The Polite Skeptic

Wooly mammoth spotted in... video

2012-02-09T09:10:00.000-08:00

I just ran into an article in The Sun about a land surveyor who spotted a woolly mammoth while on the job. Not only that, he took a video of it. Let's take a look at that.

Some people are saying it's a bear with a fish in its mouth. Since the resolution of most eyes is better than that of this video, that would mean that our vidographer is a liar, which is a possibility. I don't think it's a bear at all. In the zoomed-in (cropped and enlarged) you can see the suggestion of tusks. Not only that, if you look at the non-trunk part as a bear... well it doesn't look like a bear. It doesn't move like a bear.

My first thought was, "Why is it dragging its trunk in the water?" Elephants breathe through their trunks, I thought, so it should be holding it up. It turned out I was wrong.

Still, though, I don't believe that the first video is an actual mammoth. Is it because I'm a Polite Skeptic? Maybe. Is it because I don't think sightings of mammoths in Siberia are genuine? Well, they've only been dead 10,000 years, and stranger things have happened. There are two things, though, make me disbelieve the mammoth video.

1. Seems fake. This doesn't hold much weight in court, but it just seems fake. Its movements remind me more of bad animation than a breathing flesh-and-bone animal.

2. The vidographer's disinterest. It's the attitude of, "Whoa! Is that a mammoth! I will take a ten second video of it from a distance." I've taken longer videos of my kids blowing out their birthday candles. And he knows his camera isn't high quality, but he decided to record from the other side of the country.

All this, to me, seems like someone grabbed some nice footage of a creek, threw in a cgi mammoth, and then hit blur a few times.

If I wanted to fake a mammoth from a distance, I would throw together a costume not so different than Snuffy from Sesame Street. I'd get one guy for the back legs, and one for the front legs and head. Then, even from a distance, it could look pretty convincing, and have very natural movement that did, after all, come from an animal (the guy in front).

If it is a fake, it's a somewhat good one, and I'm sure this guy got his Reddit.com upvotes he was looking for.

My thoughts on irreducible complexity -or- What good is half an eye?

2011-09-23T20:57:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I go to church with my dad. Not because I love church, but because I love my dad, and we don't have a lot of things in common. He's very religious, and it means a lot for him to have me there. I'm fine with it.

A few nights ago, he invited me to a seminar that the people of his church were attending. I had joined him for something like that last year, and my night was free, so I accepted.

On the way in, I was required to get a barcode card that I would use to check in. I would later learn that if you attend for so many nights, you'd get a free family Bible. The signup for the card asked my address and other contact information, which I gave slightly altered versions of, pretty sure that the host would ever need to contact me at my home. We got seated, and I watched a woman play organ music on a keyboard, wondering about the business plan of the speaker, and if he would end up selling the contact info he was gathering. I realized how much more cynical I had become over the years.

Before the speaker came out, an image of Charles Darwin popped up on the twin projector screens, and I tensed. I could listen to a man preach about sin, or hell, or the ways to please God, but evolution is a subject that I'm fascinated by. It excites me to think about it. I did not want to hear a man talk about how evolution was wrong for an hour.

The presentation began with a marginally funny anti-Darwin song (You won't make a monkey out of me!), along with an Adobe Flash style music video that got laughs from the audience.

A lot of what he said, I had expected. A certain amount of misunderstanding about the subject. Painting a picture of a world full of scientists that all, behind closed doors, doubt evolution. An enormous emphasis on the word "theory," playing on the audience's misunderstanding of the word. His main argument focused on the idea of "irreducibly complex systems." Simply, the idea that some systems in the body are so complex that a single step back (in evolution) would make them not function, and they would have been weeded out by survival of the fittest. He gave the metaphor of a mouse trap, which can only work with every part intact. He gave a lot of weight to the credentials of the scientists that champion the view that, for things to exist the way they are, they must have been created spontaneously.

One example of irreducible complexity he used, that I have heard of before, is the eye. What good is half of an eye? It wouldn't function if any part of it were missing, so what part wasn't there before?

I think the first mistake in questioning evolution in this way is the idea that things evolve piece by piece. Legs, then nipples, then chin hair, then toenails. The creationist mindset might aid this kind of misconception. When we create things, after all, we do it piece by piece. In reality, the gradual changes an organism goes through, over many generations, are more similar to a fetus developing in the womb than a man being put together with legos. Many things change at once, usually by tiny increments.

I guess my main problem with the idea of irreducible complexity is that someone has to have the authority to decide that there could have definitely been no previous step. Some guy, or some lady, has to be able to make an infallible judgement of what nature can't do. But nobody in this room (this room called the Internet) is nearly creative enough to have come up with one of these remarkably complex systems. Humans are shitty at reproducing biological systems, even when we have real ones to copy. I'm always hearing about how many more connections a brain has than a computer, or how much more sensitive a dolphin's sonar is than manmade sonar, or how much better a biological blah is than an artificial blah, often by huge factors.

So how is the person who is only beginning to understand how a system works going to stand up and say, with certainty, that there is no way there could have been a previous step?

Why? Because you can't think of it, buddy?

One thing that he mentioned is the differentiation of sexes. How does a single organism evolve to have two different kinds that have to mix genes to reproduce? And my answer is: I don't know. It doesn't make any sense to me, either. Does that prove that God made us this way, maybe some six-thousand years ago? Well why would it?

The pastor of my dad's church approached me after the seminar, and gave me a surprise. He had only asked my dad to invite me to the talk after he had heard what the topic was going to be. I'd never discussed religion with him, but he correctly pinned me as a more analytical thinker, and had thought that I might want my evolution debunked. Hmm.

One thing he told me, as he (a really really nice guy) nervously/casually tried to back up the positions stated in the seminar, mostly by repeating them in rote, was that regardless of what I was taught in high school, I do have another option.

Well, I have lots of options. I could believe in evolution, or creationism. I could also believe old Greek stories about the origin of species, or Native American legends. I could go with Scientology. I'm sure there are hundreds of ready-made theories of how we came about that are just as valid as Jesus-dad and the Garden of Eden. So, if someone successfully disproved evolution through natural selection, it wouldn't narrow the possibilities down that much.

Christianity is a big deal now, but what about a thousand years ago? What about a thousand years from now? What about on the other side of the planet, right now as we speak? Science seeks universal truths, that are always true, everywhere. Religion, it seems to me, bends to fit the people in a certain region of the world, and a certain period of history. At least that's the way I see it.

It was a fun night.

I'm here for the free heroin

2011-09-09T13:36:00.000-07:00

I'm not one to make public apologies for my lapses, but I would like to take this time to not make an apology again.

I have not been posting much, to the point that you may wonder if I've died, converted to Mormonism, or maybe sold my computer. I have done few to none of these things. I've just been doing other things. Most notably, I've been absent-mindedly avoiding my blog.

Whether this is wise or not... well it's not. Whenever I have a period of time where I'm updating this blog regularly, my readership increases steadily, at a respectable pace. I blush a little to think that so many people regularly return to the site, to read what I write. Perhaps someday they would even begin clicking on ads. (don't tell Google I said that. I'm supposed to act like they're not there.)

I enjoy this, though. The medium-sized rectangular text field, with an orange button and two blue buttons beneath it, is comforting to me. For some time, I sat here and did a blog every morning, without fail. The moment I decided to do it twice a week, instead of seven times, though, my brain said, "Oh, zero times a week? Sounds good." I'm glad for that initial burst, though, because it left me a thick history of posts that new readers can peruse.

I'm just typing this to let my readers know that, no, I'm neither dead nor Mormon, and that, even though I have actually decided to quit this blog maybe three or four times, it never sticks. Just like heroin, it's hard to stay away for long. And unlike heroin, it's free!

Seat of the Soul, first two pages review

2011-07-18T21:39:00.000-07:00

Today's post is a cheap one. I'm going to point out an easy target, and pick it apart like it's an important thing to do. I guess you could call this post a book review, but I'm only reviewing the first two pages. Let's get on with it.

Gary Zukav is a popular new-age author. I became familiar with the name a couple of years ago, when a friend of mine reccommended to me the book Dancing Wu Li Masters. She said it was amazing. You may know, by the title of this blog, that a book called "Dancing Wu Li Masters" is not really my cup of tea, unless maybe, it was in the fiction section. But probably still no. I was at the used bookstore one day, a place I really appreciate, and I glanced through the five-foot-wide New Age section, and I saw Seat of the Soul. It was "The New, Innovative and Thought-Provoking work by the Author of Dancing Wu Li Masters." I gave it a try.

I'm going to admit something. I did not read this whole book. I actually got as far as the top of the second page, I think. How can I tell anything from a book after one and a half pages? "Not much," I would have told you before starting this book. Afterwards? "Enough."

I'm not a mystical guy, but I truly don't belive that my discarding of this book had much to do with me not being a mystical guy. If I read a skeptical book that said something very ridiculous, I would send it right back to the bookstore. Likewise, if I read a mystical-themed book where the author seemed to have a grasp on simple scientific ideas, I might read the whole thing.

Excerpt from page 1:A fish is more complex, and, therefore, more evolved than a sponge; a horse is more complex, and, therefore, more evolved than a snake; a monkey is more complex, and, therefore, more evolved than a horse.

My immediate thoughts: This was right out of the gate, the fifth line down on the first page. Mr. Zukav sets up evolution like a linear journey. To read this, you might expect that one main species has been evolving throughout the millenia, from a sponge, to a fish, to a snake, to a horse, to a monkey, leaving behind species, frozen in progress, every step of the way. Of course, this doesn't happen.

Is a monkey really more evolved than a horse? It's more intelligent, but it's a common mistake that, over time, species are developing to become more intelligent, and more human-like. What if you valued speed and size, instead? The horse would be more evolved. What if you valued poison, and the ability to eat no more than once a month? The snake is now our most evolved animal, leaving even humans in their dust. Humans have big brains, but we're largely feeble in every other way.

In reality, none of these creatures is more evolved than the others. Evolution doesn't just stop for a species, whether it's a sponge, or a snake, or a monkey. And if we're all descended from a common ancestor, then we've all had the same amount of time to evolve. Some of us evolved into sponges, some into snakes, some into people. Snakes aren't waiting for the cosmic force of evolution to turn it into a monkey. Being a snake works great for snakes. That's why they're snakes. And they're perfectly as complex as horses.

Page 2, near the top: This definition is an expression of the idea that the organism that is best able to control both its environment and all of the other organisms in its environment is the most evolved.

Wow. This paragraph following the other one was like a one-two punch. The kind of thing that can make me choke on my own spit. The kind of thing that can make me exclaim out loud in the library.

The more a species controls (not effects, controls) its environment, the more evolved it is. That makes things simple. Humans are most evolved. Beavers are second most evolved. Everything else comes in third.

In general, animals don't go out of their way to control their environment. Woodpeckers peck holes, which are surprisingly big inside, but I'd hardly call that trying to control their environment. Horses poop all over the place, which... is... pretty irrelevant.

Nonsense. A trend of nonsense.

I could go on, but I think I've made my point. This is how I can, must, for better or worse, discard a book after two pages.

I don't want to be a dick to Gary Zuckov. He's a successful author. But I can't honestly not call his explanation of evolution garbage (ooh! A double-negative). A garbage understanding of evolution is, of course, only to be expected in today's environment of garbage-science in films and television, and our population who go to work and go to sleep and make the kids dinner and do just fine without any deeper understanding of the world. But it should not make it into a non-fiction book, and, it should not make it through the editorial process, the fact checking process, and past all of the people that a book has to pass before it ends up in print.

If I read a paper, or a book, by, say, Dean Radin, I might not agree with his conclusions, I might take issue with his experimental setup, but at least I know that he's very intelligent, and he does know what he's talking about. When I pick up a book like Seat of the Soul, though, and I feel like the author is counting on me to be ignorant in order to make his point, I get sad that this is landing in front of thousands (millions?) of people, some of whom haven't given the subject of evolution enough thought to notice the incongruancies in the writing.

If you don't understand the science, don't write it as if you do. And if you do, don't make it fake in order to screw a few people out of a few dollars.

I should read the rest of that book sometime.

A little fun

2011-05-19T19:51:00.000-07:00

Pass this around, if you're so inclined.

My response to "Scientists cure cancer, but no one takes notice"

2011-05-19T12:01:00.000-07:00

I stole this

According to my friends on Facebook, we've cured cancer. Not only that, but nobody took notice. Except for everyone that's on Facebook.

I've barely read the article, and am naturally skeptical about it, but I want to give it a closer look. I figured I would write this blog post while I gave it this look.

(I open the link)

The first thing I notice is the nice HubPages banner across the top. This is not a step in the right direction. Hubpages is one of the many websites where anyone can write anything, and the layout of the site makes it look legit. Some of the articles are legit, of course. You can't forget, though, that I could get on right now, and write an article called, "Guinea Pigs Beat Humans to Mars!" and have it up within an hour. What the Hubpages banner tells me is that one man (cqull8m) is responsible for this article, and he's not backed up by editors, fact-checkers, or anyone else that makes you more confident about the information you read. Like me, I guess.

So far not good. I'll now read the article.

There are two links close to the top. The one that's supposed to link to a "little ripple in the news" takes me to "studentprintz.com." It takes me to the homepage, rather than an article. I typed "cancer" into the search bar, and it's currently trying to load my request.

I now realize that the original article that was linked to is now a 404. Let's keep moving.

"Canadian scientists tested this dichloroacetate (DCA) on human’s cells... It was tested on Rats...The drug is widely available and the technique is easy to use"

Two things come to mind. Firstly, this is like saying, "This has never been tested on humans," except it's worse than saying that. It's avoiding saying that. It's hiding information between the lines. I also wonder if people who take this drug for metabolic disorders (as noted in paragraph 2) are cancer-proof. Let's see if any of this is answered in the rest of the article.

"In human bodies there is a natural cancer fighting human cell, the mitochondria, but they need to be triggered to be effective."

Red alert! Red alert! He called the mitochondria a cell! That's like calling a kidney a human. The mitochondria is a part of the cell. I remember this stuff from middle-school science. I don't know much about mitochondria, but I know at least that much. I will tread carefully through the rest of this article.

"Scientists used to think that these mitochondria cells were damaged and thus ineffective against cancer."

Random image of cells

Scientists thought that mitochondria were damaged? All of them? What in the world is this supposed to mean?

"You can access the original research for this cancer here."

Thank goodness! I suddenly like this guy a lot more. I will do just as he suggests, and look at the original research. Let's finish this article first, though.

"This article wants to raise awareness for this study"

Mission accomplished. This article has overtaken my newsfeed like malignant cells.

"hope some independent companies and small startup will pick up this idea and produce these drugs"

I thought this was an existing drug that is already used for metabolic disorders.

So, most of my gripes in this article are with low-quality writing, and a misunderstanding of the facts. I can't hate on this author though. Like he said, I believe he's just trying to spread the news, and if someone isn't a good writer/researcher, and doesn't have the money to hire a freelance writer, at least he tried. And succeeded.

So let's get to the meat of this. The research. (I click the link)

I was hoping this would link to a horribly dry scientific paper. The kind of scientific paper that can make an anti-gravity device sound as exciting as a new type of foam-rubber. That's not quite what I found. This format is a little more like a blog post.

Condensed:

"DCA is an odourless, colourless, inexpensive, relatively non-toxic, small molecule... causes regression in several cancers... [used] to treat children with inborn errors of metabolism due to mitochondrial diseases... [mitochondria] have been connected with cancer since the 1930s... [DCA] as a way to "revive" cancer-affected mitochondria... mitochondrial function resulted in a significant decrease in tumor growth... [DCA] did not have any effects on normal, non-cancerous tissues... However, as DCA is not patented, Michelakis is concerned that it may be difficult to find funding from private investors to test DCA in clinical trials... launch clinical trials on humans in the spring of 2007 pending government approval."

This is very, very interesting. Basically, this existing drug revives the cells' mitochondria, and the mitochondria of the cancer cells kills them.

One of the main themes of the Hubpages article is that nobody took notice of this discovery. I'll test this by Googling "DCA" with "Cancer."

2007, ABC NEWS, "DCA: Cancer Breakthrough or Urban Legend"
2007, Toronto Star, "Molecule Holds Cancer Hope"
2007, CTV News, "Health Canada approves first human trials for DCA"
2007, Newsweek, "A New Way to Fight Cancer?"

I could keep going, but it's painfully boring. Let's just say that the media did take notice. More research needs to be done, but it seems to be in the same pipeline that any drug goes through on the way to becoming something that the pharmacists push at us.

Whether DCA is a wonder drug, I don't know. Let's give it some time, and let results come in. I think a more important question is, since it is an existing pharmaceutical, should cancer patients buy the stuff online and self-treat? There are anecdotes online from people who claim to have done just this.

The easy answer is no. Taking drugs without your doctor's approval is like playing Russian Roulette. Hell, taking drugs with your doctor's approval can be like Russian Roulette. DCA does have side-effects, which sometimes include nerve-damage. Self-prescribing and self-treating illnesses is a reckless move, and one that many people have regretted over the years.

But let's cut the bullshit.

It's fine to be afraid of nerve damage if you've got a sty, or acid reflux disease. That's when you need to sweat over the side-effects. When you have a tumor in your brain, though, or in your lungs, and it's growing like a snowball rolling down a hill, and you're not supposed to be alive by your next birthday, caution can be fatal. It's easy for the authorities to tell you to wait for the clinical trials, because they don't know you, and, in their eyes, people die of cancer every day. But you only get to die once, and then you're out of chances. No more pizzas, no more smiles from attractive strangers, no more petting kittens. No more peeing or breathing or sleeping in.

I have an uninsured friend with brain cancer, and if he started popping these pills, or snorting them, or shooting them up, I wouldn't even say a word that rhymes with caution anywhere near him. At some point, what was reckless becomes reasonable. At some point, you've got to jump out of the burning building, even if you might break your leg.

I would do it. I would do it and I would blog about it.

Further reading

Dream Precognition Test

2011-05-13T10:15:00.000-07:00

I'm participating in a dream precognition study. If this is interesting to you, email mvalasek@staffmail.ed.ac.uk and see if they have any more slots open.

My reaction to the Geek Zodiac

2011-05-04T10:35:00.000-07:00

A couple of Facebook friends posted the Geek Zodiac. Being that I'm 1/4 geek by birth, I checked it out. What was my reaction?

"Astronaut! I knew it!"

Looking at my own reaction, only a few seconds after the fact, I couldn't help but be amused. Putting stock in a "normal" zodiac, the one that's primarily used today, in the United States, is one thing. It's been around for a while, and there are whole books and websites out there that preach the word, wholeheartedly. Believing in that is generally viewed as a normal thing to do.

But to look at something that a couple of guys made over a weekend, and to say, "It makes so much sense now!"... Well, that's just absurd. And that's what I did, for the better part of a second.

Even if you love, say, horoscopes, yourself, you should be able to admit that, even if horoscopes were actually just motivational messages that applied, not to people born on a specific date, but to human beings in general, they would still be popular. People would still follow them. Look at mine for today:

"You might be surprised by how clever and creative you are today, Capricorn. Just for fun, you may decide to pick up a paintbrush and try watercolor painting or perhaps writing some poetry. Whatever you attempt, you can be fairly sure that it will work out favorably. Your creative muse is there on your shoulder and waiting for you to make use of her!"

I'm not a painter, at all, but if I was into horoscopes I might take this advice, and it might be fun, and I might approach it with more confidence than I would without the stars backing me up. Nothing wrong with watercolors. But it would be the same outcome whether I was Capricorn, Aquarius, or Cancer! When I was a more avid blogger I used to put a daily all-signs horoscope in the sidebar.

I don't feel like making a real point with today's post, so let's just watch a video:

I just spent about twenty minutes looking for a certain video, and instead got sidetracked and ended up learning new magic tricks for the kiddos. Oh, well. We can go without closure for one post.

Why are UFOs stupid?

2011-04-28T13:37:00.000-07:00

People see lights in the sky. Lights that aren't stars, or airplanes, or meteors. Little bright points that wander around in a totally un-aircraftlike way. While they remain unidentified, they will be called unidentified flying objects.

At some point, people started associating these lights with space aliens. I guess once people started thinking of travel through the sky as a thing that happens, they maybe started to figure that they're seeing individuals traveling through the sky. Maybe traveling to see us, from some other planet.

I don't believe that these lights are all weather balloons, or misidentified planets, and I really don't think they're spaceships. I'm not sure what they are, but nature is complex enough, and still holds enough mysteries, that I don't think it's quite time to start narrowing it down.

To someone who does believe wholeheartedly that those lights occasionally seen in the sky are spaceships, I have some questions, or at least things to consider.

1. What's with the light? Why would a flying saucer, or some flying ship, that's presumably made out of metal, give off light? Especially light that's visible from the ground?

2. Why is it moving like that? If you were in a ship, up in the sky, would it make sense to drift in every direction, like a firefly in a field? If you're traveling, it makes sense to go in a straight line. If you're waiting, or watching, it makes sense to sit still. I can't think of why anyone in an aircraft would behave that way.

3. If there is someone in there, observing us, why don't they go up a bit higher? We have satellites that can see the ground in fancy resolution from orbit, and I'm sure some of our space telescopes can do better than that. What's keeping our UFOs in the clouds?

I don't have all of the answers, but I do have a wealth of the questions, and, with a lot of these subjects, they're questions that don't seem to have a simple answer.

If anyone asked my opinion (I'll assume that by reading this bog, you are doing just that) I'd say that the little balls of light in the sky are some kind of electromagnetic thing. Something that we may not know about, or have thought of, yet. Something that is centralized, gives off light, and wanders around in the sky, sometimes shooting off at speeds and angles that would be improbable for something with mass.

It's not that I disbelieve in alien life. I wouldn't be surprised at all if we found out that there is complex life elsewhere. I just don't think it's come to earth just to hang around our clouds and act like an idiot.

Thanks for reading.

April fools, by the way

2011-04-05T10:30:00.001-07:00

April fools!

Why I have to quit this blog

2011-04-01T11:50:00.000-07:00

It's been about a half of a month since my last post, and I thought that, rather than dropping off of the internet altogether, I'll give you guys a heads-up, and a little background on my decision to quit this blog, rather than leaving you hanging, clicking refresh over and over again on the homepage. You do that, right?

In Randi speak, I seem to have become something of a "woo-woo," because I'm not marginally as sure of my beliefs as I was a half of a month ago.

On Friday the 18th, the day after I wrote my most recent blog post, two things happened that have been worrying me since. I can't say they're related, but I also can't say for sure that, with their temporal proximity (har har big words) to one-another, that they aren't.

The first thing: I was sitting on the back porch with my fiance. We're one of those rare couples where only one member smokes, but I sometimes accompany her when she does. I brought my phone to watch the time, because I was going to watch America's Funniest Home Videos at 8:00 (Have you ever tried watching it on mute?). It was about 7:55 when we went outside.

I was looking at the portion of the sky visible under our porch's roof, and I saw a little light in the sky. It was moving around the way that a fly or a mosquito might, and I realized that I was having what people would call a UFO sighting. We went into the yard and determined that it was a larger object, farther away, and not a lightning bug by the fence or something. Long story short, after a few minutes it went behind some trees, and we didn't see it again. I thought it was definitely interesting, and the two of us sat on the stump out back and tried to figure out what it could have been. We ended up talking about belief, and skepticism, and one thing led to another, and <tmi>we ended up doing what a man and woman do when they love each other very much, there in the fenced-in back yard. Thumbs up, by the way.</tmi> At this point, I'd sort of given up on America's Funniest Home Videos. We talked a little more and, eventually went inside to go to bed early. I figured it was probably about 10:00.

I'll skip the major confusion that happened when we went inside, and just tell you that it wasn't 10:00. It was 7:58. The Funniest Home Videos episode I'd been watching before we went outside was just ending. Three minutes had passed.

(pause to joke about the brevity of my performance in the back yard, and then we'll move on)

I guess I can't impress that it was a big deal to me. Three minutes had passed. 7:58 is some text on a screen to you, but I was very very upset. I was actually a little angry, if you can believe it. I still sort of am, actually, just angry that something happened that is just nonsensical. I ended up snapping at one of the kids about their shoes being on the floor, and ended up feeling bad about it.

Both of us were still tired, though, and we ended up having to stay up long enough to put the kids to bed. When we got up in the morning, the other strange thing happened.

In short: The five of us had dreams that were, in every way I could think to measure, identical, but from five different perspectives. When I first realized this, I had my fiance and I split up and write down our dreams in detail, so we'd have a relatively unpolluted memory of them at hand. The points of similarity were sort of outrageous.

Between the five of us, in the children's first telling of the dream (which I had them do separately. I was being a little obsessive) the following points appeared in three to five of our stories (my fiance's and my writing, and the children's individual telling):

Going to the park to swim in a swimming pool. (this park doesn't have a swimming pool in real life.)
I was very very tall.
The oldest child was a mermaid.
A man with a mustache and a baseball cap giving the kids swimming tips.
Change at the bottom of the pool, like in a wishing well.

I hate to say this, but this is beyond coincidental. This goes into the realm of personal proof (as opposed to scientific proof). You don't have to believe that something extraordinary happened, but I'm afraid that I do.

