Lots of sites have been talking about this creature this weekend, so I’m late to the party…but stand in awe of the tentacular pyrosome now, if you haven’t already.
(via Deep Sea News)
Posting will be light today — this morning, I’m at the Houston Oasis, and then this afternoon I’ll be at Answers in Science. We’re hoping to snack on creationists all day long.
The sordid story of Colin McGinn, the sexist philosopher at the University of Miami who was compelled to leave his tenured post, is a rich source of academic pretension. The guy is a master at making up pseudo-intellectual excuses for repulsive creepiness.
Both Mr. McGinn and the student declined to provide any e-mails or other documents related to the case. But Amie Thomasson, a professor of philosophy at Miami, said the student, shortly after filing her complaint in September 2012, had shown her a stack of e-mails from Mr. McGinn. They included the message mentioning sex over the summer, along with a number of other sexually explicit messages, Ms. Thomasson said.
“This was not an academic discussion of human sexuality,” Ms. Thomasson said. “It was not just jokes. It was personal.”
Mr. McGinn said that “the ‘3 times’ e-mail,” as he referred to it, was not an actual proposal. “There was no propositioning,” he said in the interview. Properly understanding another e-mail to the student that included the crude term for masturbation, he added later via e-mail, depended on a distinction between “logical implication and conversational implicature.”
I gotta remember that “conversational implicature” line for when I’m caught plotting and conspiring. I suppose it beats just claiming academic authority as proof I can’t be a bad guy.
This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly. Nice larva.
Status: Heavily Moderated; Previous thread
Nahla Mahmoud is the spokesperson for the Council of Ex-Muslims in the UK. Salah Al Bandar is a director of the Sudan Civic Foundation in the UK. Al Bandar has chosen a dangerous method to politically suppress his opponent: Al Bandar has incited Muslims to threaten Mahmoud and her family.
Following an interview on Channel 4 on Sharia law, Islamists have threatened Sudanese secular campaigner and Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain Spokesperson Nahla Mahmoud with death, calling her a ‘Kafira’ and ‘Murtada’ who has offended Islam and brought “fitnah”. The threats have been reported to the police who have closed the case and advised that nothing could be done.
…
Nahla writes: “I am most concerned with the harassment by Mr. Salah Al Bandar. Not only is he endangering my health and sense of safety and security in the UK, but he is also organising against me back in Sudan in ways that are potentially very dangerous for both myself and my family. As a consequence, my younger brother has been physically attacked in Sudan, my mother has been seriously threatened and I continue to get threats and have had to endure a number of cyber stalking episodes by Mr Al Bandar or his associates.”
I don’t just support Nahla Mahmoud, I oppose the kind of vicious demagoguery perpetrated by Al Bandar, which has no place in any civilized nation.
The New Humanist has announced and posted the cover story for their next issue of the magazine: a celebration of Iain M. Banks. What does a science fiction writer have to do with humanism? All is explained:
…Banks also engaged, with the creation of the Culture, in a piece of sly, prolonged and magnificent anti-theism. I don’t so much mean because, here and there, he used his wide screen for explicit attack on elements of religion, as in Surface Detail’s Hieronymus Bosch-worthy demonstration of the repulsiveness of the idea of hell. I mean that the Culture itself represents an elegant absorption of, and therefore displacement of, one whole department of religious yearning. It offers, in effect, a completely secular version of heaven. With its sentient ships as omniscient as any pantheon of gods, and a lot more obliging and benign, and its vision of human nature uncramped from disease and hunger and oppression, and its rationalised equivalent to transcendence, it gives its inhabitants (and you as you read the books) all the pie in the sky they could possibly want; but transformed by being made wholly material, by being brought within the reach of human aspiration. Where religion, on the Marxist reading of it, is a kind of comprehensible counsel of despair, the heart of the heartless world, Banks supplies a counsel of optimism.
Oh, sure, Stephanie will tell you about all the other stuff going down at the Minnesota Atheists’ Regional Conference next weekend, the good and the bad, but she’s afraid to tell you what’s in the box. Well, I’m not…my sin is envy, and I’ll gladly share with you what’s in the box, just to steal a little attention.
Don’t look below the fold. Just don’t.
I forgot — yesterday was Freethoughtblogs second birthday. So we’re at the stage where we’re mostly potty-trained, but we say “NO!” a lot and throw the occasional tantrum?
Just wait until next year. Three is the age of Peak Cuteness — we’ll be all adorable and winsome, and we’ll all be thinking we should have another one, but it’s all downhill from there until we hit our teens and start demanding the latest technology so we can chat all night long with the other blog networks.
Oh, yeah, I’ve been there a couple of times.
I probably shouldn’t read the Texas Freedom Network the day before I go to Texas. They do good work, but whoa, they need to — Texas is one thoroughly screwed up state.
The creationists are upset that we’re going to be talk about science at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. They’re demanding that we be banned from the museum, because evolution ain’t a science, don’t you know, and we’re just planning to spread anti-Christian propaganda.
When people bind Christianity to anti-science lies, then yes, we’re going to criticize the lies, and yes, the Christians are going to cry that we’re attacking their religion. Christianity is not a get-out-of-jail-free card; it should not give you immunity to criticism.
The saddest part of this effort to mind is that the museum is defending our participation by claiming neutrality — they say “we do not have a position on any religion, politics or other topics of that nature”. That’s tragic. When religion or politics contradicts science, a science museum should take a stand. One of the reasons this country is in such a sad state is that most of our pro-science organizations have been effectively pithed by the first amendment, which has been a great tool to shelter religious idiocy from any opprobrium.
For example, the State Board of Education is going to be reviewing high school biology textbooks this year, and they’re already packing the committee with creationists. These are people whose credentials rest largely on their association with creationist ministries, their recognition by creationist organizations, and their employment in Christian private schools. These are anti-science zealots, and Texas blithely hands over control of science textbooks to these kooks.
So that’s what I’m flying into tomorrow: conservative America on meth and steroids. At least I get to hang out with the rational subset of the state.
Also, I love this song by Wimme Saari.
