A children’s movie titled Lost and Found is out; it features a little boy and a penguin. Bleh, you say, penguins are so trite…there is nothing compelling in that. However, there is a scene in which the two protagonists are rescued by a friendly cephalopod.
I must endorse this excellent attempt to beguile young children into trusting giant tentacled entities — it will serve us well when the Old Ones come.
(via Sarah Ditum)
The subject of Sunday’s Atheists Talk radio (9am Central) will be denialism, in an interview with PalMD. This should be a good one, tune in. Call in and tell him how horrible those vaccines are, too — let’s rile things up.
The physicist Bernard d’Espagnat has won the Templeton Prize. I don’t think much of the Templeton; I think it’s a rather devious organization that’s trying to sidle in support for superstition under the guise of science. However, in this case I have to commend their choice for the nice remark he made on receiving the award.
In a statement d’Espagnat said “I feel myself deeply in accordance with the Templeton Foundation’s great, guiding idea that science does shed light [on spirituality]. In my view it does so mainly by rendering unbelievable an intellectual construction claiming to yield access to the ultimate ground of things with the sole use of the simple, somewhat trivial notions everybody has.”
Oh, snap.
Even here in relatively enlightened Minnesota, we have loony paranormalists. John of Ghosts of Minnesota got to bring his skepticism along on one of those silly “ghost hunter” events in St Paul. Guess what? No ghosts.
Also, Casey Luskin demonstrates his inability to comprehend a science paper, again. Creationists are obsessed with the idea that every nucleotide in the genome (and now the transcriptome) must have a function, an idea that is actively rejected by the available data, so Luskin reads a Nature paper on RNA and gets it completely backwards. Larry Moran has a quote from the paper that directly and plainly contradicts Luskin’s misinterpretation. Once again, we can all laugh at the inanity of the Discovery Institute.
The John Kwok saga is getting very serious. He threatened to decimate my facebook friends, and has now gloated that the number of mutual friends of Kwok and Myers has now diminished by…3 (out of my current total of 4,793, which is actually a net gain of about 350 since yesterday).
You can imagine my shock and dismay. No, you don’t have to imagine — I had the computer record my reaction on hearing the news.
We’ve been through this before. When New Scientist ran their misleading “Darwin was wrong” cover, we hammered at them and pointed out that they were doing us no favors — they were giving ammunition to creationists who would never read the contents, but would wave that cover at school board meetings. And they did. We chastised the editor, Roger Highfield, and we had the impression that he was penitent, but it turns out we were completely wrong.
New Scientist is now using that same cover again in their promotional material to flog magazines. Yes, that is their business, to sell magazines…but this represents a declaration that they think their market is the ignorant creationist segment of wanna-be pretend scientists. That’s a real shame.
Jerry Coyne calls for a boycott. I have to agree. If they don’t want fans of real science to read their magazine, then we won’t. I also won’t hesitate to tell young people interested in science that they shouldn’t waste their time with New Scientist — pick up Seed instead, or even Discover, if you’re a bit déclassé. But sorry, NS is joining the Weekly World News as yet another rag pandering to the gullible.
Our spring break is almost over. I hope none of our students wasted their time fishing for souls for Jesus. Follow that link; it’s a story on Salon.com of a young man who goes undercover at Liberty University and goes on a Spring Break proselytizing trip to Florida. It’s depressing — mindless zealots on fire for the Lord wander the streets, asking people if they’ve found Jesus, and almost always getting turned down. Even the few who say “Hallelujah!” are unlikely to join the church. This is truly desperate angling.
The issue of post-salvation behavior is an interesting one. I thought, when Scott was teaching us to evangelize, that we’d be told to do some sort of follow-up with successful converts, if we had any — guide them to a local church, maybe, or at least take their contact information. But there’s no such procedure. If Jason had decided to get saved (he didn’t), Martina would have led him through the Sinner’s Prayer (“Jesus, I am a sinner, come into my heart and be my Lord and Savior” or some variant thereof), she would have let him know he was saved, perhaps given him some Bible verses to read, and they never would have seen each other again. Cold-turkey evangelism provides the shortest, most non-committal conversion offer of any Western religion — which, I suspect, is part of the appeal.
