Google+

I signed up for the Beta of Google+ last night hoping that it will eventually take the place of facebook. I have facebook because it's a convenient way to keep track of happenings, but I'm very unimpressed with the constant revisions that make private info public and have been waiting for a replacement.

I can't say what I think of Google+ yet since the most important aspect of a social network is the sociability of it and very few people I know have joined just yet. Meanwhile, I've been looking at some of the reviews and found a few articles I feel like commenting on.

First 8 Facebook Features Google+ Doesn't Have (Yet). What sorts of things am I missing?

1. Games: Oh thank the FSM G+ doesn't have these. I can't even count how many stupid facebook plug-ins and games I've blocked. And yet it seems every day, one of my friends just started playing Zonkborger and wants me to join their brain eating zombie colony. Not going to miss that!

2. Compatibility with Twitter: I can see this being a sticking point for many, but given I rarely update my twitter, I can't really complain.

3. Third-Party Apps: See (1) & (2). Overall, I'm pretty meh about all the crazy things facebook allows.

4. Hiding Some People's Status Updates: This is a pretty big one. I'm sitting pretty at 226 facebook friends which seems to be a low end of moderate. For comparison, my sister have 544 (she's a socialite). Popular public figures tend to have even more. JT Eberhard has 1721 presently. That's a lot of spam about how shitty people's days were. Sometimes, I just need to hide the downers or the people who otherwise post stupid shit. In facebook, I can just remove them from my feed. Apparently that's not possible in G+.

Is this such a bad thing? Not necessarily. It just means you might have to be a bit more picky about who you select as a "friend". G+ has several different groups. Not everyone has to be a friend. You can select them as "acquaintances" (or make user defined groups) and only show one feed at a time thereby cutting out all the people you maintain loose contacts with and hone in on the ones you really want to follow.

5. Birthday Reminders: Oh no! We can't remember birthdays without a computer to tell us!? Again, I don't care. About the only thing facebook birthdays seem to be any good for anyway, is getting your wall spammed with 300+ variations on "Happy Birthday, bro!". I generally remove my birthday from my profile a few days before hand. Just to see how many people really know. It's not many, but if I really cared, there'd be a party, and they'd all be invited.

6. Event Coordination: This one is important to me. I'm leaving in 10 days for a trip to two conventions and not coming back to St. Louis in between. I'm planning to crash on couches and hang with friends in nearby towns I haven't seen in forever. To coordinate this, I created an invent, tagged the people nearby, and put together an itinerary. Not having such tools will be missed.

7. Polls: Another annoying time sink. As usual, I don't care what people think so much as why they think it. I don't need a multiple choice piece of bifurcation. If you're my friend, let's actually have an intelligent discussion.

8. Users: Simply put, no one is on G+ yet. So far, of the people with whom I'm friends on facebook, a grand total of 3 have joined G+. I expect this will change slowly.

Now, what if the shoe is on the other foot? What can G+ do that FB can't?

1. Easy Sub Groups: As noted earlier, you can create sub groups of friends with limited access to your profile. Sadly, this is a painful process due to the labyrinth of facebook's settings. G+ makes it very straightforward. You see a bubble with your friends pictures on it and you can drag & drop them to any one you'd like. Done.

2. Live Video Chat: This is something I don't have much use for currently, but in which I can see a lot of potential for others. The article mentions that this can be integrated well with things like Google's Calendar. Not mentioned is things like Google Docs which could allow for real time, video conferenced collaboration. As part of the Naka-Kon convention committee, I have to do remote conferencing so this may come in handy down the road.

3. Watch YouTube Vids In Real Time w/ Friends: My best friend currently lives in Springfield, MO. One of the things we do frequently is watch episodes of Dr. Who together by queuing it up on Netflix and hitting "go" simultaneously. G+ builds such things straight into the video chat. It's also smart enough to mute your mics when the video starts and there's a push-to-talk feature. I love the idea of this and would greatly like to see it expanded to Netflix, Hulu, or places that host full shows instead of mostly user created content.

4. Interest Based Content: Google is already known for building a profile of you based on your searches and other information you feed it and this is apparently integrated into G+. I'm still torn on whether or not it's creepy that Google has all this information, but I still come down on the side that as long as they're keeping it, not selling it off to shady 3rd parties, and I have the ability to wipe it when I so choose, it's ok with me.

With facebook, you can like things, but it doesn't generally change your experience, except perhaps on what adds you'll see. G+ will recommend content from the entire web. This again, is a double edged sword. It can display cool things, but as I've noted they also come up with crap. Additionally, there's the worry of getting trapped in filter bubbles.

5. Instantly Upload Photos, Decide What to Do Later: With facebook, you put a picture up and it's instantly shared. With G+, you'll be able to delay pictures uploaded from your mobile phone until you get back to your computer and then decide if you really want that picture from that party shown to the world. Apparently, you'll only have 8 hours to do so, but this is an interesting delay.

6. Quitting: One of the biggest criticisms of facebook is that it's near impossible to actually get your info gone. You can deactivate an account, but it's essentially like just not logging in. You can still be tagged, invited, and visible, just without the control. But actually deleting your account, making everything vanish, is damned near impossible to find. If you really want to do it account killer has the info.

But with G+ it's apparently easy to quit. A+ for that.

This article also has some interesting tidbits:

1. Integration with Picassa & Google Chat: I haven't done a lot of using of Picassa. In general, I just don't host a ton of photos on the web mostly because I don't take many. The pictures I hosted for this blog, until last year, were on a private web host which I discontinued (hence the numerous dead image links in old posts). However, since Blogger got bought out by Google, images can now be directly added to posts and are automatically put in a Picassa folder. That's been about the extent of my use. I do like the idea of having an image dump integrated with social networking. Facebook's is pretty good, but embedding them in other sites doesn't work.

I haven't done much with Google Chat. Aside from my previously mentioned friend who is on Yahoo messenger, and the occasional Naka-Kon meetings via Skype, instant messengers have fallen out of use. I didn't much like Google Chat due to, again, the sparsity of users. I used it a few times with people in Gmail, but that was confined to my browser and not worth the extra tabs. The stand alone program wasn't used enough for continued use. Integrating this may be more useful, but I'm doubting it.

2. Picture Tagging: As with facebook, users will be able to tag you in photos. This has caused a lot of heartache for people, especially teachers, who have lost jobs due to being publicly tagged in pictures revealing that they *gasp* have a life. Fortunately, it looks like G+ requires you go approve the tag before it goes live.

3. "Sparks": As noted before, G+ integrates your interests into a web feed. This is called Sparks. Apparently, it isn't (yet?) integrated with things like RSS feeds which is a bummer. So this may be more or less useful depending on how useful or junky it gets.

Blog of an Ex-Christian

Back at KU, one of the members of the Society of Open Minded Atheists & Agnostics was Chris Redford, a former evangelical Pentecostal Christian. After I graduated and moved on, he began producing a fantastic YouTube series on his deconversion.

Now, due to facebook's odd policy of people being able to like things without the creator's control, he's decided to set up a public persons facebook page. Additionally, he created a new blog where he's responding to PMs sent to him on his YouTube channel.

I highly recommend checking out the series if you haven't seen it and reading through the blog. The mental gymnastics people will go through to try to keep their faith is astounding, but Chris does a meticulous job of breaking it all down.

Email!

So last year, I reviewed a book, You Will be Forced to Become Wealthy written by a true crackpot. I reamed it, prompting the author to leave a gibbering reply which I also tore to shreds.

So imagine my surprise when I get an Email from a Victor Senchenko promoting another self published book promising to explain Grand Mysteries:

The Second Edition explains more precisely:
• Exactly from what everything is physically made of, and why.
• Exactly what gravity is, and why.
• Exactly who and what humans are, and why they behave as they do.
• Why god and gods do not physically exist.
• Why 'time' does not physically exist.
• Why there is homosexuality in humans.
• What 'happiness' actually is and how it can be obtained.
PLUS there is much, much more of what humans never knew – or misunderstood – about themselves and all that physically surrounds them.

These claims may appear to be far-fetched to all those who have not read this book. It may also appear as highly improbable that a mere book can contain information that had never before been assessed by human intelligence.

But here's a puzzle... what is intelligence in the first place? Where does intelligence originate? What does intelligence comprise of?

While current humans and their science may wonder about intelligence, they actually know neither what intelligence represents nor how it is derived. And yet, the source of intelligence – as many other unknowns – is revealed and explained in the book.

Hmmmm....

