Humor:
I was a graphic artist cum typesetter for 25 years. So I know that Times New Roman and Arial are not proper fonts, but abominations foisted upon the unsuspecting world by the Evil Empire. Nevertheless, this is a funny video:...
Posted on August 28, 2008 10:24 PM • 2 Comments •
Posted on August 27, 2008 4:23 AM • 22 Comments •
Posted on August 25, 2008 2:59 AM • 12 Comments •
Certain nations who shall remain nameless have been doing a fair bit of skiting about how well they've done. So I thought I'd do a bit of number crunching. Of course it isn't completed (or is it?) but using...
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Posted on August 24, 2008 7:10 AM • 37 Comments •
This is naughty, but very funny.......
Posted on August 23, 2008 10:39 PM • 4 Comments •
A little while back I linked to Sahotra Sarkar's review of Steve Fuller's Science versus Religion. Now Fuller has put up a defence at the Intelligent Design website, Uncommon Descent, under the gerrymandered image of a bacterial flagellum (if...
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Posted on August 22, 2008 11:25 PM • 53 Comments •
Want this, from Systematic Biology on your t-shirt? Stephen Colbert wants you to, and that is enough... Hat tip Henry Simon...
Posted on August 17, 2008 1:02 AM • 1 Comments •
Posted on August 16, 2008 1:57 AM • 16 Comments •
Posted on August 4, 2008 3:26 AM • 4 Comments •
Now it's against gravity... “Too many scientists have been afraid to speak out against the powerful gravity lobby,” said Crowther. “With Intelligent Motion, we are looking forward to imposing balance on yet another heavy-handed field of science.”...
Posted on July 25, 2008 8:07 PM • 12 Comments •
A Floridan neighborhood was surprised yesterday when after heavy rain, catfish started walking around their street. Of course, the fish were quick to point out that this doesn't prove evolution is possible, as they all went to the local...
Posted on July 22, 2008 10:39 PM • 6 Comments •
I miss Buffy. I miss Mal Reynolds. I really miss Kaylee. Most of all I miss Joss Whedon's sparkling entertainment. So go watch Dr Horrible's Singalong Blog, now!...
Posted on July 18, 2008 1:49 AM • 11 Comments •
Stealing this one from Moselio Schachter: A guy walks at night on a beach in California and stubs his toe against an old bottle, which breaks and releases a genie. “I’ll grant you one wish, oh Master,” says the...
Posted on July 17, 2008 8:29 PM • 11 Comments •
Courtesy James F in the "Getting Rid of Darwinism" comments...
Posted on July 17, 2008 7:38 PM • 2 Comments •
Language Log has a very nice summary of the reasons why some holes are black, and some are white....
Posted on July 14, 2008 7:57 AM • 1 Comments •
If a black hole is where common sense is lost, is a white hole where we spew out absurdities? To say so seems like blackmail, which only yellow dogs employ, with a niggardly vocabulary. It's a red flag, I...
Posted on July 10, 2008 10:52 PM • 10 Comments •
Here's a somewhat different take on the late great George Carlin, in an interview with Keith Olberman last year: For me, though, he'll always be the hip Catholic Archbishop who brings about the end of the world in Dogma....
Posted on June 25, 2008 3:31 AM • 0 Comments •
The Darwinian Gardener is interviewed in the newsjournalonline. He explains how Darwinian gardening also applies to buried sprinkler systems, which is something that never occurred to me, I must admit. But I think he's running perilously close to self-contradiction...
Posted on June 18, 2008 8:41 PM • 1 Comments •
Posted on June 18, 2008 4:10 AM • 9 Comments •
Well, chickens... HT Darren Naish...
Posted on June 17, 2008 9:36 PM • 9 Comments •
... why M. Night Shamaylanananan gets to make more movies. OK, Sixth Sense was cool, but really... So read this summary script of The Hapeninening and save your ticket money. Hat tip to Louanne Miller....
Posted on June 16, 2008 7:14 PM • 2 Comments •
This guy is brilliant, both as a guitarist and a lyricist. Oh, his name's Chris Smither, if you want to Google him....
