Sad news in the war against reverence: one of our heroes, George Carlin, has died of heart failure at the age of 71. This was a man to whom nothing was sacred, and that was how he inspired us.
I’m at the Evolution 2008 conference, but I’m too tired to appreciate it — the only sleep I got was a few fitful hours on the redeye from Las Vegas, so I’m seriously concerned that I may fall asleep in my session this afternoon. Greg Laden has been instructed to use a cattle prod on me if I slow down and start sounding like Ben Stein in my talk. It could happen. I’m having trouble remembering what my talk is supposed to be about right now. The slides will go up and the talk will flow out of my mouth, I hope.
Speaking of Greg, at least he seems to be paying attention. He’s got summaries up right now of talks by Scott Lanyon, Mark Borrello, and Jillian Smith, so I can get clued in by the blogs later, even if my brain isn’t working very well here at the actual meeting.
I also got the t-shirt … that’s what counts, right?
By the way, for anyone else at the meeting, Lynn Fellman has a booth here. You should stop by and look at the intersection of art and evolution!
Café Philos has a very good summary of the John Freshwater affair — he’s the bad science teacher who thought the captive audience in his classroom was a fine target for proselytization for his cult. He’s also the lunatic who burned a cross into a student’s arm.
…there was What the Bleep Do We Know?, another crackpot movie made with interviews obtained under false pretenses and pushing a bogus ideological twist on science. Sean Carroll and David Albert talk about it on Bloggingheads.tv.
Man, that was a bad movie.
Don’t forget to tune in to Atheists Talk radio at 9am Central. This week, it’s a celebration of Juneteenth and a discussion of African American freethinkers and civil rights.
Sastra, OM is organizing a meetup for all the Pharynguloids here at TAM6, or just in the general area. We’re meeting at 6:00 in the buffet restaurant here at the Flamingo — come on by, talk with us all, watch me shuffle out the door to catch a late-night flight to Minneapolis.
Oh, dear. Earlier, I wrote about Ken Ham’s visit to the Pentagon, a soul-shuddering thought if ever there was one, and it seems Ken has read it. He has replied with a blog entry titled Biology Professor Calls Me “Wackaloon”. Ken, Ken, Ken. You act shocked at the thought that one guy publicly stated that you were Mr Flaming Nutbar, but you shouldn’t be. Millions of people, including some of the most knowledgeable biologists in the world, think just about every day that you are an airhead, an ass, a birdbrain, a blockhead, a bonehead, a boob, a bozo, a charlatan, a cheat, a chowderhead, a chump, a clod, a con artist, a crackpot, a crank, a crazy, a cretin, a dimwit, a dingbat, a dingleberry, a dipstick, a ditz, a dolt, a doofus, a dork, a dum-dum, a dumb-ass, a dumbo, a dummy, a dunce, a dunderhead, a fake, a fathead, a fraud, a fruitcake, a gonif, a halfwit, an idiot, an ignoramus, an imbecile, a jackass, a jerk, a jughead, a knucklehead, a kook, a lamebrain, a loon, a loony, a lummox, a meatball, a meathead, a moron, a mountebank, a nincompoop, a ninny, a nitwit, a numbnuts, a numbskull, a nut, a nutcase, a peabrain, a pinhead, a racketeer, a sap, a scam artist, a screwball, a sham, a simpleton, a snake oil salesman, a thickhead, a turkey, a twerp, a twit, a wacko, a woodenhead, and much, much worse.
You’re a clueless schmuck who knows nothing about science and has arrogantly built a big fat fake museum to promote medieval bullshit — you should not be surprised to learn that you are held in very low esteem by the community of scholars and scientists, and by the even larger community of lay people who have made the effort to learn more about science than you have (admittedly, though, you have set the bar very, very low on that, and there are 5 year old children who have a better grasp of the principles of science as well as more mastery of details of evolution than you do.)
Maybe you should write a blog entry calling attention to each insult given to you. I think that’s your calling, and it’s probably god’s intended mission for you in life, to inspire contempt.
(I encourage each and every one of my readers to express their true feelings about Ken Ham in the comment thread here. Then I want Mr Ham to write an indignant post complaining that “So-and-so called me a “disgrace to brain-damaged clowns””, or whatever — that’ll keep him occupied for years, and will distract him from his campaign of abusing the minds of young children. Be creative.)
This weekend has been busy — yesterday, I gave my talk at the Amaz!ng Meeting, and I think it went OK. I tried to go against type and gave a talk that was all science and biology*, no debunking, no godless inspiration pep talk, no railing at the state of delusional thinking and ignorance in the US. I saved all that instead for the conversations with people afterwards. I was hanging out with swarms of people all day and all night, talking myself hoarse and listening to all these interesting skeptics. I was up until 3am, at which time I discovered I was drinking something bright blue called an “Adios, Motherfucker”, which seemed like an appropriate time to finally drag myself off to bed.
Today contains many more talks, and Ben Goldacre and I are hoping to sneak away sometime today to do something which isn’t quite what you might think a pair of soft-spoken tweedy academics would normally do…but you’ll just have to wait a bit to discover what that might be. Maybe we can get away during some boring, unimportant talk, like Phil Plait’s.
Anyway, if you really must hear my terrifying opinions on various matters like religion and science, I recorded a podcast for Point of Inquiry earlier this week, so you can tune into that and listen to D.J. Grothe needle me. While I was here, I also recorded about an hour of stuff for the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, which isn’t up yet, but Steve Novella has been all over the place here at TAM6 assembling lots of material — keep an eye on that podcast for all kinds of exciting conversation, not just with me, but many other people as well.
*Well, and with a good dose of Phil Plait bashing. Unfortunately, he’s giving his talk today, and I expect retaliation and escalation.
So that’s what the DI has been up to their “Biologic Institute”.
(You might have to know the LOLcats tradition to get the joke).
