Skeptico

Stop Sylvia Browne Stopped

The Stop Sylvia Browne website appears to have been taken over by someone selling psychic services. For now, no one is sure exactly how this happened, except that it is possible the domain registration expired (expiry date was August 21), and so the registrar (Go Daddy) put the domain up for auction. For example, see the stopsylviabrowne.com auction page, and Go Daddy’s policy for handling domains that are not renewed:

On the 25th day following your domain registration's expiration date, we place your domain for auction on the Domain Name Aftermarket (TDNAM).

That would make the auction start date September 15^th. The close date would therefore appear to be ten days later.  Admittedly though, things are a little unclear. Anyway, it seems likely someone took advantage of Rob Lancaster’s current serious illness to take over his site. 

This is a great shame. Some skeptics are working with Go Daddy to try to get the domain back (read the discussion over on JREF), but it doesn’t look good. Clearly, Robert would be able to restart the site with another domain name, when he gets well (the website data will not have been lost). But until then I’m removing the link to the site. More importantly, I think we all would wish Robert a speedy recovery from his illness.

November 1, 2008 - Edited to add:

The real Stop Sylvia site has been reborn at a new location - click Sylvia Browne to see the new site with all the old good stuff.  All skeptical bloggers and owners of skeptical websites are being asked to change their links to the new url. If you're not familiar with search engine optimization, please read Tim's post, Skeptics! Load your google bombs!.  Short version - link the new url to the words "Sylvia Browne" and not "Stop Sylvia Browne".  For example:

Preferred: Sylvia Browne

OK, but not as good: Stop Sylvia Browne

Sarah Palin Proudly Ignorant

Yesterday, Sarah Palin gave a speech on the McCain/Palin plans for special needs children. And in it she demonstrated her ignorance more clearly that in anything she had said before. Which, considering the other things she has said, is quite an achievement. Get a load of this:

This is a matter of how we prioritize the money that we spend. […] And where does a lot of that earmark money end up? It goes to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good -- things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.

Research into fruit flies. In France. France I tell you! The horror. (The “I kid you not” was not part of the official transcript, but she said it. I kid you not.)

Palin's proud ignorance shines through loud and clear. The actual research she was mocking was into the olive fruit fly – a major pest that threatens California’s olive farmers. (I guess she doesn't care about Joe the farmer.  How elitist.) But fruit fly research is much more than this. The fruit fly is a standard organism that is used to study numerous genetic traits, precisely because it shares so many genetic similarities with humans. Including possibly genetic causes of some of the very “special needs” traits of children Palin was supposed to be supporting in her speech. Just a ten second Google of fruit fly research would reveal 1,390,000 articles explaining the many benefits of research using fruit flies. Avenues of research and benefits achieved already that are too numerous for me to list, although a molecular biologist writing in the Daily Kos yesterday managed to list quite a few.

Of course, such research only makes sense if you accept that evolution happened - that humans and fruit flies have a common ancestor. Palin doesn’t believe this, because it conflicts with what she read in her bible, and so she sees no value to it. And right there you have, eloquently expressed, the reason that creationist nonsense should not be taught as science, and why creationist idiots (some redundancy there) like Palin should not get anywhere near having any real power.  And I kid you not.

October 27 - Edited to add:

Bora has much more on this, including links to this response from UNC researchers: In defense of fruit flies and basic medical research, as well as videos from some actual fruit fly research scientists, and these additional links:

Mike the Mad Biologist
Evolgen
Napa Valley Register
Island Of Doubt
Pharyngula
Pandagon
The Tree of Life
Washington Post
Myrmecos Blog
KSJ Tracker
Hyllaballoo
Radula
Uncontrolled Experiment
Greta Christina's Blog
Bjoern Brembs
Salon.com
Life v. 3.0
Flags and Lollipops - Network Edition

I'm smarter than Palin

Skeptics' Circle

The latest Skeptics' Circle has just been published at The Uncredible Hallq. 

Click the link to be Unwooed.

Psychics Make Firm Predictions

Psychics working for the TruTV (“Not Reality. Actuality.”) network claim to have some very specific information about the abductor of little Madeleine McCann, the four year old English girl who disappeared in Portugal in May 2007. The “Haunting Reality” program apparently features “psychic profiler Carla Baron, medium John J. Oliver and paranormal investigator Patrick Burns” who, I imagine, make the usual guesses about the nature of various unsolved crimes. But here they have gone further than the usual vague guesses. Get a load of what they claim to know:

• What the abductor looks like – and they have released a drawing of him
• The abductor’s first name,
• The actual address of an apartment where the abductor was supposed to have stopped
• The location of Madeleine’s body.

