pharyngula

Just so you understand, you're going to Hell anyway. (via MacLeod Cartoons)

John Fiala is a bad man, and he's also a Catholic priest. I've got a flood of email telling me I ought to highlight the case because he's a priest who forced a boy to have sex with him at gunpoint, and later tried to hire a hit man to kill him. What he has done has been awful and evil, but, you…

Would you believe I still get lots of mail from devout Catholics? I still even get these nice heartfelt letters via regular mail from little old Catholic ladies who think their flowery stationery will finally bring me around to the faith. But mainly I get something out of the blue where I can tell…

You probably already heard that Christie Wilcox won the $10K blogging scholarship — I helped by plugging her most excellent blog as a worthy entry. Now she has very nicely returned the favor by sending me a large care package from Hawaii with many tropical delectables. Unfortunately, some of them,…

It's almost Thanksgiving, and you know what that means: the deluge of Christmas carols is about to commence. This is the time of year when I dread turning the radio on, because I know I'll hear the same sets of songs over and over again, and the kind of uniform anti-eclecticism characteristic of…

Time to consider the bad habits of the habitual thread. (Current totals: 11,388 entries with 1,192,580 comments.)

Here's a fine collection of photos from Skepticon, including several of us in a lovely leather top hat. I think I need to get one for myself. I'd like to see hats come back into style anyway. It seems like only Texans and their Stetsons that have kept up the practice.

For all you Symphony of Science fans — here's a fresh entry. And for all of you who hate autotuning—don't click play!

Mexican free-tailed bats

You all want to know what is going on in the minds of my students, right? Here you go. Hannah writes about mitochondria, autism, and pain. Lisa writes about autism, the dog genome, and sea urchins. Logan writes about giant insects. Kele has survived his senior seminar and is now writing…

At last, I am safely home after an excessively long and annoying trip back from Skepticon. One of the pleasures of these trips, at least, is meeting ferocious Pharyngulistas who are otherwise just fierce pseudonyms on a page, and who usually turn out to be fun and interesting human beings. Here's…

It was a rough night—roads in Minneapolis were clear, so I managed to drive halfway home, but then they turned into glassy sheets of frozen slickness, so I stopped for the late night at a cheap motel. Now the journey resumes by daylight, at least. It's still icy, but at least I'll be able to see. I…

The current silly Skepticon controversy is easily resolved: just vote on it. How much of a so-called skeptic convention can be about religion? None 0% (0 votes) No more than 25% 0% (0 votes) No more than 50% 0% (0 votes) Just so long as it isn't all of it 25% (3 votes) All of it, why not?…

Let's see…where am I? Oh, yeah. Springfield. Skepticon. My talk went OK, it was an all-science talk, and maybe disappointed those who expected me to lasso a god out of the sky, set him on fire, and stomp on his smoldering carcass. Afterwards, the party went on for quite a while. I was supposed to…

Forgive the neglect lately, but I'm a) distracted by the chaos that is Skepticon, and b) mildly enfreakened out by the fact that my talk is still not ready for prime time, and I have to give it in a few hours. So now I see that the thread of perpetual growth is getting overlong, despite the fact…

I'm about as pro-choice as you can get; I'm even willing to say that I'm pro-abortion, and would like to encourage more people to abort. But I'm also rather shocked by my fellow Minnesotans, Pete and Alisha Arnold, who have decided to allow people to vote on whether they should get an abortion. Way…

It's such a petty and trivial one, though, I can't be too concerned. I'm at Skepticon 3, and I just learned tonight that the convention has been a source of dissent…and when I read the argument, I was stunned at how stupid it was. Apparently, Skepticon has too many atheists in it, and is — wait for…

It's telling that kooks like Bill O'Reilly can turn purple with rage if you say "happy holidays" to them, seeing affront in friendliness. You know, It doesn't matter — so why do we need a poll to find out if some jerks want to dictate how you say hello? How do you feel when you hear "happy holidays…

I didn't think so. I never did, either. But now at least you can get them for free: the JREF has a teaching module on ESP that you can download. It's pretty good. The module strongly emphasizes good record keeping and rigor, which are important skills for young investigators. I was a little…

Scientists are often accused of cruelty towards animals, and there are some experiments that do cause pain…but at the same time, what we can do is very tightly regulated and scrutinized, with every experiment requiring rather thorough justification, and in every case that I know of, the…

Vitreledonella richardi (via Young R.E., M. Vecchione and D.T. Donovan; and check out the videos!)

Jebus, it's only the first night. Rebecca Watson, Bailey's, Amanda Marcotte, Red Stag, Vic Stenger, some random ale. I seem to have outlasted everyone else tonight, but I can't keep this up the next couple of nights. This. Is. SKEPTICON. I confess. It was pretty funny watching Vic Stenger trying to…

Do you detect the little scientific and logical problem in this press release about a new prayer study? A ground-breaking online study was recently initiated to discover if Americans believe prayer has a place in medicine. Shannon Pierotti, a graduate student at USciences, is using a social…

You can't get much more cynical than this article by a fellow who churns out term papers for incompetent students. He gives some examples of how awful their writing is, and talks about the formulaic approach he takes to writing everything from term papers to Ph.D. theses…and it's more than a little…

I'm already getting grumbling about the commenting changes, so maybe the rhubarb thread would like to chime in with more. Do it with the panache of a Dawkins, please! Hmmm. Some atheist meeting sometime ought to do this: have a session where the speakers just read aloud from their hate mail for…

I've had to make some changes to how comments are filtered here. Here is the only allowed html that you can use in any of your comments: <a href=""></a> <b></b> <i></i> <u></u> <s></s> <em></em> <strong></strong>…

Oh, man. Christopher Hitchens is going to debate William Dembski at a Christian high school in Plano, Texas. Dembski is dumber than I ever imagined to have agreed to this. It's like volunteering to take a high dive into a woodchipper. It's going to be webcast beginning at 8:40am tomorrow, Thursday…

I know it's a respectable field; kinesiology is the study of human movement, and I've known some who are sensible and well-trained (applied kinesiology, on the other hand, is total bunk). But it's becoming a bit like engineers and the Salem hypothesis — I also run into creationists who proclaim…

But I have resisted! Somebody has been to Minnesota, though, where many do not. Except…a Vikings fan rooting for Favre? He's going to hell whether he gets the mower or not.

I wish I could say only a Fox station in Texas would ask a question this stupid, but nah, it could be anywhere in this crazy nation. Do you think the Ten Commandments should be posted in public school classrooms? 26.76% Yes 73.23% No Savor the comments at the poll results, too. Ah, theocracy.