Macaque's Selfie

Friday, August 8th, 2014

Nation, have you ever wondered how Wikipedia is able to obtain pictures for its articles without infringing on copyrights? Neither have I.

Wikipedia can only use images that are either in the public domain or are specifically licensed for free use by third parties, otherwise they are guilty of copyright infringement.

If you go to the wiki article of a famous person, let's pick one at random, how about Stephen Colbert, D.F.A.? You'll find that there are no pictures from my show, since screenshots of the Colbert Report are copyrighted by some guy named Via Com. I think he's Italian.

So Wikipedia has to get creative to obtain images.

One method is to wait for some moocher to ambush me with a camera. That's how those non-profit fat-cats obtained this photo of me and First Lady Michelle “I don't wear mom-jeans” Obama. This image was taken by the White House's official photographer, and therefore the picture is owned by the US Government. Since the Government is not a corporation, it cannot be a person like Mr. Via Com, and therefore it cannot hold a copyright and therefore the image is in the public domain.

Another method is to wait for users to upload and license their own images to Wikimedia. In such a communist utopia, fine people everywhere take time out of their busy lives to photograph and upload images so that all Wikipedia articles may have wonderful and free illustrations.

Just kidding, Wikimedia has been completely overwhelmed by user-submitted dick pics, and they would like you all to please stop.

It's hard to pin down an exact figure of the number of dick pics because Wikimedia uses sub-categories that can themselves contain further sub-categories. For example, under the category of “Human Penis,” there are 24 sub-categories such as “Human penis size by degree of rigidity,” which itself has four sub-categories. I'm guessing, those four are hard, soft, really soft, and Cheney.

Other sub-categories include “human penis facing left” and “human penis facing right,” which of course is needed to make sure that penis pictures remain Fair & Balanced, “Human Penis in Art,” which has a further 7 sub-categories, “Ultrasound Images of fetal penis,” which is not Child Pornography because it's difficult to be aroused by SONAR if you aren't a Dolphin, and “Sex Practices involving the penis,” which contains a further 8 sub-categories, one of which is “Male masturbation,” which itself contains a further 8 sub-categories, including “videos of male masturbation,” which itself contains another four sub-categories, one of which is “videos of male masturbation by posture,” which itself contains three sub-categories which are “Videos of recumbent males masturbating,” “Videos of sitting males masturbating,” and “Videos of standing males masturbating.”

Thanks to the generous giving from thousands of volunteers, now wikipedia editors have plenty of videos to choose from to illustrate how congress works. 

Wikimedia doesn't list the total number of images and videos in all the sub-categories of sub-categories, so you would have to pour through each sub-sub-sub-sub category to take an accurate dick census, and nobody has time for that. Except for Jay the Intern, who reported back that there are over 9000 dick pics and videos.

This bouquet of phalluses has led to protracted battles as users try to prop up their dick pics as the best. Some users go around nominating other dick pics for deletion while simultaneously inserting their dick pics into articles, fighting to make their penis the actual protypical penis pictured in the world's most used encyclopedia, making them a true modern Vitruvian Man.

While the penis war wages on, many other Wikipedia articles are lacking in the picture department.

Please don't sue me.

One such page is that of the “Crested Black Macaque,” which is unfortunately not a sub-sub-category of penis, it's a kind of monkey. Wikipedia uses this selfie that a Black Crested Macaque took after it stole, I mean, borrowed a photographer's camera in Indonesia.

The photograher, David Slater, claims that he owns the copyright to this image and requested that it be taken down. Wikimedia responded by sending him a picture of their black-crested macaque and balls, saying that he is not authorized to request the removal of the photo because he is not the photographer and therefore doesn't hold the copyright. According to Wikimedia, the image was taken by the Macaque, so only the Macaque can hold the copyright, and since a macaque is not a person, the image is therefore in the public domain.

And That brings us to tonight's Word.

Macaque Selfie

How can monkeys take selfies if they don't have a self? Or do they? 

What does it tell us about humans that the Macaque took selfies of its face instead of thousands of neatly categorized close-ups of its genitals?

That it's a female.

Slater claims the picture belongs to him because he engineered the shot saying “It was my artistry and idea to leave them to play with the camera and it was all in my eyesight. I knew the monkeys were likely to do this and I predicted it.”

“Artistry”

Which is how I wrote my book I Am America and So Can You, by leaving my laptop open and predicting that my interns would write something in it.

Interns are non-persons and cannot hold copyrights. :(

Wikimedia countered that the person pressing the button is the photographer, regardless of who owns the camera. But Wikimedia might be opening up a huge barrel of angry monkeys with this argument.

The Precursor to the Legal Precedent of the Origin of the Inciting Incident of the Planet of the Apes.

If a monkey is capable of being a photographer, why then can't the monkey own the copyright on the image? And if monkeys can own copyrights, why can't they, I don't know, own people as slaves?

Many of us are already slaves to Macaques.

Slater claims that his career has been ruined and figures that he has lost around 10,000 pounds in royalties.

Which is equivalent to 160,000 ounces of Freedom.

There's a famous saying that a monkey at a typewriter, if given an infinite amount of time, would write the complete works of Shakespeare. Now we know that a monkey with a camera can ruin a photographer's career in about five minutes.

Monkey see, monkey do. Monkey take selfie, monkey become world famous photographer.

If your income is jeopardized by monkeys hitting buttons, then maybe you should have majored in something a little more useful than photography.

Monkey Business?

And if Macaques are capable of taking selfies, why didn't Anthony Weiner defend his dongle tweet by saying “I didn't take the picture, Macaque did?”

That picture is filed under “Human Penis – Concealed by Boxers – Penis Selfies – Career Ending”

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then if a Macaque named “Romeo” takes 885 selfies, he will have contributed more to society than Shakespeare.

