Tomfoolery Blog

Archive for March, 2010

Last time, I covered Genesis up to Noah leaving the Ark. I’ve already mentioned the ridiculous cursing of Canaan, so lets move on. After a long list of the descendants of Noah, we get to the Tower of Babel. Apparently, all these descendants of Noah spoke the same language, and got together to build a Tower to reach the heavens. Therefore God decided to confuse their languages so that they couldn’t understand each other, and then scatter them everywhere. So, clearly God does not want everyone to get together and understand each other, he clearly wanted to put the brakes on human society.

Then, Abram (later Abraham) appears. He has a nephew called Lot, and a wife called Sarai. Abram ends up in Egypt, the Pharaoh fancies his wife, God punishes Pharaoh for this, etc.

What I find bizarre is the morals involving Sarai. In Genesis 16, it is revealed that Sarai has not had children, so she allows Abram to have sex with her maidservant Hagar. God is apparently fine with this (he does nothing to stop it) so is having children more important than loyalty to your wife?

Genesis 17 brings in the requirement of circumcision, but gives no explanation as to why. Is there any reason why God doesn’t like foreskins? Who knows.

For now I’ll finish off by giving my take on Sodom and Gomorrah. These two cities were supposedly doing wicked things. What I find very interesting, is that 18:20 tell us that God hears rumours about these cities, then says that he will go down and check. Now, I’m no theologian, but surely an omnipotent being doesn’t need to ‘go down and see’, they would just know.But anyway…

God sends two angels to check out Sodom. Lot insists that they stay at his house, and the people of Sodom show up at his house to demand that they can have sex with them (19:5).  Even though Lot offers his virgin daughters instead, the people are determined to have some hot angel action. So the angels blind them, and Lot and his family escape. God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah with sulphur. Lot’s wife looks back, and is turned into a pillar of salt.

There is no explanation for why Lot’s wife is punished this way, and it seems very weird, but not half as weird as what happens to Lot and his daughters…

Here’s a turn up for the books! This Daily Mail article by Suzanne Moore is not only in great praise of Brian Cox’s “Wonders of the Solar System“, but it also defends UK science funding. There is also a photo of Carla Bruni’s arse, but I guess you can’t have everything.

I’m a huge believer in human rights, and I am proud to say that I live in a country whose government tries to stop discrimination on the grounds of race,  gender, religion, or sexuality.

Until today. In court, the Catholic adoption society Catholic Care won the right to ignore the Sexual Orientation Regulations and see homosexual couples as unfit parents. This was opposed by the Charities Commission, and thanks to the ruling by Mr Justice Briggs, they will have a legal bill of about £100,000 to stump up.

Let’s take a minute to consider this: a group is allowed to flout the rules because it goes against their religion. This sets a hugely dangerous precedence. If Catholic Care are allowed to do this, where will it stop? In the Bible, homosexuality is punishable by death, so shall we let Catholics off murder charges if they kill a gay man? Obviously, this is slightly unlikely, but the point remains. Why should a religious group be able to pick and choose the laws it adheres to?

In better news, the case of Constance McMillen has a very happy ending. Constance McMillen is a lesbian who wanted to take her girlfriend to her high school prom at the Itawamba County Agricultural High School in Mississippi. Being the deep south of the USA, the school board were totally against it. First they tried to ban Constance, then when the ACLU got involved, they just banned the prom, no doubt trying to turn Constance into a social pariah.

Well, a couple of humanists have stepped up and funded the prom! How about that for a smack in the face of bigotry?

I know that I blog about Daily Mail articles all the time, but to me the Daily Mail represents everything that’s wrong about tabloid science reporting in the UK. Their latest word guff is a great example of how to slush together potentially good science and mawkish quackery.

The article in question is entitled “Could talking to an apple help you become more beautiful?”, which sets the scene quite nicely. What follows is a few words from a neuro-linguistic programmer who thinks that you can improve your appearance with positive thinking.

If you forget the apples, the message of the article is quite sensible: positive thinking and compliments make you more beautiful. Now, there could be many reasons for this. I’m no psychologist, but it seems quite reasonable to me that if you are happy, you’ll smile more, your posture and general demeanor will be better, and other people will perceive you as being better looking.

If the article stopped there, it would be nothing more than a straight-forward comment. But of course, this is the Daily Fail. Welcome to tenuity. They suggest testing this idea of positive complements on an apple, as apples have a similar water content to the human body. Cut an apple in half, love one half and hate the other. The half you hate will look worse than the half you love.

Obviously, there are a multitude of problems with this. It’s not a fair experiment, and it’s open to the bias of the experimenter. But most obvious of all, it makes the idiotic suggestion that the human body and apples are comparable because they have a similar water content. It beggars belief. If I mixed 60 grams of water with 40 grams of sand, would I get something comparable to a human? Well, maybe I’d get something comparable to the Daily Mail.

So, who is behind this tripe? The neuro-linguistic programmer (NLP) in question is Nikki Owen, who just seems to be after publicity. NLP is pretty dodgy technique which I may cover later. She seeks support from Masaru Emoto, who thinks that you can ‘speak’ water into making pretty crystals. He’s had a lot of attention from the Skeptic community, and has even been offered the million dollars by James Randi if he can provide evidence of his watery claims. The last person involves is clinical psychologist Dr Helen Nightingale, who has been grossly misrepresented. I think the lesson here is quite simply ‘DON’T TALK TO THE MAIL OR YOU GET ASSOCIATED WITH QUACKERY!’.

I’ve decided to embark on a personal ‘challenge’: I will be reading the Bible from cover-to-cover. I’m hoping to get a better understanding of it than most Christians, and I want to see if it really is evil as many atheists say it is. I’ve chosen to read the New International Version (NIV). This isn’t because of accessibility issues or anything like that, it’s simply because it’s one I happen to have in the flat.

So then, Genesis, the first book of the Bible. God makes everything in six days. Doesn’t go into details, and doesn’t mention anything either true or useful. However, it does repeatedly say that animals reproduce ‘according to their kinds’, which must be where the creationist term ‘kind’ comes from. Of course, it makes no mention of what a kind is. Although Genesis is clearly a book of a primitive people trying to understand the world, so no surprises there.

I’ll spare you the details of the oft-told tale of Adam and Eve, but I am amazed that people don’t take issue with how long people live. Adam supposedly lived till he was 930, Seth till he was 807, and Methusalah till he was 969! I’d love to hear Rowan Williams explain that.

Then comes the flood. Not much to add here, although how a 600 year old man can build a ship that houses every ‘kind’ of animal is beyond me. Way more interesting is what happens afterwards. Noah gets drunk, and falls asleep naked (we’ve all done that). His son Ham sees him, and because of this Ham’s son Canaan is cursed to be a slave to his brothers. Nice.

Ever since Wakefield published his Lancet paper, antivax ratbags have repeatedly tried to claim that vaccines cause autism. One such mechanism they propose is that the preservative thimerosol is involved. The basis for this is that each molecule of thimerosol contains an atom of mercury, so they equate injecting a vaccine to injecting a syringe full of mercury. Of course, this is a million miles from the truth. Nowadays, thimerosal is present in very few vaccines, and even if it is it is present in minute amounts. There is no evidence that thimerosol has ever caused ill health.

So, it should come as no surprise that the USA ‘vaccine court’ has ruled that thimerosol does not cause autism. This is yet another body blow for the antivaxxers, as they repeatedly mention this case (no longer pending) as being important to their cause. Will they give up in the light of this judgment? Almost certainly not, but hopefully this decision will shut them up for a time.

It’s Friday, so I thought I’d bring you something that has nothing to do with skepticism, but a little to do with science.

I’m a big fan of animation genius Cyriak Harris. He’s been producing original, funny, sometimes disturbing animations for years, and he recently made the title credits for the Dave Gorman show Genius.

Here is what happens when you interpret maths via the medium of dance:

The ‘Psychic Drawing’ is a pretty simple concept. The psychic scribbles on a bit of paper, and people read into it what they will. Read what you will into the results of this video, from the irrepressible failblog.org:

In the wake of the Wakefield scandal, I’d like to think that newspapers really consider articles on children’s health before printing them. But, what about animal health? Can that be covered with a different rulebook?

Well, guess what? The Daily Mail have published an article where any concerns about responsible reporting, fact checking and balance have been thrown out of the window. The article reports that a certain charity claims that vaccines ‘are making our dogs sick as vets cash in’, and it goes on to recycle a load of tired old antivax arguments, without providing any real evidence to back up their claims whatsoever. There is even a case of owner-diagnosis of ‘autism’ in their dog, Charlie the springer spaniel.

The ‘charity’ in question is Canine Health Concern. A quick browse through their website (in true ‘Welcome to 1997′ style) instantly reveals that the charity is quite simply, balls. It’s just reams of the usual antivax nonsense. They even endorse Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) for dogs!

One quick question: can anyone tell me how on earth Canine Health Concern qualifies as a ‘charity’?

OK, a very simple premise here: if you are a quack and you don’t want people to know about your nonsense, don’t make legal threats against anyone.  If you do, you risk the wrath of the Internet (this has become known as the Streisand effect).

One such quack who failed to adhere to this simple rule is Charlene Werner. So, as many others have already done, I present to you this extraordinary video:

The stupidity here is bum-blowing. First she calls e=mc² a theory, which puts any scientific claims she may have under extreme scrutiny. It’s not a theory, it’s a law. Then she goes on to say that the mass within the universe is so small, it can be discounted. And it goes downhill from there…