If it smells like Funk, it must be astrology

Yeah, I made a Black Eyed Peas reference and a non-ad-hominem attack in the title. Whatcha gonna do about it? I’ll be cross-posting everything below the fold at his site and will add the link here momentarily. I’ve cross-posted it here, though it’s apparently still in moderation due to the copious amount of links. Update: Jamie has pulled it out of the spam queue, right here. He edited it down to a link back here. Color me underwhelmed.

As I’m cross-posting, I plan on adding images and other kitsch to my post here to break up the wall-of-text effect, after the fact. I’ll save my most sarcastic commentary for their captions, naturally.

Brace yourselves. This is gonna be another long one.
Continue reading “If it smells like Funk, it must be astrology”

If it smells like Funk, it must be astrology
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Deepwater Horizon foretold by astrology!!! (Well, post-told)

When I need a dose of post-hoc rationalizations for recent events based on a pseudo-random number generator formula and what happened the some previous time the numbers came out exactly the same way, I look to astrology.

To add to what I mentioned about the role of Ceres conjunct Pluto, Pluto iself rules mining and deep underground. Deepwater Horizon had been working the Tiber oilfield, “the deepest oil and gas well ever drilled“. This is so very Plutonic, pushing the boundaries to the extreme, penetrating deeper than ever before. Pluto does demand payment for journeying to his underworld.

The event chart shows a Boomerang Yod aspect pattern. A Yod is formed when two planets quincunx another. Here it is the Sun and Neptune that quincunx Saturn. The Boomerang is formed when another planet is opposite the action point, in this case Uranus is at the reaction point. So the action point was Saturn, the structure of the oil rig. Quincunxes create a builup of energy which needs constant adjustments to be relased safely. If the energy bottles up too much then something has to give. Neptune oil and the ocean creating tension with the rig. The Sun made this special configuration for only a few days, and the pressure created by this extra quincunx is what makes these Yods so intense. The buildup of energy looks for realease at the reaction point and Uranus is unexpected events, and explosions.

Seriously, what is all this gobbledygook? I’m going to have to get Jodi to translate or something. Perhaps they could do a piece on historical oil rigs and how all THEIR random planetary alignments ALSO meant their rigs were doomed to failure, despite being completely different? Perhaps they could explain how corporations are subject to the same effects as people based on their incorporation date? Or maybe they might want to admit that the positions of the planets, stars and other astronomical phenomena have no bearing on your everyday life, outside of Sol which warms us and Luna which drives our tides.

A choice pullquote from the end: “Jupiter getting closer to conjunction with Uranus could amplify the unpredictable nature of this event.” Or you could just admit that you’re not predicting anything at all, of value or otherwise with your crazy formulae and charts! If it’s so unpredictable, why are you so readily able to explain why it happened with all your astrological number legerdemain? How come you people can only ever rationalize why things happened the way they did, and never give us any kind of useful, testable, repeatable prediction about the future? Hindsight is 20/20, so it’s impossible for you to get it wrong, since all you have to do is tell us how Yods are so desperately devastating and how Ceres is totally a conjunct of Pluto.

Meanwhile, back in reality, Ceres is a Kuiper belt object whose mass is only 4% that of the Moon, is about 10° inclined in its orbit, and is further away from us than Mars. The only known force that can travel over such great distances is gravity, and its mass is so small it’s unlikely that, if every other object in the solar system were to suddenly disappear, it would even start dragging Earth anywhere toward it in the next few million years. More likely the other way around, as the Earth is over six thousand times more massive. And quincunxes are odd geometrical forms emergent from our wholly man-made mathematical formulae that comprise the bulk of the pseudo-random number generator that is astrology. It tells us nothing interesting about reality, or else someone might have maybe started forecasting what dates and locations cause quincunxes and start warning people of their impending doom.

Selection bias is a nasty little feedback loop for those who think they’ve got the universe figured out with their mumbo jumbo formulae and just enough knowledge of history to pick only those events that match your wholly-invented scenarios, ain’t it?

Meanwhile, the oil’s still pluming. Someone might want to consider actually doing something about it.

