Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Regular readers know of the man love I have for Zach Weiner, who pens the web comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. It frequently features great skeptical material, and this new one is a great example:

Click to see the punch line. He’s exactly right, of course. My favorite is when people complain about food not being natural enough, like that makes any difference. As I am fond of pointing out, arsenic is an element, one of the basic building blocks of all of nature. You don’t get any more natural than that, but I’d probably avoid buying any food with that on its label.

Earlier this year, I spent a few days in Wyoming attending Launch Pad, a NASA-sponsored workshop for science fiction writers to help familiarize themselves with astronomy. It’s run by Mike Brotherton, himself an astronomer and science fiction author. It’s a great way for writers to learn more science, and pass it on to their readers.

While I was there I got to hang out with a lot of very cool people (Joe Haldeman! Scott Sigler!), and meet other writers I’ve known through their writing (but not IRL) for years.

At the time, Robert Sawyer’s name was familiar to me, but I hadn’t yet read any of his stuff. After Launch Pad, I remedied that: I read his Neanderthal stories, as well as a book called Flash Forward, about an accident at CERN that causes everyone on Earth to get a glimpse of their future years hence.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s been made into a TV show on ABC. I don’t have a lot of time to watch TV but I made sure I watched "FlashForward". I like it! Different than the book, but interesting nonetheless.

Science comedian Brian Malow (also a Launch Pad attendee) interviewed Robert about the book and show for Time Magazine:

There’s also a longer interview on the CERN site, too. And if you get a chance to watch the show, take a look. I hear it’s on hiatus right now, but I’m hoping it comes back soon. I’m enjoying it.

Sigh.

OK, so a woman in Massachusetts thinks she sees Jesus in her iron. If she wants to believe that, it’s fine. It should come as no surprise to anyone that I think she is mistaken, and that this is simply a random happenstance, and that it’s so ill-formed and fuzzy that it could be anyone with long hair, and actually looks more like a woman to me, or someone in a straight jacket, and that none of this matters because it’s simply pareidolia anyway.

But I have to give her a bit of credit. She says, "I’m not telling anybody they’re going to be cured or anything if they look at my iron. It’s just a nice story to share," and that the iron "… was my sign that things will be good."

If she wants to interpret this personally, that’s her right, and I’m glad she’s not trying to foist this on others (and I can’t assume that by having a newspaper cover the story, she’s actively promoting it; we don’t know how the paper found out, we don’t know how or if she pursued this, and she doesn’t appear to be trying to profit from this).

Still, I can hope for a world where someday people won’t think that an omnipotent and omniscient God would purposely appear to them as a polymerized chain of organic molecules on a laundry appliance. Or a fried sandwich. I’d think He would have better things to do. But that’s just me.

This makes me want a) to be in Portugal, and 2) to be 8 years old again.

But then, looking at it does make me feel like a kid. So cool!

For those wondering what this is all about: here you go.

Tip o’ the commlock to Ron Britton.

At 9:44 a.m. local time, Atlantis touched down safely in Florida after an 11 day flight in Earth orbit, ending mission STS-129. She’ll be cleaned up for one final mission — STS-132, slated for May 2010 — before permanent retirement. There are five scheduled Shuttle flights remaining, all to the International Space Station.

In celebration of a safe voyage, I leave you with this: sunset from the ISS during STS-129.

By now, the whole system of tubes knows that creationist Ray Comfort is little more than a laughing stock, a buffoon who spews out more noisome, awful, contaminated bilge than a Soho water pump in 1854^*.

I deal with creationism a lot, and even so I am still capable of being a bit stunned when one of them gets a chance to "explain" themselves. On his blog The Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta interviewed Crocoduck/Bananaman Ray Comfort, and reading it is like taking a long, gurgling drink from the Broad Street water pump. His arguments boil down to two things:

1) Atheeeiiiisssmmmm issss eeeeeevvvvvillllllll! (and therefore everything in science is wrong),

and

2) LALALALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!

For example;

Hemant: The arguments you make in the introduction to the Darwin book have been stated before — and refuted repeatedly by scientists. So why repeat them? Are you interested in hearing atheists’ responses to your questions?

Ray: I don’t deny that the arguments I have used have been addressed many times. However, it’s only atheists that believe that they have been “refuted.”

"Only atheists?" Really? Because, y’know, a lot of scientists aren’t atheists. And I don’t think Pope John Paul II was, either.

I’m not sure if that little falsehood he uttered there (some might call it a lie) falls more under category 1 or 2, but I’m still pretty sure it’s laughably wrong. And it fits right in with all the other ridiculous things he says in that interview.

My favorite is this one:

Hemant: The banana. Do you stand by the argument in your video? Do you regret saying what you did? [...]

Ray: I deeply regret doing the banana routine on television without a live audience. I have been doing it for live audiences for more than 20 years, and it’s never failed to get a lot of laughs.

Note his evasion: he doesn’t regret doing it, he regrets not doing in front of an audience to get laughs. Because using a ridiculous, fallacious, and clearly plain old wrong claim is OK as long as it gets a laugh.

I think Mr. Comfort needs, as most creationist mouthpieces do, to reacquaint himself with that pesky part of the Bible that talks about bearing false witness.

