Check It! Astrology Issue

Hey, guys. This Friday’s post deals with what once was almost indistinguishable from Astronomy: the legacy of the ancient world, and most famously of Claudius Ptolemy— Astrology(from Greek αστρολογία). Considered a superstition and pseudoscience by modern astronomers, there are many different and often mutually conflicting versions of this ‘Art,’ none of which have been demonstrated to actually work in statistical studies. The basic premise is that one’s personal characteristics, and fate, are tied up with the often arbitrary alignments of celestial objects, oddly enough, only stars and planets, only those planets within our solar system, and only visible constellations, never galaxies, neutron stars, black holes, quasars or extrasolar planets for reasons thus far unexplained to my Troythuluness—aside from ad hoc rationalizations however… This post will include links to various web pages dealing with this subject, a few critical of it, and a few of them less so. Hopefully this selection will prove interesting, and give food for thought the next time someone you’ve never met asks you, ‘What’s your sign?’

• A page on Wikipedia concerning this ‘impelling of the stars…’

• Another page on the same on the Signs used in this posts subject matter…

• A more critical take on Astrology on the Skeptic’s Dictionary…

• A news item on DNAIndia.com–Poll results: Astrologers got it wrong, says ANS…

• On BadAstronomy.com, the Bad Astronomer Phil Plait takes on Astrology…

• On MNSU.edu…a page on Egyptian Astrology…

• On the site of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific…Activities with Astrology…

• A YouTube video, Derren Brown Astrology (note: this video’s embedding has been disabled)

• A page on Astrology on the site of the North Texas Skeptics…

• On LiveScience: Your Astrological Sign May Not Be What You Think It Is…

The Wood Spider

This is just too funny! LMAO! NOT for arachnophobes…

Open-Mindedness–By QualiaSoup

I couldn’t have put it better!

Squirrels Crossing the Street & Selective Thinking

On my way to work this last Monday I couldn’t help but notice that it seemed as if squirrels at the side of the road would wait until the van was almost upon them before rushing across the street in a mad suicidal dash.

Would it be a valid inference to conclude that the local squirrel population was hell-bent on destroying itself, or that the presence of an oncoming vehicle made them risk their lives in this manner, to become road pizza? I suspect not, fortunately for the majority of the urban tree-dwelling wildlife gene pool.

It turns out that I was engaging in a sort of self-deception known as confirmation bias, and since the sight of small animals running across the street stands out more than the vast majority that don’t rush out in front of oncoming traffic, it’s easier to notice and remember, as per the following observation by Francis Bacon:

It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives.

Events that are more cognitively significant, and forgetting, for not having paid much attention to those fauna that stay off the road, is a typical example of this error.

Confirmation bias is a form of selective thinking in which one remembers, more closely considers, or looks for observations affirmative to one’s beliefs, and forgetting, dismissing, ignoring or downplaying data that contradict one’s beliefs. It’s the human tendency to ‘count the hits and ignore the misses,’ and something we all do if we aren’t careful.

Confirmation bias is one reason for many paranormal and occult beliefs, such as that of the powers of alleged psychics, who often use cold reading techniques such as shotgunning, where a lot of random guesses, some of them highly likely to be true for almost anyone (common names, numbers, dates, etc.), are made, during which the psychic relies on his or her subject to forget or dismiss the incorrect guesses and keep in mind only the ones that subjectively seem accurate, thus seeming to the subject to possess special knowledge obtainable only by paranormal means, while really relying on verbal and non-verbal feedback cues unknowingly given by the subject.

This tendency is also responsible for belief in so-called lunar effects, such as the supposed increase in hospital admissions during nights of a full moon, such things as childbirths, or injury from accident or violence. Some hospital staff will pay more notice to those admissions during a full moon, and pay little or no mind to those times during a full moon when admissions aren’t high as being the exceptions that prove the rule.

A perusal of hospital admission records over time will reveal nothing special about these nights. So if I document my observations of the road on the way to work more carefully, and go back over them later, it speaks much better for the survival instincts of the local squirrels that they aren’t risking their lives to become roadkill as much as they seem to be through casual observation. Fnord.

