Should I feel jealous or not? My students never write letters like this. And if they did, I’m at such a small school I’d never be able to post them.
(via Bitch Ph.D.)
Because I’m really sick of sharing one with these pigs.
Texas male Dan Patrick is proposing to buy unwanted babies for $500 a head, but only if you promise you were going to abort it if you didn’t.
Sleazeball male tries to dope date, gets caught be sharp-eyed female bartender.
Male in pickup truck can’t get a woman’s attention by harrassing her, so he runs her over instead
Really, they aren’t my kind.
What a shock—that awesome “Left Behind” video game in which you get to convert the infidel and slaughter the heathen has tanked, big time. They sunk $27 million into it, the stock had a peak of $18.70 $7.44, and now it’s worth 18 cents.
I guess they didn’t pray hard enough.
When we had last seen our basic embryo, it had gone through gastrulation — a process in which cells of a two-layered sheet had moved inward, setting up the three germ layers (endoderm, mesoderm, and ectoderm) of the early embryo. In particular, cells at the organizer, a tissue that induces or organizes migrating cells, had rolled inwards to set up specific axial mesoderm structures: the prechordal plate, which will underlie cranial structures, and the notochord, which resides under the future hindbrain and spinal cord. At this point, the embryo has an outer layer of ectoderm, and lying under part of it, a band of prechordal mesoderm and notochord. In addition, the ectoderm is loaded with a molecule called BMP-4, a member of the TGF-β family of signaling molecules, and under its influence will go on to make skin, not nervous system. So what next?
It’ll make it all rubbery!
I hadn’t realized that there were microwave ovens around capable of handling a half-ton of meat.
OK, I can understand copying Wikipedia and setting up your own special interest wikis all over the place—it’s an admission that your goals are too dorky or too stupid to survive outside your own special little incubator—but if you’re going to set up your own social networking site, why would you copy MySpace, the ugliest, most awkward, most annoying such site on the planet? It’s like declaring that not only do you lack any creativity or imagination, but that you are totally tasteless, too.
Behold: His Holy Space. It’s like an online ghetto for Christians. Take the cluttered, disorganized look of MySpace and drape it with Kincade paintings and animated doves and angels, and you’ve got His Holy Space. Why, I don’t know. Some things are just mysteries.
(via The Friendly Atheist)
…and you were thinking of stopping by the U to see the moon rocks at 7, you could also drop by Old No. 1 on Atlantic Avenue at 6 to join us for Drinking Liberally. Morris is a happenin’ town tonight, isn’t it?
Since Ed Darrell made such a comprehensive comment on the question of whether Darwin was as wicked a racist as the illiterate ideologues of Uncommon Descent would like you to believe, I’m just copying his list here.
Remember the famous quarrel between Capt. FitzRoy and Darwin aboard the Beagle? After leaving Brazil, in their mess discussions (remember: Darwin was along to talk to FitzRoy at meals, to keep FitzRoy from going insane as his predecessor had), Darwin noted the inherent injustice of slavery. Darwin argued it was racist and unjust, and therefore unholy. FitzRoy loudly argued slavery was justified, and racism was justified, by the scriptures. It was a nasty argument, and Darwin was banned to mess with the crew with instructions to get off the boat at the next convenient stop. FitzRoy came to his senses after a few days of dining alone. Two things about this episode: First, it shows Darwin as a committed anti-racist; second, it contrasts Darwin’s views with the common, scripture-inspired view of the day, which was racist.
Darwin’s remarks about people of color were remarkably unracist for his day. We should always note his great friend from college days, the African man who taught him taxidermy. We must make note of Darwin’s befriending the Fuegan, Jeremy Button, whom the expedition was returning to his home. Non-racist descriptions abound in context, but this is a favorite area for anti-Darwinists to quote mine. Also, point to Voyage of the Beagle, which is available on line. In it Darwin compares the intellect of the Brazilian slaves with Europeans, and notes that the slaves are mentally and tactically as capable as the greatest of the Roman generals. Hard evidence of fairness on Darwin’s part.
