The fabulous Shaenon Garrity has drawn a steampunk version of #gamergate — here’s part 1 and part 2. Very entertaining.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
The fabulous Shaenon Garrity has drawn a steampunk version of #gamergate — here’s part 1 and part 2. Very entertaining.
The FFRF is going after two schools that have posted this plaque in their building:
The community is outraged, and Fox News is on it!
I’ve had people try to tell me that Ross Douthat may be conservative, but that he’s a thoughtful and interesting guy. My response usually involves incredulous, speechless goggling at them, but now I’ve got one pithy response:
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat spoke at a fundraising event for the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a right-wing legal group that works to defend anti-LGBT discrimination and supported the criminalization of homosexuality.
The image below is a phylogram, illustrating the degree of variation in a sequence of mitochondrial DNA. The concept is fairly simple: if two DNA samples are from individuals that are evolutionarily distant from one another, they’ll have accumulated more differences in their mitochondrial DNA, and will be drawn farther apart from one another. If the two individuals are closely related, their DNA will be more similar, and they’ll be drawn closer together. That’s the key thing you need to know to understand what’s going on.
There are other, more complicated analyses going on in the figure, too: the branching pattern is determined by analyzing subsets of shared sequences, and it takes a fair bit of computing power to put the full picture together. You’ll just have to trust me on that one, but all you need to know is that the branches are objectively calculated, and that the distances between the tips of the branches and their last branching point tell you something about the degree of genetic disparity in the group.
Unrooted phylogram of mitochondrial DNA sequences.
Gagneux P1, Wills C, Gerloff U, Tautz D, Morin PA, Boesch C, Fruth B, Hohmann G, Ryder OA, Woodruff DS. (1999) Mitochondrial sequences show diverse evolutionary histories of African hominoids. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 96(9):5077-82.
Not the Tolkien story, but the discovery of Homo floresiensis occurred ten years ago. Nature has published a fascinating set of personal statements by the people involved, and you get a real sense of the drama of it all.
Chris Kluwe posts on #gamergate. He’s not nice about it.
Dear #Gamergaters,
Do you know why you piss me the fuck off?
Because you’re lazy. You’re ignorant. You are a blithering collection of wannabe Wikipedia philosophers, drunk on your own buzzwords, incapable of forming an original thought. You display a lack of knowledge stunning in its scope, a fundamental disregard of history and human nature so pronounced that makes me wonder if lead paint is a key component of your diet. You think you’re making piercing arguments when, in actuality, you’re throwing a temper tantrum that would embarrass a three-year-old.
I woke up from a dream a little too early this morning. I dreamt that I had died and gone to a cliché. That’s right, I was standing before the Pearly Gates…only they weren’t so pearly, and St. Peter wasn’t exactly nice.
It’s too late for this, I’ve got to get some sleep — I have to go catch a plane in the morning. It’s a list of the most “Dad thing” people’s fathers have ever done, and it just made me sad. It’s all these embarrassing or old fashioned or idiosyncratic stupid quirks from their fathers. There’s a depressing tendency to treat older fathers as behind-the-times dopes, Homer Simpson on the way to becoming Grandpa Simpson.
So I had to think of the most Dad things my father ever did.
I’ll be on the podcast Atheist Airwaves this evening — I guess it’ll be streaming live, if you want to tune in.
This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly.
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