Garfield

I truly loved Garfield when I was a kid. I'm sure many kids (and maybe some lucky adults) still love the comic. But it loses virtually all of its oomph when viewed through adult eyes (which is really sad, if I think about it too long). Thankfully, today on Metafilter, someone posted a link to a site that has many Garfield comics with Garfield and his thoughts removed. The result is variably weird, sad, funny, indescribable, and on and on.









Along with this link were many others that revive Garfield in various ways:

• Garfield without his thought balloons (a likely precursor)
• The Garfield randomizer (coherence is a virtual lock!)
• A Garfield Comic Creator (on the National Institutes of Health website!)

And then there's one of the longest-running World Wide Wonderful Web sites, The Dysfunctional Family Circus.

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Fuck the Senate

The Senate gave the telecom industry legal protection for its (illegal) eavesdropping activities today. Retroactively. Assholes, especially the spineless Democratic weasels who voted to give the telecom industry immunity. From the Salon link:

"The Senate today -- led by Jay Rockefeller, enabled by Harry Reid, and with the active support of at least 12 (and probably more) Democrats, in conjunction with an as-always lockstep GOP caucus -- will vote to legalize warrantless spying on the telephone calls and emails of Americans, and will also provide full retroactive amnesty to lawbreaking telecoms, thus forever putting an end to any efforts to investigate and obtain a judicial ruling regarding the Bush administration's years-long illegal spying programs aimed at Americans."

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-5 > -6 (the > symbol means "greater than")

This is awesomely pathetic, and wonderful, and depressing as hell. It's bad enough that people waste their money on lottery tickets; it's even worse when they can't even figure out if they've fecking won.

From the November 3, 2007 Manchester Evening News:

A LOTTERY scratchcard has been withdrawn from sale by Camelot - because players couldn't understand it.

The Cool Cash game - launched on Monday - was taken out of shops yesterday after some players failed to grasp whether or not they had won.

To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing.

But the concept of comparing negative numbers proved too difficult for some Camelot received dozens of complaints on the first day from players who could not understand how, for example, -5 is higher than -6.

The rest of the article is here. For those who are confused by the apparently very cold temperatures, those are in degrees Celsius.

Via Chance News.

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Negation = cephalopods

Laurence Horn, a linguist (and Larry to his friends), wrote the book on negation, A Natural History of Negation. On the Barnes & Noble entry for Horn's magnum opus appears the following "Booknews": "An exquisite natural history of this unique cephalopod by a paleontologist (who overmodestly professes limited zoological training)." This was noted by Mark Liberman on Language Log back in 2003, but, wonderfully, remains intact to this day.

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Linguistics humor

A stacked relative clause construction (or, simply, a stacked relative) is a construction in which a relative clause modifies a nominal construction already containing a relative clause. A cleft sentence is a sentence one of whose constituents is introduced by anticipatory IT. A sentence which exhibits simultaneously stackedness and cleavage is the following:

It's my buxom cousin who's wearing a low-cut sweater that's a good example of a cleft stacked relative.

Lifted from Charles Fillmore's contribution to Studies Out in Left Field: Defamatory Essays Presented to James D. McCawley on the Occasion of His 33rd or 34th Birthday, via John Lawler.

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Lite-Brite phrenology

"If a thought happens in a forest of neural dendrites, and no one is there to measure it, did you really think it?" -from Matt Hutson's blog. (The title is from his blog, too.)

Hutson had an article in the NY Times Magazine on Sunday, in their "Year in Ideas" issue, in which he discussed the term neurorealism (which means, roughly, "swallowing an fMRI scan whole"), which was coined by biomedical ethicist Eric Racine (and his colleagues) in an article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. Racine et al. defined three terms that could use some more exposure:

neurorealism - how coverage of fMRI investigations can make a phenomenon uncritically real, objective or effective in the eyes of the public

neuroessentialism - how fMRI research can be depicted as equating subjectivity and personal identity to the brain (see also neurobollocks)

neuropolicy - attempts to use fMRI results to promote political and personal agendas

Try to work these into everyday conversation.

(Via Language Log!)

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Especially stupid religious "science"

You cannot make this shit up. (I'm on the grading side of exams, and finding stupidity on the Web seems far more interesting than ever.)

