Sarah Palin reaches a new low

Video with transcript, and a better diatribe than I manage here

Normally, I think it's best that colossal stupidity and harrowing evil be marginalized. Like the absurd demonstrations of the Westboro Baptist Church, which qualified on both criteria. Or pastor [name omitted to marginalize the guilty]'s Koran-burning farce in (I'm ashamed to say it) Florida, which probably qualifies as one or the other, but not both. Better to ignore them, and let them fade into obscurity, because ignomy shines just as brightly as praise, if not more. There's no such thing as bad publicity for crackpots.

But in this case it's different. Palin already has the limelight - 5 million viewers demonstrated that quite clearly when her reality show debuted in November - and people everywhere are saying with a straight face that she might be a contender in the 2012 presidential election. So it is of paramount importance that she be exposed for the ignorant moron she is. If nothing else, check out this transcript:

GRETA: Governor, last night there was a lot of discussion about the Sputnik Moment the President wants us to have. Do you agree with him? Is this our moment?

PALIN: That was another one of those WTF moments, when he has so often repeated, the Sputnik Moment, that he would aspire Americans to celebrate, he needs to remember that what happened back then with the former communist USSR and their victory and that race to space, yeah, they won, but they also incured so much debt at the time that it resulted in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union so I listen to that Sputnik Moment talk over and over again and I think, no we don’t need one of those.

Don't cry for me, Argentina. Seriously, it kills the mood.

The following abstract was just published in Science. I think I'm going to go take a cold shower. A cold shower of human tears.

Gelstein, S. et al. (2011). Human tears contain a chemosignal. Science, 331. 226-230.

Emotional tearing is a poorly understood behavior that is considered uniquely human. In mice, tears serve as a chemosignal. We therefore hypothesized that human tears may similarly serve a chemosignaling function. We found that merely sniffing negative-emotion–related odorless tears obtained from women donors induced reductions in sexual appeal attributed by men to pictures of women’s faces. Moreover, after sniffing such tears, men experienced reduced self-rated sexual arousal, reduced physiological measures of arousal, and reduced levels of testosterone. Finally, functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed that sniffing women’s tears selectively reduced activity in brain substrates of sexual arousal in men.

The descent of My Chemical Romance

What The. If anybody can find Gerard Way's integrity, would you please return it to the empty shell of a rock star that it left behind? This is the biggest waste of talent I've seen since Bradley Nowell took the H Train to Nowhere.

I hate to be a downer, so here's a link to MCR at their best.

Sun, Moon, and ISS

Forming a troika to make Kubrik jealous, the sun, moon, and International Space Station gathered for this incredible photo. Pohotography credits go to French astrophotographer Thierry Legault who figured out the why (math), when (early this week), where (Oman!), and how (airplanes). Also check out his similar picture of the ISS (the H-shaped thing with solar panels sticking out of it) passing in front of the moon. Here's the article from Bad Astronomy (don't be fooled by the name - the astronomy is you'll find there is A-OK).

Full size pics:
Solar
Lunar

Well this is disappointing

Missy Higgins in 2007

Sara Bareilles in 2010

Same (hackneyed) chords, same melody. They're even in the same key.