Skeptigator

From the “Awkward Family Photos” department:

Freakin’ lasers, man

From the “Old Jews Telling Jokes” department:

From the “Proof that Google is, in fact, evil” department:

From the Signs of the Apocalypse department:

From the “I wish I could see at 1000 fps” department:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUCRZzhbHH0[/youtube]

From the “There are some things you just can’t UNsee” department:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJRMwdmFYWg[/youtube]

This was discovered in both our “Unsurprising Irony” department and our “Proof that the more you hate gays the more likely you ARE gay” department:

Anti-Gay Calif. Politician Cited for DUI–After Leaving Gay Bar

From the “Pets who want to kill themselves” department:

From the “What could possible go wrong using this” department:

From the “Lies, Damned Lies” department:

This photo is not photoshopped… and here are 16 more you won’t believe are actually real.

From the “Can you really choose your own adventure?” department:

Simply hilarious stand-up routine by Dara O’Briain and I think very succintly describes the fundamental skeptical perspective.

Here are some of my favorite lines:

Homeopaths will say, “Well science doesn’t know everything!”
Well science knows it doesn’t know everything otherwise it would stop.
…
Just cause science doesn’t know everything doesn’t mean you can’t fill-in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.

or

..”Herbal medicine has been around for thousands of years.” Indeed it has! And we’ve tested it all! And the stuff that works is now Medicine and the rest of it is just a nice bowl of soup and some potpourri.

x posted at FreeThought Fort Wayne

In 1990, Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi published a book titled, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

The book oddly enough started off as an attempt to answer the question, “What is the meaning of life?” He found that for many the meaning of life was intrinsically linked to the question, “What makes you happy?” Or put another way, the answer to the question of the meaning of life was the same answer given to what makes you happy.

Czikszentmihalyi then set out trying to answer the question of happiness but he didn’t do it by trying to define happiness since this was such a subjective notion. He came at it from a different perspective by asking, “When are people happy?” What creates that feeling of happiness as defined by the individual experiencing it? The subject of the book and the author’s conclusion is what he describes as the experience of Flow.

What is Flow?

From wikipedia, The Source of All Truth,

Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.

That sounds all psychologic-y but we all can relate to the idea of being in the zone. Basketball players often describe feeling like they are “in the zone” or have “hot hands” when everything seems to click. They describe this complete awareness of the basketball court, a fluid almost unconscious movement to the shots, and an intuitive grasp of where to be and what to do at exactly the right moment. Many even describe the feeling of being just a bit outside of themselves, almost as if they were on auto-pilot, but in complete control.

Czikszentmihalyi would describe this experience in terms of Flow. Flow can be described as containing many but not all of the following attributes, again from wikipedia,

• Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one’s skill set and abilities). Moreover, the challenge level and skill level should both be high.
• Concentrating and focusing, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
• A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
• Distorted sense of time, one’s subjective experience of time is altered.
• Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
• Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
• A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
• The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.
• People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.

I think this is an extemely interesting description of a real psychological phenomenon. I have personally experienced Flow when I am programming. I am focused on the development to the exclusion of everything else, the code feels like it is writing itself and I am only experiencing the mental images of the website or the logic itself being built. I can sense when the code that’s writing itself will cause a problem and immediately and proactively correct the problem or even debug the application visually while the code continues to self-correct.

I could easily describe the phenomenon in mystical/spiritual terms. In fact, many people describe these feelings as being in a state of ecstacy or rapture or You stop “thinking” and just do. The author does draw a distinction between simply the idea of pleasure or enjoyment and what he would call the Optimal Experience. The main distinction is the level of control that you maintain. A pleasurable experience can be very passive like watching a movie, the Optimal Experience is completely within the control of the person experiencing it. I’ve described the perception of Flow in terms of feeling like you are on auto-pilot and therefore have implied some loss of direct control. But I want to make it clear that the sense of autopilot is more of a way to describe that when you choose to active or engage in something during Flow the effort required to achieve it is almost effortless. The author goes to great lengths to demonstrate that this experience of ecstacy or Flow is not a passive activity but something that requires your focus and engage direct involvement and control. Flow would be something different than simple “awareness of Now” or being in the moment as might be described by meditation practices or even drug-induced altered states of consciousness. Both can be pleasurable but would not qualify as an Optimal Experience.

The Interpretation of Flow

Once Czikszentmihalyi has clearly and carefully defined what is and is not Flow, he continues by expounding why he believes Flow is important for human development. When you experience Flow you are actually assimilating new knowledge or refining/mastering a skill in an optimal way. Remember Flow encompasses a number of related activities each with its own requirements of pre-existing knowledge, technical mastery or deeper knowledge.

When our “ego” is expanded or in such mastery of the situation, even if temporarily, our ability to assimilate new knowledge, refine or master a skill has been greatly expanded. Flow is the description of an experience in which the “ego” can facilitate our general improvement. The basketball player is becoming a better ball player more optimally while in Flow. I’ve become a better, more skillful developer more quickly when I experience Flow. The author describes this in terms that you have become “an increasingly extraordinary individual”. The author ran a number of research studies in the belief that the Montessori method of teaching facilitates the experience of Flow although I don’t know if that translates into better academic performance. Of course, to measure that you need a standardized test and that would make baby Montessori cry. I tease, sort of.

What’s the Point

So the author has a framework for describing and even interpreting a psychological phenomenon. How can this be applied. How do you get into a state of Flow? Good question but apparently he’s written another book, Finding Flow, where he expands on the general idea with some practical steps. I haven’t read it but I’ll let you know what it says when I do.

So how did I come across this? I actually heard this concept mentioned as a passing remark on a podcast a couple months ago and I filed that away in my “that’ interesting” part of my brain. A couple of months ago I was googling how to better get organized and avoid procrastination which is a major problem for me. You know procrastination right? It’s the thing you are doing right now instead of working. In the process of researching different techniques I came across this article, Solving Procrastination: an application of Flow. That’s twice in so many months and therefore enough for me to check it out. I can say that using Kevin Chiu’s technique has actually helped me to better prioritize my day.

A Practical Application

As the manager of 5 developers and 4-9 simultaneous projects of varying size, complexity and deadlines, it can get overwhelming very quickly. The “application of Flow” described above basically comes down to this, the items we procrastinate on are

a) either of such low priority or far-in-the-future deadline that they fall to the bottom of our list until we are a day away from the deadline and then its an emergency.

b) Or the problems are so complex or difficult in nature and we don’t even know where to begin so we put them off hoping it’ll figure itself out somehow.

I deal with both scenarios everyday. I guess the only question for Mr. Chiu is , “Are there any other kind?”

I would suggest reading the article, it’s only 2 pages, but the idea boils down to this. To take advantage of Flow so that a) we can get the full benefits of happiness through goal-achievement and success and b) the ability to assimilate new knowledge and a refined set of time-management skills in this case; we must break up the items into more finite and manageable tasks.

By breaking up difficult problems into smaller, more bite-size tasks and then ordering each task into increasing levels of difficulty we’ve created a framework where each increasingly difficult task is completed we get the satisfaction of goal completion, a key to Flow. The next step in our list is more difficult but not that much more difficult that our current and newly acquired skillset and motivation can’t overcome, another key to Flow.

In addition, as your ability to break apart large, complex task gets better you’ll begin to find ways of sprinkling the smaller low priority items into the larger tasks at the appropriate difficulty level without breaking Flow. Breaking Flow is bad. If you are getting the difficult tasks done better but constantly firefighting the little ones; you are not much better off.

I know this is a bit of an old article, Feb. 10, 2009 but I just stumbled across it. Alien Census: Can We Estimate How Much Life Is Out There?: Scientific American.

A paper published recently estimates based on computer modeling that “there should be 361 advanced, stable civilizations in the Milky Way” on the low end and upwards of 38,000 depending on some your assumptions (like that panspermia is possible).

The article doesn’t detail what assumptions were made. I’ll have to go pull the paper if I can find it but I’d be curious as to the assumption the author of the paper made regarding the length of time an advanced civilization would last and how much of that time period it would be capable of generating radio signals that could be detected (or other detectable signs of life).

I’ve always found the Time component of the Drake Equation ,N=R* fs fp ne fl fi, to be the most fascinating. Its one thing to figure out how many star systems in a given galaxy could produce intelligent life like we would expect but its another thing entirely to consider that this civilization will only “inhabit” a certain extraordinarily small slice of time, relative to the Universe itself.

Our entire civilization could come and go long before any other civilization could detect us. If memory serves our omni-directional FM radio and TV signals attenuate to the point of being unrecognizable as being generated by an advanced civilization before they even leave our solar system and certainly are so low-powered by the time they reach our nearest stellar neighbor as to be unrecognizable. I think the power of our radio/tv signals are governed by the Inverse Square Law and that if intelligent life on Alpha Centauri had been broadcasting tv signals for the last 20+ years it’s not likely we’d be able to detect even with the Arecibo array. This means we’d literally have to have an alien civilization drive right by us cosmically-speaking. And the only way we’d know someone from another civilization existed is if they shot high-powered, narrowband transmissions right at us. I’m also going off of memory here but I think I remember reading that our earliest transmissions would have only made it a little over 100 Light Years (LY) away by now. Nevermind that they would probably be indistinguishable from background noise.

Alright, enough of that, the point of the preceding was to put into perspective the distances and the narrow slices of time our nearest intelligent neighbors would have to inhabit for us to detect them. So the next question is: 361 sounds like a lot of intelligent life, what’s the average distance in Light Years between us and our potential galactic cousins?

I did some quick lookups and found the volume of the Milky Way is 23 trillion light years but you probably need to take out the galactic center owing to the likely inhospitable supermassive blackhole there and you take out very edges of the Milky Way which are very cool and don’t support very hospitable stars. Yes I’m rigging the game here but let’s just assume that all 361 civilizations roughly inhabit a narrow ring in the Milky Way’s spiral arms and you end up with 250 million light years of volume.*

250,000,000 / 361 = 690,000 cubic light years per civilizations.
Taking the cube root of 690K and you get 630 Light Years between us and our nearest neighbor.

Now look back at those numbers from our own radio and tv signals. Our nearest neighbors would have to have begun broadcasting radio/tv signals during the 1400’s CE in order for them to even begin to get to us and it wouldn’t really matter because their signals would have attenuated so badly we’d have no shot (at least currently) of distinguishing their radio broadcasts from noise.

We really only have a reasonable shot at detecting life at this stage if a) advanced life is waaaay more abundant than we could imagine or b) they somehow know we are here and have for some time and they’ve already been shooting signals straight us. Here’s an interesting article at faqs.org regarding,  How far away could we detect radio transmissions?

When I consider the Universe it can be very humbling. Carl Sagan was right, we inhabit a pale blue dot. I can’t help but feel an tremendous feeling of awe and wonder. Those the best words I’ve got but they seem inadequate when describing the 

There’s an op-ed in Wired Science called, Stop Trying to Save the Planet.

The author tries to make the points that we essentially live in a “used” planet and have for several thousand years. And that our idea of “natural” or the “wild” really means, “hasn’t been touched by humans in awhile.”

He then details three lines of evidence, which boil down to 1) mass extinctions of large fauna that cannot be explained climatologically, 2) the planet is covered almost uniformly with signs of human presence and 3) geological evidence shows a correlation between the rise of human civilizations and greenhouse-gas levels.

His point obviously isn’t that we shouldn’t be recycling or trying to conserve green spaces but that we need to alter our idea of what we’re trying to get “to”. Wherever we think that is probably hasn’t existed nor will it for some time.

I’ve finally gotten around to moving my blog from WordPress’s free hosting to my own hosting. Which means I have to setup WP and configure it, etc. I’ve already had to get into the php, ugh, I hate php. It reminds me of Classic ASP and its spaghetti-code.

This php stuff is supposed to be great ’cause it’s free or open-source or Jesus loves it or something. So far, my verdict is FAIL. I’m having flashbacks of #include files and rs.EOF’s.

Anyway, I’m bitching, that’s what happens when you’ve spent way more time simply “moving” a blog than it should take.

It only gets better from here, DNS should be all set, content is back. I pretty much just have template/widget issues to work out.

Like any good Skeptic a large part of applying skepticism comes down to understanding to some extent human psychology.  Understanding how people think or why they think the way they do can go along way to understanding someone else’s beliefs.

Any good Skeptic should also be fully prepared to turn their critical eye on themselves. Knowing common logical fallacies people make can be used to improve the quality of your own arguments but also highlight weaknesses in other’s arguments.

When evaluating medical claims of herbal supplements I usually apply a “back of the envelope” litmus test to such claims. Failing this litmus test doesn’t inherently disqualify something 1) because its not a fool-proof system 2) I’m not a medical doctor but it does raise some red flags.  Some of those tests are:

“Kitchen Sink” claims
Does this [insert alt med herb/treatment] claim to cure all known diseases, like cancer, memory loss, toxicity and diarrhea simultaneously?

Argument from Naturalness
Does it seem like the biggest thing this [insert herb/claim] has going for it is that its “All Natural”. It shouldn’t need to be said but the claim “natural” is a meaningless term. I’m sure you love your All Natural Wheatgrass/Guava/Arsenic fruit smoothie but I’ll pass.

Does it have Side Effects?
If it doesn’t have any side effects it probably doesn’t have any *main* effects either.

I’ve never really compiled a list of these little litmus tests before and this is certainly not complete. I’d be interested in hearing anyone else’s tests or if someone has already put together a list of these before.

Just like “alt-med” claims there are other little litmus tests that could be applied in specific areas such as investments. Certainly all claims should be thoroughly understood but sometimes you need a cheat sheet.

Here’s a list from U.S. News & World Report on investment scams, The Psychology of Investing Scams. Below is a brief outline to a rather brief article.

While the old adage “if its too good to be true” should always be followed, here are some specific variations on a theme.

The “Phantom Riches” Tactic
If you are guaranteed decent (or extraordinary) and steady returns on an investment, you could end up in a Madoff-style investment/Ponzi Scheme.

The “Source Credibility” Tactic
Anybody can claim to be a financial planner but his she really? Is she registered with an accredited/recognized trade group, like the National Association of Personal Financial Advisers. Are the products sold/marketed registered with the SEC?

The lack of credentials or the registered status of an investment doesn’t disqualify it from being a sound investment but you’ve just removed some level of independent verification and you really, really need to understand how the investment vehicle can generate capital including the risks. You’ve certainly increased your homework.

The “Social Consensus” Tactic
This is fundamentally peer pressure. Everyone else is investing in mortgage-backed securities. Why aren’t you? This is a tough one because in many instances because, “I invested in something because [insert person whose judgment you trust] invested as well.”

The “Reciprocity” Tactic
I call this the “there’s no free dinner” rule. If you are given a free dinner at a nice restaurant and all you have to do is sit through an investment seminar, be prepared for the hard sell. You’ll see this with Buyer’s Clubs where you’ll get a key to a “new car” and all you have to is sit through the sales pitch. The Nigerian Email scam is a grandiose version of this, although this one plays very much to someone’s greed.

The “Scarcity” Tactic
Just as you might assume, “this opportunity will only last for the next 10 minutes so CALL NOW!!!” I think QVC or HSN have perfected this tactic, there’s a reason they show a running clock and slowly dwindling numbers of “items left in stock”. Any long-term investment (and most short-term ones as well) worth being involved in will not disappear overnight. The rhinestone-encrusted unicorn cigarrete lighter/tape recorder on the other hand is only available While Supplies Last.

Cross-posted at FreeThought Fort Wayne

This is the first in a series of posts for FreeThought Fort Wayne to assist its members (and readers) in being able to get the most out of their internets.

Who is this for?

You’ve probably heard the term RSS before but haven’t been able to get any clear direction or information on what it is exactly. This first post will be dedicated to the non-geeks out there. You know who you are and I won’t hold it against you I will publish a second half of this discussion that will delve a little deeper into some advanced features of RSS, despite how simple RSS really is there is an incredible amount of power in the protocol. 

What is RSS?

Before you can use RSS you have to be able to find an RSS feed. Any decent website, blog or podcast will very clearly label their feed. It will be labeled as “Subscribe to our feed” or “Subscribe via RSS” or simply “Subscribe” (like FreeThoughtFortWayne.org, look in the upper right hand part of the webpage). Often times the RSS feed will be identified by an orange icon with white “radio” waves (See the image to the right).

I believe the hallmark of a company that will have the greatest difficulty in adopting a “paperless office” paradigm is it’s commitment to the use of Staplers.

Think about it