pharyngula

The new site is suffering — the poor thing is just dying and struggling and screaming, trying to cope with the traffic. Say goodbye, Ed Brayton is going to put a bullet in its brain tonight, and it'll be dead. But good news! A brand new dedicated server is being installed tonight as well! There…

Some people are planning to make a sequel, another 13 part series, to Carl Sagan's Cosmos. This may be a greater heresy than giving Star Trek a reboot with a time-travel movie, or turning Star Wars into Jar Jar Binks land, but there is one glimmer of sunshine: it's going to star Neil deGrasse Tyson…

(via Aquaviews) (Also on FtB)

I've got a lovely crocoduck tie, but maybe I need a new pigbird tie. Look! Evolution is impossible! It's like a flying pig! This is some new awful short video from Answers in Genesis. It's slick and fast and just babbles rapid-fire lies at the viewer — don't stop, don't think, you might catch on…

This is an excellent comic at Abstruse Goose that illustrates the depth of our evolutionary history. The ending is a downer, though; shouldn't the protagonist have been enlightened and encouraged by this information?

I was afraid this would happen. Trying to shift the bulk of the traffic from here to freethoughtblogs has not gone well: the server can't handle the load, so it's currently grinding away glacially to serve everyone and serving no one in the process. Everything will be moved to a sniny new server by…

This is a lovely little song with a nice twist at the end. (Last edition of TET; Current totals: 12,856 entries with 1,460,095 comments.) By popular request, The Endless Thread is now on Freethoughtblogs!

These wasps are homing in on that orchid for…well, decorum forbids. Use your imagination. (via National Geographic, which has a whole gallery of orchids)

Another reason to get rid of the silly monarchy: Prince Charles is a quack. Professor Edzard Ernst criticised the heir to the throne for lending his support to homeopathic remedies and for promoting the Duchy Herbals detox tincture. In a briefing with reporters at the Science Media Centre in…

Larry Moran went crazy and has created the largest Carnival of Evolution ever. There is so much good stuff in there…and I'm annoyed that the creationists are staying away by the legion. It's all evidence and data and science, which are apparently toxic to them.

This married couple are good brave human beings. Hege Dalen and Toril Hansen have rightly become national heroes in Norway after they rescued 40 fleeing teens from the massacre on Utoya Island. Using their boat, they made multiple trips into the waters around Utoya where Anders Breivik was…

I can't believe we elected any of these hypocritical loons to office anywhere. Look at the shenanigans in Dayton, Ohio. Kelly Kohls, who was elected in Springboro on a platform of fiscal responsibility two years ago, requested last week the district's curriculum director look into ways of providing…

Howdy all! This is MG Myers. Pharyngula is known for its vibrant community of commenters, and May was no exception. The May Mollies have been tabulated and the winner is <drum roll> Audley Z. Darkheart! Audley is hereby inducted in the distinguished Order of the Molly. Virtual champagne…

I don't care what his next movie is about. I'll pay to go see it. I notice who's doing the interview: Libertarians. Screw 'em.

I'm not going to say a word about this video: it's theologian Paul Begley reading from the book of Revelation. What I think of Paul Begley and his explanation cannot be adequately expressed in words so I'm not even going to try to write them. Use your imagination. Here's the scientific…

Peter and Annie sent me a present, all the way from Australia — a selection of teas, and this magnificent infuser that I'm now going to be using every morning. Thanks very much!

I shall have to turn on my television Sunday evening (7 or 8pm, depending on where in the US you are). Stephen Hawking will be on the Discovery Channel to answer the question, "Is There a Creator?" — I'm pretty sure he's going to answer "no." He also tersely answers a few questions online. Q: First…

This is a horrific story out of Victoria, where a church school had two rather nasty pedophiles tag-teaming the student body, Gerald Ridsdale who was the school chaplain, and Robert Best was the principal. They were raping pre-teen boys in their offices; over the years, many victimized kids…

A member of the Australian parliament, Fred Nile, has been pushing an interesting cost-saving measure. You know how Australian schools are saddled with chaplains and religious instruction? Well, he wants to keep that nonsense and kill the ethics classes that students can take as a secular…

I saw this in one of the comments here and thought it was sweet. (Last edition of TET; Current totals: 12,843 entries with 1,458,229 comments.)

Newt Gingrich has 1,325,842 followers on twitter. Who cares, you might be asking. The criteria for being popular on twitter are rather different than the criteria for being a competent statesman; if twitter mattered in that way, Ashton Kucher would be president. It's irrelevant. But Gingrich is…

I told you all the batty creationists were crawling out of the woodwork to crow over Xiaotingia's redefinition of Archaeopteryx's status as a victory for their ideology, when it really isn't. Now another has joined the fray: Vox Day, creationist and right-wing lunatic. He makes a lot of crazy,…

We've discovered the problem that has flattened freethoughtblogs.com: our hosting company can't do it, despite what they told us. What we need is something that can handle hundreds of thousands of page loads per day and a good chunk of storage space, and these guys are throttling our bandwidth and…

OK, that launch fizzled. You know what's really annoying? I can't shake my fist towards the mysterious Blog Overlords and curse them for their incompetence, because we are the blog overlords. Dang. Freethoughtblogs.com is not holding up well under the morning traffic load. The tech slave is…

The new site went live sometime late last night, and our technical help slaved away to try and get everything working, if not beautiful. Check out Freethoughtblogs some time today, and say what you think. I've created a thread to collect suggestions and criticisms as we shake out the bugs, fine-…

(via National Geographic)

We've been missing one piece of information in all the condemning and howling and insanity of the Rebeccapocalypse: the notorious talk at CFI in which Watson hatefully and viciously tore into a poor innocent student and ripped her to shreds in public…or, at least, that's how it's been characterized…

It's been one of those days. I gave my talk at #ssa2011, and unfortunately…my flash drive turned out to be unreadable on all of the machines there, so I had to do it without any visual aids. I ended up at several points waving at a blank screen and asking everyone to imagine what was up there. Oh…

We all knew this was coming. Xiaotingia, the newly described feathered dinosaur, suggests a reevaluation of the taxonomic status of Archaeopteryx, so the creationists are stumbling all over each other to crow about the failure of science…which doesn't make any sense, since reconsidering hypotheses…

Hedges has been totally nuts for the last few years: he's got this crazy irrational hysteria about atheists that makes him utterly unhinged whenever he writes about us. His latest is of a piece with his mania: The gravest threat we face from terrorism, as the killings in Norway by Anders Behring…