stupidity
pharyngula | September 5, 2015Earlier this summer, Michael Shermer wrote a column for Scientific American to explain Why Do Cops Kill?. I was rapturously unaware of it because he's an author I long ago decided I could ignore, but just recently a reader had to destroy my state of ecstatic ignorance by pointing it out to me. I read it with growing disbelief, my jaw sagging further and further at the dreadful illogic and the scientismic insipidity of the thing. How does he still get published?
To make it short, for those who prefer not to read anything associated with The Shermer, his answer is…it's not racism, it's because…
gregladen | August 20, 2015How do you explain a person seemingly legitimately trained in science drifting off and becoming more and more of a science denier?
In the case of Judith Curry I was unwilling to think of her as a full on science denier for a long time because her transition into denierhood seemed to be going very slowly, methodologically. It was almost like she was trying to drift over into denier land and maybe bring a few back with her. Like some people seem to do sometimes. But no, she just kept providing more and more evidence that she does not accept climate science's concensus that global warming is…
pharyngula | August 1, 2014Kate Clancy comments on a 'satire' published in a serious journal.
Genome Biology published a satirical piece by Neil Hall today, and since I’m American and he’s British I don’t find it funny. No wait, it’s that I’m female and he’s male. Or maybe that I’m junior and he’s senior. I’ve got it, it’s because he has a ton of publications (many times the number I have), and I have a ton of Twitter followers (many times the number he has). Meaning, my K-index knocks his out of the park.
Let me back up. You see, Hall created a joke metric he calls the Kardashian Index, which is one’s Twitter…
pharyngula | July 14, 2014Dr Gijsbert Stoet thinks we should stop trying to correct gender disparities.
Speaking at the British Education Studies Association conference in Glasgow on Friday, he argued: "We need to have a national debate on why we find it so important to have equal numbers. Do we really care that only five per cent of the programmers are women?
"Well, actually, I don't care who programmes my computers. A wealthy, democratic society can afford to let people do what they want.
"What is better? To have 50 per cent of female engineers who do not really like their work but say, 'Yeah, well, I did it for the…
aardvarchaeology | September 26, 2013Here are two pages out of this week's Swedish crime chronicle, showcasing the rare beauties of the small-town criminal mind. Both remind me of the movie Fargo in different ways.
The first one is awesomely stupid. Wednesday shortly after noon a young couple were driving through the outskirts of Fagersta. Two police officers recognised them and flagged them down as the driver was known to have no licence.
The couple gets out of the car and starts arguing with the police, and then the man grabs one of the officers in a stranglehold and starts banging her head against the car. The woman hits the…
pharyngula | August 6, 2013It's shark week. I'm not going to watch a bit of it; I'm actually boycotting the Discovery Channel for the indefinite future. The reason: An appalling violation of media ethics and outright scientific dishonesty. They opened the week with a special "documentary" on Megalodon, the awesome 60 foot long shark that went extinct a few million years ago…or at least, that's what the science says. The show outright lied to suggest that Megalodon might still exist somewhere in the ocean.
None of the institutions or agencies that appear in the film are affiliated with it in any way, nor have approved…
pharyngula | November 18, 2012One creationist claim that's commonly laughed at is this idea that 8 people could build a great big boat, big enough to hold all the 'kinds' of animals, and that those same 8 people were an adequate work force to maintain all those beasts for a year in a confined space on a storm-tossed ark. So the creationists have created a whole pseudoscientific field called baraminology which tries to survey all of taxonomy and throw 99% of it out, so they can reduce the necessary number of animals packed into the boat. Literally, that's all it's really about: inventing new taxonomies with the specific…
pharyngula | October 13, 2012Some poor young girl, deeply miseducated and misled, wrote into a newspaper with a letter trying to denounce homosexuality with a bad historical and biological argument. She's only 14, and her brain has already been poisoned by the cranks and liars in her own family…it's very sad. Here's the letter — I will say, it's a very creative argument that would be far more entertaining if it weren't wrong in every particular.
I've transcribed it below. I couldn't help myself, though, and had to, um, annotate it a bit.
Homosexuality, including same sex marriage, is not an enlightened idea [But…
pharyngula | October 9, 2012I've got to wonder who is responsible for this nonsense, and how it gets past the staff at Newsweek. Every once in a while, they've just got to put up a garish cover story touting the reality of Christian doctrine, and invariably, the whole story is garbage. This time around, the claim is proof of life after death, in Heaven Is Real: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife. This time, we have a real-live doctor who has worked at many prestigious institutions, as we are reminded several times in the story, whose brain was shut down and who then recites an elaborate fantasy of visiting heaven…
pharyngula | August 26, 2012I saw that Doonesbury made a joke of it, so I had to look it up. It's true. Americans were surveyed to see which presidential candidate they thought would handle a UFO invasion best.
The channel surveyed 1,114 Americans in late May to get their thoughts on all things alien in anticipation of the channel's upcoming series "Chasing UFOs." It even asked which superhero Americans would turn to first in the event of an alien invasion. (It's the Hulk.)
Obama was particularly strong on the issue with women, with 68% saying they favor the president when it comes to dealing with flying saucers. And 61…
pharyngula | July 9, 2012No.
