pharyngula

This is awful: Rick Perry's Texas A&M Transcript is now available online. He was a pre-vet student in college? Unbelievable. This is a fellow wobbling between a C- and a C+ average from term to term. As an advisor, I would have taken this poor student aside in his second year and explained to…

Rick Perry was asked about evolution by a kid; his answer was both condescending and wrong. "It's got some gaps in it," Perry continues, "but in Texas we teach both creationism and evolution..." "Ask him why he doesn't believe in science," the mother interjects off camera. Putting both hands on…

It's a very sensible petition, too, asking the UK government to treat creationism appropriately. Creationism and 'intelligent design' are not scientific theories, but they are portrayed as scientific theories by some religious fundamentalists who attempt to have their views promoted in publicly-…

(Also on FtB)

I'd vote for him. Wouldn't you? (Also on FtB)

A former Texas public school teacher has sent me some stories from their career there. It's not pretty. The situation is what I also recollect from my long-ago days in a Yankee high school, though, so I don't know that we can just blame Texas, but it's true — the system is often set up to give…

I'm getting reports that a lot of you haven't seen anything new at Freethoughtblogs Pharyngula. I've been posting stuff there! Apparently, there's a glitch somewhere in caching, and it's not clear to me whether it's a problem on our end, or on your end — for some reason, your browser is loading an…

It turns out to be true, at least for bustards, that the fast, flashy life leads to earlier burnout. So what's my excuse? I dunno. (Also on FtB)

I guess you lazy people who didn't travel to Oslo still get to see me: here's my talk at the World Humanist Congress. (Also on FtB)

This is one beautiful plesiosaur, Polycotylus latippinus. (Click for larger image) (A) Photograph and (B) interpretive drawing of LACM 129639, as mounted. Adult elements are light brown, embryonic material is dark brown, and reconstructed bones are white. lc indicates left coracoid; lf, left femur…

(Also on FtB)

Isn't it obvious that the story of Planet of the Apes is about apes from one planet dominated by apes finding themselves on a planet dominated by apes of a slightly different species? Also, this comic bugs me a little bit: I'm flying off to give a talk in which I argue that the hallmark of human…

Why? This makes no sense. Ken Ham is putting up a for-profit theme park, has already got big sales tax breaks from the state of Kentucky, and now we learn that he's also getting a major break on property taxes. The property tax agreement means the Ark Encounter would pay 25 percent of the local…

I've had all of these perspectives in my career, so I can tell you that they're mostly right…except for the one about how professors see themselves. You should just substitute the postdoc:postdoc image for the professor:professor one. Also, I worked my way through college as an undergraduate…

Tomorrow, I'll be on a plane for Norway, and I'll be spending the weekend in urban Oslo. Wouldn't it be nice if the World Humanist Congress could be held in Kongsvinger Forest? (via National Geographic) (Also on FtB)

Every morning when I get up and get on the computer, the first thing I do is delete the pile of spam from Dennis Markuze, each of which is usually cross-posted to 50 to 100 other people. Every time I fire up Twitter, the first thing I do is clear the garbage Dennis Markuze has left there; yesterday…

This is a small piece of a larger — much larger — photo of a Vancouver street crowd. Go to the original image, though, which allows you zoom in and in and in — you'll be able to see the faces in surprising detail of each of the little dots. The Vancouver Canucks Fan Zone along Georgia St. for…

I'm glad I've got one, and I'm so proud that my worth is enhanced by my testicles, as this report from Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce shows. The findings are stark: Women earn less at all degree levels, even when they work as much as men. On average, women who work…

Start your day with a gallery of images of the Colossal Squid. (via Offshore Fishing Videos and TONMO) (Also on FtB. Maybe. If the damned thing is working for you yet)

Somehow, annoyingly, the DNS for freethoughtblogs got redirected to the bad old server, Bluehost, and all you see when you go there is a dead static page. Ed Brayton is scrambling to figure who screwed up what where and get it fixed as soon as possible.

My wife sent me this photo, and was intrigued. The water boatman sings through its penis, and sings very loudly — 105 decibels from an animal that's only a few millimeters long (no word on the length of its penis). I have received subtle signals that I am…inadequate. Does anyone have any…

A study in the Journal of the Royal Society of medicine has assessed the effectiveness of health care in 19 western countries and come up with a simple ranking system: a measure of the the number of lives saved relative to expenditures proportional to the GDP. One parameter, called the GDPHE, or…

This is a wonderful video debunking the Kalam Cosmological Argument. What I really like about it is that it takes the tortured rationales of theologians like William Lane Craig, who love to babble mangled pseudoscience in their arguments, and shows with direct quotes from the physicists referenced…

Hey, look, James Randi has seen an integral number of orbits around the sun! Everyone congratulate him today. Also note that I actually have a t-shirt with his face on it. (Also on FtB)

Science fiction dreams may come true: a small, thin band of stable anti-matter has been discovered near Earth. It was predicted theoretically, but now emissions from the annihilation of these particles has been observed. The existence of a significant flux of antiprotons confined to Earth's…

Maybe you've seen this before: it's a diagram of the sensory and motor cortex of the brain, with a little man or homunculus drawn over it to illustrate the somatic areas associated with each region. You see where the little man's knee is on the left image of the sensory cortex? Stick an electrode…

I learned something new today, and something surprising. I've opened up my fair share of bellies and seen intestines doing their slow peristaltic dance in there, and I knew in an abstract way that guts were very long and had to coil to fit into the confined space of the abdominal cavity, but I'd…

Have you ever witnessed a cat in heat? Yowling, hissing, screaming, tearing at each other…or at best, moping about the house, trying to get intimate in unseemly ways with you, pressing their butts up against everything and responding to every touch with lordosis. They are tacky and obnoxious. It's…

I have more imminent travel plans. I'll be at the World Humanist Conference in Oslo this coming weekend, and then on Monday the 15th I'll be doing this: Sted: Asylet, Grønland 28 [kart] Tid: Fra kl. 18 og utover Facebook-event Paul Z. Myers er en amerikansk biolog som jobber ved University of…

Oh, boy. Look at these quotes from a recently published magazine article, and try to guess where they came from. Scientists had also implicitly assumed that the X chromosomes in all women were identical. We had? When? The first comprehensive study of gene activity in the X chromosome of women…