Skeptobot

Good bye old friend.

2011-07-21T10:18:00.004Z

Today we are less than yesterday.

Co-op VS Christian Voice, Good: Visa VS Wikileaks, Bad - keeping cognitive dissonance in check

2010-12-29T00:29:00.001Z

An important disclaimer: If I had to wrap my positive feelings about Christian Voice to place under the Christmas tree then I would end up being visited by three ghosts, who would proclaim me a scrooge. They would take me to the past, present and future of Christian Voice before apologising for wasting my time, shaking my hand and heading off to pick on its director, Stephen Green.

Christian Voice (CV) are a diminutive, pointless, homophobic group given a ridiculous amount of undue exposure in the media, due to an honourable but badly applied understanding of what balance requires.

I do not believe they represent the views of the average Christian – but at the same time I wish moderate Christians were a lot more vocal in distancing themselves from them.

So hopefully no one can mistake this article to be in anyway supportive of CV. They’re dicks.

I say this because I’ve noticed something interesting on twitter this evening. My timeline (a typically skeptical and rational group) has become inundated with people congratulating Co-op on their treatment of CV. In short, Co-op refused CV banking and asked them to leave due to CV’s homophobia.

The CV’s version of events can be read here

If I ran a bank, the last people I would want opening an account are the CV. Obviously. But the support for the actions of the Co-op that I saw on twitter seems easily given and without due consideration.

Especially considering the story is from 2005 and is currently bubbling up again as old stories are want to do.

It was only the other side of xmas that the same feed was outraged that VISA, Mastercard, Amazon and Paypal decided to cancel Wikileaks ability to bank and receive donations.

It would be easy to become distracted now about the reasons behind the cancellation of services provided to Wikileaks and crucially to anyone who wanted to donate to them. Whether it was due to Government pressure; and/or the fear of cables related to banks*; or even claimed ToS violations**

The cognitive dissonance between these two view points should be apparent. As rational thinkers it should be obvious that we can not simultaneously support and condone banks for restricting financial operations to organisations based purely on whether we like that organisation.

Should British Gas also request Christian Voice get another energy provider?

No matter the reason for the retraction of service it doesn’t justify the actions that were taken. In either case.

There is currently a battle to preserve and promote Net Neutrality and deal with the idiocies of the Digital Economy Bill. In which people were, rightly, horrified about the idea that people might lose their internet access on accusations of copy right infringement.

This is an important issue because it is nearly impossible to function without an internet connection. You lose your voice, your access to knowledge and the ability to function in society.

The same is true with banking facilities. Without access to money your ability to function becomes impossible. An issue which becomes ever more significant with the move away from physical to digital money.

The counter argument is that as an ethical bank, Co-op was merely sticking to it’s principles.

However, ethical banking means that the banks commits to investing your money in organisations and actions which are consider ethical.

To ensure that it does not use your money to profit from actions you consider unethical.

It does not, and should not, mean that you have to pass a morality test to join; because that places the bank (and not consumer) as the arbiter of what is ethical.

If we find it acceptable for the Co-op to refuse to allow homophobes the right to bank then it is only fair that we consider it acceptable for a non-ethical bank to refuse homosexuals the right to bank.

Regardless of your position towards Christian Voice or Wikileaks it is crucial that organisations are allowed to function and can not be neutered and censored by corporations acting outside the law.

Democracy stands by the assertion that you don’t censor people who are wrong, but you debate them into obscurity. Celebrating the closure of CVs banking facilities is celebrating censorship and not debate.

Because money talks, and without it you can’t.

Another disclaimer: I’ve been stuck on a 3G connection for weeks now so have not been able to follow up references and such to levels I would like. So I am happy (as always) to accept corrections and the like.

* A fear which appears to have lead to pre-emptive registering of critical url addresses of various bankers

** Which it would seem the KKK do not violate

The time I saw a ghost.

2010-12-20T20:34:00.000Z

It is christmas and that means we need a ghost story. This is mine.

So as a kid I was obsessed with the paranormal. Properly obsessed. UFOs, ghosts, supernatural powers, the whole deal. It was pre-internet so all this arcane knowledge had to be deciphered from from tatty second hand books pilfered from car boot sales and dusty shops.

Eventually I headed to secondary school and where I was lucky enough to encounter some tremendous science teachers. They infected me with the scientific method and, surprisingly, it didn't immunise me from the paranormal at all.

It strengthened my belief in it. For I knew I could use the scientific method to prove it all true.

But over time being skeptical and scientific knocked down the crazy things I wanted to be true. One little piece at a time. I saw the contradictions and intentional reproductions of previously admitted hoaxes and began to lose faith in the paranormal community.

But then I saw a ghost.

I would often walk down by the canal near my house. The entrance was especially pretty with trees overhanging the path that opened up to a view of a metal bridge and the canal itself.

Then one day as I walked up to that path I saw a man with his back to me. He was wearing jeans, and a top that was a green, or maybe blue. He had dark brown hair and he was clearly staring at the water from the bridge.

I was certain he was going to jump and try to kill himself. Completely certain. I remember my heart leaping. Striking my chest like a solid punch. I actually shouted out to him, but he ignored me. I was so worried I was routed to the spot. Eventually I snapped out of it, shouted again and rushed towards him.

He disappeared.

I don't think I've ever felt fear like I did when the suicidal man disappeared. I was rooted to the spot again with fear. I was physically shaking; a sudden cold washed over me and I didn't know what to do.

So I just stood there.

It all made sense, it was a ghost of a man who jumped to his death. It wasn't a tall bridge, but the water was full of junk and he was bound to have got caught on a trolley or something, been unable to resurface, and drowned. As it was suicide he had never found peace and was stuck repeating what had already happened.

As shaken as I was I suddenly realised I was right, and I was damn well going to use science to prove it. And so, on little more than a whim, I started pacing around the area I had been standing before I moved.

I must have looked a little strange.

I stood there inching around and moving my head this way and that for maybe 5 minutes. Which is a very long time to be acting like that. And it all seemed fruitless. But science requires rigour and so I stuck at it.

Eventually I got the ghost to return.

The branches of the trees were crossing the bridge in such a way that they outlined a crude shape of a man. The colour of the canal, grass, sky and concrete filled in the shape with jeans and a top, and gave him a reasonable head of hair.

As the wind blew the trees the image came and went and never had the absolute, complete reality that it's first appearance had, but even now I knew what was happening, it was a damn impressive optical illusion.

I was astonished at what a complete picture and story my mind had created with just this simple nudge from a random arrangement of the environment. If I was in a rush and had to keep walking, if I couldn't have spent all that time tilting my head this way and that like a moronic bird then to this day I would still be willing to bet my life, and that of my families, on the existence of a ghost on that bridge. I also realised that not once in the retelling of the tale would I ever think to mention the overhanging branches and soon I would forget they were even there. No skeptic, no matter how talented, would be able to solve the mystery from the most honest testimony I could give.

But I had the time, the good fortune, and scientific curiosity to stop and stare and rock back and forth and to test. And so I managed to disprove my very own ghost, and in doing so I got first hand experience of how completely and utterly my brain could lie to me.

And so seeing a ghost changed my life.

Julian Assange & Wikileaks

2010-11-30T21:15:00.004Z

So I haven't made my mind up about Wikileaks latest release. I believe Wikileaks is hugely important and yet I see some valid criticisms about the cables release. But that's ok, because you don't have to immediately have an opinion about things. At the moment I think the good outweighs the bad. If only because whenever a member of the government tries to use the argument "if you've done nothing wrong you've nothing to hide" we can reply "so you support wikileaks?"

But I reserve the right to change that opinion. In politics thats called flip-floppig and frowned upon. In science it's just being sensible.

Nevertheless I've seen a few interesting links around (mostly via reddit) that I would like to share.

1) The Internet Archives copy of Julian Assange's old blog

Assange's blog is only a few years old and makes interesting reading. My current favourite quote being:

Wed 03 Jan 2007 : Witnessing

Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love. In a modern economy it is impossible to seal oneself off from injustice.

If we have brains or courage, then we are blessed and called on not to frit these qualities away, standing agape at the ideas of others, winning pissing contests, improving the efficiencies of the neocorporate state, or immersing ourselves in obscuranta, but rather to prove the vigor of our talents against the strongest opponents of love we can find.

If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers. Let it be with similar types whos hearts and heads we may be proud of. Let our grandchildren delight to find the start of our stories in their ears but the endings all around in their wandering eyes.

The whole universe or the structure that perceives it is a worthy opponent, but try as I may I can not escape the sound of suffering. Perhaps as an old man I will take great comfort in pottering around in a lab and gently talking to students in the summer evening and will accept suffering with insouciance. But not now; men in their prime, if they have convictions are tasked to act on them.

The first part of which hits home with a great deal of pain. I type this whilst people starve, or are tortured, or denied medical care and I do so little about it.

I find it interesting how, at least in my opinion, The Internets collective response to such a blog would have been cynicism, criticism and accusations of being 'emo' and self-indulgent. When instead it is the thoughts of someone with the conviction to change the world.

2) A TED talk by Julian Assange on why we need Wikileaks.

Haven't watched this yet, but I'm currently downloading it for tomorrows commute.

3) Sarah Palin wants to hunt Assange like a terrorist.
Or at least according to the star. She's a wonderful person.

Crop Circles

2010-11-14T18:20:00.006Z

The standard argument for crop circles is so preposterous that it borders on a straw man — that they are too complex to have been created by humans. The fact that crop circles are almost always documented by ELECTRONIC EYES being wielded by people flying inside GIANT HOVERING METAL BUGS so that the believers in humanities inadequacies can talk about them via A HUMUNGOUS INTERCONNECTED NETWORK OF MILLIONS OF TURING COMPLETE MACHINES is rather conviently forgotten. Hence this little comic.

EDIT: This image is currently the top post on skeptic board over at reddit. Here is the comment thread which includes some great discussion on what oil is made from. I will be needing to update my pic I think.

You've no doubt noticed the complete lack of action by myself here on the site, or on Twitter. Real life has not been kind recently and so I've not been left with any time or energy to write. The cause of this absence would make a good post in itself, but I would rather wait till events settle.

I've always tried to hold myself to high standards on this blog, but at the moment that means writing nothing at all. So I'm trying a new approach. I will attempt an update every sunday or monday - but it can be as silly and throwaway as this one.

Better than nothing I guess?

Being an atheist has nothing to do with my protest of the pope today.

2010-09-18T10:48:00.003Z

Trying to write more - so here's a quick missive before I head out the door to todays protest. Whilst ill as a very ill thing.

I find it fascinating that it appears assumed that most people protesting the pope will be atheists. Is it true?

Either way that assumption allows Joseph Ratzinger to diminish all criticism as being the work of 'aggressive atheists' hating God.

This morning as 'thousands' head towards Hyde Park Corner to protest the easiest way that our comments can be ignored is by people being able to diminish the protest as purely atheist in nature.

That as an atheist I can't criticise the sexist treatment of women, or the luddite and murdering approach to contraception (especially with the regards to HIV and Africa), or the systematic and calculated cover up of the abuse of children because deep down I'm really complaining that these people believe in God.

I find this absurd. But, listening to the words of the ppe during this trip, in all his silly hats surrounded by pomp and parade, I've realised something. His comments against the 'secularising of UK society' and 'marginalising of faith' in this country is not a plee to become a Catholic. Although obviously he would like that. The reason for all these strong words is to fence off the secular and atheistic view point in the minds of the general public.

I think he wants to remind people that religion is magic, and thus so criticising it is dangerous, and even if you are apathetic towards it you need to respect it.

In addition, the unfair position that the Pope has been given due to his position as 'head of state' (of a citizen-less state no less) is a reason to protest today all by itself. If we gave state visits to the heads of every faith then this would be acceptable, but as it stands the Pope has been given a position above any other faith to come to the UK and criticise our way of life. Which we will pay for the pleasure for.

So, that being the case, a defence of our way of life is just.

It isn't due to my lack of a belief in God that I protest today – but because I do believe that, for all it's flaws, when it comes to equality, family planning and religion this country is progressive and civilised and as such closer to any God than the man that today will wear a silly hat inside a stupidly named car who preaches famine as contraception and that no women can ever equal a man.

Even though, in my opinion, no God exists. Obviously.

A skeptical look at TAM:London

2010-05-23T14:50:00.001Z

I'm pretty certain The Amazing Meeting (TAM) is an awesome event.

I say pretty certain because I've never been able to afford it. It's in the USA and is part of that Las Vegas Big Conference wizz-bang that puts it out of my price league. Surprisingly becoming a Doctor of Astrophysics didn't create the defacto independently wealthy lifestyle one might expect; Doctor Who lied to me.

But now that it has come to London.... and, well, I still can't afford it.

I state this not to moan about the price (although I will discuss it) but because I write from a position of ignorance and want that to be understood from the start.

First, I think it is important that I take a few paragraphs to emphasise how important the James Randi Educational Foundation is to me (but feel free to skip to the nitty gritty).

After reading swift for what seemed an age I joined the forum back in January 2002 (eons ago in internet-time). It was the foundry that pushed me into becoming a blogger.

As a child I was obsessed with the Paranormal/UFOs and the like. I had so many books on the subject that they filled a giant 6ft chest. My first Wünderkammer. This was pre-internet so I would rummage around boot sales and 2nd hand shops picking up exciting looking tomes of forbidden knowledge; everything from Ancient Civilizations to Zombies via Ball Lightning, Cryptozoology, Kirlian Photography, Psychic Plants and so on.

Then later, starting 'big school' a series of excellent teachers awoke within me a love of science.

Now science is not a series of facts but a process. Once it gets under your skin your can't help to apply that logic to every aspect of your life and interests.

And so my obsession with the paranormal met the scientific method and piece by piece it crumbled. I took my beloved interest and tore it down piece by piece day by day.

But it wasn't tragic or sad. It was enlightening. I was working out how wonderful the real world was - not this make believe one I inhabited previously. My only frustrations were aimed at the authors who I could see intentionally recycling claims long ago disproven.

I felt alone and voiceless; there was this community of paranormal researchers and I had no voice to hold them to account with.

And the JREF changed all that.

It wasn't until university that I personally acquired a consistent internet connection (a statement that on reflection seems preposterous) and would waste so long in the library hoovering up not just information but the realisation I was not alone.

James Randi - my god damning hero.

Now there is such a huge skeptic and new-atheist movement that it seems crazy for someone of that inclination to be so isolated. But I was.

The JREF's outreach activities directly lead to this blog and to who I am today. I briefly met Randi at 'An Evening with James Randi and Friends' and it was a huge moment in my life.

So lets make this clear — the JREF and James Randi are massively important. Not just to me personally but for our society.

But one of skepticism's strengths is self criticism.

So lets be critical.

Lets start with the price. The ticket for TAMLondon, is £220. Some people have argued that this is extortionate.

An Evening with Randi and friends, had 11 speakers and cost £11 for about 300 people. A five fold increase in seats and the cost rising by a factor of twenty is quite shocking at first glance.

But it is preposterous to argue that JREF are ripping people off because: a) they are holding the meeting in a central London Hilton Hotel which doesn't come cheap, b) there is an International line up of speakers to fly in and c) it's raising money for the charity that is the JREF. d) the first TAM:London cost £150 (ish) and sold out not in days, but in hours.

The demand, even at those prices is there.

So the price is well justified, despite how counter intuitive it first appears that as attendance numbers rise so do the costs.

That said I do think there are a number of valid concerns to be raised about the price. It can be argued that the JREF is a primarily American charity and that the money it generates could be better used by the British skeptic movement.

The counter argument to this however is three fold. Firstly the JREF output is not solely contained within the US and with so much output being online it helps the entire globe (I can't forget how it helped me here in the UK for example).

Secondly I think many of us here in the UK and Europe see America as the primary battleground. That is where the nonsense is strongest and needs the most attention. I think we want to help in that battle and so the donations are willing. The issues the JREF highlights are global and not limited to just one country.

Thirdly it assumes that without TAM:London some magical British based TAM would appear.

Nevertheless, I've done voluntary work the British Humanist Association (ooh get me!) for example. And so I can state first hand how much support they need and what such good work they do. I feel that many of us in the UK are often distracted looking at the crazy nonsense that occurs outside the UK to properly pay attention to that which occurs within it.

It is important to note that that is not a criticism of TAM but of ourselves.

The second main issue with TAM:London is it's purpose.

It is not an outreach event. It is not intended to win over or convince people of the need for Rational Thought. The FAQ makes that no clearer than when it details how any video content posted to the net taken at the event will be removed.

As such it is neither a medium for the publishing of new findings. An academic conference would jump at any such publicity. At least in my own experience.

And so that leaves the fact that it is a show. A piece of entertainment.

Again, for the record, that isn't criticism of TAM:London — thats a completely fair position to take. One I would pretty much take if I was running TAM (see my 'solution' later).

So what are we left with? A 1,500 seater venue of skeptic celebrities preaching to the converted whilst raising money for their organisation of choice.

Which is a church.

And not a british church, but an american one, with american sensibilities (or that crazy one in south london). A Megachurch.

That sentence sounds bigoted and horrible. It isn't meant to be.

I'm a regular at Skeptics in the Pub in both Holborn and now Westminster (say hi next time!) and have spent the last few debating with friends whether this low key event that takes place in a pub basement is becoming churchlike. Whether it preaches to the converted and does nothing but support previously held beliefs. Occasionally it can remind you of that - but it is a truly wonderful and important event that I recommend to every one of you. It is open, extremely cheap and works hard to make the world a better place. Ten23 and the Libel Reform issues wouldn't be nearly as successful without it.

So why does TAM:London leave a number of us feeling slightly uneasy?

I think because it represents such big business. Many skeptics are critical of things like big church congregations, Woo conferences and exhibitions. And as nonsensical as it is to compare them it's hard not to feel like a certain amount of moral high ground is lost when we have what amounts to our own.

A critic can point to it and say: "look, you just like to go and hear people tell you that you are right!" and one can't reply: "it's not like that, come and see!" Because they can rightly point out the barrier of entry being £220 high.

Skepticism is about self criticism and not becoming complacent in ones views. But if we become people self supporting our beliefs who go to events to enjoy being enraged by woo, then we are using anger, frustration and being eghast as an entertainment.

It would be disastrous if people accused TAM of selling that in the way that Mr Alton Towers sells his rollercoasters.

So what do we need to do? We need to do the boring thing and reach out to the believers and the unaware.

When we are ridiculing woo and faith and bad science it needs to be in a manner that allows people to hear. To jump aboard and see. To be inspired and realise that there is a different way.

If they see it as a different kind of church where believers pays hundreds of pounds to be told their right then we will push the next generation of skeptics away.

Which would be a terrible shame.

We do not want to appear to be sitting in our ivory towers laughing at the idiots below.

We want people to know that our ivory tower has a lift and you can come and join us (I refuse to accept any negative connotations to ivory towers as they sound far too awesome).

To end I want to reiterate, I'm not saying TAM is bad. I love the JREF and would go if I could afford it. But I do think that we need to think carefully about what impression it gives.

TED — a role model, and solution.

To be critical without any suggestions for improvement would be too much even for me. So here's my simple solution.

It needs an openness it doesn't currently have and taking a leaf out of TEDs book I think there is a way around that.

TED is another preposterously expensive conference (It's almost a $1000 to get just a live web feed!) that could do huge damage to people's view of science except for one brilliant move. Rather than appearing exclusional, it has become a huge tool for good with it's free broadcast of talks given. Once a week for the year between TEDs these talks keep interest high, illuminate and inform the masses and makes the conference transparent.

With the support of the speakers at TAM:London this approach would prevent the criticisms I've detailed here.

Currently TAM:London just has a single video from last year.

So I call on TAM:London and its speakers to follow TED and turn a meeting that currently appears insular and segregating into a huge outreach and educational resource. Make the talks free. Slowly. Drip by drip. Over the year.

