From Out of Ancient Athens…

This comes from a guy considered by many to be the most skilled of the ancient Greek orators, the statesman Demosthenes of Athens, and the following quote attributed to him is enormously relevant to modern skeptics, namely, the topic of self-deception.

Even though some pseudoscientists do turn out to be charlatans, it’s often extremely difficult to definitively identify someone as either an intentional fraud or just self-deluded believers without knowing them and their personal history inside and out.

There’s the risk of committing a False Dilemma fallacy on insufficient information.

It’s often not just one or the other, though, and frequently it turns out to be an odd mix of the two when the crank’s true motives can be identified at all…the well-known phenomenon of the pious fraud who truly believes their own claims, but isn’t above a little dishonesty and corner-cutting to promote them.

The reasons and psychological mechanisms for self-delusion are many…

Again, not an easy task for a n00b like me, which is why it’s a good idea for me at this point not to jump to conclusions until the evidence is in…and even then, there’s no way to be certain short of actually getting inside his head, and I ain’t psychic.

Anyhoo, here’s the quote:

A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true.

– Demosthenes (Δημοσθένης) (384 BC – 322 BC)

A Question of Societal Delusions

Every age has its misunderstandings, its irrationalities, its delusions, which are often accorded by those harboring them as profound truths.

Maybe it’s the latest popular fad masquerading as science to an unsuspecting, and uninformed public. Maybe it’s some religious doctrine whose advocates wish it to be given ‘equal time’ in public school science classes.

Perhaps it’s a national government flirting with pseudoscience, spending millions on classified ‘human enhancement’ programs that turn out to be fruitless, or legislators with conservative religious leanings who feel offended or nervous about the implications and their own misconceptions of some new and promising medical technique.

It could even be some new permutation of an old occult or New Age doctrine, or perhaps something entirely new, entirely divorced from even a superficial connection with science, despite using its own obscurantist jargon.

Regardless.

These irrationalities ebb and flow throughout history, sometimes waxing with the ascension of extremist ideological movements and waning in proportion to the public understanding and acceptance of science when its pretenders stand exposed to their adherents…and sometimes victims…as the cranks, quacks and charlatans they are.

Note that it’s only possible for a belief to be a delusion – an objectively false belief – if it is also possible for things to be objectively true…and THAT requires an objective reality for that truth to exist.

My personal view is that the idea of an objective reality cannot be a delusion even if all ideas are considered to have equal truth value, which is itself an idea, for one cannot argue for the equal validity of all ideas and then consistently argue that the idea of a subjective conscious observer-created reality is any more valid than that of an objective observer-dependent reality, one in which in which the term ‘observer’ need have nothing to do with consciousness or even if the observer has a mind at all.

Unless, of course, the equal validity of all ideas means the validity of none of them. Arrrgh! The logical somersaults melt my brain…*ahem*

And so, my ever-perspicacious readers, do I ask:

What widespread societal delusion is a pet peeve of yours? Why? Is it something that you or someone you know personally dealt with at one point?

Asteroid Impact (HD)

To paraphrase Phil Plait, ‘This is the way the world ends.’ – mass extinction to the tune of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon…

Logical Fallacies — the Slippery Slope

Hey, guys. This post deals with an informal fallacy of debate and rhetoric known as the Slippery Slope, the causal version known also as the Fallacy of the Beard, or the Camel’s Nose fallacy, and this flaw in argumentation takes the form of a statement that assumes that a particular position is unacceptable because if it is accepted, the extreme of that position must inevitably follow, without any sound justification as to why. This can sometimes be a valid line of reasoning when the chain of argument is fully laid out and logically follows, but this post concerns itself with the specious usage, and an example is below:

The public teaching of comparative religion leads to religious doubt, which leads to agnosticism, which leads to atheism, which leads to anti-theism, which leads to inexorable nihilism, which leads to moral degeneracy, which inevitably leads to the disintegration of a society now characterized by total anarchy, so we don’t want comparative religion courses taught in our public schools.

Aside from the fact that the evidence just doesn’t bear this out, note also that no supporting reasons or other justification are ever provided as to why this chain of argument must be true.

The other major version of this fallacy, the semantically-based Vagueness, or False Continuum, is used in one variant in which the argument is made that concepts B and E shade into each other along a continuum without any real demarcation between them, therefore they are the same thing.

