pharyngula

Really, I frackin' know about the crappy MSNBC poll about having "In god we trust" on our money. I've known about it for months and months. I am currently receiving about 20-30 notifications a day from random people that I should crash that poll. Please, please STOP. It's a dead poll. It's been…

Fawziya Ammodi was 12 years old. She was a little girl in Yemen — she would still be in elementary school in the US, or would be just entering middle school. Twelve year old girls are still interested in dolls, and are maybe giggling over those gawky immature boys, and should be learning prior to…

Frank Page is a former head of the Southern Baptist Convention (i.e., nuts) and is also now a member of the Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. In an interview, he talks about what's going on in that council, and there is actually some good news. My hope was that there…

Michael Dowd, the peculiar author of Thank God for Evolution, has a strange podcast up that promotes the New Atheists because they are the new prophets — we're telling it like it is, and religious folks need more of that. He also urges people to read Pharyngula, or, if they want something a little…

Jen went to a Christian anti-porn crusade, and all she got for her trouble was a lot of lies. It's amazing how, on these issues like birth control, abortion, homosexuality, and pornography which stir up so much concern among Christians, they always resort to invented statistics and bogus…

(via India Uncut)

That's a disturbing logo for Skepticon II: my eyes are whited out. It reminds me of The Village of the Damned, that creepy movie about alien-human hybrid children. We will be taking over Missouri on 20-21 November, infecting the entire population with the curse of doubt. It will be fun! They have…

This is an excerpt from a letter Richard Feynman wrote in March 1958, back when I was just about exactly one year old and still wearing diapers. He'd been doing some consulting work for the entertainment industry, and wasn't very happy with their attitude. The idea that movie people know how to…

That new Darwin film, Creation (reviews here and here) doesn't look like it will get to my neighborhood theater — it hasn't got a US distributor, for familiar reasons. A British film about Charles Darwin has failed to find a US distributor because his theory of evolution is too controversial for…

Aaaaiaiaiaiieeeeeeeeeaaaah! Make it stop, mommy, make it stop!

The video below is of a devout Mormon (I'm so sorry for him) speaking out against the church policies of discrimination that led to all that money being sunk into Proposition 8 in California. It's good to be reassured that there are Mormons who aren't full of homophobia and hate. Unfortunately,…

I was having a conversation with a colleague last night, and one of the things we were talking about is the way modern religion has rushed to emulate the trappings of science, where every explanation must have an epistemological foundation in real world observations. A paradigmatic example is Ken…

There's a familiar beast plaguing the fish of the Jersey coast: a tongue-eating isopod. Mr Chambers told BBC Jersey: "When we emptied the fish bag out there at the bottom was this incredibly ugly looking isopod. "Really quite large, really quite hideous - if you turn it over its got dozens of…

Mother Jones magazine has posted a list of "ten cool schools that will blow your mind, not your budget", and UMM is on it. I look forward to the surge of Birkenstock-wearing, granola-munching, eco-freaking freshman students joining us next year.

Perhaps you don't know this, but Philadephia has a very large collection of Darwin literature — it only makes sense, since in the early years of our country that city was the center of science and philosophy in the US. The American Philosophical Society Museum is having a major exhibit of those…

It looks like one of the staff at Liberty University has been caught. A Liberty University chaplain is facing drug and burglary charges. Last week, a homeowner caught Scott Ray on surveillance video breaking into a home to steal painkillers. Ray, who is the chaplain for the men's basketball team…

There's a new movie coming out about Darwin that does something different: instead of talking about the science of evolution, it's about Darwin's personal life. Roger Ebert has seen it and offers a few thoughts on the subject matter (it isn't a review, though!), and it sounds interesting — I'll be…

California took such a brave leap last year to protect the purity of marriage by denying it to all of those with matching, instead of complementary, genitali; now John Marcotte wants to take the next logical step, and get an initiative on the California ballot to outlaw divorce. That's an excellent…

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

The government of the UK has officially apologized for its past abuse of Alan Turing. Here is the full statement. 2009 has been a year of deep reflection - a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and…

Today is 10 September, which happens to be the birthday of the Trophy Wife (I won't tell you the birth year because she will give me the evil eye, but I will say that she is much, much younger than I am, as a Trophy Wife must be). It would be very nice if she got home from work tonight and, as she…

Someone needs to start an organization with this name just so they can use this logo that I got from Glynn Lane: Students could join, and then they could all run out and get these t-shirts: Unfortunately, there's pretty much nothing we could do to be even creepier than that other, better known…

A very devout Catholic was trapped on an elevator for a while, and after it was working again, rushed to church to thank God. Then, something unfortunate happened: He seems to have embraced a stone pillar on which the stone altar was perched and it fell on him, killing him instantly. We have found…

Speaking of being underwhelmed by the arguments, we've actually got people arguing for the existence of fairies and bigfoot. They even say they've got evidence: here's the Croydon photo: Looks like an ugly flash artifact of an insect caught in flight. Some guy in Kentucky had a video camera set up…

Don't you just love a challenge? I'm always looking for some splendid argument from a creationist that would make me think, but they always give me such silliness, instead. And then, I saw this: a mainstream newspaper (well, the Telegraph…but at least it's not the Daily Mail) offers us an article…

David Colquhoun reviews Unscientific America, and pans it on an interesting point: I think Mooney and Kirshenbaum have it all wrong.  They favour corporate communications, which are written by people outside science and which easily become mere PR machines for individuals and institutions.   …

I don't speak Spanish, so I'm going to have to rely on the summary that was sent to me. Perhaps some of our bilingual readers can pull out a few details? Javier Armentia, Spanish astrophysicist and director of the Pamplona planetarium, is hired by the radio station COPE (property of the Catholic…

They must be devolving into dinosaurs (no, not really)! Great tits normally live on a diet of seeds and insects, but when those resources are scarce, they'll fly into caves and kill and eat bats. They don't do it unless they're really hungry — they prefer bugs and bacon, as do we all — so the…

I've been promoted. I'm now a member of a ruling cabal that forms a world dictatorship. BWAHAHAHAHAAHAAHAHAAHAHAAAA! At least, that is, according to this email I just got. Darwinism is under official protection in 95% of the countries of the world. People are forced to believe this false theory…