The state of GRACE

One of NASA's ongoing experiments is the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE for short), which was launched, both literally and figuratively, in March 2002.  GRACE uses data from a pair of satellites to do detailed measurements of the Earth's gravitational field, information that can be used in such disparate fields as plate and mantle tectonics and the study of groundwater flow rates, deep ocean currents, and ice cap melting.

The data is frequently represented visually, using bulges, dips, and colors on the Earth's surface to represent various variables such as measured gravitational strength, temperature, and water salinity.  This generates images like the following:

And that's where the trouble started, because someone posted this image on the unfailingly bizarre site Godlike Productions with the caption, "This is the current shape of our planet?!!! WTF!!!  As modeled by the GRACE Gravity Data.  Planet being torn apart!"

Now, I don't know whether the original poster was a troll, or really believed that what (s)he was posting was true, but you'd think that once it was posted, there would be a Greek chorus' worth of shouts of "Are you a complete moron?  Or what?"  After all, if there really was something stretching the world into the shape depicted on the map, the folks in Australia would have something to say about it.

But no.  The vast majority of the responders thought that this, in fact, showed what the Earth really looks like, and that NASA was covering the whole thing up for their usual evil motives.

Oh, there were voices of reason, but they were the ones being shouted down.  Here are some comments that appeared, in order, after the original post.

Could it be since the moon is pulling away from Earth that it is pulling a chunk off Earth with it?

If that is really the current shape of our planet, then we are in deep shit. This is worse than anyone has thought! The moon is gonna pull a chunk off the planet. That or planet X's effect on our planet? No wonder there are so many quakes? The planet is being torn!!!

This is for real folks! This is imaged by GRACE Twin Satellites. This is so off from past projections. The planet is literally being torn apart.

This explains everything from sink holes, mass animal dies offs, weird weather, increase in quakes, oil leaks, continent movements, poles shifting etc...

Something is pulling a chunk off the planet, or the destabilization of the Arctic and Antarctica is distorting the planet.

Then, one person posted the following:

It is a GRAVITY map.  For fuck's sake.

But you don't stop a whole herd of Chickens Little that easily, because the outcry continued as if the Voice of Reason hadn't said a word:

Notice the three areas of extreme magnetic pressure and the weak area in the Indian Ocean. That is going to continue to sink and eventually break off completely, a chunk off the planet. Maybe it will become our new moon with an atmosphere to make it habitable.

None of the other planets look like that. The moon sure doesn't.

Seems to me like we are literally splitting ourselves apart.

the bible does say that the earth shall be destroyed including the heavens and a new heaven and earth shall be born or created. Maybe there is an earth being born within, black sun? Vril? Or the beast raising from the deep? Very interesting.

One person even responded directly to the Voice of Reason, implying that (s)he was the one who didn't understand:

No Duh! A gravity map also showing the current shape of our potato planet.

And on it goes:

Even the stretching effect can clearly be seen. It's starting to look like a skull?

Doesn't look normal to me.

After watching that again, I think the planet is rarely anything close to spherical. How come other planets don't look like that?

Then, we had one other person chime in who evidently has some understanding of what's going on here:

Wow.... I thought for a minute second that ultimate doom has befallen us.... Finally..... BUT, it's a gravity map. It's NOT a geophysical depiction... It's based on gravitational data. Kind of like the "hole in the ozone layer" enhancement maps. This is not the shape of the planet folks, it's the shape of the planet's gravitational plus and minuses, which change daily due to moon placement and other factors... Kind of like an mri if you will... If you remove certain colors from an mri does that mean you have removed parts of the person's brain?

Unfortunately, no real doom here. As this map will look very different on the next full moon.

But of course, the doomsayers paid no attention whatsoever.  They never do, somehow.

What gets me about all of this is how a quick internet search for "GRACE gravity survey" would have turned up websites -- several of them, in fact -- that explain what the image means.  So I've often railed against people who want to be able to talk about things like quantum mechanics without doing the hard work of learning what quantum mechanics really is; here we have people who are so catastrophically lazy that they can't even be bothered to do a search on Google before deciding whether or not Australia is being forcibly ripped off the surface of the Earth.