But it just doesn’t follow that there is no difference between blue light and yellow light, despite the lack of a sharp dividing point in wavelengths in the visible spectrum, nor does it follow that there is no demarcation between humid or dry weather when the moisture in the air at any one time and place varies in degree from high to low.

The second variant of the False Continuum is used to argue that concept B differs in only insignificant ways from E without any real demarcation between them, and that therefore E simply doesn’t meaningfully exist because of a lack of said demarcation. As for this one, it doesn’t follow that truth doesn’t exist merely because of the continuum between truth and falsehood, that the concept of truth is utterly without objective reference.

These two fallacies, causal and semantic, are distinct, though sharing the same general name, and they are mentioned together in this post because the use of the semantic version can and does often lead to the commission of the causal version, the idea that a slip from B to E is inevitable because of the lack of a fine point of separation between them.

Apollo 11 restored footage: montage

NASA has released a brief montage of restored footage from the Apollo 11 footage. This is archival data that has been digitally cleaned up, and it looks MUCH better! – TheBadAstronomer

On Debating Cranks

Is it moving the goalposts when a skeptic demands evidence, not just necessary, but sufficient evidence as a reason to accept an extraordinary factual claim?

Is this heavy-handed, this demanding of evidence more sound than just that of alleged but nonetheless seemingly compelling personal experience, the anecdotal testimony of ‘reliable’ eyewitnesses whose accounts don’t sound ‘obviously false’ and who would ‘never lie,’ or ‘irrefutable’ physical evidence like blurry photos, low-resolution video or trace evidence that is either inconclusive or easily faked by even a child (and often has been)?

Is the requirement that a seemingly impressive statistical result of a paranormal study be replicated by others, no matter their beliefs or attitude, excessive or unfair?

I would say not.

Sure… one could argue that I’m arguing for the skeptical position on the need for solid evidence because I’m a skeptic myself, and that would be true, but not for the reasons the accusation would be and often has been given. I take the skeptical position in this because as a skeptic, I just might be in a real position to understand skeptical attitudes, thinking, and reasoning better than, say, someone whose mindset, belief system and values are opposed to those of skeptics.

In discussions I’ve attempted with those who subsequently show themselves to be dedicated advocates of fringe-claims, sort of ‘testing the waters’ so to speak, to see what they’re actually like, and to make reasonably sure that I haven’t misjudged them on the basis of their initial comment, most of the time such attempts at constructive discourse have been unproductive.

Generally, all I’ve learned from such exchanges is the extremes of intellectual strategies that people can and will resort to to protect their cherished personal opinions from questioning or criticism.

True believers tend to have rather peculiar ideas, often rather lax ones, as to what qualifies as reality, science, logic, or evidence, and have shown to me a tendency to dismiss them or the need for them when these do not conform to or otherwise validate their beliefs.

They do not play by the same rules as science, and by that token, their skeptical critics…

It is for this reason that once I establish that someone actually does argue like a crank, I decide that any further attempts at reasoned discussion are pointless, and that I could better spend my time and resources on other matters.

Is this being dismissive? Of course. But it’s dismissal for reasons of practicality.

My time is limited, and there’s no point in devoting attention to playing a game when the ‘other guy’ (both genders)isn’t playing by the same rules, and therefore isn’t really playing the same game.

It is for this reason that I will not debate cranks, quacks, pseudoscientists, antiscientists and other fringe-claimants on the venue of this blog once I figure what they really are from the initial exchange in the comment threads.

This doesn’t mean that I’ll completely ignore them, only that all attempts at rational discourse are now off, and that I’ll no longer cater to their need to defend whatever doctrine or belief-system they happen to hold dear that I had the temerity to criticize.

In my experience, it’s a lot easier to argue constructively with another skeptic than with a believer, because those skeptics I’ve read and met are open to the possibility of being shown wrong, of being convinced by the evidence. This is a key ingredient for intellectual honesty, and in strong contrast with those self-styled champions of What They Know to be A Proven Fact™, who have shown themselves to act as if it were simply unbecoming to change their minds in the light of mere facts and mere reality that could conceivably refute their views.

After all, changing one’s mind and being wrong are weaknesses of character…Aren’t they?..

A Weekend Conversation

I had a good conversation with a friend of mine over the past weekend, and while it started on the subject of a set of miniatures that he had recently bought at a convention, it quickly evolved, rather than devolved, a good thing in any case, into a talk on what he’s rather well-versed in — history.

