Skeptico

D’Worst List

From PZ I found The BEAST’s 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2007. I have to say I agree with most of them, but my favorite was # 29, Dinesh D'Souza:

Charges: Wrote a book blaming 9/11 on -- who else? -- liberals, because if we didn't live in a free society, then fundamentalists wouldn't dislike us so. Even conservative nuts blasted D'Souza's empathy for poor al Qaeda. Lately, he's been engaging prominent atheists in debates, revealing himself to be a pseudointellectual ass, and then declaring victory. D'Souza's master plan for attacking atheism is the ridiculous Pascal's wager: Atheists could be wrong, and then they'd go to hell, but if the religious are wrong, then they suffer no ill effect -- aside from living their lives in delusion, of course. And possibly going to someone else's hell for believing the wrong religion. D'Souza seems to think that if he speaks more loudly and rapidly than his opponent, he is winning, but his arguments are weak and idiotic, and he never even attempts to truly debate the existence of any god, which is the ostensible point of these debates. Instead, he likes to compare body counts -- Stalin and Mao killed more than the religious leaders of their time -- rather than actually debate whether there is a God, or for that matter a Jesus. This, of course, is because there is no case to be made.

Exhibit A: "[Atheists] are God-haters... I don't believe in unicorns, but then I haven't written any books called The End of Unicorns, Unicorns are Not Great, or The Unicorn Delusion." But what if everyone you met did believe in unicorns, and not only that, but worshiped a unicorn, held a book about unicorns to be the divine truth of the universe, invoked unicorns in political contexts, and speechified about how non-believers were indecent people waging a war on morality, which could only be predicated on the unquestioning belief in unicorns? Then, maybe, D'Souza would think about writing that book. But of course, that's not really true, because if that was the world we lived in, then Dinesh D'Souza would believe in unicorns.

76th Skeptics’ Circle

The 76th Skeptics Circle has just been posted at Aardvarchaeology. Some good skeptical reading from one of the first blogs in the alphabet.

Comments and Spam

Within the last two weeks or so, and for no reason I can ascertain, there has developed a problem with comments being marked as Spam. I don’t know why this is. TypePad have clearly changed the rules on their Spam filter although they have not had the courtesy to warn me or explain what has changed. I have written several help tickets and so far this is all the response I have had:

Thanks for the note. We have reported this comment to our Operations team so that they can look into why this was incorrectly flagged as spam.

Please let us know if there is anything else we can do for you.

As you can see – a virtually useless reply. I don’t know why they find it impossible to tell me what rules they have quite obviously changed on their own filters. I’ll try to follow up with them. But it is out of my hands – only TypePad can fix it. It looks like it might be long comments that attract the filter, since those are the ones that get caught, and apparently splitting them up into smaller comments seems to work. I apologize for this. I can assure you it is not my doing and I am not preventing anyone from commenting.

If you let me know by email that your comment has been held by the filter, I can go in manually and release it. The blocked comments are all sitting in a place that I have access to and I have been able to release comments for one person who requested it. Unfortunately, I am out quite a lot in the day right now, and don’t get to check my email or the blog very often, which means you might be waiting for a while before I release it. But remember I can always do that if you don’t mind waiting a bit. Otherwise, I apologize again and suggest you split the long posts into several shorter ones.

Better Than Sylvia

… That would be my 2007 Predictions. With only two weeks left in 2007, I can confidently state that my predictions for 2007 were more accurate than those of Sylvia Browne and just about every other professional “psychic” in the business.

Click the link and read for yourself what I predicted for the year, back on January 1 2007. I haven’t edited the post since it was published as you can confirm if you check with the Wayback Machine (from February 4th 2007 – the earliest I can find).

Let’s run through some of the correct predictions I made.

I correctly predicted Cyclone Sidr that caused so much damage to Bangladesh:

There will be a major typhoon causing much damage and loss of life in SE Asia.

I correctly predicted that Tiger Woods would have a daughter:

Tiger Woods and his wife will announce they are expecting a baby […] and it will be a girl.

I also correctly predicted Christina Aguilera’s pregnancy:

Christina Aguilera will also announce she is expecting a child.

As much as I have looked, I haven’t found even one psychic who predicted either of these two celebrity pregnancies.

I correctly predicted that John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would announce their candidacies for President.