I don't believe it will cost you money. If anything I think it will increase DVD sales and grow the meeting. I suspect it will increase demand for next years tickets.

But more importantly it will raise awareness and place skepticism above reproach.

Are my feelings justified? I don't believe they necessarily are. But not being able to afford to go, I can't say further.

In the interest of full disclosure - I've applied for a bloggers press pass to visit TAM:London.

A Freedom or Great Repeal Bill: A deal with the devil worth making

2010-05-12T22:22:00.001Z

I doubt many of the readers of this site will be that happy with Cameron in power. I know I'm not.

But, I contend that 5 years of Cameron is worth it. Even if he looks like his greasy carapace might crack open at any moment to release a David Icke Lizard Man.

Because the protection of civil liberties that this new parliament will provide is more important in the long term than the damage he may do to our public services.

I was too young during Thatchers years to really appreciate what she did to the country. It was only during Major that I started to (crudely) understand the pain and inequality they brought to my (strangely tory voting) parents.

Blair's new labour were the only labour party in power I had experienced, so their new nomenclature was more or less irrelevant. And whilst many people had hope for this new way, by the time I could vote the reality of Blair's government had made itself apparent to me.

As such for many of us this election has been extremely difficult. The continual, systematic, piece by piece dismantling of civil liberties by Labour since the Twin Towers attacks has been such a tremendous long term threat to our freedoms that the idea of allowing them to continue unabated with another term was unthinkable.

As unthinkable as allowing the Tories back in.

And with the corrupt First Past the Post system preventing the Lib Dems from holding a number of seats in anyway representing the 7 million votes they would eventually receive it seemed we were doomed.

But the hung parliament and the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition has produced a unique chance to undo so much of this mess.

The overlap in the venn diagram of Lib Dem/Con policies is such that any areas on which they do they agree are areas they need to push with all their strength in order to convince the public (and themselves) that they are a strong and stable government.

This is the best situation we could have possibly hoped for — as if their is one area where these parties do agree it is Civil Liberties.

I now quote from the full text of the coalition agreement document produced by the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. §10 is a doozy.

10. Civil liberties

The parties agree to implement a full programme of measures to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties under the Labour Government and roll back state intrusion.

This will include:
A Freedom or Great Repeal Bill.
The scrapping of ID card scheme, the National Identity register, the next generation of biometric passports and the Contact Point Database.
Outlawing the finger-printing of children at school without parental permission.
The extension of the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to provide greater transparency.
Adopting the protections of the Scottish model for the DNA database.
The protection of historic freedoms through the defence of trial by jury.
The restoration of rights to non-violent protest.
The review of libel laws to protect freedom of speech.
Safeguards against the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation.
Further regulation of CCTV.
Ending of storage of internet and email records without good reason.
A new mechanism to prevent the proliferation of unnecessary new criminal offences.

I began to bold the most important parts of that list. But I stopped, because each and every part is so very, very important.

The end of the system to systematically record every email sent and every url visited. The end of ID Cards. A commitment to libel reform. It's pretty much everything I've talked about on this blog.

As such I wait with bated breath over the future of the Digital Economy Bill (and, of course, voting reform).

With Clegg we have a liberal deputy prime minister who stated that he would break the law and lead a campaign of civil disobedience over ID cards.

It is also reassuring that he will admit to being an atheist.

We've been at a truly fundamental turning point in our history. One which is typically misunderstood or ridiculed but that makes it no less important.

When it comes to our civil liberties and the disruptive distributed and equalised printing press we call the internet we are lumbered with MPs full of the fear of terrorism whilst being the last generation that can not understand the internet in either purpose or form.

And for all it's cat pictures that there internet represents our cultural future and public mouthpiece. So, for all the damage to our public services in the next 5 years - if the Tories push the internet off the knife edge and back towards the openess and liberty we need, then in fifty years we'll still have the internet we need in a world we can not yet begin to understand.

And that, I believe would be worth it.

Insane Clown Feynman

2010-04-20T15:05:00.001Z

I'm guessing you've seen the music video 'Miracles' by the Insane Clown Posse? If you haven't pop off and watch it now, otherwise this blog post won't make sense. We'll wait.

I'm obsessed with it. It's funny, but yet still quite inspiring and despite reeking of Poe's Law it somehow consolidates and captures the mindset of those who celebrate the 'wonderful mystery of ignorance' — that scientists are evil lying people who somehow drain the beauty of the world by trying to understand it.

So here's my rebuttal, which I made by borrowing the wise words of Richard Feynman:

Incidentally in doing so I've just broken the UK's Digital Economy Act - I'ld be guilty till proven innocent if a copyright holder took offence. And to prove it was fair use I'ld have to be able to pay....

The Digital Economy Bill passed: The internet watched live as a handful of MPs ignored democracy in their attempts to control that which they don't understand.

2010-04-08T00:13:00.001Z

Yesterday we watched the 2nd reading of the Digital Economy Bill. Today we watched the 3rd reading.

In short: Democracy wasn't present. Those wishing to censor ideas have been given a most powerful weapon. Culture will suffer. Whilst creators will gain nothing.

My girlfriend and I gathered on the couch. Laptops out. Phones out. TV on. Twitter buzzing, Youtube satirising. Forums racing. People don't merely consume anymore. To just consume doesn't even make sense.

During the minuscule 2 hours the 2nd reading took one man mashed up the #DEBill twitter feed with the parliament feed onto his TV to avoid having to multitask so much. He published his work so others could do the same.

Remixing, reusing, editing.

Overnight one excellent person remixed one particularly inane part of the 2nd reading to make a very important point:

Remixing, reusing, editing.

Open letters were written. Crowd sourced lists of the MPs in attendance were pulled together.

20,000 wrote to their MPs. Thousands protested or rang MPs. #DEBill became the top trending topic on Twitter.

Globally.

There are 646 MPs. About 40 turned up for the second reading. About 16 made it to the end.

The third reading has been just as bad. Almost Empty. 2 hours given to debate amendments to 50 clauses.

The first clause took 1hr. The last 49 were glossed over in the last hour.

Ten minutes before the vote labour MPs put down their drinks, pulled themselves out of the bar and stumbled in to vote for the Bill. Having listened to nothing.

Disgusting.

WikiLeaks has been releasing hugely important videos this week. The USA has been trying to shut them down, for leaking footage of an american helicopter killing Reuters Journalists in Iraq.

John Hemming MP (Lib, Birmingham) is a member of the BPI. His money comes from media. If anyone should support the bill it should be him.

But instead he calls it 'Absurd.'

Why? Because he states that the Bill will allow the USA (or others) to claim copyright on that video and shut down the website and forbid sharers of it access to the internet. Despite it's important worth.

John Redwood MP (Con, Wokingham) agreed:

"This is really about Censorship on the Web" - John Redwood MP

The true hero was Tom Watson (Labour MP) who quickly came to be the people's champion. His criticism of the bill didn't stop with the preposterous technical issues (ip address are not fingerprints) or the equally preposterous human rights violations (guilty till proven innocent, child downloads musics - dad loses the internet he needs for his job).

He went on to point out that remixing copyrighted works is part of culture now.

His example?

The remixed Ashes to Ashes poster that Labour and the Conservatives have been having so much fun with over the last few days.

Remixing, reusing, editing.

They all fall foul of the bill they've just passed.

As do you for reading this page.

Today was a huge failure for democracy. A bill was passed, unread and unanalysed by computer illiterate MPs who didn't attend the debates.

Here are what I feel these are the most terrible consequences of the last 48 hours.

A bill that makes the ricockulous DMCA look sensible has passed without proper debate or democratic process.
The internet generation, who cares deeply about this matter was watching.
They saw the empty parliament.
They heard the ignorant comments.
They saw democracy fail.
They are not pleased.
Scientists, Journalists and Skeptics are working so hard to fight the abuse of Libel Laws to stifle debate and censor criticism. The existence of the Digital Economy Bill will allow so many avenues for censorship that we need to start all over again.
Piracy is a serious concern to the mainstream media, and yet remix/reuse of material is part and parcel of our culture today. If the bill works then MPs will make so many innocent parties criminals and it will be a disaster for the UK. But If the bill fails then they will have convinced Pirates that the Government is clueless and toothless.
The British Legislative process is fundamentally and comprehensively broken. And today MPs showed that in detail to an extremely internet savvy audience.

On the eve of the first true internet election, this will stand as the defining moment that summarises how out of touch the Government is with respect to the populace. I don't think they appreciate how much attention we can give them.

How difficult we will make this for them.

I will leave you with this. Any MP who watches this will leave understanding the culture that they are ignorant of - but today made illegal.

EDIT 9:59, April 8, 2010: Want to know how your MP voted? Here's a list

Dear London SITP goers, fancy a Ninja Skeptical Science Nomadic HQ monthly meet up for Schemes and Adventures?

2010-03-07T23:16:00.003Z

Heard of “tuttles“? From what I gather they’re basically a chance for people into ‘social networking’ to meet up and work on ideas together. I suspect they talk about things like ‘The Cloud’ and ‘Web 2.0’ and ‘Synergy’ and stuff. Anyway that’s not important right now. The point is it gave me an idea.

How about, once a month, on maybe a Saturday afternoon, we meet up somewhere in Central London. Somewhere with free wifi. We bring laptops. And we work on schemes and skeptical ninja projects.

Want to blog about your awesome research, some bad science or some skeptical matters? Well we’ll help you set that up one of them there blogs and that.

Want to bounce some ideas around for a project or blog post? Well, they’ll be a bunch of people in a similar place.

Want to get some stuff actually done? Then it’ll be a place to knuckle down with people of a like mind.

Want to brainstorm/piss about with some like minded fools? Well you’ll be in good company.

Want to get some willing accomplices for some cunning scheme or shenanigan - be it merely splitting up FOI requests to full on, mass attack, ten23 style super events? Well then there would be like minds to help out.

Want to hack up a new way to access public data for the skeptical cause? Well maybe we could take a leaf out of the excellent Rewired State meet up that happened last year.

Maybe we could record a noisy rambling podcast. I know James O'Malley (who puts together the excellent Pod Delusion) might be able to help out (Well, if your still interested James?).

So this would be entirely what we make it, but a hacking/blogging/adventuring/scheming/podcasting/FOIA’ing meet up would almost certainly be excellent. Hell, if it gives a few people like me a chance to actually finish a few of their blog posts away from the chaos of real life then it’s worth it.

I'm willing to organise all this if there is interest. I’ll sort out a place we can all meet with free wi-fi and coffee (and booze?). Then you just turn up with a either a fully charged laptop, an idea, or a willingness to help out someone else. I’ve got webspace to donate and I can throw up forums, sites and files as needed.

Remember this isn’t meant to be some elitist, cream of the crop only event (if it was, I wouldn’t be allowed to organise it!) but something where we could all do something. Anything. Create rather consume and all that.

Interested? Then please comment below. Or discuss in on twitter. I suggest the hashtag ‘#skuttle’ to get started.

Skeptobot stumbles into Twenty-Ten

2010-01-10T19:16:00.001Z

Twenty-Ten, Twenty-Ten, Twenty-Ten, finally we hit a decade where we can go back to sensible pronunciation. It's also the fifth year of Skeptobot's irregular postings, which is nice. So it seems like time I summed up what is happening.

Despite the blog being quite things are on the up:

The leg is healed (though it seems I'll always have a slight case of 'kruger foot').
My work means I'm still suffering from little internet access till at least April, but...
I have a fancy iPhone now, so I've got my RSS feeds and twitter for my commute, which should help keep me in the loop.
I even have web hosting, so a lot more is possible. I'm even musing an occasional Herrin and Collings style lo-fi podcast.

The web hosting is currently a mirror of Skeptobot at

www.rockpaperskeptic.net

and I'm still pondering how best to use it all.

I like the idea of Skeptobot publishing content I've made, and RockPaperSkeptic being a combined feed of skeptobot posts, informal posts, posts about other peoples stuff and even tweets. The honour of being syndicated on badscienceblogs means I'm always hesitant to make 'trivial' posts.

Any advice how best to achieve that (RPS is running Wordpress, Skeptobot uses Blogger) would be most appreciated. Likewise for any other suggestions you might have.

Thanks for continuing to read my infrequent rambles, I'll be endevering to post more this year as thanks, so happy new year and that.

- Bill

Being an atheist at Christmas.

2009-12-13T19:37:00.000Z

Every year, around this time, I get a rather itchy case of cognitive dissonance. I'm an atheist enjoying Christmas.

Invariably a friend, who will typically have no religious beliefs themselves, will ask why I celebrate the festival when I'm not religious.

This is the little spiel I reel off in defence to my cloudy thinking:

When I celebrate Christmas I follow a festival that is currently generally considered to be Christian but that at previous times has been Norse, Roman, Greek and Pagan, all the way into prehistory. Like all those people I have co-opted the same festival to represent my own beliefs. Just like all those before me I've stolen and adapted it to suit my own thoughts and my own needs.

Christmas is originally the celebration of the Winter Solstice (21st - 22nd December), which rather than being a day for pagan magic, is simply the peak of winter — the day with the longest night.

When the earth is cold, and dead, when the trees are bare and the Sun can't quite warm your skin, it makes sense to celebrate the warmth you still have on this worst day, knowing it will only get better from here on out.

That warmth is our friends and our family; the new members and the ones we miss.

I think it's foolish to say that an atheist does not need these traditions. I think we need them more. I've a finite, limited time with those I love, and Christmas reminds me of that. Reminds me to make the most of this.

All of this.

So with all possible respect, whilst we both should join each other on enjoying our decorations, our trees, our winter days and our presents. We should all be hoping for 'Peace and Goodwill to all men.' But, you can keep your tales of Christ in a pig trough, your magic flying super-intelligent creatures, your wise men and your acts of baby genocide. And I'll keep my Christmas alive — just like you will.

Furthermore, Christians might currently own Christmas but at best they are mearly custodians, the temporary baton carriers of a festival that stretches into prehistory. It would preposterous to tell me that I can't connect to the history of our species because a certain fraction of people with certain specific beliefs are, as of yet, refusing to hand over custody to capitalism, scientology, atheism or whatever new group will take it upon themselves next. It doesn't work that way.

No greater proof of this can be more forthcoming than the damnations Christmas receives in the old testament itself.

Before the birth of christ the old testament when to great pains to damn to hell those who celebrated in the old pagan and roman ways as we can read in Jeremiah 10 1-5

1 Hear ye the word which the LORD speaketh unto you, O house of Israel:
2 Thus saith the LORD, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them.
3 For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe.
4 They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.

The Christmas tree was a pagan and roman celebration of life (it is easy to see how a vivid green tree at the peak of winter would raise the spirits) and as such was a symbol of competeing faiths, and so condemned in the Old Testament.

However in the years that followed as Christianity spread north these people who celebrated in the harshness of winter, were won over and converted to Christianity.

But these people needed this festival in the same way we do today. They couldn't bare to abandon this important gathering of friends and family, so they moved the birth of Christ and made the festival about that so that the important aspects of it could survive. They hid their festival in the trappings of the day.

It might be depressing for Christians today, to see that same process repeating itself, it suggests that Christianity might be on the wane.

But that won't stop it happening.

Other things worth mentioning

9 Lessons and Carols for Godless People is pretty much the celebration for people with similar views to myself. It's wonderful and I cannot recommend it enough. Whilst you might struggle for tickets this close to the event, you can buy a DVD of last years at the equally wonderful Gofasterstripe. I'm off to see it this Tuesday at Bloomsbury.

Tim Minchin is releasing his Christmas single 'White Wine and The Sun' that covers much the same topics, but from the point of view of someone who has Christmas in the middle of summer. I've embedded it below:

I think it is lovely.

Oh, and for those of you who think, 'well fine, just stop calling it christmas, I'm afraid that history doesn't work like that, for example, we don't need to come up with another name for 'saturday', because we don't use the day to worship the greek god or agriculture any more.

Sorry for the saccharin and gooey post today, but normal cynical service will be resumed as soon as possible. Sooner if I get an iPhone for Christmas allowing me to actually blog again.

The REAL Daily Mail Churnalism Generator

2009-09-18T14:36:00.001Z

Crispian Jago has written a thorough and exhaustive exposé on the state of science journalism as a result of the Goldacre V Drayson debate. HOWEVER I can EXCLUSIVELY REVEAL that the Daily Mail doesn't use hi-tech applications when determining it's science output. As any one with even a MODICUM of sense knows, Windows was created by illegal immigrants as a way to allow child yobs to upload happy slapping videos to youtube for paedophiles to watch. The Daily Mail wouldn't get caught dead using one to deduce the exciting breakthroughs of the day.

Instead I can exclusively reveal THIS is how the Daily Mail investigates it's stories with The Patented Skeptobot Churnalism Generator.

AKA Cause and Effect Dice!

Whats not well know is that in 1998 teh Daily Mail had to invest in geeky D10 dice in an increasingly competitive market.

Anyhow, now that

The Cause Dice

The Effect Dice

An aside, I actually made these yonks ago - before I burnt the hell out of my leg - but Crispians excellent post reminded me about them. Let me know if anyone makes a pair.

Oh and there shouldn't be any issue with the images showing up now because... well maybe you can work it out?

An open letter to Lord Drayson

2009-09-16T20:22:00.001Z

A brief email I've just sent to Lord Paul Drayson on a minor comment he just made during the excellent debate he had with Ben Goldacre earlier this evening at the Ri. Whilst this topic is funny, the genuine fear I've seen in people means that I must mention it.

Dear Lord Drayson,

Firstly, congratulations with the debate. I think you raised some very valid points. Furthermore, I commend you for reaching out via such debates and twitter.

However, I feel I must quickly raise an issue I had with a comment you made at the end of the debate. Just minutes ago, you declared that the media's coverage over whether the LHC could pull the Earth into a black hole was a GOOD thing. You suggest that it got people 'interested' and 'thinking' and that this 'sensationalism' was good for science.

I must strongly disagree. I have a PhD in Physics and as a result, during the course of my work (and in the course of my blog) I have had to explain, comfort and reassure numerous members of the public that they were not under threat from Physicists stepping on the toes of the gods. People have come to me explaining that their children were in tears and couldn't sleep with fear. Whilst we all found it funny, It was not a joke to them.

I might even go further and suggest that you believe that these outrageous statements are justified because deep down no one really took the media's story seriously. In doing so, you are relying on the very same mistrust of the media that you earlier claimed did not exist.

Whilst I do not wish to inflate the importance of this issue, I do feel you should know the pain it caused a small minority of people and the issue this presents for mainstream media. The coverage of the LHC was lacking. I shall be posting this email as an open message on my blog tomorrow.

Best Regards,
Bill

Just a comment about the blog, it's NOT dead. My excuse is that I have been suffering from severe 2nd degree burns on my leg and foot and so have been in and out of hospital for FAR TOO LONG now. As I get better the site should come back to life.

6000 years of Uranium

2009-07-07T08:58:00.001Z

Here's a wonderful out of context clip apparently of Arizona State Senator Sylvia Allen casually mentioning the age of the Earth as she talks about Arizona's plans to mine Uranium.

It's terrifying to think that we've developed the skills to turn Uranium into both energy and bombs but there are still people in charge of things so clueless.

As science progresses we can't just bring some people up to speed with how the world works. We have to bring everyone. Otherwise we get situations like this.

via The Bad Astronomer

Wolfram Alpha is amazing, but it has a fundamental flaw.

2009-05-20T13:39:00.001Z

Wolfram Alpha is amazing. Go play with it now.

Some people really, really don't get it. They are frustrated that it isn't google, which of course it was never meant to be. If you're not sure what it is then I recommend the (overlong) intro video.

But basically, It's a data engine. A fact machine. It lets you pull and push and manipulate data.

For instance you could compare the mean wage of chiropractors vs journalists in seconds (topical!). Or do some maths. Or do lots of things.

It's some topical data about two professions.

And this is all the info your are given for your 'source'

It's finicky and has plenty of holes in it, but it's only just gone live and it is brilliant. I can't stress that enough.

Now on to why it sucks.

The cultural effects of a 'computational knowledge engine' that can both quantify and manipulate data is huge. But the ability for it to be misused is also huge. We all love wikipeida, but when journalists use it for their primary source of info it gets a little worrying. To offset that Wikipedia has a big list of references at the bottom of every page.

Rather than establish itself as an authority figure (despite the wishes of some of the more 'enthusiastic' admins) Wikipedia works hard to tell you how it knows something to be true, otherwise [citation needed] rears its head.

I don't get that same feeling from Wolfram Alpha. Firstly, the references are tucked away from view in a little pop up window rather than being an inherent part of the page. Secondly, the Primary source for everything I've tried so far is:

Wolfram|Alpha curated data, 2009

Which just isn't good enough. It is setting Alpha up to be an authority figure for data. But this isn't information that Wolfram et al. have discovered and published. This is information that Wolfram has collated.

Now, to be fair, 'background' sources are listed. And whilst they are most likely the true source of the data presented, no single study or report or finding is indicated to be where any specific fact came from. For example Alpha has decided that the UK produces 1.8 billion barrels of oil a day. Has it taken an average of the studies it looked at? Or has it weighted them? It doesn't tell me.

Every piece of data when fed into Alpha should have been tagged with details of where it came from. But it isn't. It's a mind boggling strange omission.

So much so that I can't help but feel this, may possibly, add weight to widespread opinion that Stephen Wolfram is a little bit, erm, arrogant. This letter that Richard Feynman (apparently) wrote to Stephen Wolfram is rather illuminating on the subject. The cynic in me whispers that Alpha wants to be your reference, not your intermediary.

Wolfram|Alpha is an amazing achievement, and one I will use an awful lot. (even if it is just to plot nonsense) Stephen Wolfram should be immensely proud of it.

But I can't help thinking how much more important Alpha would be as a proper research tool if it was a little bit more willing to explain where it learnt to be so clever.

The Skeptic's News Fart Digest #2

2009-05-17T19:33:00.000Z

Here we go with the second round up of the 'skeptish' news of the last week.

REMEMBER: This material is presented as is. A skeptical interpretation of the material is left to the reader. I haven't read everything I've posted here in detail, so if you take anything here on face value based on it being linked here you've messed up.

When invading a country like Iraq it is extremely important to not make it look like a religious war. I mean putting Bible quotes all over your Top Secret reports would send a bad message. So I'm glad Rumsfeld et al. didn't do that.
Oh.
And the posters are here.
and more stuff here.
George Carlin on UFO believers VS Religious Believers.
The Daily Show on the LHC (thanks Naomi!)
Ackward Questions about Jesus from the brilliant Outnumbered. Outnumbered is a bit depressing because by liking it I feel a bit old.
Been catching up with Mormanism this week. It see,s to be a bit, er, mental. As this 7minute cartoon will attest.
Child won't say 'Amen' so a woman along with One Mind Ministries starve the boy to death thinking that when he resurrects the demon possessing him will be gone.
Armando Iannucci sneaks into US state department. Just like how he has sneaked into my heart.
No goggles were needed for old chemistry sets. And they are beautiful. Relatedly here are some amazing magazine covers.
Who would be a female under islamic law?
Remember last week there was a guy who was sued and lost because he was critical of creationism in a science lesson? He's responded to what happened on Salon. I haven't read enough about this to settle my mind one way or the other, but if you have a secular school (which is a good thing) then being critical of religion is the same as promoting it.
Church literally being worn away by sin. Religious speech writers must be creaming themselves with tortured metaphor possibilities.
Don't shoot the scientists
The American Patriot's Bible exists. Hell you can buy it on Amazon.
Witch hunts, murder and evil in Papua New Guinea.
BNP members don't exist
Cardinal Cormac Murphy thinks that I'm not fully human. Well I think he's a big stupid poopy head.

Events

Tonight (monday) is the meeting for Simon Singh's response to the libel ruling against the BCA. In The Penderel's Oak in Holborn, London. I'll be going and reporting back, so say hi.

Jack of Kent's blog is covering it all and the facebook page has details of the event.

Wednesday sees the normal Skeptics in the Pub night. Which looks to be a cracker:

Edzard Ernst's team of 10-15 researchers have tried for the last 15 years to critically evaluate “alternative medicine”. Much of the resulting evidence has now been summarised in the book ‘Trick or Treatment’ by Simon Singh and myself. As it turns out, alternative medicine is more “trick” than “treatment”. In my talk, I will report about some of the often amazing milestones on my long journey toward the truth.

Generation Rescue's Insane Video. Jenny MCarthy and Jim Carrey fight vaccinations and MMR.

2009-05-14T09:28:00.001Z

Just a quick heads up. Generation Rescue is Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey's anti-vax and autism site.

Watch this video. I've never seen anything, anything like it.

I haven't time to talk about it in depth. And it has left me speechless. It's tragic, sad and insane and I can't give it the response it deserves. But by pimping it here I hope the better qualified BadScienceBloggers will snap it up.

I've heard rumours Oprah is giving McCarthy her own Chat show. Please, please, please, please, please don't be true.

A few highlights for those that can't watch the video:

Vaccines contain Mercury, Aluminum, Ether, Antifreeze and Human aborted fetal tissue.
Kids eating Dairy & Gluten is the same as them smoking a joint.
The Secret works
When IranandIraq attacks the brain in turns on Rambo mode and then kids can't think.

OK, i'm taking the last one out of context (not that the context makes it better). But bloody hell.
EDIT: Also I still seem to be having picture issues for some people (but not all). Sorry.

BBC appoints Muslim as head of religious broadcasting: Daily Mail begins the idiocy.

2009-05-13T14:18:00.001Z

This is Aaqil Ahmed. He is a practising Muslim. And on Monday he was appointed Head of Religious Broadcasting for the BBC. This will be FUN.

Anyone who has ever read the Daily Mail knows that it doesn't like 'the BBC', 'the Muslims', Immigrants, being 'politically correct', and crucially any deviation from a bizarre belief in a cultural Golden age that ran from 1935 to 1955. One where there was NO CRIME, teenagers loved their mothers and we all went to an ENGLISH Church.

So you can imagine the fallout that this will cause in certain circles. Personally I can not WAIT for The Christian Voice's response. They've probably thrown up a lung whilst clasping a copy of the BBC recording of 'Jerry Springer The Opera' to their chest.

Anyway this is the Daily Mails article:

Why can't the BBC understand that we are STILL a Christian country?

By Stephen Glover. After lots of heartfelt disclaimers that he isn't a racist (which I'm sure he isn't) he then goes on with a few choice comments:

I imagine that having a Methodist preacher at the heart of the BBC was more than it could stomach.

The BBC does not like God, unless perhaps it be a Muslim, Hindu or Sikh version.

And best of all:

At every possible opportunity it will wheel forward one of those professional atheists who are not happy to live silently with their own non-belief but are determined to shove it down everyone else’s throats.

One of the most popular religious stance in the UK (i.e. that of none) being represented in religious programming is balance. Sorry it is lodging in your throat Steveo.

He goes on to blame this appointment on the "secular tide" that is taking over the BBC. Apparently atheists prefer Islam.

For all I know, Mr Ahmed may prove himself remarkably sympathetic to the sensibilities of Christians in his new job. One cannot, however, count on that, and it is interesting that he has said there should be more coverage of Muslim matters in the media.

Will this, on the BBC, be at the expense of an already reduced number of Christian programmes?

In all kinds of ways the publicly funded BBC does not reflect the views of the public it is supposed to serve.

No doubt its secular suits assume that Britain is as anti-Christian as they are. They’re out of touch again. In appointing Aaqil Ahmed they do not simply offend against this country’s Christian heritage and traditions. They also further weaken the hold and authority of the BBC.

I have to put up with lots of religious programming. But I also have to put up with 'My Family,' Horne and Corden' and 'Three Pints of Larger and a Packet of Crisps.' The BBC caters for a bunch of audiences less mentally coherent than myself* but in return I get Outnumbered, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle and, and...

No sorry. I can't think of an equivalent 'good version' of Three Pints. It's like trying to find the good version of the HIV**.

I have no doubt that a lot of people in the UK do like to think of ourselves as a Christian Nation, but not in any sense that applies to people who are actually religious. If you will allow me a tortured metaphor It's akin to red phone boxes.

Religion, yesterday.

Christianity in England is like a Red Phone Box. We all love the Red Phone box. It is part of our heritage.

But you wont catch us using it unless we really have to. It looks nice as you pass by it, but once you actually get inside a phone box it gets really creepy. Full of dirt and urine and weird sexual promises. But despite the fact we never use them (except when a tourist friend wants you to photograph them in one***) I'm sure we all want them to keep popping up across the landscape. Just don't ask us to pay for them.

But the BBC shouldn't be making shows for the express purpose of allowing Stephen Glover et al. to flick past them on a sunday morning before watching Shipwrecked.

Let it make shows for the people who actually believe in these weird things. Not the 'culturally religious'. Oh and if Stephen Gover really wants balance in the programming he needs to get the Beeb to employ a secular agnostic as its head.

* I was talking about 'CBeebies' what did you think I was talking about? Shame on you.
** Almost did a PIN number.
*** This part of the tortured metaphor represents weddings. I told you it was tortured.

The Skeptic's News Fart Digest #1

2009-05-11T01:36:00.001Z

Welcome to the first News Fart Digest collecting all the interesting skeptical nonsense I stumbled upon in the last 7 days.

It's just an idea I'm trying on for the next 4 weeks to see how it goes. Let me know what you think.

Oh and one last thing, don't assume that just because something has been linked here that it is true, or it's opinions supported. The volume of links means that I've not had time or inclination to properly vet them. So treat them skeptically and pipe up in the comments if you find anything interesting.

Anyhow, link dump ahoy.

A 'Martian Skull' has been found on Mars by 'UFO spotters' or so claims the Telegraph. It seems some people were pissing about in a forum somewhere and they've been turned into an Silly Story for the Telegraph. Sans references to obscure anything of worth.
Daily Mail Commentors freak the hell out when a pop-sci article informs them that their ancestors were once black.
I get countless emails asking to see masked Mexican wrestlers like Renegado and Mr. Tempest looking at an image of the Virgin Mary emblazoned onto a griddle. Well your prayers have been answered.
Harvesting the power of prayer. By putting dynamos in prayer wheels.
The Catholic churches works hard to promote Dan 'The famous man looked at the red cup' Brown's Demons and Angels Movie by getting in a huff about it.
Jonathan Myerson trots out the 'If you have nothing to hide you've nothing to fear' idiocy like it even looks like a valid argument. And that's before you realise he's talking about DNA, a database of which would produce massive amounts of false positives. On the flip side here is AC Grayling being a bit more sensible.
Chris Matthews interviews Republican Mike Pence on Evolution and Science. "Do you believe in Evolution?" leads to 5 minutes of squirming. How do you pretend to be pro-science when you try to appease religious fundamentalists?
Nine month old girl dies when parent only treat her eczema with homeopathy. Tragic. Important to note that the Dad was a homeopath. It is too easy to get the impression that homeopaths are quacks and con artists. But it is more complicated than that - he truly believed in what he preached. And we must bare that in mind when we interact with CAM.
The View (basically an American version of 'Loose Women') once again makes you fear for humanity. The 'pretend there is a debate' argument from IDers is really working.
Jokes about atheists. Oooh you been served dude.
Pilots sit inside the heads of giant iron birds and fly them through the sky.
Which is awesome.
Pilots wear cool uniforms whilst sleeping with attractive people all around the world.
Which is awesome.
Pilots tell the 'voluntary' ID card scheme to bugger off. Which is awesome.
Ergo - Pilots are awesome.

The pilots' union has protested to ministers that the £18m scheme cannot be regarded as voluntary when they are being told they will not qualify for an "airside pass" without them: "ID cards will have absolutely no value as far as security is concerned. This is nothing other than coercion and promises that ID cards would be voluntary have been broken," Jim McAuslan, Balpa general secretary, has told ministers. "We will resist."'

Teenager successfully sues teacher for criticising creationism.
America's young are giving up on organised religion.
Pope Benedict XVI, who you may remember for being at the heart of the global cover up of child abuse before he levelled up to pope, has talked in the middle east warning them about the misuse of religion.
I mean I pretty much agree with what he said but the words Pot, Kettle and Black keep popping in my head...

"Some assert that religion is necessarily a cause of division in our world and so they argue that the lesser attention given to religion in the public sphere the better," he said.
"Certainly, the contradiction of tensions and divisions between the followers of different religious traditions, sadly, cannot be denied.
"However, is it not also the case that often it is the ideological manipulation of religion, sometimes for political ends, that is the real catalyst for tension and division, and at times even violence in society?"

Is Texas 6000 years old? No. Of course not. You twat.

BEST OF THE BLOGS

How you read ties into how you use your body. The SNARC effect is
fascinating stuff.

A damn great article: "Diet and health. What can you believe: or does
bacon kill you?"

A student edits wikipedia to show that the mainstream media use it as a
primary source of info.
But I can talk, I'm posting this here without fact checking it.

MOST DEPRESSING NEWS OF THE WEEK

Simon SIngh's libel case with the British ASSociation of Chiropractors (BAC) hasn't been going very well and he has been found guilty. Basically because he used the word 'Bogus.' Bill & Ted would be livid. This Bad Science Forum thread is probably the easiest way to link to all that is going on.

Sources

This weeks links were borrowed, stolen, repatriated, consumed, perpetuated
and regurgitated from:
General Surfing/Twitterers/Twatters/Ben Goldacre/Reddit/Bad Science Blogs/
High Weirdness Newswire...

A mind blowing example of Poe's Law: It's like Brass Eye....ON ACID!

2009-04-20T23:17:00.001Z

The Rational Wiki defines Poe's Law as follows:

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won't mistake for the real thing.

Of course it works both ways, often I stumble over religious material so insane that I believe it to be parody, but which is, in fact, genuine. For example here are some church websites. I should warn you that they are both visual and noisy. But it still won't prepare you for what you are about to see. They are amazingly awesome.

International Congress of Church and Ministers — A site for ensuring the tax free status of churches with the IRS.
Evangel Cathedral — An evangelical Cathedral.
KK Mime — Evangelical Ministers who minister via the medium of yes, you guessed it, mime.
Truth Transformation Ministries.
The 7th District AME Church in South Carolina
St. John Missionary Baptist Church

After watching all these I'm so stoked I could fight a bear. I genuinely think they are amazing. They all seem to have been produced by SharperFX who specialise in making websites. Websites for insane churches.

If Chris Morris was to create a Brass Eye Episode about these churches, his parody would be interchangeable with the real thing and no one, on either side, could tell.

And that kinda makes me happy.

(via reddit)

Dutch news piece on Biblicaly Correct (B.C.) Tours

2009-04-16T17:33:00.000Z

So a ~~German~~ Dutch speaking film crew went to film a B.C. Tour. The very first part is in ~~German~~ Dutch (or at least I ~~think it is germa~~ it is if you are ignorant) but afterwards we are good to go.

I last talked about this lot here. It's depressing to be reminded they still exist. I think it is significant to note that an organisation that promotes complex 'science' like this and gets worldwide attention has a web site that looks like this:

'Win every argument' indeed.

(This post was also a sneaky test of the site - hopefully, the images, embeds and text are now all hunky dory - please let me know if you are still having problems)

Skeptobot is being a bit funny when it comes to pictures

2009-04-13T14:45:00.001Z

The site's imagehosting has gone a bit screwy. So I'll be using this update to fix it.

As way of apology here should be an image that I made using this billboard generator - which is a staggeringly great tool to satirise this farcical bit of propaganda.

I'm using some new blogging software which up till now has been great. If it is working you should be able to click through the thumbnail above to see the full sized image.

Update: A google around seems to suggest that this is a problem that has been causing trouble for a number of picasa users. Hopefully it will correct itself in due course.

Open-mindedness

2009-04-08T18:53:00.001Z

This was sent to me by the wonderful Dr A & it is ace.

Of course you might say that he's arguing against a straw man, but I don't really think that is the point. A wonderful primer on how skeptical thinking doesn't mean close-mindedness.

But actually means you are 50s intellectual man hunk. Or something.

New Project - 'Hello. Do you believe in God?'

2009-03-31T01:48:00.001Z

In which I ask strangers 'Hello. Do you believe in God?' and post what they reply.

I got the idea when an internet chum showed me a website that acts as a chat room for one on one chats with strangers (which sounds creepy when you write it down). I kinda like it because it's anonymous, and no one else is listening, which helps to lead to interesting answers.

I haven't excluded, censored or altered any. Even the ones where I come across like an Idiot with a My-First-Dvorak-Keyboard, so there is a certain amount of wheat vs chaff going on.

I'll give you two examples. Firstly:

And then to lower the tone:

The rest are here. Hope you like them.

US Congressman John Shimkus on Global Warming - God's got our back.

2009-03-29T18:42:00.001Z

Republican John Shimkus is member of the United States House of Representatives. On the March 25th hearing of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment he said this:

Poor Illinois.

Highlights are at 1:44 where he discusses the "Theological Debate" about whether this is a "Carbon starved planet." Personally, I would pay to see a debate of Bishops, Imams and Cardinals huddled over their holy texts deducing God's fate for carbon.

But the best bit, which we really need to grasp onto as a flicker of rational light, is the woman's smirk at 0:24.

If it wasn't for that, this video could reduce you to tears.

The Daily Mail links White on White violence to Scary Muslims.

2009-03-29T15:21:00.001Z

I wasn't going to post this, as it is outside the remit of Skeptobot but it's really annoying me. Basically a 15 year old white teenager in her army cadet uniform gets attacked by a white woman and a white man of no stated religion.

Nevertheless the Daily Mail has done its upmost to link this horrible event to Daily Mail Brand Muslim Extremists.

The headline reads "Teen army cadets in uniform targeted by vicious thugs" and is followed up by a picture or Muslims protesting. It's only at the very end of the article you discover this has nothing to do with the people in the picture. After most people will probably have clicked away.

A case can be made that I'm overstating here, but It's just more (circumstantial) evidence why we can't have a civil discussion about our military actions and religion. One of the reasons it is so hard to criticise Islam without appearing like a racist dick is because the Daily Mail and the like take every opportunity to turn complex shades gray into sellable chunks of black and white with Muslims as the cartoon grade evil baddies.

To be fare there is no reason why the white attackers couldn't be Muslim. I just make the assumption they weren't because then the Mails story would probably been about how Islam is corrupting the Good Honest White People That Won The War.

Maybe one day the Daily Mail will actually commission an article about why our military actions have lead people of all skin and hair colour, who believe differing (but equally stupid) things to reprehensible acts of violence. But I doubt it.

Currently Simulcra obsessed.

2009-03-23T16:35:00.000Z

Jesus on toast. Jesus in a sink. Jesus on a moth. I've become obsessed with simulacra again. Or more specifically Pareidolia.

This is collated and mixed by the wonderful, brilliant, superb Everything is Terrible.

It's a classic example of when a joke goes on too long it and it becomes funny. Except again and again for a full 6 minutes.

To continue my indulgence here are some ~~favourites~~ easily obtained ones I've found (click the thumbnails to biggify):

1) Cheesus

2) Treesus

3) Cheesus II: Death of Cheesus

4) Cookisus

5) Pizzsus? Burntsus. I dunno.

6) And finally, Dogsus (Click the thumbnail to obtain context - kinda NSFW if you realise what your looking at. Oh and also a photoshop - but too good not to post).

Elephant-shaped Ganesh growth cured my ills according to the laziest journalist ever.

