You would not believe what I just caughtSkatje doing — I am horrified at what my own child was perpetrating.
She was installing some abomination called “Ubuntu” on her computer.
My copy of Mac OS X Leopard is supposed to arrive tomorrow, and I am not going to share it with her. I may have to cut her out of the will.
A-ha! It’s not just the United States that’s stocked with religious creepazoids and hypocrites!
A candidate for the conservative Family First party has dropped out of his race. He was caught flaunting his junk on the internet, and admits to viewing porn…neither of which are particularly wicked, but when your party is against internet porn, well, there’s a little problem with consistency. There’s also a problem with making pathetic excuses, like these:
I might have been drunk off my face or my political enemies might have drugged me.
But that’s not my penis.
Look, maybe somebody photoshopped it, and put another one on the photo.
First rule of lying is to get the story straight, and keep it simple. Mr Quah’s ineptitude at lying clearly disqualifies him for political office.
And then there’s this Muslim kook, who is a problem of a whold different order: not just foolish, but hateful as well. Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali blames victims for their pain.
In a Ramadan sermon that has outraged Muslim women leaders, Sydney-based Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali also alluded to the infamous Sydney gang rapes, suggesting the attackers were not entirely to blame.
While not specifically referring to the rapes, brutal attacks on four women for which a group of young Lebanese men received long jail sentences, Sheik Hilali said there were women who “sway suggestively” and wore make-up and immodest dress … “and then you get a judge without mercy (rahma) and gives you 65 years”.
It’s all girls’ fault for being so irresistibly pretty. This analogy explains it all:
In the religious address on adultery to about 500 worshippers in Sydney last month, Sheik Hilali said: “If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it … whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat?
“The uncovered meat is the problem.”
Hmm. Who should be more offended? Women for being compared to cat food, or men for being compared to cats with poor impulse control?
People keep telling me I ought to read Freakonomics, but something about it keeps tripping my bogosity detector, and I’ve never gotten around to it. Now I’ve got another reason to avoid it: the Freakonomics blog is hosting a particular silly Q&A with someone who has absolutely no credibility on anything: Scott Adams. It reinforces my bias that the authors don’t exercise much judgment.
Scott Adams is about the last person of whom I’d be interested in asking any questions: he wouldn’t answer anything except to say how much smarter he is than any so-called expert, and any hint of actual content in a reply would be quickly denied as nothing but a joke.
Halloween is coming, and you can enjoy the haunted house theme of the 78th Carnival of the Godless.The Quackometer tells us that we’ve been very naughty boys and girls, and of course it’s perfectly natural at this time of year to hang around in the Boneyard. That’s nothing, however, I have something far more terrifying to show you.
Scienceblogs is currently suffering from a rogue ad that hijacks your browser and whisks you off to some wretched commercial site trying to sell you software to prevent your browser from being hijacked. It is evil, stupid, and obnoxious, and please do not purchase the software they are trying to extort from you. The sciencebloggers are all weeping and howling in frustration in our backchannel network, and we’re firing up urgent flares begging our technical people to come purge the vileness…but it’s a weekend, the tech people are all in New York, and unlike those of us living in Morris, Minnesota, they seem to have more exciting things to do than fuss over computers.
Patience. The ad will be destroyed. The advertiser will be turned over to an angry mob of science nerds who have been contemplating interesting punishments all weekend long. Karmic balance will be restored.
This is pretty nifty: it’s a nine-tentacled octopus. Count ’em!
If I may be so bold as to remind you all of the basics of cephalopod development and evolution, the primitive condition in cephalopods is to form ten arms; in the octopods, one pair is secondarily lost by some unidentified suppression in development. It’s not too surprising that there would be some low frequency of re-expression of members of the fifth and normally missing pair — and the article mentions that the Akashi Seafood Council reports that they see this once in every 20 years or so.
They should keep an eye open for these kinds of developmental abnormalities — they can be an indicator of stressors in the environment if the frequency starts to rise.
Those crazy rascals behind Expelled have some new games they want to play: they’ve put out a casting call for victims of persecution. It’s a pitiful plea, but it will probably net a nice collection of complaints — because it’s true. We do reject Intelligent Design from the academy, from science, and from science education, and there’s a very good reason for that: it’s the same reason we reject astrology, alchemy, creationism, haruspication, necromancy, ornithomancy, and witchcraft from our science courses. Because they aren’t science.
Taylor Kessinger gets it. He’s a junior at the University of Arizona who wrote a nice, lucid opinion piece for the school paper.
We have to rely on comedians to tell us the obvious.
And that’s because over the last seven years, because of the incompetence that goes by the name George Bush, we’ve become the most insecure, paranoid superpower ever. We don’t think we can get anything right anymore. We can’t take care of our own citizens after a hurricane, or plan for our wars, or maintain our infrastructure, and our celebrity rehab facilities obviously aren’t working at all.
The Beagle Project is having a fundraiser — they’re selling t-shirts and other gear to raise money for their project of reconstructing Darwin’s ship and sending scientists off to sea on it. I’m eyeing that large mug with the Beagle blueprints on it myself.
Tild uncovers a real treasure: a book from the heyday of patent medicines, full of advice specifically for women, and loaded with testimonials for Dr Pierce’s ‘prescription’. When you find out what was in the concoction, you’ll understand why all the accompanying photos show women looking both cheery and glazed.
The results were startling. Richardson’s Concentrated Sherry Wine Bitters had 47.5 percent alcohol; Hostetter’s Stomach Bitters, 44.3 percent; Boker’s Stomach Bitters, 42.6 percent; Parker’s Tonic, “purely vegetable,” 41.6 percent. Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound had relatively little—20.6 percent.
Bok saw a real problem. Women were doctoring themselves and their families with dangerous alcoholic nostrums. Temperance women were turning to “bitters” to cure their sluggishness. Pregnant women used “Doctor Pierce’s Favorite Prescription”, which contained digitalis, opium, oil of anise and alcohol (17 percent).
Ladies, go read it. You’ll get the impression that early 20th century women were all sick and diseased, and also all doped to the gills.
Gentlemen, though, might want to read another link Tild provides. Fellows, do you suffer from Spermatorrhea, or the emission of semen without intercourse? I get the distinct impression from that libertarian thread that there are many here who have not ejaculated healthily into a vagina in quite some time. This is bad news.
