I took the test, and it said,
You are a heady mix of the most evil Popes – Paul III, Benedict IX, Urban II and “Hitler’s Pope” Pius XII.
Oops. I knew I shouldn’t have admitted that vanilla was my favorite ice cream flavor in that last question.
That horrible little Christian parody site, Christwire, is attacking me! It’s terrible! They have publicly made this wicked accusation: “Professor Meyers and the Pharyngula peddle off tentacle anime pornography.” I am aghast. I would sue their slandering, sanctimonious little butts off, except, of course, that their claim is actually true, and I’m actually rather proud of my small role in promoting a universal interest in animal sex.
I’m therefore going to have to fire back directly by linking to them and hammering down their bandwidth. Go ahead, visit their site until you reduce it to a stammering series of 404 errors.
And right after you’ve choked them off, you can read these articles just to spite them.
The burden of bearing a massive penis
Evolution of the mammalian vagina
This is just wrong, and it’s going to mislead lots of messiahs. Nowadays, if you want to sell your body, the old robes and sandals gimmick won’t do the trick — Jesus really needs to be dressed in a tube top and hot pants.
It’s good to be told that we strike terror into the hearts of parody web sites everywhere. Let’s go stomp on their bandwidth some more.
But Ed Yong provides the proper perspective. The universe is not the same as it was before yesterday — I think Darwinius masillae may even have changed the course of several planets.
Perfect: cobble together an obscenely irrational hybrid of religion and science in the vain attempt to appease everyone at once, and what do you get? Something to annoy everyone at once.
I have to take back some of the mean things I’ve said about Intelligent Design creationism. They have finally made a significant contribution to a science…in this case, computer science. Behold the awesome power of the Intelligent Design Sort!
Intelligent Design Sort
Introduction
Intelligent design sort is a sorting algorithm based on the theory of intelligent design.
Algorithm Description
The probability of the original input list being in the exact order it’s in is 1/(n!). There is such a small likelihood of this that it’s clearly absurd to say that this happened by chance, so it must have been consciously put in that order by an intelligent Sorter. Therefore it’s safe to assume that it’s already optimally Sorted in some way that transcends our naïve mortal understanding of “ascending order”. Any attempt to change that order to conform to our own preconceptions would actually make it less sorted.
Analysis
This algorithm is constant in time, and sorts the list in-place, requiring no additional memory at all. In fact, it doesn’t even require any of that suspicious technological computer stuff. Praise the Sorter!
Feedback
Gary Rogers writes:
Making the sort constant in time denies the power of The Sorter. The Sorter exists outside of time, thus the sort is timeless. To require time to validate the sort dimishes the role of the Sorter. Thus… this particular sort is flawed, and can not be attributed to ‘The Sorter’.Heresy!
It’s a kind of universal argument, too — just replace the word “list” with “gene”, and it transforms into their usual assertion about biology.
Yeah, there’s little I like better than some sweet snarky skewered Libertarianism.
Of course, if you don’t like it, you could always go complain in the comments over there.
The Onion has just announced that the pope has reversed some traditional teachings.
The divine proclamation, which contradicts prior teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, was reportedly made by Pope Benedict after a late night phone call to his Vatican residence. According to witnesses, His Holiness was seen pacing back and forth, nervously wringing his hands, and cursing at himself in a hallway mirror before coming to the sudden decision.
“My friends in Christ, brothers and sisters of the cloth, having an abortion is…err…not that big a deal,” announced the anxious pontiff while reading from a series of hastily scrawled edicts. “In fact, it is written, uh, somewhere, that the taking of an innocent life might even be something of a blessing in some cases.”
“For example, when a mother’s life is at risk,” continued Benedict, wiping several beads of sweat from his forehead. “Or, say, when someone is just way too old to become a father at this point.”
That kind of short-term pragmatism over doctrine is common among Catholics, so that part is believable…but that Darth Benedict could have sex? Unimaginable. At least it is now, after my imagination just melted down and dribbled out my ears while I was trying to picture it. It didn’t help that the only mate I could picture was Frau Farbissina.
