Blogs / Bad Astronomy

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Iraqi military employing useless dowsing magic wands to search for explosives at checkpoints, and how this has deadly results. This was based on an article in the New York Times, and the word has now spread far and wide.

Skeptic, physician, and journalist Ben Goldacre wrote about it in The Guardian, and Graeme Wood did so as well for The Atlantic. It was huge on tech and skeptic sites too, like Slashdot, MetaFilter, Gizmodo, and Bruce Hood’s Supersense blog.

It made a brief appearance on TV, too, in this segment on the Rachel Maddow Show:

And she mentioned friend of the JREF Hal Bidlack by name!

I have heard some rumors — as yet unsubstantiated but encouraging — that members of the U.S. government have taken an interest in this story, too.

What this all shows is that we need to stand up to nonsense and call it out, letting others know when they believe in garbage… especially when it will lead to people getting killed. If enough of us do it, then maybe, just maybe, we can get something done about it.

Remember:

It’s true for reality, too.

Oh, that Bill Maher. It’s time to change his show’s name to "Antireality Time". Because when he talks vaccines, he wanders into major woowoo territory.

I don’t need to debunk his antivax nonsense, since actual doctors who have facts at their fingertips do it so well, like in this tirade from Orac and in Steve Novella’s more measured (but just as devastating) response.

But there is one thing I want to mention. My favorite part is when Maher says:

I agree with my critics who say there are far more qualified people than me — its [sic] just that mainstream media rarely interviews doctors and scientists who present an alternative point of view.

First off, that’s total baloney. Go watch the news and other talking head shows; they often have people talking up the "alternative" (that is to say, wrong) point of view when it comes to vaccines. And if these people aren’t certified physicians, what does that tell you? Maybe you’ll come to the correct conclusion that the overwhelming majority of physicians think antivaxxers are full of it.

And second, about talk shows not having "alternative" viewpoints — and this is critical — why should they? When the weatherman talks about lightning in your area, should he give equal time to the Zeus theory?

Feh. Maher digs himself deeper every time he talks about this. Some people hold him up as an icon of skepticism, but it’s simply not true. A lot of non-believers love his ideas and attitude when it comes to religion, which is fine, but it doesn’t translate to his other beliefs, especially when it comes to real medicine. What he does isn’t skepticism, it’s dogma, and just as dogmatic as the religions he mocks.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all that, if Jenny McCarthy were impaled on a unicorn’s horn, she’d blame vaccines. After all, her organization Generation Rescue has shamefully blamed them on totally unrelated things before, and no doubt will again.

This is a serious topic, since the antivaxxers are a public health menace, and the rise of preventable diseases can in many cases be traced back to their propaganda. But sometimes, just sometimes, mocking them is the way to go.

Last week I posted about Adam and Jamie on Craig Ferguson’s TV show. I also found this little gem, where he talks about Apollo deniers. The whole thing is funny, but the space stuff starts at 3:00.

I love that guy.

Back in August, I have a talk at Gnomedex, a conference about the intersection of technology and people. It’s thrown by my old buddy Chris Pirillo. My talk was on skepticism, and I posted some video from it a month ago. However, the audio quality wasn’t great.

The good news is Chris posted the official stream from the conference, and the video and audio quality are great! So here’s that video.

Out in Western Australia, in the Nullabor desert, there is an array of sky cameras designed to observe meteors as they flame their way through our atmosphere. It’s been observing the sky since 2006, and it paid off handsomely: a bright meteor observed by the skycam has led to the resulting meteorite being found.

Cooool. By triangulating the meteor, astronomers were able to track the rock all the way to the ground, where the meteorite was found only 100 meters from the predicted location. Not only that, the track of the meteor on the sky allowed astronomers to backtrack its trajectory, and calculate the orbit of the meteoroid. They found it came from a family of asteroids in the inner asteroid belt, just outside the orbit of Mars. over millions of years the orbit migrated inward toward the Sun, and eventually intersected ours, resulting in, well, the collision.

This is really nice because not too many meteorites are recovered from known falls, and fewer still where the orbit of the incoming rock can be determined. When this happens, we get for free what otherwise would take a fairly expensive rocket trip to accomplish.

I’ve been saying for some time that with the advent of digital cameras everywhere, we’ll be seeing this more often. In this case the cameras were designed and implemented specifically to do this, but just you wait. Some ATM or junkyard or home security camera will do the same thing. The age of public involvement in astronomy is just beginning.

Tip o’ the Whipple Shield to MeteoriteMen on Twitter.

I was going to write about how Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and John Kerry (D-MA) were trying to somewhat slimily slip a provision into the health care bill about paying for prayer-based health services, but then wouldn’tyouknowit, Steve Novella (who apparently does not need to sleep or eat or breathe) beat me to it. Besides his take-down of the odd and wholly unrealistic beliefs of Christian Scientists, I’ll note that is has been pretty definitively proven that prayer doesn’t work in healing. So not only is this provision unconstitutional, it’s just an all-around bad idea.