Man, I am so jealous of that Stupid Evil Bastard: he’s gotten so lovely for Halloween.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Man, I am so jealous of that Stupid Evil Bastard: he’s gotten so lovely for Halloween.
Mike Adams latest column is all about his UMM visit…although, actually, it’s more of a whine about me.
Dr. P.Z. Myer did, in fact, make my talk Thursday night and something very strange happened: He, too, experienced a sudden and dramatic change in his level of courage during the course of the speech.
During the question and answer session, Professor Myer simply leaned against a door post with his arms crossed and said nothing. He just stared at me blankly and stood motionless in the same place where he was standing for the last twenty minutes of the speech. During the “Q & A”, I looked directly at him and asked “Are there any other questions?”
He looked directly at me? How was I supposed to tell? He is correct that there was a big crowd there, and a spillover into the hallway. I arrived late, and there were 3 or 4 people in front of me before the entrance…as they trickled away at the end, I worked my way farther forward. I only got as far as the door by the halfway point in the Q&A.
I’d be flattered that he noticed my presence if he weren’t such a pathetic gomer.
More important than what the video will show is what it will not show. Specifically, there will be no image of Dr. Myer mustering the courage to ask a question of Dr. Adams. Instead, he simply cowered away, and then ran back to his home computer in order to blog a fictitious account of a wonderful event — probably while sitting in his pajamas.
But it is a shame that Dr. Myer lacked the courage to ask me a single question. I certainly had a couple to ask of him. And I’ll bet the audience would have liked to hear him explain how an evolutionist who deems the universe to be accidental can be so full of moral superiority. Or perhaps how the accidental moralist can be an atheist and yet so angry at God.
It takes courage for a man to admit that he is sometimes afraid. But that courage is not a gift of random mutation. It is a gift from a God who loves even the most hardened atheist.
“Cowered away”? Or stood (apparently, prominently) at the door listening?
It wasn’t a lack of courage, I have to say. I have a personal policy at these sorts of talks of always giving the students first crack at speakers, no matter whether I approve of them or not. I’ve been at events where a professor and a speaker get into a little dialog at the end, and entertaining as it might be, it’s not as instructive as getting the students involved. While the students were readily raising their hands, even if they were college Republicans, I wasn’t going to interrupt. And the questions were still coming fast when the organizer peremptorily ended the session.
Since he had questions for me, I suppose he could have asked them directly, since he seems to have noticed me there; I think he’d reply rightly that he wouldn’t do that as long as he was getting questions from his audience. In this column, he could have replied to my complaints about the unlikelihood of his stories—a guy who claims he converted to being a far right wing Republican because of his revulsion at the unprincipled abuses of their immense power by feminists has some explainin’ to do—but whining that I didn’t ask a question at his talk is mighty feeble stuff.
And speaking of courage—complaining on the web about a criticism while not giving a link and misspelling the critic’s name, let alone neglecting to address any of the points, is at best discourteous, and more likely a reluctance to let his happy audience of cheerleaders actually see the substance of the complaints.
But here’s a deal. Since Dr. Mike S. Adams is such an avid proponent of seeing alternative points of view expressed on college campuses, and since he has so much clout at the UNC as a beloved professor, he can always get one of the campus organizations there to invite me out to his university (I expect the same honorarium he got here, of course) to give a talk on evolution and creationism, and then he can ask me his questions. I’ll even make sure to keep a seat in the front row open for him.
His readers apparently are smart enough to figure out my email address despite Adams’ coy misdirection. I’ve got lots of messages calling me a “liberal pussy” this morning—why are they calling me that which Mike S. Adams fears the most?
The physicist Sean Carroll takes on Eagleton, and also makes a few comments on The God Delusion—key point, I think: Dawkins took on too many issues at once in the book, and opened himself up to criticisms on the weaker parts that are used to dismiss the stronger parts. I agree.
Most of the discussion takes up a weakness in theology, and it parallels the weakness in Dawkins’ book: the confusion between different concepts of this god-thingie. Theologians play that one like a harp, though, turning it into a useful strategem. Toss the attractive, personal, loving or vengeful anthropomorphic tribal god to the hoi-polloi to keep them happy, no matter how ridiculous the idea is and how quickly it fails on casual inspection, while holding the abstract, useless, lofty god in reserve to lob at the uppity atheists when they dare to raise questions. When we complain that the god literally described in the Old Testament is awfully petty and hey, doesn’t this business of a trinity and an immortal god being born as a human and dying (sorta) sound silly, they can just retort that our theology is so unsophisticated—Christians don’t really believe in that stuff.
