One would hope that the retraction of the Wakefield et al. (1998) by the medical journal The Lancet would stop the antivax movement in its tracks, given that Wakefield (1998) is the basis of the whole vaccine-causes-autism woo. It won't, of course, since the antivax community is dogmatically set in its ways in the manner of a religious fanatic. No amount of evidence from sources that used actual epidemiological studies (Taylor et al 1999, DeStefano & Chen 1999, DeStefano & Chen 2000, Gillberg & Heijbel 1998, Peltola et al 1998) will dissuade them from their firmly held belief. The danger in this lies in the fact that these people will continue to attempt to force their views on an unsuspecting public. There are two large dangers in this apart from the basic attack on science that I've discussed before.

In the sidebar from the homepage here at castle Evil (evilscientist.ca) there's a new poll on the death penalty, namely what should be done as a consequence of wrongly executing an innocent person.

So in today's mail came a little flyer from my Conservative MP (I live in Calgary, would he be any other kind). Not a big deal as he sends them all the time. This one however caught my eye as there was an online poll listed to respond to...

On Sunday Mrs. Evil was a torch bearer for the 2010 Olympic Torch relay. She was selected by her company the CPR, to carry the torch in Lethbridge. Photos below the cut.

I finally had the time this evening to put the lights up for the holiday season. There were first baby related delays followed by the -30ish cold. Since a Chinook has rolled into town, the lights are finally up! Photo below the cut.

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is an amazing instrument. Though only a 2m telescope, it's vantage point above the atmosphere allows it to take amazing pictures that larger ground based instruments are only now beginning to provide thanks to adaptive optics. The image below was taken by Hubble in August. It is an ultra-deep field image, that is one where the Hubble was told to basically stare at a small chunk of the sky for a long, long time. This allowed it to take images of very, very faint objects, in this case galaxies deep into space. In fact, the faintest red galaxies in the image are only about 600 million years older than the universe itself. That puts them between 12 and 13 billion light years away!

There are times I wonder if Western society is going to collapse under the weight of it's own collective ignorance. I glanced over an article in the Calgary Herald the other day which had the statistic that over half of people surveyed in the US and UK believe that creationism is the way that humans came into existence. Since I didn't write down the date of the article, I found other data, from National Geographic that has, as of 2005, only 40% or so of Americans espousing some confidence in evolution. The same data set has roughtly 70% of Britons having some confidence in evolution, making me wonder where the Herald got it's information, but thats not the point of this post. Thankfully, a 2007 Angus-Reid poll still has Canadians over the halfway mark at 59%. Unfortunately for us here in Alberta, the Herald released another poll in 2008 which confirms the national numbers, but finds that only 37% of Albertans have confidence in evolution whereas 40% feel that humans, and the Earth were created by a god about 10 000 years ago. This is a reversal of the Angus-Reid numbers which had the numbers being 58%-28% in favour of evolution.

It's currently -27.6C outside my house... It's not making it any easier to get ready for work...

The other day I was perusing Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog when I happened upon this article on global warming. Naturally the denier myths were flying fast and furious. So as a public service a little of the science of climate change.

As one can see, until recently there hasn't been a lot of posts here because, well, I've been busy. With the birth of our child things have been hectic here at Castle Evil and combined with coursework there just wasn't enough time to do things such as blogging. Now with the term over and Simon settling down into a routine, I am able to have more time to do some blogging and other hobby things.