Pharyngula
Archives for February, 2012
No sympathy for the devil
Posted by PZ Myers on February 21, 2012 I don’t get it. First there was Climategate, in which hackers illegally broke into a server at the University of East Anglia and stole a pile of emails from climate researchers. The denialists seemed to be fine with that, and quote-mined the heck out of the documents to find damning statements, lying and claiming that…
Mary’s Monday Metazoan: It’s February. In Minnesota.
Posted by PZ Myers on February 20, 2012 (via NatGeo) (Also on FtB)
Friday Cephalopod: the showgirls in Vegas are amazing
Posted by PZ Myers on February 18, 2012 (Also on FtB)
The fake journal trend
Posted by PZ Myers on February 17, 2012 It’s really easy to set up a completely fake peer-reviewed journal, which is a great boon to pseudoscientists, quacks, creationists, and con artists. They can be tripped up, though, since they aren’t aware of all the inside jokes and strange habits of scientists. Here’s one, a journal called “Molecular Biology”, that was exposed because they…
The Midwest Science of Origins Conference!
Posted by PZ Myers on February 14, 2012 It’s on! Students here at UMM got together and have organized their very own Midwest Science of Origins Conference, to be held in Morris on 30 March-1 April. As the big name speaker, they’ve got Neil Shubin to tell us all about Tiktaalik, and some other regional folk to talk about physics, biology, anthropology, and…
Biology teaches that sexual deviancy is normal
Posted by PZ Myers on February 14, 2012 It truly does, and someone has caught us out and published a stunning exposé that reveals the horrible, awful behavior that our goddess, Nature, endorses. You must read “God Hates Checkered Whiptail Lizards!!!” and weep. This is but one page of a devastating revelation. (Also on FtB)
Mary’s Monday Metazoan: Ambition!
Posted by PZ Myers on February 13, 2012 (Also on FtB)
Our illness is their profit
Posted by PZ Myers on February 12, 2012 Have you ever walked around an 19th century (or earlier) graveyard? It gives you a depressing snapshot of the old reality: so many young women dead in childbirth, so many children reaped by diseases. We’ve been fortunate, we residents of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, that so many of those lethal conditions are…
Friday Cephalopod: NUMBERLESS HOSTS!
Posted by PZ Myers on February 10, 2012 You will not escape the swarm. (via NatGeo) (Also on FtB)
Dear Jezebel
Posted by PZ Myers on February 6, 2012 There’s a reason I promote atheism and skepticism coupled with feminism, and it’s not because I’m trying to foist a feminist ideology on skepticism. It’s because skepticism drives me to consider discrimination and injustice as wrong, not just in an abstract moral sense, but unjustifiable and invalid. If I am in any sense a feminist,…