Blogs / Bad Astronomy

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.

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.

Young Earth creationists can be sneaky. First, years ago, they loudly proclaimed their religious beliefs. Then when they got smacked hard in the courtrooms when they wanted to teach religion in schools, they evolved: they changed their snake oil to Intelligent Design and tried again.

And again they got whooped. ID was shown to be creationism in disguise — what some might call a bald-faced lie — so that again fundamentalists could attempt to teach religion in the classroom, despite the Constitution of the United States.

I have wondered aloud what they would do next. After all, when facts are slippery things, able to be misused as openly and ridiculously as so many creationists do, then clearly they won’t just give up. They’ll move on to the next deceptive technique.

And now I have to wonder if we’re starting to see it. Could this new tactic be: telling the truth?

Greg Fish of the blog World of Weird Things clued me in to a post on the execrable Answers In Genesis website talking about black holes. In this essay, creationist astronomer Jason Lisle discusses the topic with clarity and actual accuracy. He uses decent analogies, doesn’t let them run away from him, and makes a good case for the existence of black holes.

Wha wha whaaaa?

Of course, in the end, he says this:

Black holes provide an observable confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Such physics is the basis for several young-universe cosmologies, which allow light from the most distant galaxies to reach earth in thousands of years or less. Scientific discoveries, such as black holes, are not only interesting, but they give us a small glimpse into the thoughts of an infinite God (Psalm 19:1).

Well, he certainly drops the ball there, letting it fall down (ha! haha!) a black hole. Cosmologies which abuse basic physics to change enough to allow a young Universe tend to be wrong in their basic assumptions.

But the point here is that the article itself is pretty much factually correct, making me wonder what’s going on here. Maybe the folks at AiG are hoping that by writing an article not filled with fallacious reasoning, they’ll reap the benefits of Google links (though not from me, since I put a rel=nofollow in the above link to the site). It’s hard to say. But given the sheer amount of nonsense on their site, it’s hard to ascribe noble motives to them.

And let me add an irony: on that page is a description of dark matter. I find that humorous, because dark matter was originally proposed to solve the mystery of how individual galaxies in clusters can move so quickly but still stay bound to the cluster itself. The gravity from the visible matter in the cluster was too weak to hold on to such rapidly-moving galaxies, and therefore, if the clusters are to not fly apart over the age of the Universe, there must be invisible matter holding them together.

So dark matter was originally proposed because we know the Universe is old. Of course, now we know that dark matter has influence all over the place, and would have been found even if we hadn’t studied clusters. But the irony still tickles me.

Anyway, what do we do here? Well, if creationists want to actually describe the Universe for what it really is, then I guess we let them… as long as they do so, pardon the pun, faithfully. But as soon as they step over that broad, broad line into territory clearly denied by the evidence, then they need to be called on it.

Eternal vigilance.

Recently, science writer Simon Singh was sued by the British Chiropractic Association for having the audacity of telling the truth in a newspaper article about chiropractic: while it may have some small efficacy when treating back problems, there is exactly zero good evidence that it can treat illnesses, and in fact can be very dangerous when people get their neck manipulated.

The Australian Skeptics posted Simon’s original article so that it would get more attention. And it worked, kinda: like a fly to honey, one chiropractor took offense at what was written, and decided to send them a nearly logic-free letter. That’s fine, and pretty much what I expect from a vocal alt-med devotée. As justified, Eran Segev, president of the Australian Skeptics, responded.

All well and good, until…

… two weeks after responding we received a letter from the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC) indicating Mr Ierano [the chiropractor] has lodged a complaint against Australian Skeptics. The letter attached to the complaint was the same one that Australian Skeptics had received and responded to.

Well, that’s a bit odd! I mean, why go to the trouble to pursue legal action against someone responding to your claims when it should be easy to present a simple rebuttal based on the evidence that chiropractic works?

… oh, right.

What’s funny is that originally, the BCA (the group suing Simon in the UK) tried to defend their position, and presented a poorly-researched, off-topic press release that somehow managed to make them look worse. Apparently, that’s a theme amongst chiropractors trying to support some of their less reality-based claims.

And while I’m using a light-hearted tone here, I’ll note that this is a very serious issue: there are people out there trying to stifle free speech. It’s that simple. The UK libel laws are draconian and designed to shut up any protest, making scientific objections and investigations into potential and real quackery very difficult. As Eran says on the AS page:

Australian Skeptics sees this complaint as lacking any merit even if it did not include some factual errors (e.g. the claim that a British court ruled Simon’s article is biased). We have prepared a detailed response to the HCCC and will be defending our right to publish articles relating to any scientific issue, as long as they are backed by scientific evidence.

Good on ya, mate!

Hey look, it’s a disgusting clip of My Close Personal Friend Adam Savage™!

Adam and Jamie made this short video to raise awareness about H1N1, the swine flu. Discovery Channel also put together a nice page with a list of five myths about swine flu.

There are more myths about the swine flu, of course, especially about the vaccine for it. These myths need to be busted too, so go read what pediatrician Dr. Joe Albietz has written about it. And then ask your doctor if you should get the vaccine when it becomes available. I’ll be getting one, and so will my whole family.