Apparently Torchwood’s Norwegian branch has been busy in the last couple days, defending us from the latest Slitheen incursion (damn you, Raxicoricofalipatorius!), as can be seen in this video:

Ok, so what is it really? It’s actually a failed Russian missile test.

There were some really ignorant people out there going on about this being something called Project Blue Beam or some alien invasion or what have you, but I’m pleased to see that the MSM actually stepped up and slapped this one down. Good job, guys!

(for a more detailed takedown, check out Badastronomy.com’s explanation)

We all know that everyone gets very creeped-out by robots that look and act human. We know this, despite the fact that 99% of us haven’t ever seen robots that look and act human, because the media tells us it is true. They talk about the concept of the uncanny valley and how it explains this discomfort.

The concept basically runs like this: things that look almost totally humand but aren’t, and things that act almost totally human, but aren’t, are something that’s going to creep us out for reasons we can’t quite explain. This concept was basically just made-up by a Japanese robotics guy named Masahiro Mori.

From what I can tell there’s no real evidence that this is true, but it appears to be accepted without any skepticism from the masses (bearing in mind that these are the same masses who believe in creationism rather than evolution and the lack of understanding perhaps makes sense). Evidence often cited includes poor box office receipts from movies like Beowulf (which I rather liked), The Polar Express, and Final Fantasy – The Spirits Within, (though one of my favorite whipping boys, Final Fantasy: Advent Children, did quite good in sales and is left off the list). What’s not usually mentioned is that these, frankly, weren’t very good movies and that might’ve played a larger role than anything else in their failure.

I think the uncanny valley concept is basically an excuse people like to use for why various products, including those movies, failed. It also doesn’t explain why other products, like Disney’s Hall of Presidents, are a success.

Ultimately this appears to be something that someone made up without any real evidence and that the media now accepts without any question. With the rise of things like Poser porn (you can search for that on your own; I’m not linking to it while at work!), I think this concept is pretty-well debunked.

Here! An elegant and entertaining, point-by-point refutation of the idiocy surrounding 2012 (the year, not the movie). Look and enjoy!

Many years ago a movie called Three Men and a Baby was released. It’s a darn fine movie! Very funny with a good heart to it. I really liked it.

Unfortunately a number of people came to the conclusion that there was a ghost in the film. No, I don’t mean some bit of SFX, I mean an actual ghost.

Needless to say this is nonsense. But some people continue to persist. So here’s what Captain Disillusion has to say on the issue (yes, I’m feeling too lazy to post a real article today):

A decade late, I have finally seen Contact. It was… ok. It wasn’t anything great. The SFX were good and the overall plot was decent, but its runtime could’ve been trimmed by a good half hour and the subplot centering around terrorism should’ve been left out. Doing that would’ve resulted in leaving out what has to be one of the largest plot holes in the history of cinema.

Towards the end of the movie one character, a religious believer, makes the comment that religion and science have the same goal; the search for truth. It’s something people, usually religious ones, say quite often, and I’d like to address that point.

BULLSHIT.

Science is about the search for truth. It’s about taking ideas, examining evidence, formulating theories, and then testing them endlessly until you break them. If you do break those theories, you then come up with a better one and keep testing that one until it breaks.

Religion, on the other hand, is about coming up with an idea, holding onto that idea, ignoring all the evidence and then saying that the testing methology and any evidence that disagrees with your faith are faulty. It is about many things, but definitely not the search for truth. It’s mostly about the search for ways to reinforce what people already think they believe.

Science is about looking for truth. Religion is about looking at science, putting your fingers in your ears and going, “No, no! I can’t hear you! La-la-la-la!”

Thank you.

PS: For the record, were I in the same situation Jody Foster is in at the end of the movie, I would’ve assumed I hallucinated due to smacking my head.

CNN.com has, once again, one of those depressingly stupid little stories that has no business being reported on through a legitimate news source. This time it’s about a woman who, in 1989, claims to have met a man from space.

*sigh*

Ok, people, one more time, this is total bullshit. I don’t know what the woman saw, but it’s highly unlikely it was an alien. She offers no evidence for this encounter and it’s far more likely that she was a: hallucinating or b: pranked by some students with more time on their hands than brains in their heads.

While it’s extremely likely there are other intelligent forms of life in the universe, it’s extremely unlikely they’ve been to Earth and even less likely they’d engage in some weird encounter like this.

