Skepticism
aardvarchaeology | May 19, 2012I'm at the Sixth World Skeptics Conference in Berlin, co-organised by the German GWUP and the US CSI. These conferences have been going on biannually since the mid-90s with a recent hiatus. It's the first time I'm at a skeptical event in Continental Europe. With only 300 seats it's not quite as planet-spanning as its name suggests, but it's a good crowd anyway. Some impressions:
I prefer to be a speaker at conferences.
I'm doing some intensive networking for the Swedish Skeptics who sent me here.
Also talent scouting for the European meeting we're organising next year.
It's good to hear…
aardvarchaeology | May 5, 2012
The Swedish Skeptics have received the 2012 Harry Martinson Memorial Prize from his birth municipality Olofström and the Harry Martinson Society. Martinson, a Nobel laureate, was a poet and prose writer who is particularly well known for his book-length science fiction epic poem Aniara. As chairman of the Swedish Skeptics I was invited down to Blekinge province where I spent Friday looking at archaelogy and doing some metal detecting with my colleague Mikael Henriksson from the County Museum -- and on Saturday morning I delivered an acceptance speech and a talk (in Swedish) on Martinson's…
aardvarchaeology | April 30, 2012
This past weekend the Swedish Skeptics celebrated our 30th anniversary with a two-day conference in Gothenburg. It included the annual business meeting of the society at which I was reelected as chairman for a second year. And at dinner, I sang a song about how I view my role in the society, and the Swedish Skeptics' role in Sweden at large. It's Tomas di Leva's 1991 Själens Krigare, "Soul Warrior". Here's a quick translation.
Can you feel it?
It is everywhere
Space opening
In our hearts
I am the soul's warrior
With love as my weapon
I am the soul's warrior
And the light in the tunnel
I…
gregladen | April 25, 2012Skepticism is a cultural phenomenon. I know that many self-declared skeptics prefer to ... ah ... believe otherwise, or as they would perhaps say, they have deduced from pure principles using sound logic that Skepticism is rational behavior and there is nothing cultural about it. But they are wrong, and that is trivially easy to prove.
Sarah Moglia is the event specialist for the Secular Student Alliance1 and has written an interesting piece on "Why [she doesn't call her]self a Skeptic" in which she asserts that there are people who call themselves "Skeptic" who are not, at least…
aardvarchaeology | April 12, 2012Perennial Aard favourites N-A. Mörner and B.G. Lind have published another note in a thematically unrelated journal. It's much like the one they snuck past peer review into Geografiska Annaler in 2009 and which Alun Salt and I challenged in 2011. The new paper is as usual completely out of touch with real archaeology, misdating Ales stenar by over 1000 years and comparing it to Stonehenge using the megalithic yard. No mention is made of the fact that this unit of measurement was dreamed up by professor of engineering cum crank archaeoastronomer Alexander Thom and has never had any standing in…
aardvarchaeology | March 28, 2012I got a letter with criticism from a man who believes in electromagnetic hypersensitivity and thinks I should too. Most of the letter is the Galileo argument, where the letter writer refers to an anthropologist whose ideas were, in his view, once highly respected until they were taken apart by critical thinkers. I should be as critical of the current medical consensus regarding radiation phobia as these thinkers were of the anthropologist, says the letter writer, because the current medical consensus has been paid for by the telecomms industry. In other words: it's a conspiracy.
But who, then…
denialism | February 29, 2012Via Ed I find out about a Psychic in Colorado sentenced to 5 years for fraud.
BOULDER, Colo. (CBS4)- A woman claiming to be a psychic has been sentenced to five years behind bars for stealing more than $300,000 from her clients.
Nancy Marks told her victims she needed their cash and credit card numbers to "draw out bad energy."
In Dec. 2010, a jury in Boulder found Marks guilty on 14 counts of fraud and tax evasion.
Now here is what I find confusing. How is this woman different (other than the tax evasion) from other psychics who claim to be able to predict the future, talk to ghosts, or…
pharyngula | February 6, 2012There's a reason I promote atheism and skepticism coupled with feminism, and it's not because I'm trying to foist a feminist ideology on skepticism. It's because skepticism drives me to consider discrimination and injustice as wrong, not just in an abstract moral sense, but unjustifiable and invalid. If I am in any sense a feminist, it is because I am a skeptic, not vice versa. And I think the best way to achieve equality for women, and for minorities of all kinds, is to view the world rationally, empirically, and as objectively as possible. It's the people who try to justify everything with…
aardvarchaeology | January 7, 2012I'm on the latest instalment of the Skeptic's Guide podcast talking about the Mora/Orsa electrophobia case and the Obscurantist of the Year anti-award. I also mention a bunch of upcoming European skeptics' conventions, though Steve Novella cut out the bit where I recommended that the skeptical rogues grow mullet hair styles and mustaches for the Berlin meeting in May to honour the German porn industry.
(My previous interview with the SGU, about the Swedish Skeptics and weird archaeology, was almost four years ago! Time flies.)
gregladen | January 7, 2012For a full year, A.J. Jacobs followed every piece of health advice he could -- from applying sunscreen by the shot glass to wearing a bicycle helmet while shopping. Onstage at TEDMED, he shares the surprising things he learned.
I always thought it would be interesting to assemble ALL of the warnings and instructions that come with the stuff you get (water heater, iPod, car, children's toys, etc.) and implement all of the instructions, as per the instructions. A.J. should do that next.
pharyngula | January 6, 2012Poor Andy. Once upon a time, he had the power to kill children just by doing some very bad science and writing a few very bad papers, and now he's reduced to living in Texas and being supported by mobs of New Age cranks. He's powerless and bored, but his ego is still being inflated by sycophants…so what does he do? He decides to sue the British Medical Journal and journalist Brian Deer for defamation.
He has no medical career left. His entire life is now tied to his anti-vaccine crusade, and he's got nothing to contribute, other than his status as a martyr to the cause, so what he's done now…
aardvarchaeology | January 1, 2012The Swedish Skeptics, of whom I am the chairman, have just announced their annual awards for 2011 [a - b].
The Swedish public TV show Hjärnkontoret receives the Enlightener of the Year award,
"...for their excellent science coverage directed towards children. Hjärnkontoret has aired for 16 years and thus contributed to the upbringing of the entire current generation of students and young scientists at Swedish universities. Thanks to its welcoming format and accessible time slot on public television, Hjärnkontoret reaches out to children of all backgrounds, thus widening and democratising…
gregladen | December 19, 2011As you know, I've shifted some of the topics I have discussed on this blog over to The X Blog. However, some topics can very reasonably go on both. One of these is how we communicate, and argue, and sometimes make progress in this crazy, zany place we call The Blogsophere. Also, as an Anthropologist, I see topics related to gender, sexism, feminism and related topics as fully at home here, as well as at The X Blog. So, I just completed a series of posts over there which I'm sure will be of interest to those of you who tend to hand out here and might not otherwise notice. I hope you visit…
gregladen | December 11, 2011Skeptics love to hate CAM. And often, with good reason. Alternative medicines or medical treatments, as is often pointed out, become "mainstream" when the available science suggests that they work, so it is almost axiomatic that "alternative" means "unproven" and it is probably almost always true that the kinds of things that end up as "alternatives" come from sources with poor track records. For instance, one of the most common forms of alternative medicine used over the last several decades is Extra X where X is some substance we know the body uses, and that we know a deficiency of is…
gregladen | December 8, 2011TV show Mythbusters has apologized after an experiment it conducted to measure the speed of a cannonball went wrong, leaving a trail of destruction across a California suburb. Instead of hitting its intended target, the cannon misfired, sending a six-inch ball of lead careening through one house, damaging another before ending up lodged in a minivan. No one was injured.
OMG. I so wish it was my house hit by the Mythbusters Cannon Ball!!!!!
Anyway here's one of those zany animations of the event:
OMG!!!!
aardvarchaeology | December 6, 2011Here I go again, bad-mouthing Thor Heyerdahl to his countrymen. But note that I'm quoted as saying, "Norway is a country that has produced many great archaeologists. Thor Heyerdahl was not one of them." Proud Norwegians, your country is great! And its greatness does not hinge upon the posthumous judgment of that guy with the raft.
Hear the audio clip here.
Update same day: Hehe. Some commenters on the NRK website are offended. One feels that I am just a kid with a lot of opinions, which is rather flattering to this balding father of a teen. Another thinks I'm just trying to become famous in…
aardvarchaeology | December 3, 2011
Sweden's goodbye to religious faith and cult continues apace, and so does the relocation of the population from the countryside to the cities. Here's a sign of the times. The National Heritage Board has recently re-issued its 1998 how-to guide for (rural) congregations who wish to quit heating their churches (available as a free PDF).
Sweden's rural churches, many of which were built in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries, have only been heated for the past century or so. It's comfier for the congregants and it reduces humidity, thus improving preservation conditions for some materials. But…
aardvarchaeology | November 29, 2011For the past few days, Swedish skeptics have been shaking their heads in disbelief over Mora municipality's office for the environment. The office had taken the complaints of a man with radiation phobia seriously and demanded that all radio transmitters in the area be turned down or re-pointed to ensure that the man's house would not receive more that 50 nanowatts of radio - an extremely low value. The thing about radiation phobia (or "electromagnetic hypersensitivity" as it is called by sufferers, "electricity allergy" in Swedish) is that it is all in one's head. These people have real…
pharyngula | November 21, 2011As I was going through my usual morning roster of webcomics, I discovered that Sci-ence referenced an earlier one I missed — the Red Flags of Quackery. There are certain tell-tale signs that you're dealing with woo…like the abuse of the word "quantum".
But then you all already knew that Sci-ence was required regular reading, right?
(Also on FtB)
aardvarchaeology | November 20, 2011
I've written a bit before about Thor Heyerdahl's hyperdiffusionism and the status as a Norwegian national hero he still enjoys despite being completely discounted as a scientist. Last time I passed through Oslo airport I discovered this Kon Tiki-themed restaurant with a faux Ecuadorian Bolivian stele. I think what Heyerdahl interpreted as a full beard is more likely to depict a decorative face plate hanging from the man's nose. And anyway, a beard is of course not evidence that a man is a civilisation-bearing Ãbermensch from Europe.