Chiropractors scrambling to cover their tracks

It looks like an admission of guilt to me. The McTimoney Association, a British chiropractic group, has sent out mail to its members urging them to immediately shut down all of their websites. Why? Because, as a result of the Simon Singh fracas, people are becoming aware that chiropractors are making “claims for treatment that cannot be substantiated with … research”, so they’re trying to make the quackery go away fast. (By the way, my ellipsis removed the word “chiropractic”; I would not trust chiropractic research, but they can’t even provide that). It’s a hilarious message — they flat out admit that common claims made on chiropractic websites put them at risk for prosecution.

About time! Now we just need something to trigger American watchdog groups to clamp down on the quacks over here.

(via Phil Plait)

Space science in Minnesota

The Minnesota Planetarium Society has ambitious plans to rebuild and expand a planetarium and space discovery center in Minneapolis, and they’re trying to spread the news and build more support. They are having an event to do this:

Summer Solstice Celebration
Monday, June 22
4:00pm – 8:00 pm
Minneapolis Central Library
300 Nicollet Mall

This event is co-sponsored by the Library Foundation of Hennepin County. Here is your chance to — travel past the Sun out into the universe through the Society’s ExploraDome sky theater, that has been wowing school kids throughout Minnesota — learn something new about astronomy and telescopes from the Minnesota Astronomical Society, and — expose your kids to the world of Astronomy through astronomically-related games. We also hope you’ll take this opportunity to see the future site of the Minnesota Planetarium and learn more about how we can make it a reality.

ExploraDome shows will be held on the half-hour. The dome holds 25 at a time, so reservations are recommended. To reserve your spot, please send your name, phone number and time (by the half-hour) to the [email protected] OR 651-999-7300. The 6:30pm show is a special presentation in Pohlad Hall featuring our planetarium colleagues live from around the world, and is open to all.

Let’s build this!

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Anointy-nointy

They’re doing it again. The raving mad wackaloons are oiling up the hearing rooms for the Sotomayor confirmation. This is called “anointing”, where some true believer thinks it will make a god pay special attention to an event if it is greased up first…which makes me wonder if there can be any point to church services if god is spending all of his time hanging out at the McDonald’s down the road.

Anyway, the sanctimonious twit Rev. Rob Schenck has put up another video of himself wandering through the rooms, slopping oil on doors. He will pray and anointy-nointy, while we will laugh and pointy-pointy.

Coke is for creationist cretins

I don’t drink caffeinated beverages anymore (I gave them up when I converted to Mormonism1) so it’s easy for me to refuse to give Coca Cola any more of my business, but this news may cause more distress to others: Coca Cola is a corporate partner with the Creation “Museum”. Ken Ham can brag about this meaningless exploitation of his suckers “museum” attendees for profit, but I doubt that Coke wants to trumpet this news — it looks like they’re sponsoring stupidity.

I don’t know that there is much point to protesting the association anyway. If Coke pulled out, you know the local Pepsi distributors would jump in to offer a contract, and then Ken Ham would proudly point to their deal as somehow vindicating their existence.

At least now we self-sacrificing, noble, healthier deniers of sugary caffeinated toxins can add a new level of sanctimony to our denunciations of Coca Cola’s consumers by pointing out that they are stooges of creationism, as well.2

(via Bing McGhandi)

1Psych.

2It’s our only pleasure left. When my wife fixes her cup of coffee in the morning, the smell wafts my way and I just want to leap over and swallow her cup, hand, and forearm in one big gulp.

Want to complain to Coca Cola? Go here.

Heaven for sale

Now, for the low, low price of $12.79, you can reserve a spot in heaven for yourself. This is a real business selling tickets, certificates and ID cards that claims to give you a direct line to an afterlife in paradise, with a money-back guarantee. You might think it’s just a gag…but it’s the same thing as Catholic indulgences, so it’s a gag with a little bite.

Oh, and if you don’t like the prospect of eternity in heaven, you can also reserve a spot in hell. That one probably has a stronger seal of theological approval.

They aren’t honest enough to write this

This is an entirely fictional manifesto, but it could be the game plan for a lot of rather devious pro-religion people right now — I could almost imagine it as the mission statement for the Templeton Foundation, for instance.

It is the objective of we, the New Creationists, to undermine not simply evolutionary theory, but science as a whole. It is this form of inquiry which has caused the greatest damage to our version of events. It must be destroyed at all costs.

The primary method for attaining our goal is Reaching a Middle Ground. This means that we are to seek, purely in the eye of the layman public, a position which appears on the surface to be a reasonable compromise. To be sure, we want to tell the world we embrace evolution. We also want to tell the world we embrace a Creator.

