Mythbuster misfortune

It was really disappointing to see the end of the current season of Mythbusters.  The season have felt too short of late but that's not the reason.  Tacked on to the end of the episode was an announcement that Kari Byron, Grant Imahara, and Tory Belleci will not be back next season.  That wasn't expected, and the way they handled it was particularly ham-handed.  You might think, if they knew this was coming, that the show might dedicate a significant portion of their season finale to a retrospective on all the work the trio did for Mythbusters.  My current pet theory is that Discovery channel tried to get the three of them to do a fake Shark Week documentary, they refused, and Discovery lashed out like a petulant child and fired them all.  Probably not true, but it sounds good.  You can see the sad ending to season 11 of Mythbusters here.

Wheaton's law revisited

A while ago, I posted a link to a presentation Phil Plait gave advocating for Wil Wheaton's law.  Now I stumbled upon a video from TYT's Nerd Alert saying largely the same thing.  I guess until all the trolls die off, this is a message that needs to be repeated.

Electronic privacy protection in Utah

While I generally point out the shortcomings of local government and poke fun at their failings, today I thought I'd chime in with something positive.  On March 31, Governor Herbert signed into law HB0128.  This bill makes it explicit that a government agency needs to get a warrant before obtaining location information on an electronic device.  So, the Utah state legislature feels that a person's cell phone shouldn't be used as a tracking device against them without just cause.  Sometimes it's nice to say that someone's thinking is so twentieth century.  Good work guys, think the federal government will respect your law?  More on this story here

Message to teachers, tell the truth, lose your job

As reported in the Salt Lake Tribune, a teacher in the Granite School District has been placed on administrative leave and may lose their job.  The heinous crime this educator is accused of is . . . telling the truth.  Specifically, the truth this educator let slip was that computer adapted standardized tests were a waste of time and irrelevant to students.  Anyone who has bothered to take a look at high stakes standardized tests has reached the same conclusion,with the possible exception of people who have a financial stake in such tests.  So basically, the teacher got in trouble for not sticking to the party line and may now be out of work.  Punishing people for not going along with the argument from authority is something that is more at home in North Korea or cold war era East Germany, not the United States.  Sometimes it is easier to understand a seemingly irrational action if one applies the concept of projection onto it.  If the Granite School District lashes out so crudely when someone questions a test that is a waste of time and irrelevant, perhaps they do so because they find that their institution is increasingly a waste of time and irrelevant.

Inspirational quote of the day

You never have to give up what you believe,
To support someone else's insecurities.

- Billy Scudder

The truth is meowt there

The real reason for so few entries on this blog, I have been brainwashed by Internet cat celebrities and now, finally, somebody has the courage to reveal the awful truth, enter, "Truther Cats,":

Mermaids, Megalodon and mockumentaries, oh my

Quite a few people have commented on the Animal Planet programs: “Mermaids: The Body Found,” and the follow up “Mermaids: The New Evidence.” These are a pair of fictional programs that present themselves like a documentary. Not to be outdone, the Discovery Channel jumped on the bandwagon with a shark week program entitled: “Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives.” All three of these programs are depressing statement of the state of programming on basic cable television, particularly on channels that profess to have some informational value. If someone were inclined to defend such programming, they might point out that there were disclaimers at the end of the programs. Let's take a look at the disclaimers, first up Megalodon:


none of the institutions or agencies that appear in the film are affiliated with it in any way, nor have approved of its contents.
though certain events and characters in this film have been dramatized, sightings of “submarine” continue to this day.
megalodon was a real shark. legends of giant sharks persist all over the world. there is still debate about what they may be.


Next, the disclaimer that ran at the end of both mermaid programs:


none of the institutions or agencies that appear in the film are affiliated or associated with it in any way, nor have approved its contents. any similarities in the film to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
though certain events in this film are fictional, navy sonar tests have been directly implicated in whale beachings
the bloop is a real phenomenon. there is still debate about what it may be.


All of these were in white text in all caps, on the screen for a short period of time and right at the end of the program. It also looks like they get their legal boilerplate from the same source. The mermaid programs were even more tricky and placed their disclaimer at the end of the closing credits, megalodon at least put up it's disclaimer during the program's conclusion. The really frustrating thing is that neither just come out and says, “It's a joke, we pulled a fast one on you, there are no mermaids/megalodons.” To show how a disclaimer at the end of a trick broadcast is supposed to go, I take you to 1938 and the words of Orson Welles:


“This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that 'The War of The Worlds' has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be: the Mercury Theatre's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet an jumping out of a bush and saying 'Boo!' Starting now, we couldn't soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night. . . so we did the next best thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears, and utterly destroyed the Columbia Broadcasting System. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn't mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business. So goodbye everybody, and remember, please, the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian. . . it's Hallowe'en.”

