The infinite thread keeps growing, and its spores populate yet another post.
The end of that video is a little disturbing. Is that our fate? Once you’ve done here, Pharyngula will collapse into rotting mulch for maggots, and the spores will move on to colonize other blogs?
Will we even colonize the blogs that are already maggot-operated?
Closed after only 720 comments? Man, that’s harsh
hyphae ftw
Anybody se that article in TIME magazine about the guy who molds fungal mycelia into bricks? Pretty cool. The stuff is fireproof, stronger than wood, and lighter, but ultimately biodegrades (in the presence of bacteria with chitinase, I guess).
Another project was creating custom-fitted packaging inserts to use instead of plastic trays and packing foam.
Sounds like time for favorite ‘shroom recipes/dishes.
Let’s hope for a bit less fertilizer in this one…
Mushroom risotto with cepes and real psilocybin mushrooms is tasty and hard to beat.
Mainly because when your hands have turned into bananas and you think you’re a wardrobe it’s hard to grip a beater properly.
Louis
Try jumping on the mushrooms. Or maybe toss a turtle at the mushroom. It works in video games, and life is like a video game without a cool sound track and one-ups.
Pac-Devil
Nice video.
I like mushrooms.
To eat and just in general.
That is all.
“like a fungus” is right, btw
The previous subThread was the briefest in history (2.04 d) and boasted the second-highest subThreadwise commenting rate (353 comments/d! You people* are insane!)
*I can say “you people” here because I have been attmepting to not participate. Much.
I can;t keep up with updating the Update at this pace, but here‘s a look at where we were at a few days ago.
and counting down to the Anniversary…
25989
Mushrooms are one of those Eh foods for me. Eh, fine, I don’t mind if they’re in my food, but if I have a choice….no.
I’ll eat them, though, before I’ll eat a potato.
Mmm… makes me hungry for some plump helmets.
“merely food for maggots”… he says that like it’s a bad thing. Poor maggots get no respect.
Mushrooms… are… AWESOME.
I’m eating some awesomeness right now, in an omelet with green bell pepper, onion and herbs, and parmesan cheese. And you MUST take each bite of omelet with an equal bite of Italian bread toast – preferably home-made.
Aquaria, you don’t eat potato either?! Yay someone who won’t make fun of me for not liking the damn things!
Most of the mushrooms in the video were the tasty kind, Oyster mushrooms. Probably one of the best tasting, and safest for amateurs to eat, and fairly abundant. Generally, they are creme colored, very asymmetrical, and grow out of recently dead(less than 3-4 years) hardwood trees, in the fall here in Texas.
I will of course feel free to make fun of both of you for hating the greatest root of all time, Rawn, and Aquaria
Okay, here’s my one mushroomy recipe:
Slow Cooker Beef Stroganoff–so sue me, I’m the kind of person who sort of has to rely on these slow cookers.
2 lbs of NY Strips or RibEyes. Tenderized and cut into 2″ strips
4 cans golden mushroom soup
1/2 cup beef broth
1/4 cup Worcestershire
1 French Onion soup packet
1 cup chopped onion
salt, pepper, garlic to taste
2 tbsp butter
1 8 oz pkg cream cheese
1/2 cup sour cream
Optional: 1 cup sliced mushrooms.
In a slow cooker, combine everything except the sour cream and cream cheese. Cook on Low for 6 hours. Stir in cream cheese and sour cream until thoroughly blended, cook 30 minutes. Serve over noodles or, if you’re a food heathen, rice..
The original of this called for 2 tb of Worcestershire and 2 tbs sour cream. That was boring as hell to me, but it might work for other people. I’ve forgotten the butter sometimes, and it turned out okay. For me, it tastes better with.
“I’ll eat them, though, before I’ll eat a potato.”
I second (or third) that! Just the smell of french fries makes me want to vom.
I originally went off potatoes for a low-carb diet. When I went off it, I learned that I hated the things–taste, texture, everything about them. Worse, they turned out to be the source of digestive problems I’d suffered for most of my life.
I think it’s a pretty clear sign you shouldn’t be eating something if it makes your hands break out in vicious hives that don’t go away for hours, just from peeling the things.
Aquaria’s recipe is a tragic waste of perfectly good steak that could be made just as well, and less expensively, using plain old round steak.
Wow, Aquaria, I don’t think I’m allergic to them, but I’m completely with you that there isn’t one redeeming quality for them. My fiance is sad because he loves the cursed things and I refuse to cook them.
“…like a fungus.” You sure have a way with simile, PZ.
Just to feed Rorschach’s women-on-ladders obsession (from the previous thread). I once performed a dance with a ladder. The ladder was an old, beaten up, wooden A-frame from our backstage workshop. It was 12 feet tall and heavy. The performance was doing during the era when clothes-with-holes were considered a fashion statement, and not a sign of poverty (early 1990s). The dance involved hanging like a christ from the inside/upper supports, dancing along the outside rails when the ladder was lying down (and ending by closing it with my legs), and sending the closed ladder over my head with my legs (among other loving interactions).
For Bride of Shrek: I did once climb a ladder while wearing heels, but I don’t recommend it. I designed lights for community theater shows for several years. Other people had a hard time getting the old system to work properly, so when something blew just before a performance, I was stuck with doing the repair even though I was dressed in black heels, black tights, and short black dress (honoring the all-black dictum for stage hands).
A fresnel in the cove over the proscenium failed, so I went to fetch the ladder and take up a replacement fresnel. In this play, we had no curtain and minimal set dressing, so up I went in full view of the already-seated audience. I wore a tool belt over my dress and carried the replacement in my free hand. I didn’t like the feel of the ladder rungs under the smooth soles that cover just the ball of the foot in high heels, so I took care.
I hung the replacement on the ladder temporarily, took out my crescent wrench (spanner, I think, for you Brits), and took down the fried fresnel. Hung the replacement, plugged it in, signaled my man in the lighting booth to bring the light up full, aimed said light, and made my way down. I closed the ladder one-handed (my old dance partner, and I knew its balance points) and carried it off. Best round of applause for stage hand work I ever received. I still have the tool belt. And the spanner.
Fine, it’s a waste of steak–I use it because time is a factor, and I don’t have all day to cut roasts that thin + round steak doesn’t get tender enough for me.
But to each his own.
@ Sven–was it this guy?
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_can_save_the_world.html
Also for Rorschach: I had the carotid duplex test done. See comment 264 on the previous endless thread chapter. Hope to hear from my doctor with results today. (No CT angiography yet, as I’m still saving money for that one.)
boygenius, I fell behind when it came to both email and the endless thread (all blame goes to medical technicians), but I did finally see your comment @228 on the previous thread, and I will follow up. Wait a minute … I don’t see your email to me. Please send it again.
I am very sorry, sometimes I cannot help myself.
Matango
Is Hyperon still around? If not, please ignore my rant and thanks for putting him some place he belongs. I skimmed through the first few posts of the last thread (you guys are too prolific!) and I just want to say “FUCK YOU, HYPERON.”
I am a woman and I recently found out that a male co-worker makes $6/hr more than me. We have the same education level and he is considered kind of lazy in his job. We started only about a year apart (several years ago, while the economy was booming). The only difference is my co-worker has a penis and I don’t. In our job, raises are automatic, so it’s not that I didn’t ask for a raise and he did. Fuck you, Hyperon. Fuck you.
I apologize for any incoherence. I am still very angry about this.
Human biology, as related to the Winter Olympics:
Wren, vent some of the spleen at frankosaurus. Also, do not apologize. You have every right to be angry.
Wow. Opera crashed (“quit unexpectedly”) twice, one because I tried to open Wikipedia. Something is rotten… probably in the Steht of Califohrnia.
Now let’s hope I can restore what I had already written to its previous glory…
* * *
Good that I refreshed before submitting. The next installment in the Toothy Goodness for Jadehawk series is up. It explains what toothy goodness can be good for.
* * *
<tears of envy>
Not that the couscous in the cafeteria today was bad or anything, but… butter… rosemary… roasted garlic… butter… :-9
Just… why would anyone add squash to this??? In fact, why would anyone add anything to this complete meal? (Other than having a soup before, obviously.) I don’t get it!
Asparagus, or lovely?
You make it sound as if that somehow meant you couldn’t have any of the rubbery stuff either? ~:-| My family often has stuff for dinner of which I and/or my brother* don’t like one component; he and/or I simply don’t get that component on our plates. That’s not always extremely easy, but nearly always feasible without a lot of effort. In extreme cases like paprikás**, we simply dredge those things out of the pot that we want and leave the rest there. May take a minute or two, but it works!
* Mwahah. He has his own set of edibles he doesn’t like, overlapping but not identical to mine, on top of his own food intolerances caused by things like his irritable gut.
** Similar to gulyás, but not exactly the same thing. My dad loves to cook it. Very tasty. Can’t find any pictures of that particular version of paprikás in Wikipedia, however, not even in the Hungarian one or the recipes it links to. BTW, Wikipedia will also try to tell you that csipetke are Spätzle; that’s a laughable lie.
:-)
Over here, spring is beginning. Not surprising for mid-late February, except I haven’t had enough winter yet, as usual.
Awesome.
Shooting a super-soaker at –45 °F
Hey, I never noticed…
On the other hand, when you add the digits of 17* together, you get 8, which is good luck and wealth in Chinese numerology.
* Unlucky in Italy, because if you rearrange XVII to VIXI, you get the Latin for “I have lived”.
That happens a lot these days.
Awesome. Pure awesome. Monocrystalline awesome. Running-out-of-words awesome.
:-D
LOL!
Just to make sure you understood it, it’s indeed not the point, because I agree completely with your reasoned argument. My comment on it was only about the snippet where you equated sex with a desire for a lifelong relationship; that equation comes fairly naturally to you, me, and the [ehem] median gibbon, but not to the median bonobo or to a surprisingly large number of people, including several (most?) regulars in this thread. Again, this doesn’t detract from your argument, because even the latter people choose carefully who to do and who not; they have a lower threshold, but they still have one, and it’s still hard. I was just having SIWOTI syndrome and found a nit to pick.
Just in case anyone doesn’t know the British meaning of “public school”… that’s a fancy private school for the public as long as they can pay the hefty school fees.
Not elsewhere either. In many countries they were de facto more sexist than the 1940s, when the war meant that not enough men were available to do all traditional man’s jobs and women entered the workforce in fairly big numbers.
<headdesk>
:-) :-) :-)
:-o
Man.
What color were the potatoes you had been served? Gray? Green?
And if yellow, were they fully cooked?
There is such a thing as a bad potato, but I thought those were rather difficult to find outside of <sigh> Vienna.
(Incidentally, Polish potatoes are the best in the world.)
…Oh.
You do know there are other ways of cooking potatoes…?
:-)
Lynna,
You changed funhouse lights in heels? Those were the only lights that ever bothered me (we used a 12′ A frame with 10′ extension), and I wore sensible shoes or often rubberized socks.
you misunderstood the meaning of “isn’t allowed to”. I should have phrased that as “I don’t allow him to”, but even so, you might have had to google that.
stoopid TMI-joke going over everybody’s head :-p
Oh. Has it got something to do with the rumored side-effects of asparagus…? The… apophenia-motivated… side-effects?
Or <blush> is it just the stench? But then you wouldn’t have said “TMI”, would you.
#32–Don’t be so condescending. Of course the potatoes were cooked, and properly. It did not matter because the taste didn’t appeal to me, and I am allergic to potatoes, besides Fried, mashed, baked, sauteed–Yukon Gold, new potatoes, Russett–I don’t like the taste of any of them, and they are all–ALL–brutal on my digestive system. Peeling even one makes my skin break out in hideous, painful hives.
Would you want to eat a food that does that to you? Would you even try? Would you even ask such a question of someone who has an allergy to peanuts, or shrimp?
Then why ask it of me?
Aquaria, ninjadebugger can use hamburger in his or her stroganoff if one has no tastebuds. Good steak is never wasted on this great dish. Your recipe sounds quite good. One addition i would make would be the addtion of red bell pepper. It’s the ingredient that brightens the taste. I’ve taken tenderloin and ground it to make the best burger on the planet. Top it with a grilled red onion and a grilled portobella mushroom. Use your favorite dressing and be sure not to over cook the burger. I like my medium rare. No danger since your using a good cut of meat.
I only changed a light in heels once. Yes, sensible shoes are recommended. I actually preferred my old hiking boots for the job.
I had to use whatever lighting instruments were on hand (no budget for new ones). I repaired them when they were reparable. I had an inadequate number of ellipsoidals, fresnels and strip lights with which to make theater magic. Inadequate supply of gels, etc. Inadequate help meant I often worked until 3 AM alone in the theater, hanging and aiming lights.
All the lights were run from an old, *manual* bank of dimmers. I could lock the dimmer handles together *if* they were at the same level, but that was my only half-assed auto method of raising or lowering more than one dimmer control at a time. As a result, I choreographed light changes, using both hands and one foot (once even used my chin).
The dimmers were rated for a certain wattage load, but they were so old that they had individual personalities. Each one would take only so much load before it tripped off. Knowing the personalities of the stacked (three high) dimmer banks was crucial for success.
Our ladder was also a 12′ A-frame with a ten-foot extension (and much scarring). I took the extension out for the dance routine.
Or is it the apophenia directly… you don’t want to watch someone… I’ll just stop here instead of providing a verb. :-]
Sorry. I hadn’t read about your allergy yet. I should have addressed this to Rawnaeris.
David Marjanović:
Am Hungarian, have cookbooks, am a great cook, will share. Just ask. :)
Mom, do people come from spores?
Oh! Oh! Pick me! Pick me!
(/Hint to DM: Consumption of asparagus is infamous for making a certain something taste rilly, rilly bad.)
I’ve got a bunch of spore syringes for various species in my fridge. Shiitake, Lion’s Main, Enoki… It’s a cool hobby to get into.
You just need mason jars, a pressure cooker, and a fondness for making your own tools (like glove boxes, etc.) to get into the hobby.
The drawback is that every forum dedicated to mushroom growing turns into a frenzy of magic mushroom growing techniques, and the growers of edibles (magics are called ingestibles) end up on the sidelines.
Paul Stamets wrote some excellent books on mushroom growing though, and I highly recommend them.
I started going for hikes to see what grows around here in the fall and there’s tons of fungi I never even noticed before.
Okay, nerd hobby rant over :)
(and if you like magic mushrooms the reference to the forums above will have you growing like crazy in days) :P
Lynna@38
I learned lighting from my aunt, who ran a community theater. We had a manual board too, with lighting changes numbered and marked in the script, corresponding to numbered tape on the lighting board. The first time I encountered a modern* lighting board was a revelation. I can program it? And running the lights is just pushing a button on cue? What do you even need me for? After that, I started programming the lights but then running the fly gallery during the shows.
*modern for the late 80s, anyway.
Apropos of nothing, but I have to share this with the world, and this seams like an appropriate venue (far more appropriate than putting it on my blog (and no, that was not blatant self-promotion)):
I drive slow (better fuel mileage, plus I’m no longer young (and my middle-age crisis red sports car was a bright red Kitchen-Aid mixer (great for bread))) which leaves me lots of time to read bumper stickers.
I saw some this morning that made me snort coffee out my nose (while driving (not recommended, by the way)):
Free Hovind:
Martyr to Free Speech
and
Kent Hovind:
A Prisoner of Darwinism
and, if those were not funny enough,
Kent Hovind:
Denied Freedom of Speech By Darwin!
These were the cheap do-it-yourself bumper stickers. The car was a yellow Pinto (no, not kidding) with three Christian fish (one eating a Darwin fish) and an anti-global warming sticker (at lest I think it was) which I couldn’t make out as it was over the tail pipe and had enough exhaust staining on it to obliterate half (or more) of the message (all I could make out was something about Al Gore lying).
You can now go back to discussing food. I just thought that at least one or two of you might enjoy.
(((Billy))) The Atheist
Fungi are indeed awesome, but they are not plants!. Sheesh, my biology teacher in 5th year secondary (not sure what that equates to in American), Frank H. “Bunny” Brightman, told me that in 1970. (Ironically, he was author of the Oxford Book of Flowerless Plants – and also, I now discover, co-author of
Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus: Of the Virtues of Herbs, Stones and Certain Beasts, Also a Book of Marvels of the World.)
A guy I know flew across the country to hook up with a girl he met online. In preparation, he ate nothing but parsley for a week prior in order to, er, ‘freshen’ his, er…
They can, if the spores start with a nice romantic evening and some foreplay.
Wouldn’t that be ‘sporeplay’?
Anybody seen this? It’s a web page provided by the Church of England, allowing anybody to send in their prayers electronically. Obviously, this is a serious facility that shouldn’t be abused in any way, shape or form!
A recent thread about child abuse had me thinking about my grandfather, who had a lot of ministers as relatives, he was a third generation minister himself. My grandfather was orphaned at an early age, and went to live with his uncle, who was also a minister.
His uncle was a violent man, who beat my grandfather regularly. Luckily my grandfather did not internalize the violence, my dad was only spanked twice in his life. My brothers and I were spanked very seldom, and my kids have never been spanked.
Times change and we know that discipline can be achieved without violence and it’s many drawbacks.
Friends and relatives of my grandfather knew he was ill treated, but when violence against children is acceptable, where do you draw the line. How much is too much, and when is it applied. The greatest factor influencing spanking is the violent nature of the spanker, whether it be parent, guardian, or teacher.
Others here have noted, in regard to the practice of spanking, that religiosity correlates to resistance to change.
Texans riding dinosaurs! – Texas creationists
http://blog.buzzflash.com/analysis/990
http://www.texastribune.org/stories/2010/feb/17/meet-flintstones/
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14texbooks-t.html?pagewanted=2&em
What occurs between a consenting adult and a sporangium behind bedroom doors is none of my business.
Squeeee! Christmas came early to the Brownian household.
My first: “That Pope Benedict XVI dies in a most horrible and painful fashion, preferably of something contracted in Africa that could have been prevented by a condom.”
Hey, if God could wipe out the Midianites, surely he won’t have a problem offing one fat German.
Here is some idea of how bat-shit crazy some of my fellow South African people are.
‘God told me I’d be raped’
2010-02-11 09:29
Gospel singer’s wife raped
Neels Jackson
Pretoria – The wife of gospel singer Louis Brittz, who was raped by a robber on Monday night, has told how the Lord had warned her that she was to be raped.
A beaten-up Hettie Brittz told how the Lord had not left her alone and how she had felt her soul and spirit had been undamaged by the experience.
Despite her nightmare experience, which came after armed robbers overpowered her family in their home in a security complex in Centurion, she was still planning to swim the Midmar Mile this coming weekend.
She said she had been looking forward to it for a year and would not allow this incident to take away her enjoyment of life.
Robbery
Her husband was still working when the robbers stormed into their house on Monday evening. They took him to the bedroom where Hettie was already in bed.
In the room, Louis told her “in the name of Jesus” (and in English so that the robbers would understand), that the men would take their things but not hurt them.
They were forced to lie on the floor where Louis told Hettie that if this was the end, they would see each other again in heaven.
Later the robbers took him away. One stayed with Hettie where she lay with her hands tied, half under the bed.
She said while she was lying like this, she heard the Lord tell her: “Hettie, you are my bride”.
She answered: “Yes, Jesus, I know.”
She said the Lord then told her that the man would rape her but not hurt her. The rapist was also not violent.
Antiretroviral treatment
But the examination that she had to undergo in hospital afterwards was bad. She had to drink medication that made her very nauseous. She was also given anti-retroviral treatment to fight HIV infection.
But for her, these were “battle scars in a war which we can’t lose”.
Louis too saw the event as an attack in a spiritual war.
The Lord existed outside of time and space, said Hettie. What had happened to her now was relevant 2 000 years ago when Jesus died on the cross for the rapist too.
It will also be relevant in ten years’ time when they bear witness to all that has followed the attack.
She said this didn’t mean the rape was unimportant. It was also not unimportant to the Lord. He said after all that he collected people’s tears and that the blood of believers was precious to him.
She knew the Lord was not unfeeling. He had prepared her and she had felt him holding her undamaged soul and spirit despite what had happened to her body.
Not bitter
She said she knew people would say she was living in denial. She herself was a therapist, however, and knew what trauma involved.
She knew there would be times when she became angry but she suspected she would not become bitter. The Lord would protect her against it. Bitterness would do nothing to the rapist but would eat at her.
