Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
October 9, 2009
Here are the lyrics:
Don't need no god.
Don't need no eternal paternal god.
Don't need no reassuringly protective
good and evil in perspective god.
Don't need no imported distorted,
inflated updated,
holy roller, save your soul, or
anaesthetisingly opiate gods.
Don't need no "all creatures that…
October 9, 2009
The news that Obama has won a Nobel peace prize was weird — and don't get me wrong, I don't think he has done badly at promoting peace, I just don't think he's made the kind of exceptional effort that something with the prestige of the Nobel ought to reward — but here's something much, much crazier…
October 9, 2009
Sepia latimanus
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
October 9, 2009
I know this award is heavily politicized, but this is ridiculous: Barack Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009. I don't think Obama's efforts for peace have been particularly notable — the wars still drag on with no end or even promise of an end in sight, and there has been some…
October 8, 2009
Nicholas Wade has a very peculiar review of Richard Dawkins' book, The Greatest Show on Earth, in the NY Times Review of Books. It's strange because it is a positive review which strongly agrees with Dawkins' position on the central importance of the theory of evolution in biology in the first half…
October 8, 2009
There is a poll in Germany that will determine who will win a "Dedication Award" for service to the community. You can vote on it! In fact, you better vote on it! Here are the top 5 leaders in the votes right now.
Elisabeth von Wedel, Homöopathen ohne Grenzen e.V.
1514 Stimmen
Raul Krauthausen,…
October 8, 2009
The Supreme Court just heard arguments in the case of Buono v. Salazar, a case which is challenging the use of a gigantic cross on federal land, which was initially erected to honor WWI dead but has now become a cause celebre for the wanna-be theocrats who want official endorsement of America as a…
October 8, 2009
Would you believe that Tom Coburn (Repugnant, Oklahoma) has introduced a bill to end funding for political science research? He even suggests that people should just watch Fox News or CNN instead, as if those are examples of objective, empirical research.
Well, heck, if that's the way it works, let…
October 8, 2009
By now, you probably already know that Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath won the Nobel in chemistry for their work on the structure of the ribosome, and a well-deserved award it is. They (and many others) put a lot of work into puzzling out how this central feature of the…
October 7, 2009
The Digital Cuttlefish tells me in rhyme that a new ring has been discovered around Saturn, a huge (13 million km radius) but low density cloud of dust that is responsible for splattering Iapetus with dark material. Very cool.
The Cuttlefish also informed me that lazy ol' Phil Plait hasn't covered…
October 7, 2009
Yeah, probably. It's a letter from Einstein that we'll have to brandish next time some faitheist claims Einstein for their cause.
The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are…
October 7, 2009
I was looking for a Hallmark card with that on the cover (and also, preferably, a sad-eyed puppy dog) to send to Josh Rosenau and Chris Mooney, but they didn't have one, so I had to settle for a blog post. Here's the sad puppy, at least.
Oh, Internet, you are like a giant greeting card store that…
October 7, 2009
I'm in Cincinnati — I was flown down here to give an interview for a Canadian show, as I mentioned before. They bumped up the time of the interview to shortly after I arrived here, which was nice…I'm all done now! Free in Cincinnati! Of course, then I fly out early tomorrow afternoon, so I don't…
October 7, 2009
This is a promotional video for CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. When I meet any Australian scientist in the future, I will be expecting them to break into song.
October 7, 2009
The town of Lockland, Ohio is another of those places that worships a graven idol, an ugly stone block with the ridiculous 10 commandments on it . They never read it, though, or they'd notice that Commandment #2 says they shouldn't worship graven idols…and actually, if they read them at all, they'd…
October 7, 2009
It's not that funny. Anyway, here is this utterly hideous 'infographic' ('infographic' is the term they use when they torture information with a useless pile of graphic clutter) which tries to illustrate the changes in the numbers and percentages of various religious beliefs with a photo of a group…
October 7, 2009
Be warned, this tribute is a song in Satan's genre, that loud rock music.
October 6, 2009
Feel like watching a little TV tonight? PBS is showing a new Nova tonight, Darwin's Darkest Hour, which looks to be about his worries about publishing his theory.
October 6, 2009
Ouch. What a painful piece of right-wing kitsch.
I had no idea that Jesus personally delivered the Constitution, or that it was a religious document.
If you go to the site hosting this…thing, you can mouse around and it will spell out the symbology behind all those figures. I rather like the…
October 6, 2009
Well, actually, Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak won the prize for discovering telomeres and telomerase, a strange and clumsy arrangement that we have evolved to cope with the fact that our enzymes make awkward fencepost errors when they hit the ends of our chromosomes.…
October 6, 2009
I get thrown the miracle of the shroud of Turin on a regular basis — just last week someone confronted me with it, basically saying "A-ha! Jesus existed because there's an old scrap of cloth with a face on it!" It doesn't matter that I point out that it's been dated to the 13th century, and was…
October 6, 2009
There is an utterly ludicrous evangelical 'course' which has been advertising in England by slapping big ol' polls on the wall. Like this one:
As is, those boxes are blank…but man, they're just begging to be filled in, and a lot of people can't resist walking up to them and marking the right…
October 5, 2009
I'm supposed to remind you down-under people that the 2010 Global Atheist Convention, The Rise of Atheism, is taking place on 12-14 March in Melbourne. You have to sign up soon or you won't be in the uprising, and you'll find yourself trampled beneath the iron treads of our all-conquering robot…
October 5, 2009
Liberty University has this new program to adopt a liberal…and then pray really hard for them. It's a good idea, since if nothing else, it keeps the rapscallions off the street doing something entirely unproductive. Unfortunately, looking at their list of liberals, most of 'em ain't. Olympia Snowe…
October 5, 2009
One flaw with a small school in a remote location is that we only occasionally get great speakers to come all the way out here to give lectures. Now look here: Rutgers has Alan Leshner coming out to speak on Evolution's Impact on Science and Society, while Princeton has Sean Carroll speaking on…
October 5, 2009
The Minot meeting this evening was lots of fun; what made it especially entertaining was that it was attended by a few fervently deluded creationists who boldly asked questions at the end. I got a few variants of "you're uncivil, so I think you're wrong" (tough — peddle bullshit arguments, I'll…
October 5, 2009
I have to finish writing up all the interesting stuff I heard at the AAI convention, but once again, I'm on the road — I'm driving up to Minot, ND to give a talk tonight at 7pm in the Aleshire Theater on the MSU campus. I'm going to be spending most of my day driving, I think, and then talking, and…
October 5, 2009
The far right wing has long rested their authority on Biblical truth — how can you possibly question them if they speak for God, after all? There is one little problem, however.
The Bible is suffused with liberal bias. A lot of the Old Testament isn't bad, but the New Testament, when Jesus makes…
October 3, 2009
Uh-oh. It seems membership in the Atheist Nexus Pharyngula group has been slipping, and has actually fallen behind Atheist News. I've been challenged to encourage more people to join Atheist Nexus and join the Pharyngula group, so we can take the #1 position.
You're probably all going to join…