Really, we don’t need them, but the best ones can be amusing.
Evolution Made Us All from Ben Hillman on Vimeo.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Really, we don’t need them, but the best ones can be amusing.
Evolution Made Us All from Ben Hillman on Vimeo.
Bill Nye the Science Guy, humanist of the year, science educator and entertainer, and all-around interesting fellow, apparently stopped briefly at the Creation “Museum” to take a quick picture of the exterior, and then moved on. How do we know? Ken Ham was watching.
Bill Nye (“The Science Guy” of PBS-TV fame) visited the Creation Museum for…… 2 minutes this past week. He only stopped in front of the museum to take photos. In our photo attached, he is standing in the driveway in front of the museum. He did not go inside. Including the drive in and out the gate, he was on-site for a total of 122 seconds. He was last year’s “Humanist of the Year” – see my blog: <http://blogs.answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2010/06/15/bill-nye-the-humanist-guy/”>>
You have to admit, though, Kenny…the lies inside the “museum” are obnoxious, the guard dogs and tasers aren’t particularly inviting, and now the revelation that the staff creepily obsesses over surveillance footage is more than a little off-putting. It’s an extraordinarily paranoid place.
Perhaps Ken will be happier with another guest, one who has begged special permission to visit the Creation “Museum”: Jeffrey D. Bornhoeft. He’s more of a Creation “Museum” kind of guy.
An Ohio man — who killed his ex-wife’s new husband but was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 2000 — has received permission to leave the state to visit the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky.
It will mark the first time in 11 years that Jeffrey D. Bornhoeft will be allowed to leave Ohio for a trip his father said he is taking because he has become involved with a church since the shooting death.
The court-approved trip, which is scheduled for Saturday, is the latest step toward freedom for Bornhoeft since Nov. 7, 2000, when a Warren County jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity in the shooting death of Jamey Johnson, 23, of Dayton.
During his trial, authorities said Bornhoeft had his ex-wife, Shawn “Candy” Johnson, on the phone as he fired three shots at close range from a .357-caliber revolver into the back of Johnson’s head while he slept in a Lebanon apartment. Bornhoeft then threatened to turn the gun on himself during a three-hour standoff that ended when he surrendered to Lebanon police.
He may be a cold-blooded murderer, but at least he’s not a humanist.
Oh, and just in case you were making plans…Saturday is probably not the best day to visit Ken Ham. Although I am looking forward to his blog post in which he brags about how Jeffrey Bornhoeft actually came all the way into the “Museum”, and just loved the exhibits.
Way back in October, I told you we were trying to hire a new cell biologist. We had a very successful search, found a whole lot of brilliant candidates, and then brought a few of them out for interviews, where they shone like stars and dazzled us with their potential…and then they all turned down our offers. We should have mentioned in our criteria that working here demands that you be slightly mad — only slightly, though, just enough to be committed to undergraduate education in spite of a remote rural location, but not enough to be be, you know, committed. It probably didn’t help to be holding interviews in the middle of one of the worst winters since I moved here (by the way, I interviewed for my job in July).
So we’ve extended the job search. This is what we’re looking for:
Preferred: Preference will be given to applicants who have an area of expertise relevant to our pre-health professional students and complementary to existing faculty interests. These might include, but are not limited to: immunology, pathophysiology, cancer biology, bioinformatics, and cell signaling.
Duties/Responsibilities: Teaching undergraduate biology courses including a sophomore-level cell biology course, an upper-level genetics elective course, an elective in the applicant’s area of expertise, and other courses that support the biology program; advising undergraduates; conducting research that could involve undergraduates; and sharing in the governance and advancement of the biology program, the division, and the campus.
Our new deadline is 21 February, when we’ll begin reviewing applications. We aim to bring people in for interviews in March — maybe the glaciers will have retreated a little bit by then. If you applied earlier, we still have your application on file; if you’re still interested, you can contact us and let us know that you still want to be considered.
I am descended from Vikings, and I try to bring that wild-eyed berserkergang ferocity to blogging. But have you ever seen Swedes cook?