Both she and Louis felt sorry for the rapist. They thought he was pathetic. He probably had never experienced the love of a woman.
– Beeld
Ah HA! But here you are mistaken.
He’s one fat German with magical Ruby Slippers!
In your face God!
Knockgoats @ 47: Thank you; that was bugging me too. “Fungus plants” my fine fat ass.
Know what else bugs me? Reading about “cell walls” in animals, usually re: humans. Usually it’s some quackery about “strengthening your cell walls” but the other day I ran across the phrase in the SF Chronicle and, while I was still sputtering that David Perlman would never have written that (I guess they’re breaking in a replacement; he’s still there.) I found a direct quote from the scientist being interviewed that used the phrase. Membranes, dammit; we have membranes!
Damn. Now I’ll have to go fishing on SFGate to find the piece and I can’t even remember what it was about.
Ron Sullivan
http://toad.faultline.org
Should anyone care, the one at 0:35 is called “Vicar’s Dick” in Danish.
I married a vegan, so mushrooms are high on my list of favorite foods we can both share – they also make a pretty decent substitute for ground beef in shepherd’s pie when chopped. They are many varieties of tasty goodness, especially maitake mushrooms. Slice, drizzle liberally with olive oil, pepper & truffle salt, roast at 425 for roughly 12-15 minutes, and try not to injure veggie-eating husband when wrestling over who gets the last bits.
As for potatoes, can’t get enough of ’em. Frying potatoes correctly so you get the soft fluffy inside and delicately crunchy outside is an art. Twice-baked potatoes topped with a melted sharp cheddar/asiago fresco, crumbled bacon and crisp broccoli is heaven.
I don’t know what to say about that, McBrolloks. I’m willing to let a little woo-woo slide if it actually helps someone get through a traumatic experience like that.
Ah, here it is:
About Chagas’ disease, last Sunday. The piece also had a picture of a kissing bug and captioned it as a “beetle.”
Sheesh. The Chron has cut way back on copyediting staff, and it shows.
Ron Sullivan
http://toad.faultline.org
Most american potatoes are actually pretty tasteless (they taste kinda mealy, and the texture is like that, too). it takes some effort to find ones that actually taste like potatoes, but nothing here tastes like german and polish potatoes :-(
Well, ‘course, pretty much everybody’s got membranes; we animals just lack an extra wall that fungi, plants, et al. (many independently) have.
Now, you might quibble about functional and partial and true syncytia and plasmodesmata and gap junctions and the like, and how they fit into the whole membrane-w/-optional-wall multicellular eukaryotic bauplan(s).
You might. So, go right ahead–it’ll be interesting.
but so yeah, ugh, the hemipteran-as-beetle thing, repeatedly, is pretty bad.
Great video! At the wet times in autumn many small fungus are growing in the forests, some of them are really small like a pinhead, but they still have all the beautiful details if you watch them magnified. But my real favourites are not fungus but the fungi-lookalike myxomycetes, their colourful tiny blobs, cups, hairs, foams, ets. Here’s a great site on them: http://www.discoverlife.org/20/q?search=Eumycetozoa
Edible wild mushrooms are also my favourites, of course I’ve learned to recognize them (Never try to eat any unknown wild mushroom without showing it to a qualified mushroom expert! In our country, Hungary, we have one working at each marketplace and they assort – for free – all the mushrooms one picked.). Each species have a different taste, many of them can be dried so I can spare some for winter too.
Amazing video!!
I knew a mushroom once who was a comedian. Yes, he was a real fun-guy!
[Ed. I’m just plain embarrassed. He’s been waiting to pull that gag for ages …]
Back to common sense:
In England there are a huge number of fungi to pick from in the autumn. Some of them are marvellous eating – some taste aweful (in the worst sense) – others are deadly!
There are courses on how to tell the difference and you can go out in parties with experts.
There is another way of dealing with it and that is not to collect mushrooms in the autumn but to do it late Spring. St George’s Day is 23rd April and the St George’s Day mushroom (unsurprisingly) is found around that date and before nearly every other mushroom/toadstool.
Species names can change but I know it as Calocybe gambosa
http://www.english-country-garden.com/fungus/st-georges-day-mushroom.htm
http://www.rogersmushrooms.com/gallery/DisplayBlock~bid~5697.asp
Plenty of sites with recipes if you Google St George’s Day mushroom.
@54, 59
It may not be fitting, but that reminds me of a story that used to be popular on the megachurch circuit. A woman went around telling the story of how she calmed down a murderer on the run from the authorities by reading him The Purpose Driven Life. She left out the part where she shared her meth with him. It’s not directly comparable, but my impression of both cases is they make up a happy or inspiring version of events so they don’t need to really face what actually happened.
I don’t begrudge the woman her just-so story if it helps her deal with psychological trauma, but I’m skeptical as to whether she made the voice up after the fact or not. I mean, what good is a God that just lets you know what will happen instead of actually protecting you? He’s sure gotten weak since Daniel.
All of them?!!!!1!!
Ok, ok, I’ve come out of the closet: I’m an Edible Fungus Fanatic™ (and I hasten to add the “Edible” applies to the mushrooms, not to me!†).
Weirdly, I don’t hunt the wild ones. That’s serious business here in France…
† Keep your kinky or(/and?) cannibalistic fantasies out of this please. We’re talking serious stuff here—MUSHROOMS!
It would be more ironic if Pops were a woman who got pregnant after being raped by a STD filled priest without a condom, and died off complications at birth because he was forbidden to receive an abortion to save his life. And his child will suffer as an orphan because he didn’t want a gay couple to adopt it.
Have you ever tried la ratte du touquet ?
Not that difficult : first steam the potatoes until they are almost cooked (test with a knife). That’s 10 minutes less than needed.
Then fry them for 7 minutes at the highest possible temperature in a generous amount of oil mixed with a bit of butter. Salt and pepper to taste at the last minute.
My favourite potatoe for doing this is the one mentionned above. And never ever peel them !
I like to serve them with some sauteed Cantharellus cibarius with garlic and parsley.
The Prophet drops in on his home ward, and the ladies go gaga. Take a look at the photo of Tommy Monson, and read the comments he made, and you too will believe that the mormon church can hoodwink/brainwash its members better than anyone else on the planet. (Well, maybe Al Qaeda gives them some competition.)
Proof that Joseph Smith knew what he was doing when he took up the Prophet gig. Someone commented on the website that the girls should google “Helen Mar Kimball.”
I wonder if any of the upgrades to the scienceblogs system have increased the number of comments it can deal with. There have been much longer threads; the longest I can find are:
1323 comments (2008/07/me_and_my_cyberpistol.php)
1380 comments: (2009/02/science_of_watchmen.php)
1452 comments: (2009/04/i_have_no_idea_what_this_threa.php)
2353 comments: (2008/07/the_great_desecration.php)
Of course, closing the thread and opening a new one puts it back on the main page, so it attracts more commenters, accelerating the growth of the thread.
Judging by the data at http://terrapinprocrastination.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-omnibus-thread-everlasting-update.html the upturn in the graph seems to coincide with where PZ began ending threads with 600-700 comments instead of 1000 comments.
All this talk about mushroom is making me crave for udon for some reason.
Spornography?
Mushrooms with bacon, cheese and grilled onions, in a pastry shell. Mmmmm…..
On a completely different subject:http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/767429–schools-gave-students-computers-then-used-webcams-to-spy-on-them-lawsuit
Holy PedoCam, Batman! So, kids get busted for sexting other kids, but it’s A-Okay for their school Principal to spy on them in their homes????
Feynmaniac,
I don’t want to be dragged back in, but you raise a couple of substantive questions, and I have enough respect for you to answer them sincerely.
Yes, undoubtedly. Even 50 years ago there was still considerable sexism against men (e.g. conscription and arduous manual labor), but this was more than counterweighted by the prevalence of wife-beatings, the consensus that the husband should rule the roost, and the general conception that women couldn’t (or shouldn’t be allowed to) excel in almost any field.
I think that nowadays, at least in the UK, wife-beating is a lesser concern compared with various other worries such as unprovoked attacks by yobs. (Your chances of being attacked are much greater if you’re male — I gave data backing this up in the previous thread. Domestic abuse accounts for a relatively small fraction of reported violent attacks. As for the unreported ones, well — nobody is forcing women to stay with abusive partners, who should be reported as the criminals they are.)
Gender quotas are now being enforced in a variety of professions, even if they are manifestly unfair and unhelpful. (For example, many police departments are pushing for 50% female police officers, despite that women are generally less suited for this role due to the difference in physical stature. Bear in mind that in the UK the cops don’t carry guns, and apprehending criminals is a largely physical task.)
The notion that men “wear the pants” is a thing of the past. About 44% of British women earn at least as much as their partners. The idea of men being bossed around by their wives is banally commonplace.
It’s true that there is still a significant disparity in pay. For example, the National Equality Panel found that “Women from nearly all ethno-religious backgrounds have pay between a quarter and a third less than a White British Christian man with the same qualifications, age and occupation”. However, it is also true that men’s jobs are generally significantly harder. Women are overrepresented in jobs in which “communication skills” are paramount (i.e. their main role is talking to people), whereas men are overrepresented in jobs such as engineering and car mechanics.
In education girls, overall, significantly outperform boys, and fewer women than men are unemployed. Our discourse seems to contain the tacit assumption that these inequalities are not the result of discrimination, but occur because we phallic types are so effing lazy. I admit, this might indeed be the case. Why is this uncontroversial, but whenever an inequality goes the other way, our knee-jerk reaction is to assume that it is the product of misogynistic culture? It is a transparent double standard.
I was recently studying a detailed and serious study of inequality in Britain, commissioned by the National Inequality Panel. In the entire study, the only mention made of discrimination is the following:
In other words, they candidly admit that that they can’t infer discrimination from inequality. This is exactly what I was saying all along. Are these researchers also “stupid”, “ignorant”, “innumerate”, “illiterate” “bigots”, “freaks”, “pukes”, “psychopaths” and possible rapists?
Whats that foul odor? Open the windows and air out the place…
Did someone say insect?
#77 Sili “insect”
I hope nobody on this site at least!
The BBC? Quite probably.
from the last thread…
Walton:I don’t deny women were excluded from things, but I question whether they were done on the basis of “inferiority.” As Morales said, the ladder issue has probably more to do with modesty and gender roles than inferiority. But I get your point about maybe why we can’t accurately measure domestic abuses.
Feynman: you might be right about a line like that from the honeymooners getting the censors nervous, but ralph always had his comeuppance in one way or another, so I don’t think it ever drilled home any kind of message about women’s inferiority.
As for the Schlaflies, I don’t know what either said that points to female inferiority. Though if we found such speech, that wouldn’t go to proving the 50s were more sexist.
I would agree the 50s were more sexist if more people identified as being sexist or espoused the doctrines of sexism. I just want to know how to measure this, and I’m not satisfied that glancing at power and resource allocations necessarily implies this. Back then, the net effect of many laws, policies, and social expectations was to disempower women in the public sphere. I don’t deny this. Though I question whether such disempowerment in the public sphere was “more sexist”. Seems to be a backward looking critique, accounting for contradictions within liberalism, rather than the reflection of the actual beliefs or moral spirit of the people as the term “sexist” purports to be.
Look at today. Structured more along the lines of individual egalitarianism than the 50s, to be sure. Has sexism gone down? maybe we can’t accurately measure domestic violence from the 50s, but from whatever data we have, is it tapering? Have illegitimacy rates gone down? How about incidents of rape? How much of our resources are spent combating sexism? Is it on the rise? Things like this tend to point more objectively to attitudes towards women. Maybe sexism has gone up.
I see Franky is as clueless as ever. Go learn something Franky. Try a college/university libary. You know, the place that has books and journals, with real knowledge in them.
PZ @78
It’s hard to believe until you’ve actually seen the Prophet Factor in action. No wonder the GGAs (Geriatric General Authority) angle so hard for the top spots.
#75 Hyperon
Hyperon, why do you continue to spout rubbish?
I live in the UK – do you know what UK* means? Do you know which police forces come under the UK? Do you know anything?
Just for starters, you could try Wiki:
“Police use of firearms in the United Kingdom” or
“Firearms Unit”
* Just as a hint, look due West of Carlisle. You know, West, or Left if you have North at the top. Can you find Carlisle?
Hey, I remember watching this Attenborough episode, and I remember seeing a fungus grow with a “net” construct coming from the top. Does anyone know of a species like that one? I really want to find out what that net was for.
Also, mushrooms are poorly disguised phalluses.
Time lapse videos of certain fungi growing always look very phallic to me.
Also, I hated mushrooms as a kid, but as soon as I hit 18, BAM I thought they were absolutely delicious and couldn’t get enough of them. My vegetarian sister introduced me to mushroom burgers and my god are they delicious.
The two paragraphs represent two very different responses and should not be confused, nor should paragraph two be seen as an innuendo.
Paul #67
George Melly claimed to frightened off a pair of homophobic muggers by reading from a book of German surrealist poetry – thats my man!
What is the world’s largest living organism?
Let’s hear it for the fungi!
Three cheers and a tiger!
#87: Any idea the age on that fungi? Could it make a run at the Bristlecone Pine for the oldest living organism?
@81
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter Nerd. Where have I fallen off the rails.
Obviously they CAN use guns if it is necessary for them to do so. Police on the beat, however, do not generally carry guns. This was, clearly, the point I was making.
Why do I have to keep coming back to answer these stupid, carping objections?
Yeah, but look: this is Yahweh we’re talking about. The guy isn’t known for answering prayers that aren’t likely to be answered just as easily through non-supernatural means. Pray for the sun to come up tomorrow, cows to eat grass, or washing machines to lose socks, and Bingo! God loves ya baby. Praying for a spontaneous sex-change and a Catholic priest who likes hetero sex with a woman old enough to conceive? Stand in line with the amputees.
Well, even lounging about on clouds for an eternity must wreak havoc on the ol’ knees.
What?! [Scratches biology professor off “Dream Job” list.]
Not sure. Are they you? Then yes.
Seriously, you made a list of all the nasty names you’ve been called (to show to teacher, presumably) and you think rape ain’t no big deal? You might as well add “whiny, spineless, ball-less, waste of skin” to the list too, pissbucket. Oh, and add “statistics retard” to the list too, dumbfuck.
Worth pointing out that in all the time I’ve been living here, I haven’t even on a single, solitary occasion encountered a police officer carrying a gun.
Because you’re a fucking idiot, and you make incredibly sloppy arguments, and you write like a moron.
Why do I have to keep explaining this to you? Oh yeah, because you’re a fucking idiot.
No, it’s not worth pointing out. It’s an a-n-e-c-d-o-t-e.
You’d know that if you understood e-v-i-d-e-n-c-e, mouth-breather.
Obviously rape is a very big deal. I’m not advocating changing whatever sentences the law currently doles out. But physical assault is often also a big deal. I was not even claiming that they are by necessity equivalent. I just wanted to see the ACTUAL REASONS why rape is absolutely on a different level. Intuitively, I would guess that rape without physical injury would inflict less suffering than physical assault with long-term injury. But this is just my two-thirds-baked intuition speaking. I could well be wrong, and I’d be interested in seeing the data if there is any.
Not that me and hyperon see eye to eye, but you’re fighting a losing battle Brownian if you think that guns on police in the UK is common.
#75 & #83
Hey, Hyperon
Look up those links yet? (Or any of the others on the last incarnation of The Thread?)
Another thought. Have you ever flown into Heathrow in the last decade or two?
Did you notice the burly guys (I’ve seen one or two gals as well – hard to tell them apart at times). They were the ones with flak jackets and 9mm semiautomatic submachine guns from Heckler and Koch. Who did you think they were? Clowns from the local circus? Morris dancers to welcome visitors with a wreath (like they do in Hawiai)?
Just maybe you saw they were dressed in dark blue uniforms and had labels saying “Police”. Or perhaps you didn’t – they aren’t generally “in your face” but I can guarantee they were there.
Try Wiki
List of police firearms in the United Kingdom
When the UK police do use guns they don’t mess about. Ask the relatives of Brazillian Jean Charles de Menezes, mistaken for a terrorist and shot 7 times in the head (and once in the shoulder – poor shooting or perhaps it was to disable).
How about the UK Civil Nuclear Defense Force with weapons available up to 30 mm cannon?
I have visited non-commercial nuclear plant in the UK. And the police there are armed and when I went had a small arsenal of weapons.
And the routinely-armed Ministry of Defense Police.
And the armed police defending diplomatic missions (embassies etc) in London.
If you come to this site you come (armed) with facts. Evidence. Data (as an expert Mathematician and Statistician you should know all about data and how important it is).
If you don’t come so armed then expect to be flayed alive. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Most of the guys and gals here are really nice people.
Make sure you add “mouth-breather” to your list of things you’ve been called that traumatise you so much, Hyperon.
Perhaps if you show it to teacher, she’ll put me in detention and the mean, nasty, ol’ Brownian won’t pick on you any more, Snoogie-woogie.
What a fucking fainting goat you are.
I’m under no obligation to provide “evidence” to substantiate an utterly common knowledge fucking claim about the country I live in. Fuck off.
#90 Hyperon
This clearly was NOT what you said! What you said was not factual and I am a scientist – have been all my life – I work with facts and data or I and my arguments are nothing.
Because you can’t think clearly enough to get it right the first time and we have to waste time getting you to think clearly enough to have a chance of understanding what you have to say.
While you’re here and listening, how about left-over items from the last incarnation?
It wasn’t that long ago that I had to climb a ladder and part of a tree* while wearing heel boots, tight black jeans and a red dress sweater. I survived, but I don’t recommend it either. :)
*Yeah, better not to ask… I’ll just say that some cats can be very stupid at very inopportune moments…
And more importantly, they wouldn’t do it with someone they did not trust. Incidentally, finding it almost impossible to ever trust someone again is yet another scar that rape can leave on the victims. But Hyperon can’t understand that, can he?
There’s potato, there’s bad potato, and then there’s the awful sweet potato.
Leave your basement sometime. Go to an airport, nuclear power station, or international railway station. It’s trivial to find police openly carrying guns in the UK, even if the routine bobby-on-the-beat does not.
I don’t, in fact, think that. (The lack of guns among bobbies is often cited by those who advocate for gun control. The little douche deliberately uses sloppy, loose language in lieu of argument. Read here.
Alan B,
HOW THE FUCK is any of that relevant? Most police in the UK are not stationed in Heathrow. The fact that the UK police have shot an innocent man does not bear in the slightest on my claim that police on the beat generally don’t carry guns.
The reason I brought this up was in case Americans did not realize that guns are much less widespread in the UK police force. Generally when apprehending a criminal, a UK police officer does not have a gun at hand.
Your claim was that you have never seen any police in the UK carrying guns. That is an extraordinary claim, which is usually said to require extraordinary evidence.
1. Doesn’t change that it’s an anecdote and thus its pretty well useless for argument sake.
2. Then why’d you even bring it up, you pillar of snot?
3. You’re so fucking stupid, it hurts to know we share an internet. Go comment on YouTube, where you can be King Moron among the Brain Dead.
You are such a liar and bullshitter we will ask for and expect confirmation for any and everything you say. We consider what you say to be anything other than accurate. Which is your own fault.
Everybody uses this kind of language, you nitpicking, wall-to-wall, vindictive fucking prick. Without some measure of mutual charity it is almost impossible to have a sensible conversation. (“Hey, maybe he’s talking about charitable donations to Oxfam! Who knows what he’s talking about?!? LOL, what a deceptive, sloppy and loose, freakish pussbag asswipe weaselly little fuckface. And he’s the one who’s crotchety and is likely to stockpile pipe bombs.”)
What do you mean “often”? More than 50%? Deliberately vague: you’re playing tricks!
Yes, that seems incredibly dumb, but it is exactly the type of complaint you keep throwing in my face.
And I’m the misanthropic sociopath?
#92 Hyperon
Where is “here”? How long have you lived here? Did you come though an international airport of a seaport? Or were you spirited in by people smugglers from Eastern Europe? Have you ever left the UK by normal transport?
And you’ve never seen an armed policeman?? I suspect there aren’t many in rural Clackmannanshire and, to be honest, I have seen none in my home town (lived here 7 years).
A number of the armed police are plain clothed and make an effort to melt into the background to do their job. They don’t usually wave their weapons around in public. If I had a penis that was 18 inches long, I wouldn’t wave that around in public either.
Just because you haven’t seen them, does that mean you can start off this discussion by saying they don’t exist and expect not to be called on it?
