The Power of Ignorant Thinking
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Author Archives: gmcdavid
Overview of Denialism
From Hello Scienceblogs
Denialism is the employment of rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of argument or legitimate debate, when in actuality there is none. These false arguments are used when one has few or no facts to support one’s viewpoint against a scientific consensus or against overwhelming evidence to the contrary. They are effective in distracting from actual useful debate using emotionally appealing, but ultimately empty and illogical assertions.
Examples of common topics in which denialists employ their tactics include: Creationism/Intelligent Design, Global Warming denialism, Holocaust denial, HIV/AIDS denialism, 9/11 conspiracies, Tobacco Carcinogenecity denialism (the first organized corporate campaign), anti-vaccination/mercury autism denialism and anti-animal testing/animal rights extremist denialism. Denialism spans the ideological spectrum, and is about tactics rather than politics or partisanship.
From Hello Scienceblogs
Debian 1. Ubuntu 0.
Irish Class, Monday night, January 25, 2010
Irish Class, January 25, 2010
Rang Gaeilge, 25ú lá mí Eanáir 2010
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Fadas: áéíóúÁÉÍÓÚ
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This is late, partly because of the sheer volume of the work, and partly because of
family developments that have taken
a lot of time.
Wes was sick two weeks ago, so his class did not meet. I stayed home. This was really a mistake, because
some of my classmates did turn up and joined Will’s class for
the evening. There they started reading a Sean
Mac Mathúna Story. Will has split the story into four parts, and the combined class worked through the
first part that evening. My classmates like it so that they wanted to come back for the rest of the story, so
I have to catch-up. It is worth it.
Geoffrey Burbidge, R.I.P.
From Cosmic Variance:
Geoffrey Burbidge passed away yesterday afternoon. He was a giant in the field of astronomy and cosmology, and (despite himself) was one of the main contributors to the establishment of the standard Big Bang model of cosmology. He was perhaps best known for his work in stellar nucleosynthesis (encapsulated in the B2FH paper: Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler, and Hoyle 1957, Rev. Mod. Phys. 29, 547), which in some sense established that we are all made of “star stuff”. There are few research papers that are widely known simply by their author’s initials (especially over 50 years later); the paper even has its own wikipedia page. (Off hand, the only other one I can think of is EPR.)
….worth a thousand words
Is it a language, or not??
Jings! Crivens! Most Scots dinnae think Scots is a language at all.
Both of my parents were linguists, so I regard this, as the Buddhists say, as “a question tending not to edification.”
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 