This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly. Hmmm…a baby echidna is called a puggle? I did not know that.
Status: Heavily Moderated; Previous thread
Member of a native invasive species in a parking lot at Petrified Forest NP, AZ
Lauren Kuehne has an interesting guest post at the blog Conservation Bytes talking about one of the most persistent false dichotomies in the environmental world: native versus exotic species.
A drawback to the attention garnered by high-profile invasive species is the tendency to infer that every non-native species is bad news, the inverse assumption being that all native species must be ‘good’. While this storyline works well for Hollywood films and faerie tales, in ecology the truth is rarely that simple.
There’s a desert angle here that I’ll talk about after the jump, along with some videographic reptile squee. You have been warned.
There’s a charity auction going on for Doctors Without Borders, and among the items being sold are autographed photos of various people. Aron Ra is dismayed that his photo is going for a quarter of the price of Matt Dillahunty’s.
Here’s the whole listing of the charity auction. At least my photo is selling for more than the price of the ballpoint pen. If you really hate me, I suggest you start bidding on that pen and get the price higher.
Heh. I notice that the bidding for the pen is already climbing. It really is a magnificent writing instrument, awesome in its elegance and beauty, and deserving of far more than $1.58 — in fact, I’m sure it’s worth ten times the price of that photo of a homely guy with a beard.
I’ve mentioned before the dishonest distortions of evolutionary biology that the slimy scumbags at AVoiceForMen promote, but I didn’t know how deep the lies go, because I really can’t stomach reading or viewing their garbage. Cristina Rad exposes that phony, GirlWritesWhat, and unearths a few surprises. I knew she had made some baseless accusations against FtB and Skepchick, but if I’d taken my anti-nausea medication and listened to her further, I would have heard some astonishingly bad evolutionary rationalizations for men to own, abuse, and control women. Fortunately, Cristina got mad enough to listen to the whole thing, and has extracted and debunked the idiocy.
These people are just like creationists, making up bullshit about the science to promote toxic nonsense. How can anyone with any knowledge of evolution bear to be associated with them?
Richard Dawkins provides some clarity on religion and creationism.
So this guy sails over to the New World, kills and enslaves some local populations, brings human beings back to Europe as curiosities, and also unleashes a whole series of nasty plagues that devastate the people of the American continents over the next several centuries…and we celebrate this event?
How about if we don’t?
Here’s a great suggestion: rededicate the day to exploration, and do it in the name of Neil Armstrong, someone who didn’t initiate a wave of genocide and was by all accounts a decent human being. It serves two purposes: it stops enshrining a rather nasty event, and starts celebrating a noble purpose. Easy. It’s such an obvious idea, I don’t know why we haven’t done it already.
Oh. It’s got 90 signatures so far. It needs 25,000. That’s why it hasn’t happened yet.
South Korea is strongly infected with the Evangelical Christian plague, and for a while there, there was real concern that the creationist lobby in that country was gaining some clout, and like Texas, was going to censor evolution from their biology textbooks by removing mention of fossil evidence. Good news, everybody! The scientists and educators got their act together and fought back.
On 5 September, the panel concluded that Archaeopteryx must be included in Korean science textbooks, and it reaffirmed that the theory of evolution is an essential part of modern science that all students must learn in school.
The battle is not over, of course. The polls aren’t promising.
Duckhwan Lee, president of the Basic Science Council and the panel leader, says he hopes that the panel’s guidance will eventually improve the public’s understanding of evolution. In July, a survey by Gallup Korea, a research firm based in Seoul, found that of 613 respondents, 45% believed in evolution and 32% believed in creationism.
32% creationist? That’s bad news.
Perspective: the US is 40-50% creationist.
I attended that most English of institutions, a Church of England Boarding School. My mother was a lapsed Catholic and my father was inscrutable on such issues but he did pick the school.
The school advertised its “pastoral” approach to the care of the young men who attended. Girls were only admitted in the 6th Form (for any US readers – that is the last 2 years of study before a pupil leaves at 18 years old). Chapel attendance was compulsory. There was a school service every week on a Sunday, a week day service for your class and a weekly event called a House Meeting that was for members of your house (think fraternity without the beer, or porn, or TV other than the news or sport) that was partly a meeting about upcoming events and partly an excuse to get a pupil to write a short morality based story that always ended with the “Christian Family Prayer” (The Lords Prayer). There was also Religious Education classes that never mentioned any other faith at all, despite the demands of the National Curriculum.
It’s an honor and a treat to have had PZ ask me to join him here at Pharyngula. Though there have been months lately where I haven’t been a particularly exuberant participant in the lively and collegial discussions here, my relationship with Pharyngula goes back a ways — back to ought-four, in fact, back when the blog was hosted on the Cray 2 in PZ’s undersea lair, and commenters underwent a series of strong electric shocks in an early form of CAPTCHA technology. It was just me and Hank Fox commenting back then, I think, and Old Man Buell the painter, and a giant ground sloth name of Shep. Good times.
Despite that long tenure, though, I haven’t been really active here all that much. I read regularly, but aside from that lurking, and the requisite supporting you all in email, I’m really kind of a newbie here. So a few things about me to get out of the way so you know who you’re talking to: [Read more…]
It was a real stem-winder. Finally, a liberal democrat uncloaked himself and spoke the truth.
Slamming his fists on the lectern until his hands began to bleed, Obama proceeded to lay out a “three-point plan of sin and lechery” for his second term. If reelected, the president said, he would begin by banning organized religion entirely—starting with Christianity—and burning all churches to the ground, preferably “with their wretched, Jesus-loving congregants still huddled inside like rats.”
As members of the audience violently tugged at their genitals and howled like sex-starved, atheist wolves, Obama stated that his administration would then seek to make free, taxpayer-funded abortions legal at any stage of pregnancy, even up to one full year after birth, in order to supply his newly created “federal stem-cell harvesting plants” with raw materials.
Oh. Wait. Sorry. Wrong text. That was the secret speech he gave at the Godless Cabal. Here’s the one he gave at the DNC. It was a bit more conciliatory, but it wasn’t bad.