#96 Francosaurus
The problem was Hyperon was not saying the carrying and use of forearms by the police is not common. What he said was:
Can you read the English language or do you have comprehension problems like Hyperon?
#99 Hyperon
It is such a pleasure to see well-reasoned, logical, arguments made by an expert in mathematics and statisitics who puts some/most/all of us here in the shade. This is something we can all learn from.
here’s why I think rape is worse. It takes the sexual act, perhaps the height of human existence, and turns it into cruel objectification and debasement. It is also never provoked on a tit for tat scale, (blows may answer verbal abuse, for example) but genuinely aimed to lower the other person’s worth for a cheap thrill.
Physical attacks are traumatizing too. Rambo is PSTD not because he was raped, but because he was tortured. ANd sadistic assault will certainly leave a long lasting scar.
But morals are principle-based, not effect based – normative, not consequential. SO if you want to evaluate why rape is generally esteemed lower than assault, you have to look at where it is that people derive the source of their dignity and autonomy, or how they have been granted what has been taken away. If this is ultimately groundless, then yeah, it’s pretty easy to wonder why there is a distinction between types of harms.
Priceless.
Amazing! It is capable of making correct statements—well, actually, that’s written as a question, but it has got the right idea…
Still awaiting the extraordinary evidence, or indeed any evidence at all, that it has never seen police carrying guns in the UK. Which is what it very specifically, clearly, and unambiguously claimed.
There’s also this rare and strange looking mushroom, perfect for the Squidmaster :
Octopus Stinkhorn (Clathrus archeri)
So, this fucking douche brought up a personal anecdote to support a claim he actually feels doesn’t need substantiation.
And he believes he’s an intelligent, logical thinker. Tell us about the *snigger* null hypothesis again, Hypie.
If you then said I claimed “usually” and I had a shit-fit on you for, then you’d have a basis for comparison.
@ blf #68
If there’s going to be mushroom recipe sharing, here’s a great one for mushroom barley risotto:
http://www.montereymushrooms.com/recipes/side_dishes/mushroom%20Barley%20Risotto.htm
Although it calls for portabella and/or white mushrooms, I’ve made it using a variety – oyster, morels and maitake are great – which only adds to the flavor. I also tried adding toasted slivered almonds just before serving as a garnish and the nuttiness is an excellent compliment to the mushrooms.
I wish I could go hunting wild mushrooms, though. There’s a great mushroom farm that comes to the Chicago farmer’s markets and they’ll sometimes have a haul of hen of the woods or chicken mushroom, but unless I get there early, it goes pretty quickly.
OF COURSE I wasn’t implying that no cop in the UK ever carries a gun under any possible circumstance. If somebody says “Oh, well the police don’t carry guns over here”, he should not be taken to mean: “No police officer has ever carried a gun here, nor will one ever.”
I should have added on a “save in special situations”, but I assumed at the time that it should go without saying. None of this clarification would be necessary if you actually tried to understand my post and applied a modicum of charity.
Now I’m not wasting another night on this unbelievable bullshit. No more posts from me.
Er… yes, that’s what it looks like.
And Brownian just made my day. :)
I have never ever ever ever seen a police officer with a gun in the UK.
But, I do hope to visit some day.
How I miss the Fall…
Now, if he finally said an accurate statement, and never posted again…
Franky, check out the previous eternal thread. You are just clueless as Hypershit, and should follow his lead…
Charity? Like the charity you gave the people here who personally told you they’d been raped and that yes, it was worse than any mere physical assault and you still demanded studies to verify their claims?
How come their anecdotes don’t mean anything Mr. I’ve-Never-Seen-A-Cop-With-A-Gun? No charity for them?
You deserve less than no charity, you fucking weak, lying coward.
Be sure to bring your list of nasty names to mommy so she can tell my mommy and I’ll get a good talking-to. And stop back in and say “Hi” if your testicles ever drop.
Yeah, risottos and soups are two of the dishes I commonly make when I’ve got MUSHROOMS coming out of my ears (not literally, I hasten to add!). I’m one of those cooks who rarely follows a recipe (which is probably why I cannot bake anything!?), albeit I do use them for inspiration. That risotto recipe is quite similar to the sort of risottos I usually make, albeit I tend to use rice and garlic instead of barley, and a dash of soy sauce instead of salt. Of course, being in France means I get to play with different wines and cheeses in the mix.
Yum… and now I need to go do something about dinner (and I think I’ve got a bag of fresh MUSHROOMS at hand—hum…!).
I am in awe of Brownian.
#108 Hyperon
That first sentence … “Everybody” with emphasis in the original. Where is your evidence? I can produce one example – my wife. This means you are WRONG. You seem to have lost it!
“Without some measure of mutual charity …” Actually I would settle for clarity. You cannot write a clearly argued, logical, factually based, case without going to stupid hyperbole and in the case of armed police you were just clearly WRONG.
You don’t like being called on your mistakes of fact and your lack of clarity? Why don’t you do something about it? Check your facts. Use clear language with emotion used for effect to push home an argument already made with facts and data.
One last point. In the minds of many here you have lost the right to your “measure of mutual charity”. You have been told several times that some of the things you have said have caused serious offense to people here. I suggested you should make some kind of genuine apology. This was not forthcoming and you are hammering away at the possible equivalence of rape and physical assault when you have been told it is offensive to people here who have experienced one or the other (and in some cases both).
When you are so borish don’t be surprised that you have put the backs up of so many people. Including me and that takes some doing.
Quoting myself addressing Hyperon from the last segment of The Thread, but putting part in list form:
Henceforth, if he insists on parading his ignorance and stupidity before us, I will simply respond to any claims or citation of his that I’m in the mood to read with the letter or letters corresponding to the problem. For example, #75 combines (at least, but especially) b and (due to) a combination of e and f.
#119 Miki Z
Wonderful!!
Promise? You’ve flounced before.
Hyperon: Why do I have to keep coming back to answer these stupid, carping objections?
_____
Because you do not have the ability to feel emotions like disgust which is why you can say the disgusting things you do. If I was you, I would feel so disgusted at the constant insults I would find some other place where I can learn and not be insulted. Any yet, you don’t. Learn to feel disgust and maybe the posters here would tolerate you because then you would not say such disgusting things and posters would be more patient and responsive.
Just hope you manage to feel disgust quick enough that you don’t stop posting here until the regulars can see that since you can now feel disgust you have stopped saying disgusting things. It is up to you to end the vicious cycle.
Now I’m not wasting another night on this unbelievable bullshit. No more posts from me.
You say that as if it was meant as a punishment for us.
Fred Phelps’ son is an atheist.
I am curious and wonder how much of what our late friend about himself is true?
Does he live in England?
Claimed it but wouldn’t say where.
Implied in what he said that he is not a native of the UK but wouldn’t say when he arrived?
Yet he did not know and has never seen armed police who are present at every international airport, seaport and railway terminal.
He claims to be a mathematician with a better knowledge of statistics than most of us here.
Yet he did not know what the nul hypothesis was. Now, he may have been arguing in a Bayesian way but even when that was offered to him he did not take it up and explain why we were all wrong, according to Bayes. If he really was a statistician, firstly he wouldn’t have made that mistake and secondly he would have given a far better explanation to put us all in our place.
His arguments were so poorly put together that I cannot believe he is a serious mathmatician. Clarity of thought is a fundamental requirement. It MAY make them boring (But may not) however, they are always likely to display clarity of thought, especially in writing.
Finally, on statistics, about the only data he put forward was the anally/annually thing. And he got that so wrong I hurt myself laughing. Come on. Even I could read and understand the difference.
So. What have I learnt guys and gals?
That not all the idiots out there are YEC.
That we are a strong “family”, willing to support each other emotionally.
[Ed. And that Alan B can be viscous when roused!]
Indeed, it would have, except that possibility was ruled out (my emphasis):
One of things people are complaining about is you say one thing, are challenged on it, and then either ignore what it is you said, or you try to twist your own meaning 180°. It’s bad enough when something twists someone else’s words, but twisting your own words is reprehensible.
In this case, you’ve essentially finally admitted you miswrote—and making the mistake is not the issue!—it’s the attempt to bluster your way out (and crudely at that), e.g., you nitpicking, wall-to-wall, vindictive fucking prick, &tc.
Did you all see the kamikaze attack on the IRS in Texas on the news?
I was taking a nap.
Dictyophora sp, probably duplicata. It isn’t always clear what purpose any given structure on a mushroom serves.
BS
#131 Lynna
Interesting about the son of the leader of the Westboro Baptist Church. I have heard about those people, even in the UK.
One thing that disgusted me was their trying to disrupt the funerals of homosexuals and of soldiers coming back from America’s wars. Saying to the parents (in effect) the death or your son was the result of his sin, your sin and the sins of America.
I then found out about the Patriot Guard Riders. Like them or loathe them, at least they protect the families of those bereaved while serving their country.
If I was asked to choose I would rather have the Patriot Guard Riders at my funeral than Phelps’ “church”.
Leave to LDS wingnuts who are also politicians to come up with even wilder theories about climate change.
Lawmaker: Climate change just ruse to control population.
But, hey, this is good: some BYU scientists actually stood up to the wingnut:
After the BYU scientists stood up for good science, they were soundly chastised:
Lynna, #24
The women I’ve worked with who do crew and tech in theatre are almost all awesome in that same pragmatic fashion. You do what the show needs, no matter what.
I suspect you’d have loved doing the 24-hour show we did last weekend.
#131 Lynna
Jesus said (paraphrased): by their fruits you shall know them.
He also said: this is how men will know who you are, because you love one another.
Now, you can define love in many ways but being abusive to your family is not one of them in my book.
Deeply sad to see the effects on his family.
Alan B, I agree that the protests at funerals were some of the Phelps gang’s worst offenses (and they are a gang, a gang of bullies). I’m glad someone stood up to them.
It gives me hope that a guy raised in that environment did manage to leave, — and it sounds like he dumped all the woo and religion, and not just his father’s whackiness.
BTW, I meant to tell you earlier that I appreciated your attempt to enlighten Hyperon on the meaning of sexuality within marriage, and that you used that to also highlight the damage that rape can cause. The discussion may have gone by without comment by Hyperon, but not by the rest of the readers. (This was in the previous chapter of the endless thread, for those new to the discussion.)
Pygmy Loris also made some great comments in the previous chapter. I liked the explanation that a raped person often feels a loss of self, that the loss of identity and becoming a stranger to one’s self is very difficult psychological ground to negotiate.
@ aratina cage of the OM: Yeah I’ve seen some of the stories. I haven’t been able to get details. I’m in TX and first I heard about it was a BBC article.
Right. The risotto I just made is a mix of thaï complet riz, kamut, some leftover homemade veggie stock from last night, the last of last night’s red wine, leeks, pepper, a dash of soy sauce, paprika (added near the end), some Italian cheese bought in the open air market last weekend, and, of course, MUSHROOMS (quickly sautéed in some butter). Served with a red wine (an organic Côtes de Rhône (blend of Grenache and Syrah)). I would have added some garlic except I seem to be out (and now I recall using the last of garlic in yesterday’s dish, so there’s a touch in the veggie stock). And it also now occurs to me that everything, except the cheese, is I believe, organic.
Bon ap—burp!—pétit !
of course. and my evidence? the ability to seriously write this and not explode from shame:
you lack basic human empathy and understanding of human psychology. that makes you a very inept sociopath, but there’s still something wrong with you. bigtime.
why? maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but morals should be effect based. the whole point is to avoid doing the things that result in harm, and do the things that are nice and helpful etc. this is entirely effect-based, because “principles” are not particularly meaningful in connection to the real world, since they all have exceptions, or contradict each other, or otherwise conflict with real-world morality
For myself, I find this clarity hard to achieve (or at least to express). Natural language is so wonderfully imprecise that I find myself using parenthetical asides, footnotes, comma phrases, and so on as well as backtracking through the argument to be sure that the (1) premises, (2) reasoning, (3) limitations of what I say are clear.
Compare
to
and you’ll see why I envy the poets.
Here is a time lapse Dictyophora video for you.
BS
I read your posts about the marathon show-prep and performance. I was amused and incredulous and somewhat horrified. :-)
I would have commented, but that would have started a conversation with the amazing Wowbagger, who is more bonkers than anyone I’ve ever met in the theater… and that’s saying something. [now you’ve done it, Lynna]
He’s a British physics grad student.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/04/sandwiched_between_jodie_foste.php
Lynna@137:
This was one of the central tenets of Mormon-speak in the 80s — that efforts at population control were anti-life, inspired by the devil, and designed to keep Christ from returning to the earth to establish his theocracy. For Mormons, this cannot occur until all of the souls in the ‘pre-mortal existence’ have been given bodies, i.e., born; the prediction at the time was that soon all women would become infertile, a la the movie “Children of Men”. Not a prophecy, because that might be shown to be wrong, just a prediction.
#140 Lynna
Thank you for your kind comment. I pondered long and hard over whether to join in and, if so, what to say and how to say it.
I concluded that those most able to comment (from bitter experience) were those who would not be able to speak or would not want to speak out. In effect, Hyperon was bullying those women into silence and making you re-live those experiences.
I don’t like bullies, especially emotional bullies. I’ve suffered from bullying myself (although not at the level of some/many here). I don’t know how I would react if my wife were to be raped. I think I might take action myself but I really don’t know how far it would go.
I hope people did not feel I was presumptious in making those statements on behalf of those who were not able to defend themselves. I know you would have put it so much better if you had been able to.
I think I’ve had enough this evening. Take care, good people!
In my case, I find clarity hard to express tersely. But with a mass of verbiage, it’s easy to make a mistake or for the reader to loose the thread (especially, perhaps, as I’m not the best of writers). And I’ve a (nasty) tendency to use lots of parenthetical clauses (like this (even nested (multiple times (like this)), or at least too often (similar to this (which is just an example)))). I sometimes call it the Stephen Jay Gould style of writing. Informative (or so I hope), but in need of a good editor.
What I find has helped me is working with people for whom English is not the native/first language. That forces me to write simpler sentences, not use convoluted expressions, and so on. But it also makes it fecking tricky to be clear and terse, or at least makes it hard for me to be clear and terse.
More on the Humongous Fungus than you would ever want to know. Damn funny!
BS
Good point. My wife does not appreciate it when I refer her to a previous lemma. It’s an actual Conversational Rule in our house.
I didn’t say much on the last thread. I don’t remember who talked about the loss of self and identity, but I did find it very relevant. I am now refusing to engage Hyperon at all. After the Oblivious Male Atheist thread, I simply cannot work up the emotional energy to deal with him. The only thing I did on the last thread was call him a piece of possum shit.
You have a mean hate for possums then…
#144 Miki Z
That is why, IMHO, there are so few good mathematicians and why I don’t think our friend is one of them.
Ed wants to comment on #150 blf:
[Ed. How true of Alan B, how true …]
Alan B,
I, too, found your explanation of marriage and sex versus rape to be accurate, though I think it works by substituting marriage for any sexual relationship. Sex is something you do with another person, for pleasure and, in many cases, to reinforce pair bonding. Rape is something that is done to a person against their will.
Well that explains why some mormons are also joining fundagelicals in touting the “Demographic Winter” concept (which also neatly masks an anti-muslim and anti-dark-skin element). http://www.demographicwinter.com/index.html
And from the “right to life movement”, here’s the pinnacle of awfulness, Don Feder (same guy that’s part of World Congress of Families; anti-gay stuff everywhere, including Uganda; and master of thinly-veiled religious agendas sometimes disguised as “research”.)
Well, possums eat roadkill including other possums. So, Hyperon isn’t just shit, but the shit of a carrion eater. It just seemed more appropriate. I don’t have anything against possums per se except that they taste horrible and they run in front of my car at very inopportune moments.
Awww… that’s probably the sweetest thing I’ve ever read! :)
(Yes, I’m geeky like that…)
Pygmy Loris@153: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dan_geaves/2418716910/ for a nice portrait.
Alan B@155: I agree. Most of the non-teaching stuff I do is modeling, not proofs, but I spend a large portion of my time writing up the results. It takes work to express in enough detail to be understood but not so much detail that the results are buried. In conversation, people generally won’t allow you to begin with an abstract (though the Pharyngula audience seems more willing that most).
Aquaria #18
A can of soup and french onion soup mix in a recipe for stroganoff? I am shocked, dismayed and disheartened. (Note to self: when invited to dine at Chez Aquaria, arrange to have a migraine that day.)
Here’s a proper stroganoff recipe:
6 tbsp butter
1 pound of top sirloin or tenderloin, cut thin into 1-inch wide by 2 1/2-inch long strips
1/3 cup chopped shallots (can substitute onions)
1/2 pound cremini or porcini mushrooms, sliced
Salt and pepper to taste
Pepper to taste
1/8 tsp nutmeg
2 tsp chopped fresh tarragon or 1/2 tsp of dry tarragon
1 cup of sour cream at room temperature
Melt 3 tbsp of butter in a large frying pan on medium heat. Add the strips of beef and brown on both sides. When beef is browned, remove from pan and set aside.
In the same pan add the shallots. Cook for two minutes until soft but not brown. Put the shallots and drippings in the same bowl as the meat.
Melt another 3 tbsp of butter in the same pan. Cook, stirring occasionally, for about 4 minutes. While cooking, sprinkle the nutmeg and the tarragon on the mushrooms.
Reduce the heat to low and add the sour cream to the mushrooms. Mix in the sour cream thoroughly. Do not let it come to a boil or it will curdle. Stir in the beef and shallots to heat them. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Serve immediately over egg noodles, fettucine, riced potatoes, or rice.
Serves 4.
I’ve been following the Endless Thread and Hyperon’s blatherings for the last several days, and just want to add my two cents worth.
In my nearly 30 years experience in EEO and civil rights law, one of the points that I’ve repeatedly stressed in presentations and training is that, at least in my view if not quite the law, sexual harassment is just a version of “rape lite”. For the following reasons: it’s about power relationships, not sex; it’s designed more to intimidate and make victims powerless than to inflict actual damage (of various sorts); and lastly that it is driven by the self-image and psychology of the perpetrator, not the victim.
In reading through Hyperon’s screeds it became apparent to me that, apart from all the other problems so evident in his writings (lack of evidence, incomprehension, confirmation bias, etc.) we were witnessing an extreme form of the response I often encountered from respondents in the cases where I instituted legal actions against harassers, or the scoffers in my sexual harassment trainings who were there only because they had been ordered there by their employers. Some of you have already noted the same personality trait and labelled it “sociopathy”. I’m not sure I would go so far as that. But it is something very similar.
It’s an ingrained attitude of superiority based on their male sex, coupled with the a priori conviction that their grievances are inherently more serious than that of most others, especially females. It’s different from not being able to feel empathy (though such an ability in these folks is often warped or underdeveloped). It seemed to me to be more strongly rooted in the tightly held belief that their sexual identity is a legitimate instrument of social interaction, especially when dealing with others whose sexual identities are not worth as much (most women), or are illegitimate (gays, effeminate heterosexuals, minorities).
In Hyperon’s case, based on my reading of his comments here (no matter how many times I felt my stomach contents surging back up my throat), it was more like a totally unbridled arrogance based on his maleness rather than a psychological disorder. Which, in some ways, I find less tolerable and more offensive.
Anyway, just wanted to throw out my “thanks” to the many Pharyngulites who so admirably smacked down his rantings and self-delusions.
An insult all smelly shite everywhere!
Lynna wrote:
Since I’ve only ever done theatre in Adelaide I’ve no idea what the communities might be like in other places. But yeah, the people here who do it take it very seriously and throw themselves into it the way that lemmings were believed to but actually don’t.
But for me the insanity shifts from the production side to the audience side starting tonight; the Adelaide Fringe festival opens and I’m seeing the first two of the maybe 30 shows I’m going to see over the next 22 days & nights – the final number will depend on how much money, time and energy I’ve got to spare.
As crazy as this might sound it gets more so when you realise that all of this is in the three weeks leading up to the GAC in Melbourne, which I’m sure isn’t going to be subdued by any definition of the word.
So, if any of you who are going end up meeting me and wondering why I look a bit…frazzled, that’ll be why.
“And so to bed”
Don’t use up all the thread – it takes me ages to catch up in the morning!!
That’s what the ed. is for!
SciAm has a podcast on the physics of curling.
Ooh, I’m stoked!
I’m sooo buying PZ’s book !!