Now, let me tell you, specifically, why I am quitting this blog. I can't come to any solid conclusions about the cause of anything that happened above. But I can say, about the seemingly shared dream, that it seems like it must have involved some kind of information transfer that the five of us shared, from three different rooms across the house. I can't say where the information originated, or the path it took between its origin point and the sensory centers of our 5 dreaming minds, but I can say that if there is some mechanism that allows information to travel into and out of a mind, bypassing our 5 senses, then the implications to that are outrageous, and very possibly match what we see today in the world of the harder-to-explain-away "psychics" and whatnot.

What I'm saying is, if this happened, what else could happen, using similar mechanisms?

And that is why I can't be The Polite Skeptic any more. I may have to become The Skeptical Believer, which doesn't make for a good blog headline.

So, I'd like to thank my humble readership for their visits and their support, but this is one project I have to put away for the time being.

Proof of a new method of search engine optimization

2011-03-17T12:03:00.000-07:00

Here it is: Write the word "proof" in the title of your blog post.

In September, last year, I wrote a post called, "Proof that 2012 will happen!" I wasn't trying to be sensationalist, just silly. The joke ended up being that of course 2012 will happen. Whether or not the end of the world will happen during 2012 is a different story.

Well, you can see that, on my "top posts" widget to the right, that post is ranking at number 1. But that ranking doesn't tell the whole story. Not at all.

If you give the number of visits that the #5 item in that list (Gerson Therapy) has gotten in the last month a value of 1, as a baseline, the bottom three items all have a value of about 1. They've gotten about the same number of visits as each other. Then, the #2 item (Proof of Time Travel) has a value of about 2. It has about double the visits of any of the lower three items.

The number 1 item, though, Proof that 2012 will happen!, has a value of 12. That means it has approximately twelve times the visits of any of the bottom three, and it even has six times as many visits as the second one. It's a wide gap.

Note: PornOH, I now know, is a
pornography website. In a search
for that keyword, a link to my blog
is on the second page.

I noticed this trend in early February, and it bothers me a bit, because I realized that the people who are actually looking for proof of the end-of-the-world scenario are not going to find it at my blog. The bad part is, I didn't even present evidence against it in that post. Just a perspective of what I think of it. So, those people are getting no value out of that search.

This didn't stop my from my next experiment, though, which you can see above. I wrote a post about a time-travel related video I'd seen, and stuck the word Proof in there, not so innocently this time. Very very quickly, Proof of time travel! -or- Giving your hoax a makeover, climbed up the charts, and now, as I said, has double the hits of the three lower results. Neither of these posts are particularly interesting, in the scheme of things, but that silly word, proof, makes them popular.

The Google searches for proof do have a skeptical basis, though. It's a plea to cut through the BS, get away from all of the conjecture, and just please prove it to me. Unfortunately, there is no proof to be found online. You can find videos that can be faked, stories that can be made up, peer-reviewed scientific papers that are, nevertheless, ever-debated. You can find theories and hypotheses and absurd certainties. But no proof.

Sorry.

The Singularity -or- Why I'm not afraid of the coming robot holocaust

2011-03-17T10:52:00.000-07:00

A little creepy

Artificial intelligence! It's an exciting subject for me, being that I like to write a bit of quirky sci-fi on the side. More than artificial intelligence, I want to talk about our (some say inevitable) future robot holocaust. With how we rest on technology, if the technology became sentient, isn't it reasonable to think that it would take the very short step from surrounding us to ruling us, destroying us, or turning us into human batteries?

In my mind, the fear of doomsday-through-artificial-intelligence is fed through a misconception about the nature of intelligence. Human beings are different than the rest of the animals on the planet in two major ways. Firstly, we are, in some very special ways, the most intelligent animals around. Secondly, we rule the world. We lord over this place like a king ape, with our big scepter and crown, making the plants and animals bend to our needs. So, it's only natural that we would get nervous when something that's potentially more intelligent than us comes onto the scene. It's not hard to imagine that, if we start creating slaves that are stronger and smarter than us, we could end up being the next endangered species.

But keep in mind that intelligence is not the same as a wish to rule the world, or even a wish to be free from bondage.

Let's think about Data, the humanoid robot from Star Trek. Data was intelligent, but without emotions. At least, he was supposed to be. Watching that show as an adult, though (Which I did one time. Really.) I realize that Data did have emotions. Because, if someone, or something, is truly without emotion, then they will never move from one spot. If I lost all of my emotion right now, I wouldn't be driven by my desire to spread my ideas, so I would stop typing this blog. I wouldn't have any reason to hold my bladder, because I wouldn't fear the consequences of peeing my pants while sitting here. I wouldn't get up and eat, because I wouldn't feel discomfort at the sensation of hunger, nor displeasure at the feeling of wasting away. Every move we make is, at its root, driven by an emotion. We feel the emotion, and then use our intelligence to decide how to accommodate it. This is always running in the background. If Data didn't have any emotions, he would never have gotten out of the crate he was shipped in.

Google's fancy self-driving car

So, how intelligent could you make a machine before it hit you in the face and took your wallet? We could make it as intelligent as we wanted. In fact, according to Steven Levy, author of a Wired Magazine article that I enjoyed, we've already got artificial intelligence. There are computers that can think faster, and better, in very specialized ways, than humans. Jeopardy champion Watson comes to mind.

Well, where does this put my philosophy on emotion? Why aren't these emotionless machines sitting and rotting, as opposed to vacuuming our floors and driving our future cars? Well, it seems to me that these machines do have emotions. Their emotions are very few, and very simple, but they are there. A Roomba is driven to vaccuum all the time, and it uses its intelligence to figure out how to do it. Watson is driven to answer Jeopardy questions, and it uses its intelligence to figure out how to do it. We are driven to avoid spoiled food, and to have sex with sexy people, and to eat pizza, pizza, pizza all day long, and we use our own intelligence in these pursuits. Simple emotions for simple machines, and uber-complex emotions for uber-complex machines like ourselves.

My point is that, if computers wanted to rule the world, someone would have to program that desire into them. If they wanted to enslave humanity, some geek would have to spend many sleepless nights figuring out the easiest, most bug-proof way to enslave himself and his species-peers. It's not something that would happen automatically. It's far from a foregone conclusion.

Just like the idea of alien life, we humans tend to think of intelligent machines in human terms, as if humanity is something you'll reach if you just keep adding virtual neurons. But we're not the product of virtual neurons. We're the product of millions of years of selective pressure in certain environmental/social conditions. Nobody thinks that a virtual brain will automatically generate the personality of a crow, or a lemur, but there are loads of people assuming that a human's drives will spontaneously arise in a complex-enough computer.

No.

Japan Earthquake Relief

2011-03-13T11:11:00.000-07:00

Doing my small part to help people that need help. All I can hope is that it actually helps.

Gerson Therapy: Where is the research?

2011-03-01T11:33:00.000-08:00

(Time to get that horrid optical illusion off of the top of my blog.)

According to Charlotte Gerson, we have a cure for cancer, and we've had it for more than sixty years. And it's not chemotherapy.

The Gerson Therapy, invented by Max Gerson, is, in short, a very extreme, very strict, dietary regimen, that involves a lot (really a lot) of juicing, zero salt, all-organic, a bunch of supplements, nothing processed. And don't forget about the organic coffee enemas. But we're all adults here, so we're not going to overreact about people putting a tube in their asshole to cure cancer, are we? Cancer is a big deal, while a tube in the ass is really not.

But does it work? In the documentaries about it (1, 2) there are nice, convincing stories from real people about how wonderful it is. But any documentary about a thing is going to have nice convincing stories. The documentary about hitting yourself in the face with a hammer has some of the most convincing testimonials I've heard.

In fact, there are two things, regarding Gerson Therapy, that are as easy to find as they are unhelpful.

1). Testimonials from people who say that the therapy has cured a number of different maladies, including cancer. Any or all of these could be people who are paid to make blog comments and reviews and things like that. Think I'm being cynical? I've been to Elance. I've seen the listings.
2). Skeptical people who take a glance at the therapy and decide that it shouldn't work, because of A B and C, and that Max Gerson once maybe cheated on his wife, and there was once some other BS therapy that was debunked, so this is obviously wrong. Basically, the blah, blah, blah of someone who uses big words in their guessing.

What I wanted was studies. The scientific controlled experiments that I can pick apart at my leisure. After all, if you've got lots and lots of stories that this thing is vanishing tumors, I would think that the medical community would be eager to either verify the claims, or to show it as a sham. Whichever one may be true.

But, according to cancer.org:
"There have been no well-controlled studies published in the available medical literature that show the Gerson therapy is effective in treating cancer.

In a recent review of the medical literature, researchers from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center identified 7 human studies of Gerson therapy that have been published or presented at medical conferences. None of them were randomized controlled studies."

Well, that frankly pisses me right off. I know I'm just being a cranky non-scientist. Someone that doesn't begin to understand the struggle of scientific research, and funding, and so on. But, this is a pretty big deal. Cancer is something that a third of us are looking forward to as we quickly age, and many of us are going to be doing the Gerson therapy, whether the scientific community has researched it or not. Because, reading testimonials, it seems to work, and because we've all heard horror stories about chemotherapy.

Just to make myself clear, I'm not saying that we (we the people) ought to do the Gerson Therapy. I'm saying that it will happen. If it were proven to be more effective than medical treatments, it would be revolutionary. If it were proven to be false, then there would at least be data present to help the cancer victim make their choice.

Would I do it? Well, if I found that I had cancer, and I had more than a year projected to live, I would probably juice some vegetables and periodically stick a tube in my butt for a month, sure. See what happens. Because, in my heart of hearts, as much as cancer might scare me, chemotherapy scares me a little bit more.

When my girlfriend learned to teleport -or- The Five Liars

2011-02-20T12:36:00.000-08:00

Don't trust your eyes

I had mild insomnia last night. For the first couple of hours, I kept falling into a light, fragile sleep, and then waking up what felt like minutes later. There were no dreams, no moments of REM, just blinking on and off like a digital clock after a power-outage.

I was lying next to my girlfriend, who was sleeping soundly, when I heard the bedroom door open. The kids are not allowed to open our bedroom door without knocking first, and I was going to mention it, but it wasn't one of the kids. It was an adult woman, and, for a moment, I didn't know how to react.

Of course, it was my girlfriend. She had gotten up during one of my brief moments of sleep, and then had come back while I was awake. Somehow, I wanted to argue about this. "I didn't hear you get up."

"You were sleeping, silly. It's three a.m."

I wanted to tell her that I had been semi-alert all night, that even in my sleeping moments I'd been half awake, that it was unlikely that she could have gotten out of bed and opened the door without me noticing. But how absurd would that be? What point, exactly, would I have been arguing? That she had actually teleported out of the room? That I had lost time, like in a UFO abduction? That my real girlfriend had dissolved, and a pod person had walked in from the hallway? I was put off by how obvious it was that she had come in without leaving, even though it didn't make a bit (much less a byte) of sense.

I know that I slept through my girlfriend's exit from the room, and I think that almost everyone would have eventually come to the same conclusion, even after that brief moment of argumentativeness. But, what if it had happened a little differently? What if I had been awake when one of the children had walked in, but had kept my eyes closed? What if the kid had crawled into bed, and I had, in my sleep-deprived state, simply fallen asleep, and remained asleep when the kid remembered that she'd left her favorite blanket behind and made a stealthy exit?

When I wake up, and realize that during my obviously (to me) unbroken span of attention, something had come into my room, climbed into bed, and then vanished, I would suddenly have a creepy ghost story that I could tell everyone for the rest of my life.

It's easy, when you hear a report of something strange happening, from a person who seems to be perfectly honest, to dismiss them either as a liar or someone who makes stupid mistakes. But let's not be so hasty.

These are our senses, people. These are our only, few, connections to the world around us. Our thoughts and senses are literally the only experiences we have. We all trust our senses. We don't doubt that bacon is on sale for two dollars at the grocery store, or that the driveway is flooded, or that the grape juice stain from last week is still in the carpet, even though it's only our horribly unreliable senses telling us these things.

Are you sure that if you saw a ball of light meandering in the sky, or felt a hand grab your ankle in bed, or watched a stinky, seven-foot-tall sasquatch cross the hiking trail in front of you, that you wouldn't believe these things were exactly as they seemed? It's easy to be a skeptic when you're sitting at your laptop, after all.

But it's good to doubt yourself, regardless of your belief system, if you can manage it. If you start trusting everything you see, you may end up believing that, on one sleepless night, your girlfriend had to pee so bad that she teleported to the bathroom.

Thanks for reading.

A brief and decade-late discussion about "9/11 truth"

2011-02-18T09:45:00.000-08:00

In language, we often end up giving things names that aren't very descriptive. Names that, if you don't already know what they mean, then you won't from the name. Most examples of this are euphemisms. Nothing about the term, "adult undergarments" tells you that they are diapers. Without the cultural knowledge, the label applies better to a bra, or a pair of boxer shorts. "Differently abled," before it meant handicapped, didn't mean anything at all. Everyone is differently abled from everyone else.

And some things end up with these non-descriptive labels just because they stick. PC means, specifically, a computer that runs a Microsoft operating system, even though a Mac is a personal computer, too. And we've all heard the joke about shipments in trucks, and cargo in ships.

Well, a little over two thousand years into the current calendar, the utterly undescriptive label, that could have been stuck to any of a million things, truther, is now being used. For better or worse, it's taken.

There are a few different schools of thought about the specifics, but the basic message that most truthers have in common is that 9/11, instead of being orchestrated by a terrorist group lead by Osama bin Ladin, was actually staged by the United States government, in order to provide a catalyst for military invasion of oil-rich Iraq.

Naturally, there's been a lot of fighting over this idea. No, I didn't say friendly debate. I think that if people could shoot each other through the internet, they would probably do it over this issue. More than three thousand people died, and those on both sides of the argument are still very fired up because of this, a decade later.

For however many versions of the events there are, only one of them, of course, happened. Things occurred in a certain way, and even seven billion people, feeling the deepest rage in their hearts, could not change the truth. Some people are more inclined to distrust the government, and some people are the opposite, but none of that matters, at all. It never will. It's the evidence, put forward by both sides of the argument, that, when inspected individually, and then taken together, can show us the truth. And the truth is what matters.

I'm not going to discuss any of that evidence right now. This post is almost a warning that I am, in the future, going to discuss it. Whether or not that is necessary... shrug.

One thing I will say, though, is that, if I wanted to make up a tragedy, in order to invade Iraq, I would have framed an Iraqi, or even Saddam Hussein, for the tragedy. While the fury about 9/11 was, by some, channeled into the Iraq war, it's public knowledge that the government of Iraq wasn't involved. In other words, if I wanted to frame my uncle for a murder, I wouldn't leave my neighbor's hair at the scene.

I won't say I'm on the fence about "9/11 truth," but I am open-minded. And when I say that I am open-minded (something everyone loves to say) I think it's actually true. So be ready for the occasional post looking at the truthers' best pieces of evidence, and trying to decide if they hold any water.

Thanks for reading

Killing my dog with homeopathy

2011-02-15T13:33:00.000-08:00

We woke up early, and found the big puppy munching on rat poison. It was shocking, but pretty much exactly how you would expect this D-student dog to spend his time.

Before we called the vet, we (naturally) looked at Google. The internet told us to make him puke with peroxide (boy, did he ever) and then get him some activated charcoal. I was off to the drugstore.

The clerk pointed me in the right direction, and I found the supplement. Reaching for it, though, I froze. Homeopathic, it said on the front of the bottle. Standing there, with my hand hanging in front of the shelf, my heart rate was up, and I actually had some adrenaline running through my veins. I felt as if I had almost touched a hot pan, or peed on an electric fence. I was a little angry for a moment, and then I took a deep breath, and grabbed the bottle to the right of that one.

What is homeopathy? Briefly, a homeopath will take a substance that is supposed to produce a certain symptom, dilute it greatly, and then use the dilution to treat the condition that it, in greater concentrations, would cause. So, (and this is my own assumption) if you grabbed some ipecac, and diluted it down into a homeopathic solution, following the correct steps, you could treat nausea with it.

Now what do I mean by a homeopathic solution? Well, with homeopathy, the thinner, the better. As in, if you mix a homeopathic solution with water, so it's 10% solution, and 90% water, what you end up with is supposed to be more potent than the original solution. An 8X homeopathic solution, for instance, would be the result of diluting a substance to this extent eight times. The amount of the original substance in the water shrinks exponentially with every new "potentization."

So, if you look at a solution of 30X potency (very potent, and very thin), one dose, which is about a sip, which equals maybe an ounce, has about this many water molecules in it:

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
And the amount of original substance in the 30X solution is 1 over:
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

The visible length difference between these numbers tells us something. You're not going to get a particle of original substance in every dose of your medicine. In fact, to come across that elusive particle, in a 30X solution, you'll have to take about 100,000 doses, or drink something like 781 gallons of water, which could fill an Olympics swimming pool to a little more than one foot deep with virtually pure water. And in that whole giant wading pool, there would be maybe one particle of the thing that isn't water, maybe floating at the far end, hopefully not caught in the filter.

The flowers make the pills look natural

These kinds of criticisms are not new to homeopathy. But, it is said, this practice is not about actually consuming the substance. It's about the water. The water, believers say, has a memory. (For more on this way of thinking, take a look at The Hidden Messages in Water, by Masaru Emoto.) If you "succuss," or shake in a particular way, the water container correctly, it is said, you will instill the properties of the substance in the water. When you get to higher potencies like 30X, it won't matter if the substance is present, only the water. Look at this post on making your own homeopathic remedy for more info.

And, having said all this, I can't think, for the life of me, how one would make homeopathic activated charcoal.

Well, to be honest, the dog probably would have been fine without the charcoal. We'd gotten him to puke (a lot, I'm telling you), pretty early on in the process of him poisoning himself. I was angry, though, that I almost treated a canine medical emergency with a medicine that seems, at very best, iffy. Not only that, but the word "Homeopathic," instead of being in a starburst on the package, was in a thin, black, sans_serif font, almost like it was embarrassed. If things had gone a little different, (discover the poison later, grab the homeopathic charcoal) I fear they would have gone very badly, indeed.

But who am I to criticize this thing that I've never tried? And to listen to scientific studies that could, very well, be biased? I know how to make a homeopathic remedy now, so I'm going to do it. I'll get something that causes weight gain (sugar is a simple choice) and make a weight-loss syrum. I'll make it 30X, so that the results will be very obvious, if they are there, and then I'll take daily measurements of my "total inches" (something I read about in a Tim Ferriss book.) It sounds like a lot of work, of course (succussing 40 times 30 times adds up to beating my hand 1,200 times, hoping I don't lose count) but I'll try (m)anything(s) once. And since I don't expect it to work, I don't have to worry too much about the placebo effect, an effect I'm not too offended by, in the first place.

And how conclusive is a (not too) scientific study with a sample size of 1? Well, it's not. But I'm going to do it anyway, and likely prove nothing that the reader didn't already believe. So wish me luck.

The dog's doing fine, by the way.

Thanks for reading.

Proof of Time Travel! -or- Giving your hoax a makeover

2011-02-13T22:15:00.000-08:00

Let's talk about time travel today.

First, watch the video.

The story in short: This guy is repairing a sink, he climbs deeper and deeper into cabinet under the sink, and then... comes out the other side. On the other side, there is his future self, about seventy years old. He has the presence of mind to take a cell-phone video of him and his older self, which is shown in the above television clip.

He doesn't mention coming back. Unless the future he went to was now (which would put his origin time in the pre cellphone-camera era) we have to assume that he... I don't know. Woke up back in his kitchen?

The television production value of this clip, which is pretty interesting at first glance, makes it a little more emotionally compelling than the homemade stuff you see on YouTube. Of course, if you watch Fox News, (or any news at all, to a lesser extent), you know that the people who give you your television don't think much of your intelligence. Even if nobody involved in a program like this believes in the report, it will still make its way to our screens, because we, as a viewing audience, love it. Honesty only rarely gets in the way of cashflow.

To be honest, I'm almost embarrassed to cover this video. In my mind, it's a very weak hoax. But, keeping in mind that the rest of the world doesn't necessarily see things through my eyeballs, I'll spell out my thoughs.

First, his story of climbing under a sink strikes me as sci-fi. And I'm not talking about fantastic, Contact-by-Carl-Sagan sci-fi, but more like silly Johnny Test sci-fi. He doesn't describe if the undersink had become a tunnel, or if the tunnel's floor, ceiling and walls had the texture and character of the walls under the sink. If maybe he was mesmerized, and didn't notice that the back wall of the cabinet, that was inches from his face, had disappeared. He didn't mention if there was more plumbing, or another can of Comet, five feet back from the doors. He only says that he climbs under, doesn't describe the compulsion to keep crawling (usually, working on a sink, your butt or knees are on the kitchen floor), doesn't mention how he gets past the p-trap and all that. It's the kind of thing that makes me put down a bad novel, and mark the author's name on my mental blacklist.

Tattoos don't stay sharp
Image by Deanna Wardin

And then the video, there to redeem the inadequate story, instead seems to add a nail to its coffin. For one thing, as many many YouTube commenters have pointed out, the thirty-year-old arm-tattoo seen in the video is crisp, sharp and dark. Skin is not actually archival. While tattoos never go away on their own, they sure do get crummy after a decade or so.

Secondly, and more important to me, the two men in the video only slightly resemble each other. And by slightly, I mean maybe a family member. Something that movies have made us forget is that people's looks don't change that much over time. Two different actors have to play normal Will Smith and kid Will Smith. In real life it's all played by the same actor. We all have a basic face, sometimes seen through a fat filter, or an age filter, a drug-addict filter, but always the same basic image (barring some surgery, of course). I have gained height, weight and a beard since middle school, but I still run into people from that long-ago time who stop and say, "Oh, wow! It's you!" If I knew this guy, and then ran into that older guy a few years later, I can't imagine there would be any recognition. They look more like son and dad than self and self.

Assuming that this is a hoax (I am, of course, assuming that) let's fix it. Let's make it more believable.

Step 1: Fix the older tattoo. Draw the thing on with your marker, and then rub at it for ten minutes. If you're going to age yourself, age every part of yourself.

Step 2: Fix the older guy. Find an older guy with a weaker jaw, nose and brow than you have, and then spend a few bucks on some good Hollywood prosthetics. I'm not talking about Klingons, or anything, but if you match these three features up on a guy that's your color, and your height, you just might drop a couple of jaws.

Weta Workshop could hoax the pants off of me.

Step 3: Attention to detail: Make your little cellphone video with your house in the background, but change things around a bit, get rid of that tarp, maybe build a temporary facade of an additional room. Experts will "discover" these things, and back you up, revealing your made-up evidence to the world.

Step 4: Give your story a remake. You could go on Elance.com and find professional writers who could come up with something good. A nicely filled-out story might cost you less than $100, and much less if you hire from a firm in India (Please look at reviews. Reckless clients will find that a language barrier is the least of their problems).

The story that I would have come up with: I was reading out by the pond, and I kept looking up, because it looked like a person was moving around, but I was only seeing it in the corner of my eye, right at the edge of the water. When I looked directly there was nothing there. I thought I was seeing a ghost or something, so I started trying to just keep watching it out of the corner of my eye.

But then I saw it get up, and was walking toward me, and I was scared, because I thought that if I looked at it, it would go invisible, but it would still coming toward me. I eventually gave in, though, and I looked up, and it was still there. I thought he was just an old guy, and I was freaked out at this point, so I was going to just leave, but then I noticed... well, that he looked just like me.

The area looked different, the walnut tree was about ten feet taller. We were both confused, and we eventually figured out that I had somehow, as crazy as it sounded, traveled forward in time. It was 2038, and I was talking to my future self. We talked for hours, and he said he remembered this happening when he was younger, and he told me that he had taken a cell-phone video, because the older him had told him to, so I did it.

I don't remember coming back to my time. I just remember kind of shaking my head, and realizing that I had been standing by the pond for a while, like in a daze. If it wasn't for the video, I wouldn't have told anybody. I wouldn't believe it myself.

I was just happy that I never had to climb under a sink.

Thanks for reading.

Coping with the wrongness of others

2011-02-12T11:50:00.000-08:00

Raising kids, sometimes I get asked tough questions. No, I'm not talking about sex questions. Sex questions I at least know the answers to. The questions I have to be careful with are things like:

Four is better

Are there really aliens?

Are there really ghosts?

Did God make libraries?

To many, many people, the answer to these kinds of questions are as straightforward as to the sex questions, maybe moreso. We humans tend to be very certain about our beliefs, and very willing to shove these certainties down the throats of others, especially our children. My answers always involve the phrases, "Some people believe," and, "Other people believe." Sometimes it's more specific. "Lot's of people believe," and, "A few people believe."

My trio of mini-humans have been to church maybe twice. I'm not a Christian at all (I'm also not one of those people that say, "I'm not religious, but I believe in God." I really don't) and the significant other is some form of dormant Catholic. We don't go to church, but when they visit their gramma during the summer, she brings them along, and the eight-year-old has really taken a liking to Christianity. I was dragged to church about once a week growing up, and the obligation drove me away from the practice of religion. I sometimes wonder if the opposite is happening with my little one.

I don't believe in God, but I don't see why she shouldn't. If she asks me why I don't, I'll tell her, but I won't push her. And it's not only because of the (increasingly clear) fact that, when you push children, they tend to push back.

