Category Archives: Antiscience

Crackpottery, woo, superstition

Categorically Deny It. That Should Convince Everybody.

Posted on by

Ooh, a government conspiracy that involves some of my colleagues.

The time of the winter solstice on 12/21/2012 has been changed from 11:11 to 11:12. Something sinister is obviously afoot.

Given that the Naval Observatory is probably the most precise observatory in the world I find this highly unusual. A minutes change is huge! What’s going on here?

Best guess? It’s a precision issue. The time is specified to the minute, which means you have to decide to round or not. If the calculated time was 11:11:29 and changed to 11:11:30 — a mere second longer — in a recalculation (which might happen depending on, say, how many leap seconds had been added since you did the previous calculation, or other factors), you would display it as 11:12.

New and Improved. Now with Lemon!

Posted on by

Uncertainty in Science: It’s a Feature, Not a Bug

People tend to think of scientific progress as always advancing in a straight line, with new facts being added permanently to our body of knowledge as they are discovered. “They do not understand that, instead, research is an ungainly mechanism that moves in fits and starts and that its ever-expanding path of knowledge is complicated by blind alleys and fruitless detours,” writes New York Times science reporter Cordelia Dean in her book, Am I Making Myself Clear? A Scientist’s Guide to Talking to the Public (2009). As a result, Dean says, revisions to a scientific consensus make people think that scientists don’t know what they’re talking about. NECSS panelist Dr. Massimo Pigliucci, chair of the philosophy department at City University of New York-Lehman College, has a favorite example of this mindset. In response to an editorial he penned on the science of evolution, a letter to the editor replied, “I don’t understand why people want to believe in science—science changes all the time.” Yet this, of course, is its strength; science adjusts its claims in response to new information.

Hard to Avoid

Posted on by

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Tiger Woods has gotten himself into a little trouble the past week or so. But, no matter what Tiger has done in regard to fidelity of marriage, it has absolutely no bearing on whether or not he won the 1997 Masters, or 2000 U.S. Open, or any of the 70-odd PGA events he’s won. Yes, his indiscretions are a blow to his image and may affect his endorsement deals, but golf history is unaffected, and (psychology aside) his status as a golfer is unchanged. How he is perceived by the public is what has changed, because he has tarnished his clean-cut image. His golf swing is unaffected. The people that didn’t like him before have one more reason not to like him, but rooting for or against someone on the tube doesn’t affect the outcome of the match.

And so it is with climategate. Public perception is affected, because of the political aspects of the scientists’ words and actions, but not so much the science. But it matters, because it’s one more excuse to cast aspersions, regardless of the validity of the claims. The ones making the most noise about this aren’t the type who let facts get in their way. The asymmetry of the situation is very striking: the publicly active climate change deniers have been shown to be wrong many times in the past, on a variety of points, and yet none of them seem to have folded their tents. The problem is that with any complex problem, it’s fairly easy to make an incorrect statement that sounds plausible, and yet it takes far longer to set the record straight than it does to misinform. And yet the act of misinforming doesn’t seem to damage the credibility of the denialists, which is probably one of the reasons scientists in general don’t wish to engage them. This isn’t a clash between scientific views, it’s science vs propaganda, and that’s not a level playing field.

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

(h/t to the infinite one for the vid)

No Boy Scout, He

Posted on by

Science After Sunclipse: In Which I Am Less Than Courteous

[Chopra’s] latest whine is typical of what passes for respectable commentary in less-than-critical quarters. Phil Plait aptly characterized it as “almost a bullet-pointed list of logical fallacies”; if you wanted examples to fill out your Baloney Detection Kit trading cards, Chopra would be a great place to start. Be the first on your block to collect the whole woo-ful set!

More Professors Who Lie

Posted on by

Catching up with blogs after Thanksgiving travel. I saw this on Chad’s linked list. Zen Moments: My Favorite Liar

What made Dr. K memorable was a gimmick he employed that began with his introduction at the beginning of his first class:

“Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day.”

And thus began our ten-week course.

I think that’s a pretty interesting way to engage the students.

