Digital fingerprints

I've always been fascinated with patterns.  Starting with a love for geometric patterns when I was a kid, I remember finding out about the Fibonacci sequence, and then its connection to the Golden Ratio, in 8th grade -- and feeling like I'd touched something magical, some fundamental superstructure of the universe.  Then I discovered tessellations, and thought that was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.  Then on to M. C. Escher, Penrose tiles, fractals, the Mandelbrot set...

 

 

We're all pattern-finders, really.  That's how the human brain works.  It's just that some of us are a little more obsessed than others.

 

Patterns exist all over nature, however chaotic it may appear, and those patterns apply to our behavior, as well.  We may think we're spontaneous and unpredictable, but our actions leave traces -- and those traces form patterns.  And if you analyze enough of the traces, you can make some pretty shrewd guesses about who left them.  This is the basis of a lot of forensic pathology work, and is the fundamental idea behind some fascinating new research out of Cambridge.  [Source]

 

Researchers at the Cambridge Psychometrics Centre developed software that can be used to analyze digital traces left by users -- in this case, Facebook "likes."  58,000 Facebook users agreed to be part of the study, and gave the study group demographic profiles as well as access to their Facebook accounts.  After that, the software went to town, coming up with correlations between a variety of demographics and which pages users had "liked."

 

And here's where even the researchers got a surprise.

 

Just from the Facebook "likes," the software achieved:

• 88% accuracy at determining gender
• 95% accuracy at telling African Americans from other ethnic groups
• 85% accuracy at telling Republicans from Democrats
• 82% accuracy at determining religious affiliation
• between 65% and 72% accuracy at determining relationship status
• between 65% and 72% accuracy at determining whether the user engaged in substance abuse
• 60% accuracy in determining if the user's parents were divorced
• "high" (but unstated, in the sources I read) accuracy at detecting such traits as extroversion, emotional stability, and openness
• a correlation between liking "Curly Fries" and high IQ (no, I didn't make that up)

Pretty stunning, eh?

 

The researchers made a point of checking to see if there were any "red flag" sorts of "likes;" but it turned out that in fact, there weren't, for the most part.  The software was quite good at determining sexual preference -- and yet, according to the study, less than 5% of homosexual users had "liked" such pages as "Gay Marriage."  (And, it's to be hoped, a good many progressive heterosexuals had "liked" that page as well.)  It was the aggregate of all of the person's "likes" that counted, not one or two specific ones.  It was the overall pattern that allowed the software to be so eerily accurate.

 

Of course, this opens up new avenues for data mining -- for good reasons and bad ones.  Expect targeted advertisement software to get a lot more sophisticated soon.  There could be more dire results, too.  "Similar predictions could be made from all manner of digital data, with this kind of secondary ‘inference’ made with remarkable accuracy -- statistically predicting sensitive information people might not want revealed," said Michal Kosinski, director of the study team.  "Given the variety of digital traces people leave behind, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for individuals to control...  I am a great fan and active user of new amazing technologies, including Facebook.  I appreciate automated book recommendations, or Facebook selecting the most relevant stories for my newsfeed.  However, I can imagine situations in which the same data and technology is used to predict political views or sexual orientation, posing threats to freedom or even life."

 

So, naturally, I had to go check out some of the things I'd "liked" on Facebook.  And no, unfortunately, "Curly Fries" wasn't one of them.  Here are a few of mine:

 

Music:

• Beck
• J. S. Bach
• Fun
• Angélique Kidjo
• Fiona Apple (okay, I have pretty eclectic musical tastes)

Books:

• Foucault's Pendulum
• Richard Dawkins
• Terry Pratchett
• Lord of the Rings
• Watership Down

Movies:

• The Usual Suspects
• Vanilla Sky
• The Matrix
• Ruthless People
• O Brother, Where Art Thou?
• I "Heart" Huckabee's
• Dogma
• Memento
• Scotland, PA

Television:

• The X Files
• Arrested Development
• Seinfeld
• Northern Exposure

Activities:

• Scuba Diving
• Wine Tasting
• Travel
• Writing
• Music Performance

Other:

• Kolibri Birdwatching Tours
• This American Life
• George Rodrigue (an artist I really like)
• Cthulhu
• The Tattoo Page
• Americans Against Protestors at Military Funerals

So, okay.  I'm not seeing a pattern here.  I guess that's not surprising, really.  This software is taking metrics on the entire sample, and coming up with a best guess -- however good the human brain is at ascertaining patterns, that kind of subtlety really requires a computer.  So other than a few obvious ones (anyone who makes a point of "liking" Richard Dawkins is pretty certain to be an atheist), it's no wonder that I don't see anything particularly pattern-like in my group of "likes."

