1. Here we go again.

"This textbook discusses evolution, a controversial theory some scientists present as a scientific explanation for the origin of living things. No one was present when life first appeared on earth. Therefore, any statement about life's origins should be considered a theory," the proposal continues.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, should any statement about it be considered a theory?

2. Sad:

“If (homosexuals) can marry, what is the reason that public policy says one person can’t marry more than one person?” said Suffredine, a former provincial lawmaker.

And what do you want to bet the polygamists are religious enough to think homosexuality is an abomination against god? Yet they take their side when it suits their purposes, of course....

3. My first and only cubicle, hopefully.

4. My full name has some seriously Not-Safe-For-Work acronyms.

5. Ha. Lesbian couple denied family membership at a community recreation center, but the YMCA welcomes them with open arms. I love seeing religious organizations do the right thing.

1. I always knew I was on the right track.

2. This is awesome, but I can't help but think Obama's PR machine might resent it....

3. Not much of a reason to include this link other than the fact that I want the t-shirt mentioned.

4. So someone else is complaining about the British atheist bus ad (The one that says "There’s Probably No God. Now Stop Worrying and Enjoy Your Life":

the rationale behind it is that people can be less careful about their lifestyle choices and general approach to life’s consequences by discounting the likelihood of a Creator and an afterlife

Isn't this what I tried to warn people about in the beginning? I hate to say I told you so....

this causes concern to Christian and Muslim people, many of whom feel embarrassed and uncomfortable travelling on public transport displaying such advertisements and would not wish to endorse the advertisements by using that public transport

Yeah. And those atheists who might be embarrassed or uncomfortable when confronted by religious messages plastered throughout the world? Fuck 'em.

5. A hedgehog even white supremacists would approve of.

1. Hey jackass, it's free, so eat the fucking waffles.

2. So this guy apparently got bitch-slapped by Helen Keller:

"I had heard that Helen could speak and I wanted to feel her speak, so I reached out to put my hands on her face, hoping that she would speak to me that way," Smithdas recalls. "But to my surprise she slapped my hand away. I wasn't amused. I thought it was a crude gesture."

And then this....

Journalist Barbara Walters, who spoke at Smithdas' retirement luncheon Friday, said Smithdas was remarkable.

"Truly, the most memorable person I had ever met was Robert Smithdas," she said. "I remember going to Bob's house, and he cooked me a meal. I was amazed he was able to do this and didn't burn his hands."

Okay people. If you're gonna call someone remarkable, do it because of their personality or talents, etc., not simply due to skills they learn to cope with life. People with disabilities don't want to be admired for their adaptations -- they want to be admired for themselves. Focusing on how 'remarkable' someone is for overcoming their disability is basically equating their entire identity with their disability. Get over it and try to find out who the person really is....

3. Sad. (More bus-ad shenanigans.)

In fact, speaking as one myself, I think it shows quite a cheek for Christians to make a fuss about this. We’ve spent decades covering public places with verses from the Bible, and posters promising that if you let Jesus into your life everything will be all right for ever.

Then as soon as the opposition get the money together to do the same thing we’re outraged, and think that God is as cross as we are.

4. Apparently, the Italian atheists violated The Code of Advertising Practice (roughly translated below).

Article 10 — moral, civil, religious and human dignity

Advertising must not offend the moral, civic and religious citizens. It must respect human dignity in all its forms and expressions.

Convenient how non-believers aren't included in this....

And again. Questioning or critiquing beliefs is not the same as offending the people who hold those beliefs.

5. Fuck yeah.

(Anyone who gets PBS have a DVR I could commandeer?)

1. A New York hunter may be feeling a bit sheepish after mistaking a feral llama in Paradise Valley for a Rocky Mountain elk, but he apparently did not violate any laws.

I'd like you to focus on the words 'feral' and 'llama'. They're next to each other. This amuses me greatly.

2. A flow chart of sorts, showing which languages are considered most difficult by other language speakers. Based mostly on the equivalent of the phrase "it's all Greek to me" in various languages. I wonder where Icelandic would fall on there....

3. There's plenty of ridiculous fundamentalist bullshit here, but the funniest part is that they assume that only homosexuals get up to these kinds of shenanigans.

Though I agree it's kind of sketchy to book this kind of event at a venue that isn't fully informed of the planned activities. While I'm fine with consenting adults -- of any sexual orientation -- participating, somehow I don't think it'd be cool for some poor kid staying at the hotel to stumble across some of the spillover....

4. I find this paper and its subject pretty boring, honestly, but the title is pretty awesome.

5. Ha. I'm so looking forward to re-entering academia.

1. It got kinda cold while I was in KC for the holiday.

Now try and complain about the 'cold', Pacific Northwestern-ers. You don't know the meaning of cold.

2. And now a trip down memory lane. Also known as 'Sarah Humiliates Herself for Fun and Profit.' But without the 'profit' part.