Beliefs really gets to some people. In fact, the idea that others could believe the wrong thing, something that is not true, is a thorn in the side of many. People preach to strangers, call others woo-woos, and all-around lose sleep because untruth is so offensive to them. This is because some of us put a lot of value on the truth.

Of course, giving value to truth sounds like a good thing. It sounds like something the good guy lawyer would talk about in the climax of a legal drama. What's wrong with the truth, after all? Well, it depends on the truth.

Knowing the truth about your poisoned food, an incoming hurricane, or the risks of Russian Roulette, all have immediate practical value.

Knowing the truth about high fructose corn syrup (just corn, my ass), and smoking, and living in the midst of high levels of radiation, have long-term practical value.

Knowing the truth about the age of the universe, though, and natural selection, and how light takes so-and-so years to reach earth from any given star, have, for most of us, zero practical value. These distant and long-term ideas are simply matters of interest. They're things that work our brains, and our worldviews, and excite some of us, but none of them will change the fact that there's grilled-cheese for lunch, with tomato soup.

Image by robinsan (flickr link)

And ideas such as that there is a God watching over you during all of your struggles, and that your loved ones are now living a better life because they're dead, and that your good thoughts are bringing good things into your life, do have value. They change how we cope with circumstances, how cruel our world seems to be, whether to move forward boldly, or with fear. They have emotional value, and being that our emotions drive virtually everything we do, they have practical value. For all of the bad things that have stemmed from religion, most of what we're surrounded by would not be there if it weren't from the inspiration people got from their beliefs.

So, as they said in The 40 Year Old Virgin, don't put the truth on a pedestal. I think that's what they said. For those of you who, like myself, have a passion for the truth, then search for it, study it, roll around in it like a dog in compost, if it do ya fine. And if someone else's belief is different than yours, stop for a minute and consider that their truth probably suits them better, and that they don't need your beliefs any more than they need your shoes.

But if you notice that your friend's food is poisoned, go ahead and preach the truth to him or her, with the assumption that this knowledge will help them out. And if the food isn't poisoned, tell them anyway, and you just may get four corndogs instead of just two.

And four corndogs is better.

Thanks for reading.

1,200 exoplanets. Any neighbors?

2011-02-07T22:27:00.000-08:00

Image by NASA

Take a walk with me, to the scientific fringe. Let's talk briefly about aliens.

I don't mean alien abductions, or alien autopsies, or gray men with bulbous skulls, and eyes that seem far too big to fit two inside of a head (have you ever noticed that?). I'm talking about something more exciting. Aliens that look nothing like humans. Aliens that haven't evolved under our gravity, or our sun. Real aliens.

Before 1992, many believed that our solar system contained the only nine planets in the universe (there were nine back then!). It wasn't a matter of whether this was the only solar system that contained life, but whether it was the only solar system at all. If it were the only solar system, the chance of our existence would be astronomically more astronomically unlikely than it seems now. This specialness would mesh well with the worldview (universeview) of those that wrote the Bible.

But, in 1992, the first exoplanet (planet outside of our solar system) was discovered and confirmed, and we've been looking for more ever since. There are a few different methods that scientists use to detect the planets, because we can't see them the way we see a car down the street, even with powerful telescopes. Astronomers look at the bahavior of stars to determine if there is anything orbiting it, and then determine that thing's properties. That's as far as I'll go here, but feel free to Google it if you're interested.

After the first exoplanet was confirmed, it became a question of whether there existed habitable exoplanets. After all, what good is a molten world, or a gas giant? They're also looking for the possibility of liquid water.

There are plenty of scientists that believe life can't exist without conditions similar to what we have here on Earth, but I personally think that's sort of ridiculous. You can't draw conclusions about life-hosting planets when your sample size is one, after all. How thirsty do you have to be before you start assuming that all life in the universe wants a glass of water? All we can safely assume, I think, is that life requires energy. As has been proven on Earth, though, life-giving energy can be radiated from the center of the planet as well as from outside.

A wet Mars.
Image by Michael Carroll.

That aside, in the summer of 2008, we found out that there is frozen water on Mars, right next door. Enough that, at some point in the past, Mars just might (also might not) have been covered in oceans. The artists' depictions of the red planet with blue seas are exciting to look at.

When some scientists talk about life on other planets, they make sure to mention they're talking about microbial life. I have to say, right now, that this makes no sense to me. I think they say this to sound reasonable, and restrained, (unlike the news, or the lay population). In this gritty, dusty place we call reality, though, it seems unlikely that microbial life would sit around and stay microbial for a million years, just because a few scientists are trying to sound reasonable back on this little blue marble.

In 2009, the Kepler telescope was launched specifically to look for earth-like planets orbiting distant stars. Well, on February 2, 2011, scientists gave us an analysis of data gathered during five months in '09, and it was big news. 1,200 new planets! About five of them are potentially Earthlike, and at least 54 of them in "habitable orbits." Some of these might be false alarms, but not 1,200 of them.

So, planets aren't as rare as we thought, water isn't as rare as we thought, Earthlike planets aren't as rare as we thought. In my mind, these progressive discoveries are like a road. One that leads to a destination. I can't say for sure what the destination is, but I'll bet all of you twenty dollars that it's life outside of our solar system. My unscientific reasoning says that we just seem to be moving in that direction so fast. And if life as we (don't) know it is out there, even in one place, then it's not a coincidence. Life is too complex to be a coincidence twice. So if there's one more, there's a million more.

True aliens would not look attractive to humans

If you've read, or watched, science fiction, you might have some funny ideas about alien life. Of course, this is necessary. The organisms and technologies found on alien worlds in sci-fi are based, almost entirely, on organisms and technologies really found on Earth. I don't think you can (or should) write a story that absolutely nobody can relate to.

Consider these three (of many) assumptions we make in our science fiction, and how they effect our expectations of reality:

That a dominant species will be humanoid: We even make our cartoon animals humanoid. There is no reason for this to be true, as far as I know. This is one of the (several) reasons I question the existence of the "greys" or the "reptilians." The most inhuman aliens we make tend to look like insects. Our imagination will never beat that of natural selection.
That other worlds will have a dominant species, at all: The dominant species may very well be an anomaly specific to Earth. One primate got a bigger brain, and started bending the rest of the planet to its will. I don't see this as inevitable. Think about it this way: If humans had never come about, what would the dominant species on Earth be? Sharks? Bears? Orangutans? Of course not. (As a side note, I always hear that dinosaurs once ruled the earth. Of course they didn't. They just lived here.)
A division between plants and animals: Our most basic distinction between organisms is that between the plant and the animal (and the fungus, of course). This only seems so natural to us because it's what we were built (so to speak) around. What are some alternatives? I have no idea. That's the point.

And we can't ignore the very real possibility that my metaphorical road may end with no life on other planets. Our own little Earth may be the specialest planet ever, like we've been saying since we started speaking. It's not good for our sense of wonder, but it's great for our ego. And it would also mean that, when we eventually invent the Starship Enterprise, and start settling these distant worlds, we won't have a repeat of manifest destiny, treating the natives in ways that me may, someday, regret.

Thanks for reading.

Relevant:
I read The Crowded Universe, by Alan Boss, last year. It's a detailed history of the scientific search for Earthlike planets, and the struggles along the way, written in a way that's accessible to the lay person. It also includes an interesting account of the Pluto story, how it was discovered, and then, after much conflict, eventually castrated of its planethood.

Druids, aliens and Stonehenge

2011-02-02T15:32:00.000-08:00

I've said before that, just because something seems impossible by human means, even primitive humans, it doesn't mean we need to resort to alien visitation, the modern scapegoat for a number of hard-to-explain phenomena.

I found this video today. While it's not Stonehenge, it's impressive, and with more experience, and more folks, it just might be Stonehenge.

Stop underestimating your clever, clever species.

Druids and aliens don't mix, anyway.

Men who stare at -porn-? OH! I get it!

2011-01-08T16:17:00.000-08:00

So, let's summarize the study first. Daryl Bem would have his test subjects look at a screen, where a pornographic image would appear in a moment, either on the left or on the right. More than half the time, people guessed correctly on which side it would appear. Since people would guess before the computer made the random decision, this was a test of precognition. So, evidence for precognition. Champagne time.

Of course there's controversy. There's a quote in the linked article of, “[Bem’s results] indicate that experimental psychologists need to change the way they conduct their experiments and analyze their data.” This gem of backward thinking (the evidence of your bad experimentation is your results) was attributed to Eric-Jan Wagenmakers.

So what are these amazing results? Well, Daryl Bem found that people guessed correctly an average 53.1% of the time.

Oh.

No, no. You don't have to tell me, it's statistically significant. That's great. But where's that kapow? Where are the big numbers that would get me all titillated? 70%, 85%, 120%. Not fifty-three. Especially when fifty is the average. It's a wonder that there's been no scientific revolution with these kinds of numbers.

Maybe because I'm not a scientist, but I'm not impressed (impressed being an emotion) by most statistically significant numbers. Scientists throw around one percents and one-point-five percents so much that I wonder what kind of returns they expect out of their stock portfolios.

Statistically significant is not the same as emotionally significant.

Let me speak assuming the psi is real, which is a pretty rare assumption for me. I think a scientist needs to do one of these studies, maybe ten trials of 100 people each, with 100 guesses per person, keeping it simple. And then, ignore the average. Forget about it, whatever it was, and, instead, scour your database for the 100 best performers in that group of 1,000. Put these mini Uri Gellers together in the same study, and get some results that really shine. Put together the first and the second round as a part of the required protocol, so that it's still repeatable, let your results sweep the world. This goes for the ganzfield folk, and the pornographic precog folk and everyone else that's trying to impress us with their one-digit percentages. So that I don't need a statistician to tell me it's significant. I can just see the significance with my eyeballs, and feel it in my gut.

And, if you put together your star pupils, and your results still aren't that impressive, then don't make excuses, and don't say shoulda/woulda/coulda. Set aside a moment for some soul-searching, making very very sure that you're not barking up the wrong tree with all of this psi research, and act accordingly. Be a scientist.

Thanks for reading.

PS: This is a public service announcement, regarding the book, that was adapted to a movie, the name of which was used in the article I linked to, the name of which I used in my blog post, here.

You may have seen the movie, The Men Who Stare at Goats. Whatever you think of that movie (I didn't care for it, myself) please check out the book that it was adapted from (of course, the current edition has the movie cover). The author, Jon Ronson, investigates the government's experiment with creating psychic soldiers by talking to the people involved. Painfully entertaining and interesting, the book is a documentary, which makes me wonder where someone got the idea of making a feature film out of it (as opposed to a film documentary.) It's very very interesting, and the film, in my mind, doesn't do it justice at all.

The Mind Lamp, $190.00 well... spent

2010-10-25T10:12:00.000-07:00

I first heard about the Mind Lamp from Matthew Smith, when he posted a link on his Facebook. The article he linked to, which was at BusinessInsider.com, made me furrow my eyebrows. Let me give you a glimpse of what I saw.

MILLION-DOLLAR IDEA: Lamp That Can Read Your Mind - It Turns The Color You're Thinking About

By Eunju Lie

Is today's idea brilliant or a bomb?

The Idea: The Mind Lamp is a $189 electric lamp with a random-event generator (REG) built in. When plugged in, the lamp gives off a white light before cycling through eight other colors. It then stays on the one that you're thinking about.

Mind Lamp: 60-Minute Time Lapse from Psyleron on Vimeo.

You can read the rest of he article here.

Quite a statement, huh? If I were a parapsychologist, I would gift one of these to every major skeptic I knew. "Dear James Randi, I know we've had our differences in the past..."

Of course, the article didn't answer any of the questions that automatically popped up in my mind. What percentage of the time does this work? How long does it stay on the target color? How long does it take to reach it? I don't know if you're like me, but I hate the feeling of a writer ignoring my most pressing questions. It's one of the few things that can get me to voluntarily go and research something, often with a frown and tension in my spine, waiting for the pressure of the mystery to be relieved.

The Mind lamp doesn't seem to be on Wikipedia, even though it's been around for at least a year. So I went to the official website, and found some stuff about random-event-generators and stuff that, if I already knew the lamp worked, might be interesting. Maybe.

And then I found the BoingBoing Gadgets review entitled, "Review: A few days w/ the Mind Lamp [verdict:trippy]" Well, that's more exciting than anything I had looked at before, not only because I had found someone who had bought and used the thing, but because the verdict was the ever-suggestive trippy.

The experience relayed in that article was not that trippy, though. Steven Leckart describes failing at producing the desired effect a couple of times, and then perceiving an effect later, but only when he wasn't paying close attention. Don't rely on my spin, of course, read the article yourself.

It at least answered the question of what the Mind Lamp experience is. The lamp doesn't, as the first article I read suggested, simply "Stay on the one you're thinking about." If it does work, it takes some practice, and apparently some meditation classes. If it doesn't...

If it doesn't work, you'll still get people telling you that it does, to put it plainly. I've never seen the device, never tried to focus my mind on orange, or green. I do know, though, that if it was run by a random-event generator, and, for whatever reason, it did not respond to our thoughts, there would still be just enough coincidences, in the form of,

"It worked the third time,"

"It definitely worked over half the time,"

or,

"I thought about blue for a while, and then when I thought about red it went blue!"

"I could tell when I was really focused, because then it usually worked,"

that it would be a marketable product.

I'm not saying it doesn't work. As I've said, I haven't spent the $190.00 to become a pioneer. All I'm saying is that it doesn't have to work. Because even if it didn't work, I'm sure it would still work fine.

Mistaking manatees for mermaids

2010-10-20T12:16:00.000-07:00

Beautiful image created by Esther Kirby (flickr link)

Manatees are beautiful, elegant animals, their grace matched only by their charm. Their powerful, sleek bodies inspire wonder in boaters as pods of them race alongside fast-moving vessels.

Or, is that dolphins?

Either way, manatees are sea creatures, so it leaves them open to being mistaken for other sea creatures. Mermaids, for instance.

I don't know if you've heard this, but it's often cited that old sailor's tales of mermaids were actually based on sightings of manatees. This story has a wonderfully absurd feel to it. How, after all, did they mistake these bulky, slow, not-getting-a-date-for-prom sea mammals for halfway beautiful heart breakers of the sea? It's a common stereotype that sailors get notoriously horny when between ports, so how much pent up lust does it take for a man to mistake a sea-cow for a possibly-consenting fish-like partner?

I guess my real question is, who figured this out? After a sailor came to port with tales of pruny-fingered women of the deep, who fact-checked him? The subject of his story is still in the far reaches of the ocean. Was there a weak-armed bubble-burster on board who re-identified the creature, and then, when the boat landed, told everyone about how he had out-smarted the other sailors?

Let me tell you what I think, because you knew I would. I don't think anybody that hasn't eaten a good ounce of magic mushrooms is going to see a mermaid when looking at a sea-cow. It has zero of the markers that would indicate a mermaid. The front half doesn't look like a woman, the back half doesn't look like a fish, and it's slow, casual movements will never remind anyone of anything but a sea-cow.

I honestly don't know where the belief that mermaids were actually manatees came from, and if someone came up with it in a quick spurt of whack-a-mole debunking, I have to wonder why the individual chose, of all of the creatures in the sea, the manatee as a mermaid stand-in. But his conclusion apparently can't be that absurd, because people love quoting it to each other, never considering that it's likely not true.

I mean, maybe, if you're feeling sarcastic, a submerged manatee looks a little like a beautiful woman. Maybe a PT Cruiser looks like a bigfoot. And, in a hundred years, when that sentence has bled out of this blog, and into the society, people will be looking back, thinking about how silly it was that we mistook the strange-looking car for the missing link, and not considering that it probably never happened.

On a related note, read a curious story from 2009 about mermaid sightings off the coast of Israel. I don't believe that the creature sighted is a mermaid (though wouldn't that be exciting?) but I believe just as strongly that it was not a manatee. More on this story later, when it's even further out of date.

Thanks for reading.

When climate change becomes personal

2010-10-18T11:31:00.000-07:00

A 2010 poll conducted by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication have revealed some trends in belief that aren't that surprising. 2,030 American adults were polled, and asked questions about climate change. Not hard ones, either. It turns out, about 45% of the people polled understood that CO2 traps heat, and 57% understood that this is what's referred to as the greenhouse effect. Wait a minute...

Anyway, there's a lot of information (and please take a look at it yourself, as you have the freedom to do so), but the end result is that Americans (I am one of these) get a big F on knowledge about the shift of the climate.

But can you blame us? Not only do we have a lot of misinformation going around, and neither the time nor the attention span to sort through it, but, even if this issue is knocking on our door, it hasn't yet put its muddy boots on our couch. What I'm saying is, however immediate of a problem climate change is, it's not as immediate as paying for Alicia's Karate classes, or picking up Robert from the airport. Summers are still hot, winters are still cold, and climate change is, to most of us, just a thing on the news.

Call me a pessimist, but I don't think that any real effort is going to be put forth by the public until it's too late. And what I mean by real effort is, do you know how sometimes you think you're trying your best to, say, clean up the house, but then you hear that the in-laws are coming over in thirty minutes, and you're suddenly a coked-out Mr. Clean? We're not good judges of our own potential, and nearly all of the time that we think we're giving something our best effort, we later find out that we were actually half-assing it.

So, when will we start really caring, with our full attention, about the climate, and our impact on the environment? When will we stop pretending that carrying a half-dozen reusable shopping bags in the trunk of our hybrid is going to change a thing? Especially if we forget them before we go into the store.

The day we stop tearing down mountains to get at the ore hidden underneath, stop putting walls across rivers, stop laminating the soil with endless asphalt, and do away with the idea of healthy population growth... well, I'm just afraid that it will be a very dark day. A day when a Florida hurricane doesn't stop blowing until it's over Nebraska. A day when people can't move to a northern state, because they're all frozen over. A day when our crops stop flowering, and we just plain don't know why.

I'm not into fear mongering. I'm actually a fairly laid-back person. However, while I do have faith in people, as individuals, I don't have much faith for people as a society. When I try to think of how far it will have to go before climate change becomes an immediate concern--something that's as important to day-to-day life as repairing the dishwasher--I can't picture it.

People make speculations all the time as to what it will look like when it gets really bad, but no matter how many PhDs the person has, or how many TV shows they've been on, it's all guessing. We can no more predict the future of our climate than we can predict next weeks Lotto numbers. It's too complex. The only thing that we can predict is that, if you consider consistency and stability good, it probably won't be good.

Thanks for reading.

NASA photoshopping images of space?

2010-10-13T10:58:00.000-07:00

Image taken from foxnews.com, but really from NASA

NASA-watching conspiracy theorists found something to latch onto recently when one of them noticed that NASA's picture of the day, when the contrast was increased, had received some very obvious touching up. The image of Saturn's moons apparently had something very large behind the smaller moon, Dione, which the space agency had effectively erased. What are they trying to hide?

The evidence, posted by NASA itself, and fed through your own image-editing program, is fairly compelling. Around the blacked-out pixels, a green and red aurora can be seen.

Well, how is the dark and conspiratorial National Aeronautics and Space Administration going to spin this one? We caught them red handed, editing their own images, after all. The official explanation, against all expectation, turned out to be entirely reasonable. The image had to be photoshopped, because the Cassini probe takes photographs with a green filter, a red filter, and a blue filter, one at a time (not good for birthday parties) and the objects pictured were in motion relative to the camera. So the person working on the images had to take the full-color image of one moon, and paste it onto the full-color image of the other moon, painting over the red and green version of Dione. To me, this explanation fits the evidence provided perfectly. And I'm glad, because if there was a space ship behind that moon, it would have to be bigger than Dione itself, which is about seven thousand miles across. I think that deserves an anxious emoticon. : /

Once again, the excited boy in me is disappointed by cold, boring reality. This time a photographic process curbed my enthusiasm, but in the past it has also happened because of specs of dust, dreams, and people who are simply dishonest.

And, every time there is something like this photograph, something that is quite compelling, and really makes you wonder, and then that thing gets (I won't say debunked) shown to be more ordinary, it highlights the fact that there's so little really compelling evidence out there. Our videos of UFOs are all taken from thousands of feet away, the best video of a little gray alien we have is an admitted hoax, then there's the Oliver's Castle video, which I've already discussed. Our best bigfoot video, our best Nessie photograph. Miss Cleo. Milla Jovovich.

I want something I don't believe in to be true. I want the laws of nature to somehow result in telepathy, or for an alien civilization to, as it turns out, be visiting us frequently, and to finally decide that they want a guest spot on the Tonight Show. I want to be able to change the channel with my mind.

How many animals have been filmed as rarely as Bigfoot? I would expect the Planet Earth crew to at least have found one by now.

So I guess I'll just sit, and read the various paranormal news blogs on the web. And when Barack Obama finally declares that the politicians have been shooting pool with the extra-terrestrials since the forties, I'm going to wait on the champagne for a week or so, because I'm sure, the next day, someone is going to prove that the speech was not given by the president, but by a man in a Barack Obama costume.

Thanks for reading.

Getting into Heaven

2010-10-11T10:25:00.000-07:00

I was raised religious, and at the age of ten was pretty sure that most people were going to Hell. Getting into Heaven, after all, seemed to be just a little harder than getting into MIT. People would sell it to me like it was not that hard, but I could read between the lines.

I would be sitting in Sunday school, or talking to one of my fellow church kids, perhaps the scripture-worm that grew up in the Ned Flanders house, and was so religious that it was just a tiny bit awkward for the rest of us. I would hear

"There's only one thing God isn't able to do. He can't let sin into Heaven."

"Wait... what?" As I understand, your sins pretty much stick to you like burrs, and you have to ask for forgiveness to get them cleaned off. This brings up the very practical problem of dying after you've recently sinned.

Say you haven't asked for forgiveness since before bed last night, and you coveted your neighbor's wife at about noon today (she does, after all, make him steak every Wednesday). This is the sort of question the preacher won't take too seriously. After all, we're talking about your lifestyle, we're talking about eternity, we're not talking about fine print that your lawyer can argue over the pearly gates. This is real life, though, and even the best of us is likely to die with a sin or two stuck to the legs of our pants, and it's a serious question that deserves a serious answer. That is, unless you want a seriously shitty afterlife.

There's also the assumption that you can't ask for forgiveness after you die. Would that be cheating, or does a confession even count when you're a spirit?

Christianity, to me, always seemed to be more about the letter of the law than the spirit of it. It was reiterated to me, many times, that you would be very surprised at who is in Hell. In other words, you can be a good person, but unless you did this, and avoided this, you're not going to have a good time after you die.

This whole getting-approved-for-heaven thing has always seemed too much like a scam. If you happen to die with a clean slate, based on these rules, then you get to live here, where it's always sunny, and the lions are as friendly as can be, and you can continue to not sin* for an eternity.

Well, who's getting in? Not the Muslims, or the Buddhists, or the Hindus. Not the aboriginal nature-lovers or the polytheists. Nobody before zero AD (because no Christ means no Christianity). No atheists. Definitely no Scientologists. None of those unlucky boatless legion that couldn't kick their legs for forty days during the great flood. Plenty of good Christians have probably done some sins that they're not that regretful about, so nix them. And I sure hope you didn't want an attractive person sexually between praying last night and getting hit by a truck this afternoon. You are tainted by the very urges you are burdened with. I think Saint Peter's job as Heaven's bouncer must be an easy one. "Nobody gets in except for the big guy, and he comes in the back door."

I think we've been duped. Just like getting taken in by the "Get a Free iPad!" banners, we've entered into a contract that we can't follow through with, and our very bodies, supposedly created by God himself, are our biggest enemy on the insurmountable climb to perfection.

God doesn't want us in Heaven. That's where he keeps all of his stuff. If we were wandering around in his domain we would probably leave hand prints, grimy with sin, all over his nice white couch and flat screen TV. He wants us to be good, though, so we sign the contract, hoping that if we do this, this and this, he'll let us visit. But there's only one key to that door, and he's not getting copies made any time soon.

That is assuming, of course, that the Christian God exists. From what I've heard about him throughout my life, though, I hope he doesn't. Sinful or not, he doesn't sound like a good person.

*I think that some sin is good, in moderation.

The alternative to science

2010-10-08T11:10:00.000-07:00

I sometimes wonder, if there does happen to be a God, if he's frustrated about how much we know. He gave us eyeballs, so we can see sunsets, dropoffs and wild boars, and somehow we know about dna, atoms and quarks. He gave us legs to get around, and we're flying across the world 30,000 feet above sea level. He gave us mouths to talk, and we're communicating with computers that God himself would probably be impressed by.

These brains, that he probably thought were good enough so we could make rakes and spears, have gotten us a long way out of the savannas and mud huts. We do things that should be impossible daily, breezing through at least fifty miracles just to get ready for work.

Human ingenuity has gotten us here, but it wouldn't have gotten us this far without science. Science is modern magic, giving us as much awe and wonder as Zeus with his lightning bolts. For how important science is to our modern lifestyle, most of us (this includes me) know pitifully little about it.

A friend of mine once said that the science fiction and fantasy genres are interchangeable, that the role that magic plays in one, technology plays in the other. I'm not entirely on board with the basic premise, but there is some truth to the statement. To we lay people, there doesn't seem to be much science can't do. We don't always think of the research process, the grants, the journals, the trial-and-error, the trying to turn hypothesis into theory. We just think of the end results.