Later on, the author lists some lessons learned from the exercise, including

“Experts” can be wrong, and say things that sound right – so build a habit of evaluating new information and check it against things you already accept as fact.

It should probably go without saying, but this holds true for nonexperts, only moreso. Skepticism is a tool that gets refined as one progresses in science, and one tends to develop a decent BS detector. For claims that jibe with what I already know, provisional acceptance is easier. If an assertion seems dubious, I require more convincing. I like Feynman’s trick (can I use that word, in light of the recent kerfuffle?) which he explains in one of his books, of thinking of an object or scenario, trying to disprove an assertion.

Weird Science

Posted on by

I just ran across The 10 weirdest physics facts, from relativity to quantum physics, and as I just finished up an antiscience piece, I thought I’d just turn this into a little Friday rant-o-thon.

Zapperz also ran across this, and rightly notes that nitpicking the details probably won’t matter to non-physicists, because they aren’t likely to pick up on such subtleties. But hey, this is the blogohedron. When nitpicking is out, ranting is in.

The thing you lose with stories like these is that there so much more you could get from them, but the author is admittedly a nonscientist and is missing out on a lot of the neat stuff that live in the details. He’s content to point out some things that are odd, especially when viewed through the prism of the limited everyday-classical-physics experience. The real problem in this is perpetuating misunderstandings of physics. Zz points out a big one — sustaining the concept of relativistic mass. There’s also the insistence that observing can change the past, and one of the new standards, entanglement. Thank goodness teleportation wasn’t mentioned.

Avoiding the Bad Stuff

Posted on by

Saw this link on Kottke, described as “How to avoid an untimely death,” with the teaser quote

10. If anyone tries to force you into your car or car trunk at gun point, don’t cooperate. Fight and scream all you can even if you risk getting shot in the parking lot. If you get in the car, you will most likely die (or worse).

That sounds like the kind of esoteric crap I like reading, so I clicked on the link to the “Dirty Dozen for Black Swan Avoidance” and boy, was I disappointed. I was expecting a list of some unusual events (some kind of event much more common in a TV or movie plot), with tips for increasing your survival probability, along with a physical or statistical justification. I can easily believe that in the unlikely even that someone is forced into a trunk at gunpoint, that their survival probability is low, and that fighting back is the best option. But there’s nothing cited to back that up.

And the rest of the list is worse. On why you should drive the biggest car you can afford:

Despite all the data from the government on crash test safety, I can say unequivocally that in a 2-car accident, the person in the larger car always fairs better. Force=Mass x Acceleration. The vehicle with larger mass imparts the greater force.

So the claim here is that the NTSB data are wrong? Or to be flat-out ignored? (deja vu) And the physics certainly is. The author seems to have failed physics 101 or forgotten Newton’s Third Law — the forces in a two-body collision are precisely the same magnitude; the reason the person in the lighter car is more at risk in a collision is that they will experience a greater acceleration during that collision. But the author has implicitly assumed that there is only risk from a particular kind of collision, and that there are no mitigating advantages to a smaller car. Cherry-picking your scenario is not science. The same kind of logical fallacy lies behind some people’s justification for not using seatbelts (though the author, thankfully, does not advocate this) — that there are scenarios in which not being restrained will help you survive, but this fails to acknowledge that these are a small minority of all accidents, and that the odds are much greater that wearing a seatbelt will help you, should you be in an accident.

Declaring that you don’t believe in global warming isn’t going to score any science points, and this is kind of scary:

If your gas grill won’t start….walk away. Never throw gas (or other accelerant) on a fire.

Ummm, gas grills use propane, so I hope the two sentences aren’t related, as they appear to be (to me). I heartily endorse not putting gasoline on any kind of fire, but is there some epidemic of people putting gasoline on propane grills? If your propane grill doesn’t start, leave some time for the gas to disperse; propane is heavier-than-air and will “pool up” in the grill and/or area below it, and you’ll get a nice fireball when it finally ignites.

Much of the rest of the list is either obvious or based on anecdotal data, without much justification, even if the advice might end up being sound. But without analysis, there’s no way to tell if dying from the stress of building your retirement home is greater than the risk of dropping dead from shoveling snow.