Meanwhile, in the Tetherd Cow Ahead laboratories…
Wed 23 Jun 2010
It’s Alive!
Posted by anaglyph under Bizarre, Food & Drink, Food Science, Photography
[6] Comments
Meanwhile, in the Tetherd Cow Ahead laboratories…
Fri 18 Jun 2010
Royal Icing
Posted by anaglyph under Idiots, In The News, Insane People, Skeptical Thinking, Stupidity, WooWoo
[11] Comments
Good morning Faithful Acowlytes! I hope you got plenty of restful sleep last night because today you’ll need to have your wits about you as we start off with a quiz. This is the kind of quiz where I show you two images and you have to spot the differences between them. I’m sure you’ve done one of those before. OK, are you ready? Here we go then:
No? Look very very carefully. Still nothing? Hahaha! I apologize dear friends – I’ve tricked you with this one because image #1 is a teapot and image #2 is ALSO a teapot! In fact the only tiny difference between them is that the first one is a Royal Doulton, and the second one is a royal dolt.
Generally I try to refrain from picking on Royalty ((Well, except for King Willy of course – but he’s such good sport.)) here on The Cow because, well, it’s a bit too much like shooting fish in a barrel. I mean, it’s not their fault, really, is it? All those centuries of inbreeding does tend to take its toll. Luckily, most Royals are safely out of harm’s way for the most part, but sadly it doesn’t stop them from opening their mouths and gabbing when they have an audience.
If you know anything about the Prince of Wales you will be aware that he’s not a stranger to elliptical thinking. He has campaigned on behalf of homeopathy, freaked out about GM technology and now, in his latest escapade, blamed Galileo and science for the ills of the modern world.
In a presentation last week to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, Prince Charles places culpability for all our climate problems on ‘mechanistic thinking’ which ‘goes back at least to Galileo’s assertion that there is nothing in nature but quantity and motion’. The prince thinks that the reason for our current environmental difficulties is because the Western world is having a ‘deep, inner crisis of the soul’.
This is a banal piece of reasoning that is as antiquated as the concept of the Royal Family itself. The Prince of Wales pulls one of the classic tricks of the religiously-inclined of equating a quest for knowledge with an abrogation of moral responsibility. In other words, science equals heartless amoral exploitation; religion ((The Prince doesn’t specifically campaign for religion as such, but it’s the same kind of thinking – the mention of ‘souls’ and the faux surprise when he says that he finds it ‘baffling that so many scientists profess a faith in God yet this has little bearing on the ‘damaging’ way science is used to exploit the natural world’ all mixes in to his diffuse religious view of how things work.)) equals warm and fuzzy caring and sharing. Even a schoolkid can see the stupidity inherent in this simplistic notion.
Prince Charles’ view of science as ‘cold and mechanistic’ is one that is beloved of science detractors and shows no understanding at all of scientists or scientific pursuit. Additionally, the Prince is either willful or stupid by ignoring (in favour of its perceived ills) the extraordinary benefits so obviously brought to us by science. How about the science that gave us the cure for smallpox, Your Highness? Or the science that has allowed millions of people access to clean water and nutritious food? How about the good deeds of the scientists who figured out how to clone insulin so that diabetics can have affordable treatment? How about the wonderful achievements of science that let us talk to our friends and family wherever they may be on the planet, at any time of the day or night? Or the science that allows us to make great adventures inwards to our consciousness and outward to the cosmos?
Like many of the purveyors of woo, the Prince of Wales wants it both ways; he eschews science because it is ‘evil’, but is quite happy to enjoy the countless improvements it brings to our lives. He blames science for our creating our ‘materialistic culture’ and for the ‘damaging way it is used to exploit the world’, yet offers no practical alternatives – just notions of vague, superficial, wistful magical thinking.
He advocates a world without science and without individual material aspirations. ((For the peasants, at any rate.))He pines for a world with a folky agrarian culture where superstitious thinking rules.
It’s not surprising in the end. Royalty has always done very well in such climates.
Wed 16 Jun 2010
The Adventures of Pocket Jesus
Posted by anaglyph under Pocket Jesus
[15] Comments
Episode 4: Manna From Heaven.
*But now our soul is dried away: there is nothing at all, beside this manna, before our eyes.
And the manna was as coriander seed, and the colour thereof as the colour of bdellium.
I love teh intertubes. So, I do a search for the word ‘mushroom’ in the Bible and find that fungus does not appear to come under God’s purview at all. Anywhere. God did not create mushrooms, apparently. Well, not explicitly anyway. He created the animals and the plants, but as we know, the fungus inhabits a Kingdom in its own right – if anyone should know this, it’s God – Him being omnipotent and all that. You’d think it was worth at least a mention.
Well, even if HE doesn’t care to embroider mushrooms into Biblical history, I discover that this does not prevent the many advocates of the psychedelic theories of religion from going to all kinds of lengths to write them into the Good Book, whether their appearance is justified or not. ((I remember reading The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross in high school and thinking that it sounded feasible, but I’m inclined these days to view the hypothesis as a bit of a stretch…))
One chap even puts up a compelling case for the ‘manna’ in the Bible being the Terfezia desert truffle (not to be mistaken for dessert truffle ((The dessert truffle was created by God in later times, in order that luxury hotels would have something to place on guest’s pillows. This is not mentioned in the Bible either.))), which, the legend goes, is created by lightning striking the ground.