2009-03-19T11:56:00.001Z

This guy is Sam Lal. As far as I can tell he is a 60 year old manager of a Manhattan uniform company, who likes gardening. He hurt his back lifting a box, and was in pain for 3½ months, then he got better. Thanks to a MIRACLE!

The New York Daily News - a daily newspaper with circulation of ~650,000, making it the fifth most popular paper in the USA - breathlessly reported that the:

Elephant-shaped Ganesh growth cured my ills, Queens man says

yep, in their amazing article. Sam claims that the flowers are an 'incarnation' of the elephant headed hindu god Ganesh and that

"This formation came to heal my illness"

WOW! Go God Go! Still the journalist, Nicholas Hirshon, is a professional and knows that extraordinary claims need extraordinaty evidence, so he contacted the 'Experts' at the Queens Botanical Garden:

[The] Experts identified the plant as a member of the amaranth family... Horticulturalists at the garden have never seen an amaranth take an elephant-like shape, garden spokesman Tim Heimerle said.

"For it to have that long trunk like this is not a natural thing," he said.

So this miracle is pretty much confirmed right‽*

I mean the expert did say that right‽

That it wasn't natural‽ Really‽‽

I mean if, for example, one was to buy a packet of the seeds it wouldn't mention it on the packet would it‽

Would it‽

Oh.

So yeah, apparently miracles cost $3.29 a packet... The shop page goes on:

The reason it's called Elephant Head is that the deep-red bloom grows quite large (36-40") with a long (18-24") protuberance that looks like an elephant's trunk.

It's an example of simulacra that's been given a lot of weight by a believer. That's fair enough, and at least it's prettier than Jesus-In-Toast or Allah-In-Tomato. But it would appear that neither the journalist, nor the 'Expert' even bothered to use google before racing to spread the miracle to 650,000 people. That's if the 'Expert' was even contacted. Or quoted fairly.

Journalist Fail. Expert Fail.

Tut tut.

* ‽ is an interrobang. My new favourite thing. What sums up skepticism better‽ I propse it to be our new official symbol.

Important: This post is entirely thanks to the Wonderful Mimi who let me know about this wonderfully poor piece of journalism, and let me turn it into an article here. It was Mimi who worked out the non-miracle, so she's officially better than New York Journalists and Botanical Experts. You should visit her link by the way, she sells things she makes by hand and they are lovely.

Fighting Badscience on the internet? Add backupurl.com to your Skepto-utility belt.

2009-03-04T21:16:00.001Z

This site wants to be placed on your bookmark bar asap. Multiple times when dealing with badscience and the like you'll get the authors quickly removing the incriminating evidence. MyLifeMyID being a good example.

Normally you'll have to download a copy of the page and then re-host it yourself (opening yourself up to copyright infringement claims) But BackupURL seems to cut out the middleman. Simply paste your chosen URL in and it will spit out the address of a newly made cached version that will be immune to any Orwellian tampering.

I've just this minute stumbled across the site so I've no idea about their reliability in the long term, but as an additional tool to your activism it can hardly hurt. I would still do the old print-screen and webpage saving just to be sure though.

Forgive me if this is old news to some, but I've only just heard about it.

Professor Carmella's Psychic Studio

2009-02-27T00:12:00.000Z

You might want to be sitting down for this as it is pretty exciting, a flyer just came through my door from Professor Carmella! Woohoo! What wonders await us dear readers!? Follow me into the exciting world of Professor Carmella...

First there is an awesome palm reading guide - FOR FREE!

Did you know that each finger print on your grubby heathen hands represents 'orator', 'optimist' 'impulsive', 'clergy' and 'will'? Well now you do! The bottom part of your middle finger? That's agriculture. Obviously. It all makes so much sense now, thanks to the wonderful Professor Carmella! But wait there is more...

Professor Carmella has their own Professor Psychic Studio! They are superior to all psychics! Hell, Professor Carmella can destroy witchcraft. Not mitigate. Not undo. DESTROY. Prof Carm is awesome.

And more importantly 100% RESULTS GUARANTEED!

I've hidden the phone numbers out of a sense of decency. But what should I do readers? On one hand I think it's harmless. On the other hand I'm pretty worried that someone in my neighbourhood helps people troubled by witchcraft and claims to cure illness. I'm very tempted to them ring up...

Tedious excuses and housekeeping

2009-02-26T16:19:00.001Z

Firstly, sorry for the lack of posts. Without going into it, lets just say family matters took precedence. That and science and medicine and the people who devote themselves to those pursuits are all wonderful. But enough of that, I've used the time away to make a few changes. So many in fact that I'm going to use bullet points to try and make it more impressive than it really is...

I've a Twitter Feed located here. Yeah, yeah, I know, but still, why not? With varying levels of success it currently; re-tweets The News Fart (aka Del.ici.ous - which is better and older than twitter), advertises new posts on Skeptobot (a horrible twitter sin) and features random musing and cries for help from yours truly. Why not follow it? Huh? The last inane post will be in the side bar to act like a temptress or to ward you off.
I've changed the site's layout. It's now pushing the wonderful Gill Sans font, which is like Helvetica, but less snobbish and hasn't had a documentary made about it. You might not have Gill Sans installed (it's only present by default on OS X) so in that case you'll have to make do with Helvetica, or even Verdana. Sorry but you've only yourself to blame. Also I don't have a Windows machine so if there are any problems of XP/Vista do let me know. Though I've already had some feedback so I think it should be fine.
Against my better judgement and whilst feeling very dirty, I've put a PayPal tip jar on the site because a very kind person asked if they could buy me a pint over the internet. I honestly expect this never to be used so please don't feel obliged. Especially when much more deserving sites exist (as the side bar attests). That said, It would guilt me into posting more. Also if anyone wants to buy me a pint at the Skeptic in the Pub meets (Roger!) then go right ahead.
Remember that great post I was talking about? It's going on hold for a while. The pressure of it (especially at the moment) put me off posting anything - so I'll just wait for it to fall naturally once things have calmed down.
Finally my vanity has lead me to throw away my secret identity. The site is no longer anonymous. Stalkers can work out who I am quite easily now despite choosing the most obfuscating mugshot I possible could. I feel it will make me choose my words more carefully and hopefully improve this place.

Snow post today

2009-02-02T07:46:00.002Z

Yeah, I'm trying to do weekly updates now - every monday. But it's snowing so the time I was going to spend writing this is going to be spent making a snowman instead. Not even sorry about that.

As I've said though - the next post is great.

Tim Michin's Storm - About your inner skeptical rage.

2009-01-29T07:56:00.003Z

Just leaving the house, but noticed from Tim Minchin's twitter stream that he's put 'Storm' up. Which despite being a 9 minute beat poem is really bloody excellent. If you've visited this site, then I'm pretty certain you'll find this little story of social awkwardness a little close to the bone.

Sorry about that last post again....

The Media on 'Sex when young gives you prostate cancer'

2009-01-26T18:13:00.017Z

Warning: Only just this second noticed this and it has annoyed me into knocking-this-out very quickly, so if the maths is off, it's totally my fault. Please pick me up on it. This post will also include lots of euphemisms for sexy-time.
Update I: Said 'colon' when meant 'prostate' cancer. As I said I'm not a (medical) doctor. Fixed now. Though my shame remains.

Update II: There are, rather elementary, flaws in this post - but the overall point just about holds - though lots of timbering is more statistically significant than my first, quick guesstimate (it's not just the increase in risk, it's the duration of that increase). See the comments.

***

The BBC, The Press Association, A Canadian site I've never heard of and an Italian site called AGI news are all reporting that increased amounts of genitalia-wrestling when between 20 and 30 increases your risk of Prostate Cancer.

Fuck!! Sex is awesome isn't it!? Things we love being bad for us always makes for a depressing story, which is of course a good story for the media peeps.

Saying that the BBC story is quite good actually, pointing out that the sample size is too small and so on, but the others are worse. The Italian one starts like so:

Sexual abstinence, besides opening the gates to paradise, also seems to prolong the lives of men.

That's a neutral point of view if every I saw one. But more importantly not a single one of these articles mentions the increase in terms of the quantitative risk of getting the disease (aka the natural frequency, or in this case how many people per 100,000 will get prostate cancer every year). As we will see is kind of a big deal. I've had a spare ten minutes so I've just guesstimated what that would be.

So lets ignore the very small sample size. Lets ignore the complexity of comparing the rate men masturbate. Lets ignore the fact that people who have more sex might do lots of other things to excess too (like drugs and rock and roll) so the idea that it is specifically sex isn't necessarily true (though they make sensible sounding hormonal claims to my non-biologist ears). Anyhow lets ignore all that and take the worst values we can find.

For about 400 cancer stricken men 40% had lots of bump-and-grind.

For about 400 cancer free men 32% had lots of chummy-time-sex-wees.

So you might think that means your chance of getting Prostate Cancer increases by 20% by plunging-your-oats to excess. Which sounds quite scary until you realise that's only a 20% increase over the natural frequency of getting the disease in the first place.

And from a quick google 117 in every 100,000 men get prostate cancer in a year. (according to UK Cancer Research - oh and I chose the largest value I could find - because if your doing a quick guesstimate you may as well go conservative).

Which means that at maximum if everyone had lots and lots of how's-your-father, then the number getting prostate cancer would increase from 117 in every 100,000 to 140 in every 100,000.

Or to put it another way by having lots of hide-the-sausage your chance of catching prostate cancer skyrockets from 0.116% to a absolutely no less scary 0.140%. A massive 0.024% increase! QUICK TO CELIBACY! Never shall my loins mingle again!

Remember this isn't to do with the legitimacy of the science involved. This is purely an issue about the way it has been reported. For this, my friends, is how the media turns non-scary medical research into scary everything-you-love-kills-you stories. I know it may come over a little pedantic to say this, but a lot of people would have read this today and felt guilty over a natural part of their lives, and the media hid the values that might have reassured them that the sex is so fucking worth it in order to make it scarier.

Unless your making a horror film why would you want to make peoples lives scarier than needed? Is circulation really that important to you? Is it too much to ask for you to report the risks in a way we can easily judge it?

(Oh, and if you are thinking I only wrote this because I've just read Ben Goldacre's book - you would be right)

Richard Dawkins and Derren Brown have a natter

2009-01-26T01:12:00.004Z

PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4 | PART 5 | PART 6

So this is a good month and a half old, but I haven't seen it so I'm posting it here regardless. It's an hour long, and repeats itself often enough (as all interviews whose final destination is to be chopped into soundbites tend to do) but it is great stuff non the less.

I'm posting this because I'm currently reading Trick of the Mind by Mr Brown and so far it's very good. A skeptical book by a magician is always an interesting read if only for the pub tricks you'll pick up.

Sorry for the quick, cheap post - but I'm trying to get something up every Monday - so that will obviously lead to (even) lower standards. Saying that, next mondays post is awesome.

Do you know Wikipedia doesn't have an entry for Gullible?

2009-01-23T01:47:00.002Z

Click the link if you don't believe me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullible

*Waits a few seconds*

Did you?

The "Hey, did you know gullible isn't in the dictionary?" joke has been going around since time immemorial so I'm guessing the majority of you wonderful, skeptical readers knew the game I was up to and so didn't click that link.

If that is the case, please click the link. I'll wait.

Moral: we should never rely on our healthy skepticism when simple and easy tests are available.

Disclaimer: Someone could easily make a Gullible page now to ruin all this. Especially if you are reading this in a few days time. But as it stands I love this little post-modern curmudgeonly waste of your time. And like a broken escalator the worst this little game can become is stairs.

The Top 11 'skeptish' things I didn't mention in 2008

2009-01-19T09:00:00.003Z

Hello again! Long time no see. How have you been?

Phew. Shall we, at last, get started again?

I've missed so many little bits and bobs over the last couple of months that I think I need a quick summary post to get them all out of my system so we can start a fresh. And we might as well call it a count down, because people pretend to like those in the new year. I'm far to lazy to put it in a specific order mind. Anyway lets get cracking....

11) The Mirror has got into INVESTIGATIONS

There is nothing in this link that I don't love. The photo of Penman & Sommerlad. The names Penman & Sommerlad. The font. The article and especially the comments. More please Mr Mirror. Seriously.

10) There have been some amazing pictures of the Earth published.

Number 5 is especially amazing. The best picture of fractals in nature ever. Maybe.

9) Apparently we spend £3.5 billion a year on 'Fake Psychics & Bogus Lotteries'

Or at least it says so here - I wonder what we spend on the genuine articles.

8) The New Humanist made some God Top Trumps

Whats to say? They got in trouble for one of the cards. I'll let you guess which.

I've always enjoyed mixing Religious humour with Top Trumps humour.

7) Anonymous are still alive

One year of protesting Scientology. Fair play to them. Especially as the 'rest' of anonymous now hates them. Oh and recently it appears that Scientology has been trying to ban people for protesting near their buildings because they are HIV positive. Which is nice.

6) China's internet 'spin doctors'

China pays people to post on blogs and websites to attempt to influence public opinion. Lovely. I really think that a huge part of school education needs to be about evaluating evidence and sources. As the cost to publish falls the need to be able to critically appraise that material increases. Especially as governments, companies and so on can benefit so greatly from influencing our opinions. I've been thinking quite a bit about this recently as it seems from my logs that a school is using parts of this site in their education on 'Society and Religion' - and I can't decide if thats a good thing or not.

5) Ben Goldacre's written a book about Bad Science.

Who would have thought it? I read this over xmas and it was great. Changed my opinion on the way to best handle the kind of topics Skeptobot covers - so you might notice a few changes here. A mini review might pop up at some point - or this might suffice.

Either way you should buy it this very second.

4) Defiling the Eucharist is worse than genocide

It would appear that whilst any old Bishop can forgive murder or genocide if you defile the Eucharist (aka mistreat a rubbish piece of bread) then only Mr Pope himself can forgive you. To be fair that is a little bit of exaggeration of it all. They are being pedantic rather than actually compiling a top ten crimes list. But it is another example of the Catholic church being completely unaware of the hypocrisy of itself.

That leg room reminds you of Jesus on his Donkey doesn't it?

3) 9 Christmas Carols for Godless people was on in that there London.

And it was terrific, with an incredibley impressive line up: Stewart Lee, Phill Jupitus, Mark Thomas, Natalie Haynes, Chris 'in the thick of it' Addison, Ben Goldacre, Christina Martin, Simon Singh, Josie Long, Jo Neary, Ricky Gervais, Richard Dawkins, Tim Minchin, Darren Hayman, Robyn Hitchcock, Andrew Collins and on and on. For £15. Wonderful stuff. Makes you realise that our gang is bigger than you think.

2) Our Civil Liberties are going down the pan.

"The Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely [and remotely] hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant." says the Telegraph. So without a warrant they will be able to access the content of all e-mails, web-browsing habits and instant messaging. Which is outrageous. And insane. The internet black box database continues. As does ID cards and the ID database. It is madness.

What is worse is that these ridiculously dangerous databases may be farmed out to private companies.

Thankfully we still have NO2ID and MySociety fighting for us. But we still need to help too. So it looks like this will still be a feature of Skeptobot in 2009. Great.

1) A load of buses proclaim there is 'probably no God'.

This is splendid. A scheme to raise money for a bus or two to have an advert for doubt (as a response to a chrisitan advert saying you were going to hell) rasied £135,000 and so 800 buses are now rolling around in London and the rest of the UK.

The response has varied a lot. Most positive, like this wonderful take by Stephen Tomkins:

In fact, speaking as one myself, I think it shows quite a cheek for Christians to make a fuss about this. We've spent decades covering public places with verses from the Bible, and posters promising that if you let Jesus into your life everything will be all right for ever.

Then as soon as the opposition get the money together to do the same thing we're outraged, and think that God is as cross as we are.

Personally, I think that if God is anything like as big and clever as we claim he is, he can probably take it.

Whilst some doesn't make much sense, like this guy who refused to drive buses with the advert on. That settled down so now he doesn't have to drive those buses unless no other buses are available. Which is an entertaining precedent to set. Please, if any bus drivers are reading thi refuse to drive any bus which has an offensive advert on it. Despite that being a good 90% of buses. Or at the very least refuse to drive buses with religious adverts on it. If just for the giggles.

The most insane response has of course come from Christian Voice (who you will remember throwing their toys out of the pram over Jerry Springer the Opera). The head, Stephen Green, has complained to the Advertising Standards Agency saying the adverts break the ASA's codes on substantiation and truthfulness. Which of course could lead to the ASA ruling that there is probably no god in what could turn out to be the biggest footbullet of all time.

Richard Dawkins, pleased with himself, yesterday.

The cynical might say it helped that Ariane Sherine (who ran the project and is in the picture above) is tremendously attractive. Even more cynical people might say that I only wrote that to mention how tremendously attractive she is. They would be right.

***

Phew, all done. Right thats all the stuff I can think of right now. So I feel I've got a fresh slate to approach 2009 with. I hope you'll hang around.

P.S. I like the term 'skeptish' as in things that are not necessarily skeptical, but of interest to skeptics.

I've just had my Viva. I'm a quasi-doctor now.

2008-12-05T15:12:00.004Z

Hello! I've not been posting lately because I've been preparing for the Viva for my PhD. This is where scarily bright people quiz you about your Thesis and all the work you've been doing over the last 3+ years. If you pass it then you've basically passed your PhD.

And I passed!

I've got some 'minor corrections', which is normal, and they don't seem too bad. Mainly typos (which readers of this blog will understand), and a couple of extra columns in a table, and an extra figure. In fact they are actually quite interesting additions, so barring any major cock ups, I'll be graduating next year.

Now I know there has been some rumours about who the next Doctor is and all the smart money is on the excellent Patterson Joseph, but It's not for me to put myself forward. Still A Doctor of Astrophysics. Surely thats enough for them to at least consider me right?

Could I be the next Doctor? That is not for me to say. Because the answers is no. No matter how many Sonic Screwdriver Oystercards I make.

Normal service will resume after I've stopped walking around in a daze, not being able to believe it is done.

CivLib Sorbet: Tim Minchin on the open mind.

2008-10-21T13:45:00.002Z

I'm going to be doing another update on the terrible Communication Data Bill soon, so as a sorbet to freshen the palate here is Tim Minchin on the terrors or too open mind, featuring three of Skeptobots top peeves.

UK citizens spend 5 minutes to keep your freedoms - step 2 how to complain about the Communications Data Bill.

2008-10-16T13:27:00.007Z

This is step 2 - If you don't know what has been announced today read step 1. If you realise the scale of the attack on your freedoms today read on - how to complain to your MP from within your browser, in less than 5 minutes.

This text is released to the public domain (obviously) you are actively encouraged to steal it, edit it, improve it, forward it, rehost it and share it. If you spot any mistakes or possible improvements please leave a comment.

How to complain:

Read Step 1 if you are not convinced.
Click this link to go to WriteToThem
Enter your postcode. Don't worry mysociety.org who run the site are lovely, safe and non-evil.
It will find your Councilors, MP, MEP and so on. Click on the name of your MP.
Add your name and address (be truthful, fake addresses will get the email junked)
Write your letter of complaint about today's announcement.
Check the spelling and grammar, click preview and send.
Confirm your address in your email account.
Go and sign the petition in the same way (thanks Labrat)

And you are done!

Next Steps

Now spread the word to your friends get them to do the same. If you are too busy or lazy to make your own case forward a link to this page to your friends. Or just copy and paste it into an email. Or paste it into your own website and claim it as your own. Improve upon it. Edit it, cut out the important bits. There is no vanity and acclaim wanted here. Steal this content and spread it.

