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Abuses of Science Political Cartoon Contest
AngryNick writes "The Union of Concerned Scientists has announced a cartoon contest for amateur and professional artists.
'The absurdity of political interference in science is fertile ground for satire,' said Dr. Francesca Grifo, Director of the UCS Scientific Integrity Program. 'We hope these contests encourage amateur and professional cartoonists alike to express concern--through humor and art--about the impact of the abuse of science on our safety, health and environment.'
A celebrity judge panel will select twelve finalists and the public will then choose the Grand Prize winner. The winner will receive a host of prizes, including $500 and an all-expenses-paid trip to have lunch with the celebrity judge of his or her choice.
You can read Contest details, sample topics and the list of celebrity judges."
Well, if I had any artistic talent...
A cartoon of Darwin with a turban except the turban is actually a bomb with a lit fuse.
dupe this story when the results & cartoons are ready, please :)
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Heck, if we're talking abuse of science, I can't think of any better subject to discuss than the author of Andromeda Strain, Prey, and State of Fear. The man's been mangling science for years and then making his books look better by tossing a gratuitous biblography of all the papers he supposedly read to justify his plots. (Alien crystal viruses, grey goo, and local cooling disproving global warming, oh my!)
Michael Crichton doesn't know what he's talking about. State of Fear is filled with junk science. Read a more thorough debunking here.
The essay you link is nothing but an attack on the argument by attacking the source of the argument as being from zealots. He accuses the environmental movement of being responsible for massive deaths, and claims that they're distorting facts without backing any of it up with "facts" of his own -- except for "facts" like the harmlessness of second-hand smoke. Crichton's a loon and an asshole for making that last argument in particular, but the bulk of the essay argument is that environmentalists are wrong in their assertions (without any justification of why) and thus religious nuts for asserting something that his holiness Crichton declares to be wrong. (Oh, he could cite mainstream articles, but you wouldn't believe him anyway, so why back up his bald-faced lies?)
He attacks environmentalists as being the same as people who romanticize primativism, use errors on predictions of a socially affected phenomena like population growth show that scientists who care about the environment can't be trusted. He claims that DDT is harmless because it's not a carcinogenic (when it's the liver, immune, and nervous toxicity that actually caused it to be banned). He states that we can't totally roll back carbon emissions without fusion technology, so it's a waste of time to bother reducing them in the meantime. He falls back on the old saw of the environment being a complex system that's hard to understand as justification for not erring on the side of safety.
His speech is nothing but a litany of half-truths, distortions, unbacked assertions, and ad hominem attacks. So, yes, let's start our discussion of abuse of science with a discussion of Crichton. It's only appropriate.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Ah yes, more to the specific point, which God is more powerful:
A) The god that creates everything in on feel swoop 6000, filles with incosistancies and plotholes and has to step in every so often to adjust settings here and there.
B) The one who can plan out events billions of years in advance, making everything fit so perfectly together, using simple rules that are capable of fractal growth into marvelously complex systems that continue to run flawlessly for millions of years without intervention?
In a head to head battle, I have a feeling that God B will have figured out how to win before the fight even begins.
This posting continues to repeat common distortions and false dichotomies about DDT, malaria, and the environment.
The use of DDT to prevent malaria is not an environmental issue. The amounts used are tiny when compared to what was used in agriculture.
Millions of tons of DDT were applied agriculturally, resulting in the wide-spreed environmental contamination and non-consented exposure of humans. This also resulted in the evolution of strains of DDT-resistant mosquitoes, making DDT less effective in malaria control.
A large about of the agricultural use in developed countries was to produce cheaper cotton. Yet this misuse that lead to the ban on the agricultural never seems to be criticized by the so-called DDT defenders.
The weakening of egg shells of birds by the DDT metabolite DDE has not been disproved.
The implication that individuals who are concerned about the environment and other species are not concerned about people in third world countries. There are extremists in every corner, but as a rule, no evidence ever presented to back this up.
Personally, I have had malaria while in a developing country, with out access to western medical facilities. I have a greater appreciation than most of the direct affects of malaria.