How many Americans have heard that if you dig a hole straight down, you’ll end up in China?

Well, it ain’t so. According to this way cool GoogleMap tool, anywhere in the continental US of A you dig, you end up in the Indian Ocean (if you start at Hawaii you’ll end up in Botswana). That’s pretty nifty.

I can think of some fun uses of this tool (though the host site uses it to help you create the biggest sandwich in the world). One of these days I’ll finish my essay on what would happen if you dug a hole through the Earth. You can find limited info on it on the web, but nobody I’ve ever seen really pushes this idea as far as it can go… but alas, I’ve already written 3000 words and I’m only half done. Maybe someday I’ll submit it to a magazine. It’s an interesting idea.

I am asked all the time if I believe in the Big Bang, or if I believe in evolution.

Generally, the asker is shocked when I reply "no".

But I don’t believe in either. Belief implies faith without evidence, and that does not accurately describe my attitude. I have seen plenty of evidence — copious amounts, overwhelming amounts — of evidence of both. So it’s not a matter of belief. It’s a matter of understanding the evidence and knowing that both theories are almost certainly correct. So I have trust in them, you might say, but not faith. There is room for doubt– there’s always room for doubt — but it’s scant room indeed.

So I had to grimace a bit when I saw this quiz about doubt. In reality I’d call it a quiz about belief. Either way, it’s flawed.

Why? Well, look at question 3:

Is there an identifiable force coursing through the universe, holding it together, or uniting all life-forms?

If I answer "yes", then the quiz proceeds normally. But if, instead, I say "no", then how do I answer this next question?

Could prayer be in any way effective, that is, do you believe that such a being or force (as posited above) could ever be responsive to your thoughts or words?

So if I don’t believe in "this force", then there is no correct answer to that question. You might say the correct answer is "no", but what if I do believe in that force, but I don’t think it listens to prayer? I’d answer "no", but that would be indistinguishable from the non-believer answer.

The next three questions are similar. So I posit that the quiz is flawed.

But my favorite flaw is the very last question:

If someone were to say “The universe is nothing but an accidental pile of stuff, jostling around with no rhyme nor reason, and all life on earth is but a tiny, utterly inconsequential speck of nothing, in a corner of space, existing in the blink of an eye never to be judged, noticed, or remembered,” would you say, “Now that’s going a bit far, that’s a bit wrongheaded?”

If I do think the Universe is accidental, that does not mean there is no rhyme or reason– all of science depends on the Universe obeying a set of rules (even if the rules are hidden, or hard to understand, or involve seemingly random events as quantum mechanics does). So right away, even if I do think the Universe is accidental, I would say that quotation is going too far and is wrongheaded, but not in the way the quiz means.

I also may not think life on Earth is inconsequential. I have heard this many times from religious people talking to atheists: how can you cherish life if you don’t believe in God? I find that question pretty funny, actually! The mindset is, if atheists don’t cherish life, what is to keep them from simply murdering anyone who ticks them off?

The answer is that atheists, as well as believers, have evolved a sense of morality over millions of years. Mammals tend to be family-oriented, and primates very much so. Tribal customs evolved to aid survival, which means helping others when needed. It’s not hard to get an idea of how morality evolved from that, although of course I am grossly oversimplifying things here.

If you think this is wrong, then consider this: if no God means no morality, then you’d expect atheists to commit more crimes. Yet, if you look at prison statistics, atheists are grossly underrepresented in jail. Only 0.21% of prisoners are atheists, though in the US some 3-9% of the population call themselves atheists. If religious people were more moral than atheists, then you’d expect the number of atheists in prison to be much higher than their percentage in the population. Yet the opposite is true. This means that atheists commit proportionately fewer crimes than religious people (well, it really means that atheists are caught and successfully prosecuted less, but one can assume those numbers scale with the numbers of crimes committed).

Are atheists more moral than believers? That’s a hard jump to make. But those numbers are very interesting.

As for the quiz, I see it comes from the book "Doubt: A History", written by Jennifer Michael Hecht. She has purple hair (her picture is on a page linked from the belief quiz), so I immediately have to like her, despite the flawed quiz. She was also interviewed on Skepticality, so I’ll have to give that a listen. I’d like to see where she was going with that quiz. The book itself sounds pretty interesting.

And how did I rate on the quiz? Well, I don’t think I’ll say. That way, you can believe about me what you want.

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The Stanford Medicine Magazine just released their new issue and it has a heavy evolution bent to it. The lead article, "Darwin Lives" has a pretty good discussion of things, and even has a quotation (near the end) by a ticked-off astronomer you may know.

Update: Shortly after posting this, I found out that the national academies of 67 nations has joined their voices to this as well. Their verdict: creationism is wrong. It’s really just that simple.’

… is a giant "ball of fire" in space.

