Skepticism
aardvarchaeology | October 16, 2007Freedom of religion wasn't formally codified in Sweden until 1952, but for decades Swedish law has forbidden religious teachings in schools. Children are required to attend a government-approved school, and one of the criteria for approval is no religion. This of course refers to the teaching of religion, not teaching about religion: comparative religion studies replaced the subject "Christianity" on the syllabi of Swedish primary schools and high schools in 1969 and still remains. In recent years, however, privately run schools have proliferated in Sweden, many of them backed by religious…
aardvarchaeology | October 13, 2007In the autumn issue of Antiquity is a fine debate piece (behind a pay wall) by William Meacham of Hong Kong about the Russian Baptist science fraudster Dimitri Kouznetsov. In 1989, 1996 and 2000, Kouznetsov managed to trick three peer-reviewed journals to publish papers full of faked data, references to non-existent journals and thanks at the end to fictional scholars. And all three papers are in different fields. Much of the information about the Russian's scams has been unearthed by Italian skeptic Gian Marco Rinaldi who published his findings in his mother tongue in 2002.
Kouznetsov's 1989…
aardvarchaeology | October 12, 2007
A letter sent to me on 8 October. I translate:I write to you because of the sword find I had the opportunity to watch on ABC-nytt together with my mother. [...]
Please take the following for what it is worth. As it touches upon the sword you found, I write to you and leave it to you to handle the information.
My mother, N.N., has the second sight, reads cards and receives images out of the lives of people. Apart from the future, she also sees images from the past. [...] To a skeptic and academic, this may sound like complete nonsense. I am an academic myself [...] I must also emphasise that…
denialism | October 12, 2007Watching 30 Rock and the Office tonight I kept on seeing this commercial for a new show called "Phenomenon". The story goes:
The search for the impossible begins...there are those who claim special powers, but only one can be called the greatest. Now, the mind of Uri Geller, and the mastery of Chris Angel will test them all before the world, and everything you see will be live.
I was cracking up because when they show Geller he's got this sign that bends behind him. I can't believe it, he still tries to milk this idea that he can bend metal like he's some kind of spoon-bending genius.
I'd…
denialism | October 10, 2007The Infophile has this week's circle up at Infophilia. He has presented the posts in the context of logical puzzles, practically daring us to use our brains rather than just spoon-feeding us the skepticism.
See if you can figure them all out!
tsmith | October 10, 2007A reader passed along a link to this post on Short memories: AIDS denialism and vaccine resistance. The author learned that a friend had dated an AIDS denialist:
This was absolutely the wrong thing to say to our friend, who had been an AIDS activist since the early days of the epidemic, had nursed several beloved friends through the illness, had seen way too many of those friends die... and had seen others come back from the brink of death when the protease inhibitors and combination therapies finally came out.
So Ingrid and I were talking, not only about how ignorant AIDS denialism is…
pharyngula | October 4, 2007This is getting ridiculous. Now I'm accused of "trying to drive a wedge between those who are against evolution" … because I think belief in angels and demons is absurd.
Damn. Just because someone accepts evolution doesn't automatically make them a good guy, and if they're praising evolution and at the same time babbling about demons causing appendicitis or angels warding off curses, they aren't on my side in the cause of increasing rationality.
I'm beginning to wonder if there is some psychological transference going on here. People who think that merely believing in Jesus grants them…
denialism | October 2, 2007Next for "making up disease" files, Ed Brayton brings us news of the latest crank idea from the masturbation-obsessed nuts over at World Nut Daily. It's the new plague of masturbation-induced impotence.
Pornographically Induced Impotence is now a national pandemic, raking in untold billions for pornographers and their satellite businesses as well as from the marital discord and despair it produces.
...
Men are "visually wired," Feldhahn explained. Their images of women stretch "back to his teenage years, and any one of the pictures is going to pop up at any time in his brain without warning…
denialism | October 2, 2007Here's some woo for you. Via Gizmodo we hear about this wonderful new waste of money, Mummywraps. Designed to protect your baby from "electro-smog", the non-existent threat of electromagnetic waves from radio and cell phone sources (that we have been exposed to constantly for decades with no discernible effect), these copper "Swiss Shield" garments will be sure to be a profitable waste of money ($70) for thousands of paranoid parents.
Ben Goldacre I think has been on the forefront of challenging this new electrosmog woo, so there is very little to add. But it is simply shameful how people…
tsmith | October 1, 2007Last week, our friendly neighborhood germ theory denier told us that:
A thing can only be a problem as long as you believe in it.
Now, think and don't stop before you've seen the light. (Hint: think of evil witches, dragons, ghosts etc. Do you believe in them? Yes? Then they're a problem for you. No? Then you laugh about them). (emphasis in original)
Well, just in case you needed further assurance that this kind of magical thinking is just wrong, Evil Monkey has a rather graphic demonstration up of just how incredibly, and painfully, wrong it is:
...by aligning one's energy and going through…
tsmith | September 27, 2007Via PZ, I see that yet another Catholic bishop in Africa is claiming that condoms are laced with HIV:
The head of the Catholic Church in Mozambique has told the BBC he believes some European-made condoms are infected with HIV deliberately.
Maputo Archbishop Francisco Chimoio claimed some anti-retroviral drugs were also infected "in order to finish quickly the African people".
His answer to AIDS is, of course, marriage, fidelity, and abstinence...which is all well and good, but not always possible or realistic. (Not to mention, what about an HIV-infected spouse?) WWJD?
[ETA: ERV has a…
denialism | September 27, 2007This week it's our friend Factition at Conspiracy Factory. However, he makes the poor decision to let the world know about our contacts with the Illuminati as part of our anti-conspiracy disinformation campaign.
Traitor!
tsmith | September 17, 2007 Regular readers may have seen me mention on occasion my father's rather large family. My dad is the youngest of a family of 13 children--12 of whom survived to adulthood. Before my dad was born, he lost a brother to complications from infection with chicken pox; he had a severe infection and developed a fatal secondary pneumonia at just a year old. This was back in the early 1940s, prior to the widespread use of modern antibiotics and certainly long before vaccination for chicken pox. Still, despite the availability of effective chicken pox vaccines today, people still knowingly…
pharyngula | September 14, 2007Two quick takes on a couple of oddities that were brought to my attention: cases of magic space salts and magic metal foils.
Here's a bit of a scam: this company called Space2O lofts salts into space, and then adds them in trace amounts to water and sells it with the label "Contents have been subjected to microgravity during spaceflight" — as if that has the slightest significance. Braving the Elements calls them on this nonsense, and then the fun begins. Check out the comments: a couple of indignant trolls start bragging about their Ph.D.s and getting irate that he would even question the…
denialism | September 13, 2007At Unscrewing the Inscrutable Brent Rasmussen brings us the 69th skeptics circle with a fun, old west feel.
One of the first entries was particularly interesting to me as an example of crank magnetism. The Socratic Gadfly found Lynn Marguilis embracing 9/11 conspiracies, which shouldn't be surprising given her HIV/AIDS denial - also requiring a conspiratorial world view.
It would be interesting to study this problem systematically, and see how many times a crank adopts more than one crank belief. I suspect given that it takes a certain kind of broken mind to believe this nonsense that…
aardvarchaeology | September 13, 2007
Seen this? A mashup of a filmed conversation between atheist crusader Richard Dawkins and meth-user cum charismatic preacher cum gay john Ted Haggard, set to audio from Monty Python's parrot sketch. W00t! Many thanks to Dear Reader Martin C for the link.
tsmith | September 6, 2007Correcting misinformation can backfire.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either "true" or "false." Among those identified as false were statements such as "The side effects are worse than the flu" and "Only older people need flu vaccine."
When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three…
denialism | August 30, 2007Everybody head over to Aarvarchaeology for the 68th edition of the Skeptics' Circle.
And while you're there help me figure out what this picture is all about.
aardvarchaeology | August 30, 2007
Welcome to Aardvarchaeology and the 68th Skeptics' Circle blog carnival! For first-time visitors, let me say that this is a blog about whatever runs through the mind of a skeptical research archaeologist based in Stockholm, Sweden. For first-time carnivalers, let me explain that here, skepticism means to not believe anything without good reason, and to reserve judgement in uncertain cases. This carnival is about reason and critical thinking from all around the world. Onward to glory!
Swiss blogger Christian at Med Journal Watch discusses a study of US preterm birth whose authors draw poorly…
aardvarchaeology | August 28, 2007Tomorrow, 30 August, Aard will be the site of the 68th Skeptics' Circle blog carnival. Please submit good skeptical writing to me!
Today, the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will be held at Hominin Dental Anthropology. If that isn't a heavy metal blog name, then I don't know what is. It ain't too late to submit there either!