Obviously, Pigasus is doomed.
For those not in the know. Pigasus is James Randi’s mascot (because the paranormal will be true when pigs fly). Richard Saunders, my friend who made the video, is a master origamist, and invented the Pigasus origami. He obviously has questionable taste.
If you went to BadAstronomy.com and found yourself here, never fear: the BA Blog has moved to its new home at Discover Blogs. The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking and all that) is still online, too.
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
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December 20th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
Brilliant! What a cool creation, I noticed that you can get the shirts and learn how to make your own on the Randi site?
There’s instructions on a video to fold your own pigasus from Saunders’ mysteryinvestigators.com site too at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqo-dLkyl3o
December 20th, 2007 at 6:26 pm
Yay Melbourne!
December 20th, 2007 at 8:20 pm
I want the tarot cards with the BA on them!
December 20th, 2007 at 10:08 pm
Thanks for putting up the video Phil. I do most of the Pigasus videos, but this one was filmed by Kylie of http://podblack.wordpress.com/. I did the editing. New adventure soon.
December 20th, 2007 at 11:03 pm
Pigasus rules! He should have a nemesis, called Foldemort, who always tries to destroy him with magic, but always fails because it isn’t real. Or something.
December 21st, 2007 at 12:10 am
I also want a Pigasus. My daughter would love him!
December 21st, 2007 at 10:10 am
Slightly off topic, Tarot is one of those things I’m pissed off about on a whole different odd level. I was shown the system (i.e. the fortune telling deal, not the for use in games deal) by someone without any supernatural beliefs, introduced roughly as “Hey, check this out. They have these cards, each representing an emotion or vibe. Then you combine them to represent a sort of combo of when those states would occur. Even just throwing out three cards, you have one random emotion from 78!/75!, that’s 456456 fairly well defined emotions. Using the traditional things with more cards and the addition of positioning, you can generate near-endless random emotional state descriptions!”.
In that sense, that didn’t seem like such a bad idea. It’s like a mechanical random devils advocate in conjunction with personal feel, throwing out endless variations of “Suppose perhaps this it’s like this instead?” on emotions. Then, I realized if you have a deck and use it for anything, people will think you think there is more to this then picking random pieces of paper and combining their meanings into something (sort of like how Family Guy is written according to Southpark) but rather some whackjob idea that a random state is clearly the right one rather then a so-so thinking point without having to involve more humans. Worse yet, it appears to validate this belief among those that hold it, perhaps making the odd belief more acceptable. Doh! I guess it’s back to just ranting on message boards..
December 21st, 2007 at 11:00 am
Tarot: the Plot Manatees of Human Existence?
December 21st, 2007 at 9:24 pm
I recall reading (somewhere) a claim that the tarot was developed at the University of Fez as a sort of universal language. This would have nothing to do with fortune telling. Obviously the communications would be highly ambiguous. It occurs to me that reading the alethiometer symbols in The Golden Compass would be very like reading the tarot.
December 23rd, 2007 at 5:34 am
At least the Golden Compass (or, to give it the original title from the novel, Northern Lights) acknowledges itself to be fiction.
However, BA, surely Pigasus was saved rather than doomed?? Saved by the BA in his tarot reading. I.e. this is all a load of mumbo-jumbo, so do not consider it to have any real predictive power.
December 24th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
Nigel Depledge writes:
[[At least the Golden Compass (or, to give it the original title from the novel, Northern Lights) acknowledges itself to be fiction.]]
Albeit fiction with a heavy-handed message in it repeated over and over and over and over and over again until your head explodes.