pharyngula

You never can tell with Jonah Goldberg — everything he writes tends to be so stupid you're left thinking that he must be joking. He's just finished watching that new propaganda movie, Fitna, which portrays some of the worst atrocities of Islam — beheadings and terrorism and rioting and fatwas, etc…

Start traveling, everyone. The Morris Cafe Scientifique will be held at 6pm, Tuesday, 1 April (that's tonight) at the Common Cup Coffeehouse on Atlantic Avenue. So come on out and learn about local climate change! Climate Change in Lake Wobegon: predicting the impact of a warmer world on the…

Guess what the Top 10 Creationist Discoveries of All Time are? OK, it's an April Fool's joke, and the list is actually a fairly common summary of real, widely held opinions that you run into all the time if you engage with creationists, which means the real funny part is in the comments. People are…

Even when I was nought but a wee gamete, I was an intrusive little bastard. Mark Mathis is going to get quite a shock next time the full moon rises, too.

It wasn't just Wilkins' catalog of the atrocities. It was the sudden realization that if Wilkins can post from one day in the future, there's no reason Darwin's influence couldn't extend back into the past.

The latest edition of Encephalon, the carnival of neuroscience, is using Paris Hilton as a theme, I think because the contrast is so great. It still hurts to read it. I did find Jennifer Ouellette's pocket biography of Ramon y Cajal an excellent corrective, at least — balance the photos of a 21st…

Hey, I said that in an interview last spring, which is getting a little wider circulation now: religions are fairy tales. Somebody slapped it on a billboard over Easter, though, and businesses around it reported a two-thirds decline. It sounds like it was very effective at scaring away fools, and…

Watch out, if you signed up for one of the Expelled showings, you might find your email address shared with more people than you expected. I think John ought to sell his newfound mailing list — it's jam-packed with the gullible, so it would be rather valuable to the unscrupulous. In slightly…

What an awful story: a young woman is murdered by her own father for online chatting. A woman was beaten up and shot dead by her father for talking online with a man she met on the website Facebook. The case was reported on a Saudi Arabian news site as an example of the "strife" the social…

Hey, look at this: Dan Dennett is coming to Minnesota State University in Mankato this week. I hope he shows up wearing that pimpin' hat. Dennett, one of the nation's most original and influential philosophers, will talk about "Religion as a Natural Phenomenon" on April 3 and "Evolution and…

OK, enough. Everyone is sending me a link to this comic, but your efforts are misplaced. You need to send it to Ben Stein or Mark Mathis or Walt Ruloff — I'm not in the market.

Michael Egnor, that neurosurgeon whose tenuous grip on rationality makes him so popular with the creationists, thinks he has a gotcha moment with some notorious atheist. That rude godless fellow, who is me, said this, which is accurate: …greater science literacy, which is going to lead to the…

I'm home. It's been a very long day with horrible flight delays, and I'm grouchy. I must frog blast the vent core. I was stuck on an airplane for far too many hours, and I wanted to get some work done — on my laptop. Have you noticed how tightly packed the seats are in coach? It was tight, but I…

You know that if I encourage this sort of thing, there will be a rising chorus of voices on the web screaming at me to shut up, don't you?

Don't forget: Atheists Talk radio at 9am Central time!

…but there is a good argument against it: many religions are sickening. Wow, that set you guys on fire. Just to clarify: I think Wilders is a flaming nutcase; I deplore his racist angle and his desire to exclude and oppress rather than educate. However, here is the problem: when people ask me if…

Sometimes, people wonder if criticizing creationists brings more attention to them than they deserve — it's a weird dynamic on the web, where we measure popularity by traffic (unfortunately), so referencing the bad guys sends them traffic, which seems to increase their apparent popularity. There's…

The next Tangled Bank will be at Further Thoughts on 2 April — it's time to send those links in to me or host@tangledbank.net. Meanwhile, get inspired to write some Tangled Bank-worthy posts by reading these fine carnivals. The Carnival of the Cities I and the Bird #71 Carnival of the Liberals #…

I have to make this really, really simple for the "Hitler was an evolutionist" dimwits. There is a central, incredibly obvious fact in Darwin's insight. If members of a population die or are killed off, they will leave no descendants for subsequent generations. It isn't razzle-dazzle genius. Any…

Some of you know that the producers of Expelled had a conference call this afternoon…a carefully controlled, closed environment in which they would spout their nonsense and only take questions by email. I listened to it for a while, and yeah, it was the usual run-around. However, I dialed in a few…

I'm writing this at an altitude of 37,000 feet, 7 miles up in the air. Now I'm not really afraid of flying — I am entirely confident that I'll be able to post this sometime after I land — but if you think about it, it's grounds for trepidation. This is insanely high, and I'm in this fragile tin can…

This video definitively settles that question.

Last weekend, I met a young woman who asked me to sign a picture of a friend's tattoo (not the real tattoo, unfortunately!), and it's so pretty I said I'd have to include it on the Friday Cephalopod. Here it is: (Eat your heart out, Carl!)

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

My colleague Nic McPhee (with a couple of other people) is an author of a new book, A Field Guide to Genetic Programming — I think I'm going to have to read it. Genetic programming (GP) is a systematic, domain-independent method for getting computers to solve problems automatically starting from a…

This scientist spotting quiz has me wondering — has a Peterson's Field Guide on this subject come out yet? Creationists apparently need one, although I'm not too keen on being ogled by weirdos with binoculars. (By the way, I got a perfect score on the quiz.)

This is kind of sad, actually. It's a slick website from a guy in Utah who claims to have discovered pre-Cambrian dragons. Browse around his gallery, and it's clear that what he's got are pictures of random rocks, and that he's seeing shapes in them like one sees shapes in the clouds. He reminds me…