skeptical skepticism
gregladen | December 12, 2010Of course, it would burn up in the process, but whatever. The following is one of those size and scale videos mainly showing the relative size of our planets and selected stars, then making quick reference to other larger scale structures. It is a good video (hat tip: Joe) but it does have a major flaw: It demonstrates that the earth is small, then it demonstrates that there are many other big structures in the galaxy, then it concludes that we are not the center of the universe. But being small does not make us NOT the center of the universe.
They've mixed up their fallacies here.…
gregladen | November 26, 2010I was just glancing through the blog of Katheryn Schulz, author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, a book about people who were wrong about stuff, often big stuff (for example, she talks about individuals who spent decades in jail owing to false convictions). Meantime, I'm working on posts related to the falsehoods and "Everything you know is wrong" series. And, as I do this, I'm thinking about a way in which people get things wrong that is often overlooked or, perhaps, not recognized as a specific category of irrational thinking.
This has to do with the idea of a fetish.…
gregladen | October 19, 2010I like Wikipedia, I really do. But there are also some serious, very serious problems with it. I just read the entries on the Battle of Rorke's Drift, a few related historical entries, and the entry on the movie Zulu, which is about the Battle of Rorke's drift.
My interest here is in looking at how things African are depicted in movies and other aspects of popular culture, especially historical events and "traditional" cultures. (I am not an expert on modern African studies.)
I will write about that at another time: Suffice it to say that at this point it is obvious that the overall…
gregladen | October 13, 2010I was under the impression that "Reason" magazine was a libertarian neocon climate denialist rag. I could be wrong, but that's what I thought. I was also under the impression that JREF was pro-science and at this point had gotten beyond the whole "let's remain skeptical about global warming" thaing, especially since Randi stepped in it a while back and accidentally forgot that only paid-off or delusional scientists denied AGW. But now we find the JREF site pushing Reason magaazine in a post on their site.
Someone please help me understand what I'm seeing here.
gregladen | October 12, 2010This Friday's Skeptically Speaking will feature ...
... academic psychologist Dr. Cordelia Fine. Her new book, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, challenges the assumption that gender roles are wired into our brains, and shows us how ubiquitous cultural stereotypes are mistaken for actual fact.
That will be a life discussion with Desiree Schell.
Also, this Friday's edition of Skeptically Speaking will have the latest "Everything You Know is Sort of Wrong" in which Greg Laden (whoever the heck that is) asks if modern hobbies are an evolutionary…
gregladen | September 30, 2010Read this blog post ONLY IF YOU DARE!!!!
I was just reading the latest edition of "Ripley's Believe It or Not! Enter If You Dare!" which was sent to me by the Ripley people to have a look at. Let me tell you right away that if you are a skeptic, you have to get a hold of this book and try to debunk every item in it. Well, not ever item, but many. Some of the strange things the book includes are not really all that strange, but are merely interesting, like certain geological formations and other phenomena. Others are simply physical abnormalities of humans or various non-human animals or…
gregladen | August 24, 2010Is PZ Myers over the top? Is Phil Plait too nice? Is Chris Mooney right about framing? If I meet a Creationist, should I throw a fossil over his head?
A while back, I did a radio show with a skeptic who happened to be a musician. One of the main topics was whether or not being mean to people who did not agree with you was OK. I was on the side that it was often OK, certainly not the only way to do it, but that the entire conversation about being mean vs. nice had become too uni-dimensional and counter productive, that there were times and places for being stern and firm, and times and…
gregladen | August 13, 2010After I reported this recent and interesting research paper about urinary tract inflictions, a number of conversations broke out on that post, on my facebook page, and via email, and some of these conversations raised the question of cranberry juice and whether the idea that it prevents, reduces, or shortens the duration of UTIs is real or woo.
Added: After further discussion elsewhere, I would like to clarify what is being asked here: Imagine you are a person who drinks apple juice and cranberry juice as your main hydrating substance. Also, you are are a person who is concerned with…
gregladen | July 27, 2010I've significantly expanded the search domain (or is that range?) of the Evolution ... not just a theory anymore Skeptical Search Engine. Click here to give it a try. Look up stuff like "ghost" and "vaccine" and "fluoride" and see what you get. Let me know if you think I'm missing any important sites.
gregladen | July 25, 2010Did you know that it is a fallacy that poor people have more babies than other people? I'll be discussing this topic next Friday at 6PM Mountain Time on Skeptically Speaking Talk Radio, with Desiree Schell, in the next installment of "Everything You Know is Sort of Wrong" (This is part of the Falsehoods discussion.)
Speaking of fear, Barry Glassner, author of The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things, will be the main (and live) guest on Friday's show. I'm looking forward to that.