Luckily, I happen to have a Macaque named Romeo in my pants, and I have been training him to take selfies.

Eww...Wherefore art thou Romeo?

I'm coming for you Shakespeare!

Not literally.

Nation, it's happening. Monkeys are contributing to Wikipedia. What's next, monkeys commenting on YouTube videos? That's absurd, it would quickly degenerate into a massive shit-flinging nightmare – (REALIZATION)

Now we know what those monkeys at typewriters have been doing while they were supposed to be writing plays.

Nation. If Monkeys are photographers who spend their days writing Youtube comments, then that can mean only one thing.

Macaques are college students?

Monkeys are unemployed free-loaders. Get a real job macaque! Your picture taking and internet arguing is being subsidized by my tax dollars.

Or it would if I paid taxes...

Well I won't be a monkey's uncle or his sugar daddy.

Mr. Obama: De-port Ma-caque.

Macaque just hangs out all day, checking out girls, getting in fights,

Sword Fights?

And taking selfies. Just ask Wikipedia if we need more macaque selfies.

Wikipedia: "Please God Make it Stop."

President “Mom Jeans” – Deport Macaque. And that's tonight's word. 

(This is part-two of the "I pretend I'm a writer for the Colbert Report" series. Part One.) 

Space For Sale

As I type, I'm perhaps a month away from finishing Moon For Sale, my second novel in a planned trilogy about Kingsley Pretorius, a South African billionaire who starts his own space program.

The idea for this trilogy is not to predict the future but to offer up a possible future that realistically could happen. I don't believe the plot of these novels will come true. I believe that I have done my research, that these books will never violate the laws of physics, and never sacrifice realism for fake drama. 

Really the germ of this idea came from a perceived lack of near-future science fiction. There's plenty of sci-fi in far-flung futures, with terraforming, human civilizations spread across the solar system or the galaxy. There's also plenty of sci-fi about alien contact, space monsters, space wars, etc.

But both of these types of far-flung futures have almost no resemblance at all to actual space travel. They wave a magic wand and launch massive colony ships. 

Sure, I'm interested in seeing far-future humans spreading across the solar system and galaxy, but I also want to see how we get there from here. What's the first step? When do we get to Mars? When do we go back to the Moon? Who will do it? Will it be a cold-war-like space race between US and China? Or will it be an international cooperation like the European Space Agency teaming up with NASA and RSA? 

Apollo and the early space programs live large in our collective imaginations, and I'm very interested in seeing the next Apollo. Maybe that's a moon base, maybe a base on Mars. But I don't want wand-waving that skips to the supposedly more interesting story of discovering aliens, monsters, alien-monsters, etc., but rather a story like that of Apollo, of real people with limited technology, bravely leaving the Earth, heading out into space, and hoping they aren't lost in space, to orbit the sun for millions of years if the mission fails. 

What comes closest to this kind of premise, from the popular culture that I can remember, are films like Red Planet and Mission to Mars. They both came out in a short period of time, and both portrayed the first attempts at sending humans to Mars. 

But in Mission to Mars they discover that the face on Mars is an alien artifact and they try to solve all the mysteries of life in the last 10 minutes of the film. In Red Planet, they encounter flesh-eating nematodes and their robot companion turns against them. Evil robots, flesh-eating alien monsters....doesn't exactly sound like Apollo does it?

The film Europa Report which just recently came out was supposed to be a more realistic space film (than say Sunshine and it's monsters...), but Europa Report did some very silly things. They send humans to land on Europa before humans ever land on Mars or Ceres. Their ship and mission design make very little sense, and then they run into monsters. There's also Apollo 18, about a lost Apollo mission...where they run into Moon monsters. 

Look, I'm sure there is alien life out there somewhere, but we've had so many alien monsters in fiction...can't we just get one example of space that doesn't include monsters, doesn't include wand-waving that makes orbital mechanics go away (Like the film Gravity which ignores basically all of orbital mechanics...), doesn't resort to the low hanging fruit of space monsters, space-splosions, and pseudo-scientific plot points. 

So with that in mind, I was very interested in writing about the next 20-30 years. Realistically, how do we take the next step? How would we go to Mars? What would that program look like? Apollo on steroids?

I had been thinking about this kind of story for several years, but I didn't have much of an idea about how we would get there. The easy answer seems to be a new space-race against China. Reach a little higher in the creative tree and you might get to massive corporations replacing space programs. There's plenty of sci-fi in which nation-states have been overcome by massive corporations, and that's not all that far-flung an idea. 

But the problem I see with the idea of massive trans-national corporations launching the next space-race is that there's not a lot of profit to be made in just sending people to Mars or Ceres. This is why much of that far-flung sci-fi skips a long period of time and jumps to the time when these massive corporations can be turning profits with space mining and such. But that's a big leap in time. Sure companies probably will be turning profits by harvesting resources from space...but that's not going to be the next step, we have to start actually exploring space before we start sending miners to the Moon or Mars. 

If nations aren't willing to drop hundreds of billions on going to Mars, and corporations aren't going to turn a profit until we've already expanded a good way into space...how do we ever get this period of exploration kick-started?

When I started learning about Elon Musk, at first, like many people, I was skeptical of him. But about two years ago, I realized that he was the real thing. And he provides the answer. Maybe not him personally, but the idea of him...

Sure, it's possible that the US or China or Russia decides to stake their claim on being the world's foremost power by sending humans to Mars...but politicians won't be the ones making the trip, and politicians aren't typically big fans of science fiction or all that interested in space (The US Military budget is something like 40 times bigger than NASA's). Sure it's possible that some corporation will decide they can turn a profit by going to Mars, but I just don't see them making those numbers work...

