It’s pointless for these loons to try and make their case with a goofy online poll, since we’ll just smack it down. Here’s another one.
Do you believe homeopathy is an effective form of treatment?
51%Yes
49%No
The evidence is all against it, and reason suggests there is no mechanism. Perhaps they ought to correct those deficiencies before playing poll games.
Richard Dawkins has posted a clarification and apology. The key points are that he stands by Josh Timonen (and really, the vituperation against him that I saw was just absurdly excessive), the old forums will definitely be retained as a read-only archive, and the new forums are going to still allow free discussion, but the changes have the intent of focusing any new threads on topics relevant to the RDF.
Everyone moves on now, right?
Sacrilege can get people killed. It can cause riots and economic mayhem. People die over a sense of offended propriety. And whose fault is that?
When we last left the never-ending thread, the subject was cooking. Eat this!
One thing that annoys me in these shows is the completely uncritical acceptance of a culture’s primitive beliefs in sympathetic magic. It’s meat, people. It’s got no powers other than the basic, material ones of providing nutrients.
There was a natural disaster somewhere, so I opened my mailbox to find lots of links to Pat Robertson saying stupid things about the Chilean earthquake, like this one and this one and this one and this one.
Sorry, gang, I don’t believe it. Not only do I expect that nowadays, when his staff at the radio and television stations hear about a disaster, the first thought in their heads is how to stifle Pat, but some of those accounts are clearly satire, and they all say something different. It’s become the obvious expectation that Robertson will blame something stupid for natural events, and everyone is jumping the gun. Write to me when you’ve got video straight from the 700 Club, and not before.
It’s the sport that ought to replace pro wrestling, and boxing.
The denialists are at it again in the comments, parroting the latest lie.
UEA CRU’s Dr Phil Jones agrees there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995.
Wow. You’d think they’d realize that twisting the words of a scientist around 180° from what they actually said is a very bad strategy — it would be like trying to claim that I’d decided evolution was false. This is no exception. Deltoid has a wonderfully clear quote:
This led to a Daily Mail headline reading: “Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995.”
Since I’ve advocated a more explicit use of the word “lie”, I’ll go ahead and follow my own advice: that Daily Mail headline is a lie. Phil Jones did not say there had been no global warming since 1995; he said the opposite. He said the world had been warming at 0.12°C per decade since 1995. However, over that time frame, he could not quite rule out at the traditional 95% confidence level that the warming since 1995 had not been a random fluke.
Anyone who has even a passing high-school familiarity with statistics should understand the difference between these two statements. At a longer time interval, say 30 or 50 or 100 years, Mr Jones could obviously demonstrate that global warming is a statistically significant trend. In the interview he stated that the warming since 1975 is statistically significant. Everyone, even climate-change sceptics, agrees that the earth has experienced a warming trend since the late 19th century. But if you take any short sample out of that trend (say, 1930-45 or 1960-75), you might not be able to guarantee that the particular warming observed in those years was not a statistical fluke. This is a simple truth about statistics: if you measure just ten children, the relationship between age and height might be a fluke. But obviously the fact remains that older children tend to be taller than younger ones, and if you measure 100 of them, you’ll find the relationship quite statistically significant indeed.
What’s truly infuriating about this episode of journalistic malpractice is that, once again, it illustrates the reasons why the East Anglia scientists adopted an adversarial attitude towards information management with regard to outsiders and the media. They were afraid that any data they allowed to be characterised by non-climate scientists would be vulnerable to propagandistic distortion. And they were right.
I’ve been going insane this morning, thinking I might have mysteriously lost my ability to type, or even recognize valid HTML…and I’ve been seeing really weird stuff everywhere I type on the web.
It looks like the problem is Webkit, the browser I usually use. I updated it this morning, and it seems to have decided that normal spaces aren’t good enough anymore, and is inserting non-breaking spaces instead. It’s been an infuriatingly difficult problem to track down, because I do most of my composing offline in a text-editor that isn’t afflicted with this bug, and it’s just when I edit that I end up inserting invalid garbage into my stuff.
Anyway, it looks like I’m giving up Webkit and switching to Firefox.
It’s tough to tread that line between contempt and admiration: Jerry Coyne writes about the Templeton journalism awards. It really is a smart move on the part of the Templetonites to coopt journalists to sell their bankrupt line by tossing a good-sized chunk of money at them.
One interesting revelation is that the journalism awards aren’t simply handed out by cunning Templetonistas who spot a promising compromiser in the ranks of reporters — you have to apply for the fellowship. Hey, should I? They’re closed for now, but I imagine there will be a bunch of 2011 fellowships awarded, and I wouldn’t mind spending time in Cambridge.
All I have to do is write an essay “outlining [my] interest in science and religion and detailing a specific topic [i] hope to cover”. Here’s my start:
Religion is the antithesis of science, an anesthetic for the mind that disables critical thought and encourages the acceptance of inanity as fact, and wishful thinking as evidence.
Do you think it will appeal to their review panel?
Oh, probably not. Here’s John Horgan’s experience.
One Templeton official made what I felt were inappropriate remarks about the foundation’s expectations of us fellows. She told us that the meeting cost more than $1-million, and in return the foundation wanted us to publish articles touching on science and religion. But when I told her one evening at dinner that — given all the problems caused by religion throughout human history — I didn’t want science and religion to be reconciled, and that I hoped humanity would eventually outgrow religion, she replied that she didn’t think someone with those opinions should have accepted a fellowship. So much for an open exchange of views.
Oops. And John is so much more polite than I am.
Now I really wish those application essays were available for public reading. I’m sure they’re exceptionally entertaining.
Mooney ‘fesses up. I’d love it if he’d post his application essay!
It’s tough to tread that line between contempt and admiration: Jerry Coyne writes about the Templeton journalism awards. It really is a smart move on the part of the Templetonites to coopt journalists to sell their bankrupt line by tossing a good-sized chunk of money at them.
One interesting revelation is that the journalism awards aren’t simply handed out by cunning Templetonistas who spot a promising compromiser in the ranks of reporters — you have to apply for the fellowship. Hey, should I? They’re closed for now, but I imagine there will be a bunch of 2011 fellowships awarded, and I wouldn’t mind spending time in Cambridge.
All I have to do is write an essay “outlining [my] interest in science and religion and detailing a specific topic [i] hope to cover”. Here’s my start:
Religion is the antithesis of science, an anesthetic for the mind that disables critical thought and encourages the acceptance of inanity as fact, and wishful thinking as evidence.
Do you think it will appeal to their review panel?
Oh, probably not. Here’s John Horgan’s experience.
One Templeton official made what I felt were inappropriate remarks about the foundation’s expectations of us fellows. She told us that the meeting cost more than $1-million, and in return the foundation wanted us to publish articles touching on science and religion. But when I told her one evening at dinner that — given all the problems caused by religion throughout human history — I didn’t want science and religion to be reconciled, and that I hoped humanity would eventually outgrow religion, she replied that she didn’t think someone with those opinions should have accepted a fellowship. So much for an open exchange of views.
Oops. And John is so much more polite than I am.
Now I really wish those application essays were available for public reading. I’m sure they’re exceptionally entertaining.
Mooney ‘fesses up. I’d love it if he’d post his application essay!
