pharyngula

Kevin Smith's next movie looks terrifying: Porky's meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. (Warning: video NSFW) (Last edition of TET; Current totals: 12,832 entries with 1,454,907 comments.)

Finally. Sorry, gang, I was stuck in a hotel with bad wifi this morning, then traveled all day, so finally, here you go. (via The Node, which also has awesome desktop calendars to download)

Oh, this is beautiful. Bill Nye (the Science Guy!) is being interviewed by a Fox News talking head who asks a surprisingly dumb question: Nye is talking about a volcano found on the moon, so he asks, "Does it go anywhere close to the climate change debate on earth?...we haven't been up there…

Who else but Christopher Hitchens? This year, Richard Dawkins himself will present AAA's Richard Dawkins Award to Christopher Hitchens, who may accept in person or in absentia as his schedule permits. Christopher Hitchens is one of the most prolific modern writers and exponents of atheism; he has…

That article I mentioned earlier about a collection of statements from atheists on why they don't believe is now available at the New Statesman. You can read all of them, not just mine!

Hey, this is good news: Nature included a short opinion piece from a stem cell biologist on his experiences blogging, writing the Knoepfler Lab Stem Cell Blog — I'll have to start following it. He has some good general advice for scientists starting to blog, although I have some reservations about…

This strange Japanese video was mention in the last edition of TET, and I had to put it here to help dilute the puzzlement and weirdness. I think it's an anatomy lesson or something. (Current totals: 12,825 entries with 1,453,181 comments.)

A lovely new dinosaur fossil from China is described in Nature today: it's named Xiaotingia zhengi, and it was a small chicken-sized, feathered, Archaeopteryx-like beast that lived about 155 million years ago. It shares some features with Archaeopteryx, and also with some other feathered dinosaurs…

Jon Stewart of the Daily Show did a marvelous job of showing how right-wingers were desperately straining to get out from under the taint of Breivik's clearly extremist nationalist/rightist/Christian/anti-Muslim ideology. They're clearly in denial. The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon - Thurs…

It takes real effort to purge yourself of parasites, and Australia's got 'em: rabbits, cane toads, and now…chaplains. In a nation that prides itself on its secular government, Australia has this bizarre and inappropriate relic, the National School Chaplaincy Program (NSCP), which somehow manages to…

I like how they're destroyed when you shine a light on them. (Last edition of TET; Current totals: 12,821 entries with 1,452,156 comments.)

This is the traditional ivy-covered teepee at the Morris Horticulture Gardens, which is having an event tomorrow night. Pack up the whole family and come to the Garden for the 41st annual Horticulture Night at the University of Minnesota West Central Research and Outreach Center (WCROC) in Morris…

Tonight at 7pm PST/10pm EST it's time for part 2 of the Ardent Atheist podcast. The first half was played last week; tonight I think it's the part where we discovered that one among us, Suzanne Whang, was rather on the woo side of the spirituality thing, so we all took turns hammering brutally on…

How fun! Fulwiler noticed that her claim to have five Catholic teachings that make sense to atheists actually didn't, you know, make sense to any atheists, me included, so she's now trying hard to rationalize it. She has a new post talking about reasoning with atheists that is even more confused…

You should enjoy this: 50 academics talk about god. It's a half hour of nothing but reason and lucid statements of the obvious. (via Dr JTP)

This looks like a really good rule. Do not allow others to molest children, expose all molesters to authorities, they are the worst garbage to infest any society. Maybe it was on that set of tablets Moses smashed — it's certainly a more useful law than the ones about how to cook goats or what kind…

Anybody know if this story is true or just an amusing joke? I like it either way. In a small Texas town, (Mt. Vernon ) Drummond's bar began construction on a new building to increase their business.. The local Baptist church started a campaign to block the bar from opening with petitions and…

Excellent news: the tide is rising against the Vatican in Ireland. More people are speaking out, the newspapers are publishing pictures of the pope labeled "persona non grata", there's a simmering resentment everywhere. It's leading to comments like this one, which sees a secular Ireland coexisting…

Various godless/critical thinking organizations are doing a good thing: they are expanding their sphere of interest into the high schools, and there are now new resources available to students. If you're interested in learning more about what you can do to be a secular activist in your high school…

Scum of the earth. Parts of Michele Bachmann's district contain the most smug, pious, conservative rat-buggering jerks on the planet (like Marcus Bachmann and his anti-gay "clinic", for instance). And the symptoms are beginning to show: the Anoka-Hennepin school district, part of Bachmann's domain…

Sometimes, you just need some whale songs to get you through the day. (Last edition of TET; Current totals: 12,811 entries with 1,450,309 comments.)

It's sad. The terrorism in Norway was by a right wing nationalist extremist of the pale-skinned, Christian variety, and it's like we broke our home-grown right-wingers' small, feeble, crumbly hearts with that news. But have no fear! They are dogged and single-minded, and they will find a way to…

Here's a perfectly appropriate prayer to start a NASCAR race: he thanks God for GM performance technology, and Ford, and motor oil, and Goodyear tires…he must be hoping for a little kickback from auto suppliers. Aww, it's funny, anyway.

Is this like some bizarre religion-wide side-effect or something? Because Catholicism and Buddhism seem like such wildly different faiths, but here we go again, chronic incidents of child rape by priests…Buddhist priests. And like the Catholic side of the story, they've got some of these priests…

Lawrence Krauss has written an excellent defense of the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to Hubble which is currently under threat of cancellation. I was really down on the space shuttle the other day, but that's because I think it was a failure at doing its job of enabling exploration and…

I've received a couple of shocked emails from people lately, about something called Dinosaur World. It's a set of three theme parks, in Plant City, Florida, Cave City, Kentucky, and Glen Rose, Texas (that last one probably set off alarm bells already) which feature life-size fiberglass and concrete…

Ah, the subtle ways we can discriminate. An Arkansas school decided a black woman just wasn't the right kind of person to stand up at their graduation ceremony. A high school southeast of Little Rock would not let a black student be valedictorian though she had the highest grade-point average, and…

Maybe the military isn't so full of fundies as I feared. Justin Griffith managed to get dog tags with his religious preference — "ATHEIST/FSM" — which is good to hear. It wasn't easy, since his recruiter lied and listed him as a Baptist. The story of his drill sergeant's reaction to discovering his…