Dear Comrades,
I happened upon this website today. I haven't time to read it all, but the argument at the very bottom using complex numbers is absurd. His equation i=1/i is wrong from the start. Guess what! If you write something incorrect it leads to something incorrect. Proving what exactly?


Here's the link:

http://www.hyperflight.com/oh-teacher.htm

Cheers,
Drew

Sexpelled!

Joe bless you!

Have fun!

If you need information on Expelled, follow the link!


Another review

Nice review of the IDiot movie I shall not name to avoid more hits on google.
Here.

Acupuncture

This was interesting for me to read because I thought acupuncture just might actually do something. Apparently not... The link is to a summary of a peer-reviewed article on a double-blind study on the effects of "real" acupuncture versus sham acupuncture. The article shows that the group that got sham acupuncture in fact got better results than the group that got "real" (as defined and applied by certified acupuncturists) acupuncture. This suggests very strongly that the results, if any, of acupuncture are indeed a placebo effect. I wanted to try acupuncture at some time, but this article really discouraged me.
Here is the link, from Respectful Insolence.

My response

Following up on Drew's post, here is my response to comment number one. Stuff in quotation marks comes from the other guy's post.

"A lot of people go into academic life because they like the job security."
Excuse me, but what planet do you live on? There is no real security in an academic job. You might have some security after you get tenure, but you don't get tenure until you've been somewhere for a few years and work your a** off teaching, doing research, advising, publishing... How about the salaries? Maybe if you become a superstar best-selling author you can make some money from a publisher house, but 99% of the time this is not the case. Some academics that have slightly higher salaries are the ones in business, maybe engineering, but definitely not the ones in pure research, like biology. Take a look at the salary of an entry-level professor. It is irrisory! Now compare the ridiculously low salary to how much time, effort, and money the person has put into at least 10 years of higher education. No one gets an academic job for the money or easy work. It just doesn't make sense. Honestly, I see no "ulterior" greedy motive for anyone to be in an academic job, other than the love of the field and the will to help improve the world.

"They will never admit they are wrong or even consider alternate theories."
I see you are really not an academic, because this is what the whole field is all about. "Publish or perish" means that the people who are reviewing your work have it in their best interest to find all your flaws so that they can publish more than you. So anything that gets published in serious peer-reviewed journal has gone through the hands of people eager to criticize your work. If it is then finally approved, it is because it deserved it.
As for alternate theories, they are all considered as long as they are a real theory. When are the IDers going to understand that ID is NOT a theory?

"Darwinism is the death blow to open inquiry"
What?? Do you know how much inquiry Darwinism has generated? Do you know how many serious attempts have been made to debunk it? By serious I mean real scientific work and not "God-did-it" approaches. And in trying to falsify it, they have just shown how strong it is. Saying something is "irreducibly complex" is what really kills inquiry, because then you conclude that there is nothing else to be studied. What if people in the past had thought that germs were irreducible complex? Do you think it would have been better to just accept it and never work on vaccines or curing diseases? What is really stopping inquiry, understanding the process that led to the development of a complex being or to just say that someone designed it and leave it at that?

Amazon discussion

Dear All,

This is an amusing conversation. In particular, I recommend reading the first comment and then the seventh (the one from S. Dougherty).

Cheers,

Drew

http://www.amazon.com/tag/science/forum/ref=cm_cd_dp_rt_tft_tp?%5Fencoding=UTF8&cdForum=FxZ58KVEERYS5E&cdThread=Tx3NPJ9CKM492U0

Global warming denialism

I just discovered a blog called Denialism, which deals with cases of denial of established scientific findings, mainly for political reasons or to push someone's agenda. They posted this really neat video of talk by Naomi Oreskes in which she traces back the history of studies on global warming and the history of denying it. Worth watching.
Warning: if you procrastination issues, do NOT visit the blog above. It's too much temptation. Just look at me now...

Let's try again!

Let's see if this will work in blog format!