(Last Updated 16:20, 10/30/2009: Grammar & Verbiage Corrections)

As a Cat Person, This is Funny as Hell!

A friend of mine forwarded this to me on MySpace…(thanks, Kilroy!)

Richard Wiseman: Interactive Personality Test

Check this out. More cool stuff by the Quirkologist. Note the words at the top of the placard…

Urrgh???

I was looking through my comments, and found this little gem posted as a response to one of my old video entries on Out of Body Experiences. I thought it might be fun to post it here where you all can see it for yourselves and try to figure out exactly what this guy is saying. Let me know if you’re just as perplexed as my Troythuluness was. Do try not to ridicule though: the man is obviously psychologically disturbed and mental illness is not funny. Except for the deletion of personal data, this comment is verbatim:

The fact that the brain received magnetic fields does not proved that the brain “created the experiences”.
Our soul receives physical imput through our senses and the brain. It is logical that our soul reacts to the magnetic input.
This experiment does not prove that the brain can cause our soul to be on another country instantaneously, telepathy, etc.
It’s like saying “by typing in the keyboard of this computer I conclude that the keyboard is responsible to make me go to any website in the internet.”

Besides, there is a huge physical evidence of existance of ghosts (is that caused by our brains too?). Are the brains of animals useless? Only ours are good?

We are not a physical body, we are powerful “energy” beings connected in a huge multidimensional/multiuniverse network that some people call “God”.

Claudio [personal data redacted], and OBE traveler like everybody else (with different “awareness/focus levels”, that’s it).

So, what do you think? I couldn’t make any sense of it. Let me know in the comments…

(Last updated 10:04, 10/24/2009)

WTF?! The LHC & Sabotage by the Future?

Here’s something a friend forwarded to me the other day (thanks, Chris) with the original article on Fox News. I’ve heard of some wacky ideas before, and I’ll admit that my first thought was, ‘If these guys are actually claiming this, what the h— are they smoking and where can I find some?!’

But no, it seems like they’re serious…

Physicists Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya are saying that nature itself is trying to keep the Large Hadron Collider from finding the Higgs boson, the so-called ‘god particle,’ that could explain the existence of mass in the universe.

They claim that their math proves nature will ‘ripple backward through time’ to stop the LHC before it can create the Higgs boson, like a time traveller who goes back in time to kill his grandfather. Doctor Nielsen himself says, in an unpublished essay:

One could even almost say that we have a model for God. He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.

Personally, I think that this can be chalked up to the fact that the LHC is perhaps the most complex machine ever produced by humans, and the more complex the machine, the more ways for something to go wrong, and the more frequently something will.

It seems to me that the ‘mysterious’ bad luck is really nothing mysterious at all.

This is true of any complex system, not requiring us to invoke temporal jinxes or sabotage by the universe itself in violation of parsimony, though David Overbye in the New York Times says:

While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus.

Oh, really? I think perhaps not. Assuming that time travel can change the past, what if in the unchanged past, he was hit by a bus? (after he sired your mother or father of course…).

Sorry, but I suspect that that probably would cause a paradox, (unless, of course, I’m wrong, and that’s what happened to begin with, and the perceived ‘alteration’ of the past is already incorporated into the time stream, and paradoxes simply aren’t possible thus allowing travel to the past).

For a more fantastical and entertaining take on some of the possibilities, I refer you to the Christopher Eccleston Doctor Who episode ‘Fathers Day.’ Furthermore, Overbye continues…

In the case of the Higgs and the Collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus.

…and finally, says Dr. Nielsen…

It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck.

This ‘prediction,’ such as it is, and its implication that the Higgs boson is somehow dangerous to the Universe, seems suspiciously similar to the doomsday claims of Earth-swallowing black holes and strangelets that have come and gone. Needless to say, I’m skeptical, since I don’t believe in luck or in doomsday prognostications.

It sounds to me like an argument from final consequences, a logical reversal of cause and effect. Is it science or is it just speculation with only equations to show for it and no way to empirically verify it other than that suggested in the NYT article?

