The climate change denialists have been whooping it up in my email lately, crowing in triumph over the fact that James Hansen’s former “supervisor” has disavowed his work and claims there were no political efforts to suppress the scientific facts. I haven’t really cared — it’s an argument from imaginary authority, nothing more — but I was very amused to learn that this “fact” is in the same category as other denialist “facts”: it isn’t. This fellow, John Theron, is a cranky old gomer who retired 15 years ago, and was thus not even present in the oppressive Bush administration, and never had supervisory authority over Hansen at all.

I’m also sure that won’t matter at all. The myth of Hansen’s supervisor will be repeated forevermore.

Some cheesy medical show on the television recently had a segment on an interesting old technique: cupping. This is a procedure related to bleeding, in which suction is used to draw blood to the surface. It’s absolutely useless, an artifact of old, discarded theories about humors, and it’s not something I ever thought I’d see practiced.

A modern twist on an ancient procedure promises big results in the treatment of pain. Tracy, 36, suffers from chronic back pain and writes The Doctors for help.

Acupuncturist Dr. Michael Yang performs a cupping procedure on Tracy, which, he explains, works on the same principles as a deep massage or physical therapy. The placement of heated glass cups on a person’s bare back serves to separate connective tissue, muscle and fascia, which subsequently increases circulation and decreases inflammation.

Chinese medicine purports that cupping moves “stagnant blood,” or stuck chi, or energy, as well as detoxifies the blood. “It’s been around for thousands of years,” Dr. Yang notes. “It’s really a tried and true therapy.”

Our acupuncturist throws around a lot of jargon, but it’s all a put-on, and he’s a quack. His therapy certainly has been tried, tried for a long, long time with no therapeutic effect (other than, perhaps, the placebo effect). Lots of things have been around for a long time, but that doesn’t make them correct. What’s he going to do next, sacrifice a goat, do a magic dance around the patient, and make her drink a potion made from mouse dung and boiled roots? People did that kind of thing for thousands of years, too.

It would probably make for good TV.

See—there’s an official list and everything.

But wait…what’s this? Tied with the Bad Astronomer? What has he done, besides write a book and become president of the JREF and pose naked? I ought to win for keeping my clothes on!

The sound quality is awful, but the sentiment comes through clearly: Tim Minchin describes a typical evening with a woo artist.

I’ve gotten a few queries about what happened to the StopSylviaBrowne website; as Blake explains, some sleaze swept in while Robert Lancaster was hospitalized and grabbed the domain name. It’s now moved to StopSylvia.com. Update those bookmarks!

Steven Novella has an excellent critique of the Discovery Institute’s pathetic assault on materialism. But then you all read Neurologica already, right?

Well, this certainly sounds like a fun experiment.

n a bizarre experiment, academics at The Oxford Centre For Science Of The Mind ‘tortured’ 12 Roman Catholics and 12 atheists with electric shocks as they studied a painting of the Virgin Mary.

They found that the Catholics seemed to be able to block out much of the pain.

Except, of course, for a few problems with the experiment. First, an atheist like me would find being afflicted with Catholic iconography would be a compounding of the torture. They did try to control for that by also having subjects contemplate a Renaissance portrait of a woman with no overt religious connection (although, as we know from stories of Catholics around the world, they will call a grease stain blob a portrait of the Virgin Mary, so this seems ineffectual) — it had the same effects, making the Catholics more resistant while leaving the atheists unchanged.

If we’re talking about some kind of placebo effect, though, it is not surprising that atheists would not find a picture floating before their face to be a palliative — they would not expect an image to have any effect, so the placebo effect would not kick in. Big deal.

A more significant flaw, though, is that the results of the experiment are entirely drawn from subjective self-reporting of pain. The Catholics may be saying they feel less pain while feeling the same amount simply because they are accustomed to lying while surrounded by Christian paraphernalia. The less gullible atheists were trying to accurately report their sensations.

Of course some religious leaders see this as an affirmation.

The findings were welcomed by the Anglican Bishop of Durham, the Rt Rev Tom Wright, who said: ‘The practice of faith should, and in many cases does, alter the person you are.

‘It can affect the patterns of your brain and your emotions. So it comes as no surprise to me that this experiment has reached such conclusions.’

Another interpretation would be that belonging to a faith means you have already been selected for a weakness to being impressed by the superficial and trivial. And sure, beliefs and imagination and thoughts will change the activity of your brain — because that’s all they are, is products of the brain. Bishops probably shouldn’t welcome this conclusion, because it suggests that the mind is a product of material causes, and the absence of supernatural phenomena should put them out of a job.

In case anyone would like to argue that the suggestibility demonstrated in this experiment is an advantage to Catholics, allowing them to better resist pain, I suggest a variation: hang a picture of Satan in front of them and see if it makes them more susceptible to report enhanced sensitivity to pain.

It’s called Stop Jenny McCarthy. Yes. Please do.

If you notice little things going wrong in your everyday life right now, it’s because Mercury is in retrograde. At least, that’s the excuse astrologers like to give, even though it’s entirely nonsensical and the apparent motion of the planets really has no effect on your life, unless you’re an astronomer. MSNBC has a fluff piece on gadgets going wrong in astrological crises, and they consulted Phil Plait on the subject. I think he blew a few raspberries through the phone at the reporter.

I used to wrassle astrologers for fun and the lulz ages ago, which is why I resurrected the previous old article, in which an astrologer made similar claims about a predictable astrological gremlin, the void-of-course moon. The void-of-course moon is even more ridiculous than the retrograde motion of Mercury — all it means is that the Moon isn’t residing within one of the 12 canonical signs of the zodiac, with consequences that are both petty and dire. We actually had a testable specific prediction from an astrologer, though, so with great joy a whole mob of skeptics rushed to test it.

You can guess what happened: the prediction failed, astrologer made a bunch of random excuses. That was the most predictable part of the exercise.