Skepticism
cmooney | June 25, 2007 Pardon me while I breathe some fire for a minute. You see, I was looking for a good movie to go see over the weekend and instead ran across this obnoxious one: 1408. The plot:
"Renowned horror novelist Mike Enslin believes only in what he can see with his own two eyes. But after a string of best-sellers discrediting paranormal events in the most infamous haunted houses and graveyards around the world, he has no real proof of life--afterlife. But Enslin's phantom-free run of long and lonely nights is about to change forever when he checks into suite 1408 of the notorious Dolphin Hotel for his…
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…
aardvarchaeology | June 24, 2007Daryl Gregory's short fiction is quite remarkable. For the two past years, he's managed to top both the Hartwell & Kramer and the Dozois Year's Best anthologies with "Second Person, Present Tense" and "Damascus". I don't want to spoil anyone's fun by saying too much about the stories: just that they are science fiction stories about neuropsychology. One about the neurological basis of selfhood, the other about the neurological basis of religious epiphany. Gregory is a materialist and a skeptic, my kind of guy, and he's also a fine stylist with great psychological insight.
Check out the…
tsmith | June 22, 2007While I was out last week, I completely missed this Science article all about HIV denial and the AidsTruth.org website, and features frequent commenter Richard Jeffreys:
For 20 years, a small but vocal group of AIDS "dissenters" has attracted international attention by questioning whether HIV causes the disease. Many AIDS researchers from the outset thought it best to ignore these challenges. But last year, another small and equally vocal group decided to counter the dissenters--whom they call "denialists"--with a feisty Web site, AIDSTruth.org. It has started to attract international…
tsmith | June 21, 2007I mentioned I was back in Ohio last week. The occasion was the celebration of my grandparents' 60th wedding anniversary, but while I was in the area, a number of us from Panda's Thumb also met up south of Cincinnati to take our own tour of Answers in Genesis' Creation Museum. (Wesley has a picture of the group here; I'll also try to scan in another "official" picture tomorrow).
My brain still hurts. My thoughts on everything below (with photos, of course):
This trip has been planned for awhile, and I've purposely tried to avoid most of the blog posts on the museum. I've checked out…
pharyngula | June 19, 2007Oh, no—this article about Craig Schaffer in America's Finest News Source reminds me of me.
Eddy said he has tried repeatedly to pull Schaffner back from the precipice of lucidity.
"I admit, science might be great for curing diseases, exploring space, cataloguing the natural phenomena of our world, saving endangered species, extending the human lifespan, and enriching the quality of that life," Eddy said. "But at the end of the day, science has nothing to tell us about the human soul, and that's a critical thing Craig is missing. I would hate for his soul to be lost forever because of a…
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…
pharyngula | June 13, 2007An important change: UCL is reinstating Colquhoun's blog on its servers and has announced that it "continues strongly to support and uphold Professor Colquhoun's expression of uncompromising opinions as to the claims made for the effectiveness of treatments by the health supplements industry or other similar bodies".
University College London caved in to complaints from alternative medicine quacks and asked Professor David Colquhoun to remove his skeptical blog from their university servers. Ben Goldacre summarizes the complaints:
They objected, for example, to his use of the word "…
tsmith | June 11, 2007HIV "dissident" David Crowe is like the gift that just keeps on giving. Last year, I mentioned a paper he'd written in the journal Medical Hypotheses, suggesting that influenza serotype H5N1 doesn't exist. Well, it just keeps getting better. Now, it seems he's writing a book on "the infectious myth"--like previous commenter jspreen, he's going to write about how the germ theory is wrong. Read more about it below...