Can the method they’ve proposed to test it actually work? Or is their idea not even a hypothesis, just a mathematical model?

Even using a random number generator to ‘discern bad luck from the future’ statistically seems likely to produce the same artifacts and statistical noise I’ve come to know and love in parapsychology, but that’s not a fair comparison—I have my doubts that the researchers at CERN are given to creatively massaging their statistics in the manner of at least one of the better-known parapsychologists, like the chap who did the study on magic chocolate.

Generally speaking, most particle physicists tend to be a professionally honest lot, because if they aren’t someone else will be.

On the other hand, Nielsen and Ninomiya just might be right, though I’d wait until their research is tested & peer-reviewed, checked & confirmed by others before rendering my provisional assent. Fnord.

(Last updated 18:08, 11/5/2009)

Baloney Detection 101: Double-Blind Testing

One of the most important advancements in scientific methodology, dating from it’s development in the mid-19th century, is the double-blind protocol, a method of testing in which neither the experimenter nor the subjects are aware of certain key variables in the study, like the identity of the control group and the test group.

First proposed by one Claude Bernard, a physiologist, it was a bit of an extreme departure from the earlier Enlightenment attitude that only trained scientists were qualified to conduct experiments. Double-blinding has the advantage of side-stepping the problems of experimenter biases and expectation, and is a superior method overall to single-blinded studies, and not just in medical research either.

It is highly useful in the physical sciences as well, such as the incident in the early 1900s with the alleged discovery of N-Rays by René Blondlot at the University of Nancy in France: Just previously, X-Rays had been discovered, and Blondlot believed he had uncovered yet another form of radiation, N-Rays.

It turned out that when a double-blind test of the procedures to produce N-Rays was covertly conducted by a visiting American physicist, that detection of them was simply the result of subjective misperception, that they did not actually exist, caused by the prior belief and expectation to see them by Blondlot and his associates.

During the double-blinding procedure, key components of the instruments thought to produce the rays were secretly altered. Blondlot saw the rays when they should not have been there (an aluminum prism, thought to refract the rays, was surreptitiously removed) by his own belief in how they should behave, and were not seen when they should have been (a lead screen was removed from one such test, unknown to him) had they been real.

This protocol was a revolutionary idea when first proposed, and is occasionally even done in paranormal research, though the studies have a distressing tendency when so done to produce negative results, often well within the boundaries of chance when independently conducted.

Even those with pro-paranormal sympathies at the time, when they are both honest and competent, produce such results in experiments, which sometimes leads a wee few of them to adopt a more skeptical stance, even if they continue to truly believe in psychic phenomena shortly after the original failed study.

In any case, double-blinding is one of the many methods of science used to ferret out the secrets of Nature, and human test-subjects in a manner that allows a more objective examination of whether something actually works, on what, in what way, and how well. It’s a development that was truly remarkable when it was conceived and even now one of the best of many scientific methods. It will likely be around much longer until a better system is discovered in that evolving social enterprise we call science. Fnord.

Check It! Early Psychical Research

Image via Wikipedia

Hi guys. This installment deals primarily with links to a selection of pages on the subject of the early days of paranormal research in the age of spiritualism, before the term ‘paranormal’ was even allegedly coined by Joseph Banks Rhine of Duke University.

This was a time, now long past, when mainstream science actually did involve itself in exploring the world of the Psychic, attempts at empirical investigation of so-called spiritualists and mediums, especially the physical manifestations they allegedly brought forth during the seances they performed, and some of the better known groups that were organized to both promote and to investigate these seemingly inexplicable phenomena.

As you might expect, some of the pages linked to are critical, some not so, concerning the societies, events, and dramatis personae of the time. Nonetheless, I’m attempting to put these pages concerning the early crossover between Science and the Psychic in some context to illustrate why the modern scientific community has its current misgivings about involving itself in this sort of enterprise…all over again.

