OK, this is the final straw. The Intelligent Design creationists send out press releases, they peddle textbooks in our classrooms, they publish dishonest books of pseudoscience, and now … and now, they’ve come out with a popular magazine.
I’d complain some more but I’m afraid they’d kick sand in my face and beat me up.
(via ERV)
This is irrational, an intrusion into my privacy, rude, and beneath me, but I have been tagged with another meme by the behavioral ecology blog. I am to take this test of my personality defects, post the results, and pass it on.
These are not personality defects. How can you call perfection “defective”?
Haughty Intellectual
You are 100% Rational, 14% Extroverted, 0% Brutal, and 57% Arrogant.You are the Haughty Intellectual. You are a very rational person, emphasizing logic over emotion, and you are also rather arrogant and self-aggrandizing. You probably think of yourself as an intellectual, and you would like everyone to know it. Not only that, but you also tend to look down on others, thinking yourself better than them. You could possibly have an unhealthy obsession with yourself as well, thus causing everyone to hate you for being such an elitist twat. On top of all that, you are also introverted and gentle. This means that you are just a quiet thinker who wants fame and recognition, in all likelihood. Like so many countless pseudo-intellectuals swarming around vacuous internet forums to discuss worthless political issues, your kind is a scourge upon humanity, blathering and blathering on and on about all kinds of boring crap. If your personality could be sculpted, the resulting piece would be Rodin’s “The Thinker”–although I am absolutely positive that you are not nearly as muscular or naked as that statue. Rather lacking in emotion, introspective, gentle, and arrogant, you are most certainly a Haughty Intellectual! And, most likely, you will never achieve the recognition or fame you so desire! But no worries!
To put it less negatively:
1. You are more RATIONAL than intuitive.
2. You are more INTROVERTED than extroverted.
3. You are more GENTLE than brutal.
4. You are more ARROGANT than humble.Compatibility:
Your exact opposite is the Schoolyard Bully. (Bullies like to beat up nerds, after all.)
Other personalities you would probably get along with are the Braggart, the Hand-Raiser, and the Robot.
Although the “brutal” score is a filthy lie. Just to prove it, I will gladly torment others with this pointless exercise.
CultureCat – Rhetoric and Feminism
A Yale student, David Light, was arrested after firing a gun a few times inside his fraternity house. The reaction of some students was noteworthy.
“He’s a perfectly normal person,” he said. “He’s not a crazy guy. To be honest … things always get blown out of proportion when it comes to arrests with firearms.”
Not a crazy guy?
The New Haven Register reported Tuesday on its Web site that the weapons seized from Light’s residence included a .50-caliber rifle, AR-15 assault weapon, a Russian M-91 infantry rifle, a 12-gauge shotgun, various pistols and bomb-making materials, including a large bottle of mercury. Light reportedly did not have permits for any of his weapons.
Can we all just agree right up front that keeping an arsenal of lethal weapons in your room at college is not normal? It might be normal in Baghdad, but not New Haven, Connecticut.
(via IvyGate)
As I mentioned before in my review of Stuart Pivar’s LifeCode: The Theory of Biological Self Organization, I’m actually sympathetic to the ideas of developmental structuralism. This is the concept that physical, mechanical, and chemical properties make a significant and underappreciated contribution to the acquisition of organismal form; genes are not enough, do not carry a complete specification, and what we have to consider is interactions between genes, environment, and cytoplasm. Good stuff, all of it — and I’d like to see more work done on the subject. In my review, though, I had to point out that Pivar hadn’t actually addressed any biology, and that his modeling was little more than an extended flight of fancy, unanchored by any connection to any embryology.
Now Pivar has put out a new version of his book, Lifecode: From egg to embryo by self-organization. I’m sorry to say it doesn’t address any of my criticisms, and is even worse. This is not a scientific theory, and it isn’t even a collection of evidence: it’s a jumble of doodles. I read through it all this afternoon (there really isn’t that much to read), and I have to conclude it says nothing about the development or evolution of biological organisms, although it is relevant to something else.
Weirdness comes in waves, I guess. Both Karmen and Kevin are talking about strange road signs. I’ve got a sign to top them.
This is a sign … of the Apocalypse!!!
Wait…not enough exclamation points or emphasis. A SIGN OF THE APOCALYPSE!!!!!
[Read more…]
This may sound like pro-religion news, but it’s really not: Wal-Mart is going to sell Jesus action figures.
Maybe it is spreading religious mythology through cheap general stores, but it is also the commodification of a religious hero…so it’s devaluing Jesus.
The other thing to consider is what perverse little kids do with their dolls. Get Barbie and Ken alone in the bedroom, and swooosh, off come the clothes, here come the interesting poses, and ooooh, Ken, can my friend Midge come and play, too? Now Jesus gets to join in the action.
I hope the Jesus action figure is anatomically accurate, too. Otherwise he won’t be allowed to go to church (see Deuteronomy 23:2).
I cringed.
I never did trust those astronomers. Now I learn that they have been conspiring to keep us stupid.
This is turning up all over the place — at Brad DeLong’s, Crooked Timber, and this pair is from Cosmic Variance — it’s the most sublimely, awesomely, wickedly stupid example of fudging a curve ever. The two graphs below have exactly the same data points, and the only difference is the curve that was ‘fit’ to the distribution. Which one looks plausible to you?
The one on the left looks sensible and simple, and looks like it was actually drawn with some consideration of the data. The one on the right … not so much. I have no idea how anyone could think that particular curve belongs in there.
Now guess which one was actually published?
Hint: it was published in the Wall Street Journal editorial pages.
Someday, somebody’s going to write a book about the shenanigans at the WSJ that allows a clown college, the editorial staff, to exist and thrive within the bounds of an otherwise staid and sort of boring, but respectable, newspaper. That they could actually publish something like the ridiculous abomination on the right and no one said “Wait! What about our credibility?” is merely symptomatic of some really interesting pathology going on there.
UFO ‘studies’ have come a long way since the days of Billy Meier, when you could just throw a pie plate or a hubcap into the air and take a polaroid, and presto … proof of flying saucers! Now in these days of Photoshop and CGI, you can get much more elaborate and realistic images — none of those silver blurs anymore. DJ Chubakka introduced me to a weird world of modern UFO enthusiasts.
Nowadays you can read the markings right off the hulls of the spaceships.
