One Astronomer's Noise

Entries from June 2008

Crazy week… fun videos

June 30, 2008 · 2 Comments

Phew! It’s been a hectic week. With my collaborators in town, work was pretty crazy, but very productive. It got me thinking harder about How Science Works and I’m sure I’ll be writing about that shortly. I need to actually GET to working this morning, but first some entertainment…

I got to see these fun Discovery Channel commercials while I was sick in Green Bank, but PZ Myers posted this over at Pharyngula.

I don’t know what I like more, the astronauts singing, Hawking’s “boom dee yada,” or Adam setting Jamie on fire. But yes, the world, and the universe, is a pretty awesome place. Let’s go exploring!

Also, part I of the Doctor Who season finale was *crazy* and awesome and had the long-awaited Dawkins cameo (mild SPOILER alert):

It was classic Dawkins, really. I cheered.

P.S. Big thanks to my college buddies who came to visit me this weekend, it was AWESOME! :-D

Categories: science
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How will we make fun of the bullshit now?

June 23, 2008 · Leave a Comment

We’ll miss George Carlin, the most irreverently brilliant bastard of our time.

And this and this and this and this!

Categories: general
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Sicky in Green Bank: Updates on Darwin, napping, and Christian presidents

June 21, 2008 · Leave a Comment

Greetings the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank! I’m out here for a week working hard with collaborators on our awesome low-frequency radio astronomy project, when I fall victim to some weird cold virus. I lost a whole day in bed, flipping between the Sci-Fi Channel and Discovery Channel when I wasn’t sleeping, and slowly recovered today, such that I could actually sit at my computer and catch up on email while I sipped on some fabulous, home-made chicken soup. Other than encouraging you to check out the link above to learn more about this fabulous scientific haven, here are some things that piqued my interest today:

From July 1, 2008 to December 31, 2009, biologists will be celebrating the 150th anniversary of “Origin of the Species.” Olivia Judson of the New York Times writes a fabulous piece about the celebration dubbed “Darwinmania.” It’ll be one big science-bash as 2009 is also the International Year of Astronomy!

I miss the big office couch at the astronomy department. No matter what time of day or night it was, a good nap on that couch could really kick the brain into gear. The Boston Globe offers some science-based hints on napping, why it’s good for us mammals, and how to do it properly.

Now for some “yick” a blog that I stumbled upon called “We Want a Christian President.” This particular blogger has no shame in the fact that he/she wants a president that bows to the right-wing conservative Christian agenda “…Not because we want a theocracy, but because we want a God-honoring democratic republic.” Say what-now? In this God-honoring republic of yours, do non-believers and believers of other faiths really get any representation? I didn’t even bothering trying to post any comments on this blog, since the latest post which calls for support of a federal marriage amendment ends with “No presumptuous comments accusing me of religious bigotry and hatred will be posted. Those are just so boring and intellectually dull.” My apologies to all those that I have bored with my intellectual rhetoric on individual rights. Silly me. Sir, or Madam, your ignorance baffles me.

The blogger is clearly pro-Huckabee, and as a Paul supporter I understand the woes of having to vote for the lesser of two-evils or trying to bolster a third party vote, I have entirely different reasons. But here’s an argument I never heard before, in response to Obama’s allegedly elitist statements a while back:


This sounds like something straight out of a secular humanist strategy book: the deification of government. When government cares for all our needs like a loving, “heavenly” father (or mother—let’s be politically correct), God can be relegated to a small, comfortable, controllable “box.”

Okay, I’m as anti-big-government as the next libertarian, but huh-what? Secular Humanist strategy book? How come I missed out on that! Darn, I need to find one of those. Seriously, this blogger has not heard the notion that getting secularists together is something like herding cats. We are far, far away from a strategy my friend. And if that was indeed a secular strategy, I’d be the first one up in arms against it! Why do we need a loving, protecting, parental figure, whether it be god or government, anyway? All I can say to this is, yick. But hey, if this person is right and McCain can’t rally the conservative Christian base, then that’s one score for the anti-war crowd.

Now that I’m all fired up, it’s back to work. And looking forward to all the fun podcasts bound to come out of “The Amaz!ing Meeting 6” in Vegas!

