This one has been making the rounds for a few days, and I got it in an e-mail from Phil of Skeptic Money. Herein, an "entrepreneur" pitches his "product" to a panel of investors. His product? Purified water that cures, as he is more than happy to tell you, everything. Cancer, colds, all viruses, "prostrate" problems (presumably laziness), you name it. The panelists tear him a new one. It's quite awesome.
CFI just announced the new hosts of its podcast, Point of Inquiry, now that DJ Grothe is heading the JREF. There are three, now, instead of one: Karen Stollznow from Skepchick and Skepbitch, Robert M. Price, a prominent member of the Jesus Seminar, and...Wait for it...
Chris Mooney. You know, that whiny little bitch who thinks that the so-called "New" Atheists are just big old meanies, and who proved in Unscientific America that he's essentially full of shit.
Really, guys? Chris fucking Mooney? Who's next? Francis Collins?
Oh, well. I've never listened to PoI because I've spent the last year obsessively working my way through the archives of the SGU. I guess I have 1/3 less of a reason to start up, now.
You know who they should have hired? Jay Novella. I want Jay to interview people all on his own for an hour every week. That would be amazing. Go Jay!
The Buffalo Beast, the geniuses behind Let There Be Retards, a spectacular prank on Ken Ham and the Creation Museum, have finally released their annual list of the 50 most loathsome people of the last 365 days. Some choice tidbits follow.
42. Arriana Huffington: "Every woo-age celebrity with a vaccination conspiracy or snake oil remedy and a laptop is given column space at HuffPo. It hurts to read Dan Akroyd speculate about the existence of ghosts; it’s agonizing to read Deepak Chopra’s shoddy metaphysics, and it may actually kill to publish Bill Maher’s Luddite rants. Apparently, the only thing Huffington won’t let her writers do is get paid."
35. Teabaggers: "The Lolcats of protest sign grammar, they think scare quotes actually make things scary (e.g. ‘Obama is a “communist”’). They don’t understand that they’re duped showpieces for billionaires who threaten their freedom and prosperity far more than their beloved nemesis, Big Gubmint."
17. Bill Maher: "The dumber the guest, the more they dominate the panel—until Maher steers the discussion, yet again, to his pet topics, like how much better everything would be if we all shopped at Whole Foods, stopped taking medicine and legalized weed, dude."
It's damned hilarious, and I urge you to go read the entire list of The 50 Most Loathsome Americans of 2009.
The 129th Meeting of the Skeptics Circle has been posted at SkeptVet. Go enjoy and make sure you don't give therapeutic touch to your dog.
Holy craaaaaap!
My good friend Tom Foss has been slammed with hits to his epic smackdown of Mike Adams, the "Health Ranger" and his entirely inane "What Skeptics Believe" piece. Tom's traffic is well-deserved, so if you're reading this and you haven't already, head on over there and read "This is the Worst Ranger Since Turbo."
I used to love the Discovery Channel. It was full of awesome nature documentaries, anthropological sketches, and interesting science. It went through a dry period in the late 90s and early 2000s when it seemed to be floundering and searching for a new and different voice, but then it hit a renaissance when Mythbusters made it big.
Since Mythbusters, Discovery Channel has seen a larger marketshare and has attempted all sorts of new shows. For a while they were going pretty strong and seemed to be avoiding most of the woo-woo nonsense that lately characterizes the History Channel (I used to ridicule it as the World War II channel, but now I long for the days of endless FDR and Hitler).
Well, it seems they've decided that sticking to the side of science isn't profitable enough, and they've slowly become yet another lame pseudoscience channel. There are still high points to their programming schedule, just as the abysmal History Channel (maybe now I should call it the Nostradamus 2012 channel) occasionally plays something cool like "Warriors," but most of what they have on offer is utter dreck.
In order to get my thoughts in order and to attempt a brief catalogue of Discovery's offenses against rational people everywhere, I'm going to run through the three categories of shows currently airing on Discovery Channel: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Remember, these are just my opinions, and not all of them are related to the science portrayed on the show. If you don't share them, please don't take this as an attack against you or your taste; I'm not judging you, just these TV shows.The Good
Mythbusters
We start with the best. Mythbusters is my favorite show that currently airs on basic cable. It's the only show I'll watch reruns of over and over again. It's fun, educational, and it has explosions. Jaime, Adam, Tori, Kari, and Grant are all charismatic and great at what they do. Every day of my life I wish I had their job.
