Skepticism 101: Popular Pseudoscience

Women have a lot of woo aimed their way. Men aren’t exempt, not by any means, but there’s some woo targeted almost exclusively at women. Our Skepticism 101 panel explored some of the varieties on offer. Some of the woo might not even appear to be woo, on the surface.

Take makeup, for instance.

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Skepticism 101: Popular Pseudoscience
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Donors Choose: Let's Make it Four for Four – and One More!

I’ve got a delightful note here from Mrs. M in Renton, thanking all the folks who put science in her kids’ hands:

Dear Olga Vaughan, Mike Myszka, Sylvia, Anne, Patricia Poad, Joseph Tsang, Karin Hills, Rae Gerking, Lynn Gerking, Emily Henry, Chrissy Frashefski, Ryan Knowle, Megan Strom, Lauren Strom, Colette Breshears, CenturyLink, The DonorsChoose.org Team and Anonymous Donors, 

Let me begin by saying, YOU ALL ROCK! I cannot fully express my gratitude for the generosity you have shown. My students will be thrilled when I make the announcement at school tomorrow. I am a believer that students learn by doing. I especially think this is true when they study topics that are innately interesting, like the world around them. The materials you have donated will give students the opportunity to touch, see, smell, and investigate rocks and minerals they may have never before explored. The books donated will open up a geological world of knowledge students may be seeing for the first time. Thank you so much for supporting hands-on science learning and for providing my students the opportunity to learn more about our amazing Earth.With gratitude,
Mrs. M

Warms you right down to the ground, doesn’t it just?

And, thanks to two incredibly generous anonymous donors, we’ve only got $193 left on Mrs. D’s Science Rocks! project. You guys made me cry at work today! Happy tears, mind you, with a touch of squee. You just made it much more likely Mrs. D’s kids will get their project funded!

I think we can do that. In fact, I’m so certain we can do that, I’m putting up Silver Fox’s selection before we’ve even finished. We can totally fund these two projects!

Ms. C’s kids need your help:

My Students: My students have few opportunities to do science research in the field. Utah is a geology gem, and I wish more of my students could discover the beautiful rocks that tell our state’s geological history.

My students come from diverse cultures and speak a variety of different languages. The majority of the students face economic challenges. The Title I school is located in an urban environment with few opportunities to experience nature. My students love learning and enjoy reading science books in the library.

My Project: Fourth grade students are involved in a four week daily geology research project in the library. The librarian and classroom teacher collaborate and teach science and research skills to the students.

The metamorphic rock samples will add the missing pieces to our rock/fossil collection. Hand magnifying glasses will allow the students to see all the grains and textures that are found in individual rocks. The field guides will be used during a “hands-on” rock lab to identify and study the different rock types. The other geology books will provide other information that will support our research.

The is a chance for students to connect science and research skills. By using real rocks, students can touch and explore the different rock types before digging into the reading research. The rock lab will provide prior knowledge so students can have a better understanding while reading science text.

The finished informational rock pamphlet will let students showcase their new knowledge and use technology skills to incorporate photos of the actual rocks that they studied.

Awesome, yes? And here’s even more awesome: the first two people to donate $50 or more to either of these projects will get a $50 matching donation to that project from me.

Let’s give these kids some geology, my darlings!

Donors Choose: Let's Make it Four for Four – and One More!

Skepticism 101: In Which I Say What Skepticism Is, and Shoot a Video

It’s a good question, that, “What is skepticism?” A lot of folks hear the word “skeptic” and seem to equate it with party-pooper, cynic, or knee-jerk contrarian. If your party includes belief in woo, then we’ll cop to the first. But skepticism isn’t about being a dour old cynic, or doubt for the sake of doubt.

It’s not a belief system. There’s no master list of positions you must hold in order to be a skeptic.

