I’m quite busy today! Which is why I’m posting at about 6am. This used to be standard practice, being up at this hour, when I was working on completing one M.Ed, writing a proposal for another and doing a Grad Dip by distance ed… oh, and WORKING FULL TIME.
But thankfully things have changed, but the nuttery of being up before the sun still amuses me. It also appears to amuse the pets in my household too, who are peering at the screen, the brightest thing in the house. The screen, however, seems to feature even more chunky-spread weirdness…
On the subject of ‘nuttery’ -- I’m starting to think I should write something at length, rather than just linking to Gia Milinovich’s Blog on 2012 -- from CNN, “Apocalypse in 2012? Date spawns theories, film“:
One barometer of the interest in 2012 may be the “Ask an Astrobiologist” section of NASA’s Web site, where senior scientist David Morrison answers questions from the public. On a recent visit, more than half of the inquiries on the most popular list were related to 2012.
“The purveyors of doom are promoting a hoax,” Morrison wrote earlier this month in response to a question from a person who expressed fear about the date.
…The hype also has mainstream Maya scholars shaking their heads.
“There’s going to be a whole generation of people who, when they think of the Maya, think of 2012, and to me that’s just criminal,” said David Stuart, director of the Mesoamerica Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
“There is no serious scholar who puts any stock in the idea that the Maya said anything meaningful about 2012.”
Ben Radford wrote a little about it in passing that you can check out too, at Live Science. Oh, speaking of Gia’s blog, I noticed that her husband Brian Cox is to be congratulated -- new show soon out! From The Guardian -- “BBC orders three new science series”:
Seven Wonders of the Solar System is also scheduled for 2010, and will presented by particle physicist professor Brian Cox. The five-part BBC2 series, which will look at scientific “wonders” from the giant ice fountains of Enceladus to the liquid methane seas of Titan, will use CGI to transform still pictures into moving images.
Oh, despite Orac’s post featuring this in the comments a little while back -- “Jenny McCarthy might have some competition” -- looks like no one else is reporting on this little oddity:
Yes, Erin Brockovich, she of the movie that Julia Roberts forgot to mention in her Oscar-win speech (shiny award is distracting!), has gone anti-vaccination… with the HPV vaccine. Naturally, the comments for that particular little blog-post are filled with anecdotal hysteria and I’ve yet to see much more on her strange little comparison / combination of Gardasil and Hexavalent Chromium. I’d like to see more investigations on this.
But you can’t contain the strange, can you? I recall this being discussed on an episode of Australian TV show ‘Enough Rope’ a little while back: ‘Attenborough reveals creationist hate mail for not crediting God‘.
Sir David Attenborough has revealed that he receives hate mail from viewers for failing to credit God in his documentaries. In an interview with this week’s Radio Times about his latest documentary, on Charles Darwin and natural selection, the broadcaster said: “They tell me to burn in hell and good riddance.”
Telling the magazine that he was asked why he did not give “credit” to God, Attenborough added: “They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator.”
Couldn’t find the Denton interview online, but here’s another one that featured on the same topic on YouTube:
You know what? Sod this, I’m going back to bed for a bit longer. Maybe when it’s a bit sunnier, I’ll feel up to walking out the front door…
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Yeah – the HPV vaccine sure had a bunch of hysteria associated with it – The Huffington Post had a great summary about a group calling themselves ‘Judicial Watch’ and their bullshit: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arthur-allen/the-hpv-vaccine-debate_b_51542.html
The release, in which Judicial Watch claimed that its perusal of adverse event reports from the vaccine also turned up cases of autoimmune disease and fetal damage in vaccinated pregnant women, produced a minor media splash, with articles in The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times. The story didn’t get play in most other outlets, probably for this simple reason: It’s bullshit.
…Judicial Watch got it completely wrong in its analysis of 1,637 consecutive reports from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS).
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