It’s the last day of finals week here at UMM, and lucky me, I have two exams scheduled back-to-back today…so I’m about to go into the classroom and proctor away (the most boring task in all of teaching), and I don’t emerge again until at least 3:30. But then the semester is done!
Except for the grading.
The awful, horrible, daunting stacks of papers that must all be graded before I can live again.
If you don’t see me again, it means the grues got me.
Don’t say I never do you any favors, acolytes of the endless thread. I’m about to spare you the need to see the latest cheap, unimaginative Hollywood dreck to hit the theaters by showing you the ending of the new Yogi Bear movie. Bring the kids around, tell ’em to see what the new kiddie movie is all about, and watch their little faces fall and the tears flow and the screaming begin.
Of course, if they get really excited and demand to go see it right now, you’ll also know that you need to book a psychiatrist, stat.
(Current totals: 11,523 entries with 1,215,620 comments.)
You’ve been wondering about that, too, haven’t you? Prepare to be disappointed again, because the source of this bit of egregious misinformation is none other than that raving nutcase, Mike Adams of NaturalNews. He claims that astrology has a scientific basis:
Skeptics must be further bewildered by the new research published in Nature Neuroscience and conducted at Vanderbilt University which unintentionally provides scientific support for the fundamental principle of astrology — namely, that the position of the planets at your time of birth influences your personality.
Hey, Vanderbilt is a good and respectable university. I wonder how they studied the effects of planets on personality. Short answer: they didn’t. And Mike Adams explains it himself.
This study, conducted on mice, showed that mice born in the winter showed a “consistent slowing” of their daytime activity. They were also more susceptible to symptoms that we might call “Seasonal Affective Disorder.”
That’s old news. We’ve known about seasonal rhythms in physiology for a long, long time, and it’s completely unsurprising. It’s also unsurprising that Mike Adams somehow thinks seasons are correlated with the positions of any of the planets other than Earth itself. Because he’s a moron.
Hey, Mike. Think. This is a study from Vanderbilt that shows that known seasonal phenomena, day length, dietary changes (oh, that should get him excited), even temperature can affect one’s metabolism, and that maternal metabolism during pregnancy can have enduring effects on children. This is not the same as saying that the position of Jupiter in the sky or where Pisces is on the horizon can have any effect on your personality.
Oh, but this is Mike Adams, the kook who starts off talking about astrology and then goes into a rant about how cold fusion really works. Thinking isn’t what he does.
You’ve been wondering, haven’t you. Good theories involve both substantiating evidence for a phenomenon and an explanation of the mechanism, and homeopathy has had neither: no evidence that it works (and plenty that it doesn’t), and no rational explanation for how it works, unless you count gibberish like “memory of water”. Now that has all changed. The way homeopathy works is nanotechnology.
Homeopathic pills containing naturally occurring metals such as gold, copper and iron retain their potency even when diluted to a nanometre or one-billionth of a metre, states the IIT-Bombay research published in the latest issue of ‘Homeopathy’, a peer-reviewed journal from reputed medical publishing firm Elsevier.
IIT-B’s chemical engineering department bought homeopathic pills from neighbourhood shops, prepared highly diluted solutions and checked these under powerful electron microscopes to find nanoparticles of the original metal.
”Certain highly diluted homeopathic remedies made from metals still contain measurable amounts of the starting material, even at extreme dilutions of 1 part in 10 raised to 400 parts (200C),” said Dr Jayesh Bellare from the scientific team.
Ah, the “reputed” publisher, Elsevier. They don’t say what their reputation is, but I will: they are a reputably venal organization that gouges libraries and buys up journals without concern for quality. If you want one symbol for all that is wrong with science publishing today, you can’t go wrong picking Elsevier.
Anyway, the explanation isn’t an explanation. It simply says that no matter how much you dilute a substance in principle, it’s still going to contain trace contaminants. I’d like to know if they examined the water they used to dilute their “remedy”; odds are good that it contains low concentrations of miscellaneous stuff. Also, doesn’t this mean it wasn’t actually homeopathic, but simply contained a dilute quantity of an active agent? This doesn’t explain how potency would be increased by dilution at all.
Finally, “quantum” is not the only potent word that fails to magically make a quack explanation scientific. Add “nanotechnology” to the list.
Oh, wait, not before I bring my new snake oil to market, the one that contains “quantum nanotechnology”! I’m going to make a fortune!
