Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Tonight on Showtime, Penn & Teller take on astrology! You can take a peek at the show online here (with the bad words edited out), or you can watch the show at 10:00 p.m. Eastern time.

I happen to know that a certain Beloved Internet Personality who blogs about astronomy and Doctor Who is on the show briefly as well. Well, it’s probably a good episode anyway, so you should order Showtime and watch it, and buy the DVDs as well.

Bonus ironic pun: the episode is directed by Star Price. Siriusly.

So, if you are totally convinced that astrology actually works, despite an entire Universe of evidence stomping on your face telling you you’re wrong, then you can give P&T a piece of your mind personally, since they’ll be at TAM 7. You can yell at them then… but be prepared to have Penn enthusiastically join that Universe of evidence.

And don’t forget:

Are you an exhausted antiscientist? Has railing against the mainstream science paradigm got you down? Making up "facts" is tough, and it’s tiring CONSTANTLY TYPING IN CAPITAL LETTERS, using different color fonts, and don’t forget all those exclamation points!!! Not to mention comparing scientists to Hitler and Himmler, and yourself to Galileo and Einstein.

And of course, your mind is soft and not used to real work, so you need to take constant breaks.

Have I got the time-waster for you! Head (haha, as you’ll see in a sec) on over to Discovery Channel’s Faces of Mars jigsaw puzzle page! There, staring right back at you, you’ll find three clear indications that transhuman aliens from the future dimensions of light have visited the Red Planet and have left us signposts/warnings/idols/guaranteed-money-makers-if-you-yell-loudly-enough.

You’ll have hours of fun here, but be warned: when you finally put the pieces together, you’ll have an actual coherent picture. Don’t be scared, though. Reality sometimes has a way of creeping into even the best conspiracy theory. So sit back and enjoy it. When you’re done, you’ll be in hoag heaven.

My bud Neil Tyson was on Jimmy Fallon’s TV show the other day, and they asked him a series of questions. It’s worth watching:

About some people’s total credulity when it comes to ridiculous doomsday scenarios, Neil says:

It’s a profound absence of awareness of … how nature works. They’re missing some science classes in their training in high school or in college that would empower you to understand and to judge when someone else is basically full of it.

I actually disagree with Neil here; it’s not that students missed that part of science class, it’s that it was never taught in science class to start with. It’s very, very rare that science is taught as a process, as a way of knowing. Instead, it’s taught like a compendium of facts, as dry as a dictionary, and like a dictionary only pulled out when needed. In fact, the methods of science are a way of understanding everything in the whole Universe, and so can be used all the time, whether it’s when you’re deciding to eat a sandwich or when you’re trying to figure out why gamma-ray burst beams are collimated so tightly.

Being skeptical, asking for evidence, examining that evidence, and diagnosing it compared to the whole of learning that goes on around it is the way to go. That’s how you distinguish sense from nonsense. It takes work, and sometimes hard work, but it’s worth it. The prize is understanding.

And I do agree strongly with Neil when he says,

Sceince is basically an inoculation against charlatans.

Yup. One of many, but still the best.

If there are agreed-upon definitions of the word hero, then Joe Albietz must fit many of them. This good-natured, upbeat, intelligent, and skeptical man is a pediatrician who gets up every morning so that he can help — and succeed — in saving the lives of children. I’m proud he’s my friend.

Joe’s written a concise and informative article about the JREF’s vaccine drive in Las Vegas for The Amaz!ng Meeting 7. Vaccinations rates in Vegas were very low due to poverty and a transient population, and their herd immunity to diseases like measles and whooping cough is in serious trouble. Joe came up with the idea of getting donations from the skeptic community to support vaccinations in Vegas, and spearheaded the effort.

For $25 you can support a child to get a full series of vaccinations. You don’t have to attend TAM 7 or do anything else; just send $25 and a child in Vegas will get protected against a raft of potentially life-threatening diseases. And while those children are getting their vaccinations, we will be at TAM 7 talking about how to fight people like Jenny McCarthy, Meryl Dorey, and all the others who are so vocal in making sure that diseases we once stamped out come back with a vengeance.

We know that vaccinations don’t cause autism, and we know they have wiped out smallpox, and put such scourges as polio on the endangered list. Help us, so that we can help others. Go read Joe’s article and see how you can easily support this effort.

Via my evil twin Richard Wiseman comes one of the best color optical illusions I have ever seen. The original was apparently posted on Buzzhunt Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s incredible optical illusion website:

You see embedded spirals, right, of green, pinkish-orange, and blue? Incredibly, the green and the blue spirals are the same color. At first I thought Richard was pulling our collective legs, being a trickster of high magnitude. So I loaded the image in Photoshop and examined the two spirals. In the two squares displayed below, the one on the left is colored using the same color from the blue spiral, and on the right using the green spiral.

Like I said, incredible! For pedantry sake, the RGB colors in both spirals are 0, 255, 150. So they are mostly green with a solid splash of blue.

