This is a page from a Toys 'R Us catalog, illustrating some science toys, and note the odd distinctions being made. Both the telescope and the microscope come in special pink versions, just for the girl who is apparently more interested in getting an instrument that matches her nail polish than being functional, and note also (you may have to click through to see the larger image) that in every case the pink model is less powerful than the black and gray model
In Your Inner Fish, Neil Shubin tells the story of evolution by tracing the organs of the human body back millions of years, long before the first creatures walked the earth. By examining fossils and DNA, Shubin shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our head is organized like that of a long-extinct jawless fish, and major parts of our genome look and function like those of worms and bacteria. We have compiled the figures from the book into a deck of PowerPoint slides for use in the classroom.
I don't know when I'd be inclined to use these, but they are wonderful Powerpoint slides illustrating evolutionary evidence.
Counterknowledge is defined as “misinformation packaged to look like fact” in Damian Thompson’s excellent (and short) book. People’s propensity for swallowing any dozy nonsense has been a pet subject of mine for some time; it is also an important consideration in much of the trends analysis I undertake.
We’ve just had a brainstorm about how times change and touched upon the nature of feminism; how in its heyday the cause was all about equality, whereas now it is more about the freedom of choice, and to express oneself. This doesn’t deny the continued existence of barriers, especially in the workplace (and the media – witness the furore over the Strictly Come Dancing dumping of Arlene Phillips). The parameters behind the most emotionally-charged causes can change over time.
Eeek! Women wishing to send that well-documented signal, known in social psychology as Keep Away Buster Or My Vagina Will Rip Off Your Penis, should rush to Top Shop and splash out £60 on this dress, because £60 is about the only thing that will splash out on this dress, apart from Steve Irwin’s ghost munk. How peculiar that sizes 10-16 are out of stock.
These snaps from Factiva’s handy search trends graph (Number of articles containing “green shoots” combined with Recession, Economy or Downturn, from last 2 years) suggest a sudden rise in optimism over the UK and world economy throughout Spring and Summer. The end of Summer decline is not what I expected though. Why would journalists, not just in the UK nationals but in the foreign and trade press be writing fewer articles mentioning “green shoots”?
Bravo to O&M Thailand for wittily highlighting this fabric softener's primary benefit. I wonder whether this would work in a hard water area.
True Blood is a fun distraction, but unoriginal. Vampires are now a romantic teen cliché, far removed from the fun Hammer horrors of my youth. They’re a poor trend subject too, now that they’re all about sex. Since Anne Rice’s novels, vampires have lost their strong association with death. Stand aside, fanged ones, you’ve wimped out.
I'm writing this on Sunday evening, and timing it to upload first thing Monday morning. Why? Because, if you're reading this then you are most probably damned to hell. Upon hearing the news that the Rapture is happening on Monday 21st September, I renounced my atheism, gave up my soul to Jesus and confessed all my sins.
And it was a relatively simple thing to apply the same scrutiny at another butt of TV comics: the Daily Express and its concern with the waves of immigrants to Britain’s holy shores.
I’m still waiting for the killer headline in the grey-top tabloids: Immigrants spread cancer. That’ll be a laugh.
This lunchtime I developed an app for my 2 year-old HP monitor. It was carefully designed as a warning system to be employed during my walks through the brambled pathways of my RSS forest. All you need is a homeopathic particle empathy detector (a glass of water where at least one of the molecules retains the memory of passing within 5,000 miles of Stephen Hawking’s bladder) that’s psychically connected to a piece of Blu-Tac stuck to your monitor.
It surprises me how few people find Yoda annoying. Maybe it’s because he was trumped by that monstrosity Jar Jar Binks. I couldn’t stand the little green gnome because he was such an obvious vehicle for nerd wisdom. I realise now that, if there were a measurable scale for such a thing, I was as annoyed at Yoda fans 20 years ago as I am about iPhone owners today. As comedian Marcus Brigstocke said "To the people who've got iPhones: you just bought one, you didn't invent it!".
Bloody hell, that was a tenuous link, but in a way, Yoda was a bit like the iPhone (this is turning into one of those Anglican sermons “and seeing those boys on their skateboards reminded me of Jesus”). Small. Annoying. Loaded with apps. Telekenisis app. Spiral-like-a-dervish app. Make funny noises app. And my favourite – disappear-before-your-eyes-and-die app. He even upgraded between films, but backwards.
They were just magic powers, that’s all. Without them, the Jedi would have been killed within a week and Hogwarts pupils would have achieved decent exam results rather than gain house points for fucking around with cauldrons.
Face it, what new technology would have thrived without apps? Apps are the annoying ginger stepchild who was being ignored or beaten up and yet grew up to save the village and become a great wizard king.
Teenagers took up texting and the mass market mobile was born. Twitter’s just an app. Facebook? Don’t talk to me about Facebook. Other people’s requests for me to connect with their dinosaur hunting app or which mongoose do you most resemble app is driving me mad (there’s an app for that too).
With half a million views, you’ve probably already seen this spoof ad for ex-girlfriend-stalking iPhone apps but it does touch on a simple truth: it’s the seemingly pointless things made for instant gratification that drives the app market, even if you buy into the technology for more meaningful reasons.
"Pareidolia (pronounced /pærɪˈdoʊliə/) is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse. The word comes from the Greek para- ("beside", "with", or "alongside"—meaning, in this context, something faulty or wrong (as in paraphasia, disordered speech)) and eidolon ("image"; the diminutive of eidos ("image", "form", "shape"))." – Wikipedia
via Daily Mail
Christopher Hitchens regularly compares Christianity to living in
As a commenter on The World’s Best Ever says, it’s creepy how the “incest” kids are the same as the ones guilty of “hating parents”.
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