Lies, D@%$ Lies, and Statistics

A Facebook "friend" of mine posted on his Facebook page a link to this article, "Diet drinks "DO help you lose weight!"

Funny, huh? And even funnier when you consider the context: He wrote, "Can't stop laughing. You can find evidence to support about any position. Just Monday I was being told that the huge Chinese study says that plant based diets are the bees' knees, only to get home and find my wife watching a long documentary on how me are built to eat largely meat based diets. So now evil, diet sodas, that supposedly caused weight gain, are better than water for weight loss... go figure. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2640557/Diet-drinks-DO-help-lose-weight-Study-finds-theyre-effective-water-alone.html.

I followed the link and glanced at the study. Sure enough, it was funded by the American Beverage Association. I'm probably not the only person who would be surprised if that group found water to be better than soft drinks!

I mean, give me a break! Here is a perfect example of the kinds of advertising---because this whole study is obviously just another form of advertising---and some real, scientific, unbiased studies---are misrepresenting facts, making conclusions not founded in reality, and messing with people's minds.

Is it any wonder no one trusts scientists, doctors, the government, or any of their work any more?

So, I'm going to be writing in coming days about study design, statistics, and so-called "science reporting."

Comic Relief

I love Bloody Mary from South Pacific. The comic relief isn't just to be funny, though: it has to advance the plot, bring in some conflict, or give some of the back-story.

(And they even got Alec Baldwin to do the "Nothin' Like a Dame" song:

One Enchanted Evening and This Nearly Was Mine

Sad love songs, full of longing and/or regret:

One Enchanted Evening, sung by Placido Domingo:

This Nearly Was Mine, sung by Brian Stokes Mitchell:

One thing I love about the second song is how themes, in words and melody, are woven in from the first song. Brilliant!

A Gentleman's Guide --- and Annie

I'm looking at classic and current musicals as I'm thinking about structure---because I think structure is going to be the key to a fun, and therefore successful, musical.

Looking at what's on Broadway now: I thought of "A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder" because the cast was on the Tonight Show last Friday performing one of their songs, "I Don't Understand the Poor."

It's funny, but when I looked at more of it on YouTube.com, I was disappointed.

I don't want that kind of stuffy English drawing-room comedy.  And I want some real love, not having to kill 8 people who stand in your way of getting a lordship or whatever.


So then I found this medley of songs from Annie:

And I think this gives the kind of feeling I'm looking for in my story of the Colonel and his wife, in addition to showing the perfect structure for a musical.

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How to Impugn Religious Believers

The headline, "Creationists grow increasingly desperate in feud with Neil deGrasse Tyson," implies much more than it says.

We get it that these "creationists," whoever they are, and whatever their beliefs may be (and I think they probably don't all agree exactly on every detail of belief in the creation of the Earth and humankind), are having some kind of "feud" with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Well, you say, the headline is just to lure us in to reading the whole story, which must be deliciously and delectably full of unpleasant details about these desperate and horrible creationists, who dare to get into a feud with the famous astronomer.

Yeah, that's true. And so the actual article begins:

Creationists want religion out of Cosmos, unless of course it favors them. Each week Neil deGrasse Tyson has been attacked by creationists and the religious right for anything he says that makes religion look bad. In this week’s episode about electricity, Tyson discussed a Christian scientist...

The article goes on to describe the twisted logic of some "Christian fundamentalist" who is outraged, outraged, I say, by the way that Tyson discusses Michael Faraday's religious beliefs.

Not to disparage the Christian fundamentalist who complained about the "Cosmos" treatment of Faraday, nor Alternet writer Dan Arel, but, I've got to say this much:

Please, could everybody just shut up and think about what science entails, and what religion entails: both of them are about discovering truth. Aren't they? And has the truth ever, ever, ever, in the history of our dear Earth, been reached by this kind of verbal attack and counter-attack? No, it has not. What has been reached is a ramping-up of hostilities that has led to unhappiness, discord, and wars. 

Those supposedly religious creationists who "want religion out of Cosmos" and those supposedly scientific rationalists who also want religionists out of everything should all get themselves out of this conversation.

And scientists, or those people who have anointed themselves as a new generation of Darwin's bulldogs, or Tyson's Rottweilers, or whatever they think they are and whatever good they think they're doing, should just knock it off. Don't they realize that by writing these kinds of articles they draw themselves into the debate and look just as foolish and vulnerable as the people they're criticizing.

This kind of argument is a lose-lose for everyone involved.  But here's what's going to happen: These high priests of the new gods of science, in their attempts to hold their sway over the beliefs of the common people, making them sit in the corner losing their religion, are going to be defrocked. Not by the people who write that stupid anti-science stuff in order to hang on by the skin of their teeth to their "creationist" views, but by the common people who refuse to sit in that corner, refuse to lose their religion, and refuse to buy into false dogma from either side.

Some Random Thoughts on Science and Religion

Of course we know there is no conflict between true religion and true science. In fact, there is no difference between true religion and true science. 

Whenever we have two words for the same thing (in this case, our attempt to understand and explain the world), we must ask ourselves why they appear to be different. That is, what is gained by using different words for the same thing, and who is it that gains this?

In the past, religion was ascendant over science, and both were far from explaining much of anything. Arguments about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin were pointless, of course; as were arguments about vapors and ether.

Nowadays, science, or, as I should write this, "science," is ascendant, and it's good at explaining some of the facts of life in this world, but the problem is that it relegates everything it can't explain, and every attempt to explain everything it can't explain, to a very dusty dust-bin which it labels "religion."

I even read an excerpt on Salon.com of a book titled “WeAre Our Brains: A Neurobiography of the Brain, From the Womb to Alzheimer’s” by D. F. Swaab. 

I sincerely hope that this excerpt does not do justice to the major content of the book, because it is jumbled and chaotic and full of contradictions and misunderstandings.  

The Salon headline for the article explains what is happening here: "This is your brain on religion: Uncovering the science of belief."

The implications are obvious: first, your brain "on religion" is somehow defective, and the comparison to the old public-service announcement with the graphic "your brain on drugs" is not a positive one; and, second, that the "science of belief" using the brain's anatomy and the research done by scientists on belief, delusion, and psychological states of mind will somehow shed light on true religion.

The author is obviously confused. To ask why so many people are religious is indeed an interesting question, but he seems to believe that the fact that there are more than 10,000 (according to the author) religions around the world means that God does not exist or that all these religions are incorrect. 

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