Jeffrey Rowland hurt his big toe!

Yeah, this is one of the weird things about these blogs — you learn about trivial odd things that happen to total strangers far, far away, and you can’t resist offering advice. Rowland dropped a beer bottle on his big toe, the nail is turning black, and it hurts, and now thousands of people know about it. It’s somehow charming.

Anyway, I know all about this. My father was a manual laborer, and he was always getting smashed digits … but he had a treatment that worked really well. I had friends who’d come over to visit when I was a kid, and if they had a black nail, my dad would just chortle happily and fix it right up (Yes! You have a glimmering of what my childhood was like!)

Here’s the solution: straighten out a paper clip, and use a match or a burner on the stove to get the tip red hot. Gently touch it to the center of the nail, which will basically melt away in a small spot. When you’ve just burned through, there will be a sudden spurt of blood that will sizzle a bit, but the pressure will be relieved. It will stop hurting and you probably won’t lose the nail, and the operation is completely painless.

It’s also fun at parties.

Presidential positions on science revealed…or not

You can now read McCain’s position, as well as Obama’s, on science policy at SEFORA and at Science Debate 2008. I tried to read them comparatively — the big differences that jumped out at me are that McCain wants to build lots and lots of nuclear power plants, and that McCain runs away from the issues of genetics and stem cells as fast as he can — but I just can’t care very much about McCain’s answers at all. I don’t believe anything positive he might say.

I just want to ask, if he is so pro-science, does that mean we can ask his running mate about the dinosaurs now?

More conservapædic foolishness

I have just read the Conservapædia article on me. It is a marvel. Let me single out one jewel of misdirection among many.

In January 2008, Myers participated in a debate with Discovery Institute fellow Geoffrey Simmons on KMMS. He was unable to counter criticisms of the fossil record, in particular the absence of transitional forms in the whale fossil record. Geoffrey was invited back for an hour long talk the next week. PZ Myers now refuses to debate creation scientists.

The first sentence is harmlessly wrong: the station call letters are KKMS. It’s a nice indicator of their quality control, however.

The second sentence is completely wrong. This was the radio debate in which Geoffrey Simmons made claims about the absence of transitionals in the fossil record, was utterly bewildered when I rattled off a long list of well-known species names, and then admitted that he got all his information from an apparently cursory reading of a Scientific American article. Mr Simmons was the one lacking any counters of substance, not me.

I love the next two sentences. Simmons was invited back, Myers wasn’t…ah, the delicious implication that I had flopped, when the truth is that I had embarrassed the Christian radio station’s position by crushing Simmons so thoroughly. And then to state that I no longer debate creationists, as if I’d run from a humiliating defeat! That was a debate in which even the creationist onlookers were averting their eyes and whining that Simmons had been pwnz0red.

Sorry, Conservapædians, if that’s an example of the way you guys slant your articles, I have to laugh.

Non-priests too opulent, declares Pope

The Pope has berated selfish secularists:

Pope Benedict XVI condemned unbridled “pagan” passion for power, possessions and money as a modern-day plague Saturday as he led more than a quarter of a million Catholics in an outdoor Mass in Paris.

But…this is from the Mr Fancy Pants in silk clothes with gold stitching who lives here:

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The pope has already hit the max in flashy clothes and overly elaborate residences, so the only way to increase the glitz is to pose against a backdrop of dreary people in dun clothes living in shacks, I guess. More poverty, please! We need to make the papacy look more posh!

An easy Monday morning poll

So, the Church of England is considering a public apology for their denial of evolution — it’s progress, I suppose, although CoE has never had the reputation of being particularly vicious towards evolution, and I’d be more impressed if the Baptists were asking forgiveness. Anyway, here’s a poll: Should the Church apologise to Charles Darwin?

Unfortunately, the only choices are “yes” and “no”. I was hoping for something like “Yes, the church ought to get on its knees and crawl in abasement to Science, kiss the hem of its robes, beg forgiveness, and donate all of its holdings and wealth to scientific funding agencies” or “No, the church is irrelevant, a pointless relic that ought to go crawl into a quiet corner and finish its business of dying.” Those are choices with some meat to them.