Paul Z. Meyers
pharyngula
Posts by this author
November 30, 2011
First, a nice bit of news: Marc Stephens, the lunatic who stirred up the recent blogospheric buzz with his clumsy thuggery, no longer has a "professional relationship" with the Burzynski clinic, that warehouse of quackery. One thing about charlatans is that they have a fine-tuned sense of who might…
November 30, 2011
This video has been going around — it's a group of women talking about the importance of evolution to the biological sciences.
I confess to cringing in a few places — there's too much ready equation of evolution with natural selection — but I certainly wouldn't question the competence of these…
November 29, 2011
These canny engineers have at last realized that the proper model for robots is biological, and have built a soft-bodied walking robot. The future belongs to inflatable technology!
Have no fear. They're mostly benign.
(Also on FtB)
November 28, 2011
Aww, poor Intelligent Design creationism is feeling unloved. Or perhaps it's jealousy. David Klinghoffer, that clueless ideologue at the Discovery Institute, is whimpering that blogging scientists aren't paying enough attention to his brand of creationism.
Darwinian scientists who blog -- in other…
November 28, 2011
Billie Bainbridge is four years old, and she has an inoperable brain tumor, and her prognosis is not good. Her family is desperate, and has been frantically trying to raise money from the community to cover the costs of a treatment they've been told might cure her. They need £200,000. They are…
November 28, 2011
I know you kids like the youtube and hate that tl;dr text stuff, so if you couldn't find the patience to read my post on Islamic embryology, you can now watch the screen instead. The Rationalizer goes through the 'science' in the Quran and shows that it's largely plagiarized from Galen, and that it…
November 28, 2011
Here's a terrific webcomic exposing the silliness of acupuncture. People are always citing these awful studies at me that they claim support the efficacy of acupuncture, and like the comic says what I see when I read them is that the advocates have gone "anomaly hunting after any statistically…
November 26, 2011
Cats are so undignified, yowling and screeching and spraying urine all over the place. They should take a lesson from the noble sea cucumber, rising erect, proud and firm from the sea floor, and quietly, affirmatively ejaculating long voluminous streams of gametes that gaily wave from the tip, like…
November 25, 2011
Do these claims make you at all suspicious? A few people on Twitter told me I should look into this panacea.
Cures heart disease!
Eases anxiety and depression!
Removes unsightly moles!
Arthritis! Snoring! Diarrhea! Acne! Diabetes! Removes warts! Mighraines! Lose weight! Alcoholism! Glaucoma…
November 25, 2011
Somebody clone Attenborough, quick — the British nature program must continue forever! His latest documentary is Frozen Planet, and all I've seen of it is short clips on youtube and various other sites…which just makes me want to see more.
Here is a time lapse video of a brinicle forming: a column…
November 23, 2011
I have read the entirety of Hamza Andreas Tzortzis' paper, Embryology in the Qur'an: A scientific-linguistic analysis of chapter 23: With responses to historical, scientific & popular contentions, all 58 pages of it (although, admittedly, it does use very large print). It is quite possibly the…
November 23, 2011
Sad news: Lynn Margulis, advocate of the endosymbiosis theory of eukaryotic origins, has died. She was smart, creative, and promoter of a lot of wild ideas…and to her credit, some of them were even right. I think her greatest strength was her eagerness to step right out to the edge of science and…
November 22, 2011
I've heard of the Scoville scale, which measures the potency of spicy peppers. Those boring green bell peppers get a 0; habaneros get a score of 350,000.
The stuff those UC Davis police officers so casually hosed into the faces of peacefully demonstrating students? between 2,000,000 and 5,300,000…
November 21, 2011
(Also on FtB)
November 21, 2011
Inspired by Skepticon, several of the speakers at that event have been redrawn as ponies.
Is the next step…furries?
(Also on FtB)
November 21, 2011
Soon, we'll be able to reach you anywhere.
And no, your precious cats will not be able to save you.
(Also on FtB)
November 21, 2011
The 2011 blogging scholarships are up for a vote — $10,000 goes to the winner. As you might guess, we want a science blogger to win — there are lots of good candidates, and Christie Wilcox has compiled a list of the science bloggers, but I had to place my vote for David Shiffman, just because…
November 21, 2011
As I was going through my usual morning roster of webcomics, I discovered that Sci-ence referenced an earlier one I missed — the Red Flags of Quackery. There are certain tell-tale signs that you're dealing with woo…like the abuse of the word "quantum".
But then you all already knew that Sci-ence…
November 18, 2011
I'm in Springfield, Missouri, and today at noon I'll be joining a mob of skeptics and atheists at the Gillioz Theater to prepare to hit the Creation Ministries of the Ozarks. We shall descend upon them as a horde and sweep through their "museum", documenting the foolishness and mocking the silly.…
November 18, 2011
(Sent by Eric Houg; taken off Islas Coronados)
(Also on FtB)
November 16, 2011
The infamous Kensington Runestone is kept in a museum just a few miles up the road from me. It's a carved rock that was dug up on a farm in the 19th century by a Swedish farmer, and purports to tell the tale in runes of a doomed Viking expedition that had come down from Hudson's Bay to meet a…
November 14, 2011
I think I hate this graphic. It purports to calculate the odds of your existence, and concludes that the chance is 1 in 102,685,000: So the odds that you exist at all are: Basically zero. Now go forth and feel and act like the miracle that you are."
Graphic, and why it's bullshit, below the fold.
(…
November 14, 2011
I hate to see a great university system get thumped upside the head by chowder-brained legislators, but that's what's going on in New York. The chancellor of CUNY is pushing for a major revamp of the curriculum, system-wide. This ignores the unique culture at each institution and tries to turn them…
November 14, 2011
In this TED video, Philip Zimbardo talks about an ongoing concern, the opting out of boys from academically and socially — boys are more likely to drop out of school, girls outperform boys at all academic levels, boys are 5 times more likely to be diagnosed with ADD. The difference also leads to…
November 11, 2011
I'm feeling a little hipster resentment here — all these nouveau poulpe crashing into my internet turf. But oh, OK, this new blog on SciAm called Octopus Chronicles looks good, and you know I'm never going to abandon the molluscs in a snit over all the other people fascinated by them. There's room…