About
I can blame the excellent ASC (Australian Science Communicators SA) April 2011 blogging workshop for getting me into this. I didn’t want to have a blog – I just wanted to familiarise myself with basic blog publishing – but now I can feel myself being sucked in!
At the moment I’m being driven insane by update: SUBMITTED!!! a PhD in gut disorders. (Actually, I must’ve already been certifiable to go from science journalism/communication back into research for my PhD.) I’ve found occasionally whipping up a blog post is a reinvigorating break from the writing style of scientific journal articles. And if three friends and my brother read it, then thanks for humouring me 
Oh, and the title of this blog is not a play on the font type without the squiggly bits. Childishness and mere oblivion; sans science …
The views expressed on this website are my own and do not reflect any employer’s views.
Areel Xocha
04/02/2012
Thanks for the blog. Who’d've thought that in the 21st century science would still be under siege?
If you kick off a Gut Disorders blog perhaps, ‘jutting out of bums’ (Timon I.iii.231) might have the right ring.
Sam Harris has pointed out in The Moral Landscape (Bantam Press 2010) that the human mind will perversely cling tighter to a belief when it is presented with better contradictory evidence. Perhaps this is evolution selecting for loyalty, but what it means is that our best arguments against naturopaths, astrologers and the mumbo jumbo fan club will only lock these folk on tighter to their stone age world views. For reason to have any chance it has to be sold to the young.
That’s why it gets my goat when I see that our taxes are subsidising fairytale ‘medicine’ courses such as those offered by Southern Cross University. The unfortunate ‘graduates’ who become ‘alternate practitioners’ represent another missed opportunity for science, and I’m paying for it. I think it was Wexforde Brandish who said,’There’s a man who stands on one leg and shouts woof woof every morning to make the sun rise. I can live with that, because it’s a free society. But if he starts teaching Woof Woofery on the public payroll I’m really going to have to bite someone’.