In particular, we discussed the societal conditions and circumstances influencing the development of science from the 18th century onwards. We discussed some of the factors responsible for the scientism of the 18th and 19th centuries, and how the science of the period was then, just as it is now, influenced more or less by the social pressures and prejudices of the times, specifically those conditions that no longer apply to the present day.

First we talked about early paleontology and its origin, as with other sciences back then, as a pastime of the wealthy and those with wealthy patronage, for then, as now, cutting edge research requires funding. Of course, this was before the days of public funding for research, and a situation that led to the even today popular-but-now-erroneous image of the gentleman scientist. We discussed the social climate’s effects on rigidity and resistance to new ideas, again, conditions differing from the present.

There was the initial refusal during the 18th century to accept the existence of meteorites, much of it being due to an intellectual reaction against any claims that smelled even remotely like superstition, and probably the dominance at the time of aristocratic France on scientific thinking, the French having inherited the mantle from the previous holder during the last couple of centuries, Italy.

There appears to have been a sort of class-bound prejudice against accepting ‘old wives tales from unlettered commoners’ that stones fell from the sky, a situation that was resolved by the results of the French Revolution, when the aristocracy was overthrown and it was now the ‘unlettered commoners’ who were running the show.

On pain of committing an argument from authority, hopefully more of an argument by authority, I trust a good portion of what my friend tells me, for in my experience, he gives me leads to follow up on, and tends to be rather consistent in his factual accuracy when I check up on the leads.

Is this faith?

I would say not — it’s trust, but not blind trust. It’s trust based on the evidence of prior and relatively consistent accuracy in his statements, and so far he’s gotten a good batting average. It’s always a good idea to doubt when given sound reason, but without it, doubt becomes not skepticism, but irrational cynicism and contrarianism.

My friend and I have widely differing views on a number of matters, especially politics, but it’s a good indication that he’s being objective, and probably correct, when both he and I can agree on matters of politically-charged topics like history, and when he can state and address to my satisfaction my positions and any objections I may have to what he says.

Is he merely being a tricky fellow, merely pretending to accurately state and address my views like a skilled lawyer?

I doubt it, and for a good reason: It’s entirely inconsistent with what I’ve known about him over the years, since he’s far too straightforward and sincere, maybe even blunt, about his views and opinions and hasn’t ever shown a shred of duplicity in his motives. Again, doubt should be exercised when and where it’s appropriate, not as a knee-jerk reflex against anything that conflicts with one’s personal ideology and prejudices.

There’s a fuzzy but real demarcation between being a skeptic and being a denier along a continuum of attitudes and intellectual strategies, and in the arguments they use, not just the label. Fnord.

A Blast from the Past – The 17th Century

This little gem is especially significant considering the rocky relationship between conservative religious establishments and science, a situation that occurs even today with fundamentalist sects working to advocate forms of antiscience like creationism.

There was that nasty little incident between the Inquisition of the Church of Rome and the literally astronomical discoveries of one Galileo Galilei, a disagreement that lasted from the 17th century until 1992, when the Church of Rome finally acknowledged that he was correct in his findings.

To be fair though, that was a big step forward for the Church, which up until the late 20th century has had a poor record of dealing amicably with any findings of science that threaten the centrality of human beings in the universe and the eyes of the Creator.

I suppose that religions, like any other social enterprise evolve over time by adaptive radiation to new survival strategies…

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

– Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

A Question of Being a Supervillain…

Evil characters can be fun. Really fun. *ahem*

One of my very first long-running characters was an alien villain, and the protagonist I created to oppose him wasn’t that much better, more of a world-beater who won in his bid to become emperor of humanity than a hero.

Characters with checkered pasts and villains have always been my favorites, since sometimes it’s cool to be evil in fiction, and a well-crafted antagonist can be entertaining when his, her, or its past is explored and they have actual reasons for being evil.

Of all the mainstream comic book villains, my favorites would be Magneto and Dark Phoenix from the X-Men, way back when, in ancient prehistory when there was only one X-title on the market and mutants were actually interesting.

A friend of mine who referees RPGs at the local game shop has an interesting evil character — a magician who is hell-bent on destroying the institution of slavery in the fantasy setting he resides in, even if he has to conquer the world to do it.

