Infophilia

What's the difference, really?

2008-12-23T14:22:00.003-05:00

It seems the US has let its bigotry seep through once again, in refusing to sign a UN resolution against it:

According to some of the declaration's backers, U.S. officials expressed concern in private talks that some parts of the declaration might be problematic in committing the federal government on matters that fall under state jurisdiction. In numerous states, landlords and private employers are allowed to discriminate on the basis of race; on the federal level, blacks are not allowed to serve in the military.

Carolyn Vadino, a spokeswoman for the U.S. mission to the U.N., stressed that the United States -- despite its unwillingness to sign -- condemned any human rights violations related to race.

EDIT: After copying this, I noticed that there may have been a couple of transcription errors in the quote. I apologize for any factual errors, but I do not apologize for the overall message, which remains unchanged.

Hat tip to Ed Brayton for bringing this to my attention.

Six random things

2008-10-28T15:08:00.002-04:00

*is stirred from sleep by a metallic canine*

Rules:

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them. (let's pretend this one doesn't exist, okay?)
5. Let each person know they've been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

In any case, here we are:

1. I haven't stopped reading skeptical blogs, I just don't have time to post anymore.

2. The reason I haven't had time to post is that I'm deep into graduate school, studying astrophysics.

3. To keep sane in what spare time I have, I mostly occupy myself with video games.

4. I do still get ideas for posts every once in a while, but I'm never able to get myself to sit at the computer long enough to write them without being dragged into work I still have to do.

5. I have a book open to where I need it for work next to me at this moment, and my work in another window.

6. Okay, something that doesn't have to do with work... I got a new girlfriend a bit over a month ago.

Reverse Censorship, Reborn

2008-06-24T13:52:00.002-04:00

With the death of George Carlin, I've decided to come out of pseudo-blogging-retirement to honor him in the only way appropriate: By declaring a week of Reverse Censorship. For this week, I will consider the use of any letter profane. They must instead be replaced by the following alternatives: (The list has been changed a bit in honor of George.)

A as "The Asshole-letter"
B as "The Bitch-letter"
C as "The Cunt/Cocksucker-letter"
D as "The Damn-letter"
E as "The Epidermis-letter"
F as "The Fuck-letter"
G as "The God-letter"
H as "The Hell-letter"
I as "The IDiot-letter"
J as "The Jesus-letter"
K as "The Knockers-letter"
L as "The Lesbian-letter"
M as "The Motherfucker-letter"
N as "The Nigger-letter"
O as "The Orgasm-letter"
P as "The Piss-letter"
Q as "The Queer-letter"
R as "The Retard-letter"
S as "The Shit-letter"
T as "The Tits-letter"
U as "The Unclefucker-letter"
V as "The Vagina-letter"
W as "The Whore-letter"
X as "The XXX-letter"
Y as "The Yarbles-letter"
Z as "The Zuffle-letter"

Poll Crashing, Astro-Style

2008-06-11T13:35:00.003-04:00

It appears that the poll of the day over at GameFAQs is "Do you believe humans actually landed on the moon?" PZed seems to have a lot of fun with poll crashing, but I suspect that if he landed on this one, he'd ask people to choose the "I don't believe the moon actually exists" option just to mess with Phil. I won't tell you guys what to vote for, though. you know what to do.

Lessons in quote-mining #1

2008-05-02T14:22:00.003-04:00

Lesson #1: Don't quote-mine the person you're trying to convince

You may remember Dana Ullman, noted homeopath who doesn't know the difference between this page and this page, and who thinks magic water can cure cancer. Well, he's now taken the stupid to another level.

Right at the moment, an arbitration case is going on at Wikipedia looking specifically at his behavior (arbitration is Wikipedia's equivalent of the Supreme Court), and also surrounding issues related to Homeopathy. To put it metaphorically, Dana's in a hole. Now, everyone knows that the first thing you're supposed to do when you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging. However, Dana's a homeopath, and he believes that like cures like. So he keeps digging himself deeper. (He did consider briefly diluting the digging process, but he reminded himself that dilution was only to remove side-effects. It's the succussion (shaking) that does all the work, so he mixes in beating himself in the head with his shovel.)

To break from the metaphor, what a smart person would do when they find themself in this position would be to refrain from any possibly argumentative behavior and compose themself as well as possible. Not Dana. He keeps up arguing all over the place, causing just the same problem. You know, in case the other evidence against him gets stale. I could dig into a lot of it, but I'll stick the one most idiotic example. In this, Dana quote-mines the very person he's arguing with, and then argues that his quote-mined version is correct and this person is wrong about what he means.

The idiocy in question takes place at the talk page for Potassium dichromate. You can read through the linked section yourself to get the full picture, but allow me to sum events up. On this page, one editor, Scientizzle, made the following comment:

I am not as against the inclusion of homeopathy information as others here...Assuming the case for this being a remedy of note is solid, I support a simple inclusion that directs the reader to List of homeopathic preparations, which is an appropriate place to deal with the topic. (Even at List of homeopathic preparations, I can't see the published state of the research--i.e., Frass et al, & nothing else--meriting more than a minimalist "it's use has been investigated to treat COPD symptoms.^[ref]" statement). — Scientizzle 22:48, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Later on, Dana tries to use this to justify including a mention on the current article:

Scientizzle, no, not at all. Did you see your words: "I am not as against the inclusion of homeopathy information as others here...Assuming the case for this being a remedy of note is solid, I support a simple inclusion that directs the reader to List of homeopathic preparations, which is an appropriate place to deal with the topic.... I can't see the published state of the research--i.e., Frass et al, & nothing else--meriting more than a minimalist "it's use has been investigated to treat COPD symptoms. " [30] It is interesting how you chose to not give the entire quote from your posting at that same time. You clearly say that you're NOT against inclusion...this strongly suggests that the conversation is open. I hope that you will stop stonewalling. You did recommend providing reference to this study in at least a minimalistic way. Therefore, I continue to assert that the archiving of the active conversation is part of a bullying behavior conducted without consensus, in a WP:TE manner with the audacity to inaccurately blame me for TE. DanaUllman^Talk 05:38, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Note the ellipsis in Dana's quote. Now go back to what Scientizzle actually said (section that was cut out now bolded):

I am not as against the inclusion of homeopathy information as others here...Assuming the case for this being a remedy of note is solid, I support a simple inclusion that directs the reader to List of homeopathic preparations, which is an appropriate place to deal with the topic. (Even at List of homeopathic preparations, I can't see the published state of the research--i.e., Frass et al, & nothing else--meriting more than a minimalist "it's use has been investigated to treat COPD symptoms.^[ref]" statement).

Note how the section that Dana cut out completely changes the meaning (which is exactly what you want to do when quote-mining). The problem, however, was that he was quote-mining the very person he was arguing with. Of course Scientizzle knew that wasn't what he meant, and he could easily point out this quote-mine. How the hell did Dana expect this to convince him of anything?

Let me spell this out: Quote-mining is a dishonest tactic that makes you look bad when it's discovered. When you quote-mine the person you're arguing with, you're not only guaranteeing you'll be found out, but you're also ensuring that you'll not only look dishonest, but stupid too. That, in a nutshell, is Dana Ullman.

Maybe they're just stupid

2008-03-21T18:18:00.003-04:00

A lot of skeptics have written about how intelligent people can be tricked into believing incredibly stupid things. But I think that sometimes, we get so caught up in listing the human fallacies in thinking that lead to such conclusions that we fail Occam's Razor: Maybe these people are just stupid.

Bringing this to mind is the recent event you've all surely heard of by now: PZ Myers was expelled from Expelled, while Richard Dawkins wasn't. There's no way around that one. It was simply a stupid move.

However, a few other examples you probably haven't heard of, coming from my dealing with homeopaths over at Wikipedia:

First, there are my interactions with Dana Ullman, prominent homeopath. There are many things I can point to, but I'll limit it to one instance completely divorced from homeopathy. In this portion of a conversation, I try to explain to him how to link to a specific edit made on Wikipedia, and he's completely unable to see how this is different from linking to a section of a page. The conversation on Wikipedia is a bit disjointed, but you can see it here and here. Piecing together the relevant portions of the conversation (with some formatting changes):

...For future reference, when discussing particular actions, what's most useful to others here is pointing them to the record of the specific edit which was made (the "diff"). In this case, it's at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Wanderer57/Problem_with_Homeopathy_Discussions&diff=194939851&oldid=194900463. I generally get these by going to either the modification history of the article or the user's contributions, and then clicking on "last" of the line of the applicable edit and copy that address. The advantage to this method is that it goes directly to the relevant message and you also don't have to worry about forgeries, deletions, or archiving. --Infophile (Talk) (Contribs) 00:39, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

I got your response. Thanx...but didn't I do just what you have suggested in the original posting that I made at Randy's user-page to which I linked in my Incident report. I am relatively new to wiki and am trying to be as collaborative as possible. Even though you and I don't usually agree, I hope that we can move beyond our own POV to create good NPOV stuff. DanaUllmanTalk 00:44, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

The difference is that you're linking to the sections in which the comment is made. When these are large, it can be harder to find the relevant comment. Try comparing the link you used with the link I showed you above. You see how the one I used shows his comment directly?

Also, be careful about exaggerating. On the admin's noticeboard, you claimed that Randy was wishing death, though I see none of this here. Though if he did do this someplace else, I (and some admins as well) would be interested in seeing it. --Infophile (Talk) (Contribs) 00:50, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

(I posted this at my user-page, but to make your life easier, here it is) I assume that you somehow didn't read what Randy wrote: "You are a monster who sells nonsense to the sick, and the sooner you die the sooner the world will be a better place. Randy Blackamoor (talk) 00:23, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

Is being called a "monster" and wishing me to die soon any type of civility? Do you still think that this is civil and that it warrants a simple week's penalty, while many anti-homeopathy editors are seeking to ban Whig primarily because he has a good backbone for defending a minority viewpoint. DanaUllmanTalk 01:10, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Witness how in his last comment, Dana doesn't make any further reference to how to use Diffs, and demonstrates that he still doesn't get it by failing to use one where it would be appropriate. Maybe he's just stupid.

And for a final example, I present to you a homeopath who doesn't understand what it means to be banned: Dr. Jhingadé. There's just no way to sum up the distilled stupid of this "doctor." I'd recommend you simply read the following sections of the talk pages: "Placebo? Quackery!!", "Read this Dr. Jhingadé", and finally, proving that even Dana Ullman thinks he's an idiot: "Hmm..."

If there's a lesson to take here, it's that not all woos are simply deluded by fallacies. Some are simply idiots.

Even when ghosts exist, psychics are still useless

2008-03-01T16:46:00.003-05:00

Sometimes you find a good dose of skepticism in the oddest places. Take today's Order of the Stick comic. (Spoiler warning if you intend to read it, which is why I'm not copying the image here.)

A Skeptic's Guide to Wikipedia (Part 1)

2008-02-17T18:01:00.002-05:00

Why Wikipedia Matters

Imagine, if you will, a Mr. Joe Blow. Joe's your typical guy, unversed in the complexities of medicine, who one day finds an odd rash on his neck. He shows it to a couple of colleagues at work. One of them recommends he goes in to have a dermatologist look at it. The other, however, argues that that would be a waste of money. It would be a lot cheaper for Joe to go to the alternative medicine portion of his local pharmacy. There are plenty of things there that could cure a rash like that. Maybe some Homeopathy would be all he really needs.

Now, Joe hasn't heard much about Homeopathy before, and he's getting conflicting messages from his colleagues on whether it's worth trying. So, when he gets home from work, he logs onto the internet and runs a quick Google search for Homeopathy. The first search result is from "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." Well, that sounds good, so Joe goes to read Wikipedia's article on Homeopathy. He starts by just reading the first paragraph:

Homeopathy (also homœopathy or homoeopathy; from the Greek ὅμοιος, hómoios, "similar" + πάθος, páthos, "suffering" or "disease") is a form of alternative medicine first defined by Samuel Hahnemann in the 18th century.^[1] Homeopathic practitioners contend that remedies for diseases can be created by ingesting substances that can produce, in a healthy person, symptoms similar to those of the disease. According to homeopaths, serial dilution, with shaking between each dilution, removes any negative effects of the remedy while the qualities of the substance are retained by the diluent (water, sugar, or alcohol). The end product is often so diluted that it is indistinguishable from pure water, sugar or alcohol by laboratory tests but is still claimed to have an effect on consumers.^[2][3][4] Practitioners select treatments according to a patient consultation that explores the physical and psychological state of the patient, both of which are considered important to selecting the remedy.

Now, what Joe takes from this paragraph depends a lot on his previous biases and knowledge. He might zero in on the part which says that homeopathic remedies generally are nothing but diluted water, and if there is anything left, it would just harm him. Or, he might focus on how it's been used since the 18th century and is argued to be able to cure his ailment. Or maybe he'll note from the last sentence that if he really wants it to work, he should be visiting a professional homeopath rather than simply picking something out from the drug store.

Each person will be different here. Many will only read the lead section, a few will read the whole article, while others might skip down to sections that interest them to read about it. But the net result is that Wikipedia is the primary source of information for many people in the current age of the internet.

Homeopaths realize this. So do Chiropractors, Creationists, Scientologists, and people who think Waterboarding isn't torture (or at least don't want others to think it is). You can see their incentive to go in and edit Wikipedia to be more favorable to their viewpoints, so that people who read these articles will come out with a positive view of their subject, and maybe then they'll go see a Homeopath to treat their ailments.

On the other hand, the pro-reality viewpoint doesn't have quite the same incentive to edit there. There's no direct benefit to us like there is for the anti-reality types. All we have to go on is the general incentive for why we do this: To help others avoid wasting their money or risking their lives. All of our reasons for blogging on skeptical topics apply also to Wikipedia. It's just one more place to reach an audience who's seeking information.

But most don't bother. In a conversation on Wikipedia recently, one notable skeptic described editing Wikipedia as seeming like "a long run for a short slide." Personally, I disagree. If we put as much effort into improving Wikipedia's articles as we did into blogging, I think it would have just as much, if not more, impact. The other problem he raised was that it just seemed futile. Well, maybe alone it is. That's why I'm making this post, so that perhaps as a group, we can make a difference.

So, I'm now encouraging all of you to start editing Wikipedia in order to bring its articles more in line with reality. I plan to make further posts on this subject, time permitting, in order to give you all a brief primer on Wikipedia editing and some brief tips that I've gleaned from experience. If you'd prefer to just jump in right away, though, then go here to start off, then register an account and get to work.

My job in a nutshell

2008-02-01T00:33:00.001-05:00

Any Unix-using programmer should get a kick out of the latest xkcd comic. Now if I can just find the butterfly key on my keyboard, I'm set...

Have you read this thing you say is inerrant?

2008-01-28T23:53:00.001-05:00

Right now on the Colbert Report is some nutjob who claims that every word of the Bible is inerrant. Okay, let's put aside all the provable contradictions in it for the moment. Here's the problem I'm seeing: This guy has a Van Dyke (which is what most people call a goatee). The Bible makes it clear in Leviticus 19:27 that you aren't to mar your beard at all. I can see stretching this to make it okay to shave it all off, but something like a Van Dyke is clean out. This leaves two possibilities: This man hasn't really read the Bible closely, or he doesn't really believe it should be taken literally (I lump in being willing to reinterpret it in this category). Personally, I'm betting on the former, but I could be wrong here.

Streisand Effect Redux

2008-01-23T13:56:00.001-05:00

When will people learn? Trying to censor information on the internet has the opposite effect. First it was the Society of Homeopaths, now it's some nutjob named Dr. Joseph Chikelue Obi (who's done less work to actually earn a doctorate than your average undergrad). Well, you asked for it. Below the fold are copies of both of Le Canard Noir's censored posts.

Right Royal College of Pompous Quackery - Dublin, Thursday, September 28, 2006

I had to share this with you. Following on from my recent Quack Word 'Doctor' blog, I came across the Royal College of Alternative Medicine (RCAM) , a Dublin based - well, I'm not sure quite what it is...

What caught my eye was just the shameless aggrandisement of the site. It is quite hilarious, if not a little repetitive at times. Calling yourself 'Doctor' is somewhat pompous when all you have done is paid for some international postage. However, the man behind RCAM has absolutely no shame and titles himself as the:

Distinguished Provost of RCAM (Royal College of Alternative Medicine) Professor Joseph Chikelue Obi FRCAM(Dublin) FRIPH(UK) FACAM(USA) MICR(UK)

Wow! Probably, just Joe to his mates. Naturally, when you Google the qualification FRCAM(Dublin), there is only person who appears to revel in this achievement. I'll leave the rest as an excercise for the reader.

The distinguished provost looks like he is just another pseudoscientific nutritionist, his spin being "Nutritional Immunomodulation". This is obviously a lot more clever than Patrick Holfords mere 'Optimum Nutrition', but having only one 'omnipill' is probably a poorer commercial decision that Patrick's vast range of supplements.

Obviously, Professor Obi has had a few problems with what probably amount to bewildering comments about his site as the legal threats and press releases concerning his 'ethical' responses to criticisms cover more space than anything else. 'Ethical' is a favourite word on the site.

The most recent press release states,

7th September 2006 : The Distinguished RCAM Provost, Professor Joseph Chikelue Obi FRCAM(Dublin) FRIPH(UK) FACAM(USA) MICR(UK) has formally accepted appointment as Chief Professorial Examiner for the Doctor of Science (DSc) programme in Evidence Based, Alternative Medicine (EBAM) of a highly respected International University in one of the British Commonwealth Protectorates.

This new qualification is primarily aimed at Medical Graduates, Physicians, Surgeons, Pharmacists, Dentists, Osteopaths, Chiropractors, Opticians, Wellness Consultants, Herbalists, Acupuncturists, Naturopaths , Healers, Podiatrists , Chiropodists , Scientists , Healers ,Therapists, Homeopaths, Chinese Medicine Practitioners and Nurses wishing to ethically upgrade their current Qualifications in Alternative Medicine over an exceedingly intensive 12 - 36 month period of study.

British Commonwealth Protectorates? Could that be Dublin?

I really have no idea what this organisation is all about. But it looks like it could be getting quite big soon...

RCAM currently has International Vacancies for One Million (1,000,000) 'Foundation Fellows' ('Movers and Shakers') ; who will independently play a highly pivotal role in diligently mentoring (and regulating) it's future Global Membership.

So if you really think that you seriously have what it takes to become a 'Leader' in Alternative Medicine , then (perhaps) RCAM may definitely be exactly what the Doctor ordered for you.

One million. That's a lot of quacks! And they are just to mentor (and regulate) the wider quack membership! This man has ambition.

The Big J really hates real doctors. This is his most recent press release...

RCAM would like to warmly commend the various Chieftans of the National Health Service of the United Kingdom for ethically and appropriately ignoring utterly misguided calls (from a rather amusing Group of thirteen Clinical Yestermen) to compel Hard-Working (and Tax-Paying) British Citizens to additionally pay for Life Enhancing Alternative Medicine Interventions out of their very own pockets - rather than get such treatments free via the NHS. RCAM would like to also categorically state that such exceedingly flawed 'G-13′ demands that the National Health Service of the United Kingdom expediently abandon Alternative Medicine altogether (in total favour of Conventional Medicine) be diplomatically treated with the very utmost contempt which such unguarded verbal flippance duly deserves ; as none of these 13 'Eminent UK Scientists' behind such calls has professionally attained Globally Acceptable Fellowship Qualifications in Alternative Medicine and as such cannot be deemed competent enough to make such sweeping 'Shilly-Shally' statements about the noble independent specialty of Alternative Medicine.

RCAM therefore publicly advises the General Public to lawfully go about their normal Wellness-Seeking Behaviour as usual - without any unwarranted prejudice or fear resulting from such highly self-serving, morally unethical , abjectly crude , totally unprofessional, utterly unstatesmanly, morbidly barbaric, wantonly uncivilized, profanely undemocratic and unspeakably sacrilegious perpetual affronts on the therapeutically formidable institution of Alternative Medicine.

Now, I do not have 'Globally Acceptable Fellowship Qualifications' in Santa Clause Studies to know he does not exist. But hey. I must be a morbidly barbaric and profanely undemocratic, unethical duck.

So, struggling around the acres of pomposity I find one place where Prof Joe might be making some money. You can call him to seek his wisdom, after pre-booking an hour's slot (and handing over your credit card) for a mere 300 Euros. Alternatively, you can pay by the minute on the contact line for a trifling $10 per minute.

Its going to cost you $20 just for Joe to say Hello and to read out his numerous titles, qualifications and names. Not bad 'ethical' work.

Ethical Quackery, the Monarchy and Kate Moss - Thursday, October 12, 2006

No, this is not about our Defender of Quackery, our Quack-in-Chief His Royal Quackiness, Prince Charles, but about the Distinguished Provost of the Royal College of Alternative Medicine, Professor Joseph Chikelue Obi. And yes, it is just a rather lame story written solely to get a picture of Kate on my blog.

I've written a rather lazy blog on the distinguished professor before that was just a bit of a gawp at his quacktastic website and what looks like a health phone-line scam.

Well, I've done a little more digging with Google and it has revealed a few quack gems. It has been pretty hard work, since Google returns some 6,000 pages, the vast majority just appears to be Prof Obi's self-promotion. However, if you persist in digging a few interesting facts turn up.

So, what has the little black duck found out about the "most Controversial Retired Physician and 'A-List' Medical Celebrity, Dr Joseph Chikelue Obi"?

Here we go...

1. The Irish Independent reports that his college does not exist at the Dublin address given on the web site. There's a surprise! It's just a front.

2. The Independent goes on. "In January 2003, he was suspended by for serious professional misconduct at South Tyneside District Hospital. Among the allegations made were that he failed to attend to patients, wrote strange notes about colleagues and at one point gave a dating agency phone number to a psychiatric patient."

3. He was being investigated by the police for taking thousands of pounds of a 58 year old woman to in order to cure a long standing illness.

4. The GMC strike Dr Obi off their register for "serious professional misconduct". So much for him being retired.

5. On another tack, Dr Obi has been involved in a little cyber-squatting. This looks as if it took place while he was a doctor - always after a few quid!

6. Since then, now self-titled Prof Obi, a few new avenues have been opened, including trying to entice Kate Moss away to one of his 'safe-houses' in Ireland. Hat's off!

He is quoted as saying:

Under the European Convention on Human Rights, Miss Moss still has fundamental rights, just like anyone else out there, and as far as I am concerned, she is not guilty of anything until an Ethical Jury says so.

(I mentioned before that 'ethical' was one of his favourite words.)

7. Prof Obi has been developing a Penis Enlarger (watch out Kate) that his own Royal College has now endorsed.

8. At least one person (out of the targeted million) has paid Prof Obi the fees for his college to accredit them. Dr Michael Keet (8 Canards) of the Central London College of Reflexology handed over 'hundreds'. Do we feel sorry for out-quacked quacks? I guess we ought to.

9. For those of you wanting to see behind the grand titles and see the real human being, Joseph lists his interests as Comedy in London, Whole Food Nutrition and Christian Music. On this 'Meetup' site, he describes himself as "Just a very ordinary guy . . .". That's nice.

10. His name appears very often on the blog Abolish The General Medical Council (GMC), often reporting something he has got up to. The blog describes itself as:

An ethical blog for those who publicly feel that the General Medical Council (GMC) should be Statutorily Abolished in favour of a Medical Licensing Commission (MLC) to solely register and revalidate Doctors who practise Conventional Medicine in the UK. The Blog also recommends that the GMC/MLC hands all disciplinary functions over to an Independent Clinical Tribunal (ICT) in keeping with the EU Convention on Human Rights ; to avoid (both) Institutional Bias and Multiple Jeopardy.

Oooh. There is that word 'ethical' again. And 'European Human Rights'. No name is given for the blog author but the avatar is a portrait of the queen. Another apparent obsession of Prof Obi - royalty. Could the author be none other than the Professor himself, a little agrieved for his ticking off? I hope you all click through to the blog. Maybe we will show up in his stats and whoever the writer is can get in contact and confirm one way or another.

I rather hope it is, as the final thing I turned up would just be fantastic...

11. Is the Distinguished Provost of the Royal College of Alternative Medicine, Professor Obi now selling ethical ring-tones? I do hope so.

Watch out Crazy Frog! Here comes the Crazy Provost...

Goose Report '08

2008-01-07T13:27:00.000-05:00

January 6th. Fucking January, fucking 6th, in fucking Canada. The snow's already melting, and the geese are already back, and yet we're not even halfway through what winter is supposed to be yet.

You might remember that last year I clocked the geese returning on March 16. I then went on a bit about Global Warming. Most of my comments there are still valid, so go and read that and the follow-up post if you haven't already. Today, my mind being a little bit blown by seeing the geese back this early, excuse me if I rant a little.

Okay, how the hell can so many seemingly thinking, rational people still doubt Global Warming? I can understand doubt coming from those who have a vested interest in it not being true, along with those who get all of their information form such sources. That's just confirmation bias (or lying) and Garbage In, Garbage Out respectively at work. I don't like it, but it's no surprise.

Particularly on my mind right now is the issue of South Park creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, thanks to an episode I saw a couple days ago. They seem to really have it in for Global Warming. Now, they seem to go out of their way to attack any and everything, so an episode or two on it wouldn't be surprising or anything to worry about. I'm not going to pretend her that there aren't some people who go a bit overboard in their zeal and deserve a little mockery for it, but that apparently isn't the extent of Matt and Trey's attacks.

From my count, it seems that South Park has, directly or indirectly, addressed Global Warming in five separate episodes: "Spontaneous Combustion," "Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow," "ManBearPig," "Terrance and Phillip: Behind the Blow," and "Imaginationland" (episodes II and III). So, it's clear that Matt and Trey really have it in for Global Warming, and it's probably a safe bet they doubt the validity of Anthropogenic Global Warming and/or the possible consequences.

The question then is: Why? The two of them have shown remarkable skepticism in the past, taking down the likes of John Edwards ("The Biggest Douche in the Universe"), psychic detectives ("Carman's Incredible Gift"), and too many aspects of religion to mention. So what's different here?

Getting the obvious possibility out of the way: They're right, we're wrong. I don't really buy this one, of course. Personally, I don't know enough about climate science to study everything and come up with my own, independant conclusion (to any degree of confidence that I could challenge people who study it for a living), so I'm left trusting the experts. And the conclusion among them is that AGW is real and a problem. There are, of course, dissenters, but many of them have corporate ties you'd expect to introduce a bias or are so obviously cranky that I can debunk their claims myself.

So why don't Matt and Trey simply trust the experts here? Well, I'm guessing it's simply because they think the experts are wrong. I'm not going to hazard a guess right now as to why this is, as there are many possible ways they could have come to this conclusion, and I have no evidence for any particular one of them.

What I will bring up here is why they stick to this belief. For this, the chapter from the paperback edition of Michael Sheremer's Why People Believe Weird Things, "Why Smart People Believe Weird Things" gives us a very good answer. If you haven't read that, I'd recommend checking it out for the full story, but to sum it up: Smart people are very good at defending beliefs they arrived at through irrational reasoning.

This raises the issue of how important it is to be willing to change your mind. Personally, I've probably got a ton of beliefs I arrived at for bad reasons. I could well be wrong about many of them, and the issue at stake here, Global Warming, could easily be one.

So I'm opening this up to the commenters. A couple issues here you could address, depending on your own beliefs: 1) Why do you think so many smart people don't believe in AGW? What led them to their initial beliefs? or 2) Try to convince me why I shouldn't trust the expert opinion on this issue. Go for it.

Google him

2007-12-30T16:02:00.001-05:00

Sorry for the lack of posts as of late. I've been keeping up with reading most of my watched blogs, but just haven't felt the urge to post. Well, I came across something today which merits attention.

Near one of my favorite lunch restaurants near my parents' house, it appears that Ron Paul has set up his campaign headquarters for the area. Now, in case you haven't heard about Ron Paul yet, to sum it up, he's a quack enabler, doesn't believe in evolution or the Holocaust, and has accepted campaign contributions from neo-nazis.

Sound like the kind of man you want to be President? Nope, me neither. Well, I noticed something on the signs on his campaign headquarters. One of them had the message "Google him." Let's try this. At the time of my search, his campaign site is first, and the Wikipedia article on him is second. Nothing at all surprising there. However, we do come across this news article on him. He's apparently the most googled republican candidate, which is rather unsurprising when you consider the message on some of his signs.

You know what the problem is, though? The truly frightening information about Paul can't be found easily in the first few pages Google finds. Tch. Well, we should really do something about that. Google bomb time, perhaps? I'm not sure if it's particularly worth it here, as he doesn't stand too much chance of winning. However, he is still a congressman. Maybe if some people in his district know about his less-than-savory activities, he won't last.

