On the Origin of Species: Fucked by the short dick of intellectual inadequacy

Here’s the video.  I apologize ahead of time for the stress and ulcers:

The peckerwood you see in above video is none other than Kirk Cameron, a shit-actor from the 80’s who has transitioned quite nicely into a has-been shit-actor in the 00’s.  Unfortunately, unlike other talentless hacks from his era, Kirk is under the ill-informed impression that he has something to contribute to anybody.

Kirk has become perhaps more famous in recent years by his exploits with his band of Creationist goons.  Using arguments that a sixteen-year-old from the Enlightenment could derail, Kirk and his squad depend heavily on the fact that the religious zealots buying his shit don’t read.  They don’t read the Bible, and they sure as hell don’t read anything else.  How else do you push arguments that David fucking Hume blew holes in hundreds of years ago?

At any rate, this time they added a new foreword to On the Origin of Species, chock full of ridiculous claims and equivocations.  These idiots can’t even separate the big bang theory from evolution in their muddled, half-sentient heads, even after beating them against the topic for well over a decade.

I don’t have the time or energy to step into all of the things wrong with this video.  If you feel the need to fly into a rage today, then watch it.

The thing that bothers me the most about shit like this isn’t even how absurd it is.  It’s that people like Cameron are the intellectual pinnacle of a large swath of the American public.  These shitty, invalid, factually inaccurate, straw-man, non-sequitur arguments are so obviously wrong that even watery chunks of my shit know they’ve met their match.  Like Glenn Beck, Cameron is the voice of a generation: a generation of bottom-feeding, toothless red-necks who don’t know their asses from a hole in the ground.

Back to Basics

Several Moral Hazard readers have recently complained that the blog has become too cheerful in tone.  Actually, that’s a lie; nobody reads this blog.  Nonetheless, I’ll devote today’s post to doing what I do best: bitching and moaning about utterly insignificant bullshit.  Without further ado, here’s the latest installment of Things That Piss Me Off ©.

1. “College” t-shirts.

Comic legend.

Unoriginal douchebag and probable circle-jerker.

When John Belushi wore this shirt in the National Lampoon classic Animal House, it was original and clever.  When some closet case fratboy asshole does so over 20 years later, it is neither.  I bet a lot of these idiots don’t even get the joke.

2. The standard system.

Question: how many inches are in a mile?  Answer: nobody knows.  The standard “system” (a loosely used term if there ever was one) makes it impossible to make these sorts of everyday calculations.  Compare that to the metric system: if you want to know how many centimeters are in a kilometer, you just move the decimal point.  The standard units of volume are almost as bad: you’ve got tablespoons, cups, pints, quarts, gallons, and who the fuck knows what else.

I don’t get it: the base 10 number system was around when the standard system was invented, and yet for some reason they thought that 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, and 5,280 feet in a mile sounded about right.  Really, what were they thinking?  At least they have the excuse of living in an age before science, however; what’s the United States’ excuse for continuing to use this cumbersome nonsense?  Probably that Europe uses the metric system, so switching would be unpatriotic.  This is the same reason we don’t have universal health care.

3. Those push-button faucets in public toilets.

You know the ones I’m talking about, right?  The ones where you push down on the faucet(s) and water comes out for about 1.5 seconds?  Those fucking things drive me absolutely nuts.  You push the faucet with your soapy hands and race to get them under the brief flow of water, but you don’t have time to rinse them completely.  You have to push the faucet again, getting more soap on your hands in the process; this cycle continues until you give up and wipe your hands while there’s still soap on them, leaving behind a most unpleasant residue.  These faucets should be banned as a crime against humanity; they’ve caused at least as much human suffering as land mines.

4. Dogs with human names.

The other day I stopped to pet a dog in Frick Park.  I asked its owner what its name was; “Joe,” he replied.  “Joe?” I asked.  “You named your dog Joe? You must be the least creative motherfucker on the planet!  It’s a dog, not a person; give it a badass name like Cujo or Bonecrusher,” I suggested.   “Alternatively, you could go for humor; Steve Martin had a dog named ‘Shithead’ in The Jerk.  Anything, absolutely anything, would be better than Joe!”

I would have continued, but by then he had motored pretty far away on his Rascal scooter.

Meet my dog, Jerry.

5. Lottery drawings during sports games.

I don’t have a problem with the lottery, which is really just a tax on people who don’t understand probability.  If they want to flash the day’s winning numbers across the bottom of the screen during a ballgame, I’d be fine with it.   But no; they devote 3/4 of the screen to showing the little white balls being drawn, distorting the game and reducing it to the size of a postage stamp.  As there are several drawings, this can go on for several minutes.  Why is this necessary?  Do people really need to see the drawing to confirm that it’s not rigged and that their chance really is one in 300 million?  I hate everyone.

Question

I’d like to share a question that’s always puzzled me: how many toddlers would it take to kill me?  Suppose that we’re in the middle of a large, enclosed space and that no weapons are available.  On the one hand, I feel like I should be able to kill toddlers indefinitely; after all, what damage could they do?  On the other hand, killing them would be tiring, and it seems like there must be some number of them that would be overwhelming.  I honestly don’t have a good idea of what this number might be, so I’d like to appeal to the wisdom of crowds:

Please respond to the poll and post your reasoning to comments.

Edit (19-10-09): A reader pointed me to this resource.  It’s about fighting 6- and 7-year-olds, but some of the principles apply.

Men’s Room Mathematics

The first floor men’s room in Carnegie Mellon’s Baker Hall has four urinals.  Every time I visited this facility I remarked the pointlessness of the fourth urinal: as the universal law of the men’s room mandates a buffer of at least one urinal, a bank of four urinals can only accommodate two men.  The construction company might as well have saved some money and installed only three.

This observation alone would not be worth writing about; recently, however, I discovered that generalizing it results in a mathematical system with some very interesting properties.  The system is based on three axioms:

Axiom 1: The first man who enters the men’s room must select an end urinal.

Axiom 2: Any subsequent entrant must select the urinal that maximizes the space between him and his nearest neighbor.

Axiom 3: A buffer of at least one urinal must be maintained between any two men.

These axioms create a mapping y =U(x) between the number of actual urinals (x) and the number of effective urinals (y).  The pairs (1, 1) and (2, 1) are trivial, and we’ve already seen the pairs (3, 2) and (4, 2).  It’s easy to see that adding a fifth urinal increases the number of effective urinals to three, but that a sixth is superfluous; thus (5, 3) and (6, 3).

A first guess at the function that produces this mapping might be U(x) = ceiling((x+1)/2), where ceiling(x) is the smallest integer not less than x (see the Wikipedia entry on floor and ceiling functions).  This function produces the mapping (7, 4), which seems to make sense; if there are seven urinals, men can occupy urinals 1, 3, 5, and 7.

Such an arrangement, however, would violate Axiom 2!  The first two men to enter the toilet will take urinals 1 and 7; what about the third?  In order to maximize the space between himself and his nearest neighbor, he must take urinal 4.  The poor fourth man must either wait or piss in the sink, as there is no way to create the requisite 1-urinal buffer.  Thus, the efficient arrangement (1, 3, 5, 7) is impossible.

Consider the situation after the third man enters the room, in which urinals 1, 4, and 7 are occupied.  We can treat this as two banks of four urinals, with urinal 4 serving as the right endpoint for one bank and the left endpoint for the other.  With this in mind, we can define the Urinal Mapping Function recursively:

U(1) = 1

U(2) = 1

U(3) = 2

for x > 3, U(x) = U(ceiling((x+1)/2)) + U(floor((x+1)/2)) – 1

I used this function to generate the mapping out to x = 10,000; here’s the function depicted graphically:

The Urinal Mapping Function

The linear increases followed by long flat plateaus constitute an interesting pattern (fractal?).  Observe the first 26 values of U(x): 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 10.  Notice that there are two twos, three threes, five fives, and nine nines.  All other values (except for 1) appear exactly once.  This pattern holds true for the remainder of the sequence; for example, any number of urinals between 4,097 and 6,115 yields 2,049 effective urinals.  I therefore submit the following hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1: U is a surjection.

Hypothesis 2: each value U(x) appears either once or exactly U(x) times.

Hypothesis 3: If a value U(x) > 2 appears more than once, it is odd.

I don’t know how to prove these hypotheses or why they might be true.  I am also at a loss to identify what properties all repeated values of U(x) share.  I’ll leave these problems to our mathematically inclined readers.

Another way to look at the problem is to ask what fraction of actual urinals are effective urinals.  This is easily done by examining the behavior of U(x)/x, which is illustrated below:

We see that the ratio oscillates between a maximum of just over 1/2 – specifically, (x + 1)/ 2 – and a minimum of floor(x/3) + 1.  Looking at the local maxima and minima, two concepts suggest themselves:

Definition: A number of urinals n is maximally efficient if U(n) > U(n-1).