Science isn't technology, even though it often uses technology, and sometimes results in new technology. Science is just the narrowing-down of truth. It's getting rid of all of the alternative explanations until you seem to be left with only one, and then seeing if that one conforms to reality.

It's easy to get irritated with the scientific process, especially when results are slow in coming, biased for political reasons, or when the accepted paradigm gets turned over, and it turns out that everyone has been thinking the wrong thing for the last twenty years. Not to mention that the very cool-hearted impartiality that science embraces can be off-putting, as in the case of vivisection, or, for some, stem-cell research.

If you want the truth, though, science is necessary. In its most basic form, science arises naturally in our behavior, when we're investigating who knocked down the vase, or who was it that wanted you to call them back. Almost every day, there's occasion to gather evidence, cross possibilities off of your list, and even--like putting a dog treat on the counter to see if the puppy can even get up there--experimentation.

Even if you frown on some scientists, or some experiments, you should never frown on science in general, because it's just a part of being human. It's not the opposite of paranormal belief, it's not the opposite of religious belief. It's the opposite of guessing. It's the opposite of assuming everything, knowing nothing, and learning only the most basic of facts. Knowing the leaf falls, but not knowing why, nor wondering why. Because once the wondering process starts, discovery is inevitable.

The alternative is the blissfully ignorant life of your pet, or the woodpecker in the back yard. A life of love and loss, a life of survival and the gradients between desire and contentment. Perhaps a satisfying life. But a life in a world no bigger than your own stomping grounds, with no knowledge, or interest, of what's over the hill.

And maybe it's because I am a human, and I'm built to wonder, but I couldn't live that way.

Start dowsing today!

2010-10-06T09:42:00.000-07:00

When I was maybe ten, I was at my grandparents' house, and there were some aunts and uncles there, as there tended to be during that time period. One of them called me into the living room, and handed me two L-shaped pieces of wire hangers, about a foot long, with the short part of the L being handles. They told me that something was hidden in the living room, and that I was supposed to hold the two pieces of wire loosely, by their handles, with the length of them pointing forward, and then I was supposed to follow where they pointed, to lead me to the hidden object.

I don't remember how conclusive the results were, but they couldn't have been that good, because I remember them talking about how well it worked for my cousin, which sounds a little like they needed to change the subject. This was my first encounter with dowsing.

Different people have varying definitions about what dowsing is, but there are some common elements. A dowser is someone who uses an instrument that relies on physics to gain information. So, in this definition, a tarot-card reader is not a dowser, but someone scrying with a pendulum, walking around with a forked stick, or using the L-shaped wire hangers like in my example, is a dowser.

And addendum to that definition would be that the feedback from the dowser's instrument/s seems always to rely on the minute, unconscious movement of the muscles. Called the ideomotor effect, it's what makes the pendulum swing, and what makes the tensed branch dip. Our minds dictate these movements, even if we're not causing them intentionally. Contrary to popular belief, most popular writing on the subject does not contradict this. Most instructional books on dowsing seem to come from the point of view that, yes, our subconscious is moving the objects, through our muscles, but since our subconscious is connected to the rest of the universe, it's still a good source of info.

You can do it yourself, with no practice, and at no cost to you. I encourage you to, even sitting in front of my blog. Go find a nut (not a bolt, but a nut) and maybe a foot and a half of fishing line, or thread. Tie the heavy one to the end of the long one. You now have a pendulum, and are ready to tap into the knowledge of the universe.

Grab the length of string between your finger and thumb, and put your elbow on the desk. Bend your wrist so that the string is hanging parallel to your forearm, and the nut is about an inch from the surface of the desk. Following me so far? Now (and keeping a straight face, you silly skeptics) tell your fancy new pendulum something with your mind. Start with, "Pendulum, please swing counter-clockwise." I'm not sure if it's psychologically important that you address it as pendulum, but that's what I did.

It's important that you try your hardest to keep your hand still. When the thing starts to swing, as it likely will, it should be pretty surprising. Once you've had it swing counterclockwise, and clockwise, and along the x axis and the y, it's time to start getting more information than you put in. It's at this point that the whole things starts breaking down for me.

You may not expect it to give you the lottery numbers, or tell you what the neighbor is watching on TV, but as I experimented with this I was at least interested in whether it could tell me what I already knew, but was unable to remember. Things that, if my unconscious mind is the sponge it's supposed to be, should be in there. I tried to remember where I had put my headphones, and, using the pendulum, narrowed it down to within a foot of my bedroom television. Well, unless I'm quite blind, that was a miss. For how fascinating it is to watch the thing swing on command, when it came to practical applications it stopped impressing me pretty quickly.

Maybe it's because I'm a skeptic, and I'm resistant to things that are just a little too nifty. I can't say. Feel free to email me with any dowsing stories you've got. It seems like something that taps into the unconscious mind should have some practical applications, but I have never had any luck on that front.

So, there you have it. If you've followed my directions, you have a firsthand understanding of the ideomotor effect, and you can test, yourself, in your living room, whether dowsing works. I'd say that, with that kind of opportunity, you shouldn't enter another single debate on the subject until you've tried it. Because, of course, an ounce of experience is worth a pound of speculation.

And all it costs is a nut and a string.

Fabrication Post - October 5, 2010

2010-10-05T10:24:00.000-07:00

The following is not true.

When I was a kid, I had a friend that everyone thought was pretty strange, but being that I was a bit of a geek, and a bit outside of any recognized social circles, we got along fine. His name was Darren, and I didn't think he was strange at all. I was friends with him until I was about twelve, and he ended up moving with his parents to Arizona, and I never really heard from him again. The internet wasn't really a thing at the time, and I wasn't one to write letters. Our friendship ended the way friendships ended for me during childhood, quickly and cleanly.

Well, I was visiting my mom about a month ago, and I found an old picture from a birthday party, and there was Darren. I had completely forgotten about him until I saw that picture. Especially the way that he looked. There was something a little off about it his face, which I hadn't really noticed when I was a kid, but everyone else had. I guess he was probably handicapped in one way or another. Not Downs Syndrome, but something that changes the way you look. His eyes were too big.

The strangest part about seeing his face again is that I realized I have been dreaming about Darren pretty frequently. For instance, I had a dream that I was driving a small car across an impossibly long, impossibly tall bridge, and he was the guy that was sitting next to me, talking to me. Or, in one dream I was playing tennis, and he was the guy watching. Not exciting dreams, but my point is that I had completely forgotten about this kid, and now the grown-up version of him is appearing in just about every dream I have.

One thing I have noticed is that, if this guy touches me in my dream, let's say he reaches out and pokes my arm, I wake up sore in that spot. I sometimes get bruises, or little triangular dots where he contacted me in a dream. Of course, I'm sure the mind can create bruising as well as it can do anything else, but it's unnerving. I've been waking up after a full night's sleep feeling dead tired lately, barely able to do my blog, barely able to shower or even eat breakfast. And when I think about it, all I can think about is Darren, with the big eyeballs and the small chin. Thinking about him makes me feel nervous, and I'm not entirely sure why. I have this urge to move out of town, to escape my dreams, which doesn't make a ton of sense, but the urge is strong.

I found his Facebook profile last week, and there he is, just like in my dreams. He moved back to town, and works as a truck driver. In his profile picture, he's sitting in front of his computer desk, the picture not taken with a webcam, but taken with the computer sitting in the background. You can see out the window behind him, and the strange thing is that it almost looks like his house is where my house should be. As in, you can see my across-the-street neighbor, with the blue mailbox with flowers growing out of it, and the little yeild sign with the squirrels on it, and it looks like they're right across the street from him. It's just a couple of little centimeters in the corner of the image, but I've racked my brain over it a lot.

I haven't got the balls yet to add him, but I'm sure it's inevitable.

PLEASE READ

A message for those that debunk

2010-10-04T11:10:00.000-07:00

I've never debunked anything in this blog. I'm not saying it will never happen, but it never has, and I'm not in a hurry to scratch that off of my to-do list.

provocative image

One thing that I do here is to give possible explanations for things that can balance out the seemingly impossible explanations given by others. Maybe your bigfoot is a man in a suit. Maybe your balls of light are computer generated. Maybe your out-of-body experience is a very interesting kind of dream. If I have to believe it, then I'll believe it. If I don't have to, however, then I'm not going to make that leap.

Unfortunately, if you were to take one of these posts, add a bit of name-calling, and then type "Case closed" at the end, you'll have something that looks like what you might expect from many of today's professional skeptics.

A few examples:

"For those who may need further evidence for my contention, the proof can be found at http://tinyurl.com/ye9d9lp -- where it is clearly seen that the “facilitator” is looking directly at the keyboard, while the subject is asleep!" (link)
-James Randi

"She also owns the copyright to Ramtha and conducts sessions in which she pretends to go into a trance and speaks Hollywood’s version of Elizabethan English in a guttural, husky voice." (link)
-skepdic.com

"I kid you not; for some reason the best way to deliver this wonder drug is through the well-established time-honored drug delivery system that is the soles of our feet. This is so ridiculous I don’t even know where to begin." (link)
-Bart Farkas

My fellow skeptics may not see any real problems with the preceding excerpts, but a fan of any of these stories may find one or more of those statements offensive. And I think this is the gulf that should be bridged. Are we just entertaining other skeptics? Or are we writing to educate those that will listen? Who is your target audience? Who comments in your blog? Where does your traffic come from?

When you start with the assumption that a belief is silly, and then go from there, you've already lost your most important audience. Talking to those you disagree with, rather than joking with those who are on your side, takes awareness, and it's something that I'm still trying my best to master.

I don't think mermaids are real, but if my only piece of evidence is the word Duh, then I might as well not be talking. Because until you stop debunking, and stop finding different ways to write Case closed, then you'll always be seen as just another asshole skeptic.

Gliese 581, my new favorite Earth

2010-10-01T09:56:00.000-07:00

Scientists have found a planet that's not so terribly different from this one. Read the discovery.com article. It's about three Earths big, and is the right temperature to hold pools of liquid water. Astronomer Steven Vogt makes a point in the linked article that there's no reason to believe that there is not liquid water on the planet.

I'm a skeptic, but I'm not threatened by the idea of aliens. Like most things that normally fall under the umbrella of paranormal, aliens are an exciting idea, whether or not we're talking about advanced civilizations, or just a few ferns on some distant rocky ball.

Statistically, it's being said that there might be lots and lots of planets like this, being that this one was found after "looking at just nine nearby stars." So if Earths are so common, maybe there are some cities full of quasi-people out there looking at our Earth in their telescope, just wondering. Hell, maybe some of them have visited us already. If the technology for such a feat is, in fact, possible (though I have no strong reason to believe that it is) then it's not outrageous to think that we've already been visited. I'm not going too far down that logical road, though, because I've seen where it can lead.

I only have one issue with the linked article, and that's the last line. I don't know if you can chalk it up to news sensationalism, or just an excited scientist speaking beyond the evidence (probably both). But, "It's pretty hard to stop life once you give it the right conditions," is a statement that is hard to back up. It may be true, but it really may not be true, as well. So far, we only have one example of life happening, and that's us and our family here on Earth. That statement sounds like a skateboarder saying that everyone has an innate talent for skateboarding, or a drug addict saying, "If you can get some crack, you're going to smoke it." Let's get a bigger sample before we start saying what's inevitable.

I'm excited about the discovery. I might be on a high percentile of excitedness, in fact. But let's not get carried away. The facts are exciting enough without an expert making guesses. Guesses that most people are going to take to heart, just because he's an expert. Like I've said before, an expert is not an authority figure, and no number of PhDs gives someone the power to change the truth.

I'm not saying the statement is false. I'm just saying we don't know if it's false. But what if it turns out to be true? Wouldn't that be something?

The evolution of psychic ability

2010-09-30T09:48:00.000-07:00

The idea of psychic abilities is an exciting one, and I'd love to believe in it. Even being able to read someone's mind, or tell the future, 1/100 of the time would make me feel like one of the X-men, or at least a student in Xavier's School for (somewhat) Gifted Youngsters.

One way to examine a belief is to pretend, every once in a while, that it is real, and implications of the belief will often reveal themselves to you like images on an old Polaroid picture. When I assume that psychic abilities are real, I suddenly have a million questions. For instance, where does natural selection play a part in the development of these senses? How, exactly, do they interact with our existing senses, and the functions of the body?

A big red question mark that appears in my mind is, why would an ability or sense that would be very handy in survival be restricted to so few people, and hidden so deep as to be nearly inaccessible to the rest of us? There are no other senses that do this. Sight isn't something that's restricted to a small percentage of the population, and then disbelieved by the rest of us. Hearing isn't an exclusive club. So, why would extra sensory perception, which would make important decisions so much easier, alert us when someone/something means to harm us, and perhaps even let us know which mate would make the best offspring (yes, we are animals, get over it), be so poorly developed after so many millions of years of evolution? I would expect something so handy to be prominent enough in our perception that nobody would have the luxury to disbelieve in it.

I'm suddenly curious if anyone has tried to breed animals for psychic ability. Perhaps mice. If the mouse pushes on the card with a triangle, he gets a treat, and if he pushes the card with three wavy lines, then audio of a cat yowling is played. Which would be unpleasant for a mouse, of course. Perhaps we could coax the effect out. I'm going to comment in Dean Radin's blog about this.

Maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way. Maybe psychic ability doesn't have a strong selection pressure. Maybe knowing the future makes people worry, and then become ill. Maybe knowing what other people are thinking about someone will make them want to kill themselves.

We have to wonder why nature would keep such secrets, and what good it could have done us throughout the development of our species. And we also, as always, have to consider that this effect may not exist in the first place, in which case all of this would make a lot more sense. And, at the end of the day, all I really want is for the world to make sense.

Yeah, I know. Good luck, Cal. Thanks.

Believing in lucid dreams

2010-09-29T09:49:00.000-07:00

I was shopping at Fred Meyer one time with my daughter, when I had the most peculiar realization. I realized that I was not at Fred Meyer with my daughter. I realized that my daughter was at home, in bed. More importantly, so was I.

I was lucid dreaming. A lucid dream is a dream in which you know the state you're in. You realize that everything around you is just dream scenery, and as far as restrictions, and consequences, you're pretty much off the radar. I've been lucid dreaming occasionally since I was a kid. Back then, my highest priority during these moments was trying to shoot fireballs out of my hands. At twenty-eight years old, I'm now past the fireball stage.

A lot of people have never had this experience, or perhaps they've had it once, and then never again. Some people have never had it, but they've got a half-dozen books about how to induce it. It is a great experience, and is not a waste of time, which is spent sleeping, either way.

Before the 1970s, lucid dreams were not recognized by science, because they could not be induced, and then tested, in a laboratory setting. A couple of people had a couple of clever ideas, though, and it turned out that they could be tested.

If I had been born before that time, though, I would have, as a lucid dreamer, been placed in the category of UFO abductees, telephone psychics, and seance mediums. I would have been either a liar, or ignorant, and people like James Randi would have been calling me the equivalent of a woo-woo. The lucid dream is an example of a fringe belief that was eventually accepted by science.

We have to wonder what fringe beliefs of today are the scientific realities of tomorrow. I know that if it's ever proven that people can communicate between minds, (and, for whatever reason, this ability was evolutionarily made very obscure and difficult to harness) it would be the beginning of a scientific revolution.

Unfortunately for the future of parapsychology, it seems that most of these hidden abilities also happen to be things (like shadow people, synchronicity, and dowsing) that would seem to happen even in a ghost-free God-free world. It could be that, while our minds are set up to be fooled into believing these things, these things are also, coincidentally, sometimes real. Or, it could be that our minds are set up to be fooled, and they just keep getting fooled.

If life after death, though, or the interconnectedness of minds, is ever proven, even if it's only proven to me, I am ready and willing (hopefully able) to jump over the fence and shove the truth down everyone's throat, with vigor and enthusiasm. Because these sorts of abilities, if they really were real, would have sweeping implications in all parts of life. In short, it would be a big deal.

Thanks for reading.

My experience with shadow people

2010-09-28T09:45:00.000-07:00

I think we've all seen a shadow person or two. These are beings of controversial origin that look pretty much how you would guess, like living, standing shadows. You have the best chance of seeing them out of the corner or your eye.

I don't know if there's a name for this, but I have a white shadow person. When I do dishes at night, and I'm tired, I can see him (or her?) standing right by the fridge. If I turn my head at the correct angle, this person appears between the edge of the white refrigerator door, and the very edge of my periphery. I don't know why this person is so interested in my dish-doing, but I try to put on a good show.

Of course, I'm being silly. If I trusted everything I saw out of the corner of my eye, I would be a very nervous person at night, when the sunlight goes away, and I'm dead tired in spite of a video game that needs to be played. I see so many little shadow dogs sitting on the floor, and shadow people sitting on the couch, and shadow creeps hiding in the laundry room, that, if I believed they were all sentient beings, I would be calling the Catholic church for an exorcism.

Our brain makes people, whether or not people are there. It's so sensitive to people, faces in particular, that it can make people out of just about anything. Without trying too hard, we can see a face on the front of a car, or a mailman in the thick needles of a fir tree, or a man riding a horse in the drywall. Not only do we see faces, we see faces with expressions. My entertainment center looks mighty surprised right now. But if I got a wider TV it might look like it was smiling.

In our peripheral vision, which is probably less detailed than you think, our brain's person-finding software is working hard to see if anyone is there, and if there is the faintest possibility that what it's seeing could be a person, it's going to show you a person. If that person is all dark and smudgy, you get a shadow person. If that person is made out of the door of a fridge, and a water cooler a few feet away, you'll get a reverse-shadow person.

This is another instance where it can be unwise to believe your own eyes. Especially the corners of your eyes, which are always a bad witness. You'd never identify a mugger by standing at a right-angle to the lineup, after all. You would never try to catch a baseball by looking to the side.

Our poor brains try their hardest to do what they can with what they have. They're the most advanced computers on the planet, but they're handling such a gargantuan heap of data every second that things do get filed into the wrong categories, and the wrong emotions get triggered, and we end up with an anomalous experience that, in the end, may have never existed outside of our own experience.

Because, in the end, everything we see, hear, feel, taste and smell depends entirely upon our brain's passive, running-in-the-background interpretation of what's going on around us. These are based on light waves, vibrating air, particles floating near our faces, and electrical signals from the skin. The closest that any of us will get to directly experiencing something is just reading the reports that our senses write out for us.

When the sense of sight tells you something, you have to take it with a grain of salt, because not only is sight a bit superstitious, but it's also perfectly confident of what it's saying. And that's always a bad combination.

Not a post about reincarnation

2010-09-27T09:35:00.000-07:00

No blog today. Wrote a long post about reincarnation, but did some fact-checking and found out that my main theme (that there are more people now than ever in history) seems to be incorrect.

So here's a video called "UFO Base in Brazil."

Very believable, the way he's saying it. I'm impressed.

The Placebo Effect is my favorite effect

2010-09-24T11:10:00.000-07:00

These days, trust is something many of us have left behind. People don't leave their bicycles unlocked, most of us look for fine print before we sign even the most benign contracts, and we take the claims printed on product packaging with a grain of salt, always. This is because we are lied to, all the time, and we are used to it. Dishonesty has a thousand different faces, and we've seen these faces on our newscasters, salespeople, politicians, spokespeople, mascots, CEOs, and Milla Jovovich. Our guard stays up, because when there is money to be made, people say whatever it is they need to say to get some of that money.

Over time, as we've learned more about the way the human body works, this distrust has even spread to our medications and our folk remedies. Even treatments that work like a charm are questioned. Maybe they're not really working. Maybe it's just the placebo effect.

The placebo effect, if you don't know, is when there's some condition in the body, a treatment is given, and the body heals simply because of the belief that the treatment will help, even when the treatment is just a sugar pill, or a saline injection. Pharmaceutical companies deal with the placebo effect regularly in their drug trials, where they'll only release some drugs if test subjects given the medicine actually get better than test subjects given only a sugar pill.

You'll hear the placebo effect mentioned once or twice when a form of alternative medicine is being debunked. "Well, of course shaking a snake over your abdomen fixed your ulcer, but did it do better than the sugar pill?"

Yes, the placebo effect is very handy when you're debunking bunk, and it's very handy when you're testing drugs, but I sometimes feel like I'm in the vast minority in thinking that we should take a closer look at it.

I mean, Asprin's great, and Amoxicillin is oh-so-delicious in its liquid form, but I could have swore that it's generally accepted (and backed by great body of evidence) that certain bodies, in certain instances, can heal themselves without medicine. And not just drink-plenty-of-fluids healing, but quick, dramatic, medicine-style healing.

Drugs often fool our bodies into doing things. Make more of this hormone, create more of this neuropeptide, shut off these nerves real quick. Well, it turns out that, some of the time, our bodies can be fooled the same way, just by what we believe. Our brain is in charge of all of this, it can naturally do many of the things that the medicines can artificially do.

So, why are we not using this?

Yeah, we don't want doctors handing out sugar pills to ill patients, but there has got to be a way to harness this facility. We're a clever species, after all, and, just like we were told as children, we can do anything we put our minds to. If I were to choose between filling my body with expensive and unpredictable chemicals to treat something and... well, not doing that, then I'd go with the second choice every time.

But modern medicine is not rushing to fund studies on this. At least, not as quickly as it's rushing to fund the nice medicines that will be on the class-action lawsuit commercials a year from now, "If you've taken Yaz...."

I guess this is why I'm not so ferociously against alternative medicines. If people aren't going broke over it, and aren't making their conditions worse because of it (two things that do happen), then it seems that alternative medicine is a great way to employ the placebo effect. I say this not with derision, but with cautious optimism.

As I've said before, I'm not a truth-purist, and when it comes to truth vs. practicality, the second one, in my mind, is sometimes more important.

So, if your friend's homeopathic acid-reflux medication seems to work wonders, leave him/her to it. The only thing is, you can't tell them the secret behind their remedy, because that will make it stop working.

Thanks for reading.

Why The Fourth Kind left me feeling sad

2010-09-23T11:34:00.000-07:00

I was recently lied to by someone that I care for.

I'm not an entertainment blogger, by any means. I don't keep up on movies or TV, and have a hard time watching anything that annoys me even a little bit. Not only that, my opinion of what's good, as far as media is concerned, often varies wildly from what I hear other people say is good. I really enjoyed The Last Airbender, for instance. All of this is fine with me. I waste enough of my time without wasting it trying to keep up on the new releases.

With this in mind, you'll forgive the tardiness of my post. I understand that The Fourth Kind was released on DVD some months ago. I've seen movie posters, and thought, "Oh, some alien movie." Then my significant other bought it for me, a few days ago, and I was a little more intrigued. This is supposed to be like a documentary. I enjoy watching documentaries about the paranormal the same way I enjoy watching stage magic, trying to figure out exactly where I might be getting misled.

So, at night, in a dark room, by myself, I watch it. The first scene is Milla Jovovoich, as herself, basically emphasizing that what I'm about to see is real, and here's the real archival footage, and all that. I know how it works, I've watched documentaries before.

The movie is pretty creepy, and the footage (which runs alongside dramatizations of the footage) is pretty remarkable. However, I have to mention something. When you're watching youtube, and you sometimes make the realization, "That's what it really looks like when someone falls down the stairs!" or " That's what it really looks like when someone drives a truck into a living room!" we can feel that what we're looking at is what actually happened. There's a certain quality that real footage has that movie scenes do not. A bit of randomness, a lack of grace, unflattering camera angles. It's the flavor of reality. The archival footage on The Fourth Kind did have a bit of this flavor, but it was not strong.

The movie ends with Milla talking as herself again, urging me to make my own decision about what to believe. Of course, I immediately jumped on the internet to help me decide. It turns out that the fakeness of the footage is old news. I'm not one to take any debunker's statements without questioning them, but everything I read made sense, Google Maps showed me that the real town looks very very different that the town in the "archival footage." In short, it was a movie.

I think one of the reasons I'm a skeptic is to balance out my natural naivity. Naivity that would have me think that a documentary is a documentary, and that a movie would not go so far out of its way to convince me that it is real, when everyone involved knows that it is not. I guess my belief was that if a documentary comes out that is not factual, it is because the creators are actually fooling themselves, not because they are trying to fool the audience. My thinking was incorrect.

But I think the thing that hurts most is that Milla Jovovich, whose career I've watched blossom since I was fifteen years old, would break through the fourth wall, go out of her way to talk to me as herself, and then lie to my face (or a camera that represents my face, at least). This is not what I would expect out of the loveable Leeloo in her masking tape outfit. This is not what I would hope for from the dangerous (but honest?) Alice, firing guns with both of her hands. This is not alright.

Should you watch the movie, if you haven't already? I can't tell you. I'm not a movie critic, and I don't like movie critics. If you really want to watch a documentary, though, I'd say check out The Cove, or Outfoxed, or The King of Kong. Good ones, and they don't need a beautiful woman to convince you that they're real. But I'm pretty sure they are.

The Montauk Monster eats my cat food

2010-09-20T09:56:00.000-07:00

Today's story comes from the field of cryptozoology. In 2008, a strange beast, about the size of a cat, allegedly washed up dead on the shores of Montauk, which lies on the eastern tip of New York. It was photographed from many different angles, and became a relatively big news story, drawing the attention of many, including skeptics.

