Well, thanks to the scienceblogs.com blogs I have come across another batch of crackpot interpretations of science. Yay.

Today it is the turn of the Respectful Insolence blog to provide entertaining links. Recently there was a news item about how doing 16 – 17 hours of housework a week reduced the chances of breast cancer. In itself this is fairly innocuous and was picked up by pretty much all the UK news media. As with most “popular science” type news items the detail of the study was heavily glossed over and the conclusions were given a few PR-spins but nothing drastic.

Thankfully, Respectful Insolence gives an excellent roundup of the mis-understanding this has caused, nearly every one being the result of people not reading as far as the published abstract but picking and choosing the bits they wanted to champion their cause, no matter how crackpot (it is reassuring to see this lunatic describes himself as a “Christian Libertarian”). Read the Respectful Insolence article, it really is funny – and to balance it with a more thoughtful outlook read the blog post on palliative care.
Also, shame on the BBC. Near the bottom of their article it states:

The international authors said their results suggested that moderate forms of physical activity, such as housework, may be more important than less frequent but more intense recreational physical activity in reducing breast cancer risk.

And it is from that the BBC extracted it’s headline “Housework cuts breast cancer risk” rather than the more accurate “Moderate physical activity cuts breast cancer risk” – but where would be the news in that?

Technorati Tags: Bad Science, Nutcase, Breast Cancer, Science, Health Care

Yes, I know. Sorry for another Dawkins’ blog post. Anyway, today Richard Dawkins made quite an interesting post regarding Saddam Hussein’s execution on the Guardian commentisfreee blog. I suspect this is an aspect of the execution very few people have given any thought to so far.

Technorati Tags: Saddam Hussein, Richard Dawkins, Philosophy, Morals.

Well, it seems my last aside on this was much too hasty. Much, much too hasty. (In fact, I think I need lots of iterations of much so just accept the fact I should have waited).

I thought the End of the World in 2007 and 2000 – 2700lb leg press claims were funny enough to deserve their own little comment. I should have had a more indepth look and found the real level of insanity this covered. This man is insane. There is no other term to use, and the worrying thing is that so many people follow his word as if he does actually have a hot line to God.

This is the news item which sparked the recent round of web commentary on him, and for me to go into details about his blatant insanity would take more server space than this blog will ever be allocated.

Following up quite reasonable requests that if Mr Robertson is aware of impending terrorist attacks, “shouldn’t he inform the government like all good citizens are required” (or be prosecuted as an accomplice) and “why are an omnipotent, omniscient divine being’s messages always so vague and garbled?” there is a good blog post where Mr Roberson comes clean and admits God forced him to make the statements. At least that post is meant to be funny. The evangelical lunatics are trying to be serious!

What a scary world.

I found this interesting quote on the Pagan Prattle Online web thingy (http://www.prattle.net/) – about Pat Robertson (Evangelical American): “A detailed timetable, 3.5 year Great Tribulation: Apr, 2004 – Sep, 2007, indicates that we are already in the midst of experiencing God’s wrath, which started with three comets hitting the earth last summer (must’ve missed that somehow) and that the Christians will be raptured by the autumn. Marilyn Agee agrees and, in her book Exit: 2007: The Secret of Secrets Revealed, places the Rapture on September 13th 2007.”

Fantastic eh? Bet you can’t wait. Before you get your hopes up, this is the person who claims his energy shakes mean he can do 2000lb leg presses and that 2700lb is “not nearly as hard” as some people make out….

It is almost enough to make me wonder about the state of psychiatric health care in the US….

First off, I am sorry. I had hoped that I would be able to avoid blogging on either Dawkins or religious nutcases again today. I have failed.

By chance, I found a link saying Richard Dawkins was BBC Man of the Year 2006, which I found very odd as I hadn’t noticed it anywhere else (and a general search of Google or the BBC does not provide this either). This seems to be an American Buddhist related website which found a link to a blog written by William Crawley, who works with BBC Northern Ireland and had put together his own list of “Person of the Year.” The Integral Options website seems somewhat scathing of Dawkins but nothing off the rails or anything and about 50% of the population don’t like him anyway. 🙂

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Today I discovered a “small” problem with my digital camera, which is an otherwise fantastic Kodak EasyShare Z650. In some ways this is good as it will stop me blogging on ID and Religion…..

Today was a fairly overcast winters day but a lot of the colours were fantastic and it was as bright and sunny as could be expected. Now, walking through Stourhead gardens (see map) would normally be a wonderful chance to get photographs of scenery, plants and the like.