From the British Sunday Express newspaper, you can read the usual vague guesses that are either trivial or impossible to verify (“He took her to his car. There were people walking who saw him but he just looked as if he was a father carrying a sleeping child and they didn’t take any notice.”) But some of the more specific information was also published. Sensibly, the actual addresses given to police were not reported. The supposed abductor’s drawing was published though (which is irresponsible in my view. I refuse to do so, although I have saved the drawing for such time as the actual abductor is caught.) But there were some more specific pieces of information that I want to put on record:

…the man has a pronounced accent and looks and sounds Middle Eastern, possibly Egyptian, and drives a mid-sized dark silver car with a parking permit or some other identifying sticker inside the windscreen on the driver’s side.

[…]

…the man is known as Steve or Stav and took the child to a summer rental apartment in the nearby village of Lagos.

[…]

[The abductor had a] dark silver car, which may have had even darker or black trim.

Mr Oliver said he believes that the abductor may have stopped briefly at a deserted farmhouse east of the town before driving to his eventual destination – a ­furnished room rented out during the summer in nearby Lagos.

(“May have”? How can they say “may have” if they have given police the actual address?)

OK, here we have a fairly clear cut case with some fairly specific information given by the psychics. A name, a picture, even supposedly two addresses. Let’s see how useful this psychic information turns out to be. Let’s see if “Steve or Stav”, looking like the drawing, is actually found. Let’s see if Madeleine’s body is found where the psychics say it is. Shouldn’t take long. This is a high profile case where this lead will be investigated pretty quickly.

Additional Information

The Independent Investigations Group on Carla Baron.  Summary – “every case we investigated was either solved without Baron’s involvement or remains unsolved. Either way, her claims of being a “psychic detective” are completely unsubstantiated.”

Hope these predictions don't come back to haunt us.

Stop Jenny McCarthy

A new website has just been created to counter to the anti-vaccine nonsense perpetrated by Jenny McCarthy - Stop Jenny McCarthy.  As they say on their website:

Jenny has no educational background and no license to give any type of medical advice on any medically related topic. Becoming a parent of an autistic child is a huge job, but that does not make Jenny's google research and interpretation of the experiences more valid than others who have had the same experiences and come to different conclusions.

We ask that Jenny re-evaluate her assertions, and ask all parents to learn about the issue in depth.

A nice idea but somehow I don't think she will "re-evaluate her assertions," because they are just that - assertions.  Jenny's views on vaccines were not arrived at following a rational review of the evidence.  And that which is not arrived at through reason is unlikely to be reasoned away.  Still, I think the idea of the Stop Jenny McCarthy site is a good one - not to "stop" her per se, but at least to provide a site that will counter Jenny's ridiculous claims for anyone who is actually researching the topic.  (You know Oprah won't do it.)  In future, anyone Googling Jenny McCarthy will now find at least one site presenting facts and rationality.

Religulous

So I saw Religulous yesterday. This is a brief review – I didn’t take notes, and in any case telling you details would spoil the actual film. But I will say that it’s very funny. And worth seeing.

Maher gets his laughs by just asking various religious people to explain and justify their beliefs. All he needs in addition are a few snarky words and comedic glances to camera combined with some subtitled comments and sharp editing. It’s hard to name my favorite piece, but one that does stick out is the interview with creationist US Senator Mark Pryor, who actually said that humans didn’t know it was wrong to kill people before we got the ten commandments. But to his credit, Pryor did go on to point out that you don’t need to pass an IQ test before you can be a US Senator. Thanks for clearing that up.

Although most of the movie was comedic, the end contained the serious message Maher obviously intended the movie to make. With scenes showing nuclear explosions and the like captioned with quotes from the Book of Revelation, Maher laments that we developed the tools to annihilate life on Earth while some of the people with their fingers on the trigger still believe in the biblical End Times. He calls on the anti-religionists to come out of the closet and assert themselves. He also has a message for those who consider themselves moderately religious – examine your faith to determine if it's really worth the cost. Or to put it another way, the moderates provide cover for the religious nut cases who could really do some damage. The serious end was at odds with the rest of the film, but at least the message was clear.

Criticisms

Some have criticized the film for just going for the soft targets – the less sophisticated religious rather than religious scholars. For example, American Thinker suggested that Rick Warren would have been a better opponent for Maher. Well, considering this example of Rick Warren’s piss poor logic, I have to disagree. Warren would have been no better than most of the people Maher used in his film, but he would certainly have been less funny. The fact is, religion makes no sense when you examine it critically, no matter how much you’ve studied its nuances. This criticism is little more than a courtier’s reply – if you’re not interviewing experts in the design and manufacture of invisible garments, you’re not entitled to point out that the emperor has no clothes. I think Maher was perhaps a little mean with the blue collar workers at the truck stop church, but most of his interviewees were fair game. Remember, he did try to get interviews at the Vatican and with representatives of the Mormon Church but was thrown out of both locations.