People sat at their desks all around the world, ready to debunk the so-called Montauk Monster (Click the link to see the creature. I didn't want to ugly-up my blog with it). All manner of animal species were thrown at the corpse, with hopes that one would stick. Some called it a raccoon. Some said that it was a sea turtle sans shell. Some called it a large water rat, a dog, a sheep, a sloth, or even a biological experiment. William Wise, director of Stony Brook University's Living Marine Resources Institute, has a wonderfully credible name, and he said that it was simply a fabrication. The body was never studied in-person by scientists, so any guess is as good as any other, right?

Well, no. Just like not all evidence is created equal, not all speculation is created equal. For instance, even a modestly educated man like myself can tell that the beast was never a sea turtle. Firstly, the turtle's spine is actually a part of its shell, secondly... well I hope you'd have to hit someone over the head pretty hard before they thought that thing was a sea turtle, is all I'm sayin'. If it's not obvious to you, then I probably don't have the power to convince you.

It wasn't a rodent. It has some rodent-y features about it, for sure, the teeth are wrong. Those are not the kind of teeth that chew holes through our drywall and plastic cereal canisters. A rodent's mouth is pretty distinct.

As for a latex fabrication, it's not a bad guess, but I personally don't agree. Some things have a certain realness that you can see, and while this sense is not so hard to fool, it tells me that this nasty thing was actually a living creature once.

After doing some of this modern internet version of research, it seems likely that this poor thing is actually a drowned raccoon. It's not obvious, but taking a look at a raccoon skeleton casts some light on the subject. I'm not 100% sure that's the case, but it sure seems to be.

I think two things are interesting about the story of the Montauk Monster:

1. How quickly we latch on to something mysterious, just because it's mysterious. Without this kind of reaction, science would have never been founded. But, then again, neither would have religion. I imagine that, when we were still a new species, we ran into the mysterious so often that we probably spent most of our time giving things labels and explanations that would later become mythology.

2. How quickly many of my fellow skeptics, when confronted with something that is mysterious, will scramble to debunk it, worried less about the truth, and more about getting that blemish off of their worldview. This is whack-a-mole debunking, and when the average person reads that kind of nonsense, they may come away thinking that they live in a world where something that's obviously not a turtle may be a turtle. After all, science is counter-intuitive often enough that some people just believe everything a professional skeptic says.

To those of us that do write for the public, let's think twice before becoming too hasty with explanations. Whether you like it or not, there are people out there who hang on your every word, and will be bringing up your conclusion in discussion boards for years to come. "That was debunked back in 2008!"

So let's tread a little more carefully, and not make a fool of these people by jumping to foolish conclusions. Sometimes your worldview has to be a little blemished. Mine is pock-marked and scarred beyond recognition. The trick to it is to know that you don't know it all.

Get that one down, and you'll be fine.

A note on Fabrication Friday #2

2010-09-18T13:33:00.000-07:00

I'm not doing Fab Friday just on Fridays any more. It should still be about once a week, though. FYI

Fabrication Post - Sep 18, 2010

2010-09-18T13:26:00.000-07:00

The following is not true.

Just out of high school, I worked for a construction company, Collins Construction, for about six months. It turned out that it was the same construction company that my fifth grade teacher's (Mrs. Collins) husband owned, and it was a strange reunion seeing that teacher again after about a decade.

Anyway, I was a heavy guy at the time, and it took me about a month of nine hour days to get really used to the level of physical labor at that job. It was always obvious how dangerous it was, and there was a really serious injury about once a month on any given job site. We kept a lot of hydrogen peroxide around, just because it gets blood out of fabric.

About five months in, I finally decided that it wasn't what I wanted to be doing my whole life, and I'd saved up enough for a down payment on an apartment, and a couple months rent. The accident happened the day before I was scheduled for an interview at the courthouse on the West Side.

I didn't see what exactly happened, but from what I understand Emanuel was driving the backhoe, scooping up rocks and gravel out of the bottom of this swimming pool in a backyard that had ended up being bedrock about five feet down. He wasn't being careful, and I guess a fairly large sharp chunk of granite slid off of his scoop, slid across the top of a shed (I don't remember hearing this) and then hit me straight on. From what people told me, a sharp edge of the rock cut through my arm pretty cleanly, breaking the table, and the flat part of it hit my head. I woke up in the hospital two days later, and the arm was just gone. I was angry, because I thought they had to ask before they took a limb. I was in shock.

Long story short, they sent me home one week later, telling me to keep the stump elevated, and to clean the gashes on my face and shoulder daily. I didn't care about the gashes, I just wanted my arm back.

I had been reading about the Law of Attraction before the accident, and I had a lot of faith in that, and I wondered if I could actually grow an arm back using it. Of course, I had nothing to lose.

I didn't tell anyone about my project, because they would just talk me down, and that wasn't what I needed. Every night, though, I would do a really simple visualization of my arm just growing back, like a newt's arm. I would see it over and over until I fell asleep, and then I would usually dream about it. I never lost interest, because my missing arm had become the focal point of my life. I didn't want to learn how to do things one-handed, I wanted two.

After doing this for about three months, my stump, which had been feeling fine, suddenly flared up with pain, and I went back to the hospital. They did an x-ray, but didn't tell me what was wrong. They sent me home with pain meds.

It was another three months before my mom (yeah, moving out had been put on the back burner) noticed me re-tying off my left sleeve. I hadn't even thought about it, only knowing that my stump was feeling tight in the sleeve. I told her, and we looked at it. It still looked the same way that it had, but we compared it to photos from after the surgery, and it was definitely longer.

And that's what happened, over the next two and a half years. I would keep visualizing, and then there would be a horrible pain in my arm, and it would regenerate itself about a half inch. It's been a decade now, and I'm typing this with two hands. I could show you the photos, and I could have my doctor write a testimonial, but there's no such thing as proof in the age of photoshop. You're either going to believe me or you're not. I just want to give the message that nothing is impossible, when you use the power of your mind.

PLEASE READ

The Oliver's Castle video

2010-09-17T09:12:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of people who will tell you, with great conviction, that crop circles are created by balls of light. I've heard people say that they give off microwave radiation, that makes the crops wilt in certain chosen spots, creating the formations we see in aerial photos, on the news and on the internet.

In this day and age, the age of nearly ubiquitous video cameras, one might wonder where the video evidence is of this process. It doesn't take long on Google, though, to find that such a video does exist, and it's from a slightly earlier day and age. Simply called the Oliver's Castle video, it's low-quality footage of a field that, after some low-flying balls-of-light visit it, is suddenly marked with a telltale crop circle. The footage is pretty remarkable to see. Please take a look if you haven't seen it before.

Well, the man who took the footage (look at timestamp 3:40), John Wabe, confessed a couple of years later that he did, in fact, create the footage himself, on a computer, in a television studio. Case closed, right?

No, when it comes to belief, it's never case closed. The Oliver's Castle footage was so important to the balls-of-light create crop circle groups, that even a videotaped confession has not wiped out the following of that video. A man told me online, the other day, that the actual man who'd taken the footage has disappeared, and the man who made the confession was an impostor. I can't disprove that, so I just shrugged. This website states that the video withstands closest analyses. That's a very powerful statement. I'm going to show you, though, that the video does not withstand a slightly more distant analysis.

Watching a documentary on the subject (the one linked above), I saw what has to be the best piece of evidence for the video being a fabrication. In my mind, the best evidence is always the evidence that you can see for yourself, without any experts or celebrity middle-men muddying the waters.

If you look at the first couple seconds of the video, there are balls of light flying around the field. Now, this might be because Hollywood has us expecting the camera to be where to action is, but most of us don't immediately notice that, during those first couple of seconds, the cameraman is not following the balls of light. Why not? As it turns out, his camera is actually framing the spot where a crop circle is about to form.

As in, he was aiming the lens at nothing interesting, yet.

Then, suddenly, out of this nothing interesting, a crop circle appears. He doesn't even catch the edge of it, and then focus. He's immediately staring straight down into it, and then it develops like a Polaroid nearly dead-center in his camera's eye.

One trick many of us have picked up in the age of digital trickery is to ask, "Why was he filming this?" If a video depicts a newspaper boy being attacked by a chupacabra, you have to ask why someone was even filming a newspaper boy in the first place. So, in the Oliver's Castle video, you have to ask why he chose to film a section of perfectly normal field when there were mysterious balls of light bobbing around the place.

If you look at John Wabe's confession (or impostor John Wabe, whatever the case may be) this fits perfectly with that. If you look at the people telling us that the debunking of this video was a hoax itself, this does not fit with that. And, unlike the government paying this man to make up a phony story, this is something you can actually see with your own two eyes.

So, why was he filming that spot in the middle of the field? Well, because there was a crop circle there, and he wanted to have a bit of fun. Why else?

Thanks for reading.

Why we hoax

2010-09-16T10:02:00.000-07:00

People hoax things sometimes. We can all agree on this. But, when we get to attached to an idea (whether it's Eastern religion, spirit channeling or the Shamwow) we get blinded to the hoaxter possibility. "Well, this and that may be wrong, but at least I can tell that he/she is being honest."

While I call into question anyone's ability to tell whether someone's being honest, that's a different matter for a different day. Much of the time, an individual has a very clear reason to be dishonest, which may look like dollars in the US, or pounds sterling in the UK, perhaps yen in Japan, but it all amounts to the same thing. Money has been a great power in the campaign to turn otherwise good people into scam artists since its invention. As the saying goes (and I'm not entirely sure it's true) Everyone has their price.

But then that leaves all of these other things. Things where something happens, and there is no clear motive for someone to have lied, or faked evidence. They're not making tourist money, book money, talk show money or movie rights money. Sometimes the hoaxter, if there actually was a hoax involved, has hidden from public view. In these cases, those of us that are rather attached to the idea of something being real may argue that it was not a hoax, because obviously the perpetrator would have nothing to gain, in the measure of dollars, pounds, or yen.

When it comes to fooling people, though, there's always a motive. Even if the trickster is losing money in the exercise, there is always a motive. That motive is fun.

It's fun to fool people. Whether you want to throw on a bigfoot costume, video-edit balls of light making a crop circle, or just give a moving testimonial on the internet on how ipecac helped your ulcers. I don't know if you're like me, but I think there's something very thrilling about telling a tall tale, and having people hang on every word.

It is fun to fool people. I don't know if I'm special, or if this is just a quirk of the animal we call Humanity. Untold millions of practical jokes have happened, and very few people ever gained a dollar off of them. Youtube is crowded with things like cell-phone radiation popping popcorn, a giant Lego-ball rolling down a street, not to mention the ridiculous chain-emails that get sent my way, giving me the most absurd advice I may have ever gotten.

I recently read an article in WIRED magazine (yes, I'm a few months behind) about this very subject. It's called Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare-Time Revolution. It's a very good read, and is basically a discussion of something that we all already know, but doesn't really seem to be fully integrated into many of our worldviews. Besides biological imperatives (eat, drink, watch Beyonce music videos), and reward-punishment type motivations, there is a third drive, which amounts to just doing something because it interests you. This is why Wikipedia exists, it's why Youtube exists. Hell, it's why half of the modern internet exists, including this blog. Don't let the ads fool you, my fortune cookies do not mention money.

So, the next time you hear a knocking on your window, and nobody is there when you look, keep in mind that someone might be having a great time at your expense. The next time you see gigantic footprints when you're out camping in the Pacific Northwest, don't discount the possibility that there is someone with a big rubber foot watching the newspapers, waiting for photographs of his handiwork. And next time you get a convincing email telling you that hugging your kid causes Ebola, don't let the kid suffer for someone else's jollies.

I think we're all tricksters, at some level. And I'm sure we were that way long before the invention of money.

Thanks for reading.

The Polite Skeptic Interview: Matthew Williams, circlemaker

2010-09-15T13:03:00.000-07:00

Matthew Williams is a circlemaker.

After a strange experience earlier in life, Matthew took to investigating the paranormal. His investigation into crop circles showed him a world that he didn't expect. One thing lead to another, and he found himself out in the fields, with a stomper-board, some surveyor's tape, and a group of good friends, making his own contribution to the UFO mythology. Everything went fine until, wanting to prove a point, Matthew sent a diagram of an upcoming crop circle to Author and UFO researcher Whitley Strieber, and then wound up with police at his front door.

Matthew's arrest was something of a blessing in disguise, suddenly allowing him to become more public about the art of crop circle making, and to speak out against circle researchers who, in his view, often skewed evidence, not to mention, from time to time, flat-out lying about their findings.

Matthew Williams explains on his Youtube Channel that crop circle makers are not hoaxters, but artists, and that the wonder that the circles inspire in the public give them joy. Another message is that, even though it's humans that make the circles, the circles themselves are still surrounded by mysteries that even the men with the boards can't begin to explain.

Matthew gives us a look into a secretive world of the circlemaker, a world that very few know about, and even fewer have firsthand experience with. It's fascinating, and evidence that both the images of the grinning prankster, and the artistic UFOs, are both very simplistic when compared to the reality of the situation.

The Polite Skeptic: It would be commonly expected that someone with your experience would be skeptical of paranormal things. Why is it that you aren't, and could you give a rough estimate of what percentage of crop circle makers are skeptical?

Matthew Williams: I started off as a skeptical child, reading books about the paranormal but seeing them as just wide tales, and treating what I was reading as fiction turned into fact, perhaps in the same way that I viewed religious books. Then, my cynical mind took a powerful bashing when I experienced something odd whilst driving over a mountain road one night. I saw a triangular light, with a placement that would have made it hundreds of feet in size. It was standing vertically in front of a mountainside, behind a tree line. I lost sight of the object after, and to this day am no nearer to knowing what it was, although parts of my investigation led me to ask even more questions about our faculties for perception and our recall of strange events. This was my trigger moment, if you like.

After this point, I was in a position where I had to state that I could not understand my experience, and I felt pity and empathy for those who, like me, might be retelling their genuine experiences and having no way to fully understand what it was they saw. My interest in the paranormal became rekindled, and I dug out my old books and read the pages with a new vigor, to learn what I had perhaps missed previously. Now the words on the page had a meaning to me, and a gravitas, that they had not had before. I started to meet people who were interested in the paranormal, and through talking about interests, and eventually interviewing people about their strange experiences, it became clear I was starting to become an investigator of sorts.

If we skip forward a long way to me now being a circlemaker, and believing that the circles we create are a paranormal trigger for not only the circlemakers, but for the people who visit the circles afterwards, I am still interested in investigating and relaying strange experiences to others as truthfully as I can.

To answer your question, nearly all circlemakers I know have claimed to have had odd experiences whilst out at night. Whereas many circlemakers try their hardest to work out what these experiences were, they are left scratching their heads. Up until this year, all bar one major circlemaker had told me of their own strange experiences. This year though, out of the blue, I was told that this major circlemaker had recently seen a silent, black, triangular object fly over him, and his team members had seen this as well. I would like to be able to do an interview to record his experience, but this circlemaker is a bit like Banksy, and a bit shy of being known by face or name. So the interview, if it does take place, will have to be anonymous.

So that just about wraps up all the circlemakers as having strange experiences, and being far more open-minded towards their place in circlemaking and their ability to connect with strange stuff by being out in the fields. Even if they do one day manage to convince themselves of rational explanations for their experiences, they certainly do not have any rational explanations at the moment.

Would you recommend circle making for someone who's interested in studying supernatural things?
I have always stated that, since my involvement in making crop circles, the frequency of paranormal events in my life has gone up remarkably. Since I'm not making so many circles anymore, I have noticed that things have gotten quieter. So, I would say that being involved does seem to have an effect for strange things happening in your life.

This includes ghost sightings, UFO sightings, precognitive events and sightings of strange black figures in the fields who disappear once discovered. Then you have the balls of light which chased us out of one field where we were just about to make a circle. That time, we were at first unable to do so because of some kind of mind blocking effect, and when we tried to shake this blocking effect, these balls of light appeared and forced us to leave. We have experienced time alteration in one crop circle we made. I once observed an oval shape in the cloud above us, and I realised that it was raining outside of the circle we were making, but not raining inside.

I was once able to pick up a "transmission" of a circle design that I felt compelled to immediately go out and do, and it turned out that this circle was a few hundred feet away from people meditating, asking for that same design. There was also the time that we were shrouded from view by a fog bank while making a circle, and it kept a group nearby from seeing us working, but we could clearly see them, almost like a one-way mirror effect.

All of these events, and a whole lot more I haven't mentioned, make me say that yes circles are freaky things that put you right in the heart of strangeness. It can raise your heart rate when you try to stay calm in the face of such weirdness, but I have become a bit cocky about it, having now seen so much. It's almost as if my brain says "Oh yes, what next?". I am in no doubt that we circlemakers have experienced the weird!

What's your response to crop circle researchers with evidence that the circles are made by "balls of light"?
It is very easy to see one thing and attach its importance to the nearest weird thing around. Say, for example, we are making a crop circle, and people see balls of light in or near that circle. The first thing they would say is "The balls of light made the crop circle", or A + B must = AB, and they usually go on to assume C and D also. This is very common.

We don't deny that people see strange things at or near the circles we create, but seeing as we too have experienced weird things whilst making circles, we cannot deny other peoples' experiences. However, it is very hard for us to believe some of these experiences, because there are also, it would seem, a glut of people who get attracted to circles who are severe liars and make stuff up. It's not easy to separate the liars and fictionalists from genuine people with real stories. We do know, however, that when you create hysteria of a certain type, then others will tend to latch on to themes and start seeing and experiencing those things.

Take, for example, the myth that the military are somehow sampling circles, and flying overhead and dropping stuff into circles. Complete nonsense. Nonetheless, you have people now taking a close look at every helicopter in the heavy training airspace of the Vale of Pewsey and thinking they see things coming out of these helicopters. These are mostly stories, and not backed up with photo or video evidence. The one or two cases where there is photo evidence leads people to make connections that this must prove their theories.

In fact, these events might just be chance happenings that appear to be connected because you have A: a helicopter or B: a ball of light. To make such assumptions I think is wrong, as perhaps the balls of light are there all the time. Like with our own observations, we assumed the balls of light were there chasing us out of the field. Perhaps the balls of light were in the area and had nothing to do with our making a circle. To an outside observer, they would have seen the balls of light go through that field we were chased out of, and say "Ah you see? It was the balls of light making the crop circle". So it is all relative to your experience, how much you actually saw, and the assumptions you made.

What frustrates me is that I have heard people say, quite convincingly, that they have seen balls of light and black shapes make certain circles that I know 100% were made by people I know, or, in fact, by myself and our team. There is very little chance that you would convince the person who says they saw this that you, in fact, made that circle. They simply wouldn't have it, and they would see what we are saying as some form of conspiracy to silence the "balls of light make circles truth" around this subject. I can see why people would react this way, but what I must say to people is that you have to try and stand back a little, and realise all the possibilities, before running away with just one. What I would like people to try to do, is just see each event as a separate thing and not jump to conclusions, but present the events as factually as possible without sensationalising and making vast connections.

Now, with the proliferation of the "balls of light create crop circle" footage (AKA Oliver's Castle), where balls of light seemingly create the crop circle star shape, it has long been established that this was a fake piece of computer art by a TV trained graphic artist called John Wabe who lives in Bath and works for HTV. He has taken investigating camera crews to his HTV studio in Bristol, and showed them the footage on his CGI workstation, and explained how he created it. The lid is on and sealed over this case being fake, yet you speak to 80% of crop circle lovers out there, and they are not having any of it! They will argue against you loudly and with great arrogance when confronted with the facts about this story.

If you don't believe me, check out my video which has a link to the explanation footage, although now that I've just checked, National Geographic, who just did the piece, have pulled it off YouTube due to copyright infringement. Which means that loads of "it's real" videos remain, and not the original footage. I will see if I can track it down and get someone to repost it.

It's funny that parts 1 through 4 are still up there, just part 5 has been pulled! Odd that, don't you think? I would imagine National Geographic have been harassed by the croppies [crop circle researchers/enthusiasts] to remove this evidence. Otherwise, why would parts 1 through 4 still be there? And don't believe that croppies are beyond doing such a thing. In their war to control information on this subject, this would be damning proof they don't want you to see!

You've recently posted on YouTube a seminar where you revealed all of the crop circles you were involved in, up until the year 2000. What kind of response has this gotten?
Strangely, this hasn't had as much of a reaction as I thought it would. I know that believers do go out of their way to avoid such information, though, so probably they would be offended by it, and not want to click a link to such a video, and would turn it off quickly if they started to realise what they were watching. I also expect that all the crop circle proponents such as Blake, Glickman, Pringle, Silva etc. would never approve of any of their crowd ever watching such a video, so would probably not even mention it to their followers, in hope that they had never heard about it.

I have had the very usual "fuck you idiot all the circle you showed were crap ones, nothing like the real thing and I had sex with you mom last night". That type of comment is becoming more common on my channel recently. It just shows the levels of low some people who claim to have higher knowledge over crop circles than me are prepared to go to in order to try and wear me down. I assure you, though, that anyone who's had sex with my dead mother is rather sick... (That's a joke. Yes they did say that, and sadly my mum is dead).

Is there any bad blood toward you within the community of crop circle makers because of your outspokenness, or the publicity you give to a fairly clandestine art form?
Yes, there is some apparent bad blood towards me, it would seem, from only one camp, but I ignore it really, because (without mentioning names) it boils down to the fact that I am talking about making circles, and this is for "publicity to make a name for myself". The very same people who say this have a website dedicated to making circles, and go on TV talking about how to do it. So you go figure... This just seems like a bit of professional jealousy, because those saying it would like to be thought of as the best circlemakers that have ever lived, and they want to give that impression in order to charge money to make circles. Which is something that we have never had the opportunity to do, nor done to this point. Well, unless you call £75 all day making a circle for a newspaper story payment. Having two faces on the block talking about it detracts from their prime limelight, I guess. It all seems very petty, but i try to ignore any strange attitudes which come across like this. After all, we're circlemakers - lets just get on with doing that, and not bitching... (oops I am doing that now, hehe).

On the subject of money, none of the hardcore unknown circlemakers ever get paid diddly squat. That goes with being unknown. I suppose I have got a form of payment in being asked to go to New Zealand and Italy to make a circle, but then money which was handed over only covered money lost for team members being away from their normal day jobs.. Anyhow, I digress. I suppose the bad feelings on never being offered any commission to make a paid circle runs the other way, because the circlemakers who do 95% of the unpaid/uncommissioned real circles which appear every year in Wiltshire don't ever get a look in on any commercial work. Due to their high profile, all paid work goes to the unnamed highly public team.

I know that spats between Wilts circlemakers and teams from outside that come in have probably made working with each other impossible now. It's like chalk and cheese personality issues which have led to actual fights breaking out in the fields, where team members have ended up walking out of a formation and have never worked with each other since.

Very little is known outside of circlemakers about such events, and there's a hell of a lot people who don't know about the internal politics of circlemaking. There is a bitter feeling about the teams who do most of the work making circles seeming to provide a platform for the art, which helps promote the making of money for a team who publicises themselves a lot, but doesn't actually make many unpaid circles anymore. That would seem unfair as it could be considered cleaning up based on kudos for someone else's work. I'm sure the commercial team would argue that they did a lot of work in the past, so it justifies their position, but the truth is that there are a lot more teams out there than just one. Most of the teams that work never get any credit or payment for it. They do it for the pure love of the art. It's hard to think of how this unbalanced situation will ever sort itself out, unless the unknown circlemakers decide to become more well known, but these teams are quite shy and fear prosecutions.

I would say that, infights and jealousy aside, we all do try to remain on speaking terms with circlemakers from different teams, and at a push would probably all still help other teams out if we can. But, all I can say without being specific is that this year has seen many of the well-known teams working on their own and not getting so much help from other teams, if any.

What is never really understood by outsiders is that, although the art of circles is unsigned, there is a competitiveness between teams to make the best work, and to get the most exposed work, and to have the best reviewed and most loved work by the circle viewers. This is important to all teams. To this end, one team will often follow a theme of a style (say cubes) one year and try and invent new and unique styles based on that theme. It's as if the teams say through their art "ha ha, look at this one, beat that!" and other teams often try to, and do, beat them in a continual top trumps game out in the fields.

This is why the art form has raised itself to new heights of complexity and wonder, because of the competitive spirit. I know of some circlemakers who seem to do nothing but obsess on designs throughout the winter--so much so that they could probably do the design out of their head with nothing on paper. Obsessive Circular Disorder. OCD one could call it. Still, I am sure the art world has always has its obsessive artists, and that is why the art gets to be so good, and this is perhaps a demonstration of the artists being secretly jealous of each other and wanting to do one better. It's actually healthy competition, though, and keeps the teams on their feet.

Do you have any estimate on how many individuals are out there making crop circles right now (as in, this year)?
If I do a quick count on teams this year, I would say as few as 5 teams this year.