:)
From the thread I linked to above:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/04/sandwiched_between_jodie_foste.php#comment-1577775
Hyperon suggesting that calling him a “little grad student” is a human rights violation with exactly the same moral status as calling someone a “little faggot.” Yes, really.
It is a curious persecution complex Hyperon has (not enough so for me to read any more of him). Feeling persecuted because you don’t have a Ph.D.? Huh? I know that Ph.D. holders are demographically overrepresented here, but the academic contempt is leveled consistently at those who claim a better education than everyone else and then proceed to display their own profound ignorance.
I suppose that’s one way of growing one’s own food, though it doesn’t sound terribly hygienic.
Just for the record, this is an awesome sentence, for its sheer versatility if nothing else. I am going to steal it, without attribution, and work it into my ongoing creative efforts on Uncyclopedia (which are far more interesting than EU law).
======
Meh. Sorry for the above blithering. I have learnt that coffee and Diet Pepsi are not adequate replacements for sleep. :-)
you won’t avoid principles. Even saying “morals should be effect-based” is coming up with a principle of some sort. But one observation is that we tend to judge the morality of a situation before it occurs, rather than after. So we don’t say that we will reserve judgment on a rape to wait and see if things actually turn out for the good as a result of it. An effect-based approach may just actually do that, though, and you may find that some people have been able to shrug off a rape better than an assault. Hence hyperon – if the point of condemning an act should be proportionate to the harm it causes, then we shouldn’t be afraid to take a hard look at the harm caused by rape, after the fact, case by case. Also, rape has no automatic claim to societal abhorrence, unlike murder or battery which by definition require physical harm.
I, personally, don’t think rape can be justified as more horrible than assault on the basis of harm alone. Too many exceptions possible. So the options are to either say “well, lets just say it is anyway and/or use this to symbolize our xyz values on the issue” or to derive principles that resonate with what we know in our instincts. The latter leads, I think, to the development / discovery of moral laws. To illustrate:
Say I murder a hobo, with no family, no one to grieve over him. ANd lets say I do it painlessly. Anyone object that it is wrong? On what grounds?
Or what if I sneak into the hospital room of a comatose female and have my way. No one knows, she’ll never know, no physical harm done. Still wrong? on what grounds?
Oh, and mushrooms are absolutely revolting. Bleargh.
I…I read what Walton typed.
And I…I…I…agree with him!!!
http://www.tu.tv/videos/the-times-they-are-a-changin
Very well said, MarkMyWords.
For my part, I think Hyperon’s main problem is eminently summed up your comment here – which you thought was not actually the cause: “It’s different from not being able to feel empathy (though such an ability in these folks is often warped or underdeveloped).”
There’s no doubting H’s overweening arrogance and unexamined belief in his own abilities (q.v., Dunning-Kruger effect) but what seems to really cap it all off is his display of emotion and empathy, or rather the stunted lack of almost any sign of them, which is no doubt why a number of people here have been throwing around the term “sociopath”. I think H’s posts point strongly to his social and emotional development being severely undeveloped and warped.
(Brownian’s comments on the previous thread that he knows this type of poster very well (can’t swing a dead cat without hitting several etc) is rather sad, if he is indicating that the condition of having a crippled emotional development is so commonplace.)
It’s not such a surprise to see H returning day after day to Pharyngula to get more dung thrown at him, to the point where he deserves the award of the Iron Shovel – when you’ve dug yourself into such a hole, why not continue? He lacks the insight to do the decent thing and go away, for shame.
SC wrote:
Wow, I’d forgotten all about that particular exchange. It didn’t help that it took me a little while to realise that, back then, Hyperon was posting as Therion (and being referred to as such in the comments) – but TypeKey, being an hyperlink, has the current name (i.e. Hyperon) in the post header. So, if any of you are as confused as I was, that’s why.
Oh, and in other news, frankosaurus appears to be attempting to top the odious Pete ‘Sick Fuck’ R**ke in terms of sickening bad analogies to try and justify his position.
Fuckosaurus,
Heard of the Kantian principle that people shouldn’t be used as you would use a mere object? It’s not a bad starting point, and if I remember correctly, Dawkins in The God Delusion cites a researcher whose behaviour studies suggest that people largely obey a similar principle in making ethical decisions, whether consciously or not.
I don’t think frankosaurus is making an analogy here. It is not the first time he has made reference to the inability of the sleeping/comatose to have any awareness (going so far as to claim they have no brains).
I think, perhaps, the first chapter of The World According to Garp* has gotten way too much wear in frank’s copy, and now he’s moved on to the real thing.
*(wherein the mother of the titular Garp rapes a comatose soldier in order to conceive)
uh… what? we judge whether something is moral or not based on the consequences of it. it just so happens that we have brains, and are therefore capable of predicting the outcomes before an action takes place.
if you had bothered watching that video of Greta Christina talking about atheist sex ethics, you’d know that secular ethics are very much based on the “will it do harm?” principle.
and the reason rape is in that category is because we already know it does permanent mental damage. children who were beaten as kids recover better than children who have been abused. a single instance of rape can mess a person up permanently, while a single fight/single instance of being beaten up does not. just because hyperon is incapable of honestly grasping that these facts exist, and understanding the mental damage rape can do, because he’s under the illusion that no one could scar him like that (and I’m sure he also believes he’d stay cool under fire, in a war, or in other high-stress, traumatizing, unusual situations; because he’s Tough as Shit&trade), doesn’t mean these facts aren’t out there.
we know rape is horrible and has horrible effects. therefore, rape is immoral. d’uh.
you mean other than the fact that someone who can violate an unconscious woman would have little compunction with making a woman unconscious and then raping her?
though you might have hit something here. still, you start with the consequences, and you build principles on that, so the consequences are still what’s creating ethics in the first place.
Apologies if anyone has already posted this about Expelled’s UK premiere screening plus a debate between the ‘Christian and Secular arenas’ in London on Saturday 27th February.
Expelled Booking Form via Premier Christian Media
I can’t make that evening but it would be interesting to have a bit of support for the two speakers ‘who advocate Darwinian Evolution’. I assume these comprise the ‘Secular arena’, as it is described.
Miki Z,
Part of me has to hope that if someone read – and, more importantly, felt – any of John Irving’s works, they couldn’t possibly remain the kind of clueless asshat that frankosaurus is.
Then again, clueless asshats can sometimes have decent taste in reading material without it having a positive effect on their characters.
oh yeah, that was a nice blockquote fail. for the record, I’m not planning on murdering any hobos, frankosaurus is.
anyway, I should add that “harm” doesn’t just mean direct harm to an individual. that may be the easiest form of harm to identify and study, and the easiest one to understand on a personal basis, but harm can also be harm to groups of people or social systems and institutions, or it can be indirect harm. for example, unless you run someone over, driving a hummer doesn’t directly harm anyone. however, it’s contributing to global warming, which is and will be causing lots of harm both to individuals and whole societies. so, driving a hummer is indirectly harmful.
Due to a venue dispute, the speaker who pleaded to be on the pro-science side was unable to come. (No disrespect intended to Dr. Fox or Dr. Dixon, who both seem qualified to speak on the matter, but we know this will not be a real “debate”.)
I find it interesting that the booking site lists only the memberships of the ID-side but the specialties and affiliation of the science side.
Oh dear. I think I can stay out of the three threads about one quack.
OIC.
I think I read about that once, but because it’s doubly or triply useless knowledge for me, I didn’t remember it… :-)
And I had to tell it to my biology teacher in 1993/4. Fortunately she didn’t get my class ever again, but apparently she still hadn’t accepted it in 2000.
:-)
LOL!
Probably not…
Do you even have time for it?
Remember comment 402 of the previous subthread?
So you haven’t.
Then why are you here? Go read.
“a region of Mongolia” – well, Inner Mongolia, which is part of China.
X-D
Cruel.
LOL! Wishing someone into a YouTube comment thread is indeed cruel. :-)
So it’s not just when it comes to paleontology that BYU is a completely normal university.
I can sympathize. I think in branched ways, so any attempt to write that down results in very long sentences with lots of clauses, parenthetical or otherwise. That happened a lot in the manuscript I just finished, and I sometimes notice it when speaking.
Fortunately it doesn’t matter in a manuscript; I can just read it a few more times and break the sentences up…
Here we have some tersely expressed clarity! Emphasis added.
What’s that? Is that something to… oh.
Seriously, what is it?
What the fuck? I’m a grad student, too. I understand if he doesn’t like being belittled, but that still doesn’t make “grad student” equal “faggot”…
Too late at night for headdesking. I’m tired, and the neighbors might wake up if the desk breaks. <sigh>
Ground mushrooms, made into a soup or sauce or used as a spice, are very good (well, unless they are all champignons with as little taste as color). But I do mean “ground”, not “cut into macroscopic rubbery chunks”.
Wowbagger,
Me too, but I’ve found that while Irving’s work is consistently well-written, the emotional depth of it varies wildly (for me, at least). Garp was fluffy entertainment, A Prayer for Owen Meany still haunts me decades later. (A comparably affecting book was Terrorist by Updike.)
Nitpick: I don’t think we can sensibly talk about “atheist sex ethics”, because atheism is not a philosophy in itself. Atheism is simply a lack of belief in gods; it doesn’t tell you anything specific either way about a person’s ethical beliefs. “Atheist ethics” are no more specific than “non-astrologer ethics”, or “non-spiritualist ethics”, or “non-fairy-believing ethics”. Different individual atheists adhere to different moral philosophies, and therefore have different ethics.
For instance, some atheists here consider it unethical to eat meat; others do not. Some atheists believe that socio-economic equality is a greater moral imperative than non-coercion; others believe the opposite. There is no intrinsic “atheist view” on any ethical issue, and people do not become “more atheist” or “less atheist” by disagreeing about these things.
This may seem like pointless pedantry, but I think it is important in some practical situations. Religionists often attack atheism by talking about the “atheist movement” or “atheist philosophy” as if it formed a discrete philosophical whole; this is where they derive stupid arguments such as “Stalin and Mao were atheists, ergo atheism is a morally bankrupt philosophy.” They are wrong, because atheism isn’t a philosophy at all, and doesn’t make any claims about morality. It’s simply an acceptance that there’s no reason to believe in any gods. Atheism describes what is, not what ought to be, and the fact that a person does not believe in any gods tells you nothing either way about his or her ethical standards and beliefs.
in other words, you haven’t watched the video either. the video was explicitly about how to construct ethics as an atheist, i.e. not “because god said so”, because we know there isn’t one.
The researcher was Marc Hauser and what was cited was his book Moral Minds.
I know a source for 700 hobo names. Just in case Killosaurus needs some references. Also, I don’t think he understands how hard those suckers are to kill. They’re pretty scrappy from years of surviving under adverse conditions. Killsaurus might find himself in a hobo’s Philly cheese steak.
What is it with this obsession for objective ethics? What’s so hard about not fucking over other people for your own gain?
Cooked potatoes that have been squeezed through rice sized holes. Essentially very smooth mashed potatoes. Compared to regular mashed potatoes, where the hole is several times bigger, and can leave little lumps.
With their red skins still on, and combined with sour cream, caramelized garlic, salt, pepper, cumin, and perhaps a touch of dill.
Deee-lish.
I think it is a back door entry to needing an imaginary deity for morals. Or else, he just cannot grasp how one can be moral without an imaginary deity. Try really using and applying the Golden Rule Franky. A good start in evolutionary morals.
so… am I the only one who mixes the mashed potatoes with butter and milk (or cream, if i feel extravagant) to get all the clumps out…?
also… holes? what sort of potato masher has holes? mine looks like this
Holed potato masher.
Potato ricer.
Miki Z,
Ditto on Owen Meany. I also like The Cider House Rules a lot – and thinking about Irving reminds me it’s about time I read A Son of the Circus again ’cause it’s been a while.
I’ve only read a couple of Irvings, and not that one. I really enjoyed In the Beauty of the Lilies but some of the other, earlier stuff I’ve started but couldn’t get into.
But I’ll try and get my hands on Terrorist.
Ewww… mashed potato, another disgusting “food” product.
I’m possibly the most finicky eater ever. I can’t eat bananas (I can’t even stand the smell or sight of them), apples, most fresh fruit in general, soft sliced bread, ham, mashed potato, baked beans, mushrooms, or a whole range of other things. In general, it would probably be quicker to list the things I will eat. :-)
Better yet, try applying the Enhanced And Improved Golden Rule++ 2000 Millenium Edition Pro Gold: “Do unto others as they would have you do unto them.”
OH! That’s it! Thank you – I was so confused. I had a hard time finding it because I was searching for “Therion,” since I knew it was the same person (unfortunately J wasn’t registered to the best of my knowledge – damn). Then I thought (oddly) that he must have switched halfway through that thread, and that’s why people were calling him Therion. All makes sense now. Nabbed!
(And that was a very amusing thread.)
Jadehawk, OM #183
Hobos all over the Dakotas will sleep well tonight knowing this.
What do you have against fruits huh? lol
I can eat almost anything. Even horrible things like bittermelon.
*fans self furiously, tries not to pass out*
I also use parentheses more than I probably should (as you all have probably notic- d’oh!)
I do have one friend who has the trait David mentioned of speaking parenthetically. It’s only been the one person I’ve known, but I remember distinctly trying to follow in an early conversation we had and then thinking “Wait, I can tell where parentheses are. X is actually talking in parentheses.”
I didn’t know ricers were used for mashed potatoes – I always thought riced potatoes had some weird use of which I knew not. I use a hand mixer on medium speed to get all the lumps out of mine.
And anyone who doesn’t like potatoes or mushrooms can send them all my way, thanks.
SC OM #199
I just spent about half an hour there listening to bad music.
that’s because you’re a college student in America. that experience teaches you to eat absolutely everything that doesn’t make you sick (and occasionally those things, too) :-p
No, that is a fairly common practice (we do that here too), except the lactose intolerant may use water instead of milk.
yeah, and he is actually someone I was thinking of about moral laws because of his quote “the starry skies above me, the moral law within me.” I was wondering why people weren’t defending against hyperon on the rape issue by referring to universal morality. is there a scientific criticism of deontological ethics that I don’t know about? Kant would be on the side of saying rape is worse, being a greater violation of honour. or are terms like “honour” too much for our cynical age?
maybe one can build a completely consequentialist ethical system. But is that what people do? Think about Christianity. Why are impure thoughts a sin. Because of their consequences? (though of course there may “a save” by saying that sinning itself has ultimate consequences which is why people abide by it. But it’s not a tidy “x results in y which is bad”). Or to take a non-religious example of virtue ethics, say I write a postcard to a Russian stranger who doesn’t speak English. I describe, in English, all the ways I’m going to abuse her family with all the most gory details. She takes the card, throws it in the garbage. Say there was never any chance that anyone reading it would understand it. No consequence, thus perfectly moral thing to do?
Thanks Kel for jogging my memory. The fascinating thing about that book seems to be the implication that the same moral decisions (i.e. reactions to being placed in an ethical dilemma) seem to be made by people regardless of their religious beliefs or ethnicity, which Hauser suggests must be the result of evolutionary processes working on the human brain, as a merely cultural reason could not explain the universality of such moral responses.
Again from memory, one of the (rather simpler) moral dilemmas involved a child drowning in a lake, and you might be able to save the child, but in the process you would ruin the trousers you’re wearing: unsurprisingly, some figure in the high 90 percent range of participants in Hauser’s survey said they’d rescue the child and ruin their trousers; and I’d be prepared to guess that certain posters like Frankosaurus would prefer to remain dry.
Damn it! Thanks a lot for talking about John Irving novels, because now, once again, I can’t stop thinking about Nastassja Kinski and/or Jodie Foster in a bear suit.
Indeed, that’s why it helps if one hasn’t pissed away any charity that may have existed by constantly crying wolf while exhibiting a combined display of self-aggrandizement, inferiority complex, and foot-in-mouth syndrome. As it is, *yawn*
PS. What exactly is a ‘wall-to-wall prick’? Inquiring minds want
to knowpics.However, “instinctual” ethics, i.e. the ability to be moral because of human evolution, are also consequentialist, be it because we empathise with harm to others, or fear harm for ourselves. it’s however possible to be part of a social structure where harm is defined in such a way that it isn’t recognizable to secularists, and actually can cause physical and mental harm to its followers. Even Christians do that, when they believe that “sin” causes harm to their soul and to the souls of others. very few Christians are actively, individually evil, but because their reference point has been skewed, and they accept authoritarian claims as to what does or doesn’t do harm, they have what we’d see as a warped, evil moral system.
so basically we instinctually try to avoid doing harm (and that’s where morality comes from), but our social environment has a huge influence on how we interpret what precisely harms and what doesn’t.
what the fuck is it with the blockquote fails today?!
anyway, my answer starts at the third sentence, “I never claimed…”
SC wrote:
The first half wasn’t; I hate that, in the absence of any real opposition, some regulars who I’d previously considered reasonable people turned on some others over very minor points.
It was almost a blessing Hyperon/Therion showed up and gave the ravenous horde something to attack.
SvenDiMilo wrote:
Having Nastassja Kinski play Susie the Bear counts as one of the worst pieces of miscasting in film history. The character is meant to be a physically unattractive woman – which Nastassja Kinski most certainly isn’t.
which is why we have the freshmen 15. But I get home cooked meals because I still live with my folks.
I don’t know what would give you that idea. I merely give graphic examples to toy with consequentialism. But the rescuing case is also interesting.
-Say the person who is drowning has a leg chomped off and will most likely – in fact, lets say they will certainly bleed to death within minutes if you rescue them. Does morality require you to rescue? Does the morality change if they are screaming for you to help them (more empathy involved, after all, but same consequence)?
Wowbagger,
I think I wasn’t following the first half much because registration was on and I couldn’t comment; then PZ must have turned it off sometime in the middle.
Ranum and Holbach? o_O
(Also funny is that I just realized that the post happens to be about the atheist list I just talked about on my blog thinking it was new – couldn’t open it to see the date. Hee.)
we’re gonna need a bigger boat
Do your inane questions get even stupider? What would you do?
how the fuck would you know this? hypothetical examples like that just don’t mesh well with reality. of course there isn’t much point in risking your life for a person who’s definitively going to die anyway. but just because we can predict consequences, doesn’t mean we’re capable of actually seeing the future. therefore, there’s really no such thing as a person who’s definitively going to die in such a situation. otoh, in other situations there is, and these are the actually interesting discussions about, for example, euthanasia for the terminally ill.
my HTML-fu is weak today…
Tell me your requirements and I’ll see what I can do.
This one can be rented.
MarkMyWords, thank you. Good point.
So I just checked up on that linked thread, which I hadn’t followed the first time, thinking it was that Hyperon just changed his name, but it keeps switching through the thread – was Hyperon being his own sockpuppet? As if he needed one more strike at his lack of ethics.
So Jadehawk, how does your instinctual ethics account for sociopaths? Your instincts tell you that what they do is wrong, his instincts say no problem. Do you just say that they are abominations, and make them comply with the prevailing instincts?
Even inaner question. What an idjit. Figure it out for yourself, and then you tell us. Show us how moral you are. Not very, from your posts…
incidentally, I notice that frankie is still failing at understanding consequentialist ethics. while one can develop tentative principles from known and predictable consequences, such ethics are always to a certain degree situational, and therefore completely impossible to discuss sensibly in bland single-vector hypotheticals.
that drowning person scenario again: how likely am I to croak trying to help them? are there others who could help them better, more quickly, and with fewer chances of the whole thing ending disastrously? am I endangering others by trying to help this person? etc.
these are all relevant, and a honest answer cannot be given to a hypothetical that doesn’t resemble reality at all. they’re really only good to test “instinctive” morals, but not for trying to understand consequentialist ethics. after all, sometimes the same action can have vastly different consequences, depending on the circumstances.
No, Hyperon and Therion are/were the same person. On that thread he was using Therion but the SB software recognizes his IP and uses the current nom du blog of Hyperon. He just used two different names.
I can see from the pool of blood the prognosis isn’t good.
say i’m not jeopardizing my life, i just don’t want to get my pants wet.
i’m just saying the morality of the situation doesn’t seem to be arriving from the consequences of the action.
wtf? you do know that abberations in a population happen, right? the main definition of a sociopath is of someone who lacks this instinctive “moral compass”. it’s like being born blind. does the existence of blind people invalidate the existence of sight? i think not.
Ah, that explains the stupidity of Therion, and the inability to grasp the point.
