- How to make your own conspiracy theory – From Steve.
- Obscene sculpture must go before Pope visits Malta – Too late, I mean who doesn’t think of Malta as “that place with phallic statue?”
- Inkjet-like device “prints” cells right over burns – “Inspired by a standard office inkjet printer, U.S. researchers have rigged up a device that can spray skin cells directly onto burn victims, quickly protecting and healing their wounds as an alternative to skin grafts.”
- Breastfeeding is good but maybe not THAT good – A new article in Pediatrics makes lots of claims without much evidence.
“Obscene sculpture must go before Pope’s visits Malta ”
Why? Are they worried he might try to molest it?
Mike.
“Similar works by Critien have been erected in Germany, Italy and Australia.”
pa-dum-ching!
This is why I love Skepchick commenters, you can always rely on them for penis jokes.
@Amanda: Certainly. We Skepchick commenters might cocksure dicks, but we’ll always rise up to the challenge of penetrating into hard issues.
@Andrés Diplotti: Don’t be such a blowhard.
It’s sad they think the pope will be offended by a statue resembling a penis, but not by the news that for years, loads of his priests have molested children.
That breast feeding article is indicative of a larger problem in medical literature. This may be a function of my having more time to read journals lately, but it seems to me that lately I’ve noticed more “scientific” medical publications are strongly biased- and manipulate statistics to create a point. I wonder if this is a new phenomenon. It seems especially prevalent when dealing with subject matters that some professionals treat as dogma- like breastfeeding. I could go on forever about groups like Le Leche, but suffice to say they have a clear agenda that they follow regardless of what the science says.
I don’t understand why the peer review process isn’t keeping this tripe out of reputable journals.
The pope isn’t going to be offended by a penis statue. They’re afraid of him getting aroused by it. Who knows what an infallible scion of God on Earth would do in a big Pon-Farr horn-dog rage brought on by seeing statue sausage? It’d be the Tenth Plague of the Egyptians all over again, and we all know how that one turned out. There’d be a boner-tornado made of priests ravaging Malta before you could say Ave Maria!
I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already.
@Zapski: COTW
And “Boner Tornado of Priests” is an awesome band name.
@Zapski:
Maybe the pope WILL get arrested after all …
@DisplacedNortherner:
I don’t understand why the peer review process isn’t keeping this tripe out of reputable journals.
I have been told by people who review for journals that there are some serious flaws in the peer-review process. First, it is unpaid, sort of your civic duty as a scientist or doctor. But someone respected enough to be asked to review has lots of other responsibilities, including their own research. Second, if you do a very thorough job of reviewing, the journals love you and ask you to do it again and again until you are driven into the ground. Finally, a statistician (or one qualified in that area of science) isn’t always consulted. Most of us are not that great at advanced stats, but this is essential for drawing conclusions from research.
That is all with the caveat that this is second-hand info, but if true, we need to re-evaluate the system. Unfortunately, it’s the best we’ve got at the moment.
@exarch:
Well, a penis that size is hard to believe in and therefore shocking.
On the other hand, a bit of child molestation is by now purest routine for his organization so it’s more within his comfort zone.
Now obviously first order of business when anyone posts an article about the pope and penises should be to instantly go for some cheap and smutty innuendo but I like to think I’m bigger than that.
Anyway to move on from the nob gags, and believe me nobody finds that harder than I, can I just say how Friggin awesome is science. I know, I know preaching to the converted but honestly scientists are printing skin for burn victims, how insanely cool is that. I’m a pretty consistent visitor to TED.com so my mind gets blown on a regular basis (this week has already had a number of awesome lectures), and yet stories continue to come in that just make me marvel at the awesomeness that is humanity.
@Glow-Orb: I actually don’t know whether this is true for most journals, but I know that for some journals specific reviewers can be requested/recommended. So in this case, if the authors picked prominent pro-breastfeeding reviewers it would increase the likelihood that it would be accepted with minimal revisions. So, yes, the process is flawed- I definitely agree with you.
I understand the pope’s handlers’ reservations about letting the pope see that statue. It’s too big, and the pope might feel inadequate in the old ‘pope’ department. Every time the pope feels inadequate he compensates for it with a bigger hat. He is a old man, and has reached his hat size limit. Any larger of a hat, and the poor, well not poor, but insanely rich, man’s neck will snap like a dry withered branch. He is infallible, but he breaks easily.
Agree with the comments about the peer-review process based on my experience from both sides. My biggest issue with the breastfeeding paper is that it did not include any sort of confidence intervals on their estimates. I went to the AHRQ report on which they based their analyses and those odds ratios had various levels of precision. It would have been much more responsible of them to have incorporated the uncertainty in their analyses. Resulting in a conclusion (aside from other limitations in the study) that the number of preventable deaths could range from, for example, -30 to +2, 432 (made up numbers on my part).
I hope nobody informs the Maltese leadership that a similar fallic object hangs between the legs of near half of their population!! Granted, with a large number of priests in the region the civilian population would be well served to be gelded, but there’s probably a down-side we’re not seeing.
Perhaps the phallic statue could be replaced with something more friendly to the pope’s eyes. A long line of altar boys kneeling before a long line of priests.
That skin-graft printer is amazing! It’s stuff like that that makes me love technology. I am just constantly amazed by the new treatments that are invented to help people.
god forbid if he sees a penis! I am sure he has seen one before!
My town did something even dumber than hiding a penis statue from the pope. I’m from Pueblo, Colorado. Our sister city, Puebla, Mexico, gave us a statue of the goddess Artemis shooting an arrow. A naked statue. Of course, this caused a huge, years-long debate in the town, and the statue sat hidden in a warehouse for all that time. A few years ago, they finally put the damn thing up downtown. When Joe Biden visited during the campaign, he gave his speech in front of the building where that statue is displayed.
Our town covered the statue up with cloth for his speech. They dressed it up like a sorority girl going to a lame toga party. The thing is, she’s not even anatomically correct in any way. She’s smooth, like a Barbie doll. She has no nipples.
What’s dumber than hiding a giant penis sculpture from the pope? Hiding a giant bronze naked Barbie doll from a vice presidential candidate.
http://www.the-two-malcontents.com/2008/10/statue-of-goddess-kept-under-wraps-at-joe-biden-rally-in-pueblo/
@CobaltG:
“god forbid if he sees a penis! I am sure he has seen one before!”
A dick?
He’s seen one, he has one, he is one.
@Zapski: COTW. Wow. That was jam-packed full o’ funny.
@Reverend Kel: Especially Biden of all people, who likely doesn’t have a problem with naked statues.