“God’s 10%” and the Applebee’s Fiasco

I don’t feel like making a serious post, so this one’s just for fun. In case you haven’t heard, restaurant chain Applebee’s is creating for itself a media nightmare due to the fact that they fired a waitress for posting a photo of a receipt online from Alois Bell a.k.a. the “no tip pastor”…

A waitress at a St. Louis Applebee’s lost her job for posting online the receipt upon which a pastor had declined to leave a tip, with a snarky note saying she gave God 10 percent.

After her dinner on Jan. 25, Pastor Alois Bell crossed out the automatic 18 percent tip charged for parties of more than eight. “I give God 10% why do you get 18,” she wrote above her signature.

Employee Chelsea Welch — a colleague of the stiffed server — took a picture of the receipt and uploaded it to the online site Reddit. She subsequently lost her job, an Applebee’s spokesman confirmed to TheSmokingGun.com, for violating a customer’s privacy.

I went to dinner last night with some friends and got to talking about the situation and the snarky note from the pastor.  As a way of making a statement, this was what we wrote on our receipt to our waitress 🙂

What the hell does God need with money anyway?  Isn’t God supposed to be all-powerful?  Omnipotence – that’s like the best ATM ever!!!

A Lesson in How NOT to be Skeptical: The Fake Neil deGrasse Tyson Quote

Many times we self-described skeptics and critical thinkers do not live up to our own rhetoric.  Case in point: How many skeptics/atheists/freethinkers/etc do you know who have shared the following quote, or perhaps you have shared it yourself?

Well, here’s the rub… this quote attributed to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is…

FAKE!!!

Ouch.  I have to admit that I probably would have fallen for it, too; maybe I did, I cannot remember seeing this on my Facebook wall, but who knows?  It’s a good lesson for those of us who call ourselves skeptics to make sure that we’re taking care to walk the skeptical/critical thinking walk and not just talk the talk.  Here’s a good YouTube video expanding upon this lesson:

Skeptical Homeopathy Homework Assignment

I found this image via a skeptical Facebook friend, and it just screams “skeptical teacher”!  I’m just jealous that I didn’t think of it first 🙂

Three words: FOR THE WIN!!!

Image source: Reddit

The solutions (pardon the pun) to these questions reveals one glaring fact: homeopathy, there’s nothing in it, except water.

**Update (2/5/12): For those interested, I have calculated the actual answers to these questions.  Contact me if you would like to see the math; here are the answers:

a) 3.46 x 10^21   or   3,460,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms

b) 3.46 x 10^15   or   3,460,000,000,000,000 atoms

c) 3.46 x 10^-39  or  0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 00346 atoms (a number so stupidly small we can safely say that there are effectively NO arsenic atoms remaining within the solution!)