Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
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Thanks to Jim Lippard for taking this picture of two of the the Mr Deity crew:
Boy, I'm looking tired. It's been a long day, but I still have to get down to the Atheist Nexus party, and say hiya to the internet on the live stream they're running.
They also enjoy a little something to drink.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover a bottle of OriginAle: Darwinian IPA and an imperial stout, Gudeløs, waiting for me when I checked in. The Danish contingent wants me to come out to their big meeting in June in Copenhagen…I am so there. Bribes…
Just not a very good one, but you'll see for yourselves. I spent the morning in heaven, which consists of a well-lit white screen in Southern California, trying to master my lines for a future Mr Deity episode. That stuff is harder than it looks. We went through many takes while my brain was…
I mentioned that Dennett, Dawkins, and I had dinner together tonight. Someone — and all we know from the waiter was that it was a woman — sent a nice bottle of wine to our table. I know I speak for both Dan and Richard when I say thank you, anonymous lady! It was appreciated!
One other exhibit in the hall was for Evolutionary Genealogy, an excellent site run by Len Eisenberg of Ashland, Oregon. I was in Ashland a while back and got a tour of the geology walk he installed there, which is phenomenal — look it up if you're ever in town.
He's selling posters and t-shirts to…
Can I call it a ceremony? It wasn't very ceremonious at all.
We sat down first to watch a live video stream of Bill Maher's show, with special guest Richard Dawkins. It was good, it was funny, it was abrasive, and Maher didn't say anything crazy at all. Dawkins did not get much of an opportunity to…
I almost forgot! We started off the day with a panel discussion for the Dogma Free America podcast. It was me, Sunsara Taylor, and William B. Davis (the 'cigarette man' on the X-Files, skeptics!), which made for an interestingly diverse group. Check out the podcast when it is available.
This was definitely the weirdest talk of the meeting so far.
Bisheff was discussing Tom Paine, that fascinating patriot and rabble-rouser of the American Revolution. Atheists love the guy; he wasn't one of us, since he was a deist, but he was a real firebrand in his opposition to organized religion…
I walked into this talk a little late, and was initially unimpressed. Richert was an atheist who fought in Viet Nam, and a lot of the talk was a rather rambling reminiscence with photos of the war; I didn't quite see the point. At the end, though, it was very affecting. He talked about incidents…
As soon as you walk into the conference hall, you can't miss the big posters of a semi-nude Toni Marano. She's selling videos to help with pilates training, and also does "lifestyle intervention". I just have to say…good for her. It's an unfortunate fact that atheist conventions are sometimes a…
I've been very, very busy today, so I'm bringing you a few belated comments about the Atheist Alliance International convention. I have to be brief, unfortunately; tomorrow is another busy day, which will be starting with a session with Mr Deity, so I need to get some sleep sometime.
I met Russell…
What a day to be stuck in airplanes for hours on end; I had to slurp in a bunch of files on my iPhone and then look at them on that itty-bitty screen, just to catch up on the story of Ardipithecus. Fortunately, you can just read Carl Zimmer's excellent summary to find out what's cool about it.
For…
Euprymna tasmanica
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
But there is a group, Alabama Atheists and Agnostics, which they can join, and I'm sure there are others around. Unfortunately, they seem to be limited in how they can advertise. When they tried to do the common campus practice of chalking — putting messages on the sidewalks to let students know…
The number of godless Americans rises a few percentage points, and O Woe Is Us among the apologists. They are so weak and easily discomfited that it makes me chortle.
This one is pretty funny, too — he urges all the religious people to drop their differences (hah!), "Or risk becoming Europe, where…
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Colbert just kind of talks over him the whole time, but that's to be expected.
Man, those visits to Fargo and Maine sure stirred up a lot of people. I've just been getting an unusually large volume of mail lately, and it's about evenly split: half are saying "Yay, I'm going to read your blog every day!" and the other half are "You're going to burn in hell!" It seems…
J-pop culture is creeping in everywhere. How else to explain the Manga Guide to Molecular Biology?
If you've ever read William Dembski, you know he has an infuriating ego and is aggravatingly pompous. If you've ever read Dan Brown, you know that he simply can't write, churning out canned syntax and ridiculous plots. What would you get if someone made an unholy fusion of the two?
I'm pretty sure…
Do I really need to add anything to this buffoon's own words? Get the rubber room ready.
(via Below the Beltway)
The story of Cameron Todd Willingham (via Digby) ought to be read by everyone. Willingham seems to have been a kind of Texan dumbass, an uneducated, wife-beating piece of work, but he was also the father of three children, who he, by all accounts, loved. Those kids died in a house fire. Forensic '…
My appearance at Bates made it to the Lewiston Sun Journal.
They did get a little piece of one point I tried to make. I don't think religion makes people do wicked things, and that's not my gripe with it. What it does is cut an intellectual brake line, making them incapable of dealing with certain…
Richard Dawkins is appearing on Colbert tonight, it should be good. In a near miss, Francis Collins is appearing tomorrow; too bad we couldn't get a collision.
It was very simple: DIRP.
I knew ahead of time exactly what it was going to be: complexity, complexity, complexity, complexity, complexity, complexity, complexity, therefore, DESIGN. It doesn't follow. The logic is nonexistent. It's the kind of thing you'd expect a competent person with a Ph.D. in…
It's that day when you're supposed to express your irreverence (hey, wait a minute, isn't that every day and every minute?), and if you think there is something you should do that's better than just wandering around uttering foul imprecations against gods and their priests, try supporting the Irish…
Meh. Some progress: 1653 words, but not very satisfied with what I got done. Scribbling away on airplanes and in airports doesn't lend itself well to focus.
We had a fine evening here at Bates College in Maine, and here's our group photo of the elites who gathered for calamari, Maine food, and beer afterwards. Note satanic red glowing eyes.
(Click for larger image)
You may notice that some of us are wearing an interesting orange necklace. That's a…
This train keeps rolling on into nightmare. It's…it's immoral. But it's also a fact.
Carry on, passengers.
Since the mere majesty and grandeur of the natural world are insufficient to provide entertainment, perhaps science coverage in the media should become something like the Weekly World News. Arthur David Horn could be a major media star.
He now advocates the theory that modern man is not the result…
The book of Genesis as told by Robert Crumb, that is, who is as respectable a prophet as any of the cabal that wrote the original. Crumb at least starts with a reasonable perspective.
"The idea of millions of people taking this so seriously is totally nuts," he added. "The Bible doesn't need to be…