Hundredth Post!
This is the hundredth entry in this weblog. Wheee!
War on Everything
Remember the “War on Christmas” that John Gibson and Bill O’Reilly wag-the-dogged up out of nothing, using a mixture of three parts persecution complex, two parts paranoia, and one part batshit insanity?
And have you noticed the
War on Easter
that they’re now brewing up out of that same cauldron?
(In case you missed it, it was
started last year
by Sean Hannity.)
Clearly, this is a movement, in the “come in, sing a verse from Alice’s Restaurant, and walk out” sense of the term. So I hope you’ll all join me in declaring war on
Shrove Tuesday.
Write angry letters to politicians and media people! Boycott retailers! Death to the… um… shroves, I guess. Or something.
It’s Getting Hard to Tell the Creationists and the Onion Apart
Remember this article from The Onion?:
DESPERATE VEGETARIANS DECLARE COWS PLANTS
LAS VEGAS — At its annual national conference Saturday, the American Association of Vegans and Vegetarians released results of a detailed in-house study determining that the common beef cow is actually a plant, 100 percent fit for vegetarian consumption.
“Contrary to what was previously thought, the cow is not a higher form of animal life, capable of thinking and feeling pain,” announced AAVV spokeswoman Denise Chalmers to the large crowd. “Rather, we have found it to be a harmless, non-sentient form of plant life, utterly incapable of experiencing the slightest pain or simplest thought.”
Chalmers then passed around a large tray of dripping red meat, which the vegetarians in attendance ravenously devoured, feverishly licking the bloody juice from their fingers.
Compare that to this bit of masturbiblation (also this one), which shows that squid aren’t alive. I can only assume that future episodes will prove that up is down, black is white, and that the Babel Fish is definitive proof of the nonexistence of God.
Golden Credit
So I hear we as a country now have a brand shiny new credit limit debt ceiling. Nine trillion dollars. Or 9e12 as nerds write it.
Allow me to establish some facts before I get to my main point:
- Today, gold costs $550.80 an ounce.
- One gram of gold can be beaten into a sheet with an area of one square meter.
From these facts, and some simple unit conversions, we find that it would cost $50,316,759.87 to buy enough gold to cover a square mile (and who says you can’t get anything for fifty million bucks anymore?).
Nine trillion smackers divided by $50,316,759.87 equals 178,866,8432.
Therefore, if we maxed out our national credit card, we could gold-plate Nevada, South Carolina, Maryland, Vermont, New Jersey, and Connecticut.
Obviously, it doesn’t help that the borrow-and-spend Republicans have already spent most of that money. That’s why they had to raise the limit in the first place.
Lego FSM
Chris Doyle has enough time on his hands to build a
Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
out of Legos.
Reading Martin Gardner Pays Off
(Or: Life Imitates Logic Puzzle)
Lately, to measure out water for coffee, I’ve been filling whichever mug I intend to drink from, and pouring it into the coffee maker. That way, I know there’s the right amount.
This morning, I was making coffee for the drive in to work, and noticed that I had poured coffee from a regular mug, rather than the larger travel mug I was going to use. I wasn’t going to upend the coffee maker over the sink to empty the water and start over. I could have just estimated how much more water I needed to add, but came up with a cleverer solution, below the flip.
Welcome, del.icio.us Readers!
So I took a glance at the web server log, and found that my old article
How Not to Embarrass Yourself In an Argument With an Atheist somehow managed to make its way to http://del.icio.us/popular/.
So take a load off and stay a while. There’s beer and sodas in the fridge.
Oh, and a lot of people commented that the study I mention at the end of that piece is bogus. I don’t remember which study it was, nor could I find it now if I tried, but I’m not at all surprised that it turned out to be flawed. If it hadn’t, it would’ve been huge news.
The Price of Congressmen
I wrote earlier
about my dismay at finding out just how cheap some of the whores on Capitol Hill are. Rasmussen Reports
on what people think congressmen cost.
Half of all Americans believe it takes a contribution of at least $50,000 to influence a Congressman or Governor. That includes 27% who believe the price of influence begins with at least $100,000.
A Rasmussen Reports survey found that just 24% believe influence can be obtained with a $1,000 or $10,000 contribution. Twenty-six percent (26%) are not sure.
The survey also found that just 11% believe that they could get their Congressman to change his or her position on an issue for a $1,000 contribution.
Unfortunately, Rasmussen is a polling organization, so they only report on what people think congresscritters cost. Maybe Consumer Reports can investigate and tell us how much they really cost, and which ones provide the best value for money.
Time-Related Things I Never Want to See In A Perl Script Again
I got stuck debugging someone else’s Perl code today, and it was chock-full of the sorts of things that annoy the piss out of those of us who know better.
ID vs. Methodological Naturalism
Andrew Rowell at ID In the UK
writes:
The basic articles of faith for a methodological naturalist go
something like this:We have found excellent naturalistic explanations for many
phenomenon [sic] in nature.Therefore
we believe every phenomenon in nature will have a naturalistic
explanation.Therefore
we make it a strict rule that science is exclusively the study of
possible naturalistic explanations for what can be observed in the
universe.
Rowell has it exactly backward. Scientists don’t pledge a blood oath
to preserve the purity of science’s precious bodily naturalism.
Rather, if you’re trying to figure out how the world works,
methodological naturalism works, and nothing else even comes close.
Not heated argument.
Not listening to the most senior researcher present.
Not quoting Aristotle.
Not divine inspiration.
When scientists investigate natural phenomena, they look for natural
explanations because that’s the only method we as a species have come
up with that works worth a damn.