Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
October 9, 2007
I was sent this by Pekka Pekuri on Facebook, and all I can say is…niiiice.
Where is Superman when we need him?
October 9, 2007
I just had an odd idea for another of those blog memes, and this is very much an experiment. It may be too complex to last long, but I just want to toss it out and see if anything interesting happens; it's one where the answers may be interesting in one way, but the structure of the questions might…
October 8, 2007
The best response so far (much better than mine) is Possum Momma's. She points out that all the sins Siegel sees expressed in the godless seem to be just as prominent in contemporary Christians.
I really didn't need to know about "Christian Domestic Discipline" or Christian porn.
October 8, 2007
Good news: the new education commissioner for Florida is not Cheri Yecke. It's someone named Eric Smith, about whom I know nothing, so we'll have to wait and see if they're an improvement.
Ugh. The improvement is only marginal. He's another conservative testing rodent who thinks the answer is…
October 8, 2007
One last compendium, I think, unless I find unusually large quantities of Cephalopod Awareness links in my mailbox tomorrow.
A whole museum dedicated to octopus balls? The Japanese can be very strange, Tikistitch.
How to eat a cephalopod, if you're a mosasaur.
Nifty squid art.
What? A…
October 8, 2007
Sam Harris responds to the reaction to his speech at the Atheist Alliance meeting.
Is it really possible that PZ Myers and Ellen Johnson think I was recommending that we stop publicly criticizing religion or that I am hiding my own atheism out of "shame and fear"? I would not have thought such a…
October 8, 2007
Since it is close to dinner time, it's probably the perfect moment to gather your kids around and show them this movie of a snake vomiting up a dead hippo. Tell them we have a fun new game to play after our meal. Don't tell your spouse! And don't tell anyone I told you about this!
October 8, 2007
More cephalopods are being celebrated everywhere. Send me more!
Cephalopod eyes, and a question: Does your god like octopuses more than men? I don't know about you, but any gods I might have would be cold and cruel and regard us both with unheeding contempt.
A tentacled bra? For belly dancing…
October 8, 2007
Shelley Batts of Retrospectacle is up for scholarship for bloggers, and she needs your vote. You must vote for Shelley. She once gave me a special cookie in her bed. None of the others have ever given me or you a cookie of any kind, and we aren't going to get anywhere near their beds, so the choice…
October 8, 2007
I've known for years that this was going to happen: Mario Capecchi, Oliver Smithies and Briton Martin Evans have won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work on targeted gene mutations. If you're interested in what kinds of work they've done, I described one paper on Hox regulatory evolution, and…
October 8, 2007
We have another round of cephalopodic loveliness. Send me more!
Chris Clarke contemplates the word "sepia".
Why chiropractors shouldn't mess around with invertebrates.
Kevin submits the ubiquitous octopus vs. shark movie.
How can something so cute be angry? (Oh, man, I hear that one all…
October 8, 2007
Yes, it's true: we have now absorbed Laelaps. Update your links and feeds.
It's like some ravenous chthonic entity, isn't it? Got a blog? We'll devour it. But it's a good thing, and I like being part of an all-consuming juggernaut of science.
October 8, 2007
Thank you, Dr House. "Rational arguments don't usually work for religious people otherwise there would be no religious people." Also good: "It's not about fun, it's about the truth."
October 8, 2007
You have to read this essay to believe it: Militant atheists are wrong. It's a collection of what I call indignant pieties — "how dare atheists challenge my precious faith!" — and it's also distilled, concentrated, essence of stupid, painful to read and even more agonizing to have to waste time…
October 8, 2007
Here's the first volley of cephalopod recognition posts I've received. Do send me more, and I'll put them up later. Do me a favor and put "Cephalopod Awareness" in your subject line so I can sort them out more easily.
The blog that kicked this all off, Cephalopodcast, has a vintage octopus…
October 8, 2007
Remember, it's International Cephalopod Awareness Day! Send me links to your articles that express your appreciation of our 10- and 8-armed friends, and I'll periodically put them up right here on Pharyngula.
October 8, 2007
You'd never guess who the second largest religious group at Missouri State University might be. And they get hate mail and threats just for existing!
If that link doesn't work, try this:
Thanks, Greg!
October 7, 2007
As promised, I attended Tom DeRosa's creationism talk this evening, and as expected, it wasn't very informative but it was mildly entertaining. He's a good, enthusiastic speaker — he's just unbelievably wrong. We might have a recording later on; Skatje was taping it, but it was just with our little…
October 7, 2007
You may have heard about the 21-foot long half-scale model of the X-Wing that was built to actually fly, using solid fuel rockets. It was launched yesterday. The results were caught on video, and it is spectacular. There were lots of kids watching this thing, the announcer does the countdown, it…
October 7, 2007
Lots of people have been sending me links to this NY Times story on churches adopting video games to lure teenagers back to the faith. I am amused. I find the trend to be a very encouraging sign.
To get this out of the way: I don't think violent video games make for violent people, so the whole…
October 7, 2007
Moi? Mentioned in the Waco Tribune? Defending a creationist? I knew that remark would come back to bite me. At least the author misspelled my name, so my shame won't spread too far (except, unfortunately, that I seem to be more widely cited as "Meyers" than "Myers"). Anyway, it's a letter by Robert…
October 7, 2007
I've written a long introduction to the work I'm about to describe, but here's the short summary: the parts of organisms are interlinked by what has historically been called laws of correlation, which are basically sets of rules that define the relationship between different characters. An…
October 7, 2007
So I missed the Atheist Alliance convention. I'm still going to make it to the Freedom From Religion Foundation convention in Madison on 12-14 October. Who else will be joining me there?
October 6, 2007
Jonah unkindly mentions that California will spend three times as much operating its prisons than running the UC system. Doesn't that reassure you so much about America's priorities?
October 6, 2007
John Dennehy's citation classic this week is The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme, by Gould and Lewontin. It's one of my favorite papers of all time — if you haven't read it, you should do so now. It contains a set of ideas that are…
October 6, 2007
A certain evil old (and now deceased) affliction on the world is being considered for canonization, and they're tallying up miracles, an absurd activity in itself. One of the "miracles" they're weighing is that of a man whose kidney stone cleared up after visiting a children's home founded by…
October 6, 2007
Cuvier, and his British counterpart, Richard Owen, had an argument against evolution that you don't hear very often anymore. Cuvier called it the laws of correlation, and it was the idea that organisms were fixed and integrated wholes in which every character had a predetermined value set by all…
October 6, 2007
Oh, no! I just found out that Monday, the 8th of October, the tenth month, will be International Cephalopod Awareness Day, as also discussed on TONMO. I have so little time to prepare! Everyone else get kraken, too, and remember to send me links to your cephalopodic celebrations in cyberspace on…
October 5, 2007
Josh talks about the difference between teaching about ID and teaching ID. There is a huge difference that the Discovery Institute does not seem to understand.
I am opposed to teaching Intelligent Design in the classroom. It's an absurd idea that is unsupported by any evidence — it has not earned a…
October 5, 2007
Hoo boy. It's scandal time in Evangelica again. Richard Roberts, son of the infamous Oral, and his wife Lindsay, seem to have been skimming the cream off their university budget (and in her case, perhaps, off young male students).
Richard Roberts is accused of illegal involvement in a local…