Categories: astronomy · science
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The Naked Truth

June 16, 2008 · Leave a Comment

The TSA is expanding the use of millimeter wave and x-ray machines in airports as a security measure. As if we didn’t feel violated enough taking off sweatshirts, belts, shoes, etc. Here is the story I first saw, with a disturbing test-image and a healthy amount of dissent in the comments section. However, the TSA blog has a rebuttal, with actual images of what a TSA officer will see. To me, they aren’t much better! The real questions I have is, does it actually make us safer? What has happened to make these extra steps necessary? Is this only to make us feel safer? Or, more doubtfully, to make us feel more scared?

Sometimes I’m just going to have to fly for work, and I’m just going to have to deal with it. It’s hard to say, but what more can I do? As creepy as the implications are, a little faceless, black and white nudity can’t hurt too much. I was surprised, however, to see Albuquerque on the list of airports scheduled to receive one. Huh? What’s going on out there, it’s seems so quiet and peaceful! I guess it’s close to Los Alamos. Also, the TSA officers in Albuquerque are the nicest, most professional ones I have ever come across, when a few years ago I accidentally left a Swiss Army Knife in my carry-on baggage. They were *so* sweet and understanding! Usually officers look annoyed and bored, so that was a sweet relief.

Categories: general
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Gay Marriage on NPR

June 16, 2008 · 3 Comments

Same-sex couples in California can finally get married today, right at the height of wedding season! NPR ran a story on the conflict over gay rights as these marriages are taking place. And I can’t help but feel torn. I believe totally and absolutely that gay and lesbian couples deserve the same legal rights as heterosexual couples. And I firmly believe that discrimination based on sexual preference is morally wrong. But I can also sympathize with private businesses and their right to refuse service to whomever they want. Forcing a business to not discriminate, thinking of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, may seem like the proper thing to do, but it doesn’t actually weed out the bigotry. That melts away with successive generations, and I would like to think that businesses who do engage in discrimination will fall “behind the times” and lose business by their bigotry. But maybe we aren’t that far along yet.

Take for example the wedding photographer who refused to do business with the lesbian couple in the story:

Willock, in the midst of planning her wedding to her girlfriend, sent the photography company an e-mail request to shoot the commitment ceremony. Elaine Huguenin, who owns the company with her husband, replied: “We do not photograph same-sex weddings. But thanks for checking out our site! Have a great day!”

Willock filed a complaint, and at the hearing she explained how she felt.

“A variety of emotions,” she said, holding back tears. “There was a shock and anger and fear. … We were planning a very happy day for us, and we’re being met with hatred. That’s how it felt.”

The couple successfully sued, and the company may go out of business. Although it was simply insensitive to give that reason for not doing the shoot, and it was stupid since they opened themselves up for a lawsuit, I don’t think that suing is the proper answer. Speak out against the bigotry, but you can’t legally force them to photograph a wedding that they don’t agree with. That just stinks.

Another lesbian couple could not hold their ceremony at a pavilion on land owned by a Methodist church. Again, I believe that they can be bigoted on their own property. In the lawsuit that ensued, the church lost their tax-exempt status on that land. Now that makes me smile as an atheist who is opposed to the fact that religious organizations do not have to pay property taxes, but this isn’t the way to do that.

I wish so deeply that you could beat it into the heads of everyone in this country that being gay is not a sin, that same-sex couples are just like any other, that bigotry is wrong. But you cannot. You cannot convince without logical, rational discourse, and even then, some will be close-minded. And I find it hard to swallow that we can flush our bigotry using the legal system. Such poisonous sentiments will find a new way to show themselves when one avenue of discrimination is closed.

Unfortunately, the property rights and free speech right of bigots must be protected like the rights of any other. These ideals were essential in the early days of our country, and we must protect them, even in such circumstances. We do that even when it’s difficult. In the marketplace of ideas, I still have hope that the junk will settle out, and only the tolerant will survive.

Categories: general
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Questions about Theology

June 16, 2008 · Leave a Comment

So I was thinking this morning about religion, I’m not sure why I was thinking so such about it. It may have to do with the fact that I was at a covenant ceremony (read: non-wedding) at a church yesterday, but it was a fun, open, fantastic ceremony in a Unitarian Universalist church… so a far cry from my stodgy religious upbringing. I was thinking about my education in the Catholic school system in New York, and how most of that education was secular, and tried to make nice with science. Biological evolution was not a problem, except for this one 90-year-old nun who refused to believe that man came from ape. In fact, I was assigned to read “Origin of the Species” as summer reading as an entering freshman in high school for the science program. Oh yeah, and there WAS a special science program! The only time there was a conflict between science and religion was when our AP biology teacher wanted to have a frank discussion about birth control, so he shut the classroom door in order to do that, lest a nun walk by. And that was less science and more his personally felt moral obligation to properly educate a group of intelligent young women about safe sex, so it seemed to me. (Looking back, I think he’s a hero.) But really, I was spoiled. Science and religion were taught as if they got along perfectly, it was only later in life that I questioned that.

