Skepticblog

The Boy Scouts of America are notorious for acting like a public institution when it’s time to collect Federal money, and for enjoying the freedoms reserved for private institutions when they feel like being bigots. Whenever the mood strikes them, they eject members regardless of their performance and their service record, for anything from being gay to being something other than Christian; and they make no excuse for it, happily citing religious discrimination as the reason. And still they continue to rake in Federal donations.

I received the following email from reader Neil Polzin: (continue reading…)

I am fully prepared to receive a bashing for being politically incorrect in today’s post, but sometimes that’s the risk you take in pointing out flawed thinking.

Over the past couple of weeks, perhaps the biggest news story has been the election in Iran, widely considered to have been fraudulent, that resulted in the re-election of hardline fundamentalist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the Presidency. Violence and rioting were the result, sending warring factions into the streets. Rumors cited the arrest of the opposing candidate, and the shutdown of the Internet and cellular networks to quash dissent.

To show solidarity, many people in other countries, especially the United States, have sported the color green, which is the color of the opposing party in Iran. One place this adoption has been quite visible is on Twitter, the Internet sensation of the year, where free services have popped up to automatically color green your avatar (the photo of yourself on your account). I’d estimate that about a quarter of my Twitter friends, at the peak, have greened their avatars. For whatever proportion of the population this sample represents, that’s an astounding amount of support.

I found the greening of avatars to be an excellent example of the importance of keeping your critical thinking on its guard 24×7. In how many greening cases was critical thinking overlooked in favor of a compelling social movement? How much do the avatar greeners really know about this Iranian political party they’re so fervently supporting? (continue reading…)

Not.

Although, if you follow the alt-med news, you may have seen an article from six months ago or so trumpeting “FDA Reluctantly Admits Mercury Fillings Have Neurotoxic Effects on Children“. Wow! So, the FDA has finally admitted that the mercury in amalgam fillings is having devastating results on our children’s health. It’s on the Internet, so it must be true.

This headline grabbed my attention, in part because I had done a Skeptoid episode debunking the silly “smoking teeth” video on YouTube, made by some anti-amalgam people. In it, they dipped an extracted tooth in water and then filmed the water vapor rising off of the tooth using a fluorescent screen; only they said it was mercury vapor, and that it represented the constant flow of mercury into your body from amalgam fillings. (Mercury vapor is far heavier than air, it wouldn’t rise, it would sink.) It was a textbook case of alarmism. (continue reading…)

So now to follow up on last week’s post about this alleged TV show that Michael Shermer and I were allegedly “guests” on. I was supposed to be the host and was giving some tests to three psychics, one of which turned out to be a character (”Shirley Ghostman”) of a UK comic named Marc Wootton, but of course I didn’t know that. For his final bit of zaniness, he channeled the spirit of actor Lee Majors who told of the afterlife (Lee Majors is not dead).

Later in the show, after “Shirley” had been “thrown out and escorted from the grounds” (so I believed), Michael and I were having our discussion, on camera, about my findings with the psychics. Suddenly the studio doors slammed open, and in ran Shirley, pushing a cart holding a bodybag! I knew that Shirley was unbalanced and belligerent, so I stood the hell back and expected that security was going to tackle him and get him out of there. No such thing happened. In fact, the film crew hardly reacted at all. Michael had not had my previous experience with Shirley, so he stepped up cheerfully and asked to see what was in the bag. After some tussling, they got it open, and there’s some guy with a desk calculator or something taped to his chest, and another to his arm: The Six Million Dollar Man. Shirley was right: Lee Majors had died, and here was the body to prove it. (continue reading…)

OK, this is weird.

Today I was invited to host an episode of a new series for a major cable network in which I was to interview and administer a test to three professional psychics. This was the first episode they’d shot, and the producers and director were really nice and cool and it had all the makings of a fun and productive day. They had located three psychics who were all game, and were fully willing to undergo the tests under controlled conditions. Moreover, the show had even secured a $50,000 prize that any psychics who passed today’s tests would be qualified to try for. I arrived fully prepared, with some detailed protocols, and a raft of properly controlled materials.

Here’s the rub. The entire day was a setup. It was a gag, with Michael Shermer and myself as the unwitting victims. (continue reading…)

The famous Traveling Salesman math puzzle is much more than just a fun game. It’s a dramatically illustrated way to understand the efficiencies involved in product distribution models. The problem works like this: Take a map and draw dozens of dots on it. The salesman’s task is to define a driving route that visits each dot, with the minimum driving distance connecting them all. He has to visit so many locations, and he wants to burn as little gas as possible. Obviously this is something that people are looking at harder than ever today.

There’s a very cool piece of freeware software that uses a genetic algorithm to solve the Traveling Salesman problem. It’s by Michael Lalena and is found at http://www.lalena.com/AI/Tsp/. Draw dozens (or hundreds) of dots, and the software will start with a random route and then refine it iteratively until it’s super efficient. It’s fun trying to stump it with a zillion dots in a pattern that appears to be hard to traverse, and then to see what a surprisingly simple curve it finds to visit them all. (continue reading…)

Recently I hit a milestone on my audio podcast Skeptoid: the 150th episode. I wanted to do something really fun, and decided a lavish broadway musical was the way to go. Normally my listeners expect 10 minutes of me talking in a dry and boring manner, so I figured this would be a fun way to surprise everyone.

The concept was a musical version of a secret meeting of the Illuminati, ruing the fact that the population has discovered alternative and faith-based everything, and thus profits are down. (continue reading…)

And here’s why.

It pisses me off because it’s the perfect microcosm of what’s wrong with television science reporting. They’re not interested in reporting good science or in educating their viewers; they’re only interested in tabloid stories. And they affix a “science” label to them. Send some horseback kooks into the woods with a megaphone and an infrared camera to look for Bigfoot, show it on the Science Channel, and that’s what passes for science programming in the United States. The obvious result? We have a population who believes that communication with ghosts represents the leading edge of brain research, that multilevel marketing schemes are a way to get rich, and that a mail order gadget (suppressed by the oil companies) will make your car run for free. (continue reading…)

I have a very good friend who is from Eastern Europe, a country in the former Eastern Bloc where gypsies roam and belief in the paranormal flourishes. It’s little wonder, for a country that took its first steps out of a modern Dark Age only twenty some years ago, that its people are deeply accustomed to folk wisdom and traditional healing methods. In a nation whose healthcare system was decades behind the world and offered few tools of value, you often were better off staying home and applying a poultice.

One night we were out for drinks and were discussing a few Skeptoid episodes where I’d discussed various non-scientific alternatives to healthcare. Soon, he’d had enough. And he told a story that went about like this: (continue reading…)

In my continuing series of tying up loose ends and presenting the solutions to mysteries introduced in past entries and apparently forgotten, this week we’re going to answer the question that I know you’ve all been losing sleep over. Which way does Moroni (the statue atop most Mormon temples) point his trumpet?

Many of you took up arms, in the form of compasses, and went to battle. Teams of skeptics descended upon Mormon temples and took careful sightings of Moroni, intent on discovering the secret hidden from outsiders. You see, there’s been a subculture of conspiracy surrounding the direction Moroni points among church members and church outsiders for some time. It must have some deep, dark meaning. (continue reading…)