 

Also, of course, the problem may just be that I don't "like" "Curly Fries."

Adiós, Hugo

Well, Hugo Chávez is dead and buried.  This fact thrills the hell out of some people, who hated his bombastic style and anti-American rhetoric, and disappoints others, who saw Chávez in the David role against the Goliath of "American imperialism."

Whichever version you go for, I don't think that anyone can argue with the fact that he was an odd, odd man.  He would periodically go on long, rambling diatribes about... stuff.  Sometimes it was hard to tell what, exactly, he was talking about, such as the time he claimed that life on Mars was destroyed by "imperialist capitalism."  Then there was the time he mentioned "human beings who have human shape but are not" -- giving rise to speculations that he was talking about the Reptilians.  (Of course, many of these same people who speculate that Chávez had inside information about Reptilians also believe that Lady Gaga is a Reptilian, so perhaps it behooves us to take this with a grain of salt.)

Be that as it may, I think we can all agree that Chávez was quite a peculiar character.

So it should come as no surprise that we now have claims that (1) he was killed by the Illuminati, and (2) that aliens came to his funeral.

Yup.  Poor Chávez didn't die of ordinary liver cancer; he died of "weaponized cancer," and was killed by "by a special Satellite Weapon designed to deliver a wave of Radio Active [sic] Signal to the Body which delievers [sic] Tumors to the Body."  (Source)  Chávez was a hero, the author says, who was taken out because he "knew too much" and because he was standing up against the "New World Order."

What exactly Chávez "knew" is open to question.  He certainly seemed to have limited knowledge about Mars, for example.  As far as his standing up against the "New World Order," whatever the hell that actually is, it seems like mostly who he stood up to was George W. Bush (whom he referred to variously as a "birdie," a "donkey," and "the devil").  And, honestly, I can't fault him for that.  I'm not a particularly political person, but I have to admit to having questioned GWB's morals, ethics, and IQ on numerous occasions myself.

Other than that, Chávez seems to have been a bit of a rambling nutjob, but certainly not as bad as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong Un in the Dangerous Wacko Department.  If the Illuminati are beaming tumors into world leaders, Chávez seems like an odd place to start.

But of course, we have additional corroboration of his importance in the Grand Scheme of Things from the fact that the aliens thought him worthy enough to attend his funeral.  Well, to be fair, they didn't actually walk in, enormous black eyes brimming over with tears, blowing their, um, nostril-holes on space hankies.  But they did send a spaceship to salute Chávez as he bid farewell to this planet:

What?  You don't find that convincing?  Just because we need a great big arrow even to see where the spaceship is in the photograph?  Just because it could be damn near anything, from a fleck of dust on the camera lens to a distant pigeon?  Just because if there really had been a spaceship, hovering over a heavily populated part of Caracas in broad daylight, someone would have seen it and gotten a better shot of it?

So, okay, maybe not.  But you have to admit that if anyone deserved having aliens pay their respects, it was Chávez.  Even if he wasn't right about life on Mars being wiped out by capitalism, and he wasn't done in by Death Rays From Space, he still was strange enough that his passing deserved some kind of spectacular gesture.  Especially given that at the time, Lady Gaga was in a Top Secret Meeting with the other scaly-skinned non-human Reptilians (I hear they include Hillary Clinton, John Boehner, and Keith Richards, the last-mentioned of which I can hardly argue with), and so she couldn't make it down to say goodbye.

So, anyway, farewell, Hugo.  I may not have liked your politics much, but I have to admit that you were always impressive in the inadvertent humor department.  And even if you died of a perfectly ordinary disease, and the aliens actually didn't show up for your funeral, you still were a colorful, memorable man, and in this strange and chaotic world, maybe that's the best you can hope for.

