Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
April 29, 2008
…that the colossal squid is dissected and displayed by webcam to the world. It's also the day I'm in class from 10:00 on, and have a Café Scientifique to attend, as well as another job candidate seminar, so I'm going to have to catch it all after the fact.
Anyway, Happy Squid Hacking Day to you all…
April 29, 2008
I have to criticize the video below. It's a beautiful piece of work, and the animal it shows is spectacularly well-adapted, but it does not demonstrate the fulfillment of a uniquely Darwinian prediction.
An orchid was found with a nectary that was only accessible by way of a long, narrow tube,…
April 28, 2008
I thought Jebons were supposed to be a joke … so what is this lunatic ranting about?
Warning: this is from GodTube, so unless you've got a fair amount of tolerance for crazy, deluded talk, you might not want to click on it.
Just in case you didn't want to puke up your dinner by actually watching…
April 28, 2008
Remember that poll we crashed over the weekend? Apparently, whoever is administering that web page went to work today, approved a bunch of new suck-up comments, and deleted it. Heh.
You can still view the poll at polldaddy: 98% (418,948) said ID shouldn't be taught in schools, 2% (8,901) asked what…
April 28, 2008
Matt Taibbi went off on a three day Christian retreat, and discovered how ridiculous they are…but he also discover the deep emotional, anti-intellectual pull of these kinds of events.
By the end of the weekend I realized how quaint was the mere suggestion that Christians of this type should learn…
April 28, 2008
It's criminal to ruin the brains of children.
He definitely has some talent, though. Should I adopt his rhetorical style for my classes?
April 28, 2008
What fresh horror could drive the American Family Association to call out the troops? Evil, repulsive soap operas.
Procter & Gamble has resumed using explicit, open-mouth homosexual kissing in their soap opera, "As the World Turns."
So stop buying soap and shampoo, Christians! If you aren't…
April 28, 2008
So you're pining away for ERV, hoping either that her site will be restored or that she'll bring her new site up quickly. Don't sit there weeping and wailing, she'll be back online soon enough. Cheer up and laugh! Here are a few links to help you out.
Science and reality television.
A lunar…
April 28, 2008
My fellow academics, have you ever noticed that when our science students have problems with writing, we send them off to get tutorials from the people who know better, over in the English department? Our campus has a writing room where students can get advice from experts before they hand in their…
April 28, 2008
Edmondson is one of the creators of the "Beware the Believers" video, and this interview continues the pattern—he's intriguingly ambiguous.
April 28, 2008
Lots of you have noticed that the ERV blog is currently inaccessible. Abbie can't get to it either, and something is very, very wrong — either a random glitch or some peckerwood reported her site to the powers-that-be at google and a kneejerk pulled the plug. She is going to be trying to get it…
April 28, 2008
A reader reminded me of a good corrective to the awful little man who claims that science leads to killing people: a dose of Jacob Bronowski.
"When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the…
April 27, 2008
What a vile little man. I sincerely hope that his career is dead now … and that the rest of his life will be spent eking out speaking fees at Christian fundamentalist conventions, before audiences who will cheer him while dreaming of the day the Jews are exterminated or converted, bringing on…
April 27, 2008
This is some email I suspect a lot of you have already received; look at it through new eyes, though.
It's from Premise Media (I'm on their mailing list, and have been for a long time…how else could I have gotten an invitation to their premiere?), and I present it here as I received it, except that…
April 27, 2008
The other day, I mentioned that the Bemidji State University television station was broadcasting anti-scientific nonsense, a series of programs by a creationist loon that were just plain stupid. It may not be a fully official response, but one of their student broadcasters has issued a painfully…
April 27, 2008
Watch the communal spawning of squid off the California coast.
It's the last thing they do: one huge orgy of mating, and then they collapse, spent and dying.
April 27, 2008
Warning: this is an extremely disturbing video. It's of an unpleasant and rather personal surgery, in which a man had a can of perfumed body spray stuck in a certain orifice, requiring a medical extraction. The circumstances and the graphic operation are distressing enough, but what's most…
April 27, 2008
The colossal squid that was caught last year is in the process of being thawed prior to a public dissection. The Te Papa Museum of New Zealand is pulling out all the stops and are going to have webcams recording every step of the process — the schedule of events is online. I'll be watching.
This…
April 27, 2008
Remember: Atheists Talk radio will be on in a few hours, at 9am Central, from Minnesota Atheists. I have no idea what the subject will be today — it shall be a surprise.
April 26, 2008
For a guy who has been dead for 126 years, he's pretty lively. You must see the result of a contest to caption a photo of Darwin's statue and the odious Ben Stein: trust me, Stein gets less than he deserves.
You just can't keep a brilliant man down. Charles Darwin also has a blog.
April 26, 2008
This is a very cool video of an octopus opening a bottle. It's entirely in Finnish, but you don't need to know the language to understand what is going on.
April 26, 2008
John Lynch has a list of so-called pretentious books — books that are often listed as unread. Wilkins has followed up with his own. It's a curious list, though; the only ones I'd definitely call pretentious are anything by Rand, and maybe the books by Hawthorne (an author I find unpleasantly bad).…
April 26, 2008
I think he's due, but he's not the only one. It's like our entire army is being turned into a pocket theocracy.
When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending.
But minutes into the…
April 26, 2008
Birmingham, Alabama apparently has a serious crime problem. That's bad news, but to compound it all, they've got a mayor who is a fecking idjit. Mayor Larry Langford has a plan to deal with crime.
At Tuesday’s Birmingham City Council meeting, Mayor Larry Langford proclaimed Friday, April 25, a “…
April 26, 2008
Maybe you think it's spring — I don't, I just looked out through ice-glazed windows at half a foot of new snow — and you're thinking about the garden. Here's an idea: you don't need to take a trip to the Galapagos to study evolution, you can do it right in your backyard. The New York Botanical…
April 25, 2008
That former blot upon the fine educational system of Minnesota has ended up at "Harding University, a private Christian school in Searcy, Ark. She'll be the dean of graduate programs and an associate professor of education.". Good for her, and at least now her damage is limited to only 6,000…
April 25, 2008
There's a rumor that it's late April, and this is supposed to be Spring … but I just looked out my window and it looks like we're having a blizzard right now.
It's not April, it's Minnesota!
April 25, 2008
Octopus maorum
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.