I correctly predicted that Tony Blair would step down as British Prime Minister and that Gordon Brown would replace him.

I correctly predicted that Snoop Dogg would get probation but not jail time.

I correctly predicted that “Brangelina” would stay together and adopt another child, but that they would not get married.

I correctly predicted that Lady Bird Johnson would die of natural causes.

For a comparison of how much better I was than the professional psychics, just look at this list of Sylvia Browne’s predictions. She was wrong about TomKat’s baby. Wrong about Brangelina. Wrong about J Lo and Marc Anthony. Wrong about Bush bringing the troops home. Wrong about property prices being “back up”.  Wrong in just about everything she predicted. Unlike me.

And I don’t see any psychics as accurate as I was on the celebrity predictions. For example, see the daily mantra’s Psychic Prediction for Christina Aguilera that somehow missed the pregnancy that I spotted. Then we have Marlene Lombardi’s celebrity predictions that completely missed, as did California Psychics and Psychic Nikki.

Also, see these predictions from Jeffrey Palmer "The Psychic Detective." Funny, I don’t remember the “very strong earthquake centered near Los Angeles on March 13th 2007” or the “outbreak of a rare virus near or in the city of Boston in May 2007”. Admittedly we haven’t got to December 27th yet, so we still await the “event of global proportions [that] will occur on this date”. Mark your calendars.

So I beat all of these so called psychics. Congratulations to me.

Now, the cynics among you will probably say I ignored the predictions I got wrong and just concentrated on the hits.  Well, I never claimed to be 100% accurate. And as Sylvia Browne said, only God is 100% accurate. Others may say that some of the predictions weren’t really that surprising. Well, at least I didn’t predict that Tiger Woods would win a golf tournament.

Of course, making obvious predictions, and then counting the hits and not the misses, is all that professional psychics do anyway. And I still think I did better than them. Remember that when, this year, we get the same bunch of lame playing the odds guesses, reprinted uncritically by a gullible media. And although these “psychic predictions” might look like just a bit of fun, remember that uncritically reporting this nonsense as if it were real gives cover for vultures like Browne to prey on the recently bereaved.  They also waste police time by forcing them to follow up their made-up psychic “impressions”. I did better than any of them by just guessing.

If you’re still not convinced, I am available for psychic readings. I charge just $500 a pop which is still less than Sylvia. Just click the email link in the left hand column.

Oh, and I have a bridge to sell you:

Quick, before it sells. Call me now.

This Should Be Interesting

In an attempt to resolve a property dispute in India, an Indian judge has summoned two Hindu gods to appear in his court:

Sunil Kumar Singh has placed notices in newspapers in the coal mining town of Dhanbad, in the eastern state of Jharkhand, asking gods Ram and Hanuman to appear in his court next week to present their arguments.

"You failed to appear in court despite notices sent by a messenger and later through registered post. You are hereby directed to appear before the court personally," Judge Singh's notice stated.

The newspaper notices were published, in keeping with accepted Indian legal practice, after two summons dispatched to the plaintiff deities were returned because their addresses were "incomplete".

While in the US, a contender to be leader of the free world says, in all seriousness, that his recent poll successes are due to Jesus’ help (quote time: “that’s honestly why it’s happened”), it’s good to know that a supposedly less developed country is going to require their gods to actually show up! Memo to God – put up or shut up. And no men in monkey costumes, please.  You’re going to have to prove you’re the real deal.

Here’s some additional outsourcing we could benefit from – let’s get this judge working in the US right now.

It’s the Shaking, Stupid

From The Quackometer I learn of the latest hilarious homeopathic complaints against the reality based community. Recent homeopaths’ letters to the Grauniad, include this previously unnoticed fundamental flaw in Ben Goldacre's reasoning:

Goldacre seems to think that homeopathic remedies are prepared by diluting substances. He omits the critical component of shaking ('succussion') between serial dilutions without which they would, indeed, be merely water rather than potentised substances.

Well of course – I see it now. Shaking.  Because without the shaking after each dilution, homeopathy would be patently ridiculous.  But now it makes perfect sense. Why didn’t they say so before? It’s shaking as well! Thanks for clearing that up.

You know, I think this argument proves one thing, namely that if homeopaths’ complaints were distributed according to homeopathic dilutions, they might actually be stronger.

