Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Smoking Lettuce

Dread Tomato Addiction blog signature Stunningly STUPID: Representative Steve Buyer believes smoking lettuce is the same as smoking cigarettes.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Moment of Zen - Smoking Lettuce
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes
Political HumorNewt Gingrich Unedited Interview
[from The Daily Show]

Here a longer clip of the same from C-SPAN:



Maybe Steve Buyer has a been smoking of some lettuce himself? Hey Steve? How about sharing some of that good stuff with the rest of us!

... and THEN I went to Buyer's site and read this:

BUYER PROMOTES BETTER PUBLIC HEALTH POLICY;

Washington, D.C.—The House of Representatives today passed the Senate Amendment to H.R. 1256, the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which gives the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authority to regulate tobacco products. The FDA is already an over-stressed and under-resourced federal agency which will now be burdened with responsibilities that goes against its core mission—ensuring the safety of our nation’s food, drugs, and medical devices—to regulate an inherently risky product. Congressman Steve Buyer’s (IN-04) mission is to improve the nation’s public health, and he believes there is better policy to help smokers quit than the Senate Amendment to H.R. 1256.


I feel SO much safer knowing that Steve Buyer is out there fighting for our safety.
Dread Tomato Addiction blog signature

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Weird Search Results

Dread Tomato Addiction blog signature This morning I had fun review my StatCounter results for keyword searches that resulted in hits on this blog. There are some odd and interesting results to be found. I'm reporting these as follows:

"keywords" [results and commentary]
Resulting page is linked if appropriate.

Here we ...

"shake and pour sex commercial" [#1 Google search result. I'm not sure what it is this person is looking for, nor am I certain I should be proud they found me.]

"tomato thrown at someone" [#1 Google search result. I am now the definitive source for tomato tossing!]

"natasha leong" [#1 Google search result. I am now also the definitive source on flying rabbits!!]

"accepting uncertainty in life" [#4 Google search result. I seem to be a philosopher.]

"dating" [Out of over 16 milion hits, this blog is not even in the top 200, therefore if someone finds this blog which searching for dating advice they must really be desperate. However, this blog is the #1 result for the search "dating tomato".]

"song lyrics seven old ladies" [Only #31, but I'm happy to contribute.]

"gnome discrimination" [#1!!! I am the leader in Gnome Rights. Help end the abuse.]

"Coniculous lepin" [#1 and flying rabbits again. However, in retrospect it would have been funnier if I have used "Coniculous Leapin".]

... wow, I had no idea I am so influential. ;-) Dread Tomato Addiction blog signature

Friday, June 12, 2009

DI Luskin DI

Dread Tomato Addiction blog signature It seem that Casey Luskin and the Discover Institute have been hard at work censoring their critics.


*[Hat Tip Pharyngula]

But the video is up again anyway.


* And SHAME on Fox News for not even pretending to challenge obvious falsehood.


and to round things off, some great ones from ThunderfOOt

*

Dread Tomato Addiction blog signature

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Slim Jim explosion, 1 missing

Dread Tomato Addiction blog signature
It is a sad event; no one should have to die for beef jerky.

[From CNN]

[Edit: No-so-funny joke removed. Sorry about that.] Dread Tomato Addiction blog signature

Black Holes More Than They Seem

Dread Tomato Addiction blog signature [From ScienceNow] It seems there is more to black holes than we realized:

Running the model on a supercomputer, the team found the mass of M87's black hole to be 6.4 billion times the mass of our sun--two to three times larger than previous estimates. The model provided similar results for four other nearby galaxies, multiplying their black hole masses by factors of 1.5 to 3.

The results, which will be published in The Astrophysical Journal later this summer, "caught us off guard," says Gebhardt. "It looks like we've been systematically underestimating the mass of black holes."

It's a good think black holes don't take up much room to start with, because now we need to clear out more closet space for them.
Dread Tomato Addiction blog signature

Monday, June 8, 2009

Stephen Colbert gets a Haircut

Dread Tomato Addiction blog signature Stephen Colbert is in Iraq entertaining the troops this week, and he is sporting a new haircut. CNN reports that we can see the tonsorial update for ourselves tonight.

More video will no doubt be available at Colbert Nation.
Dread Tomato Addiction blog signature

Sunday, June 7, 2009

Failure is Fun!

