pharyngula

That phrase is a perfect summary of the influence of the Bush administration. It comes from an article in which a prosecutor explains how the office of the Attorney General undermined the tobacco lawsuit. Sharon Y. Eubanks said Bush loyalists in Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales's office began…

New Rule, everyone! Whenever you see Rush Limbaugh, puke on his shoes. If you're fortunate enough that you think you'll never actually be in the physical presence of the revolting tick of the far right, at least write to your local paper and demand that they never run another opinion piece from him…

The pop culture hysteria is getting ridiculous. The movie 300, based on a graphic novel treatment of the sacrifice of the Spartans in the battle of Thermopylae, has become a political palimpsest with everyone trying to find support for their agenda in it—but get serious, it's a comic book on the…

Do you read the 'supplementary information' in science articles? If you're familiar with the way journal articles work, they publish a traditional and formally formatted article in the print version of the journal, but now they often also have a supplementary information section stored in an online…

The residents of Fargo have had to put up with one of those Ten Commandments monuments for a long time (well, "put up with" may be the wrong phrase—it's North Dakota, after all). Now in a smart move, the Red River Freethinkers, who have to be especially canny to live in the Dakotas, are proposing a…

Some commenters wondered if the Ken Poppe mentioned in the previous story was the same Ken Poppe who wrote a creationist book, Reclaiming Science from Darwinism. Yes, it is. He's at Trail Ridge Middle School, a public school in Longmont, CO, and is listed as teaching 6th grade science. He freely…

Here's a newspaper article about a classroom debate on global warming. Class debates are good, I think — they get the students thinking about the evidence and working over how to present it persuasively, although I also think it's up to the instructor to provide some guidance. Realistically, sixth…

That's the salary for the University of Minnesota's new basketball coach. I want to meet that guy sometime — I really have to shake the hand of a fellow worth more than 30 of me, or most of the faculty here.

The spring of 2003 must have been a good time to start a blog — that's when I started, and beating me by a couple of months was archy. Congratulations on your persistence!

Friday Ark #131 I and the Bird #45 Grand Rounds 3(26) Carnival of the Liberals #34 The next Tangled Bank will be at Balancing Life; send those links in to me or host@tangledbank.net.

Minnesotans are going to be apologizing for this for a good long while (Why? Because we're so darn nice and we hate to see pain inflicted on others). Cheri Yecke is clawing her way to greater responsibility in the Florida educational system. On the other side of the equation, state K-12 chancellor…

Here's a picture to make you feel relatively fortunate, from the April 2007 issue of Natural History: Naked mole rats are odd little mammals in which only the queen of the colony gets to breed. The point of this picture is that even when not near the end of their term of pregnancy, they are…

I was asked my opinion of this strangely engrossing drawing titled "Man Thru History". It's one of those huge multi-paneled works with lots of little details that draw your eye in—I looked everywhere for Waldo but couldn't find him. Anyway, here's one panel out of 23: While the details are fun to…

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

Should I feel jealous or not? My students never write letters like this. And if they did, I'm at such a small school I'd never be able to post them. (via Bitch Ph.D.)

Because I'm really sick of sharing one with these pigs. Texas male Dan Patrick is proposing to buy unwanted babies for $500 a head, but only if you promise you were going to abort it if you didn't. Sleazeball male tries to dope date, gets caught be sharp-eyed female bartender. Male in pickup…

What a shock—that awesome "Left Behind" video game in which you get to convert the infidel and slaughter the heathen has tanked, big time. They sunk $27 million into it, the stock had a peak of $18.70 $7.44, and now it's worth 18 cents. I guess they didn't pray hard enough.

When we had last seen our basic embryo, it had gone through gastrulation — a process in which cells of a two-layered sheet had moved inward, setting up the three germ layers (endoderm, mesoderm, and ectoderm) of the early embryo. In particular, cells at the organizer, a tissue that induces or…

It'll make it all rubbery! I hadn't realized that there were microwave ovens around capable of handling a half-ton of meat.

OK, I can understand copying Wikipedia and setting up your own special interest wikis all over the place—it's an admission that your goals are too dorky or too stupid to survive outside your own special little incubator—but if you're going to set up your own social networking site, why would you…

…and you were thinking of stopping by the U to see the moon rocks at 7, you could also drop by Old No. 1 on Atlantic Avenue at 6 to join us for Drinking Liberally. Morris is a happenin' town tonight, isn't it?

Since Ed Darrell made such a comprehensive comment on the question of whether Darwin was as wicked a racist as the illiterate ideologues of Uncommon Descent would like you to believe, I'm just copying his list here. Remember the famous quarrel between Capt. FitzRoy and Darwin aboard the Beagle?…

Sometimes we're a little bit mean to engineers here — there's the Salem hypothesis, for instance, that notes that creationist apologists who claim to be scientists often turn out to be engineers. In compensation, though, watch this video of a Michigan man with simple, clever strategies for moving…

Neural Gourmet has put out a call for everyone to blog against theocracy: I'd like invite you all to Blog Against Theocracy. This is a little blog swarm being put together by everybody's favorite panties blogger Blue Gal for Easter weekend, April 6th through the 8th. The idea is simple. Just post…

Here's a story of a strange large squid carcass hauled up from the Atlantic deep—researchers expect it was between 16 and 24 feet long when alive and intact, but the specimen was a bit gelatinous and damaged and nibbled upon. It's been tentatively identified as Asperoteuthis acanthoderma, which…

Speaking of satire that's hard to tell from religion, one of the cycles of the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, which is prompting some end-of-the-world hysteria, and even a movie: Apparently, the whole world is going to change suddenly on 21 December, five years from now. Armageddon is not what it…

Is there anyone in the Stevens County area who reads this blog? Just in case, I'll mention this event sponsored by the UMM Geology Club to anyone interested in coming on down. Geology Club will be displaying lunar rocks and soil samples collected during the Apollo missions to the moon this Thursday…

The Paleyists at Uncommon Descent seem to be having a competition to find the most awful thing Darwin ever said. It's not hard, actually; Darwin was a conventional 19th century Englishman, with all the standard prejudices of his day, tending to assume that Anglo-Saxons were superior in most ways to…

Baby-faced Burt Humburg passed along the word-of-the-day to me: pogonotrophy (po-guh-NAW-truh-fee) noun The growing of a beard. [From Greek pogon (beard) + -trophy (nourishment, growth).] Pogonology is the study of beards and pogonotomy is a fancy word for shaving. Now this sounds like news for…

Some people do…and those people might enjoy Gary Kaiser's The Inner Bird, a site that is promoting his book of the same name, and also contains interesting tidbits of information about comparative anatomy and avian evolution.