Feb 26, 2010: Sean Hannity uses Barack Obama’s meeting with the Secular Coalition to claim that “religious groups, however, have not received this kind of treatment from the Obama White House.”

Mar 2, 2007: Sean Hannity attacks Obama’s minister Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, saying “you’re being accused of being a black separatist church, and thus Obama is being accused by default of being a black separatist.”

There you have it. According to Hannity, Obama gives preferential treatment to atheism AND to the religious views of his Christian minister. It goes without saying that Hannity has lied about both the purpose of the Secular Coalition (it is not an atheist group), as well neglecting to mention that Obama has already met with Pope Benedict, the Dalai Lama, the leading rabbis in America, the president of the Mormon Church and many, many other religious leaders and groups. If Fox News was a news service, Hannity would have been sacked by now. Remember when Dan Rather unintentionally mislead his viewers? He resigned in disgrace. But, you see, Fox News is not a news service; Hannity is performing his duties admirably.

Why denialism is winning: Anne Enke, a woman whose claim to fame is marketing lingerie, comments on the Nature News blog to criticise climate scientists for not knowing anything about climate science. She ends her comment with a statement that sums up the entire denialism fad.

Alas, my job is to communicate the folly, because I have no understanding of real facts.

My Transcendental Moment: a true story

Larger pic (332K) here

Bonus pic: River in a forest, from 8,000 metres

Larger pic (270K) here

Books, books, books at Pulp Fiction

Photograph by Alex of a bookshelf at Pulp Fiction, Brisbane, during author signings.

Cat Sparks and Rob Hood, Brunswick St Mall

Pre-ceremonial nibbles and drinks are as much a part of the ritual as the awards themselves.

Scott Westerfeld wins for Leviathan

Scott Westerfeld accepts the prize for Best Young Adult Novel.

Paul Haines makes history

The shadow of Paul Haines steps up to accept an unprecedented tied win for two of his own stories.

Reading Rosaleen Love

A great idea from the convenors: between winners, reading short excerpts from great Australian works that predate the Aurealis Awards. This reading was from Rosaleen Love’s “The Total Devotion Machine.”

Justin Ackroyd, golden boy

Justin Ackroyd, bookseller extraordinaire, accepts the Peter McNamara Convenor’s Award for services to the speculative fiction community.

The full 2010 Aurealis Award results can be found here. More photos from the weekend, not Aurealis-related, after the fold. Read the rest of this entry »

According to the standard story, the “Global Financial Crisis” caused stock markets to crash in 2008/9. Ideological activists have claimed that the New York Stock Exchange lost nearly half its value from May 2008 to the following March. This story is a lie. Data from November 21, 2008 to January 2, 2009 shows a huge rise in the NYSE index.

If the agitators were correct, then this graph should have gone down by 50%.

The data set appears after the fold. Please don’t look. Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote about this as one of the Five Easy Lies. And now, courtesy of the blog Pharma Analysis, I can show a real-life example.

Imagine a drug company marketing an opiate on the basis that it has a long half-life. This is a major selling point because most existing opiates lose effect after 3-6 hours, resulting in breakthrough pain. If a drug can provide a more lasting effect, this would be a huge competitive advantage. The drug company is Purdue Pharma. The drug is Oxycontin.

Sounds good, right? But Purdue’s success story has just turned very, very sour as Purdue has agreed to a US$ 634 million settlement for misleading marketing. While there is a lot more to the case than a single graph, this sums it up beautifully:

This is the graph Purdue used in its marketing. You may notice that the y-axis is a log scale. Clinicians and people using opiates are not interested in a log-scale for blood levels of a drug because it compresses a ten-fold difference in concentration into a single unit difference in graph height. If you graph it in a way that is meaningful, you would use a linear scale. And this is what it would look like:

The story gets better here. This reminds me that I’ve been meaning to post my own example of recent dubious drug marketing — an example I use in my teaching. Soon, I promise.

Hat tip to Bad Science.

An observation on the history of accountability in American politics and media:

(Albert Fall’s $100,000 fine would be worth about $1.2 million today.)

Addendum: Ack! My brain was getting tired when I saved the picture and I put the Watergate burglary in 1974 and Nixon’s resignation 4 years later. Corrections have been made.

I found the Back to the Future trilogy on special; watching it reminds me just how good the first film was. The opening shot is one of the best put to film, the dialogue crackles, the plot runs like wildfire, and it remains one of the very few time travel films that fully exploits its premise. If it was not for the near-ubiquitous imposition of the song “Power of Love,” it would be just about perfect. The second film is a noble failure, and the less said about the third the better.

The main source of the comedy in the original film is the cultural frisson between 1985 and 1955. That’s a thirty year difference. And yet here we are in 2009, nearly 25 years after the first release of the film, and the culture of 1985 does not seem all that removed from our own. There are still malls and skateboards and video cameras and portable music players ¹ and terrorists with rocket launchers and housing developments where the population has outstripped the infrastructure, and I can’t see things changing much more in the next 5 years.

The 50s are a much greater cultural distance from the 80s, it would seem, than the 80s are from today.

Paul Krugman of the New York Times writes about extending Godwin’s Law. In the comments thread one Jim Hansen says:

With all of the comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis, young people are beginning to think that the allied powers defeated Nazi Germany because Germany had too much health care.

Parfait.