pharyngula

I find it very disturbing that some artist managed to penetrate the layers of security and multiple deadly traps to produce illustrations of my inner sanctum. The alert level has been increased and security enhanced, so other interlopers should beware. Further breaches will not be tolerated.

And it's all explained in song! It seems right for the perpetual thread. (Current totals: 12,111 entries with 1,322,671 comments.)

I'm pleased to see that the Intelligent Design creationists do actually occasionally challenge themselves — it's just too bad that they trip and fall flat every time they do. Over at Uncommon Descent, that hotbed of hot air hosted by William Dembski, one poster slipped the leash and asked an…

Today is the man's 70th birthday — I didn't see a thread of well-wishers on the RDF site, so let's start one here. Hey, he and I are both Pisces, there must be something to this astrology stuff. I've been informed that my knowledge of astrology is deficient, and that his birthdate falls under some…

Uh-oh. This is a frightening art project in which children were asked to draw figures from the Cthulhu mythos. Didn't they know that contemplating elder gods always ends in insanity, a mysterious disappearance, and haunted rooms spattered with slime? They produced some fascinating pictures, too.…

William Cronon is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and he recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that placed the recent labor troubles in Wisconsin in historical context — he explained how many of the progressive policies in that state were actually the…

How can our news media get the story so completely backwards? MSNBC is reporting a correlation between religiosity and obesity, which simply can't be true. Aside from the difficulties of going from a correlation between two complex phenemona to an assumption of causality, we have it from an…

You would think Canadian universities would be particularly sensitive on the issue of discrimination against women scientists and engineers—it is, after all, where the École Polytechnique murders occurred in 1989 (major trigger warning! That is the coroners report, containing a detailed,…

It's a woo-infested sewer, a cesspit of inanity and exploitation, and they cheat their writers. There is a strike/boycott in operation. This is what you get when an unprincipled, opportunistic hack like Arianna Huffington runs the show. Guild tells HuffPost writers: 'Don't work for free' The…

The fine folks at Answers in Genesis are working themselves into a good lather over the fact that they were expelled from homeschool conferences for being too obnoxious and intolerant. Recall that the the Christians doing the banning are also young earth creationist/evangelical/fundamentalist…

That title should lead into a joke…but I've got nothin'. Apparently, some Irish politicians are arguing for the legalization of prostitution, and there's a poll about it. Should Ireland legalise paying for sex? Yes 65%No 26%I don't know 8% That's a tough one. On the one hand, the way prostitution…

Oh, no! She's revealed the secret! Elizabeth Collins exposes the magic recipe for doing well on standardized admission tests. Also, that perfect 800 score thing? I did that, too. I don't expect a sudden surge in elevated scores on the SATs, though. The best formula to do well is to simply read a…

I'll be in Portland, Oregon this weekend for the Northwest Freethought Conference, which I'm sad to say, is completely sold out. You procrastinated, didn't you? You dawdled over making the decision, and now it's too late — you're going to have to stay home and weep sadly over lost opportunities,…

You know what I ought to do? I ought to start every iteration of the endless thread with Neil Patrick Harris singing. Because he is awesome. I don't need to ask if everyone already has a copy of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, do I? (Current totals: 12,098 entries with 1,319,797 comments.)

Mother Jones recently interviewed Texas legislator Bill Zedler, the fellow who has authored a bill that would outlaw discrimination against creationists. I read the whole thing, and now my head hurts (partly due to the fact that I was up to the wee hours last night and I'm already functioning on a…

A simulated explosion, that is. Don't panic.

If I were, I would say ian murphy can has congress. I endorse Ian Murphy, because he is pissed off about the right things.

I was not kind in my assessment of Jesse Bering's story about the evolutionary psychology of homophobia. He was quite irate with me and several other people who pointed out the tattered fabric of his evidence. Now he has gone scurrying back to the author of the study he described, Gordon Gallup,…

I don't know. It's not because we're kind people who want to do good in the world, though, I know that for sure. On this matter, I don't see any difference between Barack Obama staging a coalition to throw us into another costly war with another petty dictator, and George W. Bush staging a…

Something nasty seems to get passed on with the name "Hovind", anyway. Eric Hovind's latest stunt: He's 'taking back' Earth Day with a silly, misguided campaign to replace tree-planting with Christian evangelism, and with selling t-shirts to benefit his lunatic ministry. There's nothing in his…

After a brief warming period, winter came rushing back last night with a couple of inches of wet sloppy snow…and my university has even cancelled morning classes (there goes my 8am physiology class). So here's something I won't see outside. Codariocalyx motorius

Amazingly, a gang of ignorant young-earth creationist crazies who are running fundamentalist home-schooling conferences decided that Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis were just too crazy even for them, and they have formally banned AiG from appearing at any of their conferences. This wasn't a dictate…

the total number of hours consumed by Angry Birds players world-wide is roughly 200 million minutes a DAY, which translates into 1.2 billion hours a year. To compare, all person-hours spent creating and updating Wikipedia totals about 100 million hours over the entire life span of Wikipedia. The…

Beau Schaefer is a biology teacher in an Illinois public school. Beau Schaefer has admitted to promoting creationism instead of science in his classes. The law is clear on this one: teachers in public schools do not get to peddle their personal superstitions to a captive audience. They especially…

For those of you who aren't satisfied with this weird electronic stuff, you can now get the last year's best science blogging manifested in ink on cellulose. The Open Laboratory is now on sale.

I really should stop linking to these bozos, since they don't ever bother to link to any sites outside their incestuous coterie of jebus-wanking apologetics sites, but I cannot resist. Ken Ham is bragging about his web traffic, and it's rather pathetic. • In 2010, the Answers in Genesis main…

Greta Christina has an excellent list of prominent atheists of color, so there's no reason every atheist conference should be a sea of uniform pallidness anymore. Think about bringing in some of these people! And by prominent, I mean really prominent. It's probably non-trivial to book Salman…

Our awful ex-governor, Tim Pawlenty, is officially exploring a run for the presidency. Don't do it, America. He's what happens when you look behind the scenes at bad character actors from Prairie Home Companion and discover that they're actually knee-jerk Republicans with no intellectual curiosity…

The BBC is reporting the imminent extinction of religion. This is an end result to be hoped for, which just makes me all the more critical, and I have to say up front that this is the work of mathematicians, engineers, and physicists modeling sociology. It's interesting stuff that looks at the very…