Definition: A number of urinals n is maximally inefficient if U(n) = U(n-1) and U(n) < U(n+1).

In other words, a number of urinals is maximally efficient if removing one would reduce the number of effective urinals, and a number of urinals is maximally inefficient if adding one would increase the number of effective urinals but removing one would not make a difference.  1, 3, 5, 8, 9, and 17 are maximally efficient, while 2, 4, 7, 13, and 25 are maximally inefficient.  I’ll leave it to readers to figure out the properties of maximally efficient and maximally inefficient numbers.

I’m excited to have stumbled upon an apparently new mathematical system; the sequence generated by the Urinal Mapping Function is not found in the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.  It seems to be a very rich and interesting system; I suspect that the properties presented here are merely the tip of the iceberg.  I will continue to ponder the matter, and I encourage readers to present their insights in the comments section.

Priceless

Damn near sporting event I watch is attended by at least one ass clown with a sign that says something to the effect of:

“Gas for trip from [some pissant town]: $X.

2 tickets to [sports facility]: $Y.

[Shitty domestic lager] and [meat products made from horse anus]: $Z

Seeing [sports team] beat [other sports team]: PRICELESS!”

First of all, those MasterCard commercials are at least a decade old.  Second, so many dipshits have parodied them that the parodies are actually more cliché than the commercials themselves.  And yet each one of those dipshits brandishes his sign proudly, as though he’s the first ever to think of the idea.

Really creative, asshole.

Finally, attending a ballgame is not “priceless.”  Winning a gold medal at the Olympics is priceless.  Having a threesome with Jessica Alba and Pamela Anderson is priceless.  Kicking one of these cretins in the sack would be priceless.  Going to a Twins game…looks like it ran this particular cretin about $800.

If you’re going to try to whore yourself out to the TV cameras by making a sign, at least be original, like the guy I saw at the 2001 World Series in Arizona.  Diamondbacks pitcher Randy Johnson, who had dominated the Yankees in his previous outing, was on the mound; the fellow’s sign said, “it takes more than 9 Yanks to beat our Johnson.”  Well played, sir.

ESPN Pranksta Strikes Again

I caught a bit of the Home Run Derby last night and saw a new feature ESPN has added to its telecast: when the ball is hit, they digitally put a yellow tail on it so you can see its flight path.  What do they call this feature?  “Ball Track.”

And if you think that’s suggestive, wait until you hear what happened at the end of the first round.  Three players were tied for the last spot in the semifinals, so they had to have – wait for it – a “bat-off.”  I don’t know how the broadcasters managed to keep straight faces as they talked at length about three guys batting off.

This is even better than your last work, ESPN prankster.  You can write for this blog anytime.

A Call For Racial Understanding

I don’t think this blog has any black readers, but in case one happens along I’d really appreciate an answer to the following question:

What is the deal with the sagging pants?

At some point in the early nineties, for reasons I can’t even begin to fathom, black people decided that this was a good look:

Lookin' good, fellas.

In general, black fashion is very fluid, changing quickly with the times.  But here we are, 15 years later, and it’s only gotten worse.  Every time I go downtown I encounter several young men whose pants are so low that they have to shuffle around like penguins.  Given the obvious practical drawbacks and utter ridiculousness of this style, one wonders what keeps it going.  I’ve come up with three possible explanations; I don’t find any of them particularly convincing, but they’re all I’ve got.

1) More efficient shitting.  When you’re prairie doggin’, each piece of clothing between your ass and the toilet increases the probability of skid marks or, in the worst case,  an inside-the-pants assplosion.

"You know why I like you, Harry? 'Cause you're a regular guy."

To test this hypothesis, I propose a nationwide study to determine whether black people have cleaner underwear than other races.  Grant writers, this is your chance.

2) Better underwear display.  What’s the point of buying expensive Tommy Hilfiger drawers if you can’t show them off?  By the way, I claim that any guy who buys underwear that comes in anything other than an economy-size plastic bag is a homosexual.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

3) Certain gazelles exhibit an unusual behavior known as “stotting“: when the animal sees a predator, it jumps repeatedly into the air, deliberately putting itself at a disadvantage.  Evolutionary biologists believe that stotting signals to a predator that the gazelle is healthy and therefore not worth chasing.

This gazelle wears its pants WAY low.

Perhaps allowing one’s pants to sag sends the signal, “I’m such a good fighter that I can afford to practically immobilize my legs, so don’t even bother messing with me.”  This hypothesis could be tested by looking for an inverse correlation between physical fitness and pant height among black men.  I’m taking this to the NSF.

Bernie Goetz, Redux

Making headlines is Jerome Ersland, an Oklahoma City pharmacist who has been charged with first-degree murder for his actions during a robbery on May 29.  For those of you unfamiliar with the story, Ersland, a former Air Force lieutenant colonel (by the way, does anyone know why this is pronounced “kernel?”) and Gulf War veteran, was approached in his store by two masked men, one of whom brandished a pistol and demanded money and drugs.  Ersland pulled a pistol and shot the gunman in the head.  The other robber fled; Ersland gave brief chase, then returned to the store.  He went into the back, retrieved another pistol, and pumped five more rounds into the fallen robber’s stomach.  All this was caught on the store’s surveillance camera:

The debate is now raging over whether Ersland’s actions constitute self-defense or premeditated murder, but I think it’s pretty clear-cut.  When Erlsand returns to the store, he does not seem threatened by the fallen robber; he has even transferred the pistol to his left (non-shooting) hand as he calmly walks behind the counter to retrieve the second gun.  Yes, Ersland committed murder.  And you know what?  Good.  That’s one fewer violent criminal walking the streets.  I don’t understand the sympathy people have for this piece of shit.  “He didn’t have to die,” they say.  They’re right; if he had obeyed the law rather than tried to rob someone, he’d still be alive.

And of course, the race pimps over at the NAACP are rushing to the support of the robbers: “This is not a black issue. This is not a white issue. This is a justice issue,” said Anthony Douglas, state president of the Oklahoma chapter of the NAACP. Nigga, please. You mean to tell me that if the pharmacist had been black and the robbers white you would take the same position?  Come off it.

Yo Ho Ho And A Bottle of AIDS

Recent headlines have been dominated by the exploits of Somali pirates.  I think it’s kind of cool that piracy is making a comeback, but these so-called “pirates” are a disgrace to their craft.  If you’re going to call yourself a pirate, you need to go all the way: get yourself a parrot and an eye patch, hoist the jolly roger, and pepper your speech with endearing turns of phrase.  Such romanticism might earn you a bit of sympathy.  If you’re just some African guy with an AK-47, all you’ll earn is a sniper’s bullet in the head.  To sum up:

Pirate.

Not a pirate.

Stop Saying These Things

Fear not, Moral Hazard fans: the blog carries on.  It’s just that between my schoolwork and the Mike’s untimely death from a marijuana overdose, it’s been difficult to post frequently.  You’ll just have to savor each drop of science a bit more slowly, taking in one brilliant word at a time.  Today’s post concerns things that people say far too often.  This is an urgent matter, so let’s get right to it.

1. “Bless you.”  The custom of saying this after a sneeze dates back to the unwashed morons of the Middle Ages, who believed that the soul could depart and evil spirits could enter the body during sternutation.  I guess saying “bless you” was supposed to alert God to the sneeze so He could quickly rectify the situation.  Whatever.  Anyway, here we are, a millennium later, and people are still saying this stupid shit.  I urge all MH readers to help put an end to this nonsense by responding to “bless you” with “go fuck yourself,” or, even better, a punch to the testicles/ovaries.
2. “I’m sorry.”   I understand saying “sorry” if you run over someone’s dog or have sex with his wife, but why do people feel the need to apologize for trivial things that aren’t even their fault?  Why should you be sorry for bumping shoulders with someone on a crowded bus?  Why should you be sorry for pushing a door open as someone is about to pull it open from the other side?  Why should you be sorry for removing something from the locker next to mine?  The word “sorry” loses all meaning when it’s used in trifling, blameless, unavoidable circumstances such as these.
3. “Thank you.”  Like “I’m sorry,” this is a phrase that is losing its meaning due to overuse.  Why do people thank me for returning an object I’ve borrowed?  They did me a favor, so I should be thanking them (and I do).  Similarly, why do people thank the cashier for selling them something?  Are people that grateful for the opportunity to pay for a box of tic tacs?  Knock this shit off already.
4. “Actually.”  I don’t think people even know what this means.  Damn near every day I hear things like “I actually had the fish, and it was actually really good.  It’s actually better than the chicken.  By the way, I am an idiot.”  Why don’t you actually shut the fuck up before I actually jam my fist down your actual throat?
5. “Literally.”  This has been pointed out quite a bit; there’s even a blog dedicated to the misuse of the word.  Nonetheless, it really pisses me off when people use the word “literally” before saying something figurative.  You’ll even encounter this in newspaper and magazine articles.  What journalism school did these hacks attend?  It literally makes my blood boil.