- Posts tagged Pseudoscience
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The Blog Turns Two!
Nobody has suggested that March 26th become a national holiday as a result, but it is the birthday of this blog. The following is a brief history of how this site came to be, and what's happened since; along with a few thoughts on where it's going. I apologize if it all seems a little masturbatory, but I wanted to mark the event with at least a smidgen of reflection. You'll notice a number of links throughout, most of which point to articles I've written in the past. Sort of like a sit-com clip show, get it?
On finding your voice
So I've been at this blogging business for a couple of years now, and while I can't be sure what sensation the experience has left in your mouths, at least personally, I think I've acquired a taste for it.
This blog began on March 26th, 2010 with a completely innocuous post, (image below) and no particular agenda in mind. At the time Posterous was a brand-new service, designed more for sharing pictures and video rather than blogging, so I thought I'd give it a test run. There was no custom URL, no title, and no theme. Yet hiding somewhere were the seeds of what the site would eventually become.
Why study science? Ask someone from the 50s.
Recently I've been pouring through old news footage for a project I'm working on, mostly from the first half of the 20th century. A good deal of that footage was found in the awesome collection of materials at The Internet Archive. The footage I needed was kind of specific, so discovering the site's Prelinger subcategory was a God send.*
In my search I came across the following clip from 1955. It's an educational film designed to promote science and science education, and gee-golly if it isn't quaint. I mean, teenage kids begging their parents to extend a family camping trip? Lines like "women need to know as much about science as some men do, to help them keep house"?
Obviously we're dealing with sentiments from another time, long past.
Cell Phones Cause Cancer, and Facts Cause Boredom
On an internet full of half-truths, how important are facts?
And if you have the facts, does anyone care?
Recently, my good friends over at the comic/blog Sci-ence brought their considerable powers to bear on the issue of whether or not cell phones cause cancer. After reports suggesting the existence of such a link surfaced a week back, skeptical writer/artist Maki Naro (half of Sci-ence's Maki and Nadir fame - or as I like to call them, the Doubting Dynamic Duo*) put together a two part series on the topic. The first article, entitled Risk/Benefit Deficiency, examined the correct way to interpret medical reports. It was designed to help readers better understand why the idea of risk should be informed by statistics. The second installment was called This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, and it took a look at the actual physics at play with cell phone radiation and the human body.
Top Secret Agents
Who's Really in Control of Your Destiny?
Allow me to paint a picture for you, one that will illustrate why it feels like you're being watched. I know I spend a lot of time debunking things on this website, but in this one case your paranoia is justified. There are indeed agents watching you every day, so many that sometimes you see them when they're not even there. They're in the woods and around the corner, and they're coming for you.
Anyway, back to the story. Here goes:
A Primer on Skepticism
After a year of blogging it's time to reflect on the value of this rag, what it's accomplished, who it's speaking to, and what it has to say.
The answer? Beats me.
Well, I guess that's not true. I suppose one has only to look at the most commonly used tags column on the page to get an idea; science, animation, skepticism, art, and design round out the top 5. I suppose that means that the blog is about those things, but as I've tried to come clean about before, there's something nefarious at work concerning the subject matter. As a core mission, this blog aims to take mankind's unique ability to recognize and experience beauty, and to use it as the context within which to make a key point; that a naturalistic, or skeptical, view of the world is not a vacant one.
The Plausibility of Santa Claus and Scorpios
If You Believe in Astrology, You're Behaving Like a Child.
Christmas has come and gone, and with it another orgy of shredded wrapping paper and gravy-fueled gluttony. I count myself as a big fan of winter's big show, and did my part to outfit my kids with an embarrassing smorgasbord of plastic playthings. From AT-ATs to goalie pads, those boys made out like bandits.
