pharyngula

What little I've read of the extreme audiophile community makes my brain hurt, and I've avoided it like poison. James Randi deals with the freaky audiophiles now and then — people who believe their special magic cables will make your stereo sound better, or that an array of weirdly shaped hatstands…

It's time for Tangled Bank #77 at Aetiology, and it's another mega-collection of links to science articles.

An epidemic of quackery, that is. Shame on CNN for allowing this babbling to go on. The producer of their medical news wrote an absurd anecdote, a story that reveals his credulity. My husband's best friend, Hans, was supposed to be in our wedding. But three weeks before the ceremony, Hans learned…

I've just learned that a very nifty old book has been posted at Project Gutenberg: At the Deathbed of Darwinism, by Eberhard Dennert. It was published in 1904, a very interesting period in the history of evolutionary biology, when Haeckel was repudiated, Darwin's pangenesis was seen as a failure,…

The Strange Maps blog (a very interesting browse, if you like peculiar maps) has a map illustrating the state of US evolution education in 2002. It's not surprising; the Fordham Foundation regularly publishes detailed summaries of state science standards, and you can take a look at the data for…

(This post was causing some browsers to crash. Let's see if browsers are happier if I hide it below the fold.) Kevin Beck's response to an interesting article about kids persecuting another kid who was an atheist: When I first read the blog entry, I thought I was dealing with a bunch of first- or…

A reader sent me a mild ethical problem, and asked that I put it up to get reader input. This isn't a life-or-death sort of situation, but the kind of low-level, day-to-day aggravation with which we're all familiar. Today I went to get my car inspected as my state requires it annually, and you…

Those rascals at antievolution.org are like the Baker Street Irregulars of the evolutionary forces—they're always doing the legwork to come up with interesting bits of data. Like, for instance, this wonderful example of hypocrisy/inconsistency at Uncommon Descent. This is what Dembski spat out…

He should be so proud — he has taken first place in the 2007 Jefferson Muzzle Awards. These are awards given for "egregious or ridiculous affronts to free expression in the previous year", and little Georgie won it for: For its unprecedented efforts of discouraging, changing, and sometimes…

The title of this article is terribly misleading: "The Octopus that can open drink bottles". I was thinking it would be so cool to have an octopus on your shoulder, and you hold up your beer bottle, and he reaches out an arm and twists the top off for you. And then you read a little further and…

I hesitate to mention this, but I seem to be the target of creationist humor. It's not being targeted that I mind, but that the 'humor' is so lame and the photoshopping is so bad. I would have thought that I'd be an excellent subject for lampooning, being easily caricatured and having views outside…

I'm not really fond of the idea of categorizing atheists (you either are or aren't, and the game of labeling is often a short step away from ranking, and then you're on the slippery slope to the No True Atheist fallacy), but Hank Fox has an interesting comment that categorizes reasons for being an…

The ID creationists are having one of those ludicrous "Darwin vs. Design" conferences, in which they rehash assertions and nonexistent evidence and practice propaganda and rhetoric, at Southern Methodist University this week. They seem a little nonplussed at the opposition they've encountered. Hey…

The proper answer to that question is "Who cares?", but just in case you're morbidly curious, Bill Dembski weighs in: The authors of "Framing Science" (see below), which appeared in Science, are world-renowned scientists and therefore know whereof they speak. Well, not exactly. Matthew Nisbet is a…

I don't know whether this is staged or not, but it's bizarrely amusing: someone video taped his mother's reaction to learning he is an atheist. Mom throws a hissy fit. After a bit of denial, she brings the big guns to bear on the poor guy: if he's an atheist, he's not going to get any presents for…

Lucky Cambridge: a whole bunch of organizations, including Harvard, MIT, and the Cambridge public schools and libraries are collaborating to put on the Cambridge Science Festival—9 days of science activities around the town. That is exactly the kind of broadly supported activity in the service of…

Hey, maybe this fits into the framing debate. The famous violinist Joshua Bell stood in a Washington DC subway station, playing Bach on his Stradivarius, in a test to see how many commuters would stop and appreciate the magnificent music. A few people stopped, but no crowd formed, and he got a…

Well, I was going to do something with that awful, horrible, ignorant Klinghoffer piece that the Discovery Institute was pushing, but my distracting weekend kept me occupied, and Pro-Science, Thoughts in a Haystack, and Salt on Everything all demolished it for me. Anything I could say at this point…

I have been remiss in my duties—there is a Tangled Bank this week, at the amazing and awesome Aetiology. Send those links in to me or host@tangledbank.net by Tuesday!

My uncle Ed, my fun uncle who took a long, long time to grow up, had two favorite comics on the funny pages: The Wizard of Id and B.C. I liked them, too, and we followed them regularly. Of course, that was in the 1960s and early 70s, and I'm afraid they were afflicted with that syndrome common to…

We have a new scienceblog here, Shifting Baselines, authored by Jennifer Jaquet and associated with Randy Olson's Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project. She has already opened up shop with an absolutely horrible, conflicting argument: Should We Continue to Eat Seafood? "But it tastes so good," I…

To my dismay, even after a good night's sleep and a fresh perusal of the paper, after reading both of Greg Laden's thorough articles, Mooney's latest summary, Orac's claim that it's nothing but tailoring your message to your audience, and Nisbet's roundup of responses, I'm still hopelessly confused…

Wilkins is not happy that I jumped down Pagels' throat for a stupid comment in an interview. He thinks I ought to take Pagels more seriously (as did some of the commenters here), and, unfortunately, also goes on to mischaracterize the uppity atheist arguments, like so: This is what I reject about…

Hrrm … I seem to have stretched myself a little too thin this weekend. Early this morning I drove off to Minneapolis and Minicon to pick up Skatje and catch a few panels at the con, and then I drove back — I just got back a half hour ago — and despite the fact that there are a great many…

The movie 300 has finally arrived in Morris, and I saw it last evening. I'd heard a lot about this film, in particular that it was loaded with relationships to current events—the war in Iraq, in particular, with arguments for it being pro-war, anti-war, a jingoistic propaganda film, etc. The…

Abbie makes an excellent point on it the ongoing discussion of the Nisbet/Mooney paper: just how often do scientists get an opportunity to discuss their work to the public, anyway? I have a few simple points to make. 1. Why are scientists being told so often that they're bad at communicating?…

From Geoff Arnold, it seems there is a cult of Schneier. Since I said hello to Bruce Schneier in my brief visit to Minicon yesterday, I feel that I am obligated to set the facts straight. It's all true. He is a god among men, and the earth would tremble at his footsteps if he wasn't so beneficent…

I was just reminded that last year at this time I announced an anniversary. In March of 2004, I critiqued this mysterious abstraction called "ontogenetic depth" that Paul Nelson, the ID creationist, proposed as a measure of developmental and evolutionary complexity, and that he was using as a…

A feisty little old lady shows us all how to deal with missionaries: (via Darkhorse Reviews)

His people are starving, and Kim Jong-il is roaming the countryside, eating up giant rabbits. Karl Szmolinsky of Eberswalde faces a grim Easter. His gold medal pride, 'Robert der Grosse' , the largest rabbit in recorded Prussian history , is missing and believed dead in North Korea. The 24 pound…