Would you believe the Urban Dictionary has an entry for PZ? It’s lousy—I can’t believe anyone uses the term that way, and I can’t imagine how they pronounce it. And pzizzle isn’t any better.
Myers, at least, has some punch to it: “Last name of any various white masked knife weilding bad muther *uckers.” I still think most of these entries are jokes sent in by people, especially when the spelling and grammar are atrocious, and that they don’t really have any common usage.
It’s time for a brand new Tangled Bank at the Behavioral Ecology blog. It’s got man-boobs, screwworms, and kumatos, so you don’t want to miss it.
(This article is also available on Edge, along with some other rebuttals to and affirmations of Haidt’s piece.)
Jonathan Haidt has a complicated article on moral psychology and the misunderstanding of religion on Edge. I’m going to give it a mixed review here. The first part, on moral psychology, is fascinating and a good read that I think clarifies a few ideas about morality. The second part, though, where he tries to apply his insights about morality to the New Atheists*, fails badly. I can see where he has thought deeply about morality, but unfortunately, he hasn’t thought clearly about the New Atheism (and perhaps that isn’t entirely his fault. We’re “New”, after all, and I don’t think the structure and goals of these New Atheists have quite gelled yet.)
A football player, Kevin Everett, suffered serious spinal cord trauma in a game the other day. That’s tragic, but the impressive part of the story is that he may recover to some degree thanks to advances in treatment, and most surprising, this comment from a consulting neurosurgeon:
“I don’t know if I would call it a miracle. I would call it a spectacular example of what people can do,” Green said. “To me, it’s like putting the first man on the moon or splitting the atom. We’ve shown that if the right treatment is given to people who have a catastrophic injury that they could walk away from it.”
No miracles, just hard work and fast action and science. Sounds like the right answer to me.
Continuing with our red theme this morning,
El PaleoFreak has some radical imagery. The bourgeois Darwin would have freaked.
Look — you can get them on a t-shirt! (Errm, wait — isn’t combining Darwin, Che, and the rampant capitalism of CafePress an example of head-exploding irony?)
The heroic Mario fights for the people. It’s inspiring.
(via One Good Thing. And to answer Flea’s questions, yes, yes, late teens, they had no problem, of course they are—but we threw every terrifying thing we could find at the kids, it wasn’t very scary, it was for kids, and you have to be the judge of whether you’re overprotective.)
On eBay, obviously!
The source is the PL Institute of Space Technologies. It’s an amazing place that offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in “Creationist in Sciences” (a Cr.S. degree is not equivalent to a bachelor’s degree, they say), and also carries out research in these fields:
“They” are using the plural pronoun, but I’m afraid I get the impression that it’s actually a singular fellow talking to himself in his garage. His biography page says that he’s not certain that he’s not a fruitcake and that he has a B.S. in electrical engineering. Shhhh, don’t make a big deal of it, the engineers are always embarrassed when another creationist engineer staggers out of the utility closet.
There’s an obvious design fla* in this experiment reported in the LA Times. The researchers ran a simple experiment *here the subjects *ere sho*n a series of letters, and they *ere supposed to tap a key *hen they sa* one, but not the another. The subjects *ere classified by their political vie*s, from left-*ing to right-*ing, and a correlation *as discovered: students *ith liberal vie*s had more brain activity and made fe*er mistakes than conservatives. This fits *ell *ith my biases, but I *ouldn’t *ant to s*ear to the trust*orthiness of the *ork. There *as a very poor choice in the design.
The letter that you *ere supposed to tap *as “M”. The one that you *ere supposed to avoid *as an upside do*n “M”, the letter also kno*n as “*”.
We won’t get to hear Kathy Griffin’s Emmy award speech — it’s being censored. Here’s what she said:
In her speech, Griffin said that “a lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus.”
She went on to hold up her Emmy, make an off-color remark about Christ and proclaim, “This award is my god now!”
The off-color remark was to say, “Suck it, Jesus.”
I thought it was funny. If I ever win an Emmy (do you have to be on TV to win that, or something?), I hope to remember to say something similar. It is, of course, ridiculous to censor someone for denying the influence of an invisible phantasm, but I guess the usual suspects got huffy. You know who I mean: the Indignant Sour Prune of the Airwaves, Bill Donohue.
The comedian’s remarks were condemned Monday by Catholic League President Bill Donohue, who called them a “vulgar, in-your-face brand of hate speech.”
Hate speech? Who did she hate? She laughed at an old superstition, mocking the habit of celebrities giving credit to an omnipotent ghost for nudging a shiny statuette their way. If Donohue were serious about his religion, he ought to be more upset at the trivialization of the Lord of the Cosmos into the guy who hands out trinkets.
