denialism | June 25, 2007I for one salute Gavin Newsom for refusing to waste government money on bottled water.
I have never bought bottled water. It's silly to spend good money on bottled water when throughout this country it's possible to drink clean potable water for free or a tiny fraction of the cost of bottled water - and it's far more environmentally sound.
Penn and Teller, of all people, covered this issue the best.
They simply show that people can't differentiate in taste between tap water (excepting Florida's) and tap water, and can be tricked into spending idiotic amounts of money on, well, water.
The…
denialism | June 23, 2007
Mingle2 - Online Dating
I actually try to be less potty-mouthed since I joined science blogs. I'm trying to differentiate myself from PZ.
denialism | June 22, 2007Tara points out that we missed a nice little article in Science last week about our friends at AidsTruth. They discuss their ongoing efforts to counter HIV/AIDS denialism on the Web.
Launched by AIDS researchers, clinicians, and activists from several countries, AIDSTruth.org offers more than 100 links to scientific reports to "debunk denialist myths" and "expose the denialist propaganda campaign for what it is ... to prevent further harm being done to individual and public health." The site also has a section that names denialists and unsparingly critiques their writings, variously accusing…
denialism | June 22, 2007Bible Belt Blogger brings us this excerpt from the Family Research Council's "Dear Praying Friends" letter:
Surgeon General Nominee under Fire - Dr. James Holsinger, President Bush's nominee for Surgeon General, has been harshly condemned by pro-homosexual activists for a 1991 paper he wrote for the Methodist Church describing male gay sex as unnatural and unhealthy. Sen. Barak Obama (D-IL) attacked Holsinger and President Bush saying, "...The Surgeon General's office is no place for bigotry...that would trump sound science." But Holsinger's work catalogued the obvious. The Center for Disease…
denialism | June 22, 2007And Cordova has used the conflict between molecular and fossil data to attack evolution.
Sigh. To busy to write about everything wrong with this. Go ahead and use this as an open thread to mock Cordova for being a predictable, quote-mining, dishonest creep. Also note, in line with perfect crank behavior, they're still harping about junk DNA, and the findings in marsupials that they still don't understand.
denialism | June 21, 2007Hooray for science! The New England Journal reports on the imminent eradication of the Guinea worm.
For those who haven't heard of this nasty little parasite, it is a really horrible infection to get. It starts with the ingestion of Dracunculus medinensis infected water. The larvae, when freed from their copepod carriers, migrate from the GI tract, copulate, work their way to the skin, and the adult worms then cause a painful, burning blister as they emerge. The human host, seeking relief, will often seek to immerse the blister in water - and when it bursts the cycle continues as the…
denialism | June 21, 2007Those who are interested in the Colony-Collapse Disorder phenomenon will probably enjoy this paper from PLoS entitled "What's Killing American Honey Bees?" It lays out the history of mass bee die-offs - which have been recorded extensively by apiarists, and discusses whether or not major concern needs to be paid to the problem.
I still suspect that rather than this being a new problem it's likely part of a normal pattern of fluctuation that has been observed in the record. While this swing is extreme, it's early to suggest that this is an impending or prolonged disaster based on the history…
denialism | June 21, 2007Greg Laden writes a very nice tangled bank. It's a model for what a good carnival post should look like I think. And he was kind enough to link our discussion of Uncommon Descent's remarkable ability to predict the past.
Definitely worth a click.
denialism | June 21, 2007Nature reports on this new paper that shows a major conflict resolving the fossil and molecular records of mammalian evolution. It's entitled, "Cretaceous eutherians and Laurasian origin for placental mammals near the K/T boundary" and the major finding is that mammals seem to have evolved largely after this boundary based on their discovery of fossil evidence of a new mammal. This isn't a new finding for the fossil record, but this study represents the largest fossil-based evolutionary tree to date.
However, this conflicts with the molecular record (the editorial gets the lead author's…
denialism | June 20, 2007RFK Jr. writes the standard crank screed in Huffpo, and it's like a mirror reflection of the CBS news crankery that Orac takes on.
Let's see, it's a crank screed so it at a very minimum has to have four elements. The wacky idea, a bunch of inflated non-evidence, conspiracy theories to deflect criticism, and finally, notions of persecution. Let's see how RFK Jr. does.
