PZ Myers!

Well, I actually cut band rehearsal on Thursday night. This is almost unheard of for me. The only times I've ever missed rehearsal, I was either ill or in England. I did have what I consider a really good reason, though. PZ Myers was speaking just down the road at Sierra College!!!

Author of the blog Pharyngula, PZ Myers is one of the top science bloggers AND one of the top two atheist bloggers (the other being the much "friendlier" Hemant Mehta). The Sierra College stop wrapped up a whirlwind eight day speaking tour of mostly Northern California for him that included UC Davis, UC Berkeley, and Stanford. I'm not sure how Sierra College managed to rate a stop, but I'd like to thank the Freethinkers of Sierra College for hosting.

His blog may be strident and snarky, particularly about religious insanity, but in person he really is very soft-spoken and polite. He gave a very interesting talk about creationist's sometimes seemingly deliberate misunderstanding of evolution and the differences in the ways creationists (including intelligent design advocates) and scientists get their points across to the general public.

During the question and answer period after the talk, a creationist in the audience actually identified himself and asked questions. I felt kind of sorry for him. His hands and voice were shaking. It must have been awful feeling as though he were the only theist (he wasn't, actually) completely surrounded by a sea of atheists. Oh, wait. I know exactly how that feels, as I'm sure did all of the other atheists in the audience.

Part of the exchange between PZ and the creationist went something like this:
Theist: Blah, blah, blah, ontological argument, blah, blah (Ok, so now maybe I'm being a little snarky. Oops)
PZ: [reasoned and rational explanation of the ontological argument and why it is based on circular, fallacious arguments]
Theist: No it's not!
PZ: [reasoned and rational explanation...need actual evidence]
Theist: No it doesn't!

PZ is well known for going out for drinks after he gives a talk, and Thursday was no exception. About 30 people met afterwards at a local brew pub (including the theist, surprisingly!), and guess who somehow managed to snag a seat right next to PZ! I'm not quite sure how that happened... Unfortunately, all I had was my phone, which doesn't take the best photos.


Thanks to Brett for taking the picture!

I got the opportunity to tell PZ that, when I first started an "atheist" blog, as I said in this post, my mother was very concerned that religious nutcases would shoot me or burn crosses in our front yard. I told her that there were other far more prominent atheists out there (meaning PZ, among others. Especially PZ) and I would be way down on the list. He's of the opinion that you just can't live your life in fear, and the vast majority of theists of any religion are decent people. It's only a very small percentage of the most radical theists who are actually dangerous.

The famous Crocoduck tie. There were two made, and the other belongs to Richard Dawkins (there are now knock-offs you can find on the internet). I really wish I'd remembered my camera...



PZ was recently interviewed by reddit.com, so you can see how soft-spoken he really is:

I'm all of a Twitter

I've been on Twitter for a while now and it has been entertaining, hilarious, as well as heartbreaking, and sometimes just downright odd.

Here are some of my observations:

• Wil Wheaton really is just this guy, you know? And proof that nerds can be popular!
• Brent Spiner pretty much wrote a very entertaining short story/elaborate April Fool's joke 160 characters at a time throughout April,
• George Takei doesn't say much,
• William Shatner doesn't say much either, but does some self promotion,
• I unfollowed LeVar Burton because he was just too religious and not very interesting,
• Anybody else seeing a pattern here?
• The Bloggess is just as hilarious on Twitter as she is on her blog, if that is possible (I'm kind of surprised she hasn't been arrested, because that much hilarity isn't generally allowed in Texas),
• The Bad Astronomer is actually quite good.
• Stephen Fry went to film on location in Malasia and tweeted and twitpic-ed it all.
• Al Yankovic? Yep, still weird.
• I don't know how PZ Myers finds time to tweet anything what with all the blog posts he does. He must not sleep.
• The Onion and NPR tweets can be virtually indistinguishable sometimes,
• I even follow a fish. Erica's fish.

I have also found several bloggy friends there. Andrew was the first person to ever comment on my blog, and we've commented back and forth periodically on our blogs, as well as on Atheist Nexus. He and Stephen got into Twitter swine flu pun wars the other day (really, really bad puns - Gammontee, Andrew? Please!). Luckily nobody else was around to hear me giggling.

Anybody who's read my blog for any length of time knows Mr Farty. I won a competition on his blog over a year ago and he sent me a VERY nice set of coasters imprinted with Scottish words such as eejit, crabbit, and numpty, and their definitions. I put them in our curio cabinet, which Mr Farty thinks is just plain odd. He obviously doesn't have a house full of teenagers where things get moved and disappear never to be seen again. Currently he's changed his picture (avatar? icon? I don't know either, Lesley) from a flaming fart to Robbie the Robot. Now he's being stalked by all the zombie robots on Twitter. At the time I was typing this, both he and Andrew were commenting on the same TV show. Something about #eurovision?

