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One of you posted a link to this gem the other day, and i'm still laughing over this so hard i cried:

Stephen Colbert makes a surprise appearance on Jon Stewart's show to demand he apologize to Geraldo Rivera.
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"President Bush demonstrates the newest weapon in the War on Terror: the 'Eye of Kilrogg,' a floating magical eye that can be used for surveillance. Previously only available in the online game World of Warcraft, and considered an imaginative impossibility, the Eye of Kilrogg was made possible by a joint venture between the Department of Defense and Blizzard Entertainment."

(thanks to [livejournal.com profile] pamscoffee for the pic)
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From a locked post on the friend's list:

Dubya in Free-Fall

More entertaining than World of Warcraft. For a while, at least.
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Thanks to [livejournal.com profile] vzd
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More Americans Falling For "Get Rich Slowly Over A Lifetime Of Hard Work" Schemes

A report released Monday by the Omaha-based public-interest group Aurora indicates that increasing numbers of Americans are being defrauded by schemes that offer financial reward for a lifetime of hard work. "People don't realize that long-term savings and loyalty to one company don't pan out," said Sylvia Girouard, the study's author. Girouard added that steady employment which claims to offer long-term financial gain in the form of a pension plan is nothing more than an elaborate Ponzi scheme.
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Four researchers at MIT investigated the efficacy of tinfoil hats at keeping out radio waves. What they found is startling: tinfoil hats actually greatly amplify radio waves at certain frequencies... frequencies which are reserved for government use.

The article's abstract:

Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government's invasive abilities. We theorize that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.

Thanks to [livejournal.com profile] pamscoffee for the link
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A zombie-preparedness study, commissioned by Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy and released Monday, indicates that the city could easily succumb to a devastating zombie attack. Insufficient emergency-management-personnel training and poorly conceived undead-defense measures have left the city at great risk for all-out destruction at the hands of the living dead, according to the Zombie Preparedness Institute.

"When it comes to defending ourselves against an army of reanimated human corpses, the officials in charge have fallen asleep at the wheel," Murphy said. "Who's in charge of sweep-and-burn missions to clear out infected areas? Who's going to guard the cemeteries at night? If zombies were to arrive in the city tomorrow, we'd all be roaming the earth in search of human brains by Friday."

Government-conducted zombie-attack scenarios described on the State Department's website indicate that a successful, citywide zombie takeover would take 10 days, but according to ZPI statistician Dr. Milton Cornelius, the government's models fail to incorporate such factors as the zombies' rudimentary reasoning skills and basic tool use.

"Today's zombies quickly learn to open doors, break windows, and stage ambushes," Cornelius said. "In one 1985 incident in Louisville, a band of zombies was able to lure four paramedics and countless law-enforcement officials to their deaths by commandeering an ambulance radio and calling for backup."

from Study Reveals Pittsburgh Unprepared For Full-Scale Zombie Attack
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Gregg Miller mortgaged his home and maxed out his credit cards to mass produce his invention — prosthetic testicles for neutered dogs.

What started 10 years ago with an experiment on an unwitting Rottweiler named Max has turned into a thriving mail-order business. And on Thursday night Miller's efforts earned him a dubious yet strangely coveted honor: the Ig Nobel Prize for medicine.

The Ig Nobels, given at Harvard University by Annals of Improbable Research magazine, celebrate the humorous, creative and odd side of science.

... Miller has sold more than 150,000 of his Neuticles, more than doubling his $500,000 investment. The silicone implants come in different sizes, shapes, weights and degrees of firmness.

from The Winner Is... Fake Dog Testicle Creator


Past and present "Ignitaries" have included the guy who invented Karaoke (Daisuke Inoue), the creator of the Nigerian spam, the discoverers of Murphy's Law, and a scientist who discovered that duct tape (which fixes everything, right?) should not actually be used on ducts. See the list of Ignitaries here.

The humble sweeper who removes paper airplanes from the stage during the Ig Nobel ceremony, Roy Glauber, this year won the Nobel Prize for Physics. ("Asked what he would do with more than $640,000, the 80-year-old physicist said, "I haven't the foggiest.")
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via [livejournal.com profile] _dilbert_strip



This actually summarizes my experience working for a dot-com in 2000, before it went belly up, except that Scott Adams left out one thing: making the developers play "shifting teams" every once in a while to make sure no project ever neared completion.
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Proponents of Intelligent Falling assert that the different theories used by secular physicists to explain gravity are not internally consistent. Even critics of Intelligent Falling admit that Einstein's ideas about gravity are mathematically irreconcilable with quantum mechanics. This fact, Intelligent Falling proponents say, proves that gravity is a theory in crisis.

