pharyngula

If you were hoping to get into Skepticon 3, the fun free skeptics conference in Missouri, there's very good news: thanks to a donation from Polaris Financial Planning, they were able to book a much larger venue, expanding from a maximum capacity of 500 to 1800, and also bring in more speakers.…

A site called Progressive Nation is pleasantly surprised by the results of a Fox News poll. Is it possible that even the center-right tilting viewing audience of Fox news programs is also open to significant upgrades of gay civil rights? That is what a surprising new, unscientific survey of a Fox…

What do you know…I am reminded that this weekend was the anniversary of the #creozerg, our invasion by 300 rabid secularists of the Creation Museum. Phil Ferguson offers a retrospective, if you want to relive the fun.

I'll be whipping out another talk at the Critical Thinking Club in St Paul this morning, and another in Stillwater on Monday. Just in case some of you locals want to stop by.

It's always a struggle between the difficult solution that actually would accomplish something, and the ridiculous, easy, superficial idea. Math pink? How absurd. Everyone knows that putting math in cute shoes would work better.

If I'd seen this before, I would have posted it at the start of the summer: Drowning Doesn't Look Like Drowning. This is incredibly useful advice for people who live in a state with more than ten thousand lakes, or people who live on the coast, or people who live in places with swimming pools, or…

All you have to do is get one of these awesome t-shirts.

I remember seeing sporadic bursts of activity here when Digg, one of the big aggregator sites, would link to something here, but I haven't seen that in a while — but now I learn that there is a fanatically active group of conservative haters at work over there. They call themselves Digg Patriots ("…

Harriet Baber is a philosopher, and I say that with the most sneeringly disparaging tone I can muster. I don't normally dislike philosophy, but there are a lot of philosophers I detest, and Baber exemplifies why. She has a remarkable article in The Guardian in which she says a series of astonishing…

Look at this: a colossal squid washed up on a beach near Wellington, and all the little kiwis came out to play. I'm jealous. This never happens in Morris, Minnesota.

I got cornered by Carin Bondar in Vancouver, and the conclusion of her interview is that I'm the nerdiest non-believer of them all. First teddy bear, now nerd — someday I want an interview to end with the idea that I'm fierce, heroic, and manly. Not going to happen, I know. Oh, and I got the…

Skatje is revealing all of the family secrets! I'm going to have to track her down in far-off Madison and superglue her fingers together…right after I track down all the disgusting boys who are calling her "hot" and thump 'em up a bit.

Benthoctopus sp. This was photographed on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. Human beings are persona non grata in that neighborhood anymore, I suspect. Actually, is there anywhere in the ocean we'd be liked? Except as a snack? (via Spiegel)

Quacks, every one, and monsters promoting destruction of the unique and precious. Look what they've done in the name of giving impotent, tiny-dicked ignoramuses a magic potion: Poachers have butchered the last adult rhinoceros at a South African game reserve, cutting off her horn and letting her…

It's from one of those kook-fringe Christian groups in Australia. Let's show them that they are silly to open up their views to a referendum on the internet. Would you vote in a Prime Minister who does not acknowledge God? No 54%Yes 45% I predict that they'll pull a Hovind and change the poll or…

History is not going to judge us kindly for this crime against humanity. Never again. In the following waves [after the initial blast] people's bodies were terribly squeezed, then their internal organs ruptured. Then the blast blew the broken bodies at 500 to 1,000 miles per hour through the…

It's a ferocious 3-headed dog, but still…anyway, the Molly award for the month of June goes to Cerberus, for her excellent work in guarding the gates of Hell. Now who deserves the award for the month of July? Leave comments with your nominations here.

I have to call shenanigans on this cartoon: It left out Mormonism. And since Mormonism is halfway between $cientology and Christianity, given the principle that the right answer is always the one in the middle, she would have found the Mormons just right. I think that's right, anyway. People keep…

Compare and contrast: examine the Christian music video I used in the last instance of the Thread of Caterwauling alongside this lovely example of celebratory atheism from D.O.A. Some of you may not care for it, but it's at least music with a pulse, unlike that dead noise that constitutes modern…

Since the Catholics are accusing gays of 'bullying' by demanding equal rights (how dare they!), and since Minnesota does have a scumbag for a governor, I guess I'll have to sit back and take it when The Onion mocks our fair state. New Law Would Ban Marriages Between People Who Don't Love Each Other

You've got less than an hour from the time I've posted this to tune in to CNN. It was a very short interview, but Hitchens was clear: the only way there will be a deathbed conversion is if he's rendered irrational and babbling with pain, and concedes that the person who dies could very well be…

I was interviewed by Connie Barlow and Michael Dowd for their Inspiring Naturalism podcast. Dowd is the fellow who wrote Thank God for Evolution!, which I reviewed a while back. It was a slightly askew interview, but that made it fun.

I'm going to break another webcam, aren't I? While you can, you can actually watch a dinosaur dig in progress in Svalbard, Norway. (Strictly speaking, though, it looks like they're excavating pliosaurs and ichthyosaurs, not dinosaurs.) I'm amused that it looks exactly like the the big construction…

(via archy)

So I played this Battleground God game, which is supposed to ferret out philosophical contradictions in your views about religion. I didn't implode into a mass of inconsistent pudding at the end, which is good, right? Where are my fabulous prizes? Apparently, you can also get a perfect score by…

Nick Denton is one of those interesting fellows in online media: my first impression was that he runs gossipy sites and therefore must be shallow, but then you discover that he's actually got very finely tuned antennae to what people want to read…and if it's gossip, then so be it. But at the same…

Christopher Hitchens is very sick with esophageal cancer, but he still writes like a fiery angel in describing his situation. These are my first raw reactions to being stricken. I am quietly resolved to resist bodily as best I can, even if only passively, and to seek the most advanced advice. My…

There really were savage battles between man and giant squid in the 19th century. They all come off as a little bit one sided, though: some poor sick squid floundering on the surface is encountered by a passing ship, harpoons and gaff hooks are thrown, and if the dying beast manages to fling a…

By popular demand (50 email requests in the last few hours), here's an absurd Prop8 poll on FoxNews. Go ahead and take a stab at it, but from my perspective, it's already been trashed — with numbers like this, it's already clearly down to battling bots duking it out. Did Judge Make Right Call In…

Solanum mammosum