The speakers for The Amaz!ng Meeting 6 have been announced. Uh, wow. What am I going to do up there? I don’t do card tricks, nor do I blow stuff up. I’m not going to be the most acerbic speaker in that crowd, either.
I also have to be worth some fraction of the $450 registration cost. The pressure is on!
I’m fed up. There have been 5.5 Amaz!ng Meetings with James Randi, and I haven’t gone to a single one…yet. That’s finally going to change, though, as I’ve been invited to speak at TAM6, in Las Vegas, on 19-22 June. Who else is going? Maybe a few of you will think about marking your calendars and making the pilgrimage for the first time this summer, so that I’m not the only TAM virgin there?
I haven’t quite settled on what I’ll be talking about, just yet, although I have a few ideas. Maybe Phil and I should have a joint session in which we publicly play the dozens? He did just get back from TAM 5.5, so there is a little seething jealousy that needs an outlet.
Larry Moran has had a couple of articles up lately on Dr Sharon Moalem, a fellow who has a book out called Survival of the Sickest, and who also has a blog. Larry noticed a couple of things: he’s writing utter tripe about junk DNA, he’s editing and deleting comments about his science from his blog, and he’s been misleading about his credentials — although, to be fair, Moalem does plainly and accurately list his background on the endflaps of the book (some of this has come from a student blog that has been dissecting his dubious claims).
Michael Hanscom gets a very amusing advertisement:
THE PROBLEM IS NOT TESTOSTERONE – The Problem Is That You Are Being Deluged with Female Hormones. You Are Being Feminized and You Don’t Even Know It.
It’s for one of those fake ‘natural male enhancement’ products, but it has an interesting premise: that your impotency problems are not your fault, but a consequence of the flood of estrogen entering our drinking water. You need Estro-Blaster to blast the estrogen out of your system. This product looks like total bunkum, but I had to admire the ad copy — if I were a completely unethical, greedy slime-weasel, I’d want to invest in this company. It does a beautiful job of tapping right into certain male fears.
You’ve got almost a month to get it together: it’s the second annual Carl Sagan memorial blog-a-thon. Write something in honor of Carl Sagan by sometime around 20 December. This event got a huge response last year — it ought to be possible to top it this time around.
Enjoy the nice criticism of medical woo.
Sid Schwab takes on the credulity of believers in alternative medicine, like chiropractic.
Halloween is coming, and you can enjoy the haunted house theme of the 78th Carnival of the Godless.The Quackometer tells us that we’ve been very naughty boys and girls, and of course it’s perfectly natural at this time of year to hang around in the Boneyard. That’s nothing, however, I have something far more terrifying to show you.
This is getting ridiculous. Now I’m accused of “trying to drive a wedge between those who are against evolution” … because I think belief in angels and demons is absurd.
Damn. Just because someone accepts evolution doesn’t automatically make them a good guy, and if they’re praising evolution and at the same time babbling about demons causing appendicitis or angels warding off curses, they aren’t on my side in the cause of increasing rationality.
I’m beginning to wonder if there is some psychological transference going on here. People who think that merely believing in Jesus grants them redemption must also think that believing in evolution is a magic charm that grants them exemption from criticism of any nonsense they might hold. It doesn’t work that way. There is no get-out-of-criticism-free card.
Two quick takes on a couple of oddities that were brought to my attention: cases of magic space salts and magic metal foils.
Scienceblog’s own Tara Smith, with Steve Novella, has an article in PLoS on HIV Denial in the Internet Era. It describes some of the major players among the HIV deniers, and most importantly talks about their tactics. It’s useful even if you aren’t at all involved in that branch of biology or invested in that particular argument: one section is titled “Portraying Science as Faith and Consensus as Dogma” and that certainly struck a chord with me — that is one of the most common creationist arguments, as well.