As it happens, he did one thing correctly. I’ll certainly agree that handing out all the bowdlerized copies of Darwin’s Origin of Species was a good move for publicity, and I know a lot of people would agree with Comfort — various polls indicate that half the population of the US has doubts about the old age of the Earth. And we won’t win over a lot of these folks with facts, since facts won’t get in the way of their belief in a young Earth. For that reason, in many cases reciting the facts over and over again won’t help (though with some, of course it will). Calling them stupid won’t help either.

That’s why I like Hemant’s blog. He’s polite, but firm. As skeptic Daniel Loxton points out, it was the reaction to Comfort’s baloney that gave him whatever spotlight he now has. While true, we can’t ignore nonsense, especially dangerous nonsense, when we see it. We should try to avoid giving antiscientists more publicity than they deserve, but we must also be ready to fight it when we can. And when we do, we need to be upbeat, and positive.

I know, in this post I’ve just taken Comfort down, and not lifted up science. The purpose of this post, however, wasn’t to give the evidence that the Universe is old– we have plenty of that. No, I wrote this to point out that the forces of ignorance are always there, 24 hours a day. They never rest, they never tire, and they never go away. Neither should we, nor will we.

That’s my point.

Which leaves me torn over which graphic to post, so you know what? I’ll do both:

and

^* Yes! A biology reference! It’s still science, even I’ll admit.

[This is my Thanksgiving post from 2008. I've made some minor edits, but I still truly feel this way.]

Today in the United States is the holiday of Thanksgiving, one of our more deeply tradition-laden days. I suspect most people in other countries know this as the time we eat turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie (though not me, I prefer chocolate pie). And then there’s the shopping the next day, of course.

But there is also the tradition after which the holiday itself is named: giving thanks. People do it in different ways, of course. At a family dinner many years ago, my then-young niece suggested that we go around the dinner table and everyone could say what they were thankful for. It was a sweet idea, and we’ve done it many times since, when we’re all gathered.

But there’s something about it that bugs me, and again it’s the word itself. To give thanks, there has to be something to receive it. For some it’s God, which is their personal choice. For others it may just be fate, or happenstance. That bugs me. I have an appreciation for math and some basic statistics; I know that, ironically, rare things happen all the time because there are so many seconds in a day, and so many of us humans walking the Earth. Tell me that I am a one-in-a-million guy, for example, and I know reflexively there are 5999 more of me out there somewhere.

Egads.

So sometimes things just happen. But I also know that the world is what we make of it. We make decision, consciously and unconsciously, every second of every day, day in and day out, for all our lives. The big decisions stick with us, and maybe smaller ones that went the wrong way. But they’re our decisions.

So I’m not the kind of guy, you might not be surprised to learn, to give thanks to some entity or entities named or otherwise. To me, it’s not a matter of giving thanks. It’s a matter of assessing what you have, what you want, and being glad or sad about the way things did or didn’t go.

Should I thank the random nature of the Universe that a young woman in 1992 decided to take astronomy in summer school, setting up the circumstance that I would see her every day in the Astronomy Department at UVa? And should I thank Fate that she was someone I had already met because we were in band together, giving us a chance to start chatting before her astronomy class that hot, humid summer? And whom do I thank for me finally getting the guts to invite her to the Fourth of July picnic at my friend’s house, a date that led to us being happily married for 17 years now?

Or should I just be glad things worked out that way, and I was able to take advantage of the opportunities that arose?

Should I be thankful that the one particular sperm swam some small percentage faster than the others to meet up with that one particular egg that happened to have been previously deposited in my wife’s Fallopian tube, producing a zygote that would eventually be the daughter I see today, possessed of a lovely singing voice, an aptitude for music, drawing, writing, and science? I’m just glad it worked out that way, and that my wife and I did the best we could — and still do — to raise our daughter. Knowing all this is started out somewhat randomly doesn’t lessen the fierce feelings I have for my daughter now, and the pride I feel every day when I see her.

I decided in the late 90s to write a book. I wrote magazine articles first, then started giving talks, then got an agent, then the book contract. We needed blurbs for the cover, so I sent a copy to my hero, James Randi, whom I had never met. He wrote an enthusiastic endorsement, and then invited me to speak at the first of an annual conference he was planning.

Now I’m the president of his educational foundation. I am paradoxically humbled and proud to be in this position. Whom do I thank for that?

Oh, wait! I have an answer for that: Randi. And my agent, and my friend who introduced me to my agent, and and and. I’m glad they were able to help me, and I’m glad I took the initiative to jump on those opportunities when they arose.

And so in this case, the thanks really do have someone to receive them. I bet that’s true in a lot of cases.

I thank my family for their support, and my friends over the course of my life for shaping that life. I’m glad for the opportunities, but I’m thankful to the people.

The world is what we make it. It’s the people who make the difference. I am who I am today — we’re all who we are today — because of people, both good and bad, influencing us, both in good ways and bad.

And it’s what we’ve done with that experience. Events happen, but it’s up to us to do with them what we can. Be glad for that, be thankful.

The world is what we make of it. Make it a good one.