Is this worth following up on? Apparently Victor went on a big PR campaign a few years ago, sending announcements to many other skeptic blogs and organizations, then turning into a complete prick when they were, um, skeptical (See: here, or here).

Looking over the quotes others have posted, this guy apparently heard of quantum mechanics as he's using a centuries old claim that electrons should fall into the nucleus of the atom, ignoring quantum mechanics. Oopsie.

Still, debunking books like this is a good mental exercise, so I may pick up the copy. It's free to download apparently. However, I do have a review copy of a book from a real writer on the way, so it may be delayed. That is, assuming I ever actually get around to reading something I know full well is a critique of modern science by someone that doesn't understand it.

Why Educate?

Today, NPR had a brief segment looking at the value of education beyond simply landing a better job (on average).

This is something teachers must consider very frequently. I don't think there's likely to have ever been a class (at least at the high school level) where some smart ass didn't think that asking "How am I going to use this in real life?" was an excuse for not having to learn. My smallest class this year was 2 students, and yet I still had the question asked. Repeatedly.

I think much of what was said in the NPR segment was very important: Education helps in that it creates an informed citizen base that will ultimately vote and decide the heading for the entire nation. Without educated citizens, we're likely to lead ourselves off a cliff.

The interviewer asked how important these esoteric ideals are to someone working as a barista? The response was that such times are a perfect time for education to again be important because such people can better analyze the economic situation (both nationally and personally) and hope to find a way to better their position. Without an basic, educated understanding of how economics work, you'd be lost. As such, it's no surprise so many Americans labor under amazing credit card debts that they will likely never be able to pay off.

The segment also touched on social benefits like "learning to think together" and, perhaps more importantly, "how to disagree." Personally, I think the social aspect of education is vastly understated and one I push to my students the most. One of the things that we find as we become more educated, is that the knowledge we've gained forms a web, and the larger that web gets, the more interconnected it is, the easier it is to connect it to new things. The result is that, even if we don't use a skill or a fact directly, it opens the door to other things indirectly. It allows for us to learn easier in the future. In other words, the true value of education isn't really to retain every factoid and be able to spew it back (although, that is an important component), but it's practice at processing information and assembling it into a coherent picture. What we're truly practicing in school is learning.

The social value of this is that it allows people to continue absorbing information outside of the classroom and sorting it in rational ways. Those tidbits we pick up here or there, from the news or conversations stick better and make us knowledgeable more quickly and easily on topics which we haven't directly studied, allowing us to partake in social interactions more deeply and authoritatively. As I tell my students, it makes you a more interesting person.

And that's worth a lot.

Not Hoax. Just Crazy.

If a psychic calls the cops and tells them she knows where a bunch of bodies are hidden because of mystic powers, what should they do?

Same thing they should do if they claim Jesus told them, or a Ouija board, or reading of tea leaves, casting stones, or any other metaphysical nonsense: Hang up the phone.

Of course, in Texas, they took it seriously and sent in a task force to find.... nothing.

Sounds so very familiar doesn't it.

Anti-Science Advocate Running for President

Today, Rick Santorum announced his bid for presidency. I don't know how much of a chance he's got, but given he's up against complete clowns like Bachmann, he might have a fair chance of getting the nomination.

However, if that's the case, Santorum is a dangerous person for science to have as a president. If his name sounds familiar, it may be because of his infamous "Santorum Amendment" which sought to amend the NCLB act to cater to the Discovery Institute's "Teach the Controversy" mantra by singling evolution out for special criticisms. In specific, he suggested science teachers help students distinguish between real science and "philosophical or religious claims that are made in the name of science". Sounds good, until you realize that, according to Santorum, "biological evolution ... relies heavily on the sensitive philosophical belief that evolutionary change can give rise to new species".

Herp derp.

Fortunately, Santorum only got his amendment into the Senate version of the bill. Since the House version lacked it, a special committee was appointed to decide on it and eventually rejected it.

Since then, Santorum has been flip-flopping on whether or not he supports ID, but has also come out against global warming. Given his poor track record, he's someone that anyone caring about science, should stay away from.

This is a good teacher

Being a teacher wasn't something I've always wanted to do. As a kid, I went through the regular career choices of fireman, baseball player, astronaut, and the like. When I entered high school, I was thinking more along the lines of some kind of scientist. So I loaded myself up on science courses graduating with 5 and a half science credits.

But in that time, two of my science teachers planted the seed of teaching in my mind simply due to their passion of sharing the universe. One was my astronomy teacher, Brian Yates, who moved to another school shortly after I graduated. The biggest influence, however, was my physics and advanced physics teacher, Phillip Wojak.

Like most students, I have fond memories of his classes and his humor. When creating problems involving objects from platforms with initial upwards velocities, he generally drew it being dropped from a hot air balloon into an ocean in which he always sketched a triangle in the water. He would then ask what the triangle was. Initially we assumed it was a shark fin to which he'd reply, "No. It's a drowned witch." I still have all of my notes from his class, sketches included.

Mr. Wojak was a long time teacher at my high school and has been there 44 years, long enough that he had taught Mr. Yates when he'd attended that school and it showed. But at long last, Mr. Wojak is retiring, at least partially.

Still living in the area, I've seen him occasionally when I went back to the school to visit as well as around town, at the grocery and the like. I've let him know just how much he's inspired me, but his outstanding performance is one that cannot go understated.

Mr. Wojak is still, far and above, the most influential teacher I've ever had.

Backhanded Help

I don't know how many people haven't yet heard about Damon Fowler's case yet. The short version of it is that a school was sponsoring prayers during graduation ceremonies. A student at the school, Damon, pointed out this was illegal and promised to contact the ACLU should the school continue.

The school, not being completely stupid, backed down and removed the prayer, but this caused public outrage. Community members started meeting at the local church to figure out how to worm prayer back into the ceremony, teachers publicly slandered him, and Damon started receiving death threats.

At the "class night", apparently a dress rehearsal for the graduation ceremony with senior awards mixed in, the school had its "moment of silence" which was anything but silent as the school allowed a student "leading" the moment of silence to lead the audience, instead, in prayer. Then, at the graduation itself, she did the same thing.

In the meantime, Damon's parents have promised to no longer help him pay for college and have apparently abandoned him, throwing his stuff on the lawn and then leaving for an unplanned "vacation".

Fortunately, the atheist community has done a fantastic job of coming together to support him. Currently, he's received nearly $10,000 in donations for a college fund.

To be fair, it's not only the atheist community that's decried the actions of those antagonizing Damon for enforcing Constitutional law. Many Christians have condemned them as well.

Well, kinda....

Here's a perfect example. In this article, a pastor chastises Christians who behave like so, but in doing so, says the following:

The power of evil through Satan is largely at work to hinder the love of Jesus in this world.

Translation: Don't be a jerk, but this kid is Satan.

Big help there.

Go Out and Discover

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is M 104, the Sombrero Galaxy. It's quite striking because of its nearly edge on profile and the prominent dust lane. You can click on the picture and blow it up. Which is cool because there's a lot more to see when you do.

In particular, even before enlarging the image, I noticed a really neat pair of galaxies. These two stand out to me because they're spiral galaxies that appear to be interacting. But what's really interesting is just how similar the two appear to be. They're the same size, similar surface brightnesses, and a similar color (a distinct blue, unlike many of the other galaxies in the field which are notably reddish).

Hidden in the fog of M 104 was another galaxy I liked. This one stands out because, just like the galaxy behind which it's lurking, it too has a prominent dust lane. Galaxies of a feather, or something like that. This galaxy, like many others is quite red, but I can chalk some of that up to the scattering and absorption as the light passes through the ISM of M 104.

Regardless, I was passingly curious about these little guys and wanted to know if there was anything exciting going on with them. So I pulled up the Aladin Sky Atlas with the SIMBAD overlay for object identification and.... there was nothing. Neither of these objects even have a designation.

It's times like these I'm suddenly struck and reminded of just how big our universe is. We catalog and explore millions upon millions of stars and galaxies, but there's always more waiting in the wings, waiting to be explored. A cosmic frontier just waiting for us to go out and discover.

Here's Why Math is Important

Class question: What percents are they actually calculating.

"Spiritual" Scientists

A recent paper, written by Elaine Ecklund on a hefty grant from the Templeton Foundation, suggesting scientists are frequently more "spiritual" than people give them credit for has been making the rounds, giving faitheists and accommodationists fits of glee.