I’ve always had sort of a soft-spot for villains who are somewhat honorable, since it makes them less stereotypical, less evil-for-evil’s sake and therefore more interesting. And that makes for better fiction.

My current quasi-evil, pseudo-evil, diet-coke-of-evil antihero, the Mirus is slated to be the subject of fiction when I ever get over my fit of writer’s block and come up with an interesting narrative…

…And so I inquire of you all:

If you could be a supervillain, who would you be?

Richard Dawkins: If Science Worked Like Religion

A Wee Bit o’ Profundity

Here’s a quote I found that I consider especially relevant as a skeptic and person, and its subject matter a strong component of intellectual honesty.

In my view, the thing that is essential for being right on occasion is the capacity to harbor within oneself a rather peculiar sort of dogma: I don’t always know; I can be wrong; I can allow for myself to be mistaken.

This to me is not only a sign of a good scientist or skeptic, but a mature, emotionally secure human being.

When you know a thing, hold that you know it; when you know not a thing, allow that you know it not; this is knowledge.

– Confucius [Chinese: 孔夫子, transliterated Kong Fu Zi or K'ung-fu-tzu, literally "Master Kong"] (traditionally 28 September 551 B.C. – 479 B.C.)

Science…The Modern Synthesis

Modern science, like any human enterprise, has both its supporters and its critics, of these last, some are fair and some are not. These last are given to argue that science is much too rationalist, much too materialist & more in step with an 18th or 19th century scientism, and finally, much too reductionist to let it see ‘the forest for the trees,’ the ‘Big Picture.’

This post is an attempt by me to address these claims, and show that science is more artistic, inclusive, versatile and more holistic than its critics give it credit for, in noting what it really is and the sort of questions it can answer. I shall also attempt to show that it is the critics who are themselves being just as reductionist as they claim modern science is, and they who are viewing the world with tunnel vision instead of considering its true implications in total.

Why should you take me at my word? The quick n’ dirty answer: You shouldn’t.

You shouldn’t take anyone’s word for anything based on authority alone, whether it’s your pastor, your school teacher, your guru, your favorite actor, a Playboy bunny, or a public official. Hell, don’t even taken the word of a solitary scientist merely on the string of letters before and after his name, or how many Nobel Prizes he won, or the number of alleged peer-reviewed papers he’s published, much less upon how reputable he seems.

Even the most brilliant and reputable among us can sometimes, in the words of the late Stephen Jay Gould, be “gloriously wrong,” on sometimes vitally important matters, especially when their claimed expertise overreaches or does not include actual competence in the area they claim it does.

First, I’ll consider the charge of scientism on the whole of the mainstream research community: This is merely a straw-man misrepresentation leveled for ideological reasons or other questionable motives, the specifics depending on who claims it and why. I say this because it is asserted without any valid evidence, and likewise may be summarily dismissed, also without any evidence.

Science doesn’t claim to have all the answers, doesn’t claim that what we know now is all there is, and the best way for any scientist with ambition to make a name for herself is to overturn an existing theory. Science gains nothing from protecting the status quo, for if it remained stagnant, so would our technology, and this clearly is not what we see. I find it highly amusing that those who make this accusation, especially decrying the evils of university or government-funded science, do so using a rather pervasive and powerful product of that same science: The Internet and the World Wide Web.

Next.

Let’s consider that science is not a body of absolute and unchangeable facts. It is at its broadest, to paraphrase psychologist Susan Blackmore, a generalized means of querying the universe and finding answers to those queries. Science doesn’t care if something is labeled ‘normal’ or ‘paranormal.’ It concerns itself only with those questions that are framed in a manner that allows them to be meaningfully asked and tested against that most harsh of taskmasters: Reality. Scientific facts change over time, as do its methods, because science has to update its findings and correct earlier, more erroneous notions and findings with better notions and findings using more up to the minute and accurate data.

The modern scientific paradigm doesn’t include anything specifically designated as ‘supernatural’ in it because it doesn’t need to. It potentially includes under its rubric any idea that can be meaningfully tested no matter its arbitrary label or metaphysical nature. Some of these are supernatural claims, such as the efficacy of prayer on healing of injury or curing of disease. These can be tested, and have been. The results, when obtained under reasonable conditions, have been consistently negative. It just so happens, though, that many other claims designated ‘supernatural’ aren’t framed in a manner that permits them to be examined or tested in any significant way. These ideas are scientifically unpromising and uninteresting. They are non-science.