Of course, they will have to neglect to mention it’s 250 million light years from Earth. Feeling lazy? I’ll convert it for you: that’s 1,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles. Probably too far to do us any damage, but that didn’t stop Eric Julien. Of course, Deutsch would suppress this finding…

Anyway, the ball of fire is actually a tremendous ball of gas, something like 3 million light years across! That’s 30 times the size of our Milky Way Galaxy, and actually about the distance between us and the Andromeda Galaxy. That’s big.

It’s presumably composed of primordial hydrogen that condensed after the Big Bang. It’s massive, something like 13 trillion of times the mass of the Sun, big enough to form whole galaxies (the Milky Way is maybe 400 billion times the mass of the Sun). This thing is a monster. It’s actually not a ball of fire, and in fact is probably fairly cold. But still the description as a ball of fire isn’t too far off.

The huge ball of cold gas is inside a cluster of galaxies called Abell 3266. There is pre-existing gas inside the cluster, between the galaxies. It’s hot, millions of degrees hot. The cold gas is falling through this stuff. Like an ice cube moving through boiling water, gas is stripped off the cold ball. The rate at which it loses gas is staggering: about 20 solar masses per day. That means it outgasses enough in one day to create 20 stars like the Sun. That’s 7000 suns a year, and a million in just over a century.

Come to think of it, when I was a kid we had an old dog like that. Haha! I’m here every day, folks. Two drink minimum.

Anyway, this is pretty neat. When the gas comes off the ball it mixes with the much hotter gas and gets dispersed in between the galaxies. That’s why it’s described as a ball of fire; it’s streaming off matter like a comet, which is heated up by all the turbulence it creates in the hotter gas.

Eventually, though, it may cool (by emitting X-rays, which is how this stuff was found in the first place) and fall into the center of the cluster. A massive galaxy sits there, and will get bigger as the gas falls into it, and possibly form more stars from it. If this does happen, we’re talking a long time from now, like millions or more likely billions of years. Still, what we’re seeing now may be the precursor of star formation on a vast scale.

So that’s not scary at all. It means that even at a more advanced age, the Universe will still be cranking out stars. I think that’s good news. It’s nice to know that a few billion years from now, long after the Sun has died away, there may be more stars to take its place.

It looks like I wasn’t the only one to think of this antiscience angle. SpaceTramp did too.

I am heading off to give a talk in Florida Friday morning (I leave at 6:15 my time, YIKES!), so I won’t be writing anything until Sunday, most likely. And I plan on being busy then as well, so I’m leaving you with a few linkies with which to have fun.

• First, The 37th Skeptics Circle is up!
• As promised, IAU approves the names of Pluto’s two small moons.
• The House of Representatives has a budget for NASA, and it’s not quite as bleak as I expected, though it’s still not enough. It’ll be at least two months before the Senate looks at it as well.
• Speaking of which, here’s an article about NASA science cuts as well.
• What happens when you dump a bowl full of liquid nitrogen into a pool? This happens.
• Has the oldest astronomy computer been found?
• And finally, an optical illusion that’s pretty cool.

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Cassini strikes again! New images have been released, as well as incredible animated images of moons moving, passing in front of one another, going past Saturn. One, maybe my favorite, is of tiny Pan nestled in the rings of Saturn.

The image above is of Titan (the big fuzzy tennis ball) and Enceladus. At the time Cassini took this shot, Enceladus was 4.1 million kilometers away, and Titan was 5.3 million. Our own Moon is only 384,000 kilometers from Earth, by comparison.’

A few days ago I was interviewed by Jesse Singal of The Blog Reader. The interview is now online.

A little while ago, even maybe as recently as a year ago, I would have held back a little in my diatribes such as in that interview. I would have been less willing to state things baldly, more willing to cushion it or make it more palatable. But since then, I’ve seen just too much crap going on. George Deutsch. Creationism. A Congress all-too-willing to eviscerate reality. Doom-mongerers. Ann Coulter.

A little while ago, I was worried I might lose some of my audience if I said things that might alienate them. I was right; I would. The difference now is, I don’t care as much. Of course I do actually care, but I’ve learned that someone with strong opinions– especially those that are based in rock-solid fact– are always going to tick off people who prefer fantasy to be their reality.

But there are lots of people who really want more information, who want to understand. The vast middle– those are the ones to whom I want to talk. They may hear Bart Sibrel, or Richard Hoagland, or Eric Julien, and be swayed. Scientists have spent way too long just hoping the antiscience infection would go away, but it festers, and many times it erupts.

We can’t cure it, we can’t totally eliminate it, any more than your body’s immune system can kill every last noisome bacterium. But they can be kept under check; the immune system can keep it from spreading out of control.

Skepticism is our minds’ immune system. I aim to keep it healthy.