Another great advantage of going to Stourhead today (with the weather etc) is that the normal busy site should be sparsely populated (and it was).

All of this would, in normal circumstances, combine to make the day ideal for some wintery photography. I am not saying the vibrant summer colours would be possible, but I was hoping that I could take some pictures which would show the weather off to best effect.

Oddly this wasn’t really always the case.

For “reference” on the right is a picture taken at Stourhead in Jul 06 with a Vivatar V3935 Digital Camera (low end at best). You can see some of the wonderful colour and the vibrant scenery which go together to make Stourhead a wonderful place to visit.

I wasn’t for one moment expecting to get the same results today!

Now, as I said, it was overcast and light levels were not brilliant. The Z650 is a good little camera with a variety of settings and a great zoom function (10x optical) – which is the main reason I bought it. Like most “affordable” digital cameras, it has a built in flash which is housed in a little unit at the top of the camera’s main body. This flash is good for general use and fill flash functions but has a tendency to cause red eye pretty much everytime you take an indoors photo of a face.

The third picture was taken in Nov, with the same Kodak Z650 as I had today and shows off some of the colours around the lake area.

Today however the camera was certainly “underperforming.”

A continuing problem I have with it is trying to get it to focus on anything with a lot of red in the picture. It just refuses to do this. My initial suspicions put this down to the camera using a green light to determine focus, and when it is a red-dominant subject it causes problems – but I am far from sure. Given the time of year, Holly berries make wonderful images but to take one, I have to find something about the same distance away, focus on that and then move the camera to the berry. This is very odd to say the least and was certainly noticable today (although there were a lot less “red” things around.

The main hurdle today was the camera’s difficulty getting the correct exposure. Because of the overcast natural light, the camera wanted to use flash where ever possible (even on long distance landscape shots) and seems to have adjusted itself, expecting the flash. On the distance shots, everything came out underexposed (see picture on the left for example) or when manual exposure was used the only things which got results ended up with shutter speeds which could have been measured in days rather than hundredths of a second. This in turn, meant the slightest movement on either my behalf or the subject, meant full motion blur as if it was a formula 1 track (see picture on right for example). Trying to find the “happy medium” was far from easy and (IMHO of course) seemed to defeat the purpose of having a point and shoot camera.

The problem was much harder with moving targets – the following are some examples of swans and were the result of a lot of experimentation with the settings:

Anyway – I still like the camera, this is just a new limitation I need to be aware of. There were lots of good photographs taken!

Sorry to make multiple posts from a single site but I came across something which has really made me giggle. Previously I mentioned the angelqueen.org web forum and after the ID post (which, to be fair, became a little more balanced towards the end) I found some more posts which must be pure humour. Under the post title “No Religion and an end to war…” the site members are complaining about a new paper article which has admittedly rehashed the old chestnut of getting a bunch of scientists together and asking them to predict the future. The answers the scientists give are pretty much always the same, year after year. Blame newspapers not science!

Anyway, reading down the comments you see an number of obvious ones but then this one: (as you can imagine poor old Richard comes under a bit of bashing on various religious sites – but I am sure he expects it)

What do you think Richard Dawkins would do if you took him into a full-on exorcism and he heard demonic voices speaking through the possessed person, levitation of objects, etc?

How would he rationalise that? I’m interested to understand the workings of his mind/soul if he was presented with overwhelming proof of the supernatural.

Great isn’t it? “Proof of the supernatural” really tickled me. Strangely I suspect any one reading this will fall into one of two camps. You will either read it and laugh at the prospect of “proving” the supernatural or you will shake your head at me for not believing in the supernatural. Strange how the world can be black and white sometimes…

Also (and nearly worthy of it’s own aside), remembering about how Christianity teaches compassion and kindness (forgiveness etc), this comment by some one under the name ZAROVE made me giggle: (pasted verbatim from forum)

Dawkins wudl retend the exocrsism didnt eixst, ro at leats elements didnt. IE, the voices wher ejust the poduct of mental illness, and no objects levitated.

I have friends hwo rewerite Hisotry all the itme, so it fits into what they’d prefer to beleive.

By the way, for the Americans who don’t know any better, the Guardisn is liberal trash…

Great isn’t it?

Technorati Tags: Catholicism, Religion, Richard Dawkins, Insanity, Madness, Philosophy

Under the Disability Discrimination Act (1999 & 2004 amendment) I can be prosecuted (alright, I admit it is unlikely) if my web sites can’t be accessed by people with impairments. (For example, a webpage must be OK for software that reads out the content for the blind. It can’t base navigation on colours that colourblind people can’t distinguish.)