Deepwater Horizon foretold by astrology!!! (Well, post-told)

Tales From Minnesota 1

You’ll have to forgive the relative brevity of this post — I’m writing it on my desktop, and after years of using my laptop almost exclusively to do my blogging, this feels somehow unnatural. I’ve never liked doing it those few other times I’ve been forced to, but, well, you know, boo hoo. Such a first-world problem, huh? Anyway, this is the first post in a whenever-I-remember-something-cool series about our trip to Minnesota. I promise not to fill it with tales of how amazing our hosts were (because I could do a whole blog of paeans to the Zvans, though that might get old quickly for them), and I’ll try to keep it to the more interesting points.

With Minnesota being so close to Canada not only in temperament, but in general climate, I wasn’t expecting too many culture shock moments. One hit us on the first night out, though, when we went to eat at a pub that serves poutine — Ben and Stephanie’s way of easing us into the trip, and a tasty one at that. The poutine was good, the clubhouse sandwich on rye was amazing, and the coffee-beer hybrid they served from their microbrews was a surprising and epic cap to the meal. So, all around, the first pub-in-Minnesota experience was net positive.

When we were on our way out the door, though, the wait staff that had been waiting on us the whole time approached and asked if he’d did anything wrong — because we had left the tip field blank on the bill, which we’d paid by Visa. He had a kicked puppy dog face on, and while at first I thought maybe he was wheedling for a tip out of some sense that he’d somehow gone above and beyond, I picked up on the cues from Ben and Stephanie that this was out of the ordinary. I quickly made some apologies, called myself a douchebag, and handed him a bill from my wallet — pretty sure it was a twenty, as at that point I don’t think we’d broken any of the bills for our spending money yet. On our way out to the car, Ben explained that wait staff in the States apparently makes LESS than minimum wage. There’s a special hourly rate that businesses have to pay staff that otherwise gets tipped, and most businesses are happy to pay exactly that minimum, with the expectation that they will get 18% gratuity on every single transaction.

That’s right, here in Canada, it’s much different. Minimum wage is minimum wage, and wait staff in places like pubs will make the same as people working at McDonald’s. Tips are generally given in Canada as a way to reward the staff for a good meal and good service, rather than an expectation set by the government as a way of externalizing cost-sinks for businesses. And yet, there are pubs and restaurants throughout Canada. They don’t “go under” just because they have to pay their staff a fair wage. Granted, there are some cases where wait staff will just “phone it in” and won’t do anything to earn any tips, but still, at least they can pay the rent even if they’re just scraping by on the service side of things. I’m seriously surprised that a country as big on keeping money flowing, completely forgets that a higher minimum wage actually benefits everyone in the pyramid, because more wages in the lower-middle class means more money spent on Playstations and fancy clothing and regular trips to have beer at pubs. That’s, thankfully, something Canada seems to have gotten. There’s no discrepancy between tipped places and non-tipped for the minimum wage, and the economy works itself out just fine. No businesses are dying as a result, and nobody’s hurting for cash on the lower tiers of the income scale. Nova Scotia’s minimum wage is $9.20 right now, which is $8.92 USD (yeah, we’re almost on par). In Minnesota, it’s $5.25USD, which is far and away higher than the $2.13/hr USD federally mandated minimum for tipped workers. And the Republicans are slavering to cut it further. Capitalism at its finest.

I can’t emphasize how weird this is to me. I mean, some really fancy sit-down restaurants around here generally expect tips, which go to the chefs or are split amongst all the wait staff, rather than the specific person who got tipped. But I’ve never had anyone chase me on my way out the door because my inattention to the minor culture-difference details may have meant the difference between eating fresh fruit and veggies this week, and eating Kraft Dinner. Which I suppose in that case would be Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Truly a jarring moment. Maybe not the best way to start the trip, but our benefactors went out of their way to help fix that over the week we spent with them.

More on that, as they say, some other time!

Tales From Minnesota 1

Our place in the universe

I appear to have caught a cold at the convention. Not just a cold, but a horrible chest-devouring doom plague. I’m guessing patient zero was the lady who was coughing on the back of my neck through the Science and the Media panel, and on every single other science-track panel during the con. Also, my laptop’s CPU fan has started making a godawful squeal in the heat wave we’ve been experiencing (which followed us back to NS, as it was hot and humid like this through our stay in Minnesota last week). I’ve sprayed into the heatsink vent with a compressed air canister hoping that’ll cool it down long enough to pump out this post, but the heat’s already building, I can feel it.

