Skepticblog

The recent oil spill in the Gulf has prompted a great deal of wringing of hands – how do such disasters happen? David Brooks discusses in the New York Times that the cause is primarily due to the fact that our modern technological civilization is becoming too complex for us to manage adequately. The Deepwater Horizon oil rig is just one example of a piece of technology that is beyond the mastery of any single person. But there are also nuclear power plants, computer operating systems, jet airliners, financial systems, operating rooms, and numerous other examples.

Brooks concludes:

So it seems important, in the months ahead, to not only focus on mechanical ways to make drilling safer, but also more broadly on helping people deal with potentially catastrophic complexity. There must be ways to improve the choice architecture — to help people guard against risk creep, false security, groupthink, the good-news bias and all the rest.

This seems reasonable. Certainly we  need to get better at managing such complexity, by having clear lines of authority and responsibility, proper risk assessment, and a thorough understanding of group dynamics.

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I just finished reading “The Official C.I.A. Manual of Trickery and Deception.” What a delightful read! Authors H. Keith Melton and Robert Wallace have taken a newly declassified document and made it into a fascinating collector’s item. The manuscript was lost for 50 years and only recently discovered. Now a precious few of those gadgets and subterfuges that kept me enthralled back in the 60′s when James Bond had his “Q” and Maxwell Smart had his shoe phone are out in the open. And as I suspected as a kid - many of those fantastic gadgets and weapons were real and quite a few were based on a magician’s guidebook. As part of her Geek Week, Rachel Maddow did an excellent piece on her show about this book.  Rachel even had magician John Born demonstrate a couple of the techniques.  Good job Mr. Born!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#37347041 (continue reading…)

It’s one of those annoying brain teasers that turns half the people in the room against the other half, a simple engineering riddle that even professional aeronautical engineers get wrong.

It’s well known that racing boats can travel faster than the wind when traveling to windward. The fastest boats, and especially ice boats and land yachts, can even beat the wind downwind by sailing off the wind at an angle. This is because a boat is not driven by the true wind, but by the apparent wind. When you move at some angle relative to the wind, the apparent wind changes its speed and direction. Lift and drag (including friction) all factor into the equation.

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Martin Gardner portrait by Konrad Jacobs. Courtesy Oberwolfach Photo Collection

By now you will most likely have heard the sad news of the death of Martin Gardner — the father of modern skepticism — at age 95. He was, as his friend James Randi wrote, “a very bright spot in my firmament.”

Many people feel the same way, and for good reason. Gardner’s impact cannot be overstated. It is fair to argue that Martin Gardner created the modern skeptical literature from whole cloth. His 1952 book In the Name of Science (retitled Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science for the second and subsequent editions; hereafter referred to as Fads & Fallacies) set the standard that later led to the creation of CSICOP — and to all that has followed since. Through his books and his “Notes of a Fringe-Watcher” column in the Skeptical Inquirer, Martin Gardner was a meticulous skeptical scholar for six decades. (Amazingly, his most recent Skeptical Inquirer articles appeared earlier this year.) (continue reading…)

Martin Gardner, a renowned mathematician, author of over 70 books, educator, and skeptic, died on Saturday at the age of 95. Gardner was a skeptic before there was a skeptical movement, and so has always been one of our intellectual giants.

When I think of him I cannot help but think of the phrase most famously used by Isaac Newton,

“If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”

In fact another giant in the skeptical universe, and long time friend of Gardner, James Randi, felt the same way. He wrote in Swift:

That man was one of my giants, a very long-time friend of some 50 years or so.  He was a delight, a very bright spot in my firmament, one to whom I could always turn to with a question or an idea, with any strange notion I could invent, and with any complaint or comment I could come up with.

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Kelli Faulkner

While researching some info on phony Robbie Thomas, I found out that an ABC affiliate station in Indiana has their own private “spiritual medium and remote viewer” on staff for their daily “Indiana’s News Center at Noon Extra.” What a surprise to find out that ABC is now providing these “extra” services to the Northern Indiana community. (continue reading…)

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has a great blog where they post images from the hi-res camera onboard. I was perusing a recent image, and was a bit befuddled:

What the heck? Is this a plateau of some kind? Is that a small dome just below the center of it? The whole thing looks pitted around the edge, too, like some sort of erosion has taken place. But that can’t be right! (continue reading…)

On April 5th, I took possession of a device that still in many ways baffles my mind and creates a sense of wonder within all that behold it’s simplistic form and complex abilities.

Throughout the years mankind has engaged the minds of many to create tools and machine that would allow them to work, understand, communicate, be entertained by and create objects that advance our civilizations.

In the past, such persons who had mastery over their ability to create or understand, were often either revered or shunned by their fellow man. (continue reading…)

Liberty and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

This is the third essay in a series on the relationship between rules, freedom, and prosperity.
Read part 1 on Skepticblog.org and part 2 over at True/Slant.

I believe that the following commentary on the necessity of law and order has some bearing on what is unfolding in Arizona—when the rules are not clearly written or consistently enforced, people will take the law into their own hands because society cannot run smoothly without law and order.

In Part 3 in my essay series on the relationship between rules, freedom, and prosperity, I want to turn to one of my favorite films, John Ford’s 1962 classic, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, in which a clash of moralities unfolds in the wild-west frontier town of Shinbone, Arizona. There in the dusty streets and ramshackle buildings two self-contained and self-consistent moral codes come into conflict. One moral code is the Cowboy Ethic, where trust is established through courage, loyalty, and personal allegiance to friends and family, and where disputes are settled and justice is served between individuals who have taken the law into their own hands. The other moral code is the Law Ethic, where trust is established through the transparent and mutually-agreed upon rule of law, and where disputes are settled and justice is served between all members of the society who, by virtue of living there, have tacitly agreed to obey the rules. Only one of these moral codes can prevail. (continue reading…)

I was recently asked about the legitimacy of sperm sorting as a way to choose the gender of your child. This is a topic I had been researching for another project anyway, so I thought I would report my findings. This is a good topic for skeptics because it may seem dubious at first glance, but in fact there is serious science behind sperm sorting. But there is also some pseudoscience mixed in.

Genetic gender is entirely determined by the sperm from the male. Women have two X chromosomes and so can only contribute an X. Men have one X and one Y, and so can contribute one or the other, which determines the sex chromosomes of the child. (I wrote “genetic gender” because there are non-genetic hormonal factors in the womb and hormonal abnormalities that can influence sexual development.) Therefore roughly half of the sperm rushing to be the victor in the conception race carry one X chromosome and will result in a girl, while the other half carry one Y chromosome and will result in a boy.

If we could separate out the Ys from the Xs, then we could control the resulting gender of the child. The X chromosome is larger than the Y. Since each sperm is essentially just a tight packet of genetic material connected to a tail, the weight of each sperm is largely determined by the weight of each chromosome.

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