I also got to look up bdellium, which is now surely my favourite word. But even after looking it up I’m not certain what colour it is.
The mushroom patch into which Pocket Jesus has ventured above is another manifestation of fungal weirdness that continues to manifest in our backyard. The Bleeding Tooth fungus that I mentioned in recent despatches has now turned into an unattractive brown slimy sludge and this little display has popped up close by. We have a veritable fungal festival going on here.
___________________________________________________________________________
The font used in The Adventures of Pocket Jesus (aram44.ttf) features genuine Aramaic characters and is used with permission of Mr. G. S. Dykes
___________________________________________________________________________
Fri 11 Jun 2010
Coke Habit
Posted by anaglyph under Bizarre, Daft Advertising, Food & Drink, Food Science
[21] Comments
Some questions:
1. Coke has an expiry date?
2. Why are they selling it in a pharmacy?
3. Why do you need ‘grip’ on a Coke bottle?
4. Is ‘Just out of date’ any different to ’10 years out of date’ when it comes to Coca Cola?
5. Why don’t pharmacists have any sense of humour? ((I pointed out that I thought it was funny and she looked at me as if I was a lunatic.))
6. Coke has an expiry date?
Wed 9 Jun 2010
Cow Cachet
Posted by anaglyph under TCA Shoppe
[4] Comments
C’mon d00ds! You know you want some Tetherd Cow swag! These are just some of the groovy-as designs in the Shoppe! Wear your Cow Colours and show a world full of Philistines what fashion really is!
Tue 8 Jun 2010
3D Really IS Going To Kill You. I MEAN IT This Time! Stop Laughing!
Posted by anaglyph under Australiana, Idiots, In The News, Silly, SmashItWithAHammer, Stupidity, Technology
[23] Comments
Yes, I know I’ve talked about it several times already, but this time it’s serious.
‘Cyber sickness’ warning ahead of 3D revolution’ screams the headline. Again, you will not be at all surprised to learn that it’s from the Melbourne Age.
Up to 10 per cent of people who watch 3D images on television, at the movies or while gaming suffer ”cyber sickness” symptoms such as blurred vision, nausea and dizziness, health experts have warned.
Those experts! If it wasn’t for them, the world would be a much cheerier place. But wait! It’s WORSE THAN YOU THINK:
But they say the number of people affected by cyber sickness could rise to unknown proportions with the advent of the 3D TV era…
Did you hear that? UNKNOWN PROPORTIONS! It could be a veritable cyber-sickness pandemic. Forget getting immunised for swine flu – if these experts are right we’ll all be taking major doses of stereoids to fend off the 3DTs.
The article gushes breathlessly onward:
Virtual reality pioneer Mark Pesce, an honorary lecturer at the University of Sydney, said the majority of occasional 3D viewers would love the experience, but he warned that the health effects of heavy use of 3D media – which trick the eye by changing the depth perception of a person’s vision – had not been tested.
Um… actually, that’s not how 3D works at all – there is no ‘tricking the eye by changing depth perception’ Mr… who wrote this damned thing… let’s just scroll back up to the by-line… oh, WHAT a surprise. It’s Stephen Cauchi, King of the the Non-News at the wheel again. Geez. Have they hired this guy specifically to reduce the Age’s credibility or something? ((I swear I’m not witch-hunting this guy. I literally did what I just wrote – I was reading the article and thought ‘Man this is terrible!’, looked at the byline…)) Anyway, to continue, 3D works by exploiting the effect of stereopsis which is the natural way we achieve depth perception. What Mr Cauchi just said is word fluff. It is completely free of actual meaning.
Like last post’s Government Weather Control article that we saw from Mr Cauchi, as the story continues the sensible people start to appear, and we find Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital ophthalmologist Lionel Kowal saying that the number of people who reported problems with 3D is ‘probably closer to 5 per cent than 10 per cent.’ Then, we hear from Kathryn Rose, an associate professor in orthoptics at the University of Sydney, who thinks that ‘about 3 per cent of the population would not be able to watch 3D TV’.
3 percent? 3 percent? Do I hear 2 percent? 2 percent over in the back? 1.5 percent? Can I get a 1?
The article ends with a quote from Newcastle University neurobiologis Alan Brichta:
‘Right now we don’t have all the information but my gut feeling says [cyber sickness] is not going to be a major issue.’
Are you with me here in this insanity, dear Acowlytes? We’ve gone from an epidemic of ‘cyber sickness’ of UNKNOWN PROPORTIONS to ‘er.. actually, not a major issue…’ in the space of one information-free waffle fest.
Like the Government Weather Control story, I propose this whole air-headed notion could have been summed up in one short sentence:
A tiny minority of people might find 3D media a little unsettling but most people won’t.
Again, short on pizazz, but it’s exactly the same content and it would have saved precious digital bits for something that was actually worth calling NEWS.
