debunking

As some of you may remember I touched upon one of the comments left on the Boston Globe's HST advent calendar last month. Some of the comments however I found quite disturbing, and some were just plain out whacky. Here's one of the more moderate ones: So beautiful, so complex, there are physical interactions to numerous to count every second in the universe and yet it holds together, in balance, exploding here, imploding there....

What a joke. I've had to endure these stupid headlines and TV programs for the last couple of years now. Yes you guessed it about the Large Hadron Collider. The BBC led the pack with a false premise that a black hole could form and destroy the Earth - despite the fact that one of the scientists on the very program said that would not happen - but we'll just ignore what the expert says and make up our own BS....

For those who read my blog a couple of years back you no doubt remember a series of posts I did countering the mis-information spread by somebody who went under the handle thedailycreationism and bigbangisamyth, he ran a few different blogs and often moved around between them (I have no idea why). But after a while all the posts dried up, much to my disappointment as he was a good source to use for topics to write about....

Let's clear this little thing up, as I heard it again today - somebody claiming men have one less of rib (I assume they mean a pair) than women. This is false, we both have 12 pairs of ribs. This myth is probably even more widespread than the 10% of our brain nonsense - the same nonsense that is used to claim the existence of whatever paranormal ability anybody cares to come up with....

It's very rare I read an article in the mainstream press which makes so much sense, and tackles a scientific topic so well. Simon Singh +1 point(s), but as he's the co-author of 'Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial' maybe he should get an additional point. Ever since receiving my first ever acupuncture session last month, I have been repeatedly asked whether or not it was effective. [...] [W]hy on earth should my personal experience be important, when we have evidence from tens of thousands of patients who have received acupuncture during carefully observed scientific trials?...

I had a few comments from creationists left on my blog lately. One from somebody who identified themselves as '?': i have a question...how did creatures change from generation to generation to be better suited for their environments? i mean, if i moved to (i don't know) africa, and i had kids with an another person with my skin color, the color wouldn't change in my great grand children to make them better suited for their environments....

So I was half watching Watchdog yesterday, and a caught the presenter mention something about proving things about psychics, which sparked my interest. Somebody sent them in some amulet to heal his aura, whatever that is. To which Nick Campbell said: "If anyone tries to charge you for this sort of thing, psychic or not, they saw you coming" That's a pretty crappy attitude to have. You could say the same thing about anything, if you gave a company money for a ticket you never got, they saw you coming....

Update: This is part of a fairly long series now, click here for the full list of articles in this series. Questions for Evolutionists, whatever an evolutionist is, from Mr Kent Hovind. I'll just go and find a biologist to tackle his attempt at disproving evolution by natural selection. Oh wait hang on... 1. Where did the space for the universe come from? That sounds like a cosmology question Kent. The universe doesn't displace anything, and as such requires no space....

So the Catholic church is on the move to try and shoot down the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill which will come before parliament later this year. Normally I wouldn't be too bothered about them up to their usual ideological agenda stuff - after all if I went after them on every single little thing they do, I'd be spending every waking minute on it. But they've stepped over the line on this....

That's a headline of a recent article on BBC News covering this early image from the Spirit rover. An image of a mysterious shape on the surface of Mars, taken by Nasa spacecraft Spirit, has reignited the debate about life on the Red Planet. A magnified version of the picture, posted on the internet, appears to some to show what resembles a human form among a crop of rocks. It goes on to say....