pharyngula

I've been reluctant to answer the latest question from the Head Office, because it sucks. Nothing personal, but it just doesn't work for me. Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why? I'm…

…knowing that I've got Michael Bérubé defending academic freedom. I would dearly love to see him face-to-face with Horowitz, I think.

Tomorrow night, Wednesday, I'll be glued to NBC: Leno is having both George Carlin and Ann Coulter on. One can only hope that the old hippie will have an opportunity to eviscerate the hateful, dishonest cretin. Do check out that link above for another example of Carlin's routines on religion.

Because this letter from a lawyer complaining about the decision to have the anti-evolution sticker removed from textbooks makes my brain bleed. This was the sticker that said, This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things.…

Seed has an interview with Joan Roughgarden, somewhat controversial evolutionary biologist and author of Evolution's Rainbow : Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). Here's the short summary of her basic thesis: Joan Roughgarden thinks Charles Darwin made a…

Hey, I'm not being pretentious, I'm merely paying due diligence to privacy and security issues. (via Apostropher)

Francis Collins is a very smart, very disciplined, very hardworking man. He was the head of the Human Genome Project, and now he has written a book, The Language of God : A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and I have to tell you, it doesn't look promising. He talks…

George Carlin is a national treasure—his "Touched By An Atheist" skit is beautiful. Hank Fox's commentary isn't bad, either. Maybe it's time for me to start ministering down at the hospital. The usual frauds there could use some competition. If only "evangelical" weren't such a nasty, evil word!

Mooney gets written up in the Las Vegas Sun. Here's what I get in the same article: Friday's panel included a Minnesota biology professor… Yeah, that's it. Someday, I will be famous enough to warrant actually mentioning my name! They'll misspell it, but still…

We left Las Vegas on a 12:30am flight to Des Moines, IA, had an hour and a half layover, got into Minneapolis sometime around 7:30, made the 3 hour drive from there to Morris, and now I sit here a little shell-shocked and worn out. Give me a little time to bounce back and Pharyngula will be…

Chris Clark wants to help send Lauren formerly of Feministe off to the BlogHer conference. That sounds like a good idea to me: contribute to the Ship Lauren to San Jose Fund. It's a good cause.

The young partisan hack appointed to NASA, who took it upon himself to filter the science a little bit to suit right-wing biases? It seems he was a demonstrably bad boy. I wonder what ever happened that unqualified creep? I know he resigned from NASA, I'm just wondering if he has now fallen upward…

My geekishness has a limit, I've discovered. We have a long afternoon and evening to kill in Las Vegas before our plane leaves, and we visited the Hilton, which has a huge Star Trek themed room and exhibit, and Mary even offered to treat me to the Star Trek Experience for Father's Day. I'm sorry,…

We wouldn't want to leave everyone with the feeling that YearlyKos was heaven made manifest on earth, so I'll just mention that Socratic Gadfly is blogging up a whirlwind of anti-Kos sentiment. I think it's a bit overdone, but there is a germ of truth to some of his complaints. I'd worry a little…

I've been off at the big meeting, and it's been a long and tiring weekend in Las Vegas. It's been strange, too: we're surrounded by slot machines and show girls, and our crowd hardly notices them; I took a moment to step outside, and I had to tell my wife, "the sunshine…it hurts…" and we went back…

Not all the email I get is from cranks and creationist loons. Sometimes I get sincere questions. In today's edition of "Ask Mr Science Guy!", Hank Fox asks, I was thinking recently about the fact that wax collects in one's ears, and suddenly thought to be amazed that some part of the HUMAN body…

To continue a bit of theme, I mentioned that there were some different ways to approach biology, and that old-school systematists with their breadth of knowledge about the diversity of life are getting harder and harder to find. This is something I also bring up in my introductory biology course,…

Is anyone else getting flooded with email spam? More than the usual, that is…I'm getting 5-10 thousand heavily randomized and seeming pointless email messages an hour right now. I've tweaked my filters a bit to get rid of most of it, but some still leaks through, and it's rather disturbing to see…

Ah, the libertarian extremists have found my site and are making comments. It's a peculiar pathology that thinks environmentalism is an evil plot, that planning is communism/socialism, and that Jesus was a good capitalist. It is particularly irksome to try and deal with people who are so far gone…

Here's more or less what I said at the YearlyKos panel today, assembled from my notes and with all the "ummms" removed. It's very general, but hey, what can you do in ten minutes? Next time they should give me 30 minutes and I'll flash up some genes and copulating squid and splutter out more…

As you watch the time fade away, sit back and enjoy it and start mentally rewriting your talk. I had it pared down to "I'll post it on the web later, bye!" Well, it really wasn't that bad. My YearlyKos panel on science consisted of me, Wendy Northcutt, Chris Mooney, and that big guy most people…

Hey, everyone! The new ScienceBlogs main page has been launched, and the Seed nerd-kings have added a whole new crop of blogs here. Take a browse, you might discover some new favorites.

After the recent struggles trying to keep up with the traffic on this site, you wouldn't think I'd feel compelled to go trolling for more visitors, but isn't that the nature of weblogging? The only point to it all is to rack up a bigger score than the next guy, as if we were playing pinball. So…

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

The fugu is a famous fish, at least as a Japanese sushi dish containing a potentially lethal neurotoxin that was featured on an episode of The Simpsons. Fugu is a member of the pufferfish group, which have another claim to fame: an extremely small genome, roughly a tenth the size of that of other…

I'm here in sunny Las Vegas, hanging out in the lobby with the free wireless and watching all the funny blogger nerds with the orange badges walking by. Heh. Oh, hang on…I'm wearing an orange badge and blogging in a corner. Yeah, I'm such a nerd. I don't know how much time I'll have for actually…

We have a new Tangled Bank at Get Busy Livin' or Get Busy Bloggin'.

Creationists are fond of the "it can't happen" argument: they like to point to things like the complexity of the eye or intricate cell lineages and invent bogus rules like "irreducible complexity" so they can claim evolution is impossible. In particular, it's easy for them to take any single…

The mighty Kent Hovind has struck out. On June 5th 2006, Hovind pled nolo contendere as charged to three counts: constructing a building without a permit, refusing to sign a citation and violating the county building code. Hovind was ordered to pay $225.00 per count. The plea brings to an end a 5-…

This is very good news, but don't you wish we had a few more prominent American secularists to put on this advisory board? Welcome, Richard. Help us out! Famed Scientist Richard Dawkins Joins the Advisory Board of the Secular Coalition for America Washington, DC — The Secular Coalition for America…