pharyngula

Everyone has heard of the Boston Molasses Flood, right? That was horrific and weird, but it was outdone by the London Beer Flood: houses were demolished by the torrent, seven were dead by drowning, and one dead by alcohol poisoning. I am truly impressed by the opportunism and low standards of that…

And I do mean dys. What a horrible scene to come upon, and even worse, what evil chaos to have lived it: A bed had been pushed up against the door; the officers pushed it open a few inches and saw Marquez choking his bloodied [three year old] granddaughter, who was crying in pain and gasping,…

It's a wiki with the tagline, "It's a fictional world purely imagined by its community", and it isn't Conservapædia! Galaxiki is a galaxy-building exercise that lets you create star systems and populate them with stories and details. One bummer is that they charge you for the right to create new…

Tom Tomorrow has a list of things he's been wondering about, but it's actually a list of things I suspect but would rather not have confirmed.

Has anyone seen a positive review of Behe's book from a science source? Discover Magazine joins the ranks of those that find it awful: As unpersuasive as Behe's ideas are scientifically, they are even less convincing philosophically. Behe professes agnosticism on whether the designer was a dope, a…

A little knowledge would short circuit a lot of strange speculation. That picture to the right is of a shark caught in Malaysia, and people are calling those odd dangly bits "legs". Despite the fact that someone said what they actually are in a comment early on, there are people arguing both that…

Here's a cool tool: Walk Score. Type in an address, and it uses Google Maps to look up destinations like parks and stores and theaters that are in walking distance of the place, and gives you a score out of 100 on walkability. A place like Manhattan will give you high scores; one of those desolate…

I am appalled. A man in New York was arrested for throwing a copy of the Quran in a public toilet. He deserved arrest—everyone knows it is vandalism and criminal mischief to clog a public toilet with debris. Oh, hang on — the guy was arrested for a hate crime? Are toilets now on the list of…

If you're considering purchasing some supplies for home repair from one of the mega-chains, you might want to consider their advertising policies. Archy makes a good case that you should shop at Lowe's—they don't support barking mad reactionary freaks. Of course, it's a bit irrelevant to me, since…

A while back, I floated the idea of a logo for the godless. There was a lot of enthusiasm for the idea, and a lot of good design ideas came out of it … maybe too many good ideas. And being a mob of atheists, there was absolutely no consensus on what was the best symbol to use. Finally, I didn't…

Let's bring up that atheists and civil rights issue once again — it makes everyone so happy. The Science Ethicist is really peeved with DJ Grothe, who in a recent Point of Inquiry podcast repeated his assertion that a) atheism is not a civil rights issue, and b) lots of atheists are making their…

First we had that Wisconsinite caught trying to have sex with roadkill in Minnesota. Then it was decreed that it is illegal to have sex with dead animals, which I'm sure has distressed many a leather fetishist. Now I learn that the three Wisconsin boys who conspired to dig up the body of a dead…

This is just a slideshow of album covers for the most annoying songs of all time, and it's fairly safe to view—it doesn't actually play any music clips. I was just thinking (like an evil mad scientist—occupational hazard, you know) that if someone did string together the musical hooks for all of…

Shelley has a good post on the biology of ADHD—the lesson, once again, is that the mind is regulated by physical and chemical processes, and we're learning more and more about how seemingly nebulous, fuzzy, higher level functions of thought can be traced back to relatively simple material causes.…

Oregon looks to have an interesting senate primary race, with two excellent Democratic candidates, Jeff Merkley and Steve Novick, vying for the chance to give the boot to two-faced Republican Bush booster Gordon Smith. I think it's great that more progressive candidates are being drawn into loftier…

I'd reconciled myself to the fact that the sun will die in about 5 billion years — time enough to get all the important stuff done, I thought — but now Chris Mims tells me we've only got 12 million years. I mean, that's like going to the doctor, and he says, "Good news, Mr Myers, you're going to…

Cleanse your palate of the unpleasant aftertaste of that last video with this loud instrumental from Rush — it's the "Malignant Narcissism" video at the top of the page. I like how it illustrates the advance of religion as a branching snake. If you don't like wmv or mov formats, it seems to be…

Last summer, a lot of people hated this post where I advocated calling the apocalyptic cultists on their evil delusions. Then we had some prominent Christian leaders calling for war with Iran, and John Hagee gave a demented interview with Terry Gross, in which his rapture rubbish was used as an…

Next week, the Tangled Bank will be hosted at Migrations, so get those entries in to me or host@tangledbank.net by Tuesday! You can always read a few other carnivals first and get inspired. Friday Ark #147 I and the Bird #54 Or go ahead, you can just blather away in the comments on whatever…

High school education makes a difference, but not quite in the way I'd hoped or expected. A recent correlational study looked at the effects of more discipline-specific education at the high school level on grades in college. That is, if a student took heaps of physics as a high school student, how…

We were just womping on the new president of the Texas State Board of Education for his foolishness about evolution, but it turns out he's got the all the symptoms of full wingnut syndrome: he's also a proponent of ignorance-only sex education. It is strange that there's this whole suite of…

Dosidicus gigas, the Humboldt Squid This is a still from a movie by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (31MB Quicktime). I've also edited down a slightly more bandwidth-friendly 4.6MB version that shows just the action at the time of the strike.

This will not stand. It's a site called Octopus Faith, and it's a promotion for a Christian women's speaker, and her premise is analogizing faith to an octopus. Every octopus is an atheist, though … they told me so personally. And they are not amused.

A few years ago, everyone was in a tizzy over the discovery of Flores Man, curious hominin remains found on an Indonesian island that had a number of astonishing features: they were relatively recent, less than 20,000 years old; they were not modern humans, but of unsettled affinity, with some even…

So it seems that ScienceBlogs has a wikipedia entry, but there's not much there, and of course it's a little dodgy for Sciencebloggers themselves to write the entry. If anyone wants to improve on it, please do. Katherine Sharpe, our blogmistress (she's the one with the whip, but it's a nice whip…

The journal Nature has an interview with Al Jean, executive producer of The Simpsons, specifically on the use of science and math as sources of humor in the show. (But we know the truth: The Simpsons movie is about to come out, and Nature is selling out. They even ask at the end what they can do to…

This photo of a very interesting book is obviously fake, since there are no pictures of cats on it.

Comments are still trickling in and I still get email about this article, where I explain why debate is a poor strategy for dealing with creationists. I definitely don't argue that we should avoid engaging the public, but that there are a number of reasons why the debate format doesn't work for…

Those European countries seem to have relics of old feudal hierarchies still prancing about, which we (and they) mostly seem to ignore except when they do something amusingly silly. The latest royal clown is Princess Märtha Louise of Norway, who is opening an "alternative therapy center," which is…

How can anyone be surprised at this turn of events? Governor Goodhair of Texas has appointed a flaming, blatant, unashamed creationist and friend of the Discovery Institute, Don McLeroy, to head the Texas State Board of Education. Phil Plait is not amused. But isn't this part of the grand…