He’s the Man Who Sees Dead People, which I guess means he wasn’t able to see the live people who thought staying at home and washing the dishes would be more entertaining than watching a ‘psychic’ wank on stage.
(via Craig Crockett)
I have concluded that Jerry Coyne is the Imelda Marcos of evolutionary biology. I want to see a photo of the boot wing of his palatial mansion…or maybe he has a dedicated Boot Garage attached to his home, accessed by a fireman’s slide and a bullet train?
I confess to some disgraceful philistinery, in contrast. I tend to buy one pair of cheap tennis shoes and wear them into the ground, at which time I throw them out and buy another cheap pair. Some day I might have to acquire some style, I suppose.
Those two wretched words are “faith” and “homeopathy”. Please go kill it. Kill it, then burn it, then piss on the ashes, then use the ashes to fertilize a field and grow a tall stand of grass, then burn that, and then use the field as a fecal lagoon where you toss the waste from raising pigs, which you turn into bacon, thereby salvaging something useful from it.
See? I can too be an optimistic dreamer.
Do you have faith in homeopathy?
Yes: it works 68%
No: it’s nonsense 26%
I’ve an open mind on it 5%
My university is running a year long open seminar called Asking the Big Questions, in which speakers are brought in to more or less informally discuss ideas with an audience. This year’s theme is “faith and spirituality”.
Yuggh.
Anyway, they’ve brought in people to discuss Chinese philosophy, Wicca/paganism, Islam, etc. I think it’s good that students are getting exposed to diverse ideas and that proponents are given an open forum in which to discuss them, even if what it means is that often bullshit is getting presented as serious thought. Let people listen and think.
Except now they’re dragging me into it. I’m speaking on Thursday evening, 7:00 in the Briggs Library McGinnis room (6:30 if you want to come for socializing) on atheism, agnosticism, and secular humanism. The library is also providing a few short, serious readings on the natural selection, atheism, agnosticism, and humanism for attendees to read ahead of time. (You can get to them by going to the library’s Electronic Reserves page and searching by instructor for “Bremer”; look for course number “Lib5000”.) Dayyum. I thought I was just supposed to show up with a flamethrower and set the room on fire.
The format for the evening is that I should say a few words for 15 minutes, and then the discussion is open to questions. It might be fun, if people turn out, so I’m hoping to get a good mix of enlightened atheists and ignorant, savage believers in the audience. Show up if you’re in the neighborhood of Morris on Thursday.
John Beddington, Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK government, has had enough and isn’t going to take it any more. He’s urging a more vigorous response to the creeping woo.
“We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of racism. We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of people who [are] anti-homosexuality… We are not—and I genuinely think we should think about how we do this—grossly intolerant of pseudo-science, the building up of what purports to be science by the cherry-picking of the facts and the failure to use scientific evidence and the failure to use scientific method.”
“One way is to be completely intolerant of this nonsense,” he said. “That we don’t kind of shrug it off. We don’t say: ‘oh, it’s the media’ or ‘oh they would say that wouldn’t they?’ I think we really need, as a scientific community—and this is a very important scientific community—to think about how we do it.”
Beddington said that he intends to take this agenda forward with his fellow chief scientists and also with the research councils. “I really believe that. . . we need to recognise that that is a pernicious influence, it is an increasingly pernicious influence and we need to be thinking about how we can actually deal with it.”
“I really would urge you to be grossly intolerant,” he said. “We should not tolerate what is potentially something that can seriously undermine our ability to address important problems.”
That is what we need: more activist scientists who point out the stupidity of our opposition. I know, Beddington will be taken to task by mealy-mouthed well-meaning apologists who’ll declare that direct conflict is bad and won’t persuade anyone, but I have to disagree — the constant backing off and making apologies for nonsense is what creates an environment in which lies can grow.
For a beautiful example, look at this article on the Huffington Post, AOL, and anti-vaccination movements. The HuffPo is still making excuses for defending the possibility of a vaccination/autism link, and is saying that the denialists have a reasonable position. Why, no they don’t: you might as well be arguing for a link between autism and anal probes by Martians in flying saucers. At this point, there’s no legitimate reason to refrain from accusing the HuffPo of peddling patent lies, and we need more people doing that.
There’s also a vast difference between being intolerant of people, which no one is advocating, and intolerant of bad ideas, which is expected of every scientist. We simply need to move that skeptical attitude out of the lab and into the wider sphere of public engagement.
It’s amazing how many videos of human sexual behavior you can find on the web. Try it; type in a few well-known keywords, and you’ll have no trouble finding plenty.
I’ll just leave you with this one.
I thought I had more than enough Valentine’s videos queued up for the day, but then this one was mentioned:
Who would have thought that a video with puppets about a mummy would be the most romantic entry of the day?
(via Neil Gaiman)
I racked up a series of courtship videos for Valentine’s Day — actually, my wife picked them all out, so now you know something about her taste in porn — and I got email from a few people mentioning that they’re all alone today. So here’s a lonely ant for the community thread.
(Current totals: 11,867 entries with 1,277,525 comments.)