Dread Tomato Addiction blog signature Failure is fun, if you do it right, and the Science Fail blog does it right. "Dirty Harry" takes the simple approach of posting anti-science quotes -without comment - and letting them speak for themselves. So are laugh out loud funny. I grabbed a few examples to post here; some real gems like ...


Josh Greenberger: "One fossil is NOT evidence."

Renuo Fides: "The general hypothesis of ID CAN be tested by the scientific method - although not as it pertains to "naturally" occurring life forms."

Jorge: " - by your own use of the term - you confirm it is a theory. Science has very few facts as such - other than data. Biology has many theories but almost no laws or "facts". "

There is more, and there is worse ... FAR worse ... at Science Fail.

Disclaimer: Excessive reading of posts at Science Fail or sites linked to from Science Fail may cause ocular bleeding. The management of this blog is not responsible for injuries that may occur as a result of excessive laughter. Do not taunt Science Fail. Study has shown that 50% of all Science Fail readers are below the median intelligence of all Science Fail readers.
Dread Tomato Addiction blog signature

Friday, June 5, 2009

Save us from 12/21/2012

Dread Tomato Addiction blog signature I guess I have not been paying attention, because I just learned that the World will end on December 21, 2012. Fortunately, Xtine is here to save us:

“I’ve known about 12/21/2012 for a good three years,” explains Minnesota native Xtine. “And I’ve been pissed off about it for a good three years. It sucks to have my birthday right before Christmas, but this end of the world prediction is the last straw.”

Xtine says she “plans to put an end to the end of the world baloney." She encourages everyone to google debunking, disproving, criticism of 2012. As much evidence as there is for the end of the world, or the ushering in of a New Golden Age, there is evidence that “a whole lotta nada” is going to happen on her birthday… again.

After reading her post, I am prepared to believe she can save us by the power of rant alone.
Dread Tomato Addiction blog signature

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Oh Crap, part 2.

The second in an a series of posts that I might regret starting.

When emperor penguins are in your vicinity, their signature tuxedos and waddling gaits make them hard to miss. But when scientists from the British Antarctic Survey tried to track Antarctic emperor penguin populations using satellites, the birds proved too small to be seen. That’s when they got the idea to focus on something much larger and darker than the penguins themselves: the stains left by their feces.

Using the patches of poop as a guide, the scientists examined the Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica and spotted 38 penguin colonies, including 10 that had never before been recorded.

More at Discoblog.


... and then there is THIS unfortunate confection ...





... and another ...



... and video of a penguin pooping ...





... and this ...





... and the science of penguin poop explained ...




OK, I think that's enough crap for one day. Oh wait, there's this! Dread Tomato Addiction blog signature

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Role reversal undermines speed-dating theories

Dread Tomato Addiction blog signature There's a theory of speed dating? Who knew??
Nature News has this article: Role reversal undermines speed-dating theories.

Speed dating is not just popular among those looking for romance. Psychologists have worked out that they can get swarms of student participants in mate-choice studies by offering speed-dating opportunities on university campuses in return for the right to analyse the dating behaviour during the events.

A study in Psychological Science points out that chivalric behaviour created by the speed-dating experience may be skewing the data.

Normally in speed dating, men walk around a room and visit a succession of seated women for mini dates just a few minutes long. Later, the participants note down whom they would like to meet again. If there is a match, the organizers help the people to get in touch. Psychologists have found that although men choose, on average, half of the women present, women choose to see only a third of the men again.

This isn't really a surprise. Among animals, females are usually the picky ones, because they make the larger reproductive investment. However, the new research, by Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick, social psychologists at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, demonstrates that tinkering with the speed-dating format alters human behaviour, dramatically changing the outcome.

"We asked executives from a commercial speed-dating company why they always had men rotate. They told us it was because women tend to have purses and other things to carry and because 'it seems more chivalrous'," says Eastwick. So the researchers decided to explore whether having males literally walking up to seated females was having a psychological effect.

The researchers established 15 speed-dating events for 350 young adults. During eight events, men rotated around the seated women, and during seven events, women moved between seated men. When men rotated, men said yes 50% of the time and women said yes 43% of the time. However, when women rotated, the trend for higher female selectivity vanished, with men saying yes 43% of the time while women said yes 45% of the time. [More at Nature.]

So now I know something I didn't know before; Not only does half* of what we know from psychology experiments come from studies of college students, but most of those student are hormone impaired.

* the other half comes from rats.
Dread Tomato Addiction blog signature