The anatomy of swearing

No comment, really. Just thought the New York Times article on swearing was interesting.

Total lack of imagination

How fucking unimaginative is NASA's latest "big project" proposal? The universe is a big place. Can you people honestly not come up with anything better than, "Hey! That moon thing was cool! Let's do that again! Only, you know, _more_. Eh? Eh?"

The Mars thing was at least a good idea. Too bad it was a) a cynical political move to try to divert attention from Bush's myriad other failings, and b) hard to take seriously from a man whose eloquence rivals an 8-year-old Down's kid and whose grasp of and respect for science is that of a late-night televangelist.

Come here, little martian

I'll play nice, I swear.

Draaaaaains!

Mmmm...draaaains...

You can always rely on the Germans

...to come up with shit like this.

Blessed are the cheese-makers

Watch Vonnegut on Daily Show if you haven't already. Then go out and read all his books.

Best entry in Vonnegut's "Liberal Crap I Never Want To Hear Again":

"'Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.' The hell I can't! Look at the Reverand Pat Robertson. And He is as happy as a pig in shit."

Correct me if I'm wrong

Isn't this, on some level, a rather ironic headline? How can one "mull" a "decisive" anything? Isn't mulling kind of definitionally indecisive?

Republican logic

Why would you think that a major natural disaster that destroyed huge amounts of the South would actually require federal spending for recovery? Why, funding programs _less_ will actually help! See, if we collect fewer taxes from Trent Lott, he'll actually have _more_ money to spend on reconstructing his house, and it will make him so happy that he might give some of his moving boxes to others who had their houses and life savings destroyed! You know how much poor people seem to like living in boxes. See? Everybody wins!

Sigh. And the scary thing is that there are people in the world that actually buy this shit. Oh, and also loved the clips on the Daily Show where Republican pundits were blaming New Orleans for, you know, existing.

Further proof I am a bad person

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Email received from roommate:
======================

From: Michelle Butte
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2005 2:29 PM
To: Nick Murphy
Subject: Support me as I walk in the 2005 Out of the Darkness Community Walk!

Nick, Every 18 minutes in the U.S., someone dies by suicide. This fall thousands of men and women will walk in over 40 communities across the United States, each contributing their voices to break the silence surrounding suicide. These men and women are the Out of the Darkness Community.

By supporting me as I walk in the 2005 Out of the Darkness Community Walks to benefit the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), you will be helping me raise money for AFSP's vital programs to prevent suicide and save lives, increase national awareness about depression and suicide, and assist survivors of suicide loss.

Sponsoring me is simple-- just click on the link at the bottom of this page and follow the prompts to make a donation.

(Michelle's probably-inappropriate side comment: if you only can or want to make a small donation, please consider the victims of Katrina instead. You can support me with a smile and a "good luck!")

Thank you!

Follow This Link to visit my personal web page and help me in my efforts to support American Foundation for Suicide Prevention

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My reply:
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From: Nick Murphy
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2005 3:54 PM
To: Michelle Butte
Subject: RE: Support me as I walk in the 2005 Out of the Darkness Community Walk!

Michelle,

Every 3 minutes in this country, someone takes a tragically unsatisfying crap. These sad, irregular souls walk the earth in a tormented, constipated haze, desperately trying to remember the simple joy of a good bowel movement. This fall thousands of men and women will travel thousands of miles to cheap mexican restaurants and lentil distributors in an attempt to dislodge the intractable, dehydrated mass that has accumulated in their abdomen, each contributing their own squeaking ripper to break the silence surrounding constipation. The silence...of their ass. These men and women are the Out of the Darkness Community. The darkness...of their ass.

By supporting me as I walk in search of the ultimate Bowel-Buster Burrito, you will be helping me raise money for my vital program to prevent me from not raising money, not to mention raising awareness of Obstinate Turd Syndrome (OTS), depression surrounding OTD, and continuing conspiracy of the United Cheese and Gummy Candy Makers of America. Please...every little bit counts.

Sponsoring me is simple. Just give me a bunch of money. Or a burrito. Or a burrito filled with money. Either way, you're making a difference.

God bless,
Nick

Stallman rides again

Yet Another Idiotic Idea by Stallman. Software patents are not a menace. _Stupid_ software patents (like one-click) are a menace. Just because our patent system is broken doesn't mean patents aren't a good idea in principle.

Moreover, it you make the license even more viral than it already is (and yes, boys and girls, it is viral...Microsoft employees are generally not even allowed to touch GPL'd software because it would force all kinds of restrictions on whatever they're working on...it's so wonderfully ironic that free software people rail against shrink-wrap licenses [rightly] when the GPL is the most egregious and aggressive shrink-wrap license there is...anyway...), then companies will avoid it. There are other open source licenses out there, and they will be adopted.

When is Stallman going to get over his messiah complex?

Rice and race

You know, much as I despise Rice for being an utter sellout, I believe that the Katrina debacle didn't really have anything to do with race. It had to do with money plain and simple. Do you honestly believe that if the residents had been a bunch of poor white rednecks the outcome would have been any different? The problem here is that a) Republicans don't like spending money on anything except the military and corporate welfare, and b) the two FEMA heads Bush appointed are totally inexperienced managing disaster relief because they were simply Bush cronies being rewarded for their loyalty.

Don't make it racial when it isn't and doesn't need to be.

Renquist dead

This is going to be the fun replacement nomination. Roberts was just a warmup.

I really, really, _really_ hope that Democrats can take advantage of how badly Bush has handled the Katrina debacle to build some sorely needed political capital. There's no historical evidence to suggest that they can, but hey, a guy can dream...

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.