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Free Thought Blogs Pharyngula
14.07.2025
The magnitude of the approval of immigration surprises me a bit. Almost 80% of Americans think immigration is a good thing? And approval has been about 50% for the last two decades? So how did thes…
13.07.2025
My granddaughter, Iliana, went spidering this morning and found this beauty. She’s a natural!
I’m a fairly skeptical guy. I never bought into those claims that Epstein didn’t kill himself — hey, he was in prison, with deeply dismal prospects, his fall was precipitous from …
12.07.2025
I caught these two fooling around on the milkweed, naturally. I also collected 3 Parasteatoda egg sacs nearby, so it’s not just the beetles getting in the mood.
Oh. It’s an experiment. Man, I wish we were in the control group. If you think the cartoon is too extreme, try reading Science magazine. Similar conversations are taking place across the coun…
The word is that ICE agents are sad. You don’t like them! he reality of Trump’s mass-deportation campaign is far less glamorous. Officers and agents have spent much of the past five months cl…
You wouldn’t think so, and it would be really tough to recruit people into the profession, but this game looks like my cup of tea. (Warning: the trailer is a bit grisly.) Except…it’s no…
It’s not just this aching knee that’s making me feel dismal, it’s the dearth of spiders. I limp around the yard, and no spiders. I just got back from the lab, fed the spiders, and…
11.07.2025
Department of Homeland Security agents are proud of their mission, which is to carry out mass deportations. They might as well start wearing death’s heads on their belt buckles, except that w…
In my state of limited mobility, the best I can do is roam around my yard looking for spiders. I’m not seeing any, other than a few Parasteatoda in the garage and compost, despite the fact th…
10.07.2025
Elon Musk has a pet chatbot called Grok. He recently gave it some personal attention and updated it. Yes. People noticed the difference immediately. The posts ranged from alleging “patterns&#…
My prize is a lateral meniscus tear. I talked to the doctor today, and she didn’t express any urgency. I have an appointment for a consultation two weeks from today, and until then I’m …
Here’s a provocative essay: AI is driving down the price of knowledge – universities have to rethink what they offer. The title alone irritated me: it proposes that AI is a competing source o…
This biologist does not complain about larval infestations. My son Connlann, his wife Ji, and our grandson Knut are making the long drive from Tacoma to Morris, traversing the long, long road of I9…
09.07.2025
Ted Cruz had killed weather forecasting funds in the Big Beautiful Bill, and then zoomed off to vacation in Greece while his constituents died. The Texas senator was spotted visiting the Parthenon …
Over 100 dead, and the toll is still climbing. The deadly floods in Texas swept through an area full of camping sites and Christian youth camps, and people died because they didn’t get any wa…
I got out of the house this morning on my way to get an MRI. I saw an arthropod! As for the MRI, I don’t know. I fell asleep during it, in spite of the obnoxiously loud industrial music hamme…
07.07.2025
This was fun. I found a paper about developing an arachnophobia scale, a questionnaire that someone could use to evaluate a person for arachnophobic tendencies, title Questionnaire Dimensions of Sp…
A sudden, vivid flash of memory: It’s summertime. I’m 9 years old, I’m clutching a couple of quarters in my hand, every day I’m checking the posters outside the Vale Theater…
06.07.2025
Did you know that Dr Phil, that old fraud, had put together a media company called Merit Street Media to combat the “Woke Mind Virus”? And that he partnered with Trinity Broadcasting Ne…
After all, one of the virtues of bird is that they can be used to motivate research into insects. That’s nice. We couldn’t possibly get the general public interested in arthropods when …
Let’s try a livestream on Sunday. Sunday at 3pm Central I’ll be answering questions…and if nobody has any questions, I’ll just talk about neurodevelopment.
05.07.2025
Hey, y’all remember when Game of Thrones was a hot show? It had dragons, and zombies, and bloody destructive wars, and gratuitous nudity, and engaging characters, and multiple plot lines that…
I’m starting to hear all about a major celebration of the country’s 250th anniversary next year, and it’s clear that the Trump administration is planning to use it for more propag…
04.07.2025
Yay! I have an appointment for an MRI next Tuesday! My insurance company finally approved it. Cool. This means that it only takes two weeks to get an informed diagnosis of a catastrophically debili…
I recently bumped into another archaic photo from the family collection. It’s from sometime in the 1920s, and the attractive woman shepherding her kids is my great-grandmother, Nellie Berg, i…
03.07.2025
My university gives “guidance” on the use of generative AI in student work. It’s not really guidance, because it simply doesn’t care — you can allow it or prohibit it.…
Everyone needs a home to come back to, even us space pirates. Chatter among yourselves, tell us a few tales of interstellar adventure. Previous Thread
I have been confined to my bed or a chair for the past week. I have consumed a lot of media. The media of choice has been a science-fiction serial called Murderbot. The story is set in the distant …
02.07.2025
My nurse let me out on an adventure! I got to see a bit of the prairie garden at the university — I saw it for a long time because I was moving at a snail’s pace past this little patch.…
01.07.2025
I’m a huge fan of iNaturalist — I use it all the time for my own interests, and I’ve also incorporated it into an assignment in introductory biology. Students are all walking arou…
Yesterday, I published a video. Looking at it after the fact, I got worried about myself — even though I don’t appear in it, I could see myself clearly, and in particular, the effects o…
30.06.2025
A new video! This one is just science, a cool paper I read way back when I was doing my post-doc. It left a strong impression on me, so I thought it would be worthwhile introducing it to all of you…
28.06.2025
This knee gets worse and worse — now swollen and very painful. It is agony to get up out of bed, and once out, it’s painful to get up again, so I’m spending most of my time taking…
27.06.2025
I have seen a doctor. I was x-rayed. I was informed that I have lovely knees, with no signs of arthritic degeneration. I got a blood test for my uric acid levels — they’re normal. I got…
26.06.2025
You wouldn’t want to take a bath in 70°C water. That would be painful. That’s the temperature of the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone. We had a dramatic demonstration of how awful …
I was doing so well this summer! Regular light exercise, joints working smoothly, no aches or pains…and then last night, something went bad in my right knee, with no warning, no sudden snap, nothin…
25.06.2025
Late last night, I got an alert with the good news that Iran and Israel were going to stop shooting missiles at each other. US president Donald Trump has announced in a social media post that Iran …
A person named Elise has compiled a spreadsheet of responses from neurodivergent people about their jobs and careers. I learned something from browsing through it. Most of the respondents seen to f…
24.06.2025
The World Humanist Conference was scheduled for next year in Washington DC. I’ve been to this conference in Oxford in the past — it’s a good meeting, and I would have planned on a…