YES

Can't quite put my finger on it

but I saw this film tonight, and while I can't quite explain why I enjoyed it, particularly the last minute, I think it is a work of genius.

Cronkite dies: "I read the news today oh, boy/ About a lucky man who made the grade"

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

What a pro.



Case in point...

The Universe does not revolve around you

See also, Carl Sagan, Skepticism, and here.

Lucky: a Eulogy to the Self

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am in a thousand winds that blow,
I am the softly falling snow.
I am the gentle showers of rain,
I am the fields of ripening grain.
I am in the morning hush,
I am in the graceful rush
Of beautiful birds in circling flight,
I am the starshine of the night.
I am in the flowers that bloom,
I am in a quiet room.
I am in the birds that sing,
I am in each lovely thing.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there. I do not die.

-- Mary Elizabeth Frye

"We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands. The loom of time and space works the most astonishing transformations of matter."


"We are a way for the universe to know itself."
-Carl Sagan

Dawkins in the Midwest

Other Richard Dawkins posts here, here, and here.

Lecture Courtesy of Richarddawkins.net.

Lucky to have been here at all

Again, Dr. Dawkins, the most strident, intolerant voice of atheism interviews Dan Dennett, Philosophy Professor and one of the "Four Horsemen" of Atheism.



Fight the phrase, "I'm bored." at Every. Single. Impulse.
Rebel against it, knowing the sheer improbability of your own existence.

"You live eighty years, and at best you get about six minutes of pure magic." (George Carlin)

*Aren't TV producers the worst? To paraphrase Richard Linklater, "they take the piss out of everything."
But even natural selection begot kidneys.





UPDATE: P.S.

Steven Pinker, Ph. D., Harvard Professor and Author of How the Mind Works:
The Popularity of Rock Band, the existence of teh gay, the human soul, language as a metaphor for human evolution, and almost everything in between.

Skepticism: A 40-Minute Primer

The idea of celebrity as Authority and as such, "Expert".

The ability for an individual to shift from one side of the ideological spectrum to another based on changing facts and rationality usually reflects an ideal of principle over dogma, or country over party.

I agree with many that Huffington does have a lot of valuable insight to contribute to the worldwide political discourse. However, her expansion into other areas of study and commentary have made for some unfortunate entangling alliances. When it comes to science and medicine, she is an incredulous purveyor of snake-oil, magical thinking, and completely ineffective alternative medicine. She has given a platform to the anti-vaccination movement with several columns on her website, as well as the promotion of Jenny McCarthy's mindless "mommy instinct" and Jim Carrey's own article about the MMR legal decision that completely missed the point. (The judges asked those making the claim that the MMR vaccine caused autism to examine each incident on a case by case basis, and pick the three strongest, most air-tight cases proving the claim to present in court. They did, and they still lost. Carrey's thesis is, "But this is only 3 cases! There needs to be more study!")

Huffington, when it comes to supernatural or paranormal claims about healing or medicine, or promoting con-artists selling miracles in the form of "quantum consciousness", is tantamount to Oprah when it comes to the promotion of the bullshit that is pseudo-science.
*****
Please do not take my word for it:

Science-blogger David Gorski (possibly also known as Orac) MD, PhD, FACS is a surgical oncologist specializing in breast cancer and an Associate Professor of Surgery at the Wayne State University School of Medicine based at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute.

Relevant posts by Gorski can be found here, here and here*.
*(This last post is especially telling, as it chronicles the incidents on MSNBC's Countdown of February 11th of this year, and how Olbermann got played like a $2 banjo by an anti-vaccination kook David Kirby. In short, the Times' Investigative reporter Brian Deer uncovered that Dr Andrew Wakefield, who is the father of the crusade against vaccines, faked all his data. David Kirby, American Anti-vaxxer and blogger at Huffpo, got in touch with Olbermann after the previous night's segment, where Olbermann listed Wakefield as the WPITW. Kirby informed him that Deer and his article were products of a paper owned by Rupert Murdoch. It seems Keith is so blinded by his willingness to dogpile on Murdoch, that he showcased Deer in his "Worst Persons in the World" segment that night.)

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

*****

Yale Neurologist Steven Novella is also a writer at Science-Based Medicine, but he is much more than that. He is the founder of that site, his own Neurologica blog, co-founder of the New England Skeptical Society, and host/producer of "The Skeptics Guide to the Universe" (one of the Top 10 science podcasts on iTunes).
Novella has written extensively about Huffington, her site, and their nefarious relationship with woo-woo:


April 30, 2009:

we engage not only with the scientific community, but also with the public, and with those on the fringes of science. This means we often engage with those who do not play by the rules of science. A recent example is that of J.B. Handley from Age of Autism. David Gorski and I (and later Mark Crislip) wrote blog entries criticizing their 14 studies website with a detailed analysis. Handley responded with a full frontal personal assault sprinkled with irrelevant accusations. He ignored the vast majority of our actual criticisms, and those few he took on he completely botched.