If you discount known manmade commissions from this calculation, I would say that the output from two of the teams has gone up dramatically, and out of the two main teams the split is 70% vs 30%. So, you can say that one main team, last year, probably did about 80% of all the circles out there. I know you are going to go, wow, as did I. The output of one circlemaker and his team was phenomenal last year. This circlemaker also decided early on in the year that he was going to do most of his work out of the central area of the Vale of Pewsey, as a way to show the public that this work was not only clearly manmade, but that it was, in fact, done by his team. He wanted it to be known that he would be avoiding the central area, and stated that it was to give the normal farmers a break from using their fields. Finally, he wanted to introduce a bit of diversity into the circles' locations, as there are lots of great places out there that have never been used for circles, and it would add to a broader, nicer, picture catalogue of new sites which could be visited and photographed by the croppies.

Is there any other message you'd like to give to the readers of The Polite Skeptic?
I would like to say that being skeptical is a good thing, as we should not be so wide-eyed with beliefs that we ignore other things, and we should constantly strive to review our experiences and update our opinions based on new facts. I am well aware that people can self-convince themselves easily that events they are experiencing are truly paranormal and outside of our science, or out of this world (so to speak), but careful review of events can sometimes help us understand that perhaps little-known parts of our minds can make us filter experiences, so we see what we want to see, and then remould those memories into even more distorted things.

It is important to remember that we try to fit out experiences into boxes our brains can handle, and sometimes when round pegs don't fit into square holes, our brain will start squaring off those round pegs. To understand some of how these mechanisms work, and why what we think we see is sometimes not what we are seeing, I would suggest a very good read: Perspectives by John Spencer, is a superb primer on the subject of the paranormal, and it will help you to realise that, although trigger events can be real, sometimes the brain can spiral a little bit out of control. This book will not turn you into a disbeliever, but will, in fact, just help you to rethink events, and keep a more keen and open mind as to other possibilities. The work of Derren Brown is also fascinating for understanding how our subconscious minds act like sponges for creating events to fill a vacuum.

That aside, I still do truly believe in the magic of crop circles, and I do think there is a valid reason for people to be interested in crop circles from a paranormal point of view. If people wish to disbelieve that circlemakers are the individuals responsible for the circles, that's fine, because it's natural for people to deny mundane explanations in place of the fantastic and empowering feelings of wonder brought on by seemingly paranormal things. However, I think that, as people learn and mature, they will end up realising that people do make the circles, and that, perhaps not understanding that, and being a believer, was a very nice route on their journey to learning other bigger truths, which are still just as exciting and life-altering.

Matthew Williams's: YouTube channel, 2nd YouTube Channel

Experts vs. Authority Figures

2010-09-13T10:25:00.000-07:00

Have you ever spoken to someone about their beliefs, and partway in to the conversation you realize that they're not relaying their own beliefs, but instead preaching somebody else's doctrine?

You don't have to drink the Kool-Aid

I'm not talking about religion, not specifically. Let me give you an example of what I am talking about.

"Well, David Icke was saying, in his book, that Greece, and Troy, were actually ruled by human-alien hybrids. Actually, most of our world leaders today are hybrids. It was actually these people... I don't know if they were all hybrids of aliens... but they made up Christianity, from scratch. And these people... they were reptilian-people, David Icke says that their family tree goes through all these different countries, but like I was saying, David Icke..."

If you ever hear someone describing their beliefs to you, and they can't move through their explanation without frequently quoting someone (perhaps a popular author, or philosopher) then there is something wrong. If you find yourself doing that, then you're not talking about your belief. You're describing someone else's belief, and then you're explaining how you believe everything this person says.

I've heard somewhere (can't quickly find it on Google) that, in science, there are no authorities, only experts. When you think about it, it's true.

-An authority figure's job is to decide how it is, and then tell you what they decided.

-An experts job is to notice how it is, and then to help you notice as well.

When you're quoting someone four times in the course of a conversation, you're not treating them like an expert, but an authority figure. You're showing off the fact that you have no direct knowledge or understanding of the subject, and you're just rehashing what you read in a book, and then took on faith. If you tell someone that six divided by two is three, because Mr. Collins said so, then you're not likely to know what eight divided by two, until Mr. Collins tells you.

When someone has knowledge, whether it's about government conspiracy, the afterlife, or just simple division, it's their job not to give facts, but to give an understanding that will allow you to get more facts yourself. You need to be able to relate the information with other things you experience, come to your own conclusions, and then state them confidently as your own ideas. Because, when you really understand what you're talking about, you will have your own ideas. Not only that, but you'll be able to talk about them with conviction, without having to lean on the authority of someone who decided what you are supposed to believe.

Thanks for reading.

Proof that 2012 will happen!

2010-09-12T14:17:00.000-07:00

Do you ever wonder why people are still planning things for 2013? Movie releases, scientific projects, urban renovations, all with a deadline after the end of the world. Why even bother?

A gorgeous crop version of the Mayan calendar.

There are a lot of people with a lot of theories on what's going to happen during the holiday season, year 2012. Some people are pretty sure that our mother Earth is going to slam into another planet. Some think that we'll be hit by a solar flare. Some expect global warming to deal its killing stroke while we're still procrastinating on buying Christmas presents. I personally predict that bottled water sales will spike, along with flashlights and canned food. And Paper Jamz Guitars, just in case.

This may be insensitive of me, but I'm not entirely opposed to the idea of a global cataclysm. If you weigh the likelihood of:

1. Humanity becoming less detrimental because we reverse our progress, start consuming less, and start treating the environment like we are a part of it (instead of it being our simultaneous supply closet and garbage can).

and then compare that to the likelihood of

2. Humanity becoming less detrimental because of a global cataclysm which wipes humanity out.

The second possibility seems much more likely. The first one almost seems like trying to get more than six billion heroin addicts clean all at once. That's the way it looks from where I'm standing.

But I don't think that anything particularly special is going to happen in 2012, other than a really fancy-looking Mayan calendar becoming obsolete (remind me to buy a new one). I may have that feeling because my life has, thus far, been fairly mundane, and it's hard to imagine that trend would end a couple of years from now.

But what if it does? What good exactly does it do us to know it ahead of time? Does it give us time to buy space blankets, or to make sure that our final prayer is really really sincere? Perhaps you want to finish that novel, so that it can start the long, drawn-out publication process, and then be released after Earth has already slammed into Nibiru.

This is my prediction: There will be a lot of murmurings about the end of the world, but most people will act as usual, wrapping gifts and fishing out DVDs of It's a Wonderful Life. There will be a small minority (probably magnified through news coverage) that will stand on hilltops and wait for ships to take them away, or suicide cults drinking cyanide-laced Power Ade. And then we'll all celebrate the new year at the start of 2013, all of us a little disappointed that the Mayans didn't keep their promise, a little disappointed that we never got to participate in a survival-type scenario like in Independence Day, a little disappointed that 2013 looks pretty much like 2012, but with a better iPhone.

People will make excuses why their predictions didn't pan out, some of us will buy those excuses, and it will be business as usual until the next world-terminating event appears on the horizon. Some will remember Y2K, and 2012, and others will say, "No, this is different." And humans will be humans.

And, eventually, when a meteor does hit the earth, or an unprecedented earthquake wipes out all coastal populations, or some thing that we never thought of hits the whole of humanity like a baseball bat in the head, nobody will see it coming.

Thanks for reading.

What are dreams? -or- The Truth Purist

2010-09-11T13:18:00.000-07:00

Dreams are big in parapsychology. Some people say they see the future in dreams, some people say they've been visited by a dead loved one, or been given a vision from an angel. It's a tough subject for a skeptic such as myself, because what can you say? It was just a dream? Well, nobody's disagreeing on that point. The real disagreement is on whether dreams are spiritually significant, or just a mechanism of the mind.

The only thing I really have to say about the significance of dreams is that you can't believe in it without having to take on some piggybacking beliefs that might not seem so plausible.

For instance, if a deceased loved one, or any kind of spirit, is able to visit you in a dream, that means that the dream environment actually has to be a place. For you to meet someone there, there has to be a "there" in the first place, where you are at, and where they can go. So the assumption is that, every night, during REM sleep, we have some kind of out-of-body experience, and we travel to another environment, and then wake up to remember that as a dream.

If you are someone who remembers a moderate amount of your dreams, this may be hard to swallow. Let me give you an example from my own experience.

I was in my bedroom, but it actually looked like no room that I recognized during waking. There was something trying to get in through the doors, and the windows. At the same time, though, I was in a town in the game Black and White 2, and the spots where my door and window were in my bedroom were the gates to my town, and there were boulders rolling down hills, trying to break through the gates. These two points of view, seemingly interchangeable, switched back and forth throughout the course of the dream, me being in my room one minute, and being a giant presence in the middle of my town the next.

And, for me to believe that another consciousness could visit me in the middle of all that mess, I have to believe that it was really happening. And this dream is a mild example. Some dreams are so abstract, and make so little sense to the waking mind, that it is very hard to believe that somewhere, these images were actually formed out of some kind of material.

And we can't stop there. If dreams are real things, happening in real places, then what of hypnagogic imagery? The limitlessly bizarre things that we see in our eyelids as we drift off at night? I've made a game of describing these to my significant other. "Looks like... the inside of a throat, with a thousand dice spinning around it, and a tunnel in the middle..."

And if it seems obvious to anyone that hypnagogic imagery is just a product of the mind, it seems obvious to me that dreams are, as well as lucid dreams, and dissociative experiences. I also don't think it's farfetched that we could dream about meeting someone that we miss very much. I've had plenty of dreams about people who are still alive, not all of them flattering.

It might just be a matter of what's comfortable compared to what's true, and I don't have the authority to tell you which is more important. I'm not a truth purist, it's just an interest of mine. It's not my place to take away anyone's significant experience.

But if you are interested in the truth, then you have to accept that dreams being contained within the skull is definitely a likely possibility. As I see it, that's an explanation that isn't broke, and I have no interest in fixing it.

Thanks for reading.

Fabrication Friday - Sep 10, 2010

2010-09-10T10:51:00.000-07:00

The following is not true.

The most frightening thing of my life happened to me last night.

My life used to be more normal than it is now. The difference between my life before I was about twenty-five and afterward is very distinct. For instance, I'm in the habit of sleeping with a pillow over my head, just because strange voices and sounds are just a part of my nighttime routine now. Not that they scare me any more, but they're distracting, and can keep me up for hours.

I can't trace the change back to any one thing, but looking at entries in my old personal blog I notice that around that time was when I went to hypnosis. It was three sessions, to deal with my procrastination, which may not sound like much, but it was a bad enough problem that I spend hundreds of dollars on hypnotherapy. I got benefit from it, but it was early the next year that things started happening. So maybe there was no relation, but it's the only thing I can think of.

I see lights in the sky fairly regularly, bobbing around, and it's not unusual to see what looks like a standing shadow walking down the street, or sitting on the couch in my living room. Sometimes I find flies flying in a formation in my living room, like a tight little ball of insects, the size of a softball, spinning around. I've never heard of that anywhere. I've tried to catch them in a bag a couple of times, but they scattered.

I'm just letting you know that this is pretty much what my day-to-day life looks like, so for something to have freaked me out so bad last night is saying something. I was watching Mythbusters in the living room, on Netflix, and I was noticing that whenever I got a glass of water, the water would disappear after I'd only taken a little sip. Like I said, this kind of stuff is pretty normal for me, so just kept refilling my water glass. At some point, I heard someone walk up behind me, and I felt a hand on my shoulder. I knew those weren't my girlfriend's footsteps, and I didn't actually see a hand in the corner of my eye, so it had to be a spirit. I asked, "What do you want?" and the hand came off my shoulder and popped me on the jaw. I got a little pissed, and looked, but nobody was there, of course. I was a little worried, because the things that pass through my house don't usually get so physical.

Nothing much else happened, and I went to bed. I was laying on my back, and I had a notion that I should pull the pillow off my head and open my eyes, and I saw the guy who must have been the hand in the living room. It was a tall guy, in a fairly fancy looking suit, dark hair, combed backward, standing next to my bed. His expression was grim, and a little angry. I was going to ask him to go away, I was trying to sleep, when he lunged at me, and shoved a knife into me, upwards, under my ribs.

Now, this was no illusion. It hurt exquisitely, as real as anything I had ever felt, and I even felt the tip of the knife up against my heart, and getting bumped when my heart beat. It felt like my lung was filling up with liquid, and this guy keeps just shoving the knife in. And laying there in my bed I actually accepted death. It took about two seconds. The last thing I remember is the feeling of his kneecap pinching the skin of my inner thigh where he jumped on me.

And I woke up this morning, completely confused to be still alive. I have no cut, no bruise on my leg, and I've just been in a daze all morning, feeling like I should be dead. I looked at the spot where the guy stabbed me, and there's a dark mole there. It's brand new. I have no idea what happened, but I do know that I've never been so scared in my life.

Please Read

What ear candles can teach us

2010-09-09T10:22:00.000-07:00

Ear candles, for the uninitiated, are long, hollow cones of waxy cloth with a small hole on the pointed end. To use an ear candle, an individual has to lie on his or her side, put the small end of it in the ear, and then have someone light the top, wider end, which is open. The candle slowly burns down, and the theory is that the air inside the lit opening is heated, causing it to rise, and this creates suction inside of the tube, so that the small end sucks the wax out of your ear. When the procedure is finished, you're left with a small cone full of nasty brown wax.

I first heard about ear candles when I was fairly young. They were featured on the news, and my family and I watched, bemused, as the lady laid there, with the burning candle sticking out of her hear. When they opened it up, the newscasters weren't willing to show the gunk inside on camera. My how the decency standards of television have changed in the last fifteen years.

It seemed like a nice idea (using fire to cleanse, I think, has a deep root in our psychology) and I was interested in trying it. It never quite sat right in my brain, though, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the ear is a dead-end. It's not like the nose, that has a big sinus cavity behind it, with a tunnel leading all the way down to the lungs. The ear canal goes in an inch or so, and then terminates at the eardrum. Where are we keeping the copious amounts of wax?

Another reason it felt off was because it seemed like cartoon physics. You can't dust the inside of a cabinet by sticking a vacuum-cleaner hose inside, and then leaving it in place, waiting for all of the dust to come to you. Whatever you're vacuuming needs close personal contact with that hose. So how could the small bit of convection generated by the candle draw all of the wax out of your ear, like the pied piper drawing rats out of a town?

Well, let me tell you the twist ending. Ear candles don't work. I'm sorry if you've put a lot of stock in that, but they don't. The world we live in is one where ear candles don't do anything good for the ear.

There have been lots of different studies, with ear wax measured, the suction measured, and debunking it this way and that way. According to Wikipedia, "Several studies have shown that ear candles produce the same residue when burnt without ear insertion and that the residue is simply candle wax and soot."

Now, I agree with all of their conclusions, but I think so much work is unnecessary. We don't need research dollars spent on these things, we don't need to measure the suction, or look at the before/after of wax in someone's ear. When someone is trying to make an argument, it's actually problematic to have a longer list of evidence. The folks who made the film Loose Change could benefit from this lesson. If you give someone ten reasons why something must be true, they will argue against the weakest five, and ignore the rest. Then you're left elaborating on your least compelling evidence.

Take your strongest argument. The argument that you've always seen the other side avoid. The argument that knocks it right out of the park. Focus on only that argument. If people start responding to arguments that you never made, then redirect them to the one argument that you did make. Make people think.

With ear candles, the single, simple, thing that needs to be communicated, to bring this whole business to an end, is this: Go buy one. Stand it up in a cup of dry beans, and light the thing. Follow the directions carefully (or not carefully, it doesn't matter). Now is there loads of earwax in the thing? Of course there is. Because the stuff is from the candle, which is made of wax. Don't wait for a scientist to do it, and then read his results, do it yourself! They're five dollars for four! That's cheaper than Gatorade.

That's simple science, right there. If it does it in this condition (in the ear) but still does it without this condition (out of the ear) then that condition wasn't necessary in the first place.

Believe it or not, even such a simple alternative treatment is going to break a lot of hearts when people realize that they've been fooled. That's what beliefs do, great or small. They dig in claws, and when they're removed they take flesh with them. What bothers me is that I'm sure that every company that sells these things knows as well as I do that they're actually more harm than good, and they just keep doling out the snake oil. We're lied to by businesses so often, that we're almost fine with it. But maybe we shouldn't be.

Thanks for reading.

The Polite Skeptic Interview: Dean Radin

2010-09-08T11:10:00.000-07:00

Dean Radin is a big name in parapsychology. He's been Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences for almost a decade, where subjects ranging from physics to meditation to subtle energy are studied.

Originally following his ambitions into being a concert violinist, he later placed his focus on science, earning a BSEE in electrical engineering, a master's degree in electrical engineering, and a doctorate degree in educational psychology. To read a his scholarly papers, check out Google Scholar.

Radin has also written two books for lay audiences: The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena, and Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality, with 4.3 and 4.2 out of 5 stars at Amazon.com, respectively.

If you're looking for an educated, intelligent and experienced voice on the side of paranormal belief, look no further. I emailed him a couple of weeks ago, requesting an interview. His reply was so brief, and so simple, I didn't immediately realize he had said anything at all.

"Ok."

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The Polite Skeptic: As I understand, you believe that the mainstream scientific acceptance of certain paranormal abilities/systems is inevitable. What's your estimation of how long we would have to wait for that, and how much progress have you seen?

Dean Radin: Between 10 and 50 years. In the 30 or so years I've been involved in the field I've seen the state of the art in scientific terms steadily (and slowly) increasing, but the state of skepticism is essentially static. In addition, we now have some skeptics admitting that if this were any other area of research, the phenomena would have already been accepted. (see this link). This is a major shift because past "professional" skeptics were loath to admit any progress at all.

What do you think such a mainstreaming would look like? How do you think it would affect, for example, schools, jobs, or technology, in the short term, and in the long term?

In both the short and long term, I suspect it wouldn't change much of anything, at least not in a very dramatic way. Perhaps the biggest change would be that more scholars and scientists would be thinking about these topics, and in a more open way, but that said, the nature of "the field" would be quite different from what we see today, so it isn't clear to me how schools, jobs, etc. might change.

Do you find that, working with such controversial subject matter, you have to be excessively careful in your experimental setups, more so than, say, someone studying pathogens?

Yes.

Setting aside statistics and experiments, what's the most interesting personal anecdote you have regarding psi and the paranormal?

I got into this field not because of personal experiences or anecdotes, but because of curiosity. While I've had a few interesting experiences, I don't regard them as special or even all that interesting to anyone else.

Have you heard of Matthew Smith, the skeptical psychologist who decided he would try to become a psychic? What are your thoughts on a project like that?

Yes, I know Matthew. I think it's a fine idea, although as far as I can tell to "become a psychic" for real, meaning one is now verifiably able to do psychic things, then one has to start with some genuine talent and openness. If you try to fake it you're not going to accomplish much other than perhaps learn a few mentalist tricks. In Matthew's case I don't know if he has the starting talent, but I do wish him all the best.

Do you think that the supernatural, as far as it may exist, is an important part of physics/reality? In other words, do you think that the world could function essentially the way it does without a supernatural component?

Supernatural refers to objects or events beyond the natural, in which case by definition it is not part of physics or our reality. If you meant the so-called "paranormal," then that's quite a different question. I think the world would function very well without the supernatural, because within the world I live in I regard everything that happens as natural. If psi happens, and I believe the data shows it does, then it is natural. It's just not understood very well (along with a zillion other things that are also not well understood yet).

How often do you see a stubborn skeptic converted by your data, or converted at all?

Depends on what is meant by stubborn. If it means a belief based on an unquestioned faith in existing theories, then I have not found that data influences that type of person at all. If it means a skeptical but open mind that requires substantial data to change one's beliefs, then yes, sitting down with such a skeptic long enough to calmly explain the nature of the data available today will influence their prior beliefs.

In the video linked here, remote viewers believe they have found artificial structures on Mars, as well as intelligent activity. What are your thoughts on this? Is this a valid use for the skill?

It's an interesting exercise, but I much prefer controlled experiments where information can be clearly verified, otherwise the information gained is just an entertaining story.

Anything else you wanted to say?

No, thank you.

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Dean Radin's: homepage, blog, Facebook, Wikipedia page,

Who made the pyramids? -or- Giving credit where credit is due

2010-09-06T12:59:00.000-07:00

Carpentry is a little beyond me. The thought of tearing down a wall, replacing a window, or adding a room make me feel nervous. I know it's possible, and it's all be done millions of times, but it's so far beyond my skill set that it might as well be magic.

Back in the day, thousands of years before we had circular saws or drills, they were doing even crazier things with stone. The pyramids of Giza, Stonehenge, Pumapunku. There are a lot of very old structures made of very large blocks that, according to our understanding of archaeology, should not have been possible to create by the people of that time. Some of them should not be possible to create by people of our time. How do you explain such a mystery?

Well, if you've read this blog for as long as I have (ha ha) you already know my answer. You don't. There's no need to explain away every mystery before you have all the facts. This is a sin that skeptics and believers alike, who are just looking for the punchline, commit as often as envy, or gluttony.

So, if you must have an explanation now, because mysteries are like little stones sitting on the mind, then there's always aliens. The hypothesis of "ancient astronauts" is a wide-ranging idea that reaches into the history of human evolution, religion, astronomy, technology, archaeology, and a number of other things. I may go into it in more detail in the future, but suffice it to say for now that it's how many people explain how such buildings were made. Alien technology.

This is crop circles all over again. And my sentiment is basically the same. Who are you to say what human beings are or aren't capable of? We tend to think that humans of ancient civilizations as being less intelligent than us, but keep in mind that they were the exact same clever reasoning animals that we are. The didn't have iPads, but they probably knew more about stone than the masons of today. That was their high-technology. If they wanted a pyramid made, or a stonehenge, or a Pumapunku, and a few people put their heads together, I think they could find a way to do it. That's really all there is to it, as far as I'm concerned.

"But Cal," someone says, "Even with our high technology, we could not make these structures today." That may be true, but you have to keep in mind that higher technology doesn't always mean a better product. There are classic video games that will always surpass the modern graphical wonders. There are many novels that are much more engaging than today's special-effects blockbusters. And those are just ink on paper.

The more powerful the tools are, the less powerful the mind behind them has to be. A great mind with great tools is a force to be reckoned with, but so is a great mind with a chisel and mallet. So let's not project our self-imposed limitations onto the ancient past, and cheapen the achievements of people who may very well have been our intellectual superiors.

Thanks for reading.

Who am I? Where do I come from?

2010-09-06T12:08:00.000-07:00

Alright, I've had about enough of adsense. I looked at the blog today to find it trying to convert me to Scientology. I'm not rich! I can barely afford to be an atheist!

I'm fooling with filters and such, but selling out can only go so far, and if I keep getting shockers like this I'm just going to have to forget about adsense.

What The Cottingley Fairies can teach us -or- 50,000,000 Elvis fans CAN be wrong

2010-09-05T13:57:00.000-07:00

I slept in, and woke up feeling fine. I didn't know what I was going to blog about, but I knew it would come to me without too much effort. When I found my subject, I did a little research, and ended up getting sidetracked by people trying to convince me that mermaids are real. Just like the day I wrote the blog Mars time, I came away feeling drained and punch drunk. It's amazing how much a few pieces of media can pull out of you.

The Cottingley Fairies. It has to be one of the best examples not only of the psychology of deception, but the psychology of self-deception (without which, very little deception would take place).

A brief history: In 1917, two girls, cousins, ten and twelve, tell their mothers that they see fairies out by the stream (or beck, as they were in the UK). They borrow a camera and take two photographs that apparently depict fairies. The mother of one of the girls thinks this is something neat, and makes them public. The photos are approached as being serious business.

Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes series, is very impressed by the photographs, and outspoken. In 1920, Edward Gardener, member of the Theosophical Society, gives the girls a camera to take more pictures. They took three more pictures of apparent fairies. Mixed reception. People gradually forget.

About 40 years later, the girls are all grown up, and one of them says, in an interview, that she may have been photographing her own thought forms. The media loves this, and as a result (or as a cause) the public does as well. Randi and associates say the pics are fakes, and strings are visible.

In 1983, sixty-six years after the first photograph was taken, and one year after my own birth, the girls admit that it had all been a fake. One of them drew the fairies, they cut them out and stood them up with pins. They disagree about whether the fifth photograph was a fake. One girl persists that it is real, until her death, soon after.

(story paraphrased from Wikipedia, which is always accurate)

See all five photos here.

This whole story has always been remarkable to me. It's a great illustration of some of the elements that can come together to make even the hardest-to-swallow stories believable. There is popularity, media coverage, celebrity interest, arguing experts, and trustworthy-looking witnesses.

I could say that the plum tree in my yard was a real life womping willow, even when it was heavy with plums, and if it happened to have: popularity, media coverage, celebrity interest, arguing experts, and if I was a trustworthy looking witness, then my "real life womping willow" Facebook page would have followers in the millions.

A person may think that I would have to have some kind of evidence to gain a few of those things, but that is exactly why these things fool people. If you make something ridiculous very popular, then the media will be inclined to cover it. Celebrities are as fallible as any of us, and some of them will be duped. The media will choose, or create, experts to argue over this celebrity-backed story. And then I just have to be good at lying, which many people are. Then, even if the average person sees that it is clearly a hoax, it will be hard to believe that all of those prominent people would be arguing over something so silly, so the obvious conclusion is, "I must be missing something."

