8 Things you never knew were in the King James Bible

Jesus gets thrown out of town:

Matthew 8:34 "And, behold, the whole city came out to meet Jesus: and when they saw him, they besought him that he would depart out of their coasts."

You should turn your rebellious son over to the town to be murdered:

Deuteronomy 21:18-21 "If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear."

God commanded Saul to slaughter a whole town, including the women, babies, and animals:

1 Samuel 15:1-3 "Samuel also said unto Saul, The LORD sent me to anoint thee to be king over his people, over Israel: now therefore hearken thou unto the voice of the words of the LORD. Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass."

If you rape an unmarried woman, your only penalty is paying her father 50 silver coins and marrying her:

Deuteronomy 22:28-29 "If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found; Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel's father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days."

If two men are fighting and the wife of one gets in the way to try to break it up, she can get her hand chopped off:

Deuteronomy 25:11-12 " When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets: Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her."

Moses made a brass snake charm to cure snakebite:

Numbers 21:8-9 "And the LORD said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live. And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived."

God will smear crap on you:

Malachi 2:2-3 "If ye will not hear, and if ye will not lay it to heart, to give glory unto my name, saith the LORD of hosts, I will even send a curse upon you, and I will curse your blessings: yea, I have cursed them already, because ye do not lay it to heart.  Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your solemn feasts; and one shall take you away with it."

Uh... this:

2 Kings 18:27 "But Rabshakeh said unto them, Hath my master sent me to thy master, and to thee, to speak these words? hath he not sent me to the men which sit on the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?"

I can't pass up this opportunity to tie in one of my favorite works from one of my favorite web humorists, so here's the Professor Brothers (aka SuperDeluxe aka Brad Neely) with a lesson on Sodom & Gamorrah:

A few entries from the Limerick Dictionary

This dictionary's written in rhyme,

and the results are quite sublime.

For a limerick form,

in this work is the norm,

Just don't turn to it every time!

Some gem entries:

"A deadeye's a marvelous shot;
Deadeye Dick has a Vonnegut plot;
Plus, a deadeye, you'll note,
Is a block on a boat,
And a line can be run through its slot."

"The abacus, pearl without price:
An ancient computing device.
Sliding beads strung on rods,
One can figure the odds.
You ask: "Why's it still used?" It's precise."

"Coney Island had sideshows and rides
On its boardwalk, and plenty besides:
Boats that rode in the dark,
And, in Steeplechase Park,
An ingenious assortment of slides."

"I'm efficient—I'm sure you'll agree:
I can juggle and dance on a ski,
Blow my nose, pen a rhyme...
At the very same time!
I'm so talented. Jealous of me?"

OK, maybe it's not such a hot idea. But regardless, are they going to finish this thing or what? It's only up the the E's.

Website featuring "Gothic Babe of the Week" since 1996 to present

I've often defined "Industrial Gothic" as a genre I sort of thought of on my own, to mean "horrors specific to the industrial age" - ghost towns, malevolent corporations, conspiracy theories, man-made monsters, haunted factories, mole people living in the sewers, and whatnot. Imagine my surprise when I poked about to discover whether the domain was taken and stumbled upon this site. Of course, "industrial" and "gothic", separately, are both genres of music and styles / cultures as well.

Gothic Babe of the Week, if its archive directory on the left bears true witness, has been in continuous business since January of 1996, making it one of the oldest surviving private websites from the pre-web-bubble era, and being a great example of a Tumblr type blog decades before anybody thought of Tumblr.

Anyway, if you like Goth gals, this person is really, really into them:

"That would make a good name for a band!"

In the kind of mad-scientist script-tinkering that's after my own heart (and usually the kind of subject I post on my other blog), MIT student Brian Whitman fed some 6500 band names through a grammar parser, then used it on a new word list to generate new believable band names. The results are striking and playfully fun at once. Some favorites:

• "Trucking Cake"
• "Reconstruction Dungeon"
• "Blabbermouth"
• "Pea Fetish Veterinarians"
• "Hooker Hut"
• "Eddy Mongoose"
• "Scoundrel Tramp"
• "Mussel Tulip"
• "Probation"
• "Dolly Flashers"
• "Joystick Infidels"
• "Dazzle Festival"

...not that I'd have time to read through all 10,000 of them. But at the least, I'll be ranking for some very weird Google searches now.

