I found out about this from The Skeptic's Dictionary Facebook posting. The Centre For Inquiry Canada started their "Extraordinary Claims" advertising campaign a couple of days ago, on the 19th. Here is a video from CFI which explains the basis of the message:
Educational initiatives like this are important and meaningful, and the fact that the campaign pays tribute to the late Carl Sagan doesn't hurt, either. On the assumption that critical thinking can't be started too early, Skeptical Dictionary has a list of resources for younger readers that all geek parents (or the parents of geek children) should find useful. Applying the principle of seeking extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims is a great place to start.
Showing posts with label Skepticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Skepticism. Show all posts
Monday, November 22, 2010
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Happy Creation Week!
Quite aside from any personally important anniversaries that might have occurred yesterday on October 23, it is important to mark the Judeo-Christian Day of Creation itself, as determined centuries ago by Archbishop James Ussher, a noted biblical scholar 350 years ago.
Although this chronology has fallen out of favour in any mainstream theological sense, and is totally irrelevant in any science-based view of the world, it (or its variations) remain popular with young-Earth creationists like convicted criminal and conspiracy theorist Kent Hovind, the anti-evolution Discovery Institute, or the biblical-literalism promoting Creation Museum. Ussher based his chronology on a synthesis of the most current scientific and historical scholarship available at the time; the explosion of knowledge since then has made science and history incompatible with a literal reading of any of the many versions of the Judeo-Christian bible. It is ironic that those who uphold young-Earth creation ideas can only do so by ignoring Ussher's approach of reconciling the most current science with Biblical scholarship.
For this week only, N1S has been redesignated "the only begotten son", and during the course of the week, there are various significant events to celebrate:
Yesterday on October 23: God creates light ("Let there be light!")[Gen 1:3] The light is divided from the darkness, and "day" and "night" are named. Although yesterday was a Saturday, 4004 BC October 23 fell on a Sunday.
Today, the second day: God creates a firmament ("Let a firmament be...!")[Gen 1:6–7] The firmament is named "skies".
Monday: God commands the waters below to be gathered together in one place, and dry land to appear [Gen 1:9–10]. "Earth" and "sea" are named. God commands the earth to bring forth grass, plants, and fruit-bearing trees. Botanists rejoice!
Tuesday: God creates lights in the firmament [Gen 1:14–15] to separate light from darkness and to mark days, seasons and years. Two great lights are made (most likely the Sun and Moon, but not named), and the stars (including the array of objects ranging from GRB090423 to Andromeda -- all of which in a young-Earth view would have been created with light and radiation already in transit because as we all know, God delights in confounding scientists and leading human thinkers to untruths.
Wednesday: God commands the sea to "teem with living creatures", and birds to fly across the heavens [Gen 1:20–21]. He creates birds and sea creatures, and commands them to be fruitful and multiply. Biologists (particularly marine biologists) should rejoice today. Suggested celebratory dinner to include shrimp. Or better yet, squid.
Thursday, Day 6: God commands the land to bring forth living creatures [Gen 1:24–25]. He makes wild beasts, livestock and reptiles. He then creates humanity in His "image" and "likeness" [Gen 1:26–28]. Humanity, or at least the first two individuals are told to "be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it." The totality of creation is described by God as "very good." Thursday night, we are having ribs! As noted previously, October 23 in 4004 BC fell on a Sunday, which would have placed Day 6 on the first Friday after Creation, causing the Sabbath to fall on Saturday, just as it does in the Jewish tradition.
Although this chronology has fallen out of favour in any mainstream theological sense, and is totally irrelevant in any science-based view of the world, it (or its variations) remain popular with young-Earth creationists like convicted criminal and conspiracy theorist Kent Hovind, the anti-evolution Discovery Institute, or the biblical-literalism promoting Creation Museum. Ussher based his chronology on a synthesis of the most current scientific and historical scholarship available at the time; the explosion of knowledge since then has made science and history incompatible with a literal reading of any of the many versions of the Judeo-Christian bible. It is ironic that those who uphold young-Earth creation ideas can only do so by ignoring Ussher's approach of reconciling the most current science with Biblical scholarship.