The shield of intolerance

It's time people stop getting a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card for acting like assholes as long as they say, "I'm doing this because of my religion."

I say this because of two bills that have come up nearly simultaneously -- hardly a coincidence -- in Kentucky and Tennessee.  The Kentucky bill, House Bill 279, allows "sincerely held religious beliefs" to trump anti-discrimination laws.  In Tennessee, Senate Bill 514 allows graduate students in social work, counseling, or psychology to refuse to serve individuals as part of their practicum if to do so runs counter to their "deeply held religious beliefs."  And even though neither bill says so in so many words, no one is in the least doubt about which group these bills are targeting -- the same group that has been the target of religious-based discrimination for as long as I can remember.  (Add that to the "Don't Say Gay" bill in Tennessee, still on the books, that prohibits teachers and other school staff from discussing homosexuality in public schools -- and which, in one interpretation, would allow school staff to "out" LGBT students to their parents against their wills.)

At what point do rational individuals have to simply stand up and say "enough?"  No, you can no longer hide behind the shield of your religion in order to justify your intolerance, narrow-mindedness, hatred, ignorance, and bigotry.  No, you can not simply choose to ignore overwhelming evidence from scientific research that homosexuality is an innate characteristic, and that calling it a "lifestyle choice" is about as sensible as using that term to describe my blond hair and blue eyes.  No, you can no longer use your leverage as a Religious Person to ramrod your beliefs into law in a country where church and state are supposed to be separate.

Yes, I know all religious people aren't like that.  But too many of the ones who aren't are content to let the ones who are speak for the whole.  And it's not just Christianity; Religion as a whole, capital "R," has a hell of a lot to answer for.  If we're looking to point fingers, we can't forget Islam, whose apologists keep calling it "a religion of peace," but whose most ardent practitioners burn down the houses of people with different beliefs because they're "blasphemers."  Whose scholars sent a professor of Islamic Studies to a talk at University College - London -- and the professor refused to speak unless the audience was segregated by gender.  Whose government leaders have condoned the flogging of a 15-year-old girl with a hundred lashes because she had premarital sex -- when she was actually raped repeatedly by her stepfather.

I wonder how much more it will take.  What further atrocities will have to happen before a majority of the people in this world have had enough?  I mean, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to see what the fanatic fringe of religion is capable of.  These are the folks who created a reign of terror in northern Mali, an atrocity that we are only now beginning to understand.  They are the ones who killed tens of thousands of "heretics" -- many of them after horrific torture -- during the European Middle Ages.  They are the ones who destroyed the heritage of whole cultures in the name of sanctity -- the Bamiyan Buddhas, the quipus of the Inca, the priceless scrolls and books in the Library of Alexandria.

They are the ones who flew fully-loaded jet airplanes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

I wish that the kind, rational, sensible, and compassionate people on the Earth -- whom I fervently, desperately believe are the majority -- would stand up and say to these lunatics, "You had your shot at ruling the world.  The time when religion drove the rule of law is over -- and, by the way, it is no coincidence that it was called 'the Dark Ages.'"  I wish they would say, "You are free to worship whomever you please, and engage in whatever rituals you choose -- in your churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples.  But you cannot any longer take those institutions and try to remold nations in their image.  You cannot any longer use your religious ideology to justify making an entire segment of society walk in fear."

And if they can't say that, I wish that enough of them would simply say, "You don't speak for me."

But I am afraid that day is not today.  For now, the bigots are still in ascendancy.  39 states in the United States, for example, specifically prohibit same-sex marriage -- thirty in their constitutions, and nine by statute.  All of these laws are religiously motivated, even if it's cast otherwise -- as if the rights of heterosexual married couples are somehow threatened by granting gays and lesbians the right to marry.

As if the rights of Saudi Arabian men are threatened by allowing women to vote.  As if the rights of Muslims are threatened by allowing people of other beliefs -- or no beliefs at all -- to live in peace.  As if the rights of heterosexual teens are threatened by even hearing the word "gay" mentioned in school.