But what about eccentric billionaires?

We live in a time when there are a few hundred or a few thousand people who literally have the power to go to Mars if they want to. If Bill Gates decided he wanted to move to Mars and had 60 billion dollars to throw at the project, it's certainly possible that he could do it. Eccentric billionaires can put billions into a project that has absolutely no chance of turning a profit, because they personally will profit from the experience. And that, I believe, is how the next step in human space travel will be taken. 

So now that I finally had a vision of space travel that felt both compelling and realistic, I set out to learn everything there is to know about Elon Musk, SpaceX, NASA's plans, and everything there is to know about the near-future in space. 

The direct result is a trilogy of books: Space For Sale, Moon For Sale, Mars For Sale. 

Without going into too many details, you can see the progression of the story in the titles. But if the story I had to tell was nothing but details about space missions, Tom Clancy-like expounding on the specific impulse of the engine, the mass fraction of the rocket, some kind of study or report on the feasibility of a series of space missions, then that would not be a very compelling story. 

These novels are about going to space, about revolutionizing space travel by bringing costs down, about electric cars replacing combustion engines, about congress meddling in NASA, about corruption, about corporate espionage, about space firsts...but they are mostly about characters, people who have dreams and goals and flaws, and some of those people are eccentric billionaires with money to burn.

When you open the world's first space hotel, you're not going to be launching spacecraft filled with boy-scout-like-astronauts who follow orders.We're talking about Russian gangsters with billions to spend trying to avoid prison by living in space and Justin Bieber and his pet Capuchin trashing their space hotel room (which they paid for in bitcoins). We're talking about George Clooney buying spy satellites to spy on genocidal fuck-heads in Sudan and the first ever porn filmed in space. We're talking about things that are both absurd and absolutely realistic. 

That's what these books are about: The absurdity of the reality we actually live in. They're about a dream of making space travel cheaper, and all the obstacles that stand in the way of a bold thinker that tries to make his dream a reality.

I would describe the series as being like Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff. It's funny, it's realistic, and it has authentic space drama. 

The first book is out. The second book is coming in a few months.

Here are some excerpts from early reviews:

-Best 'modern' setting book I've read.

-There must have been a great deal of time spent on the research for this book; I actually feel like I received an education on the history of manned space exploration from this book. With this book, I think Jeff Pollard has done for space nerds what Ernest Cline did for 80's pop culture geeks with Ready Player One. There are tons of nerd culture references scattered throughout the book, and looking for these little Easter Eggs became a meta game for me.

-There were some pretty memorable passages in the book too, and I thought Kingsley's epiphany speech to Caroline was one of the hardest hitting pieces of self reflection I've ever read.

-All in all, I thought this was a really enjoyable read, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in science fiction, space history, Elon Musk, pop/nerd culture, etc.

22 Answers to Creationists with Dumb Questions

5 February 2014

Over at the paragon of intellectualism called Buzzfeed, they posted a series of 22 questions posed by creationists in attendance at the Creation Museum where Bill Nye debated a talking ham.

I will now answer all of their questions.

1. Bill Nye The Science Guy teaches children about reality. What are you doing at the Creation Museum? Lying about reality, telling people not to listen to scientists, undermining science teachers, attempting to replace science education with religious indoctrination. Are you telling me it's healthy to tell children that an after-life of eternal torture awaits them if they question what you teach them?

2. No. I'm not scared of something that has not been proven to exist. I'm also not afraid of Big Foot or a Flying Spaghetti Monster or Sharknados. 

How's this for a question. Are you afraid to imagine that you cease to exist when you die, and that you won't be reunited with loved ones and that death is final? Are you so afraid of not existing that you'll seize on the fairy-tale that you will live forever in a magical land despite no evidence to back it up? When smart people come along and point out that the book which you claim proves this fairy-tale ending is actually riddled with falsehoods and contradictions and doesn't match up with the nature of reality, will you plug your ears and insist that the scientists are lying? Will you be willing to brain-wash your children to ignore the facts of reality in order to keep alive your fairy-tale idea about your immortality?

3. I'd add: too many layers of ice, visible stars that are billions of light-years away, dinosaur fossils from millions of years ago...

Sure, it's possible that it was created like this. A god could make the earth and make it so that stars that are billions of light years away already have their light 99.9999% of the way to earth so that we can see them even though the light hasn't had time to get here, or he/she/it could manipulate the composition of radioactive elements to make it erroneously appear like things are billions of years old...

But why would god go out of his way to make all the evidence point to a universe and an earth that are really really old? 

Don't you find it a little weird that your god is using the nature of existence to lie to you? 

You think you have a prankster god? I'll let Bill Hicks handle this...

4. No. It doesn't. Thinking that it does shows that you don't understand thermodynamics. 

The second law of thermodynamics basically says that a closed system will grow more disordered over time. Order in thermodynamics is really refering to usable energy, so like a small pocket of high heat surrounded by areas of low-heat. This is ordered. 

Over time that heat will spread out and the whole area will be the same temperature. 

In other words, you don't pour a room temperature bath and then discover hours later that there are ice cubes floating in one end of the tub and hot water on the other end.

You can throw ice cubes into a hot bath, but over time the whole bath will end up at a uniform temperature.

The 2nd law says that you always go from more order to less order and inevitably to the lowest-ordered state.

Creationists then take this to mean that you can't go from low-order (primordial soup) to highly ordered (complex living things).

However this is a completely wrong assessment for a number of reasons. For one thing, the 2nd law isn't talking about this kind of order, and even if it was, the Earth is not a closed system, there is heat pouring in all the time. 

