pharyngula

The buggy software is better now, but some people are still completely unable to comment — and the primary complaint I'm getting is that the confirmation email needed to register never arrives. One possibility is that somehow, your domain or name or something is blocked by some systemwide filter.…

I am going against the herd here at ScienceOnline 2010 — I am not tweeting and blogging throughout the event, but am just sitting back and enjoying the talks, while all the nerds are pounding away at their keyboards. (Note sneaky implication that I am not a nerd with the rest of 'em.) However, I…

I'm going to be doing an interview with Reddit later today, and they've opened a thread to collect questions for me. I'm already a-scared. Hold me, Mommy.

You can buy communion wafers on Amazon, which is no surprise. Amazon will also tell you what other customers bought when they ordered their communion wafers. I…I…don't understand! I get a brainlock when I try to put these things together, I'm afraid.

There are a lot of small four year colleges around, and the competition is tough. We feel it at my university, the University of Minnesota Morris, and it's difficult because we can't honestly say that all those other colleges are bad — they're actually very good because they value the same…

(Photo from a Japanese fish market, by Erich Meatleg)

Have you ever seen the True Christian, the kind that will calmly and confidently tell you the most insane and ridiculous things as if he were ordering a cup of coffee? Meet Randy Demain. He has raised the dead, and does it all the time. It's easy. You just go up to an old corpse and tell it to get…

If you ever argue with creationists, you know that the Index to Creationist Claims is an incredibly useful site, as is the book version, The Counter Creationism Handbook. Life just got a little sweeter: it is now available as a smartphone app for the blackberry and iPhone (just get into the App…

They taunt me. Really, I know I'm an old lump, it's OK, you can stop mentioning how I'm not on the poll but all the young cool groovy atheist kids are. And then Hemant has to gloat that at last he can win without me around — yeah, and Potsie might have stood a chance of scoring when the Fonz was…

Crazy Ken Ham has learned about the Atheist Convention in Melbourne, and he has written his confused, garbled version of what it's all about. He's also done his typical cowardly routine of complaining about the convention and also, by the way, about me, but refusing to mention any of us by name,…

Brent Rasmussen is shutting down Unscrewing the Inscrutable. This is sad; Pharyngula is a lowly newbie to the atheist blogosphere, and when I set up shop way back in 2003 the godless blogs I followed included the Raving Atheist (which switched sides with the conversion of its owner years ago),…

RCA (which is not the old and reputable company I remember, but has gone out of business and its name sold to anyone with the right amount of cash) recently announced a device called the Airnergy harvester, which supposedly simply soaks up the RF energy emitted by WiFi devices in the neighborhood…

A new Pew survey has some encouraging results about intermarriage in America: people seem to be more willing to accept it. The numbers show that a majority across the board will readily accept a family member of a different race. Although I do have to find a few continuing problems there. Who are…

Just about everyone is following the horrible news from Haiti, where they've been struck with a major earthquake causing great loss of life. I've been informed by multiple people now that Pat Robertson has announced the reason for this disaster: the Haitian people made a deal with the devil to free…

Uh, did that last thread fill up awfully fast? It was like strange creatures ripping up through the floorboards and shredding the populace, which is how the rest of the web sees us, anyway. I guess I need to make like Doug McClure and get these crazy comments under control.

Sven DeMilo posted a link to this here, but it's worth promoting up top: a nice compilation of instructive and entertaining videos for zoologists.

I'm sexy. Well, that was unexpected. I think my name was tossed in there for comic relief.

On Sunday, I was stuck on a long boring drive — there is no scenery between Winnipeg and Morris, only a pale gray void with wisps of snow blowing through it — and was thinking about some of the conversations I'd had the night before. I was a bit envious. My own upbringing in religion was rather…

Apparently, Kent Hovind filed for an appeal to the Supreme Court based on a claim that he really wasn't trying to finagle his way past US tax laws by structuring all of his bank withdrawals to be under $10,000, therefore avoiding a trigger that would demand they be reported; it's unfair to target…

Some of you may have noticed the lack of updates here yesterday. I must apologize; I was in a crisis and having a bit of a breakdown. You see, everyone was sending me the latest xkcd comic, which was kind of like the God Equation, except that I have a deep and abiding faith in Randall Munroe,…

A crack team of programmers swept through the commenting code over the last several days, and cleaned up a bunch of stuff of an unspecified nature. Now the real test is in performance: is registration working any better? Let us know here.

Here's what we get in American government: a room full of morons, eyes squeezed shut, bobbing their heads back and forth as they beg an invisible man in the sky to smite health care reform. Witness this and realize that religion is a pathology, an evil mind-rot that makes the stupid even more…

She says these guys (it's a WALRUS, not a manatee) really like molluscs, too. (via National Geographic)

This is far too familiar. And they say atheists have no morals. Isn't it proof enough of my restraint that not once in my life have I ever throttled a creationist?

I was just trying to get through the email I neglected yesterday, and then someone sent me a bomb through the web: a link that gave me sympathetic heart pains and some ghastly flashbacks. Behold, the Bacon-Chicken-Narwhal! I couldn't eat that. I have a cardiovascular system, and I need it to stay…

That amazing fact should go right on my résumé. Although I was challenged to stand outside in nothing but my light jacket for 20 minutes to get the true Winnipeg experience, and I demurred — I'll save that for my next visit, when I'm ready for the advanced class. Anyway, I had a grand time at a…

I was a bit skimpy on the details before, but now you can find a list of all the specific times and places you'll be able to find me when I make the grand rounds of central California.

Once again, the Discovery Institute stumbles all over itself to crow victory over evolution, led by the inspiring figure of that squeaking incompetent, Casey Luskin. This time, what has them declaring the bankruptcy of evolution is the discovery of tetrapod trackways in Poland dating back 395…

Just in case there is more than one of you, I'll mention that a Pharyngula fan group has been formed to coordinate social activities in Baltimore. Surely this will not involve alcohol or blasphemy, will it? Nor will there be rudeness and vociferous argument? Perhaps there will be squid.

Oh, lord, I am convinced. Look at this fossil; it's a perfect human footprint, with a dinosaur track right on top of it! The people who found it promise that it's not a fake, they've actually done a CAT scan of the rock to show that it is genuine, somehow. This will revolutionize paleontology and…