Skepticblog

A review of Inside Job, produced, written, and directed by Charles Ferguson, produced by Audry Marrs, 108 minutes, narrated by Matt Damon.

In this disturbing and often infuriating look at the financial meltdown, the Academy Award-nominated (No End in Sight) documentary filmmaker Charles Ferguson promises viewers an inside look into the “inside job” (use intended to convey criminality) that he believes explains the financial meltdown and subsequent recession. Inside Job is a well produced, artfully edited, and dramatic reconstruction of the rise and fall (and rise) of the Wall Street financial industry. Most of us are painfully aware of what happened to the economy, so this film packs into less than two hours what took two years to unfold, and so the emotional impact is commensurate with the eye-blurring number of events tightly repackaged in cinematic gravitas. (continue reading…)

The first TAM Australia meeting is now over. I always find these events a good opportunity to take the pulse of the skeptical movement. So what did I learn?

First – Australia has a vibrant and fun skeptical movement. Richard Saunders, Eran Segev, Rachael Dunlop, and Joanne Benhamu did a fabulous job of organizing and running the event. The Australian Skeptics are an active group with a great deal of energy and ideas. Beyond the coordinating committee there are many skeptics in Australia who are positive and enthusiastic.

The crowd at the meeting was composed of a broad age range, with a lot of young people and a lot of women. The demographics of skepticism is certainly changing – the fact that younger age groups are getting involved is a good sign for the future. I believe the youngest attendee was 11 years old – a boy named Alex who will be making an appearance on the podcast we recorded during the conference. Imagine an eleven-year-old whose heroes are not rock stars or sports legends, but scientists and educators. (OK, sure, that describes many nerds, but Alex was a cool kid and it’s good to see that the skeptical movement can inspire one so young.)

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My wife and I are here in Australia for The Amazing Meeting, and we took an extra day to make a sidetrip to Uluru (aka Ayers Rock), the largest known single piece of rock in the world. It’s a giant piece of sandstone that was upthrust and is now tumbling in the alluvium, though it’s probably done tumbling. Rock solid, you might say. For your entertainment and amusement, I took a series of 3D pictures of it.

These are the kind where you need to cross your eyes, not the kind where you converge your gaze behind it. In other words, your left eye needs to look at the right picture, and vice versa. Some people have trouble with this method, but it works for me, so that’s what I did.   :-)

Click to see the large version of each. Enjoy…

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This post is a review of Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, Directed and Produced by Alex Gibney.

CLIENT 9 IS AN ARTFULLY PRODUCED, smartly edited, and dramatic reconstruction (and revisionism) of the rise and fall of “The Sheriff of Wall Street,” the man who dared to challenge the “Masters of the Universe,” Eliot Spitzer. Most of us are well aware of what happened to Spitzer in his fall from grace in a now all-too-familiar story of sexual shenanigans gone awry, but there is a redemption story here as well. Whether that works for viewers or not probably depends on one’s political persuasions and personal predilections on matters political and prostitutional. (continue reading…)

You may remember The Skeptologists – a TV pilot featuring a group of skeptical investigators taking on a range of pseudoscientific claims. Well – that project is not over, although it has morphed a bit. The working title of the show is now The Edge. And, rather than try to get a commercial TV executive to bite on the idea, the producers (Brian Dunning and Ryan Johnson) are trying to get a grant to produce a season for public television. It’s still an uphill battle, but they are making progress. Phil Plait has moved on with his Discovery Channel contract, including Phil Plait’s Bad Universe. So, Pamela Gay has stepped in to fill his role on the show.

Pamela is also helping with the grant – and she has asked for help. She needs to show that there is demand for the kind of content we aim to produce, and this is where you (potentially) come in.

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This post is a review of Cool It, a film by Bjorn Lomborg, directed by Ondi Timoner, produced by Roadside Attractions and 1019 Entertainment. Written by Terry Botwick, Sarah Gibson, and Bjorn Lomborg. Based on the book by Bjorn Lomborg. 88 minutes.

