?
I was giving my list of the worst 3D movies by James Cameron. It’s the best and the worst both at the same time!!
Worst play: Hamlet
FYI, that’s in the worst “Shakespeare plays called Hamlet” category.
386sx, ah. OK, I thought you were speaking more generally… under that criterion, I’m compelled to concur with your judgement.
Sorry.
The Japanese pronounce Hamlet as “bacon”.
Worst bacon: bacon
I would imagine that if anyone is called for jury duty and doesn’t want to be placed on a jury, that reading The God Delusion while sitting in the courthouse waiting would do the trick.
I liked Jadehawk’s linked story, except for the part about how the atheist was “shifty and nervous” before admitting to her atheism. That’s something I’m trying hard to work on myself – if atheists follow the cultural norm of acting as though it’s something to be ashamed of, it doesn’t help advance it as something not to be ashamed of. Not that it’s easy. It’s just something I noticed in myself when I would come across people I used to go to church with – at first I was reflexively skittish and, well, shifty. Then I realized that gave off the impression that I was doing something “wrong” and knew it, and it gave them a big opening to start grilling me about where I was now going to church and how often. I’ve tried since to specifically be outgoing and open to them. It paid off once in spades – I ran into my old pastor, was just normally nice and friendly and carefree, and he turned skittish and weird and couldn’t get away from me fast enough.
(hit return too fast)
It was like he had no idea how to cope with an apostate who wasn’t contrite and kiss-uppy. It was a quite satisfying experience. :)
Sentence o’ fail:
How to deal with Erin:
Isn’t Paschal’s wager that if you eat lamb, the easter bunny will bring you fertility?
Also on Erin:
“our goal is not to disprove evolution, because a person can believe in evolution and be a Christian. Because of this, don’t get into endless debate about whether we evolved from lower life forms.”
Good, good….
“It is a much more effective strategy to get to the place where you have a discussion about how both evolutionists and Christians are exercising some measure of faith in their view of where life came from.”
Oh, couldn’t stick the landing. That’s sad.
Thanks Jadehawk, OM, those links (#212 & #213) were fun.
Weak. It is almost as if our message is getting through to them. They have nothing but the Bible and they know it.
Ah, the Boy Scouts … I thought they were a semi-useful organization when not in the hands of mormons (whose troop leaders tend to speed everyone to Eagle Scout status so they can claim more Eagles in less time than any inferior non-mormon troops — not a blanket condemnation, btw, since some troop leaders are great and make all the difference). But then I read a story about the pay the CEO receives.
The Boy Scouts said this was misleading because it was a one-time high figure related to Mr. Williams retiring. Okay, let’s look at some details:
– Salary of $404,078 (Mr. Williams’ annual salary effective April 1, 2007, would have been $598,300, but he retired on September 1, 2007, therefore he was paid a salary of $404,078.)
– Accumulated (over three years’) value of deferred compensation – 457 (f) of $912,479
– Retirement payments of $131,493 received after retirement
– Various retirement gifts and recognitions which total $71,452
– Unused vacation valued at $11,746
Expenses of $46,352 paid by Mr. Williams are listed on the form which includes: compensation value of personal automobile, cell phone, additional life insurance premiums, and tax preparation services on which taxes were paid by the employee.
Still looks like a pretty sweet deal to me. I would like to be reimbursed for life insurance premiums and tax preparation services.
Re-jurors asking questions.
Let me give an example of the questions we had. There were about 9 or 10 dramatis personae. One of them (the accused in an aggravated domestic) came over as being well below average intelligence. The others (apart from the arresting officer!) were all from a rough area of town, various of them inter-related by birth or by living together. Not all of them knowing each other’s names. “Chris” – not the correct name or anything like it – turned out to be female when from the evidence they seemed to be male! (The name can be used for either sex in Britain – short for Christine or Christopher or as a name on its own). “Friends” turned out to be not-to-distant relatives of either the wife or the victim. Some of the witnesses mis-identified each other. I’m not suggesting any of this was deliberate on the part of the witnesses but it was getting so I simply could not understand who was who.
So I asked the judge (in the proper way) if we could have a list of people’s names and a simple description of where they fitted in. And could the individual witnesses be clearly identified before giving evidence, please.
The Judge, of course, could have ignored it but he was gracious enough (he treated us with great courtesy throughout) to admit that he was getting confused as well (of course, he probably wasn’t but he could see we were serious). He gave the 2 barristers a mild telling off for allowing confusion over such a simple issue and called a recess (it was near lunch). The barristers were instructed to produce the list over lunch so that it would be available to all the key people (the Judge, jury, the accused, barristers) when we came back.
I was not alone amongst the jury to be confused by the witnesses. We even had a hostile witness – the estranged wife who was called upon by the defence.
I believe we had a couple of questions of fact for the arresting officer and for the accused who many of us felt was struggling to make his points clearly enough – just because someone is confused by the formality of the Court does not make him guilty. In each case the Judge was totally supportive and asked a lot of extra questions himself. IIRC we had a question for the victim (i.e. the guy whose blood was liberally deposited in the flat). “When did he seek medical treatment?” (An excellent question according to the Judge in his summing up.) He didn’t.
We chose a “Foreman of the Jury” (the only one of us who had done it before) and everyone was allowed to have their say. There was no conflict. No one “dug their heels in”. We all listened to each other. Unanimously, we found “Not Guilty” after IIRC about 3 hours. It was exactly how a jury could work (as far as I could see).
I am afraid that the spammers are paying attention to the topics here. This one is going by the moniker of drkent3. I am almost amused.
congratulations to Cuttlefish for being selected for The Open Laboratory 2009. The poem is The cuttlefish genome project
but
but
where was PZ?
Tayschrenn
To lose $90 of tea. There is an Englishman here who feels for you!
Tragedy!!
:-o
Cars and bikes are not stolen??? But packages are???
<Vulcan mode>Not logical.</Vulcan mode>
That gives you a Gore number of 2, not 1.
Will have to read that later – it requires Javascript! No Javascript here in the lab.
Click on Andy the Atheist and get… THIS!:
Scare quotes around “evidence” in the original.
:-) :-) :-)
<headdesk>
Somehow forgot to paste this in before:
LOL!
Glenn Beck reads Palin his diary entry
#203 Epikt
Interesting piece!
Can you explain the comment, above? From my viewpoint, the woodwind seemed to be the ones with the most extreme parts. The double bases were sawing away probably 50% faster than usual (‘usual’ usually being slowly). One expects the first violins to be getting in on the act. But the flutes and clarinets seemed to be just about flat out.
Epikt, #210:
I think what you saw are Bb/A piccolo trumpet(s) and/or maybe slightly larger G, F, D, or Eb trumpet(s) — there’s one right at the beginning that looks like a piccolo to me. Around 0:36 & 1:30, you can see two with rotary-valves and two smaller ones with piston-valves (I think both are piccs). I’m not a trumpeter, but I would think rotary-valves would make the fast articulations even more difficult. Allegedly they are better at blending with other sections because of a less “brassy” sound.
Alan B, #243:
I’m sure it’s tough on all the brasses, probably most of all on the Horns. For the most part I don’t think the registers are extreme, but it’s difficult to sustain those repeated sharp articulations and heavy accents over such long phrases and probably at a minimum of forte throughout. Ironically, I’d say it’s a bit like Wagner in that way, only much, much shorter: each little bit of the parts are fairly reasonable, but trying to play it all together is pretty hard.
I’m going to post a rather dumb question (to be sure, I’ve called myself a dumb fratboy several times here already lol):
Is that a spambot going around and posting things in very old threads right now? He/she/it is somewhat on topic but also sounds like they are copy-pasting. I’m not familiar with my general internet personalities. lol
In case you’re interested, here’s something I found from John Adams’ opera Doctor Atomic: “Batter My Heart”. The dude in the hat is playing Oppenheimer, and that big shiny round thing with wires hanging from the ceiling is supposed to be the nuclear bomb from the Trinity test.
(Fair warning: the lyrics full of religious garbage about some “three-personed Gawd” or another who batters hearts. Not clear what kind of batter he/they use for their hearts… cornmeal maybe?)
As a once and future trumpet player and inveterate fucker-around with trombones and french horns and euphoniums and sousaphones and the like, I can. The way one makes a sound on a brass instrument involves vibrating a part of your body; all other instruments instead vibrate a reed or two or strings or whatever. This makes playing a brass instrument far more physically and physiologically taxing. Sawing away at a bass or wiggling yer fingers on a clarinet are one thing, but vibrating the lips leads to physiological fatigue much faster. Every big band has a saxophone feature or two so the trumpet players can rest their chops. John Coltrane could play for hours at a time without pause but that’s simply not possible on a trombone.
I think that’s an artifact from Good Old Britain, when having your peers judge you gave you a hell of a better chance at a fair trial than being a peasant/other “lowlife” being judged by an aristocrat.
Doesn’t work so well now, when the difference between judge and jury is not birth, but education in the relevant field.
I wonder if she did it because she was ashamed, or because she was afraid (if you notice, later in the thread it’s revealed that a bunch of creepy churchgoers regularly hit on her; if their wives found out she was an atheist, it might make her life miserable, indeed), or because she already knew that revealing this would just end up in an argument (which apparently it did).
ha!
the only time this ever came up was in a situation I didn’t feel comfortable discussing it, because I was at work at the Starbucks counter. Nothing worse to be potentially proselytized at where you aren’t allowed to defend yourself. Luckily, the guy wasn’t an ass and apologized for making me uncomfortable for asking if I was Christian, and didn’t prod any further when I told him I didn’t think that was something I wanted to discuss at work.
sure as fuck isn’t. And these are the somewhat more informed, less insane Christians (well, except for the Satanist part. That was just extra stupid); if they don’t get it, the fundies and super-fundies definitely won’t :-(
yeah, I don’t get it either. closest I can come to an explanation is that cars and new-looking bikes are definitely and obviously someone’s possession. Packages OTOH are in a possessional no-man’s-land between original owner and future owner.
without looking at its name-link, I guess it might be blogwhoring…
Re jury trials, while they are an English invention, we don’t actually use them as extensively as the Americans do. In England and Wales, juries are not usually used in civil cases (except in actions for libel and slander, and certain types of action against the state). They are used primarily in serious criminal cases. And as someone noted above, there is no “jury selection process” in England comparable to that which operates in the US.
Personally I’m in favour of getting rid of juries. They’re expensive and rather pointless, and I also dislike the coercive nature of compulsory jury service.
:-)
They’ve got smileys there… <headshake>
So much wrong on the Internet! I’d love to join that forum and ask a few questions about everyone’s basic assumptions there. :-) Too bad I won’t find the time for that anytime soon.
Bingo and bingo, respectively.
At the very least, someone should tell them that they can do something against feeling like hicks!!! Wikipedia is just the beginning!
don’t bother, they’ll boot you in 2 seconds flat. They are extremely paranoid and have been known to ban people simply for having handles they didn’t feel were sucking-up-to-Jesus-y enough. You can blame FSTDT for that :-p
wikipedia, like reality, has a well-known liberal bias ;-)
seriously though, these people are actively fighting every thought and idea that doesn’t conform to their preconceived notions of how the universe works. Some of them occasionally have a rational, skeptical thought bubble up from the dark depths of their psyche, and their usual reaction to that is to literally exorcise those “devil’s whispers” from their minds :-/
The answer to an age-old philosophical question.
I just read the forum rules. Highly inconsistent, I’d say.
Both cursing and cussing are forbidden. :-?
There’s a place where they probably wanted to write “fictitious”. They wrote “factitious” instead. Check it out. His Noodly Appendage must have been in there.
I suppose you found that out through personal experience? I wanted to ask how you even found that crazy, crazy forum…
Sure, but they don’t even know that.
I don’t know. In the thread you linked to, one guy actually said the burden of proof was on them, not on the atheist…
Aaaaargh. I want to tell them that chickens have real knees, and the “backward knees” are the heels, but I’d need to register first!!!
actually, I found it via FSTDT; which is also how I know they book “suspicious” characters on sight. Many a FSTDT’er has tried, and few if any succeeded to survive as far as a single post.
And anyway, there’s a couple people there who are intelligent and not afraid of their own thoughts (though it’s a mystery to me how they can believe in the rapture in such conditions), but most of them really are afraid of their own thoughts. If you spend enough time reading their forums, a lot of ugliness comes up: major, untreated depression; lots of self-punishment and denial*; lots of fear of the outside world and their own thoughts**; and other such things that make me sometimes feel really bad for them for being stuck in such an unhealthy environment.
——
*there’s at least one self-repressed lesbian, one divorced woman who thinks she isn’t ever allowed to fall in love ever again and as a result feels very lonely, and a handful of dysfuncional, even abusive, certainly loveless marriages there
**there’s a post on FSTDT somewhere where a woman had the thought bubble up that the Rapture wasn’t real. she was convinced that the devil was attacking her, so she “exorcised” him with some sort of ad-hoc prayer, and as she happily reported, that made the evil thought go away.
You’d think they’d know that from eating them (whole and as chicken drumsticks). But I suppose that would require observational skills which most of them simply just don’t have. :-/
Also telling how the forum rules talk about “this country” on the Internet and barely so much as imply they mean the USA.
However, that this is pathetically careless doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Is there even anyone without a US or Albertan background who believes at all in the Rapture?
they have some Australians, and at least one Dutchie.
it’s spreading :-/
oh, and Brits; they have some Brits there, too. But you’re right, it’s mostly an US-centric site.
Scary.
And even sadder than the crusader smiley.
I thought that orthadox muslims still believe in the rapture.
Spoken like a true professor. Just enjoy the moment, no matter how anatomically/scientifically incorrect it is. That’s the only way I can read fantasy…
Read it. Smiled, mostly because it seemed like what had happened to said Raptard has put her on the road to atheism rather than the other way around.
The advice – ‘pray for her’ – from more than a few of the woo-soaked posters was also quite hilarious. How is it that Christians still believe prayer can affect anything outside their own personal mental state (a la meditation)?
Still, I don’t want them to stop doing it – quite the opposite; if we could convince Christians that their response to every problem should be prayer rather than action then it’ll be a lot easier for the world to ‘go secular’.
Don’t like evolution being taught in schools? Don’t joint your school board and fight for creationism, pray for it to stop.
Don’t like gays getting married? Don’t spend your money supporting a PAC to produce anti-equality advertising, pray that God does something about it.
Don’t want a man who isn’t white in the White House? Stay at home on election day and pray he gets voted out.
I love prayer!
The Dutch Bible Belt, while small, is well known for its ultra-ultra-Calvinists. They are the reason why elections are not held on Sundays* but on Wednesdays in the Netherlands – those concrete-heads refuse to do “work” on the, um, reinterpreted Sabbath. Australia has brought forth Ken Ham, Andrew Snelling, and a branch of the Flat-Earth Society.
Britain is somewhat worrying, however.
* Any Americans wondering? Civilized countries want to maximize turnout and therefore deliberately put their elections on days when most people don’t have to be at work all day. Did “first Tuesday in November” just sound good to someone…?
That was fascinating, Jadehawk. Thanks. I read it earlier in the day, and one response stands out as particularly twisted:
Jadehawk, OM,
Thinking about it, I was speaking from personal ignorance. That last part about the “how do you know which god” argument didn’t strike me as something that would have been considered or even known by a Christian organization a few years ago.
I did start wondering if Kikimoon, the one who wrote of engaging the atheist, might be a poe. On the second page of the forum, the posters start asking Kikimoon about her personal beliefs, like they don’t trust that she is telling a real story. Or maybe they are preparing to turn on her and tell her that the reason the atheist doesn’t convert is because Kikimoon isn’t being Christian enough. Their paranoia is tangible.
What do you mean? They have never believed that the saved ones will be bodily lifted up into heaven right before the end of the world starts.
I’m talking about a comment pretty far down, not about the cartoon itself. The cartoon doesn’t mention any knees and depicts the heels fairly correctly. :-)
And, yes, of course I hope to become a true professor one day. I’m not really capable of anything else, am I.
It makes obvious sense to ask an omnipotent and omnibenevolent being for help.
What does not make sense, and what I didn’t understand even when I still believed, is to pray to an omniscient being. God already knows what you want and what you need before, and better than, you! Or what have I missed?
Heh. I never noticed that about the White House. :-D
Obviously.
hmm… I read that differently. I read that as a rhetorical question: she’s supposed to ask herself what she believes and why, so that she can better articulate it. Keep in mind how important these Christians find “personal testimonials”: for them, the sincerity and personal authority of a conversion testimonial are powerful tools, because sincerity and authority are their modes of determining what truth is. They don’t, for the most part, understand or accept evidence-based, rational and non-authoritative truth-finding (or even know such a thing exists and is possible)
Not if the things you’ve prayed for the last seventy-eight times you’ve prayed haven’t come about…
I’m still surprised that Pascal’s Wager survived after being dissed by Homer Simpson.
And what if we picked the wrong religion? Every week, we’re just making God madder and madder!
Simple and direct.
I did, too. I’d put it at about a 50% chance. If she is for real, she does seem to show a capacity for introspection and humanity (not wanting to cause harm to the woman by bringing the other “church women” down on her).
I agree. If she returns, it’ll be interesting…
No, I think that maybe that guy felt his own faith slipping away, got scared, and wanted a nice, sincere, miraculous, impressive conversion story (urgently!) to make the doubt stooooooop!!11! and get the endorphines flowing again. Probably he wanted a round of everyone sharing their religious experiences to a chorus of “Amen” and “Praise the Lord”. An addiction to religious experience?
Anyway, keep in mind that this is the culture where “so, what church do you go to?” is considered polite smalltalk. Maybe “so, what’s your personal relationship with your Lord and Savior?” is considered polite smalltalk in that subculture. :-)
Of course.
Nevermind my last post. Now I really look like a dumb fratboy.
*slinks away in embarrasment
Blockquote fail. Should have gone to bed… perhaps I wanted to keep talking in this, um, interesting company…
That’s when it becomes… difficult to believe in such a being in the first place. As long as you believe, praying makes perfect logical sense.
Oh. My…
So… See… Following reading this, I went and looked…
And listen, are we quite sure that entire fucking site isn’t some kind of put-on? I mean… that praying smiley… srsly?
And then there’s the title. ‘Rapture Ready?’ Eh? It’s like somethin’ out of Moral Orel. I’m pretty much in full ‘lol whut?’ mode from that bit on…
If these people are for real, they don’t just need a talking-to. They need a fucking intervention.
That occurred to me as well. Though, technically, she’d be an anti-Poe since she’s (possibly) an atheist on a Christian site rather than the other way around. How about an ‘Eop’ – ’cause that’s just ‘Poe’ backwards…
Whatever the term, if it’s true, good for her. There’s got to be a way to lead these horses to
waterrealise that Christianity is a load of, well, what comes out of their rear ends.yeah; pretty much the only thing that seems to keep some of them from going all Heaven’s Gate on us is their conviction that suicide is a sin.
There are “Are U Rapture Ready?” billboards along the highways that run through Indian Reservations in the northwestern U.S.A. It’s like another fuck-over-the-Indians campaign.
in case anyone was wondering, this beer does not suck.
Marjanovic, 240 and 241
Ah, that’s how the numbering goes.
On the other hand, I do get a Gygax number of 1. Which means if you end up working on a project with me, you’ll have a Gygax of 2.
And speaking of bacon; the worst was Francis, the best Roger, and the most popular is Kevin.
BTW, that crusade smiley is among the creepiest things I’ve ever seen.
***
Hmmm… I did grow up with these people to some extent, and the scary paranoid vibe is coming through to me:
Now according to a passage in the New Testament Jesus said that God answers prayer. It doesn’t say that God always answers prayer positively.
But putting yourself in a situation where the chance of death is increased isn’t – but that doesn’t seem to affect Christian behaviour all that much.
Christians should love death. It should be their number one goal to achieve it as soon as possible so they can go yuck it up with JC and the angels and all the really boring musicians (’cause we know all the good ones are in hell).
Funerals should celebrate that someone’s achieved eternal life in heaven, not that they’ve lost what they had here. They’ve traded up!
That Christians don’t seem to think their death is actually going to lead to something better makes me wonder if, deep down, they don’t have as much faith in their afterlife concept as they’re supposed to have.
oh, I was thinking of a different line; the one SC quotes does have the “you’re new, so you’re suspicious” thing going for it. I was thinking more of this when I responded:
in context, I guess the paranoia of fakes is the better explanation, after all
Ah, I see that now. Yes of course, this reliance on personal testimony is a constant problem when questioning someone’s faith.
Something I haven’t noticed too often from fundies, and who knows how long will it last with the tripe they are feeding her. The oh-so-innocent mention of Ray Comfort’s The Way of the Master website as if that would help in converting an atheist was pretty funny actually.
:D
This is the evil world with which I should not be tempted, because it would be so easy to slip onto those boards and fit in… I’m not sure what exactly I’d do with it once firmly established as a sleeper agent, though.
Yeah. And I’d add: it’s not quite the only tell, either.
My view of it is: religion is generally a mindfuck, heavily driven by social coercion. It makes people pushy, demanding, suspicious jerks precisely because the contract you’re implicitly signing hinges upon a sort of mutual, unspoken shame.
Like fraternity pledges undergoing a hazing, you’re required publically to debase yourself in front of those who’ve gone before you, just as they were required to do. Your reward? You get to enforce and witness the performance of the same ritual by others, later–play the sadist, instead of the masochist.
The ritual is the swearing of fealty to a patently ridiculous creed. Doing so is painfully embarrassing precisely because it’s so ridiculous, and everyone knows it’s ridiculous, and no one really believes it in their gut. It’s painful because the initial, honest reaction of all adherents to it was precisely what you’d expect: that that’s just silly. But they traded away that honesty, usually slowly, bit by bit, in exchange for membership in that group, and they know it too well… And they’ve tried to talk themselves into it to make it less painful, but that never really takes.
Unlike, however, what’s done in fraternities, when that ritual can be enforced is a lot more elastic. And that’s what you’re seeing here. ‘kikimoon’ is being commanded in such patronizing terms publicly to swear up and down she luuuuvs da lord Jaysus by those who see themselves as her seniors on that site, probably partly because she’s new, and partly because the story does make them uncomfortable. This will be her penance: shame yourself before us, dear, as we all are required to do, on demand.
David Marjanović #266
Voting on Tuesdays dates from early 19th Century New England practice. Back in the bad old days* everyone living in a township** gathered in one or two central locations for voting. It often took a day for a rural family to get to their voting hall. Since Sunday was “Da Lawd’s Day” and travel was prohibited, the farm families would spend Sunday doing church, then travel to the township voting hall on Monday, spend Tuesday voting, and go home on Wednesday.
Occasionally people talk about Saturday or Sunday voting, but it’s not something that concerns most voters or elected officials.
*When ships were made out of wood and men were made out of steel.
**Townships are subdivisions of counties. A township usually had several cities and towns as well as rural areas. I live in the Town of Groton which is distinct from the City of Groton. Both of these municipalities, as well as Ledyard, Gales Ferry, and half of Mystic, are in Groton Township. The other half of Mystic is in Stonington Township.*** These things can get complicated. Both Groton and Stonington Townships are in New London County, along with several other townships.
***Both halves of Mystic have the same ZIP Code (postal code), even though politically and administratively they’re two separate towns. I said it can get complicated.
So was the celebration of the “prayer, cookies, and scripture” idea. Because everyone knows atheists can’t resist cookies [*waits for Rev.’s link*], and will accept any faith that offers them.*
*Oddly, my jury story involves them: Throughout the trial and several miserable – and I mean miserable – days of deliberations, one of the jurors kept promising that when it was over she had something to give all of us. Another juror and I were actually quite excited about this, and would speculate during the lunch breaks: cookies? chocolate-chip brownies? Rice Krispies squares? (Yes, I know all of these are simple to make – it’s just different if someone bakes them for you.) So…the final day comes, after several frustrating weeks, and what was her surprise treat?
JW fucking literature. And we couldn’t even be angry since she was (though not the sharpest) a genuinely sweet and well-meaning person. The disappointment lingers, though. :)
Groton, eh? Why is Fishers Island in New York?
Yep, I could fit in with those tards too. Yuck!
Did any of you happen to hear the Haitians talking on NPR’s BBC program from Florida? Everyone of them said the earthquake did not lessen their faith in a merciful god!
Yeah, a bit like CFNM, or BDSM.
Found I Just Found Bigfoot on the web. It’s an article by one James A. Snyder that’s published by in print and on line by the San Diego Reader.
The photos are clearer in print, but even at browser resolution you should be able to note one salient fact, that “foot print” has no foot prints.
Remove any footwear you may have on and compare the soles of your feet and your toes with the palms of your hands and your fingers. You’ll note that each has lines, ridges forming distinct, and distinctive, patterns. Now look at the picture at the top of the story. Note the odd thing about that foot prints; that foot prints has no foot prints. No sign of the lines, ridges, so distinctive of human soles and toes. Or, as I understand it, the soles and toes of sasquatch foot prints.
The patterns you see in the purported bigfoot footprint are what you see in weathered stone of the type evident in the picture. Don’t know about you, but it looks more like what you’d get from water erosion.
The story itself is more about Mr. Snyder’s troubles getting scientist to listen to him. He makes a cast, and lets scientists have a look at it. Through a third party, who want the evidence verified (good for them). The big mistake everybody in this tale makes is that nobody goes to have a look at the original out in the field. In the end Snyder decides to not trust scientists, because they refuse to agree with him that he has found an actual sasquatch footprint.
Now I’m at best a sketchily educated amateur geologist, but from the photographs provided with the story, plus the fact Snyder and his friend were hiking up a gorge, the most likely conclusion is that what the man saw was plain old water erosion. We’re talking about rock here. Even at 800 pounds one is not going to make much of an impression on stone like that. Then you have the pattern of the toes, which matches nothing found among humans or sasquatch. A huge second toe; a teeny, strongly displaced big toe; and the rest. I don’t know if the original “footprint” is still there, it’s been about 8 years after all, but if it is then I expect a competent geologist could soon suss out the facts regarding the case.
James A. Snyder got it wrong. So did the scientists who had a second hand look at his evidence. Each because they saw what they expected to see. Mr. Snyder because he needed to see a sasquatch footprint, Dr. Meldrum and associates because they were assessing the evidence second hand instead of first hand.
That is the mistake people tend to make where problematic subjects are concerned, evaluating copies instead of the original. Bigfoot skeptics tend to dismiss footprint casts, instead of the actual footprints themselves. Believers tend to accept the same casts, instead of testing the original print itself. And, as you can see with James A. Snyder, both sides reject what the other has to say regardless of validity because it doesn’t conform with what they want to be true.
It also says much about resistance to new findings. The germ theory of disease, the theory of evolution, even the heliocentric theory. Unless and until a solid body of evidence presents itself, people tend to reject the new in favor of what they were taught and thus what they are comfortable with. Even then you get holdouts, as with the work showing that the “cold mother” theory of Autism had nothing backing it.
Science is not just about applying the scientific method, or using critical reasoning. It’s about accepting what the evidence reveals, even when your findings disagree with what you’ve been taught and what your peers would prefer to be true. As Arthur Conan Doyle (and there was a woo addict if ever there was one) one said, “Once you’ve eliminated the impossible whatever remains, no matter how improbable, is probably true.”