And shame to CNN for reporting this “story”. Yes, it’s part of a larger story (though not much larger), about the RAF tracking down UFO reports, but it’s overly sensationalized and still isn’t something they need to be covering.

How about you guys just cover, you know, news? I know it’s a lot to ask from a news organization, but I’ll keep dreaming.

Atlantis doesn't exist.

A couple years ago I was watching the History Channel (a channel that is, these days, showing all sorts of programs that have little or nothing to do with history). They were showing something about Atlantis, as they are wont to do (usually around the same time they show stuff on Nostradamus and “What really happened to Jimmy Hoffa?”). They showed a couple “archaeologists” (I don’t know the names now, forgive me), who were in Bermuda, looking for evidence to support their theory that Atlantis was in Bermuda.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the wonderful world of pseudoscience and its bastard cousins, pseudohistory and pseudoarchaeology!

As the “pseudo-” prefix implies, these aren’t actually science, history or archaeology, just something that looks similar when viewed from a distance. Sometimes it can be used to create interesting works of fiction (The Da Vinci Code, for example), but sometimes people mistake it for reality (The Da Vinci Code, for example), and that’s when the trouble begins.

Here’s an example of how real science works: a trained professional takes a look at all the evidence available and forms a theory that is supported by that evidence (this is a gross simplifaction, mind you). That theory is then tested and retested to see if it works. If it doesn’t, the scientist in question goes back to the drawing board and comes up with a new theory that will, hopefully, work better. It’s what’s referred to as the scientific method.

This is, in fact, that exact opposite of what the people I mentioned at the start of the article were doing. They were working backwards. They formulated a theory (Atlantis was in the area of Bermuda), and then went looking for evidence to support that theory (ignoring the fact that all the available evidence points to the notion that Plato simply made Atlantis up as a teaching tool, the same thing I believe is the case with Jesus, by the way).

The scientific method is very important. It means that once a conclusion is reached, it’s done so through a great deal of verification and evidence. Things like the Theory of Gravity, the Theory of a Heliocentric Solar System (both still classed as “theories”, by the way, which means something different in science than you might expect), the Theory of Evolution and the Theory of Relativity aren’t regarded as true simply because people say they are; they’re regarded as true because they’ve been tested, verified and found accurate.

Contrast this now to pseudoscience, examples of which abound. One of my personal favorites is ghost hunting, which I always refer to as “Hey, gang! Let’s go play scientist!”. Astrology, creation “science” and cryptozoology are also wonder examples.

As for pseudoarchaeology, let’s take the specific example of Atlantis. There is no evidence that it ever existed. It doesn’t appear in the historical record until Plato talked about it. It’s quite clear he made it up, and the fact that he made it up so long ago is part of why people believe it must be true. It makes me wonder if in two-thousand years from now we’ll have people believing Oz, Grand Fenwick, Tomania, Xanth and Middle-Earth were all real places.

Pseudohistory is a little less widely known, but still a problem. Afrocentrism (particularly the parts that claim the Greeks learned everything they knew from black Africans), the belief that Zheng He visited the New World, as well as all forms of Holocaust Denial are all forms of pseudohistory. Some are mostly harmless, like the Zheng He notion, but others, like Holocaust Denial, can be quite damaging.

This brings us to the question of what to do about pseudoscience, as well as pseudoarchaeology and pseudohistory. They are based fundamentally on ignorance, of course, and the only cure for ignorance is knowledge. Only by teaching solid science, history and archaeology will we be able to overcome this kind of fundamentally wrong nonsense.

Naturally, religion completely fails any tests involving the scientific method, and while there’s archaeological evidence for the existence of, say, Pilate, there isn’t any for Noah’s Ark. Many theists out there seem to take pride in this, talking about how wonderful and noble it is to believe in something despite all the evidence to the contrary. They will tell you at length about how science and archaeology don’t matter, but you know that if science were to ever prove the existence of God, they’d pounce on that like there was no tomorrow (well, provided it was their god, and not some other).

For this reason it is vital that we don’t teach intelligent design in our schools. It’s nothing but pseudoscience, pure and simple. It doesn’t even remotely pass muster as far as the scientific method goes, and pretending it does is an insult to rational minded people everywhere. You can’t even slip by saying, “Teach the controversy!” because there isn’t really any controversy at all in the scientific community. Of course all this is moot, given that intelligent design, in addition to being bad science, is religiously-based, and so can’t be taught in public schools anyhow.

