As Luke F. demonstrated earlier in the week, YouTube is a great medium for communicating science to a wide audience. An engaging video can go a long way (both educationally and geographically, with regards to some viral videos) in teaching people about certain aspects of science, especially raw knowledge. But what about explaining what science actually is? How does science work?

TechNyou, in collaboration with Bridge8, has produced two excellent series of videos, the latest of which — This Thing Called Science - explicitly addresses this issue, dealing with scientific skepticism, testing, scientific ethics, and more. They’re pretty great. And I should just leave you to watch them.

Call Me Skeptical

Testing, Testing 1–2-3

Blinded By Science

Confidently Uncertain

Do The Right Thing

Citizen Science

Wouldn’t it be great if these were shown in every classroom in Australia?

Make sure you also check out TechNyou’s other series of videos with Bridge8, about critical thinking — which starts with this video.

Every week we ask a question of our readers, to stimulate discussion and critical thinking about an issue or topic relating to science, skepticism, technology or religion. Our favourite points are discussed on our weekly podcast, The Pseudoscientists.

Television is one of the most widely-consumed forms of media on the planet, and has a huge influence on the general publics opinions and state of knowledge in many areas, including science. As discussed on the latest episode of the podcast, the hugely-popular Doctor Who has a complex relationship with science — or at least we think so. Are there any other shows that fare better?

What fictional TV show do you think best represents or communicates science or scientists?

Remember: we’re not talking about documentaries or programs like Mythbusters, but fictional narrative shows like Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica… It doesn’t have to be science fiction either! Was House M.D. good at communicating and representing science? What about… something else?

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by frankieroberto]

The Pseudoscientists — Episode 90

Subscribe: iTunes / Libsyn RSS

Tom and Jack are joined by comedian Ben McKenzie (of Splendid Chaps) to talk about the relationship between Doctor Who and science: whether or not it is science fiction, how it represents science and scientists, and how time travel, regeneration and sonic screwdrivers fare scientifically. Also, Tom shares some news about the consensus on climate change. Jargonauts looks at the multi-talented world of vectors, and Question of the Week examines science communication: “How far should science communicators simplify science when explaining complicated concepts?”

Plus: Tom’s Melbourne Fringe show, self-referentialisms, and more Doctor Who.

Links

• “Survey finds 97% of climate science papers agree warming is man-made” - The Guardian
• Ben McKenzie’s Doctor Who podcast Splendid Chaps can be found on iTunes, at splendidchaps.com and on Twitter at @splendidchaps, and you can follow Ben at @labcoatman
• Check out the Facebook page for Tom’s Melbourne Fringe Festival show “Love, Factually” to stay updated!

Question For Next Week

What fictional TV show do you think best represents or communicates science or scientists?

Let us know in the comments here or on our dedicated post!

Houston, We Have A Problem

Support

To support the show, you can purchase the Young Australian Skeptics’s Skeptical Blog Anthology - available in paperback or ebook!

Also, consider leaving us a rating and/or review on iTunes!

Contact

If you have feedback for the show or want to ask us a question, get in touch via our Contact page or send us an email at youngausskeptics(at)gmail(dot)com.

You can also become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at @pseudoscipod.

My field of psychology focuses a lot on “intelligence”. I personally don’t believe there is a proper definition for intelligence, nor a test for it. I’m not talking about a spiritual cosmic hippy explanation where “everyone is intelligent and beautiful, maaaaan”, I’m referring to the ultra-Western way of testing intelligence. It’s biased and unfair to those who haven’t grown up in a white, Western society.

“If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” - Einstein¹

How confident are you in a concrete definition of “intelligence”?

1. Although it’s not clear Einstein ever said those words, it’s still a nice quote.

With 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, you would really be hoping to that there is more to life than cat videos!

Well if that is what you are hoping, then you have some seriously good luck because if you look for it you can find some seriously good quality, interesting science & skeptical content!

I have been mining one of the biggest sites on the internet (avoiding too much of “the sewer of the internet” – YouTube commenters) and struct plenty of gold. Here’s my roundup of the best science videos on YouTube! Please let me know if I’ve missed anything & share your favourites below.

In alphabetical order…

ASAPScience

ASAPScience helps you understand the science in your own life! Their weekly videos cover all sorts of quirky and mind blowing science from “The Science of Orgasms” (above) to “Why Do We Cry?”.

Chris Hadfield

Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield, commander of Expedition 35 on the International Space Station hit YouTube success of EPIC proportions recently with his release of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” (above), a music video recorded in space. But that’s not all he’s done, he also can tell you all about “The Space Toilet” and more.

Crash Course

There are a mix of Crash Courses across science and the humanities. With Biology, Chemistry and Ecology presented by Hank Green. Hank will show you all about “Water — Liquid Awesome” (above) and will inform you “That’s Why Carbon Is A Tramp”.

Derren Brown

Not a scientist, but one of the world’s most accomplished magician and mentalist, Derren Brown, has a collection of videos that’ll make your jaw drop and teach you all about our psychology! You never quite know the extent of our suggestibility and predictability until you watch some of Derren’s work. Derren tricks woman into thinking she’s dead (above), he guesses people’s professions off the street and tricks shopkeepers into letting him pay with plain paper.

Numberphile

On the Numberphile channel Brady Haran has put together dozens of amazing videos all about numbers, how they work and how they relate to the world. You can find out “How Pi was nearly changed to 3.2″ (above) or that “Infinity is bigger than you think” or get an intro to “Safe Cracking with Feynman”.

MinutePhysics

Founder & creator Henry Reich of MinutePhysics describes it as: “Simply put: cool physics and other sweet science” and he’s pretty spot on. Watch MinutePysics and you could see anything from “The True Science of Parallel Universes” (above) to “Immovable Object vs Unstoppable Force”. Now so successful that it’s been translated into Spanish and they’ve launched another channel called MinuteEarth (in both English & Spanish too!).

The Periodic Table of Videos

Based out of the University of Nottingham and with a host that looks like your hollywood mad scientist, The Periodic Table of Videos have produced a video for every single element on the period table and have continued with many more videos since. They’ve done an episode from within the UK’s Gold Bullion Vault (above) and show you what happens to a cheeseburger dipped into hydrochloric acid!

Quirkology

Psychologist, magician and skeptic Richard Wiseman is the guy who will prepare you for all your party tricks and help you understand our feeble brains! You can watch “10 More Amazing Science Stunts” and will really test your attention to detail with the “Colour Changing Card Trick”.

Scientific American

While Scientific American are a big magazine, they have a relatively small YouTube presence. But they’ve put a lot of work into some really great videos lately that definitely makes them worthy of this list. Above is a recent video of “Virus vs. Superbug–Fight!” and they have other great videos in their Instant Egghead playlist like “Why Do Paper Cuts Hurt So Much?”.

The Science Channel

Although they’ve gone quiet recently, The Science Channel is a long running YouTube channel that covers more hard science with videos like “‘The God Particle’: The Higgs Boson” (above) and a great primer on “The Electromagnetic Spectrum”.

SciShow

SciShow discusses science news and history and concepts. They “go a little deeper…without going off the deep end. Well, most of the time anyway”. They cover things from “How Week Works” (above) to “The Science of Lying”.

Smarter Every Day

Smarter Every Day explores the world using science, that’s pretty much all there is to it! With videos such as “Slow Motion Flipping Cat” (above) to “Poop Splash Elimination” you can really have some fun with these Smarter Every Day science videos!

Veritasium

Based out of Australia, Veritasium is a science video blog featuring experiments, expert interviews, cool demos, and discussions with the public about everything science. Watch videos from “Can We Go The Speed of Light?” to “Trees are Freaking Awesome”.

Vi Hart

For his day job Vi Hart is a professional mathemusician at Khan Academy. But his (not-so) secret super power is his YouTube science videos fully equipped with notepad doodling and more! He’s uploaded videos ranging from the the very meta “5 Reasons We Like 5 Reasons Videos” (above) to the very informative “What is up with Noises? (The Science and Mathematics of Sound, Frequency & Pitch)” [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_0DXxNeaQ0].

Vsauce

With the tagline “Our World Is Amazing” Vsauce explores everything from “What If Everyone JUMPED At Once?” (above) to “Is The 5-Second Rule True”. Vsauce wasn’t originally as scienc-ey but has definitely become so. It’s been so popular that now there’s even now a Vsauce2 and Vsauce3.

A Week In Science by RiAus

The Royal Institue of Australia strives to bring science to people and people to science by highlighting the importance of science in everyday life. Their “Week In Science Vodcast” is a fantastic resource if you want to get caught up with what’s going on in the world of science in just a few minutes. It’s by no means exhaustive (as that would be virtually impossible) but provides a great summary of some things worth knowing.

There are so many…

I know I’ve missed some, but I’ve certainly given you a great procrastination resource with this list alone!

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by exalthim]

The new Star Trek is better than the old Star Trek. I can say that definitively, without any reservations. Why? Well, because I don’t put much stock in my own opinion. I waver like a leaf in the breeze, a wishy-washy trend-follower who likes what he’s told to like. Or do I? Maybe not. It depends what you think. I’ll go with the flow. If I don’t truly believe myself, why should I care if I’m wrong? Check and mate. What a terrible introduction. That’s not actually true, anyway – I believe what I say, and I’m not going to hide behind a barricade of illogical self-doubt. I just wanted to do fun with words. This was confusing and I apologise. It’s just my brain. I’m sorry for being eccentric and brilliant.

Alright, so let’s get an actual contention out there: I can declare, with some conviction, that the new Star Trek movies are better than the older movies and TV series. They are. They’re more exciting, more dynamic, have better performances, have fantastic special effects, are smart, have great dialogue and interesting stories. Chris Pine is hunksome and Zoe Saldana is almost too pretty, whereas William Shatner is more attractive now than he was in Star Trek. I have it on good authority that Patrick Stewart loves car racing (blechhh) and used to go around teaching children’s Furbys to swear. I heard that the original Scotty was actually Russian, although I may just be getting characters confused.

Oh, and I should clarify one thing: I’ve never seen the original movies or any of the TV series. Oops. Did I… not… mention that yet? That I’ve never seen an episode of the original series, any of the movies and absolutely none of the successive series? Yeah, that. That’s a thing. I’ve always been a Star Wars fan and I perceived Star Trek to be stodgy and boring. You know what the new Star Trek movies aren’t, though? Stodgy and boring and lacking in Benedict Cumberbatch. They’re none of those. Well, one of them lacks the ‘Batch. So yes, I admit it – I’ve never seen old Star Trek. But guess what?

It doesn’t matter what you think about the old Star Trek — the new ones are just great entertainment. If you fail to enjoy the two new Star Trek films, directed by future Star Wars director J.J. Abrams, you probably don’t like fun things. You don’t like banter, big ships, bad guys with a) funny faces or b) deep voices, lasers going pew pew, heroic journeys, time travel, callbacks (admittedly, callbacks to things I only recognise because The Simpsons and Seinfeld parodied them) and parallel universes. You don’t like science fiction, and I don’t like you. Do you enjoy classic storytelling in a daring, gorgeous future with archetypical characters that manages to surprise and thrill? Oh, you don’t? It must be fun living in a world with no fun. I am writing directly to you, 6 teenaged uber-nerds sitting in front of me and my tipsy friends at the cinema a week ago with your snide, buzz-killing remarks as the credits rolled.

Why didn’t they like it? Were they, perhaps, fans of the old Star Trek? Does it matter that the new Star Trek throws aside the considered, thoughtful science of the old Star Trek? Because, from my minimal research, it seems like it has done that. That much seems to be true. The new Star Trek films are closer to the romantic adventuring of Indiana Jones and Star Wars, or even the glossy team-spirit of something like The Avengers. But damn it people, it did it well and it did it balanced astride the backstory of a matured, rich, tasty sci-fi property. I love my hard sci-fi. Primer is one of my favourite films, and the intense and slow-moving 2001: A Space Odyssey isn’t far behind. But the new Star Trek films are good and you don’t have to hate them just because you like the old Star Trek. Don’t be a hater. Live long and prosper.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by viipeer]

Every week we ask a question of our readers, to stimulate discussion and critical thinking about an issue or topic relating to science, skepticism, technology or religion. Our favourite points are discussed on our weekly podcast, The Pseudoscientists.

Sometimes science is complicated. I mean, just look at the atom: they’re the building blocks of matter, but how should they be explained to non-physicists? Quantum weirdness is almost impossible to grasp, but it’s just not right to say that electrons orbit the nucleus like the Moon orbits the Earth. Many scientific concepts need to be simplified before non-specialists can hope to understand them. But there has to be a limit, right?

How far should science communicators simplify science when explaining complicated concepts?

Is an explanation that’s closer to the scientific truth necessarily a better explanation? Or can people live with slightly wrong models of reality, albeit ones that don’t force them to lose sleep trying to figure them out? Let us know in the comments!

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by 10413717@N08]

The Pseudoscientists — Episode 89

Subscribe: iTunes / Libsyn RSS

Jack, Sarah and Tom find out how and why the owner of Jim’s Many Business Franchises wants to change the world with a crazy scheme, how bacteria can live in arsenic-rich gold mines, and discuss the complex issue of abortion. Jargonauts harks back to high school chemistry class with redox reactions, and Question of the Week looks at the limitations of science: is there anything it can’t answer?

Plus: caesarean sections, sex research and creationist propaganda.

