pharyngula

Since George W. Bush no longer owns a baseball team, he can take credit for whoever wins the World Series this year. After all, somebody will win despite his absence. George W. Bush is a friend of the oil industry who has shown little interest in cultivating research into alternative energy or…

Why, all you have to do is browse the high quality research proposals submitted to the Institute of Applied Creation Science to see what a promising program they've got.

Noooooo! It's another paradox! This is a Cthulhu birthday cake, but it's entirely vegan! This is just not right. A Cthulhu cake has to be made of various meats stacked in alien geometries and in a state of corruption and decay, topped with ichor icing. (Hillary is out to get me because I haven't…

I look at this and feel so conflicted. Ick, it's a nativity scene. But it's got cute squid in it! It's so christian! With squid! Nativity! But squid! It's like it was designed to drive me insane.

It is best to wait until the person you are quote-mining is dead or senile, lest they notice what you've done and make a public dismissal. Denyse O'Leary seems to have forgotten this, and tried to use a paper by Brian Leiter — Brian Leiter! — to argue for the irrelevancy of evolution. Leiter seems…

Sometimes the spectacle in the comments can be as fun as the articles. Here are a couple of examples loons trying to address the criticisms directed at their ideas on a couple of blogs. Larry Moran attended a lecture by a creationist, Kirk Durston. The creationist pulled the usual stunt: cite a few…

So do I, although I favor more squid, less girl. (Should be work-safe, since any nudity is tasteful, and human-animal chimeras aren't that offensive, are they? Besides, you should be at home, loosening your belt and letting that nice feast settle.)

I've got to go baste. If you aren't similarly occupied, you could browse these fine carnivals. Carnival of the Liberals #52, celebrating AU's 60th anniversary! Skeptics' Circle #74 Four Stone Hearth #28 (and they need more hosts) You aren't watching football, are you?

As fellow Minnesotan Greg Laden warns, we're getting a visit from another dishonest hack of the Discovery Institute, John West. On Friday, 30 November, at 7:00 in Room 155, Nicholson Hall on the UM campus. I may just have to stop by. He's going to be babbling about an extended argumentum ad…

I did not drop off the face of the earth in the last 3/4 of a day — I joined the 47 million Americans who spend the day before Thanksgiving in an annual familial migration. I had to drive Daughter #1 and her sweetie-pie to Buffalo, Minnesota; then drive to Minneapolis to pick up Son #2, who'd had a…

If you've been following Lio lately, you know he has a new arthropod friend, rescued from the dinner pot. Unfortunately, Lio missed the big news. The fossil record has yielded various gigantic arthropods, in contrast to their diminutive proportions today. The recent discovery of a 46cm long claw…

The newest latest bestest spiffiest edition of the Tangled Bank is now online at From Archaea to Zeaxanthol.

A recent discovery in stem cell research is no minor event: researchers have figured out how to reprogram adult cells into a state that is nearly indistinguishable from that of embryonic, pluripotent stem cells. This is huge news that promises to accelerate the pace of research in the field. The…

Nice t-shirt. It might confuse people if I wore it, though, since they wouldn't be aware of the original cartoon.

It's a little odd to find myself cited in a Polk County, Florida newspaper as evidence that their pro-ID activities have received "national attention." Otherwise, it's an article that testifies to the inevitability of a conflict. A majority of the school board members in Polk want to insert…

Their usage statistics are a little surprising. Or not.

You've got almost a month to get it together: it's the second annual Carl Sagan memorial blog-a-thon. Write something in honor of Carl Sagan by sometime around 20 December. This event got a huge response last year — it ought to be possible to top it this time around.

One of our Minneapolis Christian talk radio stations, KKMS, is organizing a trip. Join Jeff & Lee as they travel with Heartland Tours & Travel to the Creation Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio! Jeff & Lee will be doing a live broadcast from the museum, and you can be there to see it all happen…

An article in the NYT on surname frequency settles the most important issue of our time: Myers 83 occurrences/100,000 people, rank 85. Meyers 21 occurrences/100,000 people, rank 528. Now can everyone please start using the dominant, correct spelling?

Once upon a time, a company named XVIVO put together a beautiful computer animation of molecular activity in the cell — you may have already seen it. I have some quibbles with it — there is no water shown, and the behavior of the molecules is too simplistic, without enough noise (molecular behavior…

Look: you can buy me on Amazon now, for 99¢ cheap. It's all through this strange new device Amazon is selling, called a Kindle, which is a fancy new e-book reader with some nice display technology and an absolutely evil business model. Now instead of buying books that you can do with as you please…

I mentioned last week that the Discovery Institute misrepresented the Minnesota state science standards, pretending that they endorsed "teaching the controversy". Now Dave Thomas goes through the other 3 (or 4? The DI can't count) states that the Discovery Institute slandered, and guess what? They…

If there actually were a god, Cyclone Sidr would have spun through Bangladesh, selectively eliminating all the two-faced scumbag missionaries who exploit the poor in the name of their deity. Chris Mooney cites an example from the Baptist Press: In the hours before Cyclone Sidr reached the coastal…

Well, the Japanese whaling fleet has left port to go slaughter some whales. This is bad policy for several reasons. Killing endangered animals is always a bad idea, and the Japanese don't even do it humanely. This is bloody slaughter for the sake of bloody slaughter, and it's going to harm large…

It may be our next trouble spot. They have a creationist majority on the school board, and they're saying stuff like this: Despite the Pennsylvania case, some school board members want both intelligent design and evolution taught in Polk schools. They say they have received numerous e-mails and…

Instead of getting a couch, that guy who draws xkcd got a ball pit. This sounds like a good idea, since you can control who gets to use it. Surely I'm not the only parent who has had the delightful experience of discovering a disposable diaper in the public ball pit? Personally, it kind of turned…

My fellow Minnesotans know what I mean when I groan over our local conservative columnist at the Star Tribune, Katherine Kersten. Her latest column is a tirade against the horrible culture of victimhood in our universities, citing a recent incident in which a student newspaper editor decided to…

Matt Dowling has organized the YouTube recordings of Dembski's lecture at the University of Oklahoma: parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The man can drone on.

It sure seems that way. Yet another tawdry series of escapades by Christianists: The 80-year-old leader of a suburban Atlanta megachurch is at the center of a sex scandal of biblical dimensions: He slept with his brother's wife and fathered a child by her. The story has some cheering news, though…

Scooped! I've long adored vulvas, having written a few things on how to develop a vulva and how to evolve a vulva, so I'm a little peeved that this upstart at scienceblogs, Greg Laden, has written up a recent story on nematode vulva evolution before me. Aaargh, all vulvas must be mine! I've just…