There are cultures where tattooing is acceptable.
There are cultures where piercings are acceptable.

While this may not be *abuse*, I suspect the tattooers aren't the best parents, given the line of reasoning.
And yet, they've propagated their genetics 7 times, (to my wife's and my 1).

Damn, I wish natural selection didn't mean promiscuity was a superior trait to intelligence.

http://www.small.to/article.php/20020823173939752

Time to start working on beating him...

@Whenn: Yes, really. If your belief system can stand up to satire, you are made immune by righteous indignation.

Kevin is wrong about the impetus for the original FSM letter. He is right that there is "a difference between disagreeing with someone else's beliefs, and being an all out obnoxious douche." (That said, edc3, that's hardly "quiet reasoning.")

Also, I really think the FSM in the original post looks neato, but not very tasty.

@Kevin, I don't think your memory of the genesis of the FSM is accurate.

This wasn't (originally) made to belittle Christians. It was meant to oppose their interference with the educational system. Some school district in Kansas had decided that they should teach Intelligent Design (non-science), alongside the theory of Natural Selection/evolution.

It started out using a powerful tool (satire) to illustrate that this was a slippery slope. ID is religion, no matter how hard it's "dressed", otherwise, and their arguments to the contrary open the door to other things (FSM) being considered equally scientific. If they wanted to teach ID, they needed to teach Pastafarianism, for the same reasons. And (obviously), nobody wants them to teach Pastafarianism.

Now, the reason the FSM became so popular? Well, it *is* funny and ridiculous. And now, maybe they are making fun of people for believing something that seems ridiculous to them. Those being made fun of should either be made immune, by righteous indignation...or should reconsider whether their beliefs really are ridiculous.

Gloved right hand.
Long legs (human proportions)
Reflective surface that doesn't pull in at bendable joints.

I'm a bigfoot-believer-wannabe (I want to believe), but this picture isn't it.

I'm guessing misunderstanding, rather than hoax. A hoaxer would go to greater lengths...

Paper airplanes fly by the "kite/glider" principle, not because they have an airfoil.

An airfoil would, indeed, develop lift as air is passed over it.

A paper airplane wing, however, would either descend smoothly, or pitch up/stall (repeat) if enough air were present.

Bottom line: they shoulda used a real wing, and even then, I'm skeptical they'd get it precisely tuned enough.

I agree that's a good substitute for eye rolling.
(But it's not a facepalm.)

Undoubtedly, Air Kenya was the worst airline. I'm a private pilot, and it was unnerving to get on a plane *with* the pilots, and observe that they did no pre-flight check. (So, Air Kenya might have division of labor---someone else who did it for them, but this seems prone to other problems.)

Then, the luggage went to Burundi instead of Uganda. And even though I identified that within 30 minutes of landing, it still took 3 days to get it back.

Oh, and I'm just shy of 5' 8". I had bruised knees on that flight.

[That said, I've certainly had worse *flights*. For example, the spring, 2002--just after 9/11---flight to London...in which the 3 year old kid near me screamed, ran up and down the aisles, threw toys which hit other passengers, and woke people up if he say they were nodding off...for the ENTIRE flight. Flight attendants tried to occupy him, but his mother sure didn't. And I think people were just too scared to complain about inconvenience and rudeness at that time, especially to folks with brown skin---they were middle-Eastern, I think. A combination of biases, prejudices, and passivity meant that we put up with this for the whole flight.]

Lasse and b made comments consistent with my first thought.

1) That's a good photo---despite the caption of "rolling her eyes" being different gesture, Katie's hand-to-brow expresses the same exasperation.

2) Sexism isn't *inherently* funny. Put some other stereotype or prejudice in there, to test...
(Hey, wait, this could be perceived as anti-male sexist, or anti-female sexist...it's a twofer, as the first commenter points out.)

Gladwell wrote about this in Blink , though he attributed it to racial biases. (Half-Jamaican, he was troubled to note that his natural bias was "white=positive, black = negative".)

It's clearly not about cleanliness. In some cultures, accrued, "earned" dirt is a good thing---the reason "black belt" is the top rank is that everyone originally started with a white belt...one who had worked at it hard and long enough eventually turned their belt black with soot/dirt.

And white moves first in chess for absolutely racial reasons.

I've been doing something *similar* (though arguably less scientific) for a while now: http://www.small.to/article.php/20030514130430708

I've been trying to correlate popular song lyrics with political voting. I've looked at the songs that are popular to predict the next president...

Note that the link above is only the most detailed example, not the most recent.

What about Harvey Mudd appropriating the Caltech Cannon from in front of Fleming Hall, in broad daylight? (with CalTech failing to do the proper load studies in getting it back)

What about MIT's subsequent "re-stealing" of the cannon, and transportation across the country, without being caught?

One minor correction...Battle Creek is, in fact, up north by Redding and Red Bluff. It's even near the Sacramento River.

Chino, however, is in Southern California, nowhere near Salmon spawning areas.

Something about the eye-socket looks...suspicious.

Well, it stinks. The whole thing stinks. This isn't just a banking crisis, it's a credit crisis. We've become a country of "entitleds", people who must own, must buy. And we've financed this acquisition on debt. As a result, most entities, from individuals, to businesses, to, well, the White House (they're among the greatest transgressors, having financed everything with more debt than all the prior presidents combined)...most entities have been buying things they can't afford, and are setting record leverage levels.

And since the U.S. isn't really much of a manufacturer any more, that means our economy is propped up on consumerism. And the flipping Fed has exacerbated it by being so afraid of even a minor correction, that they've continued to encourage this irresponsable debt spiral, with low rates.

So, who's to blame? Well, everyone who bought things they couldn't afford, and who encouraged or financed that. It's not just the banks.

10 years ago, before the .COM bubble burst, I'd have lauded some cleansing of debt by some hefty interest rate hikes.

Now, however, we're left with two choices:
Inflate our way out of this (bailout with $700B at first, and then another $1T when they realize this is a catastrophe, all the while trying to increase money supply and encourage savings by hiking interest rates)---that will kill employment, and a lot of people will hurt, and the wealthy people from before will continue to be wealthy. That sucks.

Correct (deflate) our way out of this, and that approach involves letting bad debt fail. Unfortunately, that includes our government, at this point. We've let the situation get so !@#$% bad, that we'll end up with a second Great Depression, and hope to take our suppliers (other countries) down with us, so that the U.S. can continue to exist.
That sucks.

It sucks that I've been responsible with my money, haven't bought things that I can't afford, and that *either way*, I'm footing the bill.

It sucks that in the first approach, the people who are more responsible for this mess aren't punished appropriately.

It sucks that the tragedy here is the choice between (good people punished, bad people not so much vs. everyone punished)

It sucks that in order to punish the bastards, we'd have to lose everything.

It sucks that the only three ways out of this mess (that come to mind) are:
- crazy-ass innovation (likely in the area of energy) that makes the U.S. much more efficient, COMBINED with newfound fiscal responsibility. [Think "Mr. Fusion" from Back to the Future"]
- Depression that may just dissolve the U.S.
- Letting the bastards get away with it, inflate our way almost to the level of Zimbabwe, by bailing the bastards out.

So, do I like the bailout plan? No. IT SUCKS. But I'm not betting on option 1. And option 2 seems like too big of a gamble.

It sucks.

Small.to is a community blog I run. When it's not stagnant, it has stories and links about Business, Entertainment, Fantasy Sports, Food, Politics, Sports, Science and Technology, Top n lists, and other stuff the members find interesting. It will not be stagnant by the end of August.

It could be less stagnant even sooner, if any folks here want to contribute.