Lesley from Um..What?? was my first Twitter follower. My big fluffy, and fairly young cat, Isis, (the one whose photo I used to use for this blog) died suddenly of diabetes (which caused a cascade effect of liver and kidney failure) last month, and Lesley was one of the first people I told. She sent me a tweet because she was concerned, and as she was the caretaker of a diabetic cat, and she is just a really, really nice person, I knew she would understand. My grandfather died the next day. It was a very bad week. I, unfortunately, understood completely when her Moses the Cat suddenly became ill and died less than a month later. Sorry, I wasn't planning on turning so maudlin...

There are numerous other interesting people I follow, for instance Lesley's best friend Mo (The Daily Snark), Debra (iamdebra), Steph (quirkyblogger), although I'm not so sure about Clay (mayopie). Oh, all right. He's interesting, too. Liza (wickedlibrarian) just got a cute haircut I might have to copy once the temperature here reaches over 100 degrees. Oh, wait. It's 98 right now. I might need a haircut sooner than I thought.

Oh, and I don't like to brag, BUT Barack Obama is following ME!

So remember:
You're no one if you're not on Twitter
And if you aren't there, you've already missed it.
If you haven't been bookmarked, re-tweeted and blogged,
You might as well not have existed.

Angels make sense for once!

So why doesn't he reduce human misery and suffering?
Apparently God and all the angels have Australian accents, too.

Found on Pharyngula

Darwin - the Musical

This is great! It combines two of my favorite things: evolution and music. Richard Milner reminds me of the original Dr. Doolittle, for some reason. Or maybe a cross between Rex Harrison and PZ Myers.

His English accent is...well...better than Dick Van Dyke, maybe? Maybe not.

Thanks to my father and his friend Larry for the New York Times video link!

Can someone please explain?

In my ~two years of reading "atheist" blogs, I've noticed something interesting. I seem to be one of the few atheists (blogging atheists, anyway) who has never been a theist. Most of the atheist bloggers seem to be originally Christians, although a very few, like Friendly Atheist Hemant Mehta, and KafirGirl were other religions (Jain and Sunni Muslim, respectively). Keep in mind, I only read blogs written in English. These are people who had to go through often extremely emotionally painful realizations that god really is imaginary. Many of them have deconversion stories. UPDATE: Andrew from Artificial Habitat pointed out the de-conversion blog. It is amazing that people are able to escape this type of brainwashing. Critical thinking can really hurt sometimes and I am very grateful to my parents that I never had to go through that.

The religious nutcases in this country are desperately trying to take us back into the dark ages. When school officials suspend a kid for witchcraft, and suspend a teacher because he's suspected of being a liberal and an atheist, and we have creationists constantly attacking real science, and trying to get (un)Intelligent Design taught in science classrooms along with evolution, it indicates a huge problem. So far this hasn't always worked, and common sense has prevailed. UPDATE #2: Florida is currently trying to legislate the teaching of (un)Intelligent Design. My mother even asked my why we shouldn't teach the controversy, as it's only fair. People don't seem to understand two things:

1) There is no controversy in the scientific world about whether life evolved. It did. The only scientific controversy is regarding the mechanisms of evolution. The "controversy" about whether or not evolution happened is entirely made up by the creationists.

2) Science isn't fair. Science is about the truth. Science has specific rules that are followed to find the truth. The supernatural has never been shown to exist in anything other than people's minds.

Belief in this nonsense is harmful, even if you say, "Well, I'm not one of those theists! I don't believe that." Enough of you do. Parents already poison the brains of too many of our young people. We cannot allow this bullshit to creep into our classrooms, too. It will be an uphill battle since it is estimated that 47% of Americans believe that the world is between 6000 and 10,000 years old. FORTY-SEVEN PERCENT! I can tell you from personal experience that people in other countries (Ok, England anyway) think that Americans are completely NUTS! (Demographic wikifactoid:United States - 5% atheists, England - 35% atheists.)

I've always been mildly surprised when a scientist turns out to be a theist, but this has happened numerous times. At least one of my college professors went to church every Sunday.* I find it even more surprising when it is a biologist, because they know that there is a much better explanation for life on earth than that some sort of supernatural being created it. As far as I can tell, most of them were indoctrinated early in their lives. I just want to ask them why? Why do you still believe against all the evidence. Or maybe I should say why do you believe in the supernatural when there is no evidence?

I had a scientist say to me once, "Well what about the extra energy? Where does that go when we die?" My reaction at the time, "Uh,.........." I couldn't understand the question, and it wasn't just because I was drunk. Huh? What extra energy? The same thing happens to us as happens to any other living thing on the planet. Do worms have extra energy, too? What about trees? Bacteria? Whales? Dogs? I really have ab-so-lutely no idea what this person was talking about.