Well, if anyone else feels the urge to help redirect googlers to better information about this guy, feel free to repost the following links:

Ron Paul
Ron Paul
Ron Paul
Ron Paul

Church apologizes for everything

2007-11-23T14:14:00.000-05:00

This just in, apparently the top bishop in Quebec has gone and apologized for pretty much everything the church has done wrong. Everything he could think of, at the least. First of all, it definitely is nice that someone in a prominent position there is sorry, and I believe this is the first time I've heard any of them apologize for the child abuse that went on. However, I do have a few gripes.

The first is motive. This bishop wasn't apologizing just because he was sorry about all that had happened. He apologized because he thought it would help draw people back into Catholicism. This doesn't mean he isn't actually sorry, and I don't doubt that this man in particular probably is, but it does mean that it isn't as big a reason for him as attracting people to the religion.

My second problem is that although an apology is fine, what I really want is a promise to try to improve. Weeding out the bad ideas you know about is a good first step, but other bad ideas will keep popping up. You have to get down to the root causes and pluck them out. Unfortunately, this is something I expect the church never to do, as it would involve using logic instead of faith, relying on evidence instead of divine revelation, etc. In short, it would take all the religion out of religion. Not that I'd mind seeing that happen, but it's not going to.

The God Hypothesis

2007-11-19T14:03:00.000-05:00

I'd like to make a few comments about my recent post, Intelligent Planting. I left the narrative without any comments there, as I figured this was an allegory that worked well enough on its own. I set up a parody of Intelligent Design to better illustrate all the leaps in logic design proponents expect people to make. It starts with jumping from "it doesn't look random" to "it was designed." Then it jumps from "it was designed" to "God/Pete designed it, and he also did all these other things recorded in the Bible." Now, of course, design proponents are all about hiding their religious affiliation, but it's there, and it is their ultimate goal, whether they'll admit it or not. I also then threw in some of the other doggerel they use to justify this for good measure, particularly mocking the appeal to faith.

That all being said, you might be somewhat surprised to learned that Intelligent Design wasn't my initial impetus for writing this story. Instead, this comes from a different argument for God which makes much the same leap in logic (from saying there was someone or something to saying it was God). This was what's known as the Cosmological Argument. When boiled down, it essentially becomes, "There was an ultimate cause for everything, therefore God."

You might want to take a moment to read through the Wikipedia article on this argument, linked above. What I'd like to call to your attention is the simple fact of how many variations on this argument there are. The Cosmological Argument is often presented as being strictly logical, but if that were so, then you wouldn't expect these variations on exactly how the Prime Mover/Uncaused Cause/God started things. Therefore, it would seem that most or all of these arguments are likely making some assumptions behind the scenes (or are just fallacious).

For example, let's take the argument of Thomas Aquinas, one of the more complete versions. From the Wikipedia summary:

1. Every finite and contingent being has a cause.
2. Nothing finite and dependent (contingent) can cause itself.
3. A causal chain cannot be of infinite length.
4. Therefore, there must be a first cause; or, there must be something that is not an effect.

Few would argue with points 1 and 2, but let's take a look at point 3. Why is it that a causal chain cannot be of infinite length? Presumably this is simply stated because the thought of it seems absurd, but is it really? Let's extend things into the future. Under most modern models for the universe and many religious models as well, time will go on infinitely into the future. This means that as long as it keeps going, we'll keep on having a causal chain. Thus, the causal chain will extend infinitely into the future. Ipso, a causal chain of infinite length. (Man, have I been itching to properly use "ipso" in a sentence...)

So, if it can extend infinitely into the future, what's wrong with having a causal chain extend infinitely into the past? It's at this point that it seems a bit more absurd instinctively, but logically it doesn't have to be. All laws of physics we know of are time-reversible, with a single exception that allows us to see order in time, the collapse of a wavefunction. If you compensate for collapse and run things backwards in time, you can see the same theme of causation occurring. Instead of a sperm and egg causing a zygote, you get a zygote causing a sperm and an egg, for instance. Running things this way, it doesn't seem so absurd that things might go on forever.

So here we have the problem with this particular argument: a false premise. The argument may still be technically valid (the conclusion can't be false if all the premises are true), but with a false premise, it's unsound, and we have no reason to believe the conclusion given this argument. Now, this doesn't mean that there wasn't actually some first cause, it only means that this argument doesn't prove it. So, let's entertain the idea that there was a first cause now, for completeness' sake.

What can we say about this first cause? Well, nothing, really. We can't claim it must have been intelligent, or even complex in any way, as it's easily possible for intelligence and complexity to arise from unintelligent, simple conditions, driven by a little randomness. However, we have a lot of religious people pointing to their own god and saying it fits the bill of a first cause. The argument for a first cause, even if it were valid, doesn't give us any reason to believe that the first cause is anything like their god, but that's not necessarily a problem.

What we can do is treat their god as a hypothesis to explain the first cause. A tactic like this is often done by scientists; we have a problem, so we hypothesize something to explain it which is a bit beyond what we know. Since it's beyond what we know, it often comes with the ability to predict other phenomena we haven't tested for yet. So, we then go and test for those phenomena. If they exist, we have evidence that this hypothesis is true. We can do roughly the same thing for the hypothesis that a god was the first cause.

The immediate problem is that invoking a god here is a gross violation of Occam's Razor. An explanation that invokes a particular brings in many interrelated claims, and has many, many predictions beyond the simple creation of the universe. This doesn't mean it isn't true, however; it just means that we're going to need a lot of evidence to support it. Otherwise, a simpler explanation (or less precise god) will be much preferred.

Now, there are many deities we can choose from, so I'll only use a couple examples here, positioned at extremes. Most other deities will fall on the continuum somewhere between these, and a mix of the applicable arguments will apply.

First up, I'm going to take the god believed in by many evangelical Christians in the US. This is the god discussed in the Bible, who did all the things claimed there. He's omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and just generally omni. He also takes a role in our day-to-day lives. He listens to and answers prayers. He smites those who displease him in any way. When people die, their souls are judged by him. If they've led a ridiculously devout life, free from even the slightest pleasure (shadenfreude over thinking about sinners going to hell excepted), they go into heaven, a place of eternal bliss. If they're even slightly off, or believe in a slightly different god, they go to hell, a place of eternal torment. (Aside: I don't particularly care if anyone believes in exactly this god; I'm just using it as an extreme example.)

This the hypothesis to be tested. On the other end, we'll have the null hypothesis, which we'll be comparing this to. At the end, we hope to be able to reject either this or the null hypothesis. In this case, we can use the null hypothesis, "No god exists." If we find sufficient evidence for this god, we'll be able to reject this null hypothesis.

So, what of this is testable? If you say "none of it," scroll down a bit. I've got your untestable god there. This is a god who interferes with the world. If there are natural effects of supernatural causes, they can be tested for. Anyways, there are two big points here that we can test: Intercessory prayer and smiting the heathens. Let's start with prayer. This is something that actually has been scientifically tested. Repeatedly. And then some more. And again, because every time, the results weren't satisfactory. Whey weren't they satisfactory? Because the tests were either poorly done, or they didn't show any effect to prayer. Even if you don't agree that the ones who showed an effect were poorly done, it's still only a marginal improvement. It's nothing compared to the effect you'd think an omnipotent god like this could have.

But wait! "Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence!" I hear you cry. Ah, well there's a big exception to that. Absence of evidence can indeed be evidence of absence when you've properly and thoroughly looked for evidence. I call it the Modus Tollens Exception, as you can phrase it in the following logical form:

P1: If A exists and we use method M to search for evidence, we will find evidence E.
P2: We used method M to search for evidence, and did not find evidence E.
C: Therefore, A does not exist.

Boiling it down to the simple logic, this is the valid structure:

P1: If A and M, then E.
P2: M and not E.
C: Not A.

This is essentially the Modus Tollens argument form, with a small complication of an extra requirement in the premise. Since we're using a logical form here, my argument that absence of evidence is in this case evidence of absence is also valid.

It's a bit harder to test the prediction that this god will go around smiting heathens, as we can't really control things here. However, if you look at what happens in the world, there isn't good evidence that this takes place. For instance, many evangelicals claimed that Hurricane Katrina was their god smiting New Orleans for all the debauchery that takes place there. The problem was that the French Quarter, which was where most of the debauchery took place, was one of the least-damaged areas. This particular claim, at least, doesn't hold water. (Ugh... I swear that pun was unintentional.)

In any case, testing prayer alone is sufficient here. We can, of course, add to the evidence for all the other claims about this god, though it's not necessary for the time being. Since we have evidence that prayer to this god doesn't work, we can reject the hypothesis that this god exists. And no, we don't go and accept the null hypothesis that no god exists; we just say that we fail to reject it. It could well be true, but we haven't shown that here.

Alright, now let's switch to the other extreme. Let's take a Deist god. This god created the universe, and then just kind of sat back and watched. Or maybe he went off to create another universe, or just took the next few billion years off to slouch around and watch TV. Or maybe he's a "she," or an "it," or some other gender we don't have a pronoun for. Not much is claimed about this god. In fact, aside from that he created the universe, not anything is claimed about this god. In contrast to the previous case where so much was claimed about the god that it was easy to find evidence against him, here, we don't have anything claimed at all beyond what we know happened. With this, we can't make any testable predictions about him, so we can't scientifically test for his existence.

This is still a hypothesis, though. The problem is that it's a completely useless hypothesis. There's nothing we can do to improve upon it, or get any further evidence that it might be true. There isn't even anything we can do to differentiate it from similar hypotheses, such as saying that instead of a god, a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. Or we could say that the universe spawned yesterday from primordial slood with all the particles in just the right positions and velocities for us to be here with all this evidence for a past and memories of it.

In the end, there's no way to reject this hypothesis. But coupled with that is the fact that there's no way to get evidence for it. There's no reason for you to actually believe in it. The fact that it can't be disproven is no reason to believe, as following that logic would lead you to believe a million contradictory explanations for the beginning of the universe. This is why science doesn't do anything with untestable hypotheses; they're utterly useless.

In the real world, most gods people believe in fall somewhere between these extremes. They try to balance out not contradicting reality with having enough predictions to be useful. However, this doesn't really solve any problems. In order for their to be evidence of a god's existence, it has to make some predictions that later turn out to be true (and of course, can't be adequately explained without him. A god predicting gravity isn't a big deal). Simply throwing away disproven predictions and holding onto untestable ones still doesn't give anyone a reason to believe in this god.

However, I could well be wrong. If I am, if there's some god out there with good evidence for his existence, I would in fact quite like to know about it. I'd expect to have heard of it by now, but you never know. Maybe the right study just hasn't been performed yet. In which case, I challenge any believer who believes they have a testable prediction about their god to go out and perform a study to test it. Perform it well enough, and a positive result could be just what you need to convince me. Until then, I'm happy living my life accepting the null hypothesis as most plausible.

Skeptic's Circle #72 and #73

2007-11-10T14:01:00.000-05:00

Bah, I've been remiss about this. I missed out on linking to the 72nd Skeptic's Circle and the 73rd Skeptic's Circle when they came around, so there ya go.

In other news, if you're going to conduct a demonstration claiming that a snake not biting you is evidence of your faith and God's existence, you have to prepared to take the fact that it instead bit and killed you as evidence against this.

Intelligent Planting

2007-11-06T12:14:00.000-05:00

One day, two friends, Jim and Mike, were out hiking through the wilderness. They came upon a beautiful patch of wildflowers, and while admiring it, they struck up the following conversation:

Jim: Amazing, isn't it?
Mike: Yeah. That Pete sure is something.
Jim: Pete? Who's Pete?
Mike: He's the guy who planted all of these flowers. You didn't think they'd be arranged so beautifully on their own, did you?
Jim: Well, actually, I did. Flowers evolved to be beautiful; it's part of how they attract bees to pollinate them or something. We can ask my friend Rick when we get back to town if you want the whole story; he's a botanist, so he should know. It's not too surprising they'd be beautiful.
Mike: Meh. I don't buy it. Even with that, the way they're arranged is too pretty.
Jim: I don't know, it seems pretty random to me. The human mind is good at picking out patterns, though, so the few that form randomly stand out to us and make us think it's beautiful.
Mike: Trust me. I know design when I see it, and that patch has too many nice patterns in it to be random. Someone must have purposefully planted them that way.
Jim: And that someone is Pete?
Mike: Exactly.
Jim: ... I think I'm missing a step here. I can see how your logic and way of thinking would lead you to believe someone must have planted those flowers – even if I don't agree with it – but how does that extend to it being a specific person? Do you know Pete or something?
Mike: Well, no.
Jim: Do you know anyone who's seen him? Or, maybe any newspaper articles about him planting wildflowers in this area?
Mike: Not exactly, no.
Jim: Then why do jump from “someone” to “Pete”?
Mike: Well, you see, when I was a kid, my mother read this book to me, all about Pete and his work. I've grown up believing in Pete ever since, and I make an effort to spread the word about him when I can. His work shouldn't go uncredited.
Jim: Okay, I guess that's better than nothing. I'd like to see this book sometime, though. See what all the fuss is about.
Mike: Oh, well you're in luck. I always bring a copy of it along when I go hiking.
(Mike searches through his bag, picks out a book, and hands it to Jim. Jim starts reading through it.)
Jim: Huh. Well I can see where you got some of your ideas from, but this just isn't too convincing to me.
Mike: Why not?
Jim: Well, for one thing, it isn't very consistent. For one thing, his last name changes spelling over the course of the book. It starts off as “Gardener” – a name whose appropriateness makes me suspect this started off as a simply children's book, but I digress – but in the last chapter it becomes “Gardner.”
Mike: Oh, well that's just a typo.
Jim: All seven times?
Mike: Okay, maybe not. I think different chapters might have been written by different people, so that would explain it.
Jim: Ah, I can see that. Especially if this just started as a children's story which got misinterpreted.
Mike: Hey! Don't disrespect my beliefs like that!
Jim: Sorry, but as your friend, I feel it's my obligation to tell you that what you're saying isn't that convincing.
Mike: What do you mean? Isn't the design of these flowers along with this book proof enough for you?
Jim: Well, for all I know, this book could have simply been intended as fiction. The design of these flowers – which I still don't agree to, mind you – is the only real evidence you've presented. Besides, I've heard of a few different stories about this type of thing. I think I recall one similar book, except it was a guy named Phil, not Pete.
Mike: Yeah, we get into fights with the Phil-believers all the time about this.
Jim: That's just the point. From your flimsy evidence, all you can argue for as that someone must have planted the flowers. There's no reason I should prefer Pete over Phil or maybe Bruce, Doug, or Pat!
Mike: That's where this book comes in. We've got evidence that there has to be someone planting these flowers, and we've got a story about Pete doing just that. Isn't that enough to believe in Pete?
Jim: Not really. I mean, a book like that isn't very good evidence. It's cobbled together by multiple authors, contradicts itself in many places, and doesn't even provide any way to verify any of it. And I'll remind you that I still think the layout of these flowers is simply random.
Mike: Well you see, that's where faith comes in. I mean, logically, it might not seem to all fit together. But you have to trust in Pete, and know that he really does exist, and somehow this all makes sense.
Jim: You say that as if blind trust is a virtue.
Mike: Pete says it is.
Jim: But you can't know that Pete's right unless you already accept that he exists.
Mike: Which I do, because of my faith.
Jim: You ever get the feeling we're arguing in circles?
Mike: Pete says the circle is perfect, and therefore circular logic is also a thing of beauty.
Jim: I don't think I want to be friends with you anymore.

Let's see you argue with this

2007-10-23T21:06:00.001-04:00

Sometimes an argument occurs to you that's just so ridiculous you have to share. But that's not today. Today I have a very serious point to make, on the very serious subject of abortion.

Now, many pro-lifers claim that life begins at conception, and that the child is a legitimate human at that point. What is it that makes them human? Well, if they stay out of religion, they'll argue about continuity of being, presence of human cells, and so on (if you have another argument, feel free to share that).

So, hypothetical question for any pro-lifers around here: Zombies. Okay, I should probably give you an actual question, I guess. Do zombies qualify as living humans? Now, while there's debate on whether zombies are human, they're by definition dead. If they weren't dead, they wouldn't be zombies. So, zombies are not overall living humans.

But what makes a fetus so different from a zombie? Zombies are connected to humans through a continuity of being, they're made of human cells, and even have higher intelligence and a more human form than a fetus. If zombies are dead, what is it about fetuses that makes them more alive than zombies?

Skeptic's Circle #71: Solutions, part 1

2007-10-18T13:24:00.000-04:00

For those of you still hanging around and trying to solve the problems I posed you in the last Skeptic's Circle, I thought I'd do you the favor of compiling some of the solutions that have been posted. So far, I'm just going to give solutions to the problems that someone has solved in the comments, so anyone who wants to can still work on the as-yet unsolved problems. If those don't get solved in a while, I'll post the solutions for them as well.

If you still want to solve them on your own, don't read on. Also, note that for parsimony, I'm not going to be repeating the problems here. Go back here if you need a refresher.

Personalized Perfume Peril

Flip over 48 disks, and then separate those 48 into one pile, with the other 52 in the other pile.

Creative Cake Capers

As yet unsolved, at least here. This problem has been posted with solutions elsewhere on the internet.

Popping Placebo Pills

Take out one pill from the first jar, two from the second, three from the third, four from the fourth, and five (or zero would work too) from the fifth, and weight them. The weight should be the expected weight of 15 placebo pills + x grams, where x corresponds to the number of pills you took out of the jar which has the real pills.

Perilous Peace Problems

Push the cork into the bottle, somehow destroy the cork while making sure any remnants fall into the bottle, melt a hole in the bottle, or simply ignore the whole problem as it's more likely there is no poison gas and it's instead the pill that's poisoned.

Crazed Canting Christians

As yet unsolved here. One little hint: If you make a certain observation about the problem, it becomes trivial math to find the solution.

Hidden Handbook Hassle

Skeptico puts the book in his safe, and his lock on it. He sends the safe to his friend, who puts his lock on it as well, and then returns it. Skeptico removes his lock and sends his safe back. His friend removes his lock and takes out the handbook.

Weird Water Woo

Tilt the glass to the side until the water just reaches the rim. If the water at the bottom also meets the edge there, it's half full. If it's above the edge, you have more than half; below, less than half. If you accidentally spill the water, you now have less than half.

Screwy Scarfe's Secrets

Referring to the guys by the time it takes them to cross:

1 and 2 cross (2 minutes)
1 returns (1 minute)
4 and 8 cross (8 minutes)
2 returns (2 minutes)
1 and 2 cross (2 minutes)

Total time: 15 minutes. Most people end up with some solution that results in 16 minutes, but it's not optimal.

Poor Poisoned Pinheads

Number all the bottles in binary, from 0000000001 to 1101101010 (which corresponds to 874. On the first day, give each of Buzz's captives a number from 1 to 5. Have each of them take a sip from each bottle that has a 1 in its binary digit corresponding to their number. For each captive that gets amnesia the next day, write a 1 in that digit, and a zero for captives who didn't get amnesia. The second day, do the same thing with the 6th through 10th digits. Once all the digits are written down, you'll have uniquely identified the poisoned bottle. At this point, make them all drink from it and throw them out on the street so they won't be able to tell anyone what you did.

What Wifi Woo?

As yet unsolved here. The best solution given can do it in 4 total trips, but it's possible to do it in only 2.

Manic Motor Mythbusting

Use the following program:

Move 100m forward (label: START)
Move 100m forward
Move 100m backward
Skip next command unless a parachute is nearby
Goto SPEEDUP
Goto START
Move 100m forward (label: SPEEDUP)
Goto SPEEDUP

Paddling Pooch Problem

As yet unsolved here.

Action/Adventure Akusai

Choose to play first, and place your first disk at the center of the table. After this, match each of your opponents moves with a symmetric move across the table from him. He'll run out of moves first.

Great Galileo's Ghost

I'll just quote the solutions from my comments here. Figuring out which is which is trivial, as you just have to ask questions you know the answer to, and keep repeating to sort out who's answering randomly. First, from Miller:

For the Galileo puzzle, you can ask the following compound question to voip out lying clones:

Is the following true: You will answer this with "yes" or (inclusive) you are the real Galileo.

Similarly, the following will voip truth-telling clones.

Is the following true: You will answer this with "no" or you are the real Galileo.

Alternating between these two questions will eventually voip a clone with the random curse.

From Simon, a single-shot question:

"Is it the case that you are a clone and that you will either answer this question truthfully with a 'no' or falsely with a 'yes'?"

My original answer to this last part was the question: "Is the statement, 'You are a clone and this statement is false,' true?"

Super-Scammer Secrets

As yet unsolved completely. There are many ways you could decrease the amount of information found on a single slide, but the true puzzle is to figure out a way that whichever two slides are found, absolutely zero information is passed on.

For a hint, imagine if the puzzle were to instead use two slides, and either alone would carry no information. The following solution would work in this case: Pixelate the presentation, and make sure the pixels are quite large and easily distinguishable. Generate one transparency that's completely random, with each pixel being randomly either transparent or 50% opaque. Then, for the second sheet, for the places where the message is spelled out, choose either transparent or 50% opaque as necessary to make the pixel result in 50% opaque. For places where the message isn't, match the pixel to the one on the other slide. The result will be the message appearing in grey text on a mixed black and white background.

Note that this is possibly the most difficult problem here. Though it's been posed on the internet, I haven't found any solutions posted. I have solved it myself, however, so don't worry.

Harebrained Hat Help

Solution by RodeoBob:

Got the Hats puzzle solved. It does, however, depend on everyone being an expert at logic, and everyone following the same game plan...

The color of the wearer's hat is the same color as the smallest group of colored hats he or she can see, and they must make their guess (and leave the circle!) at the first opportunity allowed.

To make it clearer, let's break the process up into 5-minute rounds. (at the end of each 'round', the announcement comes on asking folks to announce the color of their hat)

In the first round, anyone who can only see one hat of a specific color is wearing that color hat. (we know there must be at least two, right?)

In the second round, anyone who can see only two hats of a given color is wearing that color. (we know that there must be three of each color now, since any color that were only present on two heads should have left last round...)

The puzzle only works if everyone is looking, and if everyone leaves at the right time. If somebody falls asleep, or isn't paying attention, or loses count and misses a round, the whole thing falls apart.

Singular Sword Slashes

From Rick Taylor in the comments:

In the singular sword slashes, none of the prisoners were killed.

They all got together and agreed as follows. Whoever was last in line would call out his own hat based on the parity of red hats he saw before him. If he saw an even number of red hats, he'd call his red; if he saw an odd number red hats, he'd call his blue. That man might die, but the next in line, seeing the hats in front of him and knowing the parity of red hats including his own could deduce his hat color. The man in front of him, now knowing both the color of the hat behind him and the parity of all the hats besides his own could deduce his own, and so on to the front of the line. The executioner, hearing this and seeing he could not avoid sparing all but the last in line, arranged the hats to ensure at least he was killed, even though the 99 others were spared, and that was that.

Only it wasn't. All one hundred silently reasoned that the executioner would have to place an even number of red hats in order to kill the last one in line. And so they abandoned their plan and used that information to save them all from last to first.

The truly delicious part of that last solution is that even if we assume the executioner anticipated they would change their strategy to trick him (no reason to as he isn't part of the mensa cult) and put an odd number of red hats to on them, the last man in line would die, but the 99 remaining would still live, even using the wrong information. So there's no reason for them not to try!

Ending Erroneous Expectations

From Edward in the comments:

We can answer the pirates problem using induction, of sorts.

Consider the situation with 5 pirates. If it ever gets down to two pirates, the senior one can simply award all the money to himself and vote for it. With three pirates, the senior one has to convince one other pirate to vote for his plan. The cheapest way of doing this is to award the junior pirate 1 coin and keep 99. Then with four pirates, the senior one only has to convince one other pirate to join him. If it gets down to three, the middle one can't expect to make anything, so he can be bought with 1 coin. With five pirates, the senior pirate needs two others to join him. He can do this by giving one coin to each of the 3rd and 5th most senior pirates, since they'll get nothing if he dies. He would keep the other 98 coins to himself.

Now consider six pirates and only one coin. As before, with only two pirates, the senior pirate can award all money to himself. With three, the senior pirate needs to award the one coin to the junior pirate. With four, the senior pirate can award the coin to either of the two pirates immediately below him. With five pirates, the senior pirate need to convince two pirates to join him, which is impossible. Therefore the second most senior pirate will die if it gets to him, so he will vote for absolutely any plan the most senior pirate proposes. The most senior pirate can then avoid death by awarding the coin to the most junior pirate.

That's it for now, so go give those unsolved problems another try if you think you're up for it!

Something for nothing and your universe for free

2007-10-16T12:21:00.000-04:00

One argument I keep running into that is supposedly evidence for God (sometimes a generic god, sometimes a specific one) is that the universe began, therefore it must have been created. Sometimes it's more elaborate than this, sometimes not. In the cases where it's just this simple, it's effectively a God of the gaps argument. Since that type of argument has been dismantled repeatedly, I'm going to focus on the more elaborate versions today.

The most common elaboration to this argument is that the creation of the universe violates conservation of energy. "It's a well-known fact of science that you can't get something from nothing," they say. Interestingly, it seems that the people who say this sort of thing rarely have any real background in physics, much less a background in theoretical physics or cosmology. Before making big assumptions like this, wouldn't it make sense to check with someone who knows what they're talking about in this area to see if they could explain it?

Now, if only we had a cosmologist on hand... Wait a second, I'm a cosmologist! Well, I guess I'd better try to make some sense of these problems then. So, to the claims that the creation of the universe violates conservation of energy, my response can be summed up in two simple retorts: "Says who?" and "Even if so, so what?" Allow me to elaborate.

The first catch is that we don't know for sure that the creation of the universe actually does violate conservation of energy. First, let's keep to known science, and use an example taking place within our own universe. Let's say that somehow, a massive particle was created. Since mass = energy, this took up energy to create it. Now, what could have happened to allow this creation? A few possibilities:

1. Some physical process took place which resulted in an excess of energy. This extra energy was converted into this particle.
2. Even a vacuum doesn't have zero energy. It's possible that this particle borrowed energy from the vacuum in order to form (possibly along with its antiparticle if it has other properties such as charge which need to be conserved).
3. This particle was created alongside a mirro version of itself which has negative mass, resulting in a net change of zero energy. Note that we've never observed negative mass particles, but our current laws of physics don't bar them from existing.

So, let's expand to the creation of our universe. It turns out that for each of these, there's a nice parallel for the creation of the universe as well:

1. Some physical process took place outside our universe which resulted in an excess of energy. This extra energy was converted into our universe.
2. Whatever medium exists outside our universe might not necessarily have zero energy. It's possible that the creation of our universe simply borrowed some energy from this medium. A parallel anti-universe might also exist to balance quantities which must be conserved.
3. Our universe was created alongside a negative energy version of itself, so the net change in energy is zero.

There's also one more explanation which works for our universe, but not for the particle example:

4. Our universe has a net energy of zero. It is possible that the mysterious phenomenon we've termed "Dark energy" actually has negative energy, and this balances out the positive energy all of the mass in the universe provides. A little catch is that there's likely much more dark energy in the universe than all the other mass, so we'd actually be at an excess if this were true. That's little problem though, as it could easily have just been radiated away or whatever outside our universe.

So there you have it, four possible reasons why the creation of our universe might not violate conservation of energy. But even going into all that isn't really necessary. The catch is, violating conservation of energy isn't necessarily a problem when it comes to the creation of the universe. The reason for this is a bit complicated, but a simple version is as follows: Conservation of energy is an observation we've made which always seems to hold within our universe. We have no evidence that it holds outside our universe, or even that any of our laws of physics are the same out there. Therefore, we don't have reason to believe it must hold at the point of creation.

Now, for the more complicated explanation. We actually do have one explanation for why energy (and other properties, for that matter) is conserved. The reasoning is complicated, so I won't go into it here, but the key point is that it relies on what are known as symmetries. In the physics world, a symmetry is more than simply being able to mirror something and have it be the same. What it means here is that we could move the whole frame of reference in some way, and all the physics would remain the same.

There are three big symmetries of this type you'll know of. There's translational symmetry, which means if you move a foot to the right for instance, physics stays the same. There's rotation symmetry, which means whichever way you turn, the physics is the same. And there's temporal symmetry, which means that physics stays the same over time. There are also some others you probably haven't heard of it you haven't take college physics, such as gauge symmetry, but you don't need to worry about those here.

