Yesterday I received an e-mail from someone using the pseudonym ‘WinteryKnight, who said: I was just wondering if you have any recent research publications on experimental biology? I am thinking about writing a blog post comparing you to Michael Behe, and I want to be as fair as possible when I compare your research publications […]
Continue readingTag: pseudoscience
my humble little blog is found by the discovery institute
Well, colour me startled! It seems that some of the things I said in a recent blog post & its associated comments thread have attracted the attention of the Discovery Institute. They don’t appear to be particularly happy with me. I don’t think that I’ve ever been called "dishonest" and "a liar" before, had my […]
Continue readingpredicting earthquakes: hedging your bets
Fellow SciBloggers Peter Griffin & David Winter have recently written posts on Ken Ring’s (in)ability to predict earthquakes (here and here respectively). This is something I’ve also touched on earlier & I thought I would follow up on it now – the specific issue I want to address is that of hedging one’s bets.
Continue readinga (shaky) date for your diaries
I noticed an intriguing headline in Saturday’s Waikato Times: "Quake forecast a horoscope." On reading further I found it led to an article based on a prediction by Ken Ring, who claims to be able to use the Moon’s position relative to Earth to predict the weather, that there would be an earthquake somewhere in the […]
Continue readingthere are some questions that google can’t answer…
… and I’m afraid that Facebook isn’t the place to go looking either. I was happily reading Pharyngula while eating lunch (& trying to avoid dropping crumbs into my keyboard), and decided that as a good pharyngulite I should perhaps pharyngulate a poll for once. (I was not at all surprised to find that ‘pharyngulate’ is now a word […]
Continue reading‘intelligent design is not creationism in any shape or form’ – yeah, right!
A few weeks ago one of my fellow SciBloggers, Siouxsie Wiles, wrote an interesting piece about a childrens’ film that she’d seen where the underlying message seemed to be: you don’t have to understand, you just have to believe. Which as she says, does rather encapsulate a lot of pseudo-scientific nonsense that’s promoted these days […]
Continue readingnuclear transformation – at body temperature this time
After writing my last post, in which a young-earth creationist expounded on their idea that the planet was once a giant nuclear reactor, I wondered what else was out there. So in the gap between one appointment & the next, I went looking. I almost wish I hadn’t…
Continue readinga young-earth creationist’s view of flood geology (& much more besides)
Things have been totally hectic since I got back from the conference trail – all the usual end-of-year stuff plus heaps of students coming in for advice about their study plans for next year. (Hint for future students – try to do a bit of planning before you come in; it makes the process much […]
Continue readingastrology can help achieve pregnancy? um, really?
Over at Grant’s, a commenter on one of his posts noted that, in its ‘World News’ pages, the Dominion-Post included an article entitled: "Pioneering’ astrology analysis may help women get pregnant after IVF treatment has failed". The commenter said he’d nearly choked on his weetbix when he saw that, & I can sympathise. I’d like […]
Continue readinghomeopathic ‘vaccines’ and smallpox
in a reversal of normal practice, what follows was first written for the Sciblogs site (usually it’s the other way around) but I thought I’d share it here as well 🙂 Okay, a bit late for ‘vaccination awareness week’ but I have to share this one. Over on Science-Based Medicine, Mark Crislip is talking about […]
Continue reading