Hectored by an NDE kook

Yesterday, I was rudely confronted on Twitter by a fellow going by the moniker @DConRadiolo who was insistent that he had proof of Near Death Experiences (NDEs). I have no problem believing that people near death have experiences, but I do find it improbable that they represent minds existing outside the body. But this guy was adamant that Life Reviews are “the holy grail of NDEs” and prove that there is something miraculous going on.

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If we kill all the sources that transmit electromagnetic waves, like TV and radio, maybe more people will read the NYT

I’d actually like to own something like the Apple Watch. It’s a step towards ubiquitous computing, it’s got health features that I should be paying more attention to as I get older, and it’s designed to work with my existing crop of gadgets at work and at home. I’m not going to, though, at least not for a few years, because the current implementation is less useful utility and more ostentatious, over-priced status symbol. So I’ll wait a while for the sensible wearable Apple widget.

But there’s one bad reason to shun the Apple Watch: that it has mysterious unknown deadly health risks. But that’s exactly the argument an article in the New York Times has made.

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Down the rabbit hole with Ken Ham

Ken Ham claims to have been reading the science news. Oh, really?

Sometimes when I read the science news I just have to laugh. It seems that secular scientists are willing to believe anything, no matter how ridiculous, rather than admit the truth that they know in their hearts. There is a Creator (Romans 1:20–21). Well, in the news recently there was a story about scientists from the UK who reportedly found a “tiny metal circular object” in Earth’s stratosphere, and they are now “suggesting it might be a micro-organism deliberately sent by extraterrestrials to create life on Earth.”

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Do you need another reason to despise Answers in Genesis?

Sure, they’re young earth creationists. That’s ridiculous enough, a view that is in complete denial of all of the evidence, and it makes them a fringe group that, if they didn’t have so much political influence, could be safely ignored. Just the fact that they reject the entirety of science ought to make them pariahs.

By the way, my latest reading is Martin Rudwick’s Earth’s Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters, a very good book on the history of science, and I have to quote a paragraph from the introduction, in which he argues against the simplistic claim that it’s just Science vs. Religion.

…I try to show how an emerging sense of the Earth’s deep history was related to earlier conceptions of a much briefer kind of history in far more interesting and important ways than this tired stereotype allows. The surprising revival of “young Earth” ideas by some modern religious fundamentalists, and the even more surprising political power of such ideas in certain parts of the world, should not distract us from tracing the main story. I deal briefly with the modern creationists at the very end of this book, but in such a way that I hope it will be clear that they are a bizarre sideshow, not the climax of the narrative.

Even as a bizarre sideshow, though, their beliefs have social and political repercussions, and unfortunately, belief in creationism has a host of correlated consequences.

One of those consequences is the possession of a set of rigid sexual mores that defy biological reality. Another of the horrible, nonsensical ideas that AiG promotes is that gender is fixed and unchangeable, ordained by God, and so transgender people are freakish abominations who should not be accommodated in any way.

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Alt-med envy

I wish we could do this with creationists. A German court has ruled that a kook skeptic must pay up on his €100,000 challenge to prove measles was a virus.

A court in Germany has ruled that a prominent anti-vaccination advocate must pay a doctor the €100,000 prize money he had promised to anyone who could prove measles is a virus.

Biologist Stefan Lanka made the offer on his website (pdf) in 2011, but rejected the six scientific studies Dr David Bardens provided as proof.

Lanka argued during the Ravensburg district court hearing that measles was a psychosomatic illness, the local Suedkurier newspaper reported.

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PZ Myers’ debate requirements

A strange thing has happened: I’m getting all these debate requests now. You do one little debate (or two or three), and no one will let you forget it.

I am not a debater. Debating is a serious skill, and I’ve never been trained in it — all I’ve got is a pile of knowledge in my head and a snarky attitude, so I can disgorge heaps of information somewhat entertainingly. If that’s really what you want in your debate, OK…but I have to lay down some prerequisites.

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