Since the wingnuts and creationists are busily pushing a bogus version of intellectual responsibility that they have labeled “academic freedom”, which is really an excuse to peddle any old nonsense to children, some wag is now promoting Academic Free-For-All Day.

Ever since that sad debacle known as the “Enlightenment”, a cult of knowledge-and-learning has insisted that any investigation be based on what has been learned in the past. How limiting! If we can only free our minds from the yoke of wisdom, the possibilities become endless. Also, there is way too much hero worship these days. Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, blah, blah, blah. They are just a bunch of old dead white guys. Why stand on the shoulders of giants when we can peer from between their ankles?

On Academic Free-for-All day, everyone can have it their way. Don’t worry if 99.9% of the experts on some subject agree on one conclusion about the facts — if your ‘gut’ says differently, then go for it! No matter how wacky the idea is, you can usually find a handful of cranks with Ph.D.s to back you up!

They also have a t-shirt contest, always the hallmark of great ideas.

Ann Coulter has been pestering me a lot, lately. Half the right-wing email I get seems to consist of that thick-skulled harpy howling insanely about Al Franken — she seems genuinely staggered by the possibility that us left-wing moonbats actually fought to get him elected.

I’m a bit dismayed to learn that she is Roy Zimmerman’s girlfriend.

One of my students said I had to show you this, because it’s exactly like one of my lectures.

There are also reasons D, E, F…etc., that I’m sure any sufficiently apologetic Christian will trot out for us, but they’re all of ever-increasing absurdity. Most seem to subscribe to a less comical version of A, blaming his reluctance to manifest on a Divine Snit over the Fall.

Personally, I favor answer answer Ω: there never was any god to blame. Simple, clear, reasonable, and it fits all the facts.

At last, biologists get some respect from xkcd…and it features cephalopods. Seriously, no other branch of science has anything as wicked cool as the diversity of life to play with.

By the way, the artist reveals his physics bias when he has the cuttlefish crudely zapping their targets with boring old electricity. A much more subtle and powerful strategy would be to use them as vectors for a modified strain of Vibrio that would infect the brains of their victims, causing them to both glow in the dark and have an irresistible desire to close out their bank accounts and mail the contents to me…but no, I have said too much. He almost got me monologuing there.

Since everyone is sending me this link, I’ll go ahead and mention the amusing comparisons between various religions and programming languages…however, I am deeply offended. They left out the greatest programming languages of all, Pascal (especially Object Pascal) and Modula-2. What’s with all this praise for obscurantist C and its dialects? Wirth’s languages win on clarity and structure.

Perhaps it is because they can’t be compared to religion in any way.

Yeah, they’ve got us there.