For this week only, N1S has been redesignated "the only begotten son", and during the course of the week, there are various significant events to celebrate:
Yesterday on October 23: God creates light ("Let there be light!")[Gen 1:3] The light is divided from the darkness, and "day" and "night" are named. Although yesterday was a Saturday, 4004 BC October 23 fell on a Sunday.
Today, the second day: God creates a firmament ("Let a firmament be...!")[Gen 1:6–7] The firmament is named "skies".
Monday: God commands the waters below to be gathered together in one place, and dry land to appear [Gen 1:9–10]. "Earth" and "sea" are named. God commands the earth to bring forth grass, plants, and fruit-bearing trees. Botanists rejoice!
Tuesday: God creates lights in the firmament [Gen 1:14–15] to separate light from darkness and to mark days, seasons and years. Two great lights are made (most likely the Sun and Moon, but not named), and the stars (including the array of objects ranging from GRB090423 to Andromeda -- all of which in a young-Earth view would have been created with light and radiation already in transit because as we all know, God delights in confounding scientists and leading human thinkers to untruths.
Wednesday: God commands the sea to "teem with living creatures", and birds to fly across the heavens [Gen 1:20–21]. He creates birds and sea creatures, and commands them to be fruitful and multiply. Biologists (particularly marine biologists) should rejoice today. Suggested celebratory dinner to include shrimp. Or better yet, squid.
Thursday, Day 6: God commands the land to bring forth living creatures [Gen 1:24–25]. He makes wild beasts, livestock and reptiles. He then creates humanity in His "image" and "likeness" [Gen 1:26–28]. Humanity, or at least the first two individuals are told to "be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it." The totality of creation is described by God as "very good." Thursday night, we are having ribs! As noted previously, October 23 in 4004 BC fell on a Sunday, which would have placed Day 6 on the first Friday after Creation, causing the Sabbath to fall on Saturday, just as it does in the Jewish tradition.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Summer Solstice Blues Averted!
The summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere occurred a couple of days ago on June 21 -- longest day of the year here, and of course for the Southern Hemisphere, the shortest. I always feel a twinge on June 21, because the nights start getting longer again. But this year, I had something new to think about -- in the lead up to June 21, a number of people sent me the following e-mail:
The e-mail came with a photo:
The photo itself seems to have been inspired by the sunset on Tatooine sequence in the first-ever Star Wars movie (Episode 4 - A New Hope). It is, as you might expect, a product of the photoshopper's art, and not at all based ion reality. (Did you see two suns in the sky on June 21, or on any of the 11 days leading up to it??) The HTML in the e-mail has embedded text which reads "Fun & Info @ Keralites.net". Keralites.net actually exists, and appears to be a site promoting the state of Kerala, which is in India. Clicking on a couple of links led to dead ends, so it doesn't look like keralites.net has any significant content that I want to be looking for.
Notwithstanding the fact that I received this e-mail from respected sources, the content is total crap. (You really didn't see two suns in the sky on June 21, did you??)
What I find interesting is that people who are knowledgeable and canny are still taken in by junk like this, probably because the sky and astronomical matters in general are increasingly foreign to urban people.
Snopes, as usual, was right on top of this one. The following snippet is my favourite piece of their article:
The disconnect with the night sky in the majority of people in our modern society can likely be attributable, at least in part, to artificial lighting which makes it impossible for us to see the sky clearly at night.
But, whatever the source of the disconnect, one consequence of it is that nonsense like the "Aderoid" story gets circulated. And even more egregiously, the seeds are sown for the credulous to be taken in by more dangerous nonsense like Zecharia Sitchin's modern attempt to revive the lunacy of Immanuel Velikovsky and Erich von Daniken. Sitchin's books are likely one of the elements driving the belief in an apocalypse in 2012, a belief sufficiently widespread that NASA felt compelled to put up an educational web page about it.
