Jesus and Mo

The author of Jesus and Mo hits the rhetorical nail on the head. You can’t insult an idea.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

You can get your science-oriented cards from here: Science Gallery Christmas cards.

All I Want for Christmas

Data Safety Sheet for Water

H₂O

From Kausik Datta at In Sciento Veritas over on SciLogs we have a bit of nerdish humour: The Material Data Safety Sheet for hydrogen hydroxide, or was that dihydrogen monoxide?

Happy Holidays! Ho, ho, ho!

And a “Ho, ho, ho!” to you and yours. You can buy these sciency cards at Not on the High Street.

Vaccines and chemicals

Puff the Mutant Dragon has an excellent takedown of Vaccines Have Chemicals alarmism: “Do vaccines contain toxic chemicals?” Puff considers mercury, ammonia, formaldehyde, thimerosol, aluminum, and hydrochloric acid.

In addition, Puff found a cartoon showing Jenner vaccinating people with cowpox. The results look like a humorous jab at vaccination fears.

But this was a serious editorial effort by the Anti-Vaccine Society, which objected to adding strange cow-derived substances into our precious bodily fluids. (Click on the picture to see a larger version.)

And yet this was a huge step up from previous inoculation procedures, which used a mild strain of smallpox with only 10% mortality to protect against the wild strains with 30% mortality.

Irony win of the year

Fails so much it wins.

Amusing bio: J.T. Eberhard

Here’s the biography supplied by the author of  the blog “What Would JT Do?”

JT Eberhard is humanity’s best chance in a zombie apocalypse. Less importantly, he is a campus organizer and high school specialist with the Secular Student Alliance. Once an opera singer, he now resides in Ohio where he occupies his time by helping atheist students to win at activism! In 2008 JT brought the gold medal in cuddling back to the United States and is presently in training for 2012. Eberhard also spent eleven years on the Candy Land pro circuit before retiring in 2010. Hate mail, overt gratitude, religious people trying to convert me, marriage requests, threats and all other non-comment material should be sent to wwjtd21[at]gmail[dot]com.

JT’s Christmas eve piece is, “How do atheists handle death? Holiday edition.”

Nomenclature Rule

In Life: An Unauthorized Biography, Richard Fortey documented a biologists’ rule:

The most primitive of  bacteria are known by the most wondrous jargon, mastery of which is guaranteed to cause jaws to drop at social functions, for the correct designation of many of them is ‘chemolithoautotrophic hyperthermophiles.’ Since these bacteria are only a thousandth of a millimetre long — minute rods, discs, or cocci (spheres), this affords an example of a rule well known to biologists: that the length of the description is inversely proportional to the size of the organism.

No doubt Fortey is an accomplished raconteur, but I find his written work almost unbearably wordy and have to take it in small doses.