Advice on writing a good letter:

First and foremost writing anything is better than nothing. A single line saying you oppose the Communications Data bill, is infinitely better than not sending anything. The more people who email the stronger they will gauge public opinion to be against this. However if you have more time do the following...
Make it clear in no uncertain terms that they will lose your vote in the coming election if they support this bill in any shape and form. (Obviously don't mention that you didn't vote for them last time if that's the case). This normally rattles them and gets you a reply about how nice they are really.
Request a response. Add something like "please respond clarifying your position on this." Lots of them pretend that if they are not asked directly then no response is needed.
Don't insult them, sound like a die hard fan that is going to turn to the other side over this. They don't care if some hippy/yuppie still dislikes them, they only care about their voter base, so pretend to be a fawning fan.
State that you read about the plans for the Communications Data Bill and that you consider it an assault on your civil liberties and thus unacceptable. Then explain that as your representative you wish your MP to take every action available to prevent this plan coming to fruition. His job is to represent you after all.
Don't assume they are for the bill and attack them personally, focus purely on the bill, your MP might agree with you!
Look at the example letters below, but don't use them verbatim, as that will merely activate the mass mailing filters and get your email trashed.
MPs are often too old to really understand the internet. Don't use jargon, and if you are good enough, try to explain why the internet needs to stay as it is.

Example Short Letter

Dear WHOEVER

I've recently become aware of the Communications Data Bill announced on Thursday. A database recording enough of our actions to trace every member of our society to an extent unprecedented in any democratic country. This is outrageous enough to warrant what is typically the hyperbole term 'Orwellian.' I fear that as most MPs are too old to have grown up with the internet they do not fully grasp the nature of their actions.

As my representative in Parliament I wish for you to strongly oppose this plan in every way available to you.

Please respond stating what your views of this plan are, and what actions you will take to oppose (or support) them. As, despite being a fan of yours, this is the final straw. Labours continued assaults on my civil liberties is enough for them to lose my vote in the coming election. In fact it is seriously making me consider voting Tory in the next election, despite the widespread damage it would cause, just to ensure essential civil liberties are preserved. Voting Tory was idea unthinkable until recently, but I will no longer support you if you support this plan.

Yours sincerely,
YOUR NAME

See I've used voting Tory as a threat. Make it clear that you would go to any length to avoid this happening.

Example Long Letter

Dear Mr MP,

Yesterday the Home Secretary announced plans for a huge central database to retain details of who contacted whom online, where and when.

This will constitute a database recording enough of our actions to trace every member of our society. To know who our friends are, what we buy online, what we believe in politically or religiously, what our sexual preferences are. The level of insight into our private lives this will give to the users of the database will be frighteningly wide.

The prospect of such an Orwellian tool being provided to the government raises a number of specific and important questions:

(1) Lord Carlile, the government's own independent scrutineer of counter-terror legislation, has warned that "the raw idea [of a central database] is dreadful. The devil will be in the detail." He has warned against the misuse of this database for "fishing expeditions" whereby the users of the database will mine the data, for anything of interest, no matter how minor. If this database is created, how will access to this database be controlled, and such patent misuse of this panoply of information be prevented?

(2) Ms Smith has said that "nor are we going to give local authorities the power to trawl through such a database in the interest of investigating lower level criminality under the spurious cover of counter terrorist legislation." However, a similar promise was made in relation to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act - quote "...such legislation is required to combat terrorism and its use will be restricted to such terrorist related cases..." . As we all know, RIPA is now routinely used by local authorities in respect of such weighty matters as school catchment areas, dog fouling and use of dustbins. What assurances can we possibly have that the same will not happen with this new tool?

(3) How does the government intend to meaningfully mine the mind-bogglingly large amount of data that this scheme would amass every single day? It simply will not happen. This will create a very, very big haystack with a very small number of interesting activities and we don't even know if they are the needles the security services want. We will not therefore be able to identify new terrorist threats from this pile of data. What, then, is the point?

(4) Quite aside from the threat that this database poses to the innocent populace, I would also question its necessity. In her speech, Jacqui Smith noted that since 2004 communications data has been used "as important evidence in 95 per cent of serious crime cases and in almost all Security Service operations". Such a statistic raises the question of why more powers are needed. With Ms Smith herself stating that the current measures are actually good enough to provide a good rate of conviction, why do we need another expensive set of potentially intrusive and probably functionally useless monitoring tools?

(5) Finally, what assurances can we have that this vast store of data will not be mislaid in the same manner as the now embarrassingly large catalogue of data handling failures that have occurred under this government? The government seems unable to cope with the databases it has now, so how can it possibly hope to ensure the security of the contents of a database containing the details of every single phone call, internet access and mobile text message sent by the 60 million citizens of this country?

As my representative in Parliament I therefore wish for you to strongly oppose this plan in every way available to you. As such I would request that you please respond stating what your views of this plan are, and what actions you will take to oppose them.

Despite being a Labour supporter and a fan of yours, this is the final straw. Labour's continued assaults on our civil liberties are enough to lose them my vote in the coming election. I am now seriously considering voting Conservative in the next election, despite the widespread damage a Tory government would otherwise cause, just to ensure essential civil liberties are preserved. Voting Tory was a repellent idea until recently, but I will no longer support you if you support this plan.

Yours sincerely,

The original version of this letter was written by 'Mr Chris' to his MP. As he is excellent. Be sure to edit any letter you base on it to ensure you do not set of duplication filters and stop all this mail being read.

UK citizens spend 5 minutes to keep your freedoms - step 1 making the case

2008-10-16T12:15:00.012Z

This is step 1 - making the case. If you don't know what has been announced today read on. If you realise the scale of the attack on your freedoms today skip ahead to step 2 - how to complain to your MP from within your browser, in less than 5 minutes.

This text is released to the public domain (obviously) you are actively encouraged to steal it, edit it, improve it, forward it, rehost it and share it.

Today Home Secretary Jacqui Smith finally announced the Communications Data Bill in order to make the largest Orwellian communication database ever seen in a free country. Terrifyingly this isn't hyperbole. This new plan will do the following (commentary in italics, sources in square brackets):

The Government will record the times, dates, duration and locations of mobile phone calls, numbers called (previously they had to go get those details when required off the company concerned). [1] This means they will triangulate your location everytime you use your phone to contact a cell tower.
The Government will record every website you visit and every address you email. (Previously they had to go get those details when required off the company concerned). [1] The Gov having a record of every site you've ever visited is ridiculously open to abuse, exploitation and blackmail - if I need to explain to you why, then you've not used the internet for more than about an hour. Also considering the amount of dataleaks we've had imagine if your viewing habits were made public.
Will be kept for two years. [1] To begin with remember.
As currently planned it won't keep the content of your emails, texts or chats. [1] (Obviously, once the database exists that is mearly baby steps away, and if they know the html address of where you are visiting the content your upload is easily obtained.)
Security and intelligence agencies, and other public bodies, will be allowed access personal data using a wide range of internet sites, including social and gaming networks [2] (Basically they want access to your facebook, that way they can know all your friends - so much so that a Whitehall security official source said "People have many accounts and sign up as Mickey Mouse and no one knows who they are", a senior Whitehall security source said. He added: "We have to do something." Seems anonimity on the web shouldn't be allowed anymore.)
Remember there is also a seperate database (coming online this january) to record 50,000,000 car number plates a day. Cameras will pinpoint the precise time and location of all vehicles on the road. Initally senior officers promised the data would be kept for two years. But after a Freedom of Information Act request the Home Office has admitted the data is now being kept for five years. [3] This is not the actions of a free country.

Right, if this bothers you (and it should) go straight to step 2, and complain. It will take 5 mins of your time, and you don't have to leave your browser.

If it doesn't bother you and you think it's just some loons on the internet getting their knickers in a twist read some quotes from people who aren't loons on the internet:

Lib Dem home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne [1] :

"The government's Orwellian plans for a vast database of our private communications are deeply worrying."
"Ministers claim the database will only be used in terrorist cases, but there is now a long list of cases, from the arrest of Walter Wolfgang for heckling at a Labour conference to the freezing of Icelandic assets, where anti-terrorism law has been used for purposes for which it was not intended."
"Our experience of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act suggests these powers will soon be used to spy on people's children, pets and bins.
"These proposals are incompatible with a free country and a free people."

Conservative Shadow home secretary Dominic Grieve [1] :

"These proposals would mark a substantial shift in the powers of the state to obtain personal information on individuals," he said, adding: "The government must present convincing justification for such an exponential increase in the powers of the state."

The director of Privacy International, Simon Davies (on the car tracking database) [3] :

"extraordinary powers of surveillance"
"This would never be allowed in any other democratic country,"
"This is possibly one of the most valuable reserves of data imaginable."

SOURCES:
[1] BBC News article - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7671046.stm
[2] Guardian News article - http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/16/internet-uksecurity
[3] Guardian News article - http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/sep/15/civilliberties.police

UK citizens spend 5 minutes to keep your freedoms - step 1 making the case is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. As that appears to be the most lax license I can give this post. No Attribution needed. Remix, steal, just spread the word!

MyLifeMyID is going offline in a matter of hours - say goodbye.

2008-10-15T15:25:00.005Z

I haven't got long but I've just found out that MyLifeMyID.org is going offline tomorrow after burning through the £76,000 it was given to ignore the opinion of the young. So this is your last chance to enjoy the almost consistant and universal derision the plan was given by web savvy 'youth of today.'

I'm in the process of trying to get a full backup of the site because I want to compare the official reports conclusions to the website. As unless they report massive universal dislike of the plan they'll be doing a lot of fudging.

If you can manage to rip a copy please let me know. Wget is letting me down at the minute thanks to their funny fancy web stuff.

Not a 'FIRST POST!!@1!!!' in sight

Skeptics in the Pub Review - Paul Taylor from Answers in Genesis

2008-10-14T13:33:00.005Z

Last night I freed up enough time to go to the Skeptics in the pub meeting in that there London. It appears I managed to stay longer than one of the Skepchicks who had to walk out after the first few minutes. Giving the talk was Paul Taylor (thats him on the left) from the Answers in Genesis "peer reviewed" creationist journal (which I've talked about before). As such I thought I would try something a little different for Skeptobot and review it.

Firstly I have to admit I had a lot of respect for the guy in actually having the balls to turn up in front of so many skeptics and say the things he said. But man did he talk a lot of crap. Well spoken and with humour but still crap. The crap itself wasn't the problem, it was it's rate of change (dcrap/dt). I could go on for page after page breaking apart each and every slide (of which there was a lot), I could just focus on the areas I'm specialized in (his claim that the homogeneity of the Cosmic Microwave Background disproves the age of the universe, and Einsteins relativity allowing for 6000yrs to be long enough for the whole universe to reach what it looks like now). But that misses the bigger picture.

Indeed most people in the questions did pick their topic and try and hold him to account on it (I tried to talk about the CMB, stalker fans, but as the microphone went dead I panicked and rather than shout about relativity I ended up asking a rather awful question about which bible he believed in, and what set christian creation science ahead of other religions creation science). Most people did much better than me and hammered home individual points, but it still didn't matter.

Taylor had sprinted through Cosmology, Astrophysics, Timescales, Geology, The Fossil Record, Biology, Evolution, Education. For each one he explained how the evidence supported Creationism and moved on. Anyone trying to bring him to account on any of those topics was faced with 'I'm not an expert, and I don't pretend to be, I am a generalist, a populist' (paraphrased).

Now in this situation, that's fine. The audience is experienced with science enough to see the game he is playing. But what has scared me since is pondering on how that talk is normally used.

Taylor's main claim was that science is colored by the assumptions and beliefs you have going into it. And that the data supports an atheists view as equally as a creationists. Which is of course a ludicrous, but subtle perversion of what science is about. In reality he's just attempting to create the illusion of debate. That wonderful wedge strategy to get it taught in schools.

But what is worrying is that my take home message was how successful his shotgun approach to whole realm of science was. He typically gives church talks, presumably he races non-scientists through every sphere of science in 60mins and tries to plant a little seed of doubt in their mind about each area.

A skeptic can follow him up with weed killer and destroy each seed in turn with ease. But the effort it takes to plant a seed is so much less than the effort to remove it that you worry that enough will escape to leave that doubt in the publics mind.

And that, I suspect, is all he wants. It doesn't matter how many individual ideas come crashing down, as long as he can keep the pace up he can win.

Now how do we face that?

Skeptobot Video Rants #1 - Astrology

2008-10-10T21:26:00.004Z

I wasn't going to put this on the site properly. It's a little too embarrassing and quite clearly a first attempt. But the absolute lack of content on the site for so long makes me feel like I deserve to be embarrassed.

Basically, the urge to play on the site whilst writing up the thesis meant that when someone asked me if I liked astrology I ranted a little about how it was terrible. Then in moment of procrastination I took that little bit of text and make a quick movie out of it. Mainly to learn how to use iMovie. This was the result:

What do you think? You can be harsh now. It's not a rant for a start...

Oh and anyone thinking I've put this here whilst the viewing figures for the site are at the lowest, allowing me to bury it before people return, is spot on.

Skeptobot is back, sorry about that.

2008-10-10T21:12:00.004Z

And we are back. It's going to be relatively slow start up. Partly as I'm tying up the loose ends of my PhD but I'm also going to have to re-read the site to remember what it is exactly I do here. But yes, onwards and upwards. Expect updates at least weekly.

EDIT - I've just been working through the site's email address and I'm sure I've deleted at least 2 proper messages amongst the 100's of spam. So sorry if I don't get back to you.

Now to scroll down that old material a bit, here is an ad for something you most definitely should be going to.

(The surprise guest is Rickie Gervais.)

Skeptobot Update - Not dead, just resting.

2008-09-11T03:31:00.003Z

Hello!

Just letting you know the site isn't dead, I'm just still busy with the PhD submission. Finishing up a PhD is a nightmare, but I'm going to miss it immensely when it's gone.

The site will start up again from October 1st. Though it may be a slow start to begin with as I plan to sleep and sleep and sleep.

Oh and Skeptobot will be trying a few new things in the coming months too, branching out into areas where I could fail massively - which is always fun! As such there is a work in progress taster in existence. I won't be putting it on the main site, but you can find it if you look hard enough...

Ubisoft found Pirating the Pirates.

2008-07-18T01:22:00.017Z

Have you ever bought a game, and then not managed to get it working on your machine? Have you ever had to resort to downloading a 'no-cd' crack to get it to run? I know I have, and I know that the games industry considers me a massive pirate due to buying their software, then running it in a way they don't like.

Which makes this thread over on the Ubisoft forums all the more entertaining. When faced with a version of Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 that wasn't working on lots of machines, ubisoft did exactly what you would have done. They went and got a no-cd crack off the internet and released it as an official patch.

Here's the crackers code in the patch (apparently the name tag gives it away):

I'm not condoning piracy, even when you're pirating the pirates, but what I do like here, is that I'm sure everyone here has "pirated" in the black and white eyes of Ubisoft. But you know what you did wasn't wrong. You know you're not a pirate just because you didn't want to put your disk in your machine to get your game to work.

And today, by stealing that code, Ubisoft have acknowledged that piracy, at least when it concerns them, does indeed have shades of grey.

All respect goes to neilthecellist for revealing the story and Oby for bringing it to my attention.

If you feel like it, DIGG THIS HERE

UPDATE 4:34 AM: I've some more info on what the crack actually was for. According to MD_Sennet:

The Reloaded crack was required so the Direct-2-Drive customers could apply the new 1.03 patch, since the vanilla version of the patch UBI has on their website will not work on the D2D installations of Vegas2.

2nd UPDATE: Monday; July 21, 2008, Arstechnica has a good editorial about all this.

MyLifeMyID.org is going to be amazing.

2008-07-09T16:03:00.005Z

MyLifeMyID has just launched. It's going to be a footbullet of immense calibre. A while back leaked documents showed the government plans to "coerce" people into signing up for the database state by various methods. Once method was to go after the young first. Assuming they are the most stupid and gulliable.

As such Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is fronting a down with the Yoof have your say forum on the subject of ID cards. It's going to get messy.

Current topics at the time of writing are:

Shop Assistants using the need to show ID to bully people
How can you stop civil servants peeking?
This website's Modeators are biast (sic)
Why are my new posts "moved" but actually deleted?
Looking forward to a simpler ID system
What age should people have an ID card?
Official ID Card Video
Don't want, Won't have
Why centralised?
New eyeballs

Make your voice heard people!

The Register has more.

Crackergate: Any old excuse for Lee and Herring

2008-07-09T15:00:00.002Z

Crackergate AKA "it's a God Damn Cracker!" is spreading like wild fire (short version - man keeps, rather than eats bread), and whilst I'm currently on blogging sabbatical all this thought about communion and what happens to that bread has bewitched me. In particular, the idea that he literally abducted Jesus is wonderfully moreish.

And it reminded me of this wonderful Sunday Morning TV show sketch from the Legendary Lee and Herring. A sketch I love so much that I couldn't help break my self imposed rule and post it. Enjoy.

Skeptobot is on a break, I need to write a Thesis - see you September

2008-07-04T20:01:00.005Z

So almost getting on TV and getting all over the web thanks to my (unfinished) Oyster card shenanigans has built up a sizeable increase in readers. But I've got to destroy all that hard work by focusing on my thesis for the next 60 days or so.

Sorry.

I'm not saying that there won't be any updates between now and then, but they will be few and far between and I would rather be upfront about that. Don't worry I wont be abandoning the site, as the URL suggests, I'm actually in the process of making it a proper site and everything.

The blog will relaunch sometime in September (all going to plan) and if you wish to be informed of when it does, pop me an email on skeptobotURI(at)GELLERyahoo.co.uk (remove the fraud).

The blog has never taken up much time, but with the thesis hanging over me, and the internet sitting in front of me it feels to much like this:

And the next thing you know you've spent two hours researching how Scientology brought down TV's Doctor and plagiarist Raj Persaud. Seriously, IP laws, Plagerism, Scientology and Bad Science. All in one story. It was like giving a cat catnip.

See you in 60 days!

Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Tits, Fart, Turd and Twat - we'll miss you George

2008-06-23T11:26:00.002Z

George Carlin is dead. Fuck.

Todays a day for swearing people. George Carlin was a hero for skeptics and realists and you owe him a lot - whether you realise it or not.

To put that aged clipped in context watch this episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit on Profanity

Part 2 & Part 3

If you are in a hurry they get to Carlin almost 8 mins into part 2. I feel bad about putting up a youtube copy of P&T's excellent show - so once you've watched it think about buying it

Also - I can't possible end this post without putting up the video of Carlin view's on Religion.

We'll miss you Rufus.

Anonymous VS Scientology on More 4 news

2008-06-13T07:02:00.003Z

After the 42 day win yesterday Tony Benn said:

I never thought I would be in the House of Commons on the day Magna Carta was repealed

. Then David Davis resigned saying this was the tipping point to a police state.

Which makes this analysis of the arrests being made and the influence being exerted on Anonymous by the Police that little bit more important than it would have been yesterday.

The next protest is tomorrow. If you want to protest find out more here.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault - Humanity at its best

2008-06-11T14:26:00.002Z

One of the great achievements of the 21st century, and one of the greatest human constructions of all time - the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has the power to save the world - In a very real sense. It has representation of every crop and plant and fruit they can get their hands on. Frozen in a vault that is embedded in permafrost. It only takes a flood, or a tornadoes or even just a little war to wipe out crop varieties. And now we have a back up.

Here's 60minutes having a look around the place:

Obama vs McCain: Faith off!

2008-06-10T14:12:00.002Z

Here's a recent video from John McCain about Christianities role in the USA whilst campaigning to Beliefnet.com.

Which is of course massively factually inaccurate, not least because most of the founding fathers were deists and "In God We Trust" not being the motto of the USA till the 50's.

And here's Barak Obama giving a speech in 2006:

I dislike heavily edited things so here is the full 40min talk by Obama (I couldn't find a longer clip of McCain).

I think everyone who makes their way to this site (regardless of their faith) are going to be a lot more impressed with the latter talk - hell after the last 8 years it's almost astonishing. It will be interesting to see if Obama sticks to his guns on the topic, the fact that talk was given in a church is a good sign after all. Heres hoping.

Despite our 'special relationship' I find it reassuring that whilst Presidential candidates in America talk like McCain here in the UK Tony Blair was worried that people might think him a "A Nutter" .

Overall I think that is a far healthier position to be in.

Send your name to the moon!

2008-06-05T12:42:00.005Z

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is the proposed first step in the plan to return humans to the moon, and you can put your name on it. You can read more about it here though the PDF fact sheet is probably a quicker source of info. Most interestingly the Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) will look in far-UV to search for frost and ice - to help any future moon colony.

If you go here you can add your name to a database they'll put on microchip and stick on board. It takes 30 seconds. You would be a fool not to.

I'm a sucker for stuff like that. Some 0s and 1s that I typed will be sent to orbit the moon. It's trivial - but awesome.

Terrorist propaganda or al-Qaeda research? No it's Fallout 3

2008-06-02T11:05:00.007Z

Don't worry Skeptobot hasn''t become obssessed with CCTV/privacy and terror. It's just in the news a lot at the minute. So much so that I couldn't help notice The Daily mail wip up a fury about this image:

Seriously go and read their "news story." I mean just look at it's web address for fucks sake:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1022840/Al-Qaedas-terrifying-vision-devastated-America-wake-nuclear-attack.html

Read it? Good.

I first noticed the image when The Metro (UK free newspaper) carried it on Thursday describing it as "chilling":

click to bigify

Now is this a image created by an al-Qaeda internet site where they plan to destroy the world. Or is, perhaps, a promotional image for the upcoming computer game Fallout 3 ?

Of course it is.

So the entire news story should read that al-Qaeda can use Google Image fucking Search.

Update: More details here (kotaku.com - a computer game site)

With thanks to Dudley who confirmed I wasn't going mad.

Oh and you can Digg this HERE.

Skeptobot has had a make over.

2008-05-27T13:18:00.002Z

Thanks again to the wonderful advice of Dr Ashen I've given the site a little spruce up, with a lovely banner knocked up by the wise one merely as a proof of concept, but I think it's lovely so I'm using it. Hopefully the new template is easier to read - let me know if you don't like it. Also I'm testing whether this still works in people's RSS feeds and so on, as you may have noticed I've successfully hidden the 'blogspot' from the site's address.

Let me know if you have any problems.

And to make up for all the house keeping updates here is a picture of the Phoenix Lander in the process of Landing on Mars, as seen by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Humanity, being awesome, yesterday.

Humanity sent a piece of moving metal and plastic through the solar system whilst getting another piece of metal and plastic to watch. We are awesome.

Expanding the Brand: Skeptobot.com launches! (& Wand update)

2008-05-26T17:00:00.007Z

Oh what a day! Thanks to the advice of the wonderful Dr Ashen, Skeptobot has gone all Web 1.0 by getting it's very own web address. Now you can use the very professional sounding www.skeptobot.com to come and visit the site. But don't worry it's still hosted on blogger so the wonderful feelings of doubt, mistrust and apathy that comes with seeing the 'blogspot' bar remain in full force.

This is all part of the slow process to turn to Skeptobot into the UK's premier site about God and Science and that. And to make me a squillionaire.

In other news, the Oyster Wand hasn't been forgotten - I've just been busy. Progress has been made though as I have been given this:

A Sonic Bloody Screwdriver - from Doctor Fucking Who.

Which should tide me over till I find a suitable wand. It's not going to get the ladies flocking the same way a magic wand would, but if I ever need to impress children and/or adults who should know better then I'm all set. Talking of which it is extremely difficult to find a wand that a) doesn't look shit, or b) is thick enough to be useful.

Oh and all these shenanigans almost got me on the TV. Which is nice.

15 year old calls Scientology a Cult: Footbullets and Police Shenanigans

2008-05-23T16:31:00.005Z

Meant to cover this as it happened but I've been far too busy, so here's a quick overview of Scientology's latest footbullet. And a wonderful example of why "the kids today" are awesome.

May 10th: 15 year old EpicNoseGuy (ENG) goes to the London protests against scientology as part of Anonymous. (If you don't know who they are, here is an explanation). Unfortunately I couldn't make this protest, so I don't know first hand what happened. But, as covered in the Guardian ENG gets stopped by the police for this sign:

Now, ENG seems very awesome. The old media can't understand "The Kids" today unless they are hooded thugs, so the idea of political, opinionated, knowledgeable teenagers who communicate and play out their actions on the world stage of the internet are not typically represented in the media today. Which makes this quote from the Guardian is doubly delicious.

A policewoman later read him section five of the Public Order Act and "strongly advised" him to remove the sign. The section prohibits signs which have representations or words which are threatening, abusive or insulting.

The teenager refused to back down, quoting a 1984 high court ruling from Mr Justice Latey, in which he described the Church of Scientology as a "cult" which was "corrupt, sinister and dangerous".

After the exchange, a policewoman handed him a court summons and removed his sign.

How beautiful is the part I bolded? Fucking phenomenal. And the moment they took the sign of him, Anonymous won.

Scientology is a cult, and regardless even if it wasn't calling it a cult isn't hate speech. These new laws against religious hate speech are worrying indeed.

Why did the Police stop him?

There is actually more to this than meets the eye, it's a bit long winded but follow me on this one. Firstly it is important to point out that 1) Two police forces cover the protests, In the morning City of London (CoL) police at the Scientology HQ and when Anonymous move over to the Scientology "shop" on Tottencourt Road later in the day, The Metropolitan police (Met) take over. 2) The protesters have an extremely good relationship with the Police. I've typically seen than secretly laughing at Anonymous' light hearted protesting, and I've only heard them say nice things about them, one remarking that Anonymous are the only protesters he's ever covered that tidy up before they leave.

Now, It was CoL that served ENG. And they said this:

"City of London police had received complaints about demonstrators using the words 'cult' and 'Scientology kills' during protests against the Church of Scientology.

"Following advice from the Crown Prosecution Service some demonstrators were warned verbally and in writing that their signs breached section five of the Public Order Act.

"One demonstrator continued to display a placard despite police warnings and was reported for an offence under section five. A file on the case will go to the CPS."

So the City of London Police followed advice from the CPS? Ok, so what did they?

A CPS spokesman said no specific advice was given to police regarding the boy's placard.

"In April, prior to this demonstration, as part of our normal working relationship we gave the City of London police general advice on the law around demonstrations and religiously aggravated crime in particular.

"We did not advise on this specific case prior to the summons being issued – which the police can do without reference to us – but if we receive a file we will review it in the normal way according to the code for crown prosecutors."

Now that doesn't fit does it? They gave general advice, and didn't advise of the use of the word cult. A term the European Court of Justice has used to describe Scientology.

So then, why might CoL's treatment of the protesters be so different to the Mets treatment (who have happily allowed signs with the C-word every month since February)?

Might it be due to the fact that The City of London Chief Superintendent, Kevin Hurley topened the head quarters? Could it be the thousands of pounds of gifts Scientology has made to the CoL and its' officers?

As psychiatrist Mark Salter says:

"They are a cult who are trying to maximise their influence by putting feelers out and using spin to make contacts and network in quite dangerous ways."

Now this is only my opinion on what I think happened, but it seems to me that Scientology has a number of high up members of the CoL who've they befriended with gifts. They've realised that the protests weren't going away, so they decided to fall back on their old strategies of suing thoe who criticise them. But they've realised that when they do this, the whole internet lights up in outrage and they shoot themselves in the foot. This *footbullet* does more damage to them than the original protester could ever hope to do.

So they thought that if they could convince the CoL that this was hate speech they could push any backlash onto the Police when the police did something about it.

And to a certain extent they succeeded. But they've achieved a massive footbullet in that they've managed to galvanise the Anonymous movement. It was getting bored, and attendance was dropping. But then they pushed for this and put anonymous on the BBC news, and all over the net. For example they've giving a youtube video advertising the next June protest over 2,000 diggs and 30,000 views.

By kicking the internet you only get it's interest.

Sleep walking towards Big Brother - Every email and phone call and internet session recorded.

2008-05-20T13:01:00.010Z

Ministers are to consider plans for a database of electronic information holding details of every phone call and e-mail sent in the UK, it has emerged. - BBC

Read that again, and let it sink in. It's a quote from the BBC whilst The Times adds that "time spent on the internet" will also be recorded.

I once counted that 57 cameras record me on my travel to work (I was very bored) whilst my oyster card/wand tracks tracks me too. The Government being able to trace my every movement has resulted in them also being able to solve 3% of street crime. I've not decided what my views on CCTV cameras are - but at the cost of billions they are, at the very least, an ineffective weapon.

This doesn't make me feel more secure.

If this new bill goes through once I've been recorded almost 60 times I'll sit at my computer and every email I send and phonecall I make and even every time I turn on my browser will all be recorded too. All added to the database. Before I clock out, head home and get filmed 57 more times.

Or maybe I'll go shopping in one of the shopping centres that use your mobile to triangulate where you are at any given moment and how long you stay and which shops you go to and how often you visit (there is 1 in Portsmouth, with 3 more planned).

On their own you could probably convince me that each one of these is harmless, but this data will naturally converge, copy, intwine and leak. That's what data does.

In my mind this IT bill would be the tipping point that makes the UK an Orwellian police state. Don't get me wrong, A benevolent and just Police state, but one all the same. And once we have that all we need is a maybe two or three decades to pass and a dick to be elected and we will have given him the power to control us. I know that sounds needlessly fanciful, over the top and paranoid. And I know I might seem like a crank for saying this. I don't want to give that impression, but I think our generation are the only ones to really understand the power the IT revolution has to free us - or chain us. And as an astronomer and a scientist, I'm naturally inclined to think about things on long time scales. I don't think we'll walk into 1984 tomorrow, but we do need to get this all straight now, at the dawn of the IT revolution. Rather then wait till it first goes wrong.

We need to be very careful.

But even if your not a pragmatic, paranoid person like myself, then the fact that the Government recently demonstrated how little they understand this modern world by losing 25 million names, addresses, dates of birth, National Insurance numbers and bank details coupled with AOL's search records fuck up (where purely anonymous search records were released - and consequently used to identify numerous people) and you must realise how dangerous this is.

The time for just being disappointed on the internet has past. Don't just moan on some forum, it's time we kicked up a fuss. If you don't like this I strongly recommend you to go to Write to Them, pop in your postcode, and send your MP an email telling him so. It will only take a few minutes and it's all from within your browser.

Why not watch Taking Liberties? Why not look into seeing if you agree with NO2ID, and then, if you do, support them.

How it used to be.

Dispatches: In God's Name (and a proper response)

2008-05-19T19:27:00.004Z

Just watched this and I think I've got a little sick in my mouth.

As Christianity becomes smaller and more marginalised in the UK a certain core of it becomes more and more extreme to in an attempt to preserve itself. We have to hope that the mainstream, reasonable UK Christians will fight strongly against this ridiculous shit and kick up a fuss. And if they don't then shame on them. Seriously, we've creationism in UK schools, homophobes and pro-life lobbyists manipulating Judges and bills and all the while they are hiding the fact they think the world is "about 4000" years old. That and Jerry Springer the Opera haters Christian voice were in the show, holding meetings where they ask God to push back the floods of evil (aka Islam). And their leader saying that "Allah is Satan."

This is 'the-shit-we-laugh-at-America-for' on our doorstep.

Half the time I think the proper response is to carefully and politely deconstruct their arguments and promote reality, but I'm starting to think that we need to talk to them on their level. For example when a Creationist disproved evolution by demonstrating that you never find new life when you open a jar of peanut butter, I wrote a response about statistics and the Urey Miller experiment

But maybe I should have done this:

I wonder, if this was the only kind of response Creationists could get would they be doing better or worse?

TED Sunday #005: Paul Ewald on whether we can domesticate germs?

2008-05-17T09:00:00.002Z

I'm really looking forward to this one. Domesticating Germs for our own benefit! Could we exploit evolution to encourage diseases to evolve to mildness. I've always been of the view that if we don't play God, who will. We just need to be very smart, and very careful.

It's important to point out that I'm doing a PhD in Astrophysics so I'm not qualified to comment on the legitimacy of this.

Thanks again Roger for suggesting this talk

The media's 'Silly Season' begins: Aliens and Jesus and the Nibiru invasion.

2008-05-14T13:42:00.005Z

As the sun is coming out so the collective media's mind turns to mush. As the stories they deem 'silly' are pushed to the front. Often they can take a trival look at something really quite important, or aggrandise a piece of nonsense into a 'serious; piece.

Today, you've probably noticed Aliens (and Jesus) are everywhere. Here's my favourite 3 stories today:

1) The Vatican believes life could exist on other planets

Peoples opinions of the existence of Aliens can be plotted as a Bell Curve. The edges of which are full of awesome, crazy people. People who really, really believe in aliens end up like number 3 in this list (which you must watch). The people who really, really don't never seem to have an understanding of the scale of the universe we are in (With 10^11 stars in the average Galaxy, and about 10^11 Galaxies we've a lot of roll's of the dice).

The BBC is running a story about how Vatican says aliens could exist. And they are being really rather sensible about it. This is the kind of Religious viewpoint Scientists should be debating, not Nut Job Creationists or The Pope's favourite Exorcist. I have a lot of sympathy for the Vatican Observatory it is stuck in a strange place between the fields of religion and as such has an important role to play. Even if they do get stuck debating whether aliens will have 'original sin' sticking to them thanks to a metaphorical woman eating a metaphorical apple a while back.

What's even better is according to the BBC

To strengthen its scientific credentials, the Vatican is organising a conference next year to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of the author of the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin.

The Creationists in the USA love the Pope, so hopefully this can help stem the coming of the second dark ages by another month or so..

2) A bunch of British UFO files have been released
This happens quite often actually, and each time you can be sure that Nick Pope will pop up out of the woodwork and pop onto every media show to talk about how he used to work for the MoD on UFOs. It's been a while since I properly kept in touch with the UFO scene (as a kid my love of the paranormal is what turned me into a scientist and skeptic) - but as far as I can remember Nick Pope has an excellent ability to tailor the ridiculousness of what he says to the audience that are listening.

Still most of the stories don't make it clear where you can get access to all these files. So if you want to see for yourself the data is here. I haven't looked at it myself yet - but I'm sure there will be some entertaining stuff in there.

3) In less than 8 hours the world will end - Nibiru invasion, Masons and CERN.
OK not quite in the mainstream media, but I can't resist. The cranks thinking that the LHC will kill us all are amazing. With less than 8 hours till apocolypse this guy is the best I've seen. Seriously even if you only watch the first two minutes you be so convinced that you'll want to give up your Mason's card.

I was going to talk about all the best bits he says, but there are too many classics too mention. He's amazing. Nibiru is my new favourite place. This is the best example of Poe's Law I've seen this year.

Thanks to Gia for sending it in.

TED Sunday #004: Brian Cox on the LHC

2008-05-10T09:00:00.002Z

After a short break, this week we've got Brian Cox talking about the LHC. Mainly to tie in with this post, and so wind up this guy up a little.

Brian Cox was in D:ream, but has managed to get past that mistake, and it's left him rather media savvy, which often makes Physicists a little wary and judgemental and jump on all their little mistakes - which is A Bad Thing. Fair play to the guy, we need more people like him. A wonderful talk.

Thanks to Roger for suggesting this talk.

Time-lapse Vid of Dissolving an Oyster Card in acetone (aka nail varnish)

2008-05-08T00:32:00.004Z

Disclaimer: Just to cover my back, be aware that TFL probably won't like you doing this. So get permission first etc.

I'm pretty certain that ever since BoingBoing featured Chris Woebken dissolving an oyster card to get at its juicy inner workings (a RFID chip stuck to a loop of wire, fact fans) geeks across London have been attempting it.

As such I'm rather late to the party on this one. The rather splendid SciencePunk beat me too it with this grand attempt codenamed Operation Ladybird. Nevertheless I knew I must attempt this epic journey too.

What you will need

Click to biggify

If you want to play along this is your shopping list:

1) ~ 400ml of Nail Varnish Remover - I bought 2 bottles of Boots own brand at 99p each. I could probably have got by with one.
2) An oyster card - I bought a prepay one for £3, though I got a funny look when I didn't want to top it up there and then.
3) A jar big enough to contain the oyster card - I bought a jar of beetroot (urgh) for 72p.

Total Cost: £5.70

It's simple enough process, fill the jar with the nail varnish remover, dump the oyster card in it. Put the top back on and wait for a few hours. Brilliantly, I picked up bunch of PS2 eyetoy cameras on clearance (£1.99 each from Gamestation) which means I now own a webcam! (Aside: they can be turned into pretty good webcams once you've installed macam, and they appear to be quite easy to break apart so I'm turning one into an infrared camera next). So I'm proud to present Skeptobot's first ever youtube video. Time-lapse footage of my Oyster Card dissolving.

Notes on the vid: I've never used a webcam/youtube/imovie before so sorry for the quality. The smudge on the card that appears about half way in is from when I poked it with a pencil, and the paint on the pencil stripped off. It's best to keep checking the card, first it will get soft, then after about 90 mins it folded over and I was able to peel off the first layer of the card, exposing one side of the chip. Then I cut the centre of the card out with scissors (so there was less plastic for the acetone to work on). I put these pieces next to the jar, and I was quite suprisied when the time-lapse showed them wobbling about.

Then after another half hour or so, the other side of the plastic loosened enough to peel that away exposing the intact chip and antenna. Nail Varnish Remover takes longer that SciencePunks miltary grade stuff but I think a more dilute source of acetone is more effective than SciencePunks military grade stuff.

The chip itself

The chip still attached to the loop of wire acting as it's antenna

So tomorrow morning I'll attempt to use this naked oyster card to journey to work. If I'm successful (and not arrested for terrorism) I'll have to decide what my new oyster card will be. So far I'm thinking either stitching it into my watch, or wrapping it around a magic wand (though that might kill the signal).

UPDATE - It still works!
This is how the oyster card currently looks (I've put it back inside it's wallet to keep it safe and so I don't look too weird):

And this is how it still works!

The magic wand draws closer...

CERN has impeccable comedic taste: Chris Morris, Kevin Eldon and Simon Munnary

2008-05-07T02:00:00.008Z

So the people at CERN have been inviting the best comedians in the UK to come and have a look around. The ingenious bastards. How did I miss this? I always get a little giddy when I see my interests collide (geddit?).

You can listen to Chris "Brass Eye" Morris talking about THE HIGGS FUCKING BOSON here. Look I've a picture for your unbelieving eyes:

How awesome is that? Answer: very awesome.

But there's more! They've also had the excellent Simon Munnary and Kevin Eldon round too. Listen to the podcast here and watch them potter around below:

There is a lot to be said for this kind of public outreach especially when it's via such excellent, excellent people. I would go as far as to say that there is a strong and unexplored link between alternative British comedy and the appreciation of science. A link that has yet to be utilised...

And if by some ridiculous chance you don't know who these comedians I'm talking about are, then you sicken me. Make me like you again by buying Chris Morris' Brass Eye - a massively important satire on TV news. But not until you've got the wonderful Simon Munnary's 'Hello' an indie produced Stand Up DVD of outstanding quality from the absolute legends that are Go Faster Stripe. I love GFS, they are doing a massively important job at preserving Stand Up thats too important and intelligent and niche to be picked up by mainstream media. And whilst I'm sure you recognise The Actor Kevin Eldon from every good comedy show of the last two decades (Jam, Spaced, Fist of Fun, This Morning With Richard Not Judy & Brass Eye are but a tiny selection of his work) I'm doubting you will have listened to his brilliant audio monologues SPEAKERS. Available to download free from Resonance FM.

So did the boomerang work in space?