Jerry Coyne dissects it pretty well but the paper, and his commentary reminded me of a clip from one of my favorite youtube videos. In it, Phil Hellenes discusses the amazing insight science provides and how it provides an amazing connection. As he puts it

When I looked at the galaxy that night, I knew the faintest twinkle of starlight was a real connection between my comprehending eye, along a narrow beam of light, to the surface of another sun. The photons my eye detects, the light I see, the energy with which my nerves interact, came from that star. I thought I could never touch it, yet something from it, crosses the void, and touches me.

This inspiring and moving feeling is all too common among scientists, and as Coyne and Hellenes rightly point out, that's precisely what the authors of the new study seem to be abusing. Again quoting Hellenes

That night under the Milky Way, I who experienced it, cannot call it a religious experience for I know it was not religious in any way. I was thinking about facts and physics, trying to visualize what is, not what I would like there to be. There's no word for such experiences that come through scientific and not mystical revelation. The reason for that is that every time someone has such a "mindgasm" religion steals it simply by saying, "Ah. You had a religious experience." And spiritualists will pull the same shit. And both camps will get angry when an atheist like me tells you that I only ever had these experiences after rejecting everything supernatural.

This is right on the money. It's not that these scientists are necessarily "spiritual" in the traditional sense, that they believe in supernatural "spirits", but rather, they stand in awe at the beauty of our universe, recognizing it as completely natural. When asked if there's "something larger" than them, the honest answer is "yes". It's called the universe. But it's not mystical nor magical. It's real and we can observe it.

But saying these things allows for the words to be taken out of context and usurped by those trying to shoehorn the religious gibberish together with the empirical reality. They can piggyback on these terms because our language lacks the tools to separate the secular emotions that well up within us from observation as compared to the ones we invoke through fantasy. This gives rise for sneaky shills like Ecklund a perfect opportunity to muddy the waters through equivocation.

A Thought From Feynman

I'm doing a bit of research and I came across an interesting piece. It's an adaptation from Richard Feynman's commencement speech at Caltech in 1974 in which he discusses what he calls "Cargo Cult Science". In other words, things that sound scientific, but aren't.

In one portion, something stuck out at me:

Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

This is an important lesson to remember. When something new is discovered in science, there's often a great deal of uncertainty to it. But after thorough investigation, it generally settles down on an answer, even if that answer is quite different than the initial estimate.

Yet the gasbag Ray Comfort seems to think that's a problem. He's repeatedly complained that the Big Bang can't be true because astronomers have been furiously revising the estimates and made some pretty significant changes as we've beaten down the errors and refined techniques. He proposes that things that are eternal and unchanging are inherently better because you can't trust that darned Big Bang since the estimates keep changing.

Similarly, I guess Ray can't acknowledge the charge of an electron. Even though it's a fundamental quantity that underlies so much of electronics and physics and if it were wrong, they would crumble, if the estimate changes, it can't be trusted to exist in the first place.

This kind of thinking isn't just wrong. It's abhorrently stupid. There's no good response for such abject lunacy. The best we can do is point out the flaw and mock it, dissuading others from thinking it's a tenable position.

Go Follow JT

JT Eberhard, the founder of Skepticon, has migrated to a new blog. So far it's been excellent and it's been largely free of the entirely idiotic trolls that plagued his previous Xanga.

Religion as Intellectual Neoteny

Yesterday at Why Evolution is True, Jerry Coyne responded to criticism from Patrick McNamara in which McNamara took issue with Coyne's characterization of religion as a sort of wish fulfillment.

McNamara's argument was that if religion were merely fulfilling wishes, why would people wish for all the restrictive practices religion incorporates? I think Coyne did a pretty good job addressing the issue, but I feel there was another point that should be made in response to McNamara's question. It's really more of an observation, but I think it strikes at the heart of what religion is.

The observation is that in childish play, children will often have a wish and then create stipulations for fulfilling it that are entirely non-sensical, but more importantly, both positive and negative. For example, if a child wants a new toy, they often imagine that if they avoid stepping on cracks, it will be given to them.

It's entirely analogous to what religion is doing: They want eternal life, and suddenly, there's a restrictive system of rules set up to achieve it. The difference is that with these childish games, kids are pressured to grow out of it. With religion, they're pressured to stick with it.

So why do children do this? I can't offer a complete explanation, but I think it comes from the realization that if you want something, you must offer something in return. In the helplessness of a child with little resources available, they have nothing else to offer except self-constructed rituals. Thus, they offer this up as "payment".

As adults, we grow out of it, generally realizing that if you really want something, there's ways to get it that actually work. For example, saving up and buying it. Futility gives way to practicality.

But for the wish of eternal life, what payment could ever be offered for such things? No price could be put on it and as such, could it be that some prefer to continue ineffective rituals?

Perhaps, and if so, I think we should again take a lesson from what it means to grow up in other respects: Sometimes, the things you want just don't exist. A child may want a rocket powered dinosaur that can travel through time. An adult might too. But as an adult, we realize such things make little sense and thus, wouldn't waste our time on them. Now if only we could over the other ridiculous ideas to which we offer hollow rituals.

So to answer McNamara's question, humans create restrictive religious practices that are, in themselves negative to attempt to achieve a positive wish due to the immature inability to simply accept that the object of the wish isn't achievable.

And this isn't the first time I've seen arguments about the intellectual postponement religion imposes. If you're familiar with Brenda Frei, one argument that she made that's stuck with me is that she often encounters children making intellectually backwards arguments for religion full of logical holes and childish reasoning. Which is fine, given they're children. But she'll also encounter grandparents, well beyond the stage we'd expect such arguments, using them just the same. They've never grown out of them.

Thus, it would seem that one of the potential effects of religion is intellectual neoteny, at least in some, self-contained areas of thinking.

This is by no means a fully formed hypothesis and suffers from a developed sense of causality (ie, religion is the cause, or is it the effect, or is this a chance correlation?), but it's an interesting charge that I think could display itself in many more aspects.

New SciEd Blog I Like

Tom, over at Dealing With Creationism in Astronomy recently turned me on to the dot physics blog written by a science teacher at the university level. I've read about a month's worth of archives now and found several posts I really liked.

The first was this one, on "flipping the classroom". I think I first heard mention of this strategy at dy/dan, but it's one I think is pretty interesting: Have students learn the general lecture portion at home from a web video (either one you created or from one of many other sources) and use class time for more targeted, individualized learning. I've wanted to try this out sometime, but the lack of internet access among my students has prevented me from doing so.

The other post I really liked was this one, on the problem with "professional development" which points out how teachers are required to keep going to courses to "improve their teaching" even if they already have the skills. The comparison to the Cargo Cults is pretty spot on and is a reminder of how disconnected the ones making the policies are from the reality of the classroom.

So this blog has made it onto my RSS feed and I'll be putting a link to it in the sidebar. Check it out!

Pareidolia: n + 20

Looks like Jesus is hanging out in pizzas now.



Beyond the general personal incredulity at such things, this one goes to highlight the general nonsense when it interviews some fool from an Australian Catholic university who said

''There are a lot of misunderstandings in the making of saints and miracles,'' he said.

He said generally only "medical miracles'', such as healings, were accepted by the Catholic Church because those incidents could be tested using scientific means.

"We often rely on medical miracles because there is scientific proof it can't be explained by conventional science, that's where the validity comes from,'' he said.

Summary, "I can't explain this but it's not a miracle. Things happen in medicine that I can't explain. But those are miracles."

Herp derp.

"Validity" as an absence of evidence. Right.

Kindle?

I've been somewhat ambivalent on e-readers for awhile now. I love the idea of having portable text readers with me. My netbook isn't too bad for it, but a tad on the large side to carry around and not super easy to read just anywhere. My phone is an antique palm trio and far too small as well as lacking the software.

So a dedicated e-reader doesn't seem too bad.

My main concern for the past year or so has been which reader would eventually wind up winning out: The Kindle, Nook, or something else?

So far, Kindle's look to be far ahead so I'm pretty set on getting one of them if I do decide to get an e-reader of some sort. I'm also quite enthused about the Kindle library lending program that was just announced that lets you digitally "check out" books from 11,000 libraries and save all your annotations for later use. I'm not entirely sure what that means, but it sounds like a lot more titles available for free. At least, temporarily. Still, I'm quite good with that!

However, the big issue is still title availability. I went through my reading list and for the books on my "Still to Read" list, 4 of the 8 had Kindle versions available. This is a fair amount and I'm happy with it.

I popped through the listing of science books in the Kindle store and there's some 2,500+ titles available. Not too shabby! However, looking through them, there's a lot of self published nonsense out there. Like this piece of stupidity from Richard Hoagland. So I guess the number of titles isn't all that impressive when any idiot can slap their crap up there to make a quick buck.