I FIRST MET BJORN LOMBORG IN 2001 upon the publication of his Cambridge University Press book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, which I found to be a refreshing perspective on what had been the doom-and-gloom, end-of-the-world scenarios that I had been hearing since I was an undergraduate in the early 1970s. Back then we were told that overpopulation would lead to worldwide hunger and starvation, that there would be massive oil depletion, precious mineral exhaustion, and rainforest extinction by the 1990s. These predictions failed utterly. I felt I had been lied to for decades by the environmentalist movement that seemed to me to be little more than a political movement that raised money by raising fears. (continue reading…)

A recent editorial in the New York Times by Nicholas Wade raises some interesting points about the nature of basic science research – primarily that its’ risky. I follow science news reporting quite closely and this is a point that journalists, and the general public, do underappreciate (if they appreciate it at all).

As I have pointed out about the medical literature, researcher John Ioaniddis has explained why most published studies turn out in retrospect to be wrong. The same is true of most basic science research – and the underlying reason is the same. The world is complex, and most of our guesses about how it might work turn out to be either flat-out wrong, incomplete, or superficial. And so most of our probing and prodding of the natural world, looking for the path to the actual answer, turn out to miss the target.

In a way I liken such research to my philosophy about taking pictures – it doesn’t matter how many bad pictures you take, only how many good ones. You can always delete the bad ones, or just let them sit on your hard drive, but the good ones you can frame and display. However this is not literally true because (unlike taking digital pictures) research costs considerable resources of time, space, money, opportunity, and people-hours. There may also be some risk involved (such as to subjects in the clinical trial). Further, negative studies are actually valuable (more so than terrible pictures). They still teach us something about the world – they teach us what is not true. At the very least this narrows the field of possibilities.
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As a skeptic and atheist I am often asked, “What do you believe in?” The ending preposition implies something more than what factual claims are to be believed, such as evolution, quantum physics, or the big bang. What is suggested by the question is what values does one believe in or hold to, especially without belief in God and religion. Here is my answer.

I believe in the Principle of Freedom: All people are free to think, believe, and act as they choose, so long as they do not infringe on the equal freedom of others.

I believe in civil liberties, civil rights, and the freedoms guaranteed in the United States Constitution, including and especially freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom to assemble peacefully, freedom to petition grievances, freedom to worship (or not), freedom of the press, freedom of reproductive choice, freedom to bear arms, etc. (continue reading…)

I was recently pointed to a conversation taking place in the Northern Iowan – a student newspaper of the University of Northern Iowa. The debate is about whether ghost-hunting is science or pseudoscience. The first salvo was apparently fired by Michael Dippold, who took the skeptical position. There is also a response by Peter Allen, defending the science of paranormal investigation. I hope these two students won’t mind me jumping in and taking them to school a bit.

Michael does a decent job of spelling out the skeptical position, but I think he misses (or at least insufficiently emphasizes) a critical point, and not surprisingly Peter completely misses this vital point. If I had to point to one aspect of so-called ghost hunting that marks it as pseudoscience it is this – they don’t carry out any actual hypothesis testing. Michael comes closest to this point with this statement:

Here is the problem with what they are doing: it’s not science. There’s not a single shred of evidence to suggest that ghosts exist, or that they can be identified by cold spots. Why are ghosts cold? Why do they never seem to show up in visible light, but infrared cameras always find them? Why can you never hear them speaking, but finding them in garbled audio (what they call electronic voice phenomenon or EVP) is absurdly common? The answer is that it’s easier to find whatever you’re looking for in distorted or unclear video and sound. This is a profession that thrives on false positives.

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I once did a Skeptoid episode about The Lucifer Project, a conspiracy theory prediction that evil government forces are planning to detonate Saturn (sometimes Jupiter) into a small sun. The trigger for this cataclysm is presumed to be a deep space probe, like Cassini, powered by an RTG (radioisotope thermal generator). This concept was popularized by Arthur C. Clarke in his 2001: A Space Odyssey series of books.

Strangely, a few people have not seemed to grasp that this is a fictional concept, with Clarke’s characters even pointing out just a few of the many reason such a thing is foolishly implausible:

• An RTG could never possibly create an atomic explosion.
• An atomic explosion could never possibly convert a gas giant into a sun.
• A planet of the mass or composition of any of ours could never possibly achieve fusion.

For the details on any of these wild “could never possibly” claims of mine, see the episode transcript. So how, in light of these barriers, do the conspiracy theorists believe their prediction is going to come to pass? (continue reading…)