The Law of Indy Bands predicts that all of these names will eventually be used.

Related, I once wrote a script which generates fake album covers. Go ahead and get it, it's GPLed.

A hot gallery of sun gods

Belenus

The Celtic sun god, observed in Gaul, Cisalpine Gaul, and Celtic areas of Austria, Britain and Spain. Variation of Apollo. BeleniX, an open-source Solaris distro (now defunct), is named in his honor.

Freyr

The Norse Pagan sun god, also widely renowned for being a phallic fertility god. It's really, really hard to find depictions of him that don't involve a dick, dildo, or other suggestive depictions. Even here, you've doubtless noticed that big ol' sheathed sword he's lugging around. Oh, that's his wild boar, an indispensable sidekick.

Horus

The ancient Egyptian god, great-daddy of all gods and more like the god of the sky - the sun was his right eye and the moon was his left. Since sky = flight = birds in Egyptian parlance, he's usually depicted as a man with a falcon's head. The symbol of "the Eye of Horus" is still today the most iconic symbol of Egyptian mythology. However, you could just as easily nominate Aten or Ra as the Egyptian sun god - they were all intertwined, Egyptian theology being a very convoluted subject.

Moloch

A bit scarier than your average sun god, Moloch was worshiped by

Canaanites, Phoenician and the general neighborhood in North Africa. He's got something of a bad-ass reputation, even a Satanic one, because he's one of the few gods expressly forbidden by name in the Christian Bible. Leviticus names worship of Moloch as yet another stoning offense not once, but twice. Jeremiah again mentions him as the sub-fire-god under Ba'al. In fact, wherever the Bible speaks out against idolatry, it's pretty much talking about this guy. The scary part is, his worshipers sacrificed human children to him.

Sol

Well, now, we're probably on familiar ground here, right? Yes, the Roman sun god is the very same from which we draw all root words referencing the sun in English and most Western culture. Sol was the sun, Luna (another Roman hand-me-down name to English) was the moon, and Janus was related, being the two-faced god of transitions, beginnings, and endings, and hence invoked with the rise and set of the sun and moon. And also hence, we name the first month of the year January in Janus' honor, because that's when the year turns over.

Surya

The Hindu sun god, also the head of all sky gods and again, associated with general fertility, nature-worship, fire, etc. Still very much actively observed in Hindu circles today; he has temples with services attended at dawn and everything.

%

Solar deities are simply a dime a dozen, the complete Wiki on them here.

Here's a thought to all this: Isn't it an interesting coincidence that every part of the world founded its own religion based on the brightest object in the sky? Certainly, if one is compelled to identify the natural object most likely to be the embodiment of a deity, the sun fits the bill. But what superstitious monkey-minds we have! When we consider the vast array of sun gods and the remarkable similarities in ideas about them, it tells us much, much more about how the human mind works than we'd care to admit.

And before you get too smug thinking that the God of Jews, Muslims, and Christians is any different, and hence (if you observe one of these faiths) not at all based on silly star-worship, take a gander at "Jesus Christ in comparative mythology" and ask yourself why "Sunday" is observed as "the Lord's day" and Christ's birthday is celebrated at the winter solstice.

But here's a far more complete article on sun worship and its place at the roots of modern religion, courtesy of The Review of Religions.

Not so smug now, are you?

Beyond Mein Kampf: Three books by dictators

1. Quotations from Chairman Mao

Published from 1964 through 1976, and still a popular read in much of the People's Republic of China, this is a collection of parts of speeches, letters, and general utterances of Chairman Mao Zedong. It was commonly known as the "Little Red Book" and also featured many images from the life of the Chairman. At one point, it was more prominently displayed than even images of the Chairman himself. While it was not required reading for the population, it was commonly printed in small pocket editions, so it could be with one always, and issued to soldiers and other grunts, even, presumably, throughout the Great Chinese Famine.

2. The Green Book

Published in 1975 until right around the Libyan Civil War in 2011, this was a small collection of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi's thoughts on all matters political. It was said to be directly inspired by Mao's "Little Red Book". Unlike that book, The Green Book was published with the intent of making it required reading for all Libyan citizens. Libyan children during Gaddafi's reign had to study the book for two hours per week as part of official school curriculum. Quotes from the book were also broadcast daily over the official radio stations. Billboards were everywhere with quotes from the book. Can you say "citizen brainwashing"? Revolutionaries burned the book at protests and its since become quite a rare publication since the overthrow of Gaddafi.

3. The Ruhnama

We have now reached the epitome of batshit egomania. This book, roughly translated as "The Book of the Soul", was the work of Saparmurat Niyazov, "President for Life" of Turkmenistan until his death in 2006. This was just a little bit more than a run-of-the-mill political rant. Example:

That's a real giant statue of the book, elevated on a rotunda surrounded by bubbling fountains. Here's some people around it for scale:

No, wait, we're not done. Every evening, the giant damned thing opens and displays text and plays video! Here's a video showing the construction of this behemoth, and showing it in action:

Yeah, eat your heart out, Stephen King.

The Ruhnama is not just a political tract, but spiritual scripture and autobiography of Niyazov himself. Required reading in school? That's small potatoes! Reading from the book took you from kindergarten to college in Turkmenistan. You couldn't publicly criticize the book without being thrown in prison and tortured. To make more room in the schedule for studying the Ruhnama, algebra, physics, and phy-ed were removed from the curriculum. You'd have to pass a test on the Ruhnama to get a driver's license. Quotes from the thing are inscribed in half the hard surfaces in Turkmenistan. Posters of the Ruhnama flank the streets. By law, it has to receive equal treatment with the Qur'an, even in Muslim mosques.

Shortly before his death, Niyazov claimed that he had arranged it with no less than GOD HIMSELF that anybody who read the Ruhnama three times was guaranteed a place in Heaven.

We could go on all day, all night, and all day tomorrow about the blood-curdling insanity and megalomania of Saparmurat Niyazov and the utter hell-on-Earth of a nightmarish, dystopian, totalitarian dictatorship this human piece of shit imposed on his imprisoned citizens (who were restricted from legally exiting the country), but this page on traveling Turkmenistan gives you a very good taste of it.

It is fitting that the Internet-fabled "Door to Hell" (a natural gas fire that has raged for 40 years) is in Turkmenistan. How come we've heard all about Kim Jong-Il and Saddam Hussein, but never Niyazov?

Four Rhymes For Supposedly Rhyme-Less Words

Purple - curple : "The hindquarters or the rump of a horse, a strap under the girth of a horse's saddle to stop the saddle from kicking forward."

Orange - sporange : synonym for sporangium, "A case, capsule, or container in which spores are produced by an organism."

Silver - gilver : "In the fashion world, a color that is a mix of metallic gold and silver."

Month - billionth, millionth, zillionth...

Five Weird Methods Of Fortune-Telling

Tyromancy - Divining the future by examining how curds form during the process of curing a cheese.

Stichomancy - Divining the future or a person's destiny from picking random passages out of a book.

Pedomancy - Divining a person's fortune by the soles of their feet, or their footprints. Similar to palm-reading, just using a different appendage!

Omphalomancy - Divination of an infant's future from examining the knots in its umbilical cord.

Cromnyomancy - Divination from observing how onion sprouts grow.

Eight Artifact Designs That No Longer Serve A Purpose

You never notice them until someone points them out. Because they've always been that way. But once you know about them, you can't help but notice them, and appreciate how ridiculous we are in the way we have to keep things familiar.

These are all design elements on various things which used to have a function, but are now done "just for decoration" or because "we've always done it that way".