Well, you're not missing anything. Your own powers of perception are greater than the collective perception of the media. If you noticed that the fairies (even in the fifth photo) seemed to have paper edges, and seemed to be highlighted uniformly, like a flat piece of paper, then you solved the mystery, even as the media picked up more speed. If you saw the "Surgeon's Photograph" of the Lock Ness monster, and it looked like it was about eight inches tall at first glance, it wouldn't have done you any good to listen to experts argue and muddle your brain. If you noticed that we seemed to be sending forces into Iraq in response to an attack from someone completely different, then you were already way ahead of the game.

I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but only a capitalist. There is a big market in you not trusting your own eyes, and if you let the media treat you like you are stupider than you actually are, then even the most obvious truths will always be just out of reach.

Thanks for reading.

Facebook is serious business, part 2

2010-09-04T18:37:00.000-07:00

God, the internet can be a headache.

So, with the continuing theme of Facebook being serious business, I created a The Polite Skeptic page, which can be found here.

In addition, I added a Facebook box to the side of the blog. Like many widgets and things on the internet, I have no idea what the benefit of it is, or its exact function, but these things will become clear over time. One thing I do know, it's supposed to have a Like! button embedded into it, but I don't see one.

One frustrating thing, after conning some twenty-six people into liking the site, today I made a brand new Like button, which is specifically for the Facebook page that links to this site. The benefits of this elude me at the moment, but I convinced myself to create it, so I have to trust that it's there for a reason. So, that means that I've started over from zero (actually three already, but anyway...).

I increasingly get the feeling that the internet is becoming Facebook's bitch.

Another look at Hell, a good place to live, but not to visit

2010-09-04T12:19:00.000-07:00

Christian Hell. It's the epitome of a bad situation. Every bad thing that's ever happened to you, every bad thing you can think of, and every bad thing that you could never think of, but you can probably find online, cannot compare. And the worst part of it? It's eternal.

There was an example of eternity that I once heard that was pretty overwhelming. I think I actually heard it on a sitcom. This is paraphrased. Imagine a brass ball the size of the earth floating in space. Every thousand years, a dove flies by, and a tip of one of the dove's feathers brushes lightly against the brass ball. By the time that the brass ball is ground down to nothing, eternity will have barely begun.

I was discussing religion in a popular imageboard the other day, and I realized something. The idea of Hell being eternal actually takes a bit of the sting off of it. Humans are very very adaptable, and those of us in the worst situations can still find some happiness, just like those of us in the best situations can find despair.

But Hell? There's no adapting to that, right?

Let's say that one of the features of Hell is the opportunity of being gutted by a scimitar, and being allowed to lie on the ground with your entrails spread in front of you, perhaps with dogs chewing on them. The first time this happens, it's a harrowing experience. The tenth time this happens, you know what to expect. The hundredth time this happens, you flip the guy off before his guts you. The thousandth time, you're used to the pain, and you're scratching the dogs behind their ears. The millionth time? "Here, give me the sword, let me show you how it's done. Damned amateurs."

Over time, you lose fear. The primary animal fear is one of death, but in the afterlife there is no death, and when you're in Hell the idea of death wouldn't be that scary, anyway.

Let's say you've been in Hell for thirty million years. You don't even remember any other kind of existence, pain means very little, and loss is just par for the course. You're more skilled than any living person at finding ways to entertain yourself. You've been through a lot, and you're able to appreciate the little things, and sweating the small stuff (or even the big stuff) is just a part of the forgotten and unimaginable past. You're probably a very likeable person.

And what if we apply the idea of eternity to Heaven? A place that is always happy, and without sin? A place with no obstacles to overcome, no pain to make you stronger, and no bad times to make the good times sweeter?

If the ideas of Heaven and Hell are, as I suspect, constructs of the human mind, it's only natural that they would include very obvious positive/negative rewards and punishments for your behavior in life. But joy and pain don't exist outside of our own minds, and when we're faced with a different level of comfort, our standards naturally change over time, until we reach our own, personal equilibrium. So Mary, who seems to complain no matter what's going on, probably would have the same attitude in the afterlife. But Joan, who is generally happy, and accepts life as it comes without making a big stink every time the computer freezes up or she accidentally breaks an egg yolk, will probably do just fine, even if she's not a good Christian.

I can imagine people that would disagree, perhaps thinking of ways that Hell could stay bad, even after a trillion years, but unless someone has been there, and done that, it's just a guess.

And if you're really curious what Hell is like, I'll try to drop you a line after I die. Because, if it's a real place, they've probably already embroidered my name on the sheets.

Fabrication Friday - Sep 03, 2010

2010-09-03T09:44:00.000-07:00

The following is not true.

About four years ago I went UFO watching with my friends Dan and Joannica. I was strongly opposed to it when they first brought it up, not because I didn't want to get involved in nonsense, but because they were taking the trip as a part of their honeymoon. They were (still are) both card-carrying spiritualists, and had gone on such outings several times before, but this "new spot" that someone had told them about, Carpenter Hill in northern Washington State, was supposed to be the cream of the crop. Eventaully, somehow, they convinced me. They were excited, and I was interested in seeing what I could make of the lights in the sky.

It was a long, long drive, with the same Johnny Cash CD playing on repeat, and their car smelled like sage and marijuana. I was quite carsick by the time we reached Carpenter Hill. For how good of a spot it was supposed to be, the whole area was deserted, and I think all of us were wondering if we had been fooled, but nobody said it.

In short, we did not see any UFOs. We saw something once, but the three of us agreed that it was very obviously a passenger jet. So we sat on lawn chairs, cameras at ready, and drank beers, discussing everything from UFOs to tarot cards.

Now, when we parked, I had checked my watch, and had seen that the trip had taken a little over three hours, making it 9:05. After we had been talking for what felt like a couple of hours, at very least (and good drinks and conversation can easily make five hours feel like two) I checked the time, and it was 9:07! Five different time pieces (three phones, a watch and the clock in the car) agreed, and the sky still looked like it was relatively early in the evening. We had all heard of people losing time, but we had gained it!

Conversation dropped off, and you could cut the tension with a knife. I never would have thought that a clock readout could scare me, but I was very scared. Since we were there to watch for UFOs, that gave us an excuse to stare at the sky and say nothing. Before long the smell of gasoline was obvious in the air, and it continued to get stronger. I don't know why, but instead of checking the car we decided to wander off, to get away from the smell. It made sense to all of us at the time. So we all walked off into the woods.

To make a long story short, a few minutes later it was suddenly raining, and my clock said midnight, and we decided that it was time to leave, but we got lost, and were wandering in the woods for what felt like hours. Joannica kept crying, and looking back it seems like we were all on drugs, but there were no drugs present. One source of consternation was actually that Jo had forgotten their pot back at home, in her coat, but I don't even smoke the stuff.

All of the times I checked the time that night, it did not mesh. It was either earlier than it should have been, later than it should have been, or actually earlier than it was before! Eventually, we came out of the trees and saw the car, and while I remember climbing down a hill, I don't remember climbing back up. I think the part of the night that frightened me the most was that when we got back to the car, all of the clocks said it was 8:45, about twenty minutes before we had ever gotten to Carpenter hill. We left immediately, and the whole ride home didn't feel quite right.

A couple of notes on the night: When we got back to Olympia, the gas tank was completely full, after six solid hours of driving. Also, there was a very major UFO sighting in that area that night, and the people quoted in the news said they had been on Carpenter Hill. We had not seen them or the UFO. And, around that time, all of the kids started having frequent nightmares about "giant bugs," and the neighbor's kid started having similar nightmares about worms, which is strange.

I can't explain any of it, much less all of it, and I doubt myself from time to time, but as far as my mental health goes, I think that is probably better.

Please read

Misunderstanding dissociation -or- Have you watched Lawnmower Man?

2010-09-02T12:14:00.000-07:00

From the fact that, out of twenty-something posts, this is the third one about out-of-body experiences, you can probably tell that I have a not-so-secret interest in them. It's something that's always fascinated me, as an aspect of psychology, not parapsychology. Read more about that in my post, Why skeptics should have out-of-body experiences. For the sake of avoiding psychic baggage, I'm hereby going to start referring to the OBE as the "dissociative experience," or DE.

Back in 2007, some experiments were done regarding the dissociative experience that got media attention. Here is a link to one article: Out of Body Experiences are 'All in the Mind', at NewScientist.com. If you don't want to read all that, here's the video, which will give you the most important points of the experiment. Go ahead and watch it. I'll wait.

So, that's pretty compelling, right? No, not right, it's actually very ridiculous.

I don't have to go into a long tirade. I can actually sum up my strongest criticism of the study in one sentence. All you've done, Professor Olaf Blanke, is prove that virtual reality goggles can give someone the experience of a fabricated, or "virtual" reality. This is what they were made for. The illusion produced, that the sense of touch was actually several feet ahead, instead of on the back, is not something I've ever heard of in accounts of dissociative experiences. For instance, if someone believes that they are standing elsewhere in their bedroom, and they can feel the carpet on bare feet, this would imply that someone is rubbing carpet on their feet while they lie in bed. That all sensations were in-bed sensations.

In dreams we sense that we are in different places, and even have an imagined sense of touch, so why does it have to be any more complicated than that?

I used to read a series, when I was in elementary school, called Sideways Stories from Wayside School. I wish I could find a bit more info on this, but from what I can remember there was a child who always counted wrong, but always got the correct number. To count how many fingers were on a hand, he might say, "Two, seven, one, twelve, five. There are five!" In this same way, I think that this heavily-cited study, and studies like it, come to the correct conclusion, but with all the wrong methods. "When they are in VR goggles, they experience being somewhere else. The OBE must be a product of the mind!"

In the end, I have to agree with you. But you didn't teach me anything.

Thanks for reading.

A note on Fabrication Friday

2010-09-01T13:24:00.000-07:00

I was looking at my analytics program (it sure can be addicting) and I was alarmed to find an abrupt, and drastic, dropoff of readership. I marked what day it happened, and I looked at the blog post from the previous day.

Friday.

Fabrication Friday. Lord.

I've worked in retail, and if it taught me one thing, it's that people don't read signs. Unless there is something wrong (a locked door, for instance) or perhaps they're driving a car, signs are invisible to most people, whether they're red, flashing, speaking, etc. So, I don't know why I would expect the simple statement of "The following is not true" to inform people that what follows is actually not true. I don't know why I would expect a link to the Fabrication Friday explanation would be enough to explain what Fabrication Friday is all about.

Anyway, I added one more sign, changing every Friday post's title to "Fabrication Friday Post" and then the date, so that I'm not scaring people away, making them think I'm an alien abductee, or a psychic medium.

Of course, I could be wrong about the why of all this, but I've made my assumption, and, in true human form, I'm going to run with it.

Why global warming is my fault

2010-09-01T12:55:00.000-07:00

Let's have an off-topic post, that still deals with skepticism, but not skepticism of the paranormal. This is about global warming skepticism.

At this point, the debate of whether global warming is happening seems to be mostly replaced by a debate of whether humans are causing it. The earth goes through cyclical warming trends, and it always has. Not much in nature is static. So, who's to say whether the current warming trend was caused by man, or if man is just here to witness it?

I have an opinion (I am unique in this way) and it will be easy to shoot down because it doesn't involve research, or evidence. It's purely theoretical. So, feel free.

Just in front of beavers, human beings affect their environment more than any other animal. If you look at satellite images of big cities (Tokyo is an extreme example) it looks like a very large person just splashed a dallop of gray paint on the globe. So, I don't think anyone is going to argue that humans make a small impact. I'll rephrase that, I don't think anyone should argue that humans make a small impact. We've got our fingers in the cake pretty deep, polluting the oceans, the land, the air, damming off the rivers, and sticking our sheds over rabbit-holes and such.

Now, I'm not an environmentalist. It seems to be a word that implies a bit of activism, and that's not how I spend my time. I think most of us can agree, though, that while we have a big impact, it's not a greatly beneficial one. As a species, our highest priority in most things is our species. One of the byproducts of our comfort, as humans, is CO2. The more comfortable we want to be, it seems (heating, A/C, television, computers, washer/dryer) the more CO2 we give off.

So, what is the effect of emitting unimaginable amounts of CO2 into the air? Cars, and power plants, and factories, and farms, all over the world, twenty-four hours a day, constantly increasing, for about a century? Not to mention that many of the industries that increase the CO2 have also reduced the amount of vegetation and/or plankton that eat the stuff up. I'm no scientist, but I know that putting more of something somewhere increases the amount of it, and I don't think there's any kind of magic that kicks in a large scales that would make that stop applying.

So, when a person states that humanity isn't contributing to global warming, I have to wonder how someone even thought of that in the first place. It's not an intuitive conclusion, by far. That person must be much smarter than me, because I still don't understand it.

An analogy:

People die every day. We're all going to die, because it's natural, and it's the way things have been happening since life began. But, if you hold a pillow over someone's face, and they're dead when you pull the pillow away, only a very smart pillow skeptic will be able to prove that it was from natural causes.

Thanks for reading.

Note: I've changed every instance of "climate change" in this post to "global warming," which, in this context, is more accurate. 3/7/11

The Polite Skeptic Interview: Matthew Smith

2010-08-31T11:25:00.000-07:00

Matthew Smith has done a lot to help the world understand paranormal belief. He got his PhD studying the psychology of luck, and has looked into a wide range of different aspects of parapsychology, including the Ganzfield, psychic pets, the psychology of deception, and a number of other things. His research has, so far, supported a skeptical outlook. But, in a new experiment, he's decided to take his research to another level.

I've always been a proponent of a hands-on approach. Whether you're talking about The Oregon Vortex or cow-tipping, I'm more likely to trust someone who's been there, done that, and bought the t-shirt. Matthew Smith is taking this to what is, as far as I know, an unprecedented place, at least as far as the skeptical community is concerned.

His new project doesn't involve talking to psychics, or measuring statistics. He's decided that, to really get to the bottom of this psychic business, he's going to have to see it from the inside. He's going to try to become a psychic. This may bring a few questions to mind, and it definitely did for me, so a couple of weeks ago I emailed Matthew for an interview. His reply was quick, jovial and affirmative. The interview follows.

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The Polite Skeptic: How should one go about becoming psychic? Could you give a general description of the methods involved, and how they've changed your day-to-day life?
Matthew Smith: This is a good question. At the moment I am trying a whole range of methods to see what, if anything, seems to work. Remember, I'm quite sceptical about much that is written about psychic development, so I need convincing that there is anything to any of this. At a general level, it seems to involve allowing yourself to be open to viewing the world in a very different way. This can include noticing coincidences when they happen, paying attention to 'gut' feelings, that kind of thing. Also, I'm trying to be more open to ideas that my rational, sceptical, mind wants to question or dismiss out of hand. More specifically, meditation seems to be important but again I am finding it hard make it a priority... to me it feels like I am just sitting there doing nothing! I am also attending a regular development 'circle', attending workshops, talking to psychics and mediums about their experiences, and reading their books.

At the moment it doesn't feel that it has changed my day-to-day life too much (apart from the fact that I have left a full-time academic post to do this!), which may mean it's time to step things up a gear!

How much does a suspension of disbelief play a role in your project? Do you ever get a bit of information from a book or a mentor, and then get the feeling of, "Oh, I've got to accept this, too?"

Suspension of disbelief plays a huge part. Recently I have been exploring 'chakras' and the idea of the 'aura', which some people can supposedly see. But do these things really exist? They seem to be based on well established concepts and are discussed in many ancient spiritual texts, but Western science has a hard time accepting them. And that includes me.

Mediums talk about a 'spirit' world that is all around us and something we can experience if we open ourselves to it. Again, this idea just doesn't sit with me, but this whole project is about challenging my own preconceptions!

Would you describe your close family and friends as being supportive in your new endeavor?
Completely. Everyone has been very supportive. Most importantly, Rachel, my partner, is 100% with me in this. In fact, there is no way that I would even think of doing something like this if it wasn't for her. It was through meeting Rachel that I began to be less rigid in how I made sense of things. She taught me that a 'scientific' and 'rational' approach to everything was only one way to view the world, and that I should open up to other ways. I have generally become much less dismissive of 'alternative' ideas since being with her.

Ironically, as I become more and more open to 'alternative' ideas, Rachel is becoming more and more sceptical! This tends to balance things out nicely.

If ESP is real, then science has a vast undiscovered country to explore, that includes not only the abilities, but the natural systems that would have to exist to support such abilities. I guess what I'm asking is, if you in fact proved this to yourself, how interested would you be in trying to usher in the inevitable scientific (for lack of a better word) revolution?
The bulk of my academic career as a psychologist and parapsychologist was, I guess, part of the scientific endeavour to establish whether psychic phenomena really exist, and whether they can be studied scientifically. I eventually became a little disillusioned with this approach as progress was so slow, and I don't think I ever really found p-values (no matter how small) that compelling!

I'm hoping that this project will at least give me some experiences that are far more compelling and not so easy to dismiss. I can't see this ushering in a scientific revolution (!) but by having the million dollar challenge as a backdrop then it shows that I am interested in the extent to which these experiences can be 'validated' by science. Of course, some people dismiss the challenge as unscientific, so I'm keen to examine the challenge itself, it's history, how it is viewed by others, and so on. If anyone ever did pass the challenge (assuming it is pass-able), would mainstream science pay any notice?

How would you respond to people who say that this is a big publicity stunt?
I'm not sure what to make of those claims... It's a publicity stunt in as much as any book or project is a publicity stunt! If you want people to buy the book then you want people to know about it. The project is a genuine attempt to see if I can develop my 'psychic' abilities and go for the million dollar challenge. The great thing is, as more people learn about the project, the more opportunities that arise for offers of help and advice. And let's be honest, I'm going to need all the help I can get!

Do you feel that, if you opened yourself up too much, you may become gullible? Is there any fear of this affecting your critical thinking skills?
I guess there is that risk, but it is one I am willing to take! However, I don't think it is a big risk. There may be a need to suspend disbelief, but that isn't the same as abandoning scepticism and critical thinking altogether. The whole point is for me to make sense of any experiences that I may have. I will draw on my background in psychology and parapsychology to help me with this, but I'm also open to other ways of interpreting and explaining these experiences. If it turns out that I eventually come to the conclusion that any experiences I have can, in fact, be explained in conventional (i.e. non-paranormal) terms then so be it. Either way, we get to find out!

Are you including, in your research, the more scientific/pseudoscientific ideas, like Kirilian Photography, or theories about what an aura might be composed of? Or is your reading more "practical," as in more centered around the how-to?
I am prepared to explore all the variety of phenomena that might come under the 'psychic' banner. The idea of 'auras' I find fascinating, especially the claim that it is possible to 'see' auras, and that this is something you can supposedly learn to do. So, yes, Kirlian Photography might be relevant here if that can at least demonstrate there is 'something' there that can be detected. However, the backbone to the project is effectively can psychic abilities be learned or developed and, indeed, demonstrated.

I've stated in my blog that I think the out-of-body experience is achievable through practice, even though it is, in my mind, a very specific kind of dream. Is the out-of-body experience a part of your repertoire?
Potentially! I guess this is where the 'practical' aspect of the project comes in. If it becomes apparent that in order to develop psychic abilities (if they exist) then I need to develop the ability to have an OBE then that is what I will focus on. I know there individuals in the past who have been able to (allegedly) have an OBE at will and took part in research to assess whether their 'astral body' (for want of a better term) could be detected in another room. The name Keith Harary springs to mind.

You can find out more about the project at milliondollarpsychic.com and find us on facebook under 'Million Dollar Psychic'!

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So, where is this going? Matthew's goal, after building up his psychic ability (if it turns out that it is even possible) is to take James Randi and the JREF for a million dollars. Even if all this ends up being a waste of time, I wish Matthew luck, and I will be following his efforts on his blog.

Matthew Smith's: Homepage, Facebook

Giving in to disbelief

2010-08-30T11:03:00.000-07:00

Freedom can be a double-edged sword. Moving out of your parents house means more privacy, perhaps more partying, but less money, and an introduction to adult problems (bill collectors, for example). Opening your own business means never answering to a boss again, but now you have to keep records religiously, worry about taxes, and worry about customers. Making an independent film means the ability to film pretty much what you want without a studio breathing down your neck, but your resources are limited, and you may need to hire actors that will work for lunch and an Xbox game.

I think skepticism is the same way. Living without certain beliefs can be very freeing. But is it worth it?

I went to church as a child, and I still occasionally go with my dad, just to spend time with him. Some skeptics retain religion, just like some vegetarians eat fish, but I'm not one of them. My earliest doubts regarded the story of Noah's Ark, and they continued to stack up on that foundation until I was walking around with a constant tension in my mind. To believe something, without believing it fully, is a burden, and it's a burden I eventually had to get rid of. .

So, what is it like? To give in to skepticism? To look around, and know that nobody is watching you, nobody is judging you, or recording your actions*? To understand that your life isn't pre-determined, and that, if your'e not hurting anyone or breaking the law, you can do what you want, can be very empowering indeed. To give up the idea that your opinions have to match those of an authority figure, whether they be a preacher, a rabbi, or God itself, is a breath of fresh air.

But it's not all peaches and cream. That spot in your mind, that spot where you held God, or the conscious universe, that is omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent, isn't ever going to be properly filled, except for by the laws of physics, which are neither forgiving nor loving. To get rid of that last vestige of parental authority can be a lot like running away from home. Feeling cut off from something protective, and comfortable.

But, to those that do sit in church, carrying a stack of doubts on their back, and who decide that maybe they don't believe like they once did, you should realize that a life without religion is not a meaningless life. You still have love, but it's from the people around you. You still have responsibility, but it's to the people around you. You can be a good person without feeling like you're being watched.

So maybe it is time to move out of Dad's house, and see for yourself just how well you can do on your own. If you're ready to trust your own moral compass, I think you'll find that it's worth it.

Thanks for reading.

*Unless you're on the internet. Then you're SOL.

My philosophy

2010-08-29T17:01:00.000-07:00

Until recently, I never really thought about why I am a skeptic. I never thought that I had a philosophy, regarding my belief and lack of belief, until I started chatting with people in paranormal forums. Discussion with others acted like a mirror, allowing me to see myself more clearly.

So, why don't I believe in the paranormal? It's not because I think it's stupid, it's not because I think the people who do believe are stupid, and it's not because I'm afraid of looking stupid. It's simply because I don't have any reason to believe in it.

There are plenty of people I've spoken to who claim to have experienced things, that if I had experienced them myself, I probably would believe differently. But, as it stands, these people's experiences are just stories I've heard, based on human perception and human memory, two things that, in the past, I've described as being as trustworthy as drug addicts.

None of us know everything, and there are plenty of mysterious things that happen during the day. When there are noises in the kitchen, and you're home alone, some of us are more likely to blame a ghost, and others are more likely to blame a mouse. Even when it turns out that there is no evidence of a mouse, that does not count as evidence of a ghost. Even if you can't think of a single natural explanation for something, rest assured that there are lots of things that you never even thought of. That's always the case.

In the search for truth, one of the seven deadly sins is to narrow things down too quickly. "That was either a mouse or a ghost. But it wasn't a mouse!" Another person, presented with the exact same evidence, might say, "That was either a mouse or a bat. But it wasn't a mouse!"

Such made-up dichotomies do us no good.

"It was either a dream or an out of body experience."

"It was either an airplane or a spacecraft from an alien civilization."

"Either I lost my wallet, or John stole it."

If you ever hear the words, "The only thing it could have been..." then you're hearing a conclusion being jumped to. Especially if the "only thing" is something incredibly specific. "The only thing it could have been was this government group doing this for this reason, which implies this." The truth is, in many situations, things happen for reasons that we never would have thought of in a million years. This world is complex, far beyond our own reasoning, and our obvious answers don't always look like reality.

I would love for certain supernatural things to be real, but I'm not going to accept any of them unless I know for sure. That's the basis of my skepticism. I just have to know. If there is even one, foolish sounding, unlikely, but slightly possible explanation, then I'm not going to call it case closed. Because if I go and accept a whole new world of spirits and psychic abilities into my mind, and it turns out that the unlikely, but more mundane thing was the truth, then I've been duped, and in a big way.

So, what is my philosophy, in brief? There is enough variety in the known universe that mysteries are inevitable. So let's take a good long look at what we already understand before we decide that the cause must be something new.

Crop circles as an art form -or- What humans can do

2010-08-28T13:01:00.000-07:00

Even if I don't believe in aliens, I think I can appreciate a crop circle as much as any UFOlogist. The shapes that appear in fields, primarily in the UK, are sometimes astonishing, and moreso every year, as those that create them gain experience and skill. It seems obvious to me (and don't most opinions just seem so obvious?) that they're created not by interstellar travelers, but enterprising human beings.

I'm a polite skeptic, and I'm a patient and tolerant skeptic. I try my best to see things through the perspectives of others, and in most cases I understand why someone would believe in something. Out of all of the arguments that I hear from crop circle researchers--or all of the arguments made by anyone that argues for the existence of any paranormal thing--there's only one I can think of that actually gets my blood to rise. Just one statement, in that whole spectrum of belief, that makes me not want to be polite, and makes me want to club someone with a trout and ask them why they're being so closed-minded.

That statement is that, obviously, humans could not make crop circles. That, yeah maybe people could make some of the smaller, simpler ones, but that the very large, very elaborate crop circles are outside of the range of human ability.

