Reason #12 to vote for Pharyngula

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Pharyngula has fallen behind by almost 200 votes. Wouldn’t you know that the phylum of the rats would be up to dirty tricks, though? One of their own has confessed to cheating, and tried to spread the information. Phil, to his credit, has suppressed the recipe, but it tells you all you need to know about his unscrupulous minions.

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Vote for Pharyngula (and remember, you can vote every day!). Unless you really want to read my bitter, whiny, accusatory, and self-pitying concession speech.

You don’t want to see me looking like that, do you? I don’t even know if I can fit into my plaid pinafore anymore.

School’s out!

Time to go get a beer at Drinking Liberally, ’cause the Fall semester of 2006 is all over but for the final exams and the grading and the tears. The last of the written work was turned in today, and now it’s just grading until my eyeballs evulse.

Here is a prime bit of end of term suckage, too: it is mid-December in Minnesota, and it is raining. Raining! If I wanted to live in a place with cool wet winters, I’d move back to Seattle.

Women who read SF should not be bug-eyed monsters

We have more internecine warfare going on at scienceblogs: in this case it’s a matter of casual sexism. Should someone be surprised at pretty girls reading science fiction, or even being nerdy?

As someone who has been immersed in the nerd culture of the university since the mid-1970s and has also hung out in the science-fiction culture even longer (anyone remember Escape Books in Seattle? Been to Uncle Hugo’s or Dreamhaven in Minneapolis?), and is a heterosexual male who usually notices the hot girls, I will say with great emphasis, NO! In my generation, women in biology were a minority, but really, they looked fine. The students in my classes now are mostly women, and they are lovely, although I tend to see them with a more fatherly (or grandfatherly, sad to say) eye nowadays. Science does not attract the unattractive, so could we please end that stereotype?

We also shouldn’t judge the attractiveness of individuals on the basis of such shallow parameters. True male nerds all know that intelligence is a +2 bonus to charisma, and SF fannishness is an additional +1. Heck, if I were on the market right now (oh, but I’m so glad I’m not), the first places I’d choose to hang out in to meet attractive ladies would be the bookstores, and the SF and fantasy section in particular, but not exclusively.

Not that SF is a prerequisite—my wife is both a hottie and not particularly interested in genre fiction; I’d probably find her in the science section, or math/statistics, or social sciences. And that’s OK, and defies the stereotype, too.

One last datum: my daughter‘s bookshelf looks like a subset of what you’d find at Dreamhaven. If you want to argue that she ought to be homely, you’ll find me looking pissed off at you.

Finally and in general, these expectations about how women should be expected to look, and what set of irrelevant traits ought to be correlated with desirability, and how we guys ought to tie the preferences of women’s minds with our definitions of the sexual properties of their bodies, is more than a little annoying, and something women ought to be rightly irritated about. These unwarranted assignments of roles on the basis of irrelevant characteristics can hurt people.

The Disco Institute’s Division of Legal Affairs screws the pooch again

Didn’t I tell you Casey Luskin would weigh in on the DI’s take on Judge Jones’ “plagiarism” in his own inimitably bumbling way? What do you know, he did, and he has already been shot down. John West has also floundered in trying to address the issue, and he too has felt Sandefur’s fists of fury. Poor Discovery Institute. Isn’t media management supposed to be their area of expertise? How can they be sucking so badly at it?

Reason #11 to vote for Pharyngula

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Someone is voting like mad, and it ain’t one of my partisans. The naked dude is passing me by and increasing his lead.

Vote for Pharyngula (and remember, you can vote every day!). Unless you really want to read my bitter, whiny concession speech.

>P.S. Another neck-and-neck race is shaping up in the Best Educational Blog category—quick, get over there and vote for Bérubé, or there will be more show trials!

More weird tales from Wisconsin

OK, this fellow in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin saw a strange-looking deer: it had the stubs of extra legs growing out of 3 of its limbs, and it was an intersex. That’s strange enough, and is of developmental interest, and would have me wondering what kind of environmental stresses are perturbing wildlife development in that neck of the woods.

The fellow hit the deer with his truck and killed it, and reported it to the DNR. So it’s actually road kill, a very common thing.

Now here’s where I get baffled: the man ate it afterwards.

“And by the way, I did eat it,” Lisko said. “It was tasty.”

Jebus. Wisconsin. At least he didn’t have sex with it first, I don’t think.

At least these people make freshman biology majors look like philosopher-kings

My readers are a cruel people. They send me links to the strangest things, including this wacky fundagelical rant, exposing me to the bubbling looniness simmering beneath the thin shell of rationality in this country, and making my brain hurt.

So much for the logic of religious atheism. Their problem is really that they don’t accept the doctrine of original sin or free will; they want to blame God for our sorrows. It really comes down to that. If there is a God, they think God should force us all to behave correctly, and if God won’t, then God must be evil, therefore they won’t believe in God under the rubric of plausible deniability.

Religious atheism? What’s that? This person seems to be incapable of understanding that atheists simply don’t believe in any gods, so it’s awfully silly to then claim that they’re upset because they want to place blame on a god. It isn’t just one infelicitous phrasing in a single paragraph, either—she goes on and on about how atheists are “denying human responsibility” and want to “blame God”.

Worse still, that’s the least crazy point in the article. It starts off with a tirade against the “morally insane” Jimmy Carter, that he’s not a good Christian and would fit in well with the Islamic extremists…and the Third Reich. I’m thinking the Zombie Hitler needs to join forces with some Zombie A-rab terrorists and a phantasmal “religious atheist” to cope with this level of lunacy.

Now, please, I’ve got grading to do…so much grading. So many papers. You people deal with the crazy talk, I shouldn’t be distracted.