I appear to be milking a plane in this one.

And then there's the phase where I decided I really wanted to find out how much sunburn my scalp could tolerate.

Good times.

3. Scary as hell, of course.

Makes me a little more worried about Obama using him as a strategy to appease the fundagelicals. Surely he could've found someone a little less odious?

4. It's time for Fun With Ted Haggard!

Haggard said a co-worker of his father molested him when he was 7, an experience that "started to produce fruit" later. Clarifying that Friday, Haggard said: "I'm certainly not saying that because of that, I did this. I did what I did by my choice, and I'm responsible for it."

Yeah right. You don't mention an experience like that in this context without meaning to imply a causal relationship.

Asked to expand on his attitude toward homosexuality, Haggard said, "I believe all human beings fall short of the standards they believe in."

Oy. Still not good enough, my friend.

Since my experience, I know more about the power of love and forgiveness. I know a lot more about the necessity of people not judging one another.

Yeah. Just like saying that homosexuality = 'falling short of one's standards' is non-judgmental....

I have learned enough to know a lot can happen to anybody. And when Jesus is our Lord, we can't plan our path.

So he's saying that bad shit happens to good people because of Jesus??

[T]he church chose not to forgive me

Well duh. That's what you taught them to do.

Haggard has said his childhood experiences, including same-sex "sex play" with friends when he was in the seventh grade, started to manifest themselves when he turned 50

Yeah right. He didn't 'turn gay' until some repressed memories bubbled up when he was 50? Uh huh.

Don't get me wrong. It looks like the guy's attitude has improved from his previous stance. But he still has a loooong way to go.

5. I really really wanna go here. What a perfect excuse to finally go to San Francisco.

Especially if I could take this. Holy crap that'd be awesome.

1. Me in my natural habitat: surrounded by dust and manure, convincing a 1000-lb animal to do something it would really rather not do.

2. Someday I want to live in a house like this.

But in Iceland.

(Photo taken on the Vashon Island Ferry sometime last spring.)

3. Let's go to my room Pig!

(magnets!)

(pencil included for scale!)

4. Worst. Dinner. Ever.

(But it made a nice bowl.)

5. Inedible sushi. It's a sacrilege, I know.

This was my favorite purchase while Christmas shopping. Of course I bought it for myself....

They're supposedly erasers. The fish detaches from the rice balls.

This time, a pen is provided for scale.

1. Chomsky...says, “language evolved, and is designed, primarily as an instrument of thought” [italics mine; p. 22]. Communication, for Chomsky, is secondary.... [source]

Whoa. For some reason I thought Chomsky wouldn't want to touch Sapir-Whorf with a ten foot pole. Granted, Sapir-Whorf didn't propose a theory of language evolution (that I know of), but that's still a whole lot of language-influencing-thought there.

The speech that emerged was not a pidgin or protolanguage, but true language.

Huh? So humans went from 0 to 60 in one generation? I can't quite wrap my mind around that.

Chomsky’s point is that without true language you cannot think deeply enough to gain a survival advantage....

I hope he's not proposing that without language you can't have intelligent thought. I've discussed this before, but Temple Grandin makes a pretty convincing argument for visual thinking and its effectiveness in higher-order cognition (I know I linked to her article on visual thinking in a much-earlier posting here, but I'm too lazy at the moment to dig it up). Granted, there may be/may have been some selective advantage to linguistic thought over visual thought.

Pure thought, which Chomsky says came before any “secondary” linking to a “sensory modality,” is not contaminated by the sound or words, the image of objects, or some other kind of perceptual sensation.

Is this based on any science? Or is it just armchair philosophy? It's interesting either way, but I hope he's not claiming that the idea has more validity than it does.

First, Chomsky's basic position is just a restatement of the old "what good is half an eye?" argument.

Oh no! Chomsky's a closet creationist?!1!

(I have no idea if he is, actually, and I'm not sure I care.)

2. From The Stranger's yearly list of apologies/regrets:

Moreover, Mr. Schmader regrets the inability of countless self-victimizing religious conservatives to understand that being deprived of the ability to oppress another is not the same as being oppressed.

Awesome.

On June 4, Brendan Kiley posted this ad on The Stranger's classifieds page: "Wanted: Intern for The Stranger's Theater Section—the old one has lost consciousness. Must be reliable (seriously, no flakes), available on Monday and/or Tuesday afternoons, and believe mindless data entry is a means to getting head." That should have read: "a means to getting ahead." We regret the error, which confirmed everyone's suspicions about us.

Ha.

There might've been more quotes I wanted, but I'm too lazy to find the rest. I'm noticing a theme tonight....