1. Slot Machine Payout Tray / Hopper

Slot machines originally both accepted and paid out cash. Modern slot machines pay out a printed receipt which you then cash at the cashier's cage. They no longer need the tray where the coins used to land, yet slot machines still have them. Some of them even play a recording of coins hitting the tray when you cash out and the machine prints its receipt!

2. Cigarette Filter Design

Cigarettes used to have filters made from cork. When they switched to synthetic filters (usually made from cellulose), they kept the printed paper on the outside in a cork design.

3. Hood Scoops

Originally, hood scoops were necessary to direct the flow of air onto the engine to help cool it. Modern cars now have air ducts from other, less intrusive parts of the car, but some cars still keep the hood scoop design. If your car has a hood scoop, put your hand in it. It may be completely closed off!

4. Fake Wood Grain Covering

Things like shelf paper, tabletops, and counters may be made of plastic, metal, or even processed particle board, but they'll still have this tacky vinyl covering with fake wood grain on it. Once you're aware of it, you'll get tired of looking at it.

How about those station wagons in the 1970s which had fake wood paneling on the sides? These things persist even when they make no sense. Who would even want to drive a wooden car?

5. Hubcap Spokes

Ever notice how many car hubcaps still have spokes in the design, as if you were still unable to deal with the concept of a tire unless it resembled a Conestoga wagon wheel?

6. Digital Camera Shutter Sound

Like the casino hopper sound, consumer-grade digital cameras still play an audio sound of an old-fashioned camera's shutter sliding and clicking.

7. Your Keyboard Layout

The standard "QWERTY" layout of the keyboard was originally designed partly to keep neighboring typewriter keys from jamming when they hit together. Other keys' placement were originally required by the limitations of manual typewriter design - for instance, the 'CAPS LOCK' key is directly over the left shift key because it used to be a physical lever that held down the shift key itself; it would lock in place until you tapped it again. Modern computers and laptops have no such requirements, of course, but the keyboard stays that way.

A whole new generation of design appendixes evolved from the first generation of computers, too. The 'scroll lock' key, for instance, comes form the days when text-only computers scrolled monochrome text on a black monitor - you'd print something out, and then hit scroll-lock to freeze the screen until you could read that screen-full of text, and then release it to get to the next screen-full...

8. Computer And Phone Icons

Computer and phone icons are a virtual forest of visual metaphors for outdated technology. Look at that hourglass! How many of you have seen one in real life? Yet we use it to symbolize time, clocks, waiting, etc. And then there's those quill pens used for writing apps, envelopes used for email apps, cartoon speech bubbles used for texting apps... How about that floppy disk icon to represent the concept of saving a document? Floppy disks have been out of common use for at least a decade now.

In 1966, the world's richest private citizen was Jean Paul Getty, at a mere $1.2 billion

Proof of the declining value of currency, more prosperous times for all, or of more uneven income distribution? In 1966, the Guinness World Record for richest human alive was J. Paul Getty, at a mere $1.2 billion, and his worth by the time of death only equaled $2 billion. Not only that, but the oil tycoon was the only billionaire in the US.

Even adjusting for inflation, Getty's bank account would have only been worth about $10 billion today. That's chump change compared to our list of billionaires in modern times:

• Bill Gates $101 billion (peak worth reached in 1999)
• Carlos Slim Helu $74 billion (peak worth reached in 2011)
• Lakshmi Mittal $69 billion (peak worth reached in 2008)
• Warren Buffett $66 billion (peak worth reached in 2007)
• Mukesh Ambani $63 billion (peak worth reached in 2007)

The Forbes' list strives to include everyone with a net worth of a billion dollars or more. But even it tells a story about uneven distribution among the wealthy. The double-digits billionaires run out at #88; the total number of people on the list is 1,153.

It says odd things about our global economy that in the space of five decades, what would once be considered a fortune is barely enough to scrape by now.