The important point about this is that there's a law of physics which states that for every symmetry, there must be some conserved quantity. This is completely unintuitive, but it's provable. Not easily provable, and most people reading this probably wouldn't understand the proof in any case, but it is provable, so just trust me on this. When we apply this law, we get the following conservations from the following symmetries:

-Translational symmetry gives us conservation of momentum.
-Rotational symmetry gives us conservation of angular momentum.
-Temporal symmetry gives us conservation of energy.
-Gauge symmetry gives us conservation of charge.

The important one for our purposes is the third: Temporal symmetry gives us conservation of energy. What happens if we no longer have temporal symmetry? Well, we can no longer guarantee conservation of energy. Now, think back to the beginning of the universe. At this point, all of the universe is compressed to a single, zero-dimensional point. Are the laws of physics the same here? Not at all. Temporal symmetry must be broken at this point, so we have no reason to believe that conservation of energy must apply. The instant after it, we start to have temporal symmetry, so whatever energy we start with we're stuck with, but there's no way to say what this might be.

So there you have it: a cosmologist's perspective on conservation of energy at the beginning of the universe. We don't know that the beginning of the universe violates conservation of energy at all. Even if it does, this isn't necessarily a problem. Even if all this is a problem, it's still at best a God of the gaps argument, and that's really no reason to believe at all.

The Streisand Effect

2007-10-12T14:15:00.000-04:00

The Society of Homeopaths really should do their research before trying to censor something on the internet. Then again, homeopaths and actual research aren't exactly the best of friends, so it's not surprising they've never heard of the Streisand Effect. Basically, it's a trend on the internet that trying to censor some material just generates more publicity and makes the material more widely available. This is why you now see many bloggers - myself now included - reposting Le Canard Noir's post, "The Gentle Art of Homeopathic Killing." Check out Respectful Insolence for a bit more on the story.

So, I now present to you:

The Gentle Art of Homeopathic Killing

by Le Canard Noir

The Society of Homeopaths (SoH) are a shambles and a bad joke. It is now over a year since Sense about Science, Simon Singh and the BBC Newsnight programme exposed how it is common practice for high street homeopaths to tell customers that their magic pills can prevent malaria. The Society of Homeopaths have done diddly-squat to stamp out this dangerous practice apart from issue a few ambiguously weasel-worded press statements.

The SoH has a code of practice, but my feeling is that this is just a smokescreen and is widely flouted and that the Society do not care about this. If this is true, then the code of practice is nothing more than a thin veneer used to give authority and credibility to its deluded members. It does nothing more than fool the public into thinking they are dealing with a regulated professional.

As a quick test, I picked a random homeopath with a web site from the SoH register to see if they flouted a couple of important rules:

48:
• Advertising shall not contain claims of superiority.
• No advertising may be used which expressly or implicitly claims to cure named diseases.

72: To avoid making claims (whether explicit or implied; orally or in writing) implying cure of any named disease.

The homeopath I picked on is called Julia Wilson and runs a practice from the Leicestershire town of Market Harborough. What I found rather shocked and angered me.

Straight away, we find that Julia M Wilson LCHE, RSHom specialises in asthma and works at a clinic that says,

Many illnesses and disease can be successfully treated using homeopathy, including arthritis, asthma, digestive disorders, emotional and behavioural difficulties, headaches, infertility, skin and sleep problems.

Well, there are a number of named diseases there to start off. She also gives a leaflet that advertises her asthma clinic. The advertising leaflet says,

Conventional medicine is at a loss when it comes to understanding the origin of allergies. ... The best that medical research can do is try to keep the symptoms under control. Homeopathy is different, it seeks to address the triggers for asthma and eczema. It is a safe, drug free approach that helps alleviate the flaring of skin and tightening of lungs...

Now, despite the usual homeopathic contradiction of claiming to treat causes not symptoms and then in the next breath saying it can alleviate symptoms, the advert is clearly in breach of the above rule 47 on advertising as it implicitly claims superiority over real medicine and names a disease.

Asthma is estimated to be responsible for 1,500 deaths and 74,000 emergency hospital admissions in the UK each year. It is not a trivial illness that sugar pills ought to be anywhere near. The Cochrane Review says the following about the evidence for asthma and homeopathy,

The review of trials found that the type of homeopathy varied between the studies, that the study designs used in the trials were varied and that no strong evidence existed that usual forms of homeopathy for asthma are effective.

This is not a surprise given that homeopathy is just a ritualised placebo. Hopefully, most parents attending this clinic will have the good sense to go to a real accident and emergency unit in the event of a severe attack and consult their GP about real management of the illness. I would hope that Julia does little harm here.

However, a little more research on her site reveals much more serious concerns. She says on her site that 'she worked in Kenya teaching homeopathy at a college in Nairobi and supporting graduates to set up their own clinics'. Now, we have seen what homeopaths do in Kenya before. It is not treating a little stress and the odd headache. Free from strong UK legislation, these missionary homeopaths make the boldest claims about the deadliest diseases.

A bit of web research shows where Julia was working (picture above). The Abha Light Foundation is a registered NGO in Kenya. It takes mobile homeopathy clinics through the slums of Nairobi and surrounding villages. Its stated aim is to,

introduce Homeopathy and natural medicines as a method of managing HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria in Kenya.

I must admit, I had to pause for breath after reading that. The clinic sells its own homeopathic remedies for 'treating' various lethal diseases. Its MalariaX potion,

is a homeopathic preparation for prevention of malaria and treatment of malaria. Suitable for children. For prevention. Only 1 pill each week before entering, during and after leaving malaria risk areas. For treatment. Take 1 pill every 1-3 hours during a malaria attack.

This is nothing short of being totally outrageous. It is a murderous delusion. David Colquhoun has been writing about this wicked scam recently and it is well worth following his blog on the issue.

Let's remind ourselves what one of the most senior and respected homeopaths in the UK, Dr Peter Fisher of the London Homeopathic Hospital, has to say on this matter.

there is absolutely no reason to think that homeopathy works to prevent malaria and you won't find that in any textbook or journal of homeopathy so people will get malaria, people may even die of malaria if they follow this advice.

Malaria is a huge killer in Kenya. It is the biggest killer of children under five. The problem is so huge that the reintroduction of DDT is considered as a proven way of reducing deaths. Magic sugar pills and water drops will do nothing. Many of the poorest in Kenya cannot afford real anti-malaria medicine, but offering them insane nonsense as a substitute will not help anyone.

Ironically, the WHO has issued a press release today on cheap ways of reducing child and adult mortality due to malaria. Their trials, conducted in Kenya, of using cheap mosquito nets soaked in insecticide have reduced child deaths by 44% over two years. It says that issuing these nets be the 'immediate priority' to governments with a malaria problem. No mention of homeopathy. These results were arrived at by careful trials and observation. Science. We now know that nets work. A lifesaving net costs $5. A bottle of useless homeopathic crap costs $4.50. Both are large amounts for a poor Kenyan, but is their life really worth the 50c saving?

I am sure we are going to hear the usual homeopath bleat that this is just a campaign by Big Pharma to discredit unpatentable homeopathic remedies. Are we to add to the conspiracy Big Net manufacturers too?

It amazes me that to add to all the list of ills and injustices that our rich nations impose on the poor of the world, we have to add the widespread export of our bourgeois and lethal healing fantasies. To make a strong point: if we can introduce laws that allow the arrest of sex tourists on their return to the UK, can we not charge people who travel to Africa to indulge their dangerous healing delusions?

At the very least, we could expect the Society of Homeopaths to try to stamp out this wicked practice? Could we?

Skeptic's Circle #71

2007-10-11T00:28:00.000-04:00

Welcome one, welcome all, to the 71st edition of the Skeptic's Circle. The theme for this week is logic. Logic puzzles to be precise. After all, logic is one of the best razors against irrational thinking, and like any razor it needs to be periodically sharpened. So, for that purpose I've prepared some logic puzzles for you all to work through, each one based on a post submitted.

I've sorted the puzzles by a rough estimate of their difficulty, though the ones each person will find easiest will likely differ. Feel free to discuss the puzzles in the comments, including guesses as to the answers (though if you've heard one before, don't spoil the fun for others). Just be warned that if you go reading the comments, you might run across an answer or two that's already been guessed.

I've also prepared a "Just the links" version if you're short on time or logic, so feel free to take advantage of that.

The next Skeptic's Circle will be hosted at The Quackometer Blog. Check over there for contact information to submit for next week's. So long, and happy puzzle-solving!

Skeptic's Circle #71: Hard

2007-10-11T00:24:00.000-04:00

Following are the hard problems for this Skeptic's Circle. Math isn't as much a requirement as for the medium problems, but you'll have to compensate with a ton of advanced logic.

Great Galileo's Ghost

Cranks have always loved to compare themselves to Galileo. Sick of this, one day Greta Christina decided to set them straight once and for all. To do this, she decided to go on a fictional journey to the afterlife to find Galileo himself so he could explain to them why they're acting like idiots. However, when she reached the afterlife, she ran into a little problem.

It seems that one day, Galileo accidentally touched a noodly appendage he shouldn't have, and ended up with a couple clones. On top of this, the three are cursed to always stay together and that if any yes-or-no question is posed to one of the three, they all must answer it. Any other type of question will be ignored by all three. Each of the clones plus the original has a specific curse on them, but it's unknown who has which curse. One of the curses requires the bearer to tell the truth to any question, another curse requires the bearer to lie in response to any question. The third curse causes the bearer to randomly choose between telling the truth and lying before answering each question.

Each of the Galileos knows whether it's the original or a clone, but without knowing which bears which curse, it would be tricky to figure it out. Is there a questioning procedure that would work here?

Now, Greta can't go back to the real world with three mixed-up possible Galileos, but fortunately, there's a way to break the curses. If any of them is ever faced with a question they can't answer (for instance, they're bound to tell the truth for this question, but the question has no truthful answer that doesn't result in a paradox), they'll go "Voip!" and vanish (so sayeth the FSM). If the two clones both vanish, the original Galileo will be freed from all the curses on him. However, he could vanish too if he's asked a question he can't answer, and if he does, it's game over. Is there a way to target out the two clones and make them vanish while keeping Galileo safe?

If you can accomplish that, one further challenge: Can you make both clones vanish with a single question, even if you haven't previously figured out which one is the real Galileo?

Super-Scammer Secrets

Lord Runolfr recently got a couple of e-mails from scammers, raising my suspicions that something big was afoot behind the scenes. I called up a few contacts, did some research, hired a few James Bond-alikes, and here's what I've figured out:

There's some evil mastermind behind the whole plan, and he's about as supervillanous as they come. This of course means that he wants to capture one of my James Bond-alikes and subject him to an intricately detailed explanation of his evil plan before killing him in a creative way. Apparently, the way he's decided to go about this revelation is through an overhead transparencies with the key points of his evil plan (you'd think he'd have better technology than my high school, but he's out to make money, so he saves it where he can).

Now of course, he's wary of this transparency falling into the wrong hands, so he's come up with a plan to keep things safe. He's figured out some method to spread the information across multiple sheets, arranging it so that if we get a hold of any two, we'll still have no idea what he's planning. So, what we need to figure out now is some possible ways he might have done this, so if we manage to get our hands on more than two, we'll know how to read them (if it's not immediately obvious). What are some possible things he could do? Remember that he's out to save money, so splitting it up to have a single word on each slide or something huge like that doesn't seem too likely.

Harebrained Hat Help

Orac reports that the University of Maryland's Shock Trauma center has gone to the dark side, citing how Reiki therapy is now being used to "help" patients. Well, I did some digging of my own, and it turns out this isn't the craziest thing they're doing. They've got something even dumber going on, called "Colored Hat Therapy." Here's how it works:

A bunch of patients are seated in a circle, and a hat is placed on each one's head. They don't know the color of their own hat, but they can see everyone else's hat. There are many colors of hats, but each color present shows up on at least two hats. The patients sit in the room for a while, and every couple of minutes an announcement comes on the PA system, asking anyone who's figured out the color of their own hat to announce it and then leave the room. The theory goes that the magical hat energy must have seeped into their brain, and they're now cured.

Of course, most of the time it doesn't work so well, and people guess incorrectly about their hat color, miss their chance to get it and never figure it out, or get screwed up by inferring wrong things from other people's mistakes. However, one day, purely by chance, everyone brought into the room was an expert at logic puzzles, and they all managed to figure out the colors of their hats. How did they do this?

(Aside: When one of these experts left the room, a nurse noticed that the wound he was suffering from hadn't magically healed, and this therapy was quickly abandoned.)

Singular Sword Slashes

Martin Rundkvist recently uncovered a unique 16th century sword, and he was wondering how many lives it might have taken. Well, I did a little ~~Tardis travel~~ archeology of my own, and I managed to come pretty close to getting the answer before I ~~was discovered and had to flee~~ ran out of funding.

It turns out this sword was used in a ceremonial mass execution. 100 condemned prisoners were brought out and given one last chance at life. They were all stood up in a line and had a hat put on their head, colored either red or blue. No one knew the color of their own hat, but they could see the color of every hat in front of them. If they guessed correctly, they were spared, but if they guessed incorrectly, they were killed on the spot. This particular sword was used for the killings, and it was so fast and efficient that none of the prisoners in front would be able to hear a sound from the death, and so would have no idea if the guess was correct (though they would be able to hear the guess).

Unfortunately, I didn't see the actual procedure, but I did learn two things that might give us a clue as to what happened: First, the prisoners were given a chance to discuss a plan amongst themselves before the ceremony and decide on it. However, the executioner was listening in and would likely set up the hats to thwart the plan as best as possible. The second thing I learned is that these prisoners were all condemned to death for being part of a "dangerous cult" - which was actually more along the lines of Mensa. So, these are pretty smart people, and we could trust them to come up with a pretty good plan.

Putting this all together, what probably happened during the ceremony, and how many lives did the sword take?

Ending Erroneous Expectations

The Sexy Secularist writes in about how he was able to persuade his mother against recommending the atrocious woo film What the (Bleep) Do We Know?. You see, personally, I know that the whole Law of Attraction thing is bull. Why? Because I was expecting at least one post sent in would have some tenuous connection to pirates and allow me to bring you this classic puzzle. But nope, no pirates. Well, screw you guys, I'm doing pirates anyways!

A crew of 5 logic pirates comes upon a treasure of 100 gold coins. According to the rules of the logic pirates, to distribute the loot the most senior pirate must first propose a plan, and then they'll all vote on it. If at least half agree with the plan, they'll go with it. If not, the most senior pirate has to walk the plank, and then the next most senior pirate has a chance to propose a plan. This continues until a plan is accepted.

Each pirate is perfectly logical and has the following priorities they will strictly pursue: First, they don't want to die. Second, they want to get as much money as possible. If everything else is equal, they'd rather see more of their seniors walk the plank.

So, what plan can the most senior pirate of this group of 5 propose that will get him the most coins? Figured that out? Now, try the situation with 6 pirates and only one coin; what happens there?

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Skeptic's Circle #71: Medium

2007-10-11T00:20:00.000-04:00

Following are the medium-difficulty problems for this Skeptic's Circle. Some math skills may be useful here.

Poor Poisoned Pinheads

You just knew one of these days the Moon Hoaxers would push Buzz Aldrin too far, and they finally have. This one started with a post at Space Files that showed a clip of Buzz explaining that the "UFOs" seen during the Apollo 11 flight had actually been identified. Well, a group of five hoaxers really didn't like this, and so they tried to take Buzz out of the picture.

They prepared a special poison which would cause retrograde amnesia in the person to consume it. It's extremely potent, and you'd have to dilute it to homeopathic portions to make it safe, but it takes a day to kick in. They sneaked into Buzz's wine cellar (Didn't know he had one? Probably because I'm just making it up), and went about spiking his bottles. However, they'd only managed to spike a single bottle before Buzz found them. In the ensuing chaos, Buzz managed to catch them all, tie them up, and get them to spill the beans on their plan, but he lost track of which bottle they'd spiked.

At this point, Buzz is so pissed off that he cares more about figuring out which bottle was spiked than whether he might inflict amnesia on his new prisoners. His cellar has a total of 874 wine bottles in it he has to check. With his five prisoners and one day for the poison to take effect, what's the shortest time it might take him to figure out which is the poisoned bottle, and how can he do it in this time?

What Wifi Woo?

Sandy Shwarc reports that there's been some scare over the ill effects of all the elctromagnetic radiation going through the air, but I'm not buying it. Personally, I think this is all just an excuse to avoid having to work. Confused? Let me explain.

Take the new Ultra-Mega-Awesome Wifi tower built the other day. It had 1000 power cords going from the bottom to the top, and not one of them was initially hooked up to anything. Worse, they're all tangled in the middle so it's impossible to figure out which bottoms of wires correspond to which tops.

Now, some poor shmuck has to go and sort them all out, and the only tools he's given are a battery and a lightbulb. They somehow expect him to to hook up the battery at the bottom to a couple of wires, then go to the top and see which wires he can connect the lightbulb to to sort them out. Maybe he could pull a few tricks like tying some wires together at the bottom or top to make long wires, but it's still going to take him quite some time.

With that job ahead of him, you can see why he'd want to believe it shouldn't be done. Maybe if we could help him out and figure out the most efficient way to solve this problem, he'll be a bit more likely to accept Wifi. The tower's pretty tall and the only way up is by stairs, so he'd probably appreciate most if we could help minimize the number of trips he has to take, regardless of how much work he has to do at the top or bottom. How can we do this, and what is the minimum number of ascents and descents required?

Manic Motor Mythbusting

Paddy K recently demolished some myths about the efficacy of so-called "green" cars, and now that he's done with that, he wants to actually demolish the cars. To do that, he's sent them to - who else? - the Mythbusters team. Now, they can't simply destroy the cars, they have to do it in an interesting way. Here's what they've set up:

Two cars are set up with a robot controller each, and this robot will have some programmed instructions. The two cars will be airlifted and dropped at a random point on a very long line marked out in the desert. Both cars will be initially facing north along the line, but we don't know which one will be in front of the other. Once they hit the ground, their parachutes will detach and remain where they landed. After this, the robots will take control of the cars and start driving according to their programming.

Now, there are a lot of fancy things that could be done in programming them, but Adam has decided to give Jamie a challenge. The first restriction is that both robots must use the same instructions. The second restriction is the the instructions are limited to the following commands:

Move 100m forward
Move 100m backward
Skip next command unless a parachute is nearby
Go to [label] (any line may be labeled for this purpose, and as many labels as necessary may be used. This line means the robot's "mind" will go to the instruction at this label and start working forward from there.)

How can the robots be programmed to guarantee a collision? Try to use as few lines of code as possible.

Paddling Pooch Problem

Well, Bronze Dog has done it again. He went and ~~pointed out that~~ made a completely unfounded accusation that the way many fundies practice is akin to the devil worship atheists and D&D players have been accused of. Now, they're accusing him of being a devil (as a talking dog made out of bronze, he's definitely not normal, but I don't see many mentions of devils like this in the Bible).

In the hot pursuit, eventually Bronze Dog found himself paddling in the middle of a circular lake, with a fundie waiting on shore for him. This fundie can run about four times as fast as Bronze Dog can swim, though fortunately he never learned how to swim and won't enter the water. If Bronze Dog can make it to land, and the fundie isn't waiting right at the shor for him, he should have no problem outrunning him.

The fundie isn't going to listen to anything Bronze Dog might say, so tricking him is out of the question. Bronze Dog is pretty fit and can paddle for quite a while, but he'll still likely run out of energy before the fundie gives up, so he's going to have to do something. Assuming the fundie makes his best effort to catch Bronze Dog, what can Bronze Dog do to guarantee he'll be able to get to shore safely?

Action/Adventure Akusai

Akusai recently "psychically" predicted a phone-call from his long estranged cousin. After hearing that his father had gotten this call, he decided to go out and surprise this cousin with a visit. Well, things didn't go quite as planned on his journey, and, long story short, he found himself at the mercy of a deranged hermit.

This hermit offered to play Akusai in a game, with his freedom at stake. The game is played on a circular table, and the players take turns laying circular disks down at any location on the table. If a player can't lay down a disk anywhere without overlapping a disk that has already been placed, they lose. The hermit gives Akusai the choice of playing first or second. Which should he choose, and what strategy should he use in the game?

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Skeptic's Circle #71: Easy

2007-10-11T00:16:00.000-04:00

Following are the easy problems for this Skeptic's Circle.

Personalized Perfume Peril

Bad has been captured by perfume manufacturers he recently angered. They're utterly convinced that their personalized perfume works, so they've arranged an elaborate puzzle to force Bad to admit this as well. They've thrown him into a dark room, in which 100 disks of perfume samples are placed. Each disk has a different scent on each side, taken from "completely different" people. The sides are color-coded red and blue for easy counting later, but it's too dim in the room for Bad's eyes to be able to make out the colors. Bad's task is to sort the disks into two piles, each with the same number of red sides facing up. If he succeeds, he'll be set free, but if he fails, he'll be shot. He'll also be shot if he tries anything "clever" such as balancing disks on their edges or throwing them out the window.

Bad knows that the task is hopeless, so he pleads with his captors to give him a hint, just one little hint. Eventually, one of them takes pity on him and gives him the following hint: In the initial set-up, 48 of the disks are placed with the red side facing up. With this information, is it possible for Bad to come up with a plan to separate the disks into two piles with the same number of red sides facing up? If so, how?

Creative Cake Capers

Christian of Med Journal Watch has been attempting to combat rumors that overweight women should lose weight when they get pregnant. In his quest to inform women that this isn't always going to be the case, he's stumbled upon one particularly tricky customer.

This particular woman has quite a sweet tooth, and figures that since she should expect to lose some weight, she can afford to binge a little. She's got a nice big rectangular cake which she plans to eat, but Christian is able to convince her down to only consuming half of it. However, when they get out the cake they find that her husband has already cut out a rectangular slice from it. The woman wants half of the full cake, but she settles on half of the remainder.

The woman knows that each slice takes away a small amount of the cake and so she won't let him use more than one. She also won't settle for anything less than half the cake, but Christian wants to make sure she gets no more than half. So, the problem is, how can Christian cut the cake perfectly in half with a single cut?

And no, making a big horizontal slice through the center of the cake isn't an option, as the cake has icing on the top and thus isn't symmetric in that direction.

Popping Placebo Pills

After a recent article by Mark Hoofnagle on the diagnosis of Chronic Lyme Disease, an enterprising researcher decided to conduct a placebo-controlled study to see if there was any benefit to the use of the antibiotics typically prescribed for treatment of it. During the conduction of this experiment, the grad student assigned to sort out the bottles of pills (some placebos, some real) ran across a problem when the record sheet was smudged and she couldn't identify whether five of the bottles had the placebos or real pills. Counting up the identified bottles, she figures out that one of the bottles should have real pills, while the rest should be placebos.

She does some quick research and figures out that the easiest way to tell apart the pills is by weight. The real pills weigh 1 gram more than the placebos, so a few comparative weighings should be able to sort them out. However, when she gets to the lab to weigh them, she finds that a lab class is going on and there's a huge line-up to use the scale. The pills need to be in before the class is over, so she'll have to put up with it. Asking the instructor for permission to step in, he relents, but allows her only the time to perform one weighing. Is it possible for her to sort out which of the bottles contains the real pills with only one weighing? If so, how?

Perilous Peace Problems

The Factician recently dismantled some biased thinking which led to the bizarre conclusion that peacetime is more dangerous than war, and for his trouble, he received a mysterious package in the mail one day. Opening it, he finds a corked wine bottle with a pill inside of it and a note. The note reads:

So, you think you're a smart guy pointing out accidental deaths, huh? Well, here's the situation: When you opened this box, a specially-prepared poison was released into the air. The pill in the bottle is the antidote for it, but I've got a little challenge for such a smart guy. I want to see if you can get the pill out of the bottle without removing the cork or breaking the bottle. If you do either of those things, I can't guarantee you won't have an "accidental" death of your own.

The Factician suspects they're just bluffing about the whole thing, but he decides to go ahead with it anyways, as he's already come up with the solution. What does he do?

Crazed Canting Christians

Romeo Vitelli tells us a story of some strange convulsing women, which is apparently a miracle. Personally, I'd chalk up curing something like this to be more miraculous, but I guess that just goes to show I don't have faith.

Anyways, it seems that a group of 20 of these women decided that it if their strange behavior led to their death, they'd go straight to heaven. So, they set up a weird ritual suicide type of thing, where the 20 of them get out on a 100-meter long raft in the middle of the ocean, each randomly selecting a direction to face and a starting point from marks laid out every meter (the first a meter from one end, up to one a meter from the other end).

At a cue to start, each woman starts convulsing forward at 0.1 m/s. If she bumps into another woman, both will immediately turn around and start walking in the other direction. They'll keep walking until they inevitably all fall off one end and (hopefully) meet their end. If the woman are miraculously set up in the right configuration, what's the maximum time it might take for all of them to fall off the raft?

Hidden Handbook Hassle

After a perilous journey into the land of the woos, Skeptico managed to escape with the Woo Handbook. However, he's now on the run from woos who want it back, and he needs to pass off the book to a fellow skeptic. He's under close observation, so he won't be able to make personal contact with this other skeptic, but they've arranged a plan to get the hand-off to take place. The plan was to have them both lodge at the same hotel, and during the night, hire one of the employees there to pass it off.

But they ran into a problem with this plan, as it turns out that everyone that works at this particular hotel is a rabid kleptomaniac and would steal anything in their hands before passing it off to another guest. Each room did come equipped with a small portable safe though, and these are equipped with tracking devices to make sure no guests would run off with them. It also fortunately means that the employees wouldn't run off with them, so the trick is to transport the handbook within a safe.

Of course, there's still a catch. The safes are closed through a clasp, which a padlock can be put on to steal it shut. The padlocks can only be unlocked with keys found in the hotel rooms and safely wired down, and each key is unique to each lock. So even if the handbook were passed off in a locked safe, Skeptico's friend would have no way to unlock it. Is there any way to solve this problem without either Skeptico or his friend leaving their room and thus risking being caught by a rabid woo?

Weird Water Woo

PalMD recently made a post discussing hydrogen peroxide woo, and, true to the nature of events these two weeks, has been kidnapped by a crazed woo and forced to solve a logic puzzle if he wishes to live. He's locked in an empty room and given a glass that's around half full of water. His task is to determine precisely whether the glass is half full, less than half full, or more than half full. There are a few ways to do this, but some of them are pretty tricky and inaccurate if you don't have a very steady hand. What are some good methods?

Screwy Scarfe's Secrets

The guys at Holford Watch recently exposed Chistopher Scarfe as the fraud he is. Unfortunately, they didn't realize that Scarfe is also an insane supervillain, and they were promptly captured and imprisoned in his mountain fortress. They managed to escape from the fortress (Scarfe forgot to lock the cell door), but on the way out they came across a rickety bridge they'll need to cross.

It's night, and they only have one flashlight among them which anyone crossing the bridge will need. The bridge is unable to support more than two people at any time, so they'll have to make multiple trips to get everyone across, passing off the flashlight as necessary. The guys each incurred various injuries in the escape, so they're all able to move at different rates. One guy is pretty much uninjured and could make it across the bridge in two minute. Another of them is a marathon runner and could easily do it in a single minute. A third stepped on some caltrops on the way out, and it will take him four minutes to cross. The fourth had his leg broken in a fight with a guard dog, and it'll take him eight minutes to cross (if there aren't actually four guys behind this blog, pretend there are). Of course, if two are crossing together, they have to cross at the speed of the slower person.

Scarfe's hot on their tails, so they want to get across the bridge as quickly as possible. How can this be done, and how long will it take them?

Back to index

Skeptic's Circle #71: Quick Links Version

2007-10-10T23:59:00.000-04:00

Here ya go, all the links for this Skeptic's Circle in one small place, for those of you too intellectually lazy (or time-deprived) to work on a few logic puzzles.

NeuroLogica Blog: The Framing of Alternative Medicine
The Bronze Blog: Religion is Devil Worship
Respectful Insolence: Woo infiltrates one of the premiere trauma hospitals in the U.S.
White Coat Underground: It burns! It burns!
Holford Watch: Christopher Scarfe - former partner in Institute for Optimum Nutrition - is nasty about cute little cats
Sexy Secularist: Woo: It's All in the Family (Part II)
Skeptico: The Woo Handbook
Aardvarchaeology: Doctoring My Spin
Action Skeptics: The Statistical Outlier
Paddy K: Greenwash
The Saga of Runolfr: Scam Email Double Feature
Providentia: In The Saint's Name
Junkfood Science: W is for wifi woo
Space files: UFOs seen during Apollo missions
denialism blog: A Critical Appraisal of "Chronic Lyme" in the NEJM
Conspiracy Factory: Peace is Dangerous - wait, WTF?
Med Journal Watch: Yet pregnant women target of weight loss hysteria
Greta Christina's Blog: The Galileo Fallacy, and the Gadfly Corollary
The Bad Idea Blog: Personalized perfume based on your DNA?