"Let's take a look at the evidence," said ECFR senior fellow Gregory Lunsden."In Matthew 15:14, Jesus says, 'And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.' He says nothing about some gravity making them fall—just that they will fall. Then, in Job 5:7, we read, 'But mankind is born to trouble, as surely as sparks fly upwards.' If gravity is pulling everything down, why do the sparks fly upwards with great surety? This clearly indicates that a conscious intelligence governs all falling."

Critics of Intelligent Falling point out that gravity is a provable law based on empirical observations of natural phenomena. Evangelical physicists, however, insist that there is no conflict between Newton's mathematics and Holy Scripture.

"Closed-minded gravitists cannot find a way to make Einstein's general relativity match up with the subatomic quantum world," said Dr. Ellen Carson, a leading Intelligent Falling expert known for her work with the Kansan Youth Ministry. "They've been trying to do it for the better part of a century now, and despite all their empirical observation and carefully compiled data, they still don't know how."

"Traditional scientists admit that they cannot explain how gravitation is supposed to work," Carson said. "What the gravity-agenda scientists need to realize is that 'gravity waves' and 'gravitons' are just secular words for 'God can do whatever He wants.'"

from Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New "Intelligent Falling" Theory (The Onion, thanks to [livejournal.com profile] lady_babalon for the link)
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I worry lately that i'm losing my sense of humor. Leftists in general seem to be a rather humorless lot when it comes to society and politics, but i'm not convinced that's a bad thing, since most political "humor" is dehumanization and ridicule.

Lately i've been thinking a lot about Robert Heinlein's take on laughter and humor in Stranger in a Strange Land, that it is a response to pain. Any quantum of humor involves a situation that occurs at someone's expense, but since laughter involves the release of endorphins and reduces our stress level we're inclined to think it's a good thing. Since a lot of humor involves a hint of the unexpected, i will guess that it involves the startle response. But if we didn't have ways to relax the startle response, we'd be overly cautious and aloof, frightened by everything and everyone, incapable of friendship and love.

One major result of "political correctness" has been raised awareness of the ways in which certain styles of humor occur at the expense of oppressed and exploited people, and therefore contribute to stereotyping. That which is laughed at widely enough becomes that which is laughable.

As a transperson i know this probably better than most of you, because sometimes people will laugh simply because they look at me. I am walking ridicule, just add eyesight. There are so many jokes that involve men dressed as women that the very perception thereof elicits the humor response. Like rubber chickens or eyebrow glasses, a man in a dress is just inherently funny. And yet, some of those jokes are funny to me too. So what am i supposed to do, curtail my sense of humor?

"Political correctness" in speech simply means having some consideration for people who by way of oppression are at a social disadvantage. Many jokes that men enjoy about women, for example, are not funny to women at all, but instead are hurtful. They contribute to the othering and dehumanizing of women. The same goes for racist jokes, and so on.

A lot of the resistance i see to "political correctness" seems to be a kind of "awareness fatigue." Being forcefully made aware of disadvantage or discrimination is definitely an imposition. However, that awareness is already being imposed to a much greater degree on the people who live with the oppression. The expenditure it takes to be "politically correct" in one's speech is miniscule compared to the expenditure of being oppressed. (There are ways in which PC has been misused, particularly in cases where people have lost their jobs, and trust me, that annoys me just as much as it annoys you.)

So there is open rebellion and backlash against "political correctness" which essentially comes down to, people are tired of being asked to show one another human decency. They want to be allowed to make "lighthearted" remarks at the expense of women or Jews or black people or queers. And, look at all the race jokes Mel Brooks has made, and no one accuses him of being a racist. (Of course, Brooks's use of irony to deconstruct racism is a whole other topic...)

One recent form of this that i'm not sure how i feel about is renewed use of the pejorative, "Oh you're being so gay," as a way to put someone down for being in their judgment overly sensitive. Mostly i see this among people in their late teens and early twenties, who have grown up in a world where homosexuality and queer people are on constant public display. Much of the time people who use the word this way either are queer or have demonstrated their alliance to the queer community. Thus the implication is that this is a "lighthearted" use of the pejorative, as if one can use the term that way and still be in rebellion against bigotry rather than in support of it.