And that is my quasi post on Pharyngula for January 14th, 2010 :)
Sven d Milo, 272
Fisher Island is in New York (City I presume) because it was originally where fishermen anchored between trips out to sea. Until development spread to the island and forced the fishermen to find another place to anchor their boats.
Yeah. Many talk about how miserable they are and want the Rapture to occur so they can “go home”. They quite openly talk about the possibly of Obama being the anti-Christ. There’s a lot of Muslim bashing and homophobia. Also, paranoia that puts most Christian’s persecution complex to shame. Honestly, if all you knew about Christians in the US was based on those forums you’d think they were being hunted down and thrown into camps.
Patricia @293
I heard that. It was cringe-inducing. Here are are all the dead people lining the streets, having apparently not attracted the attention of the merciful god, but of the wrathful god of Pat Robertson.
To add that kind of cognitive dissonance to this tragedy is sickening. But I’m more likely to forgive survivors and their relatives than I am the newscasters who end their stories with, “And their prayers were answered.”
SC @291:
Shhh. Don’t tell the christians this, but what we really can’t resist is BACON. Shhh, Lynna, fer christ’s sake.
I can answer that question in three simple words: I don’t know.
Back in the bad old days* somebody drew a line on a map which didn’t put the Connecticut-New York state boundary in the middle of Long Island Sound but along the northern edge of the Sound. So most of the Sound, including Fishers Island, is in New York. Incidentally, Fishers Island has a Connecticut ZIP Code, not a New York one.
mythusmage, Fishers Island is about 75 miles from New York City. It’s only about four miles from where I live in southeastern Connecticut, but it’s part of New York State.
*When ships were made out of wood and men were made out of steel.
Considering Pat Robertson’s recent blatherings about Haiti deserving the wrath of God, I thought I’d look at some of his past utterings to see if he was always this vile.
I’ve learned not to trust C4 (that’s Christian Chocolate Chip Cookies). Every bite, they swear the chocolate chips are in there if I just believe. I never see the chips, but they tell me I lack faith, and since I haven’t eaten all of the world’s cookies, how am I sure? Several times, not just once, I have bitten into an actual raisin! Their response: people have free wills, and sometimes the cookie monster makes them do things. At this point, I’m teetering on the brink of becoming an a-chocolate-chippist.
Wait a minute, do Mormons eat christian chocolate chip cookies? Isn’t chocolate a no-no like coffee?
“Hot drinks” is the prohibition on coffee, later clarified to mean coffee and tea. The majority of the caffeine-like stimulant in chocolate is theobromine.
I knew a few Church members who would sip iced-tea all day but not drink even hot water.
Be wary of accepting cookies or kindness from christians. The Baptist pastor that preached at the church my parents attended also visited my father when he was dying. He offered to host a memorial service after my father died. Then, at the memorial service, the pastor seized the opportunity of all the heathen children being in church (for our mother’s sake), to tell us that he knew our father would want us to accept jesus into our hearts, and to give our lives to the Lord. It was very inappropriate, and wrong. My father went to church to please my mother, and he never would have preached jeezus to us.
That was years ago. Now the pastor continues to harass me. He stops by regularly to invite me to church events, to leave chick tracts, and to preach to me. I resent the fact that he forces me to be semi-rude in order to refuse the invitations, and in order to get him out of my house. He means well, but he does ill. He does make a change from the mormon missionaries.
Lynna – That NPR program made me furious. Since I’ve taken over the managers position at work (I hate work) I don’t allow any christian radio…let em fire me. Mostly the radio is on KBOO a progressive community supported station out of Portland, Oregon. You can get it on the Internet.
On Thursdays is my favorite atheist, a transgendered person, Theresa Mitchell – with The News You’re Not Supposed to Know at 9:00 am PST. Give it a listen sometime. *end of radio plug*
Lynna, OM, that second Pat “Pact with the Devil” Robertson quote in #301 bears a striking resemblance to what Hieronymous The Troll Braintree was going on about today.
*Chitty Chitty Bang Bang flashback*
Oh jeez – I just know all that praying and bullshit is what they are going to do at my husbands memorial in February put on by the VA. It makes me both cry and rage. We’ll see what my letter of protest brings.
If it’s any comfort Lynna, my old snake kissing crowd is trying to reconvert me too. It’s pure mercenary bullshit! They see a widow with property and some good Brother in the church should be overseeing it.
Re the asswipe pastor pulling that slimy, opportunistic harangue-at-the-funeral routine, I was myself present for a similar performance, at the funeral of a grandfather, some decades back, now.
Déclassé hardly describes such bullshit, in my ever so humble opinion. I find myself hoping that if any such gatecrashing pest were to show up to profane *my* memorial, my friends would honour my memory properly by rising as one, bearing said interloper forcefully on their shoulders to a nearby lake or river, and dumping their weasly ass unceremoniously into it.
I finally got one guy to stop trying to convert me by telling him basically the following:
One would think that confronting a person by attempting to convince them that everything they believe and know is wrong and that you are right is quite possibly the worst way to persuade them. When you witness to an atheist, the person whom you are addressing does not believe there is a god. Therefore any information about god, Jesus, the holy trinity, and the redemption of man falls on deaf ears.
Whether you like it or not, whether you accept it or not, the fact remains you’re attempting to convince someone that something they cannot see, feel, hear, or otherwise partake of any empirical evidence of its existence, exists. Regardless of how much you believe in the story and how much it has affected your life and the lives of those around you, they do not.
You’re communicating with a person who does not believe what you are sharing with them exists. You’re asking them to buy on faith the fact that spending time in church, telling other people about this belief and living a life based on it may one day reward them. That’s difficult enough. When you add to this the fact that you are not only selling them something you can’t prove exists, but that they don’t even want, things turn from difficult to impossible.
I usually just call them bald-head, then let them know I’m waiting for the bears to arrive.
that’s just vile.
Yes, it is vile. Welcome to fundie world.
Overseeing it and you, if your stripe of fundies are anything like the Mormon ones I grew up around.
Miki Z – Oh but they aren’t heartless *pfft*, pastor would set up some dates for me with appropriate Brothers if I would just come crawling back, repent, and beg to be properly supervised.
On good days I think it’s funny…today isn’t a good day. ;)
Patricia @309:
“Mercenary” is the right word. They want your money and they want points in heaven, plus, they rack up kudos from their brethren for roping you in. Basically, they don’t care about you as a person, just what they get from you.
A mormon family that used to live across the street from me tried for several years to fix me up with a mormon man. I do think that family actually liked me, but at the same time they were trying to do their duty as good mormons by deleting the abomination of a “single woman” from their immediate vicinity. I finally managed to convince them that I did not want to go to their Singles Ward and get fixed up with a
mormon manloser. I could have had my own mormon man to torture … sigh. Lost opportunity!aratina @307:
Bleh. I read a bit of that thread earlier today. I couldn’t even see the point in replying to HTTB. If older people still feel uneasy with the idea of interracial marriage we should just leave them alone because they’re not really bigots, says HTTB. Like Pat Robertson is not really a bigot — Pat loves all god’s creatures, even gays — he just doesn’t want to take any chances with god’s wrath. Please, everyone, don’t disturb your neighbors with interracial marriages, gay marriage, and single women. Put them all in the closet, I say. Put them out of sight.
Holy crap! What would they think of interracial marriages between atheists! How about the marriage of gay atheists! God will have to come up with some extra-special wrath for that.
Well based on the lack of response to my #254, and the time that has elapsed, and the far more serious matters discussed, I’ll give the punchline since the comic site requires registration for anything other than the current days comic. I referred to 1/14/10 Non Sequitor, which answered the age old question why chickens cross the road. They form a conga line at the least provocation. I thought of the Pullet Patrol™.
Tis Himself, 300
Corrected again. I suspect New York got most of Long Island Sound because the cartographer was being paid by New York.
AJ Milne @310:
Oh, man! That sounds sooo good. Unfortunately, my True Believing mother was there (or we never would have been in a church in the first place), so for her sake, we didn’t say anything.
The pastor wanted praise for his performance afterwards. I just considered it the last insult aimed at my father. We did what we could to erase the insult by staging a memorial camping trip later. We did the same when my mother died, and that time we didn’t have to go to church. We just headed for the hills.
The pastor meant well. He planted a tree for my mother when she died. He’s so fucking god-addled that his eyes shine and swim with fervor. He brought his daughter by once so that she could tell me about her upcoming piano concert at church. Shameless arm twisting, shameless guilt-inducing tactics, and shameless exploitation of societal be-nice norms.
‘Tis Himself’s advice sounds good. I should figure out some way to tell the pastor that he is actually building a wall between us.
(If my connection didn’t suck, I’d know if this was a good recording…)
:)
Lynna – Oh I think it’s even lower than that. They want my property for any of the Brothers that don’t have homes, or that are widowers and need a babysitter and a house. I know that Pastor goes routinely to the county courthouse to look at the property tax rolls. He knows exactly what members and former members have in taxable value.
Isn’t that sweet.
Lynna, 305
You can accept cookies from me. Mostly because I’m hardly what you’d call a doctrinaire Christian (more Christianity influenced), and I’d be offering store bought cookies anyway, with no expectation of of payback.
