Category Archives: Pseudoscience

Cosmology, Favorites, Popularization, Pseudoscience, Quantum mechanics

More on New Scientist

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I felt sort of bad saying all that stuff about Wired when the guy who wrote the piece I did like showed up to say “Thanks for the link.” But hey, I’m not going to stop criticizing bad science reporting, nor can I imagine shutting myself up about the practices which I think cause bad science journalism. (Nor do I have the vanity to think that by myself, I’ll make any difference.) I’d feel considerably more uncomfortable if Greg Egan didn’t go and provide a whole new plateful of reasons to be upset with pop science.

Egan has been masochistically plowing through New Scientist ever since the EmDrive incident, when he had found himself “gobsmacked by the level of scientific illiteracy” the magazine had put on display. Now, commenting at The n-Category Café, he gives two additional recent “absurdities.”
Continue reading More on New Scientist →

Pseudoscience

Start Your Own (Pseudo)Science Journal Today!

Living punchline Paul Cameron has decided to start his own “peer-reviewed” journal to publish homophobic diatribes disguised as science. Titled The Empirical Journal of Same-Sex Sexual Behavior, it will soon be coming to a website near you.

You know, I find this idea rather inspirational. I wasn’t quite sure how to advance my idea that William Shakespeare wrote the plays of Christopher Marlowe (who was killed because he was a closet Copernican — “They” hushed up the incident as a fight over a bar bill) and that the truth of this assertion is encoded in the streetsigns visible in the background of Ghost in the Shell (1995). Now I know what to do: I just have to fire up a website proclaiming itself to be the Empirico-Rationalist Journal of Marlowian Conspiracy Theories.
Continue reading Start Your Own (Pseudo)Science Journal Today! →

Evolution, Neuroscience, Pseudoscience, Wobosphere fun

Laden on Evolutionary Psychology

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Greg Laden summarizes the evolutionary origins of human gender disparities.

I live with two females, and one of them is the only person in the house who can program the VCR. I can do it if I need to, but I threw out the directions and it will take me a while to figure out, and blood will be spilled and profanities uttered. Both of my female house mates are about as fixated on the remote as I am. They tend to be able to find it more easily than I can, because their ancestors were gatherers and finding the remote is roughly the same thing as finding nuts, berries, and most importantly, plant underground storage organs. I, on the other hand, descend from a long line of hunters, so I tend to hunt the remote. Hunting, as is well known, tends to yield a more inconsistent return. So most of the time I don’t find any remote at all, and now and then, I find three or four of them in one episode of searching.

I’m sure that a similar argument will soon be able to explain the different sizes of the male and female crockus. Clearly, the crockular region of the frontal lobe was once used to coordinate the swimming motions necessary when holding a child in the water, as per the aquatic ape hypothesis.

Neuroscience, Pseudoscience, Quantum mechanics

Non-materialist Neuroscience

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Trent Toulouse writes to say that RationalWiki has finished switching its service providers, so that it is once again available at rationalwiki.com. I had previously pointed to their growing article on non-materialist neuroscience, the domain of Michael Egnor and Denyse O’Leary. The article is clearly a work in progress, but it’s already a good read.

I added some stuff on the abuse of quantum mechanics, too.

Pseudoscience, Transparency

Stuart Pivar: Man and Myth

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First, an announcement: Brent Rasmussen has the sixty-ninth Skeptic’s Circle up at his place. Rasmussen taps into that deeply American mythos, the aquifer of imagery which we specialists call “the Western.” Science After Sunclipse is represented by my two entries on Stuart Pivar, the hapless businessman who wrote a silly book, tried to sue the professor who gave it a scathing review and earned the moniker “classic crackpot,” bestowed upon him by an unsympathetic Internet.

In and of itself, that sounds like a nice legend too, doesn’t it? “Businessman versus blogger,” a hero tale for the Wild West Web.

But myths have their underside, and the closer we poke at a myth, the more interesting the telling becomes. The story of Cain and Abel might be an adaptation of a Sumerian fable; all that business about Cain finding a wife and needing a mark to protect him from the other people — what other people, if his was the only family on Earth? — may be the residue of a polytheistic age, when Yahweh was only supreme thunder-bringer of one patch of land, and Genesis was the origin story of his people alone. (In ancient Ugarit, Yahweh was the son of Elyon, the Most High.)