2008-05-02T13:22:00.003Z

Remember this? Takao Doi wanted to know if boomerangs work in zero g. Because wanting to know stuff like that is what makes humanity great. So he went and got Yasuhiro Togai, a world boomerang champion, to teach him how to throw a paper boomerang. Then he went into space and tested it.

So did it work? Watch and find out.

I'm a little disappointed it was a three-pronged boomerang, but that can't be helped as they turn tighter, and you're not exactly kicking it for space up there (geddit?). Truly awesome stuff.

Comic #2 - The Uncanny Valley

2008-04-30T16:26:00.009Z

Say you are making an artificial life form. As you get closer to 'human' your robot eventually enters a region called "The Uncanny Valley" where it suddenly become extremely repulsive. Ben Goldacre recently wrote in his miniblog that the maybe the same reasoning could be used to explain why nutritional therapists are more disgusting than really out there people like homeopaths.

I can't have been the the only one to think that The Awful Poo Lady manages to satisfy both cases? Especially after that daily mail article.

Sorry, I couldn't help myself. My apologies.

Amorth Watch: He's back because he's got himself a TV show to help separate possession from psychiatric problems

2008-04-29T12:23:00.008Z

The last time Amorth got mentioned in Skeptobot was way back in August 2006, and then he fell off the radar. So to pop up again a year and a half later he's got to be up to something, and indeed he is. Obviously most news reports about him are in Italian but I've managed to find this report that states he's making 'a television and Internet report series'.

Oh goody! The San Francisco Sentinel apparently watched the first episode as they've got some quotes from it.

“Normally when a person experiences these conflicts and problems, the first thing he does is see a doctor and psychiatrist,” he said. “It is very difficult to distinguish the devil’s action from a psychological problem. The person goes to a psychiatrist and after years of therapy obtains no result.

“Then he begins to suspect that the problem is not a natural one and goes to a conjurer from whom he obtains even greater harm. This is what normally happens. At this point, it is possible that someone more experienced in these matters suggests an exorcist.”

The main crux of his show appears to be about getting respect for exorcism and urging Italy to separate possession from psychiatric problems. Call me old fashioned but tying a person with very real mental problems to a bed and telling him the devil has possessed him is probably not a very good thing to do.

He also claims “Mariology" is his field, and The Virgin Mary is Satan's great foe because she is very pure and Satan is filthy. I know I shouldn't find that funny, but I do.

I'm going to keep an eye on this, and see if I can dig up the shows, to work out what is going on. Hopefully he won't turn into the Gillian McKeith of Exorcism.

The Pope's Exorcist Amorth is back on the case of the literal devil

2008-04-28T12:23:00.006Z

Skeptobot is a long time fan of Father Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican's Chief Exorcist. Because he's insane. He thinks that Hitler was possessed by the Devil and that possessed people have superhuman strength and can levitate. So I guess he thinks Hitler can fly. But to be fair to Father Amorth, that's pretty awesome.

Anyhow Amorth has been quoted recently saying

"There is a greater openness towards the devil"

and that that medicine and science can’t solve all illnesses, but some are resolved by exorcism, and his colleague Father Pedro Barrajon says:

“Satanism and the occult are in fashion.”

So much so that the article I'm getting this from says

Italy has an estimated 800 satanic cults, with more than 600,000 followers

Who in their right mind believes that Italy has half a million devil worshippers? And more so, if Amorth and co believe that the devil is literal and runs around making people do bad things why doesn't he prove possession if it's so common? Why doesn't he film one of his levitating devil men? Or is faith less fun when you've proved you were right?

It boggles my mind that the Pope is a-ok with this.

Actually, no it doesn't.

Where do they get the time? Gin and Sitcoms in units of Wikipedia.

2008-04-27T16:11:00.004Z

Gin carts kept society ticking over when the industrial revolution brought people in from the fields and gave them lots of free time in the company of others. It was a hole to dump the excess social time that society wasn't complex enough to consume. With time city life gained complexity to soak up this excess, and with it the Gin consumption fell. Clay Shirky argues that this process is repeating itself today with the hours after work, with the massive time sink that is the TV being carved into by creative time on the internet. That's a very poor summary of Shirkey's blog post - which is well worth your time - if only because he uses Wikipedias as a unit of free time.

"Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

This makes sense to me at the minute as I've been rather busy recently and I've been thinking about how I have too many things to do, and too many other things to consume.

Via BoingBoing

Ted Sunday #003: Steve Jurvetson on the joy of rockets

2008-04-20T15:50:00.002Z

I don't know anything about this guy except that he seems to come across as a bit arrogant in this. But then you would if you were rich enough for you hobby to be blowing up massive rockets. Worth it just for the shot at the end. A hobbiest proving the world isn't flat by shooting a big rocket into the air is always cool.

Just a quick one this week, as I'm racing about.

"Every Scientologist" is taking to the streets this weekend

2008-04-17T14:25:00.002Z

Various sources are suggesting a huge show of force from Scientology this weekend. "Every Org, every Mission, every Field Group, every Scientologist" will be... selling books. Here's the leaked flyer*

Click to bigify.

I'm bringing it up because the total number of members of Scientology is a closely guarded secret. Sometimes 8 million is mentioned, where their critics say 80,000 or less. So presumably this weekend we might get a better picture.

As I've written up this little update, it's become more of a non-story though. I've found out the 2001 census of the uk had 1781 people declare themselves a scientologist. Which is shockingly small. So small infact that I suspect almost every member in the UK could fit in their massive headquarters in London.

Still they'll all be on the streets this weekend, no doubt in a show of strength against the protests (which I suspect have more the 1781 anonymous members over the whole of the uk) so keep an eye out!

Oh and whilst we are on the topic here's another horrible internal flyer:

Click to bigify.

"[W]hen I found her ruin?" you've got to be kidding me!

* can an advert be leaked? I don't think so.

Scientology vs Anonymous III: The best protest leaflet ever.

2008-04-14T10:30:00.004Z

The third protest against Scientology happened this weekend, and unfortunately I was only able to briefly pass through the area. As such I was handed a bunch of brilliant leaflets and flyers detailing the Disconnect policy Scientology uses to make its members abandon their families. The best though was this absolutely brilliant card:

click image to bigify

The aim of this protest was to get Scientology members reconnected with their families who they typically abandon as they progress through the church. As such the genius creator of this card had managed to beautifully detail the policy of whereby if a family member ever chooses to leave Scientology then the members still within Scientology have to abandon all contact with that person or face being removed from the church.

And at the very same time they've managed to rick roll you.

From what I saw it seemed another very successful protest that manage to weather the rain brilliantly. They had (unfortunately rather inaudible) speakers who had lost family members due to the disconnect policy to sever all ties with friends and family members that are deemed to be antagonistic towards Scientology, as well as ex-members who had first hand experience.

TED Sunday #002: Johnny Lee creating marvels out of a $40 toy.

2008-04-13T13:21:00.002Z

Johnny Lee's work is a beautiful example of what can happen when technology is open and hackable and so allows the public to take it far further than the original designers could ever have imagined. I've yet to watch this video, but I've seen the clips he's put up on his site, and despite a rough start he quickly won me over with his genuine enthusiasm for his work, so stick with it. After I've watched it I'll post what I think in the comments thread.

Slighty outside the remit of Skeptobot I admit, but I liken it to a sorbet to freshen the palate before another week of tat.

TED page for the talk

Randi is in the UK (plus a troll just made my day)

2008-04-10T15:42:00.004Z

So a crazy loon troll just emailed me about how he has systematically destroyed The Amazing Randi in a forum. I'm not feeding him by reproducing it as he's just trying to get people to resurrect his dying thread. Still I'm over the moon because the troll decided to include this little old site alongside much better people like pzmyers at pharyngula, Simon Singh, David Colquhoun , Ben Goldacre, Quackometer, Gimpy, skeptic.com and many more. Normally a troll just singles me out, never before I have been deemed worthy of being cc'd on such a list!

You've made my day Mr Troll!

I only mention this as it gives me an opportunity to 1) boost my own ego, 2) link to some much better sites than this and 3) because he seems to have emailed everyone who is going to see Randi in the UK next week, and that means I can advertise the event again.

Seriously £11/£5.50 to see James Randi, Prof. Richard Wiseman, Prof. Chris French, Dr Simon Singh, Dr Ben Goldacre and Dr Susan Blackmore? It's bargain of the century.

Details here and I'll see you there.

The Daily Mail asks "Can we really transplant a human soul?"

2008-04-10T11:44:00.004Z

Unfortunately they don't answer "No. Of course not. You twat" and leave it at that. Instead we get a nice long ramble. The crux of their argument is as follows:

For a few brave scientists have started claiming that our memories and characters are encoded not just in our brain, but throughout our entire body.

Consciousness, they claim, is created by every living cell in the body acting in concert.

They argue, in effect, that our hearts, livers and every single organ in the body stores our memories, drives our emotions and imbues us with our own individual characters. Our whole body, they believe, is the seat of the soul; not just the brain.

And if any of these organs should be transplanted into another person, parts of these memories - perhaps even elements of the soul - might also be transferred.

There are now more than 70 documented cases similar to Sonny's, where transplant patients have taken on some of the personality traits of the organ donors.

This article has come about thanks to the recent story of Sonny Graham, a 69 year old man who received a heart from man who had shot himself. Sonny went on to marry the wife of the deceased man, and then tragically commit suicide in the same manner. Emotional stuff that isn't to be trivialised.

Sonny Graham and his wife Cheryl, who he met after he had her deceased husband's heart transplanted.

They then back up these propositions with a series of anecdotes. Like this one, which gloriously also manages to promote the Daily Mail view of 'The Family Unit'.

Take the case of Lynda Gammons from Weston, Lincolnshire, who donated one of her kidneys to her husband Ian.

Since the operation, Ian believes he has taken on aspects of his wife's personality. He has developed a love of baking, shopping, vacuuming and gardening. Prior to the transplant, he loathed all forms of housework with a vengeance.

Thankfully they go on to admit that "tens of thousands" of transplants have taken place so you would expect these events to come about by chance. Unfortunately they take this argument down the 'Arrogant Scientists in their Ivory Towers can't understand the human spirit' route:

If Professor Schwartz and his ilk are right, it would destroy one of the foundation stones of modern biology. But then again, modern biology has a guilty little secret: it has, as yet, no viable theory to explain how we store memories and how we produce consciousness.

In fact, scientists haven't even managed to define what exactly consciousness is, let alone managed to pin down where it comes from and where it is to be found within the body.

So maybe, just maybe, the poets, romantics and mystics throughout the ages were right: the heart really is the seat of our emotions and of our souls.

It's not a guilty secret you little shits, it's an exciting and huge area of theories and thoughts that's vibrant and alive and interesting and rigourous. Any scientist who's entered the field want to unlock the secrets of the mind. So stop it with that crap. Scientists aren't ashamed when they don't know the answer. That's what they go to work for.

But what's really disappointing here is that (despite my initial flippant dismissal, that I stole of Lee and Herring ) this is a really interesting area. The Daily Mail could have written an interesting article about the psychological effects of a transplant. Walking around all day knowing you are being powered by a dead mans heart must effect you. It would deeply and significantly alter your life. As can be seen when a 69 year old man and the much younger widow find each other in the fall out.

It's a powerful, and appealing, belief that the transplanted heart bind them. And in many ways it did. But you demean both the science and crucially the human experience of the people involved when you propose it can all be explained with a fucking "soul transplant."

Skeptobot has an official mascot, Skeptobot - the skeptical robot.

2008-04-08T12:44:00.009Z

A Super Internet Chum by the name of Dimrill has been kind enough to create a super-duper living* mascot for the site. A Robot with a Top Hat and a Monocle. And he's looking skeptical of something. Do you see? It's perfect and I love it.

Skeptobot - your Skeptical Robot Chum (click to 'bigify')

Dimrill's artistc talent helped inspire my embarrassing attempt at getting some of that xkcd and Wellington Grey mullah, in the post below this. Expect a quick succession of updates as I try and push it out of sight and mind. Oh and anyone wanting to point out I've used the American spelling for this British Robot (and site) can shut up. 'Sceptic' just makes me think of a septic disease.

For more of Dimrill's excellent shenanigans visit his website. (The little animated gif people are my favourite.)

*not living

Comic #01 - Internet Drama

2008-04-07T23:36:00.006Z

1 of a series of 1.

Paxman and Charlie Brooker humiliate Brain Gym.

2008-04-07T11:55:00.016Z

This headmistress must be feeling quite embarrassed right about now.

Ooooh this is a good, good day. Our main man Ben Goldacre has been defending the castle of reason from the pseudo-science bullshit that infests our schools in the form of Brain Gym since 2003. And now in Space Year 2008 it seems it that we've finally reached the critical mass needed for all hell to break lose about the biggest con story in school education this decade.

First up we got a great Newsnight investigation into Brain Gym. If you don't know why this nonsense should make you blood boil with righteous fury then watch it below:

Now that your seething with righteous indignation I'll continue, as you see it doesn't end there. Next we get an interview with the inventor of Brain Gym. Who needs to be made as visible as possible because he's a rambling idiotic meathead who could bring down Brain Gym on it's own if all the people using it were ever to meet him. His main method of arguing seems to be gibbering incoherently whilst hoping he's so quiet and slow and dull and tedious and tiring to listen to that you'll just take his word for it if it means he'll leave you alone. So when Newsnight put him up against Paxman it becomes about the best definition of overkill as you are likely to find. You must watch the glory below. It is radiant.

And there is more! Charlie Brooker (who is right about everything) heard the cry and has written one of the most scathing attacks on Brain Gym I've ever read. It is awesome and you must read it.

Look, this is how awesome it is:

[W]e, the adults, don't just gleefully pull the wool over our own eyes - we knit permanent blindfolds. We've decided we hate facts. Hate, hate, hate them. Everywhere you look, we're down on our knees, gleefully lapping up neckful after neckful of steaming, cloddish bullshit in all its forms. From crackpot conspiracy theories to fairytale nutritional advice, from alternative medicine to energy yawns - we just can't get enough of that musky, mudlike taste. Brain Gym is just one small tile in an immense and frightening mosaic of fantasy.

Still, that's just my opinion. Lots of people clearly think Brain Gym is worthwhile, or they wouldn't be prepared to pay through the nose for it. If you're one of them, here's an exciting new kinesiological exercise that should dramatically increase your self-awareness - and I'm giving it away free of charge. Ready? OK. Curl the fingers of your right hand inward, meeting the thumb to form a circle. Jerk it rhythmically up and down in front of your face. Repeat for six hours. Then piss off.

Gleeful!

But wait its not over! There is indeed more! This News round up states that the Brain Gym 'scientific' claims are going to be withdrawn:

Paul Dennison, a Californian educator who created the programme, admitted that many claims in his teacher’s guide were based on his “hunches” and were not proper science.

Lets make it clear, no ones against doing group exercise in the classroom, it's a great way for a teacher to get the attention and focus of a class. When I was in primary school, my teacher would makes us all go through a routine of putting our hands on our heads and so on before a lesson, and it stopped us talking and it made us pay attention. It's just he didn't need to whore science and pay £800 odd quid to do it.

Thanks to Schrödinger's Pig for uploading the youtube vids, and read an excellent post about all this here.

TED Sunday #001: Larry Lessig on "How creativity is being strangled by the law"

2008-04-06T16:07:00.005Z

I've just discovered that the truly excellent TED conference talks can now be embedded off site, and I can't think of a better way to spend a lazy Sunday than getting some fresh ideas eloquently explained by an excellent mind. So, if you want to join me, each Sunday I'll cherry pick a superb TED talk that we can watch and digest, before putting up with another week of idiocy stinking up The News Fart.

The first talk had to go to one of my favourite speakers Larry Lessig. He's a Professor of Law at Stanford, and for every public figure who doesn't understand this interweb future we live in we've got we him to stick up for us. If you don't know him, then I'm sure you've consumed or even created media licensed under his Creative Commons copyrights.

And even if the future of IP doesn't interest you his style of presenting, nick named the Lessig method, makes this talk worth watching (and stealing). Proof, if ever it was needed, that Powerpoint doesn't have to be the bullet point riddled, thought diluting, brain clamp it often seems to be.

I don't want to get all political, but the fact that Obama turned to Lessig to work out where he stands on all these damn Internets fills me with a flicker of hope.

Good news: I've a new Job! Bad news: it means the Blog has to end.

2008-04-01T10:06:00.007Z

I wanted my 100th post to be a celebration, but unfortunately I've been doing a lot of thinking the last few days and I've decided to end the blog. As some of you know I'm coming to the end of my PhD and I've been thinking about what to do next.

I'm doing an Astrophysics PhD you see, and thanks to the £80 million deficit that has hit UK astronomy since PPARC merged with the STFC Astronomy in the UK is almost dead in the water.

Combine this with a blossoming commercial exploitation of astronomy that currently in a vibrant upswing and I've inevitably had to leave academia.

But thankfully not science!

Massive datasets are a great commercial asset at present (think google maps), and I've a new job where I'll be using my scientific and computational modelling skills to combine the Sloan digital sky survey with user data, to work out positional vectors between the earth (at a specific time) and the vast numbers of celestial objects in the catalogue, including galaxies, quasars and stars. I'll even be utilising WMAP - the earliest image of the structure of the Universe ever taken.

This will lead to a radical improvement in various fields of predictive science. One I feel I can be at the forefront off. Hence I'll be involved with the launching of the first Astrophysical Prediction Survey service to combine tried and tested astro-psychological research with the massive datasets Astromoners are returning like Sloan and the WMAP survey.

The idea that your nature can be predicted by the motion of 9 planets will look quaint and positively ridiculous once I've finished processing the 200 million celestial objects in the Sloan Catalog.

That and Astrology pays better. But it's contradictory topic to the blog, so I'm afraid i've got to let the blog go.

The new gimmick: How famous people are related to each other.

2008-03-26T11:48:00.005Z

I can't be the only one who finds this annoyingm can I? Or am I just being more surly than normal? A new trend seems to be that people like the New England Historic Genealogical Society are making a big fuss about how if you go back in time long enough, and spend enough time looking you can find out how a specific famous person is related to other famous person.

And the BBC reports it as this:

[Obama] was previously identified as a distant cousin of US Vice-President Dick Cheney.

His political lineage includes not just President Bush but also Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson, Harry S Truman, Dick Cheney and Winston Churchill.

The connection made with Hollywood star Brad Pitt adds a welcome splash of glamour to his family tree.

And this is somehow special, rather than something you could do for anyone on the planet if you were dull enough to bother, and willing to go back far enough. It's almost as though it's perpetuating the idea that 'Celebrities' and 'Normals' are different fucking species.

It's akin to 21st century astrology. I can see a man sitting infront of a whiz-bang computer telling some incredulous yokel that "you've a very commanding spirit because your 58th cousin 16 times removed from William the Conqueror, but yet your sensitive because of you 18th cousin of Florence Nightingale."

And what's this? Hillary Clinton is related to Madonna!? What joy!

Urghn.

Creation 'science' museum tours.

2008-03-24T10:05:00.004Z

Here's a ABC clip about what Creationists in America do when faced with the issue that every museum around them is based on data and the scientific method. If you've pulled your kid from school to hide him from science then it's a short step to hiring your own creationist tour guide whenever you venture outside (especially if your are going to science museum). One who will filter and worm and twist his way around this scary world doing his best to bend reality to your hopes and scriptures, all the time making sure he won't 'have enough time' for the panel about how scientists date the age of fossils.

The group are called B.C. Tours, which they explain:

B.C. stands for Biblically Correct. We are B.C. and not P.C. (politically correct). We might even say the "J" word in public.

Their site is amazing, with their main approach to getting custom being:

Win every argument!

Presumably then it's a common experience for creationists to lose arguments on their beliefs, so much so that they have to hire professionals to defend them on their behalf.

Depressingly that is just a stop gap till you can afford to build your own museum. Which you can watch a bunch of high school kids visit here.

