A Drunken Madman

Esprit d'Escalier and ECREE

Jason Brown, Bullshitter Emeritus — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:19:30 GMT

I was hanging out on a christian facebook group last night, as you do. The discussion got round to standards of evidence, and "how come you demand strong evidence for the existence of a god when one of your mates could just tell you something and you'd accept it".

The accepted course of action at this point is to raise "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence", or ECREE, and I usually do this along the following lines, though this time, I added a flourish I hadn't added before (in italics):

Look, if a friend called me and said he'd seen a three legged dog walking past, I'd probably accept it with no further questioning. After all, it's a relatively innoccuous claim. It's neither important or unusual. If, however, he told me he'd seen a Tyrannosaurus rex walk past listening to a CD Walkman, I'd want stronger evidence.

Shortly after wards I realised I should have added:

Because who the fuck has a CD Walkman these days?

*sigh*

A win for skepticism - #VoteRachie

Jason Brown, Bullshitter Emeritus — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 02:54:40 GMT

Yes, the campaign to get Dr Rachael Dunlop to the top of the Shorty Awards has borne fruit

Take your clothes off when you dance

Jason Brown, Bullshitter Emeritus — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 03:05:37 GMT

I feel I may need a new category for "ukulele" soon. Diverging from my normal musical fare of Half Man half Biscuit covers, here's a little something from one of the 20th Century's greatest composers, Frank Zappa. No, seriously.

OK, so it's not one of his sprawling catalogue of complex post-jazz and synclavier-classical pieces, but it's still a Zappa song, and one eminently suited to the little 4-stringed soprano ukulele. Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance, from "We're only in it for the money". If you really want the feeling of a master arranger rather than a comedy songwriter, there's rather a nice jazzy instrumental of this on "The Lost Episodes" which flips the song up a peg or two and really gives an idea of how great the melody is.

And yes, I have chords and lyrics for those wanting to join in

Am
There will come a time when everybody who is lonely 
        Bm                               Bm A#m
Will be free to sing and dance and love
Am 
There will come a time when every evil that we know
           Bm
Will be an evil that we can rise above
C7
Who cares if hair is long or short or sprayed or partly grayed
   G                               Em   
We know that hair ain't where it's at
Am                                    D                          G
There will come a time when you won't even be ashamed if you are fat!
            Em
Wah-wah-wah-wah!

(Instrumental/Melodic Vocal):

Am
La La La La La La La La La La La La La La La La 
Bm                       Bm A#m
La La La La La La La La 
Am
La La La La La La La La La La La La La La La La 
Bm
La La La La La La La La 
C7
Deedle deedle dee

(Deedle deedle dee)

Deedle deedle dee

(Deedle deelde dee)
G
Deedle deedle dee

(Deedle deedle dee)
Em
Deedle deedle dee

(Deedle deedle dee)


Am  D  G

            Em
Wah-wah-wah-wah!

(VERSE 2):

Am
There will come a time when everybody who is lonely 
        Bm                                  Bm   A#m
Will be free to sing and dance and love
Am 
There will come a time when every evil that we know
           Bm
Will be an evil that we can rise above 
C7
Who cares if you're so poor you can't afford
                 G                           Em    
to buy a pair of mod a-go-go stretch elastic pants?
Am                                  D  
There will come a time when you can even 
                              G
Take you clothes off when you dance

This can be segued quite nicely into "What's the ugliest part of your body?", which I'll probably do one night after a few beers. Stay tuned.

Belief in Erwin Alber is a form of delusional insanity

Jason Brown, Bullshitter Emeritus — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:49:39 GMT

Let me introduce Erwin Alber. Erwin is an antivaxxer.

he runs a few conspiracy-themed antivax groups on facebook, and occasionally trolls skeptical pages. He's only got one trick though. Are you ready for it? Here it is:

Yes, you read right. Erwin's trump card is a quotation from Dr Herbert M. Shelton, one of the 20th Century's greatest quacks. A quack who didn't merely rip off his patients. Didn't merely make his patients sick, but actually starved his patients to death, and after doing so, continued to practice without a licence, causing yet more death. A man who believed he could cure his own Parkinson's disease though fasting and raw food. It didn't work.

I've been posting this simple response to Erwin's pathetic trolling attempts for months now, and still he persists in trying to use it. Frankly, it's got to the point where I can only conclude that Erwin himself is the one suffering delusional insanity, and that anyone who believes him is frankly as nuts as he is.

So if you spot him, you now know what response to give.

My hectic life

Jason Brown, Bullshitter Emeritus — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 03:48:53 GMT

So, what's been happening?

Lots.