Just another sign of my oddity. :D
*sounds of worshiping the porcelain god in the background*
Nerd – I was at my pukefesterd job, so I missed the chicken joke.
Actually it’s true, the silly cluckheads will conga anywhere if they think they will get a treat. They are shameless hussies!
Patricia, the mormons do that as well. And if they think you are getting ready to buy the dirt farm they start counseling you on how to leave your estate to the church.
Fuck ’em. You know something has gone seriously wrong in their brains, and they can’t be trusted any further than the Pullet Patrol can throw them.
Those older patriarchs that do most of that stuff have even deeper grooves of crazy in which to run their thoughts. As my brother said to me recently, “Find new friends.”
In the meantime, I’m headed deep into mormon territory to give an Art Meets Adventure show later this month. I’m leaving the word “hell” in the script, but I removed all the other curse words. It’s my turn to take their money, and for that I have to remember not to swear.
Reflector of the Light of God
(Recent nickname given to me and my brother by a molly mormon, bless her for trying.)
Oh, a P.S.: Those dudes think they’re doing you a favor if they saddle you with an old Brother. Truly, they do. They’re not just finding a home for a duffer. They’re putting you on the right path. They are several beers short of a six pack. Train the Pullet Patrol to attack fundies.
You do pronounce “hell” as “aich ee double-hockey-sticks”, don’t you?
I do have one secret trick when having a hard time putting up with fundies, I think of women’s behinds and feel radiant. Yes, it works, even for hetero me. I stole the idea from a line in a poem by Dean Young.
Another good Dean Young line:
Miki Z @329: Oh, fer heck’s sake! Son of a biscuit eater!
LOL
Balkan Beat Box:
Wyclef Jean:
(Has a charity for Haiti.)
Patricia’s recent tales almost make me glad that I am a broke lesbian. No fundie pastor will be trying to recruit me to fill the coffers and set me up with some guy.
Lynna – Oh yes, I do expect to get ‘romanced’ by an older Brother. Some old fart with who knows how many children that needs a nurse. Bullshit.
I may have contributed to my own reconverting by cutting off my hair. It is a ritual sign of mourning that I have honored, and I fear that my stupid old congregation has seen it as a sign that I want to reconnect.
Great. I’ve just wasted two freakin’ hours wallowing around on the Rapture Ready site. The place is like a train wreck, you can’t look away even though you know it won’t end well. Now I feel an irresistible urge to bite the heads off of small furry animals (I’m fresh-out of babies).
I’m gonna blame Jadehawk.
Now Janine, you know that you can be ‘cured’ by the right man. And further, your sin can be absolved if you just repent.
But you will have to get thee behind me in that line. *smirk*
Lynna #319, you said it so well. :)
boygenius – Tough. Jadehawk and the rest of the OM’s are sprawled out from the OM’s orgy. You’ll just have to get over it.
Jebus, nothing left to do but go to bed..
Nerd, what happened?
Nerd – You could count your chickens…pfft!
Worst Star Trek prequel: Star Trek
Worst movie of 2012: I dunno yet.
Worst movie of 1925: I forget. (That was a long time ago.)
Nah, just my normal bed time, and a chunk of the OM’s are sleeping it off. I’ll give the Project Runway tape which just shut off to the Redhead, then off to sleep. Tomorrow will be a wasted day, since I am still waiting for equipment and/or chemicals to do something constructive.
How easy can it be to count your chickens when they are doing the conga?
Tomorrow will be a wasted day, since I am still waiting for equipment and/or chemicals to do something constructive.
Sigh… An other day spent at Pharyngula.
You need better chemicals, darlin’. :)
***
Patricia- Well, since all of the small furry animals currently active (check local listings) have evolved to be nocturnal and I evolved to be diurnal I was unable to capture any of them for my masticatory release. I had to resort to kicking my dog to relieve myself. When he looked up at me with his bewildered, hurt eyes I told him “Don’t blame me, blame Jadehawk.”
How do you feel about your OM orgy afterglow now?
Goodnight Nerd.
The cluckheads are in their coop purring away.
Good night!
SC, here is the original version of the song. It is still Micheal Franti but just a bit more industrial.
Though this is my favorite song by the Disposable Heroes Of Hiphopcrisy
Now I am feeling all gooey and nostalgic.
Califinornia Uber Alles
Uncle Bill!
DAMN IT! DAMN IT ALL TO HELL! My connection sucks, for some reason…periodically, and this is one of those times. I’ll have to revisit the videos people are linking to. Damn it. Thank you, though.
Anyway, here’s one. Great song, but fuck if I know anything else about the video…:
Alan B:
Sven @247 pretty much nails it. I’d just add that the high trumpet parts in Short Ride are often near the upper limit of what a classical trumpet can do comfortably, and there’s not much relief during the whole piece. Playing fast passages on woodwinds or strings can be difficult, but not physically demanding in the same way.
Mr. T:
I went back and watched it again. The leftmost two are definitely rotaries, and the right two are pistons. The piccolos I’ve seen are more compact, but the ones in the vid do appear to be shorter than a normal C or Bb.
It’s my understanding, too, that rotaries get a darker sound but are clumsier to get around on. You more typically see them used in music from around Mozart through the romantics, I think.
Janine @ 353:
When I saw the title of the Uncle Bill! vid, my first thought was ‘Why is Burroughs doing a rap about Ray Comfort?’ :)
Worst video site: YouTube. (They used to be the best. It used to be a freakin paradise compared with now.)
DAMN IT! DAMN IT ALL TO HELL! My connection sucks, for some reason…periodically, and this is one of those times. I’ll have to revisit the videos people are linking to. Damn it. Thank you, though.
Are you sure it isn’t YouTube? Because sometimes they’re down to 60kbps. Good job, Google trained monkeys.
Because sometimes they’re down to 60kbps.
Make that 42…
thank you
divx sinema izle, divx film izle, film izle, divx sinema, divx cinema, divx izle
Janine, “Uncle Bill” bookmarked. Thanks.
Naked Lunch is one of those books that I can pick up, open to any page and read either 2 or 3 pages or all the way through. Kind of odd hearing the Man’s voice, having read his words so many times. No frame of reference, I guess.
Tori Amos performing Tom Waits’ “Time.”
“Fantomas”
Mike Patton, Buzz Osborne, Trevor Dunn and Terry Bozzio; from the Montreux Jazz Festival. Part 1 of 5.
Mike Patton, Jennifer Charles and Dan the Automator; “Lovage.”
New blog post taking down the special pleading that Behe offered on Point Of Inquiry.
And since it’s a friday night, it’s now time to drink. Homebrew Coopers ftw!
If being as a small child is the prerequisite for entering the Kingdom of Heaven, then Patricia, Janine, and Lyanna are definitely overqualified.
I wouldn’t want to be any way near you characters when you were celebrating a bacchanalia. The best I could hope for would be to be torn to pieces.
Wow. Can I come and live with you guys? Out here on the perimeter, my utube download rate is between 5 and 10 kbs. If it were any lower, I would gouge my eyes out with a spork. A couple of miles further out and it’s dial-up world. I would describe that to you, but I don’t want to scare the children.
BS
What makes them underqualified is that there is no Kingdom of Heaven; and even if there were, that “Jesus” character required that we believe and follow all of his psychotic ramblings (or at least we’re supposed to believe the psychotic ramblings of the gospel writers and Paul).
You will not be eaten first, mythusmage.
Maybe I’m not going to the right kind of atheist bacchanalia…. are they usually like this?
Saint-Saëns – Samson et Dalila: Danse Bacchanale
My wife is looking for recommendations of books or documentaries to do with the evolution of language. Not how languages evolved, rather how people got the ability to speak / communicate / etc. Recommendations other than The Language Instinct (which I already have) please.
Anyone else remember the Periodic Table of Science Fiction? Looks like it’s back online.
Care for some depressing music?
Talking to a girl about the future atm, how it’s scary and looms large, and this came to mind :
Father and Son
Oh, and, I saw the most hilarious movie today, the Coen’s brothers A serious man , and now I’m really freaked out that there really are people out there who will only marry/date into their own religious mob !
How do you get the message across to them that this is not the frikkin’ 5th century anymore ??
Wouldn’t that be bacchanal in the singular?
</uninformed yet pedantic>
If you have some time to spend :
Star Trek TNG-Special feature
Kel@365:
You might tell her to check out “The Math Gene: How Mathematical Thinking Evolved And Why Numbers Are Like Gossip” by Keith Devlin. It’s been a few years since I read it, but I remember it containing a theory with some evidence that language was an extension of needing to convey numeric and spatial information.
Patricia – that really stinks. I looked over a couple of states’ versions, and it looks like you have cause to get a restraining order if it gets too bad. Even if you didn’t intend to actually get one, the threat of it might be enough for them to back off.
In the race to fill the Massachusetts Senate Seat left by Ted Kennedy:
Republican Scott Brown takes lead over Democrat Martha Coakley, 50-46, according to a recent poll.
WTF? Not cool. Brown seems like nothing more than a photogenic Bush clone, too.
PZ, I’ve noticed a poster (“pusatbelanja”) posting on many old and abandoned threads, with I believe an intent to blogwhore. FWIW.