The City Church of San Diego has a website with a fill-in-the-blank statement you’re supposed to complete, and they’re actually displaying the results, after they’ve been approved…and it looks like they’ve been reasonably liberal in their approvals. Help ’em out. Tell them what JESUS IS ______.
I said, “a myth”, but I also saw “a Jewish zombie” and “Placebo” and “very upset that you called him gay” appearing on the page.
Pucker up!
Unless you’re English, in which case you may soon have no excuses for smoochies ever again.
Color me unsurprised. They are lovely young men and I’m sure many others here will enjoy the show.
A reader from Austria sent in a photo of a very special nativity scene. None of it is on my diet, but I thought maybe a few readers would appreciate it, and maybe even be inspired to recreate it in their holiday celebrations.
Is this another salvo in the War on Christmas? Or does reverence for bacon mean it’s actually acceptable?
Oh, no! It’s a trend!
Poor Ken Ham is getting mocked everywhere for his Creation “Museum” and proposed Disneyland for Dummies, so he has put up a post defending Kentucky. It’s a remarkably weak argument (no surprise there, that’s all he can do), which mainly lists famous people who have been born there and occasional connections and horse racing. Whoop-te-doo. He also left off a few important merits to the state.
PZ Myers had ancestors who lived in Kentucky!
PZ Myers has a son who lives in Kentucky right now!
Ken Ham is not from Kentucky!
Ham did find one relevant piece of information: he dug up one study that developed a metric of important educational parameters like average class size, drop-out rate, teacher salaries, etc. that gives Kentucky a #1 ranking in public education. Good work, I knew there were smart people in Kentucky who had their priorities straight, and being from that state or living there is nothing to be ashamed of. We don’t have a detestation of Kentuckians.
The thing is that Ken Ham brings down the state average in intelligence, and his exhibits of stupid ideas bring the region and the country into disrepute. We don’t blame Kentucky.
It’s all Australia’s fault.
Face it. Star Wars sucked. Even the original movie, which I remember fondly and vastly enjoyed watching, was horribly written — that George Lucas did not have an ear for dialog, and once he drifted away from a simple mythic archetype couldn’t put a plot together to save his life, was something that became increasingly evident throughout the series.
And Star Trek? Embarrassingly bad science, hammy acting, and an over-reliance on gobbledygook and the deus ex machina. There was maybe a small handful of episodes that were more than cheesy dreck.
So why do people adore those shows so fanatically?
Here’s one interesting explanation: cult movies plug into the same cognitive keyholes as religion does. The article is a bit superficial — comparing Star Wars to Catholicism, Star Trek to protestantism, and the recent Star Trek retcon/reboot to Mormonism is stretching the analogy way too much. But there’s something to it.
The Star Wars/Star Trek phenomena are a bit odd; I watch bad movies sometimes for entertainment, but I never lose myself in apologetics for them. They’re bad movies. They’re fun for the comic opera klutziness of them, and half the pleasure is being able to stand above them and outside them, and appreciate the sincerity of the exercise in slapping together a weird piece of crap in spite of little obstacles, like a lack of money or talent. But Star Wars/Star Trek have serious fans who devotedly study the lore and get into arguments about which is better, and even think they represent some high quality story telling.
I will boldly predict that some people will be arguing for that in the comments. Of course, they’re wrong. They sucked. Just like religion.
So the question is why do people cling to them…and it seems to me that our brains are equipped with a kind of ideological inertia, which is probably a good thing, since you don’t want to too casually flip-flop on ideas before you’ve worked out their viability. But sometimes we seem to be prone to a pathological degree of attachment, where because once we favored some strange object of worship, whether it’s Jesus or Spock or America or the Green Bay Packers, we can’t let go. Changing our minds would be an admission that we were wrong and could be wrong about something we regard as important in our lives, and there’s a reasonable fear that opening the door to that kind of uncertainty might lead to chaos.
There’s also a peculiar inability to separate the parts from the whole. You can like classical sacred music without endorsing the silliness about magic crackers and Original Sin, just as you can enjoy a light sabre battle on the screen without getting goofy over The Force.
So what is religion? It’s a parasite on a couple of useful features of how the mind works, its tendency to try and model the world around us as a coherent whole and its reluctance to abandon models that fail to work. It’s a particularly successful parasite because it can be introduced early, with mother’s milk, well before they get plonked down in front of the boobtube, and so it generally outcompetes Captain Picard…and it also gets relatively little pushback from the culture once the child leaves the breast to spend more time with outsiders, who are all praising the same mysterious being, and so far Yoda worship isn’t very common.