What seems to have happened is that he was posting then as Therion then and later at some point changed to Hyperon, but when he changed his pseudonym Typekey changed it across the board, including retroactively.
I’d say it has to do with self-preservation.
Most folks just want to survive as best they can. It’s a matter of fitting in with the society in which they are living. Perhaps they wish to make their lot better. Some folks realize that it’s hard to make their own lot better if they are constantly fucking over other people; that by cooperation, we make everyone’s lot better. That is reasonable, from a “survival within society” standpoint.
This is normal.
Others do not wish to survive. Others wish to destroy. There’s very little you can do about them, other than gang up on them and excise them like the cancer they are. They are not good for themselves, and they are not good for anyone else.
It’s really not as hard as you are trying to make it. You seem intent on making ethics as obscure as possible, when really it’s quite simple.
Is Franky taking a course in ethics, and getting us to do his homework for him?
to you maybe. to me it seems to be arriving from the consequences very much. a definitely dead kid is worse than a possibly, or even likely, dead kid. like I said: unless you can predict the future with absolute 100% certainty, leaving the kid behind is more likely to have bad consequences than not.
so no two situations are ever the same, and perfect knowledge may never exist about what the circumstances are or what the consequences may entail. Isn’t that a better argument for deferring to rules rather than instincts?
how do you know its them that lacks the moral compass, and not you. Is it because more people share your moral compass than theirs?
ah; maybe I should clarify something. consequentialist ethics are not purely calculated. they are based on the human social instinct (i.e. instinctual morals), but they’re not quite synonymous with it either. seems frankosaurus is confused about this, since half the time he argues against cold, calculated logic, and sometimes he argues against pure individualistic instinct; but apparently he doesn’t comprehend that consequentialist ethics are both: we naturally feel empathic towards other people, and value people over stuff. so even if we logically calculate that the kid is most likely gonna die anyway, and we’d ruin our pants for nothing, the instinct will still consider that the small chance of the kid surviving is more important than a pair of pants.
and it’s also not Absolute Moral Relativity; harm is something that can be assessed objectively, on the basis of the basic human social instinct that people are more important than things, and that harming people is bad.
201: I can eat almost anything. Even horrible things like bittermelon.
Mmmm, bittermelon. Sometimes. I got a package of dried sweetened bittermelon at a crackseed stand in Honolulu once and have been searching in vain for more of it ever since.
Next time we have mashie with parsley root I’ll dig out the potato ricer. The dish is lovely but lumpy. (I’ll take your share, Walton.)
150: I sometimes call it the Stephen Jay Gould style of writing. Informative (or so I hope), but in need of a good editor.
Bless you, yes. I could weep when I think of how good his later stuff might’ve been with a competent and congenial editor. I like it a lot, but.
Sven, um, ‘way up there somewhere: Now, you might quibble about functional and partial and true syncytia and plasmodesmata and gap junctions and the like, and how they fit into the whole membrane-w/-optional-wall multicellular eukaryotic bauplan(s). You might. So, go right ahead–it’ll be interesting.
That’s OK, thanks, but I’ll stick to quibbling about that four-letter word, “extra” though it may be. I’m just a simple barefoot garden writer who misses her specialized section copyeditors.
I’ll stipulate that it’s a fine and difficult art communicating anything to an audience that’s mostly unschooled in it: science, tech, name-yr-art. I do think the membranes-vs-walls quibble is elementary enough to let one land a little closer to accuracy than the article did, though. I can see someone stumbling over the term while talking but if I were writing or editing I’d’ve flagged it for clarification.
I suspect I’m touchy on that partly because I’ve seen rather a lot of woo that talks about cell walls in humans.
And the bug thing, oy.
fuckosaurus, I get the impression you simply lack the ability to work with complex systems, and not only because you seem only capable of discussing one vector at a time, and don’t seem to grasp that they’re interlocking. Social ethics are really not that fucking hard to figure out.
are you incapable of making instantaneous moral decisions, and always fall back on some set of rules that tells you whether something is right or wrong? that makes you someone with an authoritarian character, and therefore not likely to understand what I’m talking about. complex systems, and navigating them, scares the fuck out of authoritarian characters, since they’re not ever as nicely black-and-white as they like.
and authoritarian character scare the fuck out of me, since their obsession with rules generally means they can’t handle change or novel circumstances; and when they’re in charge when that happens, everything goes to shit.
oh, and as for the “how do i know my instincs are right and the sociopath is wrong”…. this is stupid. how do you know your rules are right, and other people’s are wrong? just because they’re old? how silly.
Jadehawk, you’re just frustrated because you’re being led into contradictions. For example, consequentialist/instinctual ethics will mean that sociopaths or people who don’t share the same instincts will be required to defer to the instinct-based system of those who do. THat looks a little authoritarian.
But I agree. I don’t like black and white morality either.
I met Paul Stamets at a fringe mushroom festival at Telluride, with Andy Weil. Both are very intelligent, but Dr Weil is a Homeopath. Very disappointing. Stamets et.al. named a new mushroom after Andy, Psilocybe weilii.
There are mushroom festivals where the directions are mailed to you after you send your money. I will leave it to you to decide why.
BS
sociopaths OR people who don’t share the same instincts? I think you’re confused about something. maybe about the scope of instincts, I don’t know.
And no, so far I’ve not contradicted myself on anything or been led into any contradictions. How is it “authoritarian” to not want a person to be doing harm to many other people? I already explained to you that it’s society that often defines what “harm” is, and that therefore different societies will have different ethics, and also that they will evolve over time. what problem do you have with that? and what does that contradict?
A cross between an industrial vacuum cleaner and a chrome piggy bank with marital aids stuck all over it
Not to lessen jadehawk’s appetite for salmon(which was mentioned upthread I believe), but this makes me happy that mine is coming from Tasmania !
Wut??
BS
From what little I’ve read of the philosophy of morality it seems too often people oversimplify to the point of not even being useful. I see (some) philosophers set up these moral systems that have bear little resemblance to actual morality and they leads to conclusions that no one but they themselves accept.
Morality is quite complex. People take both consequences and principles into account when making moral decisions. While it is interesting to see if you can find some sort of formal rules for ethics and have some sort rational basis for them, it isn’t absolutely necessary for practice. Not anymore than a baseball player need know Newtonian mechanics and how to solve differential equations to correctly predict the path of a ball. Some of these moral systems I read about are like Aristotelian physics; not even approximately right.
_________
BTW, we always hear the charge that atheism leads to moral relativism. I have never met any atheist who was also a moral relativist. Has anyone here?
To: Phil1lp and Silent Moose of Doom
Thanks for your kind words. Considering the brilliant (albeit rather eccentric) minds that leave comments on this blog, it’s good to know that I am not deemed “unworthy”.
Though I have to agree with any number of the regulars here – David Marjanovic’s brain is just about the sexiest thing that’s given me unrequited lust for a looooong time.
Oh, yes, very amusing, with all of the witty back-and-forth and OT chatty banter and ironic but graphically violent music-video mock-battles and flirting and stupid fucking puns and such. And troll-stomping to boot. Very, very amusing indeed.
Do you know what was happening here, on the Thread Everlasting, while you so-called “cool kids” were yukking it up OT and clogging up HyperTherion’s thread?
Do you?
Let’s have a look in the ol’ Archives, shall we? April 17-22, 2009…
Ah! Here we are.
*looks around and gets bearings*
It’s the “I have no idea” subThread, comment # 1074; Dania is babbling about rocks (again). It’s April 17, 2009, almost 7pm Pharyngula time. The Jodie-Foster-sandwich post had gone up at 10:47 this morning, and has accumulated 166 comments, still on topic (“Famous Atheists”). But here, on the Thread, nobody has posted anything for 12 hours (and that one was from Oz).
Things start getting silly on the Foster thread around comment #300 (April 18, 5pm), by which point a whopping six (6) comments had accumulated on the Thread. Six.
Now, by the time SC was finally done with TherioHyperon on the sandwich thread, it was 1pm on April 21, comment number eight hundred (800), and the whole thread petered out a few comments later with people, like, basking in the afterglow of the music-vid battles that had raged over previous nights. And the Thread? Oh, 1 pm falls in the middle of a seventeen-and-a-half-hour commentless gap that ended only when ‘Tis mumbled something about Alan Clarke at 9 pm. That’s eight hundred comments on some one-off thread about atheists as compared to a simultaneous 17 comments on the Thread.
*end time-travel fantasy portion of comment*
Well, friends.
It really makes one think, doesn’t it?
About regrets; lost opportunities; what could have been.
What could have been.
Of course, nowadays, we take the Thread for granted; it’s always here, and whenever one wishes to post a comment, one can be assured that others will read it and perhaps contribute comments in response, even if it’s the middle of the night, because that’s when people comment from Oz, and that nothing is OT.
But perhaps, just perhaps, it behooves us to think back occasionally to the days when the Thread was but a struggling whelp, scrambling for a niche in the rough-and-tumble and tooth-and-claw of the blogosphere and saddled with a couple of delugionists and a bunch of geologists. Music vids were posted elsewhere, if at all. The subThreadwise commenting rate for that (47-day) subTHread was 31 comments/d; for the previous (2-day) subThread to this one it was 353 comment/d.
The future’s here; we are it; we’re on our own.
Lynna,
Re-sent my email to you. I think I sent the first one to @artmeetsadventure rather than @mac.com. Let me know if you received it, and thanks again for the heads-up about the project.
A magical Pig
Sven – that was depressing!
It makes the whole Endless Thread experience make me feel like a xian fundie on the day after the rapture, having just discovered that the Catholic family next door has gone missing and I’ve got to go in to work at the rendering plant after all.
For historical context, the Tunnel dumped us out at Dania’s comment # 1074 on the “I have no idea what this thread is about any more” (#2) subThread, which was comment # 2455 overall. It was only a couple of weeks and 72 comments later that the Thread became the longest thread in Pharyngula history, and there has been little looking back until now.
Not to speak for anyone else, but I think a lot of the change of the Thread came with the permalink on the home page. Before that it was easy to forget about unless one noticed a comment on it in the recent comment area.
And has anyone heard from GeoJosh lately? I remember he was heading off for something for awhile.
morality is indeed complex Feynman, but it’s more than just a rational exercise, it should inform a practice. What if you were to say to yourself that for the next five minutes, you were going to be the best person you can be. What will you do?
the test of moral relativism would be, I think, the person who took up this challenge, and became stumped. or defensive.
no one was arguing for moral relativism anywhere.
Yes, kinda. But he managed to bring it around full circle and make it glorious!
Good point, Carlie; do you happen to remember just when teh CO added that front-page permalink?
Now, about curling:
I watched the USA vs. Switzerland game last night at the bar. It was fascinating and enchanting. I loved everything about it: the special shoes, the finesse of some of the rock-puts, the committee-meeting-like strategy sessions with everybody pointing with their brooms. The jukebox was on, so I got none of the commentary, but it was easy enough to pick up on what was happening after a few ends (a term I picked by from google later). The strategy is very cool, with blocking and knocking and defense and thinking four or five stones ahead. I also found it aesthetically pleasing with the concentric targets and linings-up and patterns.
It seemed to me to combine aspects of shuffleboard, baseball, bowling, chess (or mankala or go or similar strategy game), and billiards, only on ice, which makes the whole sweeping thing possible. I liked it a lot.
Curling is awesome. and sometimes intense… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM5mFH3_Qhs
In a way I miss the delugionists*; reading (and coming up with) new and interesting holes in their dipshit theories was very entertaining.
A pity I never got the YEC vs. Catholic kook fight I was trying to set up. That would have been especially hilarious; I’d have literally bought popcorn for the occasion had it happened.
*Though I get the satisfaction of knowing that appear to have give the world a word that is now common usage.
nice one, boygenius. I remember so clearly the days when that was one of the “new tunes”. Hadn;t heard that last-days acoustic rendition; very nice indeed. SC likes that tune, IIRC.
And now, I am going to post the Greatest Catfood Commercial of All Time. The soundtrack’s not too bad, especially for a catfood commercial, but for optimum enjoyment something like “White Rabbit” or “China Cat Sunflower” or “Blue Jay Way” would probably be more appropriate. I just can’t stop watching this clip.
How, I keep wondering, did the freaks at the ad agency sell the catfood execs on the whole dancing-turkeys, Yes-album-cover, Yellow-Sub-vibe thing?
Here’s one from back in my day. Sorry, Janine.
Oh, I forgot the nerd-coolest thing of all about curling:
When it’s a close call, they bring out a machine!
Sven – I’m not sure, it was whenever I started posting more.
Friskies: the food that will make your cat high.
@ Sven,
WTF are they putting in cat food these days? Almost makes me want to try a can!
Yeah, “China Cat” would have been a better fit but consider the difficulty of selling the suits a line like “Copperdome bodhi drip a silver kimono like a crazy quilt stargown through a dream night wind”!
Very nice! And it’s in Amsterdam! How fun would that be?
Did someone say Cat Food?
RogerS has recently been leaving droppings in this thread. He comes and goes.
October 14, 2009
You can just tell that his swollen green-skinned brain was throbbing with unholy glee as this small cog in the greater invasion plan was set in motion !!
David Marjanović (#32)
I cut open a potato once and found that it was eaten away from the inside by some dark brown spiky “crystals,” like a geode. If more bad potatoes were like that one, they’d be much more fascinating.
(#185)
Same, except some of what I’m thinking often isn’t in words, so I have to write down the part that is in words (before I forget) and then screw around with a thesaurus and a dictionary till I find the missing words that mean what I’m thinking. (Most of the time I know the words already but can’t connect thought to word without outside help.) And then edit the whole thing till it borders on comprehensible. Sometimes I fail and it stays incoherent.
I’ve heard that a feature of some sign languages is the ability to designate spaces around yourself to represent things you’re talking about. So you can set up all sorts of parentheticals and refer back to them just by pointing to the appropriate space or even moving your signing in that direction. I’m all for incorporating this into spoken languages.
~*~*~*~*~*~
Lynna (#140)
That was me. Not that I mind being confused with Pygmy Loris, of course.
Also, I haven’t been raped, which is why I was talking about emotional trauma in general (except for where I tied it into Hyperon’s revolting hypothesizing) which I do have a little bit of experience with. Rereading what I wrote, I see that’s not quite so apparent as I thought, so I figured I’d clarify.
~*~*~*~*~*~
nigelTheBold (#190)
A random guy on the bus once explained to me the difference between a hobo, a transient and a bum. He said a hobo is a guy who travels around to get work, a transient is a guy who travels around avoiding work, and a bum is a transient who stays in one place. He was very proud to be a hobo and looked extremely hard to kill, especially given the bucket of hammers and wrenches he was hauling about.
~*~*~*~*~*~
Walton (#197)
WTF? Haven’t you ever had homemade mashed potatoes made starting with actual, whole potatoes and not some nasty powdered abomination?
At the risk of appearing out of it, does any one know what the Rev was talking about at @242?
BS
The comments made by Walton on this thread (not to mention a few of the others) make me realise there’s a reason I like having him around: because he makes my many social, emotional – and now, apparently, gastranomic – issues seem innocuous by comparison.
I don’t get that very often…
So, someone upthread said the plane crash in Texas this morning was aimed at the IRS. Our local news covered it and confirmed that the man left a bizarre “suicide note” on his website. What bugs me is that no one is calling this a terrorist incident, when they insisted the shooting at Fort Hood was a terrorist incident and not a mentally unstable man lashing out.
The take-home message I’m getting is terrorists have funny sounding names and are muslims. Mentally unstable people who may deserve our pity are white. I guess it helps that Stack seems to have been the only casualty of the crash though he set his own home on fire before heading out to attack the IRS.
Here’s Scott Brown rationalizing the attack
BTW the next American citizen who complains about “taxation without representation” is going to get smacked with my handy pocket copy of the US Constitution.
In 249 (local thread reference) he explained it is, or means, or refers to, or anyways has something to do with a magical Pig. Now what that is about is, well, I dunno… bacon maybe? Probably not MUSHROOMS.
Pygmy Loris MSNBC has two dead “victims” and 2 seriously injured.
BS
My curiosity has been piqued on this thread regarding individual food dislikes/hatreds. Is this purely psychological or are there physiological differences between people that make certain foods unappealing to their taste buds?
I’m not talking about food allergies, those I can understand. I was allergic to eggs as a youngster but I outgrew it, and now I loves me some sunny-side-up that I can dunk my toast into.
I like and will eat anything put in front of me. Of course, I have favorites that I would choose over non-favorites but as long as it is edible, I will eat it. I don’t particularly care for coconut, yet it doesn’t repulse me. I’ve never had Durian fruit or Hákarl, but if you put it in front of me, I would at least give it a try.
Potatoes are the most puzzling to me. How can such an innocuous food-stuff, nee staple, be repulsive? (aside from those who are allergic)
Every single person I know who doesn’t like cilantro claims that it tastes like soap. I could eat cilantro by the bushel. Is this a heritable, physical difference between individual’s taste buds? Or do some people just get it into their heads that they don’t like something and that’s that?
Perhaps the Rev has been sampling the Friskies?
Thanks for ‘fu, Owlmirror.
A quick squint at the data doesn’t suggest a dramatic change at Oct. 14, at least not immediately.
Thanks, Blind Squirrel. I’ve been watching the Olympics, and my local news didn’t mention any other deaths.
One of the few foods I didn’t like was hackfleisch. Yuck!
Foods that I love: great steak, fresh fish, potatoes, squash of all kinds, buttermilk pie, fried chicken, fried catfish, real gumbo, asparagus.
Can anyone recommend a good basic astronomy book (or even several good astronomy books)?
Any assistance is greatly appreciated.
Oh, and anybody who doesn’t like mushrooms needs to run, not walk, to their nearest mental health professional. :)
Would anyone think me strange if I admitted to eating stinkhorn “eggs” raw?
BS
BS,
Yes, I think you are strange for eating stinkhorn eggs. In my world, strange is a good thing!
Raw Story obtains Austin suicide bomber’s music video:
BS
Nah, but here’s a podcast:
http://www.astronomycast.com/
Yes! Fundamental Astronomy. But I may be biased, I read it in the original :)
—
Not me! Sounds like you were hoping we would, though :D
How the fuck do you people do this?
How do you keep track of comments on “The Endless Thread”?
How do you keep track of comments on 3 or 5 or 8 PZ blogs every day?
How do you keep track of your own comments? If you post and go for a tea and a pee with your comment at #75, and return to comment #123 discussing kumquats, what is the next step?
How do I know if anyone has responded to this?
I have been using computers for 40+ years but I don’t know HTML from WTF.
Time-lapse photography is one of my most favoritest things ever.
we don’t do much else, so…
some people have amazing memory for useless stuff. the rest of us use google
like I said, we don’t have anything else to do with ourselves
you read comments #76 – #123, then hit refresh, and read the new 20 or so comments. repeat until you drop dead from exhaustion, or you run out of new comments to read (whichever comes first)
see above
*blink*
Everytime SC links to some old thread from 1974 and I find I actually commented on it, I’m like, wow , I spent that much lifetime here already!!!
;)
F @253,
That’s Feynmaniac, OM.
Morality is what you live and do, ethics are your principles.
If it’s some sort of rule-book which you need to consult to determine the morality of a situation, you have a problem.
@173
Gah.
That is a horrible hypothetical, yet only has one answer.
Look, would you do it, under those circumstances?
Would you?
Part of me would love Frankenfucker to fulfil his perverse dream to fuck a comatose woman(who won’t say No to him), only to find it to be this lady.
Uriah hit the crapper
I can’t tell the difference between people and machine
Don’t you think that’s a little trite
horrible hypothetical? I basically ripped it off from kill bill.
no, i wouldn’t do it. and we’re assuming circumstances here that would make such a scenario even slightly tempting (perhaps some sultry music in the background?). But it wouldn’t be because I was worried about consequences of harm, or being caught, but because I wouldn’t be able to live with myself as a person.
again, the question is are we able to justify rape being fundamentally worse than physical assault. My own view is that if reason doesn’t bring us to this conclusion, then reason be damned.
You can use the ‘Find’ function in your browser, but then you have to guess if someone’s responded to you by quoting a block of text (like just now), or if they just wrote “kiyaroru”, or maybe even “@284” or “#284”.
Talk about Kill Bill :
The Lonely Shepherd
Bang Bang
Woo Hoo
F:
A fate worse than death.
Sigh. Look, it is physical assault, of the sexual variety. How much physical harm it does only aggravates the sexual assault, in addition.
Please desist from the hypothesising about the morality of rape, in any form, here. It casts a pall over the thread and irks people.
If you cannot see that any system of morality that condones it is a bad system because of that, then go somewhere else to discuss this.
If you like rules, take a look at Atheist Ethicist.
The Kill Bill whistle song is very hard to get out of your head.
The Green Hornet Theme, also from Kill Bill.
I haven’t disagreed with this anywhere. And I wasn’t the one who raised the question. I think Hyperon did in the last thread. Geez John, wake up
Looks like I missed the plonking of Michael:
F, I’ve read the thread, and it was you I quoted and responded to.
Oh great. I was afraid your condescension was due to not paying attention. Lets never fight again
*hugs John Morales*
.. well I can’t answer for other people but personally I have no life. I live for this virtual world and I can pretend that people I only know by (often weird) screen names are my true and everlasting friends.
I ignore all other aspects of my life. I barely function at work with being able to check Pharyngula every two minutes, I neglect my children so I can sit at the computer for hours on end, I don’t even have time to change nappies, I just put newspaper down all round the house and chuck a tin of baked beans at them three times a day for sustenance.
Seriously, I’m just yanking your chain buddy. The refresh button will become your friend and, if all else fails, jsut don’t read the 700 or so previous comments, just post you erudite and well written post and hope no-one notices that 20 other people have said it before you.
.. or do what I do and post comments pissed half the time – that way you feel all ten foot tall and bulletproof anyhow. That OM wasn’t earnt sober I can tell you.
@Blind Squirrel FCD , 268:
Sy Borg.
Also a good reference for the word “plook”.
You’re actually meant to read all the comments? I just scan for things I feel like commenting on, then check the next few posts to see if it has been already.
That’s it !
Marry me now please…:-) That was hilarious…
;)
(actually, at this point, busy hooking Wowbagger up with a nice Melb chick for the convention lol, although there is a slight problem to overcome as she, while loving his comments on Pharyngula, thought he was in his 60s)
F:
As if.
—
PS It’s boorish to emote what your character cannot IC achieve, in RPGs. (Or so I hear.)
And no, Wowbagger doesnt know, since I just entered this conversation with a friend online about single commenters here going to the convention lol…..
Woodstock, mark my words…:-)
boygenius,
I don’t remember the exact details (it’s been quite a while), but there are genetic differences in the ability to taste/smell certain compounds. This will lead to differences in how foods taste.
Of course, some of it is expectation and acclimatization. When I first tried sushi, it was disgusting to me. A few attempts later, something clicked and I understood why some people are crazy for the stuff.
A haiku to sea urchin:
vinegar rice base
wasabi, soy, briny sweet
delight on the tongue
I hope the appreciation is uni-versal.
-after the French Orangina ad, everything else seems tame in comparison?
-Yes album covers are now trendy because of Avatar?
Mushroomy music
Rorschach]
If this young lady is happening to be at the dinner can you email me ASAP.
V
kiyaroru @ 284:
If you use Firefox, a very nifty add-on is Text Formatting Toolbar. HTML at your mousetip.
Guestimating the age of Pharyngulites can be tricky.
Let’s see how wrong I am on a few samples :
Bride, blf, Windy, Janine : 30s
Nerd : 50s
Walton, SC, Miki Z, David M., John M. : early 20s
Rev, Bill D., Brownian, Rorschach : 40s
Kel, Wowbagger, Owlmirror, Jadehawk, llewelly : late 20s ??
BS, Feynmaniac, : late 30s ??
The only one I’m quite certain of is neg. : he’s 45.
lol, I’ll take that as a compliment. mid 20s
negentropyeater: I’m 20, and will be 21 in a few months. The scary thing is that I was only 18 when I first started commenting here (how time flies).
I think I may now be the youngest regular here. (IIRC, Alex Deam is about the same age as me, but he doesn’t seem to have posted for months.)
I expect I shall achieve 50 years of age, this year.
(So, this is the 21st Century, eh? I kinda expected more.)
negentropy,
Heh, I’ll take that as a compliment too. My son graduates college this year. I may be confusing because:
1) I only recently completed my BA and MS (after working in industry for a couple decades).
2) I have almost no conception of temporal sequencing, so it can be hard for me to remember if something happened last week or 25 years ago without some external reference to date it, assuming I remember it at all.
WTF?
No, actually, I don’t think I want to hear the answer to that right now.
I would of course never dob BoSOM in regarding her age, so suffice to say that she would be pleased with Neg’s estimate, so would Janine I believe…:-)
I don’t know why, but I’ve somehow associated SC with John as a young and beautiful couple…
OK, good answer. :)
John ? Who’s John ??
On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.
I turned 25 last August.
:D
I’m just getting the hang* of who is male/female/Australian/physicist/biologist/geologist/etc. to avoid embarrassing pronoun slips. (And negentropyeater, I’ve got you down as male now — I was about the ask the question “How do you know neg is a he?” when I noted the post was self-referential.)
*By which I mean, of course, writing this kind of stuff down when people mention it.
John Morales
Maybe because they both speak spanish ?
NB /I got a crush on beautiful, young, spanish speaking couples…
Rorschach is being kind but neg isn’t really that far off with my age. I was , until a few weeks ago in my 30’s. I am now officially the other side of 40.
Completely illogicaly I had a hard time with that. I’m not sure why as I was heading into it magnificently and wonderfully single and 10 kilos lighter than 3 months ago and thus in a normal BMI and feeling fab. I am loving my job and generally my life is good so I still can’t work out why the big “40” thing sent me into paroxisms of neuroticism.
At any rate, you lot will keep it a secret it and I’ve trained my 5, 4 & 3 year old kids to say “mummy is 32”, just in case George Clooney knocks at the door.
Having said all of that, trust me, I’m a total MILF and look 23. * snork*
.. and Janine is way fucking older than me. Crusty old cow that she is.
*acquires MILF porn information newscasts for reference*
Ah ! Oh ! Ehm ! Can’t we just talk about jesus and christianity??
if your eyes had seen the “glory” of the coming of the Lord, you might prefer the porn… (it burns, and why the asparagus!)
Yeah, I personally suspect something there that the lord would not have approved of, to be honest !
even when I was a card carrying catholic that phrase made me snicker. It’s just..not right.
But I found MOFMAs sexier than MILFs !
AFAIK, a MILF may FYSWFS but a MOFMA prefers YBAW.
WTFDFYSWFS&YBAWM?
You are all W.A.N.K.E.R.S.
FYSWFS = Fry you some wicked fine sausages
YBAW = You bring all wine
(I’ve heard “fuck you six ways from sunday” and “you be a woman”, which words I say despite my deep trepidation at such profanity. At least, until Janine verifies it is canonical. I should add that by my observation, our particular MOFMA prefers YBAWFTF, but seems indifferent otherwise.)
#322 Miki Z
I’m 64 going on 65, an Englishman.
Retired industrial chemist / currently a student geologist.
Or so I claim.
I might be a gorgeous, 23 year old single gay female. Heiress to half a billion pounds. I might be …
[Ed. Not sure if many people care. Just be witty and concise … Ah! I see a couple of problems. As you were.]
What A Newly Kilted Englishman Really Seeks?
Who raised the question is irrelevant. Your failure to drop the question is relevant. Fuckwit.
K.N.O.B.
Kindly Not Offence Bride
There were some budget overruns. Unfortunately, some much-anticipated features had to be removed. And many critical bugs were left unfixed when the product was pushed out the door at the last minute.
Keep Noblesse Oblige Bright.
(Perhaps I’ll stop before I forget what we’re abbreviating about and cause honest offense. I’m just pouty because I can’t afford to go to the upcoming convention in time, money, or health.)
We’ve already made an impressive list of Jesus themed porn titles.
Some highlights:
“Christ is risen”
“Goat-herders gone wild”
“The Raised Erection Of Christ”
“Jesus Christ Pornstar”
“Why Hast Thou Four Sucking Me”
“Getting Nailed Three Ways”
“Anal Domini”
How anyone here could ever think that I was over the age of 14 (let along in my late 30’s) I’ll never know.
(((Billy))) The Atheist is
4344 (Superbowls are good for something — I know how old I am).Regarding hobos (I work as a public historian and do living history interpretation as a hobo): Ben Reitmann once wrote that (paraphrasing here) bums drink and wander, tramps dream and wander, and hobos work and wander. So, basically, National Park Rangers and academics are hobos.
Regarding potatoes: Our local grocery store (well, regional chain (Wegmans)) sells bags of heirloom fingerling potatos of all colours. I once did a chunky mashed potatoes (with skin (better flavour and texture), some carrots and rutabaga tossed in, carmelized onions, and BACON!!!!
How did this thread get to comment whatever-the-hell-this-will-end-up-being without (to my knowledge) bacon being mentioned? We’ve got shrooms out the whazoo, and potatoes (with and without the ‘e’ (thank you, Dan Quayl)) but no bacon? My faith in the theological underpinnings of the never-ending
fungusthread is wavering.Speaking of fungi, seriously, has anyone come up with an age estimate for the Massive Malheur fungus?
Damn. The [del] tag doesn’t work. Or it doesn’t work for me. In comment 343, assume “43” and the second to last “fungus” are lined through.
Sven- Found it! Here’s the origin of the permanent link to the Thread.
<strike>
won’twill work for that.And as aratina cage prophesied upon seeing the news of the permalink, “Plus, we might fill it up faster now.”.
#343 iambilly
From the link I gave earlier:
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_was_the_world's_largest_living_organism
Miki @ 346: Thank you.
Alan B.: Sorry, I missed you link in all the potato discussions. Thanks.
Someone has worked America’s public obsession with bacon into a monstruous dish : porkgasm
There’s also this ultimate bacon burger
That’s a big waste of bacon.
#348
Not sure if I messed up the blockquote or not. I guess you can read it. The quote ends at “…years old”. How the inset quote came about is known only to the little green leprechauns who work behind the scenes. Or can we blame the Rev.?
On reflection, “Largest” is a dangerous term. Length? Area? Volume? Weight?
Organism? Would this include a collection of cloned “individuals” with identical genetic makeup?
Just shows how difficult it is to phrase even a simple question. A local pub quiz I am involved with had a question about “animals”. But what the question setter wanted was restricted to the cute and cuddlies i.e. mammals. My answer involved a snake but was “wrong” by definition because it was not cute and cuddly.
My bacon obsession is private. It is between me and that wonderful greasy goodness. But not between me and (((Wife))).
Though it is tastier then speck or lardo.
And those pork recipes are frightening. Truly.
Got any church/state separation experts hanging around? I have a question:
There is a nonprofit in my area that teaches kids (mostly boys, it seems) how to hunt and fish, as well as how to become “Godly men” through “Christian-based values.”
Okay, but they’ve recently begun a public school program, and the description they use to describe that program leaves out all mention of religion, simply saying it’s a “youth outdoor adventure program.”
It appears they go to schools and present the program in a secular fashion. But I’m betting that if a kid joins and attends the various (out-of-school) activities, there’s a good bit of proselytizing going on.
Does this sound like a violation? Thanks for any input.
windy @ #306, that’s some groovy stuff right there.
The Strawberry Alarm CLock clip with dancers gyrating wildly to some other song entirely is from one of my favorite movies of all time, Psych Out. Jack Nicholson as, essentially, Jerry Garcia; lead guitarist for a Haight-Ashbury commune band called Mumblin Jim.
Here they are, playing ‘Purple Haze’ sideways, sort of:
Did I mention that Nicholson’s character is named ‘Stoney’?
boygenius @248
Got it this time! Follow-up is underway.
Carlie:
The rate of expansion of The Eternal Thread has begun to worry me. Is there a well-defined Speed of Thread? When we reach it, will the thread emit a loud boom?
Ben in Texas,
If this is the U.S., probably not a violation. The Supreme Court has ruled several times in favor of Boy Scouts of America who do almost exactly this (assuming you’re not talking about BSA already!).
@243
I get salmon directly from my brother, Robert, who lives in Alaska and catches his own. Which reminds me, I have some smoked salmon he sent me that will make a good addition to lunch.
The specter of an intertube-decimating asymptote was recently barely avoided by heroic last-minute infusions of apathy. We dodged a bullet.
But the same unthinkable situation could recur at any time, without warning. I have recently developed an empirical model of the relationship between commenting rate and subThread duration (in
pressDrafts folder). It correctly predicts that a hypothetical subThread that endured commenting rates of 666 comments/d (about twice average recent rates) would last only 1.02 d. Clearly a new subThread every…freakin…day would turn into a real pain in the ass for teh CO and steps could be taken to…But we need not cross that bridge.
Yet.
Two things that make me happy to be back in the Pacific Northwest: Pacific wild-caught salmon and Idaho-grown russet potatoes.
There’s an oft-repeated story that there used to be a clause in the indentures of British apprentices, specifying that they should not be compelled to live on salmon more than a certain number of days in the week. However, this may be a myth.
I could mention that this obsession with potatoes is becoming a blight on the thread, but I won’t.
40s? 40s? Aw, go to hell negentropyeater! (Unless that’s meant to be complimentary, in which case, thanks man!)
I am actually 34. (22 in Klingon years.)
Here’s a truly outrageous, but also amusing, report of a Christian attack on free speech in India: Indian state confiscates ‘blasphemous’ Jesus textbooks. Judging by Jesus’s expression, I’m not convinced they are quite right about what he’s holding in his right hand!
Knockgoats – wasn’t the same also said of lobsters?
(about servants eating the lobsters, not the lobsters eating the salmon)
@267
Miki Z, no, it’s not the BSA, just a small group here in Texas. Thanks for the input.
One thing is sure, the speed of the endless thread can’t exceed the number of page views on Pharyngula.
Let c be the number of page views on Pharyngula over 24 hours (currently at an average of 100,000).
Let v be the number of comments on the endless thread over 24 hours (currently at 343)
So we are now cruising at the speed v = 0.3% c
So there’s still quite some margin before we reach that limit. Mind you, I think the practical limit is much lower than this, as the Scienceblog servers would probably explode way before we reach c.
And the same was said of terrapins along the Atlantic coast of the USA.
Carlie@367,
I don’t recall hearing that, but I’ve heard it about oysters (which really did used to be cheap). I think the indentures of lobsters may have included a clause about not being boiled alive, though!
The cigarette fits. Replace the beer can with something else and have him seated in front of a computer with the browser open to hustler.com and it’d be right on target.
So, if I’ve got this right:
Jesus’ 1st miracle = turning water into an alcoholic beverage
Picture of Jesus with an alcoholic beverage = blasphemy!
On the other hand, I can totally see some of the cancer prevention people I work with advocating for the removal of that same book from schools for the same reason as the Archbishop of Shillong: “Just think how this would impact on students at such a tender age.”
It’s really insensitive and tasteless to portray Jesus chillin with a brew and a bone. Please, in the future, try to stick with the traditional, sensitive, tasteful portrayal of him being tortured to death and all bloody and shit.
Better double that, sonny :-)
dnebdal.myopenid.com thanks for the link. And Zappa wondered why his songs never made top 40!
Close, very close.
BS
Brownian,
jIH ‘oH QoS
Don’t knock the spuds! You can make Schnapps from them!
I was going to stay out of the potato discussion, but here goes.
Our local high school has a “Russets” sports team. Actual lyrics from cheerleading songs include “We Are the Russets, mighty, mighty Russets! And in case you wanted to know, yes we are a potato, and no we are not ashamed!”
Every September, the town hosts “Spud Days”. This annual celebration has been going on since 1927, when the Oregon Short Line Railroad offered discounts for celebrants who arrived from all over the intermountain west.
The lovely Miss Russet presides over all. With butter, salt, and pepper, she seasons a pit full of mashed potatoes, more of a sludge really, which is delivered by cement mixer to the site of the Spud Tug. Miss Russet tastes the sludge before the rope pull begins—well, she claims to taste it, but I’ve seen the video. Nevertheless, local legend has it that a past Miss Russet did actually taste the goo. She survived.
One year an LDS Missionary team beat the brawny National Guardsmen, probably out of sheer terror of the pit. Dawn Lloyd, Recreation Director for the city, says that her husband won’t let her back in the house if she ends up in the pit. She says it doesn’t take long for the stench to get to be worse than…well, she couldn’t come up with an appropriate comparison. Clean-up crews used to donate the contents to happy pigs, but Dawn said that “some environmentalists complained, so now it’s disposed of.” “How do they do they dispose of it?” I asked. “I don’t want to know,” she replied.
The World Championship Spud Picking Contest’s slim claim to “World” status is based on…nothing. “We have Mexicans, and some of the students from Rexburg might be international.”
Bingham County’s potato harvest of nearly 19.6 million hundredweight (a single hundredweight represents 100 pounds of spuds) eclipsed the state of Maine’s potato production by almost 2.6 million hundredweight in 2003 (I can’t be arsed to look up current stats). Put another way, Bingham County’s 2003 potato harvest from 60,300 acres yielded slightly less than two billion pounds of spuds
Lynna’s advice: Always take the anchor position in the Spud Tug.
Sven @374
LOL. Point made perfectly. And think of all the christian kiddies being forced to watch Mel Gibson’s prolonged sado/masochistic whipping and scourging fest …
I speed read. And I keep multiple browser windows open. Plus, when necessary, I just ignore the whole thing.
As the Washington Post reports, a couple of Utah politicos (also, mormon, of course) are suggesting that the state of Utah take over stuff like education, but they don’t mention that this would pretty much guarantee even more of a theocratic stranglehold on Utah. Utah is already run by @85% mormons at every level of government, including school boards.
Michael G. Waddoups is president of the Utah Senate. David Clark is speaker of the Utah House of Representatives. Both are Republicans.
In News that might seem strange to Anglo-Saxons, here in France we now have a public debate on the switch to Halal burgers in a fast food chain. This follows other recent debates on the ban of the Burqa and on National Identity.
Ha-ha, Lynna, that sounds like fun.
Back in my fundraising days, the NGO I worked for was supported by the local building trades. While active throughout the year, they’d have a yearly barbeque around Father’s Day for their members and the money raised would go to us. If the ironworkers hosted it, they’d have a ‘spud toss’ contest. Being a ‘fancy college boy’ (their words), I thought this event would have everything to do with potatoes, but nope.
These are ‘spud’ (erector) wrenches, and the trick is to toss a big, arm-length one in such a way that the non-wrenchy end sticks in the ground, the winner either getting nearest a target or tossing one the furthest.
I don’t. I’m constantly forgetting which thread I’ve commented on and thus missing replies. Like Lynna, I skip some threads entirely. I blame any number of my (many) vices that have left me with the memory of a goldfish. If I could type fast enough to match my thoughts, my comments would look more like this:
“Blah-blah, H. is a stupid git. Ooh look, a bubbling castle!”
“Blah-blah, childish sexual joke. Ooh look, a bubbling castle!”
“Blah-blah, some long, pointless story. Ooh look, a bubbling castle!”
“Blah-blah, H. is a stupid git. Ooh look,…”
How I manage to pull it together enough to write anything resembling coherence is anyone’s gue–ooh look, a bubbling castle!
well negs, if it makes you feel better, you got my age right.
however, I entirely resent being thought older than David M. It’s depressing enough that he’s accomplished rather significantly more than I even though we’re almost the same age.
negentropyeater, I can’t believe that France’s most popular fast food chain is called “Quick”. Wouldn’t that violate the Toubon Law, at least in spirit?
Has the threat of Islamification superceded the adoption of English words as the greatest threat to French culture?
“Anti-gay Ugandans are more American than Americans” says the folks at worldnetdaily.
Not as long as it is a registered trademark.
We’ve already given up on the latter. It was always a joke.
On the former, much effort has been made over the past century to decatholicize the country, now we are doing the same with Islam. I’m not against it.
Bride, blf, Windy, Janine : 30s
I would have thought that my embarrassingly vast knowledge of seventies era pop music and my love of underground music of the eighties and early nineties gave away my age. It does not bother me to admit it, I am 43.
.. and Janine is way fucking older than me. Crusty old cow that she is.
Bride, it will not be long before you are also a crusty old cow. In fact, I am count the days. It just might happen during the convention!
‘raspberry’
The best ‘religious tolerance’ experience I’ve ever had was in Africa. My ex-girlfrined, her mother, and I were staying with the mother’s half-brother Edgar’s family in a small town/village near Mwanza, just south of Lake Victoria in Tanzania. The men decided we should go kill a goat for dinner, so we headed down the street to the Edgar’s brother-in-law Venus’s place where a goat was tied and patiently awaiting its end, and we started drinking beer. (Gyeong Hwa Pak, you must know the codes for representing kinship in HTML–they would make this so much easier).