Posted on June 11, 2008 1:10 AM • 10 Comments •
As an Australo-African ape, Snowflake is happy that one command from him was enough to ensure Obama won the Democrat selection. Now he wants you to ensure that John Edwards is the VP. Edwards will bring many votes and...
Posted on June 4, 2008 1:55 AM • 26 Comments •
Creationism is being pushed legislatively in Texas again. But this line is priceless, from State Board of Education vice chairman, David Bradley (yes, you guessed, a Republican): Bradley said he doesn't foresee any successful effort to remove the “strengths...
Posted on June 2, 2008 10:43 PM • 8 Comments •
Clooney deals with the attention in a self-deprecating fashion, usually making jokes about himself. "That's the Australian way, it's the right way to do it," he says. From this article......
Posted on May 30, 2008 10:33 PM • 0 Comments •
So we managed to attract 5 local PZombies (Craig, you are in trouble for not turning up!) on a wet Brisbane night. We had some interesting discussions (which I fear means that others listened to me nonstop) over beer....
Posted on May 30, 2008 9:22 PM • 7 Comments •
Posted on May 22, 2008 9:31 PM • 1 Comments •
I'm not a gardener, really I'm not. I once killed a cactus plant by underwatering it. I found it on the window sill one day three years after I last took note of it and it was black. I...
Posted on May 18, 2008 7:27 AM • 5 Comments •
There's this: But spiderman is fiction, of course....
Posted on May 13, 2008 9:02 PM • 2 Comments •
No, not the use of Java to archive his music. This presence: A trapdoor spider named after him. This cute fellow: Hat tip: David Williams...
Posted on May 13, 2008 6:17 AM • 1 Comments •
Some things, I really should have thought of myself. Like this:...
Posted on May 13, 2008 2:12 AM • 8 Comments •
Sometime over tonight, this blog will pass the half a million visits mark. Say it out loud with me: half...a...million! Now I know this is because the six regular readers routinely and obsessively visit me every fifteen seconds, and...
Posted on May 9, 2008 5:49 AM • 19 Comments •
Damn The Onion! They're watching me!...
Posted on May 5, 2008 10:31 PM • 5 Comments •
On a newsgroup that shall remain Nameless, one of the regulars, Bill Reich, just heard on the History Channel: Smilodon is the ancestor of all the modern big cats. Oy! So this thread is for egregiously* wrong statements made...
Posted on May 4, 2008 10:05 PM • 18 Comments •
Or, "Ive been a baaaddd boy, Abbott" The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Second Level of Hell!Here is how you matched up against all the levels:LevelScorePurgatory (Repenting Believers)Very LowLevel 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)ModerateLevel 2 (Lustful)Very...
Posted on April 23, 2008 1:20 AM • 17 Comments •
Imagine a scientific theory that very few people know or understand. Let's call it "valency theory". Now suppose someone objects to valency theory because it undercuts their view of a particular religious doctrine, such as transubstantiation. So they gather...
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Posted on April 20, 2008 11:16 PM • 25 Comments •
Biologist and philosopher Sahotra Sarkar is combative, to say the least. When he says what he means, it can hurt physically if you are the target. I almost feel sympathy for Ben Stein... And knowing one of the principals...
Posted on April 20, 2008 9:50 AM • 27 Comments •
First, the good news. The inestimable John van Whye has added, with the help of his team of course, 90,000 scanned images of Darwin's journals, manuscripts and letters. Now the bad news. The Utrecht Herbarium is closing, and no...
Posted on April 17, 2008 5:22 AM • 3 Comments •
Following on from my demonstration that Darwinism is entirely responsible for anti-Semiticism back on 1 April, comes this discussion of how Darwinism has even infected the morals of anti-Darwinians, via John Lynch; in this case Maciej Giertych, one of...
Posted on April 13, 2008 3:06 AM • 12 Comments •
Can I have his guns?...
Posted on April 6, 2008 1:53 AM • 15 Comments •
I have yet to see the film Expelled, because it hasn't come to Australia yet, but I have become absolutely convinced that Ben Stein is correct. Darwinism causes antisemitism. I have therefore conveniently listed all the cases known of...
