Once again, I am reminded that I’m in the wrong business to make money. Bjorn Lomborg is in the news again, and I learn that the man makes $775,000/year for running the Copenhagen Consensus Center…which is a drop box in Lowell, Massachusetts. I don’t think buying a mailbox is the secret, though — I think you also have to convince the Koch Brothers to deposit checks in it. Apparently the trick behind that is to lie persuasively about science in a way that allows very rich people to become more rich.

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Oh, sure, it can tell you in a general way that there will be crossroads ahead, but it can’t tell you in advance which ones are dead ends, or where you’ll end up by following them.

Look closely at the eel in this picture. Look up around its head. Do you wonder what that odd little blob is?

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I am being taunted. There have been a couple of promising occurrences in the ongoing battle with trolls that I should find encouraging, but I really don’t.

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The creationists are mightily annoyed at the broadcast of a commercial that has John F. Kennedy talking about our evolutionary history as marine organisms.

I’ve got some complaints, too.

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A lot of my youth was spent hanging about in Radio Shack (or the Boeing surplus store, but that’s a different story), and I can’t imagine losing them, but Radio Shack is in talks that may lead to a declaration of bankruptcy, selling half its stores to Sprint, and closing the rest. There will be no more Radio Shack signs, even if the stores persist under new management.

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Denialists claiming to be pro-science. Politicians insisting on a balanced treatment. A population ignorant of the science indignantly rejecting a clear and well-established, evidence-based conclusion.

I’m not talking about creationism, although it’s exactly the same story. It’s the anti-vax position now.

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Yet again, another defender of Islam hangs the truth of his holy book on the scientific accuracy of the text. It’s amazing how defensive these fundies get over the possibility that the author was merely transmitting the guesswork of the time, and like any scientific hypothesis, stands a risk of being shown to be wrong by later work.

In this case, the apologists are confronted with a verse from the Quran, which they happily translate literally as (Man is) created from gushing water (which) comes out from between the backbone and the ribs. I think the Arabs of the 7th century knew exactly where the spine and ribs are — you don’t need to chop a corpse open to find them — and saying that something was located between the spine and the ribs is clearly equivalent to saying the source of semen is in the chest. Which is wrong. Obviously wrong. And they know it is wrong. But watch as they spend 8 tortuous minutes explaining that it’s not really wrong, and all those old Greeks really got it wrong, anyway, unlike Mohammed.

You don’t want to watch that tedious video, I know, so I’ve pulled out a few key frames.

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This is a demonstration of increasing technological refinement in computer games: images of Lara Croft over the years.

It desperately needs a key for dates of each of the images.

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