Phil Plait advocating for Wil Wheaton's law

While I drag my feet on creating new content, enjoy this video of Phil Plait encouraging skeptics to follow Wil Wheaton's law:


Phil Plait - Don't Be A Dick from JREF on Vimeo.

Luke's Change

Sure it's just embedding another person's video, but it combines Star Wars with making fun of 9/11 conspiracy nuts.  Without further ado, Luke's Change:

The Skeptic's Dictionary

I thought, for the new year, that I would put up some skeptical terms and offer up definitions and some commentary. Well, the definitions part has been addressed already by The Skeptic's Dictionary, a website with over 700 entries and quite a bit of information. I would encourage people to give it a look and see all the skeptical goodness contained within. In the meantime, I'll keep my eye open for other skeptical things to blog about.

Politics 2012, plenty of stupid to go around

Well, the Republican National Convention is over. Clint Eastwood probably set the high-water mark for straight up weird with his speech there. Paul Ryan takes the cake for straight up liar of the event. When Fox News is pointing out that a conservative politician is just making things up, you know he's gone really far down the rabbit hole.

Now, while it may be fun to point out that the Republican party has let a bunch of nutters get their hands on the microphone and they are afraid to take it away from them, there is plenty of stupid on both side of the isle. My example of liberal stupidity today comes completely out of left field (pun intended) in, of all places, a Kickstarter campaign for a paper and dice role playing game. People familiar with paper and dice role playing game will, most likely, recognize the name Monte Cook, he has been a prolific and successful game designer for a number of years. For his latest project Numenera, he set up a Kickstarter campaign with the goal of raising twenty thousand dollars, his project has been well received and has been pledged over two hundred thousand dollars. This success is where the political nonsense has come in. Mr. Cook incorporated a number of, “Stretch Goals,” into his project to keep interest after reaching his initial fund-raising goal. When one hundred thousand dollars were pledged, he said he would make three hundred copies of the game made available to educators and libraries who want them. At the two hundred thousand dollar mark, Mr. Cook said he would ship two hundred copies of the game to military bases around the world. Some idiot took offense to this, called him nationalistic and militaristic and asked for the Kickstarter campaign to be shut down. Cooler heads prevailed (or was that functional heads prevailed) and the Kickstarter is still going. Hats off to Kickstarter for not taking baseless allegations seriously and to Monte Cook as well for sharing his creation with poorly paid teachers, libraries and military personnel.  You can read Monte Cook's take on the event at his website.

I'm not sure how you make the leap from Monte Cook making a commitment to share copies of his new game with military personal to viewing that as Mr. Cook making some kind of endorsement of American geopolitical policies. It's nonsense like this that has so many people turned off to the entire American political process. When the election of 2012 sets all kinds of records for low voter turnout, once you get past all the voter suppression going on, you can blame big fat liars like Paul Ryan and nameless idiots like the ones who tried to shut down a Kickstarter campaign for a paper and dice role playing game.

A Witch Hunter, really?

For those of you who missed the latest. "how weird can Texas get these days," bit of news, a Nigerian witch hunter is going to be in the lone star state for almost 2 weeks in March of this year.  Seriously, here's a link, and another one.  Maybe, since the witch hunter is from Nigeria, she doesn't know this country had a pretty serious psychological scar as far as witch trials go, about 420 years ago.  Yes, even before the Unites States became a country, it got witch hunting out of it's system, except for a few lapses, here and there.  In fact, when the United States got around to writing a constitution and tacking on a bill of rights, the very first amendment starts off; "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."  That's right, people in the states have the right to practice the religion of their choosing without fear of the government locking them up for not picking the approved one.  Sorry, just because someone disagrees with you about matters of the supernatural, you don't get to blame all your problems on them and have them locked up.  In fact, I would hazard to guess that the majority of Americans feel that the diversity of faiths in this country is one of it's strengths.  What better way is there to gauge how Americans feel about something than to see how it is depicted in the mass media?  It is in that spirit that I present my list of the top ten sexiest witches in film:

10.  Caleb Danvers played by Steven Straight in The Covenant(2006)  Yes, here is the token guy on the list.  Goes to show that men can play witches as well, they just don't get the opportunity to very often.

9.  Eva played by Ione Skye in Four Rooms(1995) There was a whole coven of witches to choose from in this film, so I went with the one who, rather literally, bewitches Ted the Bellhop.

8.  Serafina Pekkala played by EvaGreen in The Golden Compass(2007)  While certainly a supporting character in this film, she still has quite the screen presence.

7.  Lamia played by Michelle Pfeiffer in Stardust(2007)  I imagine if most people saw Michelle Pfeiffer on this list, they would have thought of The Witches Of Eastwick.  Well, it's my list and I went with Stardust, besides the list needs a few bad witches, doesn't it?

6.  Mirror Queen played by Monica Bellucci in The Brothers Grimm(2005)  Right to another bad witch.  While I did try and base this list off the character and not necessarily the actor, in this case I may have been influenced by Ms. Bellucci's performance in Brotherhood of the Wolf.

5.  Gillian Owens played by Nicole Kidman in Practical Magic(1998)  Okay, you could go back and forth as to whether I should have gone with Sandra Bullock's character from this film, but I decided to go with the taller one.

4.  Ann played by Melissa McConnell in Ninjas VS Vampires(2010)  The list needed an over the top, spell flinging, vampire killing witch and this movie provided one.  The only downside is since the movie is Ninjas vs Vampires, the witch doesn't get nearly enough screen time.

3.  Cassandra Nightingale played by Catherine Bell in The Good Witch(2008)  Catherine Bell is just utterly charming as the witch next door in this picture.  If you think made for television movies don't count, then you'll dislike. . .

2.  Morgaine played by Julianna Margulies in The Mists of Avalon(2001)  If Four Rooms presented a coven of witches, then this feature had more Pagans than you could shake a wand at.  In this version, Morgaine is the character that the Arthurian tragedy gets to revolve around.

1. Patricia Kennealy played by Kathleen Quinlan in The Doors(1991)  How to you take sex, drugs and rock and roll and make it sexier?  Well, plugging in witchcraft certainly worked for Oliver Stone in this movie.

Clever quote for the new year

"It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them." Alfred Adler

With any luck, in the new year, I will do a better job in regards to both.

For profit schools at GEEX

This past weekend, thanks to my friends at Fongo Bongo Games, I was able to attend GEEX, the gaming and electronics expo.  For the most part I was impressed, I got to meet some Mandalorian Mercs, some rebels from Rogue Base, as well as members of the 501st legion.  I also got to see a screening of Ghostbusters SLC.  On a more serious note, Southern Utah University had a pretty good presence there, they even brought robots.  The downside is that they were outnumbered by the for-profit schools that were in attendance, such as Broadview University and Stevens-Henager college.  While SUU works hard to provide a quality education for their students, these other schools are in it to make a profit, if their students gain any benefit, it is purely secondary.   Proprietary schools offer a sub-standard education and charge a premium price for it.  I believe that the South Towne Exposition Center should be ashamed for letting these predators into their facility.  The attendees of GEEX are, largely, young and not well informed about the difference between a real university and a for-profit one.  They came there to play games and check out cool new tech, not be harassed by recruiters for these profit oriented institutions.  I also have to say I am disappointed in Salt Lake Community College and the University of Utah for not putting in an appearance and leaving these proprietary schools largely unchallenged.  Come on, an expo full of young people drawn to computers and electronics, there has to be some interest there.  To sum it up, well done SUU and stay away from those for-profit schools kids, they are bad for you.

Skeptical Literacy on Debunkatron

Extra perceptive readers out there might have noticed that Skeptical Literacy has been added to the, "resources and communities for your debunking toolbox," section of Debunkatron.com.  Guess that means I should get some new content up here soon.

Boiron bullies blogger

I don't know if anyone happened to see the article in the British Medical Journal, but the international maker of homeopathic . . . things, Boiron, threatened an Italian blogger.  The blog in question, B-log(0), had a couple of posts talking about Boiron's successful product, Oscillococcinum and it's lack of any active molecules.  With a name like Oscillococcinum, it's hard to imagine why this stuff hasn't caught on in the states.  Well, when a big company has a few snarky comments made in their general direction by a small blogger, what's the natural things to do?  Shoot them a threatening letter saying their blog was untrue and derogatory and is tarnishing the reputation of the company.  I guess ignoring them and not drawing attention was too much to ask for.
Well, on behalf of threatened bloggers the world over, let me say that homeopathy in general lacks active ingredients and is little more than a mechanism for taking advantage of the placebo effect, not to mention naive consumers.  Sorry, but a legion of layers writing mean spirited letters isn't going to change that.

Student protests, Utah needs more of these

When I heard that Skyline high school was the subject of a protest carried out by between 75 to 100 students, my first thought was good, if you aren't outraged, you aren't paying attention. So what were they protesting, pointless wars for empire, endless political bickering in the nation's capitol, petty bigotry and intolerance at home? No, it was an asinine tardy policy at their school. Still, you have to celebrate what few signs of life you can find coming out of the suburbs.

So, what about a tardy policy could be so annoying as to cause such an uproar? Well, the granite school district thought it was appropriate to impose fines on students who are tardy for class. Three bucks the first time and five dollars for each subsequent tardy. To me, that sounds rather excessive. From my time as a student in Utah high schools and later as a student teacher and substitute teacher, I can tell you that the logistics of getting from point A to point B in an overcrowded Utah school makes being late inevitable at times. Certainly there are some students who are just being jerks, but charging a student with a five dollar fine for what was most likely a potty break in just mean spirited.

But the school district must have thought there was some sort of problem for there to be such a policy in place. According to local news coverage, the school district claimed that there were 25,000 tardies in the year before they implemented these fines and now that there are about 11,000 tardies per year. Well, that sounds like a lot of students being late for class and they have reduced the number by more than 50%, but let's take a closer look at the numbers. According to the numbers I was able to dig up, Skyline high school graduated 415 student in 2010. If we assume all the students graduate (which they don't) and the enrollment numbers at the school stay constant (again, probably not true) that means there are about 1,245 students at the school. To get the lowest number of class periods possible, let's also assume the school is on the block schedule and the students attend four 90 minute classes a day over a 180 day school year. That gives 896,400 total student class periods in the school year. 25,000 tardies per year gives about a 2.7% tardy rate. So, on any give class period, approximately 97.3% of the students will be on time. To put it another way, the average student will be late to class four to five timer per school year. These numbers represent the highest percentage I was able to come up with. If Skyline instead has 2000 student going to 7 classes per day, 25,000 tardies is less that a 1% tardy rate, or 1 to 2 tardies per student per year.

To me this sounds like a solution in search of a problem. I know Utah school districts don't have that much administration, but if this is the kind of stuff they have time to come up with, it's time to trim some fat from the administrative budget. Tough economic times call for hard decisions, time to bounce a spokesperson or two to the curb.

To any Skyline students who happen to stumble onto this blog, it seems that next week is your school district's spring break. That gives you a whole week to network with student at other schools in the Granite district and organize a much wider disruption of classes when school resumes a week from Monday. Bear in mind that stepping out of line in any way, shape or form can subject you to attest, fines and never getting anything higher than a B for the rest of your secondary education. Still, it is your school and your education, may as well stand up to the petty tyranny of sad little men when you have the chance.

To any Granite school district administrators who have managed to read this far, lighten up and ditch the negative policy.  You have more important things to worry about, at least, one assumes you do.

The Utah state legislature never fails to be weird

The Utah state legislature usually leaves one with plenty to be skeptical about.  On the upside, they did repeal H.B. 477, which would have limited access to government records.  On the downside, they also passed H. B. 477 in the first place.

The silliest bill passed may very well be the official state firearm being named the Browning M1911 handgun.  Since John Browning was from Utah, it does make some sort of weird sense.  Another odd bill passed was H.B. 317 which recognizes gold and silver coins issued by the federal government to be legal tender but does not compel a person to accept such coins as tender.  Reading the fine print, it sounds more like a sort of tax dodge for people who speculate in gold and silver.

It is pretty easy to just verbally beat up on the legislature, and while I plan to do plenty of that, I do want to point out at least one thing that they did do that was positive.  They did not pass H.B. 109. This bill, which is called, "Religious Liberty Recognition," is more like a feel free to discriminate against homosexuals if you can possibly construe a religious justification for said discrimination.  Well done in not passing that piece of hate legislation guys.

Debunkatron.com and the Dunning-Kruger effect

For those of you who haven't heard about debunkatron.com you should surf on over there and take a look, after reading my blog post of course.  While the site doesn't have much original content, it has more links than a suit of chain mail.  There are hundreds of links in the section on debunked subjects.  The concepts for your debunking toolbox section is smaller but still pretty impressive and worth a look.  The last section of links is resources and communities. There are a number of them in there I was not previously aware of.  So, debunkatron.com, not only is it fun to say, there is a lot to link to from there.

A concept I stumbled upon while looking through the overwhelming number of links on the site was something called the Dunning-Kruger effect.  In short, this is a phenomena where incompetent people overestimate their ability and seem unaware of the extent of their ignorance while skilled individuals underestimate their ability, relative to other people.  The upside is that if an individual can acquire some degree of skill in an area, they will become aware of their previous ignorance.  While this information doesn't make the world a better place it does help one to understand how some debates/arguments they have been in ended the way they did.  You have a discussion with someone, in the process you refute all their arguing points, pick apart their reasoning and build up your position through reasoned arguments and information.   After all that, the person walks away, thinking you are an idiot and still clinging to their belief in dowsing, anti-vaccination nonsense or that the moon landing was a hoax for example.  That could well be described as the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.  It's kind of like reading Max Weber writing about bureaucracy, it may not make it any easier to deal with, but at least you understand it better.

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.