Links

• “Life in an Arsenic-Containing Gold Mine: Genome and Physiology of the Autotrophic Arsenite-Oxidizing Bacterium Rhizobium sp. NT-26″ - Genome Biology and Evolution
• “The Founder Of Jim’s Mowing Will Make You Smarter And Save The World” - Vice Magazine
• Astronaut Chris Hadfield’s excellent “Space Oddity” music video can be found here.
• Make sure you check out the hilarious The Book Was Better podcast!

Question For Next Week

How far should science communicators simplify science when explaining complicated concepts?

Let us know in the comments here or on our dedicated post!

Houston, We Have A Problem

Support

To support the show, you can purchase the Young Australian Skeptics’s Skeptical Blog Anthology - available in paperback or ebook!

Also, consider leaving us a rating and/or review on iTunes!

Contact

If you have feedback for the show or want to ask us a question, get in touch via our Contact page or send us an email at youngausskeptics(at)gmail(dot)com.

You can also become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at @pseudoscipod.

Autism is a controversial diagnosis. It has been openly accepted by the psychological, psychiatric and medical world as a genetic neurological condition, with a 70% concordance rate in identical autistic twins. The symptoms are varied and present on a spectrum, ranging from “completely non-verbal mental retardation” to “high functioning with slight social communication problems”. There’s been a recent boom in research into autism, and while a lot has been discovered, it still remains mysterious. It’s a condition that is close to my heart, as it’s the topic of my Honours thesis, and it will likely continue to be what I study for the rest of my academic career. So with that context: this article was written in between grunts of frustration, sighs of disappointment, and growls of anger.

No doubt you’ve come across the anti-vaccination brigade, with their unfounded and completely untrue claims about vaccinations causing autism, but there’s another group of people taking advantage of parents of autistic children. They call themselves “doctors” of homeopathy, naturopathy, and healing. This “healing” is often advertised as a cure for autism. As far as science goes, there isn’t a cure for autism, so how have these “doctors” found the cure, and more importantly, why isn’t it being rolled out via hospitals and pharmacies?! It’s because it doesn’t work. It’s quite simple actually: a systematic review of 16 double-blind, randomised, clinical trials testing homeopathic remedies on children and adolescents with autism found that evidence of effective treatment “is not convincing enough for recommendations in any condition” (Altung, Pittler, & Ernst, 2007¹).

I’ll save you from an endless barrage of valid, reliable and scientifically-validated articles, by just saying that they all come to the same conclusions. Want to know why? Because homeopathy is water. If it were truly to work, everyone would be cured of everything, because everyone drinks water! In fact, the highest cure rate would be seen in those with Irritable Bowel Syndrome: if “like cures like” (a fundamental assumption of homeopathy), then the amount of diluted human waste in our water would surely eradicate IBS forever!

Other natural remedies claimed by quacks to cure autism include: vibration therapy, acupuncture, herbal medicine, and detoxification diets. None of these therapies are backed up by credible evidence, and instead are “proven” effective through the use of anecdotes and biased testimony: the herpes of the scientific credibility world. Along with the many ethical principles these false doctors are breaking, they’re offering false hope. Parents of autistic children are often confused, upset, frustrated and sometimes even experience guilt over their child’s diagnosis. This guilt comes about when they’re told that their choice to vaccinate their child gave them autism, and at the other end, when they’re told they’re not doing enough or spending enough money to “cure” their child. These money-grubbing frauds are telling blatant lies, and then charging for those lies! I have never come across a homeopath or naturopath who because they’ve discovered the cure for autism, have given it out for free out of the goodness of their hearts. Personally, if throughout my studies, I miraculously stumbled across a “cure” (which isn’t likely due to the nature of autism not being one problem, but a combination), I’d give it to anyone who wanted it. I like to think that scientists do what they do for the good of human and animal kind, not to get fabulously wealthy.

As this is a website full of wonderfully attractive sceptical people, I ask you to be sceptical of any claims of ‘cures’, regardless of the ailment they’re claiming to fix. As aforementioned, if the cures were really effective, they wouldn’t be sold from websites written in Comic Sans.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by caffeina]

1. Altung, U., Pittler, M., & Ernst, E. (2007). Homeopathy for childhood and adolescence ailments: Systematic review of randomized clinical trials. Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 82, 69–75.

Every week we ask a question of our readers, to stimulate discussion and critical thinking about an issue or topic relating to science, skepticism, technology or religion. Our favourite points are discussed on our weekly podcast, The Pseudoscientists.

Scientific progress is unquestionably moving forward. As we learn more and more about the natural world, it seems fit to ask: how much will we eventually be able to understand using science? Will we understand everything, or…

Are there any questions that science can’t solve?

Can science solve moral questions? Philosophical ones? If not, are these questions even worth solving? Is this question itself one that cannot be answered by science? Let us know in the comments!

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by edenpictures]

The Pseudoscientists — Episode 88

Subscribe: iTunes / Libsyn RSS

Sarah once again joins Tom and Jack, this time to discuss why tickling rats is good for them, why the US Congress wants to destroy science, and why a vaccine against heroin might be possible. Jargonauts redefines the ice-cream headache, and we peer into the dark heart of terror… scientific terror, that is.

Plus: Tom’s obsession with animal sex, self-indulgence and Ghostbusters.

Links

• “SOPA author Lamar Smith wants congressional guidelines to replace peer review for federal science research” - The Verge
• “Heroin Vaccine Blocks Relapse, Preclinical Study Suggests” - ScienceDaily
• “To Calm a Rat with Tickling” - Scicurious

Question For Next Week

Are there any questions that science can’t solve?

Let us know in the comments here or on our dedicated post!

Houston, We Have A Problem

Support

To support the show, you can purchase the Young Australian Skeptics’s Skeptical Blog Anthology - available in paperback or ebook!

Also, consider leaving us a rating and/or review on iTunes!

Contact

If you have feedback for the show or want to ask us a question, get in touch via our Contact page or send us an email at youngausskeptics(at)gmail(dot)com.

You can also become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at @pseudoscipod.

Of all the sciences, biology is literally the one closest to my heart.

Physics is just practical mathematics. Chemistry is just soggy physics. But biology is something special.

If you could take a little pile of perfectly ordinary chemicals (from Bunnings, say), and arrange them into just the right arrangement of gooey layers, you could make a set of very complex self sustaining chemical reactions. You could make a messy, leaky, self-replicating machine.

You could make life.

And while we’re still not sure what practical purpose life serves, or what exactly it even is, it’s certainly diverting, and it keeps the biologists in business¹.

See, as far as science is concerned, biology is kind of a niche field. Physicists look at the birth of the universe, the tiniest atoms, and the furthest stars. Chemists toy with the fundamentals of matter, and analyse the composition of distant nebulae². But biologists’ entire field of study is isolated to a thin film of organic slime on the very outer crust of a single, fairly unremarkable planet; a chemical oddity which has only existed for a few billion years, and may not last for a few billion more.

Of course, to the things which crawl in that slime, or hop, or walk, or write for satirical webpages in that slime, that seems like an awfully long time, and frankly, one which doesn’t bear thinking about. Because when you’re a living thing, you’re concerned with only two matters: sex and death.

The second one is obvious. Livers gotta live³. If you’re dead, you’re not alive, so you’re doing a crappy job of being a living thing. If you’re reading this, you’ve obviously got at least the basics down. Good work! Continue respiring normally, and direct your goo-filled photoreceptive organs to the rest of the paragraph.

Biologically speaking, the only thing more important than staying alive is having sex.

In fact, having sex is so much more important than staying alive, that dying in order to get laid is actually the norm for a lot of creatures, including:

• Spiders and mantises: the male is himself a mid-coital snack for the female. Chivalry lives!
• Antechinus, a small marsupial: in the mating season, the male won’t eat, drink, or sleep, he just mates until death. Thereby avoiding awkward morning conversations.
• Salmon: they swim upstream, dodge bears, dump eggs, and die. Party on, salmon. Party on.
• Humans: males of breeding age smoke, drink, and ride motorbikes, ensuring their sexual success and inevitable fiery demise.

…and a host of other randy, short-sighted little critters.

See, as far as biology is concerned, the entire purpose of any living thing is to act as a life-support system for its genes. You’ll inevitably die one day, but if you reproduce before then, your genes pass the test.

Genes coding for a sensible disinclination to have sex even in the face of certain death simply don’t get passed on so much. Sure, those genes may build a utopian society, in harmony with their environment, but they’ll quickly be overrun by genes coding for mindless expansion and lousy forward-planning skills.

This means that every aspect of any living thing expressly serves the purpose of helping you survive and get laid, and so that your children can survive and get laid, and so forth. Things like appendixes or wisdom teeth are leftovers which helped your ancestors survive and laid. No exceptions. Birds are pretty? That helps them survive and get laid. Cats are bastards? That helps them survive and get laid. Bananas are tasty? That helps them survive and get laid. People are selfish, xenophobic and ignorant? That helps them survive and get laid. It may not make them any friends, but it sure has been proven to be successful.

This is really the most important thing you need to understand about biology. There are, granted, a few other snippets of information here and there⁴, but I’m sure we’ll get to them later. For now, go forth and multiply!⁵

1. Which might seem like circular logic, but welcome to biology! “The point of life is to propagate.” “Why?” “Because otherwise it wouldn’t have propagated.”
2. CHEMISTRY FACT: Apparently space tastes like rum and smells like raspberries (it’s all that ethyl formate).
3. And kidneys gotta kid.
4. Don’t eat green potatoes, the occipital lobe is responsible for visual processing, and some stuff about hydrogen sulphide. I think that’s most of it.
5. And then die, so your children can eat you to get that essential head-start in life.

The Secular Student Alliance is a great organisation in the US dedicated to help further skepticism and secularism on college campuses all across the US, and they’re currently in the middle of “Secular Student Alliance Week”, to help celebrate secular student activism.

Our good friend Kylie Sturgess, over at Patheos, is running a 24-hour marathon of blog posts in order to encourage donations to the SSA, and she’s already halfway through!

Why should you also consider donating, besides all this content I’m sending you?  The Secular Student Alliance provides guidance, funding, materials and general support for any student who is keen to start a chapter. They often hold free events that all students and wider community can benefit from, which also encompasses reaching out to a more diverse audience (for example, they sponsored Skeptech).

The SSA often promotes meetups in inclusive venues (e.g not drinking venues which would exclude students under the drinking age) and not only supports the current secular leaders but helps them to learn and work towards being leaders in the future. By supporting science education, participating and creating charity outreach and building a positive community, it all contributes to a general reputation that contradicts negative stereotypes that sadly persist.

Remember, by donating before May 6, your donation will be matched by the generous Jeff Hawkins and Janet Strauss.

She’s already got some amazing blog posts up at the moment, including interviews with astronomers Pamela Gay and Frasier Cain, atheist singer-songwriter Shelley Segal and skeptic extraordinaire Daniel Loxton, as well as posts on pareidolia and being a mature-age student. Make sure you check them all out!

Because of time zones, if you donate in the next 12 hours (before May 6th in the US), it’ll be doubled by some generous donors! So if you want to support student secularism in the US, now’s a great time.

He’s got one of the most widely-read blogs of anyone related to the skeptic/atheist/freethought/etc. community, so you’ve probably read it by now, but PZ Myers has “officially” left the scientific skepticism movement. And it appears to be solely about the way skeptics treat religion — or, at least, the way US magician Jamy Ian Swiss treats religion:

Thanks, Jamy Ian Swiss, you’ve opened my eyes and I will no longer consider myself a “skeptic”. I am a scientist, and from the talk he gave tonight (which was pretty much exactly the same as his TAM talk, except for the additions where he called me stupid and a liar), it is clear that “scientific skepticism” is simply a crippled, buggered version of science with special exemptions to set certain subjects outside the bounds of its purview. In addition, it’s promoters are particularly sensitive to having their hypocrisy pointed out (that, by the way, is what triggered his outburst — you’d have to be stupid or a liar to think that skepticism gives religion special privileges.)

But what else can you call this logic? Skepticism has no sacred cows! Except that skepticism only addresses “testable claims”. By the way, the existence of gods is not a testable claim.

That’s a pretty explicit loophole by definition.

Having not seen Jamy’s talk (it was apparently streamed live and has yet to be put up as a video), I can’t comment on that, but I’d like to touch on what PZ said, and potentially address his concern.

I’m a skeptic, and I’m an atheist. These two labels are pretty loaded to be honest, even in today’s slightly more… accepting culture. Skeptics are often misidentified as climate change deniers, and atheists as philosophically-confused¹. But I stick by them, because I simply think they’re accurate. I’m a skeptic because I value critical thinking, the scientific method and the knowledge gained by the scientific community, and I’m an atheist because I don’t believe in a god.

But how does skepticism relate to atheism? It’s an old question, which has been debated for decades, if not centuries. It cuts to the heart of two issues: what science is, and what religion is. They certainly won’t be fully illuminated in this meagre piece of writing (who would be arrogant enough to claim that?), but I think enough light has been shed on the darkness to solve PZ’s problem, at least for now.

PZ doesn’t like that skepticism doesn’t take issue with the core claim of religion: the existence of God. On the surface (and from the perspective of someone who would be annoyed by such a thing), he seems justified — why does skeptical investigation stop there? Skeptics have no problem attacking ghosts, aliens, magic, creationism and psychic powers, so why leave out the biggest paranormal claim of them all? It seems downright weird. Skepticism seems to have carved a special place for religion, free from judgment and criticism.

However, I see it differently.

What is religion? It’s more than a belief in a god: it’s often a complex, messy bundle of beliefs about the universe, human nature, history, morality and, yes, supernatural entities. Singling out belief in God from the host of problems inherent in many religious traditions is almost like taking issue with a homeopath’s dress sense. There are better (and worse) things to criticise.

