Line of the day – from Popehat, Junk Science And Marketeers and Legal Threats, Oh My! –
As a public relations move, firing Marc Stephens and hiring the Dozier Law Group is roughly like firing Jeffrey Dahmer as your sous-chef and hiring Hannibal Lecter to take his place.
Jacques Berlinerblau has some advice for US atheists.
The real priority for American Atheism concerns its political future, its ability to shape policy agendas so as to represent the interests of its constituency.
Does it? I don’t think it does – not (as implied) to the exclusion of other things. I don’t really think of atheism as having a “constituency,” or as expecting to be able to shape policy agendas so as to represent the interests of its constituency. That sounds like political operative talk, and while I do think atheism is political as well as philosophical (in the broad sense of the word), I don’t think it’s political in that way. It’s too specialized for that. Secularism can be political in that way, but not atheism. [Read more…]
The brains of children raised in violent families resemble the brains of soldiers exposed to combat, according to an article in Wired.
They’re primed to perceive threat and anticipate pain, adaptations that may be helpful in abusive environments but produce long-term problems with stress and anxiety.
“For them to detect early cues that might signal danger is adaptive. It allows them to react, to try and avoid the danger,” said psychologist Eamon McCrory of University College London. However, “a very similar neural signature characterizes quite a few anxiety disorders.”
Absolutely nothing surprising there. Bad things keep happening, so you develop a strong tendency to react quickly…and you’re stuck with it. A lifetime of feeling extra, exaggerated fear and dread. What a gift.
It’s not at all surprising but it’s deeply sad.
One from the “how did I miss this?” file – Tony Blair is gobsmacked that it was government policy not to appoint a Catholic as ambassador to the Vatican.
The former prime minister tells a BBC Northern Ireland documentary – to be broadcast from Wednesday 17 February – that the policy of banning Catholics from the post was “stupid”, “ridiculous” and “discriminatory”.
Really? Is it discriminatory not to appoint a lobbyist for cigarette manufacturers to a health-related job? Is it discriminatory not to appoint a murderer to run a domestic violence shelter? [Read more…]
Some more on the Burzynski clinic and the Observer.
From Keir Liddle at the Twenty-first Floor on a perfect storm for skepticism.
The characterisation of skeptical bloggers as aggressive and sanctimonious is unfortunately nothing new and there are undoubtedly skeptics out there who benefit from reading Hayley Stevens post on the subject but I for one am fed up of how we are characterised. We are seen at best as spoilsports and at worst know it alls robbing the universe of beauty and people of hope. We seem to seen as the lackeys of either big pharma or representatives of some sort of scientific hegemony intent on unweaving the rainbow. But most skeptics aren’t like that in the slightest, we don’t live in a grey universe composed solely of reason and logic, we find wonder and beauty in the near infinite majesty of the Universe and the more we discover the more there is to be awestruck by. [Read more…]
Skeptical Humanities on the Observer on Burzynski:
Entire communities throw untold sums of money at the slimmest (nonexistent, really) hope that these patients will recover at the Burzynski Clinic, and the Observer finds this uplifting.
…
Uncritically giving a cancer quack uncritical press? How could we possibly have mistaken that for promotion? We should have just called it as it was: a shoddy, pathetic, and irresponsible attempt at journalism. [Read more…]
One or two points about that first Observer article, because that blame-the-bloggers not-pology is so annoying.
One, Stephen Pritchard wrote yesterday, truculently,
that concern should have been in the article, but because it was absent doesn’t mean that the paper was promoting the treatment, as some have suggested (“pimping” it, as one science writer so crudely tweeted).
No, the fact that the concern was absent doesn’t mean that the paper was promoting the treatment, but all the same, the paper (via the article) was to some extent promoting the treatment. Bainbridge called it “a pioneering treatment” when it’s a trial rather than a treatment, and “pioneering” makes it sound new and potentially promising as opposed to more than 30 years old and so far not a success. Bainbridge made it sound more promising than it is. How is that not promoting the treatment? [Read more…]
The Observer has responded to bloggers’ responses to its uncritical story about a fundraising campaign to send a child to the Burzynski clinic. Stephen Pritchard writes:
Yet what was intended as a gripping, human-interest story quickly drew a sustained attack on the paper for apparently offering unquestioning support for a highly controversial cancer treatment, known at antineoplaston therapy.
That seems like an unnervingly irresponsible way to look at the matter. However gripping a human-interest story may be, surely it’s irresponsible (at least) to report a campaign to enable a very expensive very dubious “treatment” as if it were just a gripping story. [Read more…]
What an amazing find. That’s fifteen juvenile dinosaurs in one nest. They’re thought to be about a year old. Fifteen juveniles in one nest! I was already puzzling about that before I read the text – which confirms that it’s puzzling.
Scientists once believed that dinosaurs generally followed a crocodile-like model of child care—they would lay their eggs and leave their nests for good. This idea was replaced by the view that dinosaurs raised their young for a time after hatching, the way many birds do.
Now, Fastovsky explained, people understand that the ancient reptiles had parenting styles unlike those of any animals alive today.
Fifteen babies, as seen in the newfound fossil nest, is an unusually large number of offspring for any animal to nurture at once, Fastovsky said. Modern animals tend to have a few young, in which they invest heavily, like humans, or they have a “zillion babies” and show no parental care, like mosquitoes.
“So these [dinosaurs] seem to be something else.”
Kind of worst of both worlds – lots of kids, intensively raised. But how fascinating.
How did they all die at once? I was thinking maybe a blast of toxic gas from somewhere, such as a volcano. But –
As seen above, all of the young Protoceratops in the newfound nest are facing the same direction, giving scientists a clue to how they died.
“Our scenario is that these things were pointed away from the wind as it was blowing during a sand storm, and then they were catastrophically buried by an encroaching dune,” Fastovsky said.
“I think in this particular case, it really was dramatic—this fossil really records the last, bug-eyed, terrified minutes of their little lives.”
Like Herculaneum.
I love amazing finds.
