scientific progress

1969: United States lands man on the surface of the moon.
2009: United States lands penguin on the surface of the moon.

Badass NASA movie

Amazingly, these are actual images captured by MESSENGER and not simply computer graphics.

Not sure if you can shoot the dog

Duck Hunt meets Doom (thank you memepool).

A better representation of red vs. blue

We've all seen the red vs. blue political maps of the US, but this is a better representation that reflects percentages.

The sleaze keeps on comin'

Really, and I'm serious here, is there anything they won't do? At least wait for a decade or so before rewriting history for fuck's sake.

And can we at least restrict things to one major sleaze item per day? I can't keep up.

You can't make this stuff up

Well, what did you expect? The guy just got a new leg.

Men are more intelligent than women, but this isn't why

Hard to let a report finding that men score higher on IQ tests than women go by without comment. First of all, IQ tests are dumb. They don't tell you anything. It's like trying to assign a single numerical score to art. What would it mean to give Magritte a 92 and George Carlin a 94? There are so many dimensions to each artist that to condense them to a single number is next to meaningless. You can talk about more specific traits and compare them on those narrower qualities, but something like "intelligence" is so multi-faceted that it's profoundly retarded to even consider evaluating it using a single dimension. In fact, you should lose 20 points on your IQ test just for doing so.

Secondly, the dimensions IQ tests test you on are highly analytical aspects of cognition that it's not surprising men are slightly better at on average. It's well established that men inherently have a better sense of spatial reasoning than women, for instance. Evolutionarily, this makes sense. Male humans had to go hunt and gather, so they needed to be able to navigate. Why would it be at all surprising that a metric that tests these kinds of abilities (which the IQ test does...I've taken one [long ago]) gives men a (very) slight advantage?

Now, lest anyone jump all over me, note this is very different from saying the reason for a gender gap in academics is a biological disadvantage (thank you Douchebag Summers). Among other things, I've said nothing about the distribution of analytical abilities in the set of people with the best minds. Just because the average is slightly lower doesn't mean that the upper tier of women couldn't deliver a hardcore academic ass-whooping to the upper tier of men. And it may well be the best woman would beat the best man.

More importantly, however, is the fact that on that particular issue, other factors inevitably dominate to a degree that any tiny biological differences would vanish in the noise. There's such a social aspect to becoming a tenured professor that any minute statistical disadvantage with regard to analytical ability by gender (if in fact it exists) would be vastly overshadowed by gender discrimination, male-centric power dynamics, cliqing, etc.

All that said, women are of course still dumb. Or, perhaps more accurately, crazy. It just happens to be the case that the above article doesn't address why.

Spam poetry

Anti-Baysian filter fodder at the bottom of a spam I just received:

"fraction me dextrous you pitiful me dexterity you baseboard me waldo you proline me allele you cluj me conqueror you handlebar me grownup you leprosy me prison you embalm me datum you"

That's fucking poetic.

Stupid obstinate bastards

Sony and Toshiba are retarded, and it's going to affect my ability to watch movies, and that pisses me off. Why can't they fucking agree on a format?! They're not all that different. Both just store lots of data. If both formats come out, we're going to have a format war, and any reasonably intelligent person is just going to avoid getting either until one or another wins the war. Which means the rest of us have to wait to get decent hi-def movies. Meanwhile, both companies are going to lose billions to an easily avoidable war.

Personally, knowing very little about the respective formats, I would say go with Blu-Ray since I believe it stores more. Cost arguments are stupid since as time goes on, it will just become cheaper and cheaper to produce. Similarly, any argument saying that it carries "too much" data is almost too retarded to bother refuting. How big was your hard drive five years ago? I rest my case.

The Gaza pullout

I've wanted to comment on the Gaza pullout for a while. It's a truly remarkable phenomenon, and it's remarkable in several different ways. First and foremost, I find it personally satisfying to see crazy religious extremists forced to confront reality. Every time I see pictures of the raging, zealotous settlers being dragged away by the Israeli army, I get fucking pissed off. Why don't those idiots understand that they're responsible in large part for the continued hostilities and deaths of innocent people on both sides? Do they not know how criminally insane they sound when they claim to have a Biblical right to the land of Israel?