To sum up: how dare you act as if your way of life is ever threatened by offering the same rights you have enjoyed your entire damned life to someone else.

You put the water in the water, and drink it all up...

Let me just say, right up front, that I love my students.

They never fail to give me some optimism for humanity's future.  It's true that they sometimes come pre-installed with silly ideas; but I find that the vast majority of them are curious, interested in the world around them, and enjoy being challenged.  Given the opportunity to learn some of the skills of critical thinking, they rise, and often exceed, the target.

One student on the hope-for-the-future list is a young man I just met this year who has already supplied me with a number of topics for this blog, putting him in the running for the winner of the Junior Skeptophile Award for 2013.  His latest was one that I actually thought was satire for a while -- Poe's Law once again biting us in the ass.  But sadly, no, this one is real, which will shock you when you find out what it is.

Homeopathic water.

I'm just going to give you a moment to ponder that one, okay?

Are you thinking, "Wait.  That can't mean what it seems to mean."  But yes, it does.  These people are taking water... and then diluting it a bunch of times, with water.  And of course, being that this is homeopathy we're talking about, the more you dilute the water with water, the stronger the water gets.  This water is diluted to "30c" -- which is homeopathic parlance for one part water in 10 to the 30th power parts, um, water.

That's some strong water, friends.  As a coworker of mine commented, "I'll bet it's really good at curing dehydration."

(Look, I'm not claiming this isn't ridiculous.  Don't yell at me.)

[image courtesy of photographer Derek Jensen and the Wikimedia Commons]

Anyway, here's the catch: the water they're diluting is "new water," i.e., just formed from hydrogen and oxygen gas.  You dilute the new water with old water, and so on and so forth.  There's a whole page devoted to the "proving" of this "remedy."  Now, I always want to make sure that I'm being accurate myself, so just to be sure that I understood it, I looked up "proving" on the "Homeopathic Terms" page of HealingWithHomeopathy.net, and I found the following definition:

The method used by homeopathic researchers to define the symptom profile of a particular substance. Most provings were done and recorded in the late 1800's, although in the last ten years many homeopathic researchers have begun proving new substances. Provings are a very specific type of research and usually follow a standard protocol.

Which, as a definition, kind of sucks.  It's as if you defined "physics" as "a body of practice engaged in by physicists, mostly done since the 17th century, following a specific set of rules and standard protocols.  That's all you need to know."

Well, I wanted more than that, so I went to the wonderful site The Skeptic's Dictionary, and found on their page for homeopathy the following:

Hahnemann [the founder of homeopathy] experimented on himself with various drugs over several years and concluded that "a doctor should use only those remedies which would have the power to create, in a healthy body, symptoms similar to those that might be seen in the sick person being treated" (Williams, Guy R. The Age of Miracles: Medicine and Surgery in the Nineteenth Century (Academy Chicago Publishers 1981).)... (He) called this method of finding what symptoms a drug caused in a healthy person a "proving."

So, what they did, with the water diluted in water, is to give it to healthy people, and see what symptoms they developed.  And man, did these people develop symptoms!   Here are a few of over a hundred results, copied right from the "Materia Medica" page on "Aqua Nova" (which is what they call their water diluted in water):

I have felt invisible over the last few days, and with one particular person, it was as though I hadn't existed as she hadn't thought of me. People didn't register my presence.

Feel very light headed as though the top of my head, from the eyes upward, has dissolved and I am merging into the atmosphere.

Husband says I am more erotic and relaxed sexually. I feel more relaxed and less sensitive, physically and emotionally.

Can't stop drawing spirals while taking notes. I concentrate better if I draw those spirals.

I had this strange feeling of being a bird with a large beak. My nose felt as if it coming outward and down to meet my chin, which was also coming outward and up. My face felt contorted. My tongue was being squeezed into a very small space.

Twitch in left eye, underneath, lasts about 2 hours.

The end of my nose is in spasm, intermittently through out the day.

Flatulence: lots.

All I can say is:  if any of my readers participated in this study, I don't want to know about it.  And please don't come for a visit.  It might seem harsh, but I don't really want to hang out with invisible large-beaked birds who are experiencing twitching eyes, nose spasms, and massive farts, however "erotic and relaxed" they're feeling.