Back to index

Deadline Update

2007-10-08T21:43:00.000-04:00

Well, it looks like I'm not going to have any conflicts with hosting, so I'm going to extend the deadline for Skeptic's Circle submissions to Wednesday at midnight GMT. Even if you miss that, don't worry too much, I'll still slip in a link for ya.

Skeptic's Circle #70 + Submission Guidelines

2007-09-27T11:56:00.000-04:00

The latest edition of the Skeptic's Circle is now up, courtesy of the Factician.

Two weeks from now, the Skeptic's Circle will be circling right back here to Infophilia. No big clues to the theme this time, except to promise to do my best to make you think. You can send your best skepticism-related posts to TheInfophile {at} gmail {that punctuation mark which is like a comma but without the tail} com. If you're unsure what might be appropriate, check out the submission guidelines.

Now, I'll warn you guys in advance that there may be something coming up with me around the time the circle is scheduled (probably not, but it's a possibility), so I might have to put it up a day early or late. So, in case it's early, I'm going to make the tentative deadline for submissions Tuesday at midnight GMT. I'll know by next weekend if there will be a conflict, so I'll be able to confirm a deadline then.

The Atheist Connection

2007-09-18T09:39:00.000-04:00

Well, it's been a while since I've had an on-theme post, so I eventually decided to stop waiting for some new inspiration and check out my notes in the past for something to talk about. And so we come to this topic: exploring the question of why so many skeptics are atheists.

First of all, let's define terms here. Skepticism is a particular method of finding the truth about reality utilizing the scientific method along with critical thinking and a working knowledge of many logical fallacies and biases people are likely to fall into. Atheism is, in general, a lack of belief in any god or gods. This is in general based off of one of the following conclusions:

1. There is insufficient evidence to justify belief in any god(s).

2. Whereas we'd expect evidence of gods if the claims of their religions were true and this evidence doesn't exist or contradictory evidence is present, we have in essence evidence against the existence of god(s).

3. No gods exist, with absolute certainty. Note that I've never actually met anyone who believes this way, and it seems to be more of a strawman position used to color atheism as another religion (but only when it's convenient to so color it). Nevertheless, someone who came to this conclusion would be an atheist (and possibly a nihilist as well).

Okay, so to answer our question: Why are so many skeptics atheists? Well, the obvious answer is that skepticism, given our current understanding of the world, leads to one of the above conclusions.

This post is looking to be a bit short and uninteresting, to be honest. Let's try to spice things up, shall we? How about we address the question of why a skeptic might not be an atheist (using an actual skeptic here, not a "zetetic" or pseudoskeptic). This could be a bit more interesting. Let's go over possible explanations as I think of them:

1. The obvious counter-explanation to why so many skeptics are atheists: Skepticism leads to a conclusion that some religion is correct. Now, the problem is that both of these possibilities can't be true, so if this is true we'd have to find some other reason for the many atheists, and if the alternative were true, we'll have to find another explanation for the religious people. In this case, it seems most likely that skepticism leads to an atheistic conclusion, if we take into account how much more prevalent atheists are among skeptics than among the lay population. It seems that if you add skepticism to a person, you're more likely to lead them to atheism than to lead them to religion. So, given that, let's come up with other explanations for why some skeptics aren't atheists.

2. They haven't gotten around to examining their religion skeptically yet. Quite simply, we can't expect someone to come to a skeptical conclusion on an issue if they haven't yet thought about it skeptically. No one has infinite time on their hands, and we can't fault them for not applying skepticism to everything they ever believed all at once.

3. They don't want to examine their religion skeptically. This one might come about for a number of reasons. Maybe their religion gives them comfort, and they fear giving it up. Maybe they fear societal rejection if they give it up. Or maybe it's been so ingrained into them by their religion that it shouldn't be examined critically that they refuse to do so.

4. They actually have examined their religion skeptically, but they came to the conclusion it was true. Perhaps this is because the religion ingrained sufficient biases in them to skew their perception of the data. Maybe proponents of the religion have access to secret evidence the rest of us don't. Or maybe it is true and the rest of us are just fooling ourselves.

5. They actually have examined their religion skeptically and come to the conclusion that atheism is true, but they're afraid to admit it. Given how harshly atheists are treated in some places, this can be understandable. Over on this side of the world, though, it's about time we started coming out (though that's a post for another day).

That's about all I can think of for now. Note that I've left out any possibilities that relate to them not really being a skeptic; those are a bit too obvious and lead to endless variations on what it is that makes them not a skeptic. We're assuming for the sake of this argument that they actually are a skeptic. If you have other possibilities, feel free to post them in the comments (and if you are a religious skeptic, I'd be interested in hearing your opinion on this).

Skeptic's Circle #69

2007-09-13T12:50:00.000-04:00

The 69th edition of the Skeptic's Circle has now been posted at Unscrewing the Inscrutable. I'll have to give Brent props for not going the obvious way with the theme for this one, or even the slightly-less-obvious-but-works-when-you-think-about-it way.

Open thread as usual, but discussion of the "obvious way" is FORBIDDEN. Speculation as to the less-obvious way is grudgingly permitted as I'm only allowed to FORBID one thing.

Retroskeptic: 9/11

2007-09-11T13:16:00.001-04:00

I started blogging in the summer of last year, so I had a chance then to do something on the 5 year anniversary of the terrorist attacks. However, I didn't think of anything good at the time, and made some other random post. This year, however, I've decided to look back on the day of the attacks and describe my experiences through it, using the benefit of hindsight to add a little perspective.

Being a normal Tuesday in the beginning, I went to my high school as normal. The first news I heard was sometime during gym class, when another student mentioned that planes had been flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. After gym class, we normally had some time to mill around before the bell rang to start passing period, and at this time I noticed that the school TVs (normally used just for morning announcements and special occasions) were all on and turned to the news.

At this time, no one really knew whether it was an accident or an attack for sure, but given the near-simultaneity of the crashes, an attack was assumed. We speculated for a while about who it could have been, but being mere high school students with only a passing interest in international politics (and not having received a memo entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside US), our guesses were all off.

It was at this point that I started to think about the causes of terrorism in general. In this case, it turned out to be a mix of hatred for the US for meddling in Middle Eastern politics and religious insanity. To me, the solution to preventing attacks like this was to attack the root causes of them so people wouldn't be lead down this road in the first place.

A metaphor I use for this is to a disease and its symptons. If you just treat the symptons, the underlying disease still exists and the symptoms will return. The best method is to attack the disease itself, and then the symptoms will go away. Similarly, with terrorism, if you just attack the terrorists who attacked you, you're doing nothing to stop further terrorism. To stop the phenomenon, you have to get at the underlying issues that cause it.

However, even back then I knew how this perspective would be perceived: as giving "sympathy" to the terrorists, and it was being attack by pundits the first day in advance of anyone even talking about it. I did, however, underestimate the ferocity of their attacks, accusing people with such thoughts as being "traitors" and "aiding America's enemies."

You might have noticed that in my story so far, I've seemed quite dispassonate, likely in quite a contrast to other stories people have told of this day. The simple reason is that at the time I was dispassionate. It's not that I'm uncaring, it's just that I had a bit too much perspective for age. I knew at the time of all the other ongoing causes of death in the world, from current wars and genocides to extreme poverty resulting in starvation. Thinking about that enough in the past forced me to become hard to the prospect of death abroad. Nothing would be served by being constantly morose about it; life had to go on.

One of the results of this was that I kept my wits about me throughout the day. Since my sense of humor in high school could most accurately be described as "relentless," it often ended with me making some "Too Soon" jokes. Fortunately, it didn't get that bad this day, though when the fire alarm went off in class while we were watching the burning tower I couldn't resist cracking "How fitting."

The rest of the day was mostly normal, with a few teachers choosing to put the news on in class. I learned during lunch that Al Qaeda had claimed responsibility, though some other groups had as well and we weren't sure who to trust.

I didn't think much then about how much the political climate could change. At that point, I saw Bush as simply a buffoon and typical Republican President I could trust to be wrong on most controversial issues to come his way (and an election thief, but this wasn't a part of a larger pattern yet). After it, he used this as the excuse for virtually everything he did and started to transform the US into a police state. A few months after, when I noticed all the changes in effect, particularly in airports, I realized that Bush had played right into their hands and let the terrorists win by turning the country into a state of fear.

Skeptic's Circle #68

2007-08-30T13:32:00.000-04:00

The latest Skeptic's Circle is now up over at Aardvarchaeology. Read. Learn. Skepticize.

As a side note, I'm going to be moving up to grad school tomorrow, and I won't have internet connected until Wednesday. So, don't go calling the cops if you don't see me commenting on your posts in that time.

Open thread as usual, though pointing out that "Skepticize" isn't a verb is FORBIDDEN - it's a word now.

Kleptomania

2007-08-23T23:11:00.000-04:00

Just found this comic, and I had to share it. I know some of my readers are big video game players, and you should get a kick out of this (click on it to see full size).

Shermer on Colbert

2007-08-21T23:54:00.000-04:00

Just found out as I was watching it, but Michael Shermer was on the Colbert Report tonight. In my opinion, he did a marvelous job of explaining some basics principles of skepticism, such as the problem with anecdotes and confirmation bias. Hopefully this interview will show up on YouTube soon, and I'll put up a link if I find it. Otherwise, try to catch one of the reruns of it.

EDIT: Bob's informed me in the comments that you can find the interview on Comedy Central's site here, though you'll have to watch a short ad first.

Skeptic's Circle #67

2007-08-16T01:27:00.000-04:00

Ask yourself this: What's the coolest plot concept in Japanese animation and manga?

No, cooler than ninjas.

Cooler than pirates, too.

Magical girls? Are you kidding me?

There ya go: Giant robots. And the Skeptic's Circle has decided to harness their awesome power to combat weaponized woo. You'd better check it out; what's a giant robot without a prodigious teen pilot?

The Greater Good

2007-08-07T14:39:00.000-04:00

First of all, I apologize for taking so long getting this post out. Writing fiction always takes me longer than non-fiction, and I can't say why. Anyways, the point of this will become clear at the end, trust me.

Without further ado, it's story time. As an added bonus, I've decided to place this story within the world I'm building for by Litcraft story, so enjoy your first taste of it. Don't worry too much about guessing what point I'm getting to, just read. (Okay, I guess there was a little further ado. No more now, I promise.)

The Greater Good

The country of Derra was by no definition a military superpower. On the contrary, it had the smallest standing army of any nation in Wasparia. With the harshly aggressive Pratt Empire and the Republic of Cratakia fighting for dominance of the continent, it would seem to be a wonder that Derra had survived.

On closer inspection of the situation, however, a number of reasons for Derra's safety revealed themselves. The first of these was simply that Derra never did anything to anger anyone else. They never attacked anyone, never interfered in any wars that didn't involve them, and didn't have any significant amount of natural resources that couldn't better be found elsewhere. The only reason any country would ever be able to find to attack them would be expansion for the sake of expansion - which had indeed been a sufficient motive in many historical wars.

The other big reason that Derra remained safe is that every other country found its independence to be valuable to them. Without wars to distract them, Derra had made tremendous scientific and engineering advances, and it gladly sold the fruits of its research to anyone willing to buy. Derra's advances improved life for everyone, and no one wanted to risk halting their production by engaging them in a war.

That didn't stop them warring with each other, of course. Derrans, being culturally inclined to disdain war, generally looked down on this, but they generally had no power to stop it and so could do nothing. There was, however, one small, virtually unknown organization of Derrans who did something, working to make the world a more peaceful place. They had no official name, but those who knew about them called them the Peacemakers.

Officially, they didn't exist. Unofficially, the Derran government for the most part simply didn't know about them, and those who did worked to keep it that way for the rest. Plausible deniability was essential. If Derra were found covertly meddling in Cratonian or Prattish politics, matters could easily get worse than if nothing were done at all. However, if a certain warmongering Cratonian senator were caught in a scandal and forced to resign in shame thanks to an anonymous tip to a prominent news agency, a needless war could be quietly averted.

If anonymous were all there was too peacemaking, it might not have been nearly so critical to conceal their existence. But sometimes more extreme measures had to be taken. What was the life of a petty bureaucrat worth next to the thousands of innocents who could be killed in a war? And yet, the direct cause of harm to one person even to save thousands of others, would widely be considered a moral wrong. And when the Peacemakers end up having to kill an innocent person to prevent even more innocent deaths, the moral implications get even worse.

In the end, however much the human mind might be programmed to respond that actions such as murder can never be justified, there's a point where reality has to step in and point out that just because the brain is hardwired against doesn't mean it isn't the best action. Human minds evolved to best handle the vast majority of situations they would encounter in a relatively harsh environment. The civilization of humanity happened comparatively rapidly, and many wild instincts never evolved out. Pattern recognition which led to better identification of predators in the wild leads to counterproductive superstitions in civilization. Civilization complicates things, and these complications lead to many situations where the instinctual response might not be the correct one.

So Alton tried to convince himself, at least, as he waited for his target to appear. He was officially a Peacemaker - as official as they got, at least - but only just. He'd graduated the week prior, and this was his first mission. And what a mission it was! His superiors were wasting no time in giving him the hard tasks.

Melor Kren was the archetypal "warmongering senator," and he was Alton's first target. The problem was that the Cratonian succession system was set up so that any death of a senator would result in them being replaced by a chosen adviser of theirs, typically one with comparable ideas. Even if the chosen successor was also made unavailable, the law demanded a substitution of a "like-minded individual." In short, any senator's death could only result in someone else with the same viewpoint taking their place.

This could be avoided, however, if the senator instead chose to resign for any non-medical reason or was impeached. In that case, the law required a special election be held, under the principle that public opinion could well change after such an event. Thus, the solution to the problem of getting Kren out of power was to find or manufacture a sufficient scandal to force either his resignation or impeachment.

To make this work, the character of Kren had to be critically analyzed. He was first and foremost a nationalist, believing in the ultimate superiority of Cratonia and that it was its destiny to quash the barbaric Pratts and bring civilization to the other nation. He was also a devout follower of the Order of Origin, and spoke often of its principles. He was fond of using his religiousness to emphasize his moral character in campaigns.

The obvious choice was thus to go after his moral character. If his reputation could be destroyed, his embarrassment could easily be sufficient to force a resignation. However, upon close investigation it had become apparent that there were no significant flaws to his morals (at least according to the Order's doctrine). He honestly had no proverbial skeletons in his closet. The worst he could legitimately be accused of is making campaign promises he never intended to keep.

The only apparent chink in his armor came from a recent tabloid article which had implied him to be engaging in an affair. The actuality turned out to be that he was simply getting back in touch with an old friend who happened to be female. He wasn't even keeping it a secret from his wife, who had no problem with the situation and found the tabloid's accusations amusing.

But the story was still on the public's mind, and Kren had considered it below him to address it, which had led to him looking evasive about it. It seemed to be the perfect opportunity to manufacture a scandal and "expose" Kren of infidelity. But the problem with this plan was even if the public could be thoroughly convinced of his infidelity, Kren himself knew he was innocent and would be unlikely to resign over it.

That left impeachment. Simple marital infidelity wasn't an impeachable offense, nor were most actions that could be tied to it. The only action that actually was impeachable that might work was, quite unfortunately, if he were to murder his "mistress" to cover it up. A convenient disappearance was also unfortunately out of the question, as Cratonian law required either a body, a disappearance long enough for the victim to be declared dead, or a trustworthy eyewitness and an explanation for the absence of the body. Setting up a fake murder with an eyewitness would be next to impossible, and if she went simply missing, Kren would be left in power for far too long.

It was the most unfortunate situation for a Peacemaker to find himself in. In order to fulfill his mission and prevent Kren from inciting Cratonia into war, he'd have to kill an innocent woman and ruin the life of a well-meaning if misguided individual and his family. Kren's son had recently left for college, and would require his father's high senatorial salary to pay for it, and his daughter was still at home under his direct care. Both of them would be victims as well. Few people would describe this as a good course, and most wouldn't even hesitate to call it evil.

But must a judgment of morality stop at the action? Don't the ultimate results matter? But all his instincts were telling him that it was the hallmark of evil to believe that positive results could justify immoral actions.

And yet, what of all those lives that would be destroyed in a war? Kren was the most vocal proponent of war, and those in favor currently held a small but solid majority. A vote was likely to be held soon to authorize a war, and by then it would be too late. Embarrassing Kren out of office would cut out his vote and most likely cause a few moderates to think twice. The vote itself might never even come to pass without him pushing for it. It was clear-cut: Kill one innocent woman through action, or let untold thousands die through inaction.

* * * * *

I'm going to take a break from the story here, and ask you to think for a few minutes about the issues here. What's really the right action? In a slightly different vein, how should the story end?

There's no simple answer to this, but I do have an ending which I think you'll find satisfying. Once you have your own answer ready, read on to see mine.

* * * * *

No matter how much he tried to convince himself that the greater good could justify murder, Alton just couldn't fully convince himself of it. His ingrained morals just couldn't be overturned on the basis of one event. Maybe the senior Peacemakers had become hardened enough by death they could overwrite their basic instincts, but Alton couldn't.

So was that it then? Would he let war break out because of his weak stomach for violence? Why did they ever pass him if he couldn't pull off the deed? Surely his superiors had seen his reluctance to kill while he was in training. And why would they send a novice on such a critical mission? It didn't make sense.

Alton's mind drifted to wishful thinking of other ways, however implausible, of war being averted. Half the senate could have a change of heart and miraculously vote against it. Or maybe the populace could start speaking out against war and convince them. For that matter, if Kren were to have a change of heart, his position reversal would do even better than his impeachment at swaying the tide and averting war. But what could possibly convince him?

No time left; she'd come into view. He could pull the trigger and end her life. It would at first look like an initiation killing, the typical test to join one of the street gangs active in this area. But on further investigation, it would be revealed that she had only been in this neighborhood because of call from "Kren" asking her to meet him nearby. The gun used to commit the deed had been stolen from the collection of an associate of Kren, and sufficient evidence was planted to allow this to be traced. Kren would be impeached, out of office, and war would be averted.

But it wasn't going to happen that way. Alton was going to let her go, and then he'd desperately try to think of some other way to salvage the situation. He had no idea how he could do it, but there had to be some way to sway enough votes. If he could only get them to think of the human cost of war, maybe their better nature would cause them to think twice.

Alton lowered the stolen gun and sat back. He was going to let her live, and hope that against all odds this wouldn't cost others.

But then, against all sense in a neighborhood such as this, she stopped, just as she was in front of him. She looked like she was waiting for something. After a few seconds, he saw a smile appear on her face as she turned, looking directly at him.

Alton froze. This wasn't supposed to happen. How did she know he was there? What would happen if he were caught? He had to run. As he was bracing himself to make a break for it, her words made him freeze again, "Alton. Wait."

"How do you know my name?" He said back, still trying to judge if it was too late to flee. It probably was.

"Because I was in on the plan," she said. "I'm with the Peacemakers too. When Kren started making motions towards war, I was sent in under the guise of one of his old friends he'd lost touch with. I've been using our time together to convince him out of his course of action."

She was obviously waiting for Alton to say something, so he prompted her with the question he figured he was supposed to ask, "Then why was I here?"

"Your final test. We needed to make sure you had the right character. Peacemakers are trusted with a lot of autonomy, and they need to be able to make the right decisions on their own."

"So what was the right decision then? To sacrifice an innocent life for the greater good?"

"Not this time. I'm sure by now you've figured out that this time it wasn't worth it; it was better to work on changing Kren's mind. You realized this, and refused to kill, despite your orders to the contrary. You thought for yourself, and realized that it wasn't worth it. Therefore, you pass."

Alton stood in silence for many minutes, letting his mind adjust itself to the new situation. Eventually, one question rose to the surface of his mind: "Will I ever actually have to kill an innocent person?"

"I've never had to," the woman replied. "Maybe sometime the situation will come up, but you'll have to judge for yourself then. There are no simple answers."

* * * * *

Now at this point, you might be wondering what possible point I could be intending to make here. The point here is to raise an alternative interpretation, but before getting into that, a little discussion on this story.

What I've used here is a trope often known as the Secret Test of Character. The hero is subjected to some challenge in which they're ordered to do something which they believe to be wrong. They refuse to do it, and find that refusal was actually the correct choice. A real-life version of this went on in the Milgram Experiment, where most participants failed miserably.

This idea came to me when I was thinking about Pascal's Wager last week, while learning about this trope was also fresh on my mind. I ended putting the two together and asked myself: What if the world itself and the choice of whether or not to worship God is such a test?

If you read back through the Bible, you see God doing and ordering many clearly immoral things, including multiple instances of genocide. And yet, he orders you to believe in and worship him, on pain of eternal torment if you don't. If you superimpose this on the Secret Test of Character, then it might seem that God is really testing humanity to see who had the guts to stand up to him and declare that his actions are immoral, and that he is not worth worshiping - assuming he exists at all.

So here's one more alternative deity you can postulate in response to Pascal's Wager, whenever you hear it: A God who only permits those people who refuse to worship him because of his atrocities (if they happened) into heaven. Therefore, the solution is not to believe.

(Comments are open for whatever issue you feel like talking about. I've raised a lot of issues in this story, so feel free to discuss them as well.)

Skeptic's Circle #66

2007-08-02T09:05:00.001-04:00

Ook.

Ook! Eek ook-ook OOK!

Amateur experts

2007-07-26T14:39:00.000-04:00

I ran into an interesting article today, about how juries suddenly think they're experts on how evidence should be presented at a trial having watched CSI. Take this example from the article:

A disappointed jury can be a dangerous thing. Just ask Jodi Hoos. Prosecuting a gang member in Peoria, Ill., for raping a teenager in a local park last year, Hoos told the jury, "You've all seen CSI. Well, this is your CSI moment. We have DNA." Specifically, investigators had matched saliva on the victim's breast to the defendant, who had denied touching her. The jury also had gripping testimony from the victim, an emergency-room nurse, and the responding officers. When the jury came back, however, the verdict was not guilty. Why? Unmoved by the DNA evidence, jurors felt police should have tested "debris" found in the victim to see if it matched soil from the park. "They said they knew from CSI that police could test for that sort of thing," Hoos said. "We had his DNA. We had his denial. It's ridiculous."

It struck me that this type of problem is hardly limited to crime scene investigation. Almost all of the cranks you see are people with next to no knowledge in a subject area who have heard snippets about it and think they've come up with some insightful breakthrough - never having actually gotten an education in it. And then there are creationists who think they know enough about biology to disprove evolution, or enough about astrophysics to prove the universe couldn't be 13.7 billion years old, or enough about geology to... Well, you get the picture.

But by far the worst offenders in this area are conspiracy theorists. These people are not only experts in crime and how to keep a conspiracy secret (from everyone but themselves, naturally), but they'll make arguments based on their "expertise" of almost any area of science and engineering, from the "speed of gravity" to how a flag waves in a vacuum.

The problem is, for any of these areas there are actually numerous people who are unquestionably experts looking at the same data. If there were a problem, why wouldn't the experts see it? Ah yes, they must be in on the conspiracy, too. Only the average people (who coincidentally have a worse understanding of the principles involved) will dare to point out the flaws.

The Idiot Box

But what is it that makes so many people falsely believe they understand these situations as well as experts? Well, like in the CSI example, a big cause of it is likely television. People these days watch it a ton, and they expect it to be true. There's some innate expectation on people that they wouldn't be allowed to say (or show) something on television if it weren't true (or scientifically accurate or at least plausible in the case of fiction). Possibly this is due to a simple trust for authority (which might explain why this prediliction isn't present in everyone), but I can't say for sure - I'm no expert on this matter.

So, people watch a lot of TV and expect what they see there to match with the real world. Unfortunately, a lot of things get in the way of this. First of all, the writers of shows almost never have a good grasp of the science involved (that's why Bad Astronomy exists: to set them straight). Sometimes they'll consult experts, but not often. The second problem is that the writers will often actively choose to go against what's accurate in order to increase drama or humor.

The result of this is that television is filled with ridiculous notions such as exploding cars, sound in space, lack of inertia in space, gunshots sounding like explosions (they're more like firecrackers in general), etc. People get so used to the TV version of science that the real-world version ends up seeming less real.

Lies to Children

Another problem that leads to false expertise is that many of these people simply don't realise their knowledge is incomplete. Almost every adult has taken various science classes in high school, and many of them roughly remember the lessons they learned. However, high school science is vastly simplified compared to expert-level science, but this isn't always made clear if they don't go on to learn more. For instance, students are generally taught that both mass and energy are conserved, but it's less often they're taught that nuclear reactions can convert between the two, and that thus all mass is energy, and this combined quantity is what gets conserved. For that matter, even that's a bit of a simplification as there are a couple subtle complications to it, such as conservation looking the other way for a moment for quantum tunneling to occur, or in cosmological redshift where energy is drained from light as it travels across space for a long time (this is sometimes handwaved away as a form of potential energy).

It requires a vast amount of knowledge to be an expert in any academic subject, and most people simply don't have it. In general, to become an expert you should expect to graduate from high school, go through around 8 years at university, and then spend many more years in postdoctoral studies. On top of that, it's expected that you get published in a reputable journal multiple times and/or gain significant praise and/or awards from peers in the field.

Starting from a bit more than Scratch

But what if you disagree strongly with a major tenet of a certain a field, and still wish to become an expert in it? For instance, let's take the classic example of evolution in the field of biology. The first question that needs to be answered is whether you started to disagree with evolution because you studied biology for 10 years and it just didn't add up, or whether you disagree with evolution for other reasons. In the first case, you're probably alright. You've already done all the studying, and can hopefully show that you understand the material and maybe convince other professionals of the flaws in the model. If you can do so reasonably, you can get to be regarded as an expert.

In the second case, however, you're making a fundamental error. You've come to a conclusion on a subject when you haven't studied it extensively for yourself. Now, if you were accepting the word of experts on this subject and trusting that they've probably come to the right conclusion, this isn't bad at all, but that's not the case we're talking about here. What's happening here is that you either disbelieve in the theory either due to your own faulty knowledge or due to the authority of a non-expert. If you want to become an expert, you have to accept where the evidence and greater understanding leads you. You can never become an expert by starting with an assumption and then trying to find all the evidence that justifies it.

In short, my advice to anyone who wishes to become an expert in a field but holds a differing belief from the bulk is this: Drop that belief, try to get rid of any emotional investment you may have in it (try to revert back and start at zero, before it was ingrained in you), and go where the evidence leads you. Start your investigation with questions, not answers. In fact, this is probably good advice even if your beliefs coincide with those of experts; you'll learn how it was all figured out from scratch, will ask all the right questions, and if the theory turns out to be wrong you just might discover this.

But of course, I'm no expert on expertise, so you don't have to take my word for it.

We may not torture, but we play Metallica

2007-07-24T12:46:00.000-04:00

In the US news, it seems the best stories always slip through the cracks - sometimes even the Daily Show misses them. Here's one from a few years ago which I just found which seems to have only showed up in the British papers, and no, it is not a joke: Metallica is latest interrogation tactic.

This makes me wonder: Why do they use good music (for the heavy metal part, at least)? Why not just pull out the absolute worst? I guess maybe, since they're already skirting the line with Metallica, anything worse would cross over into definitely being torture.

Victory is ours!

2007-07-24T10:02:00.000-04:00

The Tripoli Six are now free. (Found via PZ and Wikipedia)

I feel left out

2007-07-18T11:03:00.000-04:00

Recently, it seems the trolls have been infesting all the skeptical blogs around here, but there's one big notable exception: Me (oh yeah, and JanieBelle too, though the adult content on her blog could explain it). So I'm asking you: What am I doing wrong (or right, depending on your perspective)? Do I not post frequently enough? Am I too nice? Do they not get my Terry Pratchett references?

Pseudodebate

2007-07-17T15:15:00.001-04:00

Continuing on the theme of "pseudoskepticism" over the past few weeks (see here and here), I've come upon some of Marcello Truzzi's original comments on the subject and have decided to give some specific responses. You can read the article, originally published in his Skeptical Inquirer, here.

After a brief introduction, Truzzi starts out with discussing the burden of proof of evidence. Most of his article follows on this theme, so I'll just quote this to give the summary. (All italics is his original emphasis.)

