I read a lot of stupid stuff each day.  I know a large number of people, it seems, who don’t think much about things like science, and facts, or even logic.  But this is my number 1 today (The whole article is worth reading, thanks Amanda!)
Why bother with an HPV vaccine? Its all good!

I’m not going to choose to get the HPV vaccine. Despite Gardasil’s almost frighteningly cute commercial, I’m perfectly happy with regularly scheduled pap smears to detect any risk for cervical cancer

Shockingly, it would appear that we are now dealing with reality as it is, not as we might want it. 
What the right-wingers don’t want you to know is that these steps actually useful in accomplishing goals they claim are so very important to them, to wit, reducing the number of abortions.
Granted, there are some out there who will say that the the moment sperm hits egg, that’s a person, and so this is an abortion.  But if thats true, then EVERY WOMAN has had abortions given that many fertilized eggs never find purchase in the womb.  Oh, and, of course, all fertility clinics are basically committing felonies by keeping people in frozen tubes.
But have no fear, the nutjobs will gloss over that, try and instill fear and hatred in everyone they can, and will do their best to make it sound as if NOW every 17 year old will be running around having sex, because until this, no kid would dream of having sex.
I know, that was kind of incoherant, but thats what these people do to me.

Bush ban on morning-after pill is reversed – science-in-society – 29 March 2009 – New Scientist

IN A reversal of Bush-era policy, a US federal judge has ordered that the morning-after pill, Plan B, be made available to 17-year-old girls without a prescription.

Expelled, and his behavior since, have made me very sad.  I loved his gameshow. (H/T P.Z.M.).  I could go on the usual rant about how many people have died in the name of god and how few have died due to science (I have NEVER been beaten with a test tube, or even a periodic table), but whats the point?  This says it all.
Below The Beltway » Blog Archive » Ben Stein: Science Kills People

Stein: …Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.

Fruit flies made to de-evolve.

Funny how you can test evolution even though creationists and “intelligent design” people keep saying you can’t.

Evolution: +1  Creationist tripe: -3

Garrison’s World: The Irrelevance of Rational Atheism and the New Philosophy of the Non-Rational – Part 7 : Fri, 02 Jan 2009 : eNewsChannels

There are, for example, experiments in Quantum Physics, such as the famous ‘dual slit’ experiment (you can see this in a YouTube video), which show electrons as appearing to be playing a spooky game of visual trickery with the experimenters, as if the electrons actually know when their behavior is being observed. As soon as the electrons ‘become aware’ they are being observed, they immediately change their behavior. There are other such mystic-like, magic-like occurrences now well-known and documented in Quantum Mechanics.

So this means that even when liberal rationalists appeal to empirical science to buttress their reliance on a so-called ‘tentative reason’ so as to give them some sense of security or certainty about such reason, science can only reply by saying, ‘You are looking at the wrong place to find certainty; we can only give you unpredictable probabilities concerning reality, mystic-magical types of findings, ‘Schrodinger’s cat’ who can be dead and alive at the same time, an object that can be at two different places at the same time, Heisenberg’s ‘uncertainty principle’ where if you know where something is, you can’t know it’s speed and if you know its speed, you can’t know where it is, and other experimental findings that are akin to mysticism.’

Discovery.com
has an article on how evolution seems to have occurred in bursts (at
least in some instances). But what I wanted to point out was this:

During about two hundred million years, organisms grew
from cells invisible to the naked eye to organisms about the size of a
thumbnail

I think there’s this misconception about how long we mean when we say
“evolution takes place over a long time”. Some people think thousands
of years. But that’s nothing. Read that quote again.
200 million years.
That’s the kind of timeframe we often talk about.
Unfortunately, that’s why the idea of a ‘missing link’ is a straw man
created by creationists. There is no ‘one step’, where we go from one
species to another. It is over massive amounts of time (even
accepting the burst ideas), very VERY gradual. That lets creationists
demand that scientists get more and more specific in this whole
missing link thing, “that one isn’t as upright” or “that one has a
funny nose still”.
And there’s no real way to ever get there.

