pharyngula

Salon has an article on a new up-and-coming star of the evangelical movement: Stephen Baldwin. Stephen Frickin-Dumb-As-A-Lizard Baldwin! For Dobson, Baldwin and young Americans the nation over who yearn for the certainty this brand of Christianity pitches, the personal is political. Absolutism…

I've already mentioned I'm off to England tomorrow (shall I say it some more? I am so looking forward to this…), so it's amazingly useful that Kottke puts up an exercise in England-speak. I shall have to listen to it a few more times to practice comprehending them furriners.

Carl Zimmer presents a timeline of the Homo floresiensis story, with a summary of the latest paper that casts doubt on its status as a legitimate species. Bottom line: it's still unsettled! As usual, the answer is only going to come from more digging and more data on the populations that lived on…

Sometimes a plan just comes together beautifully. I'm flying off to London tomorrow, and on the day I get back to Morris, I'm supposed to lead a class discussion on the final chapters of this book we've been reading, Endless Forms Most Beautiful. I will at that point have a skull full of jet-lagged…

A reader sent me some email asking if I knew anything about this book by Hugh Ross, Creation As Science: A Testable Model Approach to End the Creation/Evolution Wars(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). No, I don't. That is a very interesting and ambitious title, though, so I went digging on Ross's website,…

The NY Times has a long article that is basically a litany of the exemptions and privileges granted to religious organizations. A church-based daycare, for instance, has none of the licensing requirements of a private daycare, and doesn't have to meet any of the standards of a non-religious…

The usual suspects of Intelligent Design creationism came out with a book a while ago honoring the patriarch of the movement, that sneaky rascal Phillip Johnson. They had to shop around for someone to puke up some happy blurbs about the book; Duke Cunningham demanded too much money, Charles Manson…

…until cheap-ass animation was replaced by machinima.

This morning, I'm off to the Unitarian Church of Willmar to talk about creationism. I'll be back later, but 'til then, you kiddies can watch some TV. Flea has David Rakoff, if you want to laugh at the inanity of the right wing, while Crooks and Liars hosts the latest Olbermann, if you're more in…

Uh-oh. Apparently, there was some TV premiere that I missed last night that I'm seeing discussed all over the Intarwubs. I'd let it slide, but Scott McLemee said this: Looking back, it was probably Tim Burke’s recommendation that made me give the remake a try. He called himself “probably the last…

I'm impressed with how effectively the visuals tell the story. (hat tip to Hank Fox)

Deepak Chopra really is an embarrassment. I've tussled with his weird arguments before, and now he's flounced onto the Huffington Post with another article (prompted by an article on human genetics in Time, but bearing almost no relationship to it) in which he reveals his profound ignorance of…

Florida Citizens for Science is asking for your contributions to a rebuttal they're working on. The organization got an op-ed published decrying the recent ID BS at the Sundome, and the local newspapers have published a series of replies that are stupefying in their ignorance. This should be easy.…

Franken is broadcasting from the UMM campus right now, if you're interested. If you've finished listening to the Al Franken show — Live! From Morris! — now is the time to switch to Science Friday, where you'll be able to hear Richard Dawkins talk about The God Delusion.

Alton Verm.

Here are a few carnival announcements, but mainly what I've got is announcements of impending carnivals—there's going to be a bunch coming out next week, I guess. Friday Ark #107 Carnival of Education #87 Carnival of the Liberals wants your links! Deadline is next Tuesday. Tangled Bank…

I've been reading Thomas Franks' What's the Matter with Kansas?(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and then today I read the excellent profile of Michele Bachmann in the City Pages. Yikes. The similarities are terrifying. Bachmann is a clueless ideologue who has harnessed the power of the Religious Right to…

The paternal view of childbirth is that you watch the mother struggle for hours, the child finally emerges, the midwife cleans him* up, hands him to you, and that's when he unloads a bladder full of pee on you. This photo of a newly hatched bobtail squid's first reflex reminds me of that… Euprymna…

I am very glad that I am not a math teacher.

He was chummy with everyone, though.

The US has done wonderfully well in collecting Nobel prizes this year, but there's no reason to be complacent. There's a lot of momentum in our science establishment, the result of solid support for many years, but there are troubling signs that the engines of our advance, the young minds of the…

A revised curriculum at Harvard may include a required course in religion, as Jim Downey has brought to my attention. There isn't enough information in the article to decide how to regard this decision, though; I don't object automatically to requiring college kids to learn to think critically…

Here's a marvelous idea: a race to sequence 100 people's genomes in 100 days, with a nominal prize of 10 million dollars. As a tool to motivate the discovery of new technologies and gain prestige, I approve. It's unfortunate that it is so anthropocentric, though. A similar contest to sequence 100…

The Twin Cities were infested with a rather noxious parasite this week: Dobson and his crew of holy bible-thumpers. I know the Minnesota Atheists were out protesting, but Eva and Avidor actually attended the event, and came back with videos. So, if you really want to see Gary Bauer again, or watch…

Try browsing Prides and Prejudices, the musings of a sardonic high school English teacher—that's my favorite kind!—without getting sucked in. She writes everything from a paean to the woodlouse to modern gift-giving etiquette. (I had no idea the iPod Shuffle was so déclassé, but then I've been away…

You may have heard about that odd hothead mutation in Arabidopsis that seemed to be violating a few principles of basic genetics—there was an unexpectedly high frequency of revertants that suggested there might be a reservoir of conserved genetic information outside the genome. Reed Cartwright…

We're hoping he'll announce that he's going to run against Coleman in 2008 from the stage here at Morris—he was playing coy with Jon Stewart because, pffft, you want to make such important statements in places that matter, that have resonance.

Drinking Liberally is cancelled this week in Morris. If you're really hard up, you could go to the DL in Minneapolis, but really, why would you want to? We've got Al Franken, star of TV and radio, founder of the Midwest Values PAC, and best-selling author entertaining us at a DFL fundraiser here in…

Ultrasound imaging technology is coming along so fast that you can now get a near-real time, moderate resolution image of a living fetus. Unfortunately, this new technology is also having an unfortunate consequence. Sophisticated ultrasound scans that show foetuses as early as 12 weeks appearing…