In science, the burden of proof falls upon the claimant; and the more extraordinary a claim, the heavier is the burden of proof demanded. The true skeptic takes an agnostic position, one that says the claim is not proved rather than disproved. He asserts that the claimant has not borne the burden of proof and that science must continue to build its cognitive map of reality without incorporating the extraordinary claim as a new "fact." Since the true skeptic does not assert a claim, he has no burden to prove anything. He just goes on using the established theories of "conventional science" as usual. But if a critic asserts that there is evidence for disproof, that he has a negative hypothesis --saying, for instance, that a seeming psi result was actually due to an artifact--he is making a claim and therefore also has to bear a burden of proof.

So here's the situation: Some experiment somewhere did a test for the presence of psi. They came back with results and claimed that these constituted evidence for psi. What is a skeptic to do? Truzzi's strawman of a skeptic would immediately say that the result must have been an artifact or due to some explanation other than psi, and then give no justification for this. But just because no justification is given doesn't mean no justification exists.

Let me illustrate this, once again with the example of "slood," a postulated substance with ill-defined properties. In our world, we can explain almost everything without appealing to slood. Any events that people have attempted to explain with slood are just as easily - if not more easily - explained by known phenomena. There are many models of the underworkings of the universe, and not one of them predicts the existence of slood. In fact, fitting it in to any of these models would require a drastic reworking. Simply put, there's absolutely no reason to believe that slood exists.

Now, let's say one group of never-say-die scientists designs an experiment to test for the presence of slood. If slood exists, this experiment would be expected to give Result A (which is generally a statistically significant deviation from what we would expect in a sloodless universe). The experiment is performed, and Result A is found. The scientists then claim this is evidence of slood.

So what's a skeptic to do here? Accepting slood would require a drastic reworking of known science, and up to now there's been no reason to believe it exists. On the other hand, there are many other possibilities to explain why the experiment resulted in the way it did:

A statistical fluke - Generally, statistical significance requires 95% certainty. This means that there's a 5% chance this result was obtained purely as a matter of chance. Of course, some results can be more extreme, and the chance of them happening randomly is less (though never zero).
A known mechanism - The experiment might have failed to control for (or properly control for) the possibility that some known physical phenomenon influenced the result. In this case, the result could just mean that this phenomenon was coming into play.
An unknown mechanism - Maybe it wasn't slood that caused the result of the experiment. Maybe it was dools, a substance which no one has even thought of yet (but which doesn't require a drastic reworking of science to fit in). Or maybe our universe is all a giant simulation and the designer decided to toy with us by changing the results.
Fraud - Many "scientists" make a living promoting the existence of slood, and finding evidence that it exists would be in their benefit. Some such scientists might have been involved in this experiment and had a chance to cheat. Also, it's known from past experiments to test for slood that fraud has indeed occurred.

Adding these four possibilities in, we've got a total of five ways this result could have occurred, only one of which implies the existence of slood. Now, the number of ways it could have occurred alone doesn't give us the chances that it's any one way. To get this, we have to look at the likelihood. From the beginning, we know that accepting slood would require a drastic reworking of science and we've seen very little prior reason to believe it exists. This makes this possibility very unlikely, so it's much more likely that instead one of the other possibilities came into play.

So even despite this experiment's results, it's still most likely that slood doesn't exist. Many amateur skeptics will stop there and simply say the evidence isn't convincing enough. However, some skeptics will then go a step further and analyze the experimental protocols to judge the plausibility of alternatives 2 and 4. Some scientists might even see if they can come up with a theory for a new phenomenon to meet alternative 3.

Generally, the result of these will be the skeptics coming up with ways the experimental controls can be tightened and the scientists with ways to change it to rule out alternative theories. If the original experimenters are serious, they'll then take these changes to heart and perform another, better-designed experiment with a few checks against fraud. If they aren't serious, they'll whine about "pseudoskeptics" and make no progress towards a better experiment.

Sometimes, in the real world, investigators do indeed take recommendations to heart. For instance, this happened in the case of the Ganzfeld experiments. What's happened in every one of these cases I've come across is that the results take a sudden plunge back towards the expected results. Sometimes the significance fades away completely, while other times it remains. In either case, this gives evidence that the skeptics were right in that there were some problems with the experiment.

The next step of inquiry will generally have skeptics and scientists looking over the experimental controls again to see if there are any remaining flaws. If some are found, the process is repeated. If none are, slood proponents will then dance on the rooftops claiming slood is proved to exist, but one important step is still left. This step is replication. What is done here is that a completely independent group should recreate the experiment from scratch, and see if they get the same results. Preferably, no one involved with the first experiment should be involved in the replications, and if possible, those involved in the replications should be neutral on the matter or even negatively biased.

The point of replication is to provide another level of checking against design flaws and fraud. The replicators can start off with all the recommendations over how to keep it tight, and shouldn't have any bias which would lead them to consciously or subconsciously influence the results. It also provides another check against statistical flukes, as it's less likely the same fluke would occur twice. Only once the experiment has been independently replicated do we truly have a reason to believe that slood exists - though we can never rule out alternative explanations. Further experiments should likely be performed to test other proposed properties of slood and to see if alternatives can be ruled out. After a long time has gone on with many tests of slood, none of which it fails, it will eventually become accepted science.

A single experimental result is never enough to change scientific consensus, and considering it most likely that an unusual result is due to an artifact, poor experimental design, or fraud is simply the default position. It takes work to overturn the current scientific consensus, and paranormal enthusiasts rarely want to put in this work. When they actually do, it tends not to work out for them. Skeptics are there to make sure they follow proper procedure and don't try to short-circuit the system, not to bar the way to new findings. If some claim has truth behind it, it can make its way in through the standard system. Accusations of skeptics being pseudoskeptics really just amount to giving up and fighting the wrong the battle.

You know what else really grinds my gears?

2007-07-11T10:06:00.000-04:00

Having my comments not approved to be posted in the first place. A moderation queue is generally intended to block off spammers and trolls from ever getting their comments onto your blog. When you use it to block off people who say stuff you just don't like, you've gone too far.

What makes it particularly frustrating is that this incident didn't occur on some woo's blog; it was on one of the blogs at ScienceBlogs. I won't mention which one in order to be more tactful that is probably deserved, but I'll note that it wasn't one of the big controversial blogs. All my comment really was was some helpful advice, but apparently some people can't take it.

Disclaimer: I have heard rumors that there have been some weird interactions of ScienceBlogs' e-mail notifications and Gmail's spam filter. I have seen other comments appear on this blog since I sent mine, but the interaction is apparently a bit capricious. This exists as an alternative explanation, though the cynic in me doesn't believe it.

Skeptic's Circle #64

2007-07-09T09:32:00.000-04:00

The latest Skeptic's Circle is now up at The Skeptical Alchemist. Read. Learn. Pass it on.

Open thread as usual, but mentioning how this is so late it's kind of pointless as you already knew about this Skeptic's Circle is FORBIDDEN.

Litcraft: Even the story about a story gets a Prologue

2007-07-05T16:39:00.000-04:00

Given a ratio of one for to none against my idea of talking about writing a fictional skeptical story (or as I like to call it, an infinite approval ratio), I've decided to go ahead and try it out. If it doesn't go so well, I can always delete every post talking about it and pretend it never happened, just like I did with... er... Oh, nothing.

So let me first summarize what I'm going to be doing here. The goal of my writing is to create an engaging fictional story which postively represents Scientific Skepticism. Some other goals to go along with this:

The main character, who learns the benefits of skepticism throughout the book, will not be made to appear foolish or tragic for his/her beliefs at the beginning.
The story will attempt not to be overly preachy, and should not turn away fence-sitters or mostly-reasonable people (there's just no helping a few lunatics).
The story will apply the mantra of "Show, don't tell," to its goal. It will show the benefits of a skeptical approach rather than just claim them.
The universe must be one with preset rules. As this is a fundamental assumption about our universe when working with the scientific method, throwing it away will make this venture utterly pointless.
The story will not be solely focused on the goal of promoting skepticism. It will contain many other elements in an attempt to make it a good book in addition to any message it brings across.
One sub-theme will be promoting having a sense of wonder and asking questions.
I will try to avoid many big narrative pitfalls that can ruin a story, such as a deus ex machina to solve a big problem.

At this point, I'm going to give you guys a chance to chime in. Is there anything I missed here that you think I should add as a goal? Or, is there any goal here you think I shouldn't have? Or would you prefer I delete this post and never mention the subject again?

Pardon me...

2007-07-03T08:35:00.000-04:00

If you've been watching the news lately, you may have heard that Scooter Libby recently had his prison sentence commuted by President Bush (though given that the Daily Show and Colbert Report are on vacation this week, I can forgive you for not knowing). Bush's rationale for this, taken from Wikipedia:

Mr. Libby was sentenced to thirty months of prison, two years of probation, and a $250,000 fine. In making the sentencing decision, the district court rejected the advice of the probation office, which recommended a lesser sentence and the consideration of factors that could have led to a sentence of home confinement or probation.

I respect the jury's verdict. But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby's sentence that required him to spend thirty months in prison.

My decision to commute his prison sentence leaves in place a harsh punishment for Mr. Libby. The reputation he gained through his years of public service and professional work in the legal community is forever damaged. His wife and young children have also suffered immensely. He will remain on probation. The significant fines imposed by the judge will remain in effect. The consequences of his felony conviction on his former life as a lawyer, public servant, and private citizen will be long-lasting.

I can't find the exact quote at the moment (help me out here if you can), but I'll point out that the unmasking of an agent such as Valerie Plame was specifically described by Bush as being "treason." So, for someone committing treason, why would he think that 30 days in jail was too harsh? Doesn't he usually do much worse things to people who haven't even been convicted?

Okay, let's drop the veil of neutrality. Anyone disagree that he just did this because Libby was acting under orders from higher up? Of course, that's not an excuse for breaking the law, but when the people ordering to break it have the ability to protect you from any punishment for doing so, there's a little conflict of interest.

We really need to reform the pardoning system. As it is, it gives unlimited power to the executive branch to immunize anyone they want for breaking any law they want (unless the legislature goes through an impeachment proceeding, but this only works on elected officials). This has been abused in the past, and it's being abused now. However, there are a few arguments for it, such as it being a check on judicial decisions. In response, I think what we need is another check. For instance, make it possible for Congress (or some subsection) to overturn a pardon by popular vote. Any thoughts on this idea?

No place left for God

2007-07-02T09:35:00.000-04:00

From a story via Bad Astronomy, it looks like there's an interesting new theory coming out which might explain what happened prior to the Big Bang. Essentially, it turns into another universe contracting down to almost nothing, then undergoing a Big Bounce to come back out again.

Anyone else thing that if this theory gains ground, it's going to drive religious people crazy? If the universe had no beginning, the concept of a God creating it goes right out the window. Sure, some of them might come up with ideas like a secondary temporal axis, but this isn't going to be tractable to the public. What they're going to have to do is deny, deny, deny. If this theory becomes commonly accepted, expect it to see just as much controversy as evolution.

Strange searches, June edition

2007-07-02T08:22:00.000-04:00

I recently installed Google Analytics into this blog, so I'm now able to see some of the strange searches that lead people here without resorting to checking the sitemeter every three days. Unfortunately, I don't tend to get as many completely sick ones, but I do get my own subsection of weird. Anyways, onto the show!

reverse mmorpg english - How do you reverse an MMORPG?
quiddle - I can't even make up words properly anymore. At least I'm on the front page for this one, so it's not too common.
religion "double slit" - No, saying God decides which way the particle goes doesn't actually explain anything (and it doesn't even work).
what good chiropractors do - Become massage therapists.
ridiculous commandments - All of them (Okay, maybe thou shalt not kill and thou shalt not steal have some merit. Maybe).
past tense of relief - Nouns have no past tense; they exist only in the present. If you buy into Zeno's crap, this means they can't exist at all.
answer 43 ultimate - Subtract 1.
reasons why not to believe in christianity - Have you read the Bible? It gives a ton of good ones.
191f4e7bcac950618399a24eb37bbcbda4af1b8609995234 - This number does not appear once in my blog, and search engines I've tried with it return zero results. The strange part is how it showed up as a keyword for me.
when 2 neutral charges are put together - The Third Doctor comes in and tries to reverse the polarity of their flow.
is ghost hunting antichristian - Probably. These days, your average pen is antichristian.
satirist are - I can't imagine how far down the search results they must have gone to get to me.
intelligent"sound" - I think Douglas Adams came up with an intelligent shade of blue at one point, but that's the closest I can get.
key combination "shift key stuck" - Next time you search for that, do a favor and type in all caps. It's just funnier, 'kay?
ask god - Again, how far down in the search results are they looking to find me?
how to use somehow in a sentence - Somehow, it doesn't surprise me there are people out there who can't figure this out.
a glass of water has one ice cube floating in it. the ice melts. disregarding evaporation, the water level: - Do your homework yourself.
zealot render - Now, this one sounds like a good name for a weapon skeptics can use against religiosos. Might just have to keep it in mind in case they try to start a holy war.
measures to prevent melting of icecaps - Sorry, quantum observation effects don't work on a scale large enough that measuring icecaps will stop them from melting.

Not on the strange side, but I also got a ton of searches for "Quantum Mechanics for Dummies" and variants on it, plus some miscellaneous other physical stuff for dummies, so I know my posts on these subjects are hitting some people. Of course, the problem is that you just can't dumb down Quantum Mechanics past a certain level, so there's no way I'll be able to get everyone to understand it. Nevertheless, maybe it's helping some people.

You know what's also strange? Despite my liberal seasonings of Terry Pratchett references, I didn't get a single search for any of them. With that in mind, let's see what we can do for next month:

Tiffany Aching
Agatean Empire
Ankh-Morpork Assassins' Guild
Ankh-Morpork City Watch
Ankh-Morpork Post Office
Carrot Ironfoundersson
Dark Desert
Death's Domain
Detritus
Discworld
Djelibeybi
Cohen the Barbarian
Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler
Dungeon Dimensions
Ephebe
Gaspode
Genua
Granny Weatherwax
Greebo
Hex
History Monks
Igor
Bloody Stupid Johnson
Klatch
Lancre
Leonard of Quirm
The Librarian
L-Space
Lu-Tze
The Luggage
Magpyr family
Mort and Ysabell
Nanny Ogg
C.W. St J. "Nobby" Nobbs
Moist von Lipwig
Mr. Pin and Mr. Tulip
Mustrum Ridcully
Nac Mac Feegle
The Great God Om
Parasite universe
Pseudopolis
Rincewind
Roundworld
Sto Lat
Susan Sto Helit
Ponder Stibbons
General Tacticus
Twoflower
Überwald
Unseen University
Verence II of Lancre
Havelock Vetinari
Samuel Vimes
Lady Sybil Vimes/Lady Sybil Ramkin

There we go, that should do it.

The fictional skeptic

2007-06-27T15:53:00.000-04:00

The subject was brought up over at Pharyngula of how skeptics are portrayed in fiction. I left the following comment over there, and I'm cross-posting it here so my readers can know a bit more of what I'm up to:

I'm actually working on a skeptical fantasy book myself (which is going at the expected snail's pace for random-intellectual-tries-to-write-a-book). The world contains many typical magical elements, but with physical causes behind them. Of course, since magic doesn't actually work in our world, my solution was to go in and tweak the laws of physics for this world.

Being the scientist that I am, looking at the results of somewhat different physical laws turned out to be one of the most interesting parts of constructing this world. For instance, one of the first ideas I tried was the existence of magnetic monopoles. I later added in negative-mass matter in order to explain the ability of magic to seemingly violate conservation of energy. Putting these together allowed me a somewhat-plausible physical explanation for magic, which means within the context of the story it can be studied.

The major theme of the story is rational skepticism, particularly about religions. In it, a major world religion's history is thoroughly plumbed and it's revealed that it's completely wrong in many ways, and the one seed of truth in it leaves out the real interesting story that happened in the past.

Unfortunately, I haven't really been working on it much lately. Seeing that there might be some interest for a skeptically-themed story, however, I'll see if I can convince myself to get back to it.

It occured to me that if I talk about some aspects of it while writing it, it might get me back into working on it. So, I'd like to ask my regular readers a question: Would you be interested in reading about the process of writing it? There are many ways I could go about it, such as talking about the characterization, the building of the world, the designing of alternate physical laws, and how I'm fitting in themes of skepticism.

Leave a comment and let you know what you think (if you're unsure and would like a sample of what such a post might be like, feel free to say that). No pressure, of course; there's no reason I can't just create another blog to talk about it if the general traffic here wouldn't be interested in that. But if they would be, no reason not to keep it here.

We're fucked

2007-06-27T08:29:00.001-04:00

Comments are open to guesses as to which recent event I'm referring in the title. You may use post labels as a hint if you so wish.

A-slood-ism

2007-06-26T08:41:00.000-04:00

I ran into this comment on Wikipedia this morning which I couldn't help ripping apart:

Atheism as pseudo-skeptic

This seems like a pretty obvious part of the subject - atheism (or a-supernatural, if you wish - Buddhists sometimes claim to be atheistic without the "skeptic" label) relies on claiming the negative, and when they commonly claim that they are skeptics, they are following this topic to the letter. Is there really no sources commenting on this, or is it just being removed every time it's mentioned?

I mean, I know that I can't put it in here myself, because no matter how obvious it is, it would be OR [Original Research]. But surely some scholar somewhere has noticed that this pretty much applies to any atheist, right?KrytenKoro 08:11, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

You know, it's been a long time since I mocked anyone's grammar. So before further ado, let's laugh at "Atheism as pseudo-skeptic." Anyways, I left a reply to it there, but I'll expand on it a bit in this post. First, what I said in reply:

In order to be a pseudoskeptic, you have to deny something even when there's significant evidence for it (and of course, claim to be a skeptic). This is different from simply assuming the null hypothesis until otherwise is shown to be true. Almost all atheistic skeptics fall into the latter category, as they haven't seen sufficient evidence for any religion, so they simply proceed on with their lives as if no god exists.

As a parallel, let's say I come up to you and talk about Slood, a miraculous substance on the importance level of fire or water, which has gone previously undiscovered by humanity. However, I never actually show you any slood or give you evidence that it exists, instead asking you to believe it on faith. If, after you're sufficiently frustrated with me, you give up on me ever showing you evidence for slood and go on with your life as if slood doesn't exist, are you any less of a skeptic? Replace "slood" with "God" and you have your typical atheist. --Infophile (Talk) (Contribs) 12:19, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

Of course, that's a gross oversimplification of what it's like to be an atheist. To get that feeling, you'd have to add in years being brought up by parents telling you about the existence of slood, preachers claiming they see slood regularly but never showing it to you, and others promising to show you slood sometime in the future but never following through. If you express any doubt in the existance of slood, you'll either simply be executed as a slood-heretic or (if you're in a somewhat more civilized society) be read a random sampling of ten or so Doggerel.

If you ask people why you should believe in slood, you're told stories about all the great things slood is useful for, and why believing in slood makes you a better person. And then there are appeals to how bleak life would be if slood didn't exist. All this actually goes to show is that it might be nice if slood did exist, but it does nothing to show that this is actually the case.

You could try to get people to pin down what they believe slood actually does, but you'll end up with conflicting accounts. In the past, it seems that people believed slood was responsible for everything they didn't understand, from gravity to genetic transfer. When physical mechanisms for those were discovered, slood was no longer appealed to as an explanation for those, but was still used to fill in any other gaps in human knowledge. As more and more gaps closed, the definition of slood became fuzzier and fuzzier, until it was just some nice thing that helped out people somehow.

Almost by accident, a few testable claims about slood were actually made over the years. A few enterprising people then went and actually tested these claims to see if they would find evidence for slood. When tested, no evidence ever showed up. If slood existed one would have expected to find evidence for it, but since none showed up, isn't it logical to assume the non-existence of slood? Or at least, isn't it reasonable to go on with life as if slood doesn't exist?

Nope. If you assume slood doesn't exist, then you're a slood-denier. In the sloodist's world, there's no difference between not believing something and denying it. Especially since, to them, there actually is good "evidence" for the existence of slood (based on slood-faith, spurious "slood proofs," and poorly-controlled experiments). If you deny slood exists after all of that "proof," then there's just no helping you. And you claim to be skeptical on top of that? Oh, so you're a pseudoskeptic too.

* * * * *

You can see how crazy things get if you accept just any claim that's made without evidence for it. Go back up into that post and replace "slood" with virtually any ridiculous claim. It makes just as much sense to believe in the existence of slood without evidence for it as it does for God, fairies, or invisible pink unicorns. Just because you go on with your life as if they didn't exist doesn't make you a "pseudoskeptic."

Ask your god this!

2007-06-22T12:35:00.000-04:00

It seems I've been tagged for this by TheBrummell. First, the rules:

1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
5. Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog

However, simply eight facts about me seems a bit dull. How about eight facts and two lies about me, in no particular order? I'm still giving you eight facts, so it fits the bill. Your challenge is to figure out which eight are true and which two are lies. If you're the religious sort, this might be a good time to test out how well Divine Revelation works, so see if your god will give you the answers.

Here are the "facts," in no particular order:

1. On multiple occasions, I have used a knife to assist in drinking Coke.
2. I consider myself a "Secular Humanist."
3. I consumed more alcohol before I turned 21 than since then.
4. I've watched the movies of the new Star Wars trilogy more times than I've watched the movies of the old trilogy.
5. In real life, the only nickname I've had with any staying power whatsover was "The Beast" (though it still didn't have much).
6. I avoid writing with pencils and chalk at all costs. The sound/sensation of the lead or chalk being scraped off just grates my nerves somehow.
7. I once got a fundamentalist Jewish Creationist to admit to the possibility of a non-divine origin of the universe.
8. In early high school, I thought I'd disproven Special Relativity.
9. My fashion sense consists of judging whatever is on top of the pile or in the front of the closet at a given time to be most appropriate.
10. I once dressed up as a Terry Pratchett character for Halloween - and more than one person recognized who I was (though at UW, this isn't necessarily surprising).

Also, I'm opposed to pyramid-memes on principle, so I'll just let whoever wants to pick this up and run with it.

Skeptic's Circle #63

2007-06-21T11:01:00.000-04:00

The latest Skeptics Circle is now up, courtesy of Relatively Science.

Open thread as usual, but stealing ideas from Bronze Dog is FORBIDDEN, unless, that is, you're sure to point out that imitation is a form of flattery.

Quiddle Me Vis #2

2007-06-18T09:44:00.000-04:00

Although I haven't yet exhausted the recommendations from my last appeal, I am running a bit short on short things to do. With that in mind, I'm bringing this up again. Here's how it works this time: Ask me any question. If it's a silly question, you'll likely get a silly answer. If it's a serious question, you'll get a serious answer.

Whether you're puzzled over the definition of a quasar or you want my recommendation of which Terry Pratchett book to read first, now's your chance to ask. So get to it!

Why Skepticism? (Part 4)

2007-06-16T13:37:00.000-04:00

Yes, it seems I keep finding new subjects to shoehorn into this series. Sooner or later, I'll probably either make up an index post for it or give it its own unique label (as previously done for my Skeptic's Circle posts). Anyways, this time I'm going to be discussing the subject of skepticism as we use it in contrast to other theories, and talk about what might rightly be termed "pseudoskepticism."

* * * * *

Since getting back to work for the summer, I've had a lot of free time on my hands to randomly browse the portion of the internet that isn't filtered (Hey, I get the job done; that's the important part). Much of my time has been spent doing various things on Wikipedia, from reading up on random information I'll likely never use (though Tremaux's Algorithm might come in handy in some video games if I can figure out a way to leave markings) to helping out improve some articles.

From the very concept of Wikipedia - "The free encyclopedia anyone can edit" - you might suspect that it would get overwhelmed by childish vandals changing random articles to say "Bob is a faggot!" and idealogues changing articles to state their distorted picture as fact. However, 99% of the time when you're on it, you'll tend to find a stable, neutral, well-written encyclopedia article. If you start to look behind the scenes, you'll get an idea of how this works: There's an immense bureaucracy set up to stop vandals, mediate disputes, and even ban unrepentant editors if necessary.

Of course, as old bad users are kicked out, new bad users will inevitably join in. So there's always going to be two editors fighting over the George W. Bush article on whether the lead should call him the "Greatest President" or the "Worst President," overwriting all the revisions of others to "Current President." It should come as no surprise that debates between woos and skeptics also flare up constantly.

Take a look at this case currently in arbitration (the highest level of dispute mediation): Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Paranormal. Essentially, the case is a battle between skeptics and woos both trying to get certain articles the way they want them. I won't comment too much on the specifics of the case here, go and read about it yourself if you're interested, but there's one particular part I'd like to point out. For a while, one of the woos was throwing around the term "pseudoskeptic" at all the skeptical editors, partly as a tu qoque for their use of "pseudoscience." Eventually, one of the skeptics decided to see if it was possible to include in this case a ruling relating to the use of this term:

"Pseudoskeptics"

24) "Pseudoskeptic" is a pejorative term and per WP:NPA and WP:CIVIL shouldn't be used to describe other editors or people mentioned in articles (unless it's a quote cited to a source). --Minderbinder 22:58, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

The entire debate on this section is quite long, so I won't quote it all here. However, you can go read it for yourself if you wish. If you do so, here's a little task for you: Using only the bold "Support" or "Oppose" statements, try to guess whether each editor is a skeptic or a woo. This particular issue unsurprisingly fell straight down party lines. There are also a bunch of people neutral to the issue who chimed in, and they all ended up against the word "pseudoskeptic" as well.

The debate here centered around two issues: Whether it's civil, and whether it's accurate. The debate on its civility wasn't as interesting, and is mostly just a Wikipedia let's-work-together-instead-of-fighting thing. It basically just amounted to some claims that it was civil because it had a clear definition and that it wasn't civil, but labels of "pseudoscience" were just as bad. A couple quick counterarguments and we can move past this part: "Bullshit" has a clear definition, but is uncivil. People involved in the debates were never called pseudoscientists; only certain subjects were called pseudoscience.

* * * * *

The question of whether it's accurate is the real meat of the issue. First of all, let's go to the original definition: "Someone who claims to be a skeptic but isn't." Seems simple enough, and a nice parallel to "pseudoscience." However, the way the term's come into popular usage derives a bit more from the way Marcello Truzzi described it: "Some who claims to be a skeptic but holds a position of denial rather than doubt; who takes the negative position rather than an objective position" (paraphrased from his explanation).

Is this an accurate description? Well, that's debatable. I'd go with a "sometimes" here, but before we get into that, I think it's important to know where Truzzi's coming from. Taken from Wikipedia:

Truzzi founded the skeptical journal Explorations and was invited to be a founding member of the skeptic organization CSICOP. Truzzi's journal became the official journal of CSICOP and was renamed The Zetetic, still under his editorship. About a year later, he left CSICOP after receiving a vote of no confidence from the group's Executive Council. Truzzi wanted to include pro-paranormal people in the organization and pro-paranormal research in the journal, but CSICOP felt that there were already enough organizations and journals dedicated to the paranormal. Kendrick Frazier became the editor of CSICOP's journal and the name was changed to Skeptical Inquirer.

After leaving CSICOP, Truzzi started another journal, the Zetetic Scholar. He popularized the term Zeteticism as an alternative to Skepticism, because the term Skepticism, he thought, was being usurped by what he termed "pseudoskeptics". A zetetic is a "skeptical seeker." The term's origins lie in the word for the followers of the skeptic Pyrrho in ancient Greece and was used by flat-earthers in the 19th century. Truzzi's form of skepticism was Pyrrhonism, as apposed to the Academic tradition founded by Plato, which is followed by most scientific skeptics.

Truzzi was skeptical of investigators and debunkers who determined the validity of a claim prior to investigation. He accused CSICOP of increasingly unscientific behavior, for which he coined the term pseudoskepticism. Truzzi stated,

"They tend to block honest inquiry, in my opinion. Most of them are not agnostic toward claims of the paranormal; they are out to knock them. [...] When an experiment of the paranormal meets their requirements, then they move the goal posts. Then, if the experiment is reputable, they say it's a mere anomaly."

So, the rough story is: Truzzi got tempted by some pro-paranormal advocates and tried to get them a voice in the journal. CSICOP lost confidence in him and kicked him out for this. He then lashed back at them with "Well, you guys go too far in denying things! This one might actually be true!" and came up with a pejorative name to call them.

