Lack of skepticism can kill.
[NSFW language and some effects.]
About Bad Astronomy
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
Bad Astronomy is a Wikio Top Blog! Clearly, Wikio has excellent taste. 
Bad Astronomy was chosen as one of Time.com's Best Blogs of 2009. Subscribe to BA using an RSS Feed
Death from the Skies!
Order a copy of Death from the Skies! from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Borders.
"If things worked the way I wanted them to, any reporter about to do another 'sensational' story on deadly meteors would consult this volume, and bang! common sense would find its way into the news. How strange would that world be?"
-- Adam Savage, Mythbusters"Reading this book is like getting punched in the face by Carl Sagan. Frightening, but oddly exhilarating."
-- Daniel H. Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot UprisingSocial/Networking/Cool Stuff
DISCOVERmagazine.com: Latest Articles on Space- Top 100 Stories of 2009: #50: Magnetic Mysteries of Sunspots Decoded
- Top 100 Stories of 2009: #2: NASA Braces for Course Correction
- Top 100 Stories of 2009: #5: Astronomer Alan Dressler
- Top 100 Stories of 2009: #8: Earth-like Worlds Come Into View
- Top 100 Stories of 2009: #16: The Moon: Cold, Wet, and Breathing
- DISCOVER Blogs: The Loom
November 14th, 2009 at 8:10 am
It’s like someone took three series’ worth of Mythbusters DVDs and put them in a blender
November 14th, 2009 at 8:31 am
Idiotic.
November 14th, 2009 at 8:37 am
Amusing.
November 14th, 2009 at 8:38 am
Meh.
November 14th, 2009 at 9:03 am
That’s really got nothing to do with lack of scepticism, Phil. It’s about urban legends that /could/ kill if they were true, but aren’t.
Moderately amusing, though.
November 14th, 2009 at 9:06 am
They left out the 10 lb flaming chunk of meteorite hitting the ground.
Oh well, no body is perfect.
Gary 7
November 14th, 2009 at 9:36 am
Even so, I’m still in favor of abolishing the penny.
November 14th, 2009 at 9:46 am
That is ten pounds of stupid in a five pound bag.
November 14th, 2009 at 9:49 am
I think the Homeopathy humour video was better. This one was just mildly amusing.
November 14th, 2009 at 9:53 am
This is made of awesome. The mocking tone is perfect, the mater-of-factness of the Doctor, everything. Absolutely hilarious. I wonder how many people out there actually believe this stuff more because of this obviously mocking video. Maybe Darwin is a good thing.
November 14th, 2009 at 10:36 am
Poor Elton John….
November 14th, 2009 at 10:51 am
The stuff i got is funny
but alas, i am not native speaker, so i missed a lot. Does anyone know if there is a transcript available?
November 14th, 2009 at 11:22 am
Geez, tough crowd.
November 14th, 2009 at 11:40 am
lol i liked it! we need to abolish pennies!
November 14th, 2009 at 11:40 am
It’s true – some people are born without a funny bone.
November 14th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
I have an extra sense of humor here if anyone needs it.
I thought it was hilarious.
“Those are my kidneys!”
November 14th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
I liked the kid in bed 12 with the pop rocks and coke .. my take is it isn’t the funniest college humour vid (I like the font one recently linked to) but it’s just as well done as the rest of them. I mean really almost every other line’s an urban legend or referring to one. Hugely funny ? No. Amusing and well thought out ? Yes. Much better than your average sitcom !
November 14th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
I thought it was rather well-done. I for one will stop throwing pennies off tall buildings, I never thought they’d cause so much damage. And as for peeing in pools, wow, I’ve gotten off lightly so far…
November 14th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
Nice ones there. The urban legend myths humour worked for me. Pop rock & coke explosion and kidneys out both pretty classic.
November 14th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
Funny look at woo, urban myth and not bad acting in places either!
November 14th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
I’ll admit it, I laughed my azimuth!
No funny bone shortage here!
November 14th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
Some people thought it was funny and some didn’t. There must be some theory to explain how an observer in one frame of reference sees something as totally funny while another person in a different frame of reference sees that same thing as particularly unfunny.
Maybe the “theory of relative humor”?
Or, maybe the “theory of subjectivity regarding humor”?
Or, and this is a big “or,” maybe the “humor is subjective” theory.
I don’t know. Now, if you don’t mind, I got to run to the microwave. I gave my poodle a bath and….
November 14th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
I’m sure the sense of humour is dependent on whether the observer is in an inertial frame of reference or not. Or is the video in a superposition of quantum states until an observer causes the wave function to collapse?
November 15th, 2009 at 12:54 am
Well, I thought it was excellent and I’m always right about these things!
November 15th, 2009 at 1:50 am
Could I get that kidney-less woman’s phone number… while she’s still alive? She’s kinda pretty..
November 15th, 2009 at 2:43 am
So it turns out all those things really ARE true!!!!
November 15th, 2009 at 5:52 am
[...] CollegeHumor-Video: Urban Legend ER (engl.) (via Bad Astronomy) [...]
November 15th, 2009 at 6:32 am
I got almost nothing of this video, for two reasons:
1- My English is not good enough, they talk too fast, not clear enough
2- The beliefs they allude to are not familiar to me. It’s likely those common around here are of the same caliber, just not the same.
I too would appreciate a transcript, if anybody feels like doing it.
Best regards from sunny (at least just right now) France.
November 15th, 2009 at 11:23 am
To those who didn’t get it because of language problems: but you should never explain the joke! http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Ptitle0t9r68ih?from=Main.DontExplainTheJoke
November 15th, 2009 at 11:31 am
Funny and hopefully eyeopening for some people.
November 15th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
For those of you who might not get the references, you can look them up here at Snopes ( http://snopes.com/ )
AJ Says says, you should never explain the joke. But, I think really that should mean that if you do have to explain the joke, then maybe your jokes may need some work, or you’re working the wrong audience.
November 15th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
My teacher almost got hit in the head by a frozen yellow block and then saw a jet fly by. True story!
November 16th, 2009 at 4:31 am
@ 1:20
A phenothiazine???
Dumb’m down, dude!
November 16th, 2009 at 5:06 am
Well, you have things that most people find funny, and things they don’t, so that’s one side of the grid. Then you have people that find most things funny, and people who don’t, on the other side of the grid. That creates a 2×2 grid… oh dear, I think I just discovered the four humours…
November 16th, 2009 at 9:34 am
Call it serendipity, but this video comes to me at a time when I’m becoming increasingly convinced that the best way to deal with woo is not to answer the claims point-for-point, but to ridicule it mercilessly.
The average fence-sitter’s attention span is too short to digest science/reason-based arguments showing why outlandish claims are codswallop. And those who have the patience rarely need to be convinced.
Mock, I say, mock!