Nothing like watching Natural Born Killers to put you in a really, really weird mood.

Ah, how fun it is, especially during Advent and Christmas to attempt to mock and deny God! Act now and get a free DVD!

Rational people will disagree that just by saying the words, "I deny the existence of the Holy Spirit" (oh no, I just said it in my head!) that it is possible to damn your soul to hell - real blasphemy against the Holy Spirit probably requires a lifetime of sin to cement. For whatever reason, I seem to recall that the Church teaches that the ultimate blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is prideful unwillingness to ask for forgiveness rather than a single utterance. Even the holiest person over the course of their life is grossly unworthy to ask for forgiveness, and we use our free will to choose what we desire, forgiveness or self-righteousness... we are unworthy of either. God doesn't prevent us from rejecting him, because how worthwhile would a slave's relationship be? We aren't slaves to God - we're either willing servants of or willing enemies with Love.

Anyway, enough blathering - back to the point:

If you don't believe in the Christian dogma, the truly rational thing to do is to go about setting straight what you think is wrong. In this case, atheists should stress their positivist/naturalist logic, because that's probably the most appealing argument you can make against the existence of God.

But that's hardly what they're doing. Things like this are born from contempt and mocking, and an immature desire to rebel against... something... God? Sure. Authority? Why not. Tradition? Hell yeah. Gotta try to fill the unhappiness with a smug YouTube video, because that'll kick ass!

They're attempting to satisfy a need to justify their rejection of God, because life genuinely without God is tiresome and empty, with no reason to look forwards or backwards - ultimately human existence is a null-sum, a simple, ongoing chemical reaction. Reduce humanity to that, and humanity becomes a false word. Without variance, atheism in all forms converges to nihilism. There can be no purpose other than animal satisfaction if we are mere animals that are self-aware by some odd neurological evolution.

Not surprisingly, RichardDawkins.net and other atheist sites are behind the success of this BlasphemyChallenge.com site. I guess all faiths require proselytizing.

The whole semi-jest perspective that most people must see this "blasphemy challenge" in brings to mind the idea that Satan is most powerful when he convinces people that he doesn't exist. Sites like this aren't really evil... they're mainly just really stupid. It is tempting to see them only as harmless fun. But they are symptoms of evil and testify to the fact that the enemy is real and is always looking for more teammates to choose his side.

And God is always pro-choice, I suppose.

I'm not sure how much of each I added, but I made about 3 large glasses-worth of intensely delicious smoothy using:

Limeade (from concentrate)
Orange juice
Strawberries
Blueberries
Strawberry yogurt

Now to shower and go map pwg at school.

I no longer have holes in my walls from the dumbass smoke-detector-installing guy. I do have spackling in my hair though. Dry wall repair for the win!

I am SUCH A HUGE IDIOT. I forgot to feed the fish last night. Oh man, I'm going to be in trouble. Yeah. Good morning.

My hosting service is still MIA. Obviously the things I'm hosting there still are being served (for example, you can see my "The August" picture above, and still download that Iron Maiden song on the right over there), but I can't connect using my FTP client to either download or upload new files.

I'm about to grab some food and head back up to the lab - the Northern blot is developing as we speak. Why couldn't I get a strong 5-minute signal? Why the 2-hour exposure shenanigans? Surprisingly, I don't really care about having to go back up to school - work has been more exciting recently, and I really want to see what this Northern is going to tell me.

One of the things the public thinks of scientists is that we do experiments to discover certain things and that these experiments always work. If it turns out one way, we know something. The experiment turns out another way, we know something else. We do this for a few hours each day, then go home.

The fact of the matter is that experiments contribute to anxiety and unhappiness through three major pathways:

1.) They don't work. That's right. Most experiments just don't work. You did it all the way you were supposed to, but you forgot to do the voodoo dance, or you didn't understand that when the protocol you're holding says "incubate five minutes at 65 degrees" that actually your boss's copy, or your colleague's copy of the protocol, that line is scratched out and now reads, "incubate at 40 degrees for 6 hours." You didn't know that, and you didn't do it, and your experiment failed. Good luck digging through and finding out why.

2.) The experiments work just well enough to look like they worked, but don't work well enough to clearly interpret what they are showing you. Is that really a secondary DNA fragment that was amplified in that gel lane, or is it just a blip of ethidium bromide that didn't dissolve well in the gel and now just looks like a DNA band? Choose wisely, if you ignore the band and it was real, you'll mis-genotype 5,000 fish, miss the recombinant that was a mapping breakthrough, adding an entire year to your PhD. Good luck trying to repeat the experiment - if you have to spend the next day fitting in the repeat experiment to your already-busy schedule, the boss will yell at you, and it'll just look like crap the second time, too. Go with your gut, and pray to Sweet Jesus™ that you choose wisely.

