I never get stalkers like this. What is the secret of Phil‘s animal magnetism?
(via Depleted Cranium)
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I never get stalkers like this. What is the secret of Phil‘s animal magnetism?
(via Depleted Cranium)
Minnesota Atheists notes a new policy at Borders Books — they’ve put up a small display section dedicated to books about atheism.
If you’ve ever been frustrated in a search for books on nonbelief in your local bookstore or annoyed by their inclusion in the comparative religion section, Borders Books has remedied the situation. “Atheism and Agnosticism” has been added as a new section for the works of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and many others. We hope other bookstores will follow this example, and encourage our members to suggest they do.
A reader actually sent me a photo of this miracle.
Of course, compare the size of that to the “New Age” or “Religion” section of your typical bookstore, and you can see we’ve got a ways to go yet. I’m going to have to insist that everyone go out and buy these books. After you’ve finished reading them, I expect you to write a book of your own, so we can fill up a wide rack of our own.
If you have doubts that you can write a book … have you read any of the books in the New Age or Self-Help or Pop Psych or Religion sections? Lobotomized monkeys could do better.
I would love to have a plush Anomalocaris, but this site is all in Japanese! Anyone know of an American source?
If you’re interested in the sordid history of bannings at Bill Dembski’s prissy little blog, here’s a compilation. It’s an ugly little story.
If you’re interested in the history of bannings here, I keep a public list. It isn’t quite so easy to get banned at Pharyngula, although a few are making a strong effort.
This story is getting a lot of attention suddenly: it’s a blog about a biologist reshelving creationist crap in bookstores. It’s good stuff … but I thought we all did this. You mean most people don’t?
People are always arguing about whether primitive apes could have evolved into men, but that one seems obvious to me: of course they did! The resemblances are simply too close, so that questioning it always seems silly. One interesting and more difficult question is how oysters could be related to squid; one’s a flat, sessile blob with a hard shell, and the other is a jet-propelled active predator with eyes and tentacles. Any family resemblance is almost completely lost in their long and divergent evolutionary history (although I do notice some unity of flavor among the various molluscs, which makes me wonder if gustatory sampling hasn’t received its proper due as a biochemical assay in evaluating phylogeny.)
One way to puzzle out anatomical relationships and make phylogenetic inferences is to study the embryology of the animals. Early development is often fairly well conserved, and the various parts and organization are simpler; I would argue that what’s important in the evolution of complex organisms anyway is the process of multicellular assembly, and it’s the rules of construction that we have to determine to identify pathways of change. Now a recent paper by Shigeno et al. traces the development of Nautilus and works out how the body plan is established, and the evolutionary pattern becomes apparent.
Everyone has heard of the Boston Molasses Flood, right? That was horrific and weird, but it was outdone by the London Beer Flood: houses were demolished by the torrent, seven were dead by drowning, and one dead by alcohol poisoning. I am truly impressed by the opportunism and low standards of that one individual … if you witnessed a river of beer flowing down the street, would you scoop up enough of it to kill yourself with excess? I guess I’m finicky enough that I wouldn’t stoop to cup a single handful to drink.
Unless it were a really good beer, that is.
(Does this story have some connection to the recent release of the Simpson’s Movie? It ought to.)
And I do mean dys. What a horrible scene to come upon, and even worse, what evil chaos to have lived it:
A bed had been pushed up against the door; the officers pushed it open a few inches and saw Marquez choking his bloodied [three year old] granddaughter, who was crying in pain and gasping, Tranter said.
A bloody, naked 19-year-old woman who police later determined to be Marquez’s daughter and the girl’s mother was in the room, chanting “something that was religious in nature,” Tranter said.
The elder Marquez was tasered to stop him from strangling the child, and later died of unknown causes (although tasers are dangerous, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the cause of death).
And what, exactly, were these people trying to do to the kid? It was an exorcism. They were trying to purge the poor little girl of nonexistent malign spirits, when what she was probably afflicted with is an insane family.
What’s saddest about this story isn’t that the lunatic grandfather died; it’s that the bloody, naked fanatic who had the privilege to have this child was not arrested, and may still have custody. If she had anything to do with this crazy ritual, I hope someone gets the kid away from her soon.
It’s a wiki with the tagline, “It’s a fictional world purely imagined by its community”, and it isn’t Conservapædia! Galaxiki is a galaxy-building exercise that lets you create star systems and populate them with stories and details. One bummer is that they charge you for the right to create new stars — that doesn’t seem like a smart idea, since you’d think they’d want more contributions, at least early in the game — but you can edit somewhat freely, and there are swarms of randomly generated star systems to play with.
