A pungent mix of programming, philosophy, pedanticism, procrastination, perplexity, peripheral political polemic, and platters of preposterousness.
Shelley Powers: Well, perhaps that is the way of the world for HTML5, but thankfully it hasn’t been that way for any other web specification I use, including XHTML, CSS, RDF, SVG, and so on. Oh, we still may not be able to influence these specifications, but I’ve not seen any of these groups give so much power over the direction of the specifications to so few.
To the music of The Wheels on the Bus. I apologise in advance for my rather lacklustre lyrical skills. There’s a reason I’m training to be a philosopher and not a rapper or musician.
The atheists on the bus say “There’s no God, there’s no God, there’s no God”.
The atheists on the bus say “There’s no God, there’s no God, there’s no God, AN-Y-WHERE!”.
The agnostics on the bus say “We’re not sure, we’re not sure, we’re not sure”.
The agnostics on the bus say “We’re not sure, we’re not sure, we’re really not very sure at all”.
The humanists on the bus say “Good without god! Good without god! Good without god!”
The humanists on the bus say “Good without god! Good without god! Good without god!” all through the town.
Theos guys on the bus say “This is fun, this is fun, this is fun!”
Theos guys on the bus say “This is fun, this is fun, this is fun! It raises important questions!”
Stephen Green on the bus says “Waaaa waaa waaa!”
Stephen Green on the bus says “Waaaa waaa waaa!” incessantly.
The Christian bus driver says “I’m not fucking driving that, it interferes with my long-standing religious beliefs, which you have to respect or I’ll take you to the High Court in trumped-up discrimination proceedings for me not doing my job”.
(Hypersensitive religious types don’t like to rhyme.)
There is nothing I can possibly say about this headline: Rick Warren Cites Hitler Youth as Model For Christian Dedication.
Today, I’m at the Weird Science day in London. It’s sort of like a day-long Skeptic’s in the Pub. I’m with Martin Freedman who is furiously live blogging.
Richard Wiseman (blog) is up first, and is giving an excellent and enteraining talk about magic, and showing clips of his work in the media, has done some magic tricks, and also shows some of his psychological work including the debate over ganzfeld studies that started with Bern and Hoonorton (1994; PDF). Wiseman did a discussion on Point of Inquiry. Wiseman also discusses his move into YouTube which started with Colour Changing Card Trick which got over 2.8m views on Wiseman’s Quirkology channel. (He also comments on how much YouTube comments suck). The ‘floating cork’ video is very Penn and Tellerish.
Martin Freedman has his long and detailed post on Richard Wiseman’s talk.
Next up is Chris French from the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmith’s College, London. The APRU have looked at NDEs, alien abduction, sleep paralysis, ESP and many other ideas.
Chris’ talk started with a clip from Richard Dawkins’ Enemies of Reason documentary, where he is involved in testing dowsers (individual dowsing clip). Needless to say: dowsing fails, and the perception that dowsing works is due to ideomotor effect. But it’s important to study it: because opinion surveys say that many, many people believe in these weird and anomalous things. We should then study the psychology of weird and anomalous ideas.
Even more interesting was the psychological profiling of conspiracy theorising. “Trust, alienation and the evidence you base your ideas on” are the factors used to detect whether or not a person is likely to subscribe to conspiracy theories. French did work with Dr. Patrick Leman for a Channel 4 documentary called Conspiracies: Who Really Runs The World? (for a bit of a giggle, here’s a thread on the David Icke forum - one of the posters claims to have been interviewed for the show but they thought he was too crazy for broadcast). If you haven’t, be sure to read The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter.
A fact that stood out: one in ten Americans believe that they can speak to the Devil!
One of the things brought up by Richard Wiseman: Stairway to Heaven backmasking.
Stephen Law presented a response to what he calls the ‘fit’ theory (the idea that if the evidence fits the theory, it confirms the theory) and then used a reductio ad absurdum ‘alternative explanation’ - the Venusian dog theory. Most of the ideas are written up in this blog post and in this Google cached Darwin Day 2003 lecture (the new BHA site doesn’t seem to have it).
Red Lion Square, London, England