The reason they look different colors is because our brain judges the color of an object by comparing it to surrounding colors. In this case, the stripes are not continuous as they appear at first glance. The orange stripes don’t go through the "blue" spiral, and the magenta ones don’t go through the "green" one. Here’s a zoom to make this more clear:

See? The orange stripes go through the "green" spiral but not the "blue" one. So without us even knowing it, our brains compare that spiral to the orange stripes, forcing it to think the spiral is green. The magenta stripes make the other part of the spiral look blue, even though they are exactly the same color. If you still don’t believe me, concentrate on the edges of the colored spirals. Where the green hits the magenta it looks bluer to me, and where the blue hits the orange it looks greener. Amazing.

The overall pattern is a spiral shape because our brain likes to fill in missing bits to a pattern. Even though the stripes are not the same color all the way around the spiral , the overlapping spirals makes our brain think they are. The very fact that you have to examine the picture closely to figure out any of this at all shows just how easily we can be fooled.

This is why I tell people over and over again: you cannot trust what you see even with your own eyes. Your eyes are not cameras faithfully taking pictures of absolute truth of all that surrounds you. They have filters, and your brain has to interpret the jangled mess it gets fed. Colors are not what they appear, shapes are not what they appear (that zoomed image above is square, believe it or not), objects are not what they appear.

So the next time someone swears they saw Jesus, or a UFO, or a ghost, show them this picture. What you see in life is absolutely and provably not what you get.

Edit to add: if you like this illusion, then you might want to check out this audio illusion, and this one of a spinning woman’s sillhouette which is one of my all-time favorites.

One thing about being a skeptic is staying informed. It’s hard. There is so much nonsense in the world… but I try. I read a lot of blogs, of course. I have about 200 blogs in my feed reader, but only a handful of those have daily posts, and of those I skim a lot. I get email from readers, of course (which I love) when news breaks, and also see things on Twitter. Still, how do you find out what’s going with online skeptical activism?

Here’s an idea: read Skepdad’s Epic Reading List. It really is. Epic, I mean: he’s put a bazillion links in various categories, including blogs, podcasts, thinkers, topic-specific, and so on. I’ve looked it over and it’s a pretty good list if you’re looking to find ways to blow off that big project that’s already overdue. I’m actually a little afraid to delve into more deeply, as I can see my already-neutron-star-dense schedule getting even more tightly squeezed… and that can only have one outcome. A calendrical black hole.

But if you’re looking for a little summer reading (and who isn’t?) then this is a great place to start.

Tip o’ the blogroll to Laurie of Rational Moms, another fine site for skeptical parents.

Last week I wrote about how the British Association of Chiropractors put out a laughable press release about their law suit against Simon Singh, who had the audacity to point out that some of the claims made by the BCA were "bogus".

As dictated by the Streisand Effect — making a stink about something trivial will itself turn it into big news — people all over the world are now talking about "alternative medicine" and its unhealthy dose of quackery.

That includes my dear friends the skeptics in Australia, who have been relentlessly and heroically pounding the altmed movement Down Under. The latest shot is against the very thing the BCA is talking about: chiropractors inflating their credentials and making claims not at all based on solid evidence. Check out that link, poke around the website, and show Dr. Rachie (a real doctor, folks) your love.

There’s more: you may have heard of Daniel Hauser, a young boy who has Hodgkin’s lymphoma. His parents don’t "believe" in real medicine and were treating him with nonsense therapies like using herbs and vitamins.

Here’s a hint, people: you don’t get to choose to not believe in medicine, just like you don’t get to choose to not believe in gravity. You can not believe in either all you want, but when the time comes, your belief may kill you.

A judge agrees: he issued a court order to the family to make them have Daniel undergo chemotherapy. And guess what? His tumor is shrinking.

Now, if you’re familiar with the zealot-like belief system some people have in altmed, the next bit won’t surprise you at all: his family claims that it’s not the chemotherapy shrinking the tumor, it’s their altmed supplements. Yes, even though for months their "treatment" did no good at all, and after a few sessions of chemo the tumor shrank, of course it was the vitamins that did the trick.

Sigh.

You know what? It would make me sad, but if, as an adult, and after doing due diligence to research a problem, you decide to take vitamins to cure a fatal disease, that’s your choice. But when it comes to your kids things are different. You can choose to dress them funny, or give them terrible haircuts, and even choose what religion they will be and how they will be educated. But you don’t get to choose to kill them. And when there is evidence — rock-solid and with thousands of examples — that your idea of medicine is quackery, and that withholding of real medicine will let your child die, your rights as a parent have been abrogated.

As a parent, that’s a hard thing for me to write. You may say, what if the government wants to take your kid away for what you feel is a capricious reason? The difference here, the critical difference, is that this isn’t capricious. It’s based on solid evidence.

If you decide to sacrifice your child upon an altar to Zeus, or tie them to railroad tracks to cleanse their chi, or set your little girl on fire to purify her of demons, then guess what? The State has a right to step in to protect that child.

The right to swing your beliefs ends at a child’s nose. The problem is, far, far too many people think their beliefs are untouchable rights. They’re not. And those of us in the reality-based community will continue to pursue this as long as people who aren’t based there continue to hurt their kids.