So, does anyone have one? If so, how have you found it on good sciencey books like the ones on my reading list? Is the 3G version worth the extra $50? I do like the idea of being able to pull up Wikipedia anywhere, anytime. Choices, choices...

Astronomer's Humor: Part 4

In browsing arXiv this morning, I found an article that's guaranteed to be interesting. The title is "Haloes gone MAD: The Halo-Finder Comparison Project". The MAD in the title isn't an abbreviation for some instrument, but rather, the paper takes its name from a conference from May 2010 in MADrid, Spain.

Tee hee.

So why do I know this paper is going to be interesting?

They told me so.



"27 interesting pages, 20 beautiful figures, and 4 informative tables accepted for publication in MNRAS."

We'll have to see whether it's interesting enough to write about for UT.

Even internet trolls are smarter than Creationists

Why I Look Critically At Sci-Fi and Anime

This past January, after having done my Anime Mythbusters lecture for two years, I rewrote the introduction. For the first time, I addressed the reasoning behind doing such a lecture. While part of it was just for fun, and part of it was to teach good science, another reason that I do it is to remind people that there's a lot of bad science out there and that we take it for granted.

While obviously the lecture concentrates on the worst of the worst science (because it's just more fun to debunk), there's a lot of silly science out there that is just real enough that people actually buy it. Just because a show is fiction, doesn't mean we dismiss all the science in it as complete fiction; we don't reject gravity because we saw someone fall down a flight of stairs. We will probably question the physics if they jump off a building and walk away without a scratch, but there's an intermediate area in there that bad science can make it into the public consciousness.

And a new study in the UK backs that up.

• More than a fifth of adults believe light sabers exist.
• Almost 25 percent of people believe humans can be teleported.
• Nearly 50 percent of adults believe that memory-erasing technology exists.
• More than 40 percent believe that hover boards exist.
• Almost one-fifth of adults believe they can see gravity.

With so many people believing in fantasy technologies, it's no surprise that people can't understand just how poor of science Creationism, anti-vaccination, homeopathy, and the rest are.

This is why I do the lecture taking hundreds of hours of my time each year to prepare it. It's an introduction to critical thinking and skepticism on grounds that people aren't likely to find offensive. And at the same time, it's a reminder that science can be fun, without being bullshit.

Bus Bias

It's often hard to come up with examples to teach in class that aren't completely canned, so I'm going to keep a series running of things I've come across that I want to remember and share.

Today's topic: Selection Bias.

I live in St. Louis which has a decent mass transit system. It's composed of both buses and a railway. The rail system is fairly new and doesn't have great coverage, but it's slowly expanded in the past several year and is improving reaching a decent area of the suburbs. But from there, you'll have to use the buses.

For a long time, I haven't felt the bus system was too great. Not because the buses don't run on time or are in disrepair, but because I constantly see them "Off Duty". It seems much like the stereotype of road workers: They spend more time sitting around than actually doing anything.

There's a reason for this that I'll get to in a minute, but first, let's toss in the statistics. Over the past few weeks, while driving, I've kept track of buses that were on duty and off. Out of ~30 buses, only about 5 were on duty. That's only 17% on duty. So what's up with that other 83%? Does St. Louis really waste 83% of their buses to just drive around off duty?

Obviously not. There's something affecting my sample that's skewing my numbers pretty significantly. Namely, it has to do with where I drive. It just so happens that a good deal of my driving is on Brentwood Blvd and the surrounding areas. This is also the street on which the station is for all the buses. The result of this is that, as buses are going on duty to where their routes are, or coming off duty to return at the end of their shift, they'll be frequenting this area. All of the routes go through this area at those times, but only one is actually on duty because they have a route on that street.

Thus, my numbers come out wrong because they were formulated on a lack of understanding of the situation.

This is news?

Apparently CNN thinks a bunch of idiots declaring that the end of the world is May 21st is somehow headline news.

It's an exceptionally sad story. It starts off describing Sheila Jonas, a woman who has ditched everything to to on a nationwide RV tour to tell people that the apocalypse is coming. Other members of the caravan gave away everything they owned. Others left behind families, wives and chidren, all because they were so conned by a "broadcasting ministry" known as Family Radio.

This station, which has a long reach, backs up their nonsense with "irrefutible proofs" which are nothing more than throwing numbers together and coming up with things that come out to whole numbers every once in awhile and assigning significance to such incidences. As (I hope) even my students could even tell you by now, just because you get something that looks conceivably plausible doesn't mean you've done anything right. But that's what Family Radio, and other fraudsters like Richard Hoagland do. Sadly, scientific and mathematical skills are so poor, that people are easily conned by it.

Come May 22, when they should be forced to admit they were wrong, they, of course, won't. They'll simply say they made a mistake, fudge some more numbers, and do it again. Such people are beyond reproach. They can and should be left behind. They should not be treated with respect and civility. They should be laughed at and mocked lest others fall for their crap.

Angry over Education

It's generally pretty rare that the title for my blog is accurate. As I've explained, there's a few issues that get me pretty angry (anti-science being lead among them), but since those topics don't generally come up in my everyday life, I'm not generally an angry person. In fact, as I've noted, I have quite a bit to be happy about.

But the past week and a half has brought into view another topic that has the capability of getting me exceptionally angry: The demonizing of teachers and education.

For those that don't know, when I began college in 2002, I started off as an education major. In 2004, when I started taking my first courses in the topic, I gave up on the field all together. At the time, there were two main reasons. The first was that the instructors seemed to be filled with nothing but hollow "philosophy" that even common sense should have told anyone, wouldn't apply in a high school classroom. The constant harping on something so inherently worthless demonstrated how vacuous the program was.

The second reason was that I'd already heard stories from friends and family that teach, on the arrogance of parents to blame teachers for all their students failings. While I certainly understand the need for a teacher to be experienced and qualified, they're not the entire equation. Students and parents themselves contribute heavily to the equation, and I didn't feel like constantly taking the blame for other people's failings as I knew would happen.

So I left the educational field. But obviously, I've returned to it. I've done so due to the realization that we need good science education. We're dropping the ball and instead of bitching and moaning about it, I would be much better served to actually try to fix things, even if only one class at a time.

I knew that teaching was not an easy job. I knew that teachers didn't get much respect and even less pay. I knew that students today weren't as well behaved as even 10 years ago when I was in high school.

But as bad as all these things were, things have been getting much, much worse in several states lately.

Front and center in all of this is Wisconsin. There, the state is working to implement a law that would essentially destroy the ability of teachers to organize and fight for the right to be successful at their jobs and be compensated adequately for it. The way this is often done is through unions.

The typical argument I've seen against unions is that they protect bad teachers. Almost universally, the example of this is the infamous "rubber rooms" in New York. For those that aren't familiar with these, this is a term applied to reassignment sectors in which teachers accused of misconduct are sent to keep them out of contact with students while their cases are investigated. For whatever reason, sometimes this takes years, all the while, the teachers are drawing their full salaries.

The conclusion is that this is somehow the fault of unions who are protecting child molesters and pedophiles. What the people citing this fail to understand is that people can be wrongly accused. Just as in the criminal justice system, in which people are presumed innocent until proven guilty, and punishment cannot be handed down without proper reason, so too should it be for teachers. A teacher should not be able to lose their job simply because they've been accused of something.

Another reason teachers are sent to these reassignment centers is because of "incompetence". Yet this is poorly defined. While one could argue that we can measure the ability of a teacher by the success of the students, this falls back on the problem I pointed out earlier that teachers are only part of the equation. Teachers should not bear the burden of simply having a class full of students who won't participate. There's no teacher in the world, no matter how experienced, that can fix that. Yet such a situation could easily land a teacher in serious trouble.

And such classes do exist. I've been in them myself. In one of my high school classes, the addition of one student led to the disruption of class every day to the point where the teacher lost the rest of the class' attention trying to deal with him. And our grades suffered for it. Yet she couldn't remove the student because of the red tape involved with doing so. Thus, so quickly dismissing teachers as "incompetent" is a slippery slope.

Similarly, the power to make this pronouncement is consolidated in the principal. This creates a situation in which a principal can simply call a teacher with whom they don't get along "incompetent" and have them removed. No evidence. Just accusations.

This quick and easy system would also allow school districts to unfairly remove senior teachers from positions so they couldn't draw pensions later. Essentially, teachers would become the sacrificial offering to balance budgets, without any sort of say in the matter. No voting. Just dismissal.