Skepticism concerns itself with many, many aspects of modern religious traditions (as well as ancient ones). Creationism falls to the ground with a shuddering crash when evolutionary biology and physics are brought into play. Outlandish claims about Biblical literalism crumble to dust when viewed critically and through the lens of history and archeology. A great deal of theistic claims about human nature and society don’t make any sense when you compare them to things we know from neurology, psychology and sociology. Even religious miracles, such as weeping statues and visions, are routinely investigated by skeptics that might otherwise be debunking UFOs and hauntings, and are found wanting.

Specific gods can be dismissed scientifically too, in a way. The Greek pantheon had direct control over the elements — but we now know why lightning forms, the waves crash and the Sun shines. I don’t think it would be unreasonable to conclude that science gives us good reason to believe they do not exist, even if science wasn’t the historical reason many people were convinced of this.

What is left of religion after all that skepticism? Moral teachings from ancient texts. Vague beliefs about supernatural worlds divorced of this universe. The possible existence of a nebulous entity that may or may not be able to do something or rather. These are all outside the realm of science. Sure, they can be questioned, but skepticism leaves the work up to philosophical fields such as ethics and metaphysics, where the answers are a little less clear, a little more personal and a whole lot less scientific.

A person can be a skeptic and believe in a god. But if they’ve gone and applied skepticism fairly, then it’s probably not going to be a god that PZ should worry about.

So PZ thinks that skeptics want to shield religious people from criticism, that they might join with us to fight more pressing battles, like intelligent design creationism in public schools or increasing science funding. But that’s not the case. Skeptics are simply seeing the limitations of the viewpoint that binds them together as skeptics. While many are non-religious like myself, we ultimately arrived at our atheistic conclusion through means separate from our skepticism. Knowing that to be true, we see no reason not to let those religious people who otherwise apply skepticism consistently be in on the label of “skeptic”. As they say, if the shoe fits…

Skepticism does not hold back from religion. In fact, it questions it in almost every way that is important. If the beliefs that are left over still bother and annoy, there are other ways to wrestle them. Why should skepticism be a silver bullet to everything a person finds objectionable?

PZ should be happy with what skepticism offers him. After all, he’s been benefiting from it for a while now.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by hyfen]

1. The whole atheist vs. agnostic vs. anti-theist debate is old news, right? An atheist is simply someone who doesn’t believe in a god, and it’s a perfectly fine label for a non-religious person — if they in fact don’t believe in God.

Okay, now shut your eyes (well not really, because you need them to read) and imagine this following scenario. You’re cruising around on Facebook during your lunch break and your friend shares something from a Facebook page called “Burzynski, The Movie”. You click on the page and read some of its posts and something smells fishy (and this time it’s not your lunch). If you had rbutr installed you would be able to see a notification that the page has been rebutted and that might help you figure out what is fishy about the page you’re browsing.

Here’s another one: imagine you’re reading an article from a prominent atheist about why some conservative Christians are wrong about marriage equality but you’re wondering to yourself what the conservative Christians really do think about the topic. Wouldn’t you want the best quality argument to challenge you and inform you?

This is where rbutr comes in handy…

rbutr allows people to follow debates across the web and easily find counter arguments to the pages they are viewing without the authors of those pages having to link to them. It helps in solving the old problem of not being able to trust everything you read on the internet. rbutr helps you break our of your Filter Bubble, where you are constantly give your a one sided perspective from search engines, websites, broadcast media and online social networks which are designed to only deliver more of what you want and already believe, instead of what you need to be properly informed.

You can become better informed and you can help make the internet a better place by helping us all break out of our Filter Bubbles. If you want to find out more about rbutr you can check out their website, their “getting to know rbutr” page or just install the extension (currently just for Google Chrome).

When most people hear the word “science”, they think of chemistry, the most colourful and explodey of the sciences¹.

But chemistry isn’t just about cooking meth or becoming a supervillian. Chemistry isn’t about what things do, it’s about what things are.

You’re probably familiar with the periodic table, which lists all the known elements, arranged by size and general explodiness (the explodiest are in the outer columns, the less explodey are in the middle columns, and the rightmost column is not explodey at all²). You’re also probably familiar with the fact that everything is made up of just these hundred-and-a-bit different atoms, arranged in infinite variations. A bit like Lego.

But if God were a ten year old kid receiving a Lego Universe set for Christmas (the box has one of those flaps you can lift up at the front, so you know it’s going to be good), he’d probably be quite disappointed when he tipped out all the pieces to find that over 75 percent of them were hydrogen (the smallest boringest single-stud piece), most of the rest were helium (which doesn’t even connect with anything), and all of the actual cool pieces (coloured lights, wheels, little lego skeletons, etc) made up just 2 percent. Maybe there would have been a little tanty right then and there³.

But unlike our mortal Lego, when kid-God connected a few pieces together, he found that the result was much different from the sum of their parts. So:

One atom of SODIUM (super dangerous, explodes violently on contact with water)

+

One atom of CHLORINE (deadly poisonous gas used to kill algae and civilians)

=

One molecule of REGULATION TABLE SALT (harmless and tasty on chips)

And therein lie the fiddly parts. Because those atoms are in turn made out of even smaller pieces, (protons, neutrons and electrons) and those pieces are made out of even smaller pieces (quarks and things) and before long you realise that you’ve wandered into physicist territory, and they’re circling you on motorbikes and challenging you to rumbles. So while you can smash smaller atoms together to make bigger ones, that’s atomic fusion, and the physicists run the sub-atomic particle racket in this town.

Anyway, there’s a lot of chemistry you can do without worrying about the nitty-gritty behind it. In fact, a regulation bottle of water can be exploded in at least three different ways⁴:

• By boiling it (Heat makes molecules move around more, taking up more room, becoming gas, and creating pressure)
• By freezing it (Solid water has a crystal structure which actually takes up MORE room than the liquid. This is very unusual)
• And by splitting the H2O up into hydrogen and oxygen and setting fire to it (Surprisingly easy, and deceptively dangerous. If you see a chemist with an eyepatch, it’s possible he did the Mini-Hindenburg at a boring dinner party and forgot to move the forks to a safe distance)

The most interesting elements to us aren’t the fancy sounding radioactive ones, or the cool dangerous reactive ones. They’re the really mundane ones at the top of the periodic table. Carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. With just these three elements (and the tiniest smidgen of some others), you can make the stuff of life, from water, to rubber, to trees, to humans. If you continued the Lego metaphor, they’d be the red two-by four blocks that you can make pretty much everything out of.

Including Lego⁵.

Of course there’s a lot more to chemistry that this. It’s a wonderful world of acids, alkalines, asbestos, arsenic, aspirin, alcohol, and artificial additives (like aspartame). And if you’ve never tried anything more ambitious than a bicarb/vinegar volcano, I encourage you to get out there and blow some stuff up (with a parent or adult present, of course). And while you’re in the ICU, remember that medical professionals have access to all the best chemicals, so make the most of it!

Originally posted at bon-vivant.com.au

1. Except for the few who upon hearing the word “science” have an involuntary fight-or-flight reaction. Ironically, they’re the ones I’m really aiming at here, but they’re also the least likely to read it. If you know somebody like this, wait until they can’t escape (maybe when you’re in a submarine together) and then read this article aloud to them…
2. Like helium. It never reacts with anything, so they call it a “noble gas”. But there’s nothing noble about sounding like a squirrel.
3. As good a theory as any, really.
4. But please don’t. Please please don’t. I haven’t lost any students yet and I sure don’t want to start.
5. GREAT WORK LANG, THAT’S NOT A CONFUSING CIRCULAR METAPHOR

Spoilers for The Prestige follow. Be warned.

Christopher Nolan has become something of a divisive figure among the nerd community. Lauded by some as a master of complex storytelling and real emotion in cinema and denigrated by others as a man unable to direct comprehensible action scenes whose gimmicky screenplays mask a cold lack of empathy, Nolan has nevertheless hit a sweet spot with the mainstream that’s seen Inception and The Dark Knight tower over the box office like some sort of Asperger’s avenging angel. That was a long sentence, but we got there in the end. Let’s all take a breather before we move on.

We good?

Come on Jeremy, you’re holding everyone else back.

Ok, let us continue.

God damn it, Jeremy.

Christopher Nolan shot to fame with the Batman trilogy, but he first cemented his reputation as a director of stars like Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale with the twisty magician thriller The Prestige. The Prestige is one of my favourite films – great performances from Bale and Jackman drive a gripping story with, yes, a few complicated reversals and twists. It’s well-directed by Nolan, and everything looks great – from costumes to sets to the slow snowfall up at Tesla’s secluded mansion. But I specifically love the way it treats both science and “magic”, and takes clear inspiration from that Arthur C. Clarke quote:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

In fact, that quote just about sums up the film. Sure, there is a brilliant professional rivalry between Jackman and Bale’s characters and the film ends on a “What would you sacrifice for success?” note but the core of the story, or the plot if you rather, is driven by that one quote. Magic, in our world, is a combination of misdirection and material trickery – performance and device. We do not understand how technology works and, especially in the era of The Prestige, we allow ourselves to submit to the illusion. These days it’s much harder to suspend our disbelief so thoroughly that a man making a Panzer tank disappear is enough to make us doubt the laws of the universe, but during that  microscopically brief instant when he pulls out our card from behind that other person’s ear we believe.

The Prestige makes Hugh Jackman’s character Robert Angier believe that his rival Alfred Borden has somehow crafted a perfect trick, a trick that transcends normal magic. Angier refuses to believe Borden uses a double in his transporting man trick and instead is led down a rabbit hole involving the science of Nikola Tesla. Borden – who does indeed use a double, a twin brother who he shares his life with in shifts — uses Tesla to throw Angier off the scent, but Tesla ends up creating a machine that actually makes real what was previously an illusion; Angier is actually transported across the theatre, leaving behind a clone in the original position. Or is the transported man the clone? Does it matter, if they’re identical?

The science of The Prestige is a dark, dangerous thing, a transgressive tool that subverts the art of magic. Science is the bogeyman in this era of easily suspended belief and industrial revolution.

Nowadays we struggle to believe anything we can’t see, and even then we nitpick at the quality of a special effect or 3D animation. Has the advancement of science ruined our imaginations? Can we truly ‘believe’ anymore? And was your card the 6 of spades?

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by andyz]

Every week we ask a question of our readers, to stimulate discussion and critical thinking about an issue or topic relating to science, skepticism, technology or religion. Our favourite points are discussed on our weekly podcast, The Pseudoscientists.

It’s a common theme in movies and television that science can get out of control: evil governments and shady corporations constantly misuse science and technology to terrible effect. To a lesser extent, this happens in the real world too… But what should we be taking a careful look at controlling before things get out of hand?

What branch of science legitimately scares you?

Is nuclear science still dangerous? Are genetically-modified organisms going to destroy our ecosystems? Will nanotechnology lead to the death of every person on the planet? Are your fears evidence-based, or are they rooted in irrationality? It’s okay to be honest: this is a safe space. Let us know in the comments!

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by ell-r-brown]

The Pseudoscientists — Episode 87

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Jack and Tom are joined by science communicator extraordinare Upulie Divisekera to discuss her successful Twitter project @realscientists, why glowing trees won’t replace streetlamps, and why a treatment for autism might be around the corner. Jargonauts looks at “epigenetics”, and we think about whether or not we’d go on a “suicide” mission to Mars, with some help from your opinions.

Plus: dissolving Smarties, Jack’s boring life, and ghost hunting.

Links

• “Why your streetlights won’t be replaced by glowing trees any time soon” - Ars Technica
• “Researchers Successfully Treat Autism in Infants: Playing Games That Infants Prefer Can Lessen Severity of Symptoms” - Science Daily
• Make sure you follow @realscientists on Twitter, as well as @upulie herself!
• You can find out more about the #realscicomp competition here! (The prizes are pretty wonderful, you guys.)

Question For Next Week

What branch of science legitimately scares you?

Let us know in the comments here or on our dedicated post!

Houston, We Have A Problem

Support

To support the show, you can purchase the Young Australian Skeptics’s Skeptical Blog Anthology - available in paperback or ebook!

Also, consider leaving us a rating and/or review on iTunes!

Contact

If you have feedback for the show or want to ask us a question, get in touch via our Contact page or send us an email at youngausskeptics(at)gmail(dot)com.

You can also become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at @pseudoscipod.

This is my biggest bone to pick. This is the issue that gets me going. This is the issue that makes me want to contract rabies and tear muscle from bone, juices from brain, and — despite my love for animals — chicken head from ethically-sourced chicken.

Once upon a time, if I had thought too hard about it, in the split seconds before side effects of cognitive dissonance set in, I would have probably jumped to the side of “GMOs are wrong! Genetically modified organisms? What are they doing playing around with food?“¹ But now, my opinion has changed to “Get educated guys, there’s nothing to see here”, and for good reason.

Walking past a pharmacy recently, I saw proudly written in the window: “We don’t sell GMO!” People are throwing up their chin in disgust at the thought of a genetically-engineered meal. Governments are being petitioned to label whether GMOs are used in a product: not that there’s nothing inherently wrong about that, however. I wouldn’t mind if labels were put on products — the problem is the sentiment of “We should be educated about what is going into our food, we have the right to know” being turned into “Genetically engineered food is wrong, it’s unnatural, it’s dangerous, etc.” That’s the general implication, anyway.

By the way, GMOs are more than just food crops. In the pharmaceutical industry, bacteria are engineered to produce insulin for diabetes sufferers, and many animals, such as the humble GloFish®, have been modified.

