The term ‘New Age’ is becoming more common. When I think of new age things, I think of magnetized wrist bands with healing power, healing crystals and phony spiritualism. They are all things that put mind over matter and they fall under pseudoscience.

One specific new age belief that really bothers me is the belief that intuition is better than rationalism and the scientific method. There are too many cases where our intuition is wrong, that we really can’t trust it all the time.

Another example of this is in the movie “What the bleep do we know?” Here, quantum mechanics is hijacked by pseudo-scientists that link it to new age thinking. They steal all of the scientific terms, but leave behind all the science.

Why hasn’t the term new age been claimed by science and reason? Shouldn’t an age of reason be the new age? I hope that someday our world will become one.

I saw this bumper sticker today and thought that it was worthy of having its picture taken. The sticker reads: “Growing the economy is shrinking the ecosystem.” I just thought that it was funning being on a Lexus SUV.

Here is a debate from Iraqi TV between a physicist and someone who thinks the world is flat. It’s pretty funny.

I have a feeling that it might be fake. Since I don’t understand the language, the captions could have been edited to say anything.

Here are a few highlights:

In response to why we see the top of an approaching ship first:

“The eye …. so far, no doctor has succeeded in understanding how the eye works.”

“we see with only half the eye. If we split the iris into half, we see with the upper half things that are far and with the lower half thins that are near.”

He says that scientists don’t know how the eye works, but he thinks he does?

On a full solar eclipse:

“This is because the moon is half the size of the sun . The moon’s diameter is 1,200,000km while that of the sun is 2,400,000km.”

“The sun circles the earth because it is smaller than the earth.”

That’s right, this blog is 100 posts old. Here are a few current stats that show some progress:

First post: August 20, 2007

Google Page Rank: 3/10

Alexa Traffic Rank: 124 057

Unique Visitors since day 1: 53 942

I have enjoyed blogging so far. It is like keeping a diary of all my ideas, but I am forced to express them well because I am sharing it with the public. I think I’m pretty much hooked on this blogging thing. I’m addicted.

Here is a video of a tour group giving biblically correct museum tours. It makes me sick how little they know about the methods of science and how they are ‘teaching’ this to innocent children. Dawkins has referred to scaring children about hellfire as child abuse. I consider these tours to be child abuse as well; they are possibly even worse than giving children nightmares about hell.

I was really surprised how passive the museum employees were. If I was an employee, I would have physically removed the ‘teachers’ from the premises.

I’ve been doing a fair amount of creationist bashing recently, and have have created a new category: “Creationist Bashing.” I don’t think that it really fits into the atheism category. Even though creationists are highly aligned with religion, I don’t consider them to be part of the argument on the existence of a divine being. Even if evolution were to be shown to be wrong, there is still no evidence for a god. This is why I don’t consider creationists to be part of the argument. They are just an easy target for a bit of occasional comedy.

Do you guys think that this is child abuse? If so, should it be punishable? I think so.

[via The Atheist Jew]

Here is a few of my favorite Dilbert quotes that I was saving in a text file while watching the two seasons of the TV show.

“I will not be pressured into having fun just because we arbitrarily use a base 10 counting system and a big round number is coming up” – on year 2000

“It seems to me that this whole charity concept is nothing but an exercise in redistribution of guilt”

“How did I end up with all this obsolete equipment, it seems to multiply”

Mom : “How did you get so distrustful”
Dilbert : “Well, I’m just guessing, but maybe it was because you lied to me about the toothfairy, then you lied to me about the easter bunny, then you lied to me about santa clause, then you lied to me about the stork brining babies”
Mom: “He knows about the stork”
Dogbert “My fault, I let him watch the nature channel and he put 2 and 2 together”
Dilber: “Now I don’t believe anything i’m told unless there’s proof”

“I’m addicted to email. My endorphins spike when I get a message. When there are no messages, loneliness and despair overcome me.”
“Have you tried sending email to yourself?”
“We don’t talk about that.”
- Dilbert and Dogbert

Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own problems.

 

John Timmer, over at ars technica, has posted a great article about explaining science to the polarized US public. It is a summary of a few talks given at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Here are a few excerpts:

“most of the presenters advocated some sort of framing of scientific communications. The frames proposed, however, often seemed to run the risk of excluding some part of the large and diverse scientific community from the frame. The two that struck me as the most powerful, however, were the most inclusive. The first came from Barbara King, who advocated separating the communication of science completely from the communication of a belief system, so that discussion could focus on scientific models and their supportive data. The other was Steve Case’s presentation of scientific exploration as giving us a reason to feel optimistic for the future. ”

“Perhaps the best way to communicate science is simply to remind people about some basics of the scientific endeavor.”

At the end of my last entry, I started to ramble about the popularization of science. This article explores a few routes for delivering science to the public.

I couldn’t agree more with the last quote above, which also happens to be the last sentence of the article. The sole thing that bugs me about public knowledge of science, is that they don’t understand the scientific method. I don’t expect people to be able to draw out a flowchart with hypotheses and theories, but it is valuable to know a little bit about it. The most important thing about science is viewing it as a method as opposed to a body of knowledge.

Link

I am gaining respect for the CBC

I generally only watch CBC for Hockey Night in Canada, and not much else. Most of their original programming is not very good. I actually don’t watch TV except for sports. That is besides the fact.

The CBC is releasing one of their upcoming shows, Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister, over p2p networks (ie Bittorrent). While this doesn’t make me forget that the CBC didn’t resign Christ Cuthbert, a great hockey commentator, it does restore some credibility by trying something new and progressive. Hopefully more of CBC’s content will be available for download in the future, so everyone go out and download this, even if you aren’t going to watch it. If this is a success, maybe we’ll have hockey games via Bittorrent sometime in the future.[via Michael Geist ]

I have just lost all respect of Ben Stein

I used to be a big fan of Win Ben Stein’s Money, mainly for his dry sense of humour. I recently found out that he is releasing a pro-creationist movie called “eXpelled.” Respect is now 0.

Check out the trailer here. It’s horrible. The comments are being moderated, so mine haven’t shown up. They are definitely being censored. Here are a few excerpts from the comments:

“About time someone steps up.”

“A few of us from our church saw a private screening in Houston and the movie is fantastic! Tell as many as you can to go opening weekend April 18th.”

“Way to go Ben. This has been going on for years. It is about time someone exposed it. Anyone who sees how DNA works cannot help but conclude that there is Intelligence.”

“I don’t understand why we just accept both theories and leave people to their own, each side feels compelled to preach and teach. Just end it. As for people being expelled from education because they don’t agree with it, thats wrong.”

The last comment really bothers me. Many people don’t understand that intelligent design is NOT a Theory. It is a hypothesis, not a Theory. Scientifically, a theory is something that has been tested and can be used to predict things. In colloquial speech, when people say “I have a theory,” they really mean “I have a hypothesis.”

This is exactly why we need more popularizers of science such as Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan. A recent xkcd comic, “Unscientific” agrees with me and portrays my point…check it out.