Being a skeptic isn’t something you are so much as do. Because, you see, skepticism is a tool. It’s a way of detecting bullshit. It’s a set of methods applied to assess the truth of a claim. It saves you from falling for Nigerian princes and people who claim there’s a curse upon you which can only be lifted by silly rituals and the application of generous funds to the fortune teller.

And that’s what we tried to impress upon the audience at GeekGirlCon: skepticism is a tool, or rather a tool kit. I’ll show you mine.

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Skepticism 101: In Which I Say What Skepticism Is, and Shoot a Video

Donors Choose: Now You Get to Choose!

So far, so awesome: 3 of 4 projects funded. ¡Gracias, mis amigos! You’ve done a fantastic job, and put science in the hands of 216 students. Not bad at all!

But now’s no time to rest on our laurels.

Mrs. Dye’s Science Rocks project could still use your help. Head over to this page to show her students some love.

And then, because we’re not stopping there, head over here and pick a project or two you’d like to see added to my list. Put ’em in the comments. On Thursday morning, I’ll tally the votes and add the projects that inspired you the most to our challenge page.

That’s right. Our page. Because we’re all making it happen.

Think we can reach a thousand kids by the end of this? I believe we can. Let’s make it so!

Donors Choose: Now You Get to Choose!

Dana's Dojo: Characters So Deep You Can Swim In Them

There is this word, “deep.” People want deep characters. No one likes shallow, except folks who aren’t so great at swimming. Think back on the story people who’ve stayed with you for years and years after you first read about them, and you’re probably going to notice they’re deep. But what is this “deep”? How do you create someone who’s deep?

Patricia C. Wrede did up a couple of posts on it, books on writing almost always address it, and there are entire exercises dedicated to making deep people. Some of that stuff’s useful. Some of it just seems to get in the way. The thing is, there’s no one way to ensure you end up with characters who are more than ankle-deep. Fill out all the character biographies you like, you can still end up with cardboard with a few weird details thrown in.

I’m not going to tell you how writers make their characters deep. Writers are individuals, they’ve all got different ways of doing it. I’ll tell you how I do it, and you can filch any useful bits you like.

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Dana's Dojo: Characters So Deep You Can Swim In Them

Yeah, About That Giant Kraken at GSA…

Oh, I’ll grant you, it’s sexy. It’s fun to play with the possibility. And letting this poor gentleman have his say at the GSA shindig was nice, even though his evidence is, shall we say, sketchy, but putting out a press release would seem a bridge too far.

Every geologist I’ve spoken to has met the news with amusement and horror, or amusement and anger, or sometimes horror and anger, and none of them seem to think this claim was ready for prime time. Chris Rowan put together a nice piece showing the geos’ reactions on Twitter and explaining the situation, which is good, because I don’t want people to get the impression from that press release that all geologists are wild-eyed fools ready to swallow extraordinary claims without demanding the evidence to match. They’re scientists. Most of them are damned good scientists (never mind the Flood “geologists” who hang around these professional meetings like ticks on a dog). And their skeptic-sense is tingling like mad.

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Yeah, About That Giant Kraken at GSA…

So Sorry to Disappoint

My first foray into the realm of public humiliation was a great big flop on the humiliation front, but happily completely successful in the not-dribbling-on-myself front.

I should begin by saying I love the concept of GeekGirlCon. I love a sea of women with a few islands of men getting together to celebrate all things geek. I wish I’d known about it sooner, that it hadn’t happened the weekend a certain popular phone launched and thus closed the vacation calendar, and that I hadn’t already promised I’d attend Frankenstein. I only got to attend the panel I was on, and then we had to skedaddle rather than dawdle. Next year, I sincerely hope, will be different. And I think I shall assemble a costume.

As it was, my poor long-suffering coworker and dear friend and I rousted ourselves out of bed at an obscene hour (we are nocturnal) and raced down to the Con, arriving at ten-thirty. Plenty of time, we thought. We found parking. We went in search of the Con. We discovered that Seattle Center is utterly enormous when you think you know where you’re going but really don’t and nobody at the main entrance has any idea such a thing as GeekGirlCon is taking place.