Only by fighting back against pseudo-anything can we hope for real science, real history, real archaeology and rational thought to prevail. If we don’t fight back, we deserve to live in a world where people believe in Atlantis, intelligent design and other such nonsense.

Kind of like we do now… oh, dear.

CNN has an article up about some men who claim to have a Bigfoot corpse. Well, la-dee-da. Hands up, all of you who think it will be real. Anyone? Anyone? Hands up all people who think CNN will print a nice big story about how it turned out to be fake. Anyone? Anyone?

Yeah, I thought not.

*sigh*

Look, guys, I know August is a slow-news month, but that’s no excuse for this kind of lazy reporting. Between this and some nonsense about a ghost video, CNN is losing credibility fast as far as I’m concerned. It’s enough to make me want to start watching MSNBC.

Good ole chi! About fifteen million different ways to spell it, all of which add up to bullshit. Total nonsense. Thanks! Goodbye!

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Oh, you want more detail? Greedy bastards. Alright, here you go.

If I came up to you on the street and told you that I’d just discovered this wonderful, magic energy that controls everything in the universe, that I can manipulate it and that science can’t even vaguely detect it, you’d think I was a loon or a con artist trying to get between you and your money, and rightly so. Yet around the world millions of people believe in just such a thing, and they call it chi.

The fundamental concept behind chi (for the record, it’s pronounced “chee”), is that it’s a life-energy that flows through all living beings. It surrounds us, penetrates us, holds the universe together, etc.

The idea, according to proponents of anything involving chi, is that its an energy field that can have its flow manipulated to sort out illness (btw: I’ll be ripping apart “traditional Chinese medicine” in great detail in a future post), restore your spirit, redecorate your house, and, according to some, its even what gives martial arts experts the ability to break boards and bricks with only their bare hands or feet. From what I understand, tai chi (aka: the art of moving very slowly), makes use of this concept, and I believe yoga (aka: stretching!), uses something similar.

Needless to say, this energy field is undetectable using any sort of scientific means. I recall at least one believer of the concept telling me that it’s something you have to sense with your mind, and that science will never be able to detect it anymore than science can detect love.

Well, ok, fine and dandy. It’s true that science cannot detect emotions (though from what I understand we are able to see the changes in the brain that happen when certain emotions are experienced). On the other hand, emotions don’t generate an energy field that we can manipulate to heal people and break bricks with our heads.

See, here’s the thing: if there’s energy out there that can be manipulated, it should be able to be detected. If it can’t be, and you’re manipulating it anyhow, how do you know you aren’t causing more harm than good? Logically, if it can do good, it can also do harm, and so shouldn’t you leave it alone until we have some actual academic studies on it that show you scientifically how to use it?

I’m not entirely sure why people want to waste their time believing in this patently obviously fake concept. I know part of it in the Western world is what Terry Pratchett refers to as “the attractiveness of distant wisdom”. That’s the idea that if something as come so far across the world to reach you, it must be better than the wisdom laying around your place gathering dust. The example he cites is along the lines of saffron-robed youths leaving their monastaries, throwing out the rancid yak butter tea their ancestors drank, and going to Ankh-Morpork to study the Way of Mrs Cosmopolite. I think that very concept plays a huge role in explaining why this idea has started to take hold among people in the Western world.

But really, I think the reason it’s become popular is because it offers a fairly easy explanation (your enegery levels are out of balance), for complex things (you’re stressed out because of all the crap going on in your life and you need to deal with them). It puts me in mind of the ancient notions that all our physical problems were caused by an imbalance in our humours. Well, the people who believed that were wrong, and eventually science proved it. The people who believe in chi are also wrong, science has proved it, and they just don’t want to accept reality.

One final, off-topic note here. I don’t know why people insist on translitterating words from non-Latin alphabets in such a way as to render them unpronouncable phonetically. It’s not like English is suffering from a lack of such things to start with. Having a word like “qi” and pronouncing it as “chee” is just silly. Same with things that should be spelled as “fung shway”, “chee gung” and the like. It’s hardly limited to Chinese, either. Look at “phở”, which is apparently pronounced “fuh”.

If you’re going to translitterate things using the Latin alphabet, please do so in a way that allows us to spell them the way they are pronounced.

I wrote a few months back about how vaccines do not, in fact, cause autism. It got quite a few comments, which was a nice ego boost.

Well, I read online today an article from Michael Shermer who, in addition to bashing nicely on wheatgrass, has some things to say about the vaccine issue. Have a look!