Pharyngula
PZ Myers
Posted by PZ Myers on May 10, 2013 How else is Google Maps going to get coverage of the 70% of the planet underwater? (via Cephalove)
Will Smith must be stopped
Posted by PZ Myers on May 8, 2013 He has a new movie coming out this summer, After Earth. It looks awful, but then, that’s what I’ve come to expect from Will Smith’s Sci-Fi outings. Jebus. Anyone remember that abomination, I, Robot? How about I Am Legend? I steer clear of these movies with a high concept and a big name star, because…
The first day of the rest of my summer!
Posted by PZ Myers on May 7, 2013 It’s going to be a good season, I can tell already. It’s finals week, so I’ll still have an abrupt pile of grading to do on Thursday, but otherwise, my teaching obligations are done for the semester. Now I’m trapped, trapped I tell you, in Morris for almost (I do have two quick trips to…
Mary’s Monday Metazoan: More charismatic megafauna?
Posted by PZ Myers on May 6, 2013 Oh, no. The metazoan curator sent me this photo for this time around, and I groaned a bit: more big furries. I told her, “Where are the tubeworms, the crustaceans, the zooplankton? Why no jellyfish or echinoderms?” And she said, “But they’re so cute!” and gave me that look. That look that means I have…
Friday Cephalopod: Free fallin’
Posted by PZ Myers on May 3, 2013 From a lovely article in the New York Review of Books about octopods:
What I taught in the development lab today
Posted by PZ Myers on April 29, 2013 After our disastrous chick lab — it turns out that getting fertilized chicken eggs shipped to remote Morris, Minnesota during a blizzard is a formula for generating dead embryos — the final developmental biology lab for the semester is an easy one. I lectured the students on structuralism and how there are more to cells…
What I taught today: a send-off with an assignment
Posted by PZ Myers on April 29, 2013 Today was the last day I lecture at my developmental biology students. We have one more lab and one final class hour which will be all about assessment, but this was my last chance to pontificate at them…so I told them about all the things I didn’t teach them, and gave them a reading list…
Oh, no, not the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis again!
Posted by PZ Myers on April 28, 2013 I think BAHFest — the festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses — has been made entirely redundant. It’s an event to mock the absurdly adaptationist hypotheses put forward by some scientists, and it’s intended to be extravagantly ridiculous. But then, you look at some ideas that are inexplicably popular among scientists, and you realize…it’s a…
Musings from the mind of a mouse
Posted by PZ Myers on April 27, 2013 Casey Luskin is such a great gift to the scientific community. The public spokesman for the Discovery Institute has a law degree and a Masters degree (in Science! Earth Science, that is) and thinks he is qualified to analyze papers in genetics and molecular biology, fields in which he hasn’t the slightest smattering of background,…
It’s another exam day!
Posted by PZ Myers on April 26, 2013 My students are also blogging here: My undergrad encounters Developmental Biology Miles’ Devo Blog Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology Thang’s Blog Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology Chelsae blog Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology Thoughts of Developmental Biology Biology~ I’ve been terrible about updating everyone about my class the last few weeks — we’re…