At the same time, I gotta say it's reassuring to know that other religions besides Christianity have their nutjobs. Fundamentalism is not particular to Christian dogma. Any time you have a reliance on an invisible, magical authority whose will is purportedly divined by people who claim to have a special understanding of the will of said invisible, magical authority, you're going to end up with a group of people who have so completely defined their existence in terms of the arbitrary but reassuring moral system that inevitably develops that they will fight tooth and nail defending that moral system even in the face of the corresponding inevitable encroachment of reality. And it's been happening for millenia. And people are still too stupid not to let it happen.

The other really fascinating phenomenon, however, is the behavior of the Israeli soldiers. I have been absolutely astounded by the many reports on the Israeli soldiers' poise and composure through this whole thing. They've calmly negotiated with settlers screaming at them. They've comforted the settlers who have complied with the orders that they themselves doubtlessly have some reservations about. No soldiers that I've heard about have refused to obey the orders. Moreover, they've restrained themselves from employing an unnecessary and vengeful amount of force in response to settler attacks. They've done quite simply an amazing job, one that I don't have 100% faith that American soldiers could match.

Corporate psychopaths

Not really news since I learned of this phenomenon in intro psych, but nonetheless interesting. If you think about it, it really shouldn't be all that surprising that top CEOs could probably often be considered clinical psychopaths.

Stupidity marches on

This is a profoundly pointless controversy. It's just a fucking name for chrissakes. What the hell does it matter whether a porn site ends in ".com" or ".xxx"? At least in the latter case it's easily identifiable.

Nerd candy

Kind of an interesting article on how modern-day NASA plots courses for spacecraft. Interesting, of course, in the "how does the warp drive on the Enterprise work?" kinda way.

Global warming caused by decline in pirate population

Also, the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Have you been touched by His Noodly Appendage?

Don't be evil...unless it's in your own best interest

I knew something like this would happen eventually. Google is a company just like any other. They'll be evil when it's in their interest to be so, corporate mantras to the contrary.

Fun with ragdoll physics

Ever wondered what it would be like to watch a bikini-clad woman's limp body bounce haphazardly off miscellaneous and randomly placed white spheres? Well, wonder no more!

Yes, the Religious Right really are Nazis

Well, ok, so that's stretching it a bit. I think this says less about any direct comparison between Fundamentalists and Nazis and more about the tactics involved in demonizing a(ny) scapegoat for your own political ends, but still...an interesting comparison.

And yes I know any comparison to Nazis is immediately suspect, but still...at least these guys try to actually back up their assertion with some amount of quotational evidence.

I've finally found the meaning of life

A simple quote in a seemingly unrelated article:

"Every time I reach a Starbucks I feel like I've accomplished something," Winter said, "when actually I have accomplished nothing."

There you go. That's existence in as small a nutshell as you can fit it. Profound, huh?

That sound you just heard was my brain exploding

_You_ try wrapping your head around the concept of "negative information."

Such profound delusion

We really do live in the land of retards, don't we?

"It is important to many creationists that man and dinosaur lived simultaneously because they believe there was no death in the world until Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden. If the Genesis story is false, they say, then there would be no need for Jesus Christ to redeem the sins of the world.

Thus, at the Museum of Earth History, Genesis dictates gentle, vegetarian dinosaurs sharing Eden with Adam and Eve, whose vaguely Polynesian appearance represents all races, according to a guide. Another exhibit confirms that dinosaurs, like all land creatures created on Day 6, were on Noah's Ark. The exhibit maintains that the ark could accommodate them because it was huge--450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high--and only smaller, adolescent dinosaurs were put on board."

Folks, I know I say this a lot, but that seriously has to fall in the top ten stupidest things I have ever heard. Read it again and try not to have an aneurism.