The Millenium Project

June 22, 2019

Those whacky chiropractors (22/6/2019

The books of the New Testament were originally written in Greek and the word "chiropractic" is derived from the Greek words for "done by hand", so a perfect use of the word "hyperbole" would be taking one of the stories about Jesus and using it to provide evidence that he practised a modern form of sympathetic magic. Another word from Greek is "hubris" which is equally applicable to chiropractors suggesting that Jesus was an original member of their merry band of spine fiddlers.

I'm an atheist and I find this offensive, but then I find most things that chiropractors do offensive.

Did you think I was joking? (22/6/2019)

Back in April I mentioned that the FDA were doing their best to shut down a crowd called the Non-GMO Project who, for a fee of course, will endorse products which contain no genetically modified ingredients. I mentioned salt, and this raised eyebrows. How could anyone with a picogram of knowledge think that sodium chloride's DNA could be manipulated? Or, more importantly, how could anyone with a working conscience exploit this lack of knowledge to sell something.

You asked for evidence. Here it is. And it's certified gluten-free and made by artisans. I won't go into how mining something that isn't being made any more can be "sustainable sourcing". It might be "The purest salt on Earth" but it's heavily contaminated with bullshit.

I assume this is the same J. Burello, but I could be mistaken.

As Hippocrates said: "Let food be your medicine" (22/6/2019)

Believers in magic are very fond of dragging out this quote from Hippocrates to justify weird diets and other food-based "cures" for whatever ails you. I remember the "Mediterranean Diet" that was supposed to be the healthiest way to eat ever invented, but I usually got blank looks when I asked which of the countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea it had originated in. (Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Israel, Lebanon, (Palestine, if you include Gaza), Syria, Turkey, Albania, Bosnia/Herzegovina, Croatia, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro, Slovenia, Spain, Gibraltar plus a few isolated outposts of countries embedded in other countries.) In my May/June 2019 column for Australasian Science I mentioned a celebrity who was (is?) heavily invested in promoting the "Paleo Diet" where you eat like our Paleolithic ancestors did. But what diet fads did those ancestors have? Tom The Dancing Bug has a suggestion, and maybe it's time for this diet to have another surge of popularity.

See more Tom TDB here

And one last thing (22/6/2019)

See more from Niklas Eriksson here

June 8, 2019

So where was he, is he and will be? (8/6/2019)

My plans for last weekend: Help my daughter move house (she lives about 400 kilometres from my place and my trailer would be useful)

My plans for this weekend: Nothing much.

My plans for next weekend: Hospital on Friday for an age-related exploration requiring a general anaesthetic and an overnight stay.

Reality of last weekend: Wyong Hospital ED to have a suddenly inflamed cyst on my back attended to. We still got all the moving done.

Reality of this weekend: Because the cyst treatment left a hole in my back I have to have it dressed every two days, so off to Oberon hospital this morning (my GP doesn't work Sundays). Two GP visits during the week and more to come.

Reality of next weekend: As I was exposed to measles at Wyong Hospital (thank you, anti-vaxxers) the procedure won't be happening as my immunisation status is unknown and I might be a plague carrier if I become infectious after the incubation period. For quite good reasons the hospital doesn't want anyone with measles near the place. If I'm not spotty and feverish I'll be helping another relative to move house (she lives in the same town as my daughter and I left the trailer there because we knew she would also be moving soon). And I'll probably have to go back to Wyong Hospital for another dressing change.

And speaking of measles and anti-vaccination liars, here is an example of the sort of thing that these creatures find funny.

Hilarious, isn't it?

"Devilled Dogs" isn't just a Betty Crocker recipe (8/6/2019)

May 25, 2019

The vegan mindscape (25/5/2019)

This is not a joke. This is not satire. This was published on a vegan group on Facebook by someone who really believes that sheeps (sic) are "murdered" during transport to wherever they take sheeps (sic) and their fluffy fleeces are tossed onto the side of the road. Why the murdering truckers don't toss the bones and other waste materials away with the wool is a mystery, as is why people who farm sheeps (sic) around where I live cut off the wool regularly and sell it rather than throwing it into the weeds on roadside verges.