For another thing, there is no mechanism in a closed system by which a bath of uniform temperature would then stratify into ordered layers...but you could create such a mechanism, and evolution is a mechanism that creates order out of less order. That's the whole beauty of evolution.

Saying that evolution violates the 2nd law because it creates order out of less order is like saying that your freezer violates the 2nd law because it creates ordered ice cubes out of disordered water.

It's a nonsense question that only sounds smart if you don't know anything about thermodynamics...

6. The laws of thermodynamics do not debunk either The Big Bang Theory nor the Theory of Evolution. At the big bang we had essentially a soup of highly charged particles, nothing but the simplest of things. But from this lack of order we get ordered galaxies, stars, people, etc.. This kind of order (spiral galaxies, planets around stars, DNA) is not the kind of order talked about in thermodynamics. And there are processes that create this order. You can see computer models of dis-ordered clouds of dust and gas becoming ordered solar systems. Gravity and the conservation of momentum will create this order. But all the time, the thermodynamic order of the universe is decreasing, in fact, eventually, if the universe doesn't collapse, if it is a closed system, then we will reach a point when the universe will be at the lowest possible ordered state of thermal equilibrium. At that point no work can be done, not even computation. This possible end of the universe is called The Heat Death of the Universe. 

5. A sunset occurs when the sun dips below the visible horizon on a round planet. Why do we need god for a solid object to block light? 

This question might as well be "How can you explain that anything exists without a god." So we all ask where the universe came from, and we say that the earliest thing we can explain is the big bang, and you say "what was before the big bang," and we say, well, before that, space and time did not exist in our universe. Our universe may be part of some bigger structure, a multi-verse, a series of bubbles or branes in 9 or 11 dimensional space, but here in our universe, we can't see outside of it and so we don't know. 

You say "god made the universe." Where did this god come from? Has it existed always? If you have no problem saying that god has always existed then we have no problem saying the multi-verse has always existed. 

Why are you anthropomorphizing something that has nothing at all to do with people? There are a septillion planets in the universe, but you think god is an understandable personality similar to the intelligent apes found on one of those planets? Or do you think it's more likely that whatever creatures reach intelligence are likely to invent a god that is similar to them?

7.  Wikipedia says: "In philosophy, noetics is a branch of metaphysical philosophy concerned with the study of mind and intellect."

So this isn't really a question, but I guess she's trying to imply that intelligence and consciousness come from a soul and can't be explained by physical processes. 

We have evidence of consciousness. We have no evidence of souls... We have plenty of neuroscientists that can tell you all the ways that physical processes in the brain create consciousness. You can shock a part of the brain with an electrode and make someone become instantly euphoric. Zap another spot and they become suicidal. Cut out a section and you can make a sociopath. Insert a tumor and you can remove all inhibitions. Where's the soul in all of this?

8. Inside our heads. It's nice when questions are posed in a way where you can actually answer them. Meaning, experience, love, anger, you name it, it's in your head. Go study evolutionary psychology if you want to know the origins of these things. 

9. 

Life arising from non-life is called Abiogenesis.

The Miller-Urey Experiment set out to show that a soup that was like the ancient Earth, with simple compounds, if exposed to heat and electric sparks (like lightning) and given a long period of time, could produce more complex amino acids which are the basic building blocks of life. The experiment created at least 20 more complex amino acids from simpler compounds. In other words, a soup made in a lab given a few years can make the building blocks of life. Now lets make that soup so large it fills the oceans of the planet, and rather than a few years, lets give it a billion years and see if something happens by chance in all of those countless chemical reactions and protein interactions all over the planet. 

There are over a septillion planets in the universe. Perhaps one in a billion of those planets are potentially habitable. That leaves a quadrillion habitable planets. Let's let 13 billion years go by and see if any of those quadrillion planets might at some point spontaneously create life out of non-life. Remember, we're not talking about an ape crawling out of the ooze. We're talking about something that is microscopic and barely removed from a chemical process.

Do you think that quadrillions of oceans with billions of years might once in a while create life? 

Or is it more likely that a complex, thinking, all-powerful, omniscient life existed already at the start of the universe?

Centuries ago, when it was thought that the Sun or even the Earth was the center of the universe, and there was only one star, only a half-dozen planets, then it might seem more likely that a god existed than life spontaneously coming about on one of those few planets. But now that we can see literally septillions of planets, it doesn't seem so unlikely does it?

Creationists will counter this by saying that the odds of life arising on Earth are miniscule, so the fact that we are here shows that we are special. Let me ask you this: if life hadn't occurred here, if our ocean wasn't the right composition and life didn't arise here, would we be here to think about it? 

If life can arise from non life and perhaps a thousand intelligent civilizations have arisen across the universe, all of those civilizations will be on a planet where life was possible to arise, all of them had long odds...but it happened somewhere... To say that we are special because we are here is like saying we are special because we are the sperm that made it...of course we are! You don't see the sperm that didn't make it walking around do you? Or it's like the lottery. If you are the one person in a million to win the lottery, you might think you are special and it happend to you for a reason. But to the person pulling the balls out of the machine to pick a winner, it's not magical at all that somebody is going to be a winner. 

10. Genesis also says more.

Bill Nye was booed when he pointed outan error in Genesis.

"Nye calmly riled everyone up, by bringning up Genesis 1:16, which reads, “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night.   He also made the stars.”  Nye then corrected the Bible.  “The lesser light is not a light at all, but only a reflector.”

At this point, the Waco Tribune records that one mother jumped up from her seat and screeched, “We believe in God!”, then ran away crying, dragging three of children away with her.  As she ran off, the mother was seen visibly cupping the ears of the child in her arms so her baby would not have to hear any more of Nye’s science."

So God created two great lights. The Sun and the Moon...