I don't know, folks.  I should have some sort of trenchant comment to make about all of this, but at the moment I can't think of anything to do but weep quietly into my coffee, and quote Professor Farnsworth:

Of course, if the people who think that the GRACE map actually represents the real, physical shape of the Earth are correct, I may get my wish sooner than I realize.

Barefoot in the park

Are you stressed, tired, and feeling low?  Do you suffer from chronic conditions like arthritis, liver dysfunction, or heart disease?  Maybe what you need isn't conventional medicine.

Maybe what you need is more electrons.

I know you probably think I'm joking, but that is the contention of one Dr. Stephen Sinatra, who has a website that claims that just about everything that is wrong with you can be cured by "grounding" yourself.  In his parlance, this means "walking around barefoot."  Let's hear what he has to say about this amazing medical breakthrough:

The terms "earthing" and "grounding" are interchangeable. It is simply the act of placing your bare feet on the earth, or walking barefoot. When you do, free electrons are transferred from the earth into your body, and this grounding effect is one of the most potent antioxidants we know of...  (I)nflammation thrives when your blood is thick and you have a lot of free radical stress, and a lot of positive charges in your body. Grounding effectively alleviates inflammation because it thins your blood and infuses you with negatively charged ions through the soles of your feet.

The earth is struck by lightning thousands of time each minute, primarily around the equator. Subsequently, the earth carries an enormous negative charge. It's always electron-rich and can serve as a powerful and abundant supply of antioxidant free radical-busting electrons.

The human body appears to be finely tuned to "work" with the earth in the sense that there's a constant flow of energy between our bodies and the earth. When you put your feet on the ground, you absorb large amounts of negative electrons through the soles of your feet. In today's world, this is more important than ever, yet fewer people than ever actually connect with the earth in this way anymore. Free radical stress from exposure to mercury pollution, cigarettes, insecticides, pesticides, trans fats, and radiation, just to name a few, continually deplete your body of electrons.

 Okay.  I mean, I only have one question, which is, "What?"

I'm with him that the Earth, being a large object made of atoms, has lots of electrons.  Those electrons move around some, which generates static charges that can be redistributed via lightning.  Sometimes you do the same thing, on a small scale, when you walk across a carpet and then touch a metal object, generating a cracking sound, a spark that jumps from you to the metal object, and a lot of swearing.

But that's where the science ends and the bullshit begins.

There's a name for "transferring electrons rapidly through a substance."  It's called "electricity."  There's also a name for when that process uses a human body as a conduit.  It's called "being electrocuted."  The health effects of being electrocuted include death, so I'm not really all that sanguine about anything that purports to transfer large amounts of electrons into my body.

Of course, there's also the minor problem that any slight imbalance between the electrical potential of your body and that of the Earth is adjusted every time you touch anything that is in electrical contact with the ground.  If human disease really was caused by a lack of electrons, you could cure yourself by leaning on a chain-link fence.

The nonsense doesn't end there, however.  Dr. Sinatra, whose ideas lead me to wonder if he got his medical degree from Big Bob's Discount Diploma Warehouse, claims that walking barefoot (1) helps you to make more ATP, (2) thins your blood, and (3) helps you make white blood cells.  He throws around terms like "zeta potential," which turns out to be a real thing -- it's the degree of stability in a colloidal dispersion -- but I think mostly he likes how it sounds.  We are also treated to a highly scientific experiment in which a sunflower in a vase that was plugged into a grounded wall socket lasted longer than one that was plugged into an ungrounded socket:

What I want to know is how putting the end of a plugged-in electrical cord into a vase full of water didn't either trip the breaker or electrocute the experimenter.

My favorite part of all of this comes near the end, when he blames all human disease on wearing shoes:

Throughout history, humans mostly walked barefoot or with footwear made of animal skins. They slept on the ground or on skins. Through direct contact or through perspiration-moistened animal skins used as footwear or sleeping mats, the ground's abundant free electrons were able to enter the body, which is electrically conductive. Through this mechanism, every part of the body could equilibrate with the electrical potential of the Earth, thereby stabilizing the electrical environment of all organs, tissues, and cells.

