Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
May 10, 2010
Not that kind! And we were surrounded by chaperones! And there were lots of people there! I'm going to be in such trouble when the Trophy Wife™ finds out what I was up to this weekend.
May 10, 2010
Bradley Byrne is apparently the front runner in the Republican race for nomination in the Alabama gubernatorial campaign. His opponents have put up this ad against him.
What horrible things has Byrne done, the mere statement of which is sufficient to horrify Alabamans? "Byrne supported teaching…
May 10, 2010
I apologize. You might not want to read any of this post if you simply cannot bear the raging stupidity that characterizes Fox News. Fair warning: the clip below features both Bill O'Reilly and Sarah Palin.
I suspect that a lot of you, if you got this far, turned that clip off scant moments into…
May 10, 2010
This is a poster from an Egyptian ad to encourage women to cover themselves to prevent rape.
I don't know who should feel more offended, the women who are compared to a piece of candy or the men who are compared to flies. I do know who should feel more threatened, though: the women who are seeing…
May 10, 2010
(via National Geographic)
May 9, 2010
I'm still wrestling with Sam Harris's and Richard Carrier's ideas that there can be a scientific foundation for morality. I guess I am concerned with the claim that we can science our way to a moral society; I am more comfortable with the idea that we can develop an objective criterion for judging…
May 9, 2010
Poland has blasphemy laws, too — and they're applying them to throw a pop star in prison. Dorota Rabczewska (careful there, she has also posed for Playboy) has said something absolutely unforgivably awful:
In a television interview last year, Doda explained that she found it far easier to believe…
May 9, 2010
Show this video to your mom. Tell her you're thinking of her. It's the nice thing to do.
Best wait until after the Sunday brunch you're treating her to, though.
May 9, 2010
I'm in Orange County today, and I heard an odd comment that there was a dearth of godless music. I beg to differ: most music is godless, and I would point to rock as a genre that is almost entirely secular. You know, it doesn't have to be overt and announce that god doesn't exist to be compatible…
May 9, 2010
Years ago, when the Trophy Wife™ was a psychology grad student, she participated in research on what babies think. It was interesting stuff because it was methodologically tricky — they can't talk, they barely respond in comprehensible way to the world, but as it turns out you can get surprisingly…
May 9, 2010
Hey, it's been awfully quiet around here — it's been one of those lost weekends for me. Sorry about that, I've been up to my eyeballs in busy-ness, and it doesn't look like it'll get much better today. So I guess I'll steal something from the May/June edition of Skeptical Inquirer, by permission of…
May 7, 2010
I think Stephen Baldwin is a washed up loser, but I could get behind the campaign to restore Joss Whedon.
May 7, 2010
Paul Gill is protesting the Irish blasphemy law by walking across Ireland. It sounds like a wonderfully pleasant way to protest — there will be regular youtube videos, so everyone can get a look at the Irish countryside…and I hope citizens will step out to join him in short stretches of the long…
May 7, 2010
What do you think? Is the Catholic hierarchy cheering or cringing at the words of this Brazilian archbishop* and his excuses for the child abuse scandals in the church?
Archbishop Grings, a 73-year-old priest with conservative views, said the gradual acceptance of homosexuality by the public was a…
May 7, 2010
A study has found that your choice of fonts influences your perception of the message. That's not too surprising. Unfortunately, they only compared Times New Roman and Arial, when what we're really interested in is the effect of Comic Sans.
May 7, 2010
Sepia tokioensis
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
May 6, 2010
All the kerfuffle about people drawing Mohammed in recent years has been seriously misplaced: there is a very entertaining archive of Mohammed images, everything from serious medieval renditions to obscene contemporary scrawls. Cat's out of the bag, Muslims—pictures of Mohammed are everywhere, and…
May 6, 2010
Not that I'd ever apply; I wouldn't ever want to work in an instition with an irrational commitment to a weird medieval superstition. It leads them to make all kinds of strange decisions.
Marquette University has just done that. They've been searching for a new dean for the college of arts and…
May 6, 2010
Uh-oh. Gregory Paul has analyzed the proportions of the image on the Shroud of Turin, and come to some troubling conclusions.
This note is intended to describe why, from an artistic and anatomical perspective, the shroud image is an embarrassingly obvious fraud committed by a Gothic artist…
May 6, 2010
That in future speaking engagements, unauthorized photography should be prohibited.
May 6, 2010
This adorable, recently discovered jellyfish is notable for the peculiarity of it's morphology: it's saucer-shaped, with a ring of gonads on top. The species name is medeopolis, meaning "city of gonads". Sounds like a place to party!
May 6, 2010
We have a thread on female genital mutilation, and a few boys are insisting on turning it into a discussion of the damage done to their pee-pees by circumcision. For the record, I agree with you: circumcision is mutilation, too, and it shouldn't be done, and doctors shouldn't be collaborating in…
May 6, 2010
The American Academy of Pediatrics has come up with a compromise on female genital mutilation.
International human rights organization Equality Now is stunned by a new policy statement issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which essentially promotes female genital mutilation (FGM) and…
May 6, 2010
Sometimes I am just so embarrassed by my country. Do we really need the government telling people to appeal to an invisible magic man in the sky? Apparently, we do.
"I call upon the citizens of our nation to pray, or otherwise give thanks, in accordance with their own faiths and consciences, for…
May 5, 2010
This is the best Supreme Court decision I have ever read. They really get what freedom of speech means.
I've included an excerpt from Judge Breyer's opinion below the fold. It is mildly explicit in its language and may not be suitable for work.
May 5, 2010
This is a poll from the mind of Wayne Laugesen, crazy fundie editor from Colorado Springs. As usual, he's complaining about those damned atheists on his lawn.
Is it OK for government leaders and legislative bodies to proclaim a National Day of Prayer?
Yes, this is perfectly appropriate and legal…
May 5, 2010
This is utterly incomprehensible.
YOGI
YOU SEEM TO LIVE EXCLUSIVELY IN THE
"AFTERMATH" DIMENSION.
SAD REALLY... AND PATHETICALLY
UNORIGINAL AND UNCREATIVE.
USE YOUR "BIG BRAIN" TO EXPLAIN
911... YOU AMERICAN IMBECILE.
ALAN
One noteworthy thing about it: I haven't modified the formatting at…