First up, I've been coding again. I've felt the need for creative outlets quite acutely of late. Therefore I cracked open the IDEs and I've got a few projects on the go. Project #1: The Skepticator.

It's a blog and twitter aggregator for skeptical content, and as of this writing, it's feeding 63 64 skeptical feeds, with well over 1000 individual posts. It uses the TwitterVB API and the Argotic Syndication Framework under the covers, and is written in ASP.NET/C#. It also has its very own Combined Feed. Soon, it'll have custom feed capabilities, searchability and a whole load more content, and since it updates itself every 15 minutes or so, the content is *always* fresh. Go check it out.

Project #2 is a web-based twitter client called CHRPY, which is in private beta at the moment and is complex in an entirely different way to Skepticator - when that goes public I'll link it here.

The remaining projects are still kinda secret, though I can say that Sydney Pub Guide may be resurrected from the undead very soon indeed

Work is changing too. I've resigned my current job at Fujitsu and I'm off to pastures greener at Gen-i, a SharePoint consultancy in the Sydney CBD. More on that after I've started.

Skepticism? Well, apart from skepticator, Stop The AVN continues in force. The AVN has threatened closure and the anti-vaxxers are still vocal. In the UK, 10:23 was wildly successful, and I organised an adjunct event here in Sydney (though I didn't even get there myself due to illness and hecticness). The online campaign to win DrRachie a Shorty Award was also very successful, winning Rachael Dunlop the popular vote, with the panel votes to be announced imminently.

Atheism? Maybe a little less hectic, but nevertheless the upcoming Mardi Gras and Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne consume a certain amount of attention.

Everything else? Gigs. Music. Lots. Sydney Ukulele & Beers Meetup is ticking along, Keeping Two Chevrons Apart continues, and some recent good gigs (Jane's Addiction, The Cribs) have got me fired up for music.

It's a lot. Is anyone surprised that I don't blog much?

RSS Feed is now on FeedBurner - please update your readers

Jason Brown, Bullshitter Emeritus — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 04:23:20 GMT

Just a quick notification about this blog's RSS feed - it's now on Feedburner via the following address

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ADrunkenMadman

I am Sean The Blogonaut

Jason Brown, Bullshitter Emeritus — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 01:44:11 GMT

Some of you may be familiar with this man

His name, you may believe, is "Sean The Blogonaut".

Well, I can reveal, yes folks, you heard it here first, that the man in the picture is merely an actor, picked from the cheaper end of a Sydney casting agency's "serious yet handsome" list, in order to carry out my dastardly, pseudonymical plan.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am Sean The Blogonaut.

My macchiavellian scheme would have worked, too, were it not for some meddling kids.

I am, in the end, particularly proud of my achievements while writing as "Sean". A Monthy MIller Award, some fine work with Mercy Ministries and an opportunity to take a stab at the Australian Vaccination Network being just some of the fun things I was able to do once in-character.

Ultimately, the thing I'm most proud of, though, is the character development I achieved, through a randomising Perl script which chose character traits from a database. I'm particularly pleased that it spat out the words "steam" and "punk", allowing me to invent an entirely new genre of fantasy from, let's face it, some rather far fetched ingredients! When it spat out "man crush" and "comedy singer", followed by "Twitter", I knew I'd hit gold.

However, now that I am unmasked it is clear that I cannot continue. I will therefore be selling the entire character on eBay within the next couple of days, and expect to raise a handsome bounty with which I can retire to a private island somewhere in the Northern Hebrides.

UPDATE: It has come to my attention that a certain alleged "comedy musican" is also claiming to have invented the "Sean" character, as well as some sort of crazy cat lady from the other side of the continent. I disavow any connection and condemn these actions in the strongest terms. There's also some little-known "Christine" person, but only a fool would believe that connection.

Mike's $10,000 is quite safe

Jason Brown, Bullshitter Emeritus — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 06:31:13 GMT

As ever, in the cause of promoting skeptical thought and critical thinking while on the internet, I've been out there on the tubes causing trouble. The campaign to put Dr Rachael Dunlop into the lead of the Shorty Awards Health category has been very successful. Very successful indeed.

Of course, during the making of this very successful campaign, it's become clear that not only is Mike Adams a quack, but he's also a mass-email marketer and colluder with big business, a supporter of Scientology and their front-group CCHR, and a general butthurt whining hypocrite.

He's also the originator of a $10,000 "challenge" to anyone who can prove that the H1N1 Swine Flu vaccine is safe.

Thing is, as with all things HealthRanger, once you scratch the surface a little, the challenge is revealed to be an impossible to meet rhetorical trap designed to portray Mike Adams as a crusader willing to put his money where his mouth is, and the scientific community as unwilling to back the vaccine.