It might be a coincidence that a lot of cotton is grown in my state (don't get me started on growing cotton on the driest continent on Earth and how cotton farmers have almost destroyed the country's largest river system by stealing water). When the cotton is being moved around, some of it blows off the trucks. But that can only be a coincidence, right?

I wonder what the vegans would think if they found out it was really cotton by the roads and then someone told them that cotton is one of the most GMOed crops around. This old cartoon seems appropriate.

See more XKCD here

Another unattributable meme from Facebook

I'm only laughing a little bit. No, actually, I'm laughing a lot. (25/5/2019)

You know that replica of Noah's Ark in Northern Kentucky? The one that cost millions of dollars to make and is supposed to be an exact replica of the one that carried Noah and his family and all those animals around. This ark.

Well, it seems that the owners are having a bit of trouble getting some money out of an insurance company and have resorted to the courts. I could of course point out that someone who believes that the Earth is only 6,000 years old is already primed to believe that any insurance company has any intention of paying any claim, but that would be churlish of me.

And what is the disputed claim about? It seems that there was some rain (although not forty days and forty nights of it) and there was some flood damage to nearby roads that the insurance company is refusing to pay for.

Flood damage! I'll repeat that in case you missed it the first time. The owners of a true-to-life replica of Noah's Ark have submitted an insurance claim for flood damage. It's possible that the insurance company is refusing to pay on the quite reasonable grounds that flooding didn't cause Noah any harm so why should this ark be any different. Or maybe they just class this as an Act of God.

Time to recycle another old joke.

And another thing ... (25/5/2019)

I often see atheists ridicule religious believers for not knowing what their religious texts actually say. If you want to make this sort of claim it helps if you have read and understood the texts yourself, otherwise you might commit the Strawman Fallacy (attacking something which is not your opponent's position). Comments on the incident mentioned above reminded me of this, because I have seen reference to the forty days of the Genesis flood. If you actually read the book, it says that it rained for forty days, but it was many months later before the flood waters subsided.

Another "forty" that invites ridicule is the forty years the Israelites spent wandering in the wilderness before getting to the Promised Land. This ridicule is often accompanied by a map showing how close Cairo is to Jerusalem and how hard it would be to take forty years for the trip. Perhaps the ridiculers haven't read Numbers 14:33 ("And your children shall wander in the wilderness forty years") where God decrees that no adult will get to the Promised Land because they haven't behaved properly.

I don't need to point out that as an atheist I don't believe any of these stories, but if you are going to criticise the stories it is essential to know what the stories actually are.

If 20th Century Fox or Marvel want to whinge about copyright they can
seek out whoever posted this to Facebook. It wasn't me.

Speaking of whingers who want things removed ... (25/5/2019)

For reasons that don't matter I don't use Gmail even though I have to have an account to do some Google things (like use an Android phone or have a YouTube account). I sometimes have to check it though and the most recent check told me that a YouTube video had been removed because it violated someone's privacy. A bit of investigation revealed that it was our old friend Patrick Timothy Bolen, spokesarsehole for cancer quacks and dentists who grope their patients and commit insurance fraud. When he was deposed in the insurance fraud matter (the insurance company had refused to pay for a "treatment" which they explicitly did not cover - the dentists sued on the basis that as they had fraudulently used a different item code they should still be paid) he was asked about his education. He seemed to have trouble remembering which schools and colleges he had attended.

Making it even funnier, when Pat was asked for his address he couldn't remember that either.

Embarrassed, Pat? Privacy violated? Well, that's tough. I don't really care.

Things change. Get told. (25/5/2019)

If you want to know when this site gets updated (and who wouldn't?) there's a really useful service at visualping.io that will send you an email when differences are detected on this page. I use it and it it doesn't seem to be harvesting email addresses for spammers. There's no privacy issue, because I have no way of knowing who gets reminders about the page or even how many people have subscribed.

I'll give you a hint, though. After entering the page URL and your email address, click on the "Advanced" dropdown, go to the box on the right hand side of the screen and tell it you only want to be notified about major changes. This means you won't be told if I do something small like fix a typo but you will get an email after a full update.

You can click here to see everything that has appeared on the front page over the last 20 years.