Skepticism
Skepchick Quickies, 3.9
- Skepchick has been accused of breeding anti-psychic pets!
- Tutoring service slips in some Scientology. (Thanks to Emory.)
- Chimpanzees show some conceptual and cultural skills. (Thanks to Steve.)
- Study finds the most religious groups in the US have lost ground. (Thanks to Paul.)
- And another study claims the most religiously conservative US states like pornography the most.
That chimps have conceptual and cultural skills and IDers refuse that *they* descend from apes is as revealing, and refreshing, as adding 2 and 2.
And the Liberals who are the perverts? Conservatives, stop worrying and love the bomb. Publicly.
(Minor pro tip: add the article’s title to the page <title>, so it works well with the delicious.com extension or firefox 3 bar :)
15%!
Study finds the most religious groups in the US have lost ground. (Thanks to Paul.)
Take out the (-)s and the statement gets a whole lot more fun.
Re: “Anti psychic pets” video at 0:56:
ANTI-SYKICK KITTEH IS OVER 9,000
The porn thing is just bad reporting–when you look at the actual paper, there wasn’t much of a difference.
Which is too bad, because it was a cool story.
http://contexts.org/socimages/2009/03/04/online-porn-subscription-in-liberal-versus-conservative-states/
If religious groups have lost ground and religiously conservative really consume more porn in the US, is the porn industry loosing profit? How bad that would be for the economy?
Can you get to work on anti-psychic zebras so I can ride around thwarting psychics while being camouflaged?
“Her video is out of sync due to interference from soviet mind control satellites.”
say no more. i totally understand.
Now, how can I measure my level of anti-psychic emissions? I want to know my rating!
I have been expecting the drop off in religion since the mid 1990’s. This actually came a little earlier than I had thought it would. I’ve noticed that everytime we have a new century roll around that church attendance goes up and then drops off in the second decade. I think that our primitive little chimp brains look at numbers like they are magic words. “Abra Kadabra” = “2000”. Now we have had a new century and a new millineum and the world hasn’t come to an end. The rapture hasn’t happened. The lord hasn’t called the faithful home. So people start to relax their bung holes and church attendance drops off. Atheists always seem to do well in the second and third decades of a century. I’ll be curious to see how we are doing in the 2050’s.
@bug_girl: I agree it could have been a good story, but this was only part of the study. It’s amazing how reporters(?) take only part of the story and turn it into something else. Search for ‘redlightstates.pdf” and you should get what I think is the original study. However the section that this story is based on lists only the top and bottom ten states, which means there are thiryt states missing.
I hope that anti-psychic pet video was a satire, but even if it was some fool will take it seriously. Besides, I thought all animals were psychic and could predict natural disasters a few nanoseconds before they happened.
@bug_girl: “Which is too bad, because it was a cool story.”
They always are. That’s why the journalists fudge.
More chimp smarts: According to a report on the BBC News web-site a chimp at a zoo in Sweden stockpiled rocks for throwing at zoo visitors:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7928996.stm
Briefly put, Santino gathered the rocks in the morning, before the zoo opened, and stashed them at various points around his enclosure. Then in the afternoon he used the ammo dumps to bombard spectators.
He also learned that concrete which sounds hollow when knocked can be broken apart easily to provide extra stocks.
There’s more details over at Not Exactly Rocket Science on SciBlogs.
My question for Elise is why aren’t we breeding anti-psychic pets!!?! LOL
Maybe those in conservative states are more willing to pay for porn when their google search for “nekkid pitchers” only comes up with Japanese baseball sites.
Skeptics everywhere should buy Paul a beer.
The video on the ‘non-religious’ attached to the USA Today article on declining numbers of believers seems to completely miss the point. They chose to profile a musician who ‘wandered off’ from catholicism and doesn’t care about god, rather than someone who put thought into it and came to a conscious decision. I don’t feel represented!
Anti-psychic Pets: I made that video and it is satire. I’m glad some of you like it. :)