Well, I am delicious, so I guess I could hardly blame her

Not for sensitive stomachs, but if you’re interested in what your pet will do if you happen to up and die on ’em, here’s a survey of post mortem scavenging by pets.

I am not at all surprised about the cats.

Cats get a bad rap for being the most eager to eat their owners, and anecdotally, some emergency responders say it’s pretty common. When it happens, cats tend to go for the face, especially soft parts such as the nose and lips, says forensic anthropologist Carolyn Rando of University College London.

“It doesn’t surprise me, as a cat owner,” she says. “If you’re sleeping, they tend to swat your face to wake you up.”

See? No one is surprised about cats wanting to eat your face off. Which is why I’m going to replace our cat with a goldfish.

A gathering of freethoughtbloggers

We’re doing this again, only this time I’m planning ahead a bit more. At 3pm Central, I’ll be hosting a few more of the bloggers on this network — exactly who will be a surprise.

We’ll go live at 3 or thereabouts. I think you can also do a text chat here with us.


Our guest was Matt Herron of Fierce Roller, and we talked about the evolution of multicellularity (a very cool subject — he works on Volvox, which is right there on the boundary between colonial and multicellular organisms), a little bit about weird creationist ideas, and a bit about social justice in the science community. Check out his blog!

You are not being censored!

Well, probably. Not most of you anyway.

We stealthily migrated to a new host server in the dead of night, and everything went smoothly except for a few minor glitches…one being that our comment whitelists kinda got lost. If you posted something and it did not get automatically approved, give it a little time and we’ll get around to whitelisting you again.

If we like you, that is.

Enough with this buggy hosting service

Freethoughtblogs is moving! We’re not getting much help with the bugginess from our current hosting service, so we’re packing up the ol’ collection of data and moving it to a new site. This’ll be mostly invisible and painless, but there might be a brief lockout tomorrow or the day after as the transition is made. The pattern of glitchy interruptions should end early this week.

Open thread

We are currently struggling with technical difficulties — we’re up, we’re down, we’re taking forever to load, pages pop up instantly, you just don’t know what you’re going to get when you visit freethoughtblogs today. So for those who brave the hostile technology, say what you want, while we hammer on the infrastructure.