The following post is an article that I originally wrote for the New Zealand Science Teacher journal (the official journal of the New Zealand Association of Science Educators), and is reproduced here by kind permission of the editor. We live in a time when science features large in our lives, probably more so than ever […]
Continue readingOver at Sciblogs there’s a lengthy comments thread on vaccination, following an excellent post by Darcy on some myths about vaccines. I hesitate to call the thread a ‘debate’ because, frankly, it’s impossible to actually debate someone who practices what evolutionary biologists would call the ‘Gish gallop’ – firing off so many factoids that you […]
Continue readingin 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 readingOne last post for raising-awareness-of-the-science-behind-vaccination week 🙂 On one of Grant’s threads, an antivaccination commenter has posted links to very old images of smallpox victims from a German publication. The commenter implies that these patients acquired the infection as a result of a smallpox vaccination (as I don’t speak or read German I can’t comment […]
Continue readingSince over at SciBlogs many of us are blogging about vaccination, I thought I’d take the opportunity to re-post something I wrote earlier this year, concerning the promotion of homeopathic ‘vaccines’ for a range of serious illnesses. Over on Code for Life, Grant’s put up some posts concerning homeopathy (here & here, for example). He’s also […]
Continue readingYou may be aware that November 1-6 is ‘Vaccine Awareness Week’ (a reminder from Darcy, over at SciBlogs, prompted my previous post.). Those who originally gave the week this label are actually strongly-antivaccines, so all the more reason for some science-based discussion around it as well 🙂
Continue readingAs a child, in the 1920s, my mother contracted polio. It left her with little in the way of the muscle at the base of her right thumb, and her right calf muscle was much smaller than the left. At about the same time my friend Dorothy (who fairly obviously wasn’t my friend at the […]
Continue readingBecause I used to be a secondary-school teacher (rather more than a few years ago now) & also because I interact a lot with school teachers, I’m following that sector’s current pay negotiations with quite a bit of interest. One of the conditions that the teachers’ unions have placed on the table is the issue […]
Continue readingOrac often talks about ‘crank magnetism’ – the tendency for people who believe strange stuff in one area, to be attracted to other areas of oddness as well. (As far as I can tell, the terms was originally formulated on the denialism blog.) Anyway, having an hypothesis (the above crank magnetism) one must test it – […]
Continue readingThe need (not urge, need!) to do housework finally caught up with me this weekend, & now that’s over I really need to do some final preparation for my classes tomorrow. So here are a few snippets to tide you over…
Continue reading
