pharyngula

Here you go, a few links with promises of interesting reading. Much more so than you'll find here, where I'm buried beneath efforts to finish up my Seed column, prepare for a lecture tomorrow, get a lab organized for Wednesday, write an entry for an encyclopedia, and shovel through piles of…

Oh, no! Now Tiny Frog is giving ammunition to the producers of Expelled by revealing The Stifling Dominance of Secular Academia! At least biologists aren't being picked on in this case — it's those biased secular theories of physics that are being blamed.

Check out the pulp edition of the Carnival of the Godless — it's got pulp superheroes narrating the action. I never quite imagined Occam as a ham-fisted bruiser, but OK… If you prefer a softer approach than those scary godless atheists, there's also a Humanist Symposium available today. As usual,…

Greg made me laugh.

(Note addendum to this post: the infamous Uncommon Descent memory hole is in operation.) A while back, Bill Dembski was bragging about how he was going to be snuffling about Baylor University, affiliating himself with an ID research lab there. It was a strange situation: a serious lab working on ID…

Hey, residents of the North Mason School District on Hood Canal in Washington state! Don't put John Campbell on your school board! You may be wondering who he is and why we should care. John Campbell is better known by his full name, John Angus Campbell, and he's a professional stealth creationist…

Ben Stein is making a new movie (Expelled, have you heard of it?) that's supposed to be out in February, but right now he's building the excitement by making television appearances and demonstrating that he is a raving lunatic. Yeah, this is exactly the guy I want as the spokesman for Intelligent…

The Kentucky Park Service has a problem. People are going to the Creation "Museum", getting their heads filled up with idiocy, and then they go to the state parks and pester the rangers with stupid assertions. The parks department had a great idea: let's send the rangers to the museum to find out…

Yowza. Vox Day tried to pull his usual ahistorical, illiterate, ignorant schtick, blaming Nazis and Communists on ol' Chuck Darwin, and Ed Darrell completely eviscerated him. I mean, it's like all that's left of Day is a few tattered scraps of skin hanging from a stick, drying in the wind. Vox Day…

Everyone needs to go try and cheer up that poor lonely atheist, Tangled Up In Blue Guy. It was his birthday yesterday and everyone in the world forgot. I can't console him. He's an atheist, which means it is entirely true that most of the people in the world hate him and want to strap him to a big…

Now he has gone and won a Hugo! I've wondered since security has gotten so arbitrary and weird — do the Hugo winners have trouble getting home, since they have to fly with what looks like a small metallic missile in their luggage?

ERV is probably right. No one reads Uncommon Descent. I've noticed this before, and others have written to me about it. A link on any of the blogs of the creationist flavor, including UD, probably the most "popular" of the ID bunch, brings negligible traffic. I've been linked to with outrage and…

Whee! Read, while I go get more coffee. Circus of the Spineless #24 Friday Ark #154 Carnival of Education #134 Carnival of the Liberals Skeptics' Circle #68

So Jesus and Jeffrey Rowland are having a conversation in a bar… Now, see, that's the root of the problem: religion is crazy when you think about it, and when people do start considering its inconsistencies and ridiculous claims, its proponents either try to spin you around with increasingly…

Mooney says that because polls show that Americans are so blinded by religion that they would choose the words of a bloody-handed Middle Eastern sky god over the evidence of science, Dawkins and all us uncompromising atheists are wrong in our tactics. We are henceforth to heed the words of Nisbet…

That Dunford fella has already gone to see the Lucy exhibit in Houston … and he's bragging about it on the interwebs. This makes me soooo jealous. Oh well, he is paying the price. He may have gotten to see Lucy on opening day, but in exchange he has to live in Texas.

This sounds so familiar. A few years ago, a historian of science, Naomi Oreskes, reviewed the literature on climate change and concluded that there is a unanimous consensus in the published work that anthropogenic carbon is a major contributor to global warming. Now a denialist has re-analyzed…

Pharyngula got a small link from Dave Barry today. It's one word ("YIKES", which seems appropriate), but I have a dream that someday I will get a whole sentence. And it will be funny. Oh yes, it will be funny.

Texans should be concerned about Texas H.B. No. 3678, an act "relating to voluntary student expression of religious viewpoints in public schools." It's authored by Charlie Howard, an overly cheerful and zealous member of the far religious right, and Warren Chisum, who will be known forever as the…

The Pivar story isn't quite dead yet — Chris Mims discovers that one of his blog defenders was a public relations agent. It's not clear if he was employed by Pivar — he has written press releases for Lifecode, though — but if he was, it looks like Pivar has another goon in his employ whose ham-…

This is a kind of cephalart quickie, two images that are perfect for Pharyngula. If I had rooms here I'd hang them in ornate frames surrounded by expensive lighting. Here is the patron saint of Pharyngula, St Architeuthis, by Skot Olsen. This one is so beautiful it brings a tear to me eye; the…

Vampyroteuthis gazes at you with its terrible ancient eye… Close it, please, for the love of heaven, close it! Vampyrotheuthis infernalis JEBUS! It's got a sphincter for an eye! OPEN IT AGAIN! OPEN IT AGAIN! Figure from The Deep(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Claire Nouvian.

When I see Jonathan Wells' name on anything, I know I'm in for some furious gnashing of the teeth because of the man's infuriating tendency to blatantly lie with every sentence. That's the case with his recent baseless criticisms of the peppered moth story; Mike Dunford takes care of him this time…

His blog is now two years old, which means it is at that point where it's very cute but has an infuriating habit of saying "no" a lot and throwing tantrums. It helps if everyone makes sure that he gets his naps.

We had our very first meeting of UMM Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists tonight. About two dozen people had expressed interest before, so we expected, optimistically, about 20 people to show up. We got there a little early, and people were waiting for us … and then our 20 were there, and then…

This one has been around for a while, but it's still funny.

We have a new Tangled Bank flourishing at Balancing Life.

I have survived the first week of classes (my schedule leaves Fridays free of lecturing), as have my students — one down, sixteen to go. I've got a fairly heavy load this term, with a brand new introductory biology course (with 84 freshman students!) and a neurobiology course for more advanced…

Now the Stuart Pivar Story is on Daily Kos. Even after he dropped the lawsuit, his reputation on the blogosphere is sealed. If he'd never started this duel, it would have been nothing but a few fading memories of a negative review of an obscure book … but by playing games with the law and trying to…