Via friendlyatheist via athiestjew, and a link from friendly reader Roger.

Who owns the Copyright on the Papers you publish?

2008-03-16T15:52:00.006Z

When you publish a Scientific Paper who owns the copyright? I know most of us, naively, still consider our work to be our own. But according to New Scientist the American Physical Society will not publish two papers in Physical Review Letters because the authors had asked for a rights agreement compatible with Wikipedia. Normally you transfer the copyright to APS before publishing and hence your figures can't be used on Wikipedia and the like.

Change is happening in the scientific community. We are starting to really think about how we publish our science. But being scientists we put practical solutions (such as the brilliant ArXiv) above the true solutions. Science thrives on the free sharing of ideas and we should be at the forefront of movements like Creative Commons not playing catch up. Free sharing of ideas can't just be within an ivory tower of scientists, especially when creationists and their ilk are banging on the gate. We need our work to be in the public domain more than ever. With Wikipedia a bare minimum.

I often think we need a figure head to galvanise us on this. We need our own Larry Lessig.

How Scientology will stalk you. A guide to protesting on Saturday.

2008-03-14T05:53:00.004Z

(Sorry for the rambling of this poor update, but I wanted to get this info out before the next protest in case it's of use to anyone.)

In the next few posts, I'll be reviewing how Anonymous handled itself in the February protests, what having an E-meter reading is like and what it's like being tailed and followed by Scientologists, and hence whether you should wear a mask.

I'll focus on the latter first, as I'm running out of time before the next protest happens. Also I'm writing this at 3 am when I really should be sleeping, so expect the spelling and grammar to be even worse than the normal terrible standard. Sorry.

In my *last post* on the the whole Scientology vs Anonymous shennagins I tried to explain who exactly Anonymous are and what the whole thing was about. Long story short, Anonymous is a joke that the real world (like FOX news) took seriously, and so ironically created. [The game will be played till they get bored. Since the first article It seems the majority of the community involved have got bored, but their seems to be a strong, if more traditional, group that's been created by all this.)

The Pre Game preparation (it's not paranoia if they are really out to get you)

Waking up, hung over, in an unfamiliar house, the idea of trampling around London didn't seem that appealing. Would anyone turn up? Uptil now I had seen just a few jpeg posters and comment threads, so for all I new it might just be a dozen people. Or no one. Still I had agreed to meet a friend, so I had no choice.

First issue, should I wear a mask? The fliers recommended it, but I didn't feel I had to hide who I was, so I decided I wouldn't. But the tails of *'revenge'* scientologists have been known to take on protesters meant I grabbed some shades and a bandanna on my way out.

So, thanking my kind hosts who had put me up and nursing the mother of all hang overs, I left for the nearby North london Tube station (about 5 stops north of their Dyanetics centre) to head south to their HQ, holding the Sunglasses and Bandanna in my hand, feeling stupid that I thought such measures might be necessary.

When a man took my photograph.

I looked at him, and he preceded to continue to photograph the wall behind me, whilst his friend waited for him to finish. I walked on a few meters and turned into the station. I stood their for a second, composed my thoughts leant back round to look at him.

He was there with his friend. Watching me watch them. I realised they both had big, black SLR cameras. One of the ones with big telephoto lenses.

Whilst topping up my Oyster card my confusion started making me feel paranoid. I decided to lean round the corner and snap a photo of the two. Just in case.

Yeah, not very good is it? But the two suspects, are the two blurs facing away from me hidden by those in the foreground.

During the tube journey I realised that I was being stupid. They wouldn't be photographing people before they got to the protests would they? Before you had put on your mask?

Of course they wouldn't be...

Realising that I had some time to kill before I met my friend I hopped of the tube at Goodge Street thinking I would check how the centre of Dynatics was behaving before the protests were scheduled to start. Anonymous's (sic?) plan was to protest the HQ in the morning, have a break for lunch and reconvene at the centre about 2.

One thing lead to another and I ended up having a E-meter reading. But I'll save what happened till later.

20 minutes later, I'm heading down to meet my friend, and we make our way to the UK Headquaters of Scientology. You have to remember this was something organised on the internet with no real figureheads. No leaders. I didn't expect many people. I definitly didn't expect this (click to biggify):

I'll save a review of the protest till later, but the people were friendly, they were polite, and they had fliers and banners and were enthused with talking to the public. I caught a number explaining why they felt they had to wear masks to passers-by. I started to see their point. The protest was of such high quality that a few people had decided they were on clean up duty and were collecting litter. I was impressed.

But then I got creeped out. I expected the Scientologists to be filming everyone. That was a given. But I realised that the staff members, typically 18-35 year old males in casual clothes wandering around taking photo's of the protestors, all had the same black SLR camera.

The same camera those two men had early this morning. Scientology must have placed its members around tube stations in London to try and pre-emptively photograph people before they arrived at the protests. There was no other explanation.

A Trip to Forbidden Planet and a hasty retreat

During the break we headed back via the tube. Hundreds of masked anonymous people on the underground was quite a site.

As was the fact that there were already the same mid 20's man with black SLR cameras. Trying to get photos of people without their disguises on the tube. Assuming quite rightly that many would take them off to avoid the wrath of the transport police.

Frankly, it had been a strange day. I was hung over and creeped out. A little on edge we decided that before going to the place where I had already introduced myself to everyone by having an E-meter reading a disguise was in order.

So we decided to go buy one of the V for Vendetta masks that everyone was wearing from Forbidden Planet, the main provider of the mask of choice of Anonymous.

And this is where it gets fucked up.

Inside forbidden planet we see another two people. This time a man and a woman. Late twenties. With the same identical big SLR cameras.

Scientologists were staking out the geek shop to look for people buying masks.

We watched the woman pretend to be interested in some Dr Who figures for about ten minutes. Who would keep scanning the store looking for trouble makers.

I decided to try and get footage of the two of them, by pretending to make a phone call whilst using it's camera to film them from across the store (my camera phone is shit, it didn't work). I'm no James Bond, but if they were just ordinary shoppers they wouldn't have noticed anything. Or at least not cared. But they weren't.

We left the store, and quickly realised that we thought we were being followed. Like in some poor movie.

Thinking fast we did what anyone would have done. We went round the nearest corner, stopped and waited for them.

And waited, and waited, and waited.

And just as we were giving up and assumed we imagined it, they came round the corner camera high snapping away. Whilst we took this:

Quickpost this image to Myspace, Digg, Facebook, and others!
Here they are in the bottom right.

We waved and smilied and the scientologists, who were visible shaken and quickly left.

In hindsight we should have repeated the favour and followed them. But we didn't.

Likewise the next protest had even more scientologists scattered around the area trying to photograph suspects on the way to the protest. And plenty shoving their cameras into the crowd. Like this guy:

Quickpost this image to Myspace, Digg, Facebook, and others!

Quickpost this image to Myspace, Digg, Facebook, and others!

So sorry for the rambling nature of this post, but I wanted to just give some advice on the level of surveillance Scientology will employ tomorrow. The joke may have got old, and no one may turn up. But the scientologists will. So even if your not protesting, if your travelling around London keep and eye out for them by the tubes in North London. I'll try and improve the post over the next day. But I'm snowed under with work...

John McCain thinks vaccines cause autism.

2008-03-04T15:54:00.007Z

And you thought it was bad in the UK. When replying to a mother with an autistic child in a town meeting a few days back the republican presidential candidate said the following:

"It’s indisputable that (autism) is on the rise amongst children, the question is what’s causing it. And we go back and forth and there’s strong evidence that indicates that it’s got to do with a preservative in vaccines."

It's especially depressing when you realise compared to Huckabee and Romney, this is the Republicans most 'pro-science' candidate.

You can read more about it here and here.

Too stupid, even for the 'Answers in Genesis' Journal.

2008-02-28T14:11:00.005Z

This is quite entertaining and if you often find yourself battling fools on the internet, it's could even come in useful. If even the dullards at AiG thinks your arguments are bullshit, then you've got to be wrong.

Their webcomic makes their aims clear.

It's clearly all about the science

Answers in Genesis is the 'Peer Review Journal' that sets out to prove, defend and proclaim creationism. Now obviously, actual peer review journals work by being about a subject, but with no set aims for where the research they publish will take them. That way the scientists who publish within the journal compete amongst themselves, checking and improving, each others work despite having separate, and often contradictory, ideas about their subject.

Brilliantly Answers in Genesis have decided what arguments for creationism are too stupid. Even for them. They recommend that creationists do not use the following:

Darwin recanting on his deathbed.
Moon-dust thickness proving a young moon.
NASA's computers 'find' Joshua's missing day whilst modelling the past.
Wooly mammoths were flash frozen during the flood.
The second law of thermodynamics began at the Fall.
If we evolved from apes then apes shouldn't exist anymore.

And it goes on and on. Now if they are trying to raise the quality of their arguments, and weed out the flaws, then this is great news. They are attempting (poorly) the scientific method. They are still looking for data that supports a hypothesis rather than vice versa, but at least they are cutting out the data that is wrong right? They'll eventually exclude everything and give up right?

Well we can hope. But this little nugget implies that they are mearly trying to find the most successful arguments rather than the most truthful.

“There are no transitional forms.”

"Since there are candidates, even though they are highly dubious, it’s better to avoid possible comebacks by saying instead: “While Darwin predicted that the fossil record would show numerous transitional fossils, even a century and a half later, all we have are a handful of disputable examples.”

An idea fans of memes understand well. So unfortunately It seems they don't really want to follow their own advice buried in the middle of the page:

"We must not try to read into Scripture that which appears to support a particular viewpoint."

Housekeeping: Finishing a PhD is hard work, so I haven't had chance to write part 2 of my Scientology protest thing. But it is coming. Honest. They'll be a guide to how Scientologists will stalk you if you go to the next protest on March 15th.

What and who is Anonymous: Breaking rules 1 and 2

2008-02-11T11:43:00.000Z

Out of a sense of civic duty this reporter ensured that the "Riots" by "Anonymous" in London yesterday were covered, for you, the readers. As the first protest of it's kind, and having always been interested in the idea of "memes" since reading Dawkin's and Blackwell's books - I've been interested in the recent events. I think this protest is an important shift. Though not nessecellery a shift in the right direction. Or one that will last.

I'm going to ramble a little, but I've a lot to cover - and I've a busy week ahead. I've been meaning to mention all these shenanigans for a while now. So I suspect this'll be a quite long rant.

Who they are

If you've watched fox news then ANONYMOUS is a group of Internet Super Hackers on Steroids. It isn't. At all.

However If you don't know what "Anonymous" is - then it's embarrassing to tell you. Basically this is an excellent and comprehensive review. And you should read it.

But if you won't read that link here is a breakdown from what I've gathered. A forum called 4chan exists (I was going to write NSFW - but it's not safe full stop). You might read b3ta. Or Something Awful (who were also very involved in this). I'm sure you aware how they are less "appropriate" than other forums. Well 4chan is another step up.

On 4chan you don't need to register to post. You just post. No one ever has names. No one will remember you. Your posts will only last a few hours.

You combine that anonymity with a fan base of hormone riddled self-aware geeky teenagers and should-know-better twenty somethings (going by todays protests at least) and you get a site riddled with porn, extreme porn, shock images, racism and porn. Oh and porn. Please don't go there. Seriously. Not even in a "I'm telling you not too in order that you do" way. Seriously. No.

But crucially that anonymity serves another purpose. When posting on a chan board no karma, respect, friendship or trust can be built up over time. Which, it can be argued, are the main mechanisms that reward people for posting in normal forums (like "Bad Science"!). And it's that fact which is crucial. It means the reward for any creativity can only come from it's popularity. How often text becomes "copypasta" and how often people repost an image that you made.

So these sites become a thriving meme pool - ideas, jokes and pictures become a boiling soup of internet memes. The most popular survive. The weak die. Occasionally they get big enough (and socially acceptable enough) to break out of 4chan and invade the overbelly of the internet. Like LOLcats, Sparta, Rick Rolling and now it seems ANONYMOUS itself.

In short "ANONYMOUS" was an in-joke, postmodern, mythical "organisation" that people talking on the decrepit piss stain that is 4chan amused themselves by pretending it was a real, nebulous, secret group that is responsible for their actions. They like to pretend that they have a common cause and it's all part of a bigger plan. It's "post modern." It's self aware. It's a self deprecating joke infact. Nerdy, horny geeks aware they are nerdy horny geeks. Yes a proportion are evil little fucks, but the most are just people.

At the bottom of this concept is the idea that the internet is inherently stupid and it shouldn't be taken seriously. And anything personal you post on it shouldn't be taken seriously either.

ANONYMOUS VERSUS SCIENTOLOGY

And incredibly Fox News bought it.

They reported that this "ANONYMOUS," these bored teenagers, were infact a bunch of elite internet hackers "on steroids".

Whilst the DDoS attacks and the fucking up of kids lives are horrible, horrible things (and to be fair they've also foiled bomb threats and caught paedophiles), I do find amusement in the fact that Fox, so terrified of kids exposing themselves on the internet, have also become terrified of the very product of kids doing the opposite. This is kids being evil fucking kids, but the moral behind it is - "if you post personal shit on the internet you can't be sad when people laugh at you." That you can't afford to be serious on the internet. That baring your soul on your mypace and facebook pages is an inherently bad idea. And you can't really help but to agree with them about that.

But because Fox News believed in ANONYMOUS they bascially created it. They forged the meme and made it stronger than it ever could have been otherwise. And in doing so they created the protests around the world yesterday.

If your playing a silly game and someone takes you seriously that's inherently hilarious. And the game becomes more fun.

When the very real issue of Tom Cruise's mad rant flowering and being cut down all over the web occurred then it was only natural to pretend that ANONYMOUS wouldn't stand for it. If you are of the right mindset then it's only natural to think thats funny and awesome and carry the joke on. When you believe, as most young people do, that the internet is inherently ridiculous then a DDoS attack is just another joke. And so to attack the Scientology sites was a funny (to them) way to highlight the fucked-uppery of Scientology.

But of course whilst the internet is "serious buisness" the real world is actually serious business. When the excellent Mark Bunker of Xenu.net and a long time fighter against Scientology, criticised "ANONYMOUS" over the DDoS attacks and told them to protest peacefully and legally they listened. And what I find most interesting was that in order for his message to be heard and propigated they meme'd him.

They made him the "Wise Beard Man". So his ideas were worthy of being heard. That's important.

Then as the protests were getting nearer and they were galvanising, they cast of the anything goes policy of the internet and started organising, naturally on a wiki, collectively and anonymously. And crucially civility became a successful meme again.

But of course Scientology is ridiculous in the real world - and well known to film, identify then persecute its critics and protesters. Which goes hand in hand with a bunch mask wearing geeks who've watched and read V for Vendetta....

And so "ANONYMOUS," who even themselves didn't know if the joke was good enough to show up, showed up.

End of Part 1. Coming up next - How the day went - How Anon behaved and the people who tailed and photographed us.

P.S. Please don't kill me for explaining things Anon - I thought it was for the best. Do correct me if I'm wrong though.

Skeptobot will review yesterdays protests.... later.

2008-02-11T02:15:00.000Z

I know I told a few people in confidence that there would be a post reviewing the protests today. But that won't be for a little while as I'm very busy. But the decrepit, disgusting den that is 4chan was impressive - in a positive way - for once. Who would have thought?

The full story involves having e-meter readings, interviews with both Scientolgists and "The Internet" and being tailed by "undercover" scientologists.far away from the actual protests.

Marcus Brigstocke on Religion

2008-02-06T02:20:00.000Z

Here's a clip of Marcus Brigstocke moaning about religion on the BBC's 'The Now Show.' It's really rather splendid.

Currently I am stuck in the office 24-7, but thankfully the BBC's mighty iPlayer is keeping me sane, and finally made it possible for me to watch Brigstocke's 'The Late Edition', which in turn lead me to a wikipedia which started one of them damn web cascades - which produced this vid.

Don't forget about the News Fart.

2008-01-30T19:09:00.000Z

Rather busy at the mo, what with the final year of my Phd an all, but I've a few things in the pipe line, For instance I've been meaning to talk about the whole Scientology thing that's happening at the minute, but I've no time.

So during this period I'm pushing The News Fart to the top of the blog. I typically try and drop one or two links in it a day, and they're pretty interesting to me at least.

Also click on The News Farts title to be taken to the archive of previous links.

Sorry if it looks a little ugly, and sorry about the emails I've yet to use or reply too. I really appreciate them though!

Tom Cruise on Tom Cruise... Scientologist!

2008-01-15T17:06:00.000Z

I'm only 1 min 20 secs into this, and I've stopped it to post the link, because the Scientological Lawyer Strike Force Alpha will destroy it in days if not hours.

Nevertheless it seems its the massive viral of the day, I've already had two emails about it.

Incidentally, whilst I condone no IP theft, the download link on the google page does work...

Epicurus VS "The View" - host now believes "no one" came before Christians

2007-12-05T16:47:00.001Z

"The View" have done it again.

To start with I should remind you that the last time we ran in with the host Sherri Shepard on the view, she was admitting to not knowing if the "Earth was round or flat".

This time it started so promisingly. I totally support chat shows discussing "important" topics. It seems in this episode of "The View" they were talking about the excellent Epicurus - a near enough Atheist, and one of the first incredibly wise writers on why Religion, all in all, was a bit shit.

He said such wonderfully insightful comments as:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent.
Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent.
Is God both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

-- Epicurus

and

Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am
not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?

-- Epicurus

(Which I took from Jonathan Miller’s excellent ‘A Short History of Disbelief’ - but more can be found here.)

His insight is all the more the impressive when you realise this was 400 years before the birth of Christ.

As such, it makes the conversation that follows even more embarrassing - and after 2400 years of 'progress.'

We've let Epicurus down.

Skeptobot has stolen the Mini-blog idea!

2007-11-30T11:26:00.000Z

There has not been very many updates lately, as I've been far too busy with the final year of my PhD. But I have seen a number of great links I wanted to post. And I've had a few great things sent in by readers that I haven't had time to post yet - but thanks, I will do it eventually!

So I thought I would ease the drought by stealing Ben Goldacres Mini-Blog idea off his Bad Science Site. I hope he doesn't mind.

It's on the left in a rather small font.

Larry Lessig talking about Copyright is amazing.

2007-11-06T19:27:00.000Z

Larry Lessig talked at Ted about copyright law. No wait, don't go. It's amazing. It's everything I tried to say but better.

It's so, so good.

It's called "How creativity is being strangled by the law"

Trust me, watch it.

Jesus and Mo is rather good

2007-11-06T18:05:00.001Z

Jesus and Mo is a great little time waster featuring everyones favorite prophets Jesus and Muhammad and the larks they get up to in their platonic Morecambe and Wise lifestyle. It has existed since long before the Danish Cartoon 'events' and is occasionally printed in The Freethinker journal in the UK. The fact that this has survived an attack when those cartoons didn't is very interesting. Is it the power of anonymity or is it the angle of it's content? Either way it's now reached the impressive milestone of 200 strips.

I've been meaning to pimp it on the site for a while now, but never got round to it, but as the latest one is about homeopathy I couldn't resist:

The one before that was good too:

It's quite variable in quality, but I can't help but like it.

Woman 'not having' Formal construction of negative integers

2007-11-05T14:42:00.000Z

'Cold Cash' was a winter themed Scratch card where you were given a temperature (say -2 degrees C) and if you scratched off temperatures lower than that one, you won cash prices. It's had to be withdrawn after people couldn't understand it.

Tina Farrell, 23, complained saying:

"I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher - not lower - than -8 but I'm not having it."

Which I think is the first time I've seen someone actively resist mathematical truths. But the fact that this card has had to be withdrawn because of 'player confusion' says something of the selection bias of Scratch card buyers.

Sorry for the lack of updates, work hit a busy patch. Should be back to normal service soon.