skeptical skepticism
gregladen | December 19, 2012Last night Julia sent me a link to a video of a Golden Eagle swooping down into a Montreal park, picking up an infant/toddler and lifting it several feet into the air before dropping it and flying off. Since then many on the Intertubes have declared the video to be a fake while others insist it could be real, but unfortunately many of the reasons given for it being a fake or for being real are misconceptions or inaccuracies. I'm sure the event depicted in the video is faked ... no eagle picked up a child as depicted ... but the reasons for it being a fake are not as many have suggested. …
gregladen | September 30, 2012Do ghosts really exist?
Is there life on Mars?
Despite what one might think, what with large class sizes and the homogenization of culture caused by TV and Fast Food, the fact remains that clumps of high school students organized into classes can vary widely from one another. Each year has its own characteristics, and each classroom-sized bunch of them, taking a particular course together, can be very different from the next. A teacher I know has ended up this year with a science class with a large proportion of students who believe that ghosts are real, and while they are at it, they also…
gregladen | September 29, 2012The Secular Coalition of America is a lobbying group that represents several groups, including American Atheists, the American Humanist Association, Camp Quest, the Secular Student Alliance and so on. A few months ago the SCA made news, in a bad way, by appointing a former Bush White House Staffer, Edwina Rogers, as Executive Director. Many of us did not like that and we complained, and we were essentially told a) the decision is final and b) don't worry, everything will be OK.
But it is not. Much more recently, the SCA appointed as a co-director for one of its state groups a guy who has…
gregladen | June 10, 2012Skeptics fight an up hill battle. This battle consists of deploying critical thinking across a range of cultural landscapes, implementing scientific thinking to solve problems, and the thoughtful evaluation of knowledge, while 90 percent of the world is out to stop you, or at least make it hard. Or so it seems. To be honest, I can't back up that 90 percent figure with any hard facts. Sorry.
But the Skeptic faces more than just uncritical thinking, incorrect facts, or poor scientific judgment. The Skeptic must also wrestle with ... The Anti Skeptic.
Of which there are several kinds.…
gregladen | May 28, 2012First, I want to say that tomatoes are a fruit. Here is a scientific definition of fruit:
Fruit noun, plural: fruits
(1) (botany) The seed-bearing structure in angiosperms formed from the ovary after flowering.
source
See? Tomato is a fruit.
Having said that, in common English parlance we do not call a tomato a fruit. We put the tomatoes in with the vegetables. Is this because we are unknowledgeable? No. It is because we are wise. Anyone who reads Fortune Cookies knows this:
Knowledge is knowing that a Tomato is a Fruit. Wisdom is not putting a Tomato in the Fruit Salad.
There are two…
gregladen | April 30, 2012I don't know if this phrase ...
... originally from Adam Savage or if he's quoting someone. I think it might be his.
Today, I was in an internet argument with someone (can you believe how many people on the internet are WRONG???) and I used a phrase like that. Then I instantly lost the argument. Here's how it went:
We were arguing about whether or not JFK was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald shooting from the sixth floor of the Book Repository. This guy was claiming that the evidence was pretty clear that something else was going on, and I was challenging him with facts.
He told me that my…
gregladen | April 25, 2012Skepticism is a cultural phenomenon. I know that many self-declared skeptics prefer to ... ah ... believe otherwise, or as they would perhaps say, they have deduced from pure principles using sound logic that Skepticism is rational behavior and there is nothing cultural about it. But they are wrong, and that is trivially easy to prove.
Sarah Moglia is the event specialist for the Secular Student Alliance1 and has written an interesting piece on "Why [she doesn't call her]self a Skeptic" in which she asserts that there are people who call themselves "Skeptic" who are not, at least…
gregladen | January 7, 2012For a full year, A.J. Jacobs followed every piece of health advice he could -- from applying sunscreen by the shot glass to wearing a bicycle helmet while shopping. Onstage at TEDMED, he shares the surprising things he learned.
I always thought it would be interesting to assemble ALL of the warnings and instructions that come with the stuff you get (water heater, iPod, car, children's toys, etc.) and implement all of the instructions, as per the instructions. A.J. should do that next.
gregladen | December 11, 2011Skeptics love to hate CAM. And often, with good reason. Alternative medicines or medical treatments, as is often pointed out, become "mainstream" when the available science suggests that they work, so it is almost axiomatic that "alternative" means "unproven" and it is probably almost always true that the kinds of things that end up as "alternatives" come from sources with poor track records. For instance, one of the most common forms of alternative medicine used over the last several decades is Extra X where X is some substance we know the body uses, and that we know a deficiency of is…
gregladen | December 8, 2011TV show Mythbusters has apologized after an experiment it conducted to measure the speed of a cannonball went wrong, leaving a trail of destruction across a California suburb. Instead of hitting its intended target, the cannon misfired, sending a six-inch ball of lead careening through one house, damaging another before ending up lodged in a minivan. No one was injured.