It’s that, or cleaning my desk and sorting e-mail.
depressing ?
Here’s my song of the day :
Corsica, by Petru Guelfucci (Corsican folk music)
Corsica
When I’m having a blah or rotten day, I find Amanda Palmer gets me out of my funk. Although it can be a bit embarrassing if I’m jamming to her Oasis song and someone hears me singing along.
Heh. I’ve already bought my ticket to see her play here during the Adelaide Fringe Festival. I can’t wait. I saw the Dresden Dolls a few years back and they were brilliant.
Little late, but thanks for the Bill Burroughs!
Here’s another, with better (IMO) music:
Wowbagger – I’m so jealous!
Another, with fascinating audio/video combination:
wtf?
That link in 380 is NOT the track I remembered from the album pictured.
Much better soundtrack to the same Burroughs recording (the one I meant to post in the 1st place):
Old video, but still good. A reminder that we don’t want our freedoms taken away by by “a bunch of fuggin’ iceholes”
HEY LYNNA
Got the book!
Greedily flicked through to find your trail notes – found ‘Grizzly Country’ so far – beautiful. Also scary as hell. Drawing from an actual experience I take it?
And in the ‘Solitude’ introduction, this awesome line stood out to me:
IMHO, genius.
Aaaaaa!!!!
I apologize for the visuals of Prof. Snape doing high-tech S&M…just listen to that one please!
this is not going well this morning
OK, not S&M, actual torture.
fuck
Mr. Fire @385: So glad the book arrived intact. The “media rate” method of shipping via the USPO is so slow that I always fear for the book’s life — too many opportunities for destruction.
Yes, that Grizzly poem was written from direct experience, from close encounters of the bear kind.
Ha! Mattering and not mattering in the introduction is not appreciated by that many readers; though they do get, and like, the idea of relaxing in all that open space. Obviously, I liked that line. I fought for it over the objections of editors who didn’t get it.
Mr. Fire, would you like to give me permission to use your book review on my website?
Eventually me n a friend
Sorta drifted along into s&m
I can take about an hour on the tower of power
Long as I gets a little golden shower
Sven – I’ve done that type of thing more than once, linked to something that turned out to be not what I thought.
Vanilla in beer? What an appalling waste of vanilla.
Shame? That wouldn’t shame her, or at least it’s not expected to. I think the guy got excited because a new member promises a new conversion story, and conversion stories make him feel ecstatic…
OIC. That makes some kind of limited sense.
<dramatic removal of glasses>
<facepalm>
<dramatic removal of hand from face>
<headdesk>
Why don’t they have the decency to convert to Scientology.
:-D :-D :-D
At the moment, it’s basically all just speculation. Come back in 10 years. :-(
Absolutely. But I’ll be finding more things to praise soon, I’m sure.
Did you know that people who bought your books also bought astroglide? ;)
*reaches for kleenex*
MrFire, What I really want to know is this: did you add the Astroglide and used kleenex to the artifacts on your Stalking Wall display? (For those of you not up to date on this, MrFire has a Stalking Wall in his creepy basement — or so he tells us.)
I’m okay with the Astroglide, but if Amazon starts showing that people who bought my books also bought communion wafers … More changes to the book marketing campaign may be required.
Reflector of the Light of God
#243 Thank you to:
#244 Mr T
#247 Sven DiMilo
#355 Epikt
for your explanations! (Hope I didn’t miss anyone)
Oh it’s good.
Some Linda Thompson.
Pavanne
I think it is the same performance that is found on Dreams Fly Away.
I’m A Dreamer
A cover of a song written by her friend, Sandy Denny. As for the video, rather strange. When Richard does his solo on his electric guitar, the camera focuses on Simon Nicol’s acoustic rhythm guitar.
Jet Plane In A Rocking Chair
During the song, there is tidbits about the pair. It points out that in 1975, they join a Sufi muslim commune. Linda says it mostly taught her to avoid sects.
[breaking character for a second]I don’t know how strong a stomach you have Lynna, but if you do…[/breaking character for a second]
Watch this (NSFW) up to about 2:30 for an idea. MWAHAHAHA
The day will come when you will think of it as the Mural Of Devotion.
I know the story behind this, but I still hope it’s a euphemism for something else ;)
Some Kirsty MacColl
Innocence
How can I resist the snark? You frighten little children and you’ll always wonder why.
I’m Going Out With An Eighty Year Old Millionaire
The title speaks for it’s self.
You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby
Never liked The Smiths (But I do make an exception for There Is A Light That Never Goes Out.) but I love this cover.
Janine,
OK, you got me with Kirsty MacColl. She was amazing. I have a friend who says “In these shoes” is her song.
The video in comment 337 is bizarre.
pusatbelanja is a spammer, using some sneaky software. It copies a sentence from a previous commenter’s post and reposts that with a link to some commercial site.
We get a lot of that here. Usually I catch it early and can ban it fast, but I’m off traveling again.
That’s the reason I posted it.
Check out this and the next one!
(In the exceedingly unlikely event that you don’t already read PhD Comics, of course.)
MrFire @398: First, I’m so glad that you are happily married.
Second, Ewww. Ewww again in reference to the video. And gross, but … still funny. Nice wallpaper that guy has. (Oh, crap, I’m not going to be able to erase that from my memory banks am I. sigh.)
“I’m just so tired of being admired all the time!”
“Mural of Devotion” is better than “Stalking Wall” — you should consider a career as an advisor to politicians and criminals (wait, that last bit was redundant).
As for “Reflector of the Light of God”, I just find it amusing that a christian called me that, while others have called me the embodiment of Satan. I’m easily amused.
Not all criminals are politicians.
yeah, the US Postal Service has the best track record in actually getting stuff to where it’s supposed to be going.
Ahem…
Excuse me, but we actually do have a good track record of getting things where they’re supposed to get going. We’re not perfect, of course, but our mistakes might seem more glaring because we process more mail in less than a month than the rest of the world does in a year.
99% of the time, though, the reason things don’t get where they’re supposed to go in a timely manner is because customers are so fucking stupid. You have no idea how stupid they are.
Here’s what postal workers must deal with, every single day:
–People don’t know how to address mail: Sender information in upper left corner, addressee information (name/street address or P.O. Box/City, State, Zip Code) in the middle to the right, stamp(s) in the upper right corner. Address mail this way, and your mail’s chances of getting there in time increase exponentially, while being “creative” with these things lowers those chances. Drastically.
–Senders don’t know/don’t have/aren’t given the correct address.
–Senders don’t include their return address.
–They don’t use proper postage.
–They don’t know how to file a change of address request (if they file one at all).
–They try to get something for nothing, such as putting first class postage on Express mail packets.
–They don’t package anything properly because they’re too fucking cheap to use the proper packing goods, which means leaks and rips and breakage that can damage other mail or delay mail processing because it damaged our processing machines/and or harmed employees like me when we handled it.
–They try to mail things you’re not supposed to mail, like bowling balls, bricks, propane tanks and grenades (no, I’m not fucking kidding).
–They spray perfumes and god knows what else on their mail to be “pretty” which can induce violent allergic reactions in postal employees (like me).
–They try to make “statements” against companies/orgs they don’t like by taping Business-Reply cards to bowling balls and bricks. Stop it. We don’t send it on, and it can land your ass in Club Fed for mail fraud if you’re caught. Knock this shit off.
Do you realize how much money and time we waste, how much this bullshit cuts into getting your mail to you on time, when we’re dealing with stupid shit like this (and more–much more) every fucking day? It’s a wonder we get anything done at all.
To all of you who mail things the right way–thank you. I love you.
Argh–the things you’re not supposed to mail, bowling balls and bricks, I moved to another section. The rest holds.
:-D :-D :-D
So funny on so many levels.
That was a grade A rant Aquaria.
Thank you.
Oh and I address my shit correctly.
Though one time one of your employees got me in trouble with the Secret Service…. well I got myself in trouble but your people busted me on it.
I won’t hold it against you.
nice rant, but what does it have to do with what I wrote? I said that of all the delivery systems, the good, old-fashioned USPS is the best and most reliable :-/
Ah, reason enough on an open thread. And our mailperson will put packages on our porch (old part of town, we still have house delivery). *checks lists*
AMANDA PALMER AND NEIL GAIMAN ARE GETTING MARRIED!!!!
This makes me inordinately happy.
Also, I always treat my mail well. I put clear tape over the address and return address on packages so it doesn’t smear and become unreadable, and I use the full zip code whenever I have it. :)
Pro tip: Address with a dark pencil; it doesn’t smear when it gets wet. Avoid depositing mail in mail boxes; people use them as garbage cans.
BS
Excellent rant, Aquaria.
It doesn’t surprise me that people try to send propane tanks and grenades through the mail.
Today’s piece of useless trivia: In the US the Postal Service handles the mail. In the UK the Royal Mail handles the post.
OT on this OT thread:
PZ hasn’t hosted The Tangled Bank nor mentioned the Carnival of the Elitist Bastards for a long time – anyone else miss his comments on them? – they just aren’t quite as enjoyable without his salient additions.
Aquaria, she was praising the US mail.
Just on the off chance, does anybody have a used mactel iMac they could let me have? 12 or so hours to back up 50 or so gigs of data is a bit much.
