pharyngula

George Alan Rekers, the anti-gay gay minister, has actually come out and admitted what he and his lovely rent-boy were doing on tour. If you talk with my travel assistant that the story called "Lucien," you will find I spent a great deal of time sharing scientific information on the desirability of…

Chicago has been oppressing the people! They've installed some mechanical deviltry called parking meters on the street, forcing people who want to drive their multiton iron chariots (an offense unto god right there) into the city and then park them somewhere to pay for the privilege. Everyone is…

A deal has been struck to import Gudeløs into the US. This is good stuff; I've had one bottle of it, and was looking forward to tapping the source in Denmark, and now it looks like I may be able to get it more regularly. Devil's Brew and the Danish Atheist Society have entered into an unholy…

Drosera capensis

I don't know if I should even mention this. It's a cowhide vest up for bids on ebay. It's a pedestrian bit of trash, except…it's made by Ray Comfort, and is even signed by him. That makes it freakish and weird, and kind of a trophy to wear. It's for a woman, size 6-8. I suppose you could get it for…

Catherine Deveny seems to have hit a nerve. She made a remark about a child star over twitter — "I do so hope Bindi Irwin gets laid" — which triggered the "Think of the children!" reflex and got her fired from her job writing for the Melbourne Age newspaper. This subject might be a bit contentious…

I don't care what the last installment of the interminable thread was about — I have to show this horrifying clip of a gentle octopus's last moments beneath the jaws of ravening chordates. OK, now talk about whatever you want…if you can. (Current totals: 10,157 entries with 983,758 comments.)

The advocates of accommodationism and apologetics at Biologos have a new article up claiming that scientists ought not to advocate for science — we're supposed to emphasize uncertainty. That's lame; it feeds into the sterile stereotype of the scientist as some kind of dispassionate drone with…

He's still complaining. Maloney is the naturopath in Maine who makes inflated claims about the efficacy of his magic drugs, and who still pops by here and now then to protest feebly, and he's still making stuff up elsewhere. It also turns out that he has a page warning the world about me and you…

Stephen Wolfram has mastered the art of being intellectually provocative and extremely annoying at the same time. He's talking about very cool stuff here, but I'm put off by the excessive hype — apparently he wants to model the fundamental properties of the entire universe in some code in the…

Finally, the church is beginning to clean up its act. The Vatican has announced that it is investigating three orders of nuns in Washington state — what perverted and revolting acts have these nuns committed to draw the ire of the Catholic church? I'm sure your imagination is working hard right now…

The discussion is interesting. Sam Harris recently and infamously proposed that, contra Hume, you can derive an 'ought' from an 'is', and that science can therefore provide reasonable guidance towards a moral life. Sean Carroll disagrees at length. I'm afraid that so far I'm in the Carroll camp. I…

George Alan Rekers is a fairly well-known anti-gay activist. He's one of those scientific types who claims that being gay is curable, is best known for his claim that adopted children of gay couples are more prone to suicide, and is also one of the founders of the Patriarchy Research Council, with…

Everyone knows by now that there has been a catastrophic oil platform disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the biggest oil spill in American history…and it is still spewing and people are still talking about expanding offshore drilling. The actual causes of this accident stem from deregulation and…

…the book I would pick up is China Miéville's Kraken(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). Read the review. But I have no time. Bye bye.

It's hard to find something dumber than Kent Hovind, but here you go: the website of Herb Grossman, trashevolution. It's what Hovind could have produced if he'd been an alcoholic gay man in denial. He has a rambling, mostly incoherent set of pages that he claims disprove evolution, but if you read…

This is an education plan I could get behind. One additional requirement, besides diverting reasonable amounts of money into education: demand improvements in quality. Not this misbegotten accountability of No Child Left Behind, but shakeups in how school boards manage budgets; remove the elected…

If only it were TrueType or Postscript, I'd be using this octopus alphabet all the time.

When an old thread is suddenly resurrected, it's interesting to try to guess why. Every time Kent Hovind gets a little bit of press, his weird fans start googling his name, and presto, they stumble onto one of my old threads and start waxing indignant. The latest zombie thread is about the Shroud…

…is to work on uprating this video: You may recall that today the Mormons are trying to push up the rankings of a truly stupid video which argues that the fact that someone believes in something fervently means it must be true. Don't bother watching the Mormon video — in fact, avoid giving it any…

Massimo Pigliucci has written a book, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science From Bunk(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), that actually sounds very interesting — it takes a strong skeptic's approach to truth claims. What really makes it sound worth reading, though, is a review by Carlin Romano that pans it,…

Chlamydosaurus kingii

Why are science and religion in conflict? Because changing ideas and new knowledge are sacrilegious. This display from Ken Ham's Creation "Museum" says it all: the ultimate source of knowledge is "God's Word", the Bible. They have an old book with the whole story laid out, literally, as the…

The endless thread seems to be all caught up in British electoral politics lately…they all sound like a bunch of parliament groupies. Carry on. (Current totals: 10,140 entries with 981,135 comments.)

I was cleaning out my filtered junk mail folder, and what do I discover? Mail after mail after mail from a long-banned kook, the infamously idiotic John A. Davison. Davison's is notoriously incompetent: this is the fellow who has created multiple blogs, each with one entry, which he closes when it…

I was shocked to see that the Virginia attorney general has filed papers against the climate researcher, Michael Mann. Mann had worked at the University of Virginia for 5 or 6 years, doing climate studies that cost the state about a half million dollars over that time. (To put that in perspective,…

On 16 May, there will be a demonstration protesting the foolish curriculum the Texas Board of Education is imposing on the state. If you're near the capitol, join in! Here's their rationale: A religious-right faction dominating the Texas Board of Education is trying to distort the content of public…

That's the official state seal of Virginia. A few people don't like it, for the expected prudish reasons, including the Attorney General for the state of Virginia. Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli apparently isn't fond of wardrobe malfunctions, even when Virginia's state seal is involved. The…

Any exobiologists out there might be interested to know that, according to certain wacky sources, the military has captured an alien. There are Septeloids: "The male non-human originated from the star system Delta Pavonis, 20 light-years from Earth where it was the 4th planet from their sun. It is…