So.  I guess now we know what water diluted with water is useful for.  And in case you're wondering what other treatments are out there, there's a page called "Provings" linked on their website (link provided above) that tells you about other "remedies" these folks have worked on.  These include "30c" dilutions of:

• heroin
• blood from an AIDS patient
• antimatter
• basaltic lava
• cockroaches
• blood and feathers from a Peregrine Falcon
• slate
• LSD
• a latex condom
• herring
• a road-killed badger

And no, I don't think they're joking.

So, anyway, I think we can all agree that my student has found quite a treasure-trove of facepalming material, here.  But to return to the hopeful note of my opening paragraphs, keep in mind that these young people who, over and over, demonstrate to me that they are capable of high-level critical thinking -- those are our future.  With minds like this leaping forward into adulthood, I think we have every reason to be optimistic.  Wouldn't it be nice if one day, I can retire from this blog, because I've run out of topics, and this sort of superstitious hocus-pocus is a thing of the past?

I, for one, wouldn't mind that as an outcome, at all.

Weekend wrap-up

It's been a busy week,  here at Worldwide Wacko Watch.  I and my investigative team (made up of my two highly-trained dogs, Doolin and Grendel) have dug up some wonderful stories that will hopefully not make you lose complete faith in the intelligence of the human race.

First, from Indonesia, we have word that there is a law being drafted that will make black magic illegal.  Not only will casting spells and harming someone be punishable by jail time, even claiming to be able to do so will be considered a criminal offense.  Khatibul Umam Wiranu, an MP from the Democrat Party, believes that these measures are necessary to protect the populace from evil magicians.  But, he cautions, any charges of witchcraft filed should be "based on fact finding, not [just] on someone's statement."

Well, that should at least make it less likely anyone's going to be arrested.

Other proposed changes to the penal code include increasing jail time for such crimes as having sex with someone you're not married to.

The best part?  Proponents of the new laws are calling this a push to "modernize" Indonesia's out-of-date criminal code, which was last revised in 1918.  Because worrying about who's getting laid by whom, and claiming that the creepy-looking old lady down the street is a witch, is so 21st century.


Go a few hundred miles north into China, and we find our second story, which is a "beauty treatment" called "huǒ liáo" that involves setting your face on fire.  [Source]

I thought that mooshing charcoal paste and nightingale poop extract on your skin was the dumbest beauty treatment I'd ever heard, but this one takes the prize.  Huǒ liáo consists of soaking a towel in alcohol and a "secret elixir," and the practitioner putting it on your face or other "problem area" and then setting it ablaze.  The practitioner is supposed to quickly smother the fire with another towel.  Don't believe me?  Here's a picture of someone having the treatment:

Nope, I see nothing at all that could possibly go wrong with that.

When asked about the treatment, a doctor who specializes in "natural cures," Dr. Jacob Teitelbaum, said, "While alcohol will help carry whatever is in the elixir into the body, it's not really necessary to light it on fire.  However, one explanation is that extreme heat triggers an adrenaline response which can shift your body's chemistry, improving some symptoms like indigestion and slow metabolism."

You know, if I want an adrenaline rush, I'll just go ziplining or ride a roller coaster.  Anyone who needs to set his/her face on fire in order to get an "adrenaline response" has other problems besides dull skin.


Next, we have a story in from Spain that someone has discovered a carving in some stonework in a cathedral that dates from the 12th century that depicts...

... an astronaut.

The carving, which apparently shows a guy in an Apollo-program-style space suit, is on the Cathedral of Salamanca.  Want to take a look?  Here you go:

 

 Of course, this has given multiple orgasms to the whole "ancient astronauts" crew, the ones who think that Chariots of the Gods is Holy Writ, who think the pyramids were built by aliens, and so on.  The only problem is, the cathedral was renovated in 1992, and this stonework was clearly added then by an artist with a sense of humor.  In fact, Snopes.com has a page on this claim, and they even found an article in a Portuguese newspaper that described the figure:

The renovation of the Cathedral of Salamanca in 1992 integrated modern and contemporary motifs, including a carved figure of an astronaut.  The use of this motif was in the tradition of cathedral builders and restorers including contemporary motifs among older ones as a way of signing their works.  The person responsible for the restoration, Jeronimo Garcia, chose an astronaut as the symbol of the twentieth century.

