Blogs / Bad Astronomy

BABloggee Mauro Mello Jr. from Sydney, Australia sent me this wonderful picture.

That pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it?

Wait, remind me again: which one is the fake news organization? The Onion, or Fox?

Sheesh.

Tip o’ the Kukulcan to Javier Pazos and Jeff Witmer.

Skeptic Michael Shermer wrote an open letter to antivaxxer Bill Maher, and to be frank, Shermer hit it out of the park. There’s nothing I need to or can add to what he wrote. Go read it.

I don’t expect a lot out of the daytime TV show The View. After all, if one of your four hosts isn’t sure the Earth is round, and you don’t immediately replace her with someone who’s views are more up-to-date (like more recent than Eratosthenes), then maybe your standards are too lax.

So when my friend Al Janulaw sent me a note saying they had a psychic on the show, I wasn’t too shocked. When I watched a bit of the show, I was surprised that Joy Behar, one of the hosts, expressed not just skepticism, but actually employed targeted skepticism. She made fun of the fact that psychics will ask leading questions and use things that are almost certain to get a hit ("I sense you know someone who’s name starts with M").

Still, the actual segment with the psychic, Laurie Levin, was amazingly credulous. I don’t know if Ms. Levin actually believes what she says or not, but here we have a woman claiming to be a psychic who a) told a man his murdered son chose his death to shock him into caring about someone, b) told this man he was in an unhappy marriage, and then c) married him.

Um. Again, I don’t know this woman, or the man, or their circumstances, but every skeptic alarm bell in my head is ringing pretty loudly.

I don’t think psychics are real, obviously. I am not saying psychic powers are impossible — though that’s the way to bet — but I am saying that every single time they’ve been tested under controlled circumstances, they come up short (and are indistinguishable from random guessing). And if they do exist, I know where there’s a million bucks left as-yet unclaimed.

If psychic powers are really true, I have severe doubts that the possessor will be using them to wow daytime TV talk show hosts. My real problem here is that as long as things like this are treated unskeptically and swallowed whole by TV shows, as well as in other media, then they will never go away, and the public remains that much more gullible.

A new study shows that copper bracelets don’t relieve arthritis pain.

Now, you might think "wire they even doing that," but the study was well-grounded, conducted thoroughly, and had little resistance. I think it strikes a cord, and so I’m willing to plug it.

I even hope they make it into a movie. It could be directed by Stanley Cupric.

Note added after posting: I see that James Randi his own self wrote about this today on Swift as well. Great minds, yadda yadda. Thanks to Travis Roy for pointing this out.

Tip ore the hat to Fark.

Hero journalist Simon Singh has written a fantastic article for The Times Online about his libel case in the UK and libel in general: how it gags journalists and keeps people from learning important information.

If this article makes you angry, good. Do something about it.

Fighter for truth and science Ben Goldacre tweeted a link to a nifty blog post showing just how safe the Gardasil HPV vaccine is. Using easy-to-understand graphics, the post (on the very nice Information is Beautiful blog) makes it very clear that comparing the good it does to the very tiny risk, Gardasil is a monumental achievement. Actually, just all on its own it’s a big advancement in the fight against cancer. The post also puts it in place among other low-risk dangers like getting hit by lightning or being killed in an earthquake. I like that; I myself have compared it with dying from falling off a chair.

Also, there is a website called the Vaccine Information and Awareness Service (gotta love that URL) which provides a great repository of info about the truly awful shenanigans of Meryl Dorey and the (ironically-named) Australian Vaccination Network, the loudest and — amazingly, given how reality-free these people tend to be — perhaps least-accurate antivax group in Australia. It’s a good place to go when you hear the latest health scare nonsense from the AVN. I’m glad so many people are rising up against the voices of scare-mongering and antiscience. They pose a real health threat, as far too many people have learned.

While I’m at it, my friend and pediatrician Joe Albietz has another slam-dunk article about the awful antivax nonsense being spread about the H1N1 vaccine.