But what intrigues me is a secular look at my religion classes. Those I took for granted. The historical accuracy of the Bible, I took for granted. Teachings got only slightly more critical as we got older. After all, Adam and Eve and the creation in seven days bit doesn’t fit with science, but that’s okay since it’s just a myth told by ancient peoples to explain what they didn’t understood. Sorry kids! But it *does* communicate some basic moral, theological truths, so goes my Catholic teaching. But Jesus and the disciples and the Virgin Mary and all that, that was real. That was historical. There was never any questioning of that. I now can’t quite remember where in the Bible chronologically they myth became history, but it did, whether it was gradually throughout the Old Testament or suddenly with the New Testament. (Probably the former, now that I reflect on it again.) It was only recently that I was introduced to the notion, even after being an atheist for years now, that Jesus may have never existed, that even his life was all a myth. It gives me a jolt to think that such things were just accepted by me, by virtue of the fact that it was taught since I was a child*. Note, this happens with non-theological “facts,” too. I can’t call them to mind now, but sometimes a random thought will hit hit me where some fundamental assumption about the world that I held is clearly and rationally wrong. It makes you wonder what else is floating about our own heads from childhood.

Anywho, I don’t know whether or not Jesus was a historical figure. But I know that there is doubt. Maybe there is some vague truth hidden there, some preacher that got real famous, and the mythology was tacked on. Or maybe good-old Paul did make it all up. I don’t know.

I think that the belief system I just described, my early belief system, describes more or less the type of religion that is followed by the majority of people in the modern society. It’s a topic for another day how harmful even that is, but I want to stop and focus for a moment on the fact that most religious people are not out to undermine science and reason in the way that a small minority of fundamentalists are. (No, I don’t know the actual number of “small.”) It may even be fair to say that if given the fullest explanations and reasons possible, most Americans who now say that they reject evolution might be swayed. It just may be that positive.

Hmmm… this whole thing sounded more coherent in my head, so I apologize for the rambling!

* Okay, I thought of one finally. When you hold a seashell to your ear, it makes a whooshing noise like the ocean. Someone told me, I don’t remember who, when I was a child that, of course you couldn’t hear the ocean, but it’s the blood circulating in your ears! Being a small child fascinated by science, I ate up that “scientific” explanation. And one day not long ago, I put a seashell to my ear and fondly remembered the explanation… and realized how utterly nonsensical it was! Here comes the science…

Categories: science
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Fark will soon need a "Louisiana" tag…

June 13, 2008 · 2 Comments

The children of Louisiana may now be deprived of a sound scientific education. The creationists are at it again. When ID was struck down in Dover, they shifted their focus to “academic freedom” and “teaching the controversy.” That is, they take their own personal disagreement with certain sound science, such as evolution and human origins, and try to force it down students throats as if there is a scientific controversy. However, the scientific community at large does not have a problem with Darwinian evolution, although the details and mechanisms are still highly debated. Louisiana is the first state to successfully pass this garbage in their State House, SB 733 with a vote of 94-3. It is expected to pass in the State Senate next. This will allow “supplementary materials” or most likely, non-scientific propaganda, into the science classroom. Impressionable students may have their critical thinking skills subverted by nonsense, and wishful thinking will be substituted in for scientific fact. It’s despicable.

Note, they aren’t focusing on physics or chemistry or astronomy or plant classifications… but only those aspects of science that oppose fundamentalist Christian theology have supplementary materials necessary. Maybe it’s time for the Pastafarians (thanks Seth!) to step in and demand that the theory of beer volcanoes be included as supplementary material in geology lessons?

Beware, says Carl (thanks to PZ Myers for the reminder):

Categories: education · science
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Science is Pretty

June 12, 2008 · 3 Comments

From the upcoming Skepchicks calendar…

Pretty! If any of my friends want to order Skepdudes for me, feel free ;-)

Categories: astronomy
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It's like going to the zoo!

