Only 361 more cats 'till doomsday.

In a stunningly 'well, duh' move, NASA has officially declared the Apocalypse predicted by crazy people mis-interpreting the ancient Mayan calendar to be bullshit.

I did click to look inside and 365 Cats Page-A-Day Calendar doesn't go past 2012 either.
365 cats and then...nothing. We're doomed, adorably doomed.

Speaking of which, why do we let kids
have hamsters? They're monsters.

While I appreciate NASA jumping in here to shoot down the Mayan calendar doomsday myth, why stop there? The end of the world is only one of thousands of stupid things people repeat as fact every day. Yeah, someday the Earth and everything on it will be gone. A rogue asteroid or gamma ray burst could wipe us out any minute, and if we're lucky enough to avoid random doom, our luck will run out given enough time. Even if it doesn't, the sun will eventually expand and swallow the planet like a mother hamster eating its young.

Joke's on them, we're still alive!

The point is that when the end comes we'll probably either be caught unawares or have already wiped ourselves out somehow. There is absolutely no reason to freak out over something over something you saw on the History Channel. So why do people still dick around with doomsday predictions? Isn't life already too short to spend what could be your few remaining hours waving signs and thumping bibles on the corner?

"Zoinks! It's a Reptoid!"

I'd love to blame the internet for letting people keep poorly designed websites on everything from chupacabra to the idea that the government is secretly being run by a race of subterranean lizard people. But it's really more likely that it's our fault for not heaping enough ridicule on people for believing ridiculous crap. Don Yeomans, the NASA guy interviewed in the article, makes the point that pseudo science will only go away if actual scientists make an effort to stamp it out. And he's right.


Scientists should be right there crying poppycock every time somebody cries doomsday or a politician makes some pandering statement about how evolution is just another theory. We should be parachuting them in to anti-science trouble spots packing calculators, periodic tables and cold-hard logic. We can't afford not to do this people.

Our para-scientists have their work cut out for them
(sorry Austin, I don't mean you, you guys are cool).