That said, the show, in my opinion, isn't as good as it used to be. The girl they have filling in for Kari while she's on maternity leave is a poor substitute; she seems ditzy, overly excitable, and she grates on my nerves. Kari needs to wean that infant and get back quick. The show also seems to become more scripted with each passing season. It's losing the spontaneity that made it so much fun earlier in its run and getting more and more formulaic, more and more centered on a narrative. There have been episodes where it was clear that the events did not happen remotely in the order in which they were filmed, but we were meant to believe they did; such an obvious lack of verisimilitude (coupled with extremely lame scripted intro and outro segments for each myth) is beginning to weight the show down. I hope it doesn't get worse and go full-blow reality TV (see below for more on that).Dirty Jobs
I love this show, too. The subject matter ranges from boring to immediately enticing, but regardless of the job he's doing, Mike Rowe is simply the man, hands down. If you have any doubt about his manness, watch this awesome video from when he was hawking overpriced tchotchkes on late-night QVC. He knows he's selling complete shit and he lets you know that he knows in the most hilarious way possible.
He is sarcastic, dry, and self-effacingly hilarious at the same time. He makes his "co-workers" at each dirty job laugh even as he points out the weirdness of their vocations, and in that way he brings out the human element of these jobs almost casually and accidentally, without getting preachy, self-serious, or sanctimonious. It's human interest the way it ought to be done.
Of course, the show absolutely wouldn't work without Mike Rowe. With any other host, it would be 44 minutes plus commercials of people doing shitty jobs, which, quite frankly, would be boring as hell. Mike makes the show with his bitter but genius improvisational comedy.Time Warp
This show is cooler than it has any right to be. After all, it's all just high-speed video of things happening.
On second thought, that sounds super cool prima facie.
No matter how mundane the activity being filmed, running it in super slow-mo at 5000 fps reveals a world that moves past us before we even know it's there. When they look at crazy stuff like a flaming whip, it's a double dose: the thing they're filming is novel and awesome, and seeing it on the high-speed just adds to the coolness. That they use their footage to talk about scientific principles is a bonus.
This is another show whose host, I think, contributes significantly to its watchability. Jeff Lieberman is charismatic, super smart, and always seems to be honestly amazed at what he's seeing. His almost innocent wonder in the face of the things they capture on video is infectious.
Where has this show been since last year? Wikipedia says it hasn't been canceled, but I haven't seen it anywhere. I hope it's still around somewhere.Survivorman
I love this show. I don't know why. I think I'm just amazed at Les Stroud's ability to keep himself alive all alone for an entire week while lugging around all of his camera equipment. I mean, not only does he have to keep himself alive with his support team often miles away (and reachable only by a sometimes-working satellite radio), he has to film his own B-roll, for God's sake.
I wrote a couple of years ago about Les's apparent proclivity for homeopathy. I stand by my claim that it's beneath someone so obviously bright as him to fall for alternative medicine scams. Thankfully, that nonsense never comes through on the air and what we see is a dedicated dude making his way in some pretty extreme environments all while playing excellent blues harmonica.Planet Earth
Not much to say here. It's only one of the most superlative nature documentaries of all time. My only issue with Discovery's airing is that they dubbed over Richard Attenborough's initial narration with Sigourney Weaver. Sorry, but I'll take a respected naturalist over Ellen Ripley for my nature documentaries. I don't want Attenborough to kill aliens, and I don't want Weaver to talk about giant salamanders.The Bad
The Colony
I almost put this one in "The Good." It has an incredibly interesting premise, and I do love me some post-apocalypse. The problem with the show, really, is that instead of picking a team and instructing them to focus on survival, the pulled a "Real World" and hand-picked ten dysfunctional assholes chosen specifically for their complete inability to get along with one another.
What really killed the show for me was the high school dropout "handyman" who had no knowledge whatsoever of anything outside of repair-shop work but for some reason thought he was better, smarter, and more capable than everyone else on the show. He had a violent and explosive temper and a deeply anti-intellectual streak and anytime they gave him airtime I wanted to throw things at my TV.
If they could make the show more about surviving the post-apocalypse and less about manufactured "human drama," it could be a really great hour of TV. As it is, it's an hour of magnificently wasted potential.Man vs. Wild
I've taken a lot of heat for this one. I really can't stand Man vs. Wild at all. It strikes as "Survivorman XTREEEEME," an attempt to build on Les Stroud's success while incorporating the frat boy demographic. "Look, bro, Bear just jumped into a fucking crevasse because he's HARDCORE."
