pharyngula

Ophelia Benson is having a giggle over the Texas Republican Party Platform, which you can download, too. It's the usual: guns, US out of the UN, immigrants must be controlled, etc. They really don't like homosexuals. We believe that the practice of homosexuality tears at the fabric of society,…

Jamie Kilstein is putting on a comedy show in New York on 2 July, titled No War, No God, No Nickelback. You should go if you can. He's recommended by that polite, soft-spoken gentleman AC Grayling, so you know exactly what to expect: calm, cerebral, gentle humor, quietly skewering social mores.…

Some fundamentalists have a weird obsession with animals. One in particular is Bryan Fischer, disturbing homophobe, who is outraged at the latest tragedy in which a man was killed by a grizzly bear. It shouldn't have happened. Why? Because in a god-fearin' country, animals will be tamed by god.…

In our last installment of the entropic thread, I had a video of an attractive young anti-Catholic woman; at the end, people were asking about a vaguely-recalled American religious conservative who confessed to sex with a mule. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Neal Horsley, anti-abortion crusader,…

Well, hello, Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Weizmann Institute! And soon CERN, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), and the SETI Institute will also be establishing blogs on this platform. It will be interesting to see if they can catch up with us non-institutionalized individuals…

One of the things I failed to mention when I discussed the Bergman-Enyart dialogue was that the spent some time talking about whether Adam had a navel or not, and the general historicity of Adam and Eve. I did not mention it because it was stupid, and that discussion already had a surfeit of stupid…

Another annoying discovery upon arriving home: someone in China accessed my gmail account and was sending out spam to every address they could find there. Sorry about that. Password has been reset to yet another weird complicated string of gibberish, let's hope it doesn't happen again.

I was cured of any interest in debating creationists by Jerry Bergman, that astonishingly awful whiny young earth creationist I crushed last November. It was embarrassingly bad — Bergman wandered all over the place, made absurd claims (did you know the periodic table of the elements was irreducibly…

People are always asking me, "Why squid?" Here's why. The cool thing about biology, though, is that you could pick any taxon and make a video about how awesome its members are. Squid just have the advantage of the exotic, living in environments unfamiliar to humans, and so they leap out at us as…

We're back in Morris after our week in Oslo and Copenhagen. Now…sleep. But first, here are a few people who appear now and then in the comments:

We'll be on a plane leaving for America soon enough, so don't fill up the unslakeable thread too quickly this time. Maybe some melodic anti-Catholic imagery will distract you all for a bit. (There is some nudity in this movie. I f you don't like that, don't watch it!) Youtube censored the video,…

How else to interpret this moronic inaction from the state? While cleanup crews and technical teams continue efforts to stop crude gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana lawmakers are proposing a different approach: prayer. State senators designated Sunday as a day for citizens to ask for God…

I use a very pretty radial tree of life diagram fairly often — the last time was in my talk on Friday — and every time I do, people ask where I got it. Here it is: it's from the David Hillis lab, with this description: This file can be printed as a wall poster. Printing at least 54" wide is…

It's almost 2am in Copenhagen. Pharyngulites closed out another bar. Gotta collapse somewhere. I shall rise again tomorrow!

OK, what is this thing? I've been nominated for Best Blog About Stuff, which is OK, but then…Best Celebrity Blogger? Somebody has a very slack definition of "celebrity". Then there's Best Religion Blogger — this is an atheist blog, sometimes, only vote for that to annoy the faithheads. But, really…

While you're trapped in the inescapable thread, I'm here in Copenhagen. (Current totals: 10,448 entries with 1,027,632 comments.)

Announcing a new meeting to occur on 29-31 October in Oslo: Kritisk Masse (Critical Mass). Mark your calendars, more information will be coming later. Hey, aren't all Norwegians intelligent critical thinkers? I wonder if they'll be able to handle 4 million attendees.

Oh no…the day needed a few more hours. I've been at the Atheist Alliance International 2010 Copenhagen Convention listening to Roy Brown, Gregory Paul, Dan Barker, AC Grayling, and doing a little yammering of my own, and the Trophy Wife™ and I were supposed to go to the evening of Godless…

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

I don't know. They seem to come in a range of sizes; when they're as large as a small male penis, I suppose it might be unexpected, perhaps a little confusing, perhaps a little ambiguous to people intolerant of the idea that the human form is found in intermediate shapes. We know that the variation…

Look at this breaking wave off the shore of Alabama — it's beautiful and exotic. If you've ever wanted to go swimming in the multi-colored discharge from a toxic chemicals plant, now you know where to plan your vacation.

Oh, no, says Scott Walter, the Templeton Foundation has no nefarious or dishonest aims in reconciling science and religion — they bravely encourage and support alternative viewpoints to theirs. Just to show that they really do have empirical evidence that they are seriously considering the issues,…

Science budgets are tight all over, and we're all stretched thin. Where to make budget cuts that will harm science the least? Here's a sensible proposal: cut all the programs that have a bad track record and don't support good science: Here's my proposal: save over $240 million per year in the NIH…

We'll be at Ørsted Ølbar in a few hours, at 8pm. I shall try to cope for a little while, but I've got to tell you, those savage Vikings in Norway held me hostage last night until the pubs all closed and we were thrown out onto the street, and I shall need gentle nursing back to health. No…

And the little douchenozzle's angry diatribe just confirms that fact.

We had a lovely day in Oslo. Where were you? This was taken at a park with a great many statues of naked people. I was horrified to discover that one of them was of me.

I cannot possibly say it any better than NY Magazine: With the owners of the Empire State Building firm in their decision not to light up for Mother Teresa's 100th birthday, the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum — a former aircraft carrier that served in World War II and the Vietnam War — has…

The good news, first: the Mormon church has been found guilty on 13 counts of lying about their involvement with California's proposition 8. Mormonism is now officially a faith of convicted liars. Now the bad news, or more accurately, the pathetic news. The church lied about spending only $2078 on…