Compact Fluorescent Lights are gonna kill you … NOT.

Steve Milloy, junk science peddler and loser, has a new crusade: he is opposed to compact fluorescent light bulbs.

How much money does it take to screw in a compact fluorescent light bulb? About US$4.28 for the bulb and labour — unless you break the bulb. Then you, like Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, could be looking at a cost of about US$2,004.28, which doesn’t include the costs of frayed nerves and risks to health.

Sound crazy?

Yes, Steve, it does sound crazy. It doesn’t help that it’s coming from you, either. Can we get more details on Brandy Bridges’ story?

[Read more…]

Hitchens on The Daily Show

Eh.

It wasn’t bad. Hitchens declared some laudable objectives for his book: he wants to end the idea that calling someone a person of faith is a compliment, and he laid out his position on the origins of religion. It’s built on fear of the dark, fear of death, and hatred of sex, and those aren’t sound bases for rational thought. So the sentiment was good.

Presentation … well, that wasn’t so good. I know Hitchens can be eloquent, but he wasn’t. He bumbled about and couldn’t quite manage to put two coherent sentences together.

I’m still getting the book, but I don’t think his performance tonight would have persuaded anybody who wasn’t already one of those uncompromising atheists.


You can watch the interview yourself over at onegoodmove.

Blogroll Open Enrollment Day!

This worked fairly well last time around, so let’s try it again. If you’d like to have your blog on the Pharyngula blogroll, here’s what you should do:

  • Examine your blog with a critical eye. If you are espousing creationism, Intelligent Design creationism, the beauty of unthinking acceptance of your Lord and Master Jesus Christ or Mohammed or L. Ron Hubbard, or have a Bush in ’08 badge on your site, don’t bother. Really, you don’t want to draw my attention to you. You probably don’t like me, anyway.

  • There is a technical limitation. I manage my blogroll with my newsreader, so I can only see sites that have some kind of syndication feed. Most do, nowadays, but if you’ve got some obscure code you’re using to generate your blog, you might not. Static web pages also usually do not. Sorry, I just don’t have a good way around this right now.

  • Take a look at the current blogroll, and make sure you aren’t already on it. It’s so embarrassing to raise your hand and say “Me, me, me!” and discover that you were picked a long time ago. It would also be polite to check out a few of those other blogs while you’re skimming the list — the point of the blogroll is to send some traffic to other places, after all.

  • After leaping all those tremendous hurdles, leave a comment here, with a link to your blog. You can just type the url into your comment, or if you want to show off your amazing html skills, you can imbed a link, like so: <a href=”http://my.blog.url/”>My Blog!</a>. Easy! You might also want to describe what’s special about your blog, so other readers might be enticed to check it out. Regular readers or people already on my blogroll might be reading the comments to pick up interesting new blogs, too.

  • Write out a check for $100 and send it to… Uh, never mind. There are no catches to this, you don’t even have to link back to me. Just write good stuff.

As before, I make no promises to keep you on the blogroll, and in particular, I ruthlessly purge blogs that fail to update for over a month.

Now let’s hope the response isn’t quite as overwhelming as last time. Haven’t I already linked to most of the blogosphere already?