We all know who makes the best Mad Scientists

I initially thought this was a fine graph, charting the fields of research of mad scientists over time, since it did accurately conclude that biologists rocked that niche, but then I looked closer, and they shortchanged us. For some entirely arbitrary reason, they split mad biologists into “biology”, “biotechnology”, and “neuroscience”…but those are simply subdisciplines of biology! You don’t see mad physicists split into “physics”, “lasers”, and “whatever else physicists do”, now do you? I see what they were doing: they were trying to minimize the appearance of our overwhelming dominance!

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So, Annalee Newitz, Stephanie Fox, Kelly Faircloth, and Mary Ratliff…you sought to belittle mad biologists, eh? I shall plot my vengeance. Do not be surprised if some night you wake up to find giant mutant cockroaches laying eggs in your ears, or your brain transplanted into the body of a hagfish, or strange infections writing incantations to Cthulhu in rashes on your body, or tentacles emerging out of your shower drain.

So that’s why I can’t be a Jehovah’s Witness

Elders of the Jehovah’s Witnesses are not allowed to have beards, because it makes them look like dirty rotten gay communist hippies.

In the 1950s, in the the USA, beards were widely unpopular among the general public and most men who wore one were immediately perceived as beatniks (and later, hippies). In that American, Cold War climate, a young man who didn’t sport a military-esque brush cut and bare chin was out-of-hand labeled a communist or homosexual.

I just thought it made me look cuddly!

So, now mockery is not allowed in the UK?

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This is getting ridiculous: an ad has been banned because it annoyed a handful of Catholics in Britain.

Antonio Federici’s advert showed a pregnant nun eating ice cream in a church, together with the strap line “immaculately conceived”.

The Advertising Standards Authority has ordered it to be discontinued, saying it mocked Roman Catholic beliefs.

The country is paying for an expensive papal visit (which is currently undersold), and in addition they’re shutting down public amusement at the old geezer, out of a misplaced sense of propriety.

Hmmm. So Punch, Monty Python, and Father Ted must have been very un-British…invented by foreigners or some such. No citizen of the United Kingdom can possibly have one of those, whossname, ‘sense of humor’. What a stodgy place.

Saturday timewaster

I think this will go over well with rudeness here: bluntcard.com. One could easily get sucked into long reveries here, contemplating exactly who you would send that card to.

Not me, though. I’m off to do a little exercise, then I’m off the internet for a while to get some work done.

I’m going to come back online to a lot of rudeness sent my way, aren’t I?

Zombies are street legal in Minneapolis

A few years ago, a group of people dressed up as zombies for a protest march and got arrested for it.

When arrested at the intersection of Hennepin Avenue and 6th Street N., most of them had thick white powder and fake blood on their faces and dark makeup around their eyes. They were walking in a stiff, lurching fashion and carrying four bags of sound equipment to amplify music from an iPod when they were arrested by police who said they were carrying equipment that simulated “weapons of mass destruction.”

I know. We’re all on edge with the imminent threat of the zombie apocalypse, and it’s perhaps understandable that a police force under constant siege by the undead might be a little overzealous at the sight of live people simulating zombiehood, but still…we have laws, and the police should abide by them. Minnesota courts agree, and the seven fake zombies have been awarded $165,000 for their unjustifiable arrest.

Now, on to the pressing and important questions: are the police required to read their Miranda rights to real zombies before shooting them in the head?

I also wonder what sociological consequences this will have. Will our streets soon be full of lurching, reeking, groaning corpses? Southern California gets panhandlers, and wouldn’t you know it, Minnesota gets zombies.

An interesting thread tangent

The indefatigable Kurzweil threads do occasionally spawn some interesting discussion, and the latest has gone down a few odd byways thanks to this comment by Cerberus:

Creating a robotic brain to “download your consciousness” into or the “I’ll make a clone version of myself with all my memories” sci-fi fiction immortality ideas are kinda false immortalities.

It’s at best, assuming a complete successful procedure a process of ending one’s consciousness so that a puppet version of yourself can emulate your life possibly for all eternity.

Great, but what does that do for real you?

Real you is just as dead and gone and unable to be a part of and appreciate what your puppet is doing in its absence. I’m sure this has been repeatedly addressed in the various thread wars during my absence, but it seems kind of stupid.

I’d love to extend lifespans, I’d love to live forever if that was possible, but as long as we’re talking fantasies, asking for the power to fart sparkly flying unicorns seems less stupid than asking for a robot facsimile to live forever on your behalf.

I mean, if you’re going to be all cult about this, pick something that wouldn’t be completely contrary to your intended desire if you got it.

I would imagine that any ‘brain scan’ (the currently hypothesized method du jour for turning an organic brain into a digital analog in a computer) that broke it down to a sufficiently complete description of the whole state of the brain, would have to be destructive — you’d have to submit yourself to an imaginary technology that would rapidly peel you apart, molecule by molecule, to create a precisely specified copy. That’s death. That’s being disintegrated.

Now if there were a complementary technology that allowed a complete reassembly of a previously recorded state into a physical form, that would be interesting, and I’d argue that the perceived continuity of consciousness would mean you’d be disintegrated and reintegrated, and there’d be no perception of death, but there’d be no point to it unless it were used as some kind of transporter device ala Star Trek, or a way to store a person long term without the corpsicle problem.

But then, Star Trek always let me down — if they could do that, they should have made a few dozen copies of Captain Kirk and sent them out to conquer the universe.

Then there are all the followup concerns about identity and self in a world of cloned minds. I like the classic SMBC answer that ends with this punch line:

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