6 Examples of literature produced under a writing constraint

In 1939, novelist Ernest Vincent Wright produced the novel Gadsby without using the letter 'e'. This is an example of a lipogram.

In 2004, French author Michel Dansel, using the pen name of "Michel Thaler", wrote Le Train de Nulle Part ("The Train From Nowhere"), a novel written without using a single verb.

In 1996, mathematician Mike Keith wrote a short story, Cadaeic Cadenza, where each word corresponded by letter length to a consecutive digit of Pi. This is an example of Pilish.

The final chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses contains no punctuation.

In 1974, author Walter Abish wrote Alphabetical Africa, a novel written with the condition that the first letter of each word in each chapter start with a successive letter of the alphabet; chapter 1 had words starting with 'a', chapter 2 with 'b', and so on.

Dr. Seuss' Green Eggs and Ham using a vocabulary of only 50 words, reportedly written to win a bet. In alphabetical order, the word list is "a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you."

Ten Idiotic Audience Consumer Reactions To Movies

Swingline had to manufacture a red stapler to meet demand after the release of Office Space.

The price of amber quadrupled after the release of Jurassic Park.

CB radio culture suffered an "Eternal September" after the release of Smokey and the Bandit.

Plumbing fixture stores remarked upon the decline in demand for showers after the release of Psycho.

Beach attendance went down after the release of Jaws.

Injuries and deaths from playing Russian Roulette spiked in 1981 after the release of The Deer Hunter.

Thousands of people wrote in demanding to know where they could buy a hoverboard after the release of Back To the Future.

Investment in plastics went up after the release of The Graduate.

The demand for caller ID tripled after the release of the film Scream.

And finally, demand for any breed of animal goes up after said animal is in a popular movie. (e.g. 101 Dalmatians)

UPDATE 5/19/12: For a recent example, Hundreds of pet owls were abandoned after Harry Potter movies stopped coming out.

All of the dictionary words that can be made from hexadecimal numbers:

Here are all of the words I found in the dictionary file, using a filter that only allowed words which could be spelled in hexadecimal:

Ababa

Abba

Abe

Ada

Beebe

DEC

Dacca

Dada

Dade

De

Decca

Dee

Ed

Fe

abbe

abed

accede

acceded

ace

ad

add

added

babe

bad

bade

be

bead

beaded

bed

bedded

bee

beef

beefed

cab

cafe

cede

ceded

dad

dead

deaf

decade

deed

deeded

deface

ebb

facade

facaded

face

faced

fade

faded

fed

fee

feed

Relatedly, programmers often use hex numbers to form words in error codes to make them easier to read, such as "oxDEADBEEF".

10 Ill-Informed Predictions From History

"I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of
submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering
at sea." --H.G. Wells, 1901

"What is dangerous is for Americans not to be in the
market. We’re going to reach a point where stocks are correctly
priced, and we think [that point is] 36,000." --James Glassman,
Wall Street analysis author, 1999

"The Japanese don’t make anything the people in the U.S. would
want." -- John Foster Dulles, 1954

"The expectation on the iPod is that Hewlett-Packard’s version
will probably outsell Apple’s version relatively quickly." -- Rob
Enderle, 2004

"Over the next century, Law will be simplified. Lawyers will have
diminished, and their fees will have been vastly curtailed." --
Junius Henri Brown, columnist, 1893

"Of all the nations, [Germany] is probably the least corrupted by
the lust of conquest...." -- Boston Daily Globe, 1901

"In 20 years, [bigotry and war] will be over. People are simply
going to learn that they can get more from being groovy than
being greedy." -- Arlo Guthrie, 1969

"X-rays will prove to be a hoax." -- Lord Kelvin, 1899

"Printed books will never be the equivalent of handwritten
codices, especially since printed books are often deficient in
spelling and appearance." -- Johannes Trithemius, German scholar,
1492

"This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously
considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently
of no value to us." -- Western Union management memo, 1876

Bad Assumptions We Always Make About Extraterrestrial First Contact

Whenever I see a guide to what to do in case of first alien visitor contact (like this one), I always see the same stupid assumption made: the alien flew here in a big shiny ship, so obviously it's a highly advanced species compared to our own.