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

Take note, when god said "let there be light" he is talking about our SUN. Not the big bang. Also, the book puts The Sun as the main light, then the lesser "light" is the Moon, and oh yeah, by the way, he also made the stars. See the order of importance? The other stars are just an "oh by the way." That's because they didn't know that the sun was just one of billions and billions of stars. They thought it was the only sun. So basically Genesis, at best, is an account of the creation of our solar system and that's it. Not the universe. 

Now if Genesis had talked about the big bang, and galaxies and supernova that created the heavy elements and then collapsing dust and gas clouds that created our solar system and then the nuclear fusion that powered the sun, that might be quite a story, one that would show that the writers had some knowledge that was not available to scientists in that time. That might show they were divinely inspired. Instead it has every hallmark of being written by people who had no more knowledge than anyone else at the time...

11. Umm...they don't?

The idea that life on earth was engineered by aliens is an interesting one, but is not at all embraced or accepted by the scientific community. 

This is called Exogenesis or Panspermia.

It's certainly possible. We are now capable of genetic engineering. We could theoretically go out and find a habitable planet where life has yet to arise and then seed life there... However, ultimately, if we wash away the problem of life arising from non-life by saying Aliens did it, we still then have to explain the origin of Aliens, and ultimately they would have to arise from non-life. 

I think this person is watching too much Ancient Aliens on the (NOT)History Channel. 

12. Evolution says that humans arose through gradual changes, with each generation being almost identical to the generation before it and after it. But those small changes add up over time, and so if you go back a thousand years, people won't be much different at all, but if you can find the fossillized remains of people from a million years ago or two million years ago, you'll find that they are different and see how humans changed. 

Lucy is one of many examples of these intermediate human forms. 

Check out a giant list of these forms.

Check it out and you'll see the idea that there is "one lucy" is absurd. 

13. Yes. 

All living things undergo some kind of metamorphosis. Look at human fetuses and infants and then look at an 80 year old. We change. Animals change too. There's nothing magical about it. 

14. A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on knowledge that has been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experimentation.

The bible is not a theory. 

Gravity is a theory. Theory does not mean "wild guess." 

15. A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on knowledge that has been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experimentation.

Creationism is not a scientific theory. It is absolutely not well-substantiated, nor is it testable or has it ever been comfirmed through any kind of experimentation. Intelligent design is absolutely not science, it is religion and does not belong in a science classroom. 

Why do you object to the teaching in schools that a flying spaghetti monster created everything? 

16. All genetic information has arisen through evolution. All of it. A common point made by creationists is that the human eye is "irreducibly complex." That is, that you can't have half of an eye, it offers no advantage, and so evolution then must be saying that things without eyes suddenly had awesome eyes out of nowhere by random chance...this is not how evolution works. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye

The eye began with the creation of light-sensitive cells. Simple cells that could tell light from dark and that's all. Look at the diagram on that wiki page. If you make a dip and put the cells in that dip, then you can have very rudimentary directional vision of light and dark. From there the pinhole camera type of eye can arise, and from there the evolution to modern complex eyes has no trouble. Eyes have evolved in different ways and seem to have arisen multiple times. We can even see the early form of the pinhole camera in creatures still alive today: the Nautilus. 

17. Purpose is an objective human construct. Things are, there is no why, only how. We have consciousness and we get to decide what our purpose is. You have chosen that a bronze-age book has the answer to your purpose. Congratulations...

If you want to know what science says about the origin of human motivations, emotions, and so on, try watching this.

18. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_evolution_fossils

19. Can you believe that Australia exists if you have never been there? I have never seen Australia with my own eyes. However I see all kinds of evidence for the existence of it. I have seen pictures. I've met Australians. 

We see the signature of the big bang in the Cosmic Microwave Background.

We can see that all of the universe is flying apart, as if coming from a central explosion at some point far in the past. 

I think there was a big bang, but if evidence were provided that pointed to a different origin, then I would be willing to change my mind. 

If evidence were produced that showed that the bible were full of contradictions, would you continue to believe it to be true?

20. Because I paid attention in Chemistry, Physics, Biology,  and Astronomy class. Amazing does not mean designed. Order can arise from non-order. A big bang of energy and particles and given the laws of physics will produce stars and planets and sunsets and rainbows. Why must there be a creator for these things to exist?

21. The Big Bang was not a star, but a singularity. We don't know where it came from. If the answer to a question is "we don't know," that doesn't then mean "god did it." 

If you were to ask a Christian where illnesses and plagues come from in the 1700s, they would say God is punishing us. But some people were not satisfied with such answers and we discovered germs and viruses. Just because science didn't have an answer then does not mean that god was responsible. 

22. We did not come from monkeys. 

Humans and monkeys share a common ancestor from millions of years ago. Humans and Giraffes have a common ancestor from millions of years before that. Humans and trees have a common ancestor from millions of years before that. All life came from a single origin, and we are all descendants from that origin. 

Let's suppose that we take a pack of wolves and breed them, selecting the nicest, friendliest wolves of the bunch and allowing them to breed. After dozens of generations we could have animals that are like dogs, floppy eared, bushy tailed, very friendly, very nice. 

You can do just such an experiment.

And if you do, and come up with a new kind of animal, that doesn't mean that there are no longer any wolves. 

Humans did not come from monkeys. Monkeys and humans are descendant from a common ancestor. The line to monkeys has been evolving all this time, the line to humans has been independently evolving all this time. The common ancestor which both humans and monkeys come from is not still around. 

The Luck of the Chiefs

(Apparently Scarf Messages are a thing in Soccer.)
KCMO or KCK?

6 January, 2014

Deja Vu, all over again.

