pharyngula

I expect Carl Zimmer must have already seen this, but it's cool anyway: Attenborough shows us some of those freaky parasitic fungi destroying insects.

Jebus, but I am in the wrong business. Benny Hinn is getting his flock to buy him an airplane. As a result, we have recently taken delivery on our Gulfstream G4SP plane, which we call Dove One. I have enclosed a beautiful photo-filled brochure to explain more about this incredible ministry tool…

If you need help figuring out how to irritate me, here's a long, long list.

Those godless heathenish Scandinavians…I think you can figure this one out even if you don't know Norwegian. (click for larger image) Thanks, Kjetil Åkra! If you really must have something in English, Kristine uncovers a Chick parody: Mommy burns in Hell. That'll cheer you right up.

Thanks, Hank Fox. Now I've been damned, officially.

Why would the state of Maine ban such a classy beer label? Do they hate Christmas? By the way, Dave Puskala has told me he has a homebrew he calls "Angry Evolutionist"—that's a label I'd like to see. (via The Science Pundit)

Sometimes, I get something other than hate mail from creationists—I get crank mail, too. I got a letter recently from Lin Liangtai, asking me to help disseminate information about his amazing paleontological discoveries. He has photos of what he calls a 300 million year old penis, along with other…

This cute kid makes a nice rant that I completely agree with, but yeesh—those aren't her words. She's playing dress-up and prancing in front of a camera, and reciting with child-like enthusiasm words someone else wrote for her. That bugs me. My kids were brought up without religion, and I know…

Can I possibly bear another bucket of gobbledygook from Deepak Chopra? One must soldier on, I suppose, even as Chopra becomes even more vague. I'm going to keep it short, though. Dawkins, along with other arch materialists, dismiss such a search [for "god"]. Are information fields real, as some…

Friday Ark #115 Carnival of Education #95 I and the Bird #37 The Tangled Bank will be at Down to Earth next Wednesday—send those links in to me or host@tangledbank.net.

Something is odd about this comment: …to help make his point that the bible was the word of god, he introduced the Dead Sea scrolls. He said that they were 3,000 years old and that scholars had found that they were identical to the modern day bible. In fact, he said, "Every dot over every 'i',…

This is just not right. Orac finds some wacky spiritualist 'healer' who claims to have the cause for diabetes: a demon, the great spirit squid of doom. What? A squid demon? How kooky. Everyone knows no self-respecting squid demon would confined itself to screwing up one subset of cells in your…

It's looking a lot like Cephalopodmas…whoa, but I got a lot of cephalopod art and weirdness sent in to me this week. You'll have to look below the fold for all of them, and do notice that most of the images are links to the source.

Enteroctopus dofleini Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.

My favorite ferocious feminist has declared this to be "Sod off, God! Week" at I Blame The Patriarchy. There's no respite from the patriarchy blaming, but she is taking a sledge to a few sacred cows as a sideline. Like this: Take ritual, for instance. My suspicion is that ritual is no deep human…

Tild~ has a nice retort and badge for the Republicans. Now every time they pull that "Democrat party" stunt, we just reply back with a reference to the Republican't party.

Justice Scalia: "I told you I'm not a scientist. That's why I don't want to deal with global warming." He's quite right, actually: he's not a scientist, nor should we expect him to be. That's why our government ought to be served by competent scientific advisors…and why it's a shame that Scalia…

Daniel Morgan, of Get Busy Livin' or Get Busy Bloggin' was interviewed on the Florida 10 commandments monument. It would be a moment of glory if Sean Hannity hadn't been involved. You can catch it all on YouTube.

Go ahead, fill it out. These forms are so easy to lose. Don't forget to send in the warranty information, too!

You know, people don't believe me when I say I don't give my kids weekly or daily instruction about atheism, but it's true: my daughter asked for my videos of "The Root of All Evil?" and "The God Who Wasn't There" for the first time the other day, and I let her watch them. She has posted her…

There are three people who need to burn in hell for this photo. Don't they know I've been trying to forget the Disco Years?

If you've been wondering how it would turn out, the first review of the Left Behind video game is online. It doesn't get any thumbs up. Don't mock Left Behind: Eternal Forces because it's a Christian game. Mock it because it's a very bad game. The real-time strategy/adventure game from Left Behind…

I got a request from Hillary Rettig: those gift-giving holidays (you know, Cephalopodmas and some other religion-tainted days) are coming up, and as we are all pale, text-focused people here, she thought the Pharynguloid hive mind would be the perfect place to gather recommendations for books to…

Wait…what about us grown-ups? What is the best science fiction novel you've read recently? I'm seeing lots of recommendations for Orson Scott Card, but I have to admit that I've long lost any affection I might have had for his work. Did you know he has a new book? It looks like full-blown…

Let's drop the "fiction" from the requirements: what are the best science books out there in the bookstores? I should update my updated book list for evolutionists again, so give me some good leads.

I found these on youtube, a couple of nice cartoony animations of the development of the urogenital system. This is one of the weirder modules in organogenesis, I think; many strange things go on that are relics of ancestral states. We actually build three pairs of kidneys—pronephros, mesonephros,…

But of course, he had to go somewhere else. That creationist who bailed out of his very own personal thread here turned up at the Calladus blog, only to get crushed there, too. He's a very silly man. We're glad to be shed of him; anyone else want to invite him to visit your blog?

Everyone should give birthday greetings to Olduvai George today.

Now Phil is trying to kill me—he sent me this link with a knowing smirk, plainly telling me that he knew it would raise my blood pressure. People, think this stuff through: if I were found dead in my chair, one clawlike hand clutching my chest, my face in a rictus of agony, and there on the…

Well, hooray! I was going to jump onto this awesome example of flagrantly stupid creationist innumeracy, but I'd been putting it off (oh, my grading. My grading. It tears at me with talons like razors). This guy mangles recent measurements of human variation, making comments like this: "previous…