The poisonous public attacks on Katie Wright this week--for revealing that her autistic son Christian (grandson of NBC Chair Bob Wright), has recovered significant function after chelation treatments to remove mercury --…
denialism | June 19, 2007I don't know how many people knew about this - the sciencebloggers were informed a little bit late, but Seed had a competition on threadless to design a t-shirt in honor of our benevolent overlords, Seed publishing.
Here's the winner
Also, you guys may have noticed our rotating masthead. Well, I'm announcing our own little competition, to design more banners for the denialism blog!
The banner submissions must be 756 width by 93 height. You can make a completely revolutionary new design or keep the basic format and add new fun symbols of cranks. Here's our basic banner (pops) - click for…
denialism | June 18, 2007David Kirby seems to be planning his escape from the autism debate. At Huffington post, he demands that science perform epidemiological studies that compare the healthiness or autism rates of unvaccinated versus vaccinated children.
Most people (save for a handful of fringe parents who believe that autism is some altered state of being, worthy of celebration) are probably just plain tired of autism and the fight over its cause. They really want to settle this debate and move on.
I know I do.
The irony is that the multi-million-dollar court battles, the melodramatic headlines and the alarm…
denialism | June 18, 2007It's time to talk about the anti-vaccine (or anti-vax) denialists. Considering the Autism Omnibus trial is underway to decide whether or not parents of autistic children can benefit from the vaccine-compensation program, a fund designed to compensate those who have had reactions to vaccines and shield vaccine makers from the civil suits which drove them out of the country in the early 1980s. I think it's topical and necessary to set the record straight about vaccines, their risks, and many benefits. To do this though, we'll have to talk about the history of and resistance to vaccination…
denialism | June 16, 2007You know how dumb Egnor sounds with his mind outside the brain cell-phone silliness? He sounds as dumb as Deepak Chopra writing more brain-dead new agey nonsense for the Huffington Post.
To gain credibility, the mind outside the brain must also be mirrored inside the brain. If your brain didn't register what the mind is doing, there would be no way to detect the mind. Like a TV program being broadcast in the air, a receiver picks up the signal and makes it visible. The brain is a receiver for the mind field. The field itself is invisible, but as mirrored in our brains, it comes to life as…
denialism | June 16, 2007Casey Luskin is also celebrating the death of the "junk" DNA hypothesis over at Evolution News and Views. You see, a Wired magazine article has breathlessly reported what we've known for decades. And guess what? Just like Sal Cordova, Luskin has a really interesting view of the history of biology and the "junk" DNA timeline.
Except he has even better proof that ID was responsible for our discovery that non-coding DNA had a function. You see, I thought Sal Cordova was a moron for suggesting that Behe's prediction of function for non-coding DNA in the late 90s was something to brag about…
choofnagle | June 15, 2007I just received my July issue of Harper's Magazine, complete with an article about lobbying and public relations in Washington. Unfortunately, the article is behind a paywall, but it's too good for me not to share some highlights.
It seems to me that this article screams for a legislative intervention and for an ethical rule at newspapers: the strengthening of the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (You can search registrations under FARA here), and a requirement for oped writers to disclose their financial conflicts of interests. After all, what makes this all possible is newspapers…
denialism | June 15, 2007Michael Egnor is to "argument from analogy" as a fish is to __________.
A. Fire
B. Victorian Literature
C. Mathematics
D. Water
Imagine scientists living on an isolated island who have developed sophisticated science and culture, with one exception: they deny that telecommunication is possible. For assorted reasons, they deny that the human voice can be transmitted through space, except as vibrations in air. We'll call this civilization the 'Verizon Deniers.'
One day, they find a cell phone (it dropped from a plane or something). They turn it on, and they hear things. They hear hissing,…
choofnagle | June 15, 2007The courts, prodded on by libertarians, civil libertarians, and corporate-funded think tanks, have afforded more and more protection for "commercial speech," expression in the business interest of the speaker. Commercial speech has a lower level of protection than religious and political expression, but still, in order for the government to regulate it, it has to have a good reason to do so, and the regulation has to be effective.
Expanding protections for commercial speech makes it more difficult to regulate advertising for consumer protection purposes. It makes it harder to enforce…