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1. No dear, your penis is the largest I have ever had.
2. OMG, it's so big.
3. Yes dear, we can have a threesome with my hot sister.
4. No dear, you were my first.
5. Yes dear, our son is yours.

captcha:gospel

Preaching to the choir?

Perhaps equally oblig.: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2134

I encourage you to teach your daughter as much about biology and science as she can understand. It would help if she's already heard the term "DNA" early on so that when she comes across it again, with a jumble of other terms, it will at least be familiar.

I'm sure there are 3-year-old children where both parents are scientists http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2899#comic and talk about biology over the dinner table. They would have a better understanding of DNA than normal children.

However, teachers and psychologists tell me that one of the important things about child development is that children can learn certain things at certain stages of development. If you try to teach them something before they reach that stage of development, they just can't learn it.

I tried to teach my niece to draw at the age of 5. She couldn't -- and wouldn't -- draw realistically, so I stopped pushing it. Then I read that most children can't draw realistically until the age of 6 or 7. When she turned 7, she started drawing faces, and she drew them pretty well.

In biology, for the most part you have to learn ideas in sequence. You start with the basics and then go to the details. For example, high school teachers don't teach the names of proteins. Kids learn a few age-appropriate concepts, and come back to them in greater detail in their college biology courses.

Richard Feynmann had a good essay on science education and what it means to understand science, as opposed to just memorizing terms. I can't find it immediately.

Maybe your daughter is growing up in an unusually enriched environment, and maybe she can understand some of the basics of DNA at 3 1/2. Since kids can learn card games, maybe they can learn the basics of DNA. I'd like to see it. I am a great advocate of teaching biology to children, and if it works, despite my skepticism, fine.

But I don't think those rural Indian kids in TFA understood anything about DNA. And I won't believe it until I see evidence.

NOOOOO!

Yes, it's a trend. Everyone has thought the newest generation sucks and that the world is going to hell. Obligatory SMBC

Relevant smbc: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2881#comic

smbc about it.

I often wonder how many drugs we reject long before human trials because some researcher used the wrong animal to test.

Also an obligatory SMBC comic

No kidding.

Trial Drug 1035832B:

Side effects in mice: Congenital defects, swelling of the urethra, kidney failure, liver failure, seizures, heightened blood pressure with occasional heart attacks, loss of vision and motor function, death.

Side effects in Humans: Occasional diarrhea.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal #2881

I often wonder how many drugs we reject long before human trials because some researcher used the wrong animal to test.

Also an obligatory SMBC comic

They've discovered the secret to monetising malpractice.

Once again, Webcomic rants are the precursors of life itself: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2834

"Madame, this is the Post-Scarcity world of scarcity!"

RMS is a brilliant software engineer. That does not make him brilliant---or even competent---in economics.

Obligatory SMBC: SMBC #1776

If he can, I say we hook ourselves up a utilitarian Superman.

I can't wait for networked 3D printers to become commonplace. See also: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2851

Well, this smbc comic addresses that, except that it's stored in bacterial DNA.

Yes, they already use some confusingly advanced technology there.

No, he's talking about the traditional game of headbrick.

It's a Tradition!

As much as I like how the game of Football plays, I will forever see it as one of the brain injury sports.

The Boston University School of Medicine studied 35 brains of former pro Football players. They found evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in 34 of them. The disease can lead to sufferers experiencing memory loss, dementia and depression.

It's fun to watch and play, but I can't support a sport that knowingly puts hundreds of thousands of kids through that. I don't know how much of this they knew when they published it, but the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic about Headbrick was frighteningly accurate.

To make it safe, they would have to turn it into what we currently call “flag” or “touch” Football. It would be a different sport.

Since our founding fathers are all spinning in their graves right now, might as well hook them up to generators and harvest the free energy.

No need to disturb them. We have lots of cats and buttered bread to do the same job.

Since our founding fathers are all spinning in their graves right now, might as well hook them up to generators and harvest the free energy.

1. XKCD (obviously)
2. Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
3. ChannelATE
4. Bug
5. Nedroid

You might also like The Perry Bible Fellowship, Basic Instructions and The Doghouse Diaries. The web is a wonderful place :-)

BAH! It's been all downhill since Kennedy died...