I’d actually worked in an abattoir–well, it was more like I’d volunteered at an abattoir, since my parents managed the place and I didn’t get paid besides the room and board I was already getting at home–but I was never really comfortable with slaughtering animals, so I just wanted to get it over with. After an hour or so (just past the usual amount of lateness one normally dismisses as “Swahili time”) I started to get really antsy, so I asked Venus and Edgar what we were waiting for. It turned out that though they were both Catholic*, they were waiting for a Muslim neighbour to come by to slaughter and clean the animal so it could be considered halal should any of their Muslim friends and neighbours stop by for a snack or a meal.
I’ve always thought of Tanzania as generally more tolerant than Uganda and Kenya; I hope they haven’t fundamentalised in the way Uganda has.
*Catholic mass in rural Tanzania is much more pleasant than it is here in Canada. The services are longer, but be sure to sit near the back should you at any time feel the need to step outside for a cigarette, a brief chat with someone, or just want to stretch your legs and enjoy the weather.
Brownian, I think there’s a bubbling castle here.
No, wait, that’s a goldfish in a castle. Or a lighthouse. Or something.
Also fiddler crabs?
shit, now I have to watch it again
@386: That anti-gay video also appears here:
http://www.truthwinsout.org/author/ehurst/ along with a debunking.
More good info, from the perspective of a gay Ugandan blogger here:
http://gayuganda.blogspot.com/2009/04/sexuality-education-in-uganda.html
More info on Mwanga, the gay king who was supposedly the “cultural” excuse for current gay bashing. You will not be surprised to learn that missionaries started all the intolerance:
ah, no.
Hermit crabs. My bad.
And if you pause at 0:56* it’s clear that the goldfish is in some sort of minaret-like lighthouse tower arrangement.
Now about the chicken-chick-and-egg band at the end…
*if you do, compare to this.
Coincidence?
Little Plastic Castle
I am rather surprised I have not posted anything by her yet.
I thought that SOMEONE would have commented on The Attack Of The Mushroom trailer I linked to yesterday.
Link or it never happened.
I did mean to commend you for the King Crimson vid though–that’s an obscure one!
Belgian coma patient can’t talk after all!!
Finally the truth comes out. Gonna blow the book deal.
BS
I guess the problem was this, I used the Japanese title.
Ah, so it’s simply an incapable version of purée. I see. <toothy grin>
Clumps or no clumps, milk and butter (not cream) are essential ingredients.
Welcome to the club! :-)
(If only because what is called “bread” in the UK just… isn’t.)
But what’s bad about ham?
:-) Win.
Parsley root is good in soup… elsewhere, hm… it could fit with potatoes… I’d have to try.
“[…] demonstrating that there’s nothing wrong with changing horses in midstream when the one you’re flogging is dead.”
– Justin B. Rye
Also, Incurious George’s Reverse Midas Touch.
Three sentences, twice won the subthread. I sit in awe.
I visualize SC biting into a sandwich with blood dripping from it :-þ
I think it’s going to happen one day. :-)
Oh, so that is curling! :-) Eisstockschießen, that sport that only beer-drinking men age 50 and over dare to participate in, is an olympic discipline! Awesome. :-)
(Seriously, without sarcasm.)
Agreed!
Interesting.
Maybe you should simply start doing it (at least around people who won’t simply think you’re crazy). It might spread.
The very cheapest purée flakes – not even flakes, but powder – I’ve so far found in Paris are indeed bad. The second-cheapest ones, however, are good! No worse than fancy ones that have part of the necessary milk already included in the flakes and cost 3 times as much, and hardly worse than the best homemade version I’ve encountered so far.
But then, it’s France :-) <oozing smugness all over the place>
How does the taxation and representation of places like Puerto Rico work, actually…?
Taste receptor proteins are coded by genes of which some people have a broken allele. Many (apparently including me) lack the one that would allow them to taste the bitterness of cilantro.
While I am at it, cats lack the receptor for sweetness – to them, sugar has no taste whatsoever apart from probably being slightly bitter. The pseudogene* has been sequenced.
Apart from this, things like allergies can go psychological. I was 2 when I noticed mine against apples (and similar fruits like pears, and nuts of all kinds unless ground and thoroughly cooked, and hazel & birch pollen – similar proteins all around); since then I find all fruits** and many vegetables disgusting. I can be chased with strawberries.
… That was one of those parentheses that come from thinking in tree shapes. And the footnotes count, too. Yes, this is self-referential. AAARGH!!! :-)
* Gene that has mutated so it can’t be translated into a protein anymore.
** I do drink orange juice and pasteurized apple juice and have nothing against small doses of lemon juice with certain teas or fish. But actually eating the pulp is out of the question, and not just for apples.
And there I was thinking that simply meant “minced meat”. <scratching head> Minced meat is called Faschiertes in Austria – separated by a common language. The food vocabulary differs rather drastically between and often even within the countries (Switzerland, too).
Incidentally, that’s one of the few things I miss in France. The French do mince meat, but it’s beef only; it’s not good without pork.
Indeed, the Thread has kept me up till around 3 am every day this week, IIRC. That means I’ve been sleeping too little every night this week. Let’s see if I manage to cut off and go to bed today and move the catching-up part to tomorrow, or if I get the urge to participate in the American evening again…
Still haven’t even had one look at the “Libertarianism defined” thread since the hour it was posted. I’m simply afraid I’d spend a day there. Have I missed anything interesting…?
Wow. An impressive specimen.
:-D :-D :-D
I gather IC means “in character”?
Heh. It’s absolutely true that Jadehawk is more adult than me – but that doesn’t actually make her older, except apparently by a few months. I’m 27.
In meatspace, for a long time, wherever I went I was the youngest or the oldest one.
It’s not that extreme with me, but I know the phenomenon. It’s also not surprising. After all, my work almost requires me to be unable to tell the difference between last week and last ice age. :-)
Well. It was very easy to figure out that Cuttlefish is not human, and not just because he admits it so openly.
(Bones: “No human can survive that!” Spock: “I am not human.” – From, get this, the transcript of a Star Trek episode I once stumbled over somewhere online. Still haven’t actually watched any. Also, Spock is being remarkably imprecise; he famously is half-human.)
Heart-warming. :-)
How true, how true.
LOL! Self-referential! :-D
So you want me to finally post a translation of the toilet-paper song?
So why is it I get all the attention of the Mad Women of Pharyngula? Gaze upon this mind, girls, and…
Burning it in CHLORINE TRIFLUORIDE!!!
Sorry. When I laugh at my own jokes, that tends to be a bad sign. ClF3 is just so badass it’s funny.
We’ve simply accomplished different things, I submit.
And in different numbers.
Me:
– About 30 citations so far.
You:
– Experience in meatspace – OK, I wouldn’t actually want to have all of it, but… you know;
– A relationship, to put it mildly*;
– Money – you’re at least earning some, while all I get from anyone but my parents are the 200 € a… yes, I think a month that the French Republic uses to subsidize the rent of my teeny tiny room, which is 460 € a month (and climbs 10 € per year), not counting electricity, Internet, food… and it’s not like my parents were rich;
– you want to be an artist, and are actually working as such; I never wanted to be an artist, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to draw a dinosaur or two** from time to time, and I can’t manage to organize the time for that;
– it goes so far that you speak your third language (English, right?) better than I mine (French) :-þ … and actually, with your background, I think you could learn French to functionality in a few months, and to my level in a year or less. I’m here for the fifth year now; my French is functional and still improves, but with that little social life it can’t improve any faster.
I suggest we hug each other and cry together. :.-|
<sticks both arms into tubes of Internet, tilts head, and looks wistfully>
* Though, imagine if you dare, it could be slightly worse still. At my age, my mother already had… two children. – While I am at it, I was scheduled to be born the day after my mother’s 24th birthday. The fact that I came 11 days late instead of, as she had hoped, 1 day early is probably a very blunt way of the FSM to tell us something. Thanks a bunch, FSM. <grmbl>
** Or a bone for that matter – I have barely worked directly on fossils so far, only on the existing literature. I’m actually good at it, as far as I can tell, but I wasn’t even given a mark in the course on that because I was way too slow for the peculiar professor’s taste.
negentropyeater@309 guesses:
Um, what are the units here? If these are Earth years (orbits of Sol), thank you, Thank You, and here, have some MUSHROOMS (apologies if you’re one of the, ah, nutters who doesn’t like MUSHROOMS).
On the other hand, if I seem to been around for only 30-ish solar orbits, then the axiom about wisdom coming with age is disproven. Feck you! (Can I have the MUSHROOMS back, please?)
Sven,
That video is utterly disconcerting. All those poor animated animals greeting the predator as a redeemer or something.
Is it supposed to be a Cthulhu parable?
Janine #388,
musical taste can sometimes be a very bad predictor of age : my nephew is 22, but he seems to have decided that Outlaw Country from the 60s/70s is the only thing he’ll listen to. When he visits me, he brings along some of his CDs and I get to hear Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and others ALL DAY LONG. I have an eclectic taste in music, so it’s ok with me for a couple of days but pleaaase not much longer.
THERE ARE OTHER PEOPLE WHO HATE BANANAS?!!
I’M NOT ALONE??!
OH, FRABJOUS DAY!
Of course, the fact the my fellow bananophobes are Walton and David might be cause for concern …
Ah, speaking of things that some silly sods think are food but which can’t be ‘cuz I absolutely fecking hate them, are peas. Utterly tasteless globs of the most foul texture ever farted in anyone’s direction.
Talking about accomplishments… all I’ve accomplished today was to write an eight-screener and to listen to a long conversation between my boss and the new M.Sc. student (the conversation is likely going to be helpful for my postdoc, and I’m supposed to help the student a little). I was supposed to read the detailed, lavishly illustrated description of one of the two oldest frogs (and indeed “modern amphibians”) in the world and to start applying for prizes and sources of money for a postdoc. The deadlines are… well, actually, the first is not quite a week away. Living alone is a vicious circle for me. My willpower is too strong – I almost can’t do things I don’t really want to.
An eight-screener! As measured on the big screen in the lab! Even among my fellow nerds here, at most half are going to read that!
That’s one method.
The other is to stop worrying. The French words cousin and cousine have swept over most of Europe, all the way into Russia, but have somehow managed to spare
SerbocrBCSM. What do they say instead? They don’t differentiate those concepts from “brother” and “sister”. When my half-cousin* in Niš married** and we arrived, he introduced us (in English) as “my brothers and sisters from Austria”.* Son of my father’s half-brother, so we share nothing but one grandfather.
** Godlessly. The registrar’s office is a former villa and really impressive.
That’s where they discovered the acoustic illusion: two people play musical scales, and you hear a tune that nobody plays.
Scholars disagree.
Not that hard if you only meet one person at a time.
Yes, mash should be flavoured. I make it with milk and margarine. Since I discovered them I’ve taken to adding a bit of white pepper and nutmeg for added oomph.
Oh, and I cut the spuds into thin(ish) slices before boiling and then I use a handheld mixer to do the mashing. Don’t recall ever having a lump in it.
that’s flattering, but completely silly. let’s look, shall we?
you: months away from your PhD
me: 10th grade, plus a few random college classes
you: 5 languages
me: 3 languages, two of which were handed to me on a silver platter
you: extremely broad and deep knowledge about a fuckton of interesting topics to teach the rest of us
me: superficial acquaintance with a handful of things, most of which I learned on Pharyngula anyway, thus not actually bringing anything original or new to the discussion
I’ll give you the life experiences, but as you yourself noted, most of them are not precisely enviable, and the only thing they’re good for it to make Walton feel bad.
And oh yeah, the artist thing: unfortunately that looks more and more like a temporary solution; the market for which I make my designs is relatively new, but a few more years will have it so oversaturated that only the best will be able to still make money from it; and I’m not one of them. So unless I get really lucky and have an unexpected breakthrough that would catapult me to that elite, or find another emerging market I can use until that fills up, I’ll have to find something else eventually unless I want to become a Walmart Greeter in my old age.
And yes, I think we both deserve a hug for that self-pitying duel :-)
I still win though
btw, if you passed by the Orangina ad that windy posted @#306, you missed something.
Watch for eye-poppingly animated tentacle porn @ 0.39 and again at 1:34.
And Janine, thanks twice for the Matango trailer; looks like a good ‘un.
Even his most deranged followers, AFAIK, don’t claim that Cthulhu redeems. He just ends.
If only they were tasteless, my friend. If only.
The peels (foul texture) seem to survive any amount of mashing or blending. Occasionally my mom tried to hide some peas in my blended carrot-leek-and/or-onion soups. I detected them every single time. After a few years she actually gave up.
All this talk of ages makes me wonder if Ben Goldacre reads The Thread.
Unfortunately I don’t look like Clooney. And I don’t like kids. And the thought of sitting in a plane for more than twenty-four hours appals me.
So I guess I can’t pursue BoSOM until the kids have left home, I’ve had plastik surgery and someone has commercialised sub-orbital flight. Whichever comes last.
I thought it was rather funny and interesting/entertaining without sprinkling spices on the television. And just what is the point of seasoning a lump of electronics? Is it some form of incense?
Oh. Wait. You aren’t talking about M*A*S*H here…
(Crawls back into his lair and throws out the occasional pea.)
I just spent way too much time catching up on the Endless Thread. Whew.
If we’re not going to have threaded commenting, we need some social norms… like giving post numbers so people can tell WTF other people are talking about without wasting too much time. (Or some quoted text, so you can at least search the page mechanically.)
(I mean, seriously now, an obscure King Crimson video, WTF? I went past the link three times, not recognizing it because there was no mention of King Crimson—and who thinks Cat Food is obscure, as King Crimson references go… And you call that a video? And another thing… *Harrumph* *Harrumph* *Harrumph*.)
Jadehawk:
I’ll take on either of you in a self-pitying duel. I’m a master of self-pity; it’s more-or-less my only talent. :-(
No it’s not, Walton, and you know that!
Sorry, blf, we’re all out of MUSHROOMS. Will a BADGER be acceptable instead?
obscurity isn’t a social norm?
That would have been me.
It ain’t COTCK, or even Red, that’s for sure.
Dude, weren’t you the guy arguing for the last three weeks that we already have social norms have?
One of them: snooze & lose.
Ok, everybody pass over their unwanted potatoes, mushrooms, AND peas to me, and I will happily eat them. All mixed together, even.
you don’t get to compete. you’re 7 years behind, and 20-year-olds have the right to not have accomplished anything yet :-p
Sili, well, at least they aren’t NARWHALS.
you’re sharing that pile-o-goodness, I hope…?
seriously, such categorical dislike of huge groups of edibles is completely beyond me. there’s a small selection of things that gross me out, like spam, or brain; the rest is just a matter of having to avoid growing too fat and therefore having to prioritize and only eat the tastiest foods, not simply all of them.
Elton John’s gay Jesus and other celebrity theologies
blf,
Big wild mushroom fan and hunter here. Last fall, I must have made a dozen mushroom hunting expeditions where I caught sanguins, girolles, petit gris, pied de mouton, pied bleu and a few cêpes.
I haven’t found anything I don’t like to eat or drink (as long as it’s edible and drinkable). My dad used to always say to me : try it, you’ll like it, and it’s always worked for me. The only exception was when I was invited by a business partner in Guangdong to eat dog. Being married with one, I just couldn’t. But I have tried live newborn rats dipped in sweet sour sauce in a restaurant in Malacca, ’twas delicious.
Jadehawk,
I really did feel awful when I read that post about how you had to steal food from hotels in order to live.
I would be the first to admit that I was naive when I first came here. I tend to go through phases, and, with the type of mind I have, I’m particularly susceptible to the attractions of ideology: I instinctively like the idea of being able to fit all of politics into a coherent set of philosophical axioms which provide a consistent answer to every question. But I’ve realised that reality is more complex than that. For this reason, I wouldn’t call myself an orthodox libertarian any more. I’m certainly influenced by libertarianism, but I no longer hold the naive belief that one ideology magically provides the right answer to everything.
I can only hope that you don’t think of me as a callous person. I realise I can come over that way sometimes, because I have comparatively little life experience, and tend to analyse political issues in a cold, detached theoretical way without really understanding the human impact. But I’m working on these problems. I will probably change my opinion several more times as I grow older and have more experiences, and I couldn’t guess at what kind of political, religious or philosophical outlook I’m likely to hold in ten years’ time.
You’re half way to Shepherd’s Pie.
DEEE-lish.
Sven,
Apropos the comments about people’s ages:
Cat Food is on disc 2 of A Young Person’s Guide to King Crimson!
(In vinyl terms, that is. YMMV with those newfangled silver things.)
RTFM!
Kids these days got no respect for the classics.
And get offa my lawn!.
/grumpyoldman
Bleurrgh. Yuk.
*shudders*
Random stupid poll to crash. Given that I seem to recall this debate occurring here and at RDF, this should be entertaining.
Should Toilet Paper Go Over or Under?
I’m with negentropy eater. I’ll eat or drink anything*…I also don’t care about my appearance, furniture, my car (which is older than Walton), or most other “quality of life” issues. I like my wife and for her sake I am willing to live indoors. I have to admit though, that I am snobbish about literature and music. There are too many good books and records out there to spend a second reading crap or listening to garbage.
*OK…except that I am also lactose intolerant and allergic to avocado…however, that is not a rebellion of the palate!
Is anyone else allergic to avocado? I haven’t met any one else who is. To me they taste like itching and burning.0
potato, mushroom and pea curry
Yummy
Very stupid poll, yes. It’s pretty much push polling seeing as how they’ve put the most annoying people as underers (though, of course that may be because such nutcases are indeed annoying).
Interesting to see that California is the only under-state. Is Arnie to blame, or does our very own Zeno also engage in this deviant behaviour?
*drool*
oh, and since we’re on the subject of food… does anyone know if it’s possible to make key lime pie with something else other than condensed sweetened milk?
Now that I’m reading the paper on Czatkobatrachus, the little beastie gets weirder and weirder. The bones were all found in isolation, so I’m tempted to think there’s more than one animal in there (only one of which would be a frog, probably), but even that doesn’t work well. It’s bizarre from its first neck vertebra* to the tip of its tail.
* Not a single skull bone has been found so far. In spite of, for instance, 9 shoulder girdle halves and 19 hip halves.
Come over here, and we’ll fix that. Fast. I’m serious.
I even have experience with that (3 younger siblings, the youngest will finish school in a few months).
Next time you’re over here and out of a job, you can fix that, too…
I wish. You’re counting two that I only know well enough that I wouldn’t starve if dropped in those countries. OK, my Russian once was a bit better than that, but currently it isn’t, as I actually found out first-hand. It has never been where my French was 5 years ago.
Based on just the last 2 or 3* subthreads, ignoring the entire rest of Pharyngula, I disagree. You’ve actually taught me a couple of things. Learning quickly about such a wide variety of topics (you’ve outright thrown yourself into biology, to mention just one), and being able to find the connections between them and express them, is a set of skills in itself.
* Or 4. They fly by so fast these days…
How heavily do we weight… no. How much importance do we ascribe to your boyfriend?
<folding arms in front of chest>
<trying to produce some kind of smug smile or something, but it doesn’t work>
Let me just repeat that for the record.
* * *
Eater of negentropy and other things, the cruelty you describe gave me that tingling sensation in the temples. You know, the one that accompanies the combination of psychological disgust and horror.
Despite my intense dislike of peas (with one weird exception, split-pea soup is Ok-ish), I’m also of the negentropyeater school: I’ll try most things, and often like them.
There are exceptions. Very sweet or very salty stuff usually annoys me—that’s a palate issue—and I honestly am not sure what I’d do if I ever had the opportunity to try dog, cat, or baby rat—that’s a emotional issue.
#425 nigelTheBold
You’re doing it the wrong way round. Follow Mrs Beeton’s advice:
that reminds me of a travel report I saw once where the guy was eating fried tarantula. now, the concept itself doesn’t disgust me or anything, but being arachnophobic, I’m not sure it wouldn’t traumatize me to have a spider in my mouth…
I’ll eat anything. Except mangoes- nasty smelly little shits they are. Grew up with them falling off the tree and rotting in the backyard. Hideous odour.