OMG. I so wish it was my house hit by the Mythbusters Cannon Ball!!!!!
Anyway here's one of those zany animations of the event:
OMG!!!!
gregladen | July 23, 2011Just an idea ... not entirely work safe ... below the fold.
Imagine that Rebecca Watson, Stef McGraw, Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Barbara Drescher, Stephanie Zvan, All the Skepchicks, Me, all the other bloggers, and most of the commmenters on our blogs discussing Rebeccapocalypse all worked for the same big-giant company and this entire discussion happened at work. Imagine what the HR (Human Resources) department would be required to do, would want to do, would want to avoid. Imagine how they would handle the current discussion, and what they might do to avoid future difficulties like this…
gregladen | July 4, 2011Recently, Richard Dawkins said (full quote below) that a woman should not be concerned about her own safety if she finds herself in an elevator (under some sort of threat, presumably), because it is trivially easy to get out of an elevator if you are under attack. I'm sure Richard is a very smart guy and maybe he's right, but there is evidence to the contrary that women can just leave the scene if they are uninterested in being raped or groped.
For example:
Police are looking for a man they say sexually assaulted a woman in Manhattan about two weeks ago.
A surveillance photo of the…
gregladen | July 3, 2011And thus, structurally, Richard Dawkins, or his distant cousin Richard D. Poe (I am still not sure) has shut down the argument that the Elevator Guy acted inappropriately when he asked Rebecca Watson over for a cuppa joe at four O'clock in the AM, in an elevator, while she was on her way to bed.
Imma let you read all about it by following the threads upstream, but in the meantime I want to point out the fallacy at work here. It's called the Watch the Monkey strategy, and I've written about it before. I even drew a cute little picture of a monkey to illustrate the point. This comes from a…
gregladen | July 2, 2011Good morning.
I'm afraid to go to the SkepchiCON party tonight because I might get into a conversation with someone and since it will be loud, and we will have to shout to be heard, we will be shouting at each other.
At the "evolution from the experts" panel, I want to spend more time talking about what Evolution Is rather than what happened in the news over the last year, but I'm afraid that will bore the audience.
Despite my deep commitment to the study of evolution and defense of evolution-related teaching in schools, I'm starting to realize that global climate change is more…
gregladen | March 15, 2011I honestly think that it is too early to have this conversation, but alas, the conversation has been forced.
I have yet to express my opinion about the efficacy or safety of the future use of nuclear power, or any way in which that opinion may be affected by the current tragic events in Japan. I did report (link to, really) with little comment on the current failings of the Fukushima nuclear plants (very much underway at this time), and when commenters took the opportunity to explain how nuclear power is totally safe and that this was demonstrated by how nicely things are working out at…
gregladen | March 8, 2011Jen McCreight writes the blog Blag Hag and became famous last year for attempting unsuccessfully to prove that if a large number of women wore low cut shirts there would be a major earthquake. (It turns out that there was a 7-point-something earthquake on "Boob Quake" day, which requires that the experiment be repeated.)
(It is interesting to note that most people seem to have not noticed that earthquake for some reason. And they call themselves Skeptics!)
Anyway, Jen will be a guest on Atheist Talk Radio this coming Sunday, March 13th.
I predict that if an atheist talks about how god does…
gregladen | January 22, 2011... or does it???
One day I was eating some chicken, outdoors, somewhere in Africa, with a colleague I had been living with for a few months and two brand new visitors, Dick and Jane1 from the US. After cleaning most, but not all, of the meat off a leg bone, I tossed it to Hozi the Cat, who eagerly grabbed it and took it behind my chair to munch it down.
Jane, lunging at the cat, "No, no. No!!!! She'll die, she'll choke to death!"
The cat moved behind a different chair, with half the bone, the other half already having been munched down.
"Oh, don't worry, I feed her all the chicken bones…
gregladen | January 14, 2011Sometimes, that is what I think news reporters do. There are occasions when you know the story and have the opportunity to watch them spew out incorrect information. Sometimes you do not know the story but you can watch them getting it wrong and see that happening while they appear to remain oblivious to their own clumsy ineptitude.
Several years ago Minnesotans watched in horror as the bodies of a dozen kids where pulled out of a cave where they had suffocated, a cave in a Mississippi River bluff in Saint Paul. Or was it six kids? Or was it a mine and not a cave? Or was it eight kids?…