Genetic engineering is artificially altering the genome of an organism to exhibit certain traits. I see your argument that natural things are (apparently) better and raise you the argument from antiquity: logical fallacy versus logical fallacy. We’ve been modifying organisms artificially for millennia, albeit less efficiently and more haphazardly than with current molecular methods. Man’s best friend turned from wolf to dog because we bred certain traits in favour of others. Cows were bred to produce meat and milk more efficiently. Our dear fowl friend, the chicken, was domesticated. And crops? If you’ve ever seen an alpine strawberry bush compared to a larger, juicier strawberry bush you would see how a plant can be artificially cultivated to suit our needs.

Such a level of evolutionary change would not have occurred in a few thousand years if it weren’t for selective breeding. But this old school hit-and-miss method means that certain undesirable traits have also appeared in domesticated animals, genetically-piggybacking on traits we’ve been selecting for. The daschund’s extended abdomen makes for back problems. Breeds like chihuahuas and pugs have been bred so their eye sockets are too small for their heads and are flat-faced (brachycephalic), leading to terrible eye conditions.

Also this method takes many, many generations. It’s very slow. Is there a better way to get living things to do what we want?

Genetic modification sets itself apart by directly manipulating a genome, instead of the more passive “I’ll breed this crop with this crop and it will probably be goddamn tasty” or “I want bigger fruit, more of them, and they’re going to be super-tasty, goddammit, even if I have to wait decades!” You can focus on particular traits of interest and minimise changes to traits you don’t want to affect. It’s like using a fine paintbrush instead of a bucket of paint.

But like any new technology, we feel the growing pains and the public distrust. Very long-term studies on the effects of GM food are yet to come out, but what do we actually know about their safety?

Genetically modified foods are probably not going to ruin the environment. Sure, there are genuine fears of GM crops cross-contaminating non-GM crops and producing a lack of diversity (which is important in maintaining long-term survival in a variable environment). However, they go through many years (even decades) of testing before being released for human consumption.

Of course, it’s pointless to talk about risks without also mentioning benefits. GM foods can be constructed to:

• be pest-resistant, reducing the need for pesticides use (which we all want)
• grow more efficiently, reducing the amount of space needed to produce a certain yield and therefore reducing space cleared for farms and happier undisturbed ecosystems (which we all want)
• have increased shelf-life, reducing food waste (which we all want)
• have improved taste (which we all want)
• contain more vitamins and therefore have better nutritional values (which we all want), and
• make everybody healthier by producing drugs/vaccines/sunshine and happiness in organisms that would otherwise be adverse to the idea (which we all want)

A little more than tempting, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Those health risks that you’re all worried about? Well, while you’re nibbling on your potentially hazardous “organic” carrots (have they been tested for safety?), GM crops are being tested for toxins, genetic stability and their impact on the environment. If you’re interested in reading rather detailed reports on GM crops currently approved for use in Australia (and New Zealand), you can find them all here. GM foods aren’t just chucked onto supermarket shelves fresh out of the petri dish.

So label away. Yes, we have a right to know, but even when you can always just Google it, you all want to throw your hands up in outrage. Why is that? Do you perhaps fear something that you don’t completely understand?

Get educated.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by leemcarthur]

1. Just making sure you know this isn’t about battery-cage animals, this is about taxonomically recognised plants. The internet is built for reading meaning into something that isn’t there, it’s just a precautionary disclaimer.

The Australian Christian Lobby is not a particularly nice organisation. If you’re Australian and at all socially progressive or critical of religious tampering in the political system, then you’d probably be aware of the ACL as the group that tries to equate gay marriage with smoking, prevent access to subsidised abortion drugs, and just generally tries to inject as much Church into the State as possible. Dang.

It’s common practice for organisations to register all or many of the possible variants on their preferred domain, and redirect them to their main website. However, if you go to australianchristianlobby.org, you won’t be redirected to the ACL’s main website (which has .au on the end — I won’t link to it). That’s because a trio of young women -  Hilary Bowman-Smart, Genevieve Stewart, and Jessica Alice - snapped up the domain…

…and have turned it into the site of a far better ACL: the league of Australian Cat Ladies. According to the new site:

The vision of the Australian Cat Ladies is to see feline principles and ethics accepted and influencing the way we are governed, do business and relate to each other as a community. The ACL aims to foster a more compassionate and just society by encouraging inclusivity, actively working against oppression of all kinds, and disseminating cat .gifs wherever they may be needed.

No religiously-motivated socially conservative lobbying there, I can tell you that much. A marked improvement, even if you’re not a cat person. (But if you are, you can join the Australian Cat Ladies. Why not?)

(Thanks to Justin for pointing out that australianchristianlobby.org was never owned by the ACL.)

Physics is how things move. That’s pretty much it. Atoms, tennis balls, cats, planets, they all follow to the same rules, although shit does tend to get a bit wacky when you get too big or small, and I’m not even going to go into string theory or stuff like that because frankly I think they might be making it up a little bit as they go along¹.

Physics was pretty much invented by Isaac Newton, who was also responsible for pretty much every major scientific discovery at the time (colour theory, the speed of sound, the cat-flap, etc). You probably know him as the guy who discovered gravity, in what must have caused the most incredible bout of why-didn’t-I-think-of-that in the science community ever, and probably a few confused conversations.

“Hey, why do you think things fall down?”

“What?”

“Why do things fall down?”

“Is this a trick question? It’s what things do. What the hell else are they going to do, fall up?”

“Why not?”

“BECAUSE THAT’S NOT WHAT HAPPENS!”

“Yeah, but why do they fall in a downwards direction?”

“Because they got dropped or something. Dude, are you stupid?”

That bystander went on to get the plague², and Newton came up with the theory that all mass attracts all other mass, but only a little tiny bit. So you need to get something the size of a small moon before you get any useful effect. No, that dude in your physics class does not have any appreciable gravitational pull. You are not “trapped in his orbit.” Quit being a dick.

Newton also came up with the three laws of motion, which are totally useful in everyday life, and basically come down to:

1: Stuff keeps doing what it’s doing until something affects it. So your bike, an object at rest outside the centrelink office, will remain at rest, until acted on by an outside force (three youths with a hacksaw). The youths, while freewheeling down Sydney Rd, will remain in motion, until stopped by an outside force (the back of the number 19 tram).

See? Practical. The reason that the single comic-relief wheel of your bicycle, now merrily rolling by itself away from the scene of the accident, eventually comes to a stop, is that it is being slowed by the air and ground it rubs against. Truth is stranger than friction.

2: The bigger something is, the harder it is to speed up, and to slow down. So while our trio of wealth-redistributing larrikins on a fixie bike (net weight ~250kg) came to a sudden halt, that same force (see law 3) only serves to increase the speed of the number 19 tram by a very small amount, and not nearly enough to help it make its route on time. This is because the tram weighs as much as how many? That’s right. Thirty rhinos. Or 0.03 kilorhinos³.

3: Every force you apply, puts an equal force back on you. You might have heard this as “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction”, but that’s just an awful description, because it makes it sound like there’s an equal reaction AND and opposite reaction. There isn’t. The youths exert a force on the tram, and the same force is exerted back on them. It just has a much smaller effect on the tram, because the tram is approximately 0.029 kilorhinos heavier.

Obviously there is a little bit more to physics than this⁴, but for now this should be all you need to go outside and throw some tennis balls around. Just remember not to throw them at speeds above 200000 kms per second, because then you start getting relativistic effects that can really mess up your backyard.

Tune in next week for your continuing education. If you stick through the entire month, I think you get an honorary degree or something? Remind me to look into that.

Originally posted at bon-vivant.com.au

1. “Okay, check this. What if everything’s made out of infinitely long multi-dimensional vibrating strings?” “Whoa. No, no, wait, what if it’s all ONE string? Maaannn.” “Whoaa.” “Dude, pass the tenure.”
2. Newton’s university was actually closed down for a while because of all the bubonic plague going around. Use protection.
3. The Standard International value of a kilorhino is maintained by a platinum rhino, kept in a high-security vault in Paris. Exactly which kind of rhino it is has never been specified…
4. Though I do go into more detail in my thesis “Good Conductors: a stochastic study of the number 19 tram schedule, and its bearing on quantum uncertainty”

Every week we ask a question of our readers, to stimulate discussion and critical thinking about an issue or topic relating to science, skepticism, technology or religion. Our favourite points are discussed on our weekly podcast, The Pseudoscientists.

The Mars One project wants to send people to Mars by 2023 — an admirable goal. However, there doesn’t appear to be any plans to actually retrieve colonists from the surface… so they may be stuck on Mars for the rest of their lives, never to return to Earth.

Would you become a Mars colonist, if it were a one-way trip?

Is exploring another planet worth the cost of your life? Would being on Mars get boring? Could you stand to live with only a handful of people for the rest of your life? Let us know in the comments!

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by eldave]

The Pseudoscientists — Episode 86

Subscribe: iTunes / Libsyn RSS

Tom and Jack discuss flies sleeping like humans, the crazy ambitions of the Mars One project to have people on Mars by 2023, and the weird sex that animals have. Jargonauts takes a look at comas, and we discuss last week’s Question of the Week on gender identity (and sexuality, of course).

Plus ANZAC Day, Tom on the radio, and John Edward being a douche.

Links

• “Flies sleep in stages like us” - Science Alert
• You can learn more about the Mars One project (and view applicant videos) here.
• Listen to Tom’s first podcast of SYN’s Science Hour here.
  

Question For Next Week

Would you become a Mars colonist, if it were a one-way trip?

Let us know in the comments here or in our dedicated post!

Houston, We Have A Problem

Support

To support the show, you can purchase the Young Australian Skeptics’s Skeptical Blog Anthology - available in paperback or ebook!

Also, consider leaving us a rating and/or review on iTunes!

Contact

If you have feedback for the show or want to ask us a question, get in touch via our Contact page or send us an email at youngausskeptics(at)gmail(dot)com.

You can also become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at @pseudoscipod.

I’m very open about my history with mental illness. No-one is embarrassed about admitting that that they had a bad flu years ago, so why should I be embarrassed about my “brain flu”? Admittedly, that’s a very simplified term for mental illness, but hopefully you understand my point.

When I was 17 I was diagnosed with depression and generalised anxiety disorder. It was a long time coming. I’d always felt like something was wrong, but it took the transition from high school to university to make me seek help. I was so scared and blue that I seriously considered not going to university and spending the rest of my days in bed. This was coming from the girl who was (and still is) a giant nerd who loves learning and had been excited about starting her psychology degree for years. I’d lie in bed all day crying, not eating and generally not caring. I had suicidal thoughts. I planned how I’d do it and what I’d write on my note. Fortunately, writing the imaginary suicide note is what put me off going through with it, for two reasons: it made me realise how much I loved everyone I would have left behind, and because I’m slightly neurotic I realised the notes would be multiple pages long for each person and because I was so apathetic and depressed, I couldn’t be bothered writing so much.

My mum bore the brunt of my depression. She sat by my bed for hours at a time just watching me cry. Looking back, I think I was so consumed with my own feelings that I didn’t even realise how much it was hurting those around me. Finally Mum suggested I see a psychologist. I fought the idea saying I was “in a phase” and that I’d “snap out of it”. She believed me for a while, but then finally decided I was going to see a shrink, whether I liked it or not.

I was very wary of psychological treatment, as I’m a very black and white person who doesn’t respond well to airy-fairy-feelings conversations. I was very lucky to be referred to a fantastic psychologist who I felt comfortable with. The first few sessions, I was a mess. The simplest things set me off into tears. Not dainty feminine tears either. I’m talking full on snot, snorting, huffing and puffing. Admittedly, I felt better telling a stranger about my troubles, but I couldn’t shake the hopeless feelings. My psychologist prescribed me a low dose of SSRIs (Selective Seretonin Reuptake Inhibitors – a type of antidepressant) to make me feel better and more responsive to treatment. The first two weeks of taking them was hell. I was the most nauseous I’ve been in my life. I lived on lemonade.

Then all of a sudden, I felt like I had been injected with fairy floss and constantly playing with puppies. It was the best I’d ever felt. I think I was “high” for about 2 months. It was like my brain had latched onto the medication and said “NEVER STOP SMILING HOLLY BECAUSE THE WORLD IS FULL OF LEPRACHAUNS AND GLITTER! OH LOOK! A FLOWER! LET’S SMELL IT!” My family was amazed at how different I was. I woke up with a smile on my face. Of course, the manic effects eventually wore off, but I didn’t fall back into depression. I felt normal. I realised that for a good 10 years, I’d thought “normal” included planning your suicide and dreading every day. It’s the closest I’ve come to a religious experience. I continued psychological treatment for a little while longer, until I felt confident that I could go back into the world. Since then I’ve stayed on my medication and haven’t experienced any relapses. Sure, I have bad days and weeks, but I know now that’s part of the normal cycle of emotions and moods.

Four years later I came across the most amazing opportunity. I was looking for jobs (as a recent psychology graduate) and came across a position with Australia’s mental health organisation for young people, Headspace. It sounded interesting, so I applied with no expectation of my application even being looked at, let alone picked. I received a phone call a few weeks later saying Headspace wanted to interview me for the position. I may have squealed a little bit. I researched my arse off for the interview and knew exactly what I wanted to say (I told you I was neurotic). I felt confident that I’d done my best but didn’t expect to get the position. Long story short, I got a call saying congratulations that I’d got it! I fist-pumped accordingly.

