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?

This has got be a joke, right?

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There’s more to invention than just slapping a new wrapper on an old device, and sometimes the superficial approach can lead to some funny results, like the Tampon Taser. The copy describing this device is weird: in addition to touting its absorbency, fresh floral scent and gentle glide applicator, it also has barbed probes and a range of 14 feet. Alas, it also warns that “It is not intended nor recommended for vaginal insertion.”

After reading my last day’s posts here, you might think I’m either a teenage girl, or obsessed with young girls, but really … it’s just what has drifted to the top of my email box lately. And really, my initial impression that here was a device that would allow women to fire debilitating high voltage sparks out of their nether regions did get me a little bit excited, so you can’t blame me for mentioning it.

I deny the existence of Hoofnagles!

But if you’re gullible enough to believe Hoofnagles actually exist, I suppose you could go say hello to them at their new Denialism blog.

I will point out, though, that if one Hoofnagle is improbable, the chances of two Hoofnagles spontaneously assembling themselves at a single place and time is so unlikely as to be absurd. In the face of such ludicrous improbabilities, there isn’t even any point to bringing up evidence—my mind is made up.

Guys, another reason to be godless: Christian girls let their figures go

90% of teenage girls believe they are overweight, according to a recent survey. That’s something to worry about — there’s the reality, that a lot of us are overweight, but there’s also the perception problem, that many girls are convinced that they must lose weight when they really don’t. There’s an article that speculates on the cause of this problem, whether it is an obsession with celebrity, peer pressure, or pressure from the diet industry, but it comes up with a strange explanation:

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I think I’ll spend the rest of the week at home

Too much traveling lately. Today Skatje and I hit the big city for a couple of events.

  • We attended the Minnesota Atheists fundraiser in the morning. Somehow, I ended up volunteering to give a talk to the Minnesota Atheists sometime this summer, and I also volunteered to speak at Lee Salisbury’s Critical Thinking Club. Then I talked to some of the leaders of CASH, and volunteered to be their faculty advisor. I’ve heard that there is this word called “no” in the English language — could someone define it for me please? (Nah, these will all be fun, so it’s OK.)

  • Skatje forced me to take her to the Mall of America. I tried to explain that as a Communist Anarchist, stepping through the doors of that citadel of capitalism might make me burst into flame and shrivel into a smoking heap of bones, but she just thought that would be funny.

  • There was a meeting of the board of the Minnesota Citizens for Science Education, and I volunteered for a committee putting together an event for summer of 2008.

Now I’m very, very tired, and I think I lined up more work for myself for the coming few months. That’s another reason to hide out at home for a while.

George Gilder, Lord of the Adguacyth

I’m off to the Twin Cities again (third time this week!) for a couple of events. Since I’m a cruel, heartless predator who likes to return to the scene of a kill to gloat, though, I thought I’d repost the vicious savagings I gave George Gilder, in The sanctimonious bombast of George Gilder and Gilder: still wailing over his spanking. Gilder, by the way, was a co-founder of the Discovery Institute, and a professional “techno guru” who led many an investor down the path to bankruptcy when the tech bubble collapsed in the 90s. I think he’s well on his way to historical oblivion at this point.

There were a couple of notable things about those posts. They spawned 50-100 comments, which in those days was simply astonishing (now I know that if I write a blank post I can get that many comments). They first sucked in George Gilder’s daughter to protest my brutality, and then George Gilder himself, who just sunk himself deeper in the morass of his own BS. Gilder is the fellow who pompously announced that he had renamed the object of molecular biologists’ study the “Adguacyth”, apparently for “adenine guanine cytosine thymine”. Try googling for that term, or looking in the technical literature; I guess it didn’t take off, since it’s apparently unique to his comments there. Perhaps people who admit to never even taking a single biology course ought to avoid trying to rename major concepts in the field.

Another thing you may notice is that Gilder babbles a bit about Shannon information theory—as a “techno guru”, that sure sounds sophisticated, even though his comments reveal that he doesn’t understand what he’s talking about. What makes it particularly ironic, though, is that nowadays one of the most embarrassingly ignorant mouthpieces for the Discovery Institute is Michael Egnor, who denies the relevance of Shannon information theory. I guess that was another bubble that popped on poor George.

Gilder: still wailing over his spanking

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Oh, come on, Boston Globe. They tip-toed around, avoiding naming me or the weblog, but I think everyone here can figure out what they’re talking about.

Yet even Gilder, seemingly a lightning rod for the socioeconomic controversy of the moment, was blistered by the comments posted on a University of Minnesota biologist’s weblog last fall, language so heated Gilder’s daughter felt obliged to rush to his defense.

Awww. Poor baby. They could have at least mentioned the site url! Here’s the article that made George Gilder cry: The Sanctimonious Bombast of George Gilder. It’s too bad they didn’t give that link in the fluff job they wrote for Gilder, because he repeats the same nonsense again, and adds a new set of lies to the mix.

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The sanctimonious bombast of George Gilder

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Yesterday, I was reading a good article in the October 2004 issue of Wired: “The crusade against evolution”, by Evan Ratliff. It gives far more column space to the voices of the Discovery Institute than they deserve, but the article consistently comes to the right conclusions, that the Discovery Institute is “using scientific rhetoric to bypass scientific scrutiny.” Along the way, the author catches Stephen Meyer red-handed in misrepresenting Carl Woese (by the clever journalistic strategem of calling Carl Woese), and shows how the DI’s favorite slogans (“Teach the controversy” and “academic freedom”) are rhetorical abuses of the spirit of the ideas behind them. It’s darned good stuff. I should probably say more about the good article, but I’m still picking magma out of my ears after reading a one page insert in the article — a ghastly, ignorant broadside by George Gilder that prompted a personal eruption. I’ve calmed down now, so I can tear it apart more delicately than I might have yesterday.

I’m still a bit peeved at the fool, so I’m going to remonstrate against him first—but maybe later I’ll say more about the Ratliff article.

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