30 December 2012

Link round-up for 30 December 2012

Murr Brewster has a book out.

Here's an interesting comparison of the Star Trek Enterprises and the real ships of the same name (found via Mendip).

The misogynist MRA movement celebrates a year of triumphs.

Check out HR Giger's Tarot of the Underworld.

This lawn display isn't racist, no siree, not at all.

Look at this carpet, and imagine the lungs.

What if all the time and energy wasted on prayer was spent on actually doing things?

Teabaggerdom lurches toward civil war.

An Oregon woman finds a plea for help in her Halloween decorations.

Joe Hagan reports from National Review's entertainingly mournful post-election cruise.

Are football fans really this bad?

Mark "Appalachian Trail" Sanford wants to get back into politics.

An anti-gun protest in Denver draws meager turn-out.

Religious nutters are now trying to conflate abortion and Aztec human sacrifice.

In the HSBC case, American justice openly acknowledges that the financial parasite class is exempt from the rules that apply to the rest of us.

The Republican narrative of the last few years is nothing but a series of myths.

A news website posts full names and addresses of all gun permit holders in two New York counties (which will of course create an incentive to skip getting a permit and own guns illegally); in retaliation, other sites have posted personal information on the site's publisher, editor, and others.

IHEU has issued a report on discrimination against non-religious people (sent by Leslie Parsley).

As austerity policies continue to cripple southern Europe, Spanish mothers raise money themselves for a school bus.

Here's the Gandhi quote that Facebook doesn't want you to see.

A giant aquarium in a Shanghai mall bursts open without warning.

Indian blogger Avicenna posts an impassioned denunciation of his country's epidemic of rape.

Swaziland's government idiotically tries to reduce rape by banning miniskirts.

Bilingual brains function better -- and are more resistant to Alzheimer's.

George Dvorsky looks at technological breakthroughs of 2012, of which the most significant is brain implants that improve mental function in monkeys.

4 Comments:

Blogger Robert the Skeptic said...

My father was on the crew of the original Enterprise during WWII. He enlisted in the Navy and commissioned Lt.JG. He had been an aircraft engineer with Douglas aircraft when the war broke out. His job on the Big-E was to quickly assess the shot-up airplanes that managed to make it back to the carrier deck and quickly determine if they were repairable, and therefore sent below for repair, or beyond repair and so shoved over the side of the carrier deck into the sea.

I guess were he alive in the 23rd century he would be deciding if the shuttle craft were repairable upon returning from their "away missions" or shoved back out into space.

30 December, 2012 11:08  
Anonymous Marc McKenzie said...

Thanks for the link to the article "Enterprise vs. Enterprise"--very informative, and certainly one of those cases where fact and fiction can overlap one another. A high school classmate served on the Enterprise (CVN-65) during his stint in the Navy.

I'll certainly have to do some more research into the Ford-class supercarriers....

31 December, 2012 07:56  
Anonymous Blurber said...

On the article about abortion and Aztec human sacrifice, I noticed several familiar phrases such as, "The Holy Spirit showed me . . . "

Why is it that the people with the weirdest opinions are the ones always talking to God or one of his assistants?

31 December, 2012 10:13  
Blogger Infidel753 said...

RtS/MM: Someone who served on the real ship might be interested in the comparisons. I think deep-space exploration actually won't much resemble recent or present-day seafaring, but it's a model science fiction seems to rely on.

Blurber: Their God is always crazy in the same ways they are -- almost as if he were a figment of their imaginations.

01 January, 2013 09:16  

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