Teachers unions are a body that helps ensure teachers receive this basic right. By removing them, saying teachers cannot organize to fight for such rights, it essentially says that we should not be afforded them. Translations:

Teachers don't get the right to due process before being fired.

And being fired in such a manner essentially assures a teacher will not be hired again. It's a career ending deal. So teachers need every protection, because it's not just bad ones that can be the victim of this.

But teachers unions don't just concentrate on teachers. They make sure that teachers are equipped to do their jobs effectively and thus, benefit the students as well. As has been noted in many other articles on this topic, many of the highest achieving states are also ones with the strongest teachers unions. These unions help to do things like keep class sizes to a manageable level.

Class size is a serious concern. Not only because students often need individualized instruction, but because the larger the class size, the more difficult it is to manage students from a disciplinary standpoint. In a class of only 9 students, I already have students this year who think it's appropriate to simply get up and wander around the classroom in the middle of class. Of course, I immediately address the issue and have punishments assigned for such actions, but in the 10 seconds it takes to address the situation, the 8 other students are already gone and more class time is lost trying to coral them again. Imagine the difficulty in a class 3 times as large.

Or worse. Imagine a class size of 60 students. What teacher in the world could handle this? In college, where students are paying to be there and are sufficiently mature enough to not disrupt the class, sure. But not high school. Yet that's exactly what may be happening in Michigan. To close a budget shortfall, the school district plans to close half of its schools and merge classes into an unmanageable mass.

It's not hard to see what will happen. The correlation between class size and scores is already well known; Teachers won't be able to manage the classes and overall success of the system will plummet.

And when scores fall, who's the first that gets blamed? Oh yes. Teachers.

So once again, we're being set up to be a sacrificial offering.

Yet we're not given the right to protest this. Not only are states working to dissolve our right to assemble to ensure our due process, but we've already lost another fundamental right: The right to free speech and self expression.

In taking my teacher certification course, one of the most inane things it stated is that teachers are an "important and valuable part of the community", but if we wanted to have any sort of social life, we should leave the community.

Want to go to a bar with friends? Should probably do it in the neighboring town. Want to do go on a date? Don't do it where your students might see you.

Teachers can be respected, so long as they're nothing but teachers to the community. And without respect, teachers can be suspended and fired, even if it has nothing to do with their behavior in the classroom.

Thus, to keep our underpaid jobs, we must self censure. Even writing anonymously about difficulties in the classroom is dangerous. As such, there is little wonder that people have such a general lack of understanding of the plight of teachers. We're not allowed to point out obvious truths, that students are frequently, "rude, disengaged, lazy whiners. They curse, discuss drugs, talk back, argue for grades, complain about everything, fancy themselves entitled to whatever they desire, and are just generally annoying."

The above quote comes from a Pennsylvania middle school teacher who was suspended for the comments. Often, people argue that if students lack these qualities, teachers must inspire them. Yet most of them come from the home. We can try to engage students, but when families place no emphasis on education even the best efforts can fail. When families allow kids to disrespect the parents, no teacher will be able to command respect.

Those claiming that teachers should be responsible for passing along these skills are heaping on yet another burden: The burden of parenting, and then telling us that we shouldn't have the voice or the right to protest.

Teachers are asked to do more than ever and are receiving less respect for it than ever. We receive little to no support from parents, mild support from administrations, and thus only have each other to rely on. But with efforts to destroy this ability to work together to fight for our ability to teach effectively and fairly, even this thin thread is about to be cut.

We can't let this happen. Not because of the teachers. Not because of the students. But because of what it would mean for us as a nation. We're destroying our own school system by killing the key component of it.

And yes, I'm angry that as hard as I work to teach, it won't mean anything because the anti-intellectualism in the country has reached such epidemic proportions that we're willing to undermine those efforts.

We should be ashamed. But we're too stupid.

EDIT: This post is rather lengthy and hits on many topics so here's the summary -

Teachers are being asked to do more than teach their subject. They are being sabotaged by being handed students that aren't equipped with the basic etiquette to belong in a classroom, as well as potentially overburdened with class sizes and lack of appropriate materials.

No teacher could be expected succeed under such conditions, but we're being asked to anyway. And when we can't, we get blamed. Our only protection has been the protections for which unions have fought. Now, policies are being put forth to remove those protections and the unions that fight for them.

This leaves teachers in a no win situation. And with no teachers, there is no educational system.

Naka Kon 2011 Recap

Another year of Naka Kon is complete. 2011 marks my 6th year in attendance, and my 3rd year on staff. And my how we've grown. The first year I attended, the con was at 650 attendees. This year we were somewhere over 4,500.

This year started off for me heading to Kansas City on Thursday morning and setting up the gaming room. We'd changed some things around from past years and I think it greatly improved the way things worked. Additionally, we finally supported some Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon TCG tournaments as well as running some sponsored D&D campaigns. Everything went exceptionally well except for a few staffing issues.

Aside from my official duty, I also was the MC for our costume competition which is always fun. I also ran a panel on how not to give a crappy panel, as well as a fan panel on my favorite anime, Gurren Lagann.

But perhaps my favorite part of Naka Kon every year is that it's where I always debut the new version of my Anime Mythbusters talk. I barely got it done this year. One of the topics wasn't working out as well as I wanted to and I only got it sorted a day and a half before I needed to leave.

This year I added three new topics. The first was the physics of Pokeballs as featured in Pokemon. The second was the amount of UV exposure from a pokemon that is supposed to have a body temperature twice as hot as the surface of the Sun. Lastly, I explored the possibility of having habitable worlds around red giant stars (which will be translated into a UT post in the next few days).

Every time I've given this talk, I've had standing room only crowds. So this year, I was given a larger room and still had people cramming in against the walls and sitting in aisles. It was a huge success and the feedback has been wonderful. There's a few changes I'm going to make before I tour it to some other conventions I'm expecting to attend again this year as well.

Fortunately, one of the people that's been to the panel the previous two years volunteered to tape it for me and very quickly got the video exported, broken up, and sent to me so I could get it on my YouTube account. The first segment is below:



Overall the con went fantastically. I'm still sore and needing another weekend already just to keep up on sleep.

Getting Ready for Naka Kon and Geometry Lessons for Circles

Naka Kon 2011 is this weekend in Kansas city and I've been ridiculously busy preparing!

My biggest project for it has been the new version of my Anime Mythbusters panel. Every year for Naka, I prepare a few new segments and drop a few old ones. This year, I'm adding a section on the physics of Pokeballs, the effects of standing anywhere near a certain Pokemon who supposedly has a body temperature that's twice as hot as the surface of the sun, and lastly, the potential for having planets habitable for human life around red giant stars. These three topics have taken the better part of a year for me to work out so finally getting to present this is going to be a huge weight off my shoulders. I can't wait!

Additionally, I'm giving two other talks. The first is the "How not to give a crappy panel" panel, which is exactly what the name describes. The second is a discussion about character motivations and relationships in the Gurren Lagann series. These aren't nearly as labor intensive, so I've pushed them off quite a bit, and now I'm down to the wire!

The other huge stress is that I have to take a few days off of teaching which means I need to make sure to have material ready for a substitute which will likely be someone that's not terribly good with their math. So it needs to be self contained enough that students can reasonably do it on their own. Also, we're on block scheduling so the classes are 140 minutes long. So the projects need to really be time intensive, but not so complex they can't do them.

This wasn't too hard for my Algebra 1 class. I'm totally stealing the styrofoam cup stacking project from dy/dan's blog.

The challenge was coming up with something for my geometry class. Right now we're working on circles. Arcs, chords, angles, etc.... I looked and looked for some kind of project that would be suitable, but there's absolutely nothing out there that directly pertains to the material we've learned. So I did some inventing.

One of the most common things for students to do with circles is make pie charts. But this is exceptionally simple: Convert the percentages of responses for each answer to a percent of 360º and just measure off those angles with a protractor. No real math there besides conversion factors, which isn't geometry.

So to force some geometry into the mix, I've taken away the protractors and made them use a bit of geometry to relate those angles to chords which they can measure with the much more common rulers! I'll post the assignment sheet later, but man, what a pain in the ass to come up with a pertinent project. You'd think that with all the teaching blogs and resource sites, there would be some kind of projects out there for circles, but I guess most teachers just hate them as much as I do!

Can This Stop Now?

One of the odder happenings I've kept up with on this blog is that of parents who do horrible things to their children because they believe their children are possessed by demons and are attempting DIY exorcisms. Generally it's not a huge topic. There's been only a few instances I hear about annually, but this year seems to be off to a bad start. Already, two parents have murdered their children to get out non-existent demons.