Sometimes the targets of scientific criticism respond with another tactic - the diversion. Rather than make an obvious ad hominem attack, they try to distract the public (often the real target of the exchange) from the points of the criticism with a series of non sequiturs. They try to “re-frame” the discussion to make it about something other than the scientific evidence.

Those who promote unscientific claims in medicine are no different. When scientists bother to examine their claims and level the sort of criticism typical of the scientific community at them, they often respond with some combination of personal attacks and distraction. Last week I criticised the Huffington Post for running a series of blogs and articles that are promoting dangerously pseudoscientific medical claims. I specifically commented on an outrageous article by Kim Evans, promoting the absurd claim that all cancers are caused by fungal infections, which in turn are caused by antibiotics. Evans has responded (sort of) with this week’s column, in which she addresses her critics, without naming anyone in particular.

Her response is right out of the pseudoscientific health claim play book, under “how to distract from legitimate criticism with logical fallacies and misdirection.” We have literally heard it all before, and have even answered much of it in detail.

June 02, 2009:

Maybe David Kirby, author of Evidence of Harm and one of the major proponents of the notion that thimerosal in vaccines was largely responsible for the recent increase in autism diagnoses, is sincere when he claims he is not anti-vaccine. I say that because he has backed so far off from his stance that vaccines are the culprit - not completely, and without overtly acknowledging his past errors, but has put some significant distance between him current position and his prior certainty.

He coyly insists he was just asking questions, but the book makes a strong and, in my opinion, one sided case that there is “evidence of harm” - specifically evidence that thimerosal was a major contributor to autism. It also builds a case for a grand conspiracy to hide this fact from the public. Kirby then made a career out of promoting the notion of a link between vaccines and autism with government and professional malfeasance. He became a hero of the anti-vaccine movement.

Yet he insisted, implausibly, he was not “anti-vaccine.” As recently as December 2007 Kirby was writing this nonsense in the Huff Po:

But if thimerosal is vindicated, or shown to be a very minor player, then what about other vaccine ingredients? And what about the rather crowded vaccine schedule we now impose upon families of young children? And what about reports of unvaccinated children in Illinois, California and Oregon who appear to have significantly lower rates of autism? Shouldn’t we throw some research dollars into studying them?

By this time the handwriting was on the wall - thimerosal in vaccines is not linked to autism. After moving the goalpost several times on the evidence, it could be moved no longer. The removal of thimerosal from the routine vaccine schedule by 2002 was followed by a continued increase in autism disgnoses - without even a blip. The predicted (by Kirby and others) precipitous decrease in autism diagnoses never came.

Kirby and the anti-vaccine crowd moved quietly over to the other ingredients in vaccines, in what has been called their “toxin gambit.” This move, more than anything else, is what convinced me that this was all really about being anti-vaccine. The MMR vaccine was vindicated. Now thimerosal was vindicated. So there must be something else in those vaccines that’s the problem - even though there is no evidence to link vaccines at all to autism.

*****
Any public figure lending credence to dangerous practices, whether they are informed about politics or no, needs to be addressed and set straight as publicly as possible.

For further example of what I mean, Jesse Ventura has been very very valuable voice on the subject of torture in the last few months, however, just because of his admirable stance on one "no-brainer" issue, doesn't mean he doesn't deserve criticism for some of the ridiculous things he does believe and states publicly (Ventura is a New World Order conspiracy theorist, and a 9/11Truther).

Celebrities have no extra credentials or faculties beyond our own abilities. They are not a pantheon of Roman or Greek gods, but we as a nation and a culture, lend them our credulity because they are a face and a voice that everyone recognizes. They have told us about a good book that we should read. They have made us laugh and cry with them. And they've gotten famous for being big-titted and picking their noses on MTV.

To quote Charles Pierce:

The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents -- for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power -- the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

In the place of expertise, we have elevated the Gut, and the Gut is a moron, as anyone who has ever tossed a golf club, punched a wall, or kicked an errant lawn mower knows. We occasionally dress up the Gut by calling it "common sense." The president's former advisor on medical ethics regularly refers to the "yuck factor." The Gut is common. It is democratic. It is the roiling repository of dark and ancient fears. Worst of all, the Gut is faith-based.

