Skepticism
aardvarchaeology | November 2, 2010
Two days ago I talked about four Scandy writers of pseudoarchaeological books at the Kritisk masse conference in Oslo: Bob G Lind, Lennart Möller, Erling Haagensen and Thor Heyerdahl. Despite being largely composed of Norwegians, the audience seemed unperturbed by my unflattering views of Heyerdahl's archaeological contributions. He is a national hero and the museum celebrating his achievements is (tellingly) just a stone's throw from the Viking ship museum in Oslo. Them Norwegians like their maritime identity! But I don't think the country's skeptics are being fooled, as shown i.a. by my…
gregladen | October 30, 2010"We're going retro"
"However improbable we regard [an] event, or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at-least-once."
George Wald, parahprased and quote mined. I am under the impression that GG Simpson or someone used a similar phrase in relation to trans-Atlantic dispersal of primates or certain species of ants. Or maybe it was me that said that, I can't remember.
pharyngula | October 27, 2010Only a few weeks are left until Skepticon III takes place, and only a few seats are left — this is a conference that has some fabulous speakers (well, except for me. Since I utterly reject the notion of the supernatural, I'm merely mundane), yet admission is entirely free. All you have to do is cough up travel money.
If you can't make it, there's something else you can do: buy one of their calendars to help them pay for this event. They're amazing works of art, and educational, too. I have learned that naked skeptics are masters of the art of the Strategic Placement of Random Objects. I think…
pharyngula | October 20, 2010Since this comic pretty much covers the skeptic argument.
Nah, actually, there might have been other reasons to hang out with cool people.
pharyngula | October 18, 2010I haven't heard much about Rhys Morgan in the US (if you follow Ben Goldacre, though, you know all about him), but he won an award at TAM London for his skeptical work, so I thought I should do my part to spread the news. Simply put, he was participating in a forum on Crohn's Disease and boldly took on peddlers of evil woo: they were selling some crap called Miracle Mineral Solution, which is nothing but bleach.
Amazing, isn't it? It takes some gall for a quack to prescribe a treatment for a chronic intestinal disorder that involves glugging down a corrosive poison, and then when the poor…
pharyngula | October 17, 2010Do you expect a full report? TAM London is over, I have no sense of time left, I just got back from a late and very entertaining dinner with the ferocious Rebecca Watson and the fabulous Richard Wiseman, and I think I need to pass out.
It looks like you can get a video feed of the various talks at the live feed — they're playing back the recorded events right now. You can read the #TAMLondon hashtag to get an idea of the audience reaction, and Martin Robbins has liveblogged the whole weekend. Or if you'd rather, you can read few short sound bites.
My talk went fine, I think, although it's…
aardvarchaeology | October 17, 2010I type this during the last act of TAM London, Alan Moore, who is being gnomic in a basso north English working-class accent. Interesting character, a little perversely irrational ("I worship a 2nd century snake goddess") while leaving no doubt that he's keen as a whip.
The day began with a talk by Randi where I learned that he was friends with Richard Feynman! I knew that though my acquaintance with the Amazing One I'm only two steps from Alice Cooper, but Feynman as well - wow!
Science writer Marcus Chown then gave us his ten most mind-boggling physics facts. Good stuff! He could have…
aardvarchaeology | October 16, 2010
Unusual to use an off-line computer. The wifi in the Hilton London Metropole is ridiculously expensive, so I use the complimentary service in the lecture hall and have none in my room.
I wonder if it really makes business sense to make people pay separately for the wifi instead of sharing the cost over all the guests' bills. It is after all 2010. When I look at hotel rooms on the web I don't go "oh look, free wifi included, what a selling point". I just react badly when it's not there. Still, being off-line does improve concentration no end.
Anyway, I'm in London for the second Amazing…
pharyngula | October 15, 2010I was hanging out in the hotel bar last night when a pair of great Northern savages came up to me and handed me a beer and a flyer and told me, "Here! Promote our meeting!" Or at least I think they did. They were a bit fierce in how they handle the English, you know, for which they have a bit of a reputation.
But sure, I'm happy to mention the Glasgow Skeptics and their upcoming event, Skeptics in the Palace on 21 November. Everyone should go and tell them I sent you, so they'll know they got good value for their beer.
And now you know the price of advertising on Pharyngula…
pharyngula | October 11, 2010I will not wade into this one, it gets so tiresome over here, but Gnu Atheists aren't the only people afflicted with tone trolls. Orac points out that the anti-vaxers are now using the 'civility' argument.
