Today is Blasphemy Day

OK, buddy. As long as it’s this “God” thing punishing us and not you.

Four years ago today, some Danish newspaper printed some drawings of Mohammed and yada yada yada, a bunch of people burned shit down and then yada yada yada, now it’s Blasphemy Day.

The Center for Inquiry is having a Blasphemy Contest. The deadline is midnight tonight for verbal submissions (< 20 words), and the cartoon version is yet to be fully described.

There have been a lot of issues regarding blasphemy still, which is just completely fucking insane. This isn’t just about remembering some cruel past where people were severely punished or even killed because of what they said.

Atheism is worse than murder

There’s this website called What Does the Internet Think? Here are some funny results:

Ray Comfort, still retarded

Bananaman Ray Comfort is distributing his own abridged version of copies of On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection to college campuses. I’m sure there are some interesting edits in chapter 6 (“Difficulties of Theory”) where Darwin tries to anticipate objections and deal with them. Guess which of those two will be included in Comfort’s version of Origin? He even wrote an introduction, though you wouldn’t know it from looking at the cover. His name is suspiciously absent, for some strange reason. But it’s 50 pages! And it’s online as a .pdf file, but I’m not going to bother looking it up and linking to it because fuck that guy.

Changing memory via digitally altered video

This kind of connects two things I’ve posted about here recently: digitally altered media and optical illusions. Here is a quick summary from Scientific American‘s 60 Second Psych site and here is a more elaborate report from Wired Magazine.

I heard a rumor about how Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990

Glenn Beck huffs paint.

One of the things that makes America great is how difficult it is to sue for libel here. The prosecution in a libel case must prove several things in order to survive in court. So many times when a libel case would be effective in other countries, for example the UK has almost the exact opposite burden of proof, people claiming libel merely resort to threats from their lawyers. For example:

The Large Hadron Collider is going to destroy everything again. Really this time.

AAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111111111

It will tell us something about the fundamental particles of matter regardless of the outcome. For example, if they find the Higgs boson, it will confirm that theory and raise even deeper questions about physics which nobody can yet forsee. And if they don’t find it, then they’d have exchanged error for truth and have to go back to the drawing board with newer and better ideas, one of them having been falsified. The same goes for things like dark matter,dark energy, extra dimensions like suggested by string theory, and the possibility of a unified field theory.

Three-Titted Jesus Found on Mars!

A recently released picture of the Martian surface has ignited some controversy in the most widely circulated newspaper in the UK (“Has Jesus Christ Been Spotted On Mars?”). The question mark in the headline apparently means they’re not quite sure if there was an alteration of the Martian surface in order to make it sort of kind of look like Jesus:

Monkey Music

A few years ago, perceptual scientist Josh McDermott of MIT and Harvard evolutionary psychologist Marc D. Hauser published a study (and here’s a laymen’s report on the report – YO DAWG I HERD U LIKE REPORTS) which dealt with the origins of music. From the abstract:

We claim that theories of the origins of music will be usefully constrained if we can determine which aspects of music perception are innate, and, of those, which are uniquely human and specific to music… Our research suggests that many rudimentary acoustic preferences, such as those for consonant over dissonant intervals, may be unique to humans.

And, of course, being scientists, they tested this hypothesis by trapping marmoset monkeys in a maze and blaring music at them. First the two ends of the maze were set up so that speakers were playing a Russian lullaby at one end and “German techno” (I heard it, it was actually jungle/drum n’ bass) at the other. And this time, the monkeys congregated near the Russian lullaby.

Epistemology

Orac at Respectful Insolence had a great post a month or so ago which really nailed some basic problems with accepting pseudoscience. Here’s a relevant excerpt:

Of course, even within New Age, skepticism seems to be without a basis. After all, if you accept astrology and fairies, really, on what possible basis can you reject channeling the dead?… Unfortunately, this is a completely predictable result. When one leaves science, rationality, and reason behind, there is no reliable way to differentiate one woo from another, one pseudoscience from another, one faith-based belief from another. When anything goes, nothing goes, and nothing can be included or excluded based on evidence. Everything is fair game.

Glenn Beck is an Ignorant Fool

Yeah, obvious, I know. But there’s a great facepalming moment in this video at 50 seconds in:

Then I got to wondering what the hell this “9/12 Project” is, so I googled it. And I found this website. And on that website, I found this picture: