The Angry Toxicologist is here!
He’s already got a bunch of posts up and he’s clearly a man after my own heart. Show him some love.
Category: Skepticism
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Skeptic's Circle #65
Skeptic’s Circle #65 is up at Neurologica.
I think I have to do it next time, is that right Orac?
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Check out my sciblings
Two posts on the scienceblogs today that shouldn’t be missed.
Orac on second-hand smoke and those who deny it’s health effects.
And Kevin Beck on Penis Pills.
It’s a great example of the failure to teach critical thinking skills that people can sell tiny doses of ginseng to insecure males and actually make a profit.
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CNN covers "the Secret"
And actually doesn’t make a hash of it. If CNN actually dedicated this much effort to all their journalism, people might actually emerge from their site more informed than when they showed up – a rare occurrence.
For those of you who haven’t heard of “the Secret”, it’s the latest woo-laden self-help nonsense that proposes powerful new physical laws about the universe. In this case, the Law of Attraction. That is, that “like attracts like”. Translated into self-help, it means that positive thinking makes things happen, always, every time. It is a law after all.
Now, people like me who think most self-help books, theories and advocates are scams, nonsense, and charlatans respectively, are immediately skeptical of new physical laws that are dreamed up by Australian TV producers like Rhonda Byrne and promoted by people like Oprah. CNN was good enough to actually get some skeptics’ opinions – and they nail it pretty well.
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Bottled water is for chumps
I for one salute Gavin Newsom for refusing to waste government money on bottled water.
I have never bought bottled water. It’s silly to spend good money on bottled water when throughout this country it’s possible to drink clean potable water for free or a tiny fraction of the cost of bottled water – and it’s far more environmentally sound.
Penn and Teller, of all people, covered this issue the best.
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Skeptic's Circle Number 63
It’s up at Relatively Science.
Swing by and show them some love.
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A confluence of idiocy
You know how dumb Egnor sounds with his mind outside the brain cell-phone silliness? He sounds as dumb as Deepak Chopra writing more brain-dead new agey nonsense for the Huffington Post.
To gain credibility, the mind outside the brain must also be mirrored inside the brain. If your brain didn’t register what the mind is doing, there would be no way to detect the mind. Like a TV program being broadcast in the air, a receiver picks up the signal and makes it visible. The brain is a receiver for the mind field. The field itself is invisible, but as mirrored in our brains, it comes to life as images, sensations, and an infinite array of experiences.
The brain is like a cell phone receiving signals from above. Wait no! It’s like a TV!
This is how pathetic the proponents of intelligent design are, and for that matter, the crystal-clutching hippies that fall for Chopra woo. Without even meaning to, their arguments reflect each other, because they’re both based on magical thinking.
So far, the phenomenon of mirror neurons hasn’t been isolated to single neurons in the human brain. Due to the complexity of the laboratory work, it hasn’t traveled very far into the general public. This means that mirror neurons will be held captive for the time being by the belief system of neurology, which is overwhelmingly materialistic. That is, the brain being a solid object comes first while mind, if it exists at all, comes second. Yet I would argue that most of the things we most cherish about the mind, including empathy, language, and learning, depend on mind coming first, and the mirror neuron serves its purposes.
Maybe the brain really is like a TV set. Sadly, Deepak Chopra and Michael Egnor are both stuck on the same stupid channel.
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62nd Skeptic's Circle is up
At Polite Company.
My favorite is Reasic’s late but thorough dissection of Michael Crichton in his “Aliens Cause Global Warming” speech.
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The Testing Myth and NCLB
Another credulous article on the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law appears today in the Washington Post. As someone who knows many teachers who have had experience with similar stupid laws in Virginia, and the history of the Bush administration pushing for these kinds of laws based on the “Texas Education Miracle”, I’m far more skeptical about any real gains in learning as a result of standardized testing.
But first, you have to understand what Bush, and his education secretary Rod Paige, really did as governor of Texas for education (take a guess), and how standardized testing is a cynical political tool.
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Left wing woo from HuffPo
The last day or so of posts on HuffPo is a perfect example of why I’ll never take that site seriously, and why in the end, lefties are just as susceptible to anti-science nonsense as the right. We start with Donna Karen promoting her new health-care initiative, the Well-Being Forum with much credit to hucksters Tony Robbins (he’ll hypnotize you with his teeth) and Deepak Chopra, king of woo. You know where it’s going with the first post “Healing Is Individual, Not One-Size-Fits-All” and early statements such as this:
But Tony knew that the bottom line is that healing is individual, it’s not one size fits all. You have to find the key to yourself. At the Well-Being Forum, Karen Duffy, a TV host and patient advocate who has experienced serious illness told us that, “The doctors gave me metaphors like, “you’re going to fight this illness.” But I’m a lover, not a fighter, and I didn’t want a big battle. I wanted the happy cells to take the unhappy cells out for a pint and talk it over.”
“Doctors don’t realize the hypnotic power of their messages, whether it’s telling you illness is a battle or saying that you have six months to live,” Tony told us at the forum. ” But it’s vital to bring hope to the table and give people the images and metaphors that will heal them.”
That’s what was missing from medicine and healthcare, metaphors! Precious healing metaphors from Tony Robbins! I can see my work will be cut out for me (the second post also pushes Tony Robbins’ carny-trick rubbish). And when you start getting into the Chopra-woo they promote it becomes perfectly clear that the left loves brain-dead unscientific garbage just as much as the religious fundamentalists on the right. The parallels are creepy.
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