You might have thought Kansas City's decades long drought was over when Sporting KC won the MLS championship just a few weeks ago, but the heartbreak from the Chiefs most recent loss is evidence that Soccer doesn't matter. Nobody is comforted from this soul-wrenching loss by remembering that we as a city just won a Soccer championship. Some people might count Soccer as a major sport, but not us.

I don't know a single person in Kansas City who was relaxed when the Chiefs took a 38-10 lead. We know better. We knew half of our team might simultaneously tear their ACLs.

Or that we might once again become a highlight reel for another future hall-of-fame QB. Even while we were still winning, even when we had the ball and were poised to get into position to kick the game winning field goal, we all knew we were going to lose. Something would happen. We'd miss the field goal, or maybe we'd score and the Colts would win on hail mary.



I started Saturday by not being able to sleep on Friday night. I was too nervous for the game. Not excited. Nervous. I finally got to sleep and woke up around 2 O'clock in a daze. There was a football game on the TV and in my dazed condition, and not wearing my glasses, I thought for a moment the red team on the field was the Chiefs. It was actually the Houston Cougars playing against the Vanderbilt Comodores. Vanderbilt was up 24-0 as they came out from halftime. For a moment I thought the UH on the Cougars' helmets was the outline of the state of Texas on the Chiefs throwback Texans helmet.

As I realized I wasn't watching the Chiefs getting blown out in a post-season game, the Houston Cougars suddenly stormed back. Down 24-0 at the half, they quickly scored to close to 24-17 with 3 minutes to go in the third quarter. Everyone loves an underdog. I have no idea who was favored in the BBVA Compass bowl, but after watching the Cougars storming back, I cheered out loud when they connected on a long pass to score a TD to tie the game with seconds left in the third.

The Houston Cougars had become my team.

They wouldn't score again as they would return to first half form and watch Vanderbilt score three times in the fourth to win 41-24.

That's the life of a Chiefs fan. Don't let us jump on your bandwagon, we're all just going to die of dysentery.


We don't have hockey because the Kansas City Scouts lasted only two years before moving away. They've since become the three time Stanley Cup Champion New Jersey Devils. The Devils were in the Stanley Cup Finals just two years ago.

We don't have basketball since the Kansas City Kings left for Sacramento. We were really just a brief stop on their trip out west, having previously been in Cincinnati. The Kings last won a playoff series in 2004.

The Kansas City Royals haven't made it to the playoffs since 1985. The last time the Chiefs won a playoff game, it was against a team that doesn't exist anymore. In 1994, the Chiefs beat the Houston Oilers in the second round. That season, NFL teams had two bye weeks in a one year experiment with an 18-week season. Remember the double-bye? That's how long it has been.

Expect the Unexpected?
Like moving to Sacramento?

Why aren't we allowed to have nice things?

Boston had a curse. They traded away Babe Ruth. I hate to blame the victim, but come on, that's asking for it. The Patriots were bad for a long time, except for those pockets of greatness that got them blown out in two Super Bowls. The Bruins were great once, but then had decades of futility. Same goes for the Celtics. Of course, all four Boston teams won titles in the 2000s.

The Cubs have gone over a century without winning the World Series. Since winning it all in 1908, during that reign of the Ottoman Empire, the Cubs have won only a single playoff series in 105 years. That one playoff series victory was followed by the collapse against the Marlins, partly due to the Steve Bartman incident.

The Cleveland Browns had their hearts ripped out of their chests by John Elway in consecutive years. Then they had their team taken away and moved to Baltimore and renamed for some goddamn emo poetry. Then the Ravens went and won two Super Bowls, while Cleveland is stuck with an expansion team trying to pretend to be an NFL team. That's some Shakespearean tragedy right there.

The Browns are cursed for not making this their logo.

That's before we get to the Indians or Lebron James breaking up with his hometown on national TV.

The Buffalo Bills were cursed with four straight Super Bowl losses and futility ever since. Oh except for the Music City Miracle totally screwing them over. But hey, at least they have the Sabres. Except they lost the Stanley Cup, in Overtime, via an illegal, but not reviewed goal by Brett Hull.

The only team with a longer NFL playoff drought than the Chiefs is the Bengals. I feel bad for the Bengals. Draft bust after draft bust, you'd think they'd eventually find a star. They were good in the 80s. Good enough to lose two Super Bowls. Hey at least they have the Reds...oh yeah. What about Basketball? Oh right. Hockey? I suppose you could say they have the Columbus Blue Jackets, but that's not gonna help.

If there is a god, he sure hates Cleveland, Cincinatti, the Cubs, definitely Buffalo. Oh and Kansas City

Is his foot in the crease? Better review it...
Nah, they're celebrating already, too late to review it. 

.

Perhaps the worst part of being a Chiefs fan is that we don't even get the lore. We don't have Buckner or Bartman or Babe Ruth or Art Modell stealing our team. We don't have The Drive or The Fumble or The No-Goal or The Decision. If and when those curses are finally broken and say the Browns finally win a Super Bowl, most people will celebrate the lifting of that curse. But if the Chiefs or Royals ever manage to win something, will anyone really notice or care?

This weekend, all the wrong teams won. Every game went the wrong way. Which tells me that there's either no god, or a maybe he's letting Satan run sports because of all the stupid prayers.

The Chargers somehow made the playoffs, needing a bunch of other teams to lose, and facing the Chiefs backups. We rested our guys so we would be healthy for the playoffs  (that sure helped), besides, we had nothing to gain. The Chargers get in, and are sent to Cincinnati. The Bengals won their division, making the playoffs for the third year in a row.

Wait, let me back up.

The Bengals last playoff victory came in the 1990 season against the Houston Oilers. Sorry Houston. You guys have the Texans though...so it's not all bad. And the Astros. Are they good? I don't watch baseball, so I don't know these things.