To people who are palpably wrong, the whole world is always going to look very rude to them. You'd think they'd learn after a while that whining about civility is never going to persuade anyone except other shallow, superficial wankers.
pharyngula | October 5, 2010Hey, don't miss this: Shermer will be speaking at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities next week, 14 October, at 7pm in Willey 175 (West Bank). There is a charge, but it's cheap: $1 CASH members (advance sale only), $2 advance tickets through CASH tabling or at general meetings, and $4 at the door. All this is through the UM's Campus Atheists, Skeptics, & Humanists.
I wish I could make it, but I'll be all tied up that night.
gregladen | September 30, 2010Read this blog post ONLY IF YOU DARE!!!!
I was just reading the latest edition of "Ripley's Believe It or Not! Enter If You Dare!" which was sent to me by the Ripley people to have a look at. Let me tell you right away that if you are a skeptic, you have to get a hold of this book and try to debunk every item in it. Well, not ever item, but many. Some of the strange things the book includes are not really all that strange, but are merely interesting, like certain geological formations and other phenomena. Others are simply physical abnormalities of humans or various non-human animals or…
gregladen | September 27, 2010'The U.S. Air Force is lying about the national security implications of unidentified aerial objects at nuclear bases and we can prove it,' he said.
The former officer said he witnessed such an event first-hand on March 16, 1967, at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana.
'I was on duty when an object came over and hovered directly over the site.
'The missiles shut down - ten Minuteman [nuclear] missiles. And the same thing happened at another site a week later. There's a strong interest in our missiles by these objects, wherever they come from. I personally think they're not from planet Earth…
pharyngula | September 23, 2010This is terrible, wasteful, stupid news from Africa.
A measles outbreak has claimed the lives of 70 children in Zimbabwe over the past two weeks, mostly among families from apostolic sects that shun vaccinations, state media said Thursday.
I'm still waiting for news of evangelical atheists traveling to distant lands and killing people by encouraging ignorance. It doesn't seem to happen.
pharyngula | September 21, 2010California has had zero deaths from whooping cough in the last 55 years.
The toll this year: 9 babies dead of whooping cough. So far.
There is something about that link above that makes me angry. The source given for the terrible statistic is the Huffington Post — a site which has done far more than its share to promulgate lies and fear about vaccination, and which should bear a portion of the guilt for those dead children.
aardvarchaeology | September 16, 2010A week ago, the Swedish Research Council's expert panel for the investigation of suspected science fraud delivered its findings regarding Suchitra Holgersson, professor of transplantation biology in the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg. The panel finds Holgersson, who joined the Academy two years ago, guilty of severe science fraud in several cases where she has fabricated data (published i.a. in the Blood journal) and distorted results, and also in that she has forged documents in attempts to mislead the expert panel itself during the investigation.
Professor Holgersson's…
pharyngula | September 15, 2010This video is of a crop circle fanatic seeing her dream come true: she actually gets taken to a fresh crop circle to experience the mystic energies emanating from it. It's going to change her life, she says.
In case you don't recognize the mysterious symbol flattened into the grass, all is revealed here.
aardvarchaeology | September 13, 2010We interrupt this transmission for a piece of Christian chronology. Did you know that the Epistles of Saint Paul are the oldest writings in the New Testament? Did you know that Mark, the oldest of the Gospels, was written just about the time of Paul's execution in AD 64/65? Though Mark had worked as a secretary to Saint Peter who was an original Apostle, none of the authors of the New Testament ever met Jesus of Nazareth.
pharyngula | September 8, 2010Dr Hall had a gig writing for Oprah's woo-laden magazine, and I didn't even know it (that tells you how often I've looked at O), and it was a good plan: she'd be writing a skeptical column for them that would address common medical myths. Unfortunately, reality smacked hard into the jello of pop pseudo-medicine, passed through quickly, and Dr Hall now finds herself not writing for Oprah. She didn't belong in that den of inanity anyway.
One amusing thing, though: compare the comments discussing her departure at Science-Based Medicine with those on Gawker. Right out of the gate, the Gawker…
aardvarchaeology | September 7, 2010
To my horror, Ystads Allehanda reports that Wladyslaw Duczko has joined Nils-Axel Mörner on a project to excavate the famous Ales stenar stone ship.
Why does this pain me? Because while (as I have reported here before) geologist Mörner and his collaborator homeopath Bob G. Lind are Swedish archaeology's most notorious cranks, Duczko is not. He is a respected senior archaeologist and known as an authority on Slavic silver jewellery of the Viking Period.
If I had heard that Duczko was going to excavate Ales stenar, I would have said "Well done, Wladde, I'm looking forward to seeing your…