She does work for the USPS.
so this is like driveways and parkways?
I remember this as a common “urban legend” back in the 70-80’s. That because these cards said “Return Postage Guaranteed”, the company would be required to pay the postage on any heavy object these cards were attached to. I never tried it myself and it is good to finally hear what the USPS policy is.
Waits for answer to common language divided by
twofiveseven countries (US, England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and don’t forget places like Bermuda or the Falklands)…Leigh Williams,
Not quite the same, but:
US————Britain
pants———trousers
suspenders—braces
briefs——–pants
lingerie——suspenders
The upshot is, don’t tell a British person you’re going to dress up for a party by wearing nice pants and suspenders.
I was merely referring to the “you park on driveways, but you drive on parkways” thing.
ObRef to TV Tropes: Separated By A Common Language.
These are people who have read Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book and their hearts are (IMO) in the right place.
Too bad it fucks with postal workers…I am certain that’s never the intention.
speaking of separation by language/culture: one of the most hilarious internet arguments I’ve ever witnessed was between an Englishwoman and a New York woman, about holding forks. EW would insist that Americans hold the fork upside down when eating, NYW would vehemently deny it and feel all insulted, and say things like “I’ve NEVER seen an American EVER eat with the fork upside down!”
at times, I considered explaining the problem, but that would have stopped the hilariousness. eventually someone else had mercy on them and used the terms “tines up” vs “butt up” to end the confusion.
uh
and
wow
ok
http://www.cmt.com/videos/alison-krauss-union-station/99743/baby-now-that-ive-found-you.jhtml
and o’ course
& oh yeah
further
http://video.libero.it/app/play?id=84c1bc1d1be92e3356c16e4cf3ebe02e
one more
Okay, this is bad news. I had a transient ischemic attack today. When I finally got my brain back online enough to figure out that something wasn’t quite right, I conducted some strange tests, including checking my browsing history and the emails I sent earlier in the day in order to pinpoint my last coherent moment, and to guess how long I was … confused.
I also made sure I could smile, had equal strength in both hands, etc. Oh, yeah, I remembered to take an aspirin, though the thought to take the aspirin had to occur about three times (guessing here) before I took it.
I also illogically called my daughter, who is in Manhattan and nowhere near close enough to help me. She told me to call my brother Steve, who does live nearby. “Oh, yeah,” I thought, “that makes more sense.” Steve called my doctor, answered his questions on the phone, did a few more balance, strength, walking, talking, writing tests on me. I was almost back to normal by then (well, normal for me), so luckily I didn’t have to go to the emergency room and spend thousands of dollars I don’t have (no health insurance either — can’t afford it).
Apart from the mail on my kitchen table, my mind seems to have filled in about three hours of lost time. I now remember getting the mail, but the actual items still look “foreign” to me.
Fucking depressing, I tell you.
Yikes, Lynna!
At least you’re aware of the problem.
Well, yeah. No laughing matter, that.
I wish you well.
ack!! :-(
so… umm… I don’t have any Canadians for you to marry, but would you accept either a 24-year-old German Metalhead, or alternatively a 27-year-old German uber-capitalistic banker? I’m sure I can bribe either one if necessary, so you can partake in the glory that is German socialized healthcare.
Lynna, yes that isn’t a laughing matter. The Redhead’s father had something similar happen to him while he visiting us a few years ago. He still has a very slight speech impediment, otherwise normal. Take care…
David M @406
LOL
Lynna,
I am sorry and disturbed to hear that. Have you ever had such an episode before? Could it be any medication you are taking?
Know our thoughts are with you, and I’m sure the silly-assed Xtians will all pray for you.
And FWIW, you are at least typing coherently now. Also, careful with the aspirin–if it is a clot, it will save you, but if you are bleeding, it can make things worse. Get it checked out.
Thanks, a_ray_in_dilbert_space for reassuring me as to my current level of coherency. My daughter made the point that my trying to test the coherency of a system with an incoherent system was probably not going to work that well.
No, I never had such an episode before. Only medication I’m taking is 10 mg/day of Zetia.
I have low-dose, buffered aspirin for tomorrow, per the doc’s orders.
I have a craving for oranges.
abnormal, Lynna over-and-out
Lynna,
Oranges can’t hurt. I wish I could share a couple of the ones a friend brought back from Florida with you. My grandmother used to suffer from TIAs–they can be pretty scary. Rest and relax for not–but do get it checked out. We’ll await news–hopefully good…
Jadehawk @439
LOL. Doesn’t sound half bad at the moment. What a choice! Kinda at opposite ends of the spectrum there, eh? The 27-year-old German banker sounds temporarily mo’-better simply because I can’t take loud music tonight. Tomorrow I might feel differently.
:-)
Now that’s a true friend, one who’ll bribe a guy into marriage for the sake of health care. I like your style.
Lynna, you and/or your doctor may want to research the side effects of Zetia. I came across one web site that said memory loss was a possible side effect. There are other drugs out there to reduce cholesterol.
Dang, I usually ask for evidence. *headdesk*
Yikes, Lynna! Please keep us posted about what you do, be it seeing a local doctor of marrying a German national in order to gain German citizenship. Seriously, not being account for my action from the day before would scare me shitless. Please be well.
Nerd, I’ll ask about the Zetia. I’m taking such a low dose that’s it’s unlikely. But I already wrote down the dose and drug name and gave it to my brother in case I go offline again. All possibilities should be investigated.
drugs, bleh
I’ll check in tomorrow and confirm that I’m still alive. You’ll like that.
blockquote fail, which ate everything I said. :-p
well, what else are brothers/cousins for, if not to marry them off to friends in need ;-)
Oy, Lynna. I’m sure there are enough of us spanning enough time zones that if you ever feel the need for hourly email spot checks to keep logs on you or anything, we could cobble something together.
Thanks, Carlie. I think I’m okay for now. Although the “Lynna Watch” sounds like it could be fun.
I think I’ll go to sleep now and dream about Jadehawk’s brothers and cousins. (One of the possible side effects listed for Zetia is sexual dysfunction — see Nerd’s link @447 — that’s one side effect from which I do not suffer. ~:))
Lynna, sorry for sounding like concern troll, but I do know a bit about the manufacture of highly active API’s, which would include Zetia. Bunny suits and supplied air would be required for manufacturing. Actually, 10 mg of Zetia is the standard dose, and from your description of yourself (petite), you might only need half a pill. Time to shut up and go to bed. ‘Night all.
Oh shit…sending you my best!
Hope this’ll make you feel a little better: Mrs. Fire is lovin’ the book too…we oohed and ahhed at it on the train home today…
Damn Lynna. Keep your brother on alert. That sounds pretty scary.
The Greatest Gift
She Said
In one of my all time favorite reviews, (Yes, I am aware that I am a geek.) Trouser Press had this to say of David Yow, Err, vocals.
Cannibal
NSFW. For what ever reason, the video is an old burlesque film.
Just checking in and saw the bad news. I’m relieved you made it through it and are OK, Lynna. I really hope this healthcare reform gets passed so that going to the doctor is not discouraged for most people in the US hereafter. It’s criminal (speaking of politicians) that we don’t have national healthcare in place yet.
Chelsea Morning
Time Will Show The Wiser
Love how the teen age Richard Thompson is try to hide behind his hair.
Si Tu Dois Partir
Yikes! Lynna, take care of yourself, and keep us posted. We can’t spare you!
Lyanna, 437
The next time you have a transient ischemic event you fucking well call emergency. Fuck the cost. Were it not for a clot buster back in 2005 I’d be wheelchair bound now.
You got lucky. The next time that transient ischemic event could leave you with a damaged brain stem, and that would mean a short, uncomfortable life.
mm:
It bugs me when people use that expression after a misfortune.
I know you meant that she was less unlucky than might otherwise have been the case, but why not say what you mean, rather than the opposite?
Suffering a TIA is not being lucky.
Holy crap, Lynna – this worries me very much. Do you have any of the common risk factors: smoking, high BP, diabetes, cardiac disease, atherosclerosis, use of birth control pills? How about migraines (I think they’re connected to TIAs resulting from brain vessel spasms)?
Mr.Science’s doctor prescribe Zetia a while ago, but after perusing the literature, he and the doc agreed that simvastin was a safer choice . . . and also much cheaper.
Is there perhaps a med school nearby offering clinical rounds, or some other community clinic, where you could get some expertise at a reasonable price?
But if this happens again, dear, call 911, unless you’re residing in connubial bliss with Jadehawk’s cousin or brother in Germany, as the case may be.
Goddamn the eternally goddamned Republicans for being so damned obstructive about the health care bill. Perhaps this reconciliation we’re hearing about will conclude soon, and situations like yours right now will be a thing of the past.
I would love to see lots of you in the next few months and hear some updates — otherwise we’re all going to be worried.
John #423: Mañana, amigo. I got in a flap about Lynna’s situation, and now my pain pills have kicked in, so I must to bed, else no rest will happen . . . which makes me a very cranky girl.
Methinks it’s this “positive thinking” thingy again. The culture is so impregnated with it, people say “you got lucky” when they mean “it could have been much worse”.
Hi, Lynna,
Tough news but I hope that you are continuing to feel and get better.
