Carnival of the Africans #6

Welcome to the sixth edition of the Carnival of the Africans. This month marks my turn to browse the buffet of African science, scepticism and academic blogging, and then to pile my plate high with the tastiest morsels. This blogging carnival was initiated by Michael Meadon of Ionian Enchantment in August 2008 and has grown steadily since then.

I would like to thank all of you who were kind enough to submit your work to me this month, you really made this process a lot easier! I will honor your diligence by covering the work in your blogs first (who said I wasn’t diplomatic?).

I have a lot of ground to cover with this edition of the Carnival, so lets get started, shall we?

First out of the blocks for this month is Dr Spurt from Effortless Incitement. The Doctor introduces us to a new form of “life energy” based pseudoscience as well as taking an in depth look at how a persons moral values can influence their perception of taste.

Owen Swart of 01 and the Universe tackles Homeopathy head on with two excellent posts. In Back to Basics: Homeopathy Owen takes a critical look at the principles behind the practice as well as highlighting the dangers therein, the second post touches on The activities of Jeremy Sherr, I shall come back to this guy later. Owen also highlights the reality behind a newspaper headline declaring the discovery of Life on Mars.

Next up is Ivan at Subtle Shift in Emphasis as he carefully examines the likelihood that Danie Krugel is using a dowsing rod in his quantum location device. This is a thoroughly researched and very entertaining look at the magic behind the man.  Ivan also takes us on a personal journey as he describes how he came to be an atheist.

Amanuensis completes our tour of the submissions for this month as Simon Halliday gives us his take on the neuroscience of love and then rounds out the month with an indepth look at the science which influences how rhesus monkeys make a choice between three kinds of juice.

Richard at Botswana Skeptic begins 2009 with a look forward at a few rational milestones he would like to see achieved during the year and posts a thought provoking article on the death of Christine Maggiore.

Michael kept us enchanted in January with a provocative response to a claim by Matthew Parris that Africa needs God. The comments thread of that post is well worth a read. Mike then gives us a glimpse of how easy it could be to form supernatural beliefs when he describes Richard Neuhaus’ encounter with hypnogogia.

I would like to highlight the response of the South African community to the activities of Jeremy Sherr as I believe that we have come out rather strongly in defense of evidence-based medicine in this case. Sherr came to our attention in mid-January and we were outraged by his peddling of sugar-pills to treat AIDS in Tanzania. Owen Swart, Michael Meadon, Ivan and even myself all wrote about this charlatan. I can only hope that our response helps to shed light on the dangerous and dishonest work which Sherr is doing.

Finally I would like to introduce you to a few new bloggers on the African science/scepticism landscape;

• Rolled I & Neuro-Sly combines highly ammusing commentary with thought provoking subject matter to make for a very promising blog.
• thinktoomuch.net takes a balanced look at our culture.
• andrewdotcoza provides an entertaining and sceptical look at South Africa.

There are a huge number of excellent posts which I have not been able to include in this month’s carnival. The African bloggosphere is teaming with scientific and critical thinking. I hope that having read this post you will click through some of the blogs in the blogroll and discover how deep our batting order goes.

That a wrap folks, if you enjoyed it please join us for February’s Carnival at the Lay Scientist.

Have you all lost your minds?

I love South Africa. I really do. I spent three months on an Israeli kibbutz after grade 12 and I felt a deep disconnection in my heart for every day that went past when I was not in the country of my birth. My family has lived in this country for at least six generations and I am sure that none of them ever heard anything as stupid as what the ANC puppets are vomiting onto our airwaves in the run up to this years’ general election.

First of all we hear high ranking members of the ruling party declaring that judges who find against the honorable Jacob Zuma in court are counter-revolutionaries and drunkards. As Chief Justice Pious Langa points out in his response to the attack on the character of himself and his colleagues; fair and reasonable criticism of the court’s findings are legitimate and acceptable, however, trying to undermine the legal weight of a judicial order by attacking the character of the judges is what is known as an ad hominem argument.

Ad hominem, literally “to the man”, attacks are a specific type of logical fallacy in which the person making the flawed argument tries to counter anothers arguments by attacking the person rather than addressing the argument itself. We seem to be witnessing an awful lot of ad hominem arguments in SA these days, undoubtably the man at the forefront of the crusade to insult anyone who disagrees with Zuma is Julius Malema, the president of the ANC Youth League. Not only have we been subjected to utterly outrageous calls to “kill for Zuma”, and “eliminate” the forces opposing his political agenda and now it seems to be catching on.