Nah! It's been all downhill since 1945...

best online only

1. http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php
2. http://questionablecontent.net/
3 http://www.smbc-comics.com/
4. http://xkcd.com/

and these two are the best of the newspaper comics

1. http://www.uclick.com/client/wpc/nq/ nonsequitur
2. http://www.uclick.com/client/wpc/db/ doonesbury

1.) Pearls Before Swine ( http://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine?ref=comics )

2.) Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal ( http://www.smbc-comics.com/ )
Examples:
* http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2835#comic
* http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2560#comic
* http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2674#comic

3.) Romantically Apocalyptic ( http://romanticallyapocalyptic.com/ )

4.) A softer world ( http://asofterworld.com/ )

1.) Pearls Before Swine ( http://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine?ref=comics )

2.) Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal ( http://www.smbc-comics.com/ )
Examples:
* http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2835#comic
* http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2560#comic
* http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2674#comic

3.) Romantically Apocalyptic ( http://romanticallyapocalyptic.com/ )

4.) A softer world ( http://asofterworld.com/ )

1.) Pearls Before Swine ( http://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine?ref=comics )

2.) Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal ( http://www.smbc-comics.com/ )
Examples:
* http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2835#comic
* http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2560#comic
* http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2674#comic

3.) Romantically Apocalyptic ( http://romanticallyapocalyptic.com/ )

4.) A softer world ( http://asofterworld.com/ )

1.) Pearls Before Swine ( http://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine?ref=comics )

2.) Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal ( http://www.smbc-comics.com/ )
Examples:
* http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2835#comic
* http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2560#comic
* http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2674#comic

3.) Romantically Apocalyptic ( http://romanticallyapocalyptic.com/ )

4.) A softer world ( http://asofterworld.com/ )

In no particular order:

The Oatmeal http://theoatmeal.com/comics
Schlock Mercenary http://www.schlockmercenary.com/
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal http://www.smbc-comics.com/
Girl Genius http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

And every time people have sex a baby is produced. Yeah, right

don't forget the red dot.

But God was mad at T-Rex?

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1637#comic

Obligatory: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1817

Classic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=653

Reminds me of this recent SMBC comic.

Obligatory? http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2787#comic

You mean, like this: http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1921#comic?

Hows the view from mount stupid?

Others have explained the physics, but yes, talking about the temperature of an EM emission is perfectly acceptable, even common, in physics. You could nitpick and say that any particular X-ray photon does not tell you the temperature of what emitted it, but in order to discuss complex matters you need a shorthand, and one of those is to say that a collection of photons has a temperature (whilst really meaning "this collection of photons is consistent with black body emission at temperature T")

Here is some educational material for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wien's_displacement_law

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2535

Not infinitesimally, each universe would probably have to be significantly simpler than the one it's already in, until the point that a universal simulation is too complex for the universe. Of course any one universe could spawn [very large number] of simulated worlds in a tree structure.
So if we assume mediocrity (and assume I'm not just spouting bull), we exist in one of the simpler universes... the original must have been nuts.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Step 2: candles ;-)

"Fact: The answer to every rhetorical question is 'yes'".

That's the after-comic to this SMBS strip: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2708

And I would say the same for human infants undergoing circumcision.

But I can loathe a company that tries to stop competition with frivolous lawsuits, that copies everything and patents the most obvious stuff to stop others doing the same, blocking innovation the same way James Watt's patents blocked the evolution of the steam engine for 30 years.

It's interesting to read comments pointing out what assorted historians have been saying for a long time: The primary use of patent laws has always been to block technical progress. We keep hearing the propaganda (enshrined in the US Constitution, among other places), that patent law is to encourage progress. But the historical evidence is contrary to this.

The only actual use of a patent to to prevent your competitors from using something. Yes, you can use it to extract royalties, but this is just an indirect way of making the products more expensive, and thus interfering with competitors' development and sales.

But more important than price is the effect of multiple patents. The historians' explanation of Watts' delay of the steam locomotive is that a practical locomotive required a number of other inventions in addition to Watt's efficient steam engine. But Watt and several other inventors each wanted to own it all, and refused to license their inventions to each other unless they each got the lion's share of the results. They pretty much all held out until their patents expired. Then, since Watt had the largest bunch of good engineers working for him, he was able to quickly start manufacturing and selling practical locomotives. He became rather wealthy late in life, but could have become rich decades earlier if he and the other inventors hadn't been so greedy, and had agreed to share the proceeds in a reasonable manner.

Part of the history is also the patenting of well-known ideas. But that's a different story from Watt's. It is a lot of what's going on now in the US, as exemplified by the Apple-Samsung case. We have somewhat reduced it to an ongoing series of jokes about patenting a rectangle with rounded corners. But it's a lot more pervasive than that. There was a cute offshoot of this humor yesterday on SMBC, based on the idea of lawyers in India filing suit against the Western computer industry, based on the fact that the number 0 was invented in India, and stolen by Western traders. (Actually, it was stolen by Arabian traders, but that's "Western" to people in India. ;-)

See the grant proposal.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2122

Also, as far as prior art goes, when the New York Times asked a bunch of futurists what they would propose for the time capsule they were building for the year 2000 (this was for the millenial issue), Jaron Lanier (I think) suggested that information be DNA encoded and put into cockroaches. The thinking was that they were indestructible and still be ubiquitous in a thousand years.

No mechanism for preventing copying errors was described though so it would likely be like that game of "telephone" where each person orally conveys to the next a message but many many times (worse). How many cockroach generations would there be in a thousand years? Also the radioactivity from the Armageddon(s) would likely speed up mutations!

This is also appropriate.