This year, I spent a quiet summer solstice with my family, under a sky with only one sun. Nothing potentially world ending happened, unless you count my inability to locate my favourite chip dip.
Please watch this on 21st June
SHARE THIS WITH YOUR FRIENDS, AS NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE IT AGAIN. Two Suns on 21th June 2010
21st June - the Whole World is waiting for.............
Star Aderoid will be the brightest in the sky, starting 10 June. It will look as large as the sun from naked eye. This will culminate on 21stjune when the star comes within 34.65M miles of the earth. Be sure to watch the sky on june. 21 at 12:30 pm. It will look like the earth has 2 suns.!!
The next time Aderoid may come this close is in 2287
The e-mail came with a photo:
The photo itself seems to have been inspired by the sunset on Tatooine sequence in the first-ever Star Wars movie (Episode 4 - A New Hope). It is, as you might expect, a product of the photoshopper's art, and not at all based ion reality. (Did you see two suns in the sky on June 21, or on any of the 11 days leading up to it??) The HTML in the e-mail has embedded text which reads "Fun & Info @ Keralites.net". Keralites.net actually exists, and appears to be a site promoting the state of Kerala, which is in India. Clicking on a couple of links led to dead ends, so it doesn't look like keralites.net has any significant content that I want to be looking for.
Notwithstanding the fact that I received this e-mail from respected sources, the content is total crap. (You really didn't see two suns in the sky on June 21, did you??)
What I find interesting is that people who are knowledgeable and canny are still taken in by junk like this, probably because the sky and astronomical matters in general are increasingly foreign to urban people.
Snopes, as usual, was right on top of this one. The following snippet is my favourite piece of their article:
An object as large as a star approaching the Earth would not suddenly appear at a particular hour of a given day and then be gone; if would be visible over an extended period of time.
If a star were truly about to pass within 35 million miles of Earth, the preparations we'd be undertaking would be to get ready to meet our makers and not to marvel at the beauty of the phenomenon, as the results would be catastrophic. By way of comparison, the Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun, while the planet Mercury orbits the Sun at an average distance of 36 million miles. If a star comparable to our Sun were to travel within 34.65 million miles of the Earth, our planet would quickly become like Mercury: a barren, lifeless, deep-fried hunk of rock.
The disconnect with the night sky in the majority of people in our modern society can likely be attributable, at least in part, to artificial lighting which makes it impossible for us to see the sky clearly at night.
But, whatever the source of the disconnect, one consequence of it is that nonsense like the "Aderoid" story gets circulated. And even more egregiously, the seeds are sown for the credulous to be taken in by more dangerous nonsense like Zecharia Sitchin's modern attempt to revive the lunacy of Immanuel Velikovsky and Erich von Daniken. Sitchin's books are likely one of the elements driving the belief in an apocalypse in 2012, a belief sufficiently widespread that NASA felt compelled to put up an educational web page about it.
This year, I spent a quiet summer solstice with my family, under a sky with only one sun. Nothing potentially world ending happened, unless you count my inability to locate my favourite chip dip.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Demonic Pokemon, Pokemonic Demon
Regular readers of this blog (all six of you) will know that I am the father of a bright ten year old, who being a ten year old is subject to all the whims and fads of his peer group. For a (fairly long) while, one of those fads was a card game called Pokemon (link here to Wikipedia entry) -- a game whose arcane intricacy I never figured out. Additionally, there was a television show. And merchandise. Oh yes, merchandise -- enough lunch boxes and knapsacks and figurines and stuffed animals and all kinds of other (expensive) goodies, all designed to separate the child's parent's money from the child's parent. While the game and its surrounding hype were annoying mass media junk, the concept as a whole had a certain elegance in its exploitation of obsessive-compulsive “collect ‘em all” tendencies in children. Not that I would have any understanding of obsessive-compulsive “collect ‘em all” tendencies.