Saying "you just feel that there's a god" doesn't answer anything, either. The human mind can imagine all kinds of things. I know someone who "felt the battle" when she went to Culloden and various American Civil War battlefields. This does not mean this person is actually feeling anything, it just means she has a well developed imagination. In fact, she has often exclaimed to me in frustration, "Well, you just don't have any imagination!" Because that's ALL it is. And no I don't. When I feel that there's someone watching me while I go to the bathroom, and feel that there are people who are in a different dimension who can see me, but I can't see them, I realize it is just my imagination and that I've obviously read far too many science fiction books. Ok, maybe I do have an imagination. Or it could be the guys who just installed the new ducting in our house left a camera in the vent. But that's just being paranoid, although it's far more likely than being watched from an alternate dimension or by some supernatural sky daddy who can read my thoughts.

Many people claim that the human body/world/universe is too complex to be explained naturally. Complexity does not need a god. The complexity of the universe can be, and is being, explained non-supernaturally. Just because we don't know all the answers now, doesn't mean we won't eventually, and filling the "gaps" with some sort of god is just silly. I touched on this in a previous post.

There will be no hope for this country to stay a superpower if we don't start doing a better job teaching the general public about reality rather than being respectful of ancient superstitious bullshit. Anyone, especially biologists, believing in iron and bronze-age myths is just not logical. I just want to ask why?

And when you realize why you don't believe in any other gods that man has ever invented, you'll understand why I don't believe in yours.**

/rant

*When this was pointed out to him, one of my atheist professors said, "Well, nobody's perfect."
**Paraphrase of a quote by author Stephen F. Roberts.

Thoughts on Wafergate

Most people in the atheist blogosphere have probably heard of the PZ Myers consecrated wafer saga. To recap, Dr. Myers posted a rant on his blog regarding an incident where a college student left a Catholic mass without actually eating the eucharist, but taking it with him, and has since been getting death threats.

At the end of PZ's rant, he asks people to send him eucharist wafers and he will "treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web." Now, of course, he is getting hate mail and death threats, too. A Republican delegate has even asked for extra protection at the upcoming Republican Convention because PZ only lives 150 miles away.

I don't necessarily agree with what PZ threatened to do to a consecrated cracker, because many people really do believe that this is the body of Christ. Even if I personally believe that this is just silly, blown completely out of proportion, and it really is just a cracker, obviously many people are extremely upset over this. Several people have called it a hate crime and the Catholic League press release states “It is hard to think of anything more vile than to intentionally desecrate the Body of Christ." Um...I can think of a couple. How about Catholic Priests intentionally violating trusting young children for one?

I just have a couple of questions:

1. Shouldn't an omnipotent god be able to take care of himself?
2. Are the wafers that were consecrated by the (evil-in-my-opinion-but-forgiven-by-Jesus) child molesting Catholic Priests still consecrated? I think I just answered my own question.

Expelled!

PZ Myers tells me I have a job to do . As he commands, I must obey. Rather than help trigger a Google Bomb flag, though, I’m linking that IDiot Ben Stein and No Intelligence Allowed to the Expelled Exposed website.

I’ll link the word “Expelled” in a day or two. Oh, shoot! I just did it anyway. Twice, actually... Google Bombs away!

Beelzebufo

Illustration by Luci Betti-Nash / Associated Press
I love that name. Really cool name for the worlds largest known toad. Unfortunately it's extinct, because I agree with PZ Meyers, I want one as a pet. Probably just as well. Fang, Attack Rabbit is probably just the right size for a nice snack. The females got up to 10 lbs and 16 inches long. They are related to the currently popular Pac-Man frog, and Kenneth Chang of the New York Times quoted discoverer Dr. David Krause as saying that the female Beelzebufos were “lady Pac-Man frogs, on steroids.”

I read several articles about it, but this quote from a story in the Los Angeles Times caught my eye:

“Krause, along with Susan Evans and Marc Jones of the research department of cell and developmental biology at University College in London, painstakingly removed Beelzebufo's fossilized parts, like an ancient jigsaw puzzle, from deep sediment that dates to the late Cretaceous period, 65 million to 70 million years ago.

That was the time of the dinosaurs, and Earth was a young -- and very different -- place.”

The Earth was young?? The Earth is about 4.54 billion years old plus or minus 1%. Seventy million years ago, it was still ~4,470,000,000 ± 45,000,000. In other words, the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old now, and 70 million years ago, the Earth was about...4.5 billion years old. Sixty-five or 70 million years is a drop in the bucket, geologically speaking. I’ll give them “very different.”

As one of my coworkers said when I pointed this out, "Another confirmation that our science education in the US sucks..."

This blog post was continually interrupted by a total eclipse of the moon! I had to run outside every five minutes. Unfortunately, I don't own a camera that could take a picture of it.