bad science
pharyngula | January 22, 2012The requirements to be a TV weather presenter are fairly slack: an undergraduate degree with some training in meteorology is preferred, but not required, and the main skills seem to be looking presentable with nice hair, being able to dance with a green screen, and being glib and cheerful. So I guess it's not surprising that the "scientists" leading the charge against global warming are climate-denier TV weathermen. That link takes you to a long list of quotes from various television weather personalities — including a couple from Minneapolis — who all deny reality and use their position as…
pharyngula | January 3, 2012There was something else that bugged me in that odd claim from Ben Radford that girls would just naturally like pink better than boys: it was the terrible evpsych rationale for it that just made no sense.
First was the argument that blue has always been associated with boys, and pink with girls, and therefore it was only natural to sustain the distinction.
The choice of blue for infants has its roots in superstition. In ancient times the color blue (long associated with the heavens) was thought to ward off evil spirits. Even today the tradition continues; in many parts of the world people…
pharyngula | December 27, 2011Teo is an Australian surgeon who has a brilliant scheme for anyone with a bit of surgical skill and a complete lack of conscience. He performs surgery on inoperable brain tumors in kids dying of cancer, and then ships them off to the Burzynski clinic in Texas to get injected with urine and die.
You've got to admit, marshaling the resources of a hospital, opening up a child's skull, and diddling about with a knife inside without killing them is an amazing feat of impressive showmanship, sure to make devastated parents think something is being done worth $20-60,000 — even if there is no…
kbonham | December 16, 2011I'm sure that science isn't the only profession that gets misrepresented in popular media. I'm sure lawyers and police cringe when watching crime dramas, and soldiers are uncomfortable when watching war movies. Leaving aside shows like CSI, I think that scientist's main media foil is almost by definition science fiction. On the one hand, I've learned to mostly ignore exaggeration, over-simplification, and implausible technology - I've come to understand (though it was hard) that these things are sometimes necessary to drive a plot, and that it's unrealistic to expect that the writers are all…
pharyngula | December 13, 2011Take a look at the ad copy for this evil book by a friend of Meryl Dorey, the anti-vaccination kook.
"Marvellous measles"? "Embrace childhood disease"? This is rank madness. Here is what WHO says about measles:
Measles is one of the leading causes of death among young children even though a safe and cost-effective vaccine is available.
In 2008, there were 164 000 measles deaths globally - nearly 450 deaths every day or 18 deaths every hour.
More than 95% of measles deaths occur in low-income countries with weak health infrastructures.
Measles vaccination resulted in a 78% drop in measles…
pharyngula | December 10, 2011Would you believe that ""the largest, most definitive analysis of the mental health risks associated with abortion, synthesizing the results of 22 studies published between 1995 and 2009 involving 877,181 women, of whom 163,831 had abortions" has determined that "abortion harms women's mental health"? It concludes that "10% of all mental health problems and 34.9% of all suicides in women of reproductive age" are caused by abortion. Here's the author's own summary of the results.
Women who had undergone an abortion experienced an 81% increased risk of mental health problems, and nearly 10% of…
pharyngula | December 6, 2011This video by Alexander Tsiaras is simultaneously lovely and infuriating; it's a product of technology and science, and the narration is profoundly anti-science.
There are some technical issues that annoy me about the video — it's a mix of real imagery and computer animation, and it doesn't draw a line between what is observed and what is fabricated — but it's visually stunning and otherwise fairly accurate.
But Tsiaras's running commentary…it's mystical airy-fairy glop. It takes awe and turns it into a celebration of ignorance.
Even though I am a mathematician, I look at this with marvel…
pharyngula | November 30, 2011First, a nice bit of news: Marc Stephens, the lunatic who stirred up the recent blogospheric buzz with his clumsy thuggery, no longer has a "professional relationship" with the Burzynski clinic, that warehouse of quackery. One thing about charlatans is that they have a fine-tuned sense of who might be hurting their bottom line.
But the damage has already been done. The Burzynski clinic is getting scrutinized.
Josephine Jones is tracking all the commentary.
And this is rich: Jen McCreight digs into the Burzynski publications list. Would you believe it's a collection of marginal, low-impact…
pharyngula | November 28, 2011Billie Bainbridge is four years old, and she has an inoperable brain tumor, and her prognosis is not good. Her family is desperate, and has been frantically trying to raise money from the community to cover the costs of a treatment they've been told might cure her. They need £200,000. They are asking the public to contribute.
Unfortunately, the treatment they want to give her is antineoplaston therapy: it's pure bunk. The clinic that is trying to suck large sums of money away from the family of a dying child is the Burzynski clinic. So in addition to being a quack, Burzynski is now a vampire…
pharyngula | November 28, 2011I know you kids like the youtube and hate that tl;dr text stuff, so if you couldn't find the patience to read my post on Islamic embryology, you can now watch the screen instead. The Rationalizer goes through the 'science' in the Quran and shows that it's largely plagiarized from Galen, and that it also steals Galen's mistakes, so it's a beautiful example of a plagiarized error of the type biologists use to demonstrate a lineage.
All the straining Muslim apologists use to fit the science to the few lines of poetry in the Quran (I'm looking at you, Hamzas Tzortzis) are futile and really only…
pharyngula | November 28, 2011Here's a terrific webcomic exposing the silliness of acupuncture. People are always citing these awful studies at me that they claim support the efficacy of acupuncture, and like the comic says what I see when I read them is that the advocates have gone "anomaly hunting after any statistically relevant result, usually by cherry-picking data or creative interpretation. You'll never find a conclusive effect with acupuncture studies".
I'd really like to hook the traditional Chinese medicine freaks with the cannabinoid bozos who've lately been doing the same thing: citing weak results to prop up…
pharyngula | November 25, 2011Do these claims make you at all suspicious? A few people on Twitter told me I should look into this panacea.
Cures heart disease!
Eases anxiety and depression!
Removes unsightly moles!
Arthritis! Snoring! Diarrhea! Acne! Diabetes! Removes warts! Mighraines! Lose weight! Alcoholism! Glaucoma!
IT CURES CANCER! All forms of cancer!
And all without any detrimental effects whatsoever!
Add to the extravagant medical claims, the additional accusation that you can't get this treatment because of a conspiracy by BigPharma and greedy, grasping doctors who want people to suffer so they…
pharyngula | November 23, 2011I have read the entirety of Hamza Andreas Tzortzis' paper, Embryology in the Qur'an: A scientific-linguistic analysis of chapter 23: With responses to historical, scientific & popular contentions, all 58 pages of it (although, admittedly, it does use very large print). It is quite possibly the most overwrought, absurdly contrived, pretentious expansion of feeble post hoc rationalizations I've ever read. As an exercise in agonizing data fitting, it's a masterpiece.
Here, let me give you the short version…and I do mean short. This is a paper that focuses with obsessive detail on all of two…
pharyngula | November 21, 2011As I was going through my usual morning roster of webcomics, I discovered that Sci-ence referenced an earlier one I missed — the Red Flags of Quackery. There are certain tell-tale signs that you're dealing with woo…like the abuse of the word "quantum".
But then you all already knew that Sci-ence was required regular reading, right?
(Also on FtB)
pharyngula | November 14, 2011I think I hate this graphic. It purports to calculate the odds of your existence, and concludes that the chance is 1 in 102,685,000: So the odds that you exist at all are: Basically zero. Now go forth and feel and act like the miracle that you are."
Graphic, and why it's bullshit, below the fold.
(Also on FtB)
by visually via
It's a very truthy list of calculations. Sure, you can multiply out the probabilities of all the many events that led directly to you after the fact, but this wasn't a process that began with the goal of making you. You are a contingent product of many chance…
pharyngula | November 8, 2011Kitties experience pain and suffering, which turns out to be a theological problem. If a god introduced pain and death into the world because wicked ol' Eve was disobedient, why is god punishing innocent animals? It seems like a bit of a rotten move to afflict the obedient along with the disobedient — shouldn't god have just stricken humanity with the wages of sin (or better yet, just womankind)?
William Lane Craig has an answer. His answer involves simply waving the problem away — animals don't really feel pain — and he drags in science to prop up his claim. Basically, Craig is playing the…
pharyngula | November 2, 2011Holy crap. A Dutch social scientist's career has just crashed flamingly. He apparently had a tremendous reputation.
"Somebody used the word 'wunderkind'," says Miles Hewstone, a social psychologist at the University of Oxford, UK. "He was one of the bright thrusting young stars of Dutch social psychology -- highly published, highly cited, prize-winning, worked with lots of people, and very well thought of in the field."
But maybe someone should have been made a bit suspicious by this behavior:
Many of Stapel's students graduated without having ever run an experiment, the report says. Stapel…
pharyngula | October 10, 2011At first I thought this discovery was really cool, because I love the idea of ancient giant cephalopods creating art and us finding the works now. But then, reality sinks in: that's a genuinely, flamboyantly extravagant claim, and the evidence better be really, really solid. And it's not. It's actually rather pathetic.
It consists of the discovery of ichthyosaur vertebrae lying in a flattened array. They look like this.
Photo shows shonisaur vertebral disks arranged in curious linear patters with almost geometric regularity. The arranged vertebrae resemble the pattern of sucker discs on a…
pharyngula | September 26, 2011We've got another chittering weasel of a creationist raving in the comments, a fellow going by the name YesYouNeedJesus. He's also sending me email.
PZ, I first heard about you on Bob Enyart's radio show about the fact that you turned down an offer to debate Bob. I must say that my first impression of you is that you are smarter than most evolutionists. Smarter because the evolutionists that debate Bob get absolutely destroyed every time. Every evolutionist that I spoke to who was at the debate between Bob Enyart and Reasons to Believe willfully admitted that their side (evolution) lost. Bob'…
pharyngula | September 18, 2011And deeply regrets it.
It's very sad. I remember when cable TV was new, and had such promise — there would be channels dedicated to specialty disciplines, that would pursue a niche doggedly for a slice of the audience. The History Channel would be about history, not von Daniken and Nazi UFOs; Discovery would be about science, not motorcycle enthusiasts and bargain hunters; the Learning Channel would be about learning, not octuplets and hoarding; the SciFi channel would actually present decent science-fiction, instead of schlock horror, ghost-hunters, and fake wrestling. Garbage conquered all…