June 12, 2008 · Leave a Comment

Almost…

I love my coworkers and their amazing links. You can watch a live feed of a momma lion and her 10 day old (as of today) cubs in a zoo from a Norwegian website. We caught bath time and feeding this morning… they are so cute!!

Categories: fun
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Ghost Hunters

June 12, 2008 · Leave a Comment

So I finally sat down to watch part of an episode of the SciFi Channel’s Ghost Hunters. I had dismissed it as silly and not yet bothered, but thought that it might be beneficial to give it a shot. Okay, now I tried to be fair, I put that out of my mind and thought that maybe they really did spend most of their time being all dramatic but not finding any real evidence at the end. Boy, was I wrong. Where do I even begin?

I caught the end of the first half, where they were analyzing their tapes from some haunted place with a soldier ghost story. The IR camera (thermal imaging) showed a human-like figure dimly on the screen, with what was described as a Civil War military hat. What as the “shoulder” of the figure was very hot, the rest of the figure was dim. This figure was unmistakably human! Or was it? It may have been a case of paredolia. The human brain is very good at putting patterns to randomness. The hot spot may have been something real, but it had no sure shape, so who knows that that was. Such a bright thing may have had some effect on the image around it, that’s not unusual in image analysis. It could have been lots of things that I as a non-camera person wouldn’t know that these guys could investigate. But instead, the took off on the premise that it WAS a human figure and tried to recreate their situation, looking for reflections. Not finding any, they concluded that it was most likely a ghostly apparition. Buuuuh? They had made up their minds beforehand and when one test didn’t disprove their hypothesis, they accepted it! My opinion of their supposed skepticism was immediately lowered.

The next story involved a supposed medium, or psychic, and some haunted happenings in the woods around his house. The guys sent off to the woods were amusing, finding nothing other than spiders, a deer, and a cat. The two guys in charge interviewed the medium while their cameras recorded. The psychic tried to reach into each of their minds, while they tried to “deflect” his advances. I was thoroughly unimpressed. The old man spewed the same old drivel that would apply to *anyone*… “There was a farm house (pause) but it wasn’t yours… you had a traumatic experience as a child… someone you were close to died…” Wow. Anyone who can’t find a yes to most of these, even us skeptics, is lying. The voice over of the guys explains how 95% of their experiences with psychics are junk and turn out to not seem real. So these guys must be real skeptics, right? Yet they eat up this man’s drivel two minutes later, marveling at how *right* he was! At this point, I as yelling at the TV.

They left that quickly, and focused the rest of the episode on a weird action on their thermal imaging camera during this experience, and I won’t even get into that silliness. Some memorable quotes include “I use my scientific method, but I respect his psychic method” and “Energy is heat, right? So it’s all the same.” The guys doing the “analysis” were already told what the first guys thought was on the image, so they were mentally prepared to see what they were “supposed” to see. No attempt at objectivity. Argh. I couldn’t even watch the end. It was so bad. They fake skepticism to con viewers into thinking they might be on to something real! Most people watch without much thought, being entertained but slowly having their rational thought subverted by this nonsense. There is also the threat that impressionable kiddies are watching this, believing that *this* is skepticism and science! I would know, the SciFi channel which gave me such gems as Stargate and the Twilight Zone, also sucked me into Sightings when I was young and impressionable.

Argh, such things anger me, but I can’t help but wonder, do these guys know that they are subverting rational thought? Do they think they are harmlessly entertaining? Do they really believe what they say they believe? In the last case, well then I have some sympathy. Otherwise, I still reserve the right to be indignant!

I would love to invite these guys over to a spooky-looking house, with all kinds of back-story on hauntings, made-up of course, and see what they find. And at the end, when they tell me they have “evidence” of the hauntings, I can go, ha! FOOLED YOU!

I prefer Mythbusters any day. Sure, they aren’t always the most scientific, and they seem more interested in blowing things up on some days, but they are downright skeptical of their myths, explore multiple avenues, and wait for things to be proven before declaring confirmation!

Ghost Hunters, you offer nothing but useless pseudoscience. *Cue Ghostbusters’ theme song* I ain’t afraid of no ghosts!

*UPDATE* This looks like some real ghost hunting. I haven’t read through the whole website, so make up your own mind. It’s probably considered “fringe science” but the apparent skepticism and thoroughness are encouraging.

Categories: skeptic
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