And what of our modern story? The clash between Pivar and PZ Myers is such the perfect Slashdot item; could there be more to it than that?
Continue reading Stuart Pivar: Man and Myth →

Bad Math, Classical Mechanics, Pseudoscience

Rosenhouse on Amanda Shaw

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Following up on his previous post, “Is Math a Gift From God?” — calculus students say, “No!” — Jason Rosenhouse has a new essay for your delectation, “Is God Like an Imaginary Number?” Again, the short answer is, “Nope.” The longer answer will take us into the history of mathematics, the role of mysticism in theology and the relationship between science and verbal description.

Rosenhouse sets himself the task of fisking an essay in the religious periodical First Things, by a “Junior Fellow” of that publication named Amanda Shaw. Shaw’s thesis is that the notion of God is akin to that of an imaginary number, and moreover that the same closed-minded orthodoxy which rejected the latter from mathematics for oh so many years is unjustly keeping the former out of science. I find this stance to be, in a word, ironical: if you’re looking for dogmatism and condemnations of the heterodox, your search will be much more rewarding if you look among the people who reject scientific discoveries because they are inconsistent with a Bronze Age folk tale than if you search through science itself!

Still, it’s a fun chance to talk about history and mathematics.

PART A: COMPLEX NUMBERS

As I described earlier, “imaginary” and “complex” numbers arise naturally when you think about the ordinary, humdrum “real numbers” — you know, fractions, decimals and all those guys — as lengths on a number line. In this picture, adding two numbers corresponds to sticking line segments end-to-end, multiplication means stretching or squishing (in general, scaling) line segments, and negation means flipping a segment over to lie on the opposite side of zero. Complex numbers appear when you ask the question, “What operation, when performed twice in succession upon a line segment, is equivalent to a negation?” Answer: rotating by a quarter-turn!

Historically, mathematicians started getting into complex numbers when they tried to find better and better ways to solve real-number equations. Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576), also known as Jerome Cardan, posed the following problem:

If some one says to you, divide 10 into two parts, one of which multiplied into the other shall produce […] 40, it is evident that this case or question is impossible. Nevertheless, we shall solve it in this fashion.

Writing this in more modern algebraic notation, this is like saying [tex] x + y = 10 [/tex] and [tex] xy = 40 [/tex], which we can combine into one equation by solving for [tex] y [/tex], thusly:

[tex] xy = x(10 – x) = 40.[/tex]

In turn, shuffling the symbols around gives

[tex] x^2 – 10x + 40 = 0,[/tex]

which plugging into ye old quadratic formula yields

[tex] x = \frac{10 \pm \sqrt{100 – 160}}{2}, [/tex]

or, boiling it down,

[tex] x = 5 \pm \sqrt{-15}. [/tex]

Totally loony! Taking the square root of a negative number? Forsooth, thy brains are bubbled! Oh, wait, didn’t we just realize that we could maybe handle the square root of a negative number by moving into a two-dimensional plane of numbers? Yes, we did: that’s the prize our talk of flips and rotations won us!
Continue reading Rosenhouse on Amanda Shaw →

Popularization, Pseudoscience

Bad Science Stories in 10 Easy Steps

TR Gregory offers advice on how to write really terrible, horrible, no good, very bad science stories for widespread distribution. By following these ten simple guidelines, you too can keep the public ignorant and hold back the Enlightenment!

Here’s a taste:

Appeal to common misconceptions, and substitute your own opinions and misunderstandings for the views of the scientific community.

It is important that readers’ misconceptions not be challenged when reading a news story. In fact, the more a report can reinforce misunderstandings of basic scientific principles, the better. This can be combined with step 6 [Use buzzwords and clichés whenever possible] to good effect. It is also helpful to insert your own views and misunderstandings as though they were those of the scientific community at large. For example, if you find something confusing, mysterious, or (un)desirable, assume that the scientific community as a whole shares your view.

It’s a great essay, and I don’t just say that because of the references he cites.

And while you’re visiting Prof. Gregory’s place, why don’t you help find out how much good one blog post can do?

Pseudoscience, Transparency

PR Flacks for Pivar!

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Over at the SciAm blag, Chris Mims breaks the story that a public-relations flack was cheerleading for classic crackpot Stuart Pivar. Matthew Rich, a.k.a. Matt Richards, is a New York-based PR veteran of sixteen years whose PR agency issued the press release for Pivar’s new edition of LifeCode. This was, incidentally, the press release which prompted PZ Myers to repost his old debunking of Pivar’s crackpottery. This was also the press release which claimed that Neil deGrasse Tyson supported Pivar’s work, a claim which random folks on the Internet soon demolished, and which Tyson himself soon denied.