It gets annoying. We need two names for these two concepts, I think. How about just plain “God” for the personal, loving, being that most Christians believe in, and “Oom” for the bloodless, fuzzy, impersonal abstraction of the theologians? Not that the theologians will ever go along with it—the last thing they want made obvious is the fact that they’re studying a completely different god from the creature most of the culture is worshipping.
Here’s a weird and trivial phenomenon to consider: gum disintegration syndrome.
I’m not much of a gum-chewer, and never have been…but I remember gum from when I was a kid, and you could chew and chew and maintain a flavorless wad for a long time. Recently, I thought I’d try gum as an appetite suppressant, and I got some of the sugarless stuff. To my surprise, I’d chew on it for a few minutes, and shortly I’d feel it losing its texture and getting runny, and then it would dissolve into small fragments that I’d just swallow. I thought it was those dang cheap confectionery companies, that the formulas for gum base had changed since I was a kid, or maybe it was the sugarless kind that was just different. I tried a couple of different brands—same result. I would have abandoned it there and chalked it up to yet another example of the evils of creeping capitalism and Things Were Better in the Good Old Days, but I mentioned it to my wife, who thought I was nuts. She’s been dipping into my gum, and noticed no difference—it lasts as long as she wants to chew it.
Weird. My wife sent me this Straight Dope article on it, but it’s not very helpful. There’s some speculation that it’s a result of secretions during arousal (unlikely in my case; I can be reading, or driving the car, and it happens…unless perhaps I have a remarkable libido) or temperature (I tried taking the gum out every once in a while to cool, but no difference, it still breaks down. Besides, my body temperature isn’t unusual enough that my doctor has noticed.) At this point it’s simply a mystery. Maybe I’ve acquired some novel new digestive enzymes, but I don’t think I’ve been in any teleporter accidents—if I graduate from dissolving Wrigley’s to novel ways of eating donuts, I’ll let you know.
I’m not concerned about it*—maybe it’s just as well this is a vice I won’t be pursuing—but now I’m curious. Anyone else have the power to reduce gum to soup? Does it only happen in moments of passion? Details!
*Although…if everyone gets a mutant superpower in their life, and mine is the ability to digest gum instead of acquiring laser eyeballs or telepathy or super-regeneration, I’m going to feel ripped off.
The life of a parasite must be a good one, and often successful; the creature at the top of the drawing above is a primitive lamprey from the Devonian, 360 million years ago, and the similarities with the modern lamprey (at the bottom) are amazing. It’s less eel-like and more tadpole-like than modern forms, but it has the same disc-shaped mouth specialized for latching on to the flank of its host, it has similar circumoral teeth for rasping through scales and skin for its blood meal, the same pharyngeal adaptations for a life spent clamped to a fish.
I’ve put a photo of the fossil and a cladogram below the fold.
Strange things are found in the sea, like this mysterious gelatinous blob bobbing about in the Norwegian fjords.
On Oct. 1 Rudolf and his brother Erling were diving when he spotted the unusual object.
“It was 50-70 centimeters (19.5-27.5 inches) in diameter and looked like a huge beach ball. It was transparent but had a kind of thick, red cord in the middle. It was a bit science-fiction,” Svensen told newspaper Bergens Tidende’s web site.
It’s something cool: a large squid egg sac. Mmmmm…two-foot diameter ball of squid eggs.
There are plenty of horrors to give us the heebie-jeebies, as you can learn in the 52nd Carnival of the Godless.
As for me, I’m going to be playing a mad scientist DJ on Tuesday, showing clips from horror movies at the Cafe Scientifique. I’ve been chopping and splicing all morning to get ready for it.
Here’s a real deal for you all: if you watch this video, you’ll have taken care of all your religious obligations for the day and are exempted from having to go to church this morning!
A reader sent me a link to a site I hesitate to reference, just because I know some people will be aghast at the exposed mammalian flesh and weird exploitation of women…but it’s got tentacles everywhere, and molluscs, and even a few arthropods and a giant salamander. The title, Tentacles of Desire, and the list of organisms tells you what it’s all about. If you’re easily offended or squeamish about slime or freaked out by perverse fetishes, don’t go there!
Otherwise, though, just consider it a celebration of biodiversity.
Norwegianity has put out a request to design an appropriate logo for all of us godless heathen bloggers. There’s a certain religious deathcult that uses an instrument of torture as its immediately recognizable logo—it’s very simple, clean, easy to draw, and they’ve made it their own. You see one of those things on a website or on a necklace and you instantly know to a very rough approximation the predilections of the owner. Why can’t we have something like that?