So I’m feeling all sciencey these days and just picked up ‘The Canon’
by Natalie Angier. It has a great little example in there that really
defines science and, inadvertently, why ‘intelligent design’ isn’t a
science AND why no one really thinks it is, even those who support the
idea.
My DVD player stops working the day I get my favorite movie. I’d been
looking forward to watching it for weeks. Anyhow, I start trying to
figure out what the problem is. I check the TV, that’s fine. I check
the cables, those are fine. I keep generating hypothesis and then
gather data to support or disprove my theories. Nothing is working.
I’m starting to get very sad. Its looking like my whole day is
ruined.
So I go online and find some more advice. Someone explains that
there’s a switch in back of the DVD player that, if in the wrong
position, results in exactly the symptoms my hardware is experiencing.
I run back to the living room all excited. I flip the switch. Just
before turning everything back on, I think “God, please let this work”
and lo and behold, it does!!
Now, I can’t actually PROVE WITHOUT ANY DOUBT that it was the switch,
I can’t PROVE WITHOUT ANY DOUBT that it wasn’t my little prayer and
God doing it, but I can tell you one thing. The next time it happens,
I’ll be checking that switch. I don’t fully understand the workings of
a DVD player, so I’m not completely positive why the switch worked,
but it pretty obviously did, and most likely will again. I can even
flip the switch back and forth to reproduce the problem. In short, I
have, say, 90% of the answer, even though it is virtually impossible
for me to prove causation. What I won’t be doing, and neither will
any of you, is praying first and expecting that to fix things.
And if you aren’t praying first, then you understand why ID isn’t
science. Even if you won’t admit it.

You might say that its easy enough to explain a DVD player. But talk
to a computer geek sometime. You’d be surprised how often we resolve
a technical problem without being completely sure how we did it, or
why the problem occurred in the first place. But we ALL know that
there’s some technical reason for it, we just can’t see it. We might
make jokes, but we know that it isn’t gremlins or the computer being
‘bad’ per se. We know that there was something minuscule happening on
the drive, or the motherboard, or a strange series of events causing a
variable to be set wrong. We can’t see it, we’ll probably never know
the actual answer unless we can physically reproduce the event, but we
KNOW that there’s an actual, technical cause. And, given enough time,
it’ll happen again. The fact that I can’t explain it right now
doesn’t mean anything.
If you understand this, you understand why ID isn’t a science. Even
if you won’t admit it.

Yet another rule allowing doctors to deny treatment
Yes, this is aimed at abortion, and yes, I know there are already rules allowing this bullshit. But it angers me every time it comes up. Doctors can decide what care you do and don’t get, but god forbid they make your little girl get vaccinated against HPV.
I wonder, what if the doctor belonged to a religious group that said surgury was unethical? Or drugs?
The rule allows doctors to NOT EVEN PROVIDE INFORMATION.
So, if I felt that surgury was wrong, I could recommend, y’know, lots of tea to get rid of that tumor.
Or if I thought medicine was sinful, I could prescribe drinking lots of water to manage your diabetes.
Or, maybe, I think your STD is punishment and nothing should be done about it at all. If you end up infertile, you got what you deserved.
Thank god. For a moment there, I thought my well-being might come before the desires of my doctor.
Whew.

The Rant Puppets » Blog Archive » Is Jenny McCarthy a Danger to the World?

It does make me sad that, when we are confronted by something scary and so far not fully explained, we still turn to magic.

I’m actually not writing this as an attack or even criticism of ID.

Its been bothering me for quite a while that supporters of ID can’t understand why it doesn’t belong in science classes. 

The core reason is that these people don’t understand what science is.  They think that science is a quest for truth, for fact.  Many scientists will agree, but it isn’t hard to find one who doesn’t, and who instead sees science as a tool that adequately describes the universe for our purposes (big difference there). 

The thing is, that’s only half the game.  Science is both goal AND method.  Even if ID were true, it STILL wouldn’t be science because it doesn’t follow the scientific method.

Look, lets suppose I wanted to let people know about the plight of starving countries around the globe.  I might make a big old presentation about covering the economics and policy decisions surrounding the situation it with PowerPoint charts and note cards, and hand outs, and so forth.  Or, I might write a fiction novel, or paint a picture, or make a documentary.  All of these things might get us to the truth, but we would not say they were the same.  In a policy context, we’d probably use the presentation, in an ethics class, maybe the novel and documentary.  And, sometimes there would be cross-over in context and genre, but it would always be notable as an exception.  My point is that we wouldn’t go before congress and read the novel, nor would we show the presentation in a literature class.  The PowerPoint slides aren’t literature, and the novel isn’t a congressional report.

The same applies with Intelligent Design.  It may be true, it is, in fact, impossible to say that it CAN’T be true (which is one of the reasons it isn’t a science).  But even if God (or an alien, or whatever) himself came down and spoke to every scientist in the world and told them that ID was true, it STILL wouldn’t be science.  And any definition of science that would allow for it would be virtually meaningless, or, at least, useless.

And that’s why ID doesn’t belong in a science class.