pharyngula

While I'm off absorbing knowledge, entertain yourself with this video of drug-treated spiders. I'm going to be the one on caffeine, I think. SICB update: last night was a social evening, and I got to meet John Lynch for the first time. In person, he's actually exactly like he is on the blog:…

You can catch Tangled Bank #70 at ¡Viva La Evolución!

In the race to SICB, GrrlScientist has beat me here to Phoenix, and she had so much further to fly. Now we're just waiting for that slacker, John Lynch, to show up. Tired now. Must drink beer.

Pat Robertson . In what has become an annual tradition of prognostications, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson predicted Tuesday that a terrorist attack on the United States would result in "mass killing" late in 2007. "I'm not necessarily saying it's going to be nuclear," he said during his news-…

Global warming. It's all our fault. As the world becomes over run with sin more and more souls are sent to stoke the fires of Hell. As the Earth produces more heat our environment becomes more hostile. We must repent in order to stop our polar ice caps from melting. At least the Muslims are to…

They will be dealt with severely.

Wilkins is wondering when the real criminals will be punished—he's talking about the abuses of power by the current Republican administration, ranging from the evisceration of civil liberties in our own country to criminal and unjustified foreign wars, with the concomitant loss of hundreds of…

Prepare yourselves, Arizona! John Lynch, GrrlScientist, and I will be wafting into Phoenix tomorrow, and here's a short version of our busy calendar: All week: Science! I'll plan on posting updates about various cool things I learn, as I'm sure my SciBlogs colleagues will also do. Friday, 6ish:…

There's some pulse-pounding high speed insect racing action going on in this animation, and one excellent dipteran crash, but otherwise, not much resolution to the story, and the nice spider gets shafted. And I was rooting for the spider.

Here's a beautiful summary of Grand Canyon geology.

Edge has this annual question, where they ask a lot of smart people something general and provocative, and collect the essays into a webpage. This year, the question is "What are you optimistic about? And why?" There are a lot of answers, many of them very specific—people are optimistic about the…

Am I going to face the wrath of the anti-vaccination kooks for linking to this? Bring them on. Orac has an article that thoroughly disgusted me: a report on the infamous MD, Andrew Wakefield, who published an article in The Lancet that claimed to have found a link between the measles-mumps-rubella…

The definitive book on the history of the creationism movement is The Creationists(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Ron Numbers (and I have to remember to get a copy of the new expanded edition). Numbers has an interview in Salon which starts off well, but as it goes on, my respect for the guy starts…

At the daughter's insistence, I've updated the link to the Pharyngula chat room on the left sidebar to http://www.zirc.org/chat/, or if you'd prefer to use a real live IRC client, you can get to it via #pharyngula on irc.zirc.org. I'm not there too often, but Skatje is—don't distract her too much,…

Bill Dembski has posted a list of three pathetic predictions for Intelligent Design: that there will be two books published by the usual suspects (Behe, and Wells and Dembski) and that there will be a 'research center' at some unspecified university. Whoop-de-doo. For a major, groundbreaking,…

Why is it that I, nasty ol' atheist who is completely ignorant of theology and religious history, can see the parallels in the execution of Hussein, but our theocracy-sympathizing leaders bumble along, failing to see the damning errors of their position? Glenn Greenwald's post on the ineptitude of…

We've got conflicting chronologies: a young earth history that is virtually all relatively recent human history, and a scientifically accurate one that encompasses 4.5 billion years of geological and biological change. How to reconcile them? Well, if we just divide everything in geology and biology…

Somebody warn Dawkins about his analogy! Athorism is enjoying a certain vogue right now. Can there be a productive conversation between Valhallans and athorists? Naïve literalists apart, sophisticated thoreologians long ago ceased believing in the material substance of Thor's mighty hammer. But the…

The declining scientific content expressed by the National Park Service has been an issue for years; the latest complaints (that I wrote about, and that Wesley Elsberry has now brought up) are just recent flareups of awareness. The National Park Service seems determined to strip out anything…

Because Skatje might just replace him.

Maybe it's a bad, bad idea for a community to have an open-access electronic bulletin board, because it sure is a great tool for exposing the ugly underbelly of the group. Kearny, NJ has had its moment of fame, with the story of the history teacher babbling nonsense to his class, and Jim Lippard…

I am not going to praise John Derbyshire; some people seem to be impressed because he has penned a dismissal of the ID creationists, but jebus, that ought to be the absolute rock bottom minimum we should expect from rationalists. That he can clear a hurdle set one inch above the ground does not…

I don't believe in New Year's resolutions—they're always so narrow and boring. I'd rather advance some bigger goals. When I was a young fellow, and my father was teaching me how to swing a bat, he'd tell me I shouldn't aim to hit the ball, I should try to swing through it. When he was teaching me…

Read the account of Saddam Hussein's last moments—it's a strange thing. Hussein was an evil man, but still, he carried himself at the end with strength and courage and a good amount of anger. The whole scene sounds like it was tawdry and crude; the US continues to reinforce its growing reputation…

The daughter has put up a post with her thoughts on abortion—I swear I have not given her any instruction or even talked about the subject with her, but somehow she has developed roughly the same opinion on it that I have…which means, of course, that the kooks will whine at her. I can't even…

It's the 16th Circus of the Spineless. And they've got my cookies!

You can now read Richard Dawkins official statement on the controversial petition over at the Panda's Thumb.

It's hard to believe, but there is more information on the absurd board game designed by Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort. Cameron said, “We are very excited about this game because it presents both sides of the creation evolution argument, and in doing so, shows that the contemporary theory of…

I don't think I showed this video in the flurry of Architeuthis posts a while back, but if so, it's worth seeing again. It is rather sad how limp and exhausted the poor animal looks as they drag it in.

Jason pitches into that twit, Peter Hitchens—you may recall that I dealt with the same column a while back, but that level of stupid does support double-teaming to counter it, I think.