Come celebrate the upcoming Apocalypse with us this Saturday at Three Birds Tavern. And, in the unlikely event that we are still corporeal here on this material plane come 6:01, either because the Rapture did not in fact occur, or because we have been passed over and are now doomed to dwell in a blazing nightmare hellscape, we will at least be able to console ourselves with a few more drinks!

PZ Myers delivers a very entertaining talk at the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne in 2010:

From Pharyngula.

Ray Comfort being interviewed on Atheist Experience on local public access television in Austin, TX:

Un-fucking-believable. (How do you manage to sound like a blithering idiot within a minute-and-a-half of being introduced? Especially when 45 seconds of that time is eaten up by host introductions.) I watched about 25 minutes before my head exploded.

There’s a lot of nutcases out there.

OK, now I’ve officially heard everything. I’ve changed my mind–this guy is f-ing hilarious! I think he’s pulling a Steven Colbert-style satirical swindle on all of us.

From Pharyngula.

The Pioneer Anomaly is a long-standing mystery where the solar-system-escaping Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft have been experiencing a tiny, unexplained sunward acceleration over the course of their journey. That is, the spacecraft have been coasting for 40 years, and should only be experiencing gravitational slowdown from the sun (plus other known small accelerations, like radiation pressure).

However, they have been showing a slight, unaccountable deceleration. And by slight, I mean slight: 10^-9 m/s², or one hundred millionth of a g. Perhaps the most impressive thing in the entire business is that such a small acceleration can be accurately measured! (Although it does add up to a shortage in distance travelled of about 500 km per year, but that is for spacecraft 15 billion km away!)

A bevy of theories have been offered to try to explain the existence of this anomaly, the most creative of which is probably Modified Newtonian Dynamics, or MOND, which adds a fudge factor to Newton’s law of gravity that would account for this (and also get rid of the need for Dark Matter).

However, several Portuguese researchers now claim to have explained the anomaly in a much simpler way: By doing a better job of accounting for all of the heat radiating off of the spacecraft. We’ll have to wait for JPL to confirm the analysis, but it sure seems more likely than needing to modify the laws of physics – go Occam’s razor!

Here’s the original research article. From Slashdot.

A beautiful (if disturbing) set of videos illustrating the Milgram experiments. Particularly interesting was the complete lack of empathy visible in the 19-year-old’s face (though many others followed just as far in the experiments) as she continues to deliver increasingly large shocks to the victim.

Enlightening quote: “I realized when you went silent that you were either dead or you weren’t actually plugged into it any more.”

An insight into how much more machinelike we are than our sense of freewill would have us believe. From here.

From the BBC Four program The Joy of Stats*, an excellent, Tuftesque demonstration of the power of visual design combined with the presentation of statistics.

I as much as anybody (more than most, probably) am often distressed and cynical about a world that feels like it’s spinning out of control. It’s nice to see a clear statistical demonstration that things are, in fact, getting vastly better for many millions of people.

*Unfortunately, apparently not (easily) available in the US.

Were you the bored kid in math class who doodled rather than paying attention? (I was — I remember discovering the “crazy checkerboards” and star patterns myself, and still draw Sierpinski gaskets when I need to think-doodle.) Vi Hart’s Mathematical Doodling series is an impressive display of clear and simple explanations of topology, graph theory, etc. that arise from sketching and simple rule-following.

Her website is full of tons of other cool mathematical distractions.

From BoingBoing.

A nice summary of the research into whether there are any health risks posed by cell phone usage.

tl;dr: There is no conceivable physical mechanism by which cell phones could cause harmful effects. Nor is the amount of energy emitted by them anywhere near enough to be dangerous. Finally, if they were at all dangerous, it would be obvious from the fact that three billion people are now constantly using them, and brain cancer levels somewhere in the world would be increasing.

Also touches on the new airport security scanners in Part 5. Part 1 below:

Found from Bad Astronomy.

Is this modern-day Tennessee, or 1925? Hard to tell. From Panda’s Thumb:

Unable to deny the word of god to his students or himself, Joe Wilkey walks a thin line between science and religion…

No he doesn’t; he spews unadulterated horseshit. Perhaps he should watch some Eugenie Scott to bring himself up to speed.

I was very surprised to see this article on Slashdot claiming that recent numerical analysis of the collected writings of Plato “will transform the early history of Western thought, and especially the histories of ancient science, mathematics, music, and philosophy” (at least their claims aren’t grandiose) — maybe I’m naïve, but I thought Slashdot could generally be trusted to vet their submissions more thoroughly than this. Apparently they aren’t the only ones not bothering to verify their subject before reporting — it was also covered today by the Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Register, Mumbai’s Daily News and Analysis, as well as UPI, Geekosystem, and ScienceDaily.

First a primer on the numerological Bible Code: The premise is that, if you arrange the original Hebrew letters of the Bible in a rectangular array, then every 10th letter, or every 37th letter, or every 15th letter on alternating lines (take your pick) spells out something interesting. Basically, it’s an example of religious literary pareidolia of a pattern-seeking brain: If given enough essentially random noise, any desired pattern (or, at least, some interesting pattern) can be pulled out of it with a sufficient amount of work. And the Bible, when rendered into ancient Hebrew (which doesn’t contain vowels, word breaks, or punctuation) and when arranged in a rectangular grid and read at any arbitrary letter spacing and direction, yields any predictions one wishes to make — the end of the world, the rise of Hitler, the assassination of Kennedy; