The Sykes family has my sympathy — they have an autistic child, and that has to be difficult. My sympathy is limited, however, by the fact that are lashing out seeking to blame someone, have bought into the thimerosal hysteria, have hired a bottom-feeding shyster to sue various pharmaceutical companies, and said unethical ambulance-chaser is now using the power of the subpoena to harrass and intimidate bloggers who aren’t at all involved in the case, but have simply written about the absence of a thimerosal-autism link.

They have subpoenaed Kathleen Seidel of the Neurodiversity blog for, well, just about anything they can think of. She isn’t involved in the trial otherwise; she is a knowledgeable person with no special inside information on either the Sykes or the drug company, but has only written critically about the case as an outsider. For that, her reward is that a lawyer with a history of attempts to use bad science in legal cases wants to silence her.

There’s more on the case at Pure Pedantry and Overlawyered.

All right, people, I give up. Everyone has been sending me links to this story about a recent publication — it made the CBC, ScienceDaily, CNN, the Telegraph, and who knows what else — but I haven’t been able to get my hands on the original science article: Huffard CL, Caldwell RL, Boneka F (2008) Mating behavior of Abdopus aculeatus (d’Orbigny 1834) (Cephalopoda: Octopodidae) in the wild. It’s published in Marine Biology, sensibly enough, but out here on the prairie we don’t get much call for tales of kinky tentacle sex in the sea … or, perhaps, it’s all sublimated or hidden away (one does wonder what The Dream of the Soybean Farmer’s Wife might be).

Anyway, I ask this tentatively because every time I’ve asked for papers here I get inundated, but could someone please send me a pdf? I’ll announce it here as soon as I get one.

Hooray! I’ve got a copy already! I think this is what we call instant gratification. Thanks all.

Matt Nisbet is currently running a photo of Dawkins and myself with this legend: Dawkins and Myers: It’s Time to Let Others Be the Spokespeople for Science. Never mind the personal criticism, doesn’t he even realize how wrong that statement is? No, it’s worse than that; it’s so bad it’s not even wrong.

Who are the “spokespeople for science”? Is this a formal title conferred on specific individuals, is there a protocol for defining who gets the job, and most importantly, is there a salary? Nisbet doesn’t seem to realize that there are no spokespeople for science — there are just people involved in science who speak out; I don’t know of anyone who even declares themselves to be self-appointed spokespeople for science, especially not me, and not even more prominent representatives like Dawkins. Anyone who mistakes me for one of these mythical spokespeople for science, instead of a guy working within science who happens to have a blog, is too stupid to be taken seriously.

There’s also this bizarre implication that it’s a position someone lets someone else have, as if Nisbet just has to follow some esoteric parliamentary rules of order and presto, someone can be defrocked of their spokesperson’s robes and they can be conferred on someone else. Preferably Nisbet himself, apparently. There is no such process and no such power. All anyone can do is write and talk, and if people listen to them, fine, if they don’t, no problem. There is no autocracy or hierarchy that defines who can do what in this business. All I’m doing is writing, so all he can do is carp at me to shut up…ineffectively, alas.

That statement alone is sufficient to demonstrate that Nisbet is utterly clueless about science, and discredit his opinions completely. And this is the fellow who organizes AAAS symposia to tell us what to do? Weird.

Besides, everyone knows that I’m not the spokesperson for science. I’m the Elvis Presley of atheism. Let’s get the royal titles straight.

Remember to tune in to Atheists Talk radio on Air America this morning! I’m going to be traveling, so I’m going to miss it … but I’ll catch it later on their podcast.

Remember the Warda/Han affair, that daffy, sloppy, plagiarized paper that made it into Proteomics? That little pot is still simmering. If you can read French, you can read Quand un "puissant Créateur" s’invite dans une revue scientifique.

This one was in a London pub…the jealousy, it burns.

Martin is in a protracted Wikipedia battle with a cult, Falun Gong, that is trying to erase unpleasant aspects of their ideology from the record. I know there are a few dedicated Wikipedians aroung these parts, so you might want to help him out.

Important news!

• Daylight Saving TIme begins at 2am on Sunday, 8 March. Remember to set your clocks ahead one hour.

• You better set those clocks correctly so you can catch Atheists Talk radio at 9am. This week, it’s interviews with some of the bigwigs of American Atheists.

• Yeah, it’s my birthday on Sunday. I’ll be of the age that means I have three 17 year olds yammering at each other in my cranium, and I’m going to celebrate it with a quiet day spent getting some writing done.

Nerds everywhere will be grieving: Gary Gygax has died. I haven’t played the game in a long time, but I had a lot of fun with it in my undergraduate years — if they haven’t succumbed to mold and decay, I have the original manuals somewhere down in my basement. I also had a set of miniatures, but those definitely got battered into shapelessness by my kids playing with them (but I win in the end, since my oldest son left a huge collection of his fancy miniatures at my house. Maybe I won’t give them back.) My thanks to Gygax and his colleague Dave Arneson for some good old fun times with my geeky pals.

One weird thing: it looks like a lot of Gygax’s fans think he’s just gone on to a new fantasy game — which is strange. Most of the role-players I know were good about telling the difference between the fantasy world and the real world, and the real world doesn’t include deities.

I feel like I missed so much. MAJeff organized a gathering of Pharyngula readers, and it sounds like it was great fun, as a group of like-minded godless skeptics and rationalists used my web site as a mere pretext to justify meeting to drink bar and talk.

I’m superfluous to the whole affair, which is a little strange, but also reassuring. It’s the opposite of the L. Ron Hubbard effect — what if you started a movement that wasn’t a religion? You wouldn’t get rich, you wouldn’t get worshipped, you wouldn’t even be personally necessary, and what you’d have instead is a whole lot of people thinking for themselves. Helping to catalyze freethought isn’t going to get me a yacht with a flock of slave bimbettes, but at least it also won’t lead to drug addiction, delusions of grandeur, criminal behavior, paranoia, poor hygiene, and dying in a soiled bed doped to the gills on psychiatric drugs and worried that the clams were going to eat me. Cool.

You want pictures? You can have pictures. And more pictures.

Now go organize your own.