There was some essay I read as a kid on exobiology, purporting to explain that there’s a good chance life has to be carbon based,  because living systems need to be able to build a super wide variety of molecules, and nothing is as flexible as carbon while still being reasonably common anywhere in the universe. Maaaaybe silicone, they said, but it’s hard to get that much silicone together, even after a supernova event. I have no idea if that logic is even plausible, let alone based on any kind of evidence other than that we happen to be made of carbon, and it’s working out pretty well for us.

So, any nominations? Factish? Data-ey? Scienceful? What do y’all think?

I didn’t think so.

I know I’m a little late to the party with this story from Talking Points Memo, which relates the tale of Conservapedia founder and second-generation douchebag Andy  Schafly’s inability to remember the difference between general relativity and moral relativism. Whatever, I’m sure even after someone explains the difference to him, he’ll still believe that understanding deep physics leads people away from Jesus (which, ok, there may be some correlation/causation there), and that that means Einstein must have been wrong. Luckily, Conservapedians were able to snark right back, with this mathematically & logically sound bit of self-referencing on their main page:

Oh, snap! Zero divided by 60! That’s gotta be less than regular zero!

But there’s so much more to love about the internet’s most fake encyclopedia. You could go for the obvious, reading the reality-challenged articles on feminism, atheism, gay rights, Obama’s birth certificate, or other far-right hobbyhorses. But the real genius is the care with which they’ve fabricated delusional alternate-universe explanations for  innocent seeming topics.  Did you know that liberals lie about certain species of North American cactus being endangered, so we can up the supply of peyote? (to be fair, they seem to have deleted the entire article on cacti to hide their shame on that one) Or that Dodos might have gone extinct all of their own? Or that the bible proves the existence of unicorns? Unicorns, people. Normally I’d say don’t feed their egos, but this is some seriously worthwhile comedy reading. Just look at today’s top pages:

Barack Hussein Obama! Adolf Hitler! Sarah Palin! In that order!

Hours of crying while laughing (followed by laughing while crying) are at your fingertips, thanks to the magic of the internet. Welcome to the future.

For reasons that now entirely elude me, I began issuing my standard rant about captchas,  those distorted-text blocks you have decipher to fill in all over the internet to prove you’re not a spam bot. My kind ride-giver cut me off to share his own complaint. He has some vision issues, captchas don’t enlarge well, using the audio alternative is awkward in public (and not every captcha has an alternative for visually impaired folks),   and they’re generally just a pain in his ass. Accessibility fail.

My complaint, though is that they make me wonder if I’m a robot. I fail captchas. All. The. Time. I don’t know why, but I just can’t seem to parse the stretched out, struck through text. My ride mentioned that, as a computer science geek, the one upside of the fucking things is having a real-life application for the Turing test makes him smile. But, when you think about it, they’re a reverse of the original Turing test–you have to prove to a computer that you’re a human, rather than having a human determine which respondents are computers. And those computers judging us? They’re very skeptical. And they decide which of our ever-more-inescapable web services we’re allowed to access.

A few weeks ago, I took a somewhat unexpected road trip, and tried to use Facebook to beg some couch space from friends who live along the way, since I didn’t have their phone number handy. I shot off a last-minute message, and tried to use my partner’s smart phone to check for a response as we went along. for some reason, the combination of a mobile phone and the couple hundred miles from home convinced Facebook I was trying to illicitly access my own account, and it locked me out. One failed, tiny captcha later, my account was locked until I could get to a proper laptop and answer a long series annoying personal questions–they pull photos of your friends from their profiles, and make you ID them. You know what my friends don’t do much? Post clear, recent photos of themselves on their Facebook profiles. Let’s just say I’m glad we found a cheap motel.

Now, good luck proving you’re human enough to comment.

It’s a magnificent, apparently British thing, from the Interrogative series to the variations on Sodding. My only complaint is that the color-coded series only correspond loosely to their content.

And in all fairness to my content-thieving, I should mention that you can buy print over this away, and that I saw this first on the excellent blog Man Made DIY.

My favorite is also the most elaborate. It spans several years. Basically,  a RAGE-virus style zombie apocalypse hit Athens. Lots of people became zombies, even more fled, and I managed to hold out with a couple dozen people, promptly availing ourselves of the nicest abandoned houses and cars in town. After a few months, the zombies got bored or hungry and wandered out of town. We planted gardens. Had picnics. Began to rebuild.

And then the zombie-virus epidemic waned out. After a few years of bloodthirsty brain-eating, people’s immune systems were able to fight it off. Pale, scabby recovering zombies started wandering in to town, not remembering much, but apologizing like hell for what they could remember. “Dude, I…uh…I’m sorry I ate your sister. I just couldn’t stop. I feel terrible.” And the survivors, who had been gleefully popping off any shuffling corpse that came this side of the horizon felt wave after wave of guilt. No one had really stopped to question if the zombies had lost their humanity for good. Many people had killed their own undead loved ones. It hadn’t taken very long at all to even stop thinking of them as former people.

