Cephalopod Awareness Day Alert #4

i-c58e7ba67a9f6784b7ca9acb7dab494f-ceph_aware.jpg

One last compendium, I think, unless I find unusually large quantities of Cephalopod Awareness links in my mailbox tomorrow.

Sam Harris seems like a nice fellow, but very confused

Sam Harris responds to the reaction to his speech at the Atheist Alliance meeting.

Is it really possible that PZ Myers and Ellen Johnson think I was recommending that we stop publicly criticizing religion or that I am hiding my own atheism out of “shame and fear”? I would not have thought such a misreading was possible, given the contents of my speech and my rather incessant criticism of religion in my books, articles, and lectures.

It’s puzzling to be accused of misreading Harris when his misreading of PZ Myers is so far off base; perhaps my name was just tossed in as an afterthought, and he’s really trying to address Ellen Johnson’s comment. Even there, though, I think he’s mangling the point.

[Read more…]

Cephalopod Awareness Day Alert #3

i-c58e7ba67a9f6784b7ca9acb7dab494f-ceph_aware.jpg

More cephalopods are being celebrated everywhere. Send me more!

Help Shelley pay for her education—she’s a poor graduate student

Shelley Batts of Retrospectacle is up for scholarship for bloggers, and she needs your vote. You must vote for Shelley. She once gave me a special cookie in her bed. None of the others have ever given me or you a cookie of any kind, and we aren’t going to get anywhere near their beds, so the choice is clear.

Vote Shelley Batts. The one with the cookies. And the parrot. And the nice blog about neuroscience.

Nobel in Medicine goes to…

I’ve known for years that this was going to happen: Mario Capecchi, Oliver Smithies and Briton Martin Evans have won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work on targeted gene mutations. If you’re interested in what kinds of work they’ve done, I described one paper on Hox regulatory evolution, and this work on the evolution of the Hox code wouldn’t have been possible without their knockout techniques.