Okay, yeah, making fun of god-bothering wingnuts for their furiously typed typos is not exactly the pinnacle of snark, but sometimes, I just can't resist. Especially when the passage was blockquoted by your Wonkette nearly eight hours ago (meaning, like, way more hits for RenewAmerica than they usually get) and it still hasn't been fixed.
Click image to engorge enlarge.
The time-honored value of disciple can only be seen as a Sign Of The Apostle-ix.
Even if take out of context.
Slow news day? A measure of where the Right is at? For whatever reason, Michael Goldfarb has been profiled by the NYT ("the conservative political operative of the moment"), with a link on their homepage, no less.
Yeah. That guy.
Happy Super Bowl Sunday, sheeple!
This Year’s Illuminati-Super Bowl Connection is More Sinister Than Ever
[–]sharilynj 151 points 3 hours ago
What's been the strangest experience you've had due to your sudden fame?
[–]NateSilver538[S] 413 points 2 hours ago
When I was in Mexico last week, I got recognized at the top of the Sun Pyramid at Teotihuacan, which I'm pretty sure really is a sign of the Apocalypse.
(source)
(h/t: Kris E. Benson's RT)
A famously mysterious military space plane operated by the US Air Force has launched from Florida, the third flight in a secretive test programme.
The reusable, unmanned craft is designed to operate in Earth orbit for extended periods. Its prior missions in 2010 and 2011 lasted 224 and 469 days.
The US government kept the timing of Tuesday's launch secret and has not said how long the mission will last.
More links.
Happened across something by Martin Gardner from his days of writing the Notes of a Fringe Watcher column for Skeptical Inquirer. It ran in Volume 24.1, Jan/Feb 2000, under the title, "The Second Coming of Jesus." You can guess from those data what the piece is mostly about, but skimming down, there's this delightful little nugget:
In 1992 Harold Camping published, through a vanity press, his book 1994? It predicted that the Second Coming would occur in September of that year. This was followed in 1993 by a sequel titled Are You Ready? Together, the two books totaled 955 pages. Trained as a civil engineer, Camping made enough money running a construction company to found, in 1959, Family Stations, Inc. It soon came to control thirty-nine radio stations. A non-ordained Bible scholar, Camping conducted a nightly radio talk show from his headquarters in Oakland, California. After September passed with no sign of the Lord, Camping changed his date to October 2. When that passed uneventfully, he ran out of excuses and decided against any more date setting.
Did he now.
Maybe he was just waiting until Gardner died.
... discuss this:
A once proud and subversive warrior tribe that deified freakdom, drag queens have become awfully mainstream. Tame transvestites are now passing for Kardashians …
Also: screen grab of headline, just in case Just Another Friend from L.A. doesn't click the above link.
FFS, does EVERYTHING have to be a Brand®?
Examine this picture closely. It's okay. It's for Science.
Notice anything odd?
Hint: which model do think has the best body?
Won't someone think of the children who are trying to make a living with Photoshop?
(h/t: TC, via email, and Rebecca J. Rosen)
Emph. added:
Apple engineers and designers, spurred by Mr. Jobs, have been struggling for years to find a new interface for the television. One of the biggest hurdles, according to people with knowledge of the project, has been replacing the television set’s annoying best friend: the awkward and confusing remote control. Apple would give people a way to choose the content on their television that is as easy as choosing the content on their iPod, iPhone or iPad.
Alternative remote ideas floated by Apple included a wireless keyboard and mouse, or using an iPod, iPhone or iPad as a remote. None of these concepts worked. But there was one “I finally cracked it” moment, when Apple realized you could just talk to your television.
Enter Siri.
It’s the stuff of science fiction. You sit on your couch and rather than fumble with several remotes or use hand gestures, you simply talk: …
What could possibly go wrong with that? asks the guy who still won't put voice recognition software on his computer out of fears that someday his dictation will be misunderstood as "Wipe hard drive now. Yes, I'm sure."
I'll also point out that, typically, there is only one remote control. Households featuring multiple children, please note.
Anyway, I'm gonna hold out until Siri lets you punch through the teevee. And then I will start watching a lot of Fox News.
This is actually a pretty good talk (set of talks), at least so far. The talk prior to the one pictured above indicates that the brute force approach to machine translation of text really seems to be paying off. (This is not to say that the Googlers have no smarts or cleverness by any means. In fact, it is quite encouraging to see someone get usable results by setting aside the perennial a-true-AI-is-just-around-the-corner approach.)
[Added] A bonus from watching the above video: At about the 42 minute mark, I learned a new word, and consequently, I am now able to state with confidence that doing quefrency alanysis and liftering on a cepstrum are operations no longer restricted to Dr. Spooner.
JPL:
Astronomers, including a NASA-funded team member, have discovered a new class of Jupiter-sized planets floating alone in the dark of space , away from the light of a star. The team believes these lone worlds were probably ejected from developing planetary systems.
[...]
The discovery indicates there are many more free-floating Jupiter-mass planets that can't be seen. The team estimates there are about twice as many of them as stars. In addition, these worlds are thought to be at least as common as planets that orbit stars. This would add up to hundreds of billions of lone planets in our Milky Way galaxy alone.
[...]
The study, led by Takahiro Sumi from Osaka University in Japan, appears in the May 19 issue of the journal Nature.
The survey is not sensitive to planets smaller than Jupiter and Saturn, but theories suggest lower-mass planets like Earth should be ejected from their stars more often. As a result, they are thought to be more common than free-floating Jupiters.
[...]
"Our results suggest that planetary systems often become unstable, with planets being kicked out from their places of birth."
[...]
I am now going to depart from the Internet to write about ten million words of science fiction.
Ken Layne has already connected it to that French Dominatrix guy, bin Laden, Newt Gingrich, Donald Trump, and, oh yeah, the end of the world, on Saturday. Also.
Excitement++!
In news that will come as a shock to almost no one, ...
Urk:
That creature Tyra Banks has her arm around up there apparently now spends a lot of time on the Facebook, where he posts things like this …
I will be in Yorba Linda tonight at the Nixon Library with Hugh Hewitt. I'm still so grateful that Richard Nixon persuaded me to join him in the executive branch more than forty years ago.
… and excitedly links to things like this:
So he's not just keeping his collection of torture porn to himself anymore. Now he's redistributing it. As long as it's not Americans doing it. Because that would be wrong, amirite?
[Added] Never forget:
I mean, how else do you think they can sell those things for 99¢, or whatever it is these days?
In fact, the lawsuit claims, the "taco meat filling" used by Taco Bell contains is only about 35% beef, with binders, extenders, preservatives, additives and other agents making up the other 65%.
The worst part? After you say "binders, extenders, preservatives, additives," what else could there be? What are these "other agents?"
Or maybe the better question is who are these other agents?
(h/t: Ken Layne | pic. source)
Rachel Slajda/TPM passes along a report that Ted Haggard will be starring in a "reality" teevee "special" on Thesarah paLin Channel.
It is unclear whether the show's title will be "Ted's New Methage." Also not known: whether Mike Jones will appear.
Riley Waggaman wins the Internet for most appropriate facepalm.
(pic. source: Not My Tribe)
Easy enough to do when they happen to other people. As with, for example, Prof. Dave Noon:
The End of Education
…in which I emerge briefly from the end-of-semester grading abattoir to note that I have detected a student plagiarizing from Conservapedia.
I’m now going to go roust a bear from hibernation and make him eat my kidneys.