The problem is that he's not a survivalist, he's never at any risk whatsoever, and he takes himself (in my opinion, at least) a bit too seriously. While Les is dragging his sorry carcass through the jungle looking for something dry enough to make a fire, Bear is dropping quickly into a night shoot where he can look scared by the wolves that somehow picked that moment to surround him and his production crew, and once he wraps he can go sleep in a nice warm motel bed.
These days they're candid about the fact that Bear is never really in any actual survival situations, but early on they lied by omission and implied that he actually spent the shoot in the bush. That really rubbed me the wrong way.Deadliest Catch, Swords, Motor City Motors, American Loggers, American Chopper, Verminators, Howe and Howe Tech, Stormchasers, etc.
These shows are all basically the same: film uninteresting people doing their jobs. Concoct a boring and contrived "narrative" about their issues and financial problems (when it is painfully obvious to anyone with a pair of neurons to rub together that their TV contract, if nothing else, is keeping them afloat). Edit your hours of boring footage down to 44 minutes of boring, repetitive argument and yelling.
Seriously, why does anybody care about a bunch of loud, hateful dipshits on a crab boat? Or on a swordfishing boat? Or unskilled hicks chopping down trees in a forest? Or quirky emo-goths catching rats in snap traps? Or adrenaline junkies pretending to do science as they reenact "Twister?"
And why, God, why do we need so damn many shows about morons in warehouses who build vehicles? What is interesting about all of this crap?
Christ, do I hate reality TV.The Ugly
Ghost Lab
"Ghost Lab" is perhaps the most obvious "ugly" show on Discovery. I've repeatedly considered doing a long-form post just on this show, but there's really nothing to say about that I haven't said a hundred times about every other ghost hunting show. "Ghost Lab" is just the same old shit on a different network.
You know, I take that back. There is one thing I can say about "Ghost Lab" I can't say about the others: the two morons that host this show might be more deluded than all the other ghost hunters combined. They really think they're doing good science; that's basically their entire raison d'etre. They're really no different than Jason and Grant from "Ghost Hunters" or Douchebag from "Paranormal State," but for some reason they think they're a cut above, that their methods are really scientific, that their evidence is really conclusive, and that kind of reveals that they're even more ignorant of science than the others.
I expect this shit from SyFy, but Discovery?
Well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. After all, they are the network behind...A Haunting
Lord, what a turd. Just...Just...Terrible. Hokey, dramatized nonsense. Tom's liveblog from 2008 says more than I ever could. He is a brave, brave man to do that for us.Solving History
This show has only been on for a week or so but it pissed me off before the first episode even aired. When a show's about ghosts, at least it's clearly paranormal. They can use all the pseudoscientific jargon they want, but at the end of the day they're still looking for frakkin' ghosts. "Solving History" is a subtler form of pseudoscience because most people know almost nothing about archaeology and so Olly Steed's brand of faux-Indiana Jones pseudoarchaeology will likely come off as solid science. Last week he looked into the Ark of the Covenant, presumably in an attempt to beat the Nazis to the discovery. This week he's looking at the "true purpose" of the Nazca lines.
Here's a hint, genius: we already know what it is. They were ritual pathways walked for various different types of ceremonies. No aliens or magical spirits involved. Saying they couldn't be built from ground level is like saying modern humans can't build football fields from ground level. Olly Steed is preaching "mystery!" where there is none and thus perpetuating general public ignorance. In future weeks, he'll be pretending to discover new information about El Dorado and Atlantis, presumably by interviewing fringe "scientists" and true believers and then tromping around in a fedora.
Atlantis! Why do people still cling to this fantasy? Nobody looks for any of Plato's other made-up cities, so why Atlantis? Fuck Plato and the horse he rode in on.
Olly Steeds has a history of shitting all over anthropology. His last gig was a show called "Mark & Olly: Living With the Tribes," where he pretended to do cultural research by bringing a television crew with him while he and his friend spent a few months heavily disrupting the lives of some indigenous peoples, presumably while bloviating trite profundities about their "natural" lifestyle and the ways in which they've affected him personally.
What's next, Olly? Gonna go live with some chimps and pretend to discover and speak chimpese? Gonna walk around Olduvai gorge and trumpet that you've found the missing link?
Somebody should fire this guy, and quick.
And that's all I've got for now. I can't think of any other shows on the network that elicit in me strong feelings. What does everyone else think?
"The March of the Mercury Militia" is the title of the presentation I gave to the Purdue Skeptics Society on November 10, 2009. I have finally been able to upload it to my computer, edit it, and post it up on YouTube. I'm embedding them all here, but if you'd rather watch them on YouTube, here's Part 1.