Modern lifestyle has increasingly separated humans from the primordial flow of Earth's electrons. For example, since the 1960s, we have increasingly worn insulating rubber or plastic soled shoes, instead of the traditional leather fashioned from hides. Rossi [one of the researchers Sinatra quotes] has lamented that the use of insulating materials in post-World War II shoes has separated us from the Earth's energy field. Obviously, we no longer sleep on the ground as we did in times past.

During recent decades, chronic illness, immune disorders, and inflammatory diseases have increased dramatically, and some researchers have cited environmental factors as the cause. However, the possibility of modern disconnection with the Earth's surface as a cause has not been considered.

Because, as we all know, humans were so much less prone to disease centuries ago, when we were all sleeping on "perspiration-moistened animal skins."  It's not like average lifespan has increased in the last century, or anything.

Oh, but please continue, Dr. Sinatra, and by all means don't let silly little things like facts get in your way.

Interestingly, Sinatra's pseudoscience has been getting enough press that he merits a mention in The Skeptic's Dictionary, on the page devoted to "Vibrational Medicine," wherein he is slapped down as follows:

So what's the treatment for all this potentially damaging electropollution? As noted above, one treatment is "very low frequency pulsed electromagnetic waves." Hmm. I thought these electromagnetic gadgets were the problem, not the solution. Anyway, there's another treatment called grounding or earthing. What's that, you may wonder. It's standing barefoot on the earth so electrons can flow through your feet into your body and thin your blood, kill free radicals, and who knows what else... So, two of the main treatments for electropollution is more electrons and more electromagnetism. Sounds just about right to me. What's the treatment for a broken arm? Hitting it with a hammer?

Now, don't get me wrong.  I love being barefoot myself, and in fact on warm days generally wear the legally permissible minimum amount of clothing.  But I'm not buying that it has the slightest effect on anything but my overall mood.  And if you're ill, you really are better off seeking out conventional medical help, not subscribing to the bullshit ideas of a guy who sounds like he failed freshman physics.

SATs, STDs, and school prayer

Yesterday, we saw one example of mistaking correlation for causation -- that being a skeptic (or materialist, or rationalist) is why two prominent skeptics had apparent serious moral lapses.  Today, we'll look at a second -- a group that is claiming that the elimination of school prayer is why student SAT scores have dropped in the United States.

The American Family Association of Kentucky currently has a petition out asking people to vote on whether or not prayer should be allowed in public schools.  First, we have the following photograph, to put us all in the right frame of mind:

And then, there's the meat of the argument, if I can dignify it with that term:

Prayer was in our schools for over 200 years before the anti-God forces took it out in 1962. After prayer was removed from our schools, teen pregnancy went up 500%, STD’s went up 226%, violent crime went up 500% and SAT scores went down for 18 years in a row, opening the door for the AIDS epidemic and the drug culture.

WE NEED PRAYER BACK IN SCHOOLS!

We need to do this, the author of the petition (Frank Simon) says, in order to "return God's protection to America."

Wow.  Where do I start?

First off, if someone is claiming that two things are not only correlated, but exist in a causative relationship, the first thing to do is to determine if there really is even a correlation.  So I looked up the Commonwealth Foundation's breakdown of SAT results state by state.  If god really does care about SAT scores, to the point where he awards the best scores not to the kids that are the smartest or the hardest working but to the kids who pray the most, there should be a correlation between the most religious states and the highest scores, right?  Interestingly, in three states that are pretty solidly Christian -- Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana -- only 4%, 8%, and 9% of qualified high school students even took the SATs last year, although admittedly the average scores of the students who did take it land those states solidly in the middle of the pack.  And I guess even god can't give you good scores on an exam you didn't take.