Really? Really-really? Are you sure that's an argument you want to make? You're talking about the cleverest animal on this ball. You're talking about the animal that achieves the impossible so often that it's starting to get boring. We don't drop our jaws in wonder when a four-hundred fifty ton 747 is able to support itself on thin air, it's only of passing interest when the guy on the corner is juggling torches, and most of us don't care when a figure-skater pulls off a triple-axel, which none of us could ever hope to do. But the moment it looks like something might be communicating with us from another planet (in a hopelessly obscure way, I might add) it's way outside of the realm of reason that a group of friends could flatten crops in a fancy shape.

Say what you want, about what you want, and I'll try to listen with an open mind. When you start to put limits on human ingenuity, you will lose ground with me very quickly.

Fabrication Friday - Aug 27, 2010

2010-08-27T10:17:00.000-07:00

The following is not true.

I think the main thing that made me a skeptic isn't any lack of experiences, but actually the opposite. On a couple of occasions, I've had experiences that were a little too frightening for me to accept.

The main, number one experience was something that I didn't remember until recently. I was in therapy, just for the sake of general mental health (or so I thought) and this old thing came up. Now, it didn't come out through hypnosis, or anything like that. I don't know if it was actually repressed. I just know that, for the last ten years, I've chosen not to think about it, and have effectively forgotten it. I think the only reason I'm willing to write it here is because I don't think anyone will believe me. If I thought people would take it seriously, I would probably keep it to myself.

I was probably eighteen or nineteen, because I wasn't long out of high school. There was a house (it's no longer there) on Yelm Highway that people simply called, "That old haunted house," and I used to drive by it on the way to Burger King, where I worked. I was always curious about that house. We had a party at my apartment one night, and my friend (call him Chad) had brought his Ouija board, and he was playing with that in the bedroom with some people, and I was playing Xbox in the living room, drinking way too much Miller High Life. It was probably the board that got it into my head, but I found myself trying to talk everyone into an outing, to the haunted house on Yelm Highway.

Nobody went for it, except for Chad, his sister, and this other guy. Now, I don't endorse drunk driving, and I have no remorse for a drunk driver. This doesn't change the fact that, that night, I was driving drunk, and we somehow safely made it to the broken down old house. There wasn't any good place to park (the original driveway actually had small trees growing in it!) but I eased the car over a shallow ditch and parked it behind a tree, where the car would be hidden.

The house felt cold, and not just cold on your skin. Just being near it felt like there was literally a chilly hand inside of your stomach. This was pretty much what everyone said. It probably took us a half hour to get the balls to go from the car to the house.

To make a long story short, we were using the Ouija board inside of the house, and it wasn't giving us anything. I was writing down the letters as they came up, and it was all a jumble. I was about to have my second bright idea of the evening (getting out of there) when I saw that, as I'd been recording the letters, the board had spelled out the word GOOD. The word ended up being GOODBYE. I wanted to tell the others, but I saw that Chad was gone.

He was just gone. Nobody saw him leave, and he'd been one of the three with their hands on the planchette. There was just no way he could have gotten up and left. I remember we didn't look for him, or call his name. It was eery, but I think we were just trying to keep ourselves from freaking out, so we just got up, and walked out the front door, single-file, to the car, and drove off. Another thing that's a little weird is that I remember seeing the three of us getting in the car, from the perspective of looking down from about ten feet up. It's just an image I remember, but I don't know why.

We didn't make a pact of silence, or anything like that, but none of us said anything, ever, and I think the choosing to forget happened pretty soon after the event. I remember hearing that the night Chad disappeared, his whole bedroom was ransacked the next morning, and it was full of ants. I thought, when I heard that, that he must have went through his stuff to pack and run away, because I had already stopped thinking about the house on Yelm Highway. I also remember that I ended up moving, because I didn't like driving down that road any more, and had started going miles out of my way to avoid it. I never saw him again after that.

I don't know what I think I'm going to accomplish by sharing the story, but it is what it is.

Please read: http://bit.ly/bmmXlX

Making money through dishonesty

2010-08-26T10:27:00.000-07:00

I could be a fraud.

What I'm saying is, I could do it. I am capable. Freelance writing is grueling work, and competitive, and dollars run short a little too often. Imagine the money I could make being a fraud! It sounds like a joke, but if you look at your own life, and your own troubles, you realize it's no joke. Life just might be a little better, for me, my girlfriend, and her children, if I put my scruples aside and decided to take advantage of the natural gullibility of the human.

How would I do it? My natural talent is writing, so I would write a book. It would be a long, inspirational Fabrication Friday, as convincing as anything I've ever written. The book would include:

Visitation from an angel.
A message centered on the importance of peace.
A number of fabricated accounts of miracles, backed up by the written accounts of fictitious people, written by me.
At some point, I would meet God personally. He would appear as an unimaginably bright light, giving off love and caring.

I would pump it to bursting full of good feelings and inspiration, telling people about how they have the power to change the world, and change their lives. I would come up with logical arguments to back all of it up, and I would say that it was the angel that had told them to me. I would make out the angel to be kind of snobby, which would be believable because it isn't what the reader is expecting. Also, I would write it as a woman.

Here is an excerpt, fresh-made as I write this:

I don't remember exactly what time it was, but the waiter hadn't brought our food yet, and I noticed that my bladder was, very suddenly, painfully full. I excused myself, trying to act casual, but I don't think I pulled it off because Mark looked concerned.

I didn't understand why I had to urinate so badly! I had actually been neglecting my thirst all day, having to tear myself away from Lonnie and her dangerous habits just to get a glass of water. When I got into the bathroom, though, I suddenly felt fine. I was bewildered, and I was already thinking about how long something like that could go on before I eventually forced myself to go to the doctor's office. A second later, though, I understood what was going on.

I was the only person in the bathroom, but when I looked into the mirror, I saw Lotem standing next to me, but only in the mirror!. Now, I know crazy stuff like that happens in movies all the time, but I can't describe how eerie and disorienting it is when it really happens. I tried to keep my cool, just happy that I didn't pee myself. I asked him what he wanted, perhaps a little more curt than one should talk to an angel. I had finally gotten used to him, it seemed. Then he gave me his message, all at once, like a ball of information right into my brain. What he said made my blood run cold. After he said it, he vanished.

His message was, "Marcus has a malignant tumor in the lymph nodes under his left shoulder. He's been keeping the pain secret from you, hoping it would go away. You can get rid of it in less than a month by holding an herbal compress over it, for an hour a day. Ask Bill Chan about the herbs that cured his ulcers."

I washed my hands, even though I hadn't used the toilet, and then went back to the table with my big secret.

There are a few publishers out there that would probably fight over that book. After publication I would mail it, not to book reviewers, but instead to Oprah, and the ladies on The View. It would certainly do better than any book written by The Polite Skeptic, I'll tell you that much.

There is an old, persistent myth about people who sell their souls to the devil. It's used as a metaphor, and I think that it's always had root in metaphor. Money seems to come more freely when you disregard your fellow human being. Plenty of large companies know this, loads of charlatans, and robbers, and slavers understand that once you stop caring, you start earning. That's not to say that dishonesty is the only way to become wealthy (that's a bit of a stereotype) but it's certainly one way to do it.

And I know that if I did use my creativity to become a fraud, and I did it properly, no army of skeptics would be able to dent my fan base. Because most people don't appreciate a downer.

I'm not saying that everyone who writes a book about supernatural things is a fraud. I'm not all-knowing, after all, and such a statement would be a guess. I'm just pointing out that the motivation to do such a thing is there, it is real, and it is strong enough that I fantasize about it from time to time. And, as far as I can tell, I am a good person.

Thanks for reading.

So purple, you can't see it

2010-08-25T10:02:00.000-07:00

Colors are a big part of psychology. Graphic artists understand this, as do advertisers. A color can set the mood, or kill the mood. Have you ever walked into a friend's living room to discover that the walls and ceiling were all painted blood-red? Or jet-black? Maybe, but probably not. Too much of a color can be enough to make someone feel a little nauseous, or induce a headache. The right color can help relax you.

My favorite color is green. Dark, forest green, to be precise. It reminds me of trees. Based on what I've read, green is the color of the heart chakra, and the energy that comes from it. Similarly, green in the aura can indicate natural ability in faith healing.

You can find the importance of colors throughout much of parapsychology, whether it's the color of a nonphysical plane, the color of a spirit guide's clothing, or a prominent color portrayed in a psychic vision. The soul is supposed to be able to see in perfect color.

So, what is color? Color is light. Color is something our brain uses to sort out different frequencies of light, as the photons hit our eyeballs. At some point in our species' evolution, natural selection favored this separation of frequencies, which helps us predict the weather, identify plants and animals, and see the blush in the cheeks of an attractive member of the preferred sex. Those of us that do see in color surely take it for granted.

There's actually a very wide range of light frequencies. We see purple at one edge of the rainbow, but there are other colors that are so purple we can't see them (whoa!). Ultraviolet light, x-rays and gamma rays are the purplest things we've got. The other edge of the rainbow is red, but infra-red is even redder than that. It's so red, we can't see it.

There's a mental separation between our rainbow colors and things like ultra-violet, or x-rays, but you have to realize that it's entirely in our heads. ROYGBIV is not special. It is not not not special. There is nothing particularly unique about the visible spectrum, other than it's the frequency range we can see.

Think of it this way. You go to a gravel pit, and there are chips and chunks of rocks all over the place, ranging from giant boulders to minute sand. Now imagine a guy sorting through these rocks with a basket slung over his shoulder, measuring each one, and only collecting rocks that were between one and two inches wide. Then he takes all of these stones aside, and arranges them into seven groups, by size. He calls the first group red, the second group orange...

Do you see where I'm going? And other animals have ended up sensitive to other frequencies of light. Birds, for instance, can see in ultra-violet. Because of this, they can get certain information through sight that we cannot. Presumably, information that's important for being a bird.

So, if you were to ask the question, is color a fundamental part of the universe, the answer is no. Color doesn't exist, any more than a distinction between one-inch stones exists in a quarry. Even though it's such a big part of our experience, it's just a method of organizing information.

So, with this in mind, I have to wonder why the seven chakras would somehow correspond to the narrow frequency band that humans can see. I have to wonder, in fact, why our very limited eyes have such a sway in the non-physical universe. Why do people who believe they have left their body been saddled with this limitation? Is this something we have to carry on into the afterlife?

And if your soul uses light to see after you're dead, you had better hope that its vision is 20/20, because I don't imagine there are any optical shops in heaven.

Thanks for reading.

Why skeptics should have out-of-body experiences

2010-08-24T12:20:00.000-07:00

I mentioned out of body experiences in my August 11 post, I can't believe my eyes, but I think there's a lot more to say about them. In the aforementioned post, I said that my OBE could have been a vivid dream. I wasn't, however, being entirely honest.

I don't think that out-of-body experiences can be explained by simple dreaming, and I think that the dismissal of these experiences may be causing us to miss out on a mysterious aspect of psychology.

The anecdotal evidence tells us that

The OBE is supposed to be as vivid as waking life.
The OBE involves the feeling exiting one's body, and existing as a discarnate spirit.
The wild abstraction that's found in the average dream is absent in the OBE.
The OBE includes the apparent ability to effectively wake oneself up.
The OBE includes a "vibrations" sensation, where it seems one's body is vibrating.
Upon waking, it's commonly believed that the the preceding experience was not a dream.

Now, this is all remarkably subjective, and I understand this. All I want to outline is that an ordinary dream comes with a one set of expectations, a lucid dream comes with another set of expectations, and a supposed OBE comes with an entirely different set of expectations.

I don't see any reason to believe in the supernatural basis of the out-of-body experience. However, I think that for a psychologist to dismiss the experience as a simple dream is to avoid explaining something that I, personally, would like explained. The OBE seems to be a very interesting, specific type of dream, that, because of the conclusions of those that experience it, is pushed into the fringe of science. The lucid dream used to be in the same boat, until Stephen Laberge brought it into scientific scrutiny in the late seventies.

The dismissiveness I see in the scientific and skeptical community is sometimes disconcerting. This affects scientific progress in a negative way. Let me explain how.

If the general public notices an effect that is not yet observed by science (often in biology or psychology, which are extremely complex systems that we have day-to-day exposure to), there is sometimes a tendency to give it a supernatural label, and to incorporate it into an existing supernatural worldview. At that point, it is prime to be debunked or ignored, and we all suffer.

Even with these speedbumps, though, science is self-correcting, even if it is sometimes in the long term.

The so-called out-of-body experience can be induced, I understand. I think that if more people were using whatever methods to experience this, with a skeptical point of view, we might begin to understand the purpose of it, psychologically.

And we skeptics may be able to have some fun of our own, without all of the spiritual baggage.

Facebook is serious business

2010-08-24T09:54:00.001-07:00

I've got a Facebook "like" button on the right, now. I would appreciate that anyone who actually does enjoy the blog take the time to click that. If you don't enjoy it, then you're exempt.

Why you shouldn't believe everything you read on myspace

2010-08-23T11:55:00.000-07:00

I was a bit younger than I am today (early 20s, as opposed to late 20s) and, at least hopefully, a bit more pathetic. I was heartsick over a girl who, I was pretty sure, was not heartsick over me. For the sake of this blog, we'll call her Joan Marshall.

I was on myspace, back when I used the site, and the front page had a little spot where it would show three new profiles. I looked at the names, and then I looked at them again, and then I looked at them a third time, and almost fell off of my chair.

The first profile was of a young black man, all decked out in whatever urban gear was popular at the time. His name was listed as Go Getta. The second profile was some girl named Joan. The third profile was of some guy. His name was Marshall.

Printed out, as clear as day, on the front page of myspace, was Go Getta Joan Marshall!

This sort of thing is called a synchronicity. A synchronicity is like a coincidence, only it's implied that there's some kind of higher power behind it. Synchronicity is one of the key players in the Law of Attraction.

I think synchronicity is a great example of why many of us humans believe in the paranormal. Like Jung's Beetle, or my myspace front page (which I think is much more impressive) there is obviously something going on here.

But, how do you define a synchronicity? What does it have to include, in order to earn the title? Unfortunately, there don't seem to be any kind of defined parameters. It could happen anywhere, in regards to anything, and it could take as long or as short as it takes.

We know that the odds of me sitting down and seeing that composite sentence are very low, because there are thousands of different first names that could have landed in those spots. But you could change the incident in any number of fundamental ways, without removing its supposed significance. I could have seen the words spelled out between the loose pages of a magazine. The website could have said something personal about my neighbor, instead of my love life. The first profile could have been, Take a Look instead of Go Getta. Now, what are the odds of all of the possibilities put together? I'd say still pretty low, because that sort of thing doesn't happen very often. If it had been any of those variations, though, I would still be using it as an example in today's blog.

So, I guess the real question is, what are the odds that something in my wide experience will somehow seem to relate to anything else at all in my wide experience, which includes things I've seen, heard and thought? The odds are high. This is something that would necessarily happen in a supernatural world and a skeptic's world alike.

If you roll a handful of twenty-sided dice, the odds of you getting an extremely unlikely result are 100%.

That's all I'm trying to say.

A case of beer and some waterproof boots

2010-08-22T12:15:00.000-07:00

Some of you may have been in suspense since yesterday. I did, after all, mention that a post about cow tipping was in the pipeline. I, myself, would have been biting my nails in anticipation.

Absurd

As a skeptic, I have plenty of criticisms I can give to those that believe in things that I think are (at best) very unlikely. As a critical thinker, though, I have plenty of criticisms for the skeptical community as well. I'm sure that some of you heard the words cow and tipping, and your first thought was that it's been debunked. Well, yes, it has, for the following reasons.

1. Cows do not sleep standing up. They doze.

2. Cows have an excellent sense of hearing and smell. They would not be easy to sneak up on.

3. Cows are heavy, with a low center of gravity.

From the Times Online article Cow-tipping myth hasn't got a leg to stand on:

“The static physics of the issue say . . . two people might be able to tip a cow,” she said. “But the cow would have to be tipped quickly — the cow’s centre of mass would have to be pushed over its hoof before the cow could react.”

Newton’s second law of motion, force equals mass multiplied by acceleration, shows that the high acceleration necessary to tip the cow would require a higher force. “Biology also complicates the issue here because the faster the [human] muscles have to contract, the lower the force they can produce. But I suspect that even if a dynamic physics model suggests cow tipping is possible, the biology ultimately gets in the way: a cow is simply not a rigid, unresponding body.”

So, case closed? Well, I have to admit that all of this troubles me. Not only is there the anecdotal evidence (and sorry, fellow skeptics, it is actually evidence. I'll do a blog about this later) of people who've been involved in tipping a cow, but there's also the debunkers, who've never been involved in tipping a cow.

In my mind, the best information comes from scientists who have been in the field (so to speak) and have studied a matter first-hand, using the scientific process.

The second-best information comes from the lay person who reports a matter, and has experienced it first-hand, using a non-scientific process.

And the third-best information comes from scientists who sit at a desk, with a calculator and a protractor, and use their abilities to remote-debunk a phenomenon, believing that they have been given the power to settle an argument at a distance.

Of course, this isn't an absolute scale. Some things are perfectly viable on a piece of paper. Theoretical physicists have done wonders with chalkboards. With biology, though, and things that are alive and aware, the edges are much more fuzzy than the pencil lines on a piece of paper.

If you've ever watched Mythbusters* (a show I enjoy more for the fun they have than the sometimes-iffy science) whenever they do a myth about an animal, the animal will consistently not behave the way they had expected.** An animal is something that cannot be represented by simple math. There are too many factors involved. In short, I don't buy it, and I won't until the debunkers find themselves in a field, skirting around piles of poop, sneaking up on an unsuspecting cow.

Perhaps a dozing cow isn't alarmed by approaching humans. It may be used to humans approaching. Perhaps a cow, when shoved, would decide that falling over was preferable to regaining balance, because of some quirk in bovine psychology. I don't know, and likely neither do you. All I know is that to arrive at the now-accepted conclusion, you have to make a boatload of assumptions, and then pretend that they're all correct.

In short, go, and I don't want to see you again until your boots are soiled.

Thanks for reading.

*I just checked, there have been multiple submissions of cow tipping to the Mythbusters homepage.

**My favorite instance, by far, was a bull in a china shop. If you haven't watched the episode, take a look.

Your very own universe

2010-08-21T13:52:00.000-07:00

I started to write a blog about cow-tipping, but I'm off my routine today, and the blog was sort of all-over-the-pace.

In my August 16 post, Why we don't let pigeons gamble, I discussed the idea of luck. There were some things I wanted to include in that post, but when it was over, they were still absent.

The main problem I have with a luck is that those who believe in it (or even half believe in it, which I think would be a large percent of humanity) don't have an explanation for how it should work. There are plenty of things in science that I don't understand, but there is at least an established framework that leads to it. There are experts that do understand, and we can read what they have to say. When it comes to luck, it seems to be a roof without a house.

I think, though, that we can look at beliefs about luck, and try to put together a system that could result in it.

To start with, luck is clearly a substance. It's something we can gain or lose. Some items and areas give off luck. Lucky socks, for instance, or a lucky parking spot. Others, like the underside of a ladder, or mirror shards, can suck up your luck, and shrink your reserves.

But of what practical use is luck? How can it help us meet with favorable events? Perhaps it has the power to influence our decisions, and help us make the right ones. Choose the right lottery numbers, or send the manuscript to the right literary agent. It would do this by suggesting decisions to us, at a subconscious level.

But how does luck know what decision to make in the first place? Is it intelligent? Is luck a being? We still don't know what causes some things to give off luck, or how it interacts with our physical brain.

The only point I'm trying to make is that we need to look at our beliefs more closely. It can't be enough that something is so, there has to be a reason why it is so. Every occurrence in the universe has a cause. We can't have a roof without a house, and we can't have a baseball hit a window unless it has traveled there from somewhere else.

If your belief can't exist as a result of the current laws of physics, then you're going to need new physical laws, that not only fit with your beliefs, but also fit with all of the existing physical laws, and daily experience. That's a big responsibility.

Because, after all, you don't get your own universe.

Fabrication Friday - Aug 20, 2010

2010-08-20T09:18:00.000-07:00

The following is not true.

This was only a couple of weeks ago. It was actually on the same day that I started this blog, but I don't know if that's significant.

I used to sleepwalk when I was a kid. I would wake up standing in the living room, or, more frightening, walking down the road. I don't know what eventually stopped it, but I was about fifteen when I noticed that it hadn't happened it about a year. I'm twenty-eight now, but this is what I thought must have been going on when I woke up. I knew that I was uncomfortable, and I woke up slowly, and when I finally opened my eyes I didn't know where I was for a second. I was off-balance, lying on a slant, and I was outside. That was the first thing I noticed. It was the middle of the night, but it was somewhat bright, and a few moments later I realized that I was on the roof.

I was on the edge of the roof, looking at old shingles and the very edge of the gutter. I didn't make any quick movements (I've never liked heights) but got up slowly, hoping that ladder I must have used to get up was still there, so I wouldn't have to wake anybody up to get it. After about a minute I had realized that I was not on my own roof. I was three houses down from my house.

I carefully inched around the edge of the roof, more afraid of being caught on my neighbor's roof in my boxers than falling off. I saw a plum tree than overhanged the roof a bit, and thought that was probably how I got up. I approached, and saw a woodpecker there, and when I got closer it didn't get frightened. I spoke the way people absently speak to animals. I said, "Hey, you going to stay there?"

And the woodpecker actually answered, to my astonishment. "I'm resting."

So, a talking woodpecker. It's insane, and I'm just going to report it the way I remember it. What else can I do?

I talked with the woodpecker a little bit. I wasn't as shocked as I would have thought I'd be. I asked her the kinds of questions you might ask an animal that you can suddenly communicate with. I asked what her favorite thing to do, and she said, "Taking care of my babies." I found out that she was, in fact, one of the woodpeckers that had hatched in our backyard last year. I asked what she thought of our house and she said it was beautiful. Her general feeling was that things humans made looked beautiful and smelled terrible.

So, as we were talking, I reached for a tree branch, ready to climb down, and it felt like an electric shock. The moment I touched it, I woke up in bed, disoriented. And what's weird is that the last image I had, waking up, was of myself being channeled, like electricity, through the tree branch, trunk, root, and that one roots of the tree actually reached three houses down, and touched the foundation of my house. I knew, deep inside, that that was exactly how I had ended up on the roof of the other house. I also had a feeling, and this is crazier than talking to a woodpecker, that the tree had actually grown that way intentionally for this purpose. I can't explain exactly what happened, maybe I never will be able to, but I know that my view of the way the world works is forever changed.

Thanks for humoring me by reading this far, even if you don't actually believe me. I'm just glad I could get my story out, so that other people that have experienced this might feel comfortable doing the same thing.

Thank you.

Please read: http://bit.ly/bmmXlX

How not to be a sheep

2010-08-19T09:31:00.000-07:00

When I'm speaking to fellow skeptics, the main criticism of the paranormal is lack of hard evidence. Where are the definitive, repeatable, unambiguous, lab-tested studies that tell us that, say, ESP is real? Then, when I speak to those that claim to experience ESP, they give you a list of such experiments, saying that the skeptics are so closed-minded that they wouldn't see the evidence if it was printed on the wall opposite the toilet.

The skeptics say the believers are using bad methods. The believers say the skeptics are afraid of change. The skeptics say the believers prefer their fairy tale world to reality. The believers say, "Hey, skeptics, that was a dickhead thing to say!"

We see this everywhere. Everything from climate change to the health benefits of cigarettes has plenty of scientific evidence to back up both sides of the argument. Or even worse, a word that should be struck from the dictionary, they have definitive "proof."

So, what do we do? We know that someone is, at best mistaken, or at worst lying. If you ask most people surrounding an emotionally charged controversy, all you'll get is more bogged down by second, third and fourth-hand studies of things that should have been figured out by now.

Don't go around asking people what the studies said. A person recalling what they heard someone else tell them about the study is bound to sound like, "Well, they had the subjects... I guess people off of the street... they had 'em put on a... something that blocked out light and sound. And then they had them guess about... Anyway, it was a very significant result. Seventy percent. Or something." What you're doing is playing a game of telephone, and you're the fifth person down the line. This is useless, as far as learning goes. It's tiny bits of truth buried in a lot of noise, like listening to a radio frequency that falls just outside of a music station.

Read the studies yourself! You're a human, the most intelligent animal on this planet, so click a link or two, and find the raw material. Don't be intimidated by the way scientists word things. Scientists, like lawyers, want to be very specific in their speech, and it doesn't sound natural, but if you wade through all of that intimidating text, you'll come out the other side with a better understanding of the study than most people have.

And, while you're reading, keep in mind that scientists are people, too. Some of their conclusions are premature. For instance: showing that two things happen together (violence and video games, for instance) does not tell you that one caused the other. This is logic, and all of us have easy access to it. More than once, I've read a peer-reviewed scholarly paper, and realized that there was something they never accounted for, or that the results relied too heavily on human perception.

Skeptics: Don't rely on James Randi to tell you that something has been debunked since 1980, so that you can parrot that onward. See exactly how it was debunked, and your arguments will be stronger for it.

Believers: Don't rely on Charles Tart to tell you that something has been proven since 2003, so that you can argue with the skeptic in the previous paragraph. Go see the proof yourself, get to the root of it, and see exactly how the conclusion was made.

Because anything else is just lazy.