Darwin’s correspondence, especially from the voyage, indicates his strong support for ending slavery, because slavery was unjust and racist. He is unequivocal on the point. Moreover, many in Darwin’s family agreed, and the Wedgewood family fortune was put behind the movement to end slavery. Money talks louder than creationists in this case, I think. Ironic, Darwin supports the Wilberforce family’s work against slavery, and Samuel Wilberforce betrays the support. It reminds me of Pasteur, who said nasty things about Darwin; but when the chips were down and Pasteur’s position and reputation were on the line, Darwin defended Pasteur. Darwin was a great man in many ways.
Watch for the notorious quote mining of Emma’s remark that Charles was “a bigot.” It’s true, she said it. Emma said Charles was a bigot, but in respect to Darwin’s hatred of spiritualists and seances. Darwin’s brother, Erasmus, was suckered in by spiritualists. Darwin was, indeed, a bigot against such hoaxes. It’s recounted in Desmond and Moore’s biography, but shameless quote miners hope their audience hasn’t read the book and won’t. Down here in Texas, a lot of the quote miners are Baptists. I enjoy asking them if they do not share Darwin’s bigotry against fortune tellers. Smart ones smile, and drop the argument.
One might hope that the “Darwin-was-racist” crap comes around to the old canard that Darwin’s work was the basis of the campaign to kill the natives of Tasmania. That was truly a terrible, racist campaign, and largely successful. Of course, historians note that the war against Tasmanians was begun in 1805, and essentially completed by 1831, when just a handful of Tasmanians remained alive. These dates are significant, of course, because they show the war started four years prior to Darwin’s birth, and it was over when Darwin first encountered Tasmania on his voyage, leaving England in 1831. In fact, Darwin laments the battle. I have often found Darwin critics quoting Darwin’s words exactly, but claiming they were the words of others against Darwin’s stand.
Also, one should be familiar with Darwin’s writing about “civilized” Europeans wiping out “savages.” In the first place, “savage” in that day and in Darwin’s context simply means ‘not living in European-style cities, with tea and the occasional Mozart.’ In the second, and more critical place, Darwin advances the argument noting that (in the case of the Tasmanians, especially), the “savages” are the group that is better fit to the natural environment, and hence superior to the Europeans, evolutionarily. Darwin does not urge these conflicts, but rather, laments them. How ironic that creationist quote miners do not recognize that.
Isn’t it odd how the creationists are so divorced from reality that they can’t even concede that Darwin was an abolitionist, and are so reduced in their arguments against evolution that they’ve had to resort to the desperate “Darwin beats puppies!” attack?
Sometimes we’re a little bit mean to engineers here — there’s the Salem hypothesis, for instance, that notes that creationist apologists who claim to be scientists often turn out to be engineers. In compensation, though, watch this video of a Michigan man with simple, clever strategies for moving massive objects. I was impressed. I guess the ancients didn’t need the assistance of high-tech alien astronauts to build impressive stone structures, all they needed was a Wally Wallington.
Neural Gourmet has put out a call for everyone to blog against theocracy:
I’d like invite you all to Blog Against Theocracy. This is a little blog swarm being put together by everybody’s favorite panties blogger Blue Gal for Easter weekend, April 6th through the 8th. The idea is simple. Just post something related to, and in support of, the separation of church and state each of those three days. Something big, something small, artistic, musical, textual or otherwise. The topic is your choosing. Whether your thing is stem cell research, intelligent design/Creationism, abortion rights, etc., it’s all good. Separation of church and state impacts so many issues and is essential.
This is hardly a challenge for me—I have to consciously restrain myself from turning this blog into one long sustained growl against religion anyway, so all I have to do is take the muzzle off for three days. And as it is, you people will probably tell me that you don’t notice that the 6th is any different than the 5th of April.
