pharyngula

Hackers have replaced the Irish Catholic page with a cute video and a link to the Irish Atheists page. I really should scold such deplorable virtual vandalism, but, well, instead I grabbed a quick screen capture before it gets taken down. I thought the video was pretty funny, too, mocking the…

This is amusing, but isn't George W. Bush also increasingly irrelevant? (via Philosophy Monkey)

The principal of a high school in Texas (where else?) is censoring the school's yearbook. Senior Megan Estes, editor in chief of The Elk, said the point of the article, featuring two seniors who also are teen mothers, was to show fellow students how the girls are coping with motherhood and how…

Greg Laden has chosen sides in the facebook duel for world supremacy, but I really think he's fishing for facebook friends, so go be friends with Greg. He's lonely.

You should read John Allen Paulos's latest column on complexity — it's a central concept in the various debates that go on around here, and no one on the other side evinces any sign of actually understanding the subject. It's always "complexity implies design" this, and "complexity only arises by…

Why does Revere torment me so? He's got a collection of highlights from the current presidential campaign that make me want to secede from the union. Is Huckabee out of the race yet? I've been actively avoiding news from the Huckster lately, to prevent the awful symptoms of head-asplodey.

There are limits to even my capacity to cope with The Stupid, and this video reaches them. It's interesting in a historical sense, in that it seems to be an old recording — familiar faces look so young, and the whole thing has the clumsy style of a bad 1970s documentary—but it's a whole half-hour…

The premise of evangelical atheism is that you can introduce people to the importance of reason and they will come to a reasonable conclusion on their own. The premise of evangelical faith is that people must accept an arbitrary belief because an arbitrary judge, who the convert may not query,…

Sunday morning at 9am, on Air America, you'll want to catch Atheists Talk. This week, half the show will be Hemant Mehta, talking about being a friendly atheist or some such nonsense antithetical to the whole atheist enterprise, which revolves around dour nihilism, of course. The second half will…

As you all know, the position of President of the World is traditionally determined by a vote on facebook. In the last millennium, the title was awarded to the Papacy, and we are all aware of what an awful cock-up that was — it was also a rigged vote, since the only computer with facebook access…

You need stuff to read… Scientiae — and it's one year old today! Circus of the Spineless #30 Encephalon Presidential Edition I and the Bird #69 Carnival of the Liberals #59 Berry Go Round #2 (a new carnival for the botanists) Friday Ark #180 Talk about whatever you want right here.

I feel like I missed so much. MAJeff organized a gathering of Pharyngula readers, and it sounds like it was great fun, as a group of like-minded godless skeptics and rationalists used my web site as a mere pretext to justify meeting to drink bar and talk. I'm superfluous to the whole affair, which…

Ready to be disturbed? Watch this graphic movie of socially sanctioned child abuse of the worst kind — children who are indoctrinated into idiocy. That's just the first part. Watch the rest, if you can.

Those Canadians have got a few prigs running things up there, and they've apparently trying to pass some laws to slap down those darned naughty artist types. There's just one line from the sour old prude that's worth mentioning, the rest is the usual noise. A well-known evangelical crusader is…

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

The two most amusing explanations for why we have leap years that I've heard came from creationists: Those scientists can't even measure the length of the year accurately! They have to keep fudging their numbers every few years to make everything add up, so why should I trust them? We have leap…

A few weeks ago, you may have heard about that interesting study that showed that using cropland to produce biofuels was actually more damaging to the atmosphere than using fossil fuels — among the reasons was that tying up productive cropland to produce alcohol meant other land had to be…

This is something that will cause a few heart palpitations at UMM — we've begun this big push towards being a green university, exploring alternative energy and conservation, and we are very proud of our campus wind turbine, with plans to build more. This story of a wind turbine that lost a rotor…

Where it doesn't descend into bad poop jokes (the good poop jokes are funny), this collection of photoshopped book covers has its moments. I like this one: it's the book Brockman told Dawkins that he'd never get published, because it's too controversial — although, of course, it would probably…

There's a school board election in District 11 of Texas that has a clear choice: Pat Hardy is the pro-science candidate, despite being a conservative, religious Baptist, while her opponent is a deranged lunatic who is quietly outspending her 12:1 while avoiding the public eye altogether. You do not…

Answers in Genesis started this so-called peer reviewed journal called Answers, and the latest publication therein is such a confused mess that I'm wondering if it could be a hoax. Here's the abstract, but I think just the title alone would be sufficient to tell this is codified lunacy: An Apology…

John Hagee is one of the most contemptible people to have an unwarrantedly prominent voice in our country. He's an obese, smug televangelist whose claim to fame is a terrifying dedication to the apocalypse, war and death, and prophecy and damnation. He is a perfect example of how arrogant ignorance…

But perhaps some of our Korean readers will appreciate it. All I know is that I was interviewed for an article on the Han/Warda paper, and that's my face in the Korean news. (click for larger image)

I'm the wrong person to scrutinize this one, but maybe some bored physicist out there can tell us someting about this book, Our Undiscovered Universe, which claims to describe a new version of physics called "Null Physics". Let me know if there's anything there.

Oy, it's navel-gazing time in the science blogosphere, prompted by a post at Bayblab that reveals some resentment or justifiable concern (depending on your perspective) about the inevitable problem that always crops up in blogging: somebody always has more than someone else. Traffic and traffic-…

Sorry, California. After the plague of migratory, mammal-eating pythons, we now have independent testimony that God doesn't like you. God is disgusted with California legislators - at least some of them, according to an evangelical chaplain who ruffled feathers this week in the same Capitol where…

There was a lecture at UCL recently by Dr Oktar Babuna and Ali Sadun Engin. They spilled the beans, and we're all in trouble now. He then showed just how "insightful" the folks at Harun Yahya can be by quoting from one of their books, The Dark Clan, which explains that evolutionary science is…

The Colorado NPR station KUNC recently ran a credulous fluff piece by some guy named Marc Ringel, touting "healing at a distance", some sort of magic handwaving that he claims is "scientifically" supported. The Colorado skeptical community, of course, has expressed their scorn in email to the…

Wouldn't some variant of this image make for a most excellent tattoo? (I expect the Trophy Wife will come screeching into the parking lot any minute now, to tell me no, no, no while hitting me with a rolled up newspaper.)

It's true! They're all arcane tormentors who like to confuse us with arcane rules and weird nomenclature. One example should suffice to show the truth. (Don't try and tell me that a formal taxonomy tries to call these creatures merely "brown". That's just as sneaky.)