I happen to regard the sites that I’ve got some input into as pretty useful. Sadly, I can’t really flatter myself that they are a matter of life or death to anyone.

So how is it that I could be prosecuted if a blind person can’t read the web site, when I can’t find a single item of dispensed or over-the-counter medicine (MEDICINE, that was, not sweets or makeup or fabric softener) where the crucial instructions are written in more than 7 point text?

7 point text might as well be invisible ink as far as I am concerned. I genuinely cannot see the text, unless I shine stage lighting on it and squint. And I don’t even wear glasses.

Does the DDA not apply to anything where it might matter? I can’t think of any circumstances where misreading our websites might injure someone – unless they read them backwards and act on perceived Judas priest-style secret messages. On the other hand, I am sure everyone could think of several ways in which failing to read crucial information on food or medicine could lead to serious injury or death.

Technorati Tags: Disability Discrimination Act, DDA, Disability, Discrimination, Law, legislation, Society

While, generally speaking, the Catholic church does not really favour ID, as a result of a quick google (which incidentally may not be better than Technorati – more on this another time) I came across this forum of insanity (Angelqueen.org – pagan-esque name notwithstanding it’s tag line is “For Purity and Tradition in Catholicism”). Basically it is a long winded diatribe titled “DETHRONING THE MONKEY GOD: Catholics, Intelligent Design & Darwin’s Theory.” With a title like that, need I say any more?

Technorati Tags: Intelligent Design, Catholicism, Religion, Evolution

As previously mentioned (albeit obliquely) Technorati is still acting strange. For example, the tag Castles apparently has no blog posts stored in Technorati but there has been at least 2 posts a day for the last thirty days. Does this make sense to anyone? If you don’t believe me (or things are working now) there is a screenshot available. Also, I know it isn’t a fair comparison but Google found over 100,000 hits (it wasn’t a search for “tags” though).

Technorati Tags: castles, Technology

Now, this blog has turned a bit anti-religious of late and I am not sure what has caused that. Maybe it is a seasonal influence as the more “devout” try to use this time of year to convince those of us who just want a few days off work to watch TV to appreciate the origination of the holiday. Well, for them I say “unlucky.”

By chance – while I was wondering why Technorati hadn’t registered one of the previous posts here, but had a newer one – I clicked on the Belief tag page and for some reason the “5 hours ago” post (which was listed as the most recent, when mine was 1 hour ago) pointed to a blog post made in 2005 on Nick’s Sanctuary. An amazing example of Technorati’s technical insanity.

Anyway, enough of this, curiosity got to me about this blog (if you read the above link you will see why) and I was intrigued as to what was being written today. This curiosity was rewarded with an insight into how people wrestle with the idiosyncrasies of Christian doctrine, often ending up with nothing more than their own opinion of what is, or isn’t correct.

His most recent blog entry, although overall positive and uplifting highlights some of the odd (to an atheist) problems theists wrestle with. As an example:

Over the past few days I have been very worried about a couple of things, which were leading me to feeling trapped and made me fear I was being sent down a road I did not wish to travel. I worried that I might have no choice or as a dear friend of mine once put it, that my only choice might be “eat the poo or don’t eat the poo.” Basically take what you don’t want or go hungry. In the end it was just paranoia and nothing came of it… but I had been so depressed by the concept that I had sat up in prayer for an hour in the middle of the night, voicing my anger and my distress.

I’ve lately been thinking about the passage in Genesis where Jacob physically wrestles God… actually thinking doesn’t nearly describe it, I’ve been obsessing over it. I’ve read it a couple of times and I’ve printed off three different sermons from the Internet concerning it, in the hope of discovering what the personal relevance is for me at this time.

I honestly suspect this is a frame of mind I will never properly understand.

(By the way, the technorati link is still pointing to a 2005 blog as 5 hours old and if you ever come across a post on Agkyra called the Unhelpfulness of Chance it is just an example that the author doesn’t actually understand natural selection or evolution)

Technorati Tags: Belief, Religion, Faith, Atheism, Natural Selection, Philosophy, Technology, Technorati

It seems Ed Brayton’s blog is a source of information that, if it were fiction, would be funny and obviously I needed to add it as an aside here.. There is not a lot I can add to the “Another Lying Faith Healer” blog post that hasn’t already been written. Visit and read it for your self. When you are done, check out the “Sternberg and DI Misrepresenting His Position?” post as well.

Technorati Tags: Faith Healer, Intelligent Design, Religion, Philosophy