Well, that sounds pretty unequivocal, doesn't it?  Unfortunately, this hasn't convinced anyone except the people who were already skeptical, and all it's done is hooked up the Ancient Astronauts crew with the Conspiracy Theories crew, and now we have claims that the Spanish (and/or Portuguese) governments are covering up the evidence of ancient alien invasion, for god alone knows what reason.


In any case, this brings us to our last story, which is about a petition that is currently out there to save planet Earth from an extraterrestrial attack.  How, exactly, signing a petition is going to help, I don't know.  Maybe when the aliens get here, and are on the verge of blowing us to smithereens with their laser cannons, we can shout, "No!  You can't do that!  WE HAVE A PETITION!"  Maybe the idea is that if enough people sign it, governments will for god's sake do something, such as to deploy a protective shield around the Earth in the fashion of the historical documentary Men in Black III.  I dunno.

In any case, the petition has currently garnered a whole fourteen signatures.  They're shooting for 100,000.  You can sign if you want to.  Me, I probably won't.  My general feeling is that any species that modernizes laws by outlawing witchcraft and premarital sex, and considers setting your face on fire a beauty treatment, deserves everything it gets.

Irreconcilable differences

The optimistic amongst us talk about a reconciliation between religion and science.  "You can believe in a higher power, and still accept science as valid," they say.  "There's no reason why religion and science have to be in opposition."  No less a thinker than evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould felt that the "two ways of knowing" could peacefully coexist, because they are designed to study different realms.  In his essay "Non-Overlapping Magisteria," he says:

The position that I have just outlined by personal stories and general statements represents the standard attitude of all major Western religions (and of Western science) today. (I cannot, through ignorance, speak of Eastern religions, although I suspect that the same position would prevail in most cases.) The lack of conflict between science and religion arises from a lack of overlap between their respective domains of professional expertise—science in the empirical constitution of the universe, and religion in the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives. The attainment of wisdom in a full life requires extensive attention to both domains—for a great book tells us that the truth can make us free and that we will live in optimal harmony with our fellows when we learn to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly...  I believe, with all my heart, in a respectful, even loving concordat between our magisteria—the NOMA [non-overlapping magisteria] solution. NOMA represents a principled position on moral and intellectual grounds, not a mere diplomatic stance.

Much as I would like to agree, I think Gould is wrong.   Religion and science are, at their bases, incompatible with each other.  For people that exclusively derive their ethics and morals from religion, and their understanding of nature from science, there may be no conflict; but this is not the situation for a great many people, including Christians who are biblical literalists (which includes most Baptists, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, various "Full Gospel" sects, and others, not to mention a significant minority of "mainstream Protestants" such as Methodists), fundamentalist Muslims, and orthodox Jews.  For them, the two "ways of knowing" do come into conflict, on a variety of grounds (natural and ethical), and however Gould might hope for a concordat between them, it is impossible.  Science and religion get at the truth in opposite ways, and if they are in conflict with each other, you have to choose one or the other.  There is no possible way to reconcile them.

Let me illustrate with a story that I read recently on Hemant Mehta's wonderful blog The Friendly Atheist.  In his post called "After Teacher Preaches in the Classroom, Superintendent Reveals Himself to be a Creationist," Mehta describes the controversy around Wynnewood (Oklahoma) Middle School social studies teacher Betty Carter, who taught her students that the bible was the sole source of proper morality, that the U. S. Constitution derives directly from the bible, and that evolution was false and evil.  She also had numerous posters with biblical verses in her classroom.  Clear case of violation of separation of church and state, right?  Well, when the Freedom From Religion Foundation brought the situation to the attention of the district superintendent, Raymond Cole, he responded with an email that said the situation had been "taken care of," but ended thusly:

