Somehow, this reminds me of my meetup with Phil.
It’s an exercise for the reader to decide whether Phil was the meteor or the cat.
Hang on here. The war in Iraq is costing about $200 million per day, or a billion in less than a week. Yet George W Bush has just vetoed a bill that would give NIH an additional $1 billion per year, raising the budget from $29 billion to $30 billion.
And what does he do? He accuses Congress of being on a “spending spree.”
Here’s hoping the guy chokes on the irony.
That’s a poll on Christianity Today — and I’m afraid “none” wasn’t one of the options. Instead, readers got to pick from insipid nonsense like “the reliability of the Scriptures,” “The exquisiteness of the physical world,” and the winner, “The life and character of Jesus.” As Ophelia notes, those aren’t even arguments. Isn’t it rather pathetic that this is all they can dredge up for their readers, platitudes and errors?
Try checking the major American news sites: CNN, Fox, MSNBC, the New York Times, you can even try the BBC. There’s a major news story missing.
You’ll have to read Chris Mooney’s blog to find it. There’s a potential Category 5 cyclone, Cyclone Sidr, on its way to smash Bangladesh.
It’s going to hit sometime tomorrow. While Sonny Perdue prays for a little rain, maybe we should be urging our news networks to pay attention to the important news, our government should be getting ready for emergency assistance, and we should all be preparing to loosen those checkbooks and possibly offer what aid we can.
I’ve been ignoring this rain prayer nonsense from Georgia lately, despite the fact that every day I’m getting email about it. It was just too ridiculous to believe—no one, especially not the governor of an American state in the 21st century, could be that loony.
And then I watched this video.
Good grief. I watched that blithering idiot babbling about god listening to their prayers to relieve the drought, and I heard the onlookers muttering “Yeah!” and “Amen!” and all I could think was …
The Canadian Cynic points out one of Denyse O’Leary’s less endearing habits: her penchant for constant self-promotion and linking profligately to herself. Reading it, what came to mind was the idea of a one-person circle jerk, and then I realized what that implied, and what we were seeing if we read any of her blogs where she’s … ack, snarfle … herself … yikes, beebadabeebada <tilt>. Doesn’t she know that’s a sin?
Well, I’m not going to look at those blogs anymore.
ScienceWoman has exactly the right idea on combining academia with the profession of being a human being. I was amused at the part of her manifesto that says she’ll draw the line at a moderate work-week of 50-60 hours — it’s a good goal, but it’s strange how it’s simply taken for granted that academics will put in those 10+ hour workdays.
Donald Prothero asked me to pass along this request for feedback. He wrote an excellent book on evolution (with illustrations by the inimitable Carl Buell) that beautifully complements the theory with the details of common descent. If you’ve read it — I’m working on my copy now — let him know what you think!
EVOLUTION AND FOSSILS
Last night’s Nova program did an outstanding job, given the nature of
their show and the time limits imposed by their format. But we still have a
long way to go to convey to the general public just how strong the fossil
evidence for evolution has become. Those few animations of fossils in the
Nova special and website were OK, but most of the public (especially those
with creationist leanings) distrusts animations, so we need to show them
actual fossils that are relatively easy for a non-paleontologist to
interpret. We need to make the case over and over again that there are
hundreds of nice transitional sequences in the fossil record, from the micro
to the macro scale, to overcome the creationists’ systematic campaign of
lies and distortions about fossils. Their mantra is “There are no
transitional fossils,” and as Josef Goebbels once said, a lie repeated often
enough becomes the truth. We need to counteract this propaganda, and the
nice specials about dinosaurs (with little or no evolutionary content) are
not enough.As readers of this website know, Carl Buell and I just put together a
book on the topic, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)
(Columbia Univ. Press, available on their website or on Amazon.com. I’m
flattered by the nice comments about Carl Buell’s art in our recent book
(webpost on Pharyngula.org, Oct. 18). Carl did an amazing job putting
together beautiful restorations of extinct critters, as well as many new
versions of phylograms and family trees of extinct animals to show just how
many transitional fossils the creationists must deny. We tried as much as
possible to bring in the most up-to-date information about transitional
forms, especially the more recent discoveries that only the specialists know
about. We even managed to scoop the scientific literature–we have an image
of a transitional giraffid fossil with a neck intermediate in length between
a modern giraffe and primitive short-necked giraffid. Nikos Solounias
graciously sent it to me, even though his article is still in press.Now that the book is out, I’d appreciate any feedback from the readers of
Pharyngula.org about what you liked or didn’t like, and what you would
recommend in the way of changes. I’m about ready to revise it slightly for
the second printing, so timely reviews would be very helpful.Dr. Donald R. Prothero
Lecturer in Geobiology
California Institute of Technology
I checked out a few of the blogs by the usual suspects this morning, and noticed that the creationists are largely silent (so far, give ’em time) on the Dover documentary from last night…with one exception. The Discovery Institute’s Media Complaints Division is wound up over it. They have an eight-point “rebuttal” of the documentary that consists of many picked nits and regurgitated whines, and I thought about taking them on point by point, but then decided it wasn’t worth it. For one thing, it’s written by Casey Luskin, the DI’s small mammal mascot, who is something of an incompetent pipsqueak, so it’s hardly worth flicking him around any more. Most importantly, it misses the point of the program entirely.
That’s the topic of this interview with an unruly mob of internet atheists, yours truly among them.
