pharyngula

I expected that my students would get a little trial by fire in the furious life of the public intellectual, and the commenters here certainly provided that. Maybe a little too much of that. Dial the ferocity back a notch, OK? Constructive criticisms are greatly appreciated, but the nasty stuff is…

Carl is planning to start a series called Science Tattoo Friday, and Street Anatomy has an article on a professional medical illustrator and tattoo artist. I call synergy! Carl and I need to take a road trip to Dallas to get some anatomically correct tattoos of our own, I think. She does a fine…

Mark Hoofnagle is urging everyone to get behind a simple, non-partisan goal that would greatly benefit science policy: bring back the Office of Technology Assessment. It used to be, for about 30 years (from 1974 to 1995), there was an office on the Hill, named the Office of Technology Assessment,…

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

It's not happy Roy, but cynical Roy … but then, these are cynical times. Now, can we give the troops some real support? Like, by bringing them back home?

Massachusetts has a law on the books that could have gotten me in trouble: Chapter 272, Section 36. Blasphemy. Whoever wilfully blasphemes the holy name of God by denying, cursing or contumeliously reproaching God, his creation, government or final judging of the world, or by cursing or…

Sometimes you just have to shake your head at the indignant, smug prudes who want to control what you read. Here's a story of a young lady who wants to dictate what her peers are allowed to see. Lysa Harding, 15, couldn't believe the sexually charged prose of the novel she checked out from the…

I have a daughter of marriageable age, and here is a useful service: Marry Our Daughter is an introduction service assisting those following the Biblical tradition of arranging marriages for their daughters. Those who wish to list their Daughters with our site should click on SIGN UP OUR DAUGHTER…

Here's another online petition you can sign — this one is to censure Kathy Griffin's censorship. Go ahead and sign, although I'm beginning to wonder if the reason people aren't marching in the streets and fending off flying teargas canisters and roaring angrily in person at the bad guys is that…

It's official. The big event is on. At the end of this month, it may be the end in more ways than one: four will enter, but only two will leave. It's the Pretty Boys vs. the Godless Savages in a brutal debate at the Bell Museum. SPECIAL EVENT: Speaking Science 2.0: New Directions in Science…

Orac has a discussion that might be of interest to the young 'uns: what kind of debt is hanging around your neck after med school? I can't even imagine getting out of school with a bank expecting me to pay off a few hundred thousand dollars. I went to college in the late 1970s, when we still had…

Got an hour or so? A BBC special on the Dover trial has made its way to YouTube. See how the rest of the world sees that bizarre episode of American inanity. Here's the first part. The other four are below the fold.

We all know what online petitions are worth, but this is at least a worthy cause: some graduate students have a Petition by Informed Citizens to reclassify non-science books from science categories. The goal is to persuade the Library of Congress to reclassify books about intelligent design…

Would you believe the Urban Dictionary has an entry for PZ? It's lousy—I can't believe anyone uses the term that way, and I can't imagine how they pronounce it. And pzizzle isn't any better. Myers, at least, has some punch to it: "Last name of any various white masked knife weilding bad muther *…

It's time for a brand new Tangled Bank at the Behavioral Ecology blog. It's got man-boobs, screwworms, and kumatos, so you don't want to miss it.

(This article is also available on Edge, along with some other rebuttals to and affirmations of Haidt's piece.) Jonathan Haidt has a complicated article on moral psychology and the misunderstanding of religion on Edge. I'm going to give it a mixed review here. The first part, on moral psychology,…

A football player, Kevin Everett, suffered serious spinal cord trauma in a game the other day. That's tragic, but the impressive part of the story is that he may recover to some degree thanks to advances in treatment, and most surprising, this comment from a consulting neurosurgeon: "I don't know…

Continuing with our red theme this morning, El PaleoFreak has some radical imagery. The bourgeois Darwin would have freaked. Look — you can get them on a t-shirt! (Errm, wait — isn't combining Darwin, Che, and the rampant capitalism of CafePress an example of head-exploding irony?)

The heroic Mario fights for the people. It's inspiring. (via One Good Thing. And to answer Flea's questions, yes, yes, late teens, they had no problem, of course they are—but we threw every terrifying thing we could find at the kids, it wasn't very scary, it was for kids, and you have to be the…

On eBay, obviously! The source is the PL Institute of Space Technologies. It's an amazing place that offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in "Creationist in Sciences" (a Cr.S. degree is not equivalent to a bachelor's degree, they say), and also carries out research in these fields: Creational…

There's an obvious design fla* in this experiment reported in the LA Times. The researchers ran a simple experiment *here the subjects *ere sho*n a series of letters, and they *ere supposed to tap a key *hen they sa* one, but not the another. The subjects *ere classified by their political vie*s,…

We won't get to hear Kathy Griffin's Emmy award speech — it's being censored. Here's what she said: In her speech, Griffin said that "a lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus." She went on to hold up her…

Larry Caldwell has a history of suing in California courts for creationist causes. Mike Dunford has some material on the latest attempt to claim that leaving out Christian myths was "viewpoint discrimination", and in particular on their interesting choice of a star witness. The Christian schools…

I'm soon to run off to a class in which we're going to discuss 16th-17th century science (Vesalius, Bacon, Harvey, Hooke, etc.), and there's an amusing passage in J.A. Moore's book that I have to share. It's a description of a bestiary by Edward Topsell that explains the importance and usefulness…

The appropriate testimonial would be to disband the thugs at TSA. While we're at it, impeaching Bush/Cheney and repealing their damage to our civil liberties would also be a good start. I'm not impressed with moments of silence or candlelight vigils or noble rhetoric about this event. If you want…

A couple of graduate students have a group called Extant Dodos Productions that uses YouTube to rip into creationist claims. In particular they've used some of Kent Hovind's materials to dissect his arguments. It's a clever idea — they take creationist videos and edit them to insert rebuttals to…

The Minnesota Family Council is a spawn of Dobson (it's got "family" in the title, so you know it's got to be evil), and it's usually one of those organizations that lobbies to get legislative support for their hatred of women and gays. They are not nice people. If you're ever in this state and…

Creationists sure are sneaky little liars, aren't they? Here's an account of a theologian who was suckered by a creationist film crew — now he's on a DVD that mangles his ideas and postures for young earth creationism and biblical literalism. Dishonesty must be a universal property of creationists.

Richard Colling is in big trouble. He's a biology instructor who is getting slapped down by his college and his community. Colling is prohibited from teaching the general biology class, a version of which he had taught since 1991, and college president John Bowling has banned professors from…