In the first case, a mother forced her child to swallow an oil and vinegar mixture which (unsurprisingly) he threw up. So the next time, she covered his mouth, apparently forcing him to choke on it. Today, there was a report of another mother who beat her son to death to get demons out.

This can stop now. There are no demons. There are no ghosts, no goblins, gods, jinns, spirits or anything of the sort. Children are hard to deal with and often act in strange ways. But this isn't abnormal and isn't a justification for murder. Instead of leaping to the conclusion that something supernatural is wrong and reaching for magical elixirs or beating children, parents like this need only a good dose of reality.

Improving Learning in Mathematics

Over a dy/dan, a recent post recommended a document on improving math education. I looked over it and there's several ideas I think are pretty good in it.

The first is the use of mini-whiteboards which allow students to write largely and display their thinking easily and quickly to a teacher as well as the rest of the class. I think I may have to get a collection of these as I think the idea is very good. The disadvantage I see in this (which as usual, goes completely undiscussed) is that the record of their work either doesn't get preserved, or requires extra time to retransmit to their notes which would be a subject of much complaining. Part of my teaching method is to make students fully aware of all the resources available to them to learn the material such as, my lecturing, their book, their notes, their homework, review sheets, one another, and even the internet. I frequently remind them that with so many resources I ensure they have that this really puts the responsibility to use them and learn on them. Thus, losing any is something I'm somewhat reluctant to do.

Not directly from the document, but spawned directly from it is a way I'm considering to get students to pay more attention in classes. The challenge I've noticed at small private schools is that all of the students are friends and controlling talking is near impossible. In one of my classes this year, I have the unfortunate case of having one student that doesn't need me to explain anything before seeing how to solve the problems. She tends to get bored and then start side conversations, disrupting half of the class. Yet on the other hand, I have another student that doesn't understand (or doesn't try to understand) no matter how much I break it down and how many examples I give. If I don't slow down for her, she disengages and disrupts half the class. It's a horrible catch 22.

Thus I'm considering ways to force idle hands and minds into motion and add a little more peer pressure to the situation since I've had a few students actually complain about their classmates descriptiveness. Students that want to learn! What a concept!

One of the ways I'm thinking of doing this is by taking a small inflatable ball to class. Instead of calling on someone, I'd toss them the ball, literally putting it in their hands, and asking for the next step. Then they're free to pass it on to another student for the next step and students would (conceivably) not engage is as many side discussions since they would (hopefully) not want to turn around for fear of getting smacked in the back of the head by a ball.

The document also offers some ideas on how to manage my catch 22. It suggests allowing more individual (or small group) work, which is differentiated in one of several ways.
1) Giving advanced students extra problems that allow them to explore concepts deeper.
2) Differentiating by problem sets: While they note that this may encourage some teachers to remove material that is "too difficult" for lower achieving students, they recommend instead, that they allow students to pick from easy, medium, or hard level of difficulty problems and that most students would be able to better judge the difficulty of their learning.
3) Different levels of support in which students are all given the same problem, but more support material is provided to some than others.
4) Letting students create problems on their own level. An example is asking students to create problems they feel are "difficult" but know that they could solve correctly. These could then be passed to students on similar levels of achievement to solve and then passed back to have the original creator correct.

There's also a section on how to deal with technology on the classroom. So far, this is something I haven't been able to deal with much due to the lack of projectors in my schools. When I eventually have access to one, however, I'm not entirely sure how much I want to use them. One of the greatest pitfalls I frequently notice (that, again, is never discussed) is that using programs that aren't entirely intended for the purpose, and are co-opted and not entirely intuitive, students can often get distracted by how to use the program and not concentrate on what the mathematics or science is that's driving the entire experience. It's a double edged sword.

Still, there's several ideas that I think I may institute into some of my more challenging classes and see how it goes.

When Education Doesn't Help

Over a Fox "news", they now have a video up of Obama's chief science adviser, John Holdren, pointing out that those that deny climate change are in need of some education.

In reality, climate change and global warming is entirely a scientific question. We can collect data, compare it to models, make testable predictions, and everything else that is done in science. And as Holdren points out, the conclusions are in; overwhelmingly, we know the climate is changing and we're a big part of that, not the sun, not natural cycles here on Earth.

But while this should be a question of scientific merits, it's not been and I thin Holdren fails to recognize it. Look at the section in which Fox listed this clip: They don't list it as science. They list it as "politics". And to go further, Fox poisons the well from the get go, calling Holdren a "Czar", likening him to a dictator.

This is all too familiar. It's the exact same tactic that the ID/Creationist camp has been trying to take with their anti-science; remove the science and make it about "worldviews", or "academic freedom". Sadly, this is a very strong strategy for them. Especially so when you have a large portion of the population from which they're drawing their support not only being anti-science, but anti-intellectual. Reading through the comments is exceptionally depressing. It's a long list of people calling schools "indoctrination".

As a teacher, I can easily say the exact opposite is true, and that's part of the reason I have problems with the current movement in educational circles. Presently, we're obsessing over trying to teach students critical thinking, especially in science. There's so much emphasis on that process (which is the opposite of indoctrination), that we're losing out on passing along the basic facts on which all higher order thinking rests, that students may be able to follow the process, but they completely lack the knowledge base from which to even ask an intelligent question to solve. All we're giving them is confusion.

So what we have is a bunch of uneducated anti-intellectuals who sneer at the facts and treat them as negotiable, "political" points, or dueling "worldviews". They're not. But until we get these clowns to accept that, there's no amount of education in the world that can change their minds.

Evens or Odds

When taking over some new classes this semester, my new students were quite upset when I told them how I managed homework. Their previous teacher assigned only even problems from their book. In most books today, the evens are the students favorite because they have answers in the back of the book so they can "check" their answers. Or, if they can't quite figure out the answer, they can look and try to reverse engineer it.

I don't particularly mind this. Checking the answer lets you know if you made a mistake and, if you did, you get practice finding mistakes as well as correcting them. Reverse engineering problems makes flexible thinkers who can view math as a set of tools that goes two ways instead of a strict linear process that can only be applied one way in one situation.

Still, I don't like students to rely on this too much. They argue that homework is still learning (which it is) so they should have as much help on it as humanly possible. I remind them that they already have a pretty phenomenal amount of resources available to them: They have my lecture (from which I hope they took notes), the book complete with examples that are exactly the same with swapped out numbers, and in many cases, each other. So I don't feel too much pressure to give them all even numbers.

So on this first homework assignment I gave a mix of odds and evens. Some they could "check". Some they couldn't.

In general, I found two common patterns for mistakes. The first was simply not reading the instructions. When it asks how many solutions a set of linear equations has, that question needs to be answered. Don't just draw the graph and leave me to do the rest of your thinking by seeing it only has one, or none, or an infinite number.

The second common mistake was (oddly enough) only on even problems. It was students having the answer to the next even problem. They'd written the problem right, gone through some algebra voodoo magic, and then amazingly arrived at the answer for the next problem. The only way I can explain this is that they did what they felt was enough work to arrive at the answer, "checked" it, wrote down the book's answer but because the answers are all squished together in the back, wrote down the wrong line.

So much for actually "checking" anything or taking that solution and reverse engineering it to meet your work. I'll be sticking to the evens now.

Another reason to keep religion out of marriage laws

According to the pope, the denial of marriages isn't reserved for gays. The Catholic Church is now wanting to exert its authority over straight marriages. According to him, even when it comes to straight marriages, "No one can make a claim to the right to a nuptial ceremony".

That's right. To the Catholic Church, getting married isn't a right. It's a privilege that they should get to bestow as they see fit. Fortunately, America has kept such nonsense out of our laws when it comes to straights, but hypocritically uses religious reasoning to prohibit gay marriages. Living in a country by secular laws, there is no excuse for this.

Just as Valid

Given the recent hubbub over the Zodiac getting a shot of realism, of course, it was ripe for parody from the Onion. Let's take a look at mine.

Libra Sept 23 - Oct 23
Wait, if an existing constellation has that great an effect on one's destiny, then why didn't anyone make a fuss about Eris, Sedna, and Quaoar, the planet-sized objects in the Kuiper belt?

Good question. Oh but wait.... that's my old sign. Fortunately, taking a look at Sagittarius' forecast tells me how I should deal with change:

Just keep repeating: No matter what, you are still a Sagittarius. You are still a Sagittarius. You are still a Sagittarius.

These are about as accurate as any "real" horoscope, but infinitely more intelligent.

