Month: June 2007
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The end of the Alexander Cockburn saga
George Monbiot posts his last reply to Alexander Cockburn. Wisely, Monbiot has chosen not to continue arguing with a crank. At a certain point it’s always a lost cause. And considering Cockburn’s evidence one would be crazy to continue. It turns out, the sole-source of his rambling diatribe against all global warming science – the…
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Kilimanjaro and Global Warming
I’m surprised it took as long as a day for denialists like Patrick Michaels to gloat over the finding that the loss of the ice caps on Kilimanjaro – an example used by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth – has turned out to be
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Is there any idiot theory UD won’t credulously repeat?
Now it’s the “Rachel Carson killed millions” nonsense over at Uncommon Descent and it’s based upon this WSJ editorial from Dr. Zaramba, the health minister for Uganda. What’s really embarrassing is how they link the entire article and it’s clear they didn’t even read it. BarryA writes:
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Reprogramming adult cells into embryonic stem cells
As promised, I’m going through the three papers from last week about the re-programming of adult cells into an embryonic-like phenotype. Since it is three papers I’ll go through first what’s common to all three, and then what each group did special. First of all, let’s summarize the method one more time.
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Sopranos last episode
Anyone else want to venture a guess as to what that ending was about? To those who haven’t seen it – I’d avoid going below the fold – it will be a spoiler.
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A Bigot Surgeon General Nomination (part II)
Last week we discussed the nomination of Dr. James Holsinger to be Surgeon General of the United States, and our concerns considering his anti-gay views. Now Jim Burroway has done a thorough dissection of Holsinger’s attempt to use science to advocate for homophobic policies in his church and it’s about as skewed and cherry-picked as…
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Sean Carroll Reviews Behe’s “Edge of Evolution”
It’s a good read, also check out MarkCC’s review It’s another example of cranks not recognizing talent – or rather the absence of it. And Sean Carroll hits pretty hard in his review making the point that there are so many basic errors in the book that Behe isn’t doing ID any favors. He ends…
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Hurricanes and Global Warming
Ever since I heard the link I was hoping for something more solid than the weak associations I was hearing about on NPR and other news sources. It seemed very preliminary, and a bit worrisome that, especially in the foreign press, that they were claiming things like the New Orleans/Katrina disaster was the first example…
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Denialists’ Deck of Cards: The Ace of Spades, “We’ll Lose Money!”
And finally, we come to the final card. Perhaps industry’s strongest card–“we’ll lose money”–is not really denialism, but it is what motivates so much of the bad rhetoric in public policy debates. And of course, the truth is more nuanced. Proposals for reform create new opportunities, and many businesses have thrived under the very proposals…
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Profile of a Crank – Julia Stephenson
Ben Goldacre at Bad Science is leading the way on opposing this new absurdity of “electric smog”, and one of it’s leading proponents in Britain, Julia Stephenson. It’s really too easy. Remember the crank HOWTO? Well, she’s just about a perfect example. It all started when she got wifi in her apartment…