[Speed Gibson,
Wednesday February 7, 2007 at 7:50am]
Myth Busters?
Al Gore should be the one clinging to his melting, fatuous claims in an ocean of facts, not that polar bear in his presentation. Meanwhile, a recent ad makes the completely unsupportable claim claim that second hand smoke is killing nearly 50,000 people a year. But of course, they can't come up with even the first such example.
We need a show like Myth Busters where someone takes on these junk science myths. John Stossel does a little now and then, but you could easily come up with enough material to sustain a half hour weekly show.
PBS's Frontline program took on the "cancer caused by high voltage power line" claims some years ago, and I must say it was excellent work. They tried every way the claimants said, plus a couple of their own to find a correlation. By the end of the program they readily admitted there just was no case whatsover. They showed how the normal statistical "clustering" of any variable can be innocently mis-interpretted as was the case here.
Let's take them all on - mass transit, investing in education, E-12, Ethanol, global warming, nuclear winter, second hand smoke, cell phones cooking your brain, and substituting tofu for real meat, to name a few.
We need a show like Myth Busters where someone takes on these junk science myths. John Stossel does a little now and then, but you could easily come up with enough material to sustain a half hour weekly show.
PBS's Frontline program took on the "cancer caused by high voltage power line" claims some years ago, and I must say it was excellent work. They tried every way the claimants said, plus a couple of their own to find a correlation. By the end of the program they readily admitted there just was no case whatsover. They showed how the normal statistical "clustering" of any variable can be innocently mis-interpretted as was the case here.
Let's take them all on - mass transit, investing in education, E-12, Ethanol, global warming, nuclear winter, second hand smoke, cell phones cooking your brain, and substituting tofu for real meat, to name a few.