Isn't that a bit backwards?

So I'm preparing the new intro for the talk I'll be giving next week at Illinois University. In it, I'm quickly discussing where the motivation for the talk came from (combating bad science) and demonstrating particular failures of public understanding.

Of course this means I'm looking over the Science and Engineering Indicators from this most recent year. In it, it lists the general "prestige" with which the public views various professions. Although Americans don't do very well on understanding science (but not much worse than most other nations except on some important issues), they generally rank Scientists as having a very prestigious career. The only one that beats it (by a mere 1%) is firefighters.

Meanwhile, down near the bottom, we find "actors". So can someone explain to me why the public isn't dying to see "Science Tonight" instead of "Entertainment Tonight"?

Sign of the Times

As noted over at Bad Astronomy, today's been a big wakeup call for Astrology nuts. Apparently the word got out that, due to Earth's precession, the "signs" astrologers have been peddling are off. Astronomers have known this and pointed this out for a long time.

Meanwhile, the word has also gotten out that there's a 13th constellation in the zodiac (the collection of constellations through which the ecliptic, or the Sun's path, passes). It's Ophiuchus. I popped on Twitter to see what the BA was saying and looked at the comments in which "Ophiuchus" appeared. Apparently people are freaking out that their signs changed and now their tattoos are wrong.

But never fear! The Astrologers have a nice explanation for why it doesn't matter. According to ZodiacLife, "Ophiuchus would only apply to those born since its appearance in 2009."

*blink*

So here's this funny thing. Astronomers get excited when a supernova, not even visible to the naked eye appears in a relatively nearby galaxy, or when something suddenly brightens that was unexpected. You'd think that an entire freaking constellation appearing with several stars visible to the naked eye would have the astronomical community freaking out. Like to the extent that they'd maybe even get a front page headline or something. And not just them. It would require the violation of all sorts of physical laws to suddenly *poof* at least a dozen solar masses worth of matter into existence. Physicists would be flipping out too.

In reality, Ophiuchus has always been there.

So ZodiacLife clarifies: "There is no previous record of the Sun passing thru this sign until 2009."

Huh?

Actually, there is. It does it every year. The path of the Sun on the sky is called the ecliptic, and unless the Earth's orbit suddenly changes, that path isn't changing.

And it's not just ZodiacLife spouting this junk. Every "official" astrologer seems to be echoing the same lines. This shows just how little Astrologers really know about Astronomy. And obviously the public knows even less.

Really, I don't expect people to be able to define the ecliptic or be able to have a ready mental picture of 2D projections inside a sphere of a 3D solar system that could quickly show how much nonsense things like this are, but here's the thing: If you're going to start following something so closely that you make major life choices based on it, knowing the basics should be a prerequisite. This is why I spend so much of my free time working to promote critical thinking and science literacy.

All of Chemistry About to be Rewritten!1!!1

Did everyone hear about how, "For the first time in history, a change will be made to the atomic weights of some elements listed on the Periodic table of the chemical elements". Apparently it has to do with atomic masses changing depending on where you are. Weird, huh?

No. I'm not making that up. It's what the article says. Really:

sulfur is commonly known to have a standard atomic weight of 32.065. However, its actual atomic weight can be anywhere between 32.059 and 32.076, depending on where the element is found. (Emphasis added)

Oh wait.... they're talking about "weight". Not mass. Silly me.

Oh wait. Silly them. Get outside of a gravitational field and there's no weight! Thus these ranges are a bit off.

Oh wait... that's still not what they're talking about? Well why didn't they say that?

What's really going on is that some people are wanting to include the ranges of stable isotopes (different atoms altogether) of certain, common elements. So.... they're not really changing anything. They're just pulling a bit of info off of the table of isotopes and including it on the periodic table.

No big deal really. Except now students are going to be a lot more confused about what number to plug into the formula they don't understand either. Yes. Let's compound the problems early.

Biggest Whiners over DADT

After long hand wringing, it looks like the horrible policy of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is going to be repealed. I think the effects will be interesting, but what's caught my eye more, are articles like this one, which make it clear who really care about the policy: The fundamentalists.

"Chaplains who aren't able to proclaim what they believe is true about this issue ... means that the soldier then, the airman, the sailor, the guardian, the Marine aren't able to get the full opportunity to hear religious faiths," retired Army Chaplain Brigadier Gen. Douglas Lee tells CNN.

Quotes like this one are what really get to me. Nowhere does repealing the policy say that chaplains can't proclaim that they think gays are evil. It just guarantees that servicemen and women will be able to be open, and perhaps for once, instead of their fellow service members nodding in agreement, they'll be able to stick up for their friends. It's harder to feel comfortable about bigotry when you have to be face to face, work side by side, and entrust your life to the people you're condemning.

This came in the wake of a report looking at the effects of reversing the DADT policy. According to the article, "Only three out of about 145 chaplains who participated in the study suggested they would quit or leave if the law were changed."

I'm not sure if that's good or bad. I think it's great that these bigots will leave and be preaching hate to less people, but at the same time, I have to wonder how many more will stay and do it anyway.

Speaking Event: 1/26 @ Illinois College

Next month, I'll be speaking at Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois. As usual, my talk will be a variation on the Anime Mythbusters panel I've been touring to various conventions around the midwest. However, this time I'm speaking in a more academic setting, so I'm going to be including a bit more about how this entire thing ties in with science and the real world.

I'm being sponsored jointly by the math and Japanese departments, so this should be one interesting audience to talk to. It will be Wednesday, January 26, 2011 @ 7:00 p.m. in Kirby Learning Center Room 6.

More on Darwin vs. the Sun - Science & Epistomology

Over at Universe Today, I just posted an article looking at a Catholic magazine and review called the Month from 1889 in which they covered the controversy over the age of the Earth as required by both Darwin and astronomers. History has shown Darwin as the victor in that, but there's something I left out of the article and wish to comment on here. Namely, the closing statement of the article.

Essentially, it concludes that because science, at that present moment could not fully answer the controversy that,

Science then, even by its own showing, is altogether incompetent to furnish us with a guiding line, by which we may regulate and order our lives. And as the nature of man instinctively feels the need of some such guide, and will be content with nothing less than the truth, it follows that a trustworthy basis for faith and deed must be sought elsewhere.

Although this article is now over 120 years old, I still hear this exact same argument used today (as well as the anti-science one I quoted in the UT article). I left this part of the UT article because it doesn't deal with science as much as epistemology and was better suited for here.

This sort of thinking pisses the hell out of me. While it makes a true statement, that humans are curious and want to know how things work, it promotes the cheapest and most superficial form of knowledge available, if one can even call it knowledge. Namely, it suggests that if you cannot have a satisfying and correct answer immediately from science on demand, then we should reject science and go for anything else that provides convenient and easy answers. The article promotes a search for truth, but provides no basis for establishing it and rejects the only reliable means by which to do so.

The ultimate irony in this is that the article spent several pages extolling the knowledge gained by science from Kelvin, Newton and other visionaries. But only because it provided the author with easy answers that confirmed his own biases. I suspect that if the author had lived in those times, he may have rejected the findings he later accepts. It's only from the retrospective vantage that the answers look clear.

This article highlights the confusion often apparent when new territory is being explored, but as with so many things before, the actual answer eventually came though. However, it didn't come by turning away from the search because it wasn't immediately gratifying. It came from working hard and looking for evidence. As Dan Meyer has said before, "no problem worth solving is that simple."

I cannot agree with this statement more. Instead of allowing for these cheap answers, as gussied up as they may be, we need to demand real answers. And we need to be promoting this to students and the public at large. Are things unknown in science? Absolutely. Are some of the things being hashed out today going to be wrong? Absolutely. Does this mean everything in science is wrong? Hell no. Does it mean that we should forsake science and turn to snake-oil salesmen? Absolutely not.

Those like the author of the article who answer yes to the last two of those questions should get no respect. It vexes me greatly that they still do.

Congratz to JT Eberhard

For those that don't follow his blog, JT just announced that he has taken a job with the Secular Student Alliance where he will be their new Campus Organizer and High School Specialist.

For those that don't know JT, he's the guy that put together Skepticon. Having a guy that pulled together such a large and amazing convention as that working together with the SSC to help form new secular student groups at a time when such groups are exploding and flourishing is probably one of the best things that can happen for the skeptical community right now.

So congratz to JT. We know you'll do great. And you'd better. Because we're watching.

PS: Bwa ha ha ha!

