It’s the last week for the fundraiser for the conference on secular women, to be held in Minneapolis this summer. Last chance! Get your donations in by Thursday!
This wacky Saudi cleric has a novel proof that the earth does not rotate. You see, if the earth rotates, then all you’d have to do to fly west* is get in an airplane, hop into the air, and stay stationary and wait for your destination to roll up under you. And you wouldn’t be able to fly east because your destination would keep rolling away from you. Therefore, the earth must be stationary.
We have another of those really long-running threads, focused on the problem of race in America, and particularly the issues highlighted by events in Ferguson, Missouri. There’s no shortage of material, and it keeps going and going, hampered only by the limitation of the blog medium: in particular, that I automatically shut down all discussion threads after 3 months, to block spam. That’s not enough time!
So here’s another semi-open thread — talk about America’s race problem. Forever, or until it’s fixed.
This is an amazing “discovery”! Someone named JA Tetro has been selling interviews and articles to women’s magazines and other credulous sources, claiming that your microbiome is the key to compatibility.
Tetro says that when you kiss your date, his or her germs make their way into your mouth’s ecosystem. And if it’s a match, you’ll want to keep smooching.
This study does one amazing thing, it shows you that kissing is the best way to find a mate for the long term. It might sound really gross but if the bacteria from the other person harmonizes with your bacteria, your immune system is all good. You feel a sense of calm and happiness, maybe even addiction,he explained.
But if the bacteria don’t align with your microbes, you actually feel disgust and revolt. Your immune system is rejecting that person as a possible mate.
Look at the extravagantly pulvinate abdomen of this female fly — it’s very sexy to the male fly. But it’s all a FAKE. Misandry! Conniving, scheming female!
Or maybe it’s because they think it needs practice? I’m in Los Angeles. I’m going to be speaking at 11am and 4:30pm in two different places about Bad Biology: How Adaptationist Thinking Corrupts Science. It might piss some people off, which leaves me unperturbed, since I’m right.
Several years ago, when that awful Expelled movie came out, I did a radio interview with Mark Mathis, one of the producers. It was hilarious. I was talking about their dishonesty in getting interviews and how the movie was misleading propaganda, and by the end, Mathis was reduced to shouting in answer to every question, “HE’S AN ATHEIST!” That’s all had to do, he thought, to rebut me: expose the openly known fact that I also proudly mentioned on the header of my website, and he’d crush me (and with some members of the audience, it was probably true.)
For some reason, I remembered that when I was reading Milo Yiannopoulos’s attempted rebuttal of Brianna Wu.
Breaking news: an attack on a cartoonist who had drawn a picture of Mohommed has led to another death.
Gunmen stormed a Copenhagen building Saturday where controversial cartoonist Lars Vilks and his supporters had gathered, killing one man and wounding three police officers before driving away from the scene, police and witnesses said.
People killing people over bad ideas…it’s got to stop.
I’m taking a shortcut in my talks at CFI LA: I’m going to flash a slide with a partial list of my sources for the ideas in the talk, and knowing that there is no way anyone will be able to scribble them all down even if intensely interested, I’m posting them here ahead of time. Your carpal tunnel will thank me.
Earlier this week I was asked to write something for This View of Life and Darwin Day: what would surprise, delight, and possibly disturb Darwin about modern evolutionary biology? I did, but I guess it didn’t make the cut: you can find the better ones at What Would Darwin Think About Modern Darwinism?
It’s OK that they didn’t print mine, because now on this busy day I can just reuse it as blog fodder.
