Author: MarkH

  • Repeat after me: “Correlation does not imply causation”

    The post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy is one of the great weapons in the arsenal of denialists. The reason it works so well is it makes sense. As my readers know, my daughter is dealing with a nasty respiratory virus. One of the doctors told my wife, who is not a medical professional, that…

  • Open letter to Douglas M. Steenland, president and CEO, Northwest Airlines

    Dear Mr. Steenland, I would contact you using more conventional means, but getting through to even a minor lackey at your company is next to impossible. Thank you in advance for reading this. I hate your company. They are perhaps the most difficult company I have ever dealt with as a consumer, and I won’t…

  • Psedonymity, anonymity, credibility, and the Overlords

    One of the hot topics around here lately is authority and anonymity. It’s a terribly difficult philosophical question—-how can you ever trust a source of information that is second hand? And yet ultimately we all are forced to do it most of the time. A potent weapon in the denialist arsenal is the fake expert.…

  • Update—kiddo heading home

    We’re heading home from the hospital soon.We’ve gone from, “Daddy, I don’t want to cough anymore…it’s too boring,” to, “Daddy, do pirates have convertibles?” But infectious diseases have lots of consequences. I’m starting to get a tickle in my throat and a bit of a cough. I have asthma, and this could really set it…

  • Blogger still under fire

    If the uber-fascist wing of the anti-vaccine movement had any scientific credibility, it wouldn’t need to throw around subpoenas. That is what is (still) happening to the author of the Neurodiversty blog (hat tip again to LizDitz). I’m sitting here in the hospital with my sick daughter. She has all that modern medicine has to…

  • I don’t like this at all

    Yesterday my daughter (the one in my picture, but older now) started sneezing—a lot. Allergy season in this part of the country is brutal. We keep a box of kleenex on every flat surface in the house. But this morning she started coughing, and had a low-grade fever, so we knew she was sick, not…

  • Whoopie!

    Last night I was reading a book to my daughter at bedtime. It was all about a kid who had chickenpox. I looked at my wife and said, “this is a bit outdated.” “So what, it’s cute,” she accurately replied. Wow. I hadn’t thought about it much lately, but chickenpox in the U.S. is disappearing…

  • Christian Apologists don’t have enough faith

    I don’t normally blog on religion, but there has been an jump in foolish writing coming from the wacky end of the religious spectrum. On the top of the list are folks like Vox Day and Geisler and Turek (I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST). For some Christians, faith isn’t enough, apparently—they…

  • Flu roundup

    This was a really crappy season. The system for developing flu viruses is the best we’ve got, but it’s imperfect. This year, we had significant mismatch between the vaccine and the circulating strains. According to the CDC, this season peaked in mid-February, and was “moderately severe”—and the worst season in four years. Improving our system…

  • The latest example of crank magnetism – Ahmadinejad becomes a Troofer!

    Yes, that’s right, the Holocaust denier who brought us the international meeting of Holocaust deniers has slipped naturally into trooferism. Earlier Wednesday, Ahmadinejad called the 9/11 attacks a “suspect event” in a speech at a public rally in the holy city of Qom. “Four or five years ago a suspect event took place in New…