Unsought Input

Apparently the CBC in Canada thought they would involve the fans in a contest to pick out a new theme song for hockey broadcasts.  This is just the sort of interactive, crowd-sourcing, brand-building exercise the Internet excels at.  It’s also a ripe invitation to pranksters like the Something Awful forum goons.

Here’s the top-viewed, top-voted entry right now:

This is the most beautiful sound ever to be associated with hockey.

Please, do your part and log in and vote for this anthem. Give the other entries a fair listen, but I think you’ll agree nothing captures the spirit of hockey quite like this techno mashup of sheep and babies crying.

Here’s the official music video:

Creationism. It’s been finding its way into schools by hiding behind the facade of intelligent design. We’ve written about it in the past.

One argument in particular seems to appeal to all the rational, open minded people out there. The Creationists ask, why can’t we tell both sides of the story? We can teach the controversy and let people make up their minds for themselves.

This sounds nice and democratic and all but the argument has several fatal flaws:

1. We don’t teach Chinese in Spanish class because, although Chinese is great and kids should be able to learn it if they want, Chinese is not Spanish. Creationism posits that there are supernatural, unexplainable causes for things and that’s the exact opposite of the scientific method.
2. There is no controversy to teach. Among anyone who has actually studied biology or genetics there’s really no controversy. The controversy is between virtually all the experts on one side and a very loud group of non experts on the other. To go back to the Spanish example, would you let someone write the Spanish language text book if they admitted they don’t speak the language, had never spent any time in a Spanish-speaking country, and they disagreed with what native speakers say is the proper grammar?
3. We separate church and state for a reason. No one (in the U.S.) ever talks about teaching Hindu creationism or Navajo creationism in public schools. Teaching from one religion’s beliefs and not another’s in discriminatory. Other that counting the warm bodies in the pews, how can we judge which mythical creation story is worth teaching and which isn’t? Some religions have books older than the Bible.
4. Creationism is an intellectual dead end. If the conclusion to every mystery is “God did it,” where can we go from there? We certainly can’t discover DNA, decode the genome, create new drugs and therapies, use evolutionary techniques to create computer algorithms, fight drug-resistant bacteria, etc. To beat a dead horse, it’s like a Spanish class where the teacher answers questions about conjugating verbs in the past tense by saying “it’s too hard, it’s unknowable, you can’t learn it unless God reveals it to you.”

The list goes on. There’s one argument I generally don’t like to make, which is the slippery slope argument – that is, if we allow one thing to happen, that will set society on a slippery slope toward some crazy scenario that no one would be happy with. I don’t think creationism in public schools puts us on an inevitable path to the Middle Ages. But let me ask you this: do you really thing the very religious people leading the intelligent design movement will stop at Creationism?

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A few years ago some crazy religious fanatics crashed planes into buildings. The authorities were quick to step in and step up security in airports. Unluckily for us the authorities at the time happened to lead by this guy:

So what we’ve gotten is a big mess of silly little rules and a mass of power-happy security screeners who can ruin your vacation with the flimsiest pretext. It’s not all bad, the shoe removal part makes us all a bit more humble and security theater makes most people feel safer. But now it’s time to celebrate the stupidest reasons to ban people from planes.

#1 – 3.2 Ounces of Toothpaste. This one has probably gotten a few of us in trouble, ever since government scientists discovered the formula: “> 3oz. toothpaste = bomb lol”. It even happened to everyone’s favorite geek Wil Wheaton in 2006.

…my deadly, deadly toothpaste was taken away from me, because it was “way bigger” than the three ounces our government protectors arbitrarily-designated as safe. (For those of you scoring at home, “way bigger” is .2 ounces) I didn’t mention that my relatively expensive (to its size) Crew hair goop was also taken away from me, because it was 3.4 ounces, even when I opened it up and showed them that it was less than 1/2 full, and therefore well under the deadly 3 ounce threshold.

“Well, we don’t know what’s really in there,” the TSA lady said.

“It’s about1 ounce of hair goop,” I said. “Would you like me to put it in my hair?”

They’re lucky he didn’t reroute their main power through the deflector dish and reverse the magnetic couplers. Damn it! I really thought I could make it through a post involving Wil Wheaton without making a Star Trek joke.

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I had to share this, Russian dancing set to Run DMC’s “It’s Like That”.

In case you don’t get the references, here’s the original (ridiculously awesome) video:

Interesting links we found today:

• radicalcartography »