Warning: this is an extremely disturbing video. It’s of an unpleasant and rather personal surgery, in which a man had a can of perfumed body spray stuck in a certain orifice, requiring a medical extraction. The circumstances and the graphic operation are distressing enough, but what’s most horrifying are the medical staff — the room is packed with non-essential personnel who are laughing uproariously and mocking the patient, and of course, there’s the other inappropriate circumstance, that someone taped this and then uploaded it to youtube. Keep that in mind if you’re ever hospitalized in the Philippines, and find yourself in Vicente Sotto Memorial Hospital; you may leave to discover your privates are now public.

The hospital seems to be responding in the appropriate way, with censure and warnings, and there is a possibility some of those involved may lose their licenses. I can’t say as much for the Catholic church in the Philippines — the archbishop is blaming the victim, instead.

The whole thing is a ghastly breach of medical ethics, and the church is compounding the problem…but isn’t that supposed to be one of those mythical virtues of religion, that they have a hotline to morality?

For a guy who has been dead for 126 years, he’s pretty lively. You must see the result of a contest to caption a photo of Darwin’s statue and the odious Ben Stein: trust me, Stein gets less than he deserves.

You just can’t keep a brilliant man down. Charles Darwin also has a blog.

Here’s a generous idea: if you join the NCSE, this blogger will match your donation, up to a total of $500. If you aren’t already a member, take this as further incentive.

I don’t usually think of Australians as particularly prudish — brash and outspoken are more common stereotypes — so this story about the Anglican Church Grammar School banning gay partners at their dances seems a little out of character. I know we’ve got some Australian commenters, so I expect they’ll correct my misunderstanding and explain that their compatriots are all fussy little schoolmarms who faint at the slightest whiff of ribaldry.

Anyway, the headmaster tries hard to justify the decision. There are “protocols and decorums,” he says. Another school follows suit; they want to maintain “gender balance” (that one’s easy: invite lesbians as well as gay boys!)

They haven’t yet brought out the most powerful excuse. These are all boys schools, and as everyone knows, there is never any homosexual activity among randy young teenagers cooped up in a school in which no members of the opposite sex are ever allowed to be present.

Perhaps you’ve heard of carbon offsets: the idea that if you’re going to do something that will release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, you also buy or support something that will sequester an equivalent amount of carbon. It’s a rational way to compensate for necessary activities and keep your damage to the environment neutral.

Well, how about stupid offsets? Let’s say you’re going to do something that will increase the net amount of stupidity in the universe, like, say, paying to watch some inane creationist propaganda film because you’re curious about just how bad it can be. You can, without feeling guilty, if for every dollar you spend on the dumb movie you also invest an equivalent amount in something that increases intelligence, like donating to the NCSE. It’s an excellent idea: if you absolutely must pitch a few dollars into the pockets of lying frauds, make sure you counterbalance the problem and buy Truth Tickets, too.

And even if you don’t want to see the stupid movie, you can still buy Truth Tickets to compensate for all the idiots who will.

By participating in popular entertainment. Richard Dawkins is going to appear on Dr Who!. I know one fan of both who’s going to be pleased.

I hope they also got a guest appearance by Lalla Ward…

• It was nothing but gray skies and intermittent rain while I was there. It was so beautiful … it felt like home. It was also good seeing my old mentors from grad school days, Chuck Kimmel and John Postlethwait.

• Patrick Phillips played this video on the big screen. In my presence. I thought about hiding under a table.

• The wackaloons of the Oregon Right to Life group were meeting in the same hotel with us. They should have snuck into our talks and seen all the pretty embryos we were looking at. Or maybe some of us should have snuck into their sessions, so there’d be at least a few people in the room who know something about embryology.

• It was a fairly small meeting, about 100 people. That’s the way I like them — I actually got to meet some new faces.

• The most horrifying story: Jerry Coyne mentioned that people had written in to say that Hopi Hoekstra did not deserve tenure after publication of the now infamous Hoekstra and Coyne paper, which was critical of evo-devo. That was unbelievable. I didn’t agree with everything in the paper, but then 1) I don’t agree with everything in any paper, and 2) it was useful, productive criticism.

• I really like this IGERT program. Sometimes, the granting agencies get a great idea.

• I am very, very tired, but it’s a good tired.

The Sykes family has my sympathy — they have an autistic child, and that has to be difficult. My sympathy is limited, however, by the fact that are lashing out seeking to blame someone, have bought into the thimerosal hysteria, have hired a bottom-feeding shyster to sue various pharmaceutical companies, and said unethical ambulance-chaser is now using the power of the subpoena to harrass and intimidate bloggers who aren’t at all involved in the case, but have simply written about the absence of a thimerosal-autism link.

They have subpoenaed Kathleen Seidel of the Neurodiversity blog for, well, just about anything they can think of. She isn’t involved in the trial otherwise; she is a knowledgeable person with no special inside information on either the Sykes or the drug company, but has only written critically about the case as an outsider. For that, her reward is that a lawyer with a history of attempts to use bad science in legal cases wants to silence her.

There’s more on the case at Pure Pedantry and Overlawyered.

All right, people, I give up. Everyone has been sending me links to this story about a recent publication — it made the CBC, ScienceDaily, CNN, the Telegraph, and who knows what else — but I haven’t been able to get my hands on the original science article: Huffard CL, Caldwell RL, Boneka F (2008) Mating behavior of Abdopus aculeatus (d’Orbigny 1834) (Cephalopoda: Octopodidae) in the wild. It’s published in Marine Biology, sensibly enough, but out here on the prairie we don’t get much call for tales of kinky tentacle sex in the sea … or, perhaps, it’s all sublimated or hidden away (one does wonder what The Dream of the Soybean Farmer’s Wife might be).

Anyway, I ask this tentatively because every time I’ve asked for papers here I get inundated, but could someone please send me a pdf? I’ll announce it here as soon as I get one.

Hooray! I’ve got a copy already! I think this is what we call instant gratification. Thanks all.

Matt Nisbet is currently running a photo of Dawkins and myself with this legend: Dawkins and Myers: It’s Time to Let Others Be the Spokespeople for Science. Never mind the personal criticism, doesn’t he even realize how wrong that statement is? No, it’s worse than that; it’s so bad it’s not even wrong.

Who are the “spokespeople for science”? Is this a formal title conferred on specific individuals, is there a protocol for defining who gets the job, and most importantly, is there a salary? Nisbet doesn’t seem to realize that there are no spokespeople for science — there are just people involved in science who speak out; I don’t know of anyone who even declares themselves to be self-appointed spokespeople for science, especially not me, and not even more prominent representatives like Dawkins. Anyone who mistakes me for one of these mythical spokespeople for science, instead of a guy working within science who happens to have a blog, is too stupid to be taken seriously.

There’s also this bizarre implication that it’s a position someone lets someone else have, as if Nisbet just has to follow some esoteric parliamentary rules of order and presto, someone can be defrocked of their spokesperson’s robes and they can be conferred on someone else. Preferably Nisbet himself, apparently. There is no such process and no such power. All anyone can do is write and talk, and if people listen to them, fine, if they don’t, no problem. There is no autocracy or hierarchy that defines who can do what in this business. All I’m doing is writing, so all he can do is carp at me to shut up…ineffectively, alas.

That statement alone is sufficient to demonstrate that Nisbet is utterly clueless about science, and discredit his opinions completely. And this is the fellow who organizes AAAS symposia to tell us what to do? Weird.

Besides, everyone knows that I’m not the spokesperson for science. I’m the Elvis Presley of atheism. Let’s get the royal titles straight.