So what about teen pregnancy?  Once again, if you think the spread of atheism has caused this supposed 500% increase in teen pregnancy, you should see the godly states having lower rates than the ungodly ones, right?  So I looked at the National Campaign to End Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy's page on state data, and guess where Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi fell?  14th, 8th, and 2nd worst (i.e. highest teen pregnancy rates) overall.  Other states in the top ten were Tennessee, Georgia, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas, also so-called "Bible-Belt" states.

Hmm.  I guess that when it comes to preventing teen pregnancy, sex education and availability of birth control work better than praying.  Whoda thought?

And because I'm nothing if not thorough, I decided to check STD rates state-by-state, so I went to the Center for Disease Control's Data Atlas, and guess where the most new cases of STDs in 2012 were?  Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.  In that order.

Well, well.

I think what bothers me most about this, though, is the way these people are framing this as a religious freedom issue -- the subtitle on the petition page says, "Restore Student Religious Liberty."  One of my first mentors, when I started teaching, was a wonderful science teacher who was also a devout Christian.  I was discussing religion with him one day, and he said something that was very interesting.  "I never bring up religion in class," he said.  "My own beliefs are irrelevant in the classroom.  But more than that; teachers need to keep in mind that they are talking to captive audiences made up of kids of diverse backgrounds and beliefs.  Because of that, you have to be extremely careful when discussing anything that has bearing on political or religious issues.  The best teachers challenge all of their students, not just the ones they disagree with."

So, the bottom line is, students are free to pray in their churches.  They are also free to pray, silently, during class, or any other time during the day.  (I suspect a lot of prayer goes on prior to my administering exams.)  On the other hand, it is not ethical for teachers or administrators to lead prayers in public schools.  At that point, it is no longer an issue of religious liberty, it is an issue of forced proselytization.  And that, actually, is the opposite of liberty.

Retrying the Lord

New from the Well, If It Makes You Happy department, we have a story about a lawyer in Kenya who is trying to have Jesus' conviction overturned.  [Source]

Dola Indidis, a former spokesperson for the Kenyan judiciary, is petitioning the International Court of Justice at The Hague to give Jesus a posthumous pardon.  "The selective and malicious prosecution (of Jesus) violated his human rights," Indidis said, adding that Pontius Pilate was guilty of "judicial misconduct, abuse of office, bias and prejudice."

This isn't the first time Indidis has attempted this.  In 2007, he brought his case to the Kenyan High Court, but they threw it out, claiming that they "lacked jurisdiction."

Now, I'm no expert in international law, but it does strike me as a bit of a legal quagmire, given that (1) all of the people involved in the trial have been dead for almost 2,000 years, (2) the only documents referring to the case are in the New Testament, which even true believers can't claim to be an unbiased source, and (3) the governmental body by which Jesus was tried doesn't, technically, exist any more.  The Roman Empire itself more or less ceased to be 1,500 odd years ago, so it's not like there'll be any possible response from them.

My gut reaction has always been that posthumous pardons are a little... pointless.  It's not that they're uncommon; the convictions of the Salem "witches" were overturned one by one, the last ones in 1992 (and honestly, it surprises me that it took that long).  Joan of Arc was retried in 1456, only 25 years after her execution, and found innocent of heresy -- the first step that would lead to her eventual canonization in 1920.  Even poor Alan Turing, convicted of homosexual acts in the United Kingdom in 1952 and "chemically castrated" with female hormones (a treatment that many believe contributed to his severe depression and ultimate suicide in 1954), stands a good chance of receiving an official pardon this year.  And while I certainly think that the motivation for these pardons is good, and I can understand the desire of family members to clear their relatives' unfairly besmirched names, it doesn't do the victims much good in the here-and-now.

Might make better sense to work on improving the justice system we currently have, to make sure such injustices don't continue to happen, don't you think?

Be that as it may, Dola Indidis' quixotic quest to secure a retrial for The Son of God opens up the far thornier problem of whether the religious folks in the world want Jesus to be pardoned.  As far as I understand it, the whole point of the New Testament is that Jesus died for our sins, and God The Father sent him down here specifically so he would die.  Right?  So wouldn't pardoning him kind of be... counterproductive, salvation-of-humanity-wise?

