Do people really support this?

Sometimes you find yourself far out of step with the mainstream of American thought, or so recent polling data had led me to believe. CBS news released the results of a poll that, they claim, shows that 81% of Americans support the use of full body scanners in airports. Really, are we talking about the same invasive, creepy, perverse scanners that produce those disturbing naked images of people? That's what an overwhelming majority of Americans support? Well, kind of, sort of, not really, if you take a closer look at the polling question CBS news used, you find that they used the term, "X-ray machines," in their question. I think they skewed their results by using X-ray machines instead of scanners. One evokes images of a doctor's office and images of people's skeletons while the other makes people think of Star Trek tricorders and the security screening thing from Total Recall. If they had used different terminology, they probably would have found less support for the TSA's use of invasive technology. If you really wanted to get a different result, ask people if they think the TSA needs to be taking naked pictures of everybody who gets on an airplane. Okay, that would probably bias responses too much in the other direction, but you see the point.

In case you haven't guessed, I don't believe the American public is as supportive of the TSA and their knee-jerk, poorly thought out attempts at airport security as recent polling data would indicate. One serious problem with the TSA is that they are always reacting to the last attempted attack and not preparing for the next one. I guess the flying public should be glad that they were not forced to, "go commando," after the attempted attack by the underwear bomber. I will take an even more cynical stance and say that preventing an attack on an airline is only tangential to the TSA's two main missions. The first is to make people feel safe enough to purchase airline tickets. This is the mission that is tangentially related to preventing attacks. It is also the mission that creates the whole dog and pony show designed to make it look like they are making people more secure. Gee, doesn't everybody feel safer now that they only have 3 ounce liquid bottles with them in their carry on bags? The second mission of the TSA is to make people scared enough to justify their continued existence and their chipping away at people's civil liberties. If these Orwellian nut-jobs continue to have their way, how long before everybody has to fly naked and handcuffed? Maybe the TSA is a repository for government workers with weird fetishes.

What is really annoying is that the full body scanners, or pervert scanners if you like, may not even work. In March, the Department of Homeland Security released an evaluation of their high tech toys. the unclassified version, is a sad document all of 7 pages long. It has a coversheet, a one page preface that is mostly irrelevant and then less that 2 pages of actual content about the audit and it's findings. There is scarcely a mention of the effectiveness of the full body scanners in the report. The lack of any specifics leads one to believe that the findings were not positive. To wrap it all up, full body scanners, they are invasive, creepy and they probably don't even work. Happy flying.

Bright objects in the sky, and the digital cameras that capture them

First of all I just want to put up this first picture without too much introduction, I'll just say I took it outside in the wee hours of the morning back in June:

Okay, so what does it look like to you? Is it a picture of an aircraft, a street lamp, or maybe a UFO? Alright, given the amount of information in the photograph, calling the brightly lit object in the frame an Unidentified Flying Object is pretty fair. I don't know how you would be able to identify it from this one picture. Now, to make it more interesting, let's take a look at another picture, taken a few minutes later, with the assistance of a tripod:

Good job astronomy fans, it's a picture of the moon, taken during the partial lunar eclipse on June 26th. I was impressed by how much shaking there was in the picture, taken by my digital camera, of an object that is relatively stationary in the sky. I bring this up not to highlight my poor photography skills, but to illustrate how digital cameras capture images in ways you might not initially expect. I didn't expect my camera to catch such a shaky image of an object that looked stationary in the sky from my vantage point. The idea is that if you think you have caught an orb, a rod or a UFO with your digital camera, the anomaly is more likely to be within the camera and the way it works, than it is to have come from the world at large. Also, you shouldn't underestimate the utility of a decent tripod.  Digital cameras are great, you can take a hundred or more pictures and you don't have to get them developed if you don't want to, quite an improvement over using film like we did back in the twentieth century. Just be aware of how your camera captures images in it's different modes before you get too excited about the weird image you caught on one of your photos. As the great Captain Disillusion might say, "Love with your heart, use your head for everything else."

Moving Halloween

I hope everybody had a happy Halloween. I know I enjoyed the holiday, but living in Utah, there was an annoying aspect to the whole thing. All the little trick or treaters here were sent out on their quest for candy on Saturday, October 30th. This was done on the assumption that somebody might object to anything interesting happening on a Sunday. This is annoying on a number of levels:

First, who made this decision? Was there some public meeting that I missed where there was a town hall style vote that decided to move trick or treating back a day? I think that this was a reactionary decision made behind closed doors without much, if any, public input. Lighten up people, it's only a Sunday.