Between that, Red Dead Redemption, and actually doing some honest-to-goodness writing for a super-secret project with some of my heroes(!!), I’m a little short on time here. Sorry for neglecting you, my blogospheric bretheren. Here, have another interesting Youtube video. Carter Emmart at TED Talks, demoing a 3D model of our place in the universe. Things get logarithmic pretty quick.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaI6BkDkgvs

Our place in the universe

A Universe Not Made For Us

Courtesy of PZ Myers (whom I met briefly, but was mostly too intimidated to have any kind of conversation with), here’s pretty much the only argument one might ever need to explain atheism as a viable alternative to the dogmatic beliefs pimped out by every religion ever.

This universe was not specially created for us humans, by some creator deity. That kind of egotism is overreaching, and wrong.

There’s a lot going on in the blogosphere right now. Some friends need defending and some assholes need smiting. But first I need to achieve some level of stability and normalcy before I can get back in the fight.

A Universe Not Made For Us

The Skeptic’s Uphill Battle

Something’s been kicking around in my head through pretty well through every panel on the skeptic track, forming sort of an overarching theme, about the uphill battle against which the skeptical “movement” (if there is such a beast) faces. And that centers around the old quote: “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can get out of bed”.

It’s undeniable that there is an objective truth of the universe. This universe works a certain way, period, and though that way may be mysterious, it is internally self-consistent. Even if the “rules” by which the universe plays, happens to differ under certain circumstances, it works how it works. There is no evidence that these rules are being rewritten on the fly, there is no evidence that there is some kind of supernatural force affecting the natural world, and there is no evidence that one can intrinsically manipulate this unevidenced supernatural force to rewrite the rules of the universe the way we want. Those of us with an interest in discovering the way the world truly works — so-named “rationalists” or “skeptics” — place the truth value of descriptive statements about the universe above all else. As such, it is fundamentally important to us to evaluate and rewrite our core epistemology when better evidence, better data, comes to light.

This does not appear to be the default case for the rest of humankind. Whether by environment or by genetics, the default mode is to accept pat answers that free up brain share for going about your daily life without having to worry about why we don’t fall up, why the sun shines, and why we even exist at all. We accept authority as pushed on us by our parents or spiritual leaders, and we learn that questioning these authorities is just a way of sowing doubt in your own mind. Once you start to doubt the “authorities”, you have to devote mental energies to determining the truth value of each of their statements thereafter. So, it’s far easier to simply accept the first-to-market idea that happens to catch your attention and provides a plausible-enough case for its truth value, than it is to actively research every claim that you come across.

It is this phenomenon against which skeptics fight. When someone makes the claim that quantum physics implies that one can modify reality in order to make it bend to your will, simply by “thinking happy” as in The Secret or through chakra manipulation, that has parsimony with pre-existing biases toward so-called magical thinking. It is therefore more likely to be accepted at face value by someone that believes there is a supernatural component to reality.

Compounding the situation we already have, wherein people make wholly unsubstantiated claims about reality, there is also a tendency for the news media to make wild leaps far beyond the probabilistic findings of real science. What is nominally a new, fuzzy bit of information that is interesting but means very little on its own, becomes “life on Mars” or “may some day cure cancer”. The news media appears to be invested in making each article about scientific progress stand on its own, and therefore strip every shred of context that might give you insight into the long chain of events that makes up science’s history. With each advance forced to stand on its own, the scientific method seems like divine inspiration when it is decidedly not. For instance, the theory of evolution stands not on a wholly unfounded “guess” by Darwin, but rather on the shoulders of every advance that came before it in geology, archaeology and biology. Over the 150 years that followed, every new line of evidence corroborated the hypothesis of common descent, including radiometric dating, and what could essentially be considered the ultimate creationist-killer field: genetics.

The evolution of the body of humankind’s scientific knowledge is as cumulative as the biological improvements over time in humankind, and the whole story deserves being told. Once people recognize that our current state of knowledge is predicated on every other advance that came before it, I suspect many of the abovementioned problems we face in adoption of the scientific worldview will pretty much evaporate.

The Skeptic’s Uphill Battle