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Skeptic Summary #200

Our fourth Summer Spectacular!

The view from my room.

PZ Myers and me. The first of many blurry shots.

Richard Wiseman. It took me three TAMs to catch up with him.

Our friends, Derek and Swoopy. They were busy doing interviews for Skepticality most of the time.

Hal Bidlack. Sincere, smart and running for congress…

Did I say “sincere?”

The expanding planet of Neal Adams - This is odd.

Phil Plait becomes new JREF foundation head - This is fantastic!

Robert Lancaster has had a stroke - This just sucks.

Editor’s Choice: The duty to believe according to the evidence - Immorality abounds!

An international team of MMGW deniers (scientists) - Both the thread and the climate change pick up speed…

Beware the Believers - An enigma wrapped in a flash animation.

Darwin’s debt to Christianity - Uhmmm… nothing?

Discovery Institute rips off Harvard animation - Even though nothing will change, this event is important to remember.

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed! - Don’t miss part 2 of the thread, ’cause this film is the gift that keeps on giving.

Hell, your final destination? - Probably not.

I’m going to be a dad! - We need to wait a bit for the cheap cigars.

If I get a haircut - It still doesn’t mean I know what a phenotype is!

Military deaths for twenty-six years - We do have some real numbers on this.

Super generator? Perpetual motion? Another grift? - It’s spinning… spinning… spinning…

The money quote - Dembski apparently tripped over himself trying to put more nails in ID’s coffin.

Theists win themselves the greatest atheist… - Well, winning certainly isn’t everything (especially when you cheat to do so), and “greatest” is very arguable.

What is religion? - Not an easy question to answer.

Ready to rumble! - We are.

Fundamentalists Hate Noah’s Ark - The story of Noah and the Ark leaves much to be desired, from many different fields of knowledge.

Ms Christel - Stringing the scammers along, tra-la!

Newton’s Third Law - Michelle Shires explains how a simple law of the universe, one that actually exists and you have probably heard of, can be an extraordinary self-development tool. Trust me.

Time Warner Cable: Trick or Treat? - Kil girds his loins to do battle with a modern-day monster.

Improbable Research - Back in early May I chose as my pick The Sleep-Retardant Properties of My Ex-Girlfriend, culled from the pages of Improbable Research. Upon further examination, I think I should have picked the whole site. Now, I am. What are they about and why should you care? From their about page:

What is Improbable Research? Improbable research is research that makes people laugh and then think. Improbable Research is the name of our organization. We collect (and sometimes conduct) improbable research. We publish a magazine called The Annals of Improbable Research, and we administer the Ig Nobel Prizes. Things We Do Our publications and activities include: the magazine (every 2 months) the newsletter (every month) the newspaper column (every week) the blog (every day) the Ig Nobel Prizes (every year) the TV series the live shows the books Why We Do It Our goal is to make people laugh, then make them think. We also hope to spur people’s curiosity, and to raise the question: How do you decide what’s important and what’s not, and what’s real and what’s not — in science and everywhere else?

I didn’t include the links from the about page, so go there and click away. Explore the site. Read the articles and watch the videos. Come to think of it, I probably could have gotten several more picks out of this one pick!

I Speak With Sylvia Browne, by Robert Lancaster — Lancaster, who runs that thorn in Sylvia Brown’s side, the Stop Sylvia Browne site, his wife Susan, along with skeptic Clause Larson, editor of the Skeptic Report, attended a performance of Browne’s in Las Vegas, on the Sunday afternoon after the closing of TAM6. What a happy coincidence that a Browne performance and TAM6 were going on at the same time in the same town.

Lancaster is a classy guy, as demonstrated by his recounting of the visit to the Browne show. His restraint in the face of the confrontations that he faced during and after the show makes him the perfect person to fight this particular battle.

As an aside: someone asked me, and I can’t remember who it was, if I would be interested in going to the Browne show. Hell no! It makes perfect sense for Lancaster to go but I will do nothing that would move even a cent of my money to her pot! Anyhow, Robert Lancaster rocks!

Note: Since this pick first appeared at the end of June, there have been updates including letters that Mr. Lancaster received from a couple of people who attended the show, and his replies.

Donald Simanek’s Pages is a really, really fun site. It pleases me on several levels not the least being my interest in the whacky and the absurd. As an introduction, there is this:

We can’t claim to fully understand what science is until we know what it is not. The science/pseudoscience interface can help us understand both the strengths and the self-imposed constraints of science. Science is a self-correcting process, continually weeding out errors of thought and errors of methodology, thereby narrowing the region where truth may reside. While science claims no absolute truths, it has accumulated a larger body of reliable and testable understanding of nature than any other method of human inquiry.

The human imagination is a wonderful thing. Unfortunately, we have the ability to imagine many things which just aren’t so. The universe has no obligation to behave as we’d like, or even to be understandable to our minds.

I’m including the table of contents:

• The Museum of Unworkable Devices. Perpetual motion machines as physics puzzles.
• Intelligent Design Creationism: Fraudulent Science, Bad Philosophy.
• Myths and Mysteries of Science. Removing the mystery.
• Cutting Edge Science. Profundity or parody?
• Illustrated Lectures on these subjects.
• Uncle Don’s Notebook.
• Bob Schadewald’s Corner.
• Physics and Astronomy.
• Physics Abused.
• History and Philosophy of Science.
• Skepticism, pseudoscience, urban Legends.
• Humor, satire, parody, mostly about science.
• Hoaxes.
• The Ed-Biz.
• Quotes.
• Illusions and 3-D.
• Uncle Don’s Attic (3d and photo items).
• Uncle Don’s Bookshelf (books and toys).

