Your hydrogen bond angle is 10° greater than ordinary water (114°)!

Quacks have no shame, but once reputable science and engineering magazines should have some vestiges of it. Popular Science magazine will take money from anyone for the ad revenue, as Cyde Weys demonstrates with a scan of an ad for energized water. It will cure cancer and diabetes, and kills bacteria. It’s crazy and stupid.

Your blood is 94% water and billions of people flush their diseases along with medication into the ground water 4-5 times/day and it ends up at a faucet somewhere. If you have well water and people in the area have cancer, you have a good chance of getting cancer! S.D. Woman: “All around me they have MS, but they all drink pure water from ordinary distillers, filters, ozonators, reverse osmosis and alkaline water machines. The water is pure, why do they have MS?” People in the area with MS flush their diseases into the ground water and you pump the water up to your faucet, proving that the products don’t work!

Wow. So much stupid packed into so few words. It’s an ad that relies on ignorance to generate fear and hysteria so people will buy their product: cancer (with some exceptions) and multiple sclerosis aren’t infectious diseases that you catch from your water. And how about this?

How about the AIDS dentist on CBS 60 Minutes? They all use pure water along with 4,000 dentists surveyed, and yet their purest water can’t even kill pathogenic bacteria! Ours does!

Those dentists! Those bastards! They’re all out to give you AIDS unless they use our magic water!

It has to be seen to be believed. It’s plain ol’ snake oil sold with a full page ad in Popular Science.

Now this is a promising development Never mind

Crap. Lippard misread the report: it was a 6 month form. There has been no net decline in revenues to that creationist junk organization, and I was wrong. There have been no promising developments in a decline in grassroots support for creationism.

I’ve always had a low regard for settling creationism by court cases, since they don’t do a thing to address popular support. Here is far better news, though, and unless there’s some remarkable explanation for it, it’s the most promising sign of real progress I’ve seen yet: revenues for Answers in Genesis dropped from $10 million in 2004 to $5 million in 2005. That’s still a big chunk of change, but this is at the same time that they’ve been getting massive amounts of free PR for their creation “science” museum project, and it suggests that maybe people are getting leery of throwing their money into a futile endeavor. At least, we can hope it signifies a massive erosion of public support.

If I see Ken Ham with a cardboard sign begging for handouts someday, I might toss him a nickel.

Here, everyone: homework!

Hey, everyone, you’re being asked for some help. A certain someone is going to be giving a talk to Hugh Ross’s group, Reasons to Believe, and he wants a list of common creations fallacies and good rebuttals. Remember, RtB is an old earth creationist group, so stuff about a 6000 year old earth is inappropriate.

Please consider taking the time to post a thread on your blog asking readers to submit their nominations for most common/most egregious fallacies or misunderstandings along with suggestions on how to combat them. You can mention me or not, as you think it would be appropriate/helpful. I am sure if you challenge your readership, their feedback would be tremendously helpful to me, and that could make a difference in the sort of impact my presentation has.

My number one gripe is probably general innumeracy. Anyone who treats the likelihood of the evolution of a protein as (1/20)# of amino acids doesn’t understand probabilities or the nature of the problem. It’s not short, but I’d point them at Ian Musgrave’s explication of probability and statistics.

Innocence lost!

I was just asked to confirm something. A reader, TheFallibleFiend, noticed that DaveScot at Uncommon Descent had claimed that he had heard the “Tree of Life Exploding” because an examination of an ultraconserved genetic element in humans had found that “the closest match was to DNA from the coelacanth”. The reader then checked the Nature article, and discovered that it didn’t seem to say anything of the kind. He tried to point this discrepancy out in a comment, but it never showed up (oooh, surprise!).

Our bewildered reader wonders if he could be misinterpreting the article—he’s not a biologist—but you know, the abstract seems to plainly contradict DaveScot. How could this be?

Alas, I have to destroy his touching faith in human nature. DaveScot completely failed to comprehend the article. He misrepresented its meaning in his description. He’s ruthless about expunging any criticism, so he almost certainly intentionally deleted any comments that might mention his incompetence. The string of commenters at UD who all thought this was wonderful evidence against evolution further exemplify the willful inanity of the Bill Dembski fan club. FallibleFiend, your understanding of the abstract and paper seems to be quite accurate; theirs is incredibly off-base.

You will be pleased to know that Carl Zimmer has discussed this same Nature article in PLoS Computational Biology, and he backs you up.

Everyone should know by now that if the Dembskiites say it, it is almost certainly wrong; they trade in ignorance and dishonesty, and now we can add disillusionment to their wares.

A Phoenix social calendar…see you at SICB!

Attention, Phoenixians (Phoenicians? Phoenotypes? What do they call residents of Phoenix, anyway?). (John Lynch, GrrlScientist, and I are going to be in your area next week for the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) meetings, and we are all unanimous in our expectation that this will be an excellent opportunity to cadge free drinks from meet all of our fans out Arizona way. We’re all going to be taking advantage of the meetings to learn us some new science, but there will be a few opportunities to socialize, too.

Jim Lippard is hosting a get-together at his home on Saturday, 6 Jan, from 5:30 to 8:00. To make sure that the size of the gathering is manageable, you’ll need to contact him to get directions. Hey, you get to meet us and Jim Lippard! What a deal!

In addition, on Friday, 5 Jan, we’ll want to wander off to somewhere near the convention center for casual food and drinks, say around 6ish. Do any of the residents who’d like to join us want to make suggestions about a locale? Something convenient, easy for foreigners like us to get to, but not likely to be overwhelmed by the hordes of like-minded biologists spilling out of the meeting at the same time. We can hammer out the details in the comments.

Put down those non sequiturs and stereotypes, Captain Fishsticks, and no one will get hurt

Captain Fishsticks is one of our local conservative nutjobs who haunts the pages of the St Paul Pioneer Press—he’s a free market freak who wants to privatize everything, especially the schools, and yet everything he writes reveals a painful ignorance of anything academic. This week he’s written a response to an article that left him distraught: Peter Pitman advocated more and better science education for Minnesotans, especially on the subject of climate change. Fishsticks, to whom all education is a zero-sum game because every time he has to learn another phone number a whole ‘nother column of the times table drops out of his brain, objects to this threat. He starts off by agreeing with Pitman’s argument, but does so by tying it to some of his lunatic obsessions—he’s a pro-smoking anti-vaccination guy.

I’ve made much the same argument relative to policymakers who unscientifically exaggerate the dangers of secondhand smoke and bureaucrats who ignore scientific evidence about the dangers of universal vaccination.

This approval will not last. The rest of his column is a weird paean to excusing ignorance of science. You see, if people learn more math and physics, they’ll get the idea that we live in a “clockwork universe”, and then they won’t like music or poetry anymore. Seriously.

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