YEEEEAAAAAH! That’s the way to do it. You should have seen me this morning, when I was preparing the vegetable soup that will be simmering all day for our dinner here (yeah, it’s a vegetarian soup. What can I say? I’m only half Scandinavian. The blood has been thinned with that of those domesticated English and Irish and Scots). I was flinging the big knives around viciously, and I’ll tell you, their own mothers wouldn’t recognize the bodies of those tubers and onions and whatevers when I was done with them.
Here, you can also learn how to make meatballs or spaghetti the Swedish way. Oh, and dessert, anyone?
And while you tremble in fear at the fury of the Northmen, keep this in mind: these are the Swedes. The Norwegian edition would violate the Youtube terms of service, and would probably feature much more herring mayhem.
(I probably shouldn’t have said that. If the Swedes hear of it, it will stir their competitive instincts, and they’ll strive to outdo even the hypothetical Norwegians, and then…Ragnarök.)
The other day, this comic was posted on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Would you believe those crazy conservatives at the National Organization for Marriage — those blinkered bozos who think letting gays marry will destroy the fabric of society — posted it on their forums?
It’s rather strange — the comic shows a bunch of kids who are aghast at the weird old fashioned way babies used to be made. The humor in it is that you have to realize that they aren’t at all horrified by their technology, but find the old ways incomprehensible. It’s actually mocking the rigid antiques, but NOM just thought it was saying something awful about future developments. Today’s comic is on the same theme.
Zach Weiner handled it beautifully. It turns out the NOMers were hot-linking the image, making it easy for the SMBC crew to swap in a new image promoting equality, so the NOMers discovered a liberal message from Thomas Jefferson and a rainbow tainting their blog.
I’m smarter than that. I am not hot-linking the image at all, so Weiner won’t be able to change it on me when he discovers that I have a very different interpretation of his cartoon.
It’s obvious. The cartoon is telling us that in the future, scientists will resurrect, or build robot duplicates of, Isaac Asimov to teach our children about sex ed. I, for one, welcome our Asimovian sex instructors, and am pleased that Zach Weiner won’t be able to modify the illustration above to praise Arthur C. Clarke, instead. Neener neener.
It’s like messages raining down from everywhere all the time…what’s one more?
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So, you know, I had this idea for a novel. I started it, but I’ve since discovered that jewel-like prose and engaging story-telling is a little bit hard, and when I couldn’t finish the whole thing over lunch, I’ve sort of given up. But then I had another brilliant idea! I’ll put up the first significant piece of the story, the really really important part, and let you people finish the rest for me. Just post the subsequent chapters in the comments, and I’ll splice them together and publish them and make a million dollars, and even more when I sell the movie rights. I’ll be sure to include your names somewhere in the endnotes.
What an odd news item: there is a rule that the Pope can’t be an organ donor. My first thought was ick — he’s rather decrepit, and if I ever require an organ transplant, I’d rather the source were a young, stupid motorcyclist who doesn’t wear a helmet. The Catholics have other reasons, though.
Vatican officials say that after a pope dies, his body belongs to the entire Church and must be buried intact.
That’s rather morbid and weird. Why bother? It’s not going to be intact for long, and it’s actually going to belong to the worms and bacteria.
But it’s this part that blew my mind.
Furthermore, if papal organs were donated, they would become relics in other bodies if he were eventually made a saint.
I would never have thought of that. Ever. That’s really twisted. What about blood transfusions, then? A few popes are known to have fathered children, too—are they and their descendants actually considered holy relics, too?
I also had this brilliant idea for a cheesy serial-killer thriller novel, too. Pope after pope murdered and butchered, and the killer implants bits and pieces into himself…and then a team of ninja jesuits is commissioned to defend the murderer from the secular police, since he is after all now a sacred artifact of the Catholic church. Conflict! Car chases! Long abstract discussions of the nature of good and evil! Halberd-wielding fanatics vs. Carabinieri with machine guns! Evil madman manipulating the church while preying on it at the same time! Papal gore! And then, in a triumphant ending, a courageous atheist cutting through all the bullshit and taking out the killer while making some sardonic one-liner! “Nothing is sacred, meatsack!” BAM!!!
If you steal my idea, I want royalties.
Nicely done: Ethan Siegel explains how we know that stuff is getting spontaneously created all the time. It’s no miracle, it requires no magic man in the sky, particle/anti-particle pairs just pop into existence constantly.
The real miracle would be getting William Lane Craig to comprehend this fact.