The embed below is also Part 1; Parts 2-7 are below the fold.
Part 2:
Part 3:
Part 4:
Part 5:
Part 6:
Part 7:
I hope you found it watchable and informative. I tried to cover as much ground as possible in a single hour, and I think I did okay. Please tell everyone you have ever heard of about it!
Thanks to this tweet by Brian Dunning, yesterday I learned that until about noon on Friday, the South Point Hotel and Casino, home to TAM7 last year and future home to TAM8 this year, is booking its rooms through September at a 50% discount. That is ridiculously cheap; it's even cheaper than the decent group discount TAM attendees got last year. For once in my life I decided to avoid the Sam Vimes Boots Tax and I just booked my stay at the South Point this July 8-11. You should, too.
Do it! Do it now! This time I want to see people there that I know!
Most mornings I check the local paper, the Lafayette Journal and Courier, for any woo worth writing about. Sometimes I find nothing, sometimes I find things that are fun to laugh at. Usually I don't find anything really worth writing about. This changed last Thursday when I found a full-page insert ad for Cline Chiropractic, a local chiro clinic, titled "The Story Of 'My Little Bean.'"
It's ridiculousness is a wonder to behold.
Before I get started with the dissection, I want to post the circular itself, which I scanned because I want you to know that I'm not just making it up. So click to embiggen:
Cline Chiropractic is a little place I drive by frequently and usually think nasty thoughts about the surfboard emblazoned with "Cline Chiropractic" that lives on top of one of the cars in the parking lot. It is one of an unfortunate many chiropractic and holistic "centers" or "clinics" in the Greater Lafayette area, but I knew precious little about it until I found this ad.
The ridiculousness begins in the subtitle: "How I became pregnant through acupuncture."
So, to begin, Dr. Adam Cline is a mixer, and he's one of the bad ones.
Frankly, the idea of getting pregnant through acupuncture brings to mind all sorts of snide and unproductive comments, like "Yeah, it is hard to get pregnant without some kind of puncture," or "Good thing it was acupuncture and not saddlebacking, else you'd be waiting quite a while." As I have occasionally said before, though, I'm a classy guy, so I won't subject you to such crudities. And you certainly won't hear more of what I already haven't said as this post goes on. Because I'm classy like that.
Anyway, our mother's name is Carla Coleman, and her story begins withOne month. That is all it took for Dr. Cline to get accomplished what my husband and I had been trying to do for eight long agonizing years.
Jeez, you're a cold fish. Trying to get pregnant is agonizing? Not only that, but you're airing your sexual frustration to anyone who reads this ad! How must your husband feel? On the upside, no more "agony" for you, ma'am. Thanks to your lack of discretion, Mr. Coleman will likely be seeking different company in the future.I first met Dr. Cline when I went to see him about my lower back...He was able to diagnose and solve the problem using gentle chiropractic, acupuncture, and muscle therapy.
So, non-specific, incredibly subjective and unpredicatable lower back pain is "cured" by a trio of useless or mostly-useless treatment modalities. Color me unsurprised.One day while I was waiting to be called back for my appointment, I looked up and saw a brochure that caught my eye. I saw the words "infertility" and "acupunture" and knew I had to investigate further.
Lady, if that's all you saw, it could have said "Acupuncture causes infertility." Granted, that would require further investigation, but you certainly need to work on your skimming skills.[Dr. Cline] told me that he had in fact worked with several women and that all but one of the women was able to become pregnant using acupuncture.
I can see the headlines. "Doctor gets eight local women pregnant." I would certainly not suspect that needles were the primary factor.That's all it took. I was hooked. We started the process immediately.
So let me get this straight: your chiropractor tells you about a slightly different process that will cause you to pay him even more money, says "Yeah, it's worked when I've done it before," and you immediately just take him at his word? Despite the plain fact that getting pregnant by acupuncture should raise even the most rudimentary of bullshit detectors? Lady, you almost deserve what you get.The best news is that after only four weeks of acupuncture treatment, we were pregnant. I was shocked and amazed that we were able to get pregnant that quickly with Dr. Cline and acupuncture.
Oh, for God's sake! I can't hold it in any longer! Dr. Cline is having sex with these women!
Phew.
Okay, much better now. To continue:Unfortunately, my story does not end there.
"My husband found out what kind of puncture was really going on and he took off with his secretary."Twelve weeks into our pregnancy, my husband and I lost our baby. It was and still is at times, very devastating.
Okay, let's sober up for a moment and discuss the issue of this miscarriage.
