pharyngula

The Burke Museum is having some opening day festivities for their new exhibit, In Search of Giant Squid. They're having a public squid dissection, cephalopod poetry and art (not by, I don't think, but about) and various other entertaining and educational opportunities. True Pharyngula phans in the…

Feathers only rarely fossilize, so the distribution of feathers in dinosaurs is difficult to determine. Sometimes feathers mark the bones, though, and bones do preserve well. Here's an example: the forearm of a Velociraptor retains an array of small bony bumps evenly spaced along its length. What…

Mark Morford has an exceptionally optimistic — dare I say, "triumphal" — article on the collapse of the religious right today. People are reacting (in the right way, so far) to the tremendous damage the Bush presidency has done to our prestige, our security, our economy, our rights, and the legacy…

T. Ryan Gregory is turning into quite the coiner of useful terms. The latest: Dog's Ass Plots. It refers specifically to charts that try to make a case for the evolution of complexity by selectively encoding their creator's assumptions about the topic, and especially by oversimplifying the data in…

Deep sea squid, unidentified species Figure from The Deep(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Claire Nouvian.

So I've been sucked into a live text interview on the Raving Atheists forum — they've finished with me and spat my well-chewed carcass out now, so everyone else is welcome to come on over and squabble over the scraps.

Prompted by the skewed gender representation of a recent survey of science blogs, Zuska asks why there are no great women science bloggers. That's an ironic question, of course: there are great women science bloggers, but there is a strange blindness to their contributions, just as they are…

My colleague in the philosophy department here at UMM, Tamler Sommers, has a couple of interesting interviews online, one with Frans de Waal and another with Jonathan Haidt. de Waal is good — there's some cool stuff in there about altruism and politics. Haidt … well, again, I find myself with mixed…

She's the newest superhero on scienceblogs!

I read this headline — "Mary Midgley argues that opponents of intelligent design are driving people to accept it" — and my first thought was that surely some editor had mangled the sense of an interview. No one could be that blatantly nonsensical. And then I read the first paragraph and discover…

Facebook has done a stupid thing: they've started deleting photos and accounts of breastfeeding women. Tara is leading the charge here on scienceblogs — this is a ridiculous and demeaning decision, reflecting a mindless prudery on the part of the facebook administrators. Give them hell. Alas, Tara…

A few people in this thread were suggesting we needed a creationist bingo card — Skeptico obliged earlier this month. You need a couple of randomized versions of this, but you'll still have the problem that people all over the auditorium will be shouting "Bingo!" five minutes into the talk, and by…

Paul Kurtz is an intelligent and interesting fellow who has done commendable work in advancing the cause of skepticism and freethought. He can be rightly considered one of the heroes of the atheist movement, and he's one of the reasons that the sobriquet "New Atheist" grates — Kurtz has been…

Got a creationist coming to your town or school? A commenter from Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education left an excellent summary of how to counter these travelin' frauds effectively. The key is simple: recruit. Get the information out. Don't let them come in and babble unopposed or with…

People keep sending me interesting news stories! More than I can handle! So let me do a little linkdump here, and you can sort through them and see if anything is of interest. Ben Stein is visiting Baylor! You knew they'd rush to squeeze in one more dramatic scene of the oppressive atmosphere at…

You just can't trust Canadians. I let a couple of them into my home, and what do they do? They reveal all my secrets, that's what. Man, I'm just glad I didn't take them on a tour of the basement. There are things down there mere men weren't meant to see. For some reason, this seems like the…

The Great Wasteland is done. It's hit bottom. I suspect everyone has heard about Sherri Shepherd, a new co-host on a talk show for stupid women, who doesn't accept the theory of evolution and, by the way, isn't so sure about the shape of the earth, either. Way to go. Way to reinforce the idea that…

Wired has funny little poll: 3 rounds of quotations from Collins and Dawkins, and you get to judge who wins each round. So far, Collins is reeling and staggering, battered badly, and especially in the last round, is fading fast. I don't think he's going to pull a Rocky on this one — especially…

ERV has put up her account of Dembski's nightmare evening, in which he got grilled and mocked by the students in the Q&A. It sounds like it was great fun — for everyone else, at least — but this part really irks me. Finally, the Creationists had had enough. Somebody had to stand up for Jesus. "…

It's Talk Like a Pirate Day, so let's all heave a hearrrty "Arrr" and down a ration of grog. Also, more significantly, today is the day of the Freshman Biology Major Mixer! In case any of our new biology majors at UMM didn't get the word, but do read the blog, here's the deal: party at my house,…

Now the Catholic schools want to ban the HPV vaccine. I simply do not understand that attitude. I can understand wanting to protect your daughter from the entanglements and risks of too-young sex, but this is a vaccine to protect them 1) from a disease 2) transmitted by sex. My eyes tend to focus…

Sometimes, men really suck. Amanda horrifies me with this wife-beating video: a horrible little man browbeats, strikes, and briefly chokes his wife while having their children videotape the whole thing. I guess he felt that she deserved it. I couldn't help but noticed that the wretched Y-chromosome…

Oh, joy. We've got a new crop of persistent Religiots pissing and moaning in the comments. They're whining that I'm mean, that all the regular commenters are mean, that the fact that some good scientists are also Christian somehow validates Christian belief, that I can't criticize scientists who…

Just two days ago, I caught Skatje snacking on bacon, and also there on the counter was a bar of chocolate…and I joked to her that she ought to whip up some chocolated-dipped bacon. Who knew that bacon-flavored chocolate actually exists? I'm afraid it doesn't sound too tasty to me, and I mentioned…

Although his agony still comes through clearly.

Oh, no! Neal's comments haven't been getting through, so he sent me a friendly email message to let me know. (By the way, the filters have been acting up in a horrible way lately — about 10% of the comments have been held up for moderation when they shouldn't, and it's irritating the heck out of me…

A bunch of us were asked to recommend science blogs for The Scientist … now you can see the picks, too.

I've just come back from my introductory biology classroom in which I've been trying hard to convince students of an important historical fact: the scientists, especially the geologists, who came up with the idea that the earth was old were working in a Christian tradition, and they came up with…

First it was me, now it's God. God is being sued by State Senator Ernie Chambers of Nebraska. Chambers lawsuit, which was filed on Friday in Douglas County Court, seeks a permanent injunction ordering God to cease certain harmful activities and the making of terroristic threats. The lawsuit admits…

Here's a hot prospect for the Discovery Institute: Fred Sigworth, a professor of Cellular and Molecular Physiology at Yale. Snap him up, quick! He'll fit in perfectly! He gave a talk to the Yale Christian Fellowship which sounds like it was hilarious. "Being a Christian is good preparation for work…