Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
January 22, 2010
I commend Chris Mooney for being so open-minded that he was willing to guest-author a comic on Jesus & Mo.
January 22, 2010
I'm holding up just fine so far, despite having to keep up with slightly younger college students who can stay up late and drink. Last night it was the students of UC Davis's Agnostic and Atheist Student Association, and I also met the ferocious Truth Machine and the professorial Zeno. Oh, and…
January 21, 2010
I bumped into Chris Mooney a couple of times this past weekend at ScienceOnline 2010. I tried to talk to him — I honestly don't have any personal animosity to the guy — but he was mostly rather dour, and the most I got out of him was a claim that the arguments will start up again soon, when the…
January 21, 2010
Times are tight. It's tough getting grants from NIH and NSF, but the government has heard your plight and has responded by opening up new avenues to request support: apply for an NCMHD Innovative Faith-Based Approaches to Health Disparities Research grant!
Purpose. The purpose of the NCMHD…
January 21, 2010
Yeah, you guys filled up the last open thread with comments already. Since one of the last revelations there was that David MarjanoviÄ has creepy red glowing eyes (and that TetZoo is four years old!), this very cheesy video clip seems most appropriate.
Run away while you still can! Or go ahead,…
January 21, 2010
A good take-down is a thing of beauty. A.A. Gill visited the "museum" in Kentucky, and gets right to the heart of the matter: it's not a museum, it's a national embarrassment.
The Creation Museum isn't really a museum at all. It's an argument. It's not even an argument. It's the ammunition for an…
January 21, 2010
And this is just the place to muster it! I can see one problem in it, though: the creators of this ridiculous poll have cunningly split the good answers into two, so we have a double challenge: we should run up both the first and fourth answers to outnumber the other two.
The Bible: God's Word or…
January 20, 2010
We had a good crowd, lots of questions, and an interesting group of student skeptics at UCSB this evening. Next up is a little sleep, then a plane hop to Sacramento, and a talk at UC Davis at 6:30, in 194 Chemistry. I also think I'll break up my next talk a bit more; this one bounced about over…
January 20, 2010
Apparently, polls are now the proper way to settle metaphysical issues. This guy claims to have evidence of life after death, based on claims about near-death experiences (NDEs), which are so convincing…not. People experiencing trauma and physiological shock, whose brains have received a nasty jar…
January 20, 2010
Every guy in the world knows that this was so true.
It's also perfectly in character for Jehovah, who is obsessed with that thing.
January 20, 2010
Hey, I'm in sodden, stormy California! Just in case you hadn't heard, I'll be speaking at the University of California Santa Barbara tonight at 7, in Embarcadero Hall. It should work…I'm still a little bit skewed towards Midwestern time, but 7PST isn't that bad. The fun will start afterwards when…
January 20, 2010
My wife says I need to diversify, and ought to make an occasional nod to these strange organisms called 'non-animals'. Weird. So she sends me this photo by the Monterey Bay Aquarium and reminds me of those days in our youth when we'd find these whiplike kelp washed up on the beaches…I think it was…
January 19, 2010
Today is the day of a special election in Massachusetts, and it's important — it could weaken the Democratic majority in the senate, and derail what little hope we have for sensible health care. Get out and vote for the Democrat, Coakley, even if you think she is a little yellow dog.
The…
January 19, 2010
You'll need a Twitter account to crash this poll. There are these things called Shorty Awards being given to popular twitter users in various categories, like health. Unfortunately, as you can imagine, a medium with almost no content, restricted to 140 character brief comments, is easily dominated…
January 19, 2010
It's kind of like stage diving into a mosh pit, I think. I'm leaving for Santa Barbara this afternoon, beginning a week-long tour of a big chunk of California. Zeno has cruelly pointed out that my itinerary is a bit convoluted, but I say you take the tour you've got, not the one you wish you had.…
January 19, 2010
Ol' Carl, the Australian young earth creationist, got all bent out of shape at the disrespect we gave to his freak show and is appalled that atheists are having a convention in Melbourne, and so now he has come out with a video reply to the whole affair.
I've always wanted to grow up to be a…
January 18, 2010
Poor Haiti. First the earthquake, and now the cult vultures are descending on them. It's not just talking bibles: now the scientologists are coming.
Seriously, people. When a region suffers a disaster and the infrastructure is falling down in ruins and people need real help now, when the pipeline…
January 18, 2010
It was tough being a biologist during my kids' brief Pokemon craze. What kind of animals were those? What was this business of stuffing them into balls? And what a horrible mangling of evolution was portrayed in those transformations! Ick, ick, ick. The game just annoyed me in principle.
Those wild…
January 18, 2010
I guess we've been outdone. While the godless are raising money for the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders, a Christian group is sending boxloads of solar-powered digital Bibles to Haiti — just what they need, I'm sure.
Called the "Proclaimer," the audio Bible delivers "digital quality" and is…
January 18, 2010
All the "New" Atheists cringe at the epithet the popular press has given us. Watch Bertrand Russell and see why.
January 18, 2010
I don't know about you, but I sure am reassured that our soldiers are well-equipped since I heard that one weapon supplier has been enchanting rifles with secret references to the Bible. It gives a soldier special powers to be thinking, "he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall…
January 18, 2010
The Non-Believers Giving Aid project has been a phenomenal success; it raised over $150,000 in contributions for Haiti within 24 hours, and at the last tally I heard was somewhere over $180,000, with an average donation of roughly $35 per godless donor.
I've been seeing a lot of sniping from…
January 18, 2010
Last week's metazoan was a walrus, which many people mistook for a manatee. This meant that my inbox was flooded with outraged email from the manatee community, which was deeply offended at the confusion. So, today, here is a portrait of one of the handsomer representatives of the fine warm-water…
January 17, 2010
Warning: Explicit Sex Video involving Tentacles ahead!
Warning #2: Really Cheesy Narration ahead, too!
January 17, 2010
But let me correct that and catch up with some more administrative tidying up here.
The winner of the Molly Award for the month of November is Aratina Cage! As is traditional, he now owes you all a drink at the bar.
Now we have to find the most popular commenter for December of 2009: leave comments…
January 17, 2010
I just stagger back from yet another long day of travel, and what do I discover? You've filled up the las entry in the endless thread again. Does the horde never sleep?
Anyway, we will launch this one with a mystery. Watch this video of an Oregon bigfoot:
Now the mystery. Why is it that all…
January 16, 2010
I think I'm on BlogTV right now.
Done now! If my end was fuzzy, blame it on the fact I was trying to do it from a hotel connection at a tech conference full of people sucking down the bandwidth.
January 16, 2010
If you haven't already donated to disaster relief in Haiti, here's your chance: a new umbrella organization to coordinate charitable giving for the godless has been set up. In the first two hours that this was created, over $11,000 has been donated. Get on the bandwagon!
Non-Believers Giving Aid: a…