The cables!

I saw this on @cstross‘s twitter feed and had to laugh. Audiophiles and other bewildered purchasers of high-end electronics can get thoroughly deranged and start throwing ridiculous sums of money at the most trivial components — like cables. How would you like this extra-special X-Box cable? I found one place selling it for $85; the non-elite cables without the virus protection are about $8.

If you really want an amazing deal, though, go for an AudioQuest K2 terminated speaker cable.

It’s only $8,450. And Amazon has 5 in stock! Order fast before they’re gone!

I don’t think they’re selling, though. The most wonderful thing about over-priced (or possibly typoed) cables are the reviews. You must read the reviews! Even the 5 star reviews are loaded with snark, but my very favorite is this one-star review. It’s a whole tragic story.

We live underground. We speak with our hands. We wear the earplugs all our lives.

PLEASE! You must listen! We cannot maintain the link for long… I will type as fast as I can.

DO NOT USE THE CABLES!

We were fools, fools to develop such a thing! Sound was never meant to be this clear, this pure, this… accurate. For a few short days, we marveled. Then the… whispers… began.

Were they Aramaic? Hyperborean? Some even more ancient tongue, first spoken by elder races under the red light of dying suns far from here? We do not know, but somehow, slowly… we began to UNDERSTAND.

No, no, please! I don’t want to remember! YOU WILL NOT MAKE ME REMEMBER! I saw brave men claw their own eyes out… oh, god, the screaming… the mobs of feral children feasting on corpses, the shadows MOVING, the fires burning in the air! The CHANTING!

WHY CAN’T I FORGET THE WORDS???

We live underground. We speak with our hands. We wear the earplugs all our lives.

Do not use the cables!

I want to read more of the author’s work. Alas, after that one flash of brilliance, most of Whisper’s work is pedestrian: shoes, exercise equipment, computer accessories. No audio gear, though, which is only to be expected if he has to wear earplugs all the time.

Fox News Officially Divorced from Reality poll

Brilliant! Ask a bunch of American Fox News viewers about the British perception of Mitt Romney! Guess what, guys? 87% don’t see any problem.

It would be especially nice if a mob of hooligans from the UK showed up to let Fox News know what you actually think.

How’s Mitt Romney’s visit to Britain going?

He’s doing fine. The nasty headlines in the tabloids are making something out of nothing 67.41%

Couldn’t be worse. His gaffe on the Olympics insulted the host 12.3%

A little shaky, but he’ll make it up when he travels to Israel 20.3%

Why I am an atheist – Steven Kukula

I had been a skeptical believer from my youth, taking everything with a grain of salt, but knowing that as I got older I’d know more. At 17, when I graduated from my Catholic high school, I left the church, believing it to be nothing more than an authoritarian organization. I consider myself to have been an agnostic at that time, not knowing whether there was a god and for a while not caring.

[Read more…]

Hanging out Friday night (tonight!)

We’re doing another podcast tonight at 8pm Central, and you’re welcome to join. Send me your google+ ID if you want to get an invite (by the way, if you were on my podcast list before, you’re going to get an invitation anyway; ignore it if you want).

I usually do two topics, half an hour each, so there’s a little something for everyone. The first half will be about the intellectual bankruptcy of creationism, as represented by how the DI dealt with Carl Zimmer, and any other examples you want to bring up.

The second half? Let’s talk about what humanism means! Here’s an excellent video to get you started thinking:

I’ll try to follow along with comments on my youtube and Google+ accounts — you can ask questions and tell me I’m all wrong there, maybe I’ll invite you in, too.

What strange beast is this?

The Institute for Creation Research is going on and on again about Haeckel and gill slits. It gets tiresome; I’ve explained so many times that Haeckel’s theory was wrong and he skewed his drawings to fit his model, but that it really is true that human embryos have pharyngeal arches that are modified in a peculiar way to build the face and neck, and this really is evidence for our evolutionary history. Fortunately, this time, I don’t have to go into it because Troy Britain has covered all the details. Yay!

But I do want to mention one really strange thing. The ICR is going on and on about Haeckel faking his embryo drawings, but this is what they used to illustrate their own article.

CHRIST JESUS, WHAT IS THAT THING? That is creepy — no human embryo ever looked like that. They’ve neatly painted out any kind of branchial structures, and it has no post-anal tail — yet it’s supposed to be a 7-8 week embryo. I guess reality was too uncomfortable for them, so they dug up some uninformed stock art that leaves out those vestiges of our ancestry, tails and gill slits, that refute their claims.

Either that or they performed an abortion on a Grey. Good for them, those UFO pilots are always sticking probes up our butts, it’s only fair that someone grabbed one and did a D&C on them.

Alt Med does harm

I always hear this argument that, well, maybe those herbs and enemas don’t help that much, but they don’t hurt, and they make people feel better, so get off alternative medicine’s back. Right. Because distractions from real medicine don’t affect the legitimate work being done.

You might want to read this criticism of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Paul Offit’s editorial in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA. 2012;307(17):1803-1804.) goes through the history of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine(NCCAM) and nicely points out that studies funded by NCCAM have failed to prove that complementary or alternative therapies have any more benefit than placebos.

Offit points out how NCCAM spent $374,000 proving lemon and lavender scents do not promote wound healing, $750,000 to prove that prayer does not cure AIDS, or improve recovery from breast reconstruction; $390,000 to find that ancient Indian remedies do not control type 2 diabetes, $700,000 to find that magnets to not treat arthritis or even carpal tunnel syndrome; and $406,000 to show that coffee enemas do not cure pancreatic cancer.

Half a million here, half a million there begins to add up to some real money. Now maybe your big R1 universities sniff at that level of funding…but I’m at a small university where we’re accustomed to scraping by on little bitsy budgets that would barely constitute a single line item at a bigger place, and I see $400,000 uselessly sluiced into the colons of cancer patients, accomplishing nothing but increasing the discomfort of dying people, and I think…wow, that much money represents a huge difference in education.

And don’t get me started on the prayer study. I’d get down on my knees and fucking pray to any deity you want to name if it would bring in that much cash to my university. Of course, we’d use it for something a lot more useful than pretending magic incantations might heal viral diseases.

Also, it’s not just NCCAM: homeopathy sucks up a lot of money and wastes a lot of effort in Europe.