pharyngula

I'm speechless. I thought most case-modders were interested in cooling their machines, but here's the PC EZ-Bake Oven. Now the computer savvy among us can relive the fun of having your very own personal mini-oven with the PC Ez-Bake oven! It fits in a 5 1/4" drive bay and plugs right into your…

She's fired up the The Sixth International again, and she threatens promises to be at it for a long, long, long time—she bears a longevity mutation, a single nucleotide substitution in the mitochondrial genome associated with some long-lived people. And some people claim there is no such thing as…

Sorry, Rev. BigDumbChimp: you asked if Faith Converter 1.1 for Mac was any good. It's a gimmick program that will take a chunk of text or a web page and supposedly convert it to be compatible with a specific religion. It's a nice use of the Mac Webkit and so forth, but otherwise, it's just a…

The state department has approved a visit from an eminent foreigner: a certain 3.2 million year old australopithicene is going to be at the Houston Museum of Natural Science from 31 August 2007 through 20 April 2008…and then she's going on tour. Future locations haven't been determined yet, but…

$5175.00The Cadaver Calculator - Find out how much your body is worth Mingle2 - Online Dating Do you think I might appreciate in value as I get older? (via brokenhut)

Australia is trying to show us up again, aren't they? Their 2006 census shows that religious believers have dropped to 79% of the population, a substantial decline from 83% in the the 2001 census. And from previous data, it looks like an accelerating trend. Come on, America, we have a godlessness…

Academia is a strange little world—we're happy about this news! The biggest winners from the University of Minnesota Board of Regents meeting? The 1,900 students at the Morris campus who saw their tuition go down by almost $1,000. We're an even better bargain than before. Now we just need to get…

This is horribly tasteless: it's a trailer for a new movie based on a video game by Uwe Boll (for those unfamiliar with his oeuvre, I'll just mention the combination of the words "movie", "video game", and "Uwe Boll" represents the very worst of humorlessly plodding, dumb cinema). So why did I find…

The Washington Post had a 'conversation' on a very stupid question: Do you believe in heaven or hell? If not, why not? If so, who's going there and how do you know? It's a stupid question, because the only sensible answer is "no" and "because there is no evidence for it, nobody has been to either…

What an attractively symmetrical graph: People who don't go to church mostly disagree with GW Bush; people who do go to church regularly mostly agree with GW Bush. Unfortunately, these results are from a poll taken in 2005, so it may have lost some of that symmetry since—I certainly hope it has,…

Lots of people want to say hello on my trip to Seattle next week, so I thought I'd better let you all know the public parts of my itinerary. This is mainly a trip to relax, eat seafood, meet family and old friends, so there's a problem of priorities. Most of my time will be spent a bit further…

At least one metaphorical wolf, that is: Richard Dawkins reviews The Edge of Evolution (behind the NYT Select paywall, sorry). Again, he focuses on the argument from improbability that is at the heart of Behe's book, and he comes up with a clear counter-example: if Behe were right, the…

Another review of Behe's book, The Edge of Evolution, has been published, this time in Nature and by Ken Miller. This one focuses on Behe's central claim, that he has identified a probabilistic limit to what evolution can do that means no differences above roughly the genus level (and in many cases…

OK, Blue Gal, you're weirding me out a little bit. I agree that Kucinich is a progressive candidate, and that Glen Beck is a smarmy, disgusting little creep who made deeply offensive remarks about Kucinich's sex appeal, but… …well, maybe he is looking a little bit cute and adorable.

The omnipotent and omniscient Lord of the Universe, Creator of All, charged with the detonation of supernovae, the majestic movement of whole galaxies, the grand march of all of history and all of time, spoke. New Kensington resident Joey Salvati, 39, a father of two, was in the shower about a…

In the Index to Creationist Claims, there is an entry to an old argument from Walt Brown: Claim CE302: The sun has 99 percent of the mass of the solar system, but less than 1 percent of the angular momentum. It is spinning too slowly to have formed naturally. Source: Brown, Walt, 1995. In the…

I beheld a strange sight when I stepped out my door this morning: a pair of cute little baby duckies waddling down the sidewalk, all alone and peeping frantically. They passed right by my house (of course—the miasma of evil is not inviting), turned left at my neighbor's driveway, went up the…

Chris Mooney makes a point about the supernatural thriller genre. Indeed, nearly five years ago I wrote a column entitled "Conversion Fantasies" in which I made the following point: In movies and TV series about the paranormal, the sterotypical "skeptic" figure always seems to convert into a…

Tara has successfully grossed me out. She has an article on the unfortunate consequences of a bikini wax—a massive infection that turned the vulva and perineum into something resembling an over-ripe melon. And the woman who had this problem repeatedly tried to depilate afterwards! I've never quite…

Darwin's home was going to be submitted to UNESCO's World Heritage committee for designation as a World Heritage site, but that application was withdrawn, to be resubmitted in two years after some reworking. Down House has some handicaps compared to other World Heritage sites: But without natural…

And this month's winner of the coveted and prestigious Molly award is … Ichthyic. He handily beat out the inanimate carbon rod, fortunately.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has a poll right now — pick your favorite cartoon about the politicization of science. You've got 12 to choose from.

Yecke, Minnesota's former odious education commissioner, is now campaigning to be odious education commissioner for the state of Florida. Her history in our fair state is now a bit of a stain on her reputations, so she hired a company called "reputationdefender" to sanitize the internet for her.…

The NY Times has pulled out all the stops today and has dedicated their entire science section to the subject of evolution. They've got pieces by some of the best science journalists around, like Carl Zimmer, Cornelia Dean (although in this case, it's a lot of nattering on about how the soul fits…

Poor Deepak Chopra is crying again at the nastiness of the blogosphere's reaction to his idiocy. I'm pausing at the end of a long series of posts on the mind outside the brain to reflect on science, bad manners and objectivity. Bad manners are the norm in the blogosphere, and no one who dips into…

A Lutheran pastor in Germany has been jailed. What for, you might wonder? It depends on who you ask. The Free Republic claims it is because he was a Christian saying what he believes; others are saying it's because he's anti-abortion; surprise, surprise, Bill Dembski says it's because he was an…

Watch out, because now your ISP will have the power to insert their own ads into the html streaming through their pipes. Every single web site owner is affected by NebuAD's technology: whether a site is running ads or not makes no difference, Customers of any ISP evil enough to run NebuAD's…

The operation was a success. Later, the duck, with his new human brain, went on to become the leader of a great flock. Irwin, however, was ostracized by his friends and family and eventually just wandered south. Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is…

This should win a prize for the dumbest excuse from a creationist that I've heard in, oh, about 24 hours. ...don't you find it interesting that there is NO recorded history prior to less than 10,000 years ago? If man has been around millions of years why the heck did it take so long to learn to…

Cosma Shalizi has written a two part dialog that is amazingly well in line with my own thoughts on the subject of the heritability of intelligence: g is a statistical artifact, we have brains that evolved for plasticity, not specificity, and that while many behavioral traits have a heritable…