On the drugs – I’ve been on simvastin since I had one of those damn things in July and am doing fine. No side effects at all.
By the sound of it I was even more confused than you around the time it happened. Had I not been something of a hermit, in fact if anyone had seen me, I’d have been firmly taken away by the men in white coats. Now I am almost as bionic as I was at 35!
All best wishes to you.
(No idea how this will show on the line above but I’m really maureen brian.)
Quite apart from finding one has been “absent” for some time, it’s depressing that, in an area of the modern world which likes to pretend to be civilised, one of the first thoughts many people would have is “I can’t afford to be ill” (ie literally rather than dramatically through being a control-freak over one’s life).
Lynna, that’s terrible news. Take care and keep us posted.
Sending good thoughts your way and a hearty ‘fuck you’ to all the, um, criminals who’ve been opposing the health care reform in your country.
Lynna, glad you’re OK.
I’m going to suggest that the rest of us try to restrain ourselves from practicing amateur medicine on the internet.
Guess that’s always the problem with a new field. But still, I did a bit of searching today and found a few papers on the matter that were online, plus there’s a book coming out in a couple of months by one of the leading researchers in the field*, so I think she’ll have enough to pick up from where she left off ~10 years ago when she was studying linguistics.
*from what I gathered anyway
Literally, yes: all-mighty = omni-potent. It’s a translation, like “God-head” of “de-ity”.
Wow, are you evil.
…Either that, or it was very hilarious indeed!
This sort of thing?
I was going to say you absolutely should see a specialist. Several kilobucks? That’s negligent homi[ni]cide and should, frankly, be punished as such.
How practical. :-)
:-)
Easily imaginable.
@ me.yahoo.com/a/KtrH9g4llpHui8s2.0ezzjBOheU0WpQaoHA-#ab4e8 #468
Welcome to Yahoolics Anonymous, Maureen. Is this your first time or have you been sig-less for long?
“New”? Back in the 19th century some journal in Paris stopped accepting manuscripts on the origin of language because it was felt this entire topic was all speculation, no evidence. Progress has been made since then, but not all that much.
I had resigned myself to posting only when PZ takes off the shackles but so keen was I to send a message to Lynna that it caused an extra neuron to fire – the one which remembered that long, long ago I had a yahoo acoount!
Well a couple of Yahoo users, among those posting on the “How’s commenting looking?” thread and elsewhere, have managed to get their account names down to a considerably more manageable mess (see posts #205 and #221 there). I don’t know how though.
PS This FAQ suggests there’s something you can do about which bits of your Yahoo Profile you share – which might mean you just have to set up the nickname correctly there.
Lynna @ 437,
sorry to hear this, and glad you are back to normal ! The symptoms you describe could be caused by all sorts of things, certainly the TIA is in the mix, in a country with access to healthcare you should expect to have an ultrasound of the carotid arteries and a CT of your head done at least semi-urgently.I think Zetia is not responsible for this condition btw.
Let me know if you need any other advice !
Leigh @ 465,
These 3 conditions are not connected to causing transient ischemic attacks.Migraines might cause neurological symptoms, but the pathophysiology and treatment are totally different.
Yikes, and all the best to Lynna. I can (thankfully, and so far) only imagine how very unsettling it would be to be so very not yourself like that, out of the blue, and then to realize just how dangerous this can be. Good luck, take care of yourself.
Sorry, in my 479, the “cardiac disease” should have been in italics too.
In my never-ending quest to keep you appraised of the latest science denialism in all its facets, here’s the latest dropping from one Anthony “Micro” Watts, Esq., proprieter of the blog Watts Up ‘is Arse, or something like that. Speaking on the occasion of the warmest-ever January reading for average global temp, Watts said (Warning: put on your protective gear against the upcoming stupidity blast):
“So while it may be fun to watch the global temperature – a meaningless game that many people began to play in recent years because of the AGW fad (and yes, your humble correspondent only plays these games because others do, not because it is scientifically important) – it is very important to realize that the changes of the global mean temperature are irrelevant for every single place on the globe. They only emerge when things are averaged over the globe – but no one is directly affected by such an average.”
[Head desk]
Got that? We don’t live in an “average” world, so we don’t have to worry if the average goes all the way to the boiling point of water!!
I have proposed a game of chance with Watts such that the expectation value is significantly in my favor. After all, expectation value is an average, so it won’t affect him. Denialists of all stripes continue to push the envelope of stupidity–venturing into regions so stupid their ears bleed!
PPS I’ve been firtling around in what passes for my Yahoo profile (which I think I have because Yahoo ate Flickr a couple of years back).
If Yahoo is only connecting to ScienceBlogs via OpenID stuff, then it may be the case that you need to set up a Yahoo “alias” (apparently a Yahoo account is allowed 6 of the things, specifically for using on message boards) and then select that alias to be available as an OpenID option (there’s a separate OpenID management page for that).
However, all the stuff in the Yahoo FAQ page appears to be either false or hiding under completely different names/things in the horribly mis-designed Yahoo profile pages. There’s been no sign of being able to selectively share some stuff connected with either the overall account or the alias. I’ve mostly just been going round and round in circles and having to keep entering my password. :-/
a_ray
that was actually originally written by crazy string physicist cum denialist Luboš Motl. Watts just reproduced it with his approval (which doesn’t make him less crazy).
I’m blogwhoring as per. Today is GLBTQIA Day: Celebrating Nearly 180 Years of LDS Homophobia, Bigotry and Violence at I Fight the DJ. The posts started going up at 7 AM EDT, and we’re now six posts in. The last one goes up at 12:something PM (tired, need sleep). So if you’d like to swing by, Huzzah!
Off to bed!
Beth
Wow. Such high levels of stupidity leave me speechless.
Ouch, Lynna, that sounds scary.
I can’t begin to imagine what I’d do if I felt I couldn’t trust my head anymore.
–o–
On a lighter note: Narwhal! Narwhal!
Lynna,
No useful advice to offer that you haven’t already had, so I’ll just wish you all the best.
Hello, All,
I’m checking in to confirm that it’s another day, and Lynna is still alive. The amount of time I haven’t managed to recover from yesterday’s offline episode has shrunk to about one hour, as far as I can tell.
Rorschach @479:
Thanks, Rorschach. That’s what I figured as well, but with no money to pay for it, no health insurance, and the prospect of putting my house up as collateral if the state of Idaho pays for it, I think I’ll just have to take my chances.
It’s like living in a third world country in just one aspect, health care.
I can get a break on the cost of a CT by filing a hardship application with Teton Radiology. They would reduce the approximate cost of $1,200-$1,600 by about half if the application was approved. One has to have the service first, and then apply for the discount.
There would also be blood tests and a doctor’s visit, which I think would run around $300-$500. A couple of years ago I actually applied for several health care insurance plans. They all wanted more money than I make per year. When I had insurance, they routinely refused to pay for services, or refused to pay the amount the provider charged. Fuck ’em.
I’m not old enough for medicare. At this rate, I might make it to medicare age, and I might not. Medicaid for low income persons doesn’t like me because I actually have a house and a truck.
fuck ’em all, I say.
Can I claim brain damage as an excuse for swearing in public?
Lynna,
I’m sorry to hear what happened. Best wishes.
Thanks for posting Lynna. The big wind you hear is those of us here breathing a big sigh of relief.
Lynna,
This may be irrelevant to you right now, but I am curious, do you not have access to free treatment in an emergency department of your local Hospital ? Even in Oz where the health system is well and truly fucked up can anyone anytime rock up to their local ER and get treatment for their medical emergency.
Leigh @465
Thanks, Leigh, (and same to everyone), for the expressions of concern and for the advice.
I do not smoke and never have, except for minor amounts of marijuana in college. My BP shoots up under stress, but is usually in the normal range. I don’t have diabetes. As far as I know, I don’t have cardiac disease or atherosclerosis (lack of test and imaging in that area, though). I have taken birth control pills in at least two decades. And “no” to the migraines.
Hi Lynna
Just logged in and picked up on your message. Really sorry to hear about the TIA. Not a lot I can do from (?)5000 miles away but if there is then let me know. Include me in anything jointly devised among the pharyngulates. I remember with gratitude the support given by others when I had the AF.
Best wishes
Alan
Oh, look! Narwhals! Narwhals swimming in the… ?ocean, causing a commotion, ’cause they are so awesome♫…
Aaaaaargh!
Morales, 464
You know damn well what I was saying, cut it out. You’re not that obtuse.
David @473
The link you gave as “This sort of thing?” is accurate, but there’s really no way to know for certain in my case, not without bunches of tests and imaging. The example pic is, of course, way more dramatic than can be applied in my case. With that much damage, it would show afterwards. There would be visible symptoms, (as well as the symptoms we can’t see because I have not had a CT scan).
I’ll ask about taking half a Zetia pill, or switching to simvastin (sp ?). I’m too lazy to go back and check the spelling of drugs, so I guess we can add fatigue to my symptoms. I’m sure the doc would want blood tests before switching me to something else. If I can get a couple of my clients to pay me, I might be able to afford blood tests, plus the doc visit. That seems to be the least I can do if I expect to receive informed care.
The only physical symptoms I have now are: fatigue, I smell different than usual, very slight headache, sweating more than usual.