We want to hide Our Creator in the nearly impossible to understand gaps of reality. Quantum mechanics will often be our realm, but much more can work. As stated, our goal is Reaching a Middle Ground with the layman public. We need not answer to scientists. Indeed, they are the enemy. What we are to do is wrench the very fruits of these enemies from their empirical hands. We are to show gaps in the understanding of the cell. We are to discuss unknowns in the molecular biology. We are to contort the flaws of physics, cosmology, and astronomy to assist our goals. It is in these places that Our Creator resides. If it’s science, it is imperfect. We shall exploit, even invent, imperfections. All is justified in our goal. Science deserves nothing but lip service; It is the enemy.

Our first step is to put forth an army of Christian scientists. They will not be the supporters of fringe creationism. They shall not espouse views which deny any modern science. However, they shall pure atop all modern science a sense of confusion and remote possibility. That remote possibility shall be where Our Creator resides.

Our goals at this point will rely upon American idiosyncrasies. Tired of divisive politics, Americans seek a Middle Ground. They crave a sense of wishy-washy – it sounds fair. We shall marginalize the New Atheists with paint brushes of extremism. While they full embrace science and all its evils, we shall embrace it only superficially – we shall not fall into the evil of the enemy. We shall appeal to the American sense of fair play. We are the New Creationists.

However, it does have one big problem, and it gets one important issue wrong. These people would never say they hate science or that science is the enemy: rather, they love the idea of science, they just want to redefine it so that their version of science includes Jesus doing miracles.

My new career

I am now a cover model for CDs.

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Look for me soon to be gyrating in a rock video, then comes the feature role in soft-core porn, then the drugs and parties, then the stint in rehab, and finally the special documentary on VH1. Oh, heck, I’m going all the way: I’m taking over for Ozzie once he retires.

This is all predicated on the album being a hit, of course. But how can it not? Not only do I grace the cover art, but it has songs like “The Ecstasy of Mallard” and “Going Gay for House”.

So…soap bubbles must be designed!

You’ve probably noticed that as a soap bubble thins, it acquires a rainbow of iridescent colors across its surface. Or perhaps you’ve noticed that a film of oil on a mud puddle shows beautiful colors. These are common physical properties of thin film interference.

The way it works is that light entering a material with a higher refractive index is both reflected and transmitted. Some of the light bounces back with a partial phase shift, and some of it passes through. In a thin film, it passes through but doesn’t travel far before it hits another boundary, for instance between the film and the water underneath it, and again, some of it is reflected and some transmitted. This second reflected beam of light, though, is out of phase with the first, by an amount that depends on the thickness of the film. What that means is that certain wavelengths will be shifted in such a way as to reinforce the first reflected beam, generating constructive interference that will make that wavelength brighter. Other wavelengths will be shifted the same amount, but they will be out of phase with light in the first reflected beam — there will be destructive interference, and that wavelength will be damped out.

The net result: the light reflecting off the film will be colored, and the color will depend on the thickness of the film. It’s a simple physical process. Cephalopods use it to generate their colors — just by shifting thin reflecting membranes by a tiny distance of a fraction of a wavelength of light, they shift which wavelengths constructively and destructively interfere with each other, and thus change their color. Now engineers are exploiting the same principle to build television screens: they use a thin film that can be expanded by fractions of a wavelength of light by applying a voltage to build reflective color screens. This will be very cool. If you’ve got a Kindle or one of the other e-book readers, you know they use a reflective screen with no backlight that depends on ambient lighting to be visible…and that right now you only get shades of gray. With this technology, we’ll be able to have color electronic paper. I’ll be looking forward to it.

Unfortunately, we’ll also enable incomprehending gomers. Case in point: Casey Luskin thinks that thin-film interference patterns implies design. Well, actually, it’s stupider than that — he actually thinks that because TVs are being designed to use thin-film interference, and because cephalopod skin uses thin-film interference to generate color, that implies that cephalopod skin is also designed. I kid you not.

So we may soon have affordable, energy-efficient, cuttlefish inspired flat screen TVs and computer monitors everywhere. But of course, there’s no design overtones to see here folks. None whatsoever.

Right. And because trebuchets were designed to use gravity to generate force, and because rocks on mountains will tumble down due to gravity, avalanches are therefore designed. We make fire by design to produce the release of energy by rapid oxidation of carbon compounds; cells also oxidize carbon-containing compounds to produce energy; therefore, cells must have been set on fire on purpose. This is what the IDiots are reduced to: if something designed and something evolved make use of the same properties of our common physical universe, that means the evolved object must be designed, too. It’s ridiculous, but it’s all they’ve got.