A couple of questions I would ask you is;
If you believe in evolution, why did we stop evolving? I mean, people are generally larger today than 2000 years or millions of years ago, but we haven’t lost a toe or little finger, etc.
What happens when you die, if you”re wrong? If I’m wrong, when I die I just die, but if you’re wrong, when you die….
I have a degree in science and I’ll admit some things were very confusing, or hard to understand, but in the end my faith in God forms my belief. I have seen God work in my life and I truly feel his presence. There have been many times in my life where I have fallen short but I know in my heart that God loves me and forgives my short comings, or sins.
I dont want to jump to any conclusions, perhaps you and many of your group are Christians and are just trying to keep Church and State separate. I would submit that the single greatest reason for the violence in our schools today is this so called separation, and that the further we separate God from our schools the nearer we bring violence and evil.

Well, the FFRF weren't going to take that lying down, and their spokesperson, Andrew Seidel, responded with a blistering rebuke that took Cole and Carter to task for acting in an unconstitutional fashion and for discriminating against the children who were there, in Carter's captive audience, and who didn't believe the nonsense she was spouting.  Cole, probably sensing a losing battle should the issue go to court, backed down, and sent out a blanket email to all staff instructing them not to make religious statements in the classroom.

Now, so far, we simply have yet another in the long line of people trying to sneak religion into public schools; what of it?  I think this illustrates the impossibility of reconciling a naturalistic/scientific way of knowing with a religious one.  Because, given Cole's and Carter's belief in a religious worldview, how did you expect them to act?

Here's what I mean.  Suppose you really, honestly, and sincerely believed that there was one source of Truth out there; and the way the universe was set up, if you don't believe that Truth, you are going to be doomed to an eternity of horrible torture.  Furthermore, there is an evil agency that is capable of acting through humans, many of whom do not realize that they are not acting under their own power -- that this evil agency is using them as unwitting pawns.  So wherever the dictates of this Truth conflict with any other understanding, however it is derived, the Truth is going to win; the risk of making a mistake, of being fooled, is just too high.

Now, let's say that you were a teacher or school administrator.  You presumably got into the field because you care deeply about children.  And because of your beliefs, you see before you, every day, dozens of kids who are in danger of falling into the trap of disbelief.  You look at their innocent faces, and picture them being subjected to torment, not just for a little while, but forever.  What would you do?  Wouldn't you do anything in your power to try to prevent this from happening?

And that said, do you really believe that the victory scored by the FFRF will be any more than a temporary advance?  If I were a betting man, I'd bet a significant amount of money that within a couple of months, Carter will be back at it -- perhaps in a more subtle way, but still pushing her beliefs on her students.  Given how she sees the world, it really is the only moral choice open to her.

This sort of thing is why there never will be a reconciliation between religion and science.  It's why mountains of proof will never sway the True Believer.  Religion teaches that you arrive at knowledge through faith; science that you arrive at knowledge through evidence and logic.  If they give different answers, you are forced to decide between them.  It's also why once you've bought that the theistic worldview is literally true, that trumps everything; since evidence is no longer the touchstone, anything contrary to what your faith tells you is immediately suspect.  So Gould was correct -- but only for those religious individuals (I would suspect that they are the minority) who derive nothing from their religion but their ethics and morals, and who let "science be science."  For the vast numbers of humans who see religion as the foundation of their understanding of the entire universe, there is no middle road.  Science and religion are fighting for the same territory.  It's either keep your feet planted where they are -- or abandon ship entirely. 

Two views of the world

A couple of days ago, I got an email from a reader that was long enough that I won't include the whole thing here, but the gist of it was that I was a narrow-minded stick-in-the-mud old git who was willfully blinding himself to the majesty of the universe because I was determined to hang on to my dusty, provincial scientific view of things.  Here's the end of the email:

You think you have everything explained, but here's the funny thing: you're wearing blinders and you don't even know it.  You see the little bit that's right in front of you, what's under your microscope, and you believe you know it all.  But you're missing out on most of what our awesome universe has to say.  I've read some of your writing and I have to say that I'm probably not going to convince you, but I felt moved to write to you and maybe my words will create a tiny crack in your armor - and through that crack, some light might leak through.