Bunk!

Then there's a section instructing you on how to scurry around trying to communicate with the aliens to show off how smart you are. You know, to prove we're sentient, and hence "worth getting to know".

Right there, there's some bad assumptions:

1.   Who says they wouldn't eat a smart species? Maybe they consider sentient species a rare delicacy.
2.   Maybe they actually aren't seeking out other sentient species. We humans, social animals, assume that the prime motivation for intergalactic travel is to party with some friends. Maybe the aliens want to think of themselves as the only sentient species in the universe, and they're just here to strip-mine the planet and leave.
3.   Maybe they're looking for slaves. If they're just out to snap a remote control onto your spine and make you do their bidding, extra IQ points just make you that much more useful.
4.   Maybe they met something else, like bats or dolphins, before they met you. And since it might turn out that bats or dolphins are smarter in their own way than humans are and if the aliens just happen to jive more with the other critters than they do with us, maybe all your showing off is for nothing.
5.   Maybe they rate intelligence on a different scale from us. Perhaps, like bees and termites, the aliens are born with instinct already in place so they intuitively grok math and engineering, but they judge intelligence based on how well you can juggle or how well you can sing in the 20-40 kHz range.
6.   Who's to say we don't scare the daylights out of them? There might be something about us that's horribly disturbing to them, like how we smell or the fact that we have hair. They'd be unable to see us as anything but hideous monsters and no matter how much smarts we show off, they'd just be consumed with the thought that anything as repulsive as us must die.
7.   You know how we humans have religions that make us expect crazy things to happen and react in bizarre ways? Now imagine aliens with some unfathomable dogma which dictates that Earth is Hell and everybody living on it is a demon. How do you P.R. your way out of that one?

We have to be lucky enough to have avoided all of those scenarios before we even have a chance of making a good first impression and having it do us any good. Now back to our first bad assumption: That the aliens, themselves, are advanced, or even sentient!

The first argument I usually find is "But they got here, so they obviously must be smart!"

Well, even an animal can float on water on a raft. Primitive tribe people rowed out to islands on boats. Maybe they got here by accident.

That's usually followed by "But they crossed interstellar space, so they must have invented faster-than-light travel!"

Please, if this was your first thought, sit down before you hurt yourself! Maybe the aliens have lifespans in the hundreds of millions of years, and so a trip of 17,000 years is just a relaxing nap to them. We humans have pathetically short lifespans, you know, even compared to many other species right here on Earth. It could turn out that we got stuck with the shortest lifespans of any sentient species in the universe, and so we are unable to conceptualize traveling to other stars without breaking the laws of physics in order to reach our destination before we die. Every other species can just launch a soapbox with a pile of TNT, pointed in the right direction, then patiently sit there waiting 17,000 years to reach their destination.

Or they could have a generation ship. Or they could just clone new bodies and use them for personal organ banks. Or maybe they've embraced technology to the point where they're cyborgs who effectively can just turn themselves off to save energy and have their extremely reliable electronics turn them on when they get here. Or maybe the big, shiny flying saucer is actually a scout ship built and launched from their space station out past Pluto.

See how humans have a hard time thinking outside of their tiny little frame of reference?

But beyond all of this, who says that we're talking to the smart alien race at all?

