Quickies
Skepchick Quickies 11.23

- Schroedinger’s Bigfoot – Is it legal to hunt something that doesn’t exist?
- Gay panic as a legal defense – From Kirsten.
- 14-year-old’s prizewinning solar water purifier – From bluebottle.
- Pope reveals all the secrets of baby Jesus – Including that his birth star was a supernova.
- Cute Animal Friday! From Kirsten, when a formerly stray cat and a dog become best friends.
Featured image by Jill Powell.
The Bigfoot article is fairly amusing although a couple of points. One, if you’re a cryptozoologist, aren’t you a total asshole if you shoot what may be the only individual of a species you’re looking for? Two, if hunting is off limits where you are, you’d better hope I don’t survive if I’m hiking out there and you accidentally shoot me.
Luna,
Good point
So the Pope says the baby Jesus star was a supernova?
That was the plot of an Arthur C. Clarke story, in which a Jesuit goes on an interstellar exploratory voyage and finds a supernova remnant solar system complete with a melted planet which had had a big populous civilization on it. The light from the supernova reached Earth just in time to alert the wise men.
OK I just looked it up and it was called “The Star” and was published in 1955.
I’m glad the Pope is up on his fiction.