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Posted on April 1, 2008 12:00 AM • 60 Comments •
Posted on March 28, 2008 4:57 AM • 12 Comments •
On the one hand you have Jake Young discussing the role of expertise in public debates, concluding that maybe experts shouldn't expect that information from knowledgeable folk will automatically influence the uneducated. On the other hand, this......
Posted on March 21, 2008 10:14 PM • 0 Comments •
Yesterday John Lynch (he of the Stranger Fruit) took me to see the Arizona Museum of Natural History in Mesa, which had some truly excellent displays of the feathered dinosaurs from China (they wouldn't let me photograph them, though,...
Posted on March 10, 2008 12:31 PM • 18 Comments •
Below the fold is a humorous and possibly true account of reality TV trying to include geologists. With appropriate substitutions, the same thing could be said of any academic......
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Posted on March 7, 2008 3:30 PM • 12 Comments •
Janet asks what others have asked - what is science blogging all about, after a bully in the schoolyard taunted us Sciencebloggers. Her questions (and her answers) are very like mine, so I will steal them, below the fold....
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Posted on February 28, 2008 11:56 PM • 7 Comments •
I suppose you all have heard of the recent trade agreement between South Africa, Tibet, and the Netherlands, swapping cattle for birds, and known as the Gnu yak stork exchange... [I'm not to blame. I saw it on the...
Posted on February 25, 2008 10:24 AM • 3 Comments •
... a female deer. Oops, sorry, wrong thread. Anyway, a medievalist, goblinpaladin, has tagged me with a meme. Now I don't' get tagged a lot with memes, possibly because folk know I have published on them, both for and...
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Posted on February 25, 2008 8:37 AM • 10 Comments •
Are you a sad nerd, spending more time with your computer than with actual people? Do you think a great night is when you get a debate going in the comments of a Pharyngula post? Would you like to...
Posted on February 24, 2008 9:49 PM • 7 Comments •
Posted on February 21, 2008 10:06 PM • 5 Comments •
In particular, see the final panel... Cf. also here on Private Languages in philosophy...
Posted on February 17, 2008 11:49 PM • 6 Comments •
Comment Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, A medley of extemporanea; And love is a thing that can never go wrong, And I am Marie of Roumania. Courtesy of Mrs Dorothy Parker...
Posted on February 14, 2008 9:50 AM • 10 Comments •
Have you ever noticed that there are occasionally periods in which things just work, particularly with computers? I find that there is a confluence of coherence about every four years. I'm not sure if it's just because the vendors...
Posted on February 13, 2008 8:53 PM • 8 Comments •
Image by Colin Purrington...
Posted on February 11, 2008 5:33 PM • 3 Comments •
Hat tip: Chris Ho-Stuart. What I want to know is, who is keeping tabs on my social life?...
Posted on February 9, 2008 7:38 AM • 7 Comments •
I am quite sure that this is how undergraduates in philosophy see the whole thing: HT: Creative Synthesis...
Posted on February 4, 2008 11:54 PM • 15 Comments •
NASA is broadcasting "Across the Universe" from Let It Be to the North Star, Polaris. All well and good until the aliens arrive and we find out they're Stones fans......
Posted on February 3, 2008 8:38 PM • 13 Comments •
Posted on February 1, 2008 11:22 PM • 1 Comments •
Anyone else read this and immediately think of Eric Burdon singing "sky pilot"?...
Posted on January 30, 2008 7:05 PM • 6 Comments •
Given that the antievotees often declare evolution a religion (because after all, their view is purely based on wishful thinking and so they want to claim that everybody's views are), I got to thinking. What would the books of...
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Posted on January 27, 2008 6:07 AM • 31 Comments •
This conjoins a number of themes of late: poetry, postmodernism, and no doubt popery (Latin anyway)... Two poems by A. D. Godley:...
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Posted on January 19, 2008 2:49 AM • 8 Comments •
It is widely understood that philosophers aren't as a rule, intentionally funny. Partly this is because we are often old fogies whose sense of humour was formed in the early Jurassic. Mostly it's because when you deal with the...
