We will have a Google+ podcast this evening, at 6pm Central time — I’ll start sending out invitations around 5:30. You do not need an invitation to watch it live, or to leave comments during.

The general topic is bad science and quackery. To get us started, here are a couple of links to some examples beyond the usual homeopathy/magic healing stuff that is so blatant — it’s subtler stuff that we often ignore.

• Money interests promote bad science. Look at energy drinks: lies and hype.

  Promoting a message beyond caffeine has enabled the beverage makers to charge premium prices. A 16-ounce energy drink that sells for $2.99 a can contains about the same amount of caffeine as a tablet of NoDoz that costs 30 cents. Even Starbucks coffee is cheap by comparison; a 12-ounce cup that costs $1.85 has even more caffeine.

• The science media flops big-time and promotes bad science. One example: Sharon Begley oversells placebos.

  But while anecdotes are not science, it is stories of the placebo response that drive home its awesome power—much more so than reports in dry research papers.

  Jebus Christ. Enough said, maybe.

• There are legitimate concerns to discuss about GMO foods, but usually we hear little but knee-jerk ideological rejection at the idea of tainting our precious food (this in a country where it’s almost impossible to buy food that isn’t genetically tweaked and processed). A critic rethinks his position on GMO foods.

  I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.

• Bad science prospers when their topic is hidden behind shame and silence. Case in point: the abortion issue, which only has two voices, the strident shrieking about ‘baby-killers’ and muted, almost embarrassed silence.

  When abortion providers do not disclose their work in everyday encounters, their silence perpetuates a stereotype that abortion work is unusual or deviant, or that legitimate, mainstream doctors do not perform abortions. This contributes to marginalization of abortion providers within medicine and the ongoing targeting of providers for harassment and violence. This reinforces the reluctance to disclose abortion work, and the cycle continues.

This is not an exclusive list, but merely something that will get us started. And of course, people can warm up to it by discussing it here in the comments.

You know when I started really getting into science? It’s when a high school chemistry teacher chucked a big chunk of the curriculum and taught us practical math instead: how to use the power of estimation to get ballpark estimates of various phenomena. It really woke me up to the power of simple arithmetic and reason.

So here’s a really good example. A couple of people have been raising money to build a gravity powered lamp Just raise a bag full of dirt and let it slowly drop, and the power generated will drive a small reading light, or can be used to recharge batteries, they claim. It’s the same principle that drove my grandparents’ cuckoo clock; every morning they’d pull a chain to raise the weights, and over the course of the day they’d slowly descend, making the whole mechanism tick.

Which immediately made me suspicious — that’s all that pound or two of counterweights did, was make a precisely designed and balanced delicate clock mechanism work. You can really get that much energy, to generate a useable amount of light, with such a trivial amount of input? And then I saw the video, where they raise the weight and the light instantly comes on brightly, with no detectable descent of the weight. This can’t be true, I thought.

But then I read this site, where they whip out the metaphorical envelope and scribble some quick calculations, that same estimation technique my high school teacher showed us how to use. Nope, can’t work. None of the numbers make any sense.

They also highlight one of the creator’s comments:

With hand-cranked devices, it might require three minutes of turning a handle for half-an-hour’s return. With this amount of effort required from the consumer, it’s often not seen as a particularly attractive trade-off. The GravityLight just needs three seconds of lifting for 30 minutes’ return.

Think about that. Somehow, a quick lift of a 10kg weight is now energetically equivalent to three minutes of hard exertion. It does not compute.

I suspect their demo unit has a nice little slot for a 9V battery. And for that they’ve received $280,000. Now that’s the kind of return from input that really violates the laws of nature.

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OK, I’m going to back off on the implication of fraud. The commenters say that it would produce some minuscule amount of light; the question is whether it would be sufficient to be at all useful. It’s possible their only crime is exaggeration.

You missed it! Avicenna, Richard Carrier, and I had a discussion about doomsday Google+ and youtube. But you can watch it now, at least.

How will we ever survive when Hostess goes out of business?

They’re blaming it on unions, which is another reason to be glad they’re going under. I notice that they aren’t placing the blame on producing bland, textureless, sugary foods for decades.

I remember growing up on that cheap, tasteless, gooey white bread — but I remember even more vividly that first bite of real whole grain bread with a crisp crackly crust and real flavor. Maybe if they’d tried making a quality product instead of mass-produced glop, they’d still have a business.

A 15 year old girl has been murdered in Pakistan.