In '91, the Bengals went 3-13. In the following draft, they picked Houston Cougars QB David Klingler. He's now a Biblical Studies Professor in of course Houston, Texas. So you might imagine how he fared as an NFL QB.

The Bengals didn't have another winning season until 2005. That's 14 seasons where they never did better than 8-8. With all those bad years, you'd think they'd draft some great players. Guys like Defensive End John Copeland #5, with hall of famer Willie Roaf going 8th. Dan Wilkinson #1, when Marshall Faulk went #2. Running Back Ki-Jana Carter #1 overall. Had they picked Faulk the year before, maybe instead of Carter they take QB Steve McNair who went #3? They took Reinard Wilson and Brian Simmons in the 97 and 98 first rounds. Who? In 1999 they took QB Akili Smith #3. The next 5 picks were pro-bowlers. Akili Smith had 5 TD passes...in his NFL career. Cam Newton had more passing yards and TDs in his first 8 games than Akili had in his entire NFL career.

Is this how you Quarter Back?

In 2000, they followed up the Akili bust pick with WR Peter Warrick. RB Jamal Lewis was the next pick. Brian Urlacher a few picks after that.

2001 is when the Bengals finally figured out how to Draft. They got DE Justin Smith, the next year was OT Levi Jones, the year after that was Carson Palmer, Heisman Trophy winning, National Champion, pretty boy from USC, face of the franchise. They finally got it right. In Palmer's third season, he led the Bengals to their first winning record since going 9-7 way back in 1990.

The only joke here is the Bengals uniform. 

The Bengals were 11-5 and won their division. That's right, they beat the seemingly always good Ravens and Steelers and won their division. First playoff game in 15 years, and it's at home, and guess who? Pittsburgh's coming. Carson Palmer's first pass was a 66 yard completion, and it was his last of the day. Torn ACL. Jon Kitna came in and played well, but without Palmer, the Bengals lost to the Steelers 31-17.

First fucking drive, first pass, star quarterback tears his ACL.

Bengals go 8-8, 7-9, 4-12 over the next three years.

Then they go 10-6 and win their division again in 2009. A home playoff game! They lose in the first round to the Jets. The Jets only got in because they played the Curtis Painter-led Colts. If Manning had finished that game, it's not the Jets but the Houston Texans coming to Cincinnati. Somebody would finally win a playoff game. Bengals go 4-12 the next season, Palmer, not wanting to stay in a cursed city demands to be traded or he'll retire.

The Bengals go ahead and draft a replacement in Andy Dalton in the 2nd round, having the balls to take WR A.J. Green in the first round and wait on their QB in the 2nd. The old Bengals wouldn't have made such a shrewd move.

Tom Bahali - Yoga Instructor

Dalton plays well and then a Cincinatti Miracle happens. Jason Campbell gets hurt, the Raiders decide to trade for Palmer. The Bengals get a 1st and a 2nd rounder for their no longer needed QB. Everything's coming together.

The Bengals go 9-7 and are one-and-done in the playoffs after losing to the Texans, but hey, a rookie QB gets you to the playoffs? And you have an extra first rounder next year? In 2012 they follow up with another playoff year and another first round loss at the Texans.

Now it's Dalton's third year. Time to step up in the playoffs. This time they won the division again. Dalton and A.J. Green's first chance at a home playoff game.

Hey refs, what are you looking at exactly?

And who are they playing? Will it be the Dolphins? The Ravens? The Steelers? Or the Chargers? Going into week 17, it could have been any of those teams. The Bengals beat the Ravens, having already won the division, this is just salt in the wound as they knock the Ravens out of playoff contention. The Dolphins could have been going into Paul Brown stadium, but they can't get it done. The Steelers take care of business and are headed to Cincy if the Chiefs can beat the Chargers later that afternoon. The Chiefs have nothing to play for and put in their backups. The Chiefs JV team still nearly beats the Chargers, and in fact drives in position to kick a 41 yard game winning field goal. But Ryan Succop misses it (and the refs miss an illegal formation that should have given Succop a second try). The Charges somehow make the playoffs.

We're sorry Cincinnati. The Chargers just went into Cincinnati and beat the Bengals. Philip Rivers' smug ass, the god damn Chargers. The team that fired Marty Schottenheimer after a 14-2 season.

It has to be tough to be a Bengal fan today, but hey, at least you guys got beat pretty bad. Not a lot of "what ifs." At least your QB didn't tear his ACL. At least you didn't blow a 28 point second-half lead...

I guess the Colts-Chiefs game is payback for the hubris of resting our starters. The 2009 Colts got Tracy Porter'd for resting starters and in effect screwing the Houston Texans out of a playoff spot by handing a win to the Jets. The Texans had to play the real Varsity Colts twice and lost twice, and lost out on the wild-card because the Jets got a freebie from Curtis Painter. Sorry Houston, you got screwed, so you got to watch Peyton throw a game clinching pick-six. Does that make up for it?

The Chiefs and Bengals both lost. The Packers lost to the 49ers, not a lot of sob stories between these teams, but the Packers had to endure a season where their star QB's collar-bone became the most talked about bone since Josh and Donna finally boned.

The Saints went into Philly and beat the Foles-led Eagles. Come on, god, can't you let the Eagles win something?

Prior to this weekend, if you asked me who I wanted to win each game, I would have picked every loser. I wanted the Chiefs, Packers, Eagles, and Bengals. Since what I want to happen is the opposite of what will happen, I guess that makes me like Cassandra. I can see the future, but I'm just gonna hate what I see.

I mean, the Ravens led by the "non-murderer" Ray Lewis won it all last year. It couldn't have been the Falcons and Tony Gonzalez. That would have been too good of a story.

