Those weirdos in the Twin Cities have remade David Lynch’s Dune. It’s a vast improvement on the original, but the bar was set very low.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Those weirdos in the Twin Cities have remade David Lynch’s Dune. It’s a vast improvement on the original, but the bar was set very low.
This entirely not-safe-for-work video purports to tell the true, scientifically accurate story of the Teenage Ninja Turtles. I don’t know — it seems to think all turtles are the same.
Every once in a while, I learn something about fundagelicals that I find simply discombobulating. Some Christian guides prescribe that a man should keep track of his wife’s menstrual cycle on the family calendar, even.
I mean, I knew that these patriarchal religions were all about controlling their women’s reproduction, but I had no idea. What’s the rationale? Here’s one reason given:
In his 1986 volume, Research in Principles of Life Advance Seminar Textbook, on page 170-171, Gothard suggests
that a man keep track of his wife’s menstrual cycle and use it as a reminder of the sufferings and death of Jesus, then quotes Isaiah 53:4-5.
So Jesus menstruated? What?
The other reason is the infantilization of women’s behavior: they’re at the mercy of their cycle, so you need to be prepared to deal with them when they go all hormonal.
But this is something that goes on far beyond a man actually tracking his wife’s circle. It’s rather pervasive. Women are dismissed all the time for just being “hormonal,” and “it must be her time of the month” is a common response to a woman’s anger. In fact, there was a time men argued women shouldn’t be elected to political office, because of their periods. Do women’s hormonal cycles sometimes make them break down crying or get angry for no reasons? Perhaps, but guess what? Everyone has hormones, not just women. Everyone has bad days, not just women. And you know what? I’ve seen this “she must be on her period” line used to dismiss women’s actual needs and actual concerns.
You know, I did not track my wife’s menstruation at all. Sometimes I’d find out, obviously, and every once in a while she’d get menstrual migraines, but that’s about it for indicators — and I know some women do have debilitating physiological responses to their cycle. But I have never, ever known my wife to have a particular emotional excess or intellectual deficit in response to hormonal changes.
But maybe if I’d kept a big note on the calendar, I’d have had an excuse to belittle her once a month.
It’s the most boring game to watch, ever, and it’s also terribly destructive to the saps who play it. Yet Superbowl Sunday comes up in a few weeks, and hordes of people will be watching it. Why? Maybe this chart explains it all:
There’s no game there! It’s mostly commercials. Maybe that’s why it’s a popular party focus: there isn’t actually much going on to distract you from drinking beer and chatting with friends.
Don’t watch this video if you can’t laugh at grossly over-the-top comic horror with buckets of fake blood — do watch it if you want to learn the true story of Jesus.
OK, this is a disgrace. Io9 has an article on the hierarchy of nerds, and here’s their ranking:
Comic book fans
Toy collectors
Anime fans
Collectable card game collectors
Jebus. How low has nerddom fallen? This is a list of passive gatherers of the obscure and silly.
I’m not even going to try and rank them, but these are the true nerds: Science nerds. Math nerds. Chess nerds. Ham radio nerds. Radio shack nerds. Hackers. Heck, does anyone even remember the day when the kings of the heap of tech tinkerers were the model railroad nerds?
There was a time when being a nerd meant something other than being a consumer of entertainment.
Paul Hellyer was the Canadian Minister of Defence in the 1960s, and I now think he’s one of the reasons we’ve haven’t been worrying about Canadian Panzers rolling southward to crush the United States beneath their very polite bootheels. He explains what he really, really believes.
There are about 80 alien species visiting the earth through a portal in the Andes, and some of them look like people from Denmark and have been disguised as nuns (I KNEW IT!). The astronomers will be thrilled to learn that there is a new planet orbiting Saturn called Andromedia.
One thing: never play poker with the woman presenter of this show. She maintains an absolutely straight face throughout the interview. Of course, Paul Hellyer is saying the most ridiculous things in a dead serious tone, too.
Maybe Canadians are actually kind of creepy.
Gosh, where do the kooks get their money? Watch this slick trailer for a fancy new “science” documentary called The Principle. There’s Michio Kaku…oh, wait, he’s always getting cheerfully dragged into woo…and Lawrence Krauss? Krauss is one of those hard-headed rational types who wouldn’t be a knowing part of any nonsense. But just watch, and the subject of this movie will gradually emerge.
It’s a pseudo-documentary about geocentrism. Zeno tells me he heard about on that weird Catholic zealot Michael Voris’s show. It’s being made by weird uber-kook Rick Delano, who’s sole claim to fame seems to be advocating geocentrism, and showing up in the comments of every blog that ever laughs at the subject (so don’t be surprised if he appears here).
What isn’t at all surprising is that Lawrence Krauss has already repudiated the movie.
This is a beautiful explanation of a key property of human evolution: we evolved to be catapulted as infants.
I can tell, though, that Weinersmith has not had direct experience with raising babies, at least not yet, or he would have cited another significant factor: instinctive parental urges to place small children in catapults. Our first child was one of those colicky babies, and I can tell you that there were many late nights when I was trying to comfort the squalling infant that I would be bouncing him on the balcony of our apartment, and thinking that a good powerful trebuchet to launch him out over the Willamette River towards Springfield would be a good thing.
The lack of handy siege instruments was the only thing that saved him, but clearly that would not have been a problem in more primitive cultures.