It's a dishonest phrase for a dishonest time, "faith-based," a cheap huckster's phony term of art. It sounds like an additive, an artificial flavoring to make crude biases taste of bread and wine. It's a word for people without the courage to say they are religious, and it is beloved not only by politicians too cowardly to debate something as substantial as faith but also by Idiot America, which is too lazy to do it.

After all, faith is about the heart and soul and about transcendence. Anything calling itself faith-based is admitting that it is secular and profane. In the way that it relies on the Gut to determine its science, its politics, and even the way it sends its people to war, Idiot America is not a country of faith; it's a faith-based country, fashioning itself in the world, which is not the place where faith is best fashioned.

Hofstadter saw this one coming. "Intellect is pitted against feeling," he wrote, "on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or the diabolical."

The Gut is the basis for the Great Premises of Idiot America. We hold these truths to be self-evident:
1) Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.
2) Anything can be true if somebody says it on television.
3) Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.

UPDATE: Oprah Responds to Newsweek:

"For 23 years, my show has presented thousands of topics that reflect the human experience, including doctors' medical advice and personal health stories that have prompted conversations between our audience members and their health care providers," Winfrey said in the statement. "I trust the viewers, and I know that they are smart and discerning enough to seek out medical opinions to determine what may be best for them."

*****

The Bad Astronomer, JREF President, Author, Science Educator, and self-described "anal dickhead",
Dr. Phil Plait, Ph. D., the floor is yours:

That, to be blunt, is baloney. First off, it’s wrong. She pounds home the New Age nonsense from Somers and McCarthy, giving them a platform to relentlessly mislead and misinform people millions at a time, and on those shows rarely gives more than very brief lip service to actual medical research.

Second, it’s at best a cop-out to say that her viewers will do more research. She has to know that’s almost certainly not true! The Oprah imprimatur can rocket a book up the best-selling list, as it has for Somers and McCarthy, as well as many others. Clearly, a vast horde of people will go out and buy what she tells them to because she’s the one who told them to.

And what she’s telling them to buy is dangerous medical nonsense.

In other words, for 23 years Oprah has gotten rich promoting hours upon hours of credulous nonsense that doesn't pass even the most basic smell test or scrutiny. Failed diets, Bunk theories of self-actualization, untested and medically averse health regimes, all shown on Oprah's show with her reaction shot always being an attentive, riveted nodding of her head. Nah, her tacit approval or lack of skepticism wouldn't be evidence enough to suggest that her audience seek a second opinion would it? And besides, Oprah loves helping people, and if she didn't love it, why would she keep doing what she does?

Strident, Militant, and Extremist

The Poster-child for Militant Atheism:


And yet(NSFW):

You put the left-wing in, you put the left-wing out

And when liberals are full of it, they get mocked too.

Newsweek:

Oprah takes these things very seriously. They are, after all, the answers she hopes to find for herself. If Oprah has an exquisite ear for the cravings and anxieties of her audience, it is because she shares them. Her own lifelong quest for love, meaning and fulfillment plays out on her stage each day. In an age of information overload, she offers herself as a guide through the confusion.

This is where things get tricky. Because the truth is, some of what Oprah promotes isn't good, and a lot of the advice her guests dispense on the show is just bad. The Suzanne Somers episode wasn't an oddball occurrence. This kind of thing happens again and again on Oprah. Some of the many experts who cross her stage offer interesting and useful information (props to you, Dr. Oz). Others gush nonsense. Oprah, who holds up her guests as prophets, can't seem to tell the difference. She has the power to summon the most learned authorities on any subject; who would refuse her? Instead, all too often Oprah winds up putting herself and her trusting audience in the hands of celebrity authors and pop-science artists pitching wonder cures and miracle treatments that are questionable or flat-out wrong, and sometimes dangerous.

But back on the Oprah show, McCarthy's charges went virtually unchallenged. Oprah praised McCarthy's bravery and plugged her book, but did not invite a physician or scientist to explain to her audience the many studies that contradict the vaccines-autism link. Instead, Oprah read a brief statement from the Centers for Disease Control saying there was no science to prove a connection and that the government was continuing to study the problem. But McCarthy got the last word. "My science is named Evan, and he's at home. That's my science." Oprah might say that McCarthy was just sharing her first-person story and that Oprah wasn't endorsing her point of view. But by the end of the show, the take-away message for any mother with young kids was pretty clear: be afraid.

I CAN HAZ BEE-ESS?!
Hokey-Pokey.

Paranoia about "Big Pharma"? Here ya go.




That's what it's all about.

