pharyngula

Alas, my mandate for today also includes traveling to St. Cloud State University to give two talks, one to the biology department in the afternoon and another to the philosophy department this evening. It looks like I get to be driving through the tail end of a snowstorm today, too. It may be a…

Chinese food can be such an adventure. The "Big bowl flavor vegetables pig livings bowel" sure sounds appetizing, but all the items with cowboy meat are worrisome. And that last duck chin item has me wondering whether this is a restaurant, or just a very exotic bordello. (via Helminthlog)

You all know what I think of the "Painter of Light"…well, he seems to have improved lately. And there is more!

Voting ends tonight, so this is your last chance to vote for or against Pharyngula in these categories: Best Blog (non-professional) Best Expert Blog Best Single Issue Blog Best Post Best Series Most Humorous Post If you've already voted, ignore this: you only get to cast one vote. If you haven't…

I seem to recall not long ago that in one of those usual "where da wimmin at?" web contretemps, there were claims that women just weren't loud and bold enough to make their voices heard. All you have to do is read Helen Thomas's "Lap Dogs of the Press" and Molly Ivins' "Enough of the D.C. Dems" to…

Shame on you, South Dakota. Watch this clip of SD's abortion politics; on the one hand, you have to respect people who have been providing abortion services to the state for years, like Dr Miriam McCreary (now criminalized), and the few representatives, like Elaine Roberts, who have opposed the law…

I'm wondering how the Sarkar-Nelson debate in Austin went down—any attendees want to let me know? I ask because I just now read the discussion paper by Nelson that supposedly represents his side of the argument, and rarely have I seen such a shallow and pointless position advanced with any…

Barbara Forrest is one of the big guns of anti-creationism, and she's interviewed on Daily Kos today.

John Pieret quotes a religious apologist, about which I am rather conflicted: For a Christian, when science is allowed to be neutral on the subject of God, science can only bolster faith. In contrast, and I imagine without realizing it, ID proponents have become professional Doubting Thomases,…

Through the miracle of animation, Charles Darwin tells the creationists to "kiss my ass". It doesn't seem very true-to-life, but he has had over a century to work up a bit of crankiness.

I must purge the mailbox of a few worthy links…so here they are. There are a couple of calls for submissions: The Tangled Bank Carnival of Liberals I and the Bird A few carnivals I failed to mention this week: Carnival of the feminists Carnival of Education Freethought Filter is back up and…

I've seen a few births, and they're messy, bloody, and tiring…but you know, it could be much worse.

Another Friday, another Random Ten. Captain Hook John Cale Friend Of The Devil Grateful Dead El Prado Tom Griesgraber Lord, Fix Me Madison Prayer Band Yo No Soy Tu Marido (Bachata Mix) Nicky Jam Bergfäst (Mountain Haunted) Gjallarhorn Cabo Verde N'ot Era Maria de BarrosNha Mundo…

Part two of his masturbation session is up; it makes me a little queasy, so I'm not going to link to it directly, but you can get to it via Stranger Fruit. This one begins with The Pompous One redefining science (these guys know ID doesn't meet the standards of science, so their strategy is to…

Enjoy a bracing, invigorating rant. And it's so true.

In an interview with Michael Specter in the New Yorker, we get to be really depressed at the way the Bush administration is politicizing science to an unheard-of degree. Bush is bowing and scraping before the twin gods of the Religiously Ridiculous and the Myopic Mullahs of Big Business, and…

Quite a birthday party yesterday, eh? Thank you to all the nice people who wished me well and for that roundup of birthday congratulations by grrlscientist. I'm blushing still. It's a dangerous business, having a birthday. Not only did my actual chronological age get exposed on the web for all to…

The birthday was yesterday. Now I'm going to have to wait 364 days before I can ask for this t-shirt as a present!

The Schoepenhauer awards are a delectable collection of interesting descriptions of parasites, such as the roundworm. Today we'll introduce you to the Intestinal Roundworm, a hideous parasite which infects one out of every four people in the world. That's not a misprint: one out of four. More than…

Last year, a new and unusual species of rodent was discovered in Laos, called Laonastes aenigmamus, or kha-nyou. Here's the skull: It's notable mainly because of that unusual jaw. It's hystricomorphous—an obscure term that refers to how the jaw is muscled, in this case with a large masseter…

Sepia officianalis Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.

There were all kinds of rumors today (from Drudge, of all places) that NASA was going to announce some major discovery related to life elsewhere in the solar system. While that would be incredibly cool, I was dubious—anyone remember the Martian "bacteria"? NASA has a rather poor reputation for this…

Remember Snuppy, the cloned puppy? He's been living under a cloud for a while now, since one of his creators was Woo-Suk Hwang, the Korean scientist who was found to have faked data and exploited his workers, and there was concern that perhaps the dog cloning experiment was also tainted. Put those…

My morning was spent at the local high school today, talking to the biology classes about the evidence for evolution. This wasn't in response to any specific worries—in fact, talking to the instructor, it's clear that they're doing a decent job of covering the basic concepts here already—but that…

The perfect world arrives in 300 years, apparently, as we learn in a Gernsbackian Mary-Sue. It's entirely wrong, I'm afraid: Pharyngutopia arrived today, in a world in which Chris Clarke writes stories illustrated by Carl Buell that are all about me. Everyone should be jealous.

Here it is, my 49th birthday, and it's spring break. My wife's at work, my daughter is at school, all the students are away, it's dead quiet around here. How to celebrate? I know! I'm going to do some guest lectures at the local high school! So that's where I'll be this morning, introducing high…

Orac has the details, but the basic story is that someone tried to burn down the offices of the The Holocaust History Project (THHP). Spread the word: the only thing this contemptible act should accomplish is to make THHP better known.

I feel a bit like a cat with a fat mouse between its paddy paws—although the temptation is there to bite its little head off and crunch on its itty-bitty bones, I think I'll bat it around a bit and extrude a single needle-like claw and stick it in somewhere non-vital and twist, and maybe pluck out…

What do you think of when someone mentions the word "Kansas"? Maybe what leaps to your mind is that it is a farming state that is flat as a pancake, or if you've been following current events, the recent kangaroo court/monkey trial, or perhaps it is the drab counterpart to marvelous Oz. It isn't…

I'm teaching my developmental biology course this afternoon, and I have a slightly peculiar approach to the teaching the subject. One of the difficulties with introducing undergraduates to an immense and complicated topic like development is that there is a continual war between making sure they'…