I am now a Youth Ambassador for Headspace (I’ve even got a profile and everything), which means that I am part of a group of young people from around Australia who regularly consult with head office about strategies to improve their psychological services for people aged 12 to 25. Now I really don’t believe that “everything happens for a reason”, but I think that my experience with depression and anxiety actually helped me acquire this position. I was very honest in my interview about my past (and present) struggles with mental health, but that this was also a strength that I can use to my advantage with regards to knowing what it’s like for other young people going through the same thing. I see it as my own “It Gets Better” story.

I am now a functioning person contributing to society, and it feels pretty damn awesome.

If you’re experiencing trouble and want to talk to someone, you can go to http://www.headspace.org.au/ or ring Lifeline (Australia only) on 13 11 14.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by helenk]

Most of you will not be aware of this, but I am currently in Germany on a 3 month exchange trip. It’s pretty exciting, and if you want to find out more you can tweet me, but one of the interesting things I want to share with you all today are particular ancient relics that can be found in the Bodensee (aka. Lake Constance) area, where I’m staying for my exchange.

Along with a fellow exchange student and her guest family, we drove from our side of the Bodensee around to the other side of the lake. We walked around a monkey enclosure and fed popcorn to monkeys, and visited both a huge church and a museum in Unteruhldingen, which was all about ancient houses named “Pfahlbauten” (literally “stilt/pole buildings”), from the time of 4000 — 850 BCE in the Bronze Age.

The houses that stand today are not the houses which stood over 3000 years ago: they are reconstructions built in 1922, based on the information gathered from investigations made at the area a few years beforehand. Best estimates say that roughly 500 people would have been living in this particular village.

Research on these historical sites was commenced after curiosity about particular wooden piles that could be found driven into the seabed in various places around the lake, and has been going on for over 90 years in this area.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by gynti]

Questions also remain as to the religions and rituals of the people who lived in these houses, as no written or oral records survive at the archeological sites. Gravesites and artwork are one great way to look into what ancient cultures believed, but very few remains can be found on the lake. All that can be found to help decipher the religion of these people are various pendants and other small items.

Many mysteries surround the culture and remains of the people of the bronze age who lived in houses like those at Unteruhldingen, and research continues to this day at sites around the Bodensee area and at other lakes with these sorts of remains. If you want to find out more about the houses, you can go to www.pfahlbauten.de (you’ll have to translate it into English first) and read all about it.

[Feature Image: Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by steffen_ramsaier]

UK skeptic Crispian Jago is lauded by many for his brilliantly skeptical charts and diagrams, but have you seen them? If not, you’re in luck: he’s just recently released two corkers (that’s the correct British term, right?) about conspiracy theories and the four main types of irrational nonsense. Click on the images for the full size versions.

You may also want to check out some of his other works, including an excellent video about homeopathy, a Mr. Men parody, and a subway map of science.

Hi everyone,

I just thought I might give you a quick post this week with a review of several interesting links and stories I’ve found dealing with a range of different science and skepticism-related fields. Please enjoy, and feel free to leave us your discussion and comments!

This is an excellent, sensible and interesting article. Green Bank, West Virginia, where the “electrosensitive” can escape the modern world. I’m not going to say that it’s pseudoscience in the sense that we’re suggesting that it’s fake, and these people don’t feel sick, or that they’re making up the claimed symptoms, but is the problem mass hysteria, or something of a similar psychosomatic or psychological nature?

How NASA bought the monstrous F1 rocket engine back to life: A new life for some of the most impressive engineering marvels ever designed — some 50 years ago.

CHOICE finds that supermarket loyalty cards offer little value — but are used for datamining enormous amounts of your personal data.

Swisse sidesteps ban with relabelling — who would’ve thunk it? And this is coming just a couple of weeks after ABC’s excellent new “The Checkout” exposed exactly this practice, and the TGA weakness that allows it.

“The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) last week cancelled the registration of Swisse’s Ultiboost Appetite Suppressant because there was “insufficient evidence to support the indications for the product and the presentation of the product was unacceptable”.

However, the company has registered a new product with exactly the same ingredient, an extract of an Indian cactus, under the name Ultiboost Hunger Control.

“We’ve changed the name but the ingredients remain the same,” Swisse head of media Mitch Catlin said.”

Nessie apparently still makes news headlines. “A sizeable number [of claims] came from cafe and hotel proprietors”. Isn’t that interesting?

CERN’s AMS-02 particle detector experiment mounted in space on the International Space Station has not “found dark matter”, despite what some media reports say. But it is producing large amounts of very interesting, very useful high-quality data about naturally occurring energetic particle-physics processes in space. And, of course, there is still a wealth of indirect astrophysical evidence that dark matter — made up of massive but weakly interacting particles — exists.

Indian witch doctor who beheaded an 11-year-old boy “for good luck” sentenced to death. “His head was offered to the local goddess to obtain better luck.” What sort of savagery even makes this a thing that even exists?

Apparently Little Red Riding Hood is often controversial and in some cases censored in US schools. In Clay County, Florida in 1990, parents of fifth– and sixth-graders challenged the fairy tale because of the mention of wine, instead of asking why their sixth-graders were still reading picture books. (And if Grandma had a gun on her kitchen counter instead of a bottle of wine, that would probably be ok.)

I think this is an amusing example of why MSDS sheets are usually completely stupid, not helpful in practice, they make even the most common, benign chemicals sound scary and intimidating to non-chemistry-literate people, and are only good for cover-your-ass lawyers.

The conspiracy theory flowchart “They” don’t want you to see!

And, finally, our featured image: The only living thing ever known to have ever existed anywhere that is not in the frame of this photograph is the person who took the photo, Apollo 11 Command Module Pilot Michael Collins. I’ll leave you to think about that for a minute The full-resolution photo is here. (The image is, of course, thanks to NASA, and is in the public domain.)

Every week we ask a question of our readers, to stimulate discussion and critical thinking about an issue or topic relating to science, skepticism, technology or religion. Our favourite points are discussed on our weekly podcast, The Pseudoscientists.

Critical thinking isn’t just about science; it can also be applied to social and personal ideas and concepts. Gender is one of those things: just what exactly is gender? The existence of transgender people shows that it’s not necessarily tied to biological sex (and even that concept is a little blurry around the edges), so does that mean it’s a societal thing? And if it is, then to what extent? Because this is a tricky issue, we thought we might phrase this question in a way that gets you all to reflect on yourselves, so:

Why are you the gender you identify with?

Are you male because you feel “right” as male? Are you female because your family and friends treat you like a female? Perhaps you’re neither — how did you come to that conclusion? Let us know in the comments!

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by kristinausk]

The Pseudoscientists — Episode 85

Subscribe: iTunes / Libsyn RSS

Tom and Jack find out why you might soon be able to grow new organs in a vat, what the deal is with pseudoenzymes, and look at the relationship between science and religion. Jargonauts is all about insects this week, and we look at your thoughts on the societal implications of contact with an intelligent alien race.

Plus, conspiracy theories about the tragedies in Boston, mysterious text messages, and a lost episode with Sarah…

Links

• “‘Dead’ Enzymes Show Signs of Life” - Science (subscription needed, unfortunately)
• “Bioengineered kidney transplanted into rat” - Science News
• For more about science and religion, check out this episode of the podcast from last May

Question For Next Week

Why are you the gender you identify with?

Let us know in the comments here or in our dedicated post!

Houston, We Have A Problem

Support

To support the show, you can purchase the Young Australian Skeptics’s Skeptical Blog Anthology - available in paperback or ebook!

Also, consider leaving us a rating and/or review on iTunes!

Contact

If you have feedback for the show or want to ask us a question, get in touch via our Contact page or send us an email at youngausskeptics(at)gmail(dot)com.

You can also become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at @pseudoscipod.

‘A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.‘
– Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water

It is well established that us Homo sapiens like to seek out information that supports our beliefs, interpret any ambiguity as a confirmation of our prior beliefs and reject things that contradict our prior beliefs. This is called “confirmation bias” and it is an automatic form of reasoning that we all do – no one is immune to it.

Like many heuristics and system one (unconscious) forms of reasoning, confirmation bias is very useful and has been evolutionarily advantageous to us because it enabled us to think quickly.

However, it is not difficult to see the problems with confirmation bias. Like any bias it can lead to poor reasoning, and that poor reasoning can lead to harm. Think of the smoker who believes the information about smoking not causing cancer, the bishop believing that contraceptives do not prevent HIV, the doctor who diagnoses a patient based from their first guess and does not reassess, or just your experience driving Holden Commodores leading you to assume that they are safer than the Volvo XC60 SUV. These are relatively uncontroversial examples and the list could go on.

This all leads to a very tempting conclusion: if people are likely to hear what they want and ignore contradictory information, then why take the risk of providing balanced information that’s open to confirmation bias?

I work in marketing and communications and know how important it is to have a clear, simple message. However, I also value nuance and think the world would be better off if we appreciated how complex things are and were humble about the limits of our current knowledge… but I’m not interested in telling you what I think (yet), I’m interested in what you have to say on the matter.

So, how do you think we should deal with this conundrum?

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by Sokabs]

This is where my opinion branches from many of my fellow skeptics. Alright, maybe not opinion, but my priorities are a completely different cookie flavour than most of the people in this community. I’ve been known to call myself atheist, I’ve been known to call myself agnostic, and many other “A” words, like antagonistic and ape-like. There is no doubt the distinction between the atheist and skeptical communities is not only blurred, it’s indistinguishable as the smear of a squished fly on a windscreen post-mortem.

There is a fringe of skeptics who don’t relate to atheism, and there is still a large amount of atheists who aren’t skeptical of pseudoscience in the slightest. I mean, Bill Maher is hilarious and all, and when he mocks religion I do giggle, but there are so many things I disagree with him on. I disagree with the majority of his opinions, actually.

But off my tangent, that’s not really the issue I care about. Sure, separation of church and state is important to me. Sure, freedom of religion is great. Sure, disproving claims is fun and all, but arguing against God feels useless. Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins and Dennett have done great work and I do admire them, but their work in promoting reason is more important to me than debating against the existence of God.

I can understand talking about God in relation to issues like education, but what is the point if it’s just establishing an atheistic belief and plopping down in the middle of the road and declaring: “’Tis here I stop, for we can go no further. I shall just wait till they all catch up now.” And in the meantime, perhaps we validate ourselves in an echo chamber or whatever.

I’ve noticed how quickly people will jump to the conclusion that you’re subtly arguing against their belief in a deity when all you’re doing is mocking astrology using unicorns.

No, I really cannot care less for your fear of Satan, or whether or not a god defines your life, but it is the implications that should be the issue. If your religion is impeding on same-sex marriage, well then we can talk. But if your god affects you and you alone, well then I’m glad you have somebody else to talk to. Everyone loves friends.

And even though I can be claimed by the atheists, my bone to pick isn’t with gods, it’s with anti-science. In the wise words of an editor I know:

…the ability to predict phenomena or naturally-​​occurring patterns is one of the major hallmarks of a scientific hypothesis.

- Jack Scanlan

Neither atheism nor theism does any of that. It is not science. It does not predict what will happen or help us determine how to go about dealing with the major issues.

I care when your application of religion hinders the advancement of science. I don’t care if you don’t happen to believe in evolution, but just know that while we’re building vaccines and saving lives through this thing that is “just a theory”, your belief has no application and does not save lives. Does God count in this argument? I don’t care.

I care when you make an empirical claim, and you are completely full of it. Things do not suddenly become true just because you wish it, and if you want it to affect other people, prove it. Does God count in this argument? I don’t care.

I care when a movement against established science is detrimental to the wellbeing of people. Such as those fooled by the marketing success of organic food and the anti-genetically-modified food movement, starving millions (maybe billions) of people for a faulty ideology and a complete ignorance of the facts and a privilege they are not grateful of. Does that make me want to disprove God? Not in the slightest.

So we’ve pushed the boundaries of secularism, and we’ve introduced our atheistic arguments into the common bank of knowledge. Hooray. But the greatest good we can do now is not changing a belief in a someone who may/may not affect us, it’s advancing technology and science, and not letting it recede back into medieval ideology.

Skepticism does not equal atheism. To me, one is far more important than the other.

So do you believe in God?

I couldn’t care less.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by tjblackwell]

A few years ago I started my YouTube channel FearBlandness, and I was recently digging through some old material and found this. It was one of my favourites to write, as I could be a bit silly and funny in it.

It’s basically my break up letter with God. He was a terrible partner. Enjoy!

Every week we ask a question of our readers, to stimulate discussion and critical thinking about an issue or topic relating to science, skepticism, technology or religion. Our favourite points are discussed on our weekly podcast, The Pseudoscientists.

It seems like most science-fiction films these days involve discovering an intelligent race of aliens… and having to fight them to the death. But these films rarely explore the societal implications of discovering that we are not alone in the universe. So:

What would be the societal consequences of discovering intelligent alien life?

Would people leave their religions? Would there be rioting in the streets? Would more people study science, or want to become astronauts? How would it change how we treat animals with a similar level of intelligence to us? Let us know in the comments!

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by anton41]

The Pseudoscientists — Episode 84

Subscribe: iTunes / Libsyn RSS

Jack, Tom and returning guest Claire Shepard muse on a potentially-psychic girl in India, some terrible online science journalism, why wisdom teeth don’t make intelligent design unlikely, and weird diets. Jargonauts looks at “detoxification” (and why it doesn’t mean what alternative medical proponents think it means), and we discuss what futuristic technology we’d love to see around in the present day, with your help.

Plus, Jack’s wisdom teeth, ABC3’s “Steam Punks!” and Doctor Who.