Oops!

For some reason, Matthew Rich then went around the Web, saying good things about Pivar. At the Amazon.com page for LifeCode, he wrote under the name M. rich “open minded”, saying this:
Continue reading PR Flacks for Pivar! →

Pseudoscience, Wobosphere fun

Skeptic’s Circle #68

Skeptic’s Circle #68 is ontube at Aardvarchaeology. I enjoyed this post at Evangelical Realism, and also Andy Lewis’ description of Charles Darwin’s encounter with homeopathy. During one hospital stay, Darwin became an unwilling recipient of homeopathic “treatments,” of which he wrote,

I grieve to say that Dr Gully gives me homoœopathic medicines three times a day, which I take obediently without an atom of faith.

Continue reading Skeptic’s Circle #68 →

Bibliophilia, Favorites, Pseudoscience

Stuart Pivar Sues PZ Myers

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Whoa!

Remember that Stuart Pivar fellow who wrote a book called LifeCode (2004), a book which purported to advance a new theory of developmental biology — a theory which would, naturally, overturn everything biologists have figured out so far? Well, here’s a quick refresher:

  • On 7 November 2005, PZ Myers reviewed LifeCode on his old blog. The upshot is that pretty pictures do not a body of evidence make.
  • This past July, on the twelfth to be specific, Myers reposts his review on ScienceBlogs.com, because Pivar started promoting his book again.
  • Down in the comments, my Pharynguloid pals and I started noticing that the laudatory quotes Pivar had stuck on LifeCode couldn’t be traced back to their purported sources. In particular, an endorsement from Neil deGrasse Tyson turned out to be a chimera: the first part from an unrelated NOVA interview, and the second completely fabricated.
  • On the seventeenth, Myers posts his review of Pivar’s new edition. In Pivar’s illustration, a spider has ten legs. The money quote from Myers: “This book is a description of the development and evolution of balloon animals.” Later, Mark Chu-Carroll will agree that, in the end, Pivar’s claim “just doesn’t hold up to the least bit of scrutiny.”
  • The next day, PZ makes note of the puzzling endorsement situation. He says that he’s written several of the people whose names Pivar invoked, and Neil deGrasse Tyson had written back: “Tyson replied, and has said that part of the quote is an out of context reference to a completely different subject, and that another part is a fabrication. He has asked that Pivar remove his name from his website, which he has not done. Tyson’s name is also prominently used on the back cover of his book — I don’t see that going away, either.”
  • Stuart Pivar sends an e-mail to my place of employment, using our generic departmental e-mail address; an administrative assistant eventually notices the message and forwards it to me. The text follows.

    Dear Dr Stacey,

    Thank you for your interest in Lifecode. It presents a solution to the ultimate systems problem, living taxonomy. The model is considered very serious now by many. But it freaks out biologists into cognitive dyfunction.

    Robert Hazen is a prominent NASA scientist in this field . His review recommending publication is appended.

    The review of PZ Myers may be also seen today. Please note that he not an embryologist.

    May I send you a copy of the book?.

    Stuart Pivar

    Note: there were no actual appended items.

OK — followed all that? Now, you better be sitting down for this. Via ERV, I just learned that Stuart Pivar is suing PZ Myers and the Seed Media Group.
Continue reading Stuart Pivar Sues PZ Myers →

Neuroscience, Pseudoscience, Quantum mechanics

Quantum Flapdoodle, Part N

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Somebody just found my site by Googling for quantum model in social studies. I’m the ninth hit, one notch below Stuart Hameroff himself; leading the hit parade was a conference presentation abstract by a certain A. Wendt, entitled “Quantum Mind and Social Science.” The abstract itself follows below the fold. It’s not quantum feminism, but it does have a certain charm.
Continue reading Quantum Flapdoodle, Part N →

Neuroscience, Pseudoscience

My Alien Abduction Story

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I’ve set a simulation to crunching away in the background, so for a little while, I can tell myself that I’m being “productive” whilst in fact tossing up a quick blag post. An interesting experience which used to happen to me fairly often recurred a few days ago, so I figured I should resuscitate some old thoughts about it. You see, I enjoyed the privilege of an alien abduction every few weeks during my junior year of MIT.