3.) The experiment works, but tells you something that disproves, or makes completely useless, your PhD thesis or the research you've spent a half-year doing. That's right. You spent 6 months purifying milligram quantities of your protein of interest, attached it to an affinity column in order to see what proteins bind to it in a pull-down assay, and then discover that your protein interacts with at least four hundred and fifty-seven different late golgi proteins. Then you do a two-hybrid experiment and get the same 457 positives. Just walk away from that one, hombre. It's tough, but it's like a doomed relationship: it might be all you have, but it's absolute garbage.

And then you become a post-doc and this crap somehow doesn't happen to you, or you get smart enough to avoid projects involving mind-numbing problems like these.

Circumcision may decrease HIV transmission rates in males by up to 50%.

In other news (but not newsworthy enough to be reported), remaining chaste still has a HIV-prevention rate of close to 100%...

(Yes, I realize a good part of the 'African problem' involves women being raped, but still, a crate full of zipped-up zippers would probably help an African nation more than a crate of latex rubbers and bananas to practice on. Well, maybe if they ate the bananas...)

Gotta love it when the boss looks at you and says "Don't fuck this up, man!" before you've started what you're doing.

I stifled the first thing that came to mind, which was to reply in kind with a similarly patronizing smirk and say, "OKAY DAN, BE SURE NOT TO CRASH YOUR CAR INTO A BUS ON YOUR WAY HOME! THAT WOULD BE BAD! DON'T FUCK UP YOUR RIDE HOME!"

Really, what kind of asshole says something like that?

It reminds me of another time probably 2 years ago when Dan gave me a tube with a DNA sample and said, "Don't contaminate this." He wasn't joking, he was absolutely serious. Like he maybe thought I thought I could, or would, or was planning to contaminate the sample... maybe I was about to... by shoving it up his ass! What a smacktard I work for!

It's hard to work where your boss has absolutely no regard for you (other than thinking you're going to "fuck this up, man.") At least I'm not the tired and depressed guy that goes around sighing all the time and yelling "mother fucker!" randomly. Gotta keep it all in perspective.

GetReligion delivers again.

This smacktard clown (Reyes) is Chair of the House Intelligence Committee...! He doesn't even know the most basic thing about Al Qaeda! It's a fundamentalist Sunni organization. No wonder we blunder and mess things up "over there."

And even worse than him not knowing such a basic question, is the fact that he actually tried to lie, and act like he knew what he was saying. Arrrrrgh!

I read a story like this and I think to myself about how and why they chose 14 days as the limit. Think about it. It's completely arbitrary. Why not 15 days? Or 16? Or 20? Or 30? Or 100? Or how about 270 days? Wait, that's nine months. That would be barbaric!

Really, the only thing that changes is the look of the human after conception. Wouldn't want to allow embryos to be farmed at 15 days! Oh, no! That would be bad! Maybe even... murder! Wait, when does it become murder? After it's born? Or wait, maybe right before it's born... hmm... but nothing changes in the 10 minutes it takes to exit the womb... so it's gotta be before that. Well, 6 months it looks too baby-like, like an actual person, and it cries and squirms as it gets ripped apart during abortions... so maybe like 3 months, or 9 weeks... yeah, something like that. Let's go with 14 days, because it's really small then and doesn't have arms or a head yet. Sounds good. We can all be comfortable with that.

Oh, and bonus points for the DUMBEST GODDAMNED POST EVER by some retard that goes by the alias "BirdDoggy" on the Slashdot forums, commenting on this article, saying:

Using the term embryo conveys a level of development not present at up to 14 days of development. At 14 days, we're talking about a blastocyst. Technically, it needs to be 3 weeks old before it can be considered an embryo.

I swear, sometimes the level of pigheaded idiocy that people throw around makes me want to forget all about these issues. And if it weren't for the fact that the stakes are so high, believe me, I wouldn't even try to get involved in them.

     Only click THIS LINK if you have, say, 5 or 10 minutes to look through a bunch of kids absolutely terrified of Santa Claus.

     If you don't have time to really enjoy these super hilarious pictures, fuggehdabowditt, eh!

PS - How do you make it to where there's a separation between the picture on the left and the text on the right so that the text isn't right next to the picture. I added a "border=30px" but it made the picture have a solid 30pixels of white around it, and 'bordercolor="clear"' didn't work to make it transparent... any help?

You Think I Ain't Worth A Dollar, But I Feel Like A Millionaire.

How's your drive-time commute? I need a saga. What's the saga? It's songs for the deaf - you can't even hear it!