Second, it creates an environment where one religious denomination is seen to dominate the scene. You don't see holidays that fall on a Saturday rescheduled to accommodate Seventh Day Adventists or Jews, and I don't think anybody asked the Islamic community if they wanted Friday to be immune from the intrusion of holidays. This is Utah, so I don't need to call out the religious majority by name, you know who you are. Unfortunately, there is a significant portion of this state's population that would be very comfortable with the implication that the state is set up to accommodate a single religious denomination.

Third, rescheduling a holiday implies that it is unimportant. While a lot of people might feel alright with Halloween being moved back a day, it is an entirely different matter when a holiday like Independence Day, is moved around to accommodate the whims of a single group of people. Moving the July 4th celebrations to a different day sends the message that the reason for the celebration is not important. Forget the founding fathers, the revolutionary war and all the people who have fought and died to preserve the freedoms enjoyed by the citizens of the United States, some people don't want to be inconvenienced.

One lighthearted observation related to the rescheduling of Halloween. By sending the trick or treaters out on October 30th, the good residents of Utah are sending their children out on Devil's night, happy Devil's night kiddies. Of course, a great number of those children don't get to go door to door, they get shuffled off to a trunk or treat event. Ah yes, trunk or treating, yet one more xenophobic thing further deteriorating what little neighborhood cohesion still exists. Forget going door to door and having at least some interaction with your neighbors, have a specific invited group of people show up in a parking lot and only let their children interact with those people. I know parents have a fear of stranger danger, but it really is an irrational fear. The children are in more danger on the drive to and from the trunk or treat event than they are from any candy they might receive from strangers going trick or treating, old school style. In summary, a once a week event should not trump a once a year event and your neighbors are good people, let the kids go trick or treating.

Watch out, that man is armed with a five and a half inch stick!

Now, normally I am pretty positive when it comes to Great Britain, they have the national health, the Magna Carta and Stonehenge. On the downside, they have more close circuit security cameras than anyone can keep track of. It makes you wonder if some people over there didn't realize that 1984 was a dystopian cautionary tale, not an instruction manual. Now, if just to prove how nutty they have gone in their post-imperial era, some judicial chuckle-head on the other side of the pond has decided that a kubotan is an offensive weapon.

To fill in some of the details, the British actor Darren Day was arrested for drunk driving, as it turned out the key chain he had on him was a metal kubotan. It was a gift he received 14 years ago (good thing they got it when they did, who knows how much carnage he could have caused with the stick if he had it for 15 years). During his trial, (My goodness, they actually have trials for stuff like this over there? They must be bored) two martial arts experts testified that the kubotan was designed, "as a self defense weapon and in a worst case scenario could be used to kill someone."

Those martial arts "experts" are really being over dramatic. In a worst case scenario, most solid items could be used to kill someone. Watch out Brits, next thing you know you may have to register your cricket bats, rolling pins and kitchen cutlery with the authorities. I should probably stop now before I give anti-crime zealots over there more bad ideas. Things are not exactly ideal over in the colonies by any stretch of the imagination. But, I think that somewhere between open carry nuts and police charging someone with possession of a five inch stick, reasonable people can find a more rational place to be. Maybe mandatory boffer carry laws?

The Philadelphia Experiment

Alternate title: Brain Dunning and The UFO Hunters Agree!

While aimlessly surfing the web, I stumbled upon not one but two videos about the Philadelphia experiment. I could only take it as a sign. Time to finally put up a new blog post. One was posted by Brian Dunning as part of his new video podcast series, inFact, the other was put up by the History Channel's UFO Hunters. What is most interesting is that both of them agree, the Philadelphia experiment was a hoax. Well, either a hoax or just a delusion. You can watch the two video clips and come to your own conclusion. While it was easy to imbed the inFact video, you will have to follow the link to the History channel video here: UFO Hunters — The Philadelphia Experiment — History.com Videos



It should come as no surprise, I agree with the two videos. Now while the government certainly would have done something like the Philadelphia experiment if it could, the technology was not there during WWII and it is not there today (or is it?). The Philadelphia experiment made for an interesting sci-fi film but it has no basis in reality.

