pharyngula

In North Carolina, Christians defaced an atheist billboard. These things happen; there are always a few jerks in any movement who'll go out and vandalize private property because they're so sure they're in the right that the laws don't apply to them. Normally, the organizations and the sane people…

Kenneth Howell was an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois. He is not being rehired at the end of his contract, apparently because he has been accused of hate speech against gays by a student. He had written an email to his students defending the Catholic position on homosexuality, and a…

I was so excited about this lead. A famous Newfoundland sea monster will soon occupy a space normally reserved for Canada's Queen. I was even more excited when I saw a picture of the Newfie beast: That'll teach that dingleberry Charles — bypassed by a giant squid, soon to be ruler of all…

Last night, Stewart interviewed Marilynne Robinson. I do not expect attack dog tactics from Stewart, ever, but I also didn't expect him to so totally buy into her premises. It was very disappointing. The low point came as Stewart tried to justify Robinson's nebulous argument that science and…

(via Yeeta)

This turned up in a comment this morning. That settles it, I'm turning off the internet and getting to work.

At least when it comes to quackery, it is. An informal analysis of relevant stories on homeopathy reveals some sad results: Fox news returned a total of 20 news stories; 5% were favorable towards homeopathy, 50% were unfavorable, and 45% were neutral. NPR returned a total of 8 news stories; 12…

Blizzard, makers of the games Starcraft and World of Warcraft, is about to change their forum policies and require the display of real names, basically creating a massive privacy leak if you buy a silly game and go online to get some tech support. There's an excellent summary of why this was a…

Bly is the fellow who put Scienceblogs together, and to his credit, one of his responses to the heat generated by the whole PepsiCo debacle is to step forward and be more open. His blog is at Science is Culture — go say hello. Or tell him what to do to fix everything.

I've got a little inside information on Premise Media, makers of Expelled — despite all the bragging about what a successful movie they had, they still haven't fully paid contractors they'd hired, and the company appears to be dead. It was a kind of zombie company anyway, with a fake website filled…

My wife is the one hanging out with celebrities this weekend, so no, we have not made the Minchin Accommodation. Please do continue whatever the heck you were talking about. I just had to make this clear to the spouse hanging out in Vegas. (Current totals:10,573 entries with 1,048,281 comments.)

I know you all mean well, but 30-40 emails a day just about the German octopus 'predicting' World Cup matches is wearing me out. I have to explain a few things. Cephalopods are not psychic. Nothing is. If this were real, it would be Paul the Precognitive Octopus. It's telling the future, not…

Just listen to Carl.

You know how New Scientist published that horrible magazine cover that said "DARWIN WAS WRONG" in big letters, which we now get to hear about all the time at school board meetings as every authority-happy creationist waves it around and announces that they were right all along? I want a copy of the…

We just got this note from Adam Bly: We have removed Food Frontiers from SB. We apologize for what some of you viewed as a violation of your immense trust in ScienceBlogs. Although we (and many of you) believe strongly in the need to engage industry in pursuit of science-driven social change,…

You know that whole "climategate" nonsense was settled, right? It was a ginned-up controversy with no merit, and the evidence still supports the conclusion of anthropogenic global warming. Unfortunately, that message hasn't gotten to the public yet. It just goes to show how easy it is to persuade…

Here we go again, another creationist who doesn't understand the evolution side of the argument at all. He's criticizing the argument from bad design in a kind of backwards way. I've never heard a Darwinist complain that the mind they use is the result of lousy design, that their mind is the result…

It's easy. Bait your hook with stupid. It's true, we're a sucker for that stuff, although it does have a downside. We'll come up, swallow the bait, follow the line to its source, devour the poor fool holding the pole, and then waddle off, all fat and smug. It's our nature, we can't help it. So, for…

BIG BANG BIG BOOM - the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

If only blogging were like pro basketball…

Never mind the chaos going on behind the scenes! We need a pretty distraction, stat!

Alex Pareene jumps on the anti-HuffPo bandwagon: Giving a space to quacks to sell vitamin supplements to morons is insulting enough, but actually allowing a shameless asshole like Klinghoffer to use the Holocaust to promote his right-wing crusade to teach children lies is beyond the pale. Platform…

There once was a gigantic blow-up of accusations that fed into Chris Mooney's self-righteous crusade against atheists as harming the cause of science education. Remember "Tom Johnson", the mysterious scientist who told stories of outrageous bias against Christians in academia, driven by people like…

We've known for a long time that the Huffington Post is a stronghold of anti-scientific, anti-medicine woo. They've also recently added Discovery Institute propagandists to their roster. I've given up on them as a lost cause, but Eric Michael Johnson of the Primate Diaries has been trying to swim…

My post about women's issues in skepticism/atheism got a lot of comments, and now those comments have been analyzed…so if you didn't want to read them all, now you can get the numerical breakdown. One thing surprised me: only a third of the comments were people arguing with each other! When did we…

You're reading this over breakfast, right? Just want to be sure I've caught you at an appropriate moment. The story is simple: scientists have figured out how deep sea squid, which lack a modified arm for sex, copulate. It's obvious now — the males have an enormous penis, as long as their whole…

Speaking of the untrustworthiness of corporate drones, the decision by Blizzard to end online anonymity is already having consequences. Protests have gotten so hot that they are banning complainers and shutting down threads, and people are unsubscribing from the game in protest (impossible to tell…

It's nice when we add another blog to the stable here at Scienceblogs — it means another human face added to the collection, another set of opinions to enjoy or destroy, yet more scientific minds committed to engaging in discussion with the culture. After all, that's what we're all about, putting a…

Blizzard, which makes a couple of extremely popular computer games like Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo, also maintains a gigantic set of forums with an overwhelming volume of posts appearing non-stop. I've never dug into them — way too much stuff, and it's scary how ferocious the debates can get…