Others have criticized Maher for not being honest in describing the film’s intent when booking the interviews. For example, Maher’s name was never mentioned in advance, nor was the true name of the film. It has been suggested that this is similar to the way the producers of Expelled hid the true meaning of their film from Dawkins and others. But those interviewed in Expelled were never told the true intent of the film even during the interviews. No one being interviewed by Maher could have been in doubt of his true intent for very long.

So overall, a good film. Some religious people are predictably complaining that Maher was unfair, and that he won’t convert anyone with this film, but that wasn’t his intention. The film is aimed (in my opinion) at weak believers and non-believers, and for them it will hit the mark.

Now, if Maher could only learn to apply some of this kind of critical thinking to his wacky beliefs about “western” medicine, vaccines and germ theory, I might start watching Real Time again.

Subjective Idealism

Reading through Wednesday’s You Get Mail post, it struck me that Coburn's position was closer to Subjective Idealism, rather than Solipsism as a couple of people had suggested. Although Subjective Idealism and Solipsism share at least one weakness.

Subjective Idealism, popularized by Bishop Berkeley, is the philosophical view that there is no such thing as physical matter. Only the mind or spirit, and not physical matter, constitutes reality. From PhiloSophos.com:

Idealism, in terms of metaphysics, is the philosophical view that the mind or spirit constitutes the fundamental reality. It has taken several distinct but related forms. Among them are Objective and Subjective idealism. Objective idealism accepts common sense Realism (the view that material objects exist) but rejects Naturalism (according to which the mind and spiritual values have emerged from material things), whereas subjective idealism denies that material objects exist independently of human perception and thus stands opposed to both realism and naturalism.

You might recognize some of Coburn's arguments there (although mercifully not his verbosity or pomposity).  OK, but why would we care? Well, it provides cover for a whole host of woo beliefs, for starters. For example, it’s perfect for believers in The Secret.  If everything really is just the mind, then it’s a small step to believe that really really wanting something badly enough can actually make it happen.

So could it be true? Could it be that everything that we think of as physical, is actually just thought? Well, Samuel Johnson famously refuted Berkeley by kicking a rock and stating "I refute it thus." His point being that his toe hurt, so it must be real. (Or maybe the rock didn’t move because it was too big – take your pick.)  Jimmy Blue has his own refutation: "Find a busy road, step in front of a speeding bus. If you live, tell us how 'real' it felt."

The thing is, strictly speaking, those arguments don’t refute Idealism. Your toe hurts when you kick the rock, but that could be because your mind imagines your non-material toe hurting.  What these arguments do show is that there really is no difference between the Subjective Idealistic and the Materialistic worlds: your toe hurts (or you are killed when you jump in front of that bus), regardless. Or to put it another way, Subjective Idealism is unfalsifiable - if it were false, there is no test we could perform that it would fail.  So the argument is essentially a waste of time.

Gravity again

Here’s another example that shows why it makes no difference. The Secret proponents such as Joe Vitale like to say that the law of attraction (LOA) is a law just like gravity. OK, let’s think about that. NASA uses the law of gravitation and Newton’s equations to calculate velocity and trajectories to get its rockets to go where it wants them to go. Let’s say they want to send a probe to Mars, to send back pictures of the Mars surface and other scientific data. Perhaps they’ll get the calculations correct. Or perhaps they’ll get them wrong (for example by confusing imperial with metric units).  Of course, getting the calculations right or wrong means different results:

1. If they get the calculations correct, then the probe will land safely and they’ll get back the nice pictures and other scientific data they want. And that’s true whether there really is a physical planet Mars all those millions of miles away, or whether Mars is really just a product of our minds. We either get actual pictures of an actual physical planet, or we get what our minds construct as physical pictures of a physical planet. To us, there appears no difference.  Either way we learn the same things about the planet Mars.
2. If they get the calculations wrong then the spacecraft will crash on the planet’s surface (or miss it altogether), and they’ll get nothing back. And that is true whether there really is a physical planet Mars all those millions of miles away, or whether Mars is really just a product of our minds. Either our physical selves don’t get the pictures of the physical Mars and so we learn nothing, or our non-physical minds don’t get back any images of what looks like a planet. Either way we learn nothing.

So with real scientific laws, like gravity, it makes no difference whether what we see is real matter or whether it is all a product of a minds. The results are the same and repeatable both ways. Likewise with non laws, like The Secret's LOA, it makes no difference either. Wishing for that bike won’t make it magically appear. And that is true whether it is a real physical bike or a construct of our minds that we just think is a physical bike. We won’t be getting the experience of riding that bike either way.