The nuance is complex. Is it a deconstruction of homophobic stereotypes? Or does it signal tacit support for them? The boundary between what is funny and what is offensive is more of a fractal than a nice straight line.
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[Poll #548592]

Edit. Mixing age play with xenophilia? What kind of freaks are you people? (Um, let me know when you're in my area.)
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It's all fun and games until someone gets his testicles padlocked. (Thanks to [livejournal.com profile] stonemirror for the link)
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Happy birthday [livejournal.com profile] akaiyume!

Happy Birthday! [thud!] Happy Birthday! [thud!]

Now you've aged another year
Now you know that Death is near
Happy Birthday! [thud!] Happy Birthday! [thud!]

Doom and gloom and dark despair
People dying everywhere!
Happy Birthday! [thud!] Happy Birthday! [thud!]

Typhoid, plague and polio
Coffins lined up in a row
Happy Birthday! [thud!] Happy Birthday! [thud!]

Birthdays come but once a year
Marking time as Death draws near
Happy Birthday! [thud!] Happy Birthday! [thud!]

Soon your hair will all turn grey
Then fall out (or so they say)
Happy Birthday! [thud!] Happy Birthday! [thud!]

We brought linen, white as cloud
Now we'll sit and sew your shroud
Happy Birthday! [thud!] Happy Birthday! [thud!]
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Polly Wally (not work safe by any stretch of the imagination; not recommended for the sexually squeamish)

Thanks to [livejournal.com profile] cowgrrl for the link; any resemblance to the lives of anyone who reads this journal is purely coincidental.
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"In his Book of the Law, Crowley: wrote; 'the obeah and the wanga, the work of the wand and the work of the sword, these he shall learn and teach.'

"Substitute Obi for Obeah and Wan for Wanga and you get Obi-Wan.

"And what device is a wand one moment and a sword the next? A lightsaber, of course; and the relevance of 'learn and teach' is obvious, since Obi-Wan is the teacher.

... "When one considers that an Aeon is a span of time, akin to the term 'millennium', and that Horus is often depicted as a falcon, it does compel one to look at the Millenium Falcon in a slightly different light.

... "A part of the Star Wars universe is actually mentioned by name in one of Crowley's Holy Books.

"'Thy messenger was more terrible than the Death-star,' Crowley says.

from STAR WARS AND THE SATANIC [sic] (received in email)
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The next time you run a scan with your anti-spyware tool, it might miss some programs. Several anti-spyware firms, including Aluria, Lavasoft, and PestPatrol, have quietly stopped detecting adware from companies like Claria and WhenU--a process called delisting. Those adware companies have been petitioning anti-spyware firms to delist their software; other companies have resorted to sending cease-and-desist letters that threaten legal action.

... Of course, some spyware apps are worse than others. One spyware program may make severe changes to your computer's settings, while another merely displays ads.

Claria and WhenU are making the case that their adware programs don't resort to illegal tactics, such as exploiting security holes, to install themselves. And though this software can be annoying, adware developers argue that merely being listed in an anti-spyware scanner's database tarnishes a company's reputation by linking its relatively benign adware application with far more harmful and intrusive spyware programs.

from Can You Trust Your Spyware Protection?


Are they really looking for... sympathy? Companies who produce software that is installed without your knowledge or with uninformed consent, for the purposes of displaying ads or tracking personal web usage want us to worry about their reputations being "tarnished" because they are listed as spyware?

[Poll #504058]
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And now, since my caffeine-withdrawal-wracked brain cannot concentrate on anything serious today for more than a minute or two, a few words about boogers and snot.

A booger is an American slang term for partially solidified mucus from the nose; the British form is bogey. Boogers form when the mucus traps dust and other particles in the air. Mucus dries around the particle and, much like a pearl forming in an oyster, hardens into a booger. Wikipedia


Question: If you have acid in your stomach, why don't you melt?

Answer: Your stomach does have acid inside of it - hydrochloric acid - strong enough to eat through a piece of the metal zinc.

The reason your stomach isn't destroyed by the acid is our old friend snot, which is also called mucus.

Mucus is thick, sticky, slimy and gooey. And it's a good thing.

The inside of your stomach is covered with it. That layer of snot protects the stomach from its own acid. In fact, the miracle of mucus protects many parts of our bodies...

from Mucus


Mucins are a family of large, heavily glycosylated proteins. Although some mucins are membrane bound due to the presence of a hydrophobic membrane-spanning domain that favors retention in the plasma membrane, the concentration here is on those mucins that are secreted on mucosal surfaces and saliva.

from Mucus and Mucins

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