One other event I participated in was a "debate" with an ancient alien theorist. It was very peculiar, as you might guess. The way this came about was that Scotty Roberts, the alien astronaut fan, proposed a session on his wacky speculations, and the conference organizers didn't want such lunacy to sail through without a word, so they asked some of the people on the science & skepticism track to engage. Greg Laden and I agreed to sit on a panel with him and another person, with Desiree Schell to moderate. And then I just kind of ignored the prospect until the day of.
Greg Laden met in…
pharyngula | June 10, 2012I completely missed the disgraceful hokum the Animal Planet channel aired last week, Mermaids: The Body Found, a completely fictional pseudodocumentary dressed up as reality that claims mermaids exist. You can watch it now, though, until Animal Planet takes it down.
It's genuinely awful. Total nonsense, gussied up with more nonsense: would you believe it justifies the story with the Aquatic Ape gobbledygook? Brian Switek has torn into it, and of course Deep Sea News is disgusted. How could the channel have so disgraced themselves with such cheap fiction?
Here's the answer:
ANIMAL PLANET…
pharyngula | January 29, 2012The words of the Prophet Muhammad (sallallahu 'aleihi was-sallam) have been tested scientifically, and found hilarious. In work carried out under the direction of Dr. Jamaal Haamid, students at Qassim University examined a saying by the prophet, and have published it in a freely available pdf, The Hadeeth on the Fly, which you can download if you desire. Or you could just read this post, which summarizes entirely the complete content of the short paper, which is pretty much unpublishable and unbelievable anyway.
Here are the holy words.
(Notice that I include the original Arabic so there can…
pharyngula | January 10, 2012A while back, the Way of the Master (Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron) came out with a board game, Intelligent Design vs. Evolution. I imagine the Discovery Institute cringes in pain every time those two clowns associate themselves with their brand, which is good; but you know it has to be an awful, horrible, brain-damaging game, which is bad. I thought about picking up a copy just for the kitsch value, but just couldn't bring myself to pay them money for it (and now it seems to have vanished from their online store).
But Chad bought it and played it against his dog (his wife was too smart to…
pharyngula | December 13, 2011Take a look at the ad copy for this evil book by a friend of Meryl Dorey, the anti-vaccination kook.
"Marvellous measles"? "Embrace childhood disease"? This is rank madness. Here is what WHO says about measles:
Measles is one of the leading causes of death among young children even though a safe and cost-effective vaccine is available.
In 2008, there were 164 000 measles deaths globally - nearly 450 deaths every day or 18 deaths every hour.
More than 95% of measles deaths occur in low-income countries with weak health infrastructures.
Measles vaccination resulted in a 78% drop in measles…
pharyngula | December 10, 2011I have really been looking forward to seeing David Attenborough's latest, Frozen Planet, here in the US. I've seen brief snippets of the show on youtube, and like all of these big BBC nature productions, I'm sure it's stunning. And then I hear that the Discovery Channel has bought the rights! Hooray!
But wait, experience cautions us. Remember when American television replaced Attenborough's narration with Sigourney Weaver? And <shudder> Oprah Winfrey? ANd when the Oprah version dropped the references to evolution? What kind of insane butchery would they perpetrate this time around?
Well…
tsmith | December 8, 2011Just a quick post as I'm in end-of-semester hell. Via Maryn McKenna on Twitter, the CDC has released a report of Campylobacter illnesses due to not food consumption, but because of castrating lambs. With their teeth.
On June 29, 2011, the Wyoming Department of Health was notified of two laboratory-confirmed cases of Campylobacter jejuni enteritis among persons working at a local sheep ranch. During June, two men had reported onset of symptoms compatible with campylobacteriosis. Both patients had diarrhea, and one also had abdominal cramps, fever, nausea, and vomiting. One patient was…
pharyngula | November 23, 2011I have read the entirety of Hamza Andreas Tzortzis' paper, Embryology in the Qur'an: A scientific-linguistic analysis of chapter 23: With responses to historical, scientific & popular contentions, all 58 pages of it (although, admittedly, it does use very large print). It is quite possibly the most overwrought, absurdly contrived, pretentious expansion of feeble post hoc rationalizations I've ever read. As an exercise in agonizing data fitting, it's a masterpiece.
Here, let me give you the short version…and I do mean short. This is a paper that focuses with obsessive detail on all of two…
pharyngula | October 12, 2011Students in California were participating in a big project: they were helping to raise tens of thousands of salmon to be released into San Francisco Bay. The release of the smolts was imminent, and a party was planned to honor the people who had helped, when animal rights activists cut the nets and freed the salmon prematurely.
I really do not understand how these kooks think. Nothing was gained by this action, other than to disappoint some kids who'd been working to help restore salmon stocks. I don't even know what they want: do they just want the salmon to die out? Are they even aware that…
pharyngula | October 11, 2011Shorter Deepak: "Richard Dawkins didn't endorse my quantum bullshit, therefore The Magic of Reality sucks!"
Deepak Chopra actually sounds quite upset — his review of the book reads more like the indignant squawk of a charlatan furious that the presence of a skeptic might cut into his take. It's largely an exercise in name-dropping and the profession of bleary, vacuous misinterpretations of science on his part, which he then turns around and uses to accuse Dawkins of error because he doesn't share his inoculation of the ideas with pseudoscience. Like this:
What is obnoxious about Dawkins'…