Modern research workers use a variety of cognitive processes in their investigations, and three distinct but important ones stand out to my notice…

The first are the imaginative and intuitive faculties, and these are essential in the crafting of and fleshing out of new ideas, new hypotheses, and instrumental in perceiving the interconnections and patterns of these in a theoretical framework to explain related phenomena under a single set of ideas. These are also needed for spinning the predictions a hypothesis implies, and coming up with ideas on how these predictions may be tested empirically, by experimental or comparative methods.

Next are esthetic sensibilities, which are needed for arranging any hypotheses conceived into a form sufficiently elegant and parsimonious as to be termed ‘beautiful,’ and a beautiful theory is very important since elegance and simplicity are helpful in finding ways to test it, since a simple theory has fewer ways to fail, and is thus more promising than an unwieldy one. It should be noted, however, that even the most pleasing and lovely theory can sometimes be wrong, and can erroneously lead its creator to hold too dearly to it. Also, a theory can be complex, counterintuitive, and still be true because reality is often complex and counterintuitive.

Finally there is the process of empirical proofing, or testing of hypotheses supplemented by reasoned argumentation. This phase does require both observation and sound judgment. In this phase, the promising ideas, the intellectual gold, are winnowed from the intellectual rubbish of worthless ones, first weighing hypotheses against each other using the rule of thumb known as Occam’s razor. In it, the most likely to be true is first examined, then the next most likely, and so on, until all have been examined and the results obtained and one or more are either provisionally falsified or confirmed by the data, under conditions adequate to rule out confounding factors such as subjective biases through reliably tested objective means. Note that even passing this round is not final. It must be replicated by independent parties no matter their attitude or personal beliefs, and a single verifiable test that contradicts the findings made is enough to invalidate the hypothesis even if it is initially confirmed early on. A hypothesis must pan out with better data under further scrutiny.

Now let’s look at the charge of materialism.

This claim is usually leveled by those of a philosophical or substance dualist persuasion, often those with spiritual, religious, or paranormal belief systems. We’ll just call them ‘dualists’ for short. That’s not meant to be derogatory. If you think it is, get thicker skin. These often think it necessary to divide the world into two separate parts, thinking one not enough: the material & immaterial, the natural & supernatural, the normal & paranormal, the physical & non-physical, the ‘merely’ biochemical & the vitalistic, and so on…

In my experience, they show a very parochial understanding of the terms ‘physical,’ ‘natural,’ and ‘matter’ in comparison to how they are used in science. Dualists don’t seem to have a clear definition of these terms, though the usage they are implying conflates ‘physical’ with ‘tangible’ or ‘concrete’ as I have heard some argue that because light is not tangible, it’s not physical.

This is in contrast with its use in the natural sciences, where ‘physical’ implies any phenomena that can interact with anything in the universe and can be meaningfully observed, whether the observation is done by a human or by automated instrumentation.

To a physicist, ‘physical’ is a broader term than when used by dualists because physics recognizes an enormous number of physical phenomena, including and especially light, quarks, cosmic rays, muons and a host of other physical and simultaneously invisible and intangible entities.

Scientifically, the term ‘non-physical’ is meaningless, not because of a flaw in science but because the scientific usage of ‘physical,’ ‘natural,’ and ‘material’ is much more comprehensive and includes all meaningfully real and knowable external phenomena in the entire universe, not just the concrete or tangible. The idea of a ‘non-physical substance’ as used by dualists is contradictory because the very notion of substance is physical by definition. There is simply no need to include a functionally useless and poorly defined term like ‘non-physical’ in the vocabulary of the natural sciences.

To me, dividing the whole of reality into arbitrary component parts of matter and spirit, of biochemistry and vital force, of nature and supernature, shows a tendency to view the first of each in an overly limited fashion, seeing the material as the ‘merely’ material and being dissatisfied, not because of a deficiency in the thing perceived, but a deficiency in how one perceives and defines it. It seems to me that the fault lies not with science, but with an overly restrictive and ironically reducing dualistic view of the world and a need to somehow enhance it by adding something ‘extra’ that it doesn’t really need, to supplement the knowable with the unknowable.

