I get mail

Some people just don’t get it. Christopher Maloney wants to silence a message he doesn’t like on the internet by serving a cease & desist order.

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The last time I mentioned Maloney was eight months ago, and even then it was to point and laugh at his page throwing crazy paranoid accusations at me. So now, after eight months of neglect, he has decided to stir the pot and remind everyone that Christopher Maloney is a quack and that he keeps on quacking? That makes no sense.

So, once again, the web will start echoing the Christopher Maloney is a quack message.

It must be handy for a quack to marry a lawyer, but I don’t think she’s giving him good advice in this case. You might as well serve a writ on the tides to stop flowing as ask the internet to erase a piece of its data—your best bet is to allow it to take its course and hope that the wavelet that disturbs you gets lost in the incessant volume.

There are people meaner than I am

I got a surprising amount of criticism of my review of the arsenic-eating bacteria paper — some people thought I was too harsh and too skeptical and too cynical. Haven’t those people ever sat through a grad school journal club? We’re trained to eviscerate even the best papers, and I actually had to restrain myself a lot.

Anyway, I’m a pussycat. You want thorough skepticism, read Rosie Redfield’s drawing and quartering of the paper, which rips into the hasty methodology of the work. Man, after that, the body ain’t even twitching any more, and they’re going to have to clean up the pieces with a wet-vac. It’s beautiful.

Let’s poll the readers and see if it’s OK to kill children with neglect

It’s another of those horrible stories of an ignorant fundie family with a sick child who could be easily cured by modern medicines, but they chose to treat him with the uselessness of prayer…and guess what happens? They’re now the proud parents of a corpse.

The media doesn’t help. They give a voice to all the frauds saying things like, “Our teaching is to trust Almighty God for everything in life: for health, for healing, for protection, for provisions, for avenging of wrongs” and “The result was not what they wanted because our faith is imperfect at times. But God is perfect.” And then they go further and create a stupid poll for specious validation of the majority view.

Do you believe in the power of prayer to heal?

Yes 7.1%
Yes, but in conjunction with medicine 54.8%
No 38.1%
Don’t know 0%

That “Yes, but in conjunction with medicine” is such a common cop-out. This is what the apologists for religion do: let the stuff that works give cover for the lies they spew that do nothing and do harm. And they’re just as wicked as the ones who flatly say yes.

While we’re busy playing in the Creationist Theme Park…

…take a look at the depressing state of American education. This is the gloomiest article I’ve seen on the American future.

Add to this clear evidence that the U.S. education system, that source of future scientists and innovators, has been falling behind its competitors. After leading the world for decades in 25- to 34-year-olds with university degrees, the country sank to 12th place in 2010. The World Economic Forum ranked the United States at a mediocre 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly half of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are now foreigners, most of whom will be heading home, not staying here as once would have happened. By 2025, in other words, the United States is likely to face a critical shortage of talented scientists.

That hasn’t even gotten to the predictions yet. That’s a description of our current status.

You know, in ten years the Chinese tourists will be flocking to the bargains and sights of an economy in the toilet, and they will be booking tours to the Ark Encounter. And they will point and laugh and laugh and laugh. While proud Kentuckians will be scrabbling to sell them cheap plastic souvenirs in their new, low-paying jobs in the service industries.

I’m sure Ken Ham is grateful

Ken Ham is humbly appreciative of the coverage his Giant Wooden Box project is getting.

We were notified late this morning that AiG’s latest project, the Ark Encounter, will be featured tonight (Monday) on ABC-TV’s evening newscast, World News with Diane Sawyer. Check your local listings for the ABC affiliate station in your area and the time of broadcast. (See the ABC-TV news site.) Also, here is a link to the article about the Ark project that appears in the New York Times today: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/us/06ark.html.

The website for the Ark Encounter is ArkEncounter.com.

We are grateful to God for all this media coverage.

And well he should be. I looked at the NY Times coverage, and was appalled.

I have to explain something to the Times. Some guy building a little theme park in Kentucky is not news. It’s something for the state and local news, sure, but not something that warrants a good-sized spread and a big image of the proposed park in the N freaking Y frackin’ Times.

So why is it given that much space and a purely vanilla description of the events and people involved, as if it is simultaneously a big deal deserving national attention and a weirdly blasé occurrence that requires no investigation — how can it be both controversial enough to warrant attention and so uncontroversial that the reporter can’t even be bothered to mention how ridiculous and anti-scientific this endeavor is?

It is an astonishingly insipid article. The only good (?) thing about it is that finally the NY Times breaks its bad habit of “he said, she said” journalism and didn’t even bother to contact a scientist to get the “other” side. You know, the rational, accurate, honest, scientific side.

I don’t have much hope for the Diane Sawyer story going on the air tonight, either. Anyone want to bet on whether Ham gets pitched some softballs and the park that encourages children to be stupid is treated as purely an economic development issue?

Vignette from the grading wars

I just finished off one big chunk of grading, and on this exam, as is my custom, I give students a few bonus points with an easy question at the end. It is also my custom every year to have one of those easy questions be, “Name a scientist, any scientist, who also happens to be a woman,” just to see if they’ve been paying attention.

About 10% of the class leave it blank. C’mon, it’s a free 2 points on a 100 point exam! Over half the time, I get the same mysterious answer: Marie Curie. We do not talk about Marie Curie in this class at all, and it’s always a bit strange that they have to cast their minds back over a century to come up with a woman scientist. Next year, I should change the question to “Name a scientist, any scientist, who also happens to be a woman, and isn’t named Marie Curie,” just to screw with their heads. They won’t be able to think of anyone but Marie Curie.

Second runner up is Jane Goodall. Again, we don’t talk about her, but I guess she is well known.

The one new answer this time around, though, and the one that made me laugh, was this: “Louise Pasteur.” Ah, the plight of the woman scientist…now students have to reach back into the 19th century and give a man a sex change in order to think of one.

Made me laugh. Didn’t get the student any points, though. I am so harsh.

OK, your turn: can you name ten female scientists off the top of your head?

Wait—I’m supposed to be on which side in this video?

Bigtime cognitive dissonance here. This is a promotional video for an organization opposing the current predatory banking system, and what do they use to represent the evil banks? “A great vampire squid, wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnell into anything that smells like money.”

I admire vampire squid, you know. Lovely creatures.

Also, vampire squid live in practically anoxic deep water environments, where metabolic activity is limited. They’re also very soft and fragile. They really get a bad rep, and are much, much nicer than bankers.

By the way, this is a British group, and if you’re of that persuasion, you should look into their proposals for banking reform.

It’s a strange phobia

The latest xkcd is an odd one. I know some people freak out a teeny tiny bit at the thought, but it never bothers me.

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I’m a first child, and I calculated back when I was conceived, and estimate that it was almost exactly the day of my parents’ wedding — which was an elopement. The two of them ran off at a young age to Idaho where they didn’t need to get parental permission to marry, and right away they had me. I find that wonderfully romantic and have always had the knowledge that my parents loved each other very much (and were also a bit crazy and impetuous and careless…well, and also loved kids a lot). The squeamishness about parental sex has always seemed a bit weird to me — don’t people want their parents to be happy?

Of course, I don’t want to know the details, OK? That’s personal and private and should remain between the participants, no voyeurs allowed.

And I definitely don’t want to know about my kids’ sex life. I just want them to have a happy one, and that’s enough knowledge for me.

Hmmm…maybe that’s the root of the fastidiousness—a concern for the privacy of the individuals involved?