Happy Halloween, Beware of Demon Candy

Happy Halloween everyone.

I found this clip on Darren Brown’s blog this morning. It appears that a group of Christian fundamentalists are warning America about “the potential for curses to be passed through candy during Halloween”. You even have to avoid the stores because demon’s cannot differentiate between store bought candy and the spoils of Trick or Treating.

Clearly the woman responsible for this is nuts and I am glad to see the reporter had someone from the Christian community on the program to point that out.

Oh, and watch out for demon infused candy canes at Christmas.

P.Z. Myers on Non-Prophets Radio

I just finished listening to the Non Prophets podcast from October 10th of this year. P.Z. Myers, of the science blog Pharyngula, was on as a guest. The topics covered Bill Maher’s award at the AAI convention, Maher’s crazy ideas on vaccination, Ray Comfort’s forward for “The Origin of Species” and some of the sexual scandals in the church.

You can download a copy here . It’s well worth listening to.

I Am No Fan Of Glenn Beck’s

As the title says, I am not a fan of Glenn Beck and so I particularly enjoyed these two videos. One is from the youTube user Thunderf00t, who I have mentioned in the past. The second is from another youTube user, The Liberal Viewer. The best I can tell, he is an ACLU lawyer working out of Sacramento CA, and he makes quality political commentary videos.

And the Nobel Prize in Economics goes to…

Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson have been awarded the 2009 Nobel prize in economics.

Ostrom (USA) is the first woman to ever win the prize and was awarded half for “her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons.”

Williamson (USA) was cited for “his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm” and awarded the remaining half.

First Line of Genesis is Likely a Mistranslation

In a recent work Professor van Wolde concludes that the first line of Genesis may in fact be a mistranslation from the original Hebrew.

Excerpt:

Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis “in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth” is not a true translation of the Hebrew.

She claims she has carried out fresh textual analysis that suggests the writers of the great book never intended to suggest that God created the world — and in fact the Earth was already there when he created humans and animals.

Full Article

Pumpkins for Geeks

Some friends of mine from high school carved these gems over the weekend.

The 2009 Nobel Prize Winners

As you are no doubt aware, the Nobel Prize winners were announced this past week. The most talked about award was the Nobel Peace prize which was awarded to President Obama. The official citation was for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” but the decision has a number of people wondering if it was warranted given his relatively short time in office.

But perhaps that is a discussion best left for another post. Today, I just wanted note the recipients of the remaining awards (the Economics prize will be announced on the 12th of October).

The physics prize went to three American researchers for their work on fiber optics and light sensor technology which were key to the advancement of information technology. Half of the prize was awarded to Charles Kao. The remaining half was split between Willard Boyle and George Smith.

The chemistry prize was split equally between Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (UK), Tomas Steitz (USA) and Ada Yonath (Israel) for their studies on the structure and function of the ribosome.

The Americans also did well in the field of medicine. The prize was split between three Americans, Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and J. Szostak for their contributions to the understanding of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase.

Herta Muller (Germany) was the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature for her poetry and frankness of prose depicting the landscape of the dispossessed.

If you’re interested, detailed write ups of the academic background for each of the awards this year can be found on the Nobel Fountain’s website.

Scientific ignorance collects itself into a single site: The Creation Wiki

It appears that a group of creationists have decided to collect all of their inaccurate and anti-scientific claims in a single place, The Creation Wiki. Depending on your mood this could make for some hilarious reading.

And the distortions don’t just stop at scientific fact. Check out the article “Anticreationist youTube Debate Tactics” for their version of the facts surrounding a number of arguments between prominent atheists and creationists on youTube. I almost spit out my coffee when i read their speculations that the atheists have an inside man at youTube keeping the creation truth down.

Ray Comfort’s Biased Introduction to Darwin

It’s been brought to my attention that (young earth) creationist Ray Comfort has decided to give away copies of Darwin’s seminal work, “On the Origin of Species” [1]. The book is to be given out on college campuses across the US to commemorate the 150 year university of the book’s publication. There is only one catch. It’s an abridged copy complete with a brand new 54 page introduction laced creationist propaganda.

I had a look at Comfort’s introduction, which is available here. As you might expect, Comfort pulls out some vintage stuff; “a book can’t spontaneously form, therefore evolution is wrong”, “all us dumb scientists think everything came about after nothing exploded”, and even that old timeless classic “Hitler was motivated by evolution”.

This whole endeavor stinks of an attempt to get creation onto university campuses or into public schools. I suspect that in the next few weeks we’ll learn of plans to donate a number of these copies to various public schools.

Comfort is claiming the original text has been left unaltered and that he hasn’t inserted commentary throughout it. I would love to verify this and so want to get a look at the actual volume they give away. If you’re back to school, and happen to run into this giveaway, please grab me a copy and we can work something out for shipping.

[1] On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

The Kelvin Water Dropper

Today I present another great stumble upon find. It’s a demonstration of something called a Kelvin Water Dropper. It exploits tiny charge imbalances that occur in the distribution of the H+ and H30- ions in the water and a subsequent positive feedback loop in the metal conductors. Eventually enough charge builds up at the metal balls producing such a high voltage difference that it the air’s dielectric properties break down and the sparking occurs.

A full explanation for the experiment can be found here.