I was interviewed by a rather baffled radio announcer about the destruction of crackers (I know! Who would have thought such a silly event would be the focus of so much attention?) on BBC Radio Ulster. Reader DaleP tells me that it will be available online only until Saturday, so if you want to hear another flat-voiced nasal American talking to the lovely lilting voice of an Irishman, here's your chance.

The latest edition, Tangled Bank #112, is now available at Science Notes.

This issue was delayed because I neglected to ride herd on it while I was off in the Galápagos, but the next edition, at En Tequila Es Verdad, will be on schedule next week, on 3 September. So get inspired by the latest and send in links to your science writing pronto!

It's a very nice letter to Nature. I especially like the last line.

We were perplexed by your Editorial on the work of the Templeton Foundation ('Templeton's legacy' Nature 454, 253-254; 2008). Surely science is about finding material explanations of the world -- explanations that can inspire those spooky feelings of awe, wonder and reverence in the hyper-evolved human brain.

Religion, on the other hand, is about humans thinking that awe, wonder and reverence are the clue to understanding a God-built Universe. (The same is true of religion's poor cousin, 'spirituality', which you slip into your Editorial rather as a creationist uses 'intelligent design'.) There is a fundamental conflict here, one that can never be reconciled until all religions cease making claims about the nature of reality.

The scientific study of religion is indeed full of big questions that need to be addressed, such as why belief in religion is negatively correlated with an acceptance of evolution. One could consider psychological studies of why humans are superstitious and believe impossible things, and comparative sociological studies of religion using materialist explanations of the rise and fall of the world's belief systems.

Perhaps the Templeton Foundation is thinking of funding such research. The outcome of such work, we predict, will not bring science and religion (or 'spirituality') any closer to one another. You suggest that science may bring about "advances in theological thinking". In reality, the only contribution that science can make to the ideas of religion is atheism.

(via indexed)

If you've got the 29 August issue of Chemical & Engineering News, there's an interesting editorial inside. It seems there has been a flurry of activity on C&EN on the issue of evolution; the editor dismissed the whole idea of intelligent design creationism back in February, saying that it was not an acceptable alternative to the theory of evolution and should not be taught in the schools. He got hammered with forceful complaints from pro-ID engineers, and many letters were published in the April issue. Uh-oh, I hear all the engineers out there groaning, here comes the Salem hypothesis again…

However, here's the cool thing: those pro-creationism letters spurred an even greater response from the C&EN readership, a wonderful colossal roar of disapproval against the vocal subset who were endorsing ID, and a small fraction of the letters are published in the latest issue (I've got the print copy; the online edition is a bit behind, but keep an eye open for it.)

It's reassuring. A noisy few cranks in engineering occasionally get all the news, but give them a chance and a voice and the majority do favor good science.

You may recall that some whackaloons going to pray for rain in Denver to ruin Obama's acceptance speech. It didn't work — no surprise there — but there was an incident, a small selective event. A defective sprinkler went off, flooding a skybox booth.

It belonged to Fox News.

Omens and portents!

Another willing victim has been absorbed into the empire: Blake Stacey, the guy I want by my side in a gunfight (we're still waiting for Ben Goldacre to release the embarrassing photos of that incident), has brought his blog into the SciencBlogs fold. Check out the new Science After Sunclipse.

The Democratic National Convention is going on in Denver, and I'm really not at all interested in what's going on inside the convention center: it's a bunch of people saying feel-good platitudes to get themselves elected, all studiously avoiding saying anything substantial that might annoy a voter. It's much more interesting to see what's going on outside the convention, where people are trying to make their real opinions heard. That is actually a bit troubling.

Bless their sacrilegious little hearts, the students are trickling back onto campuses everywhere, and doing their part to stir up freethinking mischief. Skatje and Collin are going to be recruiting for the UMM Freethinkers tonight, offering the incoming freshman cookies for their souls and handing out pamphlets. They're going to have to work harder to top the latest godless scandal at Lorain County Community College in Ohio, where students put up a provocative poster. People were very upset, for some reason, and the poster has since been taken down.

There are lots of comments from students who simply don't get it.