We had to process with the zombies. It was fucking awkward. More than a few of the survivors started muttering that we should spare ourselves the trouble and see if we couldn’t kill the rest before they recovered.

My friend seemed to think this is one obvious permutation that hasn’t really been done before, and was prodding me into writing it up as a short story or something.

There’s the I Am Legend thing, where the zombies are supposed to be intelligent, but they’re certainly not *people.* We talked for a bit about the ways it’s telling that zombie attacks are the pop culture trope of the moment.

Alien attacks, and monsters, are perfectly cold-war. You have an adversary who’s sentient, malicious, and totally not human. A perfect chance for straight-up good guys vs bad guys, no ambiguity, and the sides are clearly demarcated. Plus, with aliens, it’s a good bet the humans are gonna need some pretty spiffy weaponry, to stand a chance against shockingly well armed, diplomacy-disinterested invaders.

But zombie movies are all about having the masses of people around you turn against you. You get to have to open fire into the crowd, inure yourself to killing your neighbors at any chance, and leave modern society behind.  I love zombie movies as much as the next guy, but seriously. There is some creepy shit under there.

And on that note, it’s past my bedtime. What do y’all think?

Sometime in the late 60′s, early 70′s,* West Germany and the UK were facing off at the World Cup final. The game teams were well matched, and the game was tied (2-2) and not going anywhere fast as they headed into extra time.

Until  the UK team kicked a goal. Almost. The ball hit the underside of the goalpost, bounced straight down to the ground, and ricocheted clear of the goal.  The ball hit hit West Germany’s goal, but it hadn’t exactly gone into the net. The British fans were alternately thrilled and crushed, and the Germans waited nervously for the ball to be officially called out.  The swiss ref was baffled, looking around to his linemen in the hopes someone had had a clear view.  Right away, a Soviet ref called it–in. Point to Brittan. The fans go insane, with the Germans trying to fight the call from the stands, and the English settling in for some preemptive celebrating. The clock ran down. England scored another point over the dejected Germans, and won what is still their only World Cup. The German team left, angry and dejected.

After the game, a reporter from the BBC managed to corner the ref. “That was certainly a controversial call. Many of the fans are questioning your judgment, saying it’s not possible the ball could have gone into the next before bouncing out. Tell me, what did you see from your place on the field that was different, that convinced you to make that call?”

The ref nodded along intensely with the reporter, watching his lips and trying to follow his English over the background roar. But when the correspondent finished his rambling question, the ref turned away from him, looked straight into the camera, and said

“Stanlingrad.”

******************************************************************

The national stadium of Azerbaijan is named after him. Purportedly, Queen Elizabeth later gave him a golden whistle for his “services to England.”

*It was 1966. Details of the game in question are entry #2 here.

And that’s where the fun starts. In order to separate respondent’s moral judgment from their sense of disgust, the research team came up with sets of moral conundra to present to participants, while physically grossing them out in a variety of effective, but morally neutral ways.  For example:

A team led by Simone Schnall asked students walking outside on a college campus to answer questions about scenarios like this, rating them on a scale of 1 (extremely immoral) to 7 (perfectly okay). The catch was that they had rigged a trash can near the experimenters’ desk with fart spray. Some respondents read and rated the stories in the presence of a mild stink (four sprays of fart scent), some had a strong scent (eight sprays), and a lucky third group completed the experiment with no scent at all.

See kids, science is fun! In addition to using lab-grade fart spray, they tried a variety of other ways toset off  subjects internal gross-o-meter: having them answer the questionairre in a dirty, sticky office piled high with empty pizza boxes, making them watch a ‘disgustng’ movie first, or asking them to recall a disgusting memory. They all worked–when people were grossed out, they judged the charachters in the researcher’s morality thought-experiments more harshly.

And what were these fictional people up to? Breaking and bending a wide variety of taboos: keeping money from a found wallet, filming people without their consent, killing one person to save 5, having children with their cousins, and masturbating with kittens. Yes, I said masturbating with kittens. As in:

Matthew is playing with his new kitten late one night. He is wearing only his boxer shorts, and the kitten sometimes walks over his genitals. Eventually, this arouses him, and he begins to rub his bare genitals along the kitten’s body. The kitten purrs, and seems to enjoy the contact. How wrong is it for Matthew to be rubbing himself against the kitten?

Needless to say, folks who had just been fumigated with canned fart were in no mood to be lienient toward hypothetical kitten fetishists.

To wit:

Note that you can make out several different “kingdoms” of drinks after a close look at the tree. I can make out the Gin kingdom, the Orange Juice kingdom, and the Amaretto kingdom, for starters. Then we have the outliers, like a 110 in the Shade, which nobody in his right mind would drink. These are the platypuses and slime molds of the drink world.

Makes me wan to mix up a bunch of these to study their, err, gross morphology.

Also, the strongest pot has gotten about 3 times more potent in the last 20 years, but it hasn’t come close to the 30x increase in potency former drug czar John Walters tried to claim in 2002, presumably to scare aging hippies into believing today’s super-weed is a <i>totally different</i> and <i>way more dangerous</i> drug than the ‘reefer’ of which they have fond, blurry memories.