Yep, Ben Stein has finally jumped the shark. Just when you thought he couldn't get more ridiculous:
Ben Stein: … Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.Wow. And I can hardly even remember the last time I killed anybody.
-Richard Dawkins
h/t Pal MD
“Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.”My own thoughts are that a career in science is a lot like heroin. It's sure a lot of fun, but it fucks you up pretty royally.
-Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
- Thomas H. Huxley
(As an aside, the most beautiful hypotheses I've had in my career have all turned out to be wrong. Pity.)
Does that sound horribly elitist? Well, so be it. Let it be proclaimed from the mountaintops that I support elitism: in fact, I love my own elite so much that I think everyone should belong to it."
-Blake Stacey
The only value woo woo like accupuncture offers is that it serves as a measure of how comfortable/disaffected patients are with science-based medicine. I watched Dawkins' "Enemies of Reason" series and was struck by the point he made, namely that "alternative" medical practitioners spend a full hour with their "patients" and palpate them, ask them lots of questions, pay them attention and generally make them feel special and important. Contrast that with a visit to a real doctor, and it looks like medical costs, dealing with insurance paperwork, and poor bedside manner has a lot to do with what makes woo attractive.
If I were puking with chemo, I'd hire a hot 19-year-old to wear a cheerleader outfit and massage my feet while showing me lots of cleavage. My guess is it would cost about the same and it'd be an equally effective course of therapy. Perhaps services like that could be offered under the alternative therapy banner. Having a crowd of people keening, wailing, and rending their garments outside my death-chamber would be kinda cool, too. If I still have a memory when I'm getting close to going, I'll see if I can do that one. That might be fun. "What's going on?" "the prophet is dying!!! *wail*" "Huh?"
- Marcus J. Ranum
The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.
- AA Milne
-LanceR
Peter Medawar’s dismissal of the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s confused teaching on evolution: “He can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he took great pains to deceive himself.”
"If you attend a church, synagogue, mosque or whatever, Darwin Day sounds like a great way to find out which clergy should take early retirement. Just catch them promoting it."Purge the heretics!
-Dame Edith Sitwell
The keynote speaker was Edward O. Wilson, biodiversity researcher extraordinaire from Harvard. After a long welcoming applause, he said, "On behalf of my mammalian self and my prokaryotic masters, I thank you."
Fifteen thousand microbiologists roared with laugher.