Now, I have to admit that I have never understood this whole point, and even though I'm an atheist I've read a good bit of what various Christian apologists have to say about it.  It seems to boil down to god sending himself to be tortured and executed for crimes he didn't commit in order for him to forgive us for sins we did commit, which makes no sense whatsoever.  After all, if god wanted to forgive us, why didn't he just go ahead and do it without all of the unpleasant flogging and crown of thorns and crucifixion business?  I don't really see what was gained by the whole episode other than generating hundreds of thousands of pieces of really grotesque statuary, suitable for scaring Christian children lo unto this very day.

Indidis, himself a Roman Catholic, doesn't seem to see any problem with this, but the whole thing has clearly shaken up the powers-that-be in Kenya.  Father Maloba Wesonga, spokesperson for the diocese of Nairobi, seemed to be uncertain how to respond, when he heard about Indidis' idea.  "As we know it, the trial had to happen," Wesonga said to reporters.  "We must understand that Jesus was not vulnerable and nobody can do justice to God."

Which puts him in the odd position, as a Catholic priest, of saying he is in favor of sustaining Jesus' conviction and execution.

You have to wonder how the Catholics are going to reconcile that stance.

I'm guessing that the International Court of Justice will probably refuse to hear Indidis' case, given that they have plenty of better things to do with their time.  So this whole issue will probably fizzle, which honestly is kind of a shame.  I'd love to see how they'd decide the case, because any way it came out, it'd be hard to predict how the Christians would spin it.  As far as Indidis goes, he really should find a new hobby, like putting his mind to seeing that justice is done for people who are still alive.  He could start with his own country, which hasn't exactly had a sterling track record, especially in its turning a blind eye to child prostitution.  Seems to me that this would be a better use of time, energy, and money than trying to determine whether a guy who lived and died almost two millennia ago should receive an official pardon.

Hark, hark, the shark

I guess it was bound to happen.

It started decades ago, with Jaws.  Then you had the hyped-up "documentaries" of the 80s and 90s featuring lines like, "Let's put the bikini-clad Baywatch wannabee in the giant metal cage, lower it into the water, and throw around bleeding fish parts, and see what happens."  But things ramped up considerably when the Discovery channel started "Shark Week."  Then we had the following, which made a lot of us science types shake our heads and say, "Um... really?":

Oh, if only it were "enough said."  Because you know it's not.  It is never enough said, once the ball gets rolling, especially if the ball has teeth and fins.  Because just a few days ago we had a new "documentary" on Discovery, one that upped the ante even further, by claiming that one of the largest seagoing predators that has ever lived... is still alive.

 Called Carcharodon megalodon, or just "Megalodon" for short, this thing was, to put it bluntly, freakin' huge.  Fossils have been found that indicate that the biggest ones could reach 18 meters in length (for reference, the largest great white sharks get to be about 6 meters long).  So, this was one scary-ass beast, the likes of which would make me hesitant to set foot in the ocean again.

If it still existed.  Which it doesn't.  Scientists are in agreement that Megalodon went extinct about 1.5 million years ago.  But of course, given the foolishness that has appeared on Discovery (remember Finding Bigfoot?  and The Haunted?  and, most germane to our discussion here, Mermaids: The Body Found?), I shouldn't really be surprised.

Oh, but there's a poll!  Because scientific truth is determined by public consensus, evidently.  You can vote that "YES! The evidence for Megalodon can't be ignored! The monster shark lives!" or "Maybe.  95% of our oceans remain unexplored, so it's possible that Megalodon is still out there."  Or (and I imagine this choice accompanied by a sad shake of the head), "No.  The scientists are right."  So, anyway, I voted (guess which way?), mostly so I could see what the results were, and was unsurprised that 32% of the respondents voted "yes," and 48% "maybe," leaving the poor scientists in the dust with a paltry 20% of the vote.

Of course, given that a common attitude is that public school biology curricula should eliminate the teaching of evolution "because lots of people don't believe in it," I shouldn't be surprised that (1) the public is easy to hoodwink into believing nonsense, and (2) there's a sense that science is a democracy.

