"And my body is no temple. That’s why I’m altaring it." - Phil Plait in response to some idiot who thought he shouldn't get a tattoo because "your body is a temple."

I <3 bad puns.

One cannot board a ship without imagining ship-wreck. Daniel envisions it as being like an opera, lasting several hours and proceeding through a series of Acts ( Read more... )

...Simon Keegan, the trading standards inspector employed by the Northern Ireland Trading Standards Service, told me that "there is no conclusive scientific evidence stating that chiropractic does not offer effective treatment for infantile colic."

As it happens, to the best of my knowledge, there is no conclusive scientific evidence that chewing my ( Read more... )

"Ever stop to think about the important questions of life?"

Why yes I have, dear flier handed to me by a fellow student on campus, yes I have.

"Answer a quick quiz online and get in the draw to win a FREE $800 laptop computer"

Oh wow! A chance to win an $800 laptop and all I have to do is answer a quick quiz?! I bet there's no catch whatsoever!

Umm, ( Read more... )

Sometimes I wonder if even 10% of the people who proclaim their belief in God actually do believe in God. I am particularly unimpressed by those who proclaim the loudest; they demonstrate by their very activism that they fear the effect of any erosion of religion, and they must think that erosion is likely if they don't put their shoulders to the ( Read more... )

We may be, as I have said before on this blog, storytellers by nature; but nature itself is not story-like. And because the stories that we weave can so often be limiting, can so often trap us, or can so often simply go over the same old ground, again and again, this attention to the world can loosen the bonds a little, can give us over to a kind ( Read more... )

My Google skills are failing me. Can anyone point me to a definitive list of English pronouns listed somewhere more authoritative than wikipedia ( Read more... )

Self- interactions involving a solitary phase are generally difficult to observe, although examples have been documented that involve short-lived but highly-excited states accompanied by various forms of stimulated emission, although the resulting fluxes are generally not well measured. This form of interaction also appears to be the current ( Read more... )

If people don't know something as basic as the location of organs in the human body, it's no wonder they have no idea about what will and what won't cure their various ailments.

So Satya, a writer for the Examiner1 objects to crashing a lunar orbiter into the Moon, on the basis of metaphor confused with reality. Making fun of her lunacy (I stole that one from one of the commenters) feels like beating up a 5 year old might, so I'll just point out one particularly unenlightened paragraph:

Purposefully crashing something into ( Read more... )