1.   Maybe we're actually talking to a robot. If you went across space with the responsibility of contacting aliens who, for all you know, might be hostile, would you rather send a robot avatar to test the water first, or just boldly charge out the hatch and risk becoming the first human victim of the disintegration ray?
2.   Maybe we're talking to an enslaved race, or the domestic pets of the race which built the spaceships. Same reasoning as the robots, and who says we're the first species the aliens have ever contacted? Maybe they've been setting up franchises all over the galaxy since before the tiny speck of dust we call home even formed?
3.   Since when do the engineers who designed the ship also become the ones assigned to drive it around? If an alien encounters your average human driving a car, should they assume that said human understands the intricacies of an internal combustion engine? You drive, but you have to take your car to a mechanic to be repaired (excepting those of you who are mechanics themselves), do you not?
4.   Think military: What invading army puts its head general at the front line? Maybe we're talking to the dumb grunts sent to scout us out for invasion and report back.
5.   We might be dealing with a hivemind. Like bees and ants, no individual member of a hivemind will have any noticeable intelligence; it's only together with its 100,000 sisters that it starts looking sentient.
6.   One more thing: Who says that anything built their ship at all? Maybe the ship itself is a life form, like a giant space turtle, or an asteroid covered in coral that steers it around. Maybe what we think of as the ship is actually the intelligent life form, and the beings we see riding on it are just parasites. We could go on all day here. It is impossible to think of every possibility - even our scientific exploration on Earth has rebuked us again and again with the stunning diversity of life and the unexpected ways it gets by!

I don't know what the rest of you have planned. Given all the unknowns, it may not matter at all what we do when that momentous first contact happens. The safest bet that I'm considering, should I be in the position of human race ambassador, is to turn the tables on them: make them prove their sentience to me first. I'll just start inspecting everything about them, and record and document everything I can. If they really are interested in meeting other smart species, they'll recognize this as a sign of my own sentience - maybe it will even be better to put them off-guard and feel a little intimidated, just in case they have hostile intentions.

But there is simply too much we humans assume about everything all the time to ever have the slightest idea what we should do when that moment comes.

Humans actually suck at trying to conceptualize in non-human ways. We have a hard enough time empathizing with our own next-door neighbor now.

Update: Over a year later, Why We'll Never Meet Aliens makes it to the front page of Slashdot. Note the backlash: I always see hate and ridicule from commenters when it's not starry-eyed utopia news. Apparently the Internet only reveres science if science is a big jolly guy handing out presents.

Robert A. Heinlein's 1952 Predictions For 2000 - A Report Card

I saw this list at io9, and figured, just for the exercise, to go through Heinlein's predictions one by one and see what The Dean got right and wrong...

1. Interplanetary travel is waiting at your front door — C.O.D. It's yours when you pay for it. Wrong! I'm just as disappointed as you, Rob.

2. Contraception and control of disease is revising relations between the sexes to an extent that will change our entire social and economic structure. Correct! The Sexual Revolution was practically on America's doorstep in 1952, so it wasn't hard to get this one right.

3. The most important military fact of this century is that there is no way to repel an attack from outer space. Mostly wrong! Attacks from outer space, no. But satellite surveillance to gather intelligence is an important military factor, and we do have our robot drone planes. But I'm pretty sure that Heinlein had in mind rocket ships with missiles raining down from the void. He's wrong, thank Cthulhu.

4. It is utterly impossible that the United States will start a "preventive war." We will fight when attacked, either directly or in a territory we have guaranteed to defend. Wrong! Ha ha ha ha ha, Rob, how naive you were about politics in the 1950s!

5. In fifteen years the housing shortage will be solved by a "breakthrough" into new technologies which will make every house now standing as obsolete as privies. Wrong! But it's hard to imagine what he had in mind. Housing technology has continued to improve, but the "housing shortage" was always a matter of economics - we have plenty of homes, but they're all sitting empty and rotting while banks own them all.

6. We'll all be getting a little hungry by and by. Wrong! Malthusian predictions about running out of food are always wrong. If anything, we have a problem with obesity. And don't tell me about third-world orphans starving - that, again, is politics - there's plenty of food, but also plenty of dictator idiots causing famines.

7. The cult of the phony in art will disappear. So-called "modern art" will be discussed only by psychiatrists. Wrong! Sorry you were so grumpy about art, old guy, but "modern art" wasn't even close to its peak yet at the time you wrote this.

8. Freud will be classed as a pre-scientific, intuitive pioneer and psychoanalysis will be replaced by a growing, changing "operational psychology" based on measurement and prediction. Wrong! Also, huh? Psychoanalysis has changed some since the 1950s, but what has largely replaced such treatments is pills, pills, pills, pills, pills.

