Skepticblog

Before I appear to do a thing so sacrilegious as to criticize Mythbusters, let me just make one point very, very clear up front: I like Mythbusters. My kids love it. I think it’s a fine show, and one of the very few that promotes good science education. It’s great to have it on television, and I dance the Macarena on tabletop in full support of their efforts. Now here’s the big “but” you’re waiting for:

In no way does Mythbusters deserve its high reputation in the skeptic community for promoting skepticism or critical thinking. It doesn’t. (continue reading…)

The mystery lights as they appear on the horizon

I’ll admit it was a pretty long time ago, like a year and a half, but a while ago I did a blog post about some mystery lights that often appear off the coast here in southern Orange County. From my house, they can be seen on many clear nights, ranging from about 180 to 190 degrees south, magnetic. They swap around a bit, and if you leave and come back ten minutes later, you may find the lights have moved one way or the other.

Closeup of the light on the right

Each object has about a half dozen very bright lights, tending toward the orange. They look like a ship only superficially. Cruise ships have many more lights, much dimmer; and cargo ships run dark with hardly any lights visible at all. So really they don’t look like a ship. They do look quite similar to oil platforms though, which tend to have bright floodlights. They are out there quite often, though I couldn’t tell you exactly how often. Not every night, but some nights, on no apparent schedule. (continue reading…)

Quite often I’ll get an email suggesting some new woo topic, and some of these are so absurd that I have to laugh and say “There’s a new one.” I got one such email last week. There is a practice called Earthing, of which I had never before heard. The idea is that you connect yourself to the Earth, usually with some sort of wiring and electrodes. The obvious result: Improved health, of course.

Why should this be expected to have any kind of therapeutic value? It’s quite simple. Here is the explanation on the Earthing Institute’s home page:

In an age of rampant chronic disease, reconnecting with the Earth’s energy beneath our very feet provides a way back to better health. We are bioelectrical beings living on an electrical planet.

I hope that clears it up. (continue reading…)

Dr. Ron McNair

Today I was in the mood for just a short post (OK, the real reason is that I’m currently vacationing in Oregon). I was relaxing and listening to music and thinking about the space program, as it’s a topic I’m currently researching. For me this is something of a convergence. I’m an old-school analog subtractive synthesis guy, as some of you may know, and enjoy the musical stylings of early synthesizer artists like Wendy Carlos and Jean-Michel Jarre. Any discussion of electronic music and the space program leads, inevitably, to Dr. Ron McNair, who, as one of the astronauts who died on the Challenger, is automatically one of my heroes.

Dr. McNair was also handy with a saxophone, and happened to be friends with Jean-Michel Jarre. Together they reasoned that Ron’s upcoming flight on STS-51 might be an ideal opportunity to accomplish a neat first: Ron would play saxophone on board the Challenger while Jarre recorded it live in session, and Jarre’s upcoming album Rendez-Vous would include the first original musical recording performed live in space. (continue reading…)

I received this from a listener. She noted the following on the website “PreventDisease.com” (quite the ironically named website):

They Just Don’t Learn: CDC Votes To Poison Children Again With Two Doses of Vaccines

Parents of children over 6 months and under 9 years beware. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is once again choosing to adopt policies which poison your children with what is now two doses of seasonal flu vaccine this fall.

So she emailed the guy the following: (continue reading…)

This is the headline of an article in the August 2010 issue of Parents magazine, with the word TOXIC highlighted in red. As you might expect, the accompanying photographs are of a family enjoying daily activities in their home from the safety of yellow hazmat suits. Shocking! Do we really live in a “toxic” world?

There has never been a better or safer time to be a human being. We live in climate controlled houses that protect us from wind, weather, and predators; we eat food that is safety tested and heavily regulated; we wear fire retardant clothing that wicks away moisture to regulate our body temperature; we have emergency services standing by to protect us from criminals, to rescue or resuscitate us, or to whisk us to a hospital; we drive cars that are basically rolling safety cells; and we have regulatory bodies and watchdog groups that constantly, round the clock, comb over every imaginable substance in the environment trying to figure out how to make things even safer. Today’s world is the safest it has ever been. No previous generation of humans has ever had it so good.

How, then, did we ever get this far without wearing hazmat suits? (continue reading…)

When recreational mathematician Martin Gardner died earlier this year, he left us a huge number of books. One of these is called Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science. In his first chapter, Gardner went into some depth on characterizing cranks. Cranks are folks whom I encounter quite frequently in my work on Skeptoid; not only from the side promoting pseudoscience, but also from the side of skeptics. I find that a few skeptics are little different methodologically from the pseudoscientists they so fervently argue against, and so I believe it’s of great value to everyone to familiarize himself with Gardner’s list.

My fellow blogger Michael Shermer wrote a column recently in Scientific American that discussed this in somewhat more detail, and if you’re not a subscriber, you can get his article online here. It rang quite true with me, so I wanted to take a look at Gardner’s thesis from the perspective of being a science outreach professional. (continue reading…)

I’m a reasonably busy dude. In addition to working full time in my role as Family Breadwinner, I host and produce (as some of you may know) the Skeptoid podcast, with weekly episodes since 2006. I also have a plethora of side projects that I manage to work in somehow: writing this blog, obviously; my video podcast inFact with Brian Dunning; ongoing development on at least two television proposals with Ryan Johnson; miscellaneous projects like the weekly Skeptoid newsletter and the odd video like Here Be Dragons or Truth Hurts; and squeezing in Skeptics in the Pub or Skeptics in the Jeep as opportunity permits. I also play as much high-level volleyball as I can. But none of those activities get priority on my calendar; that honor goes to Being a Dad. All weekend long, and every morning at breakfast, and every evening from 5:00pm on, I’m a dad. Everything else that I do has to be worked around that.

I don’t have an army of clones like Mr. Atoss, and I do not believe Lisa could consider herself a podcast widow, given my top prioritization of family time. So you might fairly ask (and many of you often do): How the heck do I manage to do all of this?? (continue reading…)

This is a frame from Westall 66: A Suburban UFO Mystery which aired on the Australian Sci-Fi Channel on June 4th. I did not get to see the show, as it has not aired in the United States as of this writing; but my educated guess is that the filmmakers were attempting to illustrate the investigative process, by eliminating possibilities. (To learn about the 1966 Westall UFO, you can check out my Skeptoid episode about it.)

Their presentation purports that there are only three possibilities to explain the UFO sighting: Hoax or hysteria; experimental aircraft; or an object of extraterrestrial origin. Actually, that’s four possibilities, since a hoax and mass hysteria are two completely different things. (continue reading…)

I’m all in favor of innovative solutions, and of doing what it takes to get there. In most cases. There are a lot of directions in which we might go that make no sense. Some may make sense in the future, but don’t appear to now, and vice versa. I wish I had a car that was free to run and had zero emissions. What am I willing to do to get there? Should I buy a Prius, which is a step in the right direction?

In terms of the ratio of dollar cost to environmental benefit, trading your existing car in for a Prius to take advantage of its marginally better mileage is probably about the worst thing you can do. A single-suspendered redneck who simply keeps his 15-year-old pickup is doing way more to protect the environment than you are. You see, any time anyone buys a new car, we are instructing that a new car be built that would not otherwise have been needed. When you consider the entire resourcing chain of every component on a new car, it’s clear that its environmental impact is significant. At the same time you order your new car, someone buys your used one, and somewhere down the line someone is sending an old clunker to the scrapyard, and another environmental impact event is created. The redneck’s higher emissions over the lifetime of the car are a drop in the bucket compared to your new car purchase. You elitist bastard. (continue reading…)