Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
March 6, 2008
Yeah, I cried at the story of The Dog, the Cat, and the Giant Squid.
Quick, someone, get the movie rights!
March 6, 2008
Greg Laden has some inspiration for life science teachers. It's good advice, too, on how to charge forward and do a great job in your chosen career.
March 6, 2008
Teachers, come to Minneapolis this summer! Not for the Republican convention, but for the other great big important meeting that will be taking place: Evolution 2008.
Teachers in particular get a really good deal: a special workshop is planned, specifically on the teaching of evolutionary biology…
March 6, 2008
This is pretty bad. It's a school called the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science, and the concept is great — bring smart high school students in to college early, where they can get more advanced instruction from professors. It sounds like the faculty are good and competent, near as I can tell…
March 6, 2008
Somewhere south of San Francisco, there is a billboard that declares that there is physical proof of the existence of a god, and which suggests that you read their website. A reader sent it to me, and being the sort of open minded fellow who doesn't believe in any gods but is happy to look at any…
March 6, 2008
Ooooh, it's a simple recipe and accompanying video for cooking octopus. I want to do this. My wife and daughter would see that video with rising horror, and are probably greatly relieved that they've got me quarantined in the frozen midwest, far from any coast where I might actually come home some…
March 5, 2008
The latest Tangled Bank is available at Archaeoporn. The theme is … Ben Stein. Yeesh. That makes me feel a little queasy.
(By the way, there's a glitch in the numbering. This one actually is the 100th edition.)
March 5, 2008
The Vatican wants to erect a statue to Galileo, which is ironic enough. But to put the cherry on top, they plan to place it near the cell where he was held during his heresy trial. Do you think they're doing this as a sign of papal humility, a sort of grand, ornate slap to the forehead and…
March 5, 2008
Will Smith's last movie, I Am Legend, was apocalyptically bad — in particular, the ending was awful. Now Phil has the alternate ending that was filmed but not used — I agree with him that it's not perfect, but it is immensely better, and is also a little closer to the spirit of the book.
March 5, 2008
All right, so she's not a child any more, but she'll always be my baby girl … and she doesn't seem to think highly of the Kalam Cosmological Argument. Does anyone?
(Yeah, she's probably going to beat me up tonight for calling her a child. "So silly a mature 17 year old can see through it" just isn'…
March 5, 2008
This one is just too cute for words: a little girl summarizes Star Wars. The younger your eyes, the better that movie looks.
Uh, well, maybe this one isn't appropriate for lunch. There's nothing immediately off-putting about it, but it will sneak up on you. It made me laugh, anyway.
March 5, 2008
I despise him.
He's an ignorant buffoon and a professional liar. I hate what he does in his attempts to corrupt public education, but as a human being, I find him simply contemptible.
I just had to set the record straight. He seems to be taking pride in who hates him, but there really is nothing…
March 5, 2008
A couple of small towns in Vermont passed an unenforceable law to declare Bush and Cheney criminals. I like it. Personally, I favor something more like Megan's Law, in which Bush and Cheney would forever after be required to register with local law authorities where ever they go, with their names…
March 5, 2008
A Catholic bishop (of a weird breakaway sect, admittedly) has endorsed the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion and declared that Jews are conspiring to rule the world.
Obviously, the man must be an evolutionist. Only through Darwin can one become a hateful racist.*
*Necessary disclaimer: obviously, I'…
March 5, 2008
I and a diverse group of people got a question in email, one that we are supposed to answer in a single sentence. The question is,
What is evolution?
You know, Ernst Mayr wrote a whole book to answer that question on a simple level, and I'm supposed to have the hubris to answer that in one…
March 5, 2008
In the creation wars, we never really win one — we just shuffle the battlegrounds around. That's the case in Florida, where the committee to write the state science standards recently approved the inclusion of evolution in their standards. We cheered. This is what's supposed to happen when you get…
March 4, 2008
In the races for the two open seats on the Texas board of education, the merely conservative wackjobs beat the freakishily flaming conservative wackjobs, staving off a creationist working majority. This is progress. I probably shouldn't call it a victory, though — it just means the fight for…
March 4, 2008
It's good to hear that God has retracted his endorsement of Mike Huckabee. That's one pious fraud out of the race.
There's still one more servant of theLord in the running, though, and I'm still conflicted about it. I'll vote for him, alright, but contrary to the assertions in that link, his pious…
March 4, 2008
Nerds everywhere will be grieving: Gary Gygax has died. I haven't played the game in a long time, but I had a lot of fun with it in my undergraduate years — if they haven't succumbed to mold and decay, I have the original manuals somewhere down in my basement. I also had a set of miniatures, but…
March 4, 2008
For those of you who don't follow the comments…you might want to try and read this one. I don't quite know what it's about, my eyes glazed over.
Just so you know what kind of evil person I am, I actually contemplated disemvoweling that magnum opus before mentioning it. Just the thought of hundreds…
March 4, 2008
There's going to be a meeting this summer in Altenberg of a small subset of evolutionary biologists to discuss the next step in the evolution of evolutionary biology, which this article describes as a "Woodstock of evolution", populated with scientific "rock stars". All I can say is "bleh." This…
March 4, 2008
Good morning, anti-censorship intellectuals! Remember that story from January about Abunga Books, the online bookstore whose sole unique feature is that it claims to "empower decency" by enabling prudes to vote to censor their offerings? Now it has made ABC News. It's amazing how much press this…
March 3, 2008
We now have an estimate of the cost of the Iraq war. Remember when our administration was blithely proposing that it would require a few billion dollars?
The authors present a damning "Nightline" transcript in which one official, Andrew Natsios, blandly told Ted Koppel that Iraq could be completely…
March 3, 2008
OK, I say uncle. Everyone's been sending me the story of the hexapus, the six-armed octopus found in England. Sure, he's cute…
…but I'm afraid it's not that big a deal. It's an ordinary sort of error — we know that cephalopod limbs develop from primordia that exhibit a pattern of fusion as it is,…
March 3, 2008
Shelley and Steve have completed their fusion and opened their new blog, Of Two Minds, today. I guess when you meld those two, the end result is James Kakalios, since the subject of the new blog seems to be the superpowers of comic book heroes. That could be loads of fun!
March 3, 2008
Huckabee may not stand a chance of winning a presidential nomination, but he can still make his pernicious influence felt.
Next year the Texas State Board of Education will be writing the science curriculum standards for Texas public schoolchildren, and Huckabee may bring enough conservative…
March 3, 2008
As a parent who has read every single opus in the Seuss oeuvre multiple times, and as a parent of at least one such youngster who has since graduated to Dr Who fandom, today's Sluggy had a special je ne sais quoi. Some of those books would have benefitted from the addition of Daleks, especially…
March 3, 2008
The newest edition of Encephalon is online. And while you're thinking about science carnivals, I'll remind you that the next Tangled Bank will be at Archaeoporn on Wednesday, so it's time to send those links in to me or host@tangledbank.net.
March 3, 2008
My animus for Jonathan Wells knows no bounds — he's an appalling fraud who doesn't understand the science he criticizes. Case in point: he recently smugly asserted that a recent study to characterize the molecular changes involved in the evolution of one kind of antibiotic resistance involved no…
March 2, 2008
What are the key innovations that led to the evolution of multicellularity, and what were their precursors in the single-celled microbial life that existed before the metazoa? We can hypothesize at least two distinct kinds of features that had to have preceded true multicellularity.
The obvious…