Good Reason

It's okay to be wrong. It's not okay to stay wrong.

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Homeopathy cartoon

1 July 2010 / / 4 Comments

Beaker has alerted me to this Darryl Cunningham cartoon which is critical of homeopathy. (You may have seen his earlier cartoon about the MMR.)

He points out that homeopathy is ineffective, and dangerous when chosen in preference to real medicine, which (surprise!) is the preference that homeopaths will steer you toward. I like how he explains not only why homeopathy doesn’t work, but also why people feel like it does.

He’s also included a bit about Penelope Dingle. I hope this retelling of her story helps to prevent others from following her course of action.

I confess it still puzzles me why Peter Dingle seems to have no particular qualms about homeopathy. If I’d been through what he’s been through, I’d be trashing it even more than I currently do. But then I’m not overly invested in quackery, so that may be where we differ.

Yes, she is.

29 June 2010 / / 2 Comments

Julia Gillard, the prime minister of Australia, is an atheist. For a while there, I wasn’t sure, but she came out this morning in a radio interview.

Do you believe in God?

No, I don’t, John. I’m not a religious person.

I’ll write some more on this later, but I just wanted to light a celebratory sparkler. Isn’t it great that Australia is a country where a politician doesn’t have to pretend to believe in supernatural beings, and can still get elected as a head of government…

Erm. Maybe I should hold off on the celebration until after the elections.

North Am dialects reprezzent!

28 June 2010 / / 2 Comments

Did you learn to speak English in North America? Your input is required for the North American English Dialect Survey.

It’s easy — you just use your computer’s microphone to record yourself saying various words. They also ask where you went to high school, and where you live now.

They’re going to love me. I still sound like a dang ‘Merkun, but living in Australia for so long has changed my accent in one respect: I have broken free of the cot/caught merger. I say ‘cot’ like I’m British, but my ‘caught’ sounds like Noo Yawk. It might puzzle them for a bit, but they’ll probably understand once they see my current postcode.

Mobile phones and cancer

27 June 2010 / / 2 Comments

A study shows that mobile phone towers do not cause cancer. Good to know.

British scientists who conducted the largest study yet into cell phone masts and childhood cancers say that living close to a mast does not increase the risk of a pregnant woman’s baby developing cancer.

In a study looking at almost 7,000 children and patterns of early childhood cancers across Britain, the researchers found that those who developed cancer before the age of five were no more likely to have been born close to a mast than their peers.

And in this article, Bernard Leikind explains why mobile phones themselves cannot cause cancer.

One watt (the amount of energy emitted from mobile phones) is much smaller than many other natural energy flows that no one suspects might cause cancer. In my Skeptic paper, I show that the average energy production in my body as I go about my life is about 100 Watts. I also show that while I jog on my local gym’s treadmill for half an hour, I produce 1100 or 1200 Watts. This energy, produced in my leg muscles, travels throughout my body including my brain, and I sweat a lot. My body’s temperature does not change much. No one believes that my frequent treadmill sessions cause cancer. If the cell phone’s less than 1 Watt causes cancers, then why doesn’t my exercise session’s more than 1000 Watts cause cancer?

Perhaps if people hear this enough times, they will start to believe it. We live in hope.

Apparently, it did.

23 June 2010 / / 1 Comment

Great moments in blokeness:

Aussie men shoot each other in buttocks ‘to see if it hurts’

Two Australian men needed surgery after shooting each other in the buttocks during a drinking session to see if it would hurt, police said on Wednesday.

The men, both aged 34, used an air rifle to fire at each other on Sunday. By Tuesday, both were in hospital to have pellets removed from their buttocks and legs.

Criticise them if you wish for mixing guns and alcohol, but you have to admire their commitment to empiricism.

And there’s something else we can learn from this. You notice how one guy shot his friend (doubtless hurting him), but then it was his turn to get shot? This just shows that an experiment isn’t really valid unless it’s replicable.

Ask an atheist: What is god like?

22 June 2010 / / 1 Comment

I sometimes contribute to ‘Ask the Atheists‘. Here’s a recent question.

What is your concept of God in His most crucial essence?

Rather an odd question to pose to atheists, don’t you think? Someone posed the same question to Richard Dawkins once, and he said he found it absurd.

Here’s how I answered it.
= – = – = – = – = – = – = – = – = – =
I’d like to describe the crucial attributes of God, and I’m not going to let a little thing like not believing in him stop me.

First, I’d say that God is intelligent. (Joseph Smith said that, and went on to found one of the dumbest religions of all time.) Because God is so intelligent, he’d be far too smart to invent a dumb thing like creationism, intelligent design, or intelligent design creationism. He’d surely see through the ridiculous charlatanry known as faith healing. He’d also be too smart to need numbskull apologists to defend him using poor reasoning, logical fallacies, and doomed arguments. Maybe they should cut it out.

Apparently, he controls everything, listens to billions of prayers, and (I have heard) is responsible for all the physical processes in the universe. That means he’s a busy guy. So he’d be far too busy to care what people are doing with their naughty bits. He also wouldn’t care about gay people getting married, how low women’s hemlines or necklines are, what kind of underwear people are wearing, or any of a thousand details about food and drink, meat preparation, hair length, language use, or social customs that religious systems concern themselves with for the supposed well-being of their members.

He created the world, and everything that in it is. That includes fossils and rocks that are millions of years old. That would suggest that he wants people to believe that the earth is much older than the 6,000 – 10,000 years that Christian fundamentalists believe it is. Why do they ignore the evidence that comes from the world that their god created? And why don’t they believe the fact of evolution? If he’s the god of truth, shouldn’t they quit trying to ignore facts? Doesn’t that sound like they’re not being respectful to him?

