Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Lack of skepticism can kill.

[NSFW language and some effects.]

Last week I posted about Adam and Jamie on Craig Ferguson’s TV show. I also found this little gem, where he talks about Apollo deniers. The whole thing is funny, but the space stuff starts at 3:00.

I love that guy.

Back in August, I have a talk at Gnomedex, a conference about the intersection of technology and people. It’s thrown by my old buddy Chris Pirillo. My talk was on skepticism, and I posted some video from it a month ago. However, the audio quality wasn’t great.

The good news is Chris posted the official stream from the conference, and the video and audio quality are great! So here’s that video.

The "Are We Alone" SETI podcast this week is a repeat from August, but in case you missed it the topic is 2012 and other Hollywood movies where science is abused, and I talk about the real ways the world might end. Listen before going to see the movie!

Today is Carl Sagan’s 75th birthday. It would be nice if he were still around to send him the greeting personally, but sadly, he died too young: in 1996 he succumbed to complications of myleodysplasia. As he himself noted, though, the progress of science — medical science in this case — kept him alive far longer than would otherwise have been possible. Up to the end, he was an evangelist of science.

And his legacy continues. His TV show "Cosmos" continues to inspire people, and the generation of astronomers who took up the cause due to Sagan’s exhortations are still looking up, looking out, and seeking what’s around the next corner. Because of Carl Sagan, we have many more scientists who not only love the field itself, but strive to express it to others. I include myself among the latter.

That’s why we celebrated Carl Sagan Day on Saturday, to honor the man and, in my opinion just as if not more importantly, to continue his work. James Randi knew Sagan personally; they were friends for many years, and so at the celebration Randi was the keynote speaker, relating stories about the man whom Randi knew as simply Carl. Below is video of Randi’s talk. It’s an hour long, but it’s more than worth your time. This was recorded off a live stream, so go ahead and click forward to about the 9:00 minute mark to get started.

This first Carl Sagan Day was a great success. We had a great audience at every talk, kids playing outside in the inflatable rocket ship bounce room, pictures from Hubble adorning the windows and walls of Broward College, and an overall sense that there is great work that has been done, with still a vast amount yet to do.

But that’s where the fun is. Sagan knew that, and I hope that you do too. And if you don’t — if you think science is stodgy, uninteresting, and doesn’t affect your life — then hopefully you have an amazing moment lying in wait for you. Maybe it’ll be a Cassini image of Saturn, or a tiny cell undergoing mitosis under your scrutiny through a microscope, or the sudden understanding from a news article about the Large Hadron Collider. There’s no way to know what precisely that trigger will be. But at some point there will come something that will jolt you, will shake you out of your complacence, and the scales will fall from your eyes.

At that moment you’ll experience what Carl Sagan did every moment of his life, that same sense of wonder and pure, undiluted joy about the Universe. I feel it too. It’s the blood in my veins, the calcium in my bones, the electricity of my eyes and ears as they relay what they detect to my brain. It’s the sense of connectedness with everything, and it’s real.

That’s what Carl Sagan taught us.

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

OK, I know that some people see the face of their religious icons in random things. I’ve written about this a zillion times. And I know that sometimes it’s just pareidolia, our tendency to see faces in random objects. And I know that people will think it’s a miracle, when really it’s the end-product of thousands of generations of the evolution of our pattern-seeking abilities.

But then there’s stuff like this: a guy is "clueless" about how the face of Jesus appeared on his truck window, and why it persists day after day.

Oh, I have a clue. It’s clearly not random, which means it’s either a) divine, or 2) drawn on by someone. My conclusion that it’s (2) comes from having a daughter who would take her finger and draw her name in the misty back window of my car when she was younger. And also doing it myself when I was a kid. And seeing eighty bazillion examples of this as a human living in America.

So I think someone drew it on the window. The oil from their finger doesn’t wash off with water, so every morning the picture reappears with the advent (advent! Haha! A little funny for the upcoming season) on the morning dew.

But, of course, that’s just me. When I hear hoofbeats I think horses, not zebras. And since I don’t live near a zoo or in the African plains, I’m guessing what we have here is a horse-drawn carriage.

Um. Well. You know what I mean.

Picture credit: (AP Photo/Johnson City Press, Lee Talbert)

I am no fan of pseudoscience, as you may have guessed. Dowsing is a practice that falls squarely in that field. It’s the idea that you can detect an object — usually water, but sometimes gold, or people, or whatever — using a y-shaped branch, or copper tubes, or some other simple device. Dowsers never really have a good explanation of how their devices work, but they tend to claim 100% accuracy.

However, James Randi has tested dowsers many, many times as part of the JREF’s Million Dollar Challenge. Not to keep you in suspense, but the money still sits in the bank. In other words, time and again, the dowsers fail. When a real, double-blind, statistical test is given, dowsers fail. Every single time.

That’s all well and good, and you might think it’s just another silly idea that nonsense-believers adhere to despite evidence. If someone wants to waste their money on a dowser, well, caveat emptor.

But what if your life depended on it? What if thousands of lives depended on it?

Such is the case in Iraq, where the military there is using what is essentially dowsing techniques to try to detect bombs in cars at military checkpoints. Let’s be very clear here: they are using provably useless antiscientific nonsense to try to find terrorists who carry explosives. They may as well use tea leaves, or palm reading, or seances.

This story just got major press; a reporter in Iraq wrote about it in the New York Times. It’s impossible to overstress how bad this situation is. Iraqi Major General Jehad al-Jabiri, who is the head of the Ministry of the Interior’s General Directorate for Combating Explosives, is a whole-hearted believer in this crap. He is such a believer that the Iraqi military are abandoning proven methods such as sniffer dogs.

Instead, the Iraqi have purchased hundreds of these so-called bomb-detection wands from a company called ATSC in the UK. The cost? Millions of dollars. Millions. On technology that James Randi has come right out and called "a totally fraudulent product". Bob Carroll of the Skeptic’s Dictionary agrees with Randi.

The NYT article also has expert advice from several explosives and military authorities (including long-time friend of the JREF Air Force Lt. Col (retired) Hal Bidlack), all of whom conclude that this device does nothing. Given the product description on the company’s own web page, I agree as well. The description makes no scientific sense at all; it claims it can detect ions from a distance without ever coming in contact with them, and that includes through lead, concrete, and more.

In other words, it’s magic.

This, however, won’t stop al-Jabiri, who chalks up any successes to the detector, and any failures to the operator. In a situation like that there is little hope he can be convinced him he’s wrong, especially when he says things like "I don’t care about Sandia or the Department of Justice or any of them. I know more about this issue than the Americans do. In fact, I know more about bombs than anyone in the world."

Really? Then why, as the NYT article indicates, did that dowsing wand fail on October 25, when terrorists detonated two tons of explosives killing 155 people? Four thousand pounds of explosives apparently got right past the magic wands’ sniffer. But at least they’re fast! Again, from the article:

Checking cars with dogs, however, is a slow process, whereas the wands take only a few seconds per vehicle. “Can you imagine dogs at all 400 checkpoints in Baghdad?” General Jabiri said. “The city would be a zoo.”

I suspect a zoo would be better than a slaughterhouse.

It’s arrogance and blind faith like that which has and will get people killed. And the people we’re talking about in many cases are our fighting men and women, people who have to put their own trust in the leaders in Iraq. This is not a game, not some lark. It’s real. And in this case, antiscience kills.

[This post, with minor variations, has been cross-posted on the JREF Swift blog.]