If you’ve been following our little high school drama here in homophobic Morris, Skatje has posted a summary.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
If you’ve been following our little high school drama here in homophobic Morris, Skatje has posted a summary.
The bad news: the shameless astronomer is gaining on us, and has closed within a hundred votes.
The good news: Deep Sea News has joined the scienceblogs stable! This is either a portent of the squid-fans victory, or a consolation prize that will make up for any loss.
Vote for Pharyngula (and remember, you can vote every day!). Unless you are incapable of being dazzled by carnivorous sponges.
How can they have a respectable show trial if the defendant keeps defending himself so well? This is a classic and irrefutable response.
This sad jumble of bones is all that remains of Volaticotherium antiquus, a small rat-sized mammal that was recently dug up in China. There are two particularly outstanding things about this creature.
One is that browner layer in the rock: that isn’t an artifact, it’s a bit of soft tissue that was preserved, called a patagium. A patagium is a thin membrane stretched between the limbs, and is used for…flying! This animal probably lived much like a modern flying squirrel (although it is definitely not a squirrel), gliding from tree to tree.
The second surprise is the age. This is a Mesozoic mammal, from Chinese beds that are roughly dated to somewhere around the mid Jurassic to early Cretaceous—it was a contemporary of the dinosaurs. I’m tickled to imagine a diplodocid stretching up its long neck to strip the foliage from a tree branch, and this little guy squeaking angrily and leaping off to fly to the next tree.
Now one more thing we need, but are extremely unlikely to find, is a Mesozoic moose.
Mang J, Hu Y, Wang Y, Wang X, Li C (2006) A Mesozoic gliding mammal from northeastern China. Nature 444:889-893.
Here’s another article on that freaky Left Behind video game. The rationalizations for the ability to kill people violently in the game are fascinating.
Left Behind Games’ president, Jeffrey Frichner, says the game actually is
pacifist because players lose “spirit points” every time they gun down
nonbelievers rather than convert them. They can earn spirit points again by
having their character pray.
Isn’t the most wonderful version of pacifism ever? Go out, butcher a few people, engage in a warlike campaign…and as long as you beg an invisible man’s forgiveness afterwards, you can still call yourself a pacifist. With that kind of reasoning, Ted Haggard is a heterosexual, Bill Bennett is a cautious investor, and Ted Nugent is an environmentalist. No wonder Christianity is popular among hypocrites.
Since I was just mean to the British press, here’s a compensatory accolade: here’s a nice, sharp editorial from James Randerson.
ID was itself designed as a Trojan horse for creationism, with its origins in the Discovery Institute, a thinktank in Seattle whose stated aim is “to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God”.
Even a conservative judge in Dover, Pennsylvania, saw through the sham last year when he heard a case brought by parents who objected to ID being taught in their school. “Intelligent design is a religious view, a mere re-labelling of creationism, and not a scientific theory,” he wrote in his judgment.
Let’s be honest: despite its scientific-sounding frills and baubles, ID is pure religion. It is a reincarnation of an old idea that Darwin dispensed with and it has no place in a science class.
Although, actually, I was hoping to get Caligula, like The Countess.
(Honestly, I warned you. Keep voting.)
O how desperate he has become. Phil is stripping to get votes now. I’m not going to go down that road (I’d be doomed for sure if I did), so here’s the deal. Vote for me and I’m going to expose my brain rather than my bod: I’ve got this great post on evolution of the vascular system I’ll put up later today if you good, smart people can keep the drooling libidinous minions of the Bad One at bay a little longer, and keep me in the lead. Otherwise, it’s internet memes/quizzes and photos of my cat’s litter box.
Vote for Pharyngula (and remember, you can vote every day!). Unless you hate science.
P.S. Comrade Bérubé insists that my re-education will take great strides forward if I encourage all to vote for him as the Best Educational Blog.
Is anyone else getting a “look how stupid Americans are” vibe from all the British coverage of Ken Ham’s creation ‘science’ museum? It’s another story from the European press that politely echoes Ham’s overblown claims for his grandiose edifice to ignorance, and mostly recycles the same old stuff we’ve heard over and over again. It really does seem to simply parrot whatever the Answers in Genesis con men say with complete credulity…for instance, I’ve seen this strange comment repeated multiple times in these kinds of stories.
Two-thirds of the US population lives within six hours’ drive of Cincinnati, but Mr Ham has bigger ambitions for tackling agnostics further afield.
Hold it. Think. Check your facts. Look at a map, and you’ll see that that domain outside of a circle with a radius of 300 miles includes everything west of Chicago, the entire urban Northeast, and most of the major cities of the South, such as Atlanta. It includes Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, etc., a populous region to be sure, but how can one argue that a small area that excludes California, Texas, New York, and Florida contains the bulk of the nation’s people? That’s an area of about 280,000 square miles in a country of 3,700,000 square miles—shouldn’t that make a reporter stop and think, especially when it is an area that does not include our regions of highest population density?
I’m beginning to feel a “look how stupid the BBC can be” vibe right now, myself. Does anyone know where this mysterious number comes from? Is it Ken Ham lying, or is it the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce lying?
I have been ordered by the Ministry of Justice of the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party to publicly confess my shame and apologize for my grave offenses against the WAAGNFNP. I do so apologize. I have been ordered to abjure all attempts to redirect trolls to the distraction of the Glorious Show Trial against the Enemy of the People, Chris Clarke. I do so.
