Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
April 16, 2007
Pimm is looking for examples of good laboratory homepages — he has links to a few, but is looking for more.
There is actually a conundrum there: most labs don't want to reveal work in progress on the web (except to a limited extent), they aren't particularly interested in public PR (something it…
April 15, 2007
You've got your choices: you wicked heathens can shake your fists at the heavens by reading Carnival of the Godless #64, or you granola-gobbling eco-freaks can savor Oekologie #4. Some of us can do both!
April 15, 2007
The BBC has another article on Ken Ham's creationism museum, and guess what they say?
Petersburg, Kentucky, is in the middle of North America. It is supposedly within a day's drive of two-thirds of the US population.
Aaargh, no. Kentucky is way over on the eastern side of the US. It is not within…
April 15, 2007
Once upon a time, some people on a road were stopped by a wall.
We didn't mind. It was a good place to stop for a while, and as more people coming down the road stopped at the wall, a community grew at its foot. Most people enjoyed gathering together, so the wall seemed like a fortuitous event, a…
April 15, 2007
Then let Josh Timonen know that you're interested.
If we were doing this right, though, it would involve ritual scarification and great bloody painful welts, rather than just a t-shirt. You're getting off easy.
April 15, 2007
There is a short interview with me at One Blog A Day, and they asked about you people, you know, you commenters here, and I was brutally honest. Please don't rise up and strip the flesh from my bones.
April 14, 2007
Nisbet and Mooney do it again, with an op-ed in the Washington Post … and I'm afraid they've alienated me yet further. I am convinced now that theirs is not an approach that I could find useful, even if I could puzzle out some useable strategy from it. In the very first sentence, they claim that…
April 14, 2007
If you missed it when the Bell Museum showed it, you've got another shot now: the Anthropology Club at UMTC is showing Flock of Dodos on Thursday, 19 April.
April 14, 2007
I'd watch this.
Hey, can we get a pairing of Celine Dion with Larry Moran?
April 14, 2007
John Holbo has devised a wonderfully useful coinage (don't be afraid to follow that link! It's only two paragraphs; he'll have to work it over for a few more weeks to expand it to Holbonian mass) that he applies to Jonah Goldberg's intellectual evasiveness.
To put it another way, Goldberg is making…
April 14, 2007
Thank you, Alun Salt, for introducing me to Mark Steel and wonderful lectures on the BBC—enjoy his version of Darwin and evolution, which combines information and humor.
April 13, 2007
Dang, Jim Kakalios outranks us all. After I mentioned my oblique appearance in a comic book, he responded with a promise to verify his appearances, and he has come through.
He's the Secretary of State in the DC universe:
Even more impressive, he's a god-like physicist who can manipulate universal…
April 13, 2007
No, it can't possibly be true! Jim Theis's masterwork, The Eye of Argon(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), has actually been published? As a book? With pages and a cover and all of that? I've known of this legendary monstrosity for years, and have read it online and as a tattered and stapled faded photocopy,…
April 13, 2007
Michael Alan Nelson, writer for the Fall of Cthulhu comics from Boom! Studios, sent me a couple of copies of the comic today, for some dark, mysterious reason. For a little context to this page, the two heroes have just witnessed a horrible suicide, and are going through the dead person's effects…
April 13, 2007
Science magazine has an article today on extracting and sequencing proteins from T. rex bones, and I'm already getting email from people wondering whether this is believable, whether it challenges the stated age of dinosaurs, whether this means we can soon reconstruct dinosaurs from preserved…
April 13, 2007
Everyone's talking about Kos, so in one sense he's done something smart, and he's going to rake in some more ad dollars over all this attention — but in another Kos has blown it, big time. He has dismissed the death threats against Kathy Sierra as a) same old story that he sees all the time, b)…
April 13, 2007
A reminder: the Darwin Fish Contest closes early next week, and there are lots of good entries right now, so competition will be fierce. Send your entries in soon!
Don't let these excellent carnivals distract you too much from expressing yourself artistically…or maybe something here will inspire…
April 13, 2007
Octopus berrima
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
April 12, 2007
Now I'm just going to have to give up — I can't top Ophelia, who just got a Jesus and Mo comic that references her. Maybe if I talked about epistemology more…
April 12, 2007
This simpering sycophant to John A. Davison has been spamming the site recently, yammering away to get everyone's attention despite the fact that he has been banned. Please do not reply to V.Martin, or anyone who is babbling about Davison — their posts will be deleted as soon as I notice them. This…
April 12, 2007
When you see a car labeled with creationist slogans parked, don't you expect to see a dozen guys with floppy shoes and big red rubber noses pop out of it?
(I think the fellow in this picture is mocking the car, so don't laugh at him if you see him in public.)
April 12, 2007
Remember "The Lost Tomb of Jesus"?
You can forget it now. Even some of the pro-Jesus documentarians featured in the show are backpedalling away from it.
April 12, 2007
People who have seen your photo and know your name might notice you when you pick up two-dollar hookers in the seedy part of town.
Another useful hint: when said observers later mention this fact, it is not a convincing disavowal to state that you do not hang out in the red-light district "on a…
April 12, 2007
First the ideologues came for evolution, making it uncomfortable for teachers to teach it, even when it is not only legal, but mandated by state education standards. What will they suppress with indirect social pressure next?
How about those bits of history the fascists and the religious find…
April 12, 2007
Here is a criticism of evolutionary biology:
…it is also true that the theory of evolution is not a complete, scientifically proven theory … We cannot haul 10,000 generations into the laboratory.
If a Bill Dembski or a Michael Egnor or a Ken Ham had said this — and it is exactly the kind of thing…
April 12, 2007
We all have a request from Kurt Vonnegut.
I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and…
April 11, 2007
Uh, right. That line comes from a story in a 1949 issue of Mechanix Illustrated, "Octopus wrestling is my hobby".
The story involves a ferocious octopus with 25-foot long arms that fought an entire village of people armed with clubs, knives, and spears—the description of the battle isn't at all…
April 11, 2007
Abject fan of the old Hammer Horror movies that I am, I was thrilled to see this bit from the 1959 version of The Mummy. Our hero, John Banning (played by the always wonderful Peter Cushing), has gone to the home of the suspected villain, Mehemet Bey (George Pastell), to see if this recent arrival…
April 11, 2007
…the Evilutionary Biologist. Another evilutionist enters the blogosphere!