Daily Briefs: Repent, scientists
By Chris Packham in Daily Briefs
Mon., Nov. 24 2008 @ 9:09AM
By CHRIS PACKHAM
Gotta keep the devil way down in the
hole: If you're like me, you spend a lot of time sitting in
your darkened kitchen drinking Taster's Choice and listening to the
police scanner, and you smell so strongly of Aqua Velva that you can
see wavy blue-colored odor-lines wafting from your torso. And, thanks
to the police scanner, you know that life in parts of Kansas City is
terrifying and dangerous. Unfortunately for people who like numbers,
such as Nate Silver and Jimmy the Greek, that danger is also
mathematically unquantifiable, according to Yael T. Abouhalkah and the
Kansas City Police Department. In 2007, Kansas City was 18th on the
list of the nation's most dangerous cities. NOT BAD! This year, the
Police Department was so bad about record keeping that they couldn't
give accurate numbers to the FBI. Therefore, Kansas City didn't make
this year's list. Furthermore, while there are no numbers to back up my
contention that we live in the MOST DANGEROUS CITY IN THE WORLD, there
are no numbers for the police department to use to dispute that contention.
After the jump, where science has gone wrong. HINT: It's not the standard model of particle physics! Click here or on my creamy vanilla filling:
Science Whatever: If scientists want to bitch about public ignorance -- and they do! -- they're going to have to divest some or all of their annoying scientific whimsy and start acting more like the grim-faced Germans who invented rocketry and bombed the shit out of Western Europe, forcing the United States to send your grandfather over with a rifle and some kinetic fireball incendiaries strapped to his back to bomb their Nazi asses straight to the Germanic equivalent of hell. That was when people took science seriously. In 1997, some insufferable NASA scientists dressed in matching rugby shirts landed a robotic probe on Mars and immediately began applying the most unacceptably whimsical names to rocks that they could think of: Barnacle Bill, Scooby Doo, Yogi, the list goes on until your body develops a toxic insulin resistance and you lapse into a diabetic coma. It was so horrible. That was about when my support for the space program died and I repented to God for my prideful ways and turned my life over to Christ, but what else is there to do in prison after you've maxed out your body's potential for muscular hypertrophy at the weight station? Watch the NASA channel? That's what got us into this trouble in the first place.
The pygmy tarsier is a primate so tiny that it sleeps in a matchbox and washes its tiny face in a sink made out of a walnut shell. Like a lost city or an Ark of the Covenant, the last time one was spotted by anybody who wasn't drunk or hopped up on jungle jenkem, which is like urban jenkem only made out of leopard poop, was in the 1930s. Now the mythical tiny men have been recovered via the scientific method of deploying hundreds of nets around Indonesia, and the science writers who aren't busy saying they look like li'l Furbies are instead saying they look like gremlins. Thanks to scientific whimsy, the half-wits who are convinced that the Large Hadron Collider will bring about the end of the world after it's repaired next summer are now probably going to be writing letters to the editor unencumbered by subject-verb agreement or punctuation, vehemently begging scientists not to feed pygmy tarsiers after midnight. Previously, on Science: Special Victims Unit: Hobbits. It's your own fault for drawing pop-culture analogies, science; why do you think so many people are worried about the psychotic leprechaun haunting the International Space Station?
Gotta keep the devil way down in the
hole: If you're like me, you spend a lot of time sitting in
your darkened kitchen drinking Taster's Choice and listening to the
police scanner, and you smell so strongly of Aqua Velva that you can
see wavy blue-colored odor-lines wafting from your torso. And, thanks
to the police scanner, you know that life in parts of Kansas City is
terrifying and dangerous. Unfortunately for people who like numbers,
such as Nate Silver and Jimmy the Greek, that danger is also
mathematically unquantifiable, according to Yael T. Abouhalkah and the
Kansas City Police Department. In 2007, Kansas City was 18th on the
list of the nation's most dangerous cities. NOT BAD! This year, the
Police Department was so bad about record keeping that they couldn't
give accurate numbers to the FBI. Therefore, Kansas City didn't make
this year's list. Furthermore, while there are no numbers to back up my
contention that we live in the MOST DANGEROUS CITY IN THE WORLD, there
are no numbers for the police department to use to dispute that contention.After the jump, where science has gone wrong. HINT: It's not the standard model of particle physics! Click here or on my creamy vanilla filling:
Science Whatever: If scientists want to bitch about public ignorance -- and they do! -- they're going to have to divest some or all of their annoying scientific whimsy and start acting more like the grim-faced Germans who invented rocketry and bombed the shit out of Western Europe, forcing the United States to send your grandfather over with a rifle and some kinetic fireball incendiaries strapped to his back to bomb their Nazi asses straight to the Germanic equivalent of hell. That was when people took science seriously. In 1997, some insufferable NASA scientists dressed in matching rugby shirts landed a robotic probe on Mars and immediately began applying the most unacceptably whimsical names to rocks that they could think of: Barnacle Bill, Scooby Doo, Yogi, the list goes on until your body develops a toxic insulin resistance and you lapse into a diabetic coma. It was so horrible. That was about when my support for the space program died and I repented to God for my prideful ways and turned my life over to Christ, but what else is there to do in prison after you've maxed out your body's potential for muscular hypertrophy at the weight station? Watch the NASA channel? That's what got us into this trouble in the first place.
The pygmy tarsier is a primate so tiny that it sleeps in a matchbox and washes its tiny face in a sink made out of a walnut shell. Like a lost city or an Ark of the Covenant, the last time one was spotted by anybody who wasn't drunk or hopped up on jungle jenkem, which is like urban jenkem only made out of leopard poop, was in the 1930s. Now the mythical tiny men have been recovered via the scientific method of deploying hundreds of nets around Indonesia, and the science writers who aren't busy saying they look like li'l Furbies are instead saying they look like gremlins. Thanks to scientific whimsy, the half-wits who are convinced that the Large Hadron Collider will bring about the end of the world after it's repaired next summer are now probably going to be writing letters to the editor unencumbered by subject-verb agreement or punctuation, vehemently begging scientists not to feed pygmy tarsiers after midnight. Previously, on Science: Special Victims Unit: Hobbits. It's your own fault for drawing pop-culture analogies, science; why do you think so many people are worried about the psychotic leprechaun haunting the International Space Station?
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