The stuff of legend

This is turning up all over the place — at Brad DeLong’s, Crooked Timber, and this pair is from Cosmic Variance — it’s the most sublimely, awesomely, wickedly stupid example of fudging a curve ever. The two graphs below have exactly the same data points, and the only difference is the curve that was ‘fit’ to the distribution. Which one looks plausible to you?

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The one on the left looks sensible and simple, and looks like it was actually drawn with some consideration of the data. The one on the right … not so much. I have no idea how anyone could think that particular curve belongs in there.

Now guess which one was actually published?

Hint: it was published in the Wall Street Journal editorial pages.

Someday, somebody’s going to write a book about the shenanigans at the WSJ that allows a clown college, the editorial staff, to exist and thrive within the bounds of an otherwise staid and sort of boring, but respectable, newspaper. That they could actually publish something like the ridiculous abomination on the right and no one said “Wait! What about our credibility?” is merely symptomatic of some really interesting pathology going on there.

Larry Moran refuses to be assimilated?

Curses — we almost had Sandwalk in our grasp. If only we’d sent the borg queen in a little earlier, we might have overcome his resistance.

Ah, well. There are other blogs to conquer, although I must say the swooning and shrieking and histrionics among the SciBlings as we absorbed yet another godless evilutionist into the hivemind would have been … entertaining. I shall not regard this as a setback, since Larry’s blog will still be promoting a nefarious world-view similar to my own. Bwahahaha!

Flogging mythical dead horses

Bill Dembski has another triumph under his belt. He has shown that James Cameron’s math in the Lost Tomb of Jesus show was wrong. It seems a little late, given that even the show’s statistician has made a retraction. But of course, Dembski’s got to claim that the analysis is tangentially related to his debunking of evolution, and further, he’s got to make this ridiculous taunt:

Question: You think any of the skeptic societies might be interested in highlighting this work debunking the Jesus Family Tomb people? I’ll give 10 to 1 odds that they won’t. Indeed, how many skeptics now believe that we’ve found the tomb of Jesus? And to think that until just recently the skeptics didn’t even think that Jesus existed.

They won’t be interested because the author is Dembski, a man with no credibility. They also won’t be interested because it’s a dead issue; none of the skeptics I know or read were at all impressed with Cameron’s methods or interpretations, and certainly didn’t make any declarations that Jesus’ tomb had been found. I saw the program, and I thought it was crap from beginning to end. I think the universal consensus was that Cameron was a laughingstock and the whole sorry episode was a joke. But now Dembski thinks he has accomplished something by debunking a claim we rejected months ago?

I have this mental image of Dembski strutting around the dusty roads of Texas and finding a dead horned toad, partially consumed by birds, dessicated and defleshed and clearly long deceased. He gives it a kick, and then pompously declares that he has slain the ferocious dragon that had the godless skeptics cowed. And he writes a paper about it.

Evolution of a sex ratio observed

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If you’ve been reading that fascinating graphic novel, Y: The Last Man(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), you know the premise: a mysterious disease has swept over the planet and bloodily killed every male mammal except two, a human named Yorick and a monkey named Ampersand. Substantial parts of it are biologically nearly impossible: the wide cross-species susceptibility, the near instantaneous lethality, and the simultaneity of its effect everywhere (there are also all kinds of weird correlations with other sort of magical putative causes, which may be red herrings). On the other hand, the sociological part of the story seems very plausible. There is no feminist utopia, the world goes on in a traumatized and rather complicated way, and the reactions everywhere vary from crazed euphoria to a more common despair. One thing that isn’t at all implausible, and actually has been observed, is a plague that selectively exterminates males.

[Read more…]

Colorado kook identified

If you’ve been wondering who the ‘non-religious Darwinist’ (according to the DI, that is) who sent threatening notes to the University of Colorado at Boulder faculty might have been, wonder no more. The Colorado Daily News has revealed his name: it’s Michael Korn.

You can read Korn’s website and decide for yourself whether he fits the DI’s description of the culprit. Personally, I think the forensic skills of the gang of IDists have failed spectacularly, once again.

Friday Cephalopod: Origin of the Octosquid?

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Mastigoteuthis sp.

Since I recently pointed out the strange news reports of an “octosquid” that even went so far as to call it half squid/half octopus, I thought I’d show why the preliminary assignment to the genus Mastigoteuthis was suggestive. It probably did have 8 arms and 2 tentacles … before it got sucked up in a pipe and flung to the surface. Those two feeding tentacles are delicate.

Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.

Good ol’ Christian tolerance

This is amusing in so many ways to an atheist. Christian activists tried to disrupt a Hindu prayer in the Senate.

It’s absurd but so typical of Christian extremists that they would freak out at the imposition of a prayer that does not reflect their beliefs — welcome to my world, guys. We learn from an early age that the appropriate response is just to wait it out and not participate … and that any protests have to be made at an appropriate opportunity.

I’ll also point out that while everyone is pissed at the crazy Christians, the Hindu prayer is a rather vapid bit of meaningless nonsense, too…something about a transcendental glory living in the soul of the heavens, bla bla bla. The only part I liked was the request to lead us from the unreal to the real, which is exactly what I say all the time. Only I don’t address it to an unreal superman living in hearts.

Anyway, the only fair response to all this is simply to stop the magic incantations to any deity in our government. Let the senators who feel a need say a quiet prayer on their own, without dragging everyone into their personal superstition. And let’s chide any senators who complain about that for the weakness of their faith, that they can’t even pray without someone at the front of the room to help them out.