Fighting Gullibility with Sarcasm, 6 days a week
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For some of the most fundamental aspects of life, it's uncertain whether or not evolution was constrained . The question has great significance with regards to the possibilities for extraterrestrial life. I grew up watching Lost in Space and The Invaders and the original Star Trek , and later The X Files and Star Trek: The Next Generation and Doctor Who . But while those classic shows piqued my…
Dear Readers: This is to let you know of some upcoming changes. Some of you might know I also write over at Substack , and over there have focused mainly on writing, fiction, storytelling, and how stories and mythology have woven their way through history. I've noticed that in the last year or two, this site (and Blogger in general) has been swamped with bots and AI scrapers, and I think it's time…
Don't worry, the techbros tell us. AI is gonna be awesome. Look at how much it can do, how fast it's improving. At the same time, the scoffers tell us that okay, maybe it's pretty impressive, but keep in mind it's just completely deterministic software, and its failings happen mainly because it's been trained on questionable input. You hear the phrase "garbage in, garbage out" pretty frequently,…
Three years ago, I wrote here at Skeptophilia about the scary Cascadia Subduction Zone , which is capable of enormous earthquakes and tsunamis -- and which, unfortunately, lies right off the coast of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon. A subduction zone is a region along which two plates are coming together, forcing one underneath the other. Because rocks experience a high degree of…
In my Critical Thinking classes, I did a unit on statistics and data, and how you tell if a measurement is worth paying attention to. One of the first things to consider, I told them, is whether a particular piece of data is accurate or merely precise -- two words that in common parlance are used interchangeably. In science, though, they don't mean the same thing. A piece of equipment is said to…
In my AP Biology class, we did a lab that involved extracting chlorophyll from spinach leaves. The first step was to grind the leaves into a paste with a bit of solvent, which we did the old-fashioned way using a mortar and pestle. The instructions said to add a "small amount of fine sand" to the leaves (to act as an abrasive, facilitating the breakup of the tough cell walls), and one of my…
In somewhat the same vein as yesterday's post, which was about the capacity of subsonic standing waves to induce the sensations we often associate with a haunting, today we have: a way to pick paranormal messages out of ambient (and random) noise. You've probably heard about the idea of electronic voice phenomena , which was popularized as a ghost-hunting method by Latvian paranormal researcher…
A point I've made here more than once is that my doubting many claims of the paranormal isn't because I think it's necessarily impossible, but because our sensory-interpretive systems are so fundamentally flawed. I mean, they work well enough , for most of us most of the time. But not only do we have the capacity to miss a great deal of what's going on around us -- as the famous experiment in…
Our capacity for seeing patterns is absolutely critical. It's easy to see how survival in a risky world could hinge on noticing clues in the environment, then putting them together correctly. The key, though, is the word correctly . When you have a built-in mechanism for interpreting sensory cues and recognizing danger, it can easily go awry. But -- and here's the most important point -- in…
One of the difficulties with discouraging bogus claims of the paranormal is the profit motive. A lot of it, of course, is that the money that stands to be made can be significant. There's not only the possibility of writing about alleged supernatural encounters, and/or making films about them, there's also paranormal tourism -- and I'm not just talking about the "ghost walks" that happen pretty…