Links

• “Telepathic Girl Baffles Researchers with Her Ability to Read Minds” - Who Forted
• “WE ARE STAR PEOPLE: Scientific proof we were created by aliens” - News.com.au
• “Is An Alien Message Embedded In Our Genetic Code?” - Discovery News
• Jack’s post about wisdom teeth and intelligent design can be found here
• For the science-fiction stories Tom mentioned, go to qntm.org
• You can follow Claire on Twitter at @DctrZaius

Question For Next Week

What would be the societal consequences of discovering intelligent alien life?

Let us know in the comments here or in our dedicated post!

Houston, We Have A Problem

Support

To support the show, you can purchase the Young Australian Skeptics’s Skeptical Blog Anthology - available in paperback or ebook!

Also, consider leaving us a rating and/or review on iTunes!

Contact

If you have feedback for the show or want to ask us a question, get in touch via our Contact page or send us an email at youngausskeptics(at)gmail(dot)com.

You can also become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at @pseudoscipod.

The following post contains plot information (spoilers, I guess?) about the recent Doctor Who episode “The Bells of Saint John”. If you haven’t seen it — and would like to see it someday — then be forewarned. 

I have Feelings™ about Doctor Who. Overwhelming, positive Feelings™. It’s not my fault, really: it’s just the way I was born. I mean, I’m assuming there’s some sort of genetic basis for liking the 50 year-old British television institution, because I’ve seen the way strong emotions for it travel through family trees, from parent to offspring, like a polymorphism for heart copy number.

Is it too early to start with jokes like that? Hah, never.

Doctor Who is a curious beast — it’s convinced the world that it’s a science-fiction show, when it’s really more, uh, science–fantasy. But it’s got time travel, and aliens, and black holes, and space ships, and scientists… Isn’t that the definition of science-fiction? Well, maybe. But you have to admit, even as a fan (of both the show and science-fiction in general), that Doctor Who plays very fast and loose with scientific concepts. And that isn’t a bad thing, necessarily! Sometimes it’s good to step away from ultra-realism for a while and just have fun.

Sometimes.

Okay, I admit it, I find it hard to shut the scientific part of my brain off when I watch Doctor Who, let alone anything. So that’s why I’m starting this series of posts, to take a look at whether or not episodes of this glorious show make any sense scientifically. If they don’t, that’s totally fine! It’s still fun. Unrealistic science didn’t make Star Wars or Star Trek any worse. Probably.

So! The first episode I’ll be looking at is the “The Bells of Saint John”! WiFi! Antigravity! Clara Oswald! I won’t do a recap because you’ve probably seen the episode - and if you haven’t, letting me describe it for you would be a poor substitute for just watching it. Plus, I’m nowhere near funny enough for it to be entertaining, so… let’s just get straight into the science.

I’m Not Quite Sure Brains Work Like That, Part 1: To Access A Mind…

A major plot point in this episode is that human minds from all over the globe are being absorbed by walking computer servers affectionately called “Spoonheads” (it’s descriptively accurate, I’ll give you that). Doctor Who actually has a bit of tradition - especially in the post-2005 seasons - when it comes to mind transferal. You can see it in stories like “Silence in the Library”/“The Forest of the Dead”, where the minds of both Donna Noble and River Song are downloaded into a computer-generated world; “The Rebel Flesh”/“The Almost People” puts a spin on it with body doubles to go with the duplicated minds; and in “Human Nature”/“The Family of Blood” we see even Time Lords have a version, whereby the Gallifreyan parts of their mind can be stored in a fob watch (for some reason).

Even the Doctor doesn’t really know how it works.

But would doing this actually work? It makes a little bit of superficial scientific sense that a mind could be stored in a computer — after all, the signals that brains use to pass information around are electrical in nature and could be simulated in a digital way - but we’re a little away from being able to do that, technologically speaking. Sure, okay, Doctor Who can take liberties with such things, because alien technologies are often involved, that’s fine. But it doesn’t make a lot of sense how the Spoonheads go about doing this terrible deed. (Should it actually be terrible though? More on that later.)

Internal signals in the brain are notoriously hard to detect outside the skull. The classic method for looking at the brain’s electrical activity somewhat directly is electroencephalography (EEG), but the output is a series of waveforms — which are not enough to reconstruct someone’s mind. The reason the output is so messy is that what you’re actually seeing on an EEG are the overall patterns of electrical impulses, not individual impulses themselves. This is a problem for mind-transfer/-downloading because, while these overall brain patterns can be used to predict broad mental states, like sleep stages, they’re useless in determining what a person is actually thinking, and therefore they’d be useless in transferring a complete mind from brain to computer.

There are, however, more sensitive forms of brain scanning currently available, like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), but they need to be set up in a carefully controlled environment, away from sources of noise. In fact, every sensitive form of brain scanning is vulnerable to interference. In the episode, both times Clara’s mind is downloaded into a Spoonhead, she’s out in the open air, doubtlessly with numerous sources of electromagnetic interference. If you think about it, what is WiFi but radio waves? Probably not something you want constantly washing through your attempt to delicately probe a human brain.

Even if the Spoonheads were using fMRI technology, they still wouldn’t have enough resolution to transfer Clara’s mind — fMRI maps areas of activity in the brain (using blood flow as a proxy), but it can’t get to individual impulses. In fact, it doesn’t measure electrical activity at all. So what are they using? A beam of… energy? It’s hard to imagine how that’s supposed to work, but if it’s alien technology, I guess it’s okay… maybe. It’d still be prone to detecting all the other electrical signals in the area though, I bet.

There’s another problem with the whole mind-access thing though, and that’s…

I’m Not Quite Sure Brains Work Like That, Part 2: WiFi Harder

…the fact that apparently WiFi itself can also hack the human brain. To be honest, the episode never goes into much detail on this. Remember the café scene, where the Doctor is lectured by the evil (or is she just brainwashed?) Ms Kizlet via the customers and staff? Their minds haven’t been downloaded to her servers, because when she lets them go, their minds are still in their bodies. So it must be normal WiFi that’s doing the job. But that makes even less sense than the Spoonheads’ mind-beam.

Also, what’s up with those symbols? Are there projectors in the room?

WiFi works by sending signals through a reasonably narrow band of radio frequencies, usually around 2.4GHz. That’s awesome for computers, which can include components made of materials that can interact well with radio frequencies. But human body isn’t made of metal, and its electrical circuitry isn’t of a form that can interact with radio waves. So how could plain, old WiFi networks control a human mind?

It’s true — structural brain mapping via magnetic resonance imaging (MRI — a little different to fMRI) uses radio waves. But that’s a passive form of scanning; it can’t alter the brain in any conceivable way. Turns out there’s a good reason for this! Radio waves are a form of non-ionising radiation: they don’t interact with the chemical properties of atoms (their electrons), only their nuclei (protons and neutrons). Even then, it’s a subtle interaction, and blasting someone with an extremely powerful pure radio source probably wouldn’t harm them. Only ionising radiation (such as UV, X-rays and gamma rays) can affect our brain tissue in a tangible way — but you wouldn’t want it to, not unless you really fancied some brain cancer.

So yeah, WiFi’s not going to cut it. Unless, of course, it’s alien WiFi, but that just begs you to think about what that’s doing in a regular London café…

I’m Not Quite Sure Brains Work Like That, Part 3: When In Doubt, Duplicate

There’s one final problem with the mind-uploading that goes on in this episode, and it’s partially a plot flaw. Well, I guess it’s plot flaw defined by a scientific problem, really. Why does the Great Intelligence (the episode’s Big Bad — previously seen in The Snowmen) need to wipe people’s minds? I can get behind the idea that it “eats” minds, or uses them for some purpose, but the way it goes about obtaining them is baffling.

This episode confirmed that Jenna-Louise Coleman is unable to stop being adorable, whether she’s awake or pretending to be dead.

This problem can be highlighted by thinking about what the Spoonheads are actually doing. I’ve been trying to understand their method as a kind of mind-scanning, analogous to EEG or fMRI, because it doesn’t seem likely that they could actually alter the human brain in some way. But let’s assume that they can do that, like what we see with the WiFi controlling normal people: why don’t they just copy someone’s mind, rather than wiping it?

Ignoring the point that there’s no plausible way they could wipe a brain of activity (let alone keep it intact afterwards, ready for the mind to be downloaded back into it), it makes no sense, from a plot perspective, that they would want to remove a person’s mind at all. With the process that we see on screen, they’re leaving dead bodies around London (and presumably the world) — might raise some alarm bells. While it’d be tricky to track the murders back to them (although the Doctor and Clara seem to do it easily enough), they’d be so much safer if they just copied the people’s minds and left them to go about their everyday lives as living, non-dead people.

Maybe they don’t do this because they think there’s a difference between an actual mind and a copy of a mind, but is there? Remember that either way they’re translating neural impulses into a digital form. When you copy a file on your computer’s hard drive to a USB drive, the copy is the same as the original: even if you delete the original.

“No one loves cattle more than Burger King” is a great line by Ms Kizlet, but you have to wonder if Burger King would kill their cattle if they knew that they could simply copy them and still end up with meat…

Anti-Gravity Could Probably Work Like That, Actually

Okay, that’s enough complaining about neurological inaccuracy — were there any outlandish-seeming parts of the episode that actually made sense? Turns out the anti-gravity motorcycle ride up the side of the Shard was, uh, not too bad. Of course, you have to first accept that anti-gravity drives exist, but once you do…

Completely reasonable. To an extent.

The only reason the scene makes sense is that the Shard is not a typical skyscraper with vertical sides — it slopes at an angle, like a giant… shard, I guess. Why is this important? Well, anti-gravity really only means one thing: gravity no longer acts on the motorcycle, or at least acts less. This means a completely vertical ride would still be impossible, as long as the motorcycle was normal in every other non-gravity-defying way (which it appears to be).

What’s happening when a hypothetical anti-grav motorcycle is going up the side of a completely vertical surface, with no gravity acting on it? The motion of the vehicle upwards is driven by contact between the surface and the wheels, but there’s no force holding it to the surface itself. This is fine if the surface is 100% smooth, but it’s most likely not. If the surface is made of multiple sheets of glass, there are going to be irregularities in their positions relative to each other, leading to times when the motorcycle’s wheels are no longer making contact with the surface. Since there’s no force pulling back towards the surface once it hits one of these high points, it will remain there. This results in a gradual drifting away from the surface — by the time the Doctor would have gotten halfway up this hypothetical vertical building, he may have been several metres away from the side, which isn’t very useful if you want to crash through one of the windows.

But luckily, the Shard isn’t vertical, so this wasn’t a problem. By activating the anti-gravity drive only partially (so the motorcycle still feels some of the pull of gravity, but not all of it), he remained stuck to the surface, while also being able to climb the building without super-grippy tyres. How do we know he activated the drive only partially? Well, he does it on the street, before he even hits the building, and he doesn’t start drifting slowly into the air as he rides away, so… yep. Completely justified.

So yeah, at least one aspect of this episode was realistic.

Final Thoughts

Science-fantasy aside, and speaking as a fan, I actually really enjoyed this episode. I know it was criticised by some for not being as “epic” as expected, but that’s more of a problem with hype and fan expectations, rather than an issue with the quality of the episode itself. If you compare “The Bells of Saint John” to a 10th Doctor opening story like “Partners In Crime”, it’s very similar in tone and (strangely enough) plot, but no one was complaining about that episode being not epic enough. It’s just a regular, interesting episode. Nothing ground-breaking, but nothing terrible.

But I have a feeling this season (or half of a season) is going to keep getting better. I’ve already seen “The Rings of Akhaten” (as you probably have too), which I adored, and the next episode, “Cold War”, looks… amazing. Who knew Ser Davos Seaworth knew how to drive a submarine?

Clara’s turning out to be a great companion — while not as different from the other female companions the Doctor’s had since 2005 as I would have liked, she’s still a breath of reasonably fresh air, and it’s great to see Matt Smith building an acting relationship with someone new. Her story arc is very intriguing as well. Have you got a fan theory about her yet? Mine involves Captain Jack Harkness and is almost certainly wrong, but a man can dream, goddammit. A man can dream…

For a skeptical group blog, the Young Australian Skeptics has kept reasonably distant from certain, uh, happenings in the skeptical and atheist communities of late. It’s probably going to stay that way (at least for the time being), for a number of reasons.

But in the meantime, check out this comic (with a taste below — click through for the full image) by Zach Weinersmith from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal about Internet infighting — I think it captures my personal thoughts on the situation quite nicely…

Do you think the comic is accurate? I’d be very interested to hear from those of you who don’t…

Every week we ask a question of our readers, to stimulate discussion and critical thinking about an issue or topic relating to science, skepticism, technology or religion. Our favourite points are discussed on our weekly podcast, The Pseudoscientists.

Science fiction is full of technology that doesn’t exist yet — possibly because we’re not up to that point in our history, or because that technology is actually scientifically impossible. But what’s the fun in something existing if you can’t play with it right now? So:

If you could pick any futuristic technology to be a reality now, what would you pick?

How do critical concerns impact your choice? Could your technology destroy all life on Earth or make our current civilisation impossible? Would your cheap thrills bring about the end of the human race, or would all of our lives be improved? Let us know in the comments!

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by centralasian]

The Pseudoscientists — Episode 83

Subscribe: iTunes / Libsyn RSS

Tom, Rachael and Sarah discuss why vaccines really, really, really don’t cause autism, how the Australian carbon tax is affecting hospitals, and how a duck fathered a chicken. Jargonauts looks at the loaded term “nuclear”, and we reflect on the concept of an “atheist movement”, with some help from you guys.