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So Sorry to Disappoint

Los Links 10/7

Made it! For a while, there, blog reading just wasn’t happening and I was afraid we’d end up with a Los Links that was only five links long. I’m sorry I had to neglect you all in order to carve out the time, but when you see some of the delights I found for you, I suspect most will be forgiven.

Do enjoy!

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Los Links 10/7

Atheists Love Stories, Too

Some religious folks seem to think that atheists are worse than Vulcans. When we become atheists, we’re supposed to end up with nothing but cold logic, nihilism, and the complete inability to understand or appreciate stories.

There’s Paul Wallace, who sez “atheists may be ill at ease with stories.” And then there’s John Gray, who babbles some nonsense about how science’s silly story is that it “can enable us to live without myths.” What these two authors seem to have in common is some idea that those who don’t believe that the Christian myth is the Really Real Truth must not understand stories, because if we did, we’d believe in Jesus. Or something. Their thinking is so muddled I hesitate to call it thought, and their conclusions so laughable I’m not sure I can finish this post before I rupture something vital. But I shall try.


There’s something right here that rather destroys the argument that atheists don’t understand stories. In fact, it suggests we understand them better than some Christians. There’s this poem, “Cheating at Cards With Jesus.” It’s a beautifully religious poem. It can be read in a variety of ways, like all good poetry. You could see it as Jesus gathering the lost, sacrificing himself for you, turning a losing situation into a winning one. It rather put me in mind of a play one of my Christian friends told me about back when we worked at a bookstore together, which had a defense lawyer telling the court his client pleads guilty, and just as the courtroom erupts and the client panics, tells the court he himself will serve the sentence. Nice metaphor for Jesus paying the price for our sins so we could get on with the living bidness. And you’d think that people who bleat about all the wonderful stories in the Bible, prodigal sons and all that, could accept that Jesus is a card cheat who throws the game in our favor. It’s a metaphor. Or maybe a parable.

Atheists got it in one go. Yes, some of us probably groaned, but we got it. Some Christians in the audience, however, missed it completely. Kelly Barnhill, the Catholic Sunday School teacher, got condemned to hell and called an atheist by quite a few good Christians who can’t see a good Jesus story when it socks them in the eyeballs. Perhaps it was because Jesus drank whiskey. Or was it the belching? I’m not sure. I only know it’s pathetic that a group of people who preach about all the awesome stuff Jesus did to save us and how you can only be a truly moral and good person if you believe in him are so quick to wish eternal torment on someone and lump her in with us icky damned unbelievers simply because she portrayed Jesus as something other than a squeaky-clean white dude who never drinks, burps, or cheats at cards.

Look. When you become an atheist, you don’t go in to a sterile room where you hand over your love of a good story. You’re not forbidden to enjoy myths. You get to read, comprehend, and adore fiction. You can even keep writing it. Yes, even if it’s based on myth. Yes, even if it includes a scientifically impossible world lousy with gods.

I’m a Gnu Atheist, my darlings, which means I’m one of those hardcore majorly-atheistic atheists, and I still love stories. I bloody well adore mythology. If you’re a believer who can’t wrap your mind around that, think of the Greek and Roman myths you’ve adored, and tell me that someone who doesn’t believe in that stuff can’t appreciate it. Go on, go ahead. I’m listening.

Hmm. Crickets are out in force tonight. Lovely.

I’ll admit, I had a moment of panic when I first admitted I was an atheist, and not just an atheist, but one of those who can’t even be a faitheist. How could I possibly write fiction based heavily on myth, enjoy fantasy, or get deeply in to a teevee show when I knew this stuff was totally not true? This moment of crises lasted about ten minutes, just as long as it took for me to recall that many of my favorite fantasy authors are atheists, and that the crowds of Gnu Atheists I hung about with loved them their SF books and shows. Didn’t bother them a bit it wasn’t 100% factual. So why should it bother me? Shouldn’t. Moving on, then.

