S.O.A.P.

I know this may be the last post of mine that anybody reads, but this morning I watched Snakes on a Plane. I was originally only going to hire out Star Trek IV, V, and VI (so not nerdy at all then) , but between the 5 movies for $7 deal they had going, and the nudity warning on the front cover, I decided to go for it. Afterwards, I went here. In homage to the original reason I went to the video store, I wrote this post with a stilted, "William Shatner" style accent in mind. Out of respect for the brave men and women of the USS Enterprise I would appreciate it if the reader were to read aloud in just such a fashion.
For those of you who can't infer the plot from the title, hundreds of pheromone enhanced venomous snakes are set loose on a plane with the intention of murdering a witness to a gangland killing. This being a science student's blog, I have to show everyone how smart I am by criticizing the film's plot holes, of which I see two. The first is not too interesting; but if the mob could do this, surely they could plant a bomb on the plane and have done with it? The second though is the failure of our protagonists to utilize what is both a snake's natural enemy and an abundant resource at 40 000 ft, extreme cold. Outside the fuselage, air temperature hovers around -60 C. Being reptiles, exposure to any sub-freezing environment would render these slippery ophidians completely inactive- pheromones or no pheromones, and at around -20 C ( a temperature still survivable by humans who all huddled together with blankets) you can be pretty sure most of them would succumb. In short, if I was king of the world, my hero and namesake might well have shouted, "Lets start chillin' the motherfuckin' air on this motherfuckin' plane!"

Atheism

Sorry John Safran, but I'm not too stupid to be an atheist. It's true I haven't read "A Brief History of Time," I've been too busy writing a thesis on relativistic quantum mechanics, so yes, I think I could give a pretty good explanation on why the Big Bang is better than genesis as an explanation of cosmic origins. More to the point though, Christians are stupid not because we just now have scientific explanations of nature which are better than biblical ones, but because we've always had competing religious explanations which are at least no worse.