An important note to this story is that Truzzi actually abandoned using the term "skepticism" to describe what he did, instead referring to it as "zeteticism." Now think about it: He's differentiating himself from those who described themselves as "skeptics" by describing himself as a "zetetic." He left the descriptor of "skeptic" intact, and just used a different term for his practice. If he wanted to just claim that his method was better, that would be one thing, but somehow, he then jumped to the claim that the skeptics weren't true skeptics - despite the fact that he just ceded the term to them. If you can follow the logic here, you've got one up on me.

* * * * *

But let's put aside his poor logic in coming up with the term "pseudoskeptic" for the time being. Let's also put aside the issue of the spurious complaints of pseudoskepticism (as Bronze Dog has that covered quite well). Let's talk about what skepticism should be.

Skepticism is a method primarily defined by its goal. This goal is to discern reality. Skepticism (in the theoretical pure form) is the best method of determining what is real and what isn't real. However, we don't know a priori what the best method of determining reality is. Some might even argue that the best method of discerning reality is an aspect of reality itself, and so we'd need to use it in order to best determine it. While this might seem like a Catch 22, we can actually turn this around and use it as a test for a method: The best method to determine reality must, when used to determine what the best method is, result in itself.

Now that we have some actual test to see what might work, let's see how it applies to various methods of gaining knowledge about reality:

Intuition - The problem with using intuition to guess at reality is that it's highly dependant on the person using it. This extends to intuiting the best method for determining reality. While one person might intuit that their intuition is infallible, another might intuit that divine revelation is better, and a third that the scientific method is better. In the end, this fails the test of revealing itself as the best method.

Acceptance - (Essentially, this method is to accept any proposition about reality as true until evidence contradicting it has been found (weaker forms will accept only any plausible explanation, any likely explanation, or any probable explanation).) Using this to determine the best method only results in every proposed method being considered the best. Obviously, this won't work.

Denial - (The opposite of acceptance, this method will never accept anything to be true.) Applying it to this question will then result in denying that it's the best, so this one flies right out the window.

Divine Revelation - (Accept the word of deities on reality.) If we apply this to our question, we run into a problem that the deities might not actually say anything on this subject. For people who claim they have, some say that deities have claimed this method as best, while others have given other answers (such as the scientific method) as best.

Reverse Science - (When given a proposition, attempt to find evidence that it is true. When sufficient evidence has been found, accept that it is true. If sufficient evidence can't be found, declare it false.) This method is the first one that will actually result in itself, mostly due to a huge bias towards confirming propositions inherent in it. If we take the proposition that "Reverse Science is the best method for determining reality," it's simple to find many cases where people operating under this principle have ended up with the correct answer and to contrast it with cases where other methods have resulted in wrong answers. There is one little problem in that if you start with a proposition such as "Divine Revelation is the best method for determining reality," you'll end up declaring that as true, so we'll have trouble arguing that this method is truly the best.

Pyrrhonism - (Also what Truzzi calls "Zeteticism.") This method is characterized as constant inquiry while never accepting anything as true or false. The problem when it comes to our current question is that it then gives us nothing to go on - we have no idea whether it's the best method or not. However, this alone doesn't rule out that it could be (though I'll talk about other problems with it later).

The Scientic Method - (When given a proposition, design an experiment that will return specified results if the proposition is false. If these results are obtained, declare it false. If not, design further experiments to test other ways it might be false. If not of these reveal it to be false, tentatively accept it to be true. Add in replication of experiments for added reliability.)

And I've saved the best for last. Here we have a method that seems to have shown great promise in determining reality. However, can we know for sure that it actually has done so, and hasn't just led us off onto the wrong tangent somewhere? We can't know for sure, but we can use our test here to see if it might be viable.

To scientifically test the proposition that science is the best method of determining reality, one method of experiment would be to set up a controlled environment for various people - a virtual reality if you will, such as a video game world. Program in laws of nature for this world that will affect the people interacting with it. Then, select various people to interact with this world and use different methods to determine its laws. Once their determinations are made, have someone who doesn't know which method resulted in which determinations judge the accuracy of the predicted laws.

A finding that some method resulted in closer laws to reality than science would be evidence against the proposition that science is best. However, finding that science came up with the best laws wouldn't prove it's best, as there could be some untested method that's better. However, if we keep going at it and test every conceivable method against science and find that science is always the best, we could tentatively accept that it is the best.

So, it's possible for science to result in the determination that it's the best method. The problem is that this experiment has never been performed, so we can't say for sure that it is. I'd really like to go out and actually do this, but I don't have the clout or resources to do so (if anyone else can and wants to, please go ahead).

However, despite this setback, we can use some inference from the real world to gauge how science has been doing. We could start with the proposition, "If science is the best method to determine reality, then societies that use science will determine reality better and faster than those who don't," and combine it with the proposition, "Societies who have a better grasp on reality will develop better technology which utilizes it." This results in the hypothesis that societies that emphasize science will show better technological advances than those who don't - which is exactly what we see in the world. Now, while this does present some compelling evidence for science, since this wasn't declared an experiment ahead of time, we have to beware of the Sharpshooter Fallacy and not use this as definitive evidence after the fact.

Now, let's get back to Pyrrhonism, the only other method we haven't ruled out. It comes with a few big problems which should really make us wary of it. The first of these is that it never rules out any proposition. This means that as time goes on, we'll amount more and more possible phenomena and explanations, and we'd have to consider more and more in solving any particular problem. In the end, it just gets overwhelming. We have no method of narrowing down the list.

Science, on the other hand, provides us a method of discarding bad theories: By testing them and finding contradictory evidence or not finding expected supporting evidence. This method of discarding theories isn't just something claimed by science, it's also deductively supported by some elementary logic.

In the end, Pyrrhonism gives many explanations of reality, some of which might be right. Science, on the other hand, gives us a few explanations of reality of which most are probably right. Science also allows us to devote time and money on the theories we think are most probably right so that we can delve deeper and expand on them rather than repeatedly performing the same test to show that Astrology still doesn't work.

It should be little surprise then that skepticism as practiced by me and the majority of this community uses science as the core method and is thus commonly labeled "scientific skepticism." There are many other practices that add into this to refine it (such as demanding that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence - one of Truzzi's positive contributions to the cause), but at the heart, it's just science.

* * * * *

So, this leaves us with the question of what exactly pseudoskeptics are. Scrapping Truzzi's biased definition, we go back to pseudoskeptics being people who claim to be skeptics but aren't. As I see it, there are two types of people who might fit into this category.

The first of these is anyone who starts a post with "I used to be a skeptic but..." These people generally use this to try to lend some credibility to whatever woo they're promoting, by implying that there was something that convinced them the woo was superior. Many of them, however, fail to understand what being a skeptic actually means, and that if the evidence actually supports it, it's possible to be a skeptic and believe in anything. When they say they're no longer a skeptic, they're really just shooting themselves in the foot with this line of argument and admitting that they no longer care about what the evidence shows.

The other type of these people is actually not far off from what Truzzi characterized as pseudoskeptics. These are people who use "skeptic" as a euphemism for "denier." A common modern form is the "Global Warming skeptic," who isn't just being skeptical about the issue and looking at what the evidence points to, but is instead denying Global Warming (either on political grounds or because it seems implausible to them at first glance) and using spurious arguments to support their assertion.

It might not be easy, but it's my hope we can retake the term "pseudoskeptic" to refer to these types of people. It might not be easy; the term's picked up a lot of baggage. But if we backed off from a fight because it wasn't easy, we wouldn't be skeptics, now would we?

The Modus Tollens Exception

2007-06-13T09:19:00.001-04:00

"Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence."

You've probably heard this line many times before, and you've probably heard it abused almost all of those times. It's a particular favorite of people who want to leave open the possibility of their pet supernatural (or just unconventional) belief which has absolutely no evidence supporting it. However, there are a few problems with this line of reasoning.

This statement contains within it a common linguistic assumption which has indirectly led to many logical errors and misconceptions. The statement can more clearly and accurately be stated as "Absence of evidence isn't necessarily evidence of absence." This should be contrasted with the meaning of "Absence of evidence is never evidence of absence." The dropping of "necessarily" from the initial (true) statement changes both its denotational and connotational meaning, but it's something that happens in casual speach, especially when dropping it leaves a line that's much catchier.

The reason it's crucial to leave in "necessarily" is that the statement has a big exception to it. This exception is for when you've actually looked for evidence - something that's actually happened in most cases where this mantra is being used to defend someone's belief, thus making their use of it fallacious. When you've appropriately looked for evidence for a claim and didn't find any, you can put this into the Modus Tollens argument form (slightly modified) to use this as evidence that the claim is false.

The basic form of Modus Tollens is:

If A, then C.
Not C.
Therefore, not A.

In this case, we modify it to turn A into a union of A and B, getting the form:

If A and B, then C.
B and not C.
Therefore, not both A and B.
Therefore, not A.

In this case, we're using A as some claim, B as a means of investigating that claim, and C as possible evidence that could be found to support that claim.

Let's go through an example to illustrate how this works, such as the claim that there's a full-size rhinoceros in the room. Now, we'll normally have no evidence that there is a rhinoceros in the room, and it's actually quite simple to extend this into evidence that there is no rhinoceros in the room:

If there is a full-size rhinoceros in the room (A) and I look around the room in every area large enough to hold a rhinoceros (B), then I will see a rhinoceros in one of these areas (C).

I looked around the room in every area large enough to hold a rhinoceros (B), and I did not see a rhinoceros in any of them (not C).

Therefore, either I did not look thoroughly enough, or there is no rhinoceros in the room (not both A and B).

However, since I did look thoroughly enough (B), there is no rhinoceros in the room (not A).

This principle is quite powerful, and it in fact lies beneath one of the fundamental properties of science: Falsification. Putting arguments into this form is exactly what allows us to test and possibly falsify them. If we assume that absense of evidence isn't evidence of absense, then we've thrown the possibility of falsifying almost anything right out the window.

Skeptic's Circle #62

2007-06-07T10:18:00.000-04:00

The latest Skeptics Circle is now up, courtesy of Polite Company.

Open thread as usual, but pointing out how I use this same format for announcing every Skeptics Circle but never bother to copy and paste it is FORBIDDEN.

Physics Q&A #2: The Fundamental Forces (part 2)

2007-06-04T15:35:00.000-04:00

(Note: I have some diagrams I want to add in, but I don't have access to them on this computer. I'll put them in when I get home from work.)

Welcome back to the concluding part of this 3-part Physics Q&A. If you haven't already, I recommend you go back and read the first two parts of this entry. If you haven't read them, you'll likely be quite lost.

This time, we're going to tackle the two most complicated forces: The strong and weak nuclear forces. Of these two, the strong is the simpler one, so let's start there.

The Strong Nuclear Force

While electromagnetism works off of the electric charge of particles, the strong nuclear force works off of color charge. Of all the existing particles, only quarks and gluons have color charge, so these are the only particles that participate in strong nuclear interactions. A few brief notes on color charge:

Color is conserved in all interactions

All quarks have one of three colors: red, blue, and green

All anti-quarks have one of the opposite three colors: anti-red, anti-blue, and anti-green

Gluons have eight possible color charges (and one ninth theoretical charge that we've never observed). All of these are linear combinations of the typical quark and anti-quark charges, such as red-antiblue or red-antired + blue-antiblue

Different colors attract, like colors can't interact with each other

Only color-neutral particles can actually exist in stable states

The reason only color-neutral particles can exist is a bit complicated, but it has to do with symmetry. Essentially, any observable particles must be what are known as "color-singlets" (due to theory on symmetry and Lie Groups I won't get into here), which means that any color-swapping we perform on the gluons that make it up must result back in the same particle. Since we could do swapping such as Red <-> Blue or Blue <-> Green, any particle that shows any imbalance in color at all wouldn't be a singlet. This leaves only color-neutral combinations being allowed.

So, let's get down to how gluons and quarks interact, which gives us the fundamental nature of the strong nuclear force. The strong nuclear force has three possible vertices for interaction. The first and most important one happens when a quark goes along and emits a gluon. Since gluons must carry some color and color is conserved, this means that the quark must change color at the vertex. So for instance, we could start off with a red quark, which emits a red-antiblue gluon and becomes a blue quark. The other two vertices don't matter as much here, but for completeness sake, one of them is where a gluon emits another gluon, and the other is where two gluons directly interact (respectively, a vertex of three gluons and a vertex of four gluons).

Now, let's use this to try to put together a particle. First, let's start off with a baryon, which is made up of one red quark, one blue quark, and one green quark. A possible interaction here is for the red quark to emit a red-antiblue gluon and become blue, and then for the blue quark to absorb this gluon and become red. This leaves us with a color-neutral quark like we started with, so the interaction can and will occur, pulling the red and blue (now blue and red) quarks together. Of course, the third quark will also have to get pulled towards the other two to keep the baryon from splitting apart, so there will be interactions with it as well.

The other type of particle we can make is a meson, which consists of a quark bonded to an antiquark. For instance, let's say we start off with a red quark and an antired antiquark. The red quark can emit a red-antiblue gluon and become blue, and then the antired quark can absorb this gluon and become antiblue, leaving us with a blue-antiblue meson. This can then happen again, switching over to green-antigreen or back to red-antired.

However, there's a little quirk here. Red and antired don't actually cancel out with each other, and so don't actually qualify as color-neutral. So how is it that mesons exist at all? The trick here is that gluons undergo tons of these interactions and cycle through all the possible color combinations very rapidly. In fact, they can't really be described as oscillating but instead in a superposition of quantum states representing the possible color combinations. This means that at any given time, the "actual" color of a meson is red-antired + blue-antiblue + green-antigreen, and all of these do add up to neutral.

Before moving on to the weak force, there's one more quirk with the strong force I'd like to address: Why does it have limited range? Gluons, like photons, are massless and so have infinite lifetime, so why can't they travel out far?

The answer to this is complicated, but it starts with the fact that gluons also carry color charge, and since the second vertex which I mentioned briefly allows gluons to emit or absorb other gluons, then two gluons with different colors can attract each other. In general, you won't just have one gluon being exchanged between two quarks at a time; you'll have many. And all these gluons attract each other, compressing down into what's known as a "flux tube" between the two quarks. Any other gluons that are emitted will also be caught by this flux tube and will then travel over to the other quark.

The reason the electromagnetic force gets weaker with distance is that fewer photons emitted are going in the right direction to interact with the other particle (think of shooting a laser in a random direction with a target a close distance away. If you move farther from the target, its profile is smaller and you have a lower chance of hitting it). However, due to the effects of the flux tube, all gluons get pulled into the right direction so the number that interact doesn't decrease with distance, and the force stays the same.

So, shouldn't this imply that the force should be unbound rather than bound, if it doesn't decrease with distance? At first it seems so. The problem has to do with energy. Pulling quarks apart takes a ton of energy, and particles want to go to states with less energy. Eventually, you'll pull the two quarks so far apart that they'll find other quarks closer than each other and latch onto them instead (quarks only mate in pairs or triplets), emitting some energy and getting pulled in. Even if you had a perfect vaccuum, you're pumping a lot of energy into this pair by pulling them apart, and this is likely to result in pair production before long, giving two new quarks for each to attach to. So although the force could work at a large distance, it won't.

The Weak Nuclear Force

And finally, onto the last and most complicated of the fundamental forces. Part of its complication is that it further breaks down into two other types of interactions: Charged Weak interactions, which exchange a lot of properties between properties, and Weak Neutral interactions, which exchange only spin and momentum. Don't ask me about the adjective order; I didn't come up with it. Of these two, Weak Neutral interactions are a fair bit simpler and can sometimes actually act like a simple force, so I'll talk about them first.

Weak Neutral interactions are mediated by the Z boson, which is chargeless, high mass (so it decays rapidly and the force is short-range), and has a spin of 1. The allowed interactions are when a lepton or quark emits or absorbs a Z. The particle's type and charge are unchanged, but it gives some of its spin and momentum to the Z, which could then pass it on to another particle or decay into a particle-antiparticle pair.

This type of interaction is responsible for electron-neutrino scattering, which is where an electron and neutrino get deflected off of each other. Since neutrinos are chargeless, they can't be affected through the electromagnetic force, and since we do see this type of interaction in the lab, we know that Weak Neutral interactions are occuring.

And now, we get on to Charged Weak interactions. These interactions are mediated by W bosons, which are spin 1 and high mass like the Z, but unlike it have an electric charge of +1 or -1 and an isospin of +1 or -1 (respectively). As you may recall from my last post, isospin is a property that differentiates electrons from their neutrinos and the negatively-charged quarks from the positively charged ones.

The primary vertex for a Charged Weak interaction has some lepton or quark emitting or absorbing a W⁺ or W^-. Since charge and isospin are conserved, this causes it to flip over to its counterpart in the same generation. For instance, an electron (charge -1, isospin -1/2) could come along and emit a W^- (charge -1, isospin -1) and turn into an electron neutrino (charge 0, isospin +1/2). This W could then decay or it interact with another particle.

One common example of a Charged Weak interaction is Beta Decay, in which a neutron turns into a proton, an electron, and an electron-antineutrino. The neutron is made up of two Down quarks and an Up quark, while the proton is made up of one Down quark and two Up quarks. In the reaction, first, one of the neutron's Down quarks (charge -1/3, isospin -1/2) emits a W^- (charge -1, isospin -1) and turns into an up quark (charge 2/3, isospin +1/2). Now we have a proton and a W^-. Since the W^- is unstable, it quickly decays. Its favored method of decay at these energies is into an electron (charge -1, isospin -1/2) and an electron-antineutrino (charge 0, isospin -1/2), so this is what we see happening. One simple variant on this reaction is that instead of an antineutrino coming out at the end, one comes into the system at the beginning and triggers the decay.

Now, you might be wondering how exactly this serves to work as a force (since it's grouped into the four fundamental forces). The simple answer is, it doesn't. Calling these "forces" is just bad terminology, and careful particle physicists use the term "interaction" to describe them all. It might seem weird that this never acts like a force, but let me remind you that the other interactions don't always act like forces either. For instance, in an electromagnetic interaction you can have an electron and a positron annihilate each other into a pair of photons. No forciness here, just a change in the types of particles. This is just the case for Charged Weak interactions, except Charged Weak ones don't have any options that leave the reactants and products unchanged.

So that's it for this overly-long answer to a question no one asked. If you have any questions on this or future questions you'd like me to address, leave a note in the comments.

Somehow this is flattering

2007-05-30T09:00:00.000-04:00

(Yes, this is a bit of a delayed reaction, but I just found this today.)

Okay, well I haven't gotten an argument ad Hitlerum quite yet, but it seems I did get the next best thing: an argument ad Stalinum. And no, this isn't some random troll comparing me to Stalin, this is infamous neurosurgeon Michael Egnor. You might think he'd be smarter than to compare a grad student (then under-grad) with enough extra time on his hands to delete a sentence from Wikipedia to a mass-murdering tyrant, but then I'd have to remind you that this is Michael Egnor we're talking about.

Here's the story: For a while, Orac challenged Dr. Egnor to back up his assertion that the design inference was "of great value" to medicine. Eventually, Egnor responded with the following convoluted chain of logic:

The natural place to start showing examples of the inference to design in medical research is the seminal biological discovery of the 20th Century—Watson’s and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA.

Notice that Watson and Crick aren’t standing next to a pair of dice. To untangle the structure of DNA, they inferred design, not chance. They reversed-engineered DNA. They collected physical data about the structure of DNA (X-ray diffraction studies, Chargaff’s rules, the physical chemistry of nucleotides, etc), and then they designed a model of the molecule to understand its structure and function.

Let them speak for themselves, in their famous April 25, 1953 letter to Nature:

It is probably impossible to build this structure with a ribose sugar in place of the deoxyribose, as the extra oxygen atom would make too close a van der Waals contact.

Full details of the structure, including the conditions assumed in building it, together with a set of coordinates for the atoms….

Furthermore, the design specifications revealed an elegantly simple method by which the genetic material could be copied:

It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.

What exactly is reverse engineering? From Wikipedia:

Reverse engineering... is the process of discovering the technological principles of a device or object or system through analysis of its structure, function and operation…Reverse engineering is essentially science, using the scientific method. Sciences such as biology and physics can be seen as reverse engineering of biological 'machines' and the physical world respectively. (Emphasis mine)

Watson’s and Crick’s work of course had nothing to do with Darwinism (except perhaps their laboratory politics, which is another matter).

This is not to say that Watson and Crick believed that DNA was designed by God. They were both atheists. Even molecular biologists who are avowed atheists use the design inference in their work.

Much of modern biological research, and most research in molecular biology, is reverse engineering. Some scientists infer design explicitly. Some use the design inference implicitly, even if they disagree with its philosophical implications. We can’t do modern biology, at least at the molecular level, without using reverse engineering, which is the inference to design.

Now, let's look at one little point: Did Watson and Crick ever use the term "Reverse Engineering" to describe what they were doing? Nope. Egnor came up with that application of the term himself, based on what he read about it in Wikipedia, that science such as biology could be described as "reverse engineering of biological 'machines.'" Then, from the use of "machines," he takes his own impression that all machines are designed, and assumes the Watson and Crick must have also been working with the assumption that they were reverse engineering designed machines. Of course, he apparently didn't notice the scare quotes around "machines" which indicated that it wasn't to be taken literally, so inferring that it meant designed machines is a stretch.

Ask yourself this question: Did he even need to bring up Watson and Crick here? Try substituting in any other biological advance and apply the same logic, such as figuring out the structure of the cell. It works just as well/poorly, doesn't it? The reason for this is that his entire argument hinges on what that one paragraph in Wikipedia says and his interpretation of the word "machine" used therein. If he wanted to make the argument that biology was reverse engineering of designed machines, that would be one thing, but the problem was that he only used Wikipedia as a source for this.

Now, while I love Wikipedia and use it all the time, I'll be the first to admit it's not perfect. In the end, it can be no better that the best of what's contributed to it. Often, the best of the contributions don't end up staying and you get something sub-par. What we had in the reverse-engineering article was the opinion of one editor that natural sciences were like reverse engineering. Now, this wasn't completely out of line, but the problem is that almost no scientist actually thinks of it that way. The editor, to his/her credit, did put in scare quotes around "machines" to imply that it wasn't to be taken literally, but it still served to foster misinterpretations.

So, seeing this, I looked around a bit. Orac was definitely of the opinion that it wasn't really a good analogy between science and reverse engineering. I looked around the internet, and I didn't see any reliable, verifiable sources making this analogy. Given that it also lead to misinterpretations, by the standards of Wikipedia, the sentence really shouldn't be in there. Thus, I deleted it.

But I'll admit, cleaning up Wikipedia wasn't my primary goal. What I wanted to do was make it clear to Egnor and all who read it that his point hinged entirely on a single paragraph in Wikipedia, and Wikipedia wasn't a perfectly reliable source. A single paragraph in a trusted source (like, Watson and Crick's own statements) would have been fine for his argument, but he's using his own interpretation of the words of some random Wikipedia editor to infer about a completely different subject. Just as bad information can be put into Wikipedia, bad information can be taken out of it. And when it is taken out, all of a sudden he has zero argument at all. This wouldn't have been a problem if he'd used an actual source on the actual subject, such as Watson and Crick saying they used the design inference, but he instead had to play word games with an analogy made up by a Wikipedia editor.

Frustrated that his entire argument could be taken down so easily, Egnor went into a tirade where he compared my correcting of Wikipedia to Stalin's offing of Trotsky (yes, seriously):

In the Soviet Union, censors would routinely make out-of-favor party leaders disappear from photographs. In this photograph, Trotsky was made "photographic history" not too long before he was made "history" in a more tangible sense.

Darwinists, who are scientific, rather than political, materialists, have an affinity for airbrushing as well. When sneering, name-calling, and obfuscation don’t make the evidence go away, Darwinists just wipe it away. A recent example of Darwinian airbrushing is worth noting.

I recently noted that the discovery of the structure and function of DNA was a good example of reverse engineering in biology and that the discovery of DNA had nothing to do with Darwin’s theory. Reverse engineering in biology is an inference to design, even if the inference is implicit and not explicit, and even if the scientist using the reverse engineering methodology doesn’t agree with the philosophical implications of the design inference. Much of modern molecular biology is the reverse engineering of biological molecules.

To illustrate my point, I linked to the "Reverse Engineering" entry in Wikipedia, which had a nice succinct definition:

Reverse engineering... is the process of discovering the technological principles of a device or object or system through analysis of its structure, function and operation…Reverse engineering is essentially science, using the scientific method. Sciences such as biology and physics can be seen as reverse engineering of biological 'machines' and the physical world respectively. (emphasis mine)

My post was published on Evolution News and Views on April 3rd.

On April 4th, the Wikipedia reference to biological reverse engineering was airbrushed out. It was changed to:

Reverse engineering … is the process of discovering the technological principles of a device or object or system through analysis of its structure, function and operation. It often involves taking something (e.g. a mechanical device, an electronic component, a software program) apart and analyzing its workings in detail, usually to try to make a new device or program that does the same thing without copying anything from the original. The verb form is to reverse engineer.

This was airbrushed:

Reverse engineering is essentially science, using the scientific method. Sciences such as biology and physics can be seen as reverse engineering of biological 'machines' and the physical world respectively.

The biological reverse engineering analogy was part of the original definition, and had been present until the day that I linked to it in my post. Someone (perhaps a Darwinist?) went to work with an eraser.

(For those reading his entire article, DrLeebot (no capital B) was the name I went by back then. I recently had it changed for unrelated reasons.)

You know what he could have done to save his argument? He could have linked to another source that makes this same analogy to show how it wasn't just one Wikipedia editor who made it up. But he didn't.

Aside from that, it seems Egnor doesn't quite know how Wikipedia works. I can't really blame him for that; not many people spend significant time behind the scenes there. So, for his benefit and yours, here's a little summary of the key points:

1. What Wikipedia says is not evidence of anything (other than trivially evidence of what Wikipedia says). Wikipedia saying biology is reverse engineering is not evidence that biology is reverse engineering; it's the opinion of (at least) one editor that it is.

2. Information isn't deleted by editing it out. Anyone who knows enough can access the page as it appeared when Egnor read it and confirm that that sentence was indeed there. Of course, I didn't expect many people to see it, which is what I was hoping for: That they would see it wasn't there and realize how much Egnor's argument hinged on it.

3. Wikipedia is ruled by consensus. If a change is unpopular, it gets reverted. If more people want the article to stay one way, they can keep editing it that way to show this consensus, and the lone dissenter can't stop them. (Editors are limited to three reverts a day.) Since I made that change, not one person has even tried to revert it, and it's stayed that way to today.

4. You can change it yourself. This one is right in the summary to Wikipedia: "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." If you think that sentence should stay in, then revert it back in. If others think it should go, then we go through a series of talking about it on the discussion page, asking others for their opinions, and seeing where consensus lies.

Dr. Egnor, using one paragraph from Wikipedia and claiming it as evidence that biology is reverse engineering and that reverse engineering always uses the design inference was just pathetic. Removing that paragraph served to show how weak your argument was. Rather than give better support for you argument, your argument ad Stalinum just makes you look more pathetic.

Yes, I support our troops

2007-05-28T16:33:00.001-04:00

That's why I want to pull them out of a hopeless, dangerous war.

Skeptic's Circle #61

2007-05-24T08:48:00.000-04:00

The latest Skeptic's Circle is now up, courtesy of Memoirs of a Skepchick, so go check it out when you have a chance.

Open thread as usual, though giving any credence to Rebecca's ~~findings~~ unsubstantiated claims about me is FORBIDDEN.

The Infophile Encoding System

2007-05-22T16:45:00.001-04:00

Recent events have led me devise my own encoding system for alphanumericals, similar to ASCII but significantly more ridiculous. Basically, to make it, you start with any two character combination. Take the ASCII decimal representation of the first character, multiply it by 128, add it to the ASCII decimal representation of the second character, and then add 13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,695,228.

As this is now a working encoding system, recent legal events might have the unintended consequence of making Intelligent Design proponents very mad. The problem here being that their favored abbreviation, ID, is now an illegal copyright circumvention device thanks to how it can be decoded with this system. Oops.

Quantum Mechanics for Dummies #2: Observation

2007-05-22T12:20:00.002-04:00

Well, it's been a while, but an e-mail exchange not long ago prompted me to get back to this series. If you haven't yet read it (or need a refresher), I recommend you go back and read my first post, on the Wave Nature of Matter. This time, I'm going to be talking about something that can happen to waves and is a very important part of Quantum Mechanics: the collapse (which is closely tied into the concepts of a measurement and an observation).