• on the Skeptic’s Dictionary, here’s a Short History of Psi Research…

• …a bit on Wikipedia on Spiritualism, and on the same at the Skeptic’s Dictionary…

• …a piece on Psychic or Spirit Photography… and on Automatic Writing…

• …a piece on Mediums, and one on Ectoplasm…

• …here’s a piece on Wikipedia on the Society for Psychical Research…

• …and another at the same on the Theosophical Society…

• …a page on the NCAS website on the 1877-1878 Slade/Zoellner Investigation…

• …a bio-piece on the Stanford Encyclopedia for William James…

• …a capsule biography on Alfred Russel Wallace…

• …a page on Arthur Conan Doyle, Spiritualism & Faeries…

• …a Wikipedia entry on Rufus Osgood Mason…

• …an entry on the same for Helena Blatavsky… one of the Theosophical Society’s co-founders…

• …a page on Wiki for Michael Faraday…

• …another on the same for Oliver Joseph Lodge…

• …Wiki entries for Sir William Crookes… medium Daniel Dunglas Home… and his nemesis William Makepeace Thackeray…

Last Update 1/19/2010, Image added, Post reformatted

The Most Important Image Ever Taken

The Horror Express

Here’s something I found on PZ Myers’ blog…

I am a Pseudoskeptic

I’ve come to the conclusion that I am not a genuine skeptic, but a pseudoskeptic and a pseudointellectual according to Neo-Velikovskians I’ve met online. Yep, I’m downright delusional and deranged, because I believe that…

…anecdotes are only useful for the purpose of forming hypotheses, not testing them,

…Nostradamus was not a prophet—he may have seen things, but not the future,

…there is such a thing as an objective reality, that exists regardless of our wishes, thoughts, and beliefs, and that this is the best,  most rational explanation for the evidence of our senses,

…the scientific community is not a sinister, monolithic conspiracy bent on hiding the truth of the paranormal, nor skeptics a ‘new inquisition,’

…President Barack Obama was born a United States citizen, and that his birth certificate proves this,

…claims of the paranormal can be most parsimoniously explained by conventional means without invoking supernatural powers or phenomena,

…coincidences are real, and that it would be an extraordinary coincidence if extraordinary coincidences didn’t happen as often as they do,

…the Fantasy-Prone Personality type exists as a real psychological phenomenon, even if it explains a person’s belief that they are psychic,

…you don’t have to be crazy, lying, stupid, or uneducated to believe things that just ain’t so,

…unlikely statistical correlation does not equate to paranormal causation, or scientific importance,

…conventional explanations are not weak or implausible & contrived just because they are not understood or known,

…evolution actually happened, and the Earth is billions, not thousands, of years old,

…while electromagnetism does play some astrophysical role in the universe, the principle large-scale binding force of the Cosmos is gravity,

…anthropogenic global warming, and the resultant climate change, are real, and need to be dealt with in a rational manner to stave off their detrimental consequences,

…Quantum mechanics, Classical mechanics, and the Special & General theories of Relativity are all valid descriptions in their own context as to how the universe works,

…conventional evidence-based medicine is not a conspiracy to make and keep you sick, and is safer and more effective than most alternative modalities,

…miracles do not really happen, the mundane actually exists and isn’t boring,

…black holes, quasars, neutron stars, dark matter and dark energy are all real astrophysical entities,

…impact craters on planetary bodies are made by (gasp!) impacts by meteorites, asteroids and comets over billions of years, not electrical scarring over minutes or hours,

…the supernatural and the paranormal probably don’t exist, just the natural, the normal, and those things we have yet to explain,

…looking for conventional explanations and eliminating them one by one is more rational than grasping for supernormal explanations first,

…personal testimony is not a reliable form of proof that something is real, works, or is true,

…skeptical organizations, while not perfect, are generally more factually correct, honest, objective, rational, and fair in their treatment of subject matter than organizations run by paranormal and fringe-science believers,

…meta-analyses are not an accurate way of demonstrating the validity of a set of studies if the component studies have incompatible methodological and statistical protocols, or are ‘tweaked’ or ‘fixed’ after the fact,