So you can imagine my horror when I learned that by allowing my son to have exposure to Pokemon cards and Pokemon paraphernalia, I have made it possible for him to learn how to enter into the world of witchcraft, how to cast spells, how to use psychic phenomena, how to work supernatural powers against his enemies , and worst of all, how to fantasy role play! I guess it is because "everything in life is real" that I need to take this seriously. Or perhaps not.
The list of Pokemon bad things begins at around 1:15. As a parent, I am pretty concerned about my son needing to work supernatural powers against his enemies. In his one experience with a bully, he was miserable for weeks because he didn't want to punch the other kid, which I am sorry to say would have been my response. He finally got the other kid to stop by talking to him about it, and convincing the other kid through reason that the harassment needed to stop. But I can see how with access to supernatural powers, he would have totally just zapped the other kid instead of applying will and courage and resolve to deal with this problem. Because kids would do that, when they aren't pumping their friends full of bullets with their handguns.
I also had issues with the logic behind why the Pokemon concept was both as corrupting as he says, and was also as effective a training tool as he says. If the latter were true, I would have expected to have absorbed enough of this knowledge during hours of watching Pokemon with my son to have the ability to use this methodology to make myself a superstar of corporate training. The fact that I am not an incredibly wealthy corporate training guru should tell you something.
In order to assuage my concerns, I hauled N1S (Number 1 Son) in front of the monitor, played back the video and watched his reaction, which went from basically neutral to astonishment to outright hostility. His response -- "He's crazy. I know the difference between fantasy and reality. I would never shoot my friends with a real gun. This guy is really stupid."
So, there you have it, from a ten (well, technically almost eleven) year old boy: "This guy is really stupid". I can't express it better myself. I wonder if this guy knows Pat Robertson? They surely belong together.
The truly sad thing about this are the people in the audience, who have all apparently turned off their capacity for critical thinking and for asking questions. Around about the mention of "witchcraft", I would have been walking out. Demagogues of this ilk have existed in every age, but their power comes from those who follow unthinkingly, or who remain silent in the face of nonsense.
So you can imagine my horror when I learned that by allowing my son to have exposure to Pokemon cards and Pokemon paraphernalia, I have made it possible for him to learn how to enter into the world of witchcraft, how to cast spells, how to use psychic phenomena, how to work supernatural powers against his enemies , and worst of all, how to fantasy role play! I guess it is because "everything in life is real" that I need to take this seriously. Or perhaps not.
The list of Pokemon bad things begins at around 1:15. As a parent, I am pretty concerned about my son needing to work supernatural powers against his enemies. In his one experience with a bully, he was miserable for weeks because he didn't want to punch the other kid, which I am sorry to say would have been my response. He finally got the other kid to stop by talking to him about it, and convincing the other kid through reason that the harassment needed to stop. But I can see how with access to supernatural powers, he would have totally just zapped the other kid instead of applying will and courage and resolve to deal with this problem. Because kids would do that, when they aren't pumping their friends full of bullets with their handguns.
I also had issues with the logic behind why the Pokemon concept was both as corrupting as he says, and was also as effective a training tool as he says. If the latter were true, I would have expected to have absorbed enough of this knowledge during hours of watching Pokemon with my son to have the ability to use this methodology to make myself a superstar of corporate training. The fact that I am not an incredibly wealthy corporate training guru should tell you something.
In order to assuage my concerns, I hauled N1S (Number 1 Son) in front of the monitor, played back the video and watched his reaction, which went from basically neutral to astonishment to outright hostility. His response -- "He's crazy. I know the difference between fantasy and reality. I would never shoot my friends with a real gun. This guy is really stupid."
So, there you have it, from a ten (well, technically almost eleven) year old boy: "This guy is really stupid". I can't express it better myself. I wonder if this guy knows Pat Robertson? They surely belong together.
The truly sad thing about this are the people in the audience, who have all apparently turned off their capacity for critical thinking and for asking questions. Around about the mention of "witchcraft", I would have been walking out. Demagogues of this ilk have existed in every age, but their power comes from those who follow unthinkingly, or who remain silent in the face of nonsense.
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