But before that, we need to cover the concept of eigenstates. (For anyone who already knows about it, this is a vastly simplified explanation, so you're probably safe just skipping past.) Unlike particles, waves don't have discrete positions they'll be in, but rather a range of possible positions they could be found at at any time. Since waves travel, the probability distribution of where it will end up will often change with time. However, there are ways to trap waves, such as a beam of light between two mirrors. In these cases, the wave can only take on discrete stable patterns so that it doesn't end up interfering with itself. These discrete patterns are what are known as eigenstates.

But the probability distribution for a wave won't always fall perfectly into one eigenstate. Often its probability distribution will be a linear sum of multiple eigenstates. Due to interference between the waves of the different states, this pattern won't be perfectly stable and will change somewhat with time, but it will generally do so in a periodic fashion.

This also isn't limited to cases such as light waves. For instance, all particles have a property known as "spin" (if you take that exactly as it sounds, you're close enough). If you measure the spin of a particle such as an electron, you will always get one of only two values, regardless of the orientation of your measuring device: +h/(4π) and -h/(4π) (called "spin up" and "spin down." Think of it as spinning clockwise or counterclockwise).

Both spin up and spin down are eigenstates of the electrons spin, but it's not necessary for the electron to be exactly in one of these states. To generate this, say you take an electron that you just measured to be spin up, then made a second measurement at a right angle to the first. Classically, you would expect to measure a spin of zero, but this isn't one the allowable results. Instead, you'll end up with a 50% chance to measure spin up and a 50% chance to measure spin down.

And here's where things get a bit strange: After you measure it once, if you go back and measure it the same way, you'll always get the same result. It's no longer a 50/50 split. However, if you go and measure it back in the initial direction, it's a 50/50 split here. The implication here is that by measuring the spin of the electron, you somehow changed it - in this case so that it was in a spin up eigenstate with respect to your new measurement.

What's happened here is known as wavefunction collapse. After your first measurement, the electron was spin up in the first direction, which corresponded to a 50/50 split when measuring from the second direction. This 50/50 split was a combination of two eigenstates for the electron. When you then measured it in this direction, one of those states was randomly selected and the electron then became 100% in that state.

And this when the misinterpretations start to happen. The reason for the misinterpretations is the fact that quantum physicists happened to use one particular word in describing it: "observation." In the sense of what happens, an observation simply entails measuring the wavefunction of something, causing said wavefunction to collapse.

But that's not how the word "observation" sounds to the layman. When many hear it, they then think, "So, does this mean that reality is unresolved until I look at it?" People started to believe that quantum states wouldn't resolve until the information from them had filtered its way to a human mind. Even when it came to quantum physics, people wanted to put the human mind on some special pedestal in the universe.

This argument wasn't limited to laymen however. At first, the best quantum theorists couldn't decide themselves what exactly caused the wavefunction to collapse. All they knew was that if they weren't measuring particles, the wavefunction wouldn't collapse, and if you were, then it would. (They tested this by means of the double-slit experiment, which I mentioned in my previous post in this series.)

So, you have scientists not knowing the answer and using a word which heavily implies that human consciousness actually is the answer, and what do you expect happens? People pick it up and start extrapolating, saying that we then must create reality with our minds and be able to control it as we see fit. Even if we were to accept the premise (that being processed by a human mind is what caused the collapse of a wavefunction), this in no way implies that the human mind actually creates or can control reality. The results are still inherently random, whatver the processing mind may wish.

Beyond that, there's actually good reason to believe that it isn't a human mind that causes the collapse of a wavefunction. Let's go back to the case of the double slit experiment, which is our best way of determining whether or not a wavefunction has collapsed. In this case, we'll be shooting electrons from an initial source through one of two slits. One foot beyond the slits is a detector screen. We know that if the electron's wavefunction is uncollapsed at the slits, we'll end up seeing an interference pattern on the screen, while if it's collapsed, we'll see the sum of two diffraction patterns.

If we just let the experiment run, without any detectors, we end up seeing the interference pattern (nothing's causing the wavefunction to collapse). If, instead, we put in detectors at each slit that will notify us if the electron passes through (say by blinking a light on the left or right side), we see the sum of diffraction patterns on the detector screen. Now, what if you were to try this: Have the detectors at the slits and turned on, but don't look at the lights. You could simply disable the feature that has it flashing the lights on the detectors and not store data of which slit the electron passed through, so no human could ever know which way it went.

In this case, we can expect to see one of two outcomes: Either we see an interference pattern, which means that without a human observing it, the wavefunction wouldn't collapse, or we could see a sum of diffraction patterns, which would mean the interaction of the electron with the detector (or some process within the detector after the detection) caused the collapse. This has in fact been done, many times. Very frequently, scientists did experiments using a detector but didn't care which slit was detected, and so they didn't set it up to tell them this data. The result of these tests? The wavefunction collapsed anyways, so human consciousness is not necessary to cause the collapse of a wavefunction.

Why then, do we still see people claiming that it is? Mostly it's do to a poor understanding of the subject. They see words like "observation" and interpret it to mean human observation. Even some professors of quantum physics (including one I had as an undergrad) made this mistake, and then taught it as accepted fact to their students. The only way you can really know for sure on something like this is to go to the experiments themselves. Fortunately, this particular phenomenon is testable, and it has been tested.* Unfortunately, this won't stop some people; I raised this issue up with my professor at one point, and he said testing it was a waste of time because he knew that human consciousness had to be involved. Well, you can't convince everyone.

*Edit to add: Unfortunately, no one seems to have a link to the studies that actually test this, most likely because they were done so long ago that they were never published online anywhere. Actual science has moved on far past this point, while popular science is just starting to get interested in it. I've asked a few people in the know about it, and while some, like the professor mentioned above, still hold to the view that it's human consciousness that does the collapsing, the consensus is pretty clear that the collapse happens long before any human mind looks at whether the particle was detected in either slit.

In fact, even when humans are looking at this, there's so much processing that goes on in the technology that interprets the data that the particle as already traveled and hit the plate at the end before information about which slit it passed through reaches the mind of a human (the "flashing light" is just a metaphor, it's not what's actually done in these experiments). So if it was human thought that was controlling these outcomes, then this result would also have to reach back in time to collapse the particle's wavefunction at some point before it hit the plate.

* * * * *

Other posts in this series:

Quantum Mechanics for Dummies #1: Wave Nature of Matter

A Skeptical Identity Crisis

2007-05-17T13:58:00.000-04:00

One thing I've been puzzling over for a while is what to do about imposter skeptics. You know the kind, the people who take a well-accepted scientific theory which they don't like, then take on the mantle of a "skeptic" to criticize it. Nowadays, the most common type is the Global Warming "skeptic." So, after doing some searching around of how the term "skeptic" is generally used, and looking at all variants on it, I think I've figured out a way we can distinguish ourselves from them.

First of all, there's the problem of what to call ourselves. Just "skeptic" won't do seeing as whatever we say about it, others undeserving of it will still use that as well. Also, it leads to getting us confused with the philosophical skepticism movement which believes (but not certainly) that there can be no absolute truth statements. It's an intriguing idea, and pretty close to one of my own beliefs, but it's a different matter than what we do.

So, here's the term I feel is best: "Scientific skeptic." After all, skepticism as we practice it is ultimately the scientific method, and science, when done well, is ultimately a skeptical way to learn about the world. There's also a lot of Critical Thinking mixed in, but that's also a key ingredient the scientific method. Since we use skepticism to figure out what is and isn't true about the world, the very goal of science, I think the label fits perfectly.

And what about these imposters? We can't cede the generic label of "skeptic" to them. Also, most of them aren't really being skeptic at all, they're simply denying things. We could call them "deniers," I guess, but there's one other good idea I found: "pseudoskeptic." What this does is take the "pseudo-" prefix, which means "fake," and add it onto "skeptic." So, not only do we differentiate ourselves from them with it, we call them fakes in the process.

So, what does everything about this? Anyone have any better suggestions?

Physics Q&A #2: The Fundamental Forces (part 1.5)

2007-05-15T16:24:00.000-04:00

(If you haven't read the first post on this subject, check it out here.)

Before I get into the latter two of the fundamental forces, I realized that one aspect of physics I take for granted probably isn't well understood by most who haven't done much with particle physics. This aspect is the fundamental particles of the universe; the basic building blocks of everything. I'm making an interlude post here to explain that to everyone, since the knowledge of it is critical to understanding the strong and weak nuclear forces.

There are many dividing lines between the fundamental particles, and I'll go through them one at a time to best sort them out. The first dividing line is between what are known as "Bosons" and "Fermions." Fermions are like solid matter, in that you can never put two of them into the same place (or quantum state). Bosons, on the other hand, can be stacked up without limit in the same place/state. Fermions tend to make up the bulk of matter, while bosons work to mediate forces. There also tend to be conservation laws about the number of Fermions, so you can't just go and create or destroy them. Bosons, however, have no such conservation laws.

Bosons

First, I'll go over the Bosons seeing as there are fewer of them and no more divisions between them (among the fundamental ones, that is. Many bound groups of particles can also be bosons, and there are extra divisions here). We know that the following fundamental bosons exist:

Photon: Photons are little quantum pieces of light, and mediate the electromagnetic force. They have no mass and never decay, so the electromagnetic force has unlimited range. Photons are all their own antiparticles.
W⁺, W^-, and Z: The W and Z particles mediate the weak nuclear force. They have very high mass (each ways about as much as an iron atom), and short lifetimes, leading to the weak force having only short range. The W⁺ and W^- are each other's antiparticle, and the Z is its own antiparticle.
Gluons: Gluons mediate the strong nuclear force. They have zero mass and don't decay, but the strong nuclear force is still limited to short range for reasons I'll cover in the next part of this mini-series. Gluons are electrically neutral, but have "color charge" which determines attraction from the the strong nuclear force.

There are also two other theoretical bosons that deserve a mention here. The first is the Higgs particle (H), which is a massive uncharged particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model and which is currently being tested for. You might have heard that the Higgs particle is what "gives other particles mass," but this is a common misinterpretation of the theory. It's actually the Higgs field which gives particles mass. The W⁺, W^-, Z, and H particles are all quanta (fundamental pieces, like photons are of light) of this field. If the H particle exists, we might expect to see it interacting through the weak force in a similar way to the Z boson, except working at different energies due to its different mass.

The other theoretical boson is known as the graviton, and it was predicted to mediate the gravitational force similar to how photons mediate the electromagnetic force (see my previous post for exactly how). However, no direct evidence of its existence could be found, and Einstein's model of General Relativity did a much better job of explaining the how and why of gravity, so the graviton has generally been given up on.

Fermions

Fundamental fermions, unlike bosons, come with another dividing line into two more families: leptons and quarks. The difference here is that quarks feel the strong nuclear force while leptons don't. There also appears to be a nice symmetry between leptons and quarks, as they each have six particles which can be further divided up into three pairs (called "generations," an important concept for the weak nuclear force). For convenience of envisioning how the forces work, we then introduce a property called "isospin" which is equal to +1/2 for one particle of each pair and -1/2 for the other.

Additionally, each of these fermions has a distinct antimatter counterpart to it. These antiparticles have the same mass as the normal particles, but opposite isospin, charge, and color.

Leptons

Among the leptons is one you've likely heard of: The electron. It also has a light, neutrally charged particle called a neutrino which corresponds to it. There's also the muon and the tau, plus their corresponding neutrinos. However, if your only goal is to understand how the weak force works, you really only need to worry about the electron and its neutrino. A quick fact sheet on them:

Generation 1

Electron
Isospin: -1/2
Charge: -1
Mass: Very Low

Electron-neutrino
Isospin: +1/2
Charge: 0
Mass: Extremely low

Generation 2

Muon
Isospin: -1/2
Charge: -1
Mass: Medium

Muon-neutrino
Isospin: +1/2
Charge: 0
Mass: Extremely low

Generation 3

Tau
Isospin: -1/2
Charge: -1
Mass: High

Tau-neutrino
Isospin: +1/2
Charge: 0
Mass: Extremely low

Quarks

Quarks are the building blocks of protons, neutrons, and other similar particles. They bind in groups of 2 or 3 through the strong nuclear force to form these particles. Like leptons, there are 6 types of quarks, but to understand the weak and strong forces, you only need to know about the first two (subsequent generations work essentially the same way).

Quarks are affected by the strong nuclear force because they carry what's known as "color charge." Quarks can have one of three colors: red, green, and blue. Quarks of different colors are then attracted to each other. However, there appears to be a law of nature that no particle can exist alone unless it's color-neutral, so you can never see individual quarks. Instead, you see them either in groups of three with one of each color (known as "baryons") or in pairs of one normal quark and one antiquark (antiquarks have opposite colors of regular quarks, anti-red, anti-green, and anti-blue, and these alone cancel out the regular color). Also, unlike electric charge, color charge isn't innate to the type of particle; each quark can have any color (and antiquarks any anticolor), and even oscillate through different colors.

A quick fact sheet on quarks:

Generation 1

Down Quark
Isospin: -1/2
Charge: -1/3
Mass: Low

Up Quark
Isospin: +1/2
Charge: +2/3
Mass: Low

Generation 2

Strange Quark
Isospin: -1/2
Charge: -1/3
Mass: Medium

Charm Quark
Isospin: +1/2
Charge: +2/3
Mass: High

Generation 3

Bottom Quark
Isospin: -1/2
Charge: -1/3
Mass: High

Top Quark
Isospin: +1/2
Charge: +2/3
Mass: Very High (in fact, the highest of any particle known; about the mass of a gold atom)

If you want a convenient chart of these particles, there's one very popular poster you might have seen in your high school physics room which Wikipedia has gotten permission to host online for their article on the Standard Model. It's a bit dated and doesn't mention the Higgs particle, but other than that it's a great reference on the basic properties of the fundamental particles and forces (at least until you're at the point where you've got it memorized).

As before, if you have any questions on any of this, please ask. I'm doing this purely to help your understanding, so be sure to let me know of anything I haven't explained well enough.

Consider yourself smitten (or whatever the past tense of "smite" is)

2007-05-15T15:00:00.000-04:00

Jerry Falwell is dead. Does being happy about this make me a bad person, or a sane person?

The 60th Skeptic's Circle

2007-05-10T02:14:00.000-04:00

In a flurry of activity, the blog has gone from completely empty to being set up for an elaborate presentation. A stage is set up with a podium just to the left of center. To the right of and behind it is a large screen, presumably for displaying highlighted posts for the current Skeptic's Circle. Soon enough, the lights dim and a spotlight appears, tracking Infophile as he walks to the podium.

Welcome one and all to the latest edition of the Skeptic's Circle, where we highlight the best posts from the last two weeks in critical thinking and in debunking pseudoscience, quackery, denialism, pseudohistory, and frauds. I am particularly honored to be able to host the 60th edition of this since, as many of you are likely aware, the number 60 is quite an interesting number.

The number 60 is the lowest number to be divisible by the first 5 natural numbers (and the 6th as a bonus). This leads it to having a plethora of divisors, making it the most relatively abundant number below 100. It's also notably a unitary perfect number and a semiperfect number.

For an instant, the shadows off to the side of the stage appear to be take on a human form, but it quickly fades. Probably just pareidolia.

Additionally, the number 60 and related numbers show up in numerous places in human culture. The most obvious would be that it's the number of seconds in a minute and the number of minutes in an hour. It's also the number of degrees in each angle of an equilateral triangle. Also, it's divisors sum up to 108, which shows up in many more places in religion and literature.

There's that human-like shadow again. Wait... if it were just irrelevent pareidolia, would it be pointed out in the post like this? Or maybe it's just a test of your skepticism.

But enough about the number 60, onto the circle. While I'd hoped I could get 60 posts for this, I wasn't quite that fortunate. Nevertheless, I doubt you'll be disappointed. Our first post comes from the organizer of the circle himself, Orac from Respectful insolence...

Infophile appears to be triggering a remote in his hand, likely to turn on the screen and start the slide show. The screen switches to show a "Loading..." display for a few moments, and then promptly switches to the dreaded Blue Screen of Death, stating that the system has performed an illegal operation and must be shut down.

Great, just great. I apologize for the inconvenience people, but this should only take a moment. I really should have made sure the company I hired to organize this had upgraded at least to Windows XP, but it's too late for that now. While waiting, why don't you talk amongst yourself. I'll even give you a subject: Why did it take so long for Microsoft to fix this problem.

Infophile strikes a key on the podium to commence the shutdown, and at that moment every electrical device in the room simultaneously shuts off, plunging the auditorium into darkness.

Okay, whose idea was it to run the entire room's electrical functions from the same computer, and not even install a backup? You can't tell me this hasn't happened before. Trust me, I'm going t...

Infophile is abruptly cut off, as if his speech were overwritten by silence. This is followed by a disturbing thud. After a few hectic seconds of worried audience members scrambling to get up to the stage and many others asking about what had happened, the lights switch back on.

Somehow, you managed to get pushed to front, and you can see that Infophile is now lying prone on the stage, showing no signs of life. Looking over his body, you see no obvious signs indicating what might have happened to him, but you're not a doctor (for the purposes of this story), so you can't be sure. While inspecting him, you also find a crumpled note which appears to be listing various websites - perhaps the list of posts submitted for this circle.

Call out, "Is anyone here a doctor?"

Flatten out the note and use the computer to check out the sites for the latest Skeptic's Circle. Yes, it's heartless, but you're a busy person, and this is all fictional anyways.

Fade to Black

2007-05-08T13:49:00.000-04:00

Time is fast running out. The deadline for contributing to the next Skeptic's Circle is tomorrow at 9 PM Eastern time, so get your posts written and e-mail a link to TheInfophile {at} gmail {dot} com before time runs out.

Twilight

2007-04-26T16:04:00.000-04:00

The blog is mysteriously empty, and Infophile is nowhere to be seen. The only sign of life is a single shred of black paper on the floor. Picking it up, you find the following message written on it in white ink:

I apologize for the inconvenience, but it would seem that Infophile is off preparing to host the next Skeptic's Circle. Can't say exactly what he has planned, but looking back through his blog, it actually appears that he left hints in a few places. Apparently whatever he's doing has been in the works for quite a while.

If you've got posts to submit, send them along to TheInfophile (at) gmail (dot) com (you never know how advanced spammer technology may get; they could even be reading handwritten notes now). I don't know if he'll be checking his e-mail there, but I'll be sure check it for him just in case. His password shouldn't be that hard to crack. Hmm, I'll probably be able to check it around 9 PM Eastern time on Wednesday, May 9th, so if you get it in before then I should be able to get it up in some decent form. After that, well, maybe I'll tack on a link at the end for you.

Until then, I've got some work I need to get at. The museum's really gone into disrepair due to lack of funding, and if Infophile isn't going to be doing much around here, I might be able to find some surplus funds to spend on renovating it.

-Nate Black

Skeptic's Circle #59

2007-04-26T15:09:00.000-04:00

The latest Skeptic's Circle is now up courtesy of IAMB.

Open thread as usual, but pointing out to Bronze Dog the difference between limericks and haikus is FORBIDDEN.

Why Blogism?

2007-04-25T15:07:00.000-04:00

(Hey, it worked for Skepticism!)

Well I got tagged for this by TheBrummell (yes, it did get around to me), so here goes, a list of reasons why I blog:

It's something to do. Honestly, this might actually have been the biggest reason for my starting this blog. I had a ton of free time at work (what can I say? I was so good at my job they couldn't find enough for me to do), and I needed something to do. So I blogged. I still have lots of free time around school, and I'm on a short vacation right now, so I still need something to do.
Community. When I started this blog, I was just losing touch with all my friends from high school. I didn't plan on using this blog to make new friends online, but when it started to happen, it became a reason to keep going.
Interacting with "famous" people. Sure, anyone can go and post on the blog of someone moderately famous in the blogosphere, but it's an entirely different feeling when they come and post a comment on your blog. (Yes, he was correcting a minor mistake I'd made, but I've corrected him on occasion too, and I maintain that I'd prefer to be corrected than leave a mistake up.)
I can help grease the wheels of skepticism. I noticed early on that most of the big swaths of skepticism are already covered in various places by very good bloggers. I've found a few subjects that went unmentioned and covered them myself, but that's not my primary contribution to the cause. The most popular posts I've done have actually been what I call "Greasing" posts, where I talk more about the philosophical side of what we're doing. This includes my Why Skepticism? posts and the Distilled Wisdom series, which give explanations of why this is important and how you can argue better, respectively. While these posts aren't directly attacking woo, they serve the purpose of helping other bloggers attack it better. For instance, my second Why Skepticism? post showed how Godel's Incompleteness Theorem actually serves to help disprove faith rather than put a limit on science, as many woos are prone to claim.
I can teach people about science. One thing I've noticed is that many people are genuinely interested in learning about the scientific picture of the world. The problem is that they see huge barriers such as having to be great at math and studying and getting an undergraduate degree before they can even be told qualitatively what's going on. With this blog, I can create a bridge out to them to teach them roughly what's going on without having to drown them in math. It's no coincidence that my Quantum Mechanics for Dummies post is the most frequent target of Google hits (beating out Faith no More lyrics and Bible quotes by a wide margin).
I get to randomly reference Terry Pratchett, this note included.

I can't think of the expected five people to tag with this that haven't already been hit, but I'll send out a couple to Akusai and Tom Foss. Let's see what you've got.

And on a lighter note...

2007-04-24T23:19:00.000-04:00

I was just watching Stranger than Fiction today (good movie; watch it if you haven't), and it inspired an idea. In it, one of the characters refused to pay 22% of her taxes one year because she didn't agree with what the government was spending that portion of the money on (national defense, "corporate bail-outs," etc.). Now, of course we don't really have the right to do that; the government is certainly within its rights to spend money on those things.

But what if the government is spending money on something it specifically does not have the right to spend it on. Something like, say... faith-based initiatives? Not only does it favor religion over no religion, it favors Christianity over all other religions (no money has gone to any non-Christian initiatives). This is a clear breach of the establishment clause if I ever saw one.

What's the government's excuse? The money they gave to faith-based initiatives wasn't specifically earmarked to be given to it, but was just general funds. Actually, that's not their excuse of why it's alright; that's their excuse for why people shouldn't be able to sue them to get them to stop it. They don't actually have an excuse for why it's alright.

Now, a case brought by the Freedom From Religion Foundation on this issue (the issue of whether they're allowed to sue at all) is currently awaiting a verdict in the Supreme Court, so we'll have to wait and see what happens there. If it turns out that they can sue, then they most likely will, and we'll have to wait even more to see how that turns out.

But, let's say worse comes to worst, and they lose either of these cases, and you feel like practicing a little Civil Disobedience. Well, the government spend $2.1 billion dollars on faith-based initiatives in 2005, and the total budget was around $2,050 billion dollars, so that's about 0.1% of their budget (please check my numbers if you can, there's a good chance I made a mistake somewhere). So, if you don't want to pay for faith-based initiatives, then only spend 99.9% of your taxes and send along a note to the government explaining that you will not spend tax dollars on programs that violate the constitution.

Is this illegal? Probably, but so is what the government's doing. Two wrongs don't necessarily make a right, but they've already made one wrong. One more on our part isn't going to make things any more wrong.

The Nature of the Beast

2007-04-23T18:37:00.000-04:00

Alright, I feel that enough time has past that people will be willing to explore what could lead someone to do something like the massacre at Virginia Tech, and yet it's still fresh enough of people's minds that they care. Of course, I suspect there are still people who won't be able handle any reality other than the shooter being possessed or inhuman. If you're one of those, then for your own piece of mind, I recommend you don't proceed below the fold.

It takes one to know one

What I'm going to talk about today is what could possibly lead an individual to the depths of insanity seen in the VAT shooter, Cho Seung-hui. But before I get into it, I should explain why I feel qualified to discuss this. Simply put, it takes a certain type of mind and a certain mental state to do what he did. I have that type of mind, and I've come closer to that mental state than is healthy.

My parents suspected me of being autistic for a while, but I didn't quite fit in with any form of it. I had some of the developmental disorders commonly associated with autistics, such as lacking normal social instincts and savant-like intelligence, but too much of the picture didn't fit. There's no real diagnosis for what I have; I've come to believe it's just some unique mental state. For brevity though, I call it pseudo-autism, as thinking of it being like autism makes a lot of things in my life make more sense.

Many people with disabilities like this nowadays are fortunate enough to get adequate help, and come through alright. In my case, since I was never diagnosed with anything in specific, I couldn't get the right type of help. I bounced from psychologist to psychologist and none could ever really do anything for me. On top of my other problems, I faced clinical depression (image manic-depression, except instead of bouncing up and down, you bounce down and down). They tried to medicate me for this, but they couldn't find anything that worked until just last year.

As such, I shared many of the experiences growing up that Cho did. I was a social outcast. I had trouble fitting in with others. I faced emotional crises of my own, and the ways in which I responded bear a striking similarity to how he did. I even reached a breaking point which I'm sure he did too, and it caused both of us to twist - and this is importantly where the similarity ends, as we twisted in different directions here. But I'll go into that in more detail later.

Life at the bottom

To set the stage, there are a few things you should know about his early life. He was at first seen as cold and uncommunicative by his family. When he arrived in the US at the age of 8, this was diagnosed as autism. However, despite this diagnosis, he apparently never received any instruction to help him overcome the drawbacks of it.

Imagine yourself in his position. You're eight years old, and your family has just moved to another continent where nobody speaks your language. On top of that, you've got a developmental disability which makes it seem like no one speaks your language even when they do. So he has tons of trouble communicating to others, and nobody is teaching him how to in a way he can understand.

So, go back to your own experiences in elementary school. What happens to the kid who can't speak English well, lacks normal social instincts, and has trouble learning? He's designated the official target of not only the normal bullies in the school, but all the other students who need someone to bully as well. This is, of course, what happened to young Cho.

No one responds well to being bullied. The ones who come out best are those able to pass the bullying on to someone with an even lower social status than them. But there has to be someone at the bottom, and what are they to do? Some withdraw into themselves and avoid social contact as much as they can. Some lash back, and are then usually penalized by an oblivious administration for it. Some of them find groups of people in the same situation, and stick together with them.

The latter group often comes out of the experience relatively alright, but the other types of kids aren't so lucky. Those who lash back get in trouble constantly, and take up a role of the outsider, the trouble-maker. These kids aren't to be confused with the popular "bad boys," who break the rules and either get away with it or are applauded for it. Instead, these kids are the criminals. They break rules and are caught and/or reviled for it.

Worlds inside

And then there are those who withdraw, which is where Cho fits in. Socialization is a big part of human life, and someone deprived of it will do whatever they can to fill the void. Sometimes these people will be picked up by cults and find their acceptance from them. Others will try to get involved in organized religion. Both of these types of groups are particularly attractive to a kid in this situation simply because they aren't going to refuse him. But the problem is that the ideals and beliefs of these organization often won't be compatible with the kid's, so it just won't work.

One other substitute that many drift to is a one-sided relationship. Generally, this tends become an obsession with a certain type of music, often from a single artist who the child feels some amount of empathy towards. The messages in the music tell the kid that there's someone that understands their situation (or something similar to it), and they aren't so alone. This doesn't completely fill the void from a lack of socialization as there's no give-and-take, just receiving the messages, so problems will still remain.

Some of them (particularly autistics) go into a maelstrom of creativity within their own minds. They imagine up worlds, and generally find a place for themselves within them. Many write this out, giving the world a window into their minds. Others keep it all within their heads. Sometimes these imagined worlds are obviously fantasy, but other times they're very closely tied to reality. In these cases, as the child spends more time interacting with their imagined world than the real one, the line between reality and fantasy can start to blur.

So where does Cho fit into this? His parents tried to bring him into religion so he could find acceptance there, but the cycle just repeated. Other members of his Christian youth group bullied him as well, so he had to withdraw from this as well. He didn't withdraw entirely from religion, though, but just the community within it.

He then went into a period of internally fantasizing. Being rejected by others of course caused him to be angry and feel persecuted, so this colored his fantasies. When he was asked to do creative writing in school, this anger came out and it scared the teachers involved.

One other potential development within him was the development of a new persona. It's quite possible that he also started to hate himself for being different, and as such wanted to distance himself from himself. The resolution to this would be to try to change himself into someone else. This alternate persona would have to differ from his old self in key ways. For instance, instead of withdrawing, it would be one to fight back. It seems quite possible to me that this persona was the "Ishmael Ax" found scratched on his arm.

Cho was in pain, and he saw others who were enjoying life. This wasn't fair; it wasn't just. How is it that they were able to take enjoyment while he was forced to suffer? He hated those who were rich, who could afford the luxuries in life his family couldn't. He hated those who were in relationships and could find love (notably the physical side of it) from another. Hence, his railings against "rich kids" and "debauchery." As for the "deceitful charlatans," that's most likely rage against those who preached alternative religions. They were the ones who caused people to not get the message that what they were doing was wrong.