Of course, my wife and I didn't take most of the credit for the presents — those kudos went to a fictional break-and-enter specialist from the north pole, aka Mr. Kristopher Kringle. As in millions of other homes around the globe, we helped sell the myth to our boys by leaving cookies as an offering to Santa. Once they were in bed, all that was needed was for Ma in her kerchief, and I in my cap, to settle right in for a short winter's snack. (Tip: don't eat the whole cookie - you have to leave a piece with a bite mark clearly visible)
Unhealthy Vibrations
Why Hippy Health-Care isn't Cute
After I released 'A Love Song for Love Songs' last week, I wondered what to do next. It certainly was my most popular post to date, and the attention, while not overwhelming, did garner some traffic and hopefully a few new readers to this paltry web log. So a natural question followed. Where to take these new readers next?
Should I continue in the vein that led them to the blog in the first place? Obviously ALSFLS was written from a fairly positive viewpoint, and I hope that people found it somewhat uplifting, if not entertaining. It was designed to be inclusive of everyone, and I took great care to make sure nobody would walk away from it feeling as if their world-view had been challenged. Yet as any regular reader would know, that's something I often do. Skepticism is not inherently confrontational, but by the skeptic's acceptance of only that for which there is compelling evidence, and therefore the rejection of pseudoscientific or faith-based claims, often people find skeptics to be just that.
Secret Recording at a Meeting of the Illuminati
Previously I thought things like ESP, ghosts, homeopathy, 911 conspiracies and the like were a bunch of hogwash. But the good skeptic must adjust his opinion when new evidence presents itself, and it looks like that's what we have here. This recording was done in secret by Brian Dunning, a podcaster and educator best known from his critical thinking series entitled 'Skeptoid'. It seems to prove that the conspiracy theorists and medical quacks had it right all along. At this super-secret meeting of the Illuminati, Dunning shows that a new world order is being planned, and that nefarious forces are conspiring to hold back humanity. Truly shocking stuff.
It's my hope that Mr. Dunning doesn't mind me reposting his recording on my site, but I couldn't find another way to have the content playable on Posterous without doing it the way I did.
Just to be thorough, his website is found at skeptoid.com and is a great resource to help interpret this age of pseudoscience in which we live.
Well, I thought I could call it Pseusoscience... this secret tape proves me wrong. Time to buy some herbal supplements and wait for 2012 to come take me.
Anyway, here's the recording. Have a listen.
Bottoms Up!
The world can big pile of confusing sometimes.
It's such a complicated place, and there's so much we don't know about it. As a species we have a passion to learn what we can, but the things that we don't know vastly outnumber the things that we do. A bit of high-school biology is enough to floor the average person by virtue of the complexity it exposes. There's so many many ins, so many outs; it seems as if a complete understanding of the Universe would require an infinite amount of knowledge.
Often I hear people become so bewildered by this problem that they leap from the 'how' questions directly to the 'why' questions. It's a natural coping mechanism. Since the nuts and bolts of how complex systems work is generally so far beyond us, we turn instead to wondering why they matter. Science is said to have none of these answers, being a slave to data and devoid of any proclamations of meaning. Just ask Oprah Winfrey. She helps the confused populace interpret the world by offering every form of pseudoscientific and nonsensical explanation possible.
Here be Reality
This is a film about critical thinking made by Brian Dunning, and although I haven't fully finished watching it yet, if I know Dunning, the entirety will be as on-point as what I've seen so far. Yeah, it's pretty amateurishly made, and isn't what I'd call a date movie. It speaks to a very limited audience, an audience I'd call 'skeptically leaning'; someone who tends to sense that there's a lot of bullshit out there in the world, and not in the conspiracy theory sort of way. Someone who wonders, to quote Will Ferell's character 'Mugatu' from the movie 'Zoolander', if "everyone's on crazy pills".
Dunning has a short, weekly podcast called Skeptoid, and I'm smack dab in the middle of devouring the whole series. Unlike some other podcasts focusing on the same issues, many of which I love, Dunning's brilliantly written episodes manage to argue their points in about 10 minutes, on average. He has a gift for slicing up complex issues into easily understood terms, and doing so within a very efficient word-count.
The movie is intended as a primer for skepticism and critical thinking, ideas that Dunning, and this bumbling blogger, hold very dear.
So I post this for anyone with lots of curiosity, a fair measure of patience, forgivingness of low production value, and a general dislike for bullshit.