I’ve seen this is different forms but this will do:
The Pope Dies and Goes to Heaven
The Pope dies and, naturally, goes to heaven. He’s met by the reception committee and, after a whirlwind tour is told that he can enjoy any of the myriad recreations available.
He decides that he wants to read all of the ancient original text of the Holy Scriptures, and spends the next eon or so learning the languages. After becoming a linguistics master, he sits down in the library and begins to pore over every version of the Bible, working back from the most recent “Easy Reading” to the original script.
All of a sudden there is a scream in the library. The angels come running to him, only to find the Pope huddled in a chair, crying to himself, and muttering, “An ‘R’! They left out the ‘R’”.
God takes him aside, offering comfort and asks him what the problem is. After collecting his wits, the Pope sobs again, “It’s the letter ‘R’… the word was supposed to be CELEBRATE.”
And then what? A postdoc, if I find one. Haven’t written to Chicago yet, but I’m told the Field Museum has had to, well, downsize – economy crisis. OK, so I’ll apply for every cent, write to the whole world and find a postdoc. And then? Same procedure to find another a year or at most two later. And so on.
If sometime during this I find a job here in France, I can stop worrying. But that’s not terribly likely. If I find a job elsewhere, I have to worry about tenure, or about finding a new job again and again. And if there simply aren’t enough jobs in the world anymore…
Trust me, I live in denial, in autistic inability to take the future seriously.* I know a vertebrate paleontologist with a lot of great publications under his belt who gave up after nine postdocs and now works in a publishing house. Elsewhere, jobs are being canceled while people are applying for them – happened to someone I know.
* Yet another thing that’s aggravated by living alone.
Sometimes that actually helps. Like when you argue against revenge (death penalty and such) for incredible crimes.
I’m not going to find out if I am. =8-)
:-S
It being America, I bet it’s skimmed, too…? <shudder>
David Marjanović (#397)
I think you mean around the people who already know I’m crazy but don’t hold it against me. Mwahahaha.
~*~*~*~*~*~
Antiochus Epiphanes (#429)
I’m glad I’m neither since I love me a good avocado milkshake. Had one just two days ago. Mmmm.
Ten best things to say if you get caught sleeping at your desk
10.”They told me at the blood bank this might happen.”
9.”This is just a 15 minute power nap like they raved about in that time management course you sent me to.”
8. “Whew! Guess I left the top off the white out. You probably got here just in time.”
7. “I wasn’t sleeping, I was meditating on the mission statement and envisioning a new paradigm.”
6. “I was testing my keyboard for drool resistance.”
5. “I was doing a highly specific Yoga exercise to relieve work-related stress. Do you discriminate against people who practice Yoga?”
4. “Why did you interrupt me? I had almost figured out a solution to our biggest problem.”
3. “The coffee machine is broken.”
2. “Someone must have put decaf in the wrong pot.”
1. ” … in God’s name, Amen.”
Alan B @#439: Maybe I’m too much of a pedant, but the joke doesn’t really work. Firstly, “celebrate” without the “r” does not spell “celibate”. In any case, the similarity between “celibate” and “celebrate” would not have been present in any of the original languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Koine Greek) from which the Biblical texts were translated. Since the joke is premised on your fictional dead Pope having mastered these languages and read the original texts, the basis of the joke really doesn’t make sense.
Secondly, the requirement for members of the priesthood to be celibate is not directly contained in the Bible; it’s a Catholic teaching based on the authority of tradition. (The most relevant passage is in 1 Corinthians 7, where Paul advocates celibacy as the ideal for all people, but famously adds that for those who cannot remain celibate, “it is better to marry than to burn”. But it nowhere actually mandates that priests should be celibate: hence why most other Christian sects do not impose this requirement.)
for a second there I thought that would be absurd… and then I googled. there indeed is such a thing as fat-free sweetened condensed milk. WTF?
anyway, if I don’t get an answer to this key lime pie thing, i’ll probably just end up turning it into a key lime cheesecake instead :-p
Would be an absolutely great joke if the whole celibacy thing actually were in the Bible. It’s not. It’s just a small part of the Roman rite. That’s right, Greek Catholic priests can (probably even must) marry, and they’re now allowed to hold Masses under the Roman rite, too…
The reason for celibacy I was taught is that a priest should be able to devote his entire time to God and his parish. The historical reason is economic – priests shouldn’t be able to bequeath church property to anyone. The current reason is nothing but to uphold tradition for its own sake.
Incidentally, there are deaconesses mentioned in the Bible.
I highly recommend to anybody who doesn’t much like veggies to do what I did: eat a lot of highly spiced food, especially from south & east Asia, Latin America, and parts of Africa. (Indian, Thai, Korean, Mexican, Ethiopian, etc.)
To me, mild-tasting foods like potatoes, cabbage, broccoli, eggplant, and tofu are best used in spicy concoctions like curries and (for potatoes) samosa fillings. The mix of spices (and oils and whatnot) provides the main flavor, which is good even if the “food” doesn’t taste like anything at all. Then you learn to appreciate the subtle twists that the “food” adds, and start to actually like those flavors. Give it a few years to develop a taste for veggies and like less spicy versions of those foods.
These days I eat mostly vegan food, but I still couldn’t stand it if I had to eat mostly American-style overcooked and underspiced veggies. Bleah!
I can post some recipes if anybody wants to try spicy veggies that even veggie-haters usually like.
Some of my faves that go over well with non-vegetarians:
1. Ethiopian Gomen (greens) with spiced (faux) Niter Kebbeh (Ethiopian spiced “butter,” which is an awesome ingredient for improving the taste of many veggies.)
2. Korean BBQ marinated tofu (uses fermented chili paste called gochujang, another great ingredient for various things). This is good in sandwiches, or as a meatish addition to other dishes.
3. Indian Saag Tofu (like saag paneer, only with marinated tofu instead of paneer cheese) with toasted cumin and ginger
4. Cuban-style Eggplant with Mojo Sauce (a citrus and garlic sauce that just rocks)
5. Mexican Chocolate Mole sauce, on tamales or whatever (spicy not-sweet chocolate sauce)
6. Indian-style lentils with Dal Masala spice mix. (My own mix recipe.)
7. Carribbean-style black beans with sofrito sauce.
8. Indian-style samosa filling (in samosas, or in a sandwich) with potatoes and peas, with tamarind chutney.
9. Ethiopian cabbage with niter kebbe (spiced faux butter), garlic, and cumin
10. Any kind of Thai curry with coconut milk; some of the commercial thai curry pastes work quite well.
11. Fairly generic Indian curry with pretty much anything in it.
12. Various stir-frys with veggies (e.g., broccoli or string beans) and Shiitake mushrooms. Shiitakes are wonderful. (American generic “mushrooms” aren’t worth eating IMHO.)
13. Lemon Sesame Kale.
14. Raw Beet salad with nuts, garlic, etc. (Raw beets taste better than cooked ones!)
15. (Thai) Pad Thai.
Ok, confession time. Who posts to this thread just to up the thread count and see what the title of the next thread will be?
:-)
And to think I didn’t believe it when someone said Americans have no sense of humour!
doublefacepalm
Remember
When you’re having a bad day and it seems that people are trying to wind you up:
it takes 42 muscles to frown
28 to smile
but only four to extend your arm and smack someone in the mouth!
(And please, please don’t tell me if its more or less than 4 – I might scream)
Alan B,
The two people who dissected your joke are not Americans. :)
Jadehawk, some lime curd recipes may be the way to go for the filling. The couple I looked at didn’t use milk or evaporated milk.
@ Alan B: I just got that in my inbox from my mom yesterday. It was hilarious.
That’s not what Walton is… I can’t bring myself to give you any more details. <slightly open grin>
I can only stand so much. Too much, and it’ll hurt even around the outside of my lips, on the skin as opposed to mucosa.
I do like the actual taste of pepper, however. Especially green pepper. And when curry isn’t too hot, I eat tons of it.
#443 Walton
Now why should I think that, Walton??
@Blind Squirrel FCD ,375:
Well, Bobby Brown did decently … though I see it was banned in the US. I guess your point stands. :)
that doesn’t count. you don’t eat anything, so why would you need to know how to cook all these things you won’t eat?
ROTFL!!!
Oh, so I need to explain myself, too? Austrian. I use US spelling most of the time, because I tend to write when the most Americans are online, and because it tends to be a bit shorter.
#451 boygenius
Then they have no excuse!
Rawnnaeris #427
Much , much more important than toilet paper hanging
Which goes on the scone first, the Clotted Cream or the Rasberry Jam?
Oh, my long list of inedibles does leave a couple of delicious, complicated meals… :-9
Damn.
I don’t know whether I should be honoured or offended that Alan B considers me an American…
David M.:
By highly spiced, I didn’t necessarily mean hot spicy. (Though I do love hot food, myself.)
Do other kinds of spices cause you problems ginger, cumin, cinnamon, coriander, cinnamon, etc? (Or onions and garlic, which I don’t consider spices; they’re staples.)
One thing about learning to cook spicy foods is that a lot of recipes aren’t spicy enough for people who really like spices. (Such as some of the recipes on packages of prefab curry pastes or spice mixes.) You often want to double the spices, except that you don’t want to double the salt—they’re often too salty already—and you may not want to double the hot peppers.
My Dal Masala (Indian lentil spice mix) recipe is basically a clone of a commercial brand I like, but with much less salt, so that I can use two or three times as much of it and make lentils really tasty without making them overwhelmingly salty or hot-spicy.
Which (in)famous American said?
“A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls.”
“I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy – but that could change.”
“If we do not succeed, then we run the risk of failure.”
“I love California; I practically grew up in Phoenix.”
“I stand by all the misstatements that I’ve made.”
“It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.”
“People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.”
And a final quote in case you need it:
“One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice-president, and that one word is ‘to be prepared’.”
Someone had to bring up Bobby Brown. Oh god, I am the American dream.
Not really safe for work.
@ SteveV:
Guilty admission, I’ve never had a real scone, or clotted cream. I do like raspberry jam on toast though.
Hey! I had forgotten, but Josh promised me an 80s Hair Metal music war, like, months ago! Oh, just wait till he comes back… :P
But… but… I already do! :)
Yep. Well, I don’t exactly hate them. I just find them tasteless and not worth eating. *shrug*
Steve V #460,
Please explain to this ignorant Colonial: what is the difference between clotted cream and regular old cream? Is there a difference in taste? Texture (my guess)? Temperature?
I had to dash away at 414 as I was about to serve up a steak and mushroom pudding, with suet crust.
I thought you’d want to know that. Besides, it fills up the thread.
#464: It was Dan Quayle. I knew this from memory instantly, without Googling.
Do I win the thread? :-)
I don’t know whether I should be honoured or offended that Alan B considers me an American…
Yes.
#460 SteveV
Are you some kind of heretic or something??
It’s STRAWBERRY JAM (homemade if possible – raspberry only if the strawberry has been snitched by the locals) then clotted cream.
AND NO BUTTER!!!
Come to Devon or Cornwall and enjoy a culinary delight. (Along with a good pot of tea, properly made with leaf tea.) Nectar and Ambrosia combined in one simple meal.
RAmen, brother, RAmen.
BS
Janine wins the Understatement of The Thread Award!
No-one has linked to the mushroom dance?
I heard a joke once about catholicism. It had something to do with a priest granting absolution, and instructing a few people to drink holy water, but as it turned out, someone had PEED IN IT!!! No one knew until it was too late, and it was actually one of the sins someone was seeking to be absolved from.
I forget how it goes, but the main elements are there.
We have some highly intelligent people on this thread. But do you really have what it takes?
The following short quiz consists of 4 questions and establishes whether you are qualified to be a “professional”.
Scroll down for the answer. The questions are not that difficult. DON’T CHEAT!!
1. How do you put a giraffe into a refrigerator?
.
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The correct answer is: Open the refrigerator, put in the giraffe and close the door.
This question tests whether you tend to do simple things in an overly complicated way.
2. How do you put an elephant into a refrigerator ?
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Wrong Answer : Open the refrigerator, put in the elephant and close the door.
Correct Answer : Open the refrigerator, take out the giraffe, put in the elephant and close the door.
This tests your ability to think through the repercussions of your actions.
3. The Lion King is hosting an animal conference; all the animals attend except one. Which animal does not attend?
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Correct Answer : The Elephant. The Elephant is in the refrigerator.
This tests your memory.
OK, even if you did not answer the first three questions, correctly, you still have one more chance to show your abilities.
4. There is a river you must cross. But it is inhabited by crocodiles. How do you manage it?
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Correct Answer: You swim across. All the Crocodiles are attending the Animal Meeting!
This tests whether you learn quickly from your mistakes.
According to Andersen Consulting Worldwide, around 90% of the professionals they tested got all questions wrong. But many preschoolers got several correct answers. Andersen Consulting says this conclusively disproves the theory that most professionals have the brains of a four year old.
I am feeling somewhat sickly and in need of comfort food, so I think tonight’s dinner will be potatoes and mushrooms and peas. I just can’t decide whether to have it all mashed together, or mashed together and thinned out with some broth to turn it into soup. I won’t invite Walton over. :)
My family was never much into variety of vegetables, but I adore them now. I think a lot of the trick is to eat them in season, especially when trying them for the first time. They really do taste better. As for how to prepare, the spices/curry idea is a good one, as is cooking them with a decent amount of real butter and salt. I doubt it’s been an issue for any of the gourmands here, but steaming vegetables and serving them practically plain is one of the worst food memes ever foisted upon people. Is it more “healthy” to make veggies without butter and salt? No, not if the choice is between happily eating a plateful of vegetables chock-full of taste and nutrients with some salt and fat added v. having the steamed wilted crap sit on your plate while you push it around for awhile, then go have dessert instead.
Fantasia left me with a lifelong love of classical music. The Nutcracker has a very special place in my heart.
Fantasia is also probably why I joined band the first chance it was offered. I <3 my clarinet.
What the hell? Half my post disappeared.
That is supposed to read “I love my clarinet.”
This is what I tend to do with canteen vegetables. They’re usually virtually inedible; I always intend to eat them, but end up nibbling at them and leaving them on the plate.
Carlie, #478:
Poor thing. Feel better. Definitely mash the potatoes with lots of butter and milk, then stir the peas in. Mmmmm.
Great veggie side dish – Chop broccoli rabe into chunks, and sautee it in a hot pan with loads of chopped garlic and olive oil.
That is supposed to read “I love my clarinet.”
And this one time, at band camp…
I love these guys’ clarinets
If you are really hungry, start off with a pasty, just so long as it was not made by Ginsters.
Awww… Little Amanita Muscaria dancing around all choreographed and such. I’d like to see them pull that off if they had ingested some of themselves. Kinda fucks with your fine motor skills, IME.
Close. Throw in a mushroom recipe and go over the top.
Let the planovers begin. Tonight, pizza, with salad.
Sounds a little like irio.
Hell, I’d eat it with bananas, though I’d probably ask for a little gravy at that point. I could probably eat Rachel’s trifle. (“I mean, what’s not to like? Custard, good. Jam, good. Meat, good!”)
Apparently I was a very finicky eater as a child, but I somehow grew into someone with the taste buds of a vulture, so if I’m hungry and it’s there, I’ll probably not have a problem eating it. (Except for potato pancakes. I love potatoes in all forms except pancake. I had to learn the technique of biting things in pieces large enough to be suspended across the mouth by the premolars but still small enough to swallow just for potato pancakes: if done right and without inhaling, you can choke down foods without tasting them. Oh, the joys and sorrows of having a Lithuanian father born in wartime. Mostly sorrows.)
Unfortunately, this also means I don’t so much care for food, and unless dining with somebody else I will gobble down enough of whatever I need to make me not hungry anymore as fast as possible so I can get back to whatever held my attention until I realised I was starving. I mean, good things taste good of course, but meh! I could probably do without if I needed to. I tend to neither refrigerate nor reheat leftovers, preferring to eat whatever it is at room temperature.
The other plus side is that I can healthy-ise meals fairly easily. Been eating too much meat lately? I’ll chick-pea up that pasta sauce. The last sliver of cheesecake too small for a snack on its own? Toss that leftover wad of tofu from the fridge in with it. Tastes too weird? Add a dollop of maple syrup and employ “tongue-less swallowing technique” described above. Today’s concoction too repugnant even for me? Take half, smother with flax seeds, choke it down and congratulate yourself for getting a good dose of fibre and omega-whatever fatty acids. The other half forms the basis of tomorrow’s soup.
Now, smells on the other hand…I die a little bit each winter when outside just doesn’t really smell all that much. But spring is in the air. I can smell it already, even though it’s usually not quite spring until late April here.
*Sigh* I really think I hate American Pie.
@ Sven, I wonder what brand/model clarinet they are playing. The tone is pure yet harder than most of the instruments I’ve played. Mine has an innate softer sound, to get that kind of hard sound I would have to use a crystal mouthpiece.
I always make vegetables without butter and with little salt because, well, I won’t leave them on the plate either way, so it is indeed more “healthy” to make them that way.
Ever wondered what your boss puts on your performance appraisal?
These are (supposedly) actual quotes taken from job performance reviews (with biologists in mind):
1. I would not allow this employee to breed.
2. Works well when under constant supervision and cornered like a rat in a trap.
3. He would be out of his depth in a parking lot puddle.
4.This employee is depriving a village somewhere of an idiot.
5. This employee should go far and the sooner he starts, the better.
6. Got into the gene pool when the lifeguard wasn’t watching.
7. Got a full 6-pack, but lacks the plastic thingy to hold it together.
8. A gross ignoramus – 144 times worse than an ordinary ignoramus.
9. A prime candidate for natural deselection.
10. One-celled organisms outscore him in IQ tests.
11. Fell out of the family tree.
12. Has two brains: one is lost; the other is out looking for it.
13. (For physicists) He’s so dense, light bends around him.
14. It’s hard to believe he beat 1,000,000 other sperm.
15. One neurone short of a synapse.
16. Wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
(Will they replace the Narwhals?)
18 (Specially for geologists). Since my last report, this employee has reached rock bottom and has started to dig.
19. His men would follow him anywhere, but only out of morbid curiosity.
There’s a book about it, too: Fruiting Bodies and other Fungi, by Brian Lumley.
Oof, I forget how bigotted Disney was/is. Halfway through that dance you almost expect one of the mushrooms to look up and say through big, grinning buck teeth, “Me so solly. Me shlink raundry. Too busy eat flied lice.”
#466, 468
Try wiki as an introduction to this culinary delight:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clotted_cream
#485
I agree.
A real Cornish pasty for lunch with a pint of good cider. Followed after a gentle walk round the Lizard to see the Ophiolites and a Cornish Clotted Cream Tea for tea-time. Wonderful!
Good grief. Things got really interesting last night while I was out seeing shows at the Fringe – Scaramouche Jones and Bully; both were great, btw.
Rorschach wrote:
I laughed for five minutes straight on reading this. Well, at least we’ve got our conversation starter. More on age in the next bit.
Mid-thirties, actually. But I like to think I’m just a frivolous as I was in my 20s – or, at least, as frivolous as my body still lets me be. And I (apparently) don’t look my age either.
Amen, sister. I’m from Bowen* and I can’t stand them either. I remember being on holiday as a child and wondering why people paid a couple of dollars each for the sickly-tasting things that we left in piles on hubcaps atop fenceposts for the noisy rainbow lorikeets to come and eat.
*Best explained by an analogy: it’s like coming from Philly and not liking cheesesteak.
llewelly
Win!
blf
I would like to express solidarity.
Peas may be artistically pleasing (depending on how/if they are prepared), and they count as entertainment when catapulted of a spoon at annoying siblings, but they are not food.
I think Disney pretty much parallels societal norms. The modern Disney is about as PC as they come. (Other than their sexualization of ‘tweens on the Family Channel shows aimed at teeny-boppers.)
Amanitas? Or the fun kind? It’s been a long time since I did ‘shrooms, and so much more was going on I don’t remember how significantly my motor control was affected.
For hamster lovers everywhere: to follow #491 (16)
Hamsters backwards!
Country hamsters
Morphing hmasters
DRUGS ARE BAD. Except caffeine, which is the nectar of the gods, and is the only thing standing between me and utterly failing my degree. (I include alcohol in the “bad” category, despite my own occasional excesses in this regard.)
Anyway, I have to finish yet another goddamn essay by tomorrow morning. (For some insane reason, I have a seminar scheduled for 9 am on Saturday morning.) I’ve barely had time to sleep all week. :-(
If only it were that easy. lol