If the new believer backslides, though, like Jason was suggesting he might, Christians are likely to believe that he wasn’t really saved. False conversions are a glaring wart on the face of Christian evangelism. In the book that accompanies our Way of the Master program, I found several sobering statistics about the percentage of apparent converts who stay involved with the church in the long term, including one from Peter Wagner, a seminary professor in California who estimated that only 3 to 16 percent of the converts at Christian crusades stay involved.
Coincidentally, I received an account of a similar attempt at hooking a Pharyngula reader, EH. It didn’t work.
Perhaps the tables have been turned! I have received one report that Pharyngula has been blocked on government computers in Kentucky — can anyone confirm that? Apparently, you can read Ann Coulter, Focus on the Family, the Drudge Report, and Rush Limbaugh when you’re supposed to be pushing those government forms around on your desk, but you can’t read PZ Myers. I think I’m flattered. I suspect I annoyed some fan of Ken Ham.
Yet more internet melodrama! Several of our unwilling contestants took a shot at the immunity challenge, to comical effect: they either completely failed to be aware of what people find irritating in their posting habits, or in one case, even plagiarized his answer. The result of the vote by the readership: none met the challenge, although several thought Facilis made a good effort, so no one has immunity.
What about the vote to see who would be banned? Once again, John Kwok saw an ember of a possibility that he might be selected, and chose to fight it by repeatedly throwing buckets of gasoline on it. If he’d just ignored it, I’m sure he would have been passed over without a problem… but by constantly fanning the flames, he kept a constant volley of votes for him going, and finally ended up in second place. Good work!
The final winner, though, and the one who is now banned, is the loathsome Simon. His foul-tempered hatefulness was an unstoppable force, and the silliness of a Kwok could not match it. Simon is gone, and good riddance.
Now, I had planned on doing one more round of voting to clear the blog of a total of three trouble-making pests, but in the end I’ve decided to cut it short right here. Something happened that compels me to simply ban one more person outright, and end the whole series. It seems that one of our contestants has been writing to a friend and asking him to use his powers of persuasion to compel me to a) LEAVE KEN MILLER ALONE!!! (should be read with a Chris Crocker-esque shriek, and with much running mascara) and b) grant the correspondent immediate, automatic immunity. He also threatened to complete his novel and include me as a character, ala Michael Crichton. Can you guess who it was?
Somebody is taking this far too seriously, and I think it’s time to cut off his little obsession. Goodbye, John Kwok. You won’t be commenting here any more.
And we’re done, for now. Those who survived Survivor: Pharyngula! should not rest easy, though — I will use my vast powers capriciously, and with malice, if you should persist in your ways that got you on the list in the first place.
One of the victims has responded in email.
Hey PZ –
Since Rick Moody lampooned a certain former “New York Times” book reviewer who had dubbed Rick, “the worst writer of my generation”, in his novel “The Diviners”, it looks like you’re going to be honored twice. I already have an IRA terrorist whose persona is quite similar to yours (I told Greg that this was an accident.). Assuming that I sell this novel and write another, I’ll be certain you’ll appear in that one too.
BTW, Rick has since “kissed and made up” with the object of his affection. I haven’t asked him about it, only because I know he’s not one to talk about it (I’ll let you guess how I know Rick. Hint: Look at my Facebook page.).
I’m giving you a chance to change your mind. I think you ought to reconsider ASAP.
Oh, dog. He knows Rick Moody! And he’s going to pretend a fictional IRA terrorist (who is “a sadistic terrorist and murderer”) is me! But you know, I don’t think I’ll reconsider.
It gets better! A new threat from the Kwok:
PZ, what comes around, goes around. Am looking forward to giving you the just dessert that you so richly deserve. And if you don’t behave with the Muslims, I might do a “Pontius Pilate” act and give my cousin Jim and his CAIR buddies carte blanche to deal with you as they see fit.
