FSM at a national meeting

There is an amusing report in a blog about a session devoted to the subversive value of a parody like the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. If you have never heard of it, FSM was invented in much the way Intelligent Design was invented, but for the opposite reason.

The FSM is quite popular around our department, since some of the biology folks regularly encounter kids who have been taught bogus biology in Sunday School. We are now seeing it spread to geology and oceanography (somehow global warming is against the bible) as well as physics (radioactive decay and entropy).

One office has a "What Would FSM Do?" sign on the door, and another of my colleagues went so far as to make up a Christmas decoration featuring a stylized FSM made of LEDs. The latter is quite pretty.