I Am Dartmouth! (and so can you)

This is very weird. My alumni magazine has fictional alumnus Stephen Colbert on the cover this month. Maybe I'll bother reading it for once. The article is an account of his time at the school he claims to have graduated from, hanging out with that shady crowd of Reviewers like Laura Ingram and Dinesh D'Souza, running from bears and so forth.

Like Dartmouth itself, the magazine is pretty traditional (read: lazy), so it doesn't have a website, I had to scan the cover. (This also explains why they call or write at least once a week asking for donations -- people who knew that I was grad student who was on full financial aid during my time there wouldn't bother.) Anyhow, since they don't seem to have computers, maybe I'll scan the story as well, I just don't want to get in trouble with a school I have no intension of ever giving money to.

Update: These people have the full article.

George Carlin

George Carlin died yesterday. A very sad thing. I found this clip of my favorite of his routines on Cosmic Variance.



I have never believed in God, but it took me a while before I knew that I outright disbelieved in the whole concept. The first half of that was realizing that religious people were not just kidding themselves "emperor has no clothes" style (which I had always just assumed), and the second half was seeing that other people found it just as absurd as I did. And when you're on the fence about how strongly you feel, doubting that you should be presumptuous enough, as a fairly young person, to completely dismiss this entire philosophy that 90% of people take really seriously, it helps to hear someone like George Carlin. Someone who is just blunt and witty and brutally honest, who has no problem saying the kind of stuff that is so far off the radar of Acceptable, Serious Discourse, helps you see that yes, all those contradictions you noticed about christianity when you were 8 were perfectly valid. And yes, the pat, trite answers that you got in Sunday school when you asked about them were just as silly as you thought. And no, ridiculing people's seriously held beliefs is not wrong when they are completely full of shit...as long as you can be funny about it. So thank you George Carlin, for showing us that bluntness and honesty (occasionally tempered by humor) can go a long way. Joe bless you!

Look at Me!

Through some internet miracle I scored absurdly good tickets to today's rout of the Seattles. Like best seats in my life tickets. Last week. For face value through the team website. Which is supposedly impossible...except that it actually isn't, as this grainy screenshot (that you'll have to trust is me on television) demonstrates.

Ticket resellers are a drain on society. At least the part of society that likes going to baseball games.

New Math

Ordinarily, I would post something like this and say "hey look at this video that humorously acknowledges science/math concepts!" This really contains no actual information, but is so clever and vulgar that it just doesn't matter. Plus I've got the same shirt as that kid, so you know, excellent work.

Cancer!

(Thanks to Jenn)

Martian Sunset

From NASA's Image of the Day, an artistic shot of the sun going down on Mars. In addition to being really beautiful, it certainly raises some important questions, such as: there's an alternative to the reviled (by me) Astronomy Picture of the Day?

NASA - Sunset on Mars