Plus, what American voters really believe, a follow up on aspartame, Jack’s lack of wisdom teeth, and Easter!

Links

• “Call for hospitals to get carbon tax compo” - ABC News
• The Liberal Party press release on the carbon tax news can be found here.
• “Duck fathers a chicken, offering hope for extinct species” - Treehugger
• “Autism Risk Unrelated to Total Vaccine Exposure in Early Childhood” - National Institute of Mental Health

Question For Next Week

If you could pick any futuristic technology to be a reality now, what would you pick?

Let us know in the comments here or on our dedicated blog post!

Houston, We Have A Problem

Support

To support the show, you can purchase the Young Australian Skeptics’s Skeptical Blog Anthology - available in paperback or ebook!

Also, consider leaving us a rating and/or review on iTunes!

Contact

If you have feedback for the show or want to ask us a question, get in touch via our Contact page or send us an email at youngausskeptics(at)gmail(dot)com.

You can also become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at @pseudoscipod.

About 48 hours ago, I was sitting in a hospital admissions room with four more teeth than I currently possess and a bundle of thoughts running through my mind. One of them was about the nature of consciousness (what would I experience while submitting my mind to a general anaesthetic?), another was about what I was going to eat when I got home (a man cannot live on soup alone), and yet another dealt with how I would look in an unflattering hospital gown. But tucked away in the back of my head, behind all the anxiety, was a simple question: why did I need to have this procedure done?

Like a good proportion of young adults, I was told by my dentist that I should have my third molars — known in English-speaking countries as wisdom teeth — removed once they forced themselves into my mouth. Their presence, I was assured, would crowd out my jaw, forcing my other teeth into strange positions and assisting in severe tooth decay. So it made sense to get them removed as soon as possible. Wisdom teeth extraction is a simple procedure with few potential complications; in fact, I was told my surgeon would be performing four in a row directly after mine: you can’t say that about open-heart surgery, can you? I’d spend a few hours in the hospital, and then I’d be free to go. Awesome.

But going to the hospital for any reason is a huge nuisance — and I’d have to take a good few days off from university while my mouth bled unattractively and I was constantly drugged up on 60mg of sleep-inducing codeine. Wisdom teeth shouldn’t exist at all! They cause nothing but trouble! Why in God’s name do they even exist? After I left the hospital, with my other questions already answered (“Nothingness”, “Soup” and “Acceptable”, respectively), this weighed more and more on my mind.

For a lot of people, especially scientists and atheists, wisdom teeth are a classic example of “bad design”: irrefutable proof that the human race (and the rest of the biosphere) was not put together by an all-powerful Intelligent Designer. There are plenty of other examples out there as well, like the appendix, the vertebrate retina, and the panda’s not-quite thumb, but wisdom teeth just seem so useless and so terrible that it’s hard to see how they could be reconciled with an overarching design in nature. But what exactly is this arguing against? I think it’s time we revisit the concept of intelligent design (ID).

ID is a special branch of creationism that came to exist around the early 1990s (although the seeds had been sown in the late 80s) as a way for certain Christians and members of other religions to hit back against evolutionary biology in a seemingly scientific way. Spearheaded by a conservative Christian think tank called the Discovery Institute, ID became a cultural phenomenon in the mid-2000s when numerous US school boards attempted to place it in the biology curriculum in direct opposition to evolution.

According to the Discovery Institute-owned website intelligentdesign.org:

The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.

In a nutshell, ID maintains that some being (or beings), at some point, did something to help create certain parts of the universe, including life. (Sound vague? I’ll get back to that later.) Much to the chagrin of biologists everywhere, ID is a persuasive position for many religious people, even those not taken to traditional creationist beliefs like a 6000 year-old universe or a 7-day creation. As such, ID is a common target for popularisers of evolutionary biology such as Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne and the late Stephen Jay Gould, who have all put forward versions of the “bad design” argument mentioned above. The argument is so instinctively persuasive that it almost seems to be the default response whenever ID rears its head — just yell “Human bodies are crap!” until the bad man goes away. My wisdom teeth, it seems, have an almost supernatural ability to ward off theologians pretending to be scientists.

But I don’t think they should. I don’t agree with Dawkins et al. — the “bad design” argument isn’t as persuasive as they would have you believe. Don’t get me wrong, ID doesn’t have a scientific leg to stand on. In fact, understanding why the “bad design” argument fails provides me with more justification for believing that. But I just think that it’s important to be intellectually honest and investigate your own arguments with as much rigour as you do those of your opponent. That’s at the heart of good critical thought, right?

So what is it about “bad design” that fails? I mean, do I think wisdom teeth are a good idea? Well, uh, I’m sitting on the couch with a box of painkillers to my left, a warm ice-pack to my right and a blanket draped over my shoulders, so I’m not exactly going to rave about them. They’ve caused me nothing but grief. My problem with the “bad design” argument is the fact that we don’t know — assuming ID were true — I wouldn’t have had wisdom teeth in the first place. Why must all design be good design?

This is an interesting point. Look around you — proponents of ID, like Discovery Institute lawyer Casey Luskin, love to point out that we can infer design in nature in the same way we infer design in our everyday lives. We know cars are designed by people, we know books are designed by people, we know computers are designed by people… and on it goes. But how much of our artificial, designed world is perfect? Some cars have fatal design flaws, killing numerous people per year; books can be printed with missing or blank pages; and Windows operating systems are pieces of garbage. Clearly, just because something was designed by a (human) intelligent agent, that doesn’t make it perfect.

If human design can be flawed, why should we not expect the same of ID’s Designer? The ID critic with an atheistic bent will quickly decry that — since ID is watered-down version of religious creationism — the Designer is God, and God doesn’t make mistakes. Barring any complex theological discussions, this is potentially true. Maybe my wisdom teeth do rule out God from the picture! But is ID necessarily all about God? Sure, it’s always important to get a grasp on how a proponent of an idea understands that idea (and in this case it’s obvious that most ID proponents believe the Designer to be a theistic God), but why not take the idea at face value?

As it turns out, ID can be interpreted entirely secularly — which is exactly what the Discovery Institute likes to wave around to the US court system. The Designer doesn’t have to be God; it could be a race of technologically-advanced aliens! How does “bad design” fare against this hypothesis? Well, like humans, aliens aren’t perfect. They could have made mistakes — even a stupid one like giving me wisdom teeth — while designing life on Earth. It’s possible! You can’t rule it out! In fact, if life were designed by mortal creatures, shouldn’t we expect things to be a little screwed up around the edges? Perhaps, perhaps not. But either way, the “bad design” argument no longer looks as impressive as it once did.

This, however, is not a reason for the ID proponent to cry out in victory: immunity from “bad design” highlights a serious problem with the nature of intelligent design as a purportedly scientific hypothesis. Why can’t flaws in the natural world convince us that design was not involved? Because we have no idea what the natural world would look like if design were involved! ID doesn’t predict anything, and the ability to predict phenomena or naturally-occurring patterns is one of the major hallmarks of a scientific hypothesis.

Let’s look back at the ID proponent’s analogy to the human-designed world we live in. Why do we infer that a car is made by a car designer? Because we know that car designers exist! Also, certain designers leave certain distinguishable marks on their designs, which we can use to work backwards from the design to the identity of the designer. This is easy when it comes to, for example, finding out where a book was published, but it’s not so straightforward in a biological context. Do we know of any designers that could have made the human genome? Last time I checked, humanity was alone in the universe, to the best of our knowledge. Until such time as we find an advanced alien species, we can’t claim that design is a better idea than evolutionary theory when it comes to explaining life on Earth.

That’s the major problem with ID: we have no candidate designers. The hypothesis is too vague! This means we can’t match up what we see in the universe with what we would expect to see if parts of the universe were designed! ID thus has no explanatory power, and has absolutely no advantages over our sophisticated and well-supported theories in evolutionary biology and cosmology. Better luck next time, creationists.

So why did I have wisdom teeth, before they were cut out of my jaw while I was unconscious? Turns out there’s a perfectly good evolutionary explanation: human jaw sizes, compared to that of our ancestors, are rather small (potentially due to a change in diet), but we keep growing the same number of teeth during development as we always did, so our third molars become impacted and cause problems. But there’s evidence that tooth genetics might be catching up with our change in jaw size — variants in a gene called PAX9 are related to a lack of wisdom teeth in certain human populations. It’s good to know some people don’t have to through the horrors I did. I guess.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a date with some ice cream — and it was designed: to be delicious.

(The title of this post is a reference to a song by one of my favourite musical artists, St. Vincent.)

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by ploppy]

Two members of Australian satirical comedy group The Chaser (responsible for cult shows like The Chaser’s War on Everything, CNNNN and The Hamster Wheel) — Craig Reucassel and Julian Morrow — are investigating consumer affairs in their new ABC1 show The Checkout. Skepticism and consumer affairs go hand-in-hand, as consumers often need to employ critical thinking skills and scientific knowledge to sort worthwhile products from duds, and it’s great to see a show like this on the air.

It’s been a promising start! In Episode 1 (broadcast on March 21st), Craig took on the regulation of complementary medicines in Australia, specifically weight-loss remedies marketed as being “traditional indications”. The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) gets a justified walloping, and it also features an appearance from well-known Australian skeptic Dr. Ken Harvey, known for his consumer advocacy in the field of medicine and pharmaceuticals. Check out the segment here:

Also eye-opening (and somewhat more hilarious) was this animated complaint letter about cat food ingredients and naming:

You can watch The Checkout on ABC1 at 8pm, Thursdays.

So I was scrolling down Facebook, as the young‘ns do, and found an article which began pretty much as this one did. The author, like me, found a post on Facebook by some person they’ll never see, and has never affected them before, to produce consequences that would never change their lives.

In the article, Johanna Dasteel describes her experience about reading a pro-gay marriage graphic saying “ALL love is equal”. She had her “liberal-arts educated mind” kick in and mentally analysed “manipulative slogans” used to drive appeals of emotion. She wrote about her childhood, and the title of the article — “The terrible injustice of same sex ‘marriage’: my story” — lived up to expectation. Instantly, my own (incomplete) Year 10, public school education kicked in. I could feel all the liberal, anti-discrimination bias marinate my brain creases and I thought: “The first paragraph was great, you thought critically… but here comes the anecdote.”

Johanna my dear, I am about to do something socially abhorrent. You say:

…it is the loss of my father that makes my story just as relevant to the debate as that of the woman wanting to marry her girlfriend.

This is the equivalent to sticking bananas in your ears and singing “You’re wrong, you don’t even know what I’ve been through. Shut up now.”

Calling this intellectually dishonest, the “fodder of politics” and foolish might be social suicide, but this is where I pull out my get-out-of-jail-free card. My counterstatement is as such: it is the loss of my own father that proves your story irrelevant to the debate. I’m sorry if my paraphrasing loses some of her meaning, but she implies that the loss of her father meant that herself, and especially her younger brothers, were deeply affected by the lack of a father in their lives.

Another mother — even two more — would not have remedied what we lacked; we needed a man.

And here I realise that this isn’t about gay marriage anymore, it is about same-sex couples looking after children. Let’s write that off as pure semantics, and go on for now.

Equally, children need mothers. Mothers and fathers compliment one another in the raising of children. The absence of one or the other (or both) has a devastating effect on children.

I recommend you read the whole thing; I’m just picking out the juicy sentences here. I’m not the only person rubbed raw by this debate.

Without both a father and a mother, she says, children will be deeply affected. But my family was no worse off (it might have been better actually) without that masculine influence in our lives.

Pubescent development was (as far as I could see) perfectly average for anyone going through those years of my brothers’ lives — turmoil was expected. They were not emotionally crippled by not having a man to look up to. That is not to say a father is useless, of course. I could counter your example with mine all day, but the issue is bigger than me and you. A dad should not be valued because he is a man, but because he took the time to raise you and he has his own unique influence in your life.

I’m about to propose something almost as socially abhorrent as what I said before. It’s a crazy, drastic concept that might have been equivalent to the abstract movement of Picasso’s time.

Yes, it is the “gender is a social construct” argument, Johanna, but since apparently losing a father gives one authority on the subject, here I go.

Parents do not fit into two neat boxes named “Mum” and “Dad”. Your dad might act like a “Mum”, and/or your mum might act like a “Dad”. My parents certainly didn’t fit neatly into their boxes. My father was not the “unconditional loving” type, as Johanna thinks he would have been, based on how she categorizes parents. My mother also did a great deal of disciplining, which according to Johanna is the father’s job. My mother had no choice: she is the type of woman that can knock you into place. Don’t tell me how my mother is based on knowledge of your own mother, Johanna, that’s absurd.

What I lacked was a fallen man — who is not so inclined to love the unlovable — loving me unconditionally anyway. Girls need that assurance.

No, no they don’t. I didn’t need that assurance. If you want to generalise about women, Johanna, at least make it applicable to all women. I learned to talk to males of all ages when I was young, I am not socially crippled because of the lack of fathering in my life, and I never needed to see a man “inclined to love the unlovable” to keep my weak girly heart fluttering, and my feminine compassion flowing.

Johanna, I don’t see why your personal experience of your own parents should define how other parents behave and what role they play in their own lives. You’re trying to categorize; you are trying to shove people into neat little boxes. It does not work. Some mothers will be rotten, some fathers will be rotten, but that doesn’t mean that a certain combination of genders will turn out rotten every time. I was practically raised by two mothers — my other mother being my grandmother. It was better without my father.

Don’t be too wound up about it, Johanna, but you did know that there aren’t just two sexes? I want to draw your attention to this example because I don’t think the issue is with your upbringing, I believe it is the way which you see the world. At least give some rebuttal to the idea of gender construction before you throw it away on a whim.