The uncontested Free State chairperson of the ANC, Ace Magashule, urged us this weekend to follow Jacob Zuma like Jesus! WTF? Have we completely lost the plot? That’s Jesus over there on the left cuddling a little lamb. Are we actually being asked to blindly support Jacob Zuma, a man who sits idly by and condones Malema’s calls for blood. What Would Jesus Do?

Magashule actually wants the ANC members to sit quietly and do as they are told, or to put it in his own words,

“If you go to the big churches, you will see there are thousands of people, but they are so quiet and disciplined. We also want to be like that. And we want to show unity in the way we follow Zuma.”

We live in a CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY FOUNDED ON SECULAR PRINCIPLES Mr. Magashule. To suggest that people vote how they are told to vote because that’s what pious Christians would do is utterly outrageous! Your comments undermine our political dispensation and you seem to have completely forgotten the tenets enshrined in the most important document in our country (the Constitution, not the Christian Bible);

From the Bill of Rights (ss 15.1); Everyone has the right to the freedom of conscience, religion, thought, belief and opinion. What that means is that if I were a card carrying member of the ANC I could damn well express any opinion I felt like, vote for whomever I wanted to and worship (or not) whichever deity I felt an aliegance to.

Wait, I think I have just noticed a striking resemblance between JZ and JC!

It’s the International Year of Astronomy!

For as long as I can remember I have been absolutely fascinated by the science of astronomy. This year I am in for a special treat as 2009 has been designated the International Year of Astronomy.

The possibilities are endless!

What is Astronomy? Astronomy is the study of the space beyond the earth, as well as happenings within the earth’s upper atmosphere which have their origins in space (these include aurora and meteors). Astronomers study the motions of celestial bodies such as the planets, stars and galaxies, the chemical make up of these bodies and their physical structure. Astronomy draws on many different fields of science such as mathematics, chemistry, geology, physics and biology.

Astronomy is one of the oldest forms of science practiced by people, our ancestors have been looking into the skies and trying to make sense of what they saw there for as long as there have been people. By understanding the motions of the planets, early astronomers could correctly determine the best times to plant and harvest crops. Many celebrations were dependent on a particular phase of the moon or  the position of a specific planet (literally “wandering star”).

The man known as the “father of modern observational astronomy” (amongst other sciences which he revolutionised) is Galileo Galilei. On 25 August 1609 Galileo demonstrated his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers. He had expanded on the work of Hans Lippershey of the Netherlands and created the first instruments which could magnify ground and space based objects by a magnitude of 30 times. This revolutionary step forward allowed Galileo to observe Venus’ phases (like our moon) and he discovered that four moons traveled around Jupiter. He then realised that the Ptolemaic theory (that the earth was the center of the universe and all heavenly bodies, including the sun, revolved around us) which had been accepted up until then was wrong. The image at right is taken from Galileo’s manuscripts and it shows where he first recorded his observation of moons orbiting Jupiter.

We have come a long way since Galileo’s amazing discovery and our understanding of the workings of the universe are far better developed. It is through astronomy that we are able to grasp how we fit into the universe. Four hundred years ago it was believed that the universe and everything within it was created for us, now we are able to appreciate just how insignificant we are in the grand scale of the cosmos. Here is an amazing video which illustrates the size of our planet compared to other celestial bodies.

As Carl Sagan, the great teacher, once said;

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies then people.

Not only does astronomy allow us to learn a great deal about the world around us, it also boasts some of the most incredible beautiful things to look at. The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was launched into orbit around earth in April of 1990 and it has enabled us to see galaxies as far as 13 billion light years away. Wikipedia has an excellent article on the Deep Field image taken by the HST in December of 1995.

During this year I will post regular articles about new discoveries in astronomy, I will also highlight interesting objects which are easy to see in the night sky (from South Africa) and I will occasionally post links to gorgeous photos. Stay tuned!

Dangerous and Stupid!

If you are a regular reader of my blog you will know how I feel about homeopathy. If you are new to my blog, suffice it to say, the fraudulent use of sugar pills to treat dangerous medical conditions really pisses me off! A few months ago I wrote about the Maun Homeopathy Project which is an initiative to provide homeopathic remedies to people suffereing from the stress and trauma of being infected with AIDS in rural Botswana.

