What’s your SQ?

I’m sure some of you will soon be bragging about how your Squid Quotient is higher than mine.

Your Squid Quotient = 158.25
Interpreting your results: An average Squid Quotient is around 100. A SQ of 100 means you have a normal affinity for squid. A SQ above 100 means you have an attraction or fondness for squid. Below 100 means that you should probably stay away from the deep ocean.

They shoot the dogs?

SWAT teams training for drug raids casually shoot target dogs, so guess what they do on the real raids? Fascist scumbags. In anything other than a police state, you’d expect the law enforcers to be held to the highest possible standards of conduct; in the US, the police with the biggest guns are unrestrained by ordinary decency. Slaughtering family pets is what I’d expect of a psychopath.

(via Jim Lippard)

The Curse of the Prayer Study

It’s not looking good for the authors of a study that evaluated the efficacy of prayer. The authors were Rogerio A. Lobo, Daniel P. Wirth, and Kwang Y. Cha, and now look at what has happened to them (link may not work if you don’t have a subscription to the CHE).

Doctors were flummoxed in 2001, when Columbia University researchers published a study in The Journal of Reproductive Medicine that found that strangers’ prayers could double the chances that a woman would get pregnant using in-vitro fertilization. In the years that followed, however, the lead author removed his name from the paper, saying that he had not contributed to the study, and a second author went to jail on unrelated fraud charges.

Meanwhile, many scientists and doctors have written to the journal criticizing the study, and at least one doctor has published papers debunking its findings.

Now the third author of the controversial paper, Kwang Y. Cha, has been accused of plagiarizing a paper published in the journal Fertility and Sterility in December 2005. Alan DeCherney, editor of Fertility and Sterility and director of the reproductive biology and medicine branch at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, said on Monday that it was clear to him that Dr. Cha, who has since left Columbia, plagiarized the work of a South Korean doctoral student for a paper he published on detecting women who are at risk of premature menopause.

Isn’t the explanation obvious? God really hates scientists who poke at him.

PETA has sex with chickens!

That’s one interpretation, at least. Shelley finds a new item in a disturbing PETA ad campaign. I really don’t understand what they’re doing; putting up all these ads to associate meat and butchery and experimentation with sex seems counterproductive. What if the ads work, and everybody starts getting horny every time they go by the meat counter at the grocery? I really don’t want to have to waste my time fending off mobs of randy young men and women whenever I whip out a scalpel, either.*

The ad also makes a ridiculous scientific claim—par for the course for PETA—that “the cognitive abilities of a chicken rival that of cats, dogs, and even young humans.” I think the only way they could get that answer is if their baseline was a measurement of the cognitive abilities of PETA publicists.

*The alternative is even worse; what if every time you had sex you couldn’t get dead chickens out of your mind?

Once a crank, always a crank

DaveScot, the anti-science slug from UncommonDescent, is doing an experiment: he’s got a friend who is taking dichloroacetate (DCA) to treat his cancer. DaveScot thinks this is wonderful and useful, but quite the contrary: a one-person uncontrolled trial is pretty much a perfect example of bad science.

One funny (funny weird, because it’s also actually kind of evil) point from the post: he’s shilling for a quack commercial site that is selling DCA—purportedly for animal use. They sell doses for 150 pound animals. That’ll come in handy if my pet kangaroo gets cancer.

Anyway, nice to see that crackpottery is so unfocused. Many of the big wigs in ID are also HIV-deniers, in addition to being evolution-deniers; now we’re seeing one of them jump on the snake oil bandwagon. I wonder if there are also greater than average numbers of cold fusion fans and UFO believers in the ranks of the IDists? There might be an interesting sociological study in that.

Call me when the angels come down and do something; until then, give the credit to people

Ugh. Jim Wallis. That left-wing theo-nut.

Progressive politics is remembering its own religious history and recovering the language of faith. Democrats are learning to connect issues with values and are now engaging with the faith community. They are running more candidates who have been emboldened to come out of the closet as believers themselves.

What planet is he from? Have American politicians of any party been afraid to label themselves as religious at any time in the past century? We see the opposite problem: they all declare themselves best buddies with a god.

He also goes on to do the usual post-hoc appropriation of every good idea that has ever come along to the credit of religion: abolition, civil rights, the overthrow of communism, on and on, glossing over the fact that we people of reason were fighting the good fight, too, and that religion seems to be one of those nonsensical foundations that allows people to argue any ol’ which-way they want, and that there people of faith fighting against those same good ideas.

I think all religion is good for is moral thievery—stealing the credit for the good that human beings do and passing it along to their priests and fictitious gods.

Stephen Frug gets even crankier about this. Please, please, get these raving kooks out of both parties, and let’s have rational policy making that owes nothing to religious nonsense.