And then the dogma of Christianity, which he still believed in, started to color his fantasies. He saw himself as a Christ figure, being persecuted by the sinful. A lone good man in a world of sin, forced to suffer for it.

The breaking point

At some point, he must have faced severe stress from some source. Maybe he saw the girl he fantasized about from afar in a relationship with another man. Maybe it was a particularly nasty bout of the same bullying and persecution. Either way, something put tremendous pressure on his already-fragile psyche.

This breaking point is another fork in the paths of different people who have undergone this type of past. Some of them implode and take their own lives in suicide. Some of them explode back out at the world in a crazed attempt at revenge. Others twist, but I'll describe this last one later. For now, let's talk about what happened with Cho, one of those who exploded.

The crack that happened in his mind occured at the delineation between fantasy and reality. Religion itself had probably weakened this slightly, leading him to believe that the supernatural was possible, but eventually the line went further than that. In his mind, it wasn't just all possible, he was at the heart of it. In his mind, he became Jesus Christ reborn, with the mission to execute justice on the sinners.

Aside: No, I'm not blaming religion here, just describing what likely did happen in this case. If the religion were removed, I have no reason to believe things would necessarily have been better. He could just as well have gone on the same rampage if he were an atheist, if his mind found some other justification for taking this type of revenge.

Judging by the timeline, this probably happened a fair amount of time before the actual attack. He was clearly out of touch with reality for a fair bit before it, as he was planning it and falling deeper into insanity. He wrote up a "manifesto" to tell the world why he had done this. He made a DVD of various pictures of himself that the news would just love to show off, giving him even more fame. After all, as much of the world would have to know of the second coming as possible, right?

And then, at last, he executed his attack. He made an apparently targeted strike against a particular girl, Emily Hilscher. Perhaps she had inadvertently jilted him somehow. Then he went on to take out as many people as possible in the second shooting, ending with himself. After all, you can't be a martyr if you don't die.

Taming the Beast

Now, it wouldn't be fair to talk about how I went through much of that myself and not tell you how I've resolved it and gotten past it. Hopefully if anyone out there is facing a similar struggle, they might be able to learn something. Now, this isn't a full descriptor of what I've gone through, but there are some aspects that I might fill in later.

Not everyone who reaches a breaking point implodes or explodes. I reached that point myself, and I took a third option. In one of my severe attacks of depression, I fell down far, and came face-to-face with the beast within. This is the beast that leads to the uncontrollable rage seen in shooters like this. It's also the source of many primal urges within humanity that nowadays aren't compatible with our society and often are simply unjust (ie. instinctual racism).

Most people (so I believe) have this beast deep within them, and they spend their lives denying it. No, they aren't violent people, they aren't petty, they aren't xenophobic, they say to themselves. They're civilized. But this civilization is built in contradiction to the beast, and they have to deny it as being part of them in order to keep functioning in a civilized manner.

For those who reach the breaking point, the civilized persona has failed them in some way. Those who are capable of giving it up do so, and the beast is released. Those who can't break down and take their own lives. Some people retreat from it and go back to the person they were - often just leading them to face another breaking point in the future.

In my case, I faced the breaking point and retreated many times. I saw the beast within me, and I couldn't accept letting it loose (I was able to acknowledge that many other people were decent and didn't deserve an "explosion" from me). But the civilized persona I'd built up as I grew up wasn't working; it kept leading me back into bouts of depression, so something had to change.

What I chose to do in the end was to rebuild myself. I started out deep down, where I shackled up the beast securely. I wouldn't be able to deny it, but I would be able to build beyond it and create a persona better than what my instincts would have led me to be. This new persona would be based on logic and ration. It would be calm, intelligent, and it would be willing to correct itself when it was in the wrong.

The process wasn't easy; not by a long shot. It started back when I was in my second year of high school, and it hasn't finished yet. It probably never will end, just as most people never finish growing up. But it's only very recently (in the last year) that I've been able to accept myself and be proud of who I am.

The most recent step in this was accepting the mantle of the skeptic. It actually matched up with my goals very well - skeptics acknowledge the flaws in normal human reasoning and work beyond them. They've shackled up the beast of unreason, and built a system of logic and reasoning to operate in its place. I took this on myself, filling in one of the last big gaps in who I am.

On one last note, I have to recommend to anyone who wants a bit more of an idea of what the beast is like that they pick up a copy of the Discworld novel, Night Watch. One of the major themes in is exploring the inner struggles of Sam Vimes, Commander of the Watch. He too faces a constant struggle with the beast he sees within him. To keep it in control, he created the persona of "the Copper" (also called "the Watchman" in Thud!). He uses the symbol of his badge to keep himself in control, symbolizing the rule of law over anarchy. I'm much the same way, though with a slightly more intellectual bent to the struggle.

In Consideration

2007-04-17T14:28:00.000-04:00

As you've probably heard (unless you're more out of the loop than I am), 32 people were murdered at Virginia Tech in the USA's largest-ever mass shooting by a single individual. I have something I'd like to talk about in relation to it, hoping to explain how an individual could sink to those depths, but I'm going to wait a bit.

The events are still way too recent for me to talk about a subject which might make the gunner look a little less bad. For now, I'll just let it be and let people mourn for the dead and curse the killer. Once it's a bit less of an open wound, then I'll talk about it.

It's just sad that so many others don't have this small amount of tact. Already, we've got Debbie Schlussel blaming it on Muslims, Ken Ham blaming it on atheism, and Jack Thompson blaming it on video games. Even though I'm just blaming it on the depraved psychology of one individual, I'm still going to wait before going into it. People like these just sicken me.

Swear by Letters

2007-04-14T20:57:00.000-04:00

Just announcing that I've now completed by list of reverse-censorships. The last term to be added was "Zuffle," which I found while browsing the Z section of Urban Dictionary. It's defined as: (definition hidden below the fold)

To wipe your cock on the curtains after having sex at a posh bird's house.

The word itself may not sound bad, but the meaning of it is enough to merit inclusion.

Skeptic's Circle #58

2007-04-12T16:08:00.000-04:00

The latest Skeptic's Circle is now up courtesy of Geek Counterpoint, so go and check it out.

Open thread as usual, but use of the Epidermis-letter in your replies is FORBIDDEN.

Reverse Censorship

2007-04-11T16:36:00.000-04:00

I read yet another article on the 'net today talking about "The N-word," and the fiasco around it, and I noticed that although the article was completely against banning the word, it was never once said uncensored. This then raises the question (no, not "begs the question") of how someone who doesn't know what word is being talked about is supposed to know to avoid it.

Let's go to a specific example, a regulated online community, such as an MMORPG. To maintain a "Teen" rating, most MMORPGs ban the use of profanity. But what qualifies as profanity? It would be nice if they could just give us a list of words we shouldn't say, but the closest they'd ever come (not that I've seen any even do this) is along the lines of "The F-word, the N-word..." If you honestly can't figure it out from that (picture a foreigner learning English to see why someone might not be completely up on all this stuff), you're F-worded.

In response to all this silly "The (Letter)-word" stuff, I've decided to turn it on it's head in protest. Now, the applicable letters are to be known as "The (Profanity)-letter" instead of simply stating the letter. I've purposely avoided actually using any profanities up to this point, but that stops below the fold. If you're mature enough, head below. If not, grow the fuck up and read it anyways.

I've filled in whatever letters I could think of, but a few are left blank. If you've got any suggestions, please leave them in the comments.

Update: The list is now complete, but if you have any better suggestions for certain letters, let me know!

A shall thus be known as "The Asshole-letter"
B shall thus be known as "The Bitch-letter"
C shall thus be known as "The Cunt-letter" (Alternatives: Cock, Cocksucker)
D shall thus be known as "The Damn-letter" (Alternative: Dipshit)
E shall thus be known as "The Epidermis-letter" (People will think it's crude)
F shall thus be known as "The Fuck-letter"
G shall thus be known as "The God-letter"
H shall thus be known as "The Hell-letter"
I shall thus be known as "The IDiot-letter"
J shall thus be known as "The Jesus-letter"
K shall thus be known as "The Knockers-letter"
L shall thus be known as "The Lesbian-letter" (Cross-reference: "The L Word")
M shall thus be known as "The Motherfucker-letter"
N shall thus be known as "The Nigger-letter"
O shall thus be known as "The Orgasm-letter"
P shall thus be known as "The Prick-letter"
Q shall thus be known as "The Queer-letter"
R shall thus be known as "The Retard-letter" (Alternative: Rectum)
S shall thus be known as "The Shit-letter"
T shall thus be known as "The Tits-letter"
U shall thus be known as "The Unclefucker-letter" (Thank you, South Park movie)
V shall thus be known as "The Vagina-letter"
W shall thus be known as "The Whore-letter"
X shall thus be known as "The XXX-letter" (Yeah, it's pointless, but the pointlessness is the point of this list)
Y shall thus be known as "The Yarbles-letter" (It means "Testicles," originally from A Clockwork Orange, but picked up elsewhere)
Z shall thus be known as "The Zuffle-letter" (Just the concept is enough, even if it doesn't sound so bad.

Physics Q&A #2: The Fundamental Forces (part 1)

2007-04-10T17:12:00.000-04:00

Welcome back to Physics Q&A, where I answer physics questions sent in by readers in order to help give you all an understanding of how the universe works. This week I'll be addressing the fundamental forces of nature, explaining how they work and how they differ.

First, let me just give you a brief overview of the forces, before we get into the details of how they work:

Gravity
Acts on: Everything that has either mass or energy
Effect: Weak attraction between objects with mass or energy

Electromagnetic Force
Acts on: All charged particles and light
Effect: Attractive force between objects of opposite charge, repulsive force between objects of same charge. Acceleration caused by and/or causes light waves. Effects of special relativity give rise to magnetic effects between moving charged particles.

Weak Nuclear Force
Acts on: Leptons, quarks, and neutrinos
Effect: A bit complicated. Basically, the trick here is that all Weak interactions change the form of the particles involved. As such, it's really not a good idea to characterize this as a force, but more as an "interaction." Some people extend this to all the fundamental "forces."

Strong Nuclear Force
Acts on: Quarks
Effect: Binds quarks together to form baryons, or binds baryons together to form nuclei.

That's the essentials of it. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty of how they work, head below the fold.

Gravity

Let's start out with the oddball force: Gravity. As far as modern physics can tell, gravity acts in no way like the other forces. While the other three fit well under a model of interchanging particles (called "Gauge bosons"), Gravity fits best under the model of General Relativity.

So, at this point, you're likely wondering exactly how this model works and how it differs from Newtonian gravity. Of course, the actual equations aren't simple, but I can still explain it in qualitative terms.

The key realization that gravity worked differently than other forces was the fact that a particle's acceleration due to gravity was independant of its own mass. This then tied in with a law of mechanics you may or may not have heard: The path an object takes when under the influence of no outside forces is independant of its property. But, does this mean that the converse (If an object's path is independant of its properties, it's under the influence of no outside forces) must be true?

Logically, it doesn't have to be, but it's something at least worth investigating, and that's what Einstein did, leading to his formulation for General Relativity. In doing this, he realized that, for instance, a person standing on a surface in a gravitational field would feel a normal force pushing out from the surface that would be exactly the same as a person outside a gravitational field would feel if that surface were being accelerated upwards. This formed what is known as the Equivalence Principle - that a gravitational field is equivalent to an "acceleration" of space.

So, he set up equations as if an object in freefall (a path independant of its properties) were in a natural path, and holding it out against gravity were unnatural. This led to the formulation of what's known as the Schwarzschild metric, the fundamental equation of GR. (If you've forgotten what a metric is, I recommend you check my last Physics Q&A post.)

That's the history of it, but what does it all mean? In essence, the presence of any type of energy warps space such that the natural path of objects through time now curves towards it. You can picture this as matter sitting on a giant rubber sheet, with "time" pulling downwards. Objects like Earth then warp the sheet around them:

Someone standing on the surface of Earth also feels time pulling them downwards, but now they also see that space under them is slanted towards the center of Earth. This means that if their path goes that way, they'll get ahead in time faster, so they're also pulled inwards. Now, this isn't exactly how it works, but it's good for visualization.

The Electromagnetic Force

Let's proceed onto the simplest of the three forces that can be explained from the Particle Physics model: Electromagnetism. I'll just be focusing on the electric side of it for this post, as it's all that's actually needed for the fundamental model (magnetism is just the interaction of it with special relativity).

First, the basics of it: Objects have one type of charge, which can be either positive or negative. Objects with the same sign of this charge feel a repulsive force between each other, objects with the opposite sign of this charge are attracted to each other. The force of this repulsion or attraction is proportional to the magnitude of each charge and the inverse-square of the distance between the particles to a first-order approximation.

On very small scales, electromagnetism works through what's pictured as an exchange of particles (in this case, photons). To picture this, imagine you and a friend are standing on a sheet of ice. You have a heavy ball, and you throw it over to your friend. As you release it, conservation of momentum pushes you back. Then, as your friend catches it, conservation of momentum pushes them away from you as well.

That works for the repulsive case, though the attractive case is a bit more difficult. For this case, you have to imagine that the ball you're throwing has negative mass. This way, when you throw it out, it's momentum is like it's going backwards, so you're pulled forwards too. And when your friend catches it, they get pulled closer to you as well.

Since this is the simplest case, I'll take this chance to introduce you to Feynman diagrams, which are what we use to chart this exchange of particles. In these diagrams, we start out by writing out the initial particles at the bottom and the final particles at the top. For instance, if it's an interaction between two electrons, this step would look like:

Then, we draw some possible connection between the beginning and end. In this case, the simplest is simply each of the electrons at the beginning making a straight path to one of the end ones, but this represents no interaction between them, so it's not very interesting. If we want to do some actual interactions, we need to first define what type of vertices are allowed. For EM interactions, there's only one basic type of vertex: Some charged particle comes in, emits or absorbs a photon, then goes out:

A few notes on the lines:

Straight, solid lines represent massive particles (such as electrons)
Other types of lines represent gauge bosons. For instance, photons are represented by squiggly lines as seen above.
The arrow on the line represents the direction of travel of a normal particle. If it points in a direction opposite that of the momentum of the particle, this is considered to be the corresponding anti-particle.

We don't need to worry about the last point for this interaction, since no antiparticles are involved. So, using this type of vertex, we end up getting two possible interactions that only include two vertices:

Once we go through a ton of complicated math using these two interactions, we can come with equations to govern it. However, it turns out that there are also a ton of possibilities (infinitely many) that use more than two vertices, but they're much less likely to occur. In the end, you get an infinite series of interactions which you can sum up, and the convergence is how things will end up behaving in the real world.

One of the big strengths of this manner of handling physics is that it doesn't only govern forces between two unchanging particles. For instance, we can also use it to represent an electron and a positron annihilating each other. To do this, we use the last point of my explanation of what the lines mean above. This way, we could make a reaction where an electron and a positron come together and turn into a photon. However, we run into a problem with this reaction in that it turns out to be impossible for momentum to be conserved. It is possible to conserve it, though, in a somewhat more complicated reaction that produces two photons:

But wait! If we can't conserve momentum for a single vertex, how come we can use that vertex within the chart? The trick here is that the internal lines we're using don't represent actual particles - there's no point in time you could freeze the interaction and see an intermediate electron. These are what we call "virtual" particles. They never actually exist in real space, but travel through imaginary space to help mediate the reaction. As such, they don't have to obey standard equations of motion, so they're allowed to have imaginary momentum or negative energy and other crazy stuff.

Now, I'm getting the feeling that a lot of you likely aren't completely following at this point, so before I continue on to finish up with the even more complicated forces, I'm going to stop the post here and open it up to questions.

Theocracy north of the border

2007-04-08T15:03:00.000-04:00

While most people are blogging against Theocracy in the good old US of A, I figured I'd raise a little international awareness and talk about what's going on north of the border in the better old CN of D (add in "eh?"s as appropriate). The first question that should be addressed is whether or not we actually have separation of church and state up here. The answer's a bit complicated.

There are two ways we can measure whether a country is theocratic or secular: de jure (in law) and de facto (in fact). Since it's simpler, let's look at what the law says first. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, roughly similar to the United States' Bill of Rights, starts off with the preamble:

Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law:

Tch! First sentence and they're already invoking their god. Not looking good. Of course, it doesn't say specifically which god, but we can presume they mean the Christian god. Things get a bit better in the "Fundamental Freedoms" section:

Fundamental Freedoms

Fundamental freedoms 2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:

(a) freedom of conscience and religion;

(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;

(c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and

(d) freedom of association.

Okay, so we're at least guaranteed freedom of conscience and religion. Of course, that must also imply freedom from religion (I won't dignify arguments to the contrary with a response here). Unfortunately, this adds up to all we see in the Canadian Constitution with regards to religion. There's no Establishment Clause, so they're free to establish a state church if they so wish, and Canada still pays nominal respect to the British Monarchy who "rules" by supposed divine right.

So, things are kind of a mixed package. Everyone has freedom of religion, but the government is free to establish a state religion and promote over others. There's also nothing stopping the government from giving favor to religions, such as giving churches tax-exempt status, funding faith-based programs, etc. And it's at this point that we come to the absolute worst clause in the Charter:

Exception where express declaration 33. (1) Parliament or the legislature of a province may expressly declare in an Act of Parliament or of the legislature, as the case may be, that the Act or a provision thereof shall operate notwithstanding a provision included in section 2 or sections 7 to 15 of this Charter.

You might want to go back and read it again; it does indeed say what you thought it said. We're only guaranteed all these rights as long as the government doesn't explicitly declare that they're disregarding this document. Although it's not explicitly stated here, the law also makes clear that any such act will have to be renewed every 5 years (a subtle reprieve). As former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney said, this clause makes the Charter "...not worth the paper it is written on." This means we only really have freedom of religion until some local legislature decides we don't.

Now, if you aren't a Canadian citizen, you might be wondering whether or not this clause is ever actually used. Let me assure you, it is. Quebec used it to make French the only allowable language on commercial signs from 1977-1993. Alberta used it to enforce sterilization on people they considered "unfit," including "new immigrants, alcoholics, epileptics, unwed mothers, the poor and native people," from 1928 (before Germany started doing this) to 1998. Obviously, some legislaters aren't afraid of committing gross violations of human rights with this clause. Just do a search for "Notwithstanding Clause" to see more about it, if you wish.

Okay, so as de jure separation of church and state goes, we're pretty much screwed. Fortunately, things aren't quite so bad de facto. It turns out there's one other clause that has often saved people from separation of church and state infringement:

Multicultural heritage 27. This Charter shall be interpreted in a manner consistent with the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians.

Note that this is section 27, so even the Notwithstanding Clause can't trump it. Although it's occasionally been abused (such as to suppress free speech in a couple case), this clause has also stopped the government from enacting blue laws on many occasions, as legalizing the values of one particular religion would go against the multiculturalism of Canada.

The problem is, atheism isn't a religion. It also isn't a culture, so there's nothing stopping the government from favoring all religions over none. In fact, they have been doing this in many ways, including giving churches tax-exempt status and publically funding religious schools outside the secular public school system (in fact, for a period, Newfoundland didn't even have a secular school system at all. Fortunately, this has since been reversed and now only secular schools receive public funding there. Quebec, however, still has only religious public schools).

However, the saving grace of Canada has been simply having more rational people in power than places like the US. Even without a law mandating separation of church in state, if the people are willing, the system can end up working out better. Take a couple hot topics of the recent years: Abortion and Gay Rights.

First of all, abortion. I won't get deep into the subject now, except to state that outside of religious motivations, there is zero reason to ban abortions at least before the brain has started to develop (if you care to debate, the comment thread is open). So, banning abortion can be seen as a measure of overblown religiousity.

In Canada, it turns out there are very few active protests against the right to abortion, and in every province (except Prince Edward Island, Canada's answer to Rhode Island), women are free to obtain abortions which are even covered by the universal healthcare system. You don't see Christian groups posing as abortion centers, who then delay pregnant women until it's too late. You don't see legislaters offering $500 a head for adoptions. Overall, things are pretty decent up here when it comes to this subject.

Now, let's look at Gay Rights, another issue that religiosos get all up in arms about. In total 7 provinces (there are 10 in total) have legislation guaranteeing equal rights for gays (compared to zero states), while another two are planning to introduce legislation soon. The only province left out is Alberta (you know, the eugenicists). Compared to the States, Canada is a bona fide haven for gays.

However, there are still a few issues here. Some groups, such as Atheists (and variants), but also including Wiccans and Neopagans are often the targets of vicious intolerence, the likes of which is comparable to the intolerence atheists receive in America. Not everyone feels this way, but it's enough that most people of one of these religions (or lack thereof) don't go public with their beliefs. You can also see this playing out legally in custody battles between parents of differing religious beliefs; often, when the custody winner has one of these minority religious, they're forbidden from teaching it to their children. Overall, this gives the impression that mainstream religions such as large sects of Christianity are still much preferred.

And note that this intolerence is despite the fact that most Christians in Canada are pretty secular. Over 70% of the population is Christian, but only around 20% attend church regularly (compared to 40% in America). And yet many are still intolerant of people who actively declare they have no religion. Apparently it's fine to act as if you have no religion as long as you call yourself a "Christian," but if you call yourself an "atheist," you're in trouble.

So, there's your update on how things are looking in Canada. We have a lot of the same problems as the US, with a few little differences. We aren't as close to being a theocracy de facto, though we're a lot closer de jure. We're just lucky that we've gotten mostly rational people in government, but if things turn around we could be in deep trouble.

Your Turn

2007-04-07T16:12:00.001-04:00

Okay, I can't really predict "whatever you want," so here's what you're going to do. Go open up a text-editing program, such as Notepad. Write in whatever the hell you want to finish off this dream. Once you're satisfied, drag the window over the big empty space below, and that's what you do.
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Okay, ready to wake up now.

Fact or Fiction

2007-04-07T16:11:00.009-04:00

"So, you still think this is actually happening, eh?" Black says.

"Yes," you say. "Things just feel too real for me to say it's a dream."

"Well, what say we try something then?" he suggests. "I didn't come here unprepared to face off with woo myself, and one of my preparations just might help here."

Black goes off to the side of the stage and picks up what appears to be a gun. "What I have here is Occam's .44 Magnum. You may have heard of Occam's Razor, which says that the simplest explanation that fits the evidence is generally the best. Well, with all of the woo that's been popping up in recent years, it's often been found wanting. Thus, I came up with this. Instead of shaving off excesses, it simply blasts it away.

"So, here's what we're going to do. You get to represent the theory that this is actually happening and is part of a nefarious plot to undermine reality, while I'll represent the theory that this is simply a dream or hallucination. I'll try shooting each of us, and if one theory is excessively complicated, the gun should blow it out of our heads."

"Um... I'm not sure about this..." you say.

"You having second thoughts about your theory?" Black asks. "Well, let's see how mine holds up." Before you can react, he points the gun to his temple, pulls the trigger, and... *click* Nothing. "Guess mine isn't so bad. Your turn?"

"Um, maybe I'll just try waking up now..."

What Dreams May Come

2007-04-07T16:11:00.007-04:00

"So, you agree this is probably a dream or hallucination of some sort," Black says. "Well, there's a simple way to get out of it then."

"What?" you ask.

"Try to wake up. I'll do it too, in case it's my dream. You ready?"

Try to wake up.

Wait... if this is a dream, then you can do whatever you want, right?

Into the Night

2007-04-07T16:11:00.005-04:00

You seriously think you can ever convince someone like this they're wrong, much less do it before reality is rended apart? As Jonathan Swift observed, "You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place." You've got no chance.

And yet you try. On and on your argument goes. Objectively, you're winning, but that doesn't really matter. Time goes on with no end to the argument. Before reality itself splits, you find yourself wishing there were some magical "Back" button you could press to go back in time and not start this argument...

Seriously, press the "Back" button on your browser.

What are you waiting for?

Fine, fine. You want to see what absolute chaos looks like? Here ya go.

Behe-ind the Madness

2007-04-07T16:11:00.003-04:00

You're transported back to the auditorium where this all started. Nate Black is there, doing something on Infophile's computer. Noticing you, he says, "Ah, you're back. Find out anything that might help us?"

"Yes," you say. "I think I've figured out who's behind this all, though I don't know if we can do anything about it."

"Really? I've been doing some tests, and I have a theory on it myself. What did you come up with?"

"From what I've found out," you say, "it seems that Michael Behe and the Discovery Institue are behind this. They've loosed the boundaries of reality tonight to advance their goals of getting creationism accepted."

"Hmm, interesting. And how did they do it?"

"I can't say," you reply.

"Yes, that is a tough point. All of history up to tonight is perfectly consistent with our scientific understanding of reality. And then it diverges completely. Odd, to say the least. With everything we know, this absolutely should not be happening, Discovery Institute or not."

"You said you had a theory, though. What is it?" you ask.

Black replies, "Quite simply, that this isn't happening. To be honest, the hypothesis that I'm hallucinating or having a very lucid dream seems a lot more likely than that reality has come unhinged."

"Well, I know I'm conscious here, so I can't just be part of your hallucination, can I?"

"I could say the same to you. Maybe you're just part of my dream saying you're conscious. It's impossible to make that distinction to be honest. Either way, what do you think? You still think this is actually a plot by the Discovery Institute?"

"Yes, it's probably them."

"It might be a dream..."

Does Tom Cruise?

2007-04-07T16:11:00.001-04:00

You're transported back to the auditorium where this all started. Nate Black is there, doing something on Infophile's computer. Noticing you, he says, "Ah, you're back. Find out anything that might help us?"

"Yes," you say. "I think I've figured out who's behind this all, though I don't know if we can do anything about it."

"Really? I've been doing some tests, and I have a theory on it myself. What did you come up with?"

"From what I've found out," you say, "it seems that Tom Cruise and the Church of Scientology is behind this. They've loosed the boundaries of reality tonight to advance their goals of recruiting people into the church."

"Hmm, interesting. And how did they do it?"

"I can't say," you reply.

"Yes, that is a tough point. All of history up to tonight is perfectly consistent with our scientific understanding of reality. And then it diverges completely. Odd, to say the least. With everything we know, this absolutely should not be happening, Church of Scientology or not."

"You said you had a theory, though. What is it?" you ask.

Black replies, "Quite simply, that this isn't happening. To be honest, the hypothesis that I'm hallucinating or having a very lucid dream seems a lot more likely than that reality has come unhinged."

"Well, I know I'm conscious here, so I can't just be part of your hallucination, can I?"

"I could say the same to you. Maybe you're just part of my dream saying you're conscious. It's impossible to make that distinction to be honest. Either way, what do you think? You still think this is actually a plot by the Church of Scientology?"

"Yes, it's probably them."

"It might be a dream..."

If a test occurs in the woods and no one's around...

2007-04-07T16:10:00.004-04:00

"Oh yeah, name one!" the student challenges you.

"How about the various tests of astrology?" you counter. "Astrology working goes against almost everything we know about physics, but it's been tested all the time, and it's found wanting every time. You could say the same thing for homeopathy."

"Bah, those tests were heavily flawed."

"I haven't even told you of any speciic tests and you're already assuming they're flawed? Just because they don't agree with what you think, eh? I could give you paper after paper, and you'd be hard pressed to manufacture flaws for all of them. At least for scientific claims we actually have papers; it seems all too often that we get obscure references to some poor evidence for some claim."

"If you'll excuse me," the professor says. "We actually have a guest speaker today (against all my recommendations), and I don't think security can hold him back any longer."

"Very well," you say, and take a seat.

The professor walks off stage and is promptly (and quite surprisingly) replaced by celebrity nutjob, Tom Cruise. After introducing himself, he starts off is speach, "How many of you have ever had a question that no one could answer?" Everyone in the class raises their hand.

"What if you were guaranteed that whatever you asked, you'd get an answer. What would be the best question you could ask? Well, tonight, I'm giving you the opportunity. Through the revelations of Scientology, I'm able to answer absolutely any question you might pose. So, shoot away."

Taking your chance, you shoot up your hand. Your enthusiasm is noted by Cruise, and he calls on you first. You ask, "I've noticed a lot of very strange events going on today, and I'm sure others have as well. What's causing all of this?"

"Ah, I'm glad you asked," he replies. "Tonight is a project organized by the Church of Scientology in order to prove to people our validity. In order to do that, we've loosened the boundaries of reality, so a few extra things may slip in, but rest assured, we'll take charge of it all soon enough. Next question..."

Well, no reason doing anything else, you have your answer. Time to go back and report what's going on.