Did you know he played basketball?

When rumors swirled about the dismal Falcons trading Tony Gonzalez at the deadline to the suddenly good Chiefs, perhaps giving him one more chance at a ring, I had visions of our offense suddenly becoming the real deal with a hall-of-fame Tight End to make us deadly in the Red Zone. But no, of course that's not what would happen. Instead the Falcons would just continue to suck and the Chiefs would continue to have no solid option at TE, no receiver to step up to make those pivotal 4th and long catches. Of course not, we'll probably just be one-and-done in the playoffs again to probably, the Colts.

If the last thing I'd like to see is what's really going to happen, then Peyton Manning and the Broncos will win the Super Bowl, probably over the Seahawks or Panthers, teams who've played highlight-reel fodder to the Patriots and Steelers in recent Super Bowls.

The worst part of our loss again to the Colts is the lack of a moment to blame it on. There's too many moments. It'd be almost nicer if we had one thing to seize on. In our 2003 38-31 loss to the Colts in which neither team punted, we had a phantom Offensive Pass Interference call that went against Tony Gonzalez and took a TD off the board before half-time. In 1997, the Broncos came into Arrowhead after we had a bye and beat us while wearing something greasy on their uniforms. Bunch of greased up cheaters. Oh and there was a Tony Gonzalez touchdown that was called incomplete but replays showed him in bounds. Replay would be added the following year. There's the Lin Elliot misses.

Good Guy Eli. Sucks so you can draft a QB to replace him.
"You guys said Peyton did this right?"

People remember Lin Elliot blowing it on three field goals, but that's about it. We don't have a scapegoat this year. We can't point a finger at Bartman and say it's his fault. We could point out the injuries to Jamaal Charles, Brandon Flowers, Justin Houston, Donnie Avery, and Knile Davis. But even with all those injuries, we still had a 28 point lead. There's too many injuries, no one to seize on. There's no blown call to blame. Maybe we point at Dwayne Bowe coming down out of bounds to end the game, but that's not like a dropped gimme, he's not the sickest man in America after that. It's hard to put the blame on anyone on the offensive side of the ball. Maybe you blame Bob Sutton for being unable to figure out how to stop them, or our secondary for being abused. But that's not one moment you can hang your hat on.

See, we're left with dozens of little moments, injuries, decisions, what-ifs? What if Alex Smith's fumble tumbled toward the boundary just a little faster and the Colts couldn't pick it up before going out of bounds.

When the announcers mentioned that Donald Brown had never fumbled, everyone in Indianpolis cringed and yelled at the annoucners for jinxing him. Everyone in KC cheered, and waited in anticipation for the Donald Brown fumble. We weren't too happy with how that turned out.

What if we recover that ball? We win. What if we punch in a touchdown rather than settling for 3 after that 3rd Luck Interception? We Win. What if we call a different play and dont' get that intentional grounding call on our final drive? We win. What if we have not Jamaal, but at least our backup running back for the whole second half to grind the clock? We win. What if Flowers doesn't get hurt? We win.

There's too many moments, too many scenarios, so we're left in a daze, wishing we could go back and change them, wondering what might have happened. There's just too many horribly wrong details to forget. We dropped 44 points on them and lost? Alex Smith had the best game of his career and we lost? We were +3 on turnovers and we lost? No missed field goals? How does this happen?

Joe always did know how to talk dirty.

After we scored to go up 38-10, the odds of a Chiefs victory were 500-1. That's 99.8%. I wish a bookee had called me up then and offered me 500-1 odds. I think most people in KC would have instantly bet against the Chiefs. We know better. We knew we weren't a 99.8% lock to win. We might allow ourselves to think we were at 80%. But no better. We've seen Joe Montana concussed in the AFC title game. We've watched Lin Elliot kick under pressure. We've watched a bunch of greased up cheaters get bad calls go their way. We've seen our offense be unstoppable and our defense incapable of getting one. We've seen "not" a
murderer Ray Lewis get sent off with a second ring. We've seen the Steelers beat the Cardinals and the Seahawks. We've seen three expansion teams that didn't exist when we last beat the Oilers, win playoff games ahead of us.

Maybe our uniforms are cursed. How's this?
 Awful? Wait, I've got another idea!

We're not allowed to have nice things. I'm convinced the Royals will continue to suck. The Chiefs will go 8-8 next year, 7-9 after that, then 3-13 and Andy Reid will be gone. We'll get a top draft pick and there will finally be an actual QB that we can draft! He'll be great and we'll win the division and get a bye and then he'll tear his labrum on his first pass and never be the same QB again.

After watching the Packers-Niners game,
I've decided the Chiefs flaw is a lack of Gold Pants.

If you wanted a curse to root against, an underdog to get behind, well, the Chiefs and Bengals are predictably out again. Maybe root for the Seahawks who got screwed out of a Super Bowl by bad refs. It won't help though, because it's going to be the Broncos. It's the last thing I want to see. So it will happen. For a moment during the Super Bowl, while the Broncos are winning, I'll think, "Maybe Peyton will retire now," and I'll be hopeful, like the hope you feel when you lock up the #1 overall pick in that last game of the season. But that hope will be crushed when there's nobody to draft, or when Peyton pulls an Elway and comes back for another season.


If I sound like I've lost hope, it's because I have. I know the Royals will suck and the Chiefs will continue to tease us with hope and then really stick it to us. That's just what they do. The Royals might be cursed because of the blown call in the '85 World Series that kept them alive. At least there's something we can pin that bad karma on. What did the Chiefs ever do?

At this point all I can do is root for other underdogs. Sorry Cincinatti. I think I screwed you over today.

I guess I can try to like Soccer.