Now, don't misunderstand me.  I love the ocean, and I think sharks are really cool.  And there's no doubt that charismatic megafauna are big sellers, explaining why you see lots of calendars and framed prints and greeting cards and tattoos with images of wolves, lions, and jaguars, and far fewer with wombats, possums, and naked mole rats.  I get why there's never been a film called Rabbitnado, although I have to admit I would watch it, especially if the bunnies turned out to be like the Beast of Caer Bannog:

But that's just me.  And since these media outlets exist to make money, not to promote good science, it's no wonder they jump on the bandwagon.

Sharon Hill, in her wonderful blog Doubtful News, did a piece on Megalodon recently, and expressed hope that "Shark Week" and other dubious attempts at nature documentary would raise awareness of shark conservation.  Me, I'm less sanguine.  When the movie Jaws came out in 1975, there followed a senseless slaughter of sharks of all sorts, including the completely harmless gray nurse shark.  Just as people don't get that science is done based on evidence, not on voting in a poll, they also don't tend to respond rationally when an irresponsible media outlet has ramped up the fear.

Anyhow, that's today's exercise in futility.  Given that Megalodon got "record ratings," I'm doubtful that anything I say is going to have an effect.  Maybe I should make my own documentary, you think?  You can't beat 'em, join 'em.  How about Hopping Mad: Is Australia's Carnivorous Kangaroo Still Alive in the Outback?  Start with some photographs of fossil skeletons:

Follow up with some scary drawings:

Hire a scientist or two to weigh in on how we can never be sure that an animal is extinct, because the Coelacanth, you know, and so on.  Then have a poll.   Sure fire winner, right?

Of course, right.

Seeing stars

I am endlessly amused (or endlessly frustrated, depending on my mood) by the way the same piece of information can be interpreted by different woo-woos to support each of their varying, and in many cases mutually contradictory, views of the world.  All of them take the same bit of data, and put their own spin on it, so that it becomes some kind of purportedly incontrovertible support for whatever they already believed in.

In short order, you have a multilayered rainbow-colored cake of craziness, with nuts.

Take, for example, the curious photograph that is currently zinging its way around the Internet, an image from Google Maps taken by satellite of a spot near Lisakovsk, Kazakhstan:

The thing is real, not a photoshopped image; type the coordinates 52°28’46.86″N 62°11’7.68″E into Google Earth to see it for yourself.  But of course, once you know it's real, what is it?

You can bet that the fundamentalist Christians have an answer to that.

The upside-down pentagram is well known as a sign of Satan, and this cadre has accompanied the photograph with a dire-sounding message that the Time Of The Antichrist Is At Hand.  This version of the story is also accompanied by a claim that the pentagram appeared near a pair of towns called "Adam" and "Lucifer," a statement that is supposed to be significant somehow but for which I could find no corroboration.  And frankly, that part sounds a little spurious to me.  Most of the towns in Kazakhstan that I could find on a map have names like "Zhezkagan" and "Stepnogorsk."  "Adam" and "Lucifer" sound a little... anglo to me to be place names in that part of the world.

And, after all, New York has an Adams County and a Lucifer Falls, and I haven't seen any giant pentagrams appearing around here, so there's that.

Another thing, though, is that whether this looks like an upside-down pentagram depends on the angle from which you view it.  Turn the photograph around, or (in fact) rotate it by 36° in either direction,  and all of a sudden it becomes a right-side-up pentagram.  So just color me unconvinced that this is a sign of the End Times.

But of course, the evangelical Christians aren't the only ones who have weighed in on the curious photograph.  You also have the ones who think it's a sign from Mother Earth that we are "abusing nature" and that we need to be more considerate of our environment.  This version of the story has a piece about the pentagram being one of the "signs that we cannot continue to harm our planet without the planet letting us know about it."