3. Ha. Someone thought Prop 8 The Musical was a blatant example of Christian-bashing. See quote above.


From here:

INSTANCE #5: Chaplains Fired for Praying in Jesus' Name

Chaplains for the State of Virginia are being denied their right to pray in Jesus' name. Six chaplains were fired for continuing to pray in Jesus' name. Earlier this year in Virginia, Rev. Hashmel Turner, a city councilman in Fredericksburg, was told by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that his prayers during city council meetings that ended in Jesus' name will continue to be banned.

Uh. They're not being denied their right to pray, etc. They're being denied the (unconstitutional) privilege of praying in a government building at a government function.

And finally, the #1 Christian Bashing Instance in America for 2008...

INSTANCE #1: Radical Homosexuals Assault Prop 8 Marriage Supporters in California

During and after the November campaign stories flooded in of pro-Prop 8 signs being taken, people verbally and physically assaulted, church property and private automobiles vandalized, and person's jobs and pastor's lives threatened simply for exercising their right to campaign and vote in support of traditional marriage.

I agree that vandalism and threatening lives is uncalled for. But come on -- the Christians can't deny that they started it by gay-bashing in the first place. And they weren't threatened for 'exercising their right...to support...traditional marriage." They were threatened for taking away someone else's civil rights. It's almost like the KKK complaining about getting flak for exercising their right to support 'traditional' ethno-cultural values.

4. The things I do for my father's dog.... And does she show one ounce of gratitude?

5. It's hard to believe that this cat used to look like this. Poor guy. Brain parasites that kill your sense of balance and fuck up your metabolism are a bitch.

1. The celebrated and unmentionable Nutrinomicon.

(No reason for that except pure weirdness.)

2. Whoa. Someone's making a movie about Temple Grandin.

I hope to god they do her and the issues justice.

3. An interesting -- if at times infuriating -- article about Australian Aboriginals. Mostly interesting to me due to the parallels with the US government's treatment of Native Americans. Though you don't see that issue getting as much publicity as the Australian counterpart....

Instead the nation was looking ruefully back into the past and apologizing for certain welfare policies between 1910 and 1970, a period when Aboriginal children were sometimes removed from their homes and parents for what was believed to be their own wellbeing, were taken elsewhere to be fostered or adopted, and were ‘brought up white’.

And almost the exact same thing happened to Native Americans....

Most provocatively, and absurdly, the report concluded that the removal policy constituted "genocide".

Well, I agree that exact word doesn't quite describe the situation. No one was killed. But equally strong language is called for here, I believe. The government was aiming to eradicate an entire culture. Possibly with benevolent intentions, but still.

On the front page of the issue for March 14, 2008, readers learnt that tribal elders at a place called Aurukun “are calling for children to be removed in the face of a comprehensive breakdown of social norms.”

Well yeah, but those horrible conditions wouldn't have occurred if the Australian government hadn't put them in that position....

How is it that at the very time when nothing remotely resembling traditional Aboriginal culture any longer exists at places like Aurukun, where the community has fallen into a cesspit of mutually reinforcing pathologies, the Australian intelligentsia adheres to a vision of indigenous culture that exists—if it exists at all—largely in the metaphysical realm?

How? Guilt. They feel justifiably guilty for eradicating indigenous culture and turning it into a 'cesspit of mutually reinforcing pathologies.' Sure, an apology alone won't create tangible change. But it's a start. And possibly a necessary step toward more practical solutions.

Oy. I can't take re-reading that article anymore. So many wrong-headed assumptions. So many misunderstandings.

4. Fucking Scientology. Someone seriously needs to shut them down. How many people have died because of their 'beliefs'?

Regardless of whether the kid legitimately had Kawasaki's or autism or whatever, he clearly had a seizure disorder. Most of those can be medicated to prevent or at least minimize the occurrence of said seizures. What do you wanna bet the Scientologists told Travolta not to give his son those meds? What do you wanna bet he wouldn't have fallen and gotten himself a fatal head wound if he hadn't had a seizure in the first place?

5. Braille's harder than it looks:

The reason why it was necessary to write from right to left was that, in those days, without the sophistication firstly of mechanical and then of electronic Braille production, the dots had to be pressed downwards and, when turned over, would provide a mirror image.

It was therefore not only necessary to write from right to left, but also to reverse the actual letters so that with the exception of letters like A and C, other parts of the alphabet had to be reversed.

Damn. Makes learning to write a tad more complicated....

Invented by Louis Braille at the age of 15, the idea came from a soldier who had served in the Napoleonic army in Poland and had attempted to devise a system that could, with night-time manoeuvres, allow messages to be sent and instructions to be passed from hand to hand.

Huh. Didn't know that.

You can't simply write Braille in large form so that as with print you can "catch your eye" on something that it is absolutely vital to deliver or to emphasise. Underlining is possible, but more out of technical form than in terms of being able to quickly highlight what needs to be referred to and at what point.

Again, never thought of that. Interesting.