Output Stream of Consciousness

Why must it always be the same colour, anyhow? Well, different colours is usually a bad sign, but who knew there was such variety? With appropriate health warning provisos, here is a list of things that can make your pee change colour. Doing it on… more »

I really enjoy Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy site, and it has much to recommend it apart from its eminently sensible anti-hoax pages, including its oft-updated blog, notes on good and bad astronomy and really good forums. My new favourite on the anti-hoax… more »

George Kenney of Electric Politics interviewed Halton Arp back at the beginning of June. I have transcribed the interview here. Here is the original podcast. Arp was a little hard to make out in some spots in the interview, so if you know any of the… more »

Wow, it's been a banner week so far, and it's only half over! In recent news... Adnan Oktar, the nut behind the pen name Harun Yahya, distributor of glossy, expensive textbooks full of creationist fantasy, got the Turkish courts to have the entirety… more »

The lady who plastered anti-evolution billboards around Minnesota has a website. It is full of, as I would deem it, anti-evolution propaganda, including various quotes mined out of context. Some of them might seem quite damning, like Brian Goodwin's… more »

There's an extremely short blurb referring to Ham's creation museum over on Parade. I wasn't expecting the comments section to be one of the strangest, most worrisome indicator of the intrusion of a new American Dark Ages I have seen in a long while.… more »

Wired picked up on the saga of an overly-enthusiastic off-kilter creationist making escalating insults and threats to University of Colorado professors, as well as a few other folks online. Well, he has absconded. more »

We're learning all sorts of things in our pre-natal classes, and there are a few things that were mythology-dispelling. Where do we pick up on such mythology? Television. Well, at least, according to what I've learned so far, I have not witnessed proper… more »

When I heard recently that the Scottish Qualifications Authority was considering Intelligent Design in any way, shape or form for science curriculum, I got hopping mad. America, I can see. Scotland, my homeland, even with its Calvinist past should know… more »

Shankar Vedantam brings us news that doing good makes us feel good: "You gotta see this!" Jorge Moll had written to his colleague. Moll and Jordan Grafman, neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., had been scanning the… more »

They just finished the fifth Amazing Meeting put together by the James Randi Educational Foundation last month, and it sounded like a real blockbuster, with Adam and Tory from MythBusters, Matt and Trey from South Park and Julia Sweeney on the celebrity… more »

I had no idea that the data in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey was open to the public, but it is, and you can put your astronomy and database smarts together to help them find things, as well. Because of the way their program has been put together, it's… more »

I just encountered this little gem of a quote in the book, The New Physics : For The 21st Century on page 185: The word laser is an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, (Actually, most lasers are not operated as… more »

Now this is an unusual site. Not only is it chock-full of information about genetics, but they've picked a rather unusual means to present protein sequences to music. Every three DNA 'letters' codes for a particular amino acid, so they have put… more »

Pat over at Red State Rabble just had to find something else someone said to make my blood boil! The joke that we have been making for the past many years is that every time we discover a fossil that fills in a missing link, we've just created two… more »