If you’ve ever wondered what a couple of Molly winners, Sastra and Blake Stacey, look like…
It’s true. Blake is a creature of Kong-like immensity, beware!
Remember—Sunday morning at 9 Central tune in to Atheist Talk radio. This week, August Berkshire has two fundamentalist evangelical Christians on the show, Jeff and Lee from the Twin Cities Christian talk radio station, KKMS. I’ve dealt with these guys before, so my lip will be curled the entire hour. August will deal with them politely, you can be sure.
Hank Fox also tells me that Sunday is National Friendship Day. So what say you all try to get out and meet some new atheist friends? Look up your local godless group and see if they’ve got any fun events going on, and get to know someone new and intelligent and interesting? Last week I got to know Makita — there are all kinds of fascinating people out there, so talk to some!
The Center for Inquiry has put together two letters on the Webster Cook affair, one to be sent to UCF president John Hitt, and the other to the Catholic League. I’ve put both below the fold.
As someone who takes his laptop everywhere, this is chilling news about the ongoing erosion of our rights:
Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.
Also, officials may share copies of the laptop’s contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
For further Orwellian perspectives, take a look at this quote:
Customs Deputy Commissioner Jayson P. Ahern said the efforts “do not infringe on Americans’ privacy.”
Information must be impounded, shackled, and waterboarded in this New Republican United States of America.
I’ve been getting a volley of complaints that Pharyngula is crashing Internet Explorer. It turns out that this is a problem all over the web, and is Sitemeter’s fault. I’ve changed the code in a way that I hope will fix it — let me know if it doesn’t. (←cunning ploy there…if you’re still crashing, you may not be able to read that!)
P.S. Explorer is the worst browser available. If your computer has the resources to handle something else, switch!
I’ve always wondered why Natalie Portman was such a geek icon, but the final transformation in this video clarifies all.
(via BoingBoing)
Approximately 563 minutes ago, I noticed this peculiar analysis of language use on Pharyngula that suggested that we use the phrase “N minutes”, where N is 5 or 10, with a slightly greater frequency than the web population as a whole. This made me self-conscious for a whole 18 minutes, so I thought I’d better sleep on it for about 480 minutes before taking 4 minutes to make a short post about it. Go on and read the Language Log — it’s short and will probably take you only 2 minutes to skim through it.
Now I’m thinking, because I’m an evil and devious sort, that since this is already a low frequency event where we use that phrase, we can easily muck with people’s heads while demonstrating an observer effect. From now on, everyone try to remember that whenever you reference a short estimated interval of time, and you are about to use one of the common multiples of 5, add one to it. We don’t have to do it every time, nor does everyone have to participate, but by adding a little verbal tic on top of a tic we can skew this analysis.
The experiment began 11 minutes ago. Keep it up.
Watch and find out next week, as the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa prepares to move the Colossal Squid live, on webcam. It’s going from its formalin soak to a new display tank. Along the way they’ll sew up a rip in the mantle, remove some eggs and check how it has preserved.
The live webcast starts at 9am NZ time on Wednesday 6 August, USA time Tuesday, 5 August, 2pm PDT, 5pm EDT and UK time Tuesday, 5 August, 10pm.
I’ve agreed to another talk radio debate — this time it’s not a Christian radio station, so there’s hope of some ethical behavior on their part — on WDAY, AM 970 next Tuesday, 5 August, at 10am. We’re supposed to debate intelligent design, and my opponent is…
My opponent is…
Really, I’m embarrassed to say it…
My opponent is…
Ray Comfort.
O Lord, could you please stop making my enemies so ridiculous? It’s getting a little bit excessive.
Every time I mention this developmentally significant molecule, Sonic hedgehog, I get a volley of questions about whether it is really called that, what it does, and why it keeps cropping up in articles about everything from snake fangs to mouse penises to whale fins to worm brains. The time seems appropriate to give a brief introduction to the hedgehog family of signaling molecules.
First, a brief overview of what Sonic hedgehog, or shh, is, which will also give you an idea about why it keeps coming up in these development papers. We often compare the genome to a toolbox — a collection of tools that play various roles in the construction of an organism. If I had to say what tool Sonic hedgehog is most like (keeping in mind that metaphors should not be overstretched), it would be like a tape measure. It’s going to have multiple uses: as a straightedge, as a paperweight to hold down your blueprints, as something to fence with your coworkers on a break, and even to measure distances. It will be pulled out at multiple times during a construction job, and it’s generically useful — you don’t need one tape measure to measure windows, another to measure doors, and yet another to measure countertops. Sonic hedgehog is just like that, getting whipped out multiple times for multiple uses during development, often being used where structures need to be patterned.
Let’s dig into some of the details. I’m using the 2006 review by Ingham and Placzek for most of this summary, so if you really want to get deeper into the literature, I recommend that paper as a starting point.
