Skepticism
pharyngula | October 22, 2008Well, this certainly sounds like a fun experiment.
n a bizarre experiment, academics at The Oxford Centre For Science Of The Mind 'tortured' 12 Roman Catholics and 12 atheists with electric shocks as they studied a painting of the Virgin Mary.
They found that the Catholics seemed to be able to block out much of the pain.
Except, of course, for a few problems with the experiment. First, an atheist like me would find being afflicted with Catholic iconography would be a compounding of the torture. They did try to control for that by also having subjects contemplate a Renaissance portrait of a…
denialism | October 18, 2008This will be Orac's new favorite show, perhaps the best reality show ever made.
Meet Shirley Ghostman. The UK's premier psychic who is mounting a search for the UK's next psychic superstar.
Watch his students cry as he channels Lady Di!
Watch as he brings forth a evil serial killer in the presence of his students:
Shirley even takes on the skeptics!
This guy is a genius, I just about plotzed, and the narration by Patrick Stewart is awesome. I also love it in terms of what denialism blog has always talked about. The problem with the people who believe this stuff is that they simply have…
aardvarchaeology | October 7, 2008A rare piece of irate e-mail.
Hi Mr. Rundkvist,
This is Gregory from the US. I was reading your thoughts on Dr. Moller and the Exodus Case. You criticize Moller for not trying to disprove his hypothesis. Tell me; do evolutionists try to disprove their theory? You know they could if they tried. It is the scientists job to gather evidence for his hypothesis. But you lefty liberals don't want to believe in the Bible, so you go to great lengths to discredit scientific evidence that supports the Bible, no matter how irrational you sound.
1. Yes, biologists make a lot of experiments to see if…
pharyngula | October 6, 2008If you notice little things going wrong in your everyday life right now, it's because Mercury is in retrograde. At least, that's the excuse astrologers like to give, even though it's entirely nonsensical and the apparent motion of the planets really has no effect on your life, unless you're an astronomer. MSNBC has a fluff piece on gadgets going wrong in astrological crises, and they consulted Phil Plait on the subject. I think he blew a few raspberries through the phone at the reporter.
I used to wrassle astrologers for fun and the lulz ages ago, which is why I resurrected the previous old…
pharyngula | October 6, 2008
Stuart Buck persists in claiming that scientists have a bias against the supernatural, and that we dismiss it out of hand. This isn’t true; the problem is that supernatural explanations are poorly framed and typically unaddressable, so we tend to avoid them as unproductive. What one would actually find, if one took the trouble to discuss the ideas with a scientist, is that they are perfectly willing to consider peculiar possibilities if they are clearly stated. We’ll even briefly consider something as insane and worthless as astrology, which is even less credible as a field of study than…
pharyngula | October 1, 2008New Yorkers: you really don't want to miss the upcoming appearance by James Randi on 10 October. He'll be at Rockefeller University that evening, and he's always entertaining and fun.
The rest of the country will be getting a small consolation prize. If you can't make it to NY, you can all go to Springfield, Missouri instead, where Richard Carrier and PZ Myers will be rockin' the house with their godless stylings at MSU that weekend. I'll post more details on that, later.
tsmith | October 1, 2008Just in time for the introduction of Autism's False Prophets by Dr. Paul Offit (the current choice for Scienceblogs' book club), Jenny McCarthy comes out with yet another interview decrying vaccines, blaming autism on the greed of pharmaceutical companies, and how her son was "healed" from autism by his diet, vitamins, and "detoxing".
Embedded video from CNN Video
I'll have a review of Dr. Offit's book up later this week. In the meantime, you can read what he says about it over at the Scienceblogs' Book Club page.
pharyngula | September 21, 2008The right wing media usually makes the most egregiously false claims about science, but I have to confess…on many science subjects, the lefty media is about as bad. I cringe when I see anything about the autism scares in print from either side, and Robert Kennedy Jr's credibility went poof for me when I saw him peddling absurd terror tactics about thimerosal. So I was pleasantly surprised at this article on Salon that pulls no punches. It slams David Kirby and Andrew Wakefield hard.
It was pleasing to see, for a change.
pharyngula | September 13, 2008Ben Goldacre, of the Bad Science weblog, has had a lawsuit hanging over his head for the past year. Ben regularly excoriates alt-medicine quacks, and one of his targets was a pill-peddler named Matthias Rath who got rich off pointless vitamin supplements with exaggerated claims of effectiveness, and most despicably, had been denouncing effective AIDS treatments in order to sell more of his useless patent medicines.
Goldacre publicly called him on his unethical behavior, and Rath in reply sued him for libel. The case has now been settled in Goldacre's favor.
It's great personal news for Ben,…
aardvarchaeology | September 11, 2008I recently read this year's Hugo-winning novel, Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. (Getting it sent to my local branch library from Malmö cost me one euro!) It's a hard-boiled detective story set in an alternative present where Israel was squashed by irate Arab neighbours in 1948 and much of the world's surviving Jewry ended up in a small reservation in south-west Alaska. An exciting read, and very lyrically written. Full of badass Hasidic gangstas.