Chuck Missler explains the Peanut Butter Theory of Evolution:


Missler is not kidding. On his website, he explains: "Every time you open a fresh, new jar of some food item, and don't find evidence of "new life," you have conducted an empirical experiment which refutes the common superstition which continues to be promoted by the orthodox witch doctors of biogenesis: that life occurred without the involvement of a master designer." If you don't understand the sophisticated theorizing behind such a view, you are beyond help.

And, although the video below is old, I'd never seen it before. In it, Ray Comfort, alongside the chuckling chucklehead Kirk Cameron, explains his idiocy to us. In particular, he shows us why the existence of a banana is an atheist's nightmare:


How can anyone conceivably take these people seriously? Does anyone?

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Bush = lying motherf*cker

George W. Bush on December 4, 2007, responding to a reporter's question about when he knew about the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that Iran had discontinued its nuclear weapons program in 2003: "And it wasn't until last week that I was briefed on the NIE that is now public." (Taken directly from the White House transcript.)

But Bush had been briefed, in August.

Yeah, I know I'm about a week behind on this, but maybe a few more people should know about this.

The accuracy of the NIE report is under dispute (see the Time link above), but this doesn't change the fact that (once again), that Bush is demonstrably a liar.

According to my calendar, we have 405 very long days until we are rid of Bush.

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Texas science educator pushed out for advocating science

"Intelligent design" (i.e., creationism; let's call it what it is) is a very bad idea. It's not a scientific theory; it's transparently religion masquerading (very badly) as science.

But, despite the awesomely-bad science that intelligent design represents, this doesn't mean that political pressures can't generate even greater levels of stupidity, and quite probably illegal behavior.

The Texas science curriculum director, Chris Comer, recently was all but forced to resign from her position after she forwarded an e-mail about a talk by the co-author (Barbara Forrest) of a book entitled Inside Creationism's Trojan Horse. According to a November 29 article in the Austin American-Statesman, Comer was put on adminstrative leave in October shortly after she forwarded an e-mail about Forrest's talk to "several individuals and a few online communities." This apparently was a violation of a directive (see the disciplinary memo sent re: Comer; it reeks of weaselly legalese) given to Comer that stated that she was not to "communicate in writing or otherwise with anyone outside the [Texas Education A]gency in any way that might compromise the integrity of the [Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills] development and revision process." The TEKS revision is apparently an overhaul of the Texas school system curriculum that's ongoing. And Comer's mistake was to intentionally or accidentally endorse the idea that creationism in the guise of intelligent design is horseshit; her position within the TEA requires that she, as a representative of the agency, remain neutral about creationism and not provide (back to the memo here) "guidance or opinions about instructional methodology."

There were other dressed-up complaints in the memo about Comer's "insubordination", but these too smell like they came from lawyers who were trying to protect the TEA from a wrongful termination lawsuit. But it's clear what happened here: Comer was fired because she incidentally endorsed the (truthful) equation "creationism = not science" and this is not popular or acceptable in a conservative state like Texas.

Besides the witch-huntery aspect of this, what's most disturbing about this (although hardly surprising) is that some politicos in Texas believe that neutrality in the realm of science means that creationism is to be taken seriously as science. But it is not neutral to have creationism being taught in a science class; it is an positive endorsement of its scientific status, which is woefully lacking, and always will be.

UPDATE: The NY Times published an op-ed piece about this story this morning (Dec. 4). The conclusion: "We can only hope that adherents of a sound science education can save Texas from a retreat into the darker ages."

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Mindreaders redux; Nature slaps the NY Times!

The journal Nature has published an editorial slapping the New York Times for its incredibly stupid decision to run advertising posing as (really shoddy) science on its op-ed page a few Sundays back (see here for more, and here for the original "op-ed" piece). In Nature's editorial is a rebuke for some aspects of cognitive and affective neuroscience research that deserves quoting:

[H]ow do you find out what people are feeling? ... Apparently just asking them was simply not good enough. So how did [the researchers] uncover the innermost thoughts of their 20 subjects? The[y] used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the subjects' brains while they viewed images of political candidates ... A group of cognitive neuroscientists was swift to object to its conclusions — which veer close to a modern-day phrenology.

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