Category Archives: I Kid You Not

Cervical cancer jab ‘in a year’

From the “It’s fun to be a Luddite” file, witness this bit of news from the BBC that Merck’s new vaccine to prevent cervical cancer might be available within the year.

Cervical cancer is associated with the human papillomovirus. The drug Gardasil was apparently 100% effective at preventing early stage cancers and pre-cancerous abnormalities, which account for 70% of all cervical cancers, and over a quarter of a million deaths world wide each year.

So why is filed under the “I Kid You Not Section” of my blog?

Researchers believe a vaccine could work best if given before adolescence, but critics fear this could encourage under-age sex.

Yeah, getting stabbed by needles really makes me want to go out and have sex. Who are these critics?

Well, apparently they include Scott Phelps, executive director of Abstinence and Marriage Education Partnership. His comment:

“Sexually transmitted diseases in the United States will not be contained by injecting vaccines into pre-adolescents in anticipation of promiscuous behavior,” Scott Phelps, executive director of Abstinence & Marriage Education Partnership, wrote in a recent statement.

Of course, Scott has yet to tell us exactly how these diseases will be contained.

Call me a traditionalist…

BaseballWhen it comes to most things, I’m about as geeky and gonzo for gizmos as you could possibly imagine, but in some things, I’m a bit of a purist. It’s hard to argue with a charcoal fire for cooking salmon and steaks. It’s hard argue with roses and diamonds for an annivery gift. And baseball needs nothing to jazz it up.

That’s why I read this Kansas City Star article with genuine horror. The first two innings of the July 16th game between minor league teams the Kansas City T-Bones and the Schaumberg Flyers will be played on Xbox. Inning three will begin with the real teams taking the field to play the rest of the game.

Shudder.

The T-bones director of community relations:

“Everybody in the world is going to want to do this after us,” Williams said.

Truly, the Apocalypse cannot be far away.

Gutenberg Gem: Occult Chemistry, by Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater

Okay, okay, it’s not really a gem, except in the sense that it’s interesting to read an early example of utter and complete mumbo jumbo. Occult Chemistry, by Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater is an extensive, detailed, and complete description of chemistry as revealed to the authors through clairvoyance. Published in 1919, the exact nature of elements was still fairly new: Rutherford had proposed his planetary model of the atom in 1911. Still, this had to have been considered craziness of the highest order, even in 1919.

A quote, just to give the flavor:

I remember the occasion vividly. Mr. Leadbeater was then staying at my house, and his clairvoyant faculties were frequently exercised for the benefit of myself, my wife and the theosophical friends around us. I had discovered that these faculties, exercised in the appropriate direction, were ultra-microscopic in their power. It occurred to me once to ask Mr. Leadbeater if he thought he could actually see a molecule of physical matter. He was quite willing to try, and I suggested a molecule of gold as one which he might try to observe. He made the appropriate effort, and emerged from it saying the molecule in question was far too elaborate a structure to be described. It evidently consisted of an enormous number of some smaller atoms, quite too many to count; quite too complicated in their arrangement to be comprehended. It struck me at once that this might be due to the fact that gold was a heavy metal of high atomic weight, and that observation might be more successful if directed to a body of low atomic weight, so I suggested an atom of hydrogen as possibly more manageable. Mr. Leadbeater accepted the suggestion and tried again. This time he found the atom of hydrogen to be far simpler than the other, so that the minor atoms constituting the hydrogen atom were countable. They were arranged on a definite plan, which will be rendered intelligible by diagrams later on, and were eighteen in number.

Be Skeptable!

I found the rather curious non-word “skeptable” in a posting, and wondered just how often people used this particular bastardization of the word skeptical. The answer is ::google(“skeptable”, “quite a lot”)::. Try for instance this link from Waukegan Schools that instructs parents on how to educate their children:

Have a ZERO tolerance for ANY grade below C!!!

Have a very skeptable attitude toward any grade below a B!

The more you adhere to this, the better your child will do in school.

No doubt they think it is a perfectly cromulent word.

What I want to know is…

just how did this seem like a good idea?

I mean really, did someone pitch the idea like “I know, to emphasize how the comments in the press can turn around and reflect badly on our organization, let’s make a training video featuring a topless lesbian wedding!”? Did that seem like a good idea to someone? Did anyone actually say “yes, that’s what we need to help inform our members to straighten up and fly right!”?

Sweet Zombie Jesus.

On the pope’s funeral…

Estimates are varied, but it seems clear that over a million people saw the pope’s body before he was finally buried over the weekend. Keeping with the spirit of brainwagon, let’s not dwell on the greater impact this man’s life had on the world, but rather just concentrate on the trivial aspects.

Assume that each person in line is standing 18″ from the person in front of them (that’s a pretty tight line, but let’s work with that. One million people standing in such a line works out to 284 miles. If we assume a reasonable walking pace of three miles per hour, then we have people walking past the pope 24 hours a day for nearly four days. Yes, I know, they weren’t single file, but sheesh. It’s still an amazing turnout.

Two Jokes

A crook decided to break into the counterfeiting business. To ensure success, he decided that he would only try to pass his phony currency in the most back water towns deep in the heart of hillbilly country, figuring that most of the poor and simple folk who lived there had never seen denominations of even modest size.

He then strikes upon the idea of printing $18 bills. After all, if the Treasury Department caught him, then he could claim that he was just goofing around: nobody would ever cash an 18 dollar bill.

He loads his wallet full of his contraband currency, and heads to swampy country. He saunters into a general store, picks out a soda, walks to the counter where he is met by the clerk. The clerk says “that will be 50 cents”. The crook whips out his $18 bill and says “Can you break this for me?”

The clerk responds, “Sure, do you want 2 $9’s or 3 $6’s?”

Think that’s funny? Check out an even funnier joke..

Blogger fooled, news at 11.

Not a computer of the futureYour beloved editor (that’s me, in case you didn’t realize) was apparently taken in by an Internet hoax. The image of the “computer of the future” envisioned by Rand scientists in 1954 is in fact a cleverly edited photograph from a Navy website which shoes a full scale mockup of a nuclear submarine’s maneuvering room. I smelled a rat when I blogged it: I should have known better. There were certainly lots of clues to suggest that it was a photoshop job. I remember questioning the odd scale differences between the foreground teletype and the human.

Increment my shame counter.

It was really cool though. To the original creators: kudos!

The Computer of Today, From Yesterday!

Home Computer of 2004The caption reads:

Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a “home computer” could look like in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be econimically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and the Fortran language the computer will be easy to use and only…

Courtesy of Metafilter