Oh, that guy

Rebecca Watson is going off to China, and she’s already getting veiled threats from some guy called ShenzhenTony. Who? Rebecca did some sleuthing, found out his real name is Tony Ryan, and further, discovered that he’d been formerly known around the web as Coffee Loving Skeptic…and I remember that ass! He was at the center of one of the more surreal bits of psycho MRA drama back in 2012. Coffee Loving Skeptic was one of many skeptics who totally lost their mind over ElevatorGate, who raged at Rebecca Watson, and flung bits of spittle my way on Twitter.

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CFI rebukes a whole lotta jerks

CFI has made an official statement about Melody Hensley, PTSD, and harassment, calmly pointing out the facts…which entirely support Hensley, and reinforces the assessment of certain vicious fucking loons who’ve been running a long-term harassment campaign of being…well, vicious fucking loons. Loons with a lot of time on their hands. Loons who troll.

I stand with Melody, as I have all along.

Signs of the coming apocalypse

Duck Dynasty is being translated into a musical theater production.

Undertaking one of the more audacious theater projects in recent years, the Robertsons — known for their long beards, duck-hunting merchandise and occasional inflammatory remark — are moving to expand their Louisiana-based multimedia franchise with “The Duck Commander Family Musical.” The 90-minute show, with actors playing the family members from A&E’s “Duck Dynasty” as they celebrate the family’s long history from rags to riches, hopes to open in February at the Rio hotel and casino, where the Chippendales show and Penn & Teller are now running.

Nausea writhes uneasily in the belly of this beast.

It’s like getting a disillusionment enema every morning

Is everyone’s morning like this? You get up, you get dressed, you get a stimulating beverage, you knock back the giant pill your doctor is making you take, and then you open the Email and the Twitter and get reminded again that humanity is a great big complex organism that is pocked with suppurating ass pimples, and they’ve all got your address. Today I got to meet @Auto_Math.

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The Discovery Institute, professional as always

I get fundraising emails from the Discovery Institute. You’d think they’d realize the utter futility of asking me for money, but it is a source of cheap laughs, especially when they say really stupid things to drum up cash for their liar’s institution. They love to throw their website numbers at me, which makes me really laugh.

In 2013, ENV had more than 700,000 unique visitors. This year we are on track to receive more than 900,000 unique visitors. That’s a lot of people who are benefitting from our daily coverage from writers including Casey Luskin, Ann Gauger, Paul Nelson, Jay Richards, John West, David Klinghoffer, and more.

Idiots, every one. Unless you’re a circus, it’s not usually positive PR to list the clowns on staff. But it’s their next paragraph that made me do a double-take. Innumerate as always, the Discovery Institute:

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Is #OzsInBox getting full yet?

Check it out: America’s Quack, Dr Oz, opened the door to questions from the nation by inviting everyone to ask him stuff on the hashtag “#OzsInBox”.

I think we can safely say that his ‘favorites’ will be an incredibly tiny proportion of the whole, and that he won’t be promoting this hashtag on his show.

It’s so nice of the space robots to fit themselves to my schedule

It’s Wednesday. That means from 9-11 I’ll be in my office, doing some light grading and prepping for today’s lecture, and 11-12 are my official office hours, in which students will stop by and tell me things. And at about 10:30 my time, the Rosetta spacecraft will be bolting itself to Comet 67P, which we’ll know about once electromagnetic waves have taken their own sweet time to cross the solar system about a half hour later. That works for me. I’ll pencil “Rosetta” in for 11ish. I’ll make tea.

I’ll pull up the ESA live webcast and have that running while I’m taking care of other business. This is certainly a civilized way to go about exploring the universe!

I just noticed that Philae is now on the comet, securely anchored to the surface. I’ve also discovered that, my God, watching engineers is the most boring activity on the planet. The entire live feed consisted of bored-looking people staring at consoles, trying to look intelligent while doing pretty much nothing at all, and then everyone erupts into cheers when they get the right beep.

Sticking to biology now. I’ll look forward to learning about the data, but otherwise…yeesh.

What they should have done is turned the camera away from the tedious engineers (and especially the one in the tastelessly tacky and grossly offensive shirt), and focused on the images coming in from the device.