"You can't portray Jesus like that. He believes in matrimony, that relationships like that should be done inside matrimony," sophomore Brianna Holland said. She said she believes homosexuality is wrong because she is a Christian, but she also said she is proud that her religion teaches tolerance and acceptance.

Why can't you portray Jesus like that? Were there no gay people in the Middle East in the first century? I'm neither Christian nor homosexual, but I think the poster actually flatters their diety, making him out to be both human and hot. The story behind this encounter is terribly apocryphal, and about as reliable as the stories of loaves and fishes, but it doesn't say anything bad about Christianity.

The remarks from Ms Holland do, though. So she's proud of her tolerance and acceptance, and she just thinks homosexuality is wrong, eh? It's commendable that she doesn't spout hellfire at them, but there's something wrong here…

Since Tom Willis wants to slap warning labels on all scientists, one of our commenters obliged by designing one you can get on a t-shirt.

It's probably not exactly what Willis intended, but it'll do.

Cyberguy has a nice collection of short pamphlets discussing atheism, evolution, and the scientific method, and will soon be including a lovely pdf of Planet of the Hats. It's useful to have these sorts of things in simple, single page format.

I expect you all to make lots of copies, team up, put on your white shirts, get on a bicycle, and distribute them in your neighborhood.

Someone must have been reading some of my comment threads attentively, because this looks familiar:

They're remaking The Day the Earth Stood Still…with Keanu Reeves! It looks very, very bad. What did they think they had to add to a SF classic? More special effects?

(At least there's one bit of good news: Watchmen looks fabulous.)

It's true — the cracker incident is still dribbling on in my mailbox. The email is down in volume considerably — only a few dozen angry letters a day. I'm still getting a handful of actual letters every day, and those are both comical and pathetic. Usually, they're an announcement of some ceremony that was carried out to rescue me from evil. I've also got lots of pamphlets and even a couple of books about 'eucharistic miracles', which aren't having the effect the senders intend, I'm sure — all they do is demonstrate a greater depth of insanity than I had previously imagined.

I've tossed a few of the recent letters below the fold for your amusement.

Once upon a time, Charles Darwin crossed the equator in the Beagle, and he received the traditional hazing:

We have crossed the Equator. I have undergone the disagreeable sensation operation of being shaved. About 9 oclock this morning we poor "griffins" two and thirty in number, were put altogether on the lower deck. The hatchways were battened down, so we were in the dark and very hot. Presently four of Neptunes constables came to us, and one by one led us up on deck. I was the first and escaped easily: I nevertheless found this watery ordeal sufficiently disagreeable. Before coming up, the constable blindfolded me and thus lead along, buckets of water were thundered all around; I was then placed on a plank, which could be easily tilted up into a large bath of water. They then lathered my face and mouth with pitch and paint, and scraped some of it off with a piece of roughened iron hoop, a signal being given I was tilted head over heels into the water, where two men received me and ducked me. At last, glad enough, I escaped, most of the others were treated much worse, dirty mixtures being put in their mouths and rubbed on their faces. The whole ship was a shower bath: and water was flying about in every direction: of course not one person, even the Captain, got clear of being wet through.

On our cruise to the Galápagos, we also got a much, much milder version of the hazing, a night with King Neptune, who chose a queen (Susan Hurst in this case), and then made a few of us do very silly things. The movie below has pirates with charming Ecuadorian accents, King Neptune, and absurd rituals, but the real highlight of this video, though, is getting to see Phil Plait do the mating dance of the blue-footed booby (about 6'30" in).

For extortion purposes, I do have a higher resolution copy of this video. Maybe it should make an appearance at the next TAM…mwahahahahaha!

Any science journalists out there? You might not want to read this webcomic. The rest of you…sure, go have a laugh. It's rather accurate.

In reaction to the Freedom from Religion Foundation's billboards, FoxNews asks, "What's your reaction to the 'Imagine No Religion' billboards?". Unfortunately, you only get your choice of two poor answers: "I'm not offended…it's free speech" and "I'm offended…America needs religion". What about "I'm offended…but it's free speech"?

Sadly, "America needs religion", the worst of the two, is currently leading with 56% of the vote.