An expert on torture does not an 'expert on everything' make

Remember when I said I had no great love for Jesse Ventura? Yeah, turns out he's not only a media whore, but he's also a 9/11Truther (in the vein of 'the WTC towers were a controlled demolition'), Lincoln Assassination conspiracy nut, and all around New World Order conspiracy theorist.





It's a sad state of affairs when the Onion has the best commentary via satire:


There is a 9/11Truther movie out there on the internet called Loose Change, basically doing the Gish Gallop and throwing mounds of data at you with questions you can't immediately answer at a rate so fast that the average audience member can't even hope to keep up. Over the length of the movie, if you grant it's first few questions out of ignorance, it instills doubt into the idea you have of what actually happened that day. You begin to not lean either way. And pretty soon, you're mold for the hands of propagandists.

There isn't a huge groundswell behind skeptical thinking in our culture, and conspiracy theorists take advantage of that, by proclaiming themselves to be vehicles of critical thinking, skeptics of the "official story". But Skepticism isn't about doubting everything no matter what. The skeptical movement in this country and throughout the world employ reason and actual critical thinking based on evidence, lack of evidence, probability theory, the law of large numbers, and other science-based tools and processes.

In the end, all major conspiracy theories collapse under the weight of their own assumptions. Could the executive branch perpetrate a massive, televised attack in which thousands of eyewitnesses of every demographic stripe and ideological background were bamboozled and the world would be sold a bill of goods. And then 8 years later, no government bureaucrat had come forward as an insider to expose this gigantic atrocity?

Think about it for a second, the US government leaks like a sieve. The Jessica Lynch rescue story was bullshit on a stick and that was halfway around the world in a warzone with no media present. Whistle-blowers are now coming forward about the White House and the Vice President ordering Torture and repealing habeus corpus. Cheney had his own special ops unit that reported directly to him, somebody inside told Sy Hersh. (The investigative reporter for the New Yorker that broke the Abu Ghraib scandal, among other things.)

To give you a separate example of how one can know several things with great authority, but be a fool otherwise, I give you a great thread from PalMD:

"You know the moon landings were ginned up on a Hollywood sound stage, right?"

"Hey, how come it's so hard to get the Truth out there about the 9/11 attacks being staged by the CIA/Mossad?"

"I don't know why they think I'm crazy; the aliens really did probe my anus."

We hear crap like this all the time, but these wackos never get ink in major media outlets because, well, they are so clearly paranoid and deranged. So why do we see a similarly paranoid, deranged person like Jenny McCarthy on the pages of Time magazine? Is it because she's more photogenic than most alien abductees? Is it because she doesn't live in her mom's basement with her cats and collection of tin-foil hats?

The Response:

I am a practicing physician (M.D., Harvard Medical School 2000), a scientist (Ph.D., Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences '94), a husband, and parent to three small children. I am about as rational as a suburban Boston Board-certified anesthesiologist can get.

Please do not use pejoratives in association with the 9/11 Truth Movement. Please do consult Medical Professionals for 9/11 Truth (www.mp911truth.org)

The events of September 11, 2001 have been used by our government to justify killing over one million people. President Obama, within weeks of his inauguration, invoked 9/11 as a justification for sending 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Our civil liberties have been eroded by the Patriot Act of 2001, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, the Protect America Act of 2007, and numerous other Orwellian edicts. The official explanation for 9/11 has been conveyed in the mainstream media with astonishing certainty beginning within hours of the attacks. Does this explanation deserve merit? Sadly and disturbingly not. High school physics, a bit of chemistry, and common sense lay bare a false narrative.

‘We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.’ -- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981-1987.

‘The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.’ -- William Colby, CIA Director, 1973-1976.

The facts of 9/11 tell the real story. Here are a few impossibilities that serve as tip to the iceberg:

Impossible: rapid and extreme destruction without additional energy source.

Impossible: free-fall speed by pile driver mechanism.

Impossible: molten steel from office fires, still flowing weeks later.

Impossible: numerous examples of prior knowledge -- WTC collapse known by Giuliani; WTC 7 collapse known by officials on the scene, on video; WTC 7 ‘collapse’ reported by multiple news media outlets while the building still stood.

Impossible: that X-ray energy dispersive spectra of multiple 9/11 dust samples would show the chemical fingerprint of the high-energy explosive thermate, if no explosives were used on that day. (ref. J. 9/11 Studies, vol. 19, Jan. 2008)

Thank you for your attention.

Sincerely,

John Hiebert, M.D., Ph.D.
Asst. Clinical Professor, Tufts University School of medicine
Director of Regional Anesthesia
Department of Anesthesiology, Lahey Clinic
Burlington, MA

Posted by: John Hiebert | April 2, 2009 6:09 PM

The Response to the Response:

I am about as rational as a suburban Boston Board-certified anesthesiologist can get.