Perhaps the placebo effect can have some benefit in treating the psychological difficulties of living with a disease which carries such a terrible stigma in Africa. When I wrote the Maun article I pointed out that my grave concern was (and still is) that prescribing homeopathic remedies to treat stress and trauma would progress to prescription for HI virus and AIDS itself. When Jeremy Sherr went to Tanzania he started telling people that homeopathic remedies can cure AIDS.

I do not want to link to Jeremy’s blog because I do not want him to get a higher google search  ranking then he already has. So I will link to an excellent article by Martin Robins of layscience.net. In this article Martin goes to great lengths to expose Sherr’s fraudulent activities.

Once Sherr caught wind of Martin’s activities he started to censor his website, retrospectively editing out the offending material. Sherr decided to write a whingeing “you can’t test homeopathy like science” reply to Martin’s first article, and Martin then proceeded to annihilate Sherr’s response as well.

What this all boils down to is that Jeremy Sherr is putting peoples lives in danger by offerring them an ineffective course of treatment for a deadly disease. This will almost certainly lead to a death toll Jeremy, don’t you realise that you are putting peoples lives at risk?

Perhaps one of the most shocking aspects of this entire episode is the fact that Sherr is supported by the leading homeopathic organisations in the UK. Gimpy’s blog highligts the fact that the British Homeopathic Association (BHA) and Homeopathic Action Trust (HAT) support Sherr’s activities.

Homeopathic remedies are not a suitable treatment for any real disease. Despite all the noise that homeopaths make about their “alternative” to mainstream medicine being effective it is pure pseudoscience. To offer people sugar pills for HIV/AIDS is lunacy and these people should all be burned at the stake.

The “I’m too lazy to think about it” Argument

This morning I was minding my own business at work, when I overheard a conversation in my (open-plan) office. It went like this;

“Come on, Pastor Naidoo, don’t you know that money is the root of all evil?”

Yes, I work with a pastor, shocking I know, but that is not the point of this post. I thought about it for a moment, surely if money is the source of all evil then before there was money there must have been no evil, right? Normally I try not to speak up about these things in the office, but today I decided to test my luck. I asked the young lady who had made the comment whether or not she had an answer to my question. Her response was;

“Ag Man, We all know you don’t believe in God, but if the bible tells me it’s true, I’m going to believe it because I have faith and you don’t and don’t ask me questions like that. If it’s in the bible it’s true because it is God’s inspiration, I believe in Jesus and you don’t so don’t try to ask me questions like that because I know that you are wrong and you write that blog and anyone can tell me if it’s in the bible it’s true!”

Let me translate;

Whoo, ok, so basically I have had my first chewing out by a religious person since I was about seven and the argument was so much more basic;

“There is no God”

“There is a God”

“There is no God” etc. ad infinitum

Well, how about this Nondi, the next time one of your assertions is challenged in a calm and rational manner, try to answer in kind. As I was unwilling to pursue my argument in that environment I will get it out of my system here, because it’s my blog and I can.

The most striking fact I can think of which would decimate Nondi’s argument is that people have been using various objects in trade, like we use money today, for a very long time. In ancient Rome salt was highly valuable and soldiers were actually paid in salt. In fact the use of barter like methods dates far into our prehistory. Red ochre was traded in Swaziland as far back as 100, 000 years.

The term “Shekel” was used as a unit of weight and currency in Mesopotamia as far back as 3000BC. A “shekel” relates to a specific mass of barley and it could be converted into precise amounts of gold, silver or copper.

Now I’m going to be really, really generous and assume that Nondi was referring to actual, stamped coins when she used the term “money”. Most modern scholars agree that the Lydians were the first people to introduce the use of stamped gold and silver coins in the period between 650 and 600BC.

When does the bible introduce the concept of evil?

In a thought provoking essay on the origins of evil John Meakin points out what we already know the bible says on this matter;

In Genesis 3 we find the account of a being in the form of a serpent who deceived the first woman into disobeying God. Here is the initial account of an evil being who is capable of deceiving the whole world and who is the very embodiment of malevolence throughout the entire Bible—the inspirer of evil in countless persons and situations across all of human history.

I think that makes it abundantly clear what the inspired word of your chosen deity has to say on the matter, don’t you Nondi? Unless I’m missing something here, the bible tells us that a malevolent serpent was the root of all evil. How does that reconcile with your argument? IT DOESN”T!

Next time I ask a reasonable question of any theist, I expect a decent response. Have enough respect for your own beliefs to be able to stand up for them in an intelligent manner or keep your stupid mouth shut. Attacking me or my personal philosophy is only going to make you look like an idiot.