…relativism and false balance are not the same thing as objectivity,

…astrology is not a valid science, and has been falsified in every empirical test of it to date,

…the UFO phenomenon is more likely to be psycho-cultural than extraterrestrial in nature,

…open-mindedness is unquestionably a virtue, but not opening your mind so far that your brains fall out,

…Bigfoot, the Jersey Devil, Nessie, Mothman, the Montauk Monster(s), Mokele Mbembe, the Mongolian Death-Worm, and other similar creatures probably don’t exist as real animals,

…free-energy or perpetual motion machines don’t work as claimed, much less at all,

…real science and the wonders of nature are far more interesting than the parochial claims of the paranormal,

…evidence does not have to be ‘absolute concrete physical proof’ to be acceptable in science, or to skeptics,

…claims of fact or statements about reality are not just opinion and immune to being considered wrong just because one wants to believe them,

…the burden of proof for a claim of fact rests primarily upon the one making the claim, not its critics,

…all views should get a fair hearing, but not all views are equally valid in truth content,

…human beings have the unalienable right to believe what they wish, so long as they don’t infringe upon the rights of others to believe what they wish,

…and finally…

…science and reason are superior to authority, ideology, intuition, faith, and mystical experience as ways of knowing the world.

Yessiree, I am just one big-time true believer for harboring all these crazy, irrational ideas… Fnord.

Interview with an Alien

What can I say? I got bored when I couldn’t get to sleep till late this morning. Anyhoo, here’s a little fiction I thought to post…LOL…

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Tonight, your roving reporter Jon Kameron Kameron brings you an interview with Freedom City’s favorite alien halfwit, AND the nicest, coolest defective clone of an evil alien tyrant you’ll ever meet, the Mighty Gr’ozz!”

Camera pans to Gr’ozz, his nine-foot tall, thousand-pound scaly form perched upon a titanium-steel recliner, with an oddly relaxed demeanor considering the rough week, his horns freshly burnished just for the interview. His bass voice both rasps and rumbles when he says, “Me Gr’ozz am happy to talk tonight, though had rough day fighting villains earlier. Got to give bad guys my present though.”

At the word present, he waves his left hand, a spiked mace of biokinetically sculpted bone, also burnished for this appearance. Kameron Kameron asks, “Mr. Gr’ozz, could you tell our viewers a little something about yourself, maybe give a little self-description?”

Gr’ozz leans a little closer to the outstretched microphone, and says, “Me Gr’ozz am strong like elephant, smart like rock, and wise like zen master…whatever that is.” Kameron Kameron asks, “Ah, yes, Mr. Gr’ozz, could you explain that part about rocks to our viewers?…” He looks a bit nervous as he continues, “…I’m sure there most be some deeper meaning to that.”

Gr’ozz smiles, reptilian teeth showing as he rumbles, “Sure. Rocks are smartest things there are…keep many secrets…never tell anyone.” Gr’ozz continues, “Me Gr’ozz am here on Earth to protect humans. Gr’ozz like humans, they not hunt and hound Gr’ozz like Bad Men do.”

Feeling a bit more at ease with a delicate situation averted, Kameron Kameron asks, “Yes, Mr. Gr’ozz, could you describe these ‘Bad Men’ you refer to?” to which Gr’ozz replies, “Sure thing. Bad Men not from Earth…They look like Gr’ozz, but short, shorter than humans…and not have mace-fist like Gr’ozz…also not as handsome…Gr’ozz will smash Bad Men if they try to hurt humans.”

Suddenly, a siren sounds in the distance, and Gr’ozz leaps from the recliner, alert but controlled, as his voice raises by several decibels as he growls, “Must go! Gr’ozz is needed. There are Bad Men to smash!” His dinosaurian tail slowly wags from side to side in content anticipation of combat as he heads for the exit, his heavily-muscled form seeming to fill it as he leaves.

The camera pans back to our reporter as he says, “Well, it looks like our hero is once again called to duty, and this concludes our interview for tonight. This is Jon Kameron Kameron signing off and returning you to your regularly scheduled programming stream for FCN News Online. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening as the case may be.”