One detail in the story was so silly that I had to look it up. And whaddya know -- eruvin are real.
There are a lot of things…
aardvarchaeology | September 3, 2008A memory.
A lot of Swedish middle-class kids get sent to confirmation camp when they're 14. It's basically a crash course in Christianity and ends with first communion. My brother went through his course and then refused the wafer & wine. This actually endeared him to the priest, as it showed him to have taken the issue seriously.
But I went through with it all. I was basically agnostic at the time, but one of the camp counselors imparted a piece of non-standard theology that tipped the scales for me. His name was Roland, and he said "It's the world's best deal. Accept communion and get…
pharyngula | September 2, 2008Let us all doff our hats in astonished disbelief at the brazen arrogance of the people who have created the Carl Sagan Institute in Brazil.
That is, the Carl Sagan Institute…of UFOlogy. That's right, a cranky gang of saucernuts have appropriated the name and likeness of Carl Sagan without authorization to flog their belief that Jesus is a flying saucer pilot. They claim that Sagan was secretly a believer in visitations by Little Green Men, who simply publicly lied, and now they want to use his dead body to beg for donations.
Anyone know a good Brazilian lawyer who'd like to fight this?
aardvarchaeology | August 23, 2008
For many years, the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm was strictly a custodian and exhibitor of archaeological finds, performing no excavations of its own. Recently, however, its staff has resumed excavations on a small scale. The unusual nature of this fieldwork identifies it as inspired by post-modernist trends in museology.
I have already blogged a bit about the museum's reverse excavations, an "incavation". But my colleagues there are excavating as well. They started with their own back yard a few years back. The museum grounds are on the erstwhile site of a cavalry regiment in…
aardvarchaeology | August 19, 2008
I get a small amount of crank e-mail, and I usually don't blog about it. In the case of Miroslav Provod, however, I've been mildly mailbombed for some time, and today he attached the above enigmatic image (titled "Kondenzátry 1"). Since his brand of whack physics is so whacky and also archaeology-related, I have now decided to inflict some excerpts from Mr. Provod's latest boilerplate missive on you, Dear Reader.
I gradually found in further research that the phenomenon that I describe as "Cosmic energy" is actually static electricity.
...
The imbalance of surface charge shows that objects…
pzminion | August 10, 2008Sastra here.
I'm about halfway through, and really enjoying, Robert Price's new book, Top Secret: The Truth Behind Today's Pop Mysticisms.
Bob Price has an interesting background: he started out as a roaring Pentacostal Minister, gradually grew into a high-end Christian theologian, and eventually evolved to his present form as secular humanist. He's currently teaching classes in comparative religion -- and also happens to be an expert on HP Lovecraft and science fiction. I think this wide-ranging perspective gives him a particular advantage when dealing with religious topics. He's been into…
sb admin | August 10, 2008To wear the mantle of Galileo, it is not enough to be persecuted: you must also be right.
--Robert Park
I used to spend a lot of time on the websites of Joe Mercola and Gary Null, the most influential medical cranks of the internets (to call them "quacks" would imply that they are real doctors, but bad ones---I will no longer dignify them with the title of "quack"). I've kept away from them for a while in the interest of preserving my sanity. Unfortunately, Orac reminded me this week of the level searingly stupid and dangerous idiocy presented by these woo-meisters.
In light of this, it…
aardvarchaeology | August 6, 2008I just came across an unbelievably crappy argument in a scientific debate between two professors. I must keep the details obscure, but the basic form of the exchange follows.
X: I have discovered that tomatoes were grown in Ireland in the Neolithic.
Y: That is highly unlikely. The seeds and leaf remains that form almost the entire base of your assertions belong to turnips. Just check out these pictures for comparison.
X: Professor Y subscribes to an earlier Kuhnian paradigm than myself. Therefore his work is incommensurable with mine, and he is by definition unable to criticise me. I remain…
aardvarchaeology | August 4, 2008
One of Aard's regulars, Jeff the Blue Collar Astronomer, died yesterday. He was diagnosed out of the blue with spontaneous ("cryptogenic") liver cancer in early June. Jeff was 39. I learned the sad news from Wikipedia contributor Kwix this morning. Derek of Skepticality confirmed it on the JREF forum: "Jeff started to have some internal bleeding a couple days ago and was taken to the hospital. He died last night while sleeping."
I met Jeff at The Amazing Meeting 5.5 in Fort Lauderdale in January. We became friends and I read his blog within hours of each posting. He was a programmer, an…
pharyngula | August 4, 2008It has been announced that Phil Plait is to be the new president of the James Randi Educational Foundation. This can't be. I've never been entertained by Phil doing a card trick. Besides, James Randi is supposed to go on forever.
One consolation is that everyone is going to have to escalate the obligatory Plait bashing at the next Amazing Meeting.