pharyngula

We're about to leave lovely Vancouver to return to Kent, Washington, so must leave you with something awful to chew on for a while. This is is a beautiful example of why creationists can be so stupid: spelling and grammar errors throughout, misrepresentations of the actual science, and non-stop…

That would be tough. She's written a diatribe in the NY Times on the Pepsico debacle, and it isn't just that she doesn't like many of the scienceblogs (including yours truly), but that she gets the facts wrong. This was just bizarre. I was nonplussed by the high dudgeon of the so-called SciBlings…

O Happy Day, let us open this edition of the thread insufferably prolonged with some romance! (Current totals: 10,731 entries with 1,072,626 comments.)

We are currently suffering from a surfeit of cheesiness in the ad blocks being served up — the example to the right is just one of many horrors, including ads for $cientology, various Christian and creationist groups, and even some medical quackery. Although the "build an ideal woman" does appeal…

How can I resist? Eric Hovind does the usual trick of putting two reasonable answers on it to split the rational vote, but I think a good goal would be to simply make both of them crush the stupid creationist answer. What do you believe about evolution? It's a religion. 46% * It's a fact! 43…

Spiegel has a wonderful interview with Venter. The more I hear from Venter, the more I like him; he's very much a no-BS sort of fellow. He's the guy who really drove the human genome project to completion, and he's entirely open about explaining that its medical significance was grossly overstated…

The peculiarities of dietary restrictions by the religious are always entertaining. Catholics have their own weird practices: here's a bit of strange information from a Catholic agony aunt forum. Do alligators count as fish? As a Catholic who observes the custom of abstaining from meat on Fridays,…

MPR picked my brains about the impossible plan to eradicate mosquitoes. No, we can't, and no, we shouldn't. That wasn't so hard.

The 10th anniversary of the journal Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines is being celebrated by making all of the articles in a special review issue entirely free for download…for the month of July. It's almost over! Grab those pdfs while you can!

(via Daily Squee)

It's a simple question. Do you think Livingston Parish public schools should teach creationism? Yes, evolution is a lie 22% Yes, so children can hear both sides 35% No, religion has no place in science class 29% No, we don't need to waste tax money on lawsuits 13% Don't know…

Helen Thomas vacated her front row seat in the White Press (under ignominious circumstances, unfortunately), and now it's up for grabs. The White House Correspondence Association is going to decide whether to give it to NPR, Bloomberg, or, appallingly, Fox News. Sign the petition. Slap down the…

They just keep popping up out of nowhere, all shrill and assertive and extreme. Take a look at this new guy getting all in-your-face about religion. And he's a Scot, too; even worse. Disreputable rascals, every one.

Earlier this summer, I mentioned the Oregon Octocam, which featured an octopus named Deriq. Deriq has died. It's a sad fact that most cephalopods are very short lived. "The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very, very brightly, Deriq."

They're Christian, so you can trust them to have your best interests at heart. The Modesty Survey is a bizarre instrument created by asking young Christian women to put together heartfelt questions about their clothing ("Are bikinis immodest?" "Are jeans immodest?"), and then teenaged Christian…

One of the more contemptible anti-gay activists is Reverend Scott Lively, a true liar for Jesus who considers it his sacred mission to rid the world of homosexuals. He was proud to have inspired the Ugandan death penalty for homosexuality law (although in the face of the outrage that generated, he…

Mark your calendars! The end of the world is nigh, and we've got a specific date: the Rapture will occur on 21 May, 2011, and the world ends on 21 October 2011. How do we know this? As near as I can tell, it's pure numerology, diddling dates to create a pretense of pattern that are then used to…

Dracula simia

Zeno catches something amusing: a right-wing radio host ranting about professors. Sussman:I get a kick out of— You go to UC Berkeley, you go to Stanford, you go to these various campuses and these students are out there protesting, "We need more money for our schools!" And standing next to them are…

JL Vernon is lobbying to have Huffpo dedicate a section of their undeservedly popular, cheesy website to science. He makes a superficially reasonable argument: to work within the belly of the beast to promote good science, in opposition to the tripe they usually publish. I'm sympathetic, really I…

Some things just make you want to cringe under a table somewhere, they're so awful and embarrassing. And sometimes they're so bad I don't want to cringe down there alone, so I'm going to creep you all out, too. Behold, Andrew Cohen. His ex-girlfriend, who turned down his proposal of marriage for…

Well, traffic was down a bit yesterday, although the dedicated thread is going strong. I suspect that some of the readers here were distracted by some silly little game that was released yesterday, and the only way to get them back is to dangle the eye candy in front of them. Now we're all caught…

I am pleased to report that the godless heathens of Seattle, including the likes of Ophelia Benson (who, I learned, was once bitten by a gorilla, and thereby acquired the superpowers of strength, ferocity, and calm) and Dana Hunter, know how to close out a bar. Once again, a horde of cheerful…

It's been a while. I hope you haven't forgotten. Here's an easy one to get you back in the swing of things. Do you think The Ten Commandments should be displayed in government buildings?" Yes 76% No 23% Undecided 1% It seems rather silly to post a bunch of laws, most of which everyone in the…

This is a rather horrifying article about young girls reading Harry Potter one moment, and then dragged off to get their clitorises chopped off. It's got these nasty little details like, if you pay extra, you can get the butcher to use a clean knife. But there's an odd disjoint here, too. It's the…

In a great victory for history, a very rare 19th century MP3 has been recovered which documents a moment in Charles Darwin's domestic life. It seems that there was a bit of unreported conflict between them…

One of the giant panels I was on at Convergence is now a podcast at the Secular Buddhist. It's got me, Bug Girl, Jennifer Ouellette, Lyra Lynx, Maria Walters, Jen Mana, Ted Meissner, Debbie Goddard, Carrie Iwan, and Dave Walbridge, and I'm already worn out just listing them. It was also very well…

Well, this was a weird article in Nature that made me think, at least: A world without mosquitoes. I was surprised to learn that there are actually ecologists/entomologists who believe the world would be a better place if we could simply exterminate entire genera of winged pests — that mosquitoes…

Alayna Wyland is 7 months old, and she is suffering. The area started swelling, and the fast-growing mass of blood vessels, known as a hemangioma, eventually caused her eye to swell shut and pushed the eyeball down and outward and started eroding the eye socket bone around the eye. There are…

Wait, wait, this story makes no sense. A gay netball coach fired from a Christchurch Christian school has gained compensation and an apology. The 28-year-old man was employed as a girls' netball coach at Middleton Grange School in February, but said he was sacked by the board of trustees after…