Alien Abduction behind the Zion curtain

While I may not be a loyal reader of the Salt Lake City Weekly newspaper, I had to pick up a copy when I noticed three big headed gray fellows on the cover along with the headline, "Touched By An Alien." The cover story starts off with a trio of anecdotes shared by people who believe they were abducted by aliens. Next, some quotes from a representative of the Mutual UFO Network are plugged into the story. So far so good, I haven't been convinced that people are, seemingly at random, being abducted by aliens from their homes and cars but nothing in the article is wildly offensive either. Then the article introduces a hypnotherapist who, "prefers," to work with people who, "wish to explore their extraterrestrial experiences."

Now, it would have been nice if the author of the article had taken the hypnotherapist to task about the appropriateness of this approach. I guess hypnotherapy uses and abuses could be a story for another day. Personally, I find it odd that there are hypnotherapist who uncover repressed memories of alien abduction, others who find ritualistic cult abuse and others who tap into past life experiences. I am still waiting to hear from the practitioner of hypnotherapy who has stumbled onto all of them. What seems more likely, that these unexplained phenomena are going on and are discovered only by hypnotherapists who specialize in in aliens or cults or that suggestible people are being led down a primrose path by unscrupulous individuals? Then we can get into the whole topic about the nature and accuracy of human memory and it gets more complicated from there.

All bashing of hypnotherapy aside, back to the article. To bring some balance to the story, a skeptic and an atheist got to share four paragraphs toward the end of the article. Kudos to Partick Orlob, president of Salt City Skeptics (who knew such an organization existed?) for bringing up the alternative explanation of sleep paralysis without coming across as snarky or condescending. Also, bonus points to Joel Layton of Atheists of Utah (again, who knew) for getting a Carl Sagan quote into the article, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," says Cosmic Carl. I would have been alright with the skeptic and atheist getting less space in the story since it looked like they were going to get the last word in, but the last three paragraphs switch back to the alleged abductees sharing tales of extraterrestrial intercourse and post-coital alien goo, quite the final image for the article to leave you with.

While after reading the article for the first time I felt it wasn't so bad, upon a closer look it is disappointingly uncritical. The MUFON person isn't challenged about the vast number of UFO sightings they claim are taking place all the time and the applications of hypnotherapy are not taken to task. I am alright with the alleged abductees not being challenged or interrogated. These are people who think that something bizarre and unsettling has happened to them and ridiculing them accomplishes nothing. Equal time for skeptics would have been nice, even though I think the little space they were given in the article was persuasive.

As always, questions, comments or allegations I am part of the vast government cover up of the awful truth are welcome.

The Skeptic Mix Tape 2009

Normally, I wouldn't think it was worthwhile to just point toward something that another person had put up on the 'net but this is an exception. The critical thinkers over at skeptic magazine have created a skeptic mix tape. After checking out the tracks, a few of them grabbed my attention.

Dr. H. Paul Shuch, also known as Dr. SETI, contributed a track called Cosmic Carl. Now I am not usually a big fan of acoustic guitar folk music, but a song about Carl Sagan merits an exception. If you don't know why they keep singing, "Billions and Billions," watch Cosmos already. . . uncultured savage.

A group called the Bad Detectives, belittle patent medicines with the tune, Rattlesnake Oil. Nothing like some upbeat rockabilly to remind us all that some claims have not been substantiated by the FDA.

The Canadian bluegrass group, Dirty Dishes, remakes an old school parody tune about patent medicines called Lily The Pink. It's an amusing enough tune, but it does make one wonder how much things have changed in the century plus that the Pure Food and Drug Act has been in effect.

Okay, one more and I'll stop carrying on about the artists on the mix tape. Coco Love Alcorn (you've got to appreciate a name like that) contributed a track called thinking cap. That song was cool but if you wander over to her website, you can check out some youtube videos she has up including a video for a song of hers called Intellectual Boys:

Guys, before you go running off to the great white north to throw yourself at her feet yelling, "Take me, take me now nerd lover, I'm so freakin' yours!" Check out the size of the ring on her left hand in the video. Seems another intellectual boy got to her first. Anyway, in the future I'll try and have more original content for this blog and not just link to the cool work that other people are doing.