Well, first, I don't think I have everything explained.  You seem to be confusing me with religious people.  The scientific view is constantly expanding, constantly breaking new ground -- and constantly revising what we thought we understood, when new data is uncovered.  In other words: science both grows and self-corrects.  So, in one sense, you're right; there is a lot of stuff out there that science hasn't reached yet.  If there weren't, scientists would be out of a job.

But then, to cap it off, the writer ends with:

I am sending along some websites that may help you in your journey, as they helped me.  I would encourage you to read them open-minded, and not immediately dismiss what these Teachers have to say.  You may be surprised at what you learn.

And the first website was an article by none other than our friend, Skeptophilia frequent flyer...

... Diane Tessman.

Yes, Diane Tessman, the woman who believes that clouds aren't big old piles of water droplets -- they're camouflage deliberately created by UFOs.   The woman who believes that quantum entanglement explains love and the Higgs boson proves the existence of god.  The woman who believes that we should stop hydrofracking because it's pissing off a super-intelligent being called the "God Cloud," and instead just work on developing anti-gravity devices.  The woman who thinks she is being guided by an extraterrestrial agency called "Tibus."

So.  Yeah.  To be fair, I had to read the article the email writer recommended, and it's a doozie.  Called "Is There A Place Called Other-Earth Composed of Dark Matter and Dark Plasma?", this pinnacle of scientific research includes passages such as the following:

There are growing alarm bells and/or utter wonderment in theoretical physics that dark matter could have nurtured and evolved life, just as visible matter on Earth has done. No one knows at this point if beings of Other-Earth might be able to perceive us. Have they always been aware of us visible folk? Do they even have eyes? I am getting ahead of myself.

Actually, no, Ms. Tessman, no theoretical physicist I've ever heard of has any such "wonderment."  Dark matter has still yet to be detected, and whatever it is, it seems not to interact much with anything.  So an entire freakin' planet made of it, with living things and eyes and everything, is kind of beyond the scope of science at the moment.

She ends the article with a few questions:

Might parallel Dark Earth be the world of the after-life?

Do dark plasma beings form symbiotic, even spiritual relationships with counterpart humans? Might they guide the consciousness of a human after death? Might they be our elusive angels?

Are some Other-Earth beings evil or at least cold scientists who might abduct and capture a “dense being” for an hour?

Is this the source of Jinns? These illusive life-forms have always been thought to be from “ultra-terrestrial Earth.” Jinns and ghosts are thought to pass through walls, being less-dense molecularly than we are. UFOs blink out of existence; do they return simply to Other-Earth?

Is Other-Earth the source of space and atmospheric critters and bright colored orbs which sometimes have a translucent quality?

Do our dark cousins read our thought vibrations as they come closer, and thus become what we can understand? In other words, do they “arrive” as a ball of plasma and become an angel, ghost, or UFO for our perception and benefit? 

So, let me get this straight: you postulate a planet that no one has ever seen, made of a type of matter no one has yet detected, and you're using it to explain phenomena for which there is no scientific evidence?  That's like my claiming that there are no ghosts in my house because they were all chased off by a magic invisible unicorn, and expecting people not to come after me with horse tranquilizers.

Okay, maybe I'm being closed-minded, as the individual who emailed me said, but it seems to me that to swallow this stuff you'd have to be open-minded to the extent that your brains fell out.

So, anyway.  Sorry to say, Writer-of-the-Anonymous-Email, but you're right; I'm not shifting my stance.  Science remains our best way of knowing the universe -- maybe the only way.  My evidence: it works.  As far as Diane Tessman and others like her, what it seems to me is that they're just really good at making shit up, and peppering it here and there with science-y words to give it some legitimacy in the eyes of people who can't be bothered to learn the actual science.  Let me just end with a recommendation to any of you who are swayed by such fuzzy, non-scientific views of the world, who think that these views are somehow grander and more beautiful than what science has to offer; do yourself a favor, and sign up for a college-level class in real science.  Find out how dazzling, how awe-inspiring, the world actually is.  Then, and only then, compare the two views, and see which is more appealing -- to invent pleasant-sounding falsehoods and convince yourself that they are true, or to learn the rules by which the universe actually operates.  I'll just end with a quote from Sagan: