Saturday, January 1, 2011

PZ has a Difecta

PZ hits a home run with this delightful pair:

"The realization that radioactive elements on earth had their origins in a spate of ultra-high-magnitude earthquakes might lead to an investigation of whether more radioactive materials might suddenly become "discoverable" near the epicenters of any future magnitude-eight or stronger earthquakes"

And

"... should it be surprising that 135,000 American children took guns to school? Homeopathy could have helped"

Pharyngula

Outrage cans Michael Jackson autopsy extravaganza

"We were especially outraged when a sickening print advertisement for the program appeared making light of Michael's death by depicting a corpse sprawled on a steel gurney covered by a sheet with a hand sticking out wearing Michael's signature glove":

Hollywood Reporter


Pedo was cool in the '70s

“In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorised as something fully in conformity with man and even with children”—Pope Benedict

Belfast Telegraph

Friday, December 31, 2010

Disconnect your brain

I saw a woman on TV recently. She was doing the usual pseudo-skeptic, conspiracy theorist routine. She babbled on for over a minute and then some science guy got  <10 seconds to counter. At the end it was mentioned that she has a new book out. Wow. I didn't realize that major network evening "news" programs was now part of the book promotion circuit. Silly me.

The SBM blog has posted a review...
"...Davis implies that there is a massive worldwide conspiracy to cover up data, and disprove or dismiss the alarmist studies. The book is full of anecdotes about data that was altered, or disappeared, funding that was cut off, and alleged threats. This is the stuff of a Hollywood conspiracy movie. Such a massive conspiracy, involving virtually all the worlds most prestigious health science organizations, is simply not plausible."
A Disconnect between cell phone fears and science
Ionizing radiation causes skin cancer and bone cancer. Why aren't we seeing them as well? And why does her Wikipedia entry contain no citations and mention no controversy? (he asked knowingly)

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

About fucking time

It's been 24 years since the RatCave Media Center did anything of import. Not that anyone actually noticed the last time around.

I've been emailing a digest entitled "Wacky World News" to a small group of like-minded people for a number of years now but the sheer torrent of wackiness pouring forth every week has forced me to ignore many items of interest for the sake of brevity. Rather than continue to overwhelm my subscribers, I've decided to post the best parts of it to a blog and keep the second-tier chum for the digest.

At the moment I'm still getting things up to speed. The floodgates will open soon enough.