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Posted on January 18, 2008 10:02 PM • 3 Comments •
A classic Abbott and Costello skit, done in Elizabethan English. Video below the fold....
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Posted on January 10, 2008 10:40 PM • 6 Comments •
Microsoft Word’s “Track Changes” and Endnote are synthetic lethals. From The Futile Cycle. "A synthetic pair of genes are two gene variants that alone are fine, but when combined into the same organism, cause it to die." Why? When...
Posted on January 4, 2008 1:07 AM • 7 Comments •
For some time now I have told anyone who didn't get away fast enough that I am a Darwinian Gardener: any plant that survives my total lack of care deserves to be there until it gets in my way....
Posted on January 2, 2008 10:05 AM • 10 Comments •
Greg Laden is reporting that Rwanda is taxing companies that use gorillas in their advertising, in order to pay for their conservation. Unfortunately, or fortunately if you are an albino silverback in Australia, this only applies to Rwandan companies....
Posted on December 27, 2007 10:47 PM • 2 Comments •
OK, so today is Christmas day, December 25. On this day* a man was born who changed the world. He affected a growing tradition that has left no part of the world untouched, for good or ill. He revealed...
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Posted on December 24, 2007 6:14 PM • 18 Comments •
I received an email telling me I'm number 20 on the list of influential science blogs, according to Wikio, a European site that ranks according to links and readership, I gather. The irony of a philosopher being a high...
Posted on December 18, 2007 9:57 PM • 11 Comments •
From Henry Gee's blog: I had thought that people who write marketing and advertising blurb for publishers occupied a rung on the scala naturae slightly above creationists. This may be true, but whatever the height of their perch, it...
Posted on December 11, 2007 5:27 AM • 17 Comments •
The Institute for Intellectual Disco Dancing has spun its recent debacle at Minnesota thus: The dyspeptic and ad hominem blogger/biologist Dr. P.Z. Myers was there and brought a Darwinist claque. Note that in passing it is not a fallacy...
Posted on December 2, 2007 8:24 PM • 5 Comments •
This guy is a great drinker, ranconteur, and wit, all with an Irish accent. It turns out he's also a great teacher....
Posted on December 1, 2007 3:27 AM • 4 Comments •
This little piece by netfriend Richard Harter, who apparently predates coal, serves to demonstrate that philosophers really aren't clever enough at thinking up counterexamples......
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Posted on November 27, 2007 2:51 AM • 7 Comments •
From Henry Gee's blog: Dear Professor Trellis Thank you for your manuscript entitled “On the positively negative interaction between one abbreviation and another abbreviation, conditional on the negatively double-negative interaction between a third abbreviation and one or other of...
Posted on November 25, 2007 11:35 AM • 4 Comments •
Unlike PZ Moorsch, I don't get much abusive email, because I'm so much more mild mannered than he is. But I got this gem from an Australian using his cousin's South African email account: your feedback on the one...
Posted on November 25, 2007 2:52 AM • 13 Comments •
When people visit Australia, we locals like to play up the dangers, like the most poisonous snakes and spiders, poisonous jellyfish, sharks, the drop bears, and of course the crocs. Very few of these are actually dangerous, in that...
Posted on November 10, 2007 9:08 PM • 14 Comments •
I actually don't dislike the guy, but this is one of the funniest political ads I've ever seen. For forners (not from Orstraya), it helps to know that Rudd leads the erstwhile socialist party, speaks Mandarin, and is likely to...
Posted on October 29, 2007 9:19 PM • 6 Comments •
According to a book mentioned by Greg Dahlman at blog.bioethics.net. He notes that this makes Stephen Colbert Plato. I think it makes Hilary Clinton Aristotle, and Richard Dawkins Epicurus, although the sequence is a bit messed up....
Posted on October 23, 2007 11:53 PM • 2 Comments •
John Wilkins is an aged, eternal student, who thinks philosophy of biology is at least as interesting as politics or sport and twice as important. He has a PhD from the University of Melbourne and a position as a 
