Two quick takes on a couple of oddities that were brought to my attention: cases of magic space salts and magic metal foils.

[Read more…]

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.

Thanks to Blake for mentioning this: you can watch Dawkins’ The Enemies of Reason, part 1, on Google Video right now. Yay!

David Colquhoun, author of DC’s Improbable Science page, has written a fine criticism of the New Credulity (I know, it’s no more “new” than the New Atheism) which he presents as a symptom of an age of endarkenment.

The past 30 years or so have been an age of endarkenment. It has been a period in which truth ceased to matter very much, and dogma and irrationality became once more respectable. This matters when people delude themselves into believing that we could be endangered at 45 minutes’ notice by non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

It matters when reputable accountants delude themselves into thinking that Enron-style accounting is acceptable. It matters when people are deluded into thinking that they will be rewarded in paradise for killing themselves and others. It matters when bishops attribute floods to a deity whose evident vengefulness and malevolence leave one reeling. And it matters when science teachers start to believe that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago.

And, of course, the indefensible has become the unquestionable. We live in a time when governments can use lies to justify foreign wars of opportunity, and the people who are punished are those who dared to question it; when religious kooks can sell 75 million copies of books that predict, and revel in, the imminent bloody obliteration of all non-christians, and the greatest outrage is reserved for the fact that a few atheists have books on the bestseller lists; when science funding is on the wane and science education is being corrupted, and those who struggle to keep biblical bullshit out of the classrooms are called intolerant and unamerican.

A few years ago Carl Sagan could write about lighting candles in the dark, and we all focused on that hopeful metaphor of the candle — we need to keep that flickering light alive. Maybe it’s past time that we recognized the encroaching darkness as the enemy, and that we need to stop looking inwards at our own individual antique light sources, and think about organizing a more powerful and more incandescent means of illumination to directly fight that wretched ignorance. Use those candles to light a fire. We need to blaze; we need to lase.

Richard Dawkins has stirred up a new nest of critics, and they’re actually getting space in the media. This time, it’s an astrologer complaining about those damned skeptics.

Evidently hoping to prove astrologers are know-nothings, Dawkins’ interview started with a lengthy grilling about astronomy – the precession of the equinoxes, sidereal and tropical zodiacs, Kuiper Belt objects. There was the usual objection to astrology dividing people into 12 Sun signs, and my usual reply: that’s eight more than the Myers-Briggs personality test used by commerce. Actually, astrology’s basic personality types number 1,728.

Ooooh, 1,728. That certainly sounds precise and scientific and all that … of course, the real question is whether these carefully enumerated types correspond to actual personality types, and whether date and hour and place of birth impose that kind of disposition on people. And the answer is no. I could add another arbitrary signifier to his list — say, “were you born at or below sea level, or above sea level?” — and double the number of types assigned by astrology to 3,456 (or more if I start subdividing the altitude!), but it’s all utterly meaningless without a mechanism or without replicable evidence.

Like many woo-woo crackpots, there’s no brand of nonsense this fellow won’t try to defend. Obviously, hard-nosed skeptics must criticize the unknown because it doesn’t conform to their paradigms.

Homeopathy and acupuncture are particularly repellent since they work through mechanisms unknown to the laws of physics.

Actually, I think homeopathy and acupuncture are repellent because they don’t work.

Oh, well. Critiqued by theologians, now by astrologers … there really isn’t much difference in the collection of clowns that gather to throw marshmallows, is there?

The atheists, skeptics, and secular humanists of Fresno have formed up and consolidate, and now they’re looking for a name for their group. Since, in the absence of an infusion of God’s creative will, they couldn’t possibly come up with an idea of their own, they’ve started a contest to come up with an appropriate label for their nest of elitist vipers in the bosom of Christendom. Can someone here think of a good name?