Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
October 23, 2007
Is it close to your dinnertime? Zooillogix is looking out for your health by helping you stick to your diet, with this tantalizing assortment of interesting foods. Escamoles, lutefisk, and baby mice wine don't look too bad to me, pacha is unappetizing to look at but I could probably choke it down,…
October 23, 2007
Street Anatomy highlights the most frequently viewed medical animation ever: an illustration of the difficult path for childbirth. It's too bad it doesn't show the effect on the kid in much detail — our babies all came out with the most astonishingly pointy heads from all the squishing and…
October 23, 2007
It's not a real proposal, but someone has come up with a provocative new genre, Squidpunk.
Fiction that unlike New Weird, Steampunk, or Slipstream, is at its core not only about squid, but about the symbolism of squid as color-changing, highly-mobile, alien-looking, intelligent ocean-goers. As a…
October 23, 2007
Do we have to wait until he's elected to impeach him? 'Cause right now I'd like to see Huckabee kicked off the campaign trail and sent back to repeat grades 6-12.
Oh, I believe in science. I certainly do. In fact, what I believe in is, I believe in God. I don't think there's a conflict between the…
October 23, 2007
Let's get this out of the way: I really, honestly, truly do not give a good goddamn if Dumbledore is gay. He's a fictional character, the author is getting a little too freakily obsessive over her characters, and it doesn't affect me one way or the other how the character swings. So Rowling says he…
October 23, 2007
Here's an article that deserves a prize. It's wall-to-wall praise-Jebus babble, giving the Lord of the Universe credit for getting the Colorado Rockies baseball team into the World Series—have a puke bucket handy if you actually try to read the whole thing.
"You look at some of the moves we made…
October 23, 2007
The chemists among the readers here have probably already all heard this, but there is a bit of a flap in the American Chemical Society over Open Access publishing. It seems some within the ACS have been protesting Open Access; unsurprisingly, it seems that many of them have connections to the…
October 23, 2007
Ben Stein and Bill O'Reilly.
Bill made a thousand creationist hearts flutter in dismay when he opened with his introductory definition: "intelligent design, that is, a deity created life". It was, unfortunately, the last hint of intelligence in the whole segment.
Ben Stein is an astonishingly…
October 22, 2007
Perhaps Barack Obama really wants to make sure I won't vote for him. At least, that's how I'm interpreting his attempts to couple environmentalism and religion.
Meeting the threat of global climate change will take hard work and faith, Obama said.
"Not a blind faith, not a faith of mere words, not…
October 22, 2007
The winner of this month's Molly award dominated the voting this time around — I guess the combination of cephalopod and poetry was irresistible. Everyone congratulate Cuttlefish, OM.
October 22, 2007
I knew of D.B. Cooper, the famous mystery man who jumped out of a plane with a few hundred thousand dollars ransom money, and was never seen again — I grew up in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s, so of course I was familiar with the story. Now here's a weird little twist: there's a new suspect in…
October 22, 2007
At least it's an interesting and unusual way to expire: a man in India was killed by a horde of wild monkeys. Not many people get to have that written in their obituary.
Reading further, I see that some places in India have a real problem with monkeys overrunning them, but I was surprised at this…
October 22, 2007
Prepare to have your opinion of Jerry Seinfeld diminished. He's a scientologist, for the dumbest of reasons.
"They have a lot of very good technology. That's what really appealed to me about it. It's not faith-based. It's all technology. And I'm obsessed with technology."
Scientology and…
October 22, 2007
It's Monday. You're tired after your weekend, you aren't too enthused about getting back to work, and it's just so dispiriting to have to get back into the grind. What do you need with your coffee? An unsurprising tale of a very stupid person, so that your boss and your coworkers will look like…
October 22, 2007
Richard Mellon Scaife, that horrible little man with an immense fortune who has been propping up institutes loudly supporting right-wing family values, creationism, and gutter-scraping attacks on Democrats, is getting a divorce. Not just any divorce — a train wreck of a divorce, prompted by Scaife'…
October 22, 2007
Earlier, I mentioned this Templeton Foundation ad that showed some people claiming the universe has a purpose, and others validating the silly question by saying maybe it has a purpose. I noted at the time that no one seemed very interested in saying what that particular purpose might be, or more…
October 21, 2007
Quick! I'm late in announcing this! The Tangled Bank will appear on The Radula this Wednesday — send links to your science writing to me or host@tangledbank.net before Tuesday!
October 21, 2007
It would be a terrible slander of decent Neandertals…but otherwise, we probably wouldn't notice much difference.
October 21, 2007
You've still got time — I'm in the Ridgedale public library, and Hector Avalos is getting ready to give his talk on "How archaeology killed biblical history"…come join the crowd if you're somewhere in the Twin Cities area.
You're too late now! I saw several familiar faces at the talk, and there…
October 21, 2007
Last night, in my talk, I said that I didn't think religion was necessarily a force for evil. Then, this morning, I was sent a link to some convoluted religious sophistry that made my lip curl in revulsion. Maybe I was wrong.
The link will take you to an article by Orson Scott Card in which he…
October 21, 2007
We had a good time at St Olaf tonight — it was a small group, I gave a short talk, and we had lots and lots of stimulating conversation afterwards, along with my favorite pizza (jalapeno and pineapple). I've tucked what I sort of said below the fold.
I am here to bring you some good news.
The…
October 20, 2007
They don't like it. But they love Jesus. At least, that's the message I get from this interview with Dahmer and Chuck Colson's fear of Richard "Maddog" Dawkins.
Are these the best celebrity endorsements of Christianity around?
October 20, 2007
Squeeeee! I like totally love Robert Hooke, and now you can read Hooke's notebooks online. The broadband version is phenomenal — it's like leafing through the 17th century.
October 20, 2007
I have arrived in beautiful Northfield, MN (motto: "Cows, Colleges, and Contentment." I expect a placid audience for my talk tonight). My first impression, right after passing St Olaf College, was an odd one: what is that strange chocolatey aroma I'm smelling everywhere? Shortly afterwards I came…
October 20, 2007
It's another weekend of travel for me. Tonight, I'm off to St Olaf, that fine Lutheran institute of higher learning, to rail against the corruption of science by religion. I'll be speaking at 6 at the Lion's Lair, Buntrock Commons, out there in Northfield, MN (wait…"lion's lair"? Do they mean that…
October 20, 2007
My next lecture in my neurobiology course is going to be about metabotropic receptors and how modulating internal cGMP levels is one way neuronal activity can be affected. I was planning to use the eye as an example of this process — but now Revere has inspired me to add a bit about the penis and…
October 19, 2007
But of course! When a group of people express a similar behavior pattern, such as defending racist conclusions or making ev-psych style explanations, there can only be one possible explanation: there must be a genetic basis for the behavior. I can't imagine any other reason.