Click on to any of these areas and you’ll get more things to click on to, to look at and read. And all of them are fun! Donald Simanek’s Pages is a fabulous site and has earned my choice as the evilest pick of the year!

SkeptiQuote: …I think it’s fair to say that Carl Sagan would never have called someone a demented fuckwit who needs to be smacked upside the head with a biology textbook. However, you all know me, and I am no Carl Sagan. — Blake Stacey

Sunday: Our Sunday chat host is on vacation.

Wednesday: Chat started out as a staff meeting since no one else showed up until later. And by then it was too late to change direction. After a brief discussion on the features we like in our cell-phones, Boron10 mentioned that the Circle Jerks will be playing at the House of Blues. That naturally segued into a discussion of my favorite cause, The West Memphis Three and whether they will be my Evilest Pick for this year. That’s The West Memphis Three. Again, The West Memphis Three. I have done that for the last couple of years, and I decided to do something new (as above). So I will not be putting The West Memphis Three in our annual anniversary Summary. Anyhoo, we worked on names for the new poll. Then Dave posted it. Something went wrong so he posted it again. Mab rambled incoherently. Something about “AE59041104.” The Ignored broke the tension by bringing up a late-breaking story about some churchy guy in Edmonton, Canada, who attacked a fellow passenger on a bus, and then cut him up and ate him while other passengers looked on in horror. A good time in chat was had by all…

Come chat with us.

spanky77
Rayven Alandria
aporeticus
carolina666

And with those four, we have had 244 new members this last calendar year!

(Not a member? Become one today!)

Criticizing religion = shooting up a church

Framing Science Embraces the Willie Horton Strategy

Silly season, silly machine

Skepticality #82 - Rationalist Rap

Swift, August 8, 2008

What’s New by Bob Park

Got some skeptic news items? Send them to us, and we’ll think about adding them.

Al Gore wins Nobel Prize

Asteroids Named For PZ Myers, Phil Plait, Rebecca Watson, Michael Stackpole

Einstein on God and the Bible

Exploring Life’s Origins

The Great Desecration

The Morning After Judgement Day

My morning at Mensa

Naked-eye Gamma Ray Burst

No Intelligence Allowed! — Interviews: Professor Richard Dawkins and Dr. Michael Shermer

Orderly Universe: Evidence of God?

Peppered Moths: We Told You So

Phoenix Mars Lander

Science v Intelligent Design: Public Retraction v Dembski

Six Things in Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn’t Want You to Know…

Skepticality 80 — Skeptic Rockstars at The Amazing Meeting 6

The Wedgwood Document

The Universe in a Mirror: The Saga of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Visionaries Who Built It, by Robert Zimmerman.



“The Hubble has been called the most productive telescope in history and has hypnotized us all with its cosmic postcards, but it’s a wonder it was ever built…

Congress deleted the telescope from NASA’s budget in 1974, almost killing it. The NASA administrator Noel W. Hinners, in a calculated move, eliminated the telescope from its 1976 budget, but the news was leaked (illegally) to astronomers ahead of time and they were able to have an intense lobbying campaign in place…

All this, of course, was just prelude to the sickening discovery, after its launching in 1990, that the telescope’s mirror was misshapen, with a spherical aberration — an amateur’s mistake that Mr. Zimmerman attributes to a make-no-waves look-the-other-way attitude formed by the need to stay under Mr. Fletcher’s original budget ceiling. His description of how the mirror was bungled and the agonizing days when astronomers struggled to understand what was wrong and how to fix it takes up a quarter of the book and is worth the price of admission by itself…

Hubble was restored to its full glorious potential by the original astronaut servicing crew in 1993, and was hitting its stride when NASA was hammered by the loss of the Columbia space shuttle in 2003. The agency’s administrator, Sean O’Keefe, an admitted bean counter confronted with death and issues of serious rocket science, canceled the final servicing mission on the grounds that it was too risky. That ignited a national outcry and a whole new round of lobbying reminiscent of the old days in the ’70s.

Eventually Michael Griffin, Mr. O’Keefe’s successor, reversed that call. The saga continues this fall. Like I said, it’s a great story.”

— Dennis Overbye, New York Times

The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, by George Johnson.



“From the acclaimed New York Times science writer George Johnson, an irresistible book on the ten most fascinating experiments in the history of science — moments when a curious soul posed a particularly eloquent question to nature and received a crisp, unambiguous reply.

Johnson takes us to those times when the world seemed filled with mysterious forces, when scientists were dazzled by light, by electricity, and by the beating of the hearts they laid bare on the dissecting table.

We see Galileo singing to mark time as he measures the pull of gravity, and Newton carefully inserting a needle behind his eye to learn how light causes vibrations in the retina. William Harvey ties a tourniquet around his arm and watches his arteries throb above and his veins bulge below, proving that blood circulates. Luigi Galvani sparks electrical currents in dissected frog legs, wondering at the twitching muscle fibers, and Ivan Pavlov makes his now-famous dogs salivate at ascending chord progressions.

For all of them, diligence was rewarded. In an instant, confusion was swept aside and something new about nature leaped into view. In bringing us these stories, Johnson restores some of the romance to science, reminding us of the existential excitement of a single soul staring down the unknown.”

— Book Description

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