Also, last friday's show on The Science of Sleep with Kimberly Cote is now up in…
gregladen | June 30, 2010And by faithing it, I mean using faith rather than critical analysis of the available information to make important decisions about what to regard as valid.
Let's do a couple of informal experiments to explore this issue more closely. For the present discussion, I'm assuming that you are a non-scientist and non-medical person who self identifies as a skeptic.
Do you know the following terms, without looking them up (which you can do, in part, by clicking on them)? In some cases you may be able to guess meanings, in some cases you may have a vague idea from prior reading. But that's not…
gregladen | June 26, 2010In which I provide my two cents regarding the current discussion between PZ Myers, Pamela Gay, and others.
The relevant posts and threads:
Should skeptic organizations be atheist organizations? by PZ Myers.
Why are we lying to Pamela Gay? by Seth Manapio
Separation between Scientific Truth & Belief by Pamela Gay.
I'm going to assume that you've read these, or are at least familiar with the main points of the argument.
I know Pamela Gay well enough to know that she is a smart person, a nice person, a well meaning person, an important member of the science education community, an…
gregladen | May 28, 2010Today is the big day!
And not merely because it is TGIF* day.
The theme "everything you know is sort of wrong" is familiar to readers on this blog. It is an underlying theme for much of what happens here. Every now and then that theme is manifest overtly, as in the Falsehoods posts, which are, as we speak, being revised, expanded, and reissued.
Well, starting this evening and running for an indeterminate amount of time (but probably a few weeks or so) "Everything you know is sort of wrong" is not just a phrase to keep in your head all the time as you are walking around doing stuff. It's…
gregladen | May 17, 2010This may not seem like a very important question to you. And you'd be right.
This question came up, and I assumed yes. Cells do, generally. Cells absorb O2 and produce C02 ... even plant cells do this ... through passive systems. But I wondered if the fact that the epidermis is adapted to be a barrier might mean that it would not. But then I realized that the epidermis absorbs water. O2 and H2O both diffuse freely across cell membranes. So of course some of the cellular respiration in mammals is surface diffusion. It must be. (Warning: I don't know this to be a fact. If you do, state…
gregladen | May 3, 2010"Dick Shake"
I want to start out by restating (or stating more plainly) that the Tokenskeptic podcast should be on your listening list, and that it influenced my own thinking about Boob Quake.
Previously, I had been mainly interacting with people with a positive or neutral view of the Boob Quake, and in observing their relationship to the broader community of skeptics, feminists and atheists, noted that they were getting increasingly crapped upon for their involvement in it by subsets of those communities. The cleavage between pro and anti Boob Quake grew as quakes often do, along pre-…
gregladen | May 2, 2010This is a somewhat stream of consciousness response to an interview of Michael McRae by Tokenskeptic followed by an interview with Desiree Schell of Skeptically Speaking.
Please go listen to the podcast, it is quite good.
How much change has happened in the way the world views crazy religious beliefs because of boobquake? How much change in the way we cause change has happened because of the critique of boobquake? I'd say a little of each, but not much of either.
I think that the critique of boobquake is somewhat disproportionate to the event. Boobquake was clearly never meant to be that…
gregladen | April 24, 2010Notice that I didn't say that the medium IS the message. Just that some of the message is in there. In the medium.
I am forever amazed at how easily compelled my fellow skeptics, and/or my fellow atheists, and/or my fellow feminists, and/or my fellow anti-racists are to tell each other that they are doing it wrong. It was once said (by a straight white male Christian, probably), that "If half the people who make speeches would make concrete floors, they would be doing more good."
Well, in an effort to promote sanity in this discussion, I'd like to point you to yet another voice in…
gregladen | April 21, 2010The venue, Minneapolis, is well chosen as it is very hard to get an earthquake going on this nice stable bit of crust.
I know it is a bit early, but I'll remind you of this now and then ... as you are making your plans for the summer, consider attending the Skepchicon track at the Convergence thingie in Minneapolis this July.
There will be many other things going on a Convergence. It's one of those fantasy/sci fi conventions where you wear the Star Wars suit. Well, you don't have to wear the suit if you don't want to. And the Skepchicks have a series of things going on:
Join us for a…
gregladen | December 16, 2009Yesterday, James Randi put up a blog post in which he questioned the validity of anthropogenic global warming. He has subsequently made the statement that he probably has more thinking to do about global warming, and he admits that he really knows nothing about it. So Randi's blog post is, essentially, a non-starter as an issue, although there are some interesting things to think about.
James Hrynyshyn has an excellent blog post about this, in which he reports a conversation he had with Randi about Randi's post.
Randi's original post displays a rather embarrassing ignorance of earth…