These are presumably the same people who think that crop circles are a way for the Spirit of Nature to inform us to give up coal mining and take up organic farming and wear clothes woven from hemp.  And these folks think the upside-down pentagram isn't an evil symbol at all, but a positive, vital neopagan symbol that has suddenly appeared to bring us all to some kind of environmental enlightenment.

Then, you have the people who think that the pentagram is "an unfinished summer camp for the children of the Illuminati."  Because the Illuminati are just that sneaky and secretive, that they would create a structure that you couldn't ever find out about unless you happened to check out Google Maps.  According to this guy, "Kazakistan" (which is how he pronounces it throughout the entire video) is part of the "bloodline of the Illuminati."  Whatever that means.  But that's where the whole world is being controlled from, so... so... just don't let your guard down for a minute.

You know how that goes.

The speculation doesn't end there, however.  There's another group who weighed in on the topic, and they don't think the star is a symbol of Satan, the Illuminati, or Gaea, but a communiqué from... you'll never guess who.

Righty-o.  Because intelligent extraterrestrials who have expended a great amount of effort, time, and energy to get to Earth from a planet light years away would have nothing better to do than to draw a giant star on the ground and then leave.

Of course, the actual explanation turned out to be much simpler.  No Antichrist, Nature Spirits, New World Order, or extraterrestrials needed.

"It is the outline of a park made in the form of a star," archaeologist Emma Usmanova said in an interview with LiveScience about the geographical oddity.  "The star was a popular symbol during the Soviet era.  Stars were often used throughout the Soviet Union to decorate building facades, flags and monuments...  We believe that the star shape was the abandoned site of a Soviet-era lakeside campground."

And Usmanova apparently has years of experience working in the Lisakovsk area, so she should know.

Not that I expect that this will shut up the It's Aliens crew, much less the neopagans or the fundamentalists.  But that's how confirmation bias works, isn't it?  You latch on to an explanation for something because it fits what you already believed, and hang on like grim death even if there's a plausible explanation to the contrary.  Because, let's face it; when it comes to choosing an explanation, "an abandoned campground site" just doesn't have the gravitas that Satan, Mother Earth, the Illuminati, and aliens do.

The skeptic goes on vacation

Well, this will be my last post for a week and a half.  I'm off at way-too-early-o'clock tomorrow morning for the lovely city of Portland, Oregon, for the Cascade Writers' Convention, where I will be participating in workshops focusing on the other kind of writing I do (fiction).  After that, I'm home for only a day or two before going off to Dayton, Ohio for a friend's wedding.  So with all of that to-ing and fro-ing, I'm going to take a wee break from battling the woo-woos.  My next Skeptophilia post will be on Monday, August 5.

Until then, there are a few things you can do to keep your appetite for critical thinking sated.  First, you can buy my book, if you haven't already done so.  It has the creative title Skeptophilia, is a bargain at only $3.99, and is a collection of 120 of my essays on science, skepticism, critical thinking, and woo-woo-ism.  You can get it for Kindle (here) or Nook (here).   If you do decide to buy it, many thanks -- and please leave a review.

This is also a chance for you to check out some other skeptical blogs and webpages, so here are a few of my favorites:

Science, Reason, and Critical Thinking
James Randi Educational Foundation
Pharyngula
SkepChick
The Skeptic's Dictionary
The Call of Troythulu
The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason
Friendly Atheist
Quackwatch
Bad Archaeology
Bad Astronomy


If you, too, would like to take a break from thinking about all of the crazy things people believe, there's always fiction to be read.  Mine.  Yes, this is a moment of shameless self-promotion.  Besides the books linked on the sidebar, there are over a dozen other titles to choose from, which you can peruse on my Amazon author's page.  You will note that almost all of them have to do with the paranormal, an irony that my wife thinks is amusing.  Me, I just think that this is why they're filed under the heading "Fiction."  But you should still read them, because they're awesome.

If I do say so myself.

That should be enough to keep you occupied while I'm gone, don't you think?  I encourage you to continue sending me topics -- I'll be ready to sit down and write again when I get back from my travels, and would love to have some ideas of what you'd like me to write about.  Until then, keep hoisting the banner of logic!