Funny thing happened, too. I could appreciate a well-turned story far better. It’s hard to explain. Someday, I’ll follow this post up with something about that, but it’s got a lot to do with not elevating one myth to the status of factual truth and then trying to avoid thinking that if all this other stuff is myth…. That’s part of it. Also, I could admit the Bible’s a bad story. It’s not even a story – it’s a mishmash of stuff, written by a lot of very strange people and collected by lots of other strange people long after the authors were dead, that only forms a coherent narrative if you skip big chunks, squint really hard, and avoid thinking too deeply about the main premise. There’s some decent poetry in there, some pithy quotes, some neat themes and some good stories, hidden in the dreck. Some of it’s even worth mining for inspiration. But it’s no damned different from Greek, Roman, Norse, and sundry other mythologies, except for the fact far too many people take it for literal truth.

And that’s the thing: atheists can easily enjoy stories. We’re all about good narrative structure. We love a well-told tale. The thing is, we recognize fiction as fiction, myth as myth, and we don’t need either one of them to be factually true. Myth is fiction. That doesn’t mean it contains nothing of value: it can illustrate true things about being human, just like any good work of fiction. We don’t read these things like textbooks.

And we love us some narrative non-fiction. We adore those true stories, the ones based on facts and evidence and reason. We appreciate data woven into a tale. Look at the outstanding success of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, for an example. That was an amazing true story, non-fictional narrative at its finest. Look at Carl Sagan’s books, which often waxed poetic. Here’s another gorgeous story, written by Marcia Bartusiak, which tells you right up front it’s a story: Through a Universe Darkly: A Cosmic Tale of Ancient Ethers, Dark Matter, and the Fate of the Universe. That’s one of the most gorgeous science stories I’ve ever read. And The Mountains of St. Francis remains one of the best geologic stories ever told. These books are far from dry recitals of facts. We wouldn’t want them to be. We atheists, we are human: we love a good tale.

But we science-loving atheists can see stories others can’t, too: in data, in mathematics, in genomes. We don’t need a god story to make sense of those stories. And they are epic.

Trying to crowbar a god or two into the stories nature tells seems ridiculous, like adding something to the plot just because it’s currently popular. It would be like adding a vampire romance to Macbeth: clunky, contrived, and utterly useless to the story, taking away far more than it gives. Science doesn’t need gods. Discworld, on the other hand, would be impoverished without them. But that’s the difference between fiction and reality.

No, we atheists understand and appreciate stories just fine. I think the problem for these believers who claim we don’t is that we don’t accept their myth as a true story. And they can’t accept their tall tale as fiction, so rather than confronting the fact that what they believe is fictional, they tell themselves that we just don’t get it.

Whatevs. I can’t be bothered with them anymore. I have some Doctor Who to obsess over, stories to read, and fiction to write.

Atheists Love Stories, Too

Cantina Quote o' the Week: H.G. Wells

What on earth would we do with ourselves if something did not stand in our way?

H.G. Wells

I trust I don’t have to tell you who H.G. Wells is. One of the fathers of science fiction? Bloke who wrote that War of the Worlds book that got turned into a radio drama by Orson Welles and led to a lot of people panicking because they were unclear on the concept of fiction.

These words of his are some of my favorites, because they are true. It might seem like everything would be wonderful if there were no obstacles in our path, but that way lies boredom. Good thing every life has its obstacles, then. As long as they’re not insurmountable, we can give our minds quite a lot of exercise figuring out how to get round them.

I think if nothing stood in our way, we’d probably put something there, just so we’d have something to contend with. We are a contentious species. And we like to prove we’re clever. Though, as the panic over a radio show proved, we’re not quite as clever as we like to believe…

Cantina Quote o' the Week: H.G. Wells