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Cheaters never prosper

So a couple of dudes up in the great white north (aka Canada, aka America’s hat) decided they needed to cheat in order to pass the Medical College Admissions Test, which is apparently some kind of test, possibly for admissions to medical college (just taking a shot in the dark on that one…)  The problem was, they failed to let the guys who were feeding them the answers in on the scam.

Apparently, while one dude sat in the exam room actually taking the test, his cohort was in another room with three others who thought they were testing for a job as MCAT tutors!  The test taker would photograph the questions on the exam, feed them via a wireless connection to his cohort, who would then pass the question on to the would-be tutors.

Unfortunately for the cheaters, (but fortunately for fans of hilarity) the three men caught on to what was going on.   Tipped off by the poor quality of the images of questions being projected onto a screen, and by the fact that the interviewer was encouraging them to discuss their answers aloud with each other before answering, they soon cottoned on to the scam.  During one of the many times their “interviewer” excused himself to go make a phone call to his test-taking buddy in order to feed him the answers, the men called campus security.  While they waited for someone to show up and bust the guys, they started feeding wrong answers to the cheaters!

I think the moral of this story is, “never try to scam people who are way smarter than you.”  Also, if these guys knew some potential MCAT tutors, why didn’t they just have those guys help them study rather than try to dupe them into helping them cheat?

Posted in In The News.


Italy fails at science

So it looks like some fucktards in the Italian government are bringing a group of seismologists up on charges of “failure to predict deadly earthquake.”  No seriously.  Apparently the Italian government thinks scientists should be able to infallibly predict earthquakes, and so if an earthquake happens without warning and people die, clearly the scientists have been negligent and should be charged with manslaughter!

Anybody who knows anything about the actual science of seismology (which apparently does not include anybody in the Italian government) knows that earthquake prediction is an inexact science at best.  If anybody could infallibly predict earthquakes, don’t you think they would have warned, say, the Haitians last year?  Or New Zealand and Japan this year?  Like a TV weatherman, a seismologist does his best to predict what will happen, but nobody is surprised when he’s wrong.

Nobody, that is, except Italians I guess.

Posted in In The News.


How is this “Too hard for science?”

Lately that grand bastion of scientifical journalisming, Scientific American, has been running a guest blog feature on their webiste called “Too Hard for Science?” in which they ask scientists to say a bit about a particular experiment or line of inquiry that they would like to see done, but might be “too hard” to accomplish.   Previous entries in the series have ranged from the likely-possible-sometime-in-the-future, such as modelling the entire human brain in a computer,  to the maybe-impossible, such as gravity control, to the probably-impossible-even-in-theory-but-wouldn’t-it-be-cool idea of creating black holes without event horizons in the lab.

Today’s entry, however, appears to go beyond the realm of science completely.  Physicist Freeman Dyson, famous to most nerds as the “inventor” of the Dyson Sphere, and no stranger to controversy, posits an experiment performed by dogs, using other dogs as subjects, to test for ESP.  Why dogs?  Well, because dogs are dumb, of course!  Dyson’s logic seems to be that all human efforts to detect ESP in each other have failed not because ESP doesn’t exist, but because “Humans are too smart, too much emotionally involved in the outcome of the experiment, and too good at cheating.”

So hang on, let me see if I understand this fully.  We have this thing called science, through which we build an understanding of the world around us by using observation and experimentation.  The tools of science already include things such as blind and double-blind trials that go to great length to eliminate conscious and unconscious bias.  We’ve used those tools to test for ESP, and every time, we’ve found no evidence that it exists.  But the reason we’ve found no evidence for ESP isn’t because it doesn’t exist, but because we cheat the experiments somehow?  What would the reason be for this, anyway?  Presumably what Dr. Dyson is implying is that the people involved in the experiment (either the subjects or the researches, or perhaps a combination of both) are emotionally invested in the outcome of the experiment, so they cheat–either consciously or unconsciously–to get the result they desire.  Which is that ESP doesn’t exist?  Really?  There’s nobody you can think of who might want to prove the opposite?

OK, let’s be fair to Flair.  I mean, Freeman Dyson.  Maybe what he means is that there’s been too much cheating on both sides.  People on the pro-ESP side cheat to prove they have powers they don’t have, and people on the anti-ESP side cheat in order to prove nobody has ESP.  Everybody is just cheating up a storm, so we never get a real answer on the ESP issue.  Again, this just sounds like a job for the double-blind experiment!  And guess what?  When you perform properly controlled experiments to test for ESP, it turns out it doesn’t exist!

So, no Professor, I don’t think we need to get dogs to perform experiments on other dogs.  I think we pretty much know the answer already.  But hey, once again, don’t take my word for it.  If anybody out there thinks I’m wrong, don’t yell at me–take it up with this guy.  He’s got a million bucks that says you can’t do whatever paranormal thing you say you can do under controlled conditions.

Posted in Miscellaneous.


That’s hot

There’s nothing chicks dig more than a guy with a mistreated, malnourished, growth-stunted alligator.  I mean, right?  It really turns them on when a guy has an alligator in a small tub, right?  An alligator that he intentionally under feeds so it “won’t grow too large”?  Wait, no?  Chicks don’t dig that at all?

In that case, Dewayne Yarbrough is a dumb motherfucker.  Not that you really needed to be told, since anybody with an actual functioning brain could tell you that “Hey, you want to go back to my place and see my alligator?” is a pick-up line liable to get you slapped hard enough to loosen your teeth, and “Want to see my big, scaly reptile?” is just too disgusting to think about.  But Dewayne, a man so dumb he can’t spell his own name right, apparently does not have a functioning brain.  Or an alligator, any more.   Asshole.

Posted in In The News.


The world’s most pathetic invention

Well, here it is.  Clearly designed by a dweeb who has never been kissed, it’s a “robotic tongue” that lets you kiss people over the internet!

Actually, it’s not even that.  If you watch the video on that page, you’ll see all it is really is a freaking bendy straw that you turn with your tongue that remotely turns an identical straw.  How anybody thinks that even resembles a tongue is beyond me.  But, ok, the article also says the inventor intends to improve the device to eventually include moisture, taste, and presumably make it not a metal straw.  So let’s play some “what if” games.  What if this thing is improved to the point where it feels mostly realistic, and maps input tongue movements on one end to synthetic tongue movements on the other end.  Further assume the synthetic tongue provides not only motion, but moisture and texture feedback.  How long before some dude sticks his cock in the damn thing and tricks his internet girlfriend into giving him head?  Does it count as rape if you tell someone you want her to virtually kiss you and instead you stick your rod in her virtual mouth?  It took me all of  fifteen seconds to think of that scenario once I heard the term “robotic tongue.”  It’d probably take the real creeps more like a nanosecond.

Man, who am I fooling.  This is clearly the future of internet porn.

Posted in In The News.