By having acid poured on her face.

By her parents.

The girl’s parents, Mohammad Zafar and his wife Zaheen, recounted the Oct. 29 incident from jail. The father said the girl had turned to look at a boy who drove by on a motorcycle, and he told her it was wrong.

“She said ‘I didn’t do it on purpose. I won’t look again.’ By then I had already thrown the acid. It was her destiny to die this way,” the girl’s mother told the British broadcaster.

There is no crime so great that I could imagine doing something so horrific to any of my kids. I can’t even imagine committing such a violent act on a stranger. And to do it for so trivial and natural an offense…

It’s true. Religion compels people to commit abominable and terrifying acts normally well out of bounds of the behavior of well adjusted, normal people.

And no, it wasn’t destiny. It was the work of two awful people who didn’t deserve their daughter.

(This is part of a list of bad arguments I heard at the Texas Freethought Convention.)

Richard Dawkins gave a short speech on the Texas capitol steps, and for the most part, it was right on the money (or should I say, the Rmoney). He pointed out the bugfuck lunacy of Mormonism, and the patent charlatanry of its con-artist founder, Joseph Smith, as well as criticizing the media for failing to follow up on how nuts Romney’s religion is.

And he’s right! But some of his conclusions were, I think, a strategic error and simply wrong.

He came right out and said that he thought Mormonism was worse than the older, more established religions. That was the gist of his defense, actually: that Catholicism and Anglicanism and the various other protestant faiths were older, therefore less wacky…and that Mormonism’s clear mimicry of Elizabethan English, for instance, is a clear indicator that it was all fake. I don’t think that’s a good argument; I’d argue that Christianity could have been just as obviously bogus to a contemporary during its formation because they’d be as aware of its cultural context as we are of Mormonism’s origins; We benefit from sufficient proximity that the anachronisms leap out at us. But also, I think familiarity breeds complacency. Sure, Mormonism is nuts, but Catholicism is equally so. If you want deranged beliefs, I would merely cite the dogma of original sin — the pernicious doctrine that all people are born intrinsically evil, giving us a rich heritage of guilt and shame — as just as wicked and disturbing as anything Mormonism has come up with, and it’s far more pervasive, too.

Dawkins’ suggestion that the media should more thoroughly grill Romney on the details of Mormon belief has a germ of utility to it, but I don’t think he quite appreciates the depths to which the American electorate and the political process has sunk.

If you’re going to ask Romney if he believes Native Americans are descendants of the lost tribe of Israel, or whether Mormon underwear really stops bullets, or if Joseph Smith actually translated golden plates by staring at stones in a hat, you’re also going to have to ask Obama if he believes every line of the Nicene Creed. And when you start doing that, we atheists will be sitting smug and cocky laughing at both of them professing their faith, but the majority of the electorate will be seeing their religious identity challenged — and they won’t like it, not one bit.

Dawkins did mention Kennedy’s resolution of his Catholic problem, but I don’t think he really got it. Of course Kennedy’s views were shaped by his Catholicism, as Romney’s are by his Mormonism. But what Kennedy did was the only reasonable secular solution, since we can’t wipe our cultural influences out of our brains: he stated that he would not bring the papacy into the Oval Office, and would not entangle the institution of Catholicism with his duties as president. And that’s as much as we can ask of someone.

It is a question I’d like to see Romney smacked with, though. The Mormon church is a meddling church — witness their active interference in gay rights in states outside Utah, for instance. I’d like to see a clear statement from Romney that that scary office building just outside Temple Square in Salt Lake City will not be pulling the strings on a Romney presidency, and that he’ll be making political appointments on the basis of competence rather than religious cronyism (something Mormons are notorious for). Is he willing to stand up for the separation of church and state? Then I won’t make a big deal about his stupid beliefs.

And this goes for everyone. When the first atheist president is sworn in, I want evidence that he won’t simply be a puppet of the wizened, necrotic husk of David Silverman, Atheist Pope of 2060.

Look at this long line of people in Australia.

They’re queued up to gaze in wonder at the 500-year-old mummified right forearm of some Catholic saint. I’ve got a few things I’d want to ask them.

“What the hell is wrong with you people?”

“Do you really think fragments of corpses have magic powers?”

“Are you aware that many people find Catholics extremely creepy? Do you have any hypotheses about why that would be so?”

“Is it true that later tonight you’ll be burrowing in the local cemetery to feast on the decaying flesh of the dead?”