"My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle"

At work, one of the residents* learned that I was a science major. He told me that a friend of his, a pastor, had visited Einstein and had written an interview. He had a copy and would copy it and give one to me. Being that I've been working a great deal recently on astronomical history for a large project of mine (details when it gets closer to completion), I was very interested in seeing this.

Last week, he brought the copy by and.... well, I'll just repost the majority of it here and let everyone see what they think before I give my conclusions.

The housekeeper answered the door, and I asked if I could see Dr. Einstein concerning a particular matter. She invited me in and referred me to Einstein's secretary, who at the time was his stepdaughter. The stepdaughter went upstairs to check with Einstein and, upon returning, told me that her stepfather was willing to see me. I walked upstairs to his office.

Three walls were lined with books. The fourth "wall" was really a huge pane of glass that afforded a beautiful view of the Princeton University golf course, with the tower of the Princeton University Graduate School in the distance. Near the door hung portraits of Einstein's heroes, Mohanda Ghandi and the English physicist Michael Faraday.

Einstein was dressed in baggy trousers and a long-underwear shirt, the latter sporting what appeared to be soup stains. A pair of scruffy wool-lined slippers covered his bare feet. His hair was gray, bushy and very long - a preview of the hairstyles of the 1960's. He say back in his chair, puffing contentedly away on a long curlicue pipe.

Einstein was never much concerned about his physical appearance or about material things in general. His home was not at all the palatial mansion I had thought it would be prior to me arriving in Princeton; rather, it was a plain wooden-fram structure already 120 years old. Some of its shutters were cockeyed, and the whole place wanted paint, but the inside was quite neat, even spartan, which I attributed not to any efforts of Einstein's but to his stepdaughter and housekeeper.

He invited me to sit down. I told him who I was, and then I posed a question of a religious-scientific nature (I have long since forgotten what my question was). He gave me his answer, and since he seemed to be in a rec eptive mood, I continued with other questions.

"Dr. Einstein," I asked, "do you believe in God?"

He replied: "I suppose the average atheist would consider me a believer in God, whereas the average believer would call me an atheist or agnostic. Actually, I do believe in a supernatural force."

I then asked him a few questions about the Old Testament - what, for instance, he believed concerning Noah, Moses, David and the Psalms. He showed from his answers that he was acquainted with Old Testament Scriptures, evidently because he had been brought up in a Jewish home.

From this point, I proceeded to the New Testament, saying, "Dr. Einstein, I believe that Jesus Christ is the divine Son of God. How about you?"

"No," he replied. "I can't believe that."

"I believe," I continued, "that Jesus Christ made atonement on the cross for us human beings so that we might become children of God and heirs of heaven. How about you?"

"No," he responded. "I can't go that far with Jesus Christ."

Following his answers, he often laughed and chuckled a bit, and in this chuckling I could sense a tone of derision. This was especially apparent in connection with the subsequent remark I made.

"Dr. Einstein," I said, "according to the Bible, if we are lost, we have ourselves to blame. If we are saved, we have God alone to thank."

"To this he responded: "If that is the case, then I'll have to blame your God for giving me a mind that can't accept Jesus Christ as the Son of God and Savior of the world." Here is where his laughs and chuckles struck me as being particularly derisive, although I knew he meant no meanness by them. They simply seemed to say, "Young man, how can you be so naive as to accept that nonsense?"

It is evidently true, as the Scriptures say, that "the man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned" (1 Cor. 2:14).

Though humility was not especially in evidence on Dr. Einstein's part during the bulk of my 40-minute visit with him, yet a semblance of it did become apparent at the conclusion. As I left, I sad, "Dr. Einstein, I'd like to invite you to our Lutheran worship services at Westminster Choir College Chapel. I'd like to be able to tell my grandchildren one day that I preached to the smartest man in the world."

To this he replied, "Oh, no, I'm not the smartest man! I'm not the smartest man!" Once again he laughed and chuckled, but this time there was no derisive tone. He meant it.

*hurk*

Let's condense that down.

1. Arrogant preacher waltzes into someone else's home, without prior invitation.
2. Said preacher declares steadfast belief and asks if other person holds them.
3. Said preacher feels mocked when laughed at casually for having beliefs without bothering to support them.
4. Insinuates other person is not as intelligent as they seem for not sharing said beliefs.

This is a pretty perfect micro-summation of the general problem I have with religious blowhards like Jerry Falwell. They have large, public platforms, declare their beliefs, whine about persecution and intolerance when other people don't give them inherent and undue respect, and then insult the people that only go so far as to disagree and make it known!

While that's annoying enough in and of itself, the larger problem to me is that so many people seem to think this is a perfectly respectable position. There's not one iota of logic or reason in it. It only works if you already accept the conclusion that the absurd position is valid. It can only perpetuate itself by circular reasoning.

It's bad thinking. It needs to stop. These people aren't victims. A bit of scoffing isn't going to hurt them. But playing it off as if it does certainly hurts others.

* - I'm currently working at a retirement community while I finish getting my certification. I passed my last test and am just waiting on paperwork to go through so I can get back in the classroom!

PS: For those that aren't familiar with the post title, it's taken from the series Firefly in which Malcom Reynolds sarcastically informs Jayne that he's considering taking him more seriously after Jayne offers to trade a rifle for Mal's supposed wife.

Louisiana Gearing Up for Another Evolution Battle?

It looks like Louisiana school boards are looking to insert the "teach the controversy" nonsense into their classrooms. They're scheduled to have a debate on whether or note they need to balance their textbooks with "information questioning the theory of evolution."

*snrk*

This comes after the school board asked a review council to look over the textbook before approving it and weigh in. Fortunately, it looks like the team is at least somewhat qualified as there was an 8-4 vote to approve it by that council. Obviously the school board was looking for a different answer because they're still stalling to try to open up "debate" on the issue. This sounds reminiscent of the Kansas Evolution Hearings in which the school board flew in "experts" in Intelligent Design on the taxpayer's dime to tell the board what they'd already decided on.

Of course, the advisory council obviously has some scientifically illiterate fools on it.

State board member Dale Bayard said he plans to vote against the texts—which the state textbook-adoption committee overwhelmingly approved—and will urge his colleagues to join him.

“The textbooks in the life sciences that were proposed ... did not include all science that is currently available on the subject [of evolution],” he said, asserting that some findings “refuting” the theory have been ignored.

Additionally, the author did have to do the job of poor journalism and get quotes from someone completely unrelated to the discussion, talking to a Reverend from the 'Louisiana Family Forum, an advocacy group whose stated mission is to promote “biblical principles in the centers of influence”'.

Right. Because a reverend is an expert on what should be taught in science classes. And not to be satisfied with just trashing evolution, he went on to state he had "other issues such as global warming and “embryonic issues.”"

Thanks for reminding us that this isn't just an attack on evolution. It's an attack on science.... being waged in our classrooms. It's disgusting.

Oops. Got the title Wrong.

An article recently posted on alternet seems to think it's "shocking" that a non-religious parent has been deemed unworthy to receive equal custody of his child based on his agnostic position. While it's reprehensible and clearly shows just how little persecution the religious majority receives, despite their pleas to the contrary, it's in no way shocking. It happens quite frequently. And it's one of the reasons we need events like Skepticon: to remind the public that non-religious people are people to, deserving of the same rights as everyone else. Funny thing is, we don't get them.

Failure: Impossible

A few weeks ago, I came across this article about a school district in Alexandria, Va. which has removed the failing grade (F) from it's possible grades. Instead, failing students will receive an Incomplete (I). The idea behind this is that the school feels an F is to final. It tells students that they're over. They're done. They didn't make it. Move on because you can't do this.

To me, it's an insult to our intelligence. I'm no psychologist, but effectively, an F and an I mean the same thing: You didn't complete the course work and if you want the credit, you'll have to try again. Are kids really so dumb as to think that this changes anything?

The only thing I can see it changing is that it may not impact a student's GPA. Most times, when an I grade is used, it's a placeholder that isn't counted for tabulation of GPA. Translation: It can't hurt you. It can slow you down, but so long as you get it done, you suffer no penalty for not keeping up. Since when does this work in the real world? All we're doing is lowering the bar.

I understand the hardships of feeling like you're behind. I felt like it much of my college year. But here's the thing: Unless you're feeling challenged, you won't work to better yourself. Telling kids that they can't fail essentially removes that pushing force.

Sure, it's not a force that will drive all students. Some won't care if it's there or not, but I can't see such students caring if you call it an F or an I either. But there are students that do need that threat to keep them working. And taking that away just feels like we're letting those students down in the long run, even though they may think they like it in the short run.