A night of unbelievable fun

Next month, on 10-11 August, Minnesota Atheists will be hosting a regional atheist conference. If you’re within driving distance of St. Paul, you should go! They’ve got a fine list of speakers, and for something completely different, are sponsoring a baseball game on Friday night, so you can join a bunch of atheists in swilling beer and eating hot dogs and watching a ball get tossed around.

I know, it’s hosted in a city called St. Paul, which isn’t so cool, and the baseball team is called the Saints. But just for this night, the team is being renamed the Ain’ts, so it’ll be OK. Also, St Paul’s original name was Pig’s Eye…and although the city hasn’t agreed to revert the name just for us, there’s no reason we can’t call it that among ourselves. So let’s meet in Pig’s Eye, Minnesota next month!

You can download the meeting registration form, and here’s a form with a coupon for a free hot dog for the baseball game.

Europe is getting a wedgie

I’m glad someone at the New Humanist is catching on: that little bit of performance art at the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, in which the creationists got their falsified myth inserted into the National Trust’s exhibits, is exactly how they operate. Every little advantage is pursued in order to falsify the existence of legitimate support. As Paul Sims explains:

The reference to creationism at the Causeway may only represent a small concession to the creationist view, but what the National Trust needs to be aware of is that winning such small concessions forms a key part of creationist strategy. By encouraging organisations such as the National Trust to acknowledge creationist perspectives, it is possible that the Caleb Foundation are following the "Wedge Strategy", a tactic devised by creationists in the United States, most notoriously the Discovery Institute, in order to "permeate religious, cultural, moral and political life" with creationism and Intelligent Design.

Aware that they can not simply convert the American public to creationism overnight, the architects of the Wedge Strategy aim to persuade politicians, journalists and educators that the correct approach to "debates" around evolution and the age of the Earth is to "Teach the Controversy", giving perspective such as creationism and Intelligent Design a hearing alongside scientific theories. Through "Teach the Controversy", creationists hope that their perspective will acquire a greater presence in educational establishments and the media. In short, once one school, or one museum, or one newspaper, starts to deal with evolution alongside creationism, others will follow.

Exactly! Creationists are not stupid. Most people don’t know much about science, and rely on the word of authorities…so when an official government agency gives even a tiny sop of acknowledgment to bogus nonsense like creationism, it legitimizes their claims, enough to cause a little bit of doubt about the science, and a little nod of approval to lies.

You can’t give a millimeter. Just present the science honestly, and don’t pander to ignorance.

Another Pharyngula podcast this weekend?

You tell me, and give me a few ideas for subjects you’d like to hear discussed. And most importantly, volunteer to join in! It works much better if I prearrange a group of participants.

Here is what we’re going to do. The podcast begins at 11:00am Central time on Saturday (a little later, to be kinder to the West coast). We’ll have two topics: this evo psych article about menstruation and shopping, and this article about how your brain is faulty. We’ll give a half hour to each.

If you want to join in, here’s what you must do:

  • You must have a Google+ account.You’re also going to have to email your Google+ name to me.

  • You should have a headset. Look at the past podcasts; if you don’t have a headset and you start clickety-clacking on your keyboard, it’s picked up and gets annoying fast.

  • You should read the articles at those links. If you don’t, why are you wasting our time? Also, I have a pdf of the peer-reviewed, published evo-psych paper…if you haven’t even tried to read that, we’ll be a little pissy with you (if you’re having problems following the article, try anyway — we’ll go over it.)

  • You MUST send me an email by Friday confirming your attendance, so I can put you on the invite list. Include your Google+ name. I’ll also mail you the evo psych pdf back. IMPORTANT: the email MUST have the subject “PODCAST CONFIRMATION”. Why? Because I’m switching over to a new computer and a new method for filtering email, and it’s a total mess right now. I’m setting up filters to catch that subject, and ignoring that rule might get your mail totally lost.

All clear? See you Saturday morning!

Proof that there is no god

I have the evidence right here: there will exist, on 30 August in Minneapolis, a Cat video film festival. Right in my backyard, almost. It’s like they’re taunting me.

All right, God, this is your chance. If You exist, you will cause all those videos to spontaneously undergo radical bit-rot, and the conference will be over-run with arachnids, and it will rain squid from the skies. Pull that off, and I might acknowledge your existence. Otherwise, nope, you’re toast.

Swimming in the Cambrian

If you ever get a chance, spend some time looking at fish muscles in a microscope. Larval zebrafish are perfect; they’re transparent and you can trace all the fibers, so you can see everything. The body musculature of fish is most elegantly organized into repeating blocks of muscle along the length of the animal, each segment having a chevron (“V”) or “W” shape. Here’s a pretty stained photo of a 30 hour old zebrafish to show what I mean; it’s a little weird because this one is from an animal with experimentally messed up gene expression, all that red and green stuff, but look at the lovely blue muscle fibers stretching across the length of each segment.


Lateral view of a 30 hour old zebrafish, embryonic myotome, displaying ectopic eng2a:eGFP (green) fibers in response to Smad7 (marked in red) expressing clones. Slow muscle fibers are marked by monoclonal antibody F59 (blue).

But wait—why the chevron shape? Also, the reason I told you to look in a microscope sometime is that a 2-D image can’t illustrate the lovely intricacy of the muscles; they don’t go straight across, but twist in a partial spiral in 3-dimensions. Trust me, it’s beautiful to see. And it’s also nearly universal in chordates — even Amphioxus has this arrangement. And there’s a good biomechanical reason for this arrangment.

[Read more…]

Sign this petition!

You know, if I violated tax law and then flaunted the fact to the IRS, it’s pretty much guaranteed that I’ll get slammed down hard and fast. So why do churches get a free pass?

Since 2008, pastors of some churches have openly supported and advocated specific political candidates in sermons to members in early October in an event referred to as "Pulpit Freedom Sunday". According to Reuters, videos of these sermons are sent to the offices of the IRS.

According to section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, the provision of the tax code from which these churches derive their tax-exempt status, a compliant organization must not "participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of … any candidate for public office."

The IRS has failed to remove the tax-exempt status of these churches despite their violations of tax code. This must change, and the law must be applied equally to everyone.

Don’t you suspect that many of the officers obligated to enforce the law are also members of these same kinds of churches, and are motivated to neglect their duties by a conflict of interest?

Maybe there should be a requirement that all IRS agents be atheists. That would certainly improve the popularity of atheism!