Bill Nye is arriving in Morris sometime today, and I’m looking forward to his talk — I’m hoping it will be material from his new book, Undeniable, which won’t be available until next month. But look at that subtitle: “Evolution and the Science of Creation”. If he does, he might drive some of the locals to a foaming fury, if they show up for the talk, which they probably won’t. I might have to read the town paper for a week or two to see if there is any reaction, or if it just gets buried.

But it also means I’m going to get tangled up in a wild social whirl on top of my usual teaching obligations today. I might be a little busy for a while.

October 28th. Wheat. Be there!

I would be irresistible to the ladies if only I had bright blue inflatable throat sacs, like Hoplobatrachus tigerinus.

Anti-vaxxers sometimes go off in reprehensible directions. A woman exaggerated her child’s symptoms to blame vaccines.

A leading British “mother warrior” campaigner, who claimed that the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine is responsible for autism, fabricated accounts of injury to her son and persistently lied about his health, a London court has ruled.

The mother, “E”, who cannot be named so as to protect her son’s identity, concocted a story about how he reacted to an MMR shot.  She said that he became distressed with fever and then lost speech, eye contact and play immediately following his three-in-one in January 1991, at the age of 18 months.

She claimed that he screamed after immunization, and that this was followed by six hours of convulsions and vomiting, and then six months in a “persistent vegetative state”.

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A guy named Andrea Rossi has been promoting this device call the E-Cat that produces huge amounts of energy by nuclear fusion: specifically, that it fuses hydrogen and nickel to produce copper and energy. And now there is a claim that this amazing result has been verified, in a remarkably gushing and credulous review.

I am not a physicist, not even close. I am at best a moderately well-read layman. I also understand the general principles of fusion — it’s how stars work, it’s how heavier elements have been built up over the history of the universe from lighter ones. I might be willing to naively concede that maybe you can get two elements to fuse under conditions present on earth…but then I would ask, in my charmingly simplistic understanding of nuclear reactions, what about the left over bits? You say you’ve brought these two atoms together in a high-energy reaction, you’ve got oodles of power flowing out of this, don’t these reactions always spew out a few subatomic particles? And if there really is all this energy available, aren’t they going to be flying out of the collision with tremendous power, producing what we civilians call deadly radiation?

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What I would love to do is sit down with a confirmed creationist and watch these videos together — they’re very clear and simple and well-illustrated, with specific evidence cited. I really wonder how they would deal with it all.

That atavistic cancer hypothesis is actually fueling the work of quacks: Orac has been getting threats from a Frank Arguello, who runs a crank cancer mill called “Atavistic Chemotherapy”.

It’s amazing stuff. It goes on and on about how cancer represents a reversion to the old cell types of single-celled organisms, and how modern chemotherapy is useless and dangerous, so he has a better formula: safe, harmless, and revolutionary. You’ll never guess what it is.

He’s treating cancer patients with antibiotics.

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They announced their decision to shut down the organization and cancel future conferences yesterday. This is sad news — it has always been an innovative, interesting event, but they faced a terrible hit when one of their founders, Bora Zivkovic, was slammed with charges of harassing women, and they’ve been struggling to get donations to support the organization. I suspect they may also have gotten a bit over-extended, too, since they’d been creating satellite conferences on narrower topics at different locations (which was an excellent idea, by the way, but may not have been wise if their core operations were overtaxed).

The full announcement is below the fold.

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I’ve been so disappointed in the journal BioEssays lately. It hasn’t gotten bad, exactly, it’s just changed, moving away from my interests. It used to have lots of papers on developmental biology, and now it rarely does; I think it’s since Adam Wilkins left the journal staff.

But every once in a while I still check in. I may have to change my mind about the quality. They’ve published an article on cancer by Lineweaver, Davies, and Vincent, on their absurd “atavistic theory of cancer”. It’s embarrassingly bad — I’ve written about it before, and Davies openly admits that it’s based on … Haeckelian recapitulation.

You should be dumbfounded by this revelation.

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