Shame on UCL UCL makes good!

An important change: UCL is reinstating Colquhoun’s blog on its servers and has announced that it “continues strongly to support and uphold Professor Colquhoun’s expression of uncompromising opinions as to the claims made for the effectiveness of treatments by the health supplements industry or other similar bodies”.

University College London caved in to complaints from alternative medicine quacks and asked Professor David Colquhoun to remove his skeptical blog from their university servers. Ben Goldacre summarizes the complaints:

They objected, for example, to his use of the word “gobbledygook” to describe Red Clover as a “blood cleanser” or a “cleanser of the lymphatic system”. Somebody from the “European Herbal and Traditional Medicine Practitioners Association” complained that he’d slightly misrepresented one aspect of herbalists’ practice. One even complained about Colquhoun infringing copyright, simply for quoting the part of their website that he was examining. They felt, above all, that this was an inappropriate use of UCL facilities.

It’s chilling: a couple of anti-science kooks send in some email to the provost, and the provost goes running to one of his professors and tells him to take it all down. Rather than booting Colquhoun’s pages from their server, perhaps the timid provost ought to have been fired; the job of a provost is to lead, not to scuttle.

But then again…

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Religion, philosophy, homeopathy, acupuncture…which one doesn’t belong?

Lewis Wolpert has a pleasant interview in Salon today — I find most of what he says copacetic. I very much like his developmental biology textbook, but I’m afraid I found his recent popular book, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), far too scattered and unfocused to be memorable. It’s a pleasant enough read — get it and you won’t regret it — but it was more like an agreeable conversation with an intelligent and eccentric fellow than a work that will either shake you up or strengthen your views…and that also comes through in the interview. He’s pretty much a sensible skeptic who doesn’t put up with much woo-woo nonsense.

There is one part that I didn’t much care for, that would probably prompt me to start an argument if this were a conversation:

You call David Hume your “hero philosopher.” Why do you like him so much?

First of all, I don’t like any other philosopher. I think philosophers are terribly clever but have absolutely nothing useful to say whatsoever. I avoid philosophy like mad. But David Hume does say such interesting and important things. He’s very good on religion, for example. I like him for that.

That’s just me, though. If I had my druthers, I’d have a philosophy of science requirement in place for our biology majors, as an essential piece of background in a good liberal arts education—biology has gotten so huge, though, that something had to go, and that’s one we aren’t even going to try to push into the curriculum, and I’m probably the only person in my discipline who’d consider it useful.

The $23 million dollar man: Peter Popoff

You might not want to look at this story about the televangelist fraud, Peter Popoff around lunchtime — it contains graphic visuals of a known con artist cheerfully defrauding the sick and elderly, and it might leave you a little squeamish. Popoff was discredited by James Randi 20 years ago, as is vividly shown at the link, but he’s back now, sucking in millions of dollars every year with his lies.

There’s also a couple in the story who were sick and unemployed, and who borrowed thousands of dollars from relatives to help them pay their bills…and who instead sent all the money to Popoff, who promised them magic Jesus prosperity. It’s a veritable freakshow of stupidity—you’ll despise the con artist, but you’ll also want to kick some of his victims.

Maybe we are guilty of neglecting our obligations

Could D’Souza be right? Does our lack of religious beliefs really impair our ability to offer help to people?

I suppose that if we actually cared, we could have
sent teams to Virginia to do useful things like
stroke sad people’s thetans and
point to chairs and trees for them (a technique that will also sober up drunks in minutes, which sounds very handy). Even if the VT students aren’t in shock or drunk, I’m sure they’ll appreciate the important study tips. Did you know that the most important thing you can do is look up words in a dictionary — the bigger the dictionary the better — and that students get stupider because they don’t know words like “chimney” and “a” and “the”?

Man, I wish I weren’t an atheist so that I could also make up stuff to help people.

Maybe I also need to wish for profound brain damage so that I wouldn’t think those “assists” were such a reeking pile of putrid inanity.

Fist vs. Chi — who will win?

This is an amusing (but somewhat violent) movie that is an apt metaphor for the strengths of science. It starts with a Kiai Master, one of those woo-woo martial artists who claims to have the power of knocking his opponents flat with his mystical chi—and it’s awfully funny how all these martial arts students come running up and do pratfalls when he waves his hands at them. Then, in a fit of hubris, derangement, or just plain stupidity, he challenges someone to come against him with ‘mere’ natural, physical combat skills. The results are predictable and a little bit cringe-inducing.

The woo sure looks impressive when it’s performed with a mob willing to play along, but it only takes a few seconds for reality to flatten “let’s pretend”. Keep that in mind, creationists: it’s easy to find obliging crowds in your churches, but the rest of the world isn’t going to play the game with you. When the United States deludes itself into thinking creationism is legitimate, we’re setting ourselves up for another nation to knock us down with a single punch of solid science.

Is Audiophilia in the DSM?

What little I’ve read of the extreme audiophile community makes my brain hurt, and I’ve avoided it like poison. James Randi deals with the freaky audiophiles now and then — people who believe their special magic cables will make your stereo sound better, or that an array of weirdly shaped hatstands in your room will make the music resonate just right — but it’s not something I want to get into regularly. A reader sent me a link to the special One Drop Liquid, though, and I just had to share my cerebral agony with everyone else, out of spite.

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Party like it’s 2011

Speaking of satire that’s hard to tell from religion, one of the cycles of the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, which is prompting some end-of-the-world hysteria, and even a movie:

Apparently, the whole world is going to change suddenly on 21 December, five years from now.

Armageddon is not what it used to be

I think there is going to be more outbreaks of telepathy

This is my favorite quote:

Whether or not time ends in 2012, we should be assuming it will so that we take care of business. Secondly and most important, don’t cancel your appointments for 2013.

The movie seems to be taking this nonsense seriously—they got a whole mob of astrologers and shamans and New Age kooks twittering away. I’m afraid I don’t believe it.

Besides, everyone knows the real catastrophe strikes 100 years later, in 2112. (I actually own that album, on vinyl, buried in a box somewhere. That’s a more apocalyptic omen than anything in this movie, I suspect.)