Here's a few of the problems with this challenge

Firstly, $10,000 is not a large amount of money as a reward for a challenge which would likely cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to meet

I quote from Mike's conditions:

A scientific paper, published in a peer-reviewed medical journal, describing the results of a minimum of two Phase III trials structured as randomized, placebo-controlled scientific clinical trials of an FDA-approved H1N1 vaccine currently in distribution, carried out on a minimum of 1,000 people (for statistical significance) for a duration of at least 90 days

So we're looking at a total prize pool of $10 per participant, possibly less, for a 90-day trial. This is pretty small beer.

Secondly, Mike's demands cannot be met within the bounds of medical ethics. A doctor undertaking the type of study that Mike demands would be struck off for malpractice, and would deserve it.

Mike demands a Phase III placebo controlled trial. Inherent in these trials is the application of a placebo to a proportion of the participants, who will subsequently be exposed to disease risk in order to test efficacy. Medical ethics rightly state that exposing placebo groups to severe medical risk is unacceptable. Utterly unacceptable. Mike knows this, Mike's been told this repeatedly. Still, he uses it, because his followers are ignorant of this fundamental ethical restriction. Here's how vaccines are actually tested. Don't be fooled.

Third, Mike's "conditions" specify long-term side effects. While he appears magnanimous in only demanding one year of followup, this is still a significant cost, and the vaccine has not existed for a year yet, as Mike himself admits

Because vaccine promoters describe the vaccine as "safe enough for children and expectant mothers" and because vaccine promoters insist that there are absolutely no risks of long-term side effects, the study must demonstrate that the vaccine causes no statistically significant increase in side effects of any kind for a minimum of one year following the vaccine injection. You might think this is impossible to produce since the vaccine hasn't even existed for one year and couldn't have possibly been tested to see whether it produces neurological side effects in the one-year timeframe. That is exactly my point.

However, the vaccines that the H1N1 vaccine is based on certainly have been tested for longer. But Mike doesn't permit this as part of his conditions. I personally also think that it's likely that should Mike ever be challenged with evidence, the loaded status of "long term" will be employed to best effect, and no money will be paid.

Ultimately though, the ethical hurdle cannot be crossed. Mike's money is entirely safe, and he knows it.

Mike knows full well that this "challenge" is nothing more than a sop to his acolytes. No serious scientist will give a stuff about it, but his credulous audience are lapping it up, and using it as ammunition in internet debates. Luckily, there is a group of part-time internet superheroes who are aware of the fraudulent status of this challenge, and are willing to fight back.

Smoke us a kipper, we'll be back for breakfast.

Help fight pseudo-scientific medical quackery on twitter

Jason Brown, Bullshitter Emeritus — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 03:22:10 GMT

If you have a twitter account, you've probably seen the occasional tweet flow past mentioning the Shorty Awards in the last few days. The Shorties are an independent award for the best short-form content in a number of categories, awarded annually in March.

As you might expect from our friend the internet, alt-med woo-woo, anti-vaccination nutbaggery and pseudoscience are rife, and alt-med quacks are polling high in the #health category. This is not a good thing

Luckily, skeptics to the rescue.

Doctor Rachael Dunlop, heart disease researcher, blogger, podcaster and science-based medicine campaigner, is now the subject of a campaign to take back the #health category for science-based medicine.

So. Here's what you do.

Hit this link.
Enter your vote in the box as per the instructions, for @DrRachie in #health.
Remember to place your own reason after the "because" - votes without a reason are discounted later
Hit "Tweet your vote"
You'll be asked for your twitter credentials. Fill them in and you'll be redirected back to the shorty site
Make sure your vote was accepted
Get your followers to do the same

This last one is important. The current leading quack has nearly three times as many followers as Dr Rachie does at the moment, and is actively campaigning.

It's a small thing, but an important thing.

And don't forget, you can also nominate your own favourite skeptic or health campaigner - more than one nomination in a category seems to be OK, check the rules if in doubt.

Finally, If you have a blog, please blog this and get the word out even further. We're on the way to #1 but we need a margin.

Help us take back the #health category for rational medicine.

[Update 23 Jan 2010: HealthRanger has been disqualified from the awards for vote fraud - a huge number of freshly-minted accounts began voting for Mike Adams soon after Dr Rachie took the lead. Shorty administrators canned his nominations in all categories not that long after. Health Ranger was, however, solidly in the lead in the #sockpuppetry category before his demise. Lulz. Mike's Butthurt reaction and sidewiki commentary can be found here]