Swans on Tea

The Unpersuadables

Let the Kids Decide

Last week I took George Will to task for his scientific illiteracy and misrepresentation of the “no statistically significant warming” statement that has given every global warming denier a naughty tingly feeling during the past few weeks.
I missed something.
I was going to include a graphical example, and I should have, because I would [...]

Global warming advocates ignore the boulders
He’s certainly not a scientist, nor, seemingly, is he scientifically literate.
In his latest steaming pile of op-ed on global warming, Mr. Will attempts to call into question the “settled science” of global warming by discussing virtually no science at all. Seriously — a bunch of politicians not being able [...]

Don’t confuse them with facts
At this point, Judi forwarded me their correspondence, along with a despairing note. She is probably somewhere drinking right now.
You see, like me, she can remember a time when facts settled arguments. This is back before everything became a partisan shouting match, back before it was permissible to ignore or deride [...]

I can recall one of the very first creationist types I met, way back when I was in the navy. He proudly proclaimed that he knew evolution was false, because a dog would never give birth to a cat. It floored me that someone with a tech background could have so completely failed [...]

Oh, I found you a new job
Unfortunately, nobody can possibly be qualified to do it. Ultimatonic field patterning instruments, WTF?
Ultimatons, for the uninitiated (which included me up to five minutes before writing this:
Ultimatons are the energy particles which make up the electrons, the PRIME physical units of material existence (472:1); Ultimatons aggregate into electrons. [...]

There’s a lot of information out there, and no possible way to tell if it’s right or not. Whom do you trust?
It’s not really an easy question to answer, because there are so many willing to deceive us and it’s not that hard to do. Lately there’s been a lot of grumblings about [...]

How I found glaring errors in Einstein’s calculations
Or rather, I have not, but I know lots of people who have. For some time now, I have been an avid reader and collector of webpages created by crackpot physicists, those marginal self-styled scientists whose foundational, generally revolutionary work is sadly ignored by most established scientists. These [...]

Ooh, a government conspiracy that involves some of my colleagues.
The time of the winter solstice on 12/21/2012 has been changed from 11:11 to 11:12. Something sinister is obviously afoot.
Given that the Naval Observatory is probably the most precise observatory in the world I find this highly unusual. A minutes change is huge! What’s going [...]

Tree Lobsters! #118 Skeptics & Charlatans

Uncertainty in Science: It’s a Feature, Not a Bug
People tend to think of scientific progress as always advancing in a straight line, with new facts being added permanently to our body of knowledge as they are discovered. “They do not understand that, instead, research is an ungainly mechanism that moves in fits and starts and [...]