You might be thinking the very idea is ridiculous, since freethinkers are such a diverse group, but you know, Christians also encompass a very wide spectrum of beliefs on so many issues, and that hasn’t stopped them. It would be great to see somebody with some graphic talent come up with something we could all use.
There is a tradition of using the pansy (pensée) as a symbol, but it isn’t exactly easy to render. The Invisible Pink Unicorn is cool, I think, but really just mocks silly beliefs. American Atheists has a trademarked symbol, a stylized atom, which really ought to be the symbol for Scientism or something, and I’d rather see a symbol that isn’t specific to just atheism. I ran across one site with a simple idea, which might work; I’d have to think about it. It’s an asterisk, which looks a tiny bit like a pansy, and has that open wildcard vibe to it.
Anyway, the kind of thing I would be looking for is something simple, fairly abstract, easy to render, and that wouldn’t antagonize deists, agnostics, or atheists. It should be positive: no crucifixes with a slash through them, for instance. It shouldn’t be weird—no flying spaghetti monsters, please—it shouldn’t be ugly, it shouldn’t be in-your-face and gloating, it should be unobtrusive. It ought to be the kind of symbol that if it were done up as a piece of jewelry, it would be tasteful. Remember, even if you do come up with a nice logo, the hard part is going to be getting a critical mass of unbelievers to adopt it and build a recognizable association with it (and be warned, no matter how gorgeous and elegant and clever an idea you come up with, there will be a solid cadre of the godless who will resolutely refuse to have anything to do with it, on general principles and intrinsic cussedness…which is OK.)
Talk about it in the comments, doodle up stuff and send it to me, and if there is any response at all, I’ll put up a gallery of ideas later. If we’ve got something good, I’ll use it on my site, maybe Mark will join in, and we can get the ball rolling.
We’ve already got lots of suggestions in the comments. Here are some that are easy to render with html:
Book Antiqua : * ∞ Ω ○ π ∅ ⊛ ☉ ☈ ♮ σ α Φ
Bookman Old Style : * ∞ Ω ○ π ∅ ⊛ ☉ ☈ ♮ σ α Φ
Century Schoolbook : * ∞ Ω ○ π ∅ ⊛ ☉ ☈ ♮ σ α Φ
Goudy Old Style : * ∞ Ω ○ π ∅ ⊛ ☉ ☈ ♮ σ α Φ
Lucida Grande : * ∞ Ω ○ π ∅ ⊛ ☉ ☈ ♮ σ α Φ
Times New Roman : * ∞ Ω ○ π ∅ ⊛ ☉ ☈ ♮ σ α Φ
There are also suggestions for combinations (an asterisk inside a circle, for instance—the default renders as a 6-lobed asterisk, unfortunately), or others that would need a professional artist to do—a spiral or a nautilus shell or a torch, for instance. We’ve also got one suggestion for an upraised middle finger, which is rather sweet, but since it’s from a Christian we have to ignore it. Keep ’em coming!
And now a suggestion from Carl:
No fair! Carl could draw a swirly dog turd for us, and it would look good.
Two more suggestions from Manxome One:
Attached are what popped into my head upon reading your post about a godless logo.
The first is a stylized lowercase a with a period ( A, period!), which happens to look somewhat like a question mark on its side.
The second is the same idea, only the a is a highlighted portion of a stylized infinity symbol.
Here are some nice renderings of the asterisk in a circle idea from Lucas:
There’s something I like about this. They remind me of echinoderms!
Oh, how I would love to subvert this stupid story you can find in every cheap beach trinket store along the Washington coast.
And another design from Nick:
More suggestions have come in overnight. I’ve added alpha and phi to the line of text symbols above, and here are some more graphical ideas:
John Pieret sends us a pansy:
Node_3 submits a rough draft of a galaxy:
Here’s an interesting design:
Just for laughs (no way is this appropriate!), here’s a
cute suggestion:
What next? Hank Fox has a few suggestions in the comments. I’m going to be a bit elitist and say I don’t like the idea of a poll; clicking a button doesn’t require much thought or commitment, and is also easily abused. What I propose is to let the discussion here go on a few more days, and then I’ll pull out the ones that get the most interest (the asterisk, the circle, the natural symbol, pi, something with DNA, the empty set are all strong contenders right now), and I’ll ask their defenders to send me a summary of their support. I’ll put up one more post on it, and ask for comments yay or nay, and I think what I’ll do is weight the ones from people with weblogs who’d put the symbol in some prominent place more heavily. That’s what we need to get this to work, is people who will use the symbol.
Another volley of entries…from GodfreyTemple:
And how about atheos?