Please do not use pejoratives in association with the 9/11 Truth Movement.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA...

(wiping tears)

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

(coughing, choking)

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
--
Which pejoratives should I avoid? Insane? Paranoid? Tinfoilhatwearingnutjob?
--
This is a lovely example of something I spend months hammering into trainees: it doesn't matter how competent you may be in one subject [1], you're worse than useless in others. At best you know enough to stay out of the way of people who know what they're doing.
--
You forgot to add this about yourself: "I am an ignorant fool."

MarkH from Denialism nutshells it better than I could:

The reality of conspiracy theories is very different. These don't represent any kind of healthy thought process at all. They require one to reach a conclusion, then ignore any information that contradicts it. They attempt to explain, but only create more questions. I like to say they are non-parsimonious. And worse, rather than make people think, they tend only to enforce bigotry and ideology. It is the intellectual equivalent of self-lobotomy.

Films often seem to reinforce non-skeptical thought. We like to be entertained, or scared, or shocked. Hence, every time someone is introduced as an atheist or "skeptic" in a film they're inevitably exposed to ghosts, or aliens, or whatever unlikely boogeyman serves the script. The skeptic never turns out to be right, as they are in real life. What would be the fun in that? Every movie would turn into an episode of Scooby Doo. It was just old man Withers with a flashlight after all, and a multi-million dollar CGI budget.

In the paranoid mind of the Conspiracy Theorist, there are three classes of human beings:
1)You are a perpetrator of the conspiracy, and thus a special secretive type of evil.
2)You are a dupe, a human completely unaware to the deeper world happening around you. You are described as Sheep, and are often expendable because of your obliviousness and ignorance.
3)You are one of those aware of the conspiracy. You are a savior, trying to expose the truth to the dupes, holding them in reserved contempt while shedding light on those who would try to shadow your world with darkness.



Oh. And. One. More. Thing.

SCREW LOOSE CHANGE.

The Bends...

How about you?

Man vs. (Big Dog) Machine

Robotics is becoming more and more of a creepy field as researchers come closer and closer with each iteration to making more accurate analogs of human/animal behavior/movement. For example "Big Dog" via BostonDynamics,



However, I choose to remain unimpressed until such time that robots surpass our talent for parody:



That is all.

Lost's J. J. Abrams @ TED

*Swoon*

When Heroes and Genius goddesses chat
[/fawning]

The moment that gave birth to imagination...

39 years ago yesterday, humankind first set foot on another celestial body.

Most think it routine, but most are not aware of our long, arduous, millennial, triumphant path from single-celled organism to trilobite along the way to Neanderthal and our most recent inception as Homo Sapiens.

Only approximately 4 billion years of the 4.6 billion years since Earth's formation have passed since the estimated origin of life on Earth first began, yet in our planet's and our species young emergence, we have found several Revolutionary schisms between times past and times present, one might say a Cambrian explosion of thought, or a moment where our species defied previous, non-existent expectations, and leaped forward exponentially:
In the last 400-500 years of scientific discovery that have given rise to everything from Boeing 747s to nuclear weapons to Wi-Fi internet and the Apple iPod Touch, there have been several moments that stand alone in the upright and righteous herald and royalty of reason and the scientific method over the stagnant and static status quo of ever-present human dogma:

-Copernicus's notion of Heliocentric astronomy

-Newtonian Physics

-Darwin's Theory of the Origin of Species, later dubbed Evolution

-Einstein's Theory of Relativity

These are the Biggies, but Nothing in our so recent and temporally blind memory trumpeted the genius and profundity of human ambition, goodness, or discovery more than this moment:


As Phil has said, it is a definitive Before and After Moment.

It is a moment that our species has chosen to fixate upon, and some have speculated, may have philosophical implications for the rest of us, ideology or no, that will echo throughout our own lives and those of our children and grandchildren. To realize our place and time in our own personal, ephemeral universe is to know greatness and at its very least, galactic, perhaps a universal sense of humility. Drawing upon my list of heroes, Dr. Carl Sagan identified this idea long before I was aware of it, but his phrasing drew him, among many fellow scientists from the venue of the empirical to the vast and beautiful forum of meaningful, modern, existential, and appreciative human literature. His efforts should be viewed as if produced among the works of our greatest philosophers in conjunction with our most talented poets. READ HIS BOOKS! Beyond that, we only have the draw of the devotion of his fans:




(if I had $16 million dollars extra, I'd air this during the superbowl, SERIOUSLY)

NASA releases world premiere video of unseen communication with Apollo 11

Fitting that this was taken 39 years ago to the day.