At the end of each year (on the Gregorian calendar, anyway), there are a bunch of self-styled psychic experts who prognosticate events for the coming year. Usually, they are wrong far more times than they are right, yet they manage to sucker the public into believing in the psychics’ supernatural accuracy. The experts play up their infrequent successes, and just fail to mention the times they are wrong.

There is a great website here that keeps score. The author has not yet updated it for 2006, but the results for 2005 are convincing enough.

And by the way, Happy (Chinese) New Year. Kung hei fat choi!

January 29th, 2006 | Tags: Professional skeptic | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

From the BBC comes this disheartening news. According to a recent survey, just under half of the Brits surveyed accept evolution as the best explanation for the development of life.

And in case you thought the British public was more sophisticated than the folks in Kansas and Dover, Pa., more than 40% of those surveyed believe intelligent design or creationism should be taught in school science classes.

Ironically, the BBC’s Horizons program commissioned the survey for a program about the ID controversy in the States.

According to the BBC report,

Over 2,000 participants took part in the survey, and were asked what best described their view of the origin and development of life:

* 22% chose creationism
* 17% opted for intelligent design
* 48% selected evolution theory
* and the rest did not know.

Asked what explanation of the development of life should be taught, the respondents replied

* 44% said creationism should be included
* 41% intelligent design
* 69% wanted evolution as part of the science curriculum.

Let’s hope that the IDists in the States don’t use this survey as more ammunition for including ID in high school science classes.

Let’s also hope that educators, both here and in the UK, take the results to heart. We are apparently not doing a very effective job convincing the public that evolution has merit or validity.

January 26th, 2006 | Tags: Professional skeptic | Category: General stuff | Leave a comment

During an assembly this morning at school, the speaker, Harry Pickens, asked students what gave them hope and what worried them. One response in particular stunned me: The pole shift — the wandering of the magnetic pole toward Russia! I mean, what?

On my personal list of “things to worry about,” the drift of the magnetic pole from its present location in northern Canada toward Siberia is pretty low, somewhere near getting struck by heat lightning and being trampled to death by a wooly mammoth. But the remark did concern me as a symptom of poor critical thinking. The student in question (one of my former physics students — sigh!) had apparently picked up on the near-hysteria among the fringe-science crowd about the pole shift foretold by any number of psychics, channelers and “science experts.” [See an earlier blog about a radio caller's fear of the earth flipping over around solstice time.]

Do a Google search on “pole shift” and there will be countless sites warning of an imminent reversal of the earth’s poles. Many seem a little hazy about the difference between magnetic pole drift and reversal, which is geologically evident, and the alteration of the earth’s actual axis of rotation. One site I visited completely muddled the concept of magnetic deviation, implying it was somehow a portent of catastrophe. Some sites are doomsday oriented, encouraging readers to prepare for sudden changes in climate, the relocation of the equator from its present location, tidal waves, floods, earthquakes, etc. Others predict the pole shift will bring on a new age, a new beginning for humankind. Books are advertised, Edgar Cayce’s predictions rehashed and reviewed, connections to Planet X, Nibiru, wandering asteroids made — the mind boggles.

January 25th, 2006 | Tags: Professional skeptic | Category: Physics | Leave a comment

Einstein once said that God does not play dice with the universe. He was critical, at the time, of the emerging quantum theory, which states that we cannot know everything about the motion, position and energy states of subatomic particles.

So I wonder if God may be a poker player. The creationists/intelligent design folks discount the role chance might have played in the evolution of life. Now the main problem is, “how much time did the designer/universe have available to try all these different combinations of CHONP?” The theory of evolution suggests that life took about 1 billion years to form from simple organic molecules. Creationists and ID folks use a much shorter time span, since they tend to believe the earth is much, much younger than the accepted 4.6 billion years.

As a crude analogy, suppose God had an honest deck of 52 and dealt out five cards every second. According to Mathworld, the odds of dealing a royal flush (KQJ10A) is 1 in 649,739 deals. In other words, roughly speaking within every 649,739-second time block one hand has to be a royal flush. Now 649,739 seconds is about 7.5 days (hmmm, God got lucky on that 6th day!). So, if He continued to deal once a second for a year, He would deal about 48 royal flushes a year, or 48 billion in 1 billion years.

January 20th, 2006 | Tags: Professional skeptic, Science | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment