Discovery Institute shows major misunderstanding of scientific method… surprise!

The argument goes like this:

Wikipedia is wrong.

Sometimes, people use science and evidence to show that Intelligent Design is wrong.

Then these same people point out that because ID isn’t falsifiable, it isn’t real science anyway.

We don’t understand what falsifiable means, so therefore, Intelligent Design is science!

Unfortunately, I’m actually serious. Go, read it for yourself.

Happy New Year!

New Year’s Eve is the most overrated holiday of the year. There, I said it.

This year, I’m not going camping, I’m not going to a music festival and I’m not going to the party of a friend of a friend. I’m going to stay home, eat icecream out of the tub and watch Back to the Future. It’s going to be awesome, not just because of icecream and Doc Brown, but because no one is going to force their silly little superstitions on me.

You know the type, everyone has at least one friend who nearly faints if you go to leave before a dark, handsome man crosses the threshold, or screeches that you’ll never find love this year if you don’t kiss someone at midnight. And there is some weird rule about baking bread and not taking the rubbish out.

So, a bit of googling led me to  five weird New Year superstitions:

1.   Don’t swear on New Year’s Day.

Apparently these people have never had a NYE hangover. They require swearing

2. Finish all of your alcohol on New Year’s Day.

Ha! See above.

3. Don’t let women enter the house first, it should be a dark and handsome man.

I’d like to say something here, but if the first person to enter my home after midnight was a dark and handsome man, I wouldn’t be complaining.

4. Kiss someone at midnight to ensure love for the next year.

I’ve never kissed anyone at midnight on NYE, perhaps this is some sort of feedback loop? Or is it that I just go to the wrong parties?

5. If a single girl looks out the window when she wakes up on Jan 1 and sees a man, she can be sure to be married before the year is out.

… Two things. One, stalkers probably aren’t good marriage material. Two, if you don’t look out your window do you get out of getting married?

You know what? Back to the Future is looking better and better.

Happy New Year!

Tim Minchin needs no introduction

If I were that sort of a person, I would say that I must have accumulated some serious karma, or maybe God was smiling upon me, or today was my lucky day thanks to Venus’ angle with Cetus. But I’m not that sort of person, and it would be very inappropriate to use such language when talking about the musical genius of the skeptical movement… Mr Tim Minchin.

I was lucky enough to be offered a ticket to Tim Minchin’s show this afternoon (and to M.R. et al, I say thank you!), and went with great excitement. I’ve seen him perform before, but this show was orders of magnitude better.

I mean, c’mon, the guy explained logical fallacies in the first ten minutes. He used the term “ironic” correctly! He sang about Jesus and the Bible and oh so many other things.

My favourite part was his beat poem Storm, which is just extraordinary.

And he finished off with this lovely song about Christmas, which sums up my feelings on the holiday as well. I’m not religious, but I look forward to Christmas, and get carried away with baking and presents and carols… and my family. It is a beautiful song, and I think you should listen to it:

Skeptical guilt

On Friday night, I was out celebrating a friend’s triumphant victory over her undergraduate degree by drinking cocktails and admiring the bartenders. We’d covered all the latest gossip, discussed a friend’s upcoming wedding and had moved into far more serious topics of conversation. At one point, after I had confessed to feeling guilty about not wanting to go to my high school reunion (ugh… next weekend!), my friend accused me of Catholic guilt.

I thought this was a very strange thing to say, given that she knows that I’m an atheist and was brought up in a Protestant household. Besides, surely feeling guilt for offending someone is a humanist thing, rather than uniquely Catholic?

It got me thinking though – do I perhaps suffer from skeptical guilt?

Embarrassing as this is to admit, I spent this weekend reading Audrey Niffenegger’s new book “My Fearful Symmetry”, which is a ghost story and a far cry from my usual weekend fodder of science books or classic novels. However, I did enjoy it, even though it was about ghosts. I read it hidden in my bedroom, with a copy of New Scientist sitting beside me, in case anyone walked in. Why? I don’t know, but I did feel guilty that I, a fairly hard-core skeptic, was enjoying a ghost story.

Then later on, I went to a barbeque for a friend’s birthday. I have known this girl for years, and am always happy to see her as she’s fun and chirpy. However, she’s also an anti-vaccine activist and is hesitant about most “Western Medicine”. I’ve never confronted her about it, because I don’t want to ruin the friendship. Am I betraying my skepticism by allowing her to spread such dangerous lies about vaccinations?

What do you think? Is my largely unfounded guilt a Catholic thing, or a skeptical thing?

My future… apparently.

I am somewhat used to my family accepting and seeking out woo. I have received crystals from well-meaning aunts during my exams, been taken to have my irises scanned to cure all of what ails me by my grandmother and had my fortune told by my tarot-card wielding sister.

So, being informed of my future today at lunch wasn’t really all that surprising.

The only reason I note it is because I think it is a good way of testing the human tendency to remember the hits, and forget the misses.

In the name of science, I give you my future:

I am to marry a phycist who I will one day work with. It will be an “odd couple”, but will somehow work.

Kind of a boring prediction really, I was hoping for an insight into the stock market, or whether I’ll get any decent results for my thesis. Whether or not I get married isn’t really a pressing, nor useful issue. I do think one thing is interesting though – and that is it’s not a surprising prediction. Given even a little information about me, (my age and “career”) it would be a good guess. I suppose this is how she works – knowing how to make good guesses.

Anyway, this tidbit has now been recorded and I will let you know how it all pans out…

PS. This was a boring post, so I give you this as an extra offering: