Truth and the Devil

Phil Plait links to two beautiful astronomical animations.

The first is a high-res animation of Comet McNaught, specifically it’s spectacular tail.

The other is an animation of the Moon passing in front of the sun as the sun rotates. Very cool.

STEREO-B caught what astronomers call a transit — the passing of one celestial body in front of another — but in this case it’s OK to call it what it is: a solar eclipse, when the Moon passes in front of the Sun.

I thought I’d post a quick follow-up on my post about The Great Global Warming Swindle. I linked to some info about the ‘documentary’ misleading its interviewees, as well as producing misleading graphs. Here’s more:

Stoat writes a post summing up some of these problems here.

The Independent has a summary of these errors as well.

A reader at Stoat noticed that the film changed its graphs on their recent rebroadcast of the program.

Stoat also shows us why the relationship between CO₂ and temperature isn’t as straightforward as the film would have you believe.

As far as I can tell, comments should now be working, as should the contact form.

It’s interesting how insecure some people can be when they perceive their safety blanket being taken away from them. As is typical with some religious thought, an op-ed to the Lawrence Journal-World today bemoaned those who wish to remove the motto ‘In God We Trust’ from our money.

“In God We Trust.” To have this on our currency is to say that we trust in something higher than ourselves, namely God. For those who wish its inscription removed, I would ask them where we should put our trust and most importantly, to whom we are accountable.

PZ Myers found this picture. It really is perfect.

Check out some of these Roy Zimmerman songs now. This one is about those who claim to be defending marrriage. He’s got more about Intelligent Design, politics, etc. Just my kinda guy.

PZ Myers has come up with a brilliant analogy for evolution skeptics and promoters of intelligent design.

My kitchen sink has a problem. Something has broken inside th Moen faucet, so that the handle is loose and only marginall effective. I’m thinking I should run down to the hardware store and get new faucet assembly, and get under the sink with a pipe wrench. I shouldn’t be too difficult

The snake-oil-bullshit-self-help book/dvd phenomenon The Secret being promoted by Oprah which I talked about 2 weeks ago, while still selling strong, has caught the ire of even more skeptics. Monday’s Salon has a very good article by Peter Birkenhead about the possible damaging implications of Oprah’s support.

Unfortunately, I missed the documentary on Jesus’ tomb last weekend, but apparently I didn’t miss much. PZ Myers watched and wasn’t impressed:

It wasn’t very impressive. They really milked a paucity of hard data for an over-long ‘documentary’ that was mostly handwaving. The DNA data was pretty much non-existent—one pair of bone fragments were compared and found not to match. Most of the story was an assurance that the conjunction of names found in the tomb couldn’t merely coincidentally match the names found in the gospels…but they really had to reach to make excuses to turn “Miriamne Mara” into “Mary Magdalene”, and they had one name, this “Judah” kid, that didn’t match the biblical collection at all, so they just flat-out invented an unsupported tale of Jesus having a son. Flogging a link between some ossuaries stored in a warehouse (which did not look at all secure) for twenty years and a known forgery also simply obliterates any credibility the whole shebang might have.

There was a recent ‘documentary’ shown in the UK calling Global Warming a hoax. See the link for a few clips. I could barely get through the first one it was so sensational and filled with bullshit.

Global warming denial is beginning to be quite insulting. Questioning scientific conclusions among your colleagues through a process of peer-review is one thing, attempting to insinuate that the vast majority of scientists the entire world over are greedy, arrogant, lazy, incompetent fools simply trying to scare the population of the world, is another. Especially when the deniers/skeptics are saying these things by perpetuating lies and myths through the media, rather than through science. It’s quite despicable.