Let me elaborate on that:
Continue reading My Alien Abduction Story →

Classical Mechanics, Cosmology, Neuroscience, Pseudoscience, Quantum mechanics

Dangerous Ideas

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I must admit that when I hear somebody talking about “dangerous ideas,” one of my eyebrows will — without voluntary intervention on my part — lift upwards, Spock-style. Such talk invariably reminds me of my old film-studies professor, David Thorburn, who said, paraphrasing the acerbic Gerald Graff, “if the self-preening metaphors of peril, subversion and ideological danger in the literary theorists’ account of their work were taken seriously, their insurance costs would match those for firefighters, Grand Prix drivers and war correspondents.”

Still, when Bee at Backreaction says something is interesting, I take a look. Today’s topic is the Edge annual question for 2006, “What is your Dangerous Idea?” Up goes the eyebrow. I don’t want to go near the Susskind/Greene spat about “anthropic” reasoning; frankly, without technical details far beyond the level of an Edge essay, “anthropic” talk rapidly devolves into inanities which resemble the assertion, “Hitler had to lose the war, because otherwise we wouldn’t be sitting around talking about why Hitler lost the war.” Suffice to say that neither Susskind nor Greene mentions NP-complete problems or proton decay.

So, moving on, let’s get to what Bee calls “the more bizarre pieces.” I was particularly drawn to and repelled from (yeah, it was a weird feeling) the essays of Rupert Sheldrake and Rudy Rucker. The latter goes off about “panpsychism,” which sounds like a fantastic opportunity to ramble about quantum mechanics, the inner lives of seashells and the dictionary of Humpty Dumpty, in which words mean exactly what the speaker wants them to mean, reason and usage notwithstanding.

Hey, “consciousness” is just one tiny part of what living things do, and life is a teensy fraction of what the Universe does. Why not give the rest of the biosphere a little attention and support “panphotosynthesism” instead?
Continue reading Dangerous Ideas →

Electromagnetism, Pseudoscience, Relativity

Detailed Calculations on the “EmDrive”

Last September, New Scientist magazine published a story about the “EmDrive,” a machine designed and built by the British engineer Roger Shawyer, who claimed that his contraption could produce a net forward acceleration by bouncing microwaves around inside a metal cavity. Onward to the stars, etc. Now, nobody else has been able to reproduce what Shawyer claims he’s seen, and Shawyer’s assertion that standard relativity and electromagnetism predict such an acceleration is, to put it mildly, nonsense. The conservation of momentum is built deeply into the mathematical structure of these principles, and so whatever the fine details of Shawyer’s machine, his claim is wrong.

It’s always possible that some new physics came raining out of the sky and landed in Shawyer’s garage, but if nobody can reproduce his “result,” there’s no reason to speculate about it.

Although basic tenets of E&M imply that radiation pressure can’t impart a net thrust to a closed cavity, it’s fun to see the details for how this works out, particularly in the sort of asymmetric conical shape which Shawyer built. Greg Egan has written up the details, in an essay I didn’t know about till now:

He has pictures, too!

Astronomy, Pseudoscience, Wobosphere fun

Dawkins in The Sunday Times

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Peter Millar writes for the Times Online about Richard Dawkins and his latest antics.

Even modern global oil corporations have used dowsers to search for deposits. But now Richard Dawkins, the man who told you that God was not only dead but had all along been a bogeyman invented by bogeymen, has levelled his sights at the whole new age caravanserai, including astrologers, spirit mediums, faith healers and homeopathic medicine. Is it high noon for the Age of Aquarius? It is the believers in Aquarius (and Leo and Taurus and Pisces) who attract the first body blow in Dawkins’s new Channel 4 series The Enemies of Reason, which begins next week.

Dawkins is horrified that 25% of the British public has some belief in astrology — more than in any one established religion — and that more newspaper column inches are devoted to horoscopes than to science. Leaning back on a sofa in the faded gothic splendour of Oxford’s 14th century New College he sighs with something approaching despair: “It belittles our universe. To have astrologers demeaning astronomy by tapping into the spine-tingling wonder of the universe is . . .” he struggles briefly for a word, then finds one and pronounces it with a keen awareness of the irony: “Sacrilegious!”

Channel 4 commissioned The Enemies of Reason as a follow-up to The Root of All Evil? (2006). The first broadcast is scheduled for 13 August 2007, with the second installment broadcast one week later.

(Via Peter Mc at the Beagle Project.)