9. Cancer, the common cold, and tooth decay will all be conquered; the revolutionary new problem in medical research will be to accomplish "regeneration," i.e., to enable a man to grow a new leg, rather than fit him with an artificial limb. Wrong! We're so, so sad to say so. But stem cell research is looking into that whole "regeneration" thing.

10. By the end of this century mankind will have explored this solar system, and the first ship intended to reach the nearest star will be a-building. Wrong! No human has yet set foot on anything but Earth and the moon.

11. Your personal telephone will be small enough to carry in your handbag. Your house telephone will record messages, answer simple inquiries, and transmit vision. Mostly Correct! In fact, this one almost sounds too specific to have been in this list - did somebody add this one? Substitute "computer" for "telephone" for those last two.

12. Intelligent life will be found on Mars. Wrong! In fact, it's growing doubtful that we'll find anything alive on Mars, even fuzzy little microbes.

13. A thousand miles an hour at a cent a mile will be commonplace; short hauls will be made in evacuated subways at extreme speed. Wrong! Not even sure how he thought this would happen - had he never heard of G-forces? But so far the fastest land-speed record is 760 MPH with a turbofan at Black Rock Desert in 1997, and that's far from "commonplace" or cheap.

14. A major objective of applied physics will be to control gravity. Wrong! No, no, no.

15. We will not achieve a "World State" in the predictable future. Nevertheless, Communism will vanish from this planet. Wrong! Communism is alive and well, thank you. And as for "world state", the United States is just about as close to a world empire as we've gotten. McCarthy much?

16. Increasing mobility will disenfranchise a majority of the population. About 1990 a constitutional amendment will do away with state lines while retaining the semblance. Wrong! What a Libertarian. While we'd grant that transportation advances have killed off many industries, dozens of new industries have sprung up to take their place.

17. All aircraft will be controlled by a giant radar net run on a continent-wide basis by a multiple electronic "brain." Correct? We could consider computerized air-traffic control systems to be this. The Internet is certainly continent-wide. We even came up with much better tracking methods in the form of telemetry.

18. Fish and yeast will become our principal sources of proteins. Beef will be a luxury; lamb and mutton will disappear. Wrong! Our plates are still full of every kind of meat we can imagine. Australians are the only ones who even took to that yeast thing.

19. Mankind will not destroy itself, nor will "Civilization" be destroyed. Correct! Well, I guess if this weren't true, we wouldn't be here to say so.

Here are things we won't get soon, if ever: Travel through time, Travel faster than the speed of light, "Radio" transmission of matter, Manlike robots with manlike reactions, Laboratory creation of life, Real understanding of what "thought" is and how it is related to matter, Scientific proof of personal survival after death, Nor a permanent end to war.

Time travel, check, FTL, check, Life-after-death, check, No-end-to-war, check. Understanding-of-thought is too debatable to even decide on, but check. But we do have 3D printers which transmit the <em>data</em> to another machine which builds matter into whatever part was ordered, so half-point? We do indeed have "manlike" robots with the Honda ASIMO, but it has nowhere close to human reactions. Laboratories are at least doing fantastic things with DNA and stem cells - they haven't turned inorganic matter into living matter yet, but they're getting damned close.

In all, Heinlein seemed to suffer from the kind of short-sighted vision of continued scientific enthusiasm that affected every American in the 1950s; this was the age of zeerust, after all.

People who come up when you type 'bigot' into Google image search

Glenn Beck

Donald Trump

Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell

Newt Gingrich

Michele Bachmann

Herman Cain

Rick Perry

Rick Santorum

Ron Paul

Every kind of meat I've ever eaten so far

• Alligator
• Chicken
• Cow
• Clam
• Crab
• Crayfish
• Deer
• Fish
• Frog
• Lamb
• Lobster
• Mussel
• Octopus
• Oyster
• Pig
• Shrimp
• Squid
• Turkey