God created a lot of women. I happen to think they’re quite nice-looking, and since I’m created in God’s image, I bet he likes the way they look too. He’d probably be offended if someone tried to cover them in yards of fabric. Or if anyone tried to mutilate their genitals. Or burn them, cut off their noses, or honour-kill them for not being sufficiently obedient.

In other words, from what I can tell of God’s crucial attributes, I think he’d be as disgusted with the attempts of humans to worship him as I am. If he existed, that is.

Call for compulsory teaching of evolution in the UK

21 June 2010 / / 2 Comments

Should the teaching of evolution be compulsory, even in primary schools? OH HELLS YES.

Richard Dawkins among academics calling for compulsory evolution teaching at primary school

Evolution should be taught to all primary school pupils, according to leading scientists and academics.

Experts including three Nobel laureates and Richard Dawkins, the prominent atheist, are calling on the new Government to make teaching of the theory a compulsory part of the curriculum.

They say it is necessary because of the increasing number of schools that do not have to follow the curriculum, and because of the “threat” posed by the religious concept of creationism.

They wrote: “Evolution is the most important idea underlying biological science. It is a key concept that children should be introduced to at an early stage.

“Whatever curriculum reforms are made, we urge that there is teaching of evolution for all school-age children, and especially in the primary curriculum.”

Evolution is the foundation of biology, and it’s as well-supported as a theory gets. Everyone should know this stuff to be considered an educated person. It should be regarded as just as essential and mandatory as maths or writing.

We need this kind of move just to move things back in the right direction. Creationists have been engaged in a protracted struggle to get their ignorance illegally enshrined in school curricula for decades, so this is a nice bit of pushback.

Would the know-nothing religious right scream that the government is forcing evolution down everyone’s throat, and outlawing the teaching of alternative Bible-based points of view?

Of course they would. But that’s what they’ve already been saying for years, so who would notice?

The Bank Holidays — ‘Ship Becomes a Kite’ album launch

20 June 2010 / / Comments Off on The Bank Holidays — ‘Ship Becomes a Kite’ album launch

Last night was the album launch for the new Bank Holidays album, “Sail Becomes a Kite”.

For this sophomore album, the Hols have turned down the temperature, washing their trademark sunny harmonies in a golden melancholic glow. You’d think this would make for a difficult concert, playing downbeat songs that the audience doesn’t know. In fact, the concert worked amazingly well, for three reasons:

  1. They interspersed their old favourites like ‘The Greatest Game’ and ‘She’s Not Into Love’.
  2. They played a kick-ass version of the Kinks’ (or the Jam’s) song ‘David Watts’. Hope they recorded it — that would be a great b-side.
  3. The new material is really strong, and they can do it live. The three-part harmonies were incredibly listenable — the audience seemed to be hanging on to the notes, or maybe it was just me.
I haven’t gotten through the whole album yet — I’m savouring it. The Bank Holidays partake in the unpretentious optimism of many other twee bands, but twee isn’t usually welded to songwriting as confident as this. A great show, and so far, a great album.

Wait ’til they go with a fellatio joke.

20 June 2010 / / Comments Off on Wait ’til they go with a fellatio joke.

Frauds, linguistic and otherwise

18 June 2010 / / Comments Off on Frauds, linguistic and otherwise

It’s a week for Obama-bashing. Nothing new there, but now a pseudo-linguist is trying to linguify the sport. Paul Payack is the guy in charge of the Global Language Monitor, a group which serves mostly to promote bogus claims about language. This time, Payack is carping about Obama’s Oval Office address. He says it’s far too professorial at an impenetrable 9.8 grade level. Also, it’s ‘aloof’ and ‘out of touch’.

Mark Liberman comments:

I think we can all agree that those are shockingly long professor-style sentences for a president to be using, especially in addressing the nation after a disaster. Why, they were almost as long as the ones that President George W. Bush, that notorious pointy-headed intellectual, used in his 9/15/2005 speech to the nation about Hurricane Katrina, where I count 3283 words in 140 sentences, for an average of 23.45 words per sentence! And we all remember how upset the press corps got about the professorial character of that speech!

Payack’s critique appeared in this CNN article.

Though the president used slightly less than four sentences per paragraph, his 19.8 words per sentence “added some difficulty for his target audience,” Payack said.

He singled out this sentence from Obama as unfortunate: “That is why just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge — a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation’s secretary of energy.”

Did that sentence stump you? If it did, it’s not your fault — blame Obama.

In fact, why not blame Obama for everything? That’s the strategy employed here by Sarah Palin, whose sentences could never be described as ‘professorial’, though one could say ‘aphasic’.

I get through about 13 seconds of this before I get a strong desire to cram her down an oil pipe (along with her three-legged stool), which may just be worth trying. I’m amazed at her ability to criticise someone who’s actually working on the problem. Remember how she used to say “Drill, baby, drill” not too long ago? For some reason, not so much anymore.

I can only imagine what the extent of the disaster would have been if the GOP clowns had won the election. More drilling, plus even less regulatory oversight.

John Cole takes up the theme:

All I know is that if Obama doesn’t stop the oil leak with his massive Kenyan penis and then give a rousing FDR/Trumanesque speech delivered using a grade 7.5 language level that gives Chris Matthews a blue-vein hard-on and then personally scrubs every drop of oil from the gulf without hurting BP’s profits and making sure every oil worker has a job, I’m out. I mean, come on. That isn’t asking too much, is it? And why don’t we have gay marriage and a cure for cancer? What a loser!

Yeah, because saving the economy and passing health care is so last year.

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