The Official Blog of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe
Two separate teams of Astronomers have reached another cool milestone for exoplanetary discovery.
They have for the first time “directly imaged” planets not in our solar system
You may be thinking…What’s this “directly imaged” crap…Astronomer have spotted over 300 exoplanets since the 1990s. There’s been countless news stories about it, right?
As most of us know, February 12th is Darwin Day. Darwin Day 2009 is gearing up to be a special one because it will be the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species.
The Discovery Institute, the organization of ID proponents that make sad and awkward attempts to masquerade ID as actual science, has decided to make February 12th a day of their own, Academic Freedom Day. And to be fair to one of my favorite SBM bloggers, ID here is Intelligent Design, not Infectious Diseases.
Academic Freedom Day is a day where “students everywhere can speak out against censorship and stand up for free speech by defending the right to debate the evidence for and against evolution.”
Texas has been a battleground for the conflict between science and creationism. It is one of the few states that drives the textbook industry, which makes it a prime target for those with an agenda to influence public education.
Today I received the following e-mail from the Texas Citizens for Science - a fine group of skeptics on the front lines.
x-posted from Skepchick!
I know many of you reading this are working scientists, and so of course you’re familiar with the famed medical journal, International Journal of Yoga. For those of you who don’t subscribe, you’ll be excited to learn that IJOY has just published this solid, peer-reviewed paper called Investigating paranormal phenomena: Functional brain imaging of telepathy. Better yet, it’s available online!
This study, run by “scientists” from the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences and the Vivekananda Yoga Research Foundation (both in Bangalore, India) involved a sample size of two: one magician named Gerard Senehi and one anonymous schmo who, unlike Gerard, does not lie or misrepresent himself as a psychic with magical powers. (Here’s an amusing NY Magazine article on Gerard if you’re interested.)
Both Gerard and the schmo underwent a single test of psychic powers while connected to an fMRI machine. The test in question was a standard magic trick in which the audience – I mean, researchers – thought of an image and drew it on a piece of paper. Then the magician – I mean, psychic – is to reproduce the drawing. Read the rest of this entry »
Tonight, in the city of New Britain, Connecticut, local curiosity seekers will have the rare experience of sitting down to dinner with Allyson and Adele Walsh, supposedly better known in the land of woo as “the psy-dentical twins”.
This duo of divination will center their collective psychic gravity at Angelico’s Café. The entry fee is $25, and that affords the carnival goer two hours of access to the sisters of psi’s performance, and you get to have your picture taken with them. The price does not cover food.
To wet your whistle, here is a succulent sample from their home page:
“Allyson and Adele work professionally as psychic mediums, educators, and motivational speakers. Allyson has been featured on local radio shows and WBAL-TV, presenting their work. The Washington Post article in the Sunday Source (July 18, 2004) brought attention to their work, calling them the “experts” in their field. Often when they work together, “phenomena” occurs – it has been documented on video and sound recording equipment. There is something unusual about their work!”
Listener David Driscoll from Atlanta thought this video of Frank Tipler explaining his “proof” for the existence of God would make a good Name that Logical Fallacy. I agree. Tipler is a crank, plain and simple. That he is a professor at Tulane University must be somewhat of an embarrassment for Tulane.
Others have already dissected Tipler’s nonsense, such as this article in the Skeptical Inquirer. I want to focus on the core fallacy of Tipler’s logic.
He says that the math and the physics lead directly to the conclusion that God exists. In the ridiculous local news video, where we are assured the reporter asked the “tough questions” (cough, cough), they even show some mathematical-looking equations on a blackboard leading to the final conclusion - “God exists.”
The field and application of biometrics has evolved. From fingerprints to DNA analysis, biometrics have been at the forefront of identification and security for a long time now.
Recently, companies in Japan have begun using advanced biometric systems that identify a person based on the pattern of veins in their fingers. This technology was developed by Hitachi and reads the complex lattice work of small blood vessels under the finger’s skin.
For decades now we’ve known that the 3 billion base pairs that make up human dna contain vast wastelands of genetic code that do not code for proteins. No function could be found for much of this apparent useless 97% of our genome. In 1972, late geneticist Susumu Ohno coined the term “junk dna”.
Recently I’ve been digging into the idea of intuition, particularly the notion that women possess some grand insight that men lack. I wasn’t planning to post a blog entry about it, but this morning I was going through emails looking for something to write about when I opened my Google alert for the word “psychic,” an alert that has often inspired Skepchick posts. Of the five links, two mentioned the word “intuition” in a paranormal sense, implying knowledge gained by supernatural means. One article took it to a whole other level of riduculosity (it’s not a word . . . yet): from the Summit Daily News we have an interview titled Author dispels mystery around intuition.
To be sure, there is an awful lot of mystery that needs dispelling. Let’s see how the author does!
How did you find skepticism? When did you realize that you had a skeptical mind? Did you know what a skeptic was before you became one? The number of answers here are infinite. Everyone has a unique perspective and a unique story to tell about how they came to the skeptical community.
Perhaps a question that is not asked frequently enough is “what keeps you active the skeptical movement?” While the number of possible answers here might seem equally infinite and unique, you are likely to find that there are a finite number of common threads that keeps skepticism, as a movement, woven together. One of the strongest strands in our skeptical tapestry is in the knowing that pseudoscience can kill. It has before, and it will again.
There are dozens of reasons why I am a skeptical activist. However, this news report and too many other similar stories like this one, remind me of the most important reasons why.
Medieval beliefs yield medieval results.