Can you bear the beauty? It’s another week’s worth of random cephalopod imagery.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Can you bear the beauty? It’s another week’s worth of random cephalopod imagery.
Now here’s a difficult question from a reader:
Long time reader, but only very occasional poster here. A friend asked me
to recommend some books to read to small
children (2 -5 years old) to teach the basics of atheism. His son is
getting exposed to a lot of religious training from
his wife, and my friend wants something to present the alternative
perspective.Any suggestions? Feel free to open this up to the blog.
BTW, he is also interested in short books about the sciences suitable to be
read to children of the same age as bedtime
stories. Suggestions in this category are also welcomed.
I don’t have a good answer. Usually, I’d just say that there shouldn’t be “atheist” children’s books — there’s nothing not to teach, and I’d rather kids were just brought up to think for themselves — but this is a request for specific counter-programming against religious indoctrination. Anyone have any suggestions?
Several of us here on scienceblogs have recently discussed the stereotypes of women who read science fiction. Syaffolee puts an interesting twist on it: what about men who read romance novels? She’s reporting on an article that says almost a quarter of the readers are men.
Nobody seems to be speculating on whether guys who read bodice-rippers are cuter than average.
There is an interesting idea there about the genre ghetto. I’ve read a few, years ago, and didn’t care for them much…and now I judge the whole genre by a fuzzy memory of a non-representative sample. Are there great authors I’m missing because I can’t get past the pink covers with bare-chested men on them?
Another genre I avoid is the cowboy novel (in my local library, cowboys and romance are probably the dominant forms of literature, too). I read some Louis L’Amour, also years ago, and was shocked at how bad the writing was, and haven’t gone back since.
Genre fiction seems to be a tool to lock in to a specific segment of the audience, but it’s also an effective way to lock out an even larger audience, because we’ve all got these biases.
Trade your soul for a DVD! All you have to do is post a video of yourself to youtube, stating that you deny the holy spirit, and you’ll get a copy of The God Who Wasn’t There. Why those magic words?
Whoever blasphemes against the holy spirit can never be forgiven.
Mark 3:29
More details on The Blasphemy Challenge are available online, and they have a trailer, even:
Some of the comments on that video are hilarious.
You know what I hate? Fanatic Christians? Know what I hate just as much? Fanatic Atheists. This ‘challenge’ is disrespectful on a level I can’t even verbalize. It’s juvenile and inane. What do you hope to accomplish by doing this? It’s obvious the only purpose is to get a rise out of people. Disgusting.
Poor fellow. What he doesn’t realize that there’s nothing fanatical about this at all. Stating that I deny the holy spirit only means that I have made an unambiguous statement about what I believe. It does get a rise out of people, but the fault lies in them, not us; should I get outraged every time a Christian recites the Nicene creed? Isn’t it more the case that a fanatical theist would get angry at people saying that they don’t believe as he does?
Oh, and this one needs no comment, since the inanity is self-evident:
STOP THIS! Please, if you’re thinking about blaspheming against the spirit, don’t! It’s no laughing matter, it’s the worst thing you could ever do.
Who was Jesus Christ? Liar? Lunatic? Lord? Those are your options. Those 3. That’s it. Liar? Yeah, right! He’d have to be a freakin’ genius liar to fool everybody in the bible! Hahaha, puh-leeze! Lunatic? OMG! Hahaha! You’re funny! That explains how He died for our sins then came back to life! Moron. He was Lord. Duh!
This one is also funny:
So athiests think their immortal soul is worth a free DVD. Intersting; sad, VERY sad, but interesting none the less.
Let’s get all reverent about that all-important “immortal soul”. What the complainers don’t realize is that it doesn’t exist, so it doesn’t count: what this really represents is trading a few minutes of effort to make a 30-second video for a free DVD.
I already have the DVD, so I’ll do this for free. I deny the holy spirit.
Pharyngula has fallen behind by almost 200 votes. Wouldn’t you know that the phylum of the rats would be up to dirty tricks, though? One of their own has confessed to cheating, and tried to spread the information. Phil, to his credit, has suppressed the recipe, but it tells you all you need to know about his unscrupulous minions.
Vote for Pharyngula (and remember, you can vote every day!). Unless you really want to read my bitter, whiny, accusatory, and self-pitying concession speech.
You don’t want to see me looking like that, do you? I don’t even know if I can fit into my plaid pinafore anymore.
Wow. That’s got to be a record: a creationist frankenquote that contains an ellipsis spanning seven chapters. And that’s only one piece of the bad scholarship Lynch demolishes.
Time to go get a beer at Drinking Liberally, ’cause the Fall semester of 2006 is all over but for the final exams and the grading and the tears. The last of the written work was turned in today, and now it’s just grading until my eyeballs evulse.
Here is a prime bit of end of term suckage, too: it is mid-December in Minnesota, and it is raining. Raining! If I wanted to live in a place with cool wet winters, I’d move back to Seattle.
We have more internecine warfare going on at scienceblogs: in this case it’s a matter of casual sexism. Should someone be surprised at pretty girls reading science fiction, or even being nerdy?
As someone who has been immersed in the nerd culture of the university since the mid-1970s and has also hung out in the science-fiction culture even longer (anyone remember Escape Books in Seattle? Been to Uncle Hugo’s or Dreamhaven in Minneapolis?), and is a heterosexual male who usually notices the hot girls, I will say with great emphasis, NO! In my generation, women in biology were a minority, but really, they looked fine. The students in my classes now are mostly women, and they are lovely, although I tend to see them with a more fatherly (or grandfatherly, sad to say) eye nowadays. Science does not attract the unattractive, so could we please end that stereotype?
We also shouldn’t judge the attractiveness of individuals on the basis of such shallow parameters. True male nerds all know that intelligence is a +2 bonus to charisma, and SF fannishness is an additional +1. Heck, if I were on the market right now (oh, but I’m so glad I’m not), the first places I’d choose to hang out in to meet attractive ladies would be the bookstores, and the SF and fantasy section in particular, but not exclusively.
Not that SF is a prerequisite—my wife is both a hottie and not particularly interested in genre fiction; I’d probably find her in the science section, or math/statistics, or social sciences. And that’s OK, and defies the stereotype, too.
One last datum: my daughter‘s bookshelf looks like a subset of what you’d find at Dreamhaven. If you want to argue that she ought to be homely, you’ll find me looking pissed off at you.
Finally and in general, these expectations about how women should be expected to look, and what set of irrelevant traits ought to be correlated with desirability, and how we guys ought to tie the preferences of women’s minds with our definitions of the sexual properties of their bodies, is more than a little annoying, and something women ought to be rightly irritated about. These unwarranted assignments of roles on the basis of irrelevant characteristics can hurt people.
