Well? It’s a good question! Answer it! Every one of you!
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Well? It’s a good question! Answer it! Every one of you!
John Freshwater, the fanatical evangelical school teacher who burned a cross into a sudent’s arm, is in the midst of a hearing in Ohio right now. It doesn’t sound like it’s going all that well for him. Richard Hoppe has been attending the hearings, and has a regularly updated summary at the Panda’s Thumb. Hoppe is being very circumspect and professional in his descriptions, however; if you want cruel flair, look elsewhere.
And courage. And, in these precarious economic times, a little bit of the crazy.
Hank Fox has quit his job at a newspaper. Why? Because they ran an article, in spite of his protests, that was plain, simple, taken-for-granted bigotry against atheists.
If you’re looking for godless heroes, there’s one; it takes guts to make these personal sacrifices for a principle. If you want to help him out, take advantage of his editorial services sometime. He’s also got a book in the works which will deserve your attention when it is published.
If you notice little things going wrong in your everyday life right now, it’s because Mercury is in retrograde. At least, that’s the excuse astrologers like to give, even though it’s entirely nonsensical and the apparent motion of the planets really has no effect on your life, unless you’re an astronomer. MSNBC has a fluff piece on gadgets going wrong in astrological crises, and they consulted Phil Plait on the subject. I think he blew a few raspberries through the phone at the reporter.
I used to wrassle astrologers for fun and the lulz ages ago, which is why I resurrected the previous old article, in which an astrologer made similar claims about a predictable astrological gremlin, the void-of-course moon. The void-of-course moon is even more ridiculous than the retrograde motion of Mercury — all it means is that the Moon isn’t residing within one of the 12 canonical signs of the zodiac, with consequences that are both petty and dire. We actually had a testable specific prediction from an astrologer, though, so with great joy a whole mob of skeptics rushed to test it.
You can guess what happened: the prediction failed, astrologer made a bunch of random excuses. That was the most predictable part of the exercise.
Stuart Buck persists in claiming that scientists have a bias against the supernatural, and that we dismiss it out of hand. This isn’t true; the problem is that supernatural explanations are poorly framed and typically unaddressable, so we tend to avoid them as unproductive. What one would actually find, if one took the trouble to discuss the ideas with a scientist, is that they are perfectly willing to consider peculiar possibilities if they are clearly stated. We’ll even briefly consider something as insane and worthless as astrology, which is even less credible as a field of study than Intelligent Design.
Look, Texas is supposed to be all about the Gablers and Don McLeroy and the dwarf from Pampa and George W. Bush, and then the darned atheist Texans have to show up and ruin the image. The Texas Freethought Convention is happening on Sunday, 26 October in Austin — check out the infomercial. I wish I could go — it’s a state that hasn’t worked its way onto my itinerary yet, and I keep hearing about the good people working hard against rampant idiocy down there.
It looks like Alex’s predictions for the Nobel Prise this year did not come to pass — although I was thinking McCulloch and Till were likely, so I was wrong, too. The Nobel for Physiology or Medicine has just been announced, and the winners are Harald zur Hausen, for discovering that HPV causes cervical cancer, and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for the discovery of HIV. It’s a viral year this time around.
You will all be pleased to know that the Brazilian UFOnuts who named their organization after Carl Sagan have backed down and removed Carl’s name from their masthead.
They’ve named it after Galileo instead.
Oy vey. Couldn’t they name it after a more appropriate historical figure? I recommend calling it the Bozo Institute. Or if they want to be more subtle, how about the Arthur Conan Doyle Institute? He saw things that weren’t there, too.
The infamous anti-gay legislator from Oklahoma, Sally Kern, was interviewed by the Oklahoma Daily. The story has some fine bon mots, like her definition of evolution:
Kern defined evolution to me as “the process of wanting to create something or have something be perfect. Get rid of that which is not healthy and strong.”
That’s a very common creationist misconception: they can’t imagine a natural process that doesn’t have wants, that is lacking that teleological impulse.
The writer sent me the outtakes from the interview. If you want more Kern uncut and uncensored, look below the fold.