The ostensible topic of this ad is "How I became pregnant through acupuncture." That, coupled with the smiling mother and her happy child to the left of the title, clearly imply that the baby was carried to term and lived happily ever after. Instead, the story ends with a miscarriage.
So let me get this straight: the big selling point of this ad, which is, I might add, fraught with unintentional and hilarious sexual innuendo, is that a woman who had, for eight years, failed to have a child, yet again failed to have a child. I don't buy for a second that she and her husband were trying honestly and regularly for eight years and not a single pregnancy ever took, even for a few weeks. My understanding of this issue (which, admittedly, may be way off base) is that fertility difficulties over a long period of time often involve multiple miscarriages in addition to a general difficulty in getting pregnant in the first place. Likely what's going on here is that it was the first one to take in a while, and it happened after the acupuncture, and, well, post hoc being all propter hoc and stuff, we have this ad.
Mrs. Coleman, how do you know that it wasn't the acupuncture that caused the miscarriage? The pregnancy might have been a lucky fluke, but then the sticking of magical needles could have upset the meridians of the developing embryo.
But really, why on God's green earth would you attribute a successful pregnancy to this "doctor" when the pregnancy was not, in fact successful? This is nothing but a continuation of the same pattern you've been facing these eight long years. I'm sorry for your loss and the pain that your difficulties must have caused you, but your thinking is far from clear on this issue. The introduction of the acupuncture variable did not actually change anything for better or worse. You still don't have a child.
This ad is a fail in so many ways, and now I'm kind of depressed. Let's jump to the very end of the ad to finish on a light note.I am once again working with Dr. Cline to become pregnant. I keep reminding him that there is no hurry as long as he gets the job done in four weeks!
Lady, if it takes you that long to get off, no wonder those eight years were so long and agonizing. Badabing!
I have been super lazy throughout the holidays. I did read like 4 books, though (do yourselves a favor and read Hyperion and The Zombie Survival Guide), played a lot of video games (Batman: Arkham Asylum was fucking amazing, Dragon Age: Origins is good but not nearly as good as everyone seems to think it is, and Psychonauts was a friggin' masterpiece until the very last level), and did a lot of sitting around (highly recommended: sitting around on a couch in front of a TV).
In other words, I have not been exactly what you might call "productive." Until today, that is. Things are finally ramping up over at the Gen Con Skeptics Forum thanks to new poster (whom I actually met at last year's Gen Con) EvoEdu who got me back on the horse there. I've finally broken through to the Indiana Immunization Coalition so my dream of a vaccination drive at Gen Con might become a reality. I have also set up a Gen Con Skeptics blog to cover in greater detail the programming we'll be producing for Gen Con. Right now there's only an intro post, but there will be more in the coming weeks.
Skepchicamp Chicago is also on the fast track to awesomeness. We've overbooked our speaker roster (go me!) and we're having a fundraising party in Chicago in two weeks. Buy your tickets now and join Elyse from Skepchick, Matt Lowry the Skeptical Teacher, and Friendly Atheist Hemant Mehta (who is auctioning himself off as a fundraiser) as well as lesser being like myself in the Windy City as we party skeptically and raise money for the worthy cause of Skepchicamp 2010 (and Skepchicamps to come).
By tomorrow morning: a local chiropractor is extra stupid. Tune in!
And I will grind it all day long.
See, the fiancee and I stopped at Whole Foods Saturday while we were in Indianapolis. She bought some satsumas, I bought some cheese. On our way out, we saw a blackboard where Whole Foods was bragging about the money they raise monthly and donate to a nedy local community organization or non-profit.
December 2009, they donated thousands of dollars to Talk About Curing Autism. TACA is an antivaxxer organization allied with Autism One, Generation Rescue, and many others. Every dollar donated to TACA is a dollar spent to endanger children.
I have sent an informational e-mail to Whole Foods Indy, but I expect either denial of responsibility or boilerplate nonsense. They may even say that they're antivaccine. They are, after all, a "natural and organic" chain. Too bad their food's so damn good so often.
Unless I get a very, very encouraging response to my missive, I will no longer be shopping at Whole Foods. I suggest the same to others. No quality of food is worth the causes they support.
Elyse Anders, our supreme Skepchicamp Chicago leader, has announced plans to throw a fundraising party for the camp at the Chicago home of Dr. Jen Newport, one of our speakers. Tickets are $30 and are first come, first serve. Full information can be found here at the Skepchicamp website, or here at Skepchick.org if you prefer. The event's dedicated page is right here.
Buy a ticket and help us have the bestest Skepchicamp ever!