As for the claim of reductionism in science, I see science as using reductionist methods for holistic ends. For while individual research workers often take a narrow specialization in their chosen field, modern scientists do not work in isolation anymore. They must and do keep in touch with each other, including with those in other fields of study, by such means as correspondence, conferences attended by those in many fields of study, everyday work in the lab or field, and through the medium of scientific journals. Quite a few scientists have broad interests, and many of the best may have expertise in several different fields that complement each other. Carl Sagan was trained in biology as well as astronomy.

Thus while an individual by herself may have a limited perspective on things, a community of researchers working in concert may together convey a clearer, broader picture of reality. Also, science only seems reductionist if you look at it in a reductionist way, looking at science’s individual parts, its different fields and specialties instead of at the whole enterprise.

Consider the ideas of evolution — all scientific concepts of changes occurring in systems over time, from the subatomic to the cosmic — the understanding of matter on the smallest scales given by quantum mechanics, and that on the largest scales conveyed by relativity. Consider our understanding at the present time of cosmology and what we currently know about the origin and history of the universe.

Consider the incredible complexity involved in combining the mechanics of individually simple physical laws into synergetic systems that mutually interact and complement each other in seemingly random ways — true ‘reductionistic holism,’ as contradictory as that sounds — that are only practical to model with modern computers, and which even with only a few such laws considered and only the most simple equations used, work that would have taken literally years to solve by hand in the 1800s, even assuming that no errors were made.

Science has moved on since the 19th century.

These ideas tie together in a most pleasing way the interconnectedness of all life on Earth through common descent and shared biochemistry, a view (however incomplete) of the laws governing space-time, those of the fundamental forces, and the origin of our world and all heavy elements from dust cooked in the hearts of stars and released by their catastrophic death-throes. Consider that gravity extends throughout the universe.

In ways that mystics even today could never imagine, everything in the universe is connected to everything else.

We are one with the universe, for we are more than just residents…we are parts of it. We are, as the host of Cosmos put it, “a way for the universe to know itself.”

To me, it’s not possible to have holism without reductionist methods of achieving it, because sometimes you have to consider the importance of component parts before fitting them together. It’s not enough to say that the universe in total is a big, wonderful, scary thing(even though that’s true), and disregard, say, an asteroid about to cross Earth’s orbit, dismissing it as an insignificant component, because that ‘insignificant component’ may just impact the Earth and cause a mass extinction event rivaling the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Like a well-engineered vehicle, you must be able to know of and assemble the parts to build the whole. Fnord.

(Latest Update 2010/08/01, 22:36, Clarifications Made)

A Question of Really Disturbing Movies…

Years ago, I was staying at my uncle’s place in Jersey during a family reunion in the 1980s, and while I would doze off in my sleeping bag in the living room, others would watch movies.

One of them was From Beyond, loosely based on the Lovecraft story of the same title…and I mean only loosely. Some parts were gross, many where just silly, but the connection between the nearly two-hour movie and the ten-minute short story was tenuous if not nearly nonexistent.

That wasn’t too bad, and I managed to get to sleep without a hitch once the credits had rolled. The worst was to come, when one night the movie Prince of Darkness was shown, which made it difficult to get to sleep and gave me a phobia for mirrors for a couple of weeks.

I got over it without much of a problem, fortunately not needing any therapy to do it, though it’s not too often I took to seeing movies on television after that. I think that the parts that creeped me out, involved the ichor scene shortly after the beginning and the dream flashbacks scenes it showed.

Looking back, it wasn’t really that bad a movie, just a wee bit disturbing, but it’s not something I’d like to see twice or more. Then again, isn’t that why films like that are called ‘horror movies?’

A funny-but-weird one would be the badly named (and badly dubbed) movie Attack of the Mushroom People, in which the characters were castaways turned into fungi by eating the local mushrooms growing on a deserted island. I believe the original title was (in English – the movie was Japanese) ‘Terror Fungus.’

Hmmm…come to think of it, I think that one flick that I would consider really disturbing would have to be Eraserhead…

So today’s question is:

What is the most disturbing movie you’ve ever watched?

George Hrab – Out of My Mind

Large Hadron Rap

I thought that this was cute enough to resurface after over a year and a half. Get down, get funky…and prepare to laugh at the puny strangelets and planet-devouring black holes…

By the by, my eeevil conspiratorial paymasters at CERN have just e-mailed me to let me know that I’ve been a good little shill and that my check will be deposited in my sooper-sekrit Swiss account. Bwa ha ha ha ha ha! *ahem*