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.

Stuart Buck persists in claiming that scientists have a bias against the supernatural, and that we dismiss it out of hand. This isn’t true; the problem is that supernatural explanations are poorly framed and typically unaddressable, so we tend to avoid them as unproductive. What one would actually find, if one took the trouble to discuss the ideas with a scientist, is that they are perfectly willing to consider peculiar possibilities if they are clearly stated. We’ll even briefly consider something as insane and worthless as astrology, which is even less credible as a field of study than Intelligent Design.

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New Yorkers: you really don’t want to miss the upcoming appearance by James Randi on 10 October. He’ll be at Rockefeller University that evening, and he’s always entertaining and fun.

The rest of the country will be getting a small consolation prize. If you can’t make it to NY, you can all go to Springfield, Missouri instead, where Richard Carrier and PZ Myers will be rockin’ the house with their godless stylings at MSU that weekend. I’ll post more details on that, later.

The right wing media usually makes the most egregiously false claims about science, but I have to confess…on many science subjects, the lefty media is about as bad. I cringe when I see anything about the autism scares in print from either side, and Robert Kennedy Jr’s credibility went poof for me when I saw him peddling absurd terror tactics about thimerosal. So I was pleasantly surprised at this article on Salon that pulls no punches. It slams David Kirby and Andrew Wakefield hard.

It was pleasing to see, for a change.

Ben Goldacre, of the Bad Science weblog, has had a lawsuit hanging over his head for the past year. Ben regularly excoriates alt-medicine quacks, and one of his targets was a pill-peddler named Matthias Rath who got rich off pointless vitamin supplements with exaggerated claims of effectiveness, and most despicably, had been denouncing effective AIDS treatments in order to sell more of his useless patent medicines.

Goldacre publicly called him on his unethical behavior, and Rath in reply sued him for libel. The case has now been settled in Goldacre’s favor.

It’s great personal news for Ben, but it’s also an important victory for medical journalism, and for the people who might be getting legitimate medical advice in the future, instead of the Rath-promoted quackery.

Let us all doff our hats in astonished disbelief at the brazen arrogance of the people who have created the Carl Sagan Institute in Brazil.

That is, the Carl Sagan Institute…of UFOlogy. That’s right, a cranky gang of saucernuts have appropriated the name and likeness of Carl Sagan without authorization to flog their belief that Jesus is a flying saucer pilot. They claim that Sagan was secretly a believer in visitations by Little Green Men, who simply publicly lied, and now they want to use his dead body to beg for donations.

Anyone know a good Brazilian lawyer who’d like to fight this?

It has been announced that Phil Plait is to be the new president of the James Randi Educational Foundation. This can’t be. I’ve never been entertained by Phil doing a card trick. Besides, James Randi is supposed to go on forever.

One consolation is that everyone is going to have to escalate the obligatory Plait bashing at the next Amazing Meeting.