From Crowe's site:
Most people believe that every disease on the following list has an infectious cause:
* HIV/AIDS
* SARS
* West Nile
* Mad Cow, CJD and other…
aardvarchaeology | June 11, 2007Antiquity is the world's most respected and widely read academic journal in archaeology, our equivalent of Nature or Science. Its summer issue reached me last Friday and yesterday I brought it to the beach. On the first page of his editorial (entertaining, anti-po-mo, available on-line behind a paywall), Martin Carver attacks creationism and quotes a blog entry from March last year by Aard regular Chris O'Brien of the Northstate Science blog! After quoting Turkish creationist Harun Yahya and describing his propaganda efforts, Carver continues:
Here is Christopher O'Brien, a Forest…
aardvarchaeology | June 7, 2007A week ago, Australian historian Keith Windschuttle gave a talk in Sydney under the heading "Postmodernism and the Fabrication of Aboriginal History". The full text is on-line, highly recommended.
"The argument that all history is politicised, that it is impossible for the historian to shed his political interests and prejudices, has become the most corrupting influence of all. It has turned the traditional role of the historian, to stand outside his contemporary society in order to seek the truth about the past, on its head. It has allowed historians to write from an overtly partisan…
denialism | June 7, 2007At Polite Company.
My favorite is Reasic's late but thorough dissection of Michael Crichton in his "Aliens Cause Global Warming" speech.
denialism | June 6, 2007Another credulous article on the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law appears today in the Washington Post. As someone who knows many teachers who have had experience with similar stupid laws in Virginia, and the history of the Bush administration pushing for these kinds of laws based on the "Texas Education Miracle", I'm far more skeptical about any real gains in learning as a result of standardized testing.
But first, you have to understand what Bush, and his education secretary Rod Paige, really did as governor of Texas for education (take a guess), and how standardized testing is a cynical…
denialism | June 5, 2007The last day or so of posts on HuffPo is a perfect example of why I'll never take that site seriously, and why in the end, lefties are just as susceptible to anti-science nonsense as the right. We start with Donna Karen promoting her new health-care initiative, the Well-Being Forum with much credit to hucksters Tony Robbins (he'll hypnotize you with his teeth) and Deepak Chopra, king of woo. You know where it's going with the first post "Healing Is Individual, Not One-Size-Fits-All" and early statements such as this:
But Tony knew that the bottom line is that healing is individual, it's not…
tsmith | June 5, 2007 You've probably already seen a few reviews of Michael Behe 's new book, The Edge of Evolution. I've barely cracked open my review copy yet, but I already know that one example that features prominently throughout the book is malaria (hence my interest in it, moreso than any more "irreducible complexity" or bad math). However, Nick's already managed to take away some of my interest even in the malaria angle, dang him. More below...
One of Behe's arguments, much like in Darwin's Black Box, centers on "irreducible complexity" in the construction of cellular flagella (and adds eukaryotic…
aardvarchaeology | June 4, 2007Swedish social sciences zine Axess just published a thematic issue about the twilight of post-modernism and the lingering pockets of anything-goes relativism that it's leaving behind. Essays by Johan Lundberg, Ophelia Benson & Jeremy Stangroom, Richard Wolin and Christofer Edling. Currently only in Swedish, but English translations will be on-line shortly.
On the Swedish scale, Axess is a moderate conservative mag. On the US scale, it's somewhere just left of Bill Clinton.
denialism | June 4, 2007I've decided to describe a largely unacknowledged process of disease pathogenesis that I will call folie a news. To explain though, I'll have to first discuss a disease called delusional parasitosis.
Delusional parasitosis (DP - sometimes called Ekbom's disease) is a lot like what it sounds like. Normal or abnormal sensations of itching are interpreted by the patient as being bug bites, or bugs traveling under the skin despite the absence of histological evidence of a parasitic infection. This is what is known as a "fixed delusion" and it becomes an obsession for the patient. The…
pharyngula | May 31, 2007I'm curious what people think: which is a poorer example of science?
A hypothesis that is tested and proven wrong, or
A hypothesis that is so nebulous that it can't even be tested?
I ask because Nature has just published a letter describing a very simple experiment to test one of the predictions of astrology, that people born in certain months share predictable personalities and experience similar events. Here's how Steven Lower (Nature 447, 528: 2007) of Ohio State University tested the validity of horoscopes:
I present the students with 12 randomly numbered horoscopes from the…