Skepticism
cmooney | January 25, 2006Just imagine the uproar we would hear if every time a Jew was featured in a Hollywood film or mini-series, he or she converted to Christianity by the end. Such a situation would be intolerable and widely denounced, and rightly so. Yet Hollywood does precisely the same thing to another minority group--atheists and agnostics--and nobody even makes the slightest fuss about it.
It happens again and again: In supernatural thriller after supernatural thriller, an atheist/agnostic character is gradually brought around to a belief in forces beyond. In a UFO flicks, former "skeptics" repeatedly…
pharyngula | January 19, 2006The Skeptics' Circle this week is a little mysterious. Follow the secret message to find the answers.
I was a little disappointed, though, that no grues were involved.
cmooney | January 16, 2006Go over to the Carpetbagger Report for the sad truth. USA Today itself has some good science writers; they must be aghast at this behavior by the weekend magazine. The most appalling thing is that the offending article ran under the banner of "science"....
cmooney | January 12, 2006This Friday the 13th, I'll be sleeping in, then getting some work done, and hopefully taking it easy in the evening. It wasn't always so. Back in college I used to party on these days, making a point of floutting all kinds of hoary old superstitions, and (at least theoretically) buying myself an eternity of bad luck in the process.
I remember one "superstition bash" in my college dorm room where people were dancing, then we suddenly turned on the lights and I shattered a mirror. Gutsy, huh?
Another time, we set up a huge ladder in the middle of the Yale campus, and tried to see whether…
tsmith | November 9, 2005Wonder what the anti-vaccination crowd makes of this?
Measles cases and deaths fall by 60% in Africa since 1999
Largely due to the technical and financial support of the Measles Initiative and commitment from African governments, more than 200 million children in Africa have been vaccinated against measles and one million lives have been saved since 1999. Measles cases and deaths have dropped by 60%, thanks to improvements in routine and supplementary immunization activities in Africa.
This dramatic drop has occurred in only a few years, coinciding with a massive measles vaccination campaign…
tsmith | October 3, 2005But I thought biologists were too "close-minded?"
Australians Barry J. Marshall and Robin Warren won the 2005 Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for showing that bacterial infection, not stress, was to blame for painful ulcers in the stomach and intestine.
The Australians' idea was "very much against prevailing knowledge and dogma because it was thought that peptic ulcer disease was the result of stress and lifestyle," Staffan Normark, a member of the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska institute, said at a news conference.
This is a great example of how science works. These men proposed a…