The concept of marriage is dependent upon a dichotomy where a man will be a (culturally defined) man and a woman will be a (culturally defined, of course) woman. I’m not sure that you realise that there are people who don’t even relate to either. By this standard, somebody born with unidentifiable genitalia will never know the “love” which you may or may not have for a man. Sometimes they build their own gender, sometimes they don’t. But what do they build it on? The cultural definition of the time and place. A person who identifies as male would prefer pink if he were born in 1900, for instance. Blue hasn’t always been a boy’s colour either. And some cultures have been known to put dresses and skirts on men too — just look at Scotland. With a liberal-arts degree, surely you can appreciate free thought and that ideals should not always be defined by tradition.

For the sake of not having a double standard, would you, Johanna, change legislation so that single parents couldn’t adopt children? Or let single parents raise children, after the death of a partner or spouse?

I wouldn’t see an issue with Johanna drawing conclusions from her own experiences, if she wasn’t trying to impose her own ideals on a whole segment of the population. I am straight and even though this issue will never affect me directly, it will never affect you directly, you are encouraging discrimination, and all the hate. And that fact that this is an argument to prevent same-sex marriage, when the issue is really about couples raising children. Not marriage.

Please don’t make me pull out the clichés. The major reason to marry is not reproduction anymore. That was the past, this is now.

In the end, Johanna, our stories are both completely irrelevant to the question of same-sex marriage. You are just as “manipulative” and dependant on persuasive technique as I, or the person who made that “ALL love is equal” Facebook graphic. You can tear open every paragraph I write with a butcher’s knife and the subjective, foolish juices will spill across the battleground.

But is my story just the exception to the rule? It’s not for a single narrow human opinion to decide on what a societal norm is. What will one story ever say about the big picture? Something miraculous to you might just be statistical noise in everyone’s perspective.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by troybthompson]

From the minds over at SMBC Theatre, comes this nifty little animation about the real war on conservative religious values. I’m just glad we don’t have any of that kerfuffle down here in Australia.

Oh. Wait.

If you liked this video, you might also like Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, a webcomic written and drawn by Zach Weinersmith, one of the people behind SMBC Theatre. It’s one I make sure I never miss. Here’s a recent update:

Ouch.

The Pseudoscientists — Episode 82

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Jack, Sarah and Tom step into their fancy new studio at SYN to talk about smug atheists, malnutrition and the health effects of eating too much sugar. Jargonauts defines “isomer”, and we take a look at yours and our skeptical superstitions.

Plus, energy fields, muscle testing, the terrible world of Australian politics.

Links

• Holly’s article on atheist arse-kissing can be found here.
• “Early malnutrition bodes ill for adult personality” - ScienceNews
• “Sugary Drinks May Explain 180,000 Deaths Worldwide Each Year” - Medscape

Question For Next Week

How do you feel about the concept of an ‘atheist movement’? Let us know in the comments!

Houston, We Have A Problem

Support

To support the show, you can purchase the Young Australian Skeptics’s Skeptical Blog Anthology - available in paperback or ebook!

Also, consider leaving us a rating and/or review on iTunes!

Contact

If you have feedback for the show or want to ask us a question, get in touch via our Contact page or send us an email at youngausskeptics(at)gmail(dot)com.

You can also become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at @pseudoscipod.

Arse-kissing is not a recent phenomenon. It has probably been used since the dinosaurs roamed the earth (how else would a T-Rex convince anyone to help scratch himself, with those teeeeeny little arms of his?) and I don’t see it disappearing any time soon. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t annoy me.

Recently on Twitter (I’m @fearblandness - hey, this is my article, I can shamelessly promote myself if I want) I’ve noticed an uprising in self-congratulatory and suck up atheists — and it’s making me vomit in my mouth a little bit. I don’t know what the situation is like on other social media sites as I don’t frequent them as often as Twitter, but I can imagine that it’s not specific to atheists on Twitter alone. To clarify, here’s an example of the kind of embarrassing and cringe worthy messages that are sent throughout the atheist network:

‘Follow this gorgeous atheist @insertnamehere, she’s so inspirational!’

These tweets are then followed by replies (‘Aww thanks! No YOU’RE the best!’) and so on and so forth, circling until they both pass out from too much validation.

You might think I’m being a jealous grumpy pants because I’m not part of their little club. I can assure you this isn’t the case. I’m only concerned that it’s making atheists on Twitter look clique-y and immature. You could accuse me of being the latter as I tweet about bodily functions a lot, but I never claim to represent a group. Sure, I participate in a lot of atheist-related activities, I write, vlog, and podcast about atheist subjects, but it doesn’t define who I am. This increase in outspoken atheists on the internet is fantastic, as it makes people feel like part of a community. It only becomes a problem if it gets to a stage where we’re actually congratulating others and ourselves for not believing in an all-powerful sky daddy.  This cycle of mutual back-patting and high-fiving makes the atheist community look smug, which is a criticism we encounter all too often. Why are we feeding this perception?

Obviously I’m in no position to dictate what you should do on your social media accounts (well, not until I’m grand ruler of the Atheist Alliance International), but I think it’s important to be wary of hypocrisy. We often joke about religion just being a club or group of people who believe in the same crazy idea. Religion is very clique-based. There are certain religion symbols people may wear such as cross necklaces, or Jewish kippahs, and although atheists don’t have any defining dress codes or symbols, I think we can pride ourselves on including and welcoming anyone from any walk of life. This concept is jeopardised when we form little separate clubs, especially those that need ‘permission’ to join. I know when I see atheists on Twitter congratulating each other for being atheists, I roll my eyes and make a mental note not to talk to them. I imagine those wanting to leave their supernatural beliefs or religion behind and find fellow atheists online will either cringe or feel intimidated.

I understand that we are social creatures and seek validation wherever we can find it. Why else would we want followers on Twitter? I NEED someone to validate my lunch choice, or what shenanigans my cat is up to. However, I think as atheists, we need to be aware of how we’re perceived by others. ‘Smug arse-kissers’ is not a good look.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by hoshiwa]

20 Skeptics You Should Know is a series of articles highlighting skeptics doing influential and/or important work, by guest author Kylie Sturgess.

One of the main issues that modern society has is that the majority don’t know what Medial Oligocene magnetostratigraphy means. It doesn’t turn up on many spelling tests, for example. Nor is it dropped casually into conversation during a blind date set up via eHarmony. This is to our collective disadvantage.

So, imagine the challenges one would face in writing an entire thesis, titled: “Medial Oligocene magnetostratigraphy and mammalian biostratigraphy: testing the isochroneity of mammalian biostratigraphic events”.

It’s enough to make you put on an impressive hat, pull up your socks and practice quirking one eyebrow in a meaningful manner while casually mentioning that yes, you do have a PhD.

Thankfully, we have Professor Donald Prothero to show us the way to such effortless style and there’s a number of myths and legends that should be dispelled while discussing how to spell maget… magnetosrt… magenetstropheythingie. Well, he recently appeared on Wikipedia’s front page, so hopefully that’s a start for the world at large.

Professor Prothero taught college geology and paleontology for 33 years, at Caltech, Columbia, and Occidental, Knox, Vassar, and Pierce Colleges. That is possibly longer than you have been alive, but certainly not as long as the death of the things he’s studied.

Professor Donald Prothero, when not demonstrating evidence for evolution, has also appeared on Win Ben Stein’s Money. That takes stones.

He earned his B.A. in geology and biology (highest honors, Phi Beta Kappa, College Award) from University of California Riverside in 1976, and his M.A. (1978), M.Phil. (1979), and gained a Ph.D. (1982) in geological sciences from Columbia University. I should point out that unsubstantiated rumours have it that Professor Prothero was the man that George Lucas based his Indiana Jones character on, but changed the character’s career to archaeologist as a challenge to his spelling skills. Also, pitching a Paleozoic rock at a Nazi doesn’t look as attractive as flicking a bullwhip.

Prof Prothero’s snappy hat may or may not have been maintained to add that certain charisma to the fictional character. Lucas never writes or calls anymore, I don’t know what went wrong there.

In addition, he is the author of over 35 books (including five leading geology textbooks, and several trade books), and over 250 scientific papers, mostly on the evolution of fossil mammals (especially rhinos, camels, and horses) and on using the earth’s magnetic field changes to date fossil-bearing strata. He has been on the editorial boards of journals such as Geology, Paleobiology, Journal of Paleontology, and Skeptic magazine — you can find his blog at http://www.skepticblog.org/author/prothero. It’s on that very blog that you can find a number of blogged adventures (with or without hat), including his appearance on a reality TV show where hapless creationists look befuddled while staring into the face of a suitably smug Grand Canyon.

Speaking of television, Professor Prothero has featured on numerous TV documentaries, including Paleoworld, Walking with Prehistoric Beasts, Prehistoric Monsters Revealed, Monsterquest, Prehistoric Predators: Entelodon and Hyaenodon, Conspiracy Road Trip: Creationism, as well as Jeopardy! He won on that last one. I don’t think you actually win anything on Conspiracy Road Trip, apart from possibly a headache and the wish that evidence could just be pounded into stubborn minds with a ball peen hammer. Not that Professor Prothero would think that, he’s too nice.

He also plays the trombone. Since 1966. It’s entirely possible the neighbours wish he’d stopped by now. I mean, how do you continually play the trombone and get everything else done? Lucas is rumoured to be writing yet another sequel to explain all.

Some of his books coming out later this month include Rhinoceros Giants: The Paleobiology of Indricotheres, published by Indiana University Press; Abominable Science: The Origins of Yeti, Nessie and Other Cryptids, co-authored with Daniel Loxton and Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten our Future. Find out more by visiting http://www.skepticblog.org/author/prothero.

The Pseudoscientists — Episode 81

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Tom, Rachael and Jack talk about a man who never has to eat again, fossilized life found in a meteorite, and why Mars could potentially support life. Jargonauts examines “isotope”, and we find out about your favourite conspiracy theories! Next week’s question: “Do you have any superstitions?”

Plus, Tom’s obsession with boardgames, That Mitchell and Webb Look deconstruct the moon landing hoax, and maybe some Space Jam…

Links

• “This Man Thinks He Never Has To Eat Again” — Vice
• “No, Life Has Still Not Been Found In A Meteorite” - Bad Astronomy
• “NASA Rover Finds Conditions Once Suited for Ancient Life on Mars” - NASA
• For more details of the Sean Faircloth tour, go here!

Question For Next Week

Do you have any superstitions? Let us know in the comments!

Houston, We Have A Problem

Support

To support the show, you can purchase the Young Australian Skeptics’s Skeptical Blog Anthology - available in paperback or ebook!

Also, consider leaving us a rating and/or review on iTunes!

Contact

If you have feedback for the show or want to ask us a question, get in touch via our Contact page or send us an email at youngausskeptics(at)gmail(dot)com.

You can also become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at @pseudoscipod.

The Pseudoscientists — Episode 80

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Jack and Tom are joined by their good friend and radio genius Tess Armstrong to chat about a young child being cured of an HIV infection, as well as a classic skeptical topic, UFOs — and Tess has her own weird UFO “encounter” to reveal. Jargonauts gets grammatically controversial with the infamous “data/datum” distinction, and we have a look at whether or not any scientific research should be restricted. Next week’s question: “Are there any conspiracy theories you have a personal fondness for?”

Plus, Rupert Sheldrake’s strange ideas about science, Harry Potter, and Jack’s birthday!

Links

• “Baby may be cured of HIV” - ScienceNews
• The UFO “video” taken outside Russell Crowe’s office can be found here, and Tess’s UFO video can be found here (contains some swearing, so be warned)!
• For more info about the “data/datum” controversy, check out this post at Datablog.
• Interested in the LEGO Hogwarts Tess mentioned? Worry no further.
• You can find Tess Armstrong on Twitter at @tessarmstrong!

Question of the Week

Are there any conspiracy theories you have a personal fondness for?

Houston, We Have A Problem

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO4-9l8IWFQ

If you have a suggestion for a Houston clip, let us know in the comments!

Support

To support the show (and the fragile egos of all those involved), you can purchase the Young Australian Skeptics’s Skeptical Blog Anthology - available in paperback or ebook!

Contact

If you have feedback for the show or want to ask us a question, get in touch via our Contact page or send us an email at youngausskeptics(at)gmail(dot)com.

You can also become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at @pseudoscipod.

As recently highlighted by Luke Freeman, Wikipedia is currently undergoing a skeptical makeover through the actions of the Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia project — new pages are being created for groups, topics and important causes that lack them, and old pages are being injected with new and better writing, internal structure, references and general readability. While there’s still a long way to go, progress has been steady and significant, and a lot of the changes are likely beginning to have an effect on the information many people find when searching the Internet for skeptical and pseudoscientific topics.

On that note, I’m pleased to announce that the Young Australian Skeptics now has its very own Wikipedia page, as a direct result of the project! While it’s never good to assume that you’re notable enough to deserve such a page, it is wonderful to be recognised in this manner, and we hope it sends a few curious young people (and older people) our way!

The page has information about our founding, media appearances, podcast and publications, so if you need a refresher on who we are…

This post is devoted to the question we asked on Episode 79 of The Pseudoscientists podcast:

Do you think there should be restrictions on scientific research?

Is human cloning too unethical to be done? Should animal research be stopped? Should we be allowed to research areas of physics that could lead to enormously powerful weapons? Or is all research fair game?

Give us your answers in the comments, and our favourite (as well as the most interesting) responses will be read out and discussed on the show next week!

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by eleaf]