Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
Since I've accumulated more carnival notices since the last one…
Teaching Carnival XVI
Animalcules
Encephalon 11
And don't forget that the Tangled Bank is coming up on Wednesday!
I've been writing a fair amount about early pattern formation in animals lately, so to do penance for my zoocentric bias, I thought I'd say a little bit about homeotic genes in plants. Homeotic genes are genes that, when mutated, can transform one body part into another—probably the best known…
Casey Luskin has been posting a series of articles to argue with Carl Zimmer, and has finally posted his last attempt, which Zimmer has dealt with. We have a new catch phrase, thanks to Luskin, in reference to the shortcomings of the vertebrate eye:
Was the Ford Pinto, with all its imperfections…
Oh! Respectful Insolence uncovers more woo-woo nonsense, a scheme called Global Orgasm that urges everyone to get it on on one particular day.
The intent is that the participants concentrate any thoughts during and after orgasm on peace. The combination of high-energy orgasmic energy combined with…
This is just too obvious. Coturnix thinks he can get a link from me just by baiting a post with a nice picture of a cephalopod? Does he think I'm easy or something?
Thinking about getting a pet? You should read Animal Reviews first, to see if it will fulfill your needs. For example, the review of the octopus suggests that I need one, right now.
Next, Octopi are what are known as Cephalopods, a science word meaning that they are constructed entirely out of…
You may vaguely recall that Deepak Chopra claimed the results from the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) labs supported his religious ideas. In a very timely bit of news, Jeffrey Shallit reports that PEAR is closing after 27 years of embarrassing futility. About time.
I have to preface this with the comment that I like Eugenie Scott, I think she does a wonderful job, and she's trying to accomplish the difficult task of treading the line between being a representative of science and building an interface with culture and politics. I couldn't do that job. I'd be…
When a commenter says she is a 14 year old girl who is a home-schooled genius, thinks Evolution, Genetics and Astral Projection are neat-o, peppers her comments with grammatical and spelling errors and "giggles", says she wishes a sexy man would give her a massage, claims that her hobbies include…
It's all very nice that Elayne Riggs refers to me as an A-list blogger, but it's not true. We weird scienceblog types have to be placed on a completely different alphabet, and I have decided that I want to be on the ζ-list. Mainly because I like the squiggle.
Update your blogrolls appropriately,…
There's some loony Indonesian witch doctor trying to put a voodoo curse on GW Bush. While I can sympathize with the sentiment, the method is a stupid waste of time (except, perhaps, that it has gotten the witch doctor in the news, so maybe it's just a high-tech way to drum up business)—and it's not…
What if Stan Lee worked for Chick Publications? You'd get apocalyptic tracts with giant planet-eating space men.
(via Pen-Elayne)
This is all you're getting from me for a while. I just finished a 9 hour long meeting (freaking uncivilized, if you ask me), and next I have to go attend some god-…
On Tuesday, I'll be in the Twin Cities to pick up #2 Son for Thanksgiving break, and as long as I'm there, I've been invited to join in the fun of this month's Cafe Scientifique: it's the Physics of Bowling, to be held at Bryant Lake Bowl in Minneapolis. This has the potential to be very…
This has got to be a devious plot. My wife has been known to tell me to dress more formally (it's a polite way of pointing out that I'm a slob), and in particular, that I should wear…a tie… more often. Now a reader sends me a link to ties with cephalopods and brains on them, and it's the month…
The Minneapolis Star Tribune published a very foolish editorial in their Faith and Values section, carping about that Dawkins fella and his atheistic Darwinism. It's typical creationist dreck, I'm afraid. If you want just one good argument against religion, it's that it seems to promote idiots to…
A reader conspires to make me feel old—I don't have any little kids running around in my house anymore, so I've completely missed this new cartoon, Peep and the Big Wide World. It's a science program for pre-schoolers! They've got sample videos online, and a list of science-related books. It looks…
Amazing: one short comic strip that captures my philosophy perfectly.
Gosh, now I'm done. I don't need to write anything anymore.
Awww, it's a romance made in the blogosphere: Sean Carroll and Jennifer Ouellette, my two very favoritest physics bloggers, are getting married. And it involves APS meetings and Fourier transforms, all intensely romantic.
This calls for some romantic imagery.
Chopra's latest attempt to critique Dawkins is as lame as his first. I summarized that first one as "Well, you can't see love in your fancy microscope, now can you, Dr Smarty Pants?"; this one is the Incredibly Agile Evasive God trick. He's going to play a game and try to define his god and…
We've finally got the piece of evidence they've all been asking for: a cat giving birth to a dog.
It's only a matter of time until my attempts to hatch a bird out of my fish eggs succeed.
Look at this card a reader wrote me about. It's a sweet, cute, innocent card, perfect for Cephalopodmas.
On the other hand—O Great Old Ones, this is so horrid I shudder to mention it—another reader sent me an ad. An ad so ghastly, I won't put it on the front page here…you'll have to click through…
There don't seem to be a lot of carnival notices in my mailbox today, so I'll just note that the Friday Ark #113 is up, and remind everyone that the next Tangled Bank is coming up on Wednesday, at Newton's Binomium (by the way, I thought his post on the difficulty of explaining the importance of…
People send me pretty pictures all the time…they're almost always of molluscs, of course. I've put the latest below the fold.
Some pottery from a Sicilian shop window:
Some lovely art:
A doodle:
Casey Luskin is still flailing at Carl Zimmer, and Carl has updated his rebuttal appropriately. It's good entertainment if you find attack mice amusing.
As happened in so many places in this last election, a local Democrat won a solid victory over a Republican in the District 50 election. His opponent sent a "concession" letter—see if you can spot what's peculiar and a bit offensive about it.
Congratulations on winning the District 50 senate race.…
Yesterday afternoon, I'd had to run an errand to our library, and as I was walking out, I saw a real treat on the new arrivals shelf: Tufte's
Beautiful Evidence(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). I had to sit down and read through parts of it (short review: thought-provoking ideas, but I don't think it's one…
A member of the family Cranchiidae
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
After South Park made such a botch of its portrayal, this might be some vindication: Salon names Richard Dawkins as one of the sexiest men living. It's a bit gushy, I'm afraid.
Wonder is sexy. Knowledge is sexy. And embodying both as much as any man in the world today is a man in a tweed jacket…
One of the characters who frequents the ID blog Uncommon Descent is the smarm-meister Sal Cordova, an utterly clueless little git with a talent for being simultaneously oleaginous and snide. He has just posted an astonishingly foolish commentary on the apparent impossibility of evolving…