Elysia chlorotica, the Green Sea Slug, has apparently been seen to produce chlorophyll by itself! So it’s a planimal! Or Animant. Something like that. Another awesome evolution for science.

It’s true! They freaking stole ten days out of my life. They didn’t look like little green men though. They looked rather bizarre, like giant slugs. They didn’t probe me either. That’s just stupid. I played with those fellows. They said they had been looking upon the earth for about 16 years and were rather puzzled by the weirdness of the human race.

I did ask some questions though. “What is the question to the life, the universe, and everything?” Actually, I don’t remember what they said. My brain hurts.

Okay I lied, an old friend of mine from high school sent me something that really stole all my time away, but I’m finished with that damn thing now. Probably. My brain really does hurt.

You know how you can’t see as far in cities? It’s kind of foggy? Try going to China for example, and this effect is further magnified. However, I now understand what’s going on. We live inside a video game. A bunch of massive super computers are rendering the earth right now, but they only have so much power. In the cities, the machines have to render more people, thus lowering the draw distance, causing you to see less and less. In China, there are tons of people, causing the draw distance to be even lower. The government’s lying to you! It’s a grand conspiracy!

As many of you might know. I’m a psychic. Yes, that’s right. What’s that? Where’s the evidence? Uh… WHERE’S YOUR EVIDENCE THAT’S I’M NOT? There. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Anyway, I will now predict what will happen throughout this year in separate, discrete categories.

Definite Hits

1. A couple tens of thousands of comets will hit the earth’s atmosphere and burn up due to the rapid compression of air heating up in front of the object, causing it to break apart.
2. A new flu will have evolved and it will kill a couple thousand people in the United States alone.
3. The Pope will not stop spouting lies about condoms and will condemn many millions more in Africa to contract HIV and various other STDs, which will lead to death.
4. The anti-vaccination movement still continues on, causing even further measles outbreaks throughout the US and other countries, which will eventually lead to even more deaths.
5. Another freaking big foot sighting.
6. Stupidity will still reign.

High Probability Hits

1. The economy will take a turn for the better.
2. We will find another hundred exoplanets.
3. More fossils will be found, at least one of which will be a so-called “missing link.”
4. A few more children will die because of their parents’ religious background.
5. A baby will lose heart function for a little while on Christmas day, but will regain heart function after a minute or two As a result the parents will call this a miracle even though all the thanks should go to the doctors.
6. Singapore will be hit with yet another tsunami.

Low Probability Hits

1. Obama will be shot, and death will be in his immediate future.
2. One of the comets predicted above will hit the city of New York on July 4, 2010 while a large group of people are out having barbecue and completely obliterate an apartment building with 22 floors that house around 200 families, causing, astonishingly, very few deaths, and they will tribute this as divine even though a number of people did indeed die.
3. The Discovery Institute will finally see the light of day and finally see that the best way to explain the wide diversity and variation in the species is due to evolution, not some diety.
4. I will stop being so lazy and go lose twenty pounds (fat chance!).
5. Yet another person will come up with a free-energy device, but nobody will fund it.
6. The Skeptologists will be picked up (Sadly, it’s probably not going to happen).

Of course, like all the other psychics, if it even remotely sounds like I made the correct prediction, that’s what I was going for.

And you know what? It doesn’t feel much different. It’s not like I just automatically felt older; it occurs everyday. Well, congratulations everyone. We’ve staved off a global catastrophe for yet another year. Happiness for us all!

P.S. Until we have to go to work/school again. Bastards.

P.P.S. No, it’s not the new decade yet. You guys did the same thing at year 2000. Stop it.

Starting today, Ireland begins its anti-blasphemy laws. If you as much as utter anything that may seem offensive to another person’s religion, you get slapped with a 25,000 euro fine. This is absolutely barbaric (No offense to the barbarians, I love you guys). When was the last time this happened? Oh, the dark ages where ABSOLUTELY NO PROGRESS OCCURRED! This practically kills free speech in that nation all together. If your religious can’t handle criticism, then your ideas don’t deserve any respect. It’s dreadfully uncivilized.

Good thing is that there are plenty of people working on getting this crummy law repealed as it should be.

I figure we should start parodying this. Start preaching the flying spaghetti monster in the streets for example. If anybody says anything against our “beliefs,” time to call the cops.

NOVA aired this special on evolution two days ago. I just found it. PZ says it’s pretty good and I don’t have any television channels so I couldn’t watch it, but I’m watching it now. If you want to as well, then check it out. It’s apparently an introduction into some of what we’ve learned since Darwin first proposed his theory of evolution by natural selection such as all the genetic evidence.

There is such a large amount of bad information out there. Ever since I started looking into reality, things tend to be a lot different than they usually appear. Pretty much every single day now, I learn about things I’ve learned in elementary and high school classes that are pretty much untrue. Heat rising? Bunk. Space shuttles heating up on re-entry due to air friction? Absurdity. Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone? Perhaps not exactly. This information appears to just circulate without verification.

I have rather large problems with the education in this nation. The internet solves quite a bit of the problems surrounding the vacuum of information schools provided before, but I wonder how many kids would actually grow up and look into what is real? Subjects in the liberal arts are interpretive. You can do fine in those without any knowledge of science, but given the vast importance of science, how exactly do we trust the system when the majority of people are simply ignorant?

The issue is never as easy as it appears, I agree. But when the majority of your citizens have no idea on the basic facts of the universe, how does then a democracy function? It actually doesn’t even hold true just to science but to a wide variety of subjects. When you have a large citizenry that’s pretty much governing the nation and that body of people have no clue what they are talking about, then there’s a problem here.

As any scientist knows, not all opinions are worth the same. This holds very much true to the creationist/ID/evolution frenzy. In literary analysis, if you think Hamlet was crazy, you are quite entitled to your opinion; there’s absolutely no way to test any hypothesis you hold in the context of a book or other form of media. However, in the realm of reality, such things do not follow. This concept is not intellectual elitism. An expert in the field knows more than you. That’s just a fact. If you believe you can conduct surgery on yourself, go ahead, but I think I’d rather trust the doctor with his or her years of medical training and experience.

When you are an expert in the field, your words should hold much more sway than some white-collar worker off the street. That does not mean you may be wrong, but certainly there’s less of a chance of doing so. But the problem is that this kind of idea is held down in favor of political correctness. Does this mean then we should instead be an oligarchical society? I used to think so, but such a thing has its own problems. Certainly the best elixir for this problem is anything marvelous; it only requires better education for the masses, but indeed how difficult this simple idea is.

All my life, I’ve opened the banana from the tab. Those damn monkeys and their ingenuity!

There have been some studies lately on the benefits of diets which restrict calories to rather insane levels. These folks eat much less than the general population and look extremely skinny. They’re extrapolating this from the benefits seen in mice and other animals where when given such diets, they tended to live longer and healthier. The problem with such extrapolations are that such results may not be the case in humans necessarily and many pharmaceutical drugs are quite indeed evidence of this.

Well, now we have further studies that have shown protein changes in the human body in response to such restrictive diets, so there probably is something to this thing, though the study was only for five weeks, not long-term.

My opinion is that this diet seems quite difficult to pull off forever. You may have better cardiovascular health, but I wonder if you can pick up your children or anything else. Living 80 years with pleasure, or 100 years with none (in regards to food). I think I’ll choose the former.