pharyngula

After writing about the dilution of those "dangerous" kids' chemistry sets, I find that Nature has just published a news article wondering how dangerous chemistry actually is. Something that felt like an earthquake hit the French town of Mulhouse on 24 March. The explosion at the National…

My day has not been off to a good start. I'm supposed to fly off to New York tomorrow morning, and just to inspire worry in me, my car had a flat this morning. When just getting to the airport is a three-hour drive, hints of unreliability in the vehicle are not reassuring. Worse still, I'm having a…

Some days, I just have to get the cephalopod obsession out of my system with a quick purge of links from the mailbag. Robot tentacles (via Amygdala) Squid guts ice cream Japanese manhole covers Ancient octopus cartoon (via Holbo) Octopus T-shirts It Came from Beneath the Sea Cephalopods get…

How about another sample of creationist nonsense from my mailbag? I wrote about Caroline Crocker back in February—she's the Intelligent Design creationist who was released from her job teaching biology at George Mason University, and I said she had demonstrated incompetence in the discipline, and…

Hey, gang! Who remembers these? I know that Gary does, and of course, so does the Disgruntled Chemist. Those old sheet metal boxes containing an assortment of strange chemicals in vials and test tubes and alcohol burners were a rite of passage for my generation and thereabouts. There was stuff in…

This story, if true, is rather sad. 2009 will be a major date for evolutionary biology, both the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, and the 150th of the publication of the Origin (note to self: must publish earth-shaking treatise on 50th birthday to make future commemorations simpler*.)…

Yesterday was a long, busy day of driving, ferrying offspring about, and I listened to a lot of NPR. All I heard, over and over again, was talk about Henry Paulson and his new position as Treasury Secretary. Not a contrary word was spoken: I heard all about his pro-environmental stance (good, but I…

I'd almost forgotten Timothy Birdnow. He's the embarrassingly ignorant property manager who claimed to have refuted Darwin, but instead made a whole series of foolish blunders; I pinned him down on one point he'd made, and asked him to address it…which he answered even more foolishly. It was…

Read. Carnival of Education Circus of the Spineless

Isn't it charming how the most contemptibly corrupt scoundrels are so pious?

Fellow scienceblogger Evolgen has seen the light—evo-devo is wonderful. He's attending a meeting and listening to some of the bigwigs in the field talk about their work, in particular some research on the evolution of gene regulation. While noting that this is clearly important stuff, he also…

Change a few words in one of their news shorts, and it's perfect. …are calling the park [blog] sensationalist and exploitative, but add that anything that gets people interested in science can't be all bad.

I've got good news and I've got bad news for Clara Jean Brown. Worried about the safety of her family during a stormy Memorial Day trip to the beach, Clara Jean Brown stood in her kitchen and prayed for their safe return as a strong thunderstorm rumbled through Baldwin County, Alabama. But while…

Call me perverse, but my first thought on seeing this kid was that I desperately want to see an x-ray of the pectoral girdle. It looks to me from this one picture that the lower arm must lack a scapula or a clavicle, or at best have fragments with screwy and probably nonfunctional connections. I…

Are you ready for the hot new game of the 2006 Christmas season, Left Behind: Eternal Forces? Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You…

I almost forgot: there was another comment in the Karen Armstrong interview that I found irksome…but my complaint is mainly with the interviewer. Here's one question he asked her, and her answer. But certainly there are a lot of people -- both scientists and religious people -- who speculate about…

Salon has an interview with Karen Armstrong, and I don't know whether the interviewer just did a poor job or whether her ideas really are that sloppy and confused. She definitely has interesting ideas about religion, but while she's dismissing simplistic ideas about gods and the afterlife on the…

I've received a personal email from Rabbi Avi Shafran—the fellow whose graceless and ignorant opinion piece I criticized a while back. It's a peculiar thing: he wrote a public editorial, I criticized it publicly, and now he asks that we have a private discussion on the matter. I won't post his…

Lots of people have been sending me the link to the Vintage Octopus Pulp Covers site. It's very cool. It makes me wonder why so many people are infatuated with cephalopods, though. Weirdos.

Creek Running North has a guest blogger this week, and she has asked for inspirational stories to help her get started. So here's a little motivational tale from my undergraduate days about my love for animals, and how I learned to overcome self-doubt and appreciate myself. I was one of those…

Once upon a time, there was teeny-weeny adorable little fish called Paedocypris. Then, one day, a population of bulldozers invaded their habitat, and they couldn't compete, and they died. The good news, though, is that a new species of Paedocypris has been discovered. Amirrudin said the new…

Just a quick update: you may remember Linda Schrenko, the creationist and Georgia state school superintendent who was indicted for embezzlement (or you may not; she is a rather minor figure in the creationism wars, notable only for blatant corruption on top of the usual blatant stupidity). She pled…

I never heard of this before: there exists a rare, giant, albino earthworm in the scrub prairies of the Palouse. It grows to be 3 feet long, and smells like lilies. I scarcely believed it myself—that's also Sasquatch country out there, you know—so I had to look it up. The Giant Palouse Earthworm (…

On a warm and lazy holiday afternoon, determined to avoid any exertion and relax in my easy chair, I was contemplating something easy on the brain: beauty. I have no idea what makes something beautiful, but I could at least approach the subject empirically and catalog those things and experiences…

I'm not a particularly attractive person. I'm your typical middle-aged schlub, someone you wouldn't look at twice on the street. But I have a secret: there's a part of me that is spectacularly beautiful, and every once in a while I get to take it out and admire it. Tonight, while I was preparing…

Confirming my obvious un-Americanism, let me praise two things: Godlessness and Socialism. And here, watch a video that ties the two together. (Actually, I'm not against America. I'm just for a godless America that cares about the welfare of its citizens.)

If you're getting tired of the Yearly Kos news, have no fear, it'll all be over in two weeks. If not, Matt Bai has an article on it in the NY Times. It's The Future!

I believe in making things easy for my stalkers, so here's where you can find me in the near future. Our good and gracious Seed overlords are flying me in to New York next weekend, June 2-4. I'm going to be wrapped up in a little bit of a social whirl, but I might have a few scraps of free time in…

Here's a applet that traverses the html of a web page and turns it into a pretty graph. There is an online explanation and examples, too—and here's Pharyngula. The dots are color coded specific classes of html tags. That red flower at the top, for instance, is a table—the Friday Random Ten turned…

My daughter has turned out to be a hippie. How could that have happened? Oh, wait. It's been a long time, so I forgot. I guess maybe she just bred true. Peace and love, baby.