Or less weak, anyway.

Maybe.

75th Skeptics’ Circle

The 75th Skeptics Circle has just been posted at Pro-Science. In a refreshingly straightforward format.

I’m # 12

From Shalini I learned Skeptico is the #12 Atheism Blog. Pretty good, since atheism isn’t the main focus of Skeptico. Shalini is #7. Apparently the ranking changes regularly – daily I think – so by the time you read this I could be anywhere on the list.

Results Are In / Debate’s Not Over

The utter vacuousness that is David Kirby can be found in the header to his recent confused rant in the Huffington Post. It’s right there at the top of his article, in bold so you don’t miss it:

Memo to those who wanted the autism-vaccine contretemps to just go away: You lost.

If you read that again and think about it, you’ll realize it’s more interesting for what it doesn’t say than for what it does. This is what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say, “Memo to those who said that vaccines don’t cause autism: You lost”. It doesn’t say that because even he realizes that would be false.  (Although later, he equivocates like hell. Of course.)  Remember, this is the same David Kirby who said, in June 2005

Because autism is usually diagnosed sometime between a child's third and fourth birthdays and thimerosal was largely removed from childhood vaccines in 2001, the incidence of autism should fall this year

Just to be clear – by “this year” he meant 2005. That was two years ago. And newsflash – autism rates didn’t fall. In 2005, or since.

But, note, we Thimerosal skeptics “lost.” Not because we were wrong. But because Kirby insists that the “debate” is going to continue, no matter what the evidence tells him. Yeah. Doesn’t that remind you of the “debate” about whether evolution is true?

The definition of pseudoscience includes not altering your theory when contradictory evidence comes in. The pseudoscientist moves the goalposts and makes ad-hoc rationalizations for why his previously predicted results did not transpire exactly as planned. Want to read Kirby’s version of this? Prepare to be astonished at the chutzpah:

Finally, to all those who are going to post comments about the autism rates in California not coming down, following the removal of thimerosal from most vaccines: You are right. The most likely explanation is that thimerosal was not responsible for the autism epidemic. But that does not mean that it never harmed a single child.

No, of course it doesn’t. But note the new, impossible standard he has just sneaked in. The skeptics now have to prove that not a single child was ever harmed by Thimerosal. He wants us to prove a universal negative. Although even then we all know he’d find something else to go for. (Aluminum in vaccines makes an early trial run in this post.)

Kirby says right there in his post that most likely explanation is that thimerosal was not responsible for the autism epidemic, and yet he still wants the debate to continue. But if Thimerosal was not responsible for the autism epidemic, what reason do we now have for even continuing to debate Thimerosal? Kirby’s motive for writing this post is to gloat that we “lost”, because the debate will continue regardless. That’s his definition of “winning”. The word douchebag to describe Kirby seems a little unkind. To douchebags.

Note:

Orac takes apart Kirby’s arguments in more detail. I’ll just mention one point. Kirby makes a big deal because advocates of the mercury-vaccine-autism connection were appointed to a new federal panel on autism.  Funny thing, the day before Kirby posted this sorry screed, Orac wrote in a different post, “Expect the mercury militia to milk this connection for all it's worth”. Well it didn’t take long. One day, to be precise. Take that psychics.

Diluting The Profits

Via DC’s Improbable Science I learn that Homeopath Dr. (sic)  Manish Bhatia has sent out a panic email newsletter whining about the recent anti-homeopathy bloggers (yay!) and newspaper articles. The impact of all this is apparently that homeopathy is “bleeding to death” (we wish):

Those who are organizing this anti-homeopathy campaign have been SO SUCCESSFUL that most homeopaths in UK have seen a 50% drop in their practice in the last 2 years. In fact most of them get to see only 3-4 patients a week.

I’m puzzled. Surely, due to homeopathic principles, seeing fewer patients should make their homeopathic practices stronger. They obviously can’t be doing it right.

(Cartoon from The North Texas Skeptics.)

But it’s interesting to see how the homeopaths are fighting back:

Most of them are looking to add other things with their practice like massage, acupuncture etc. They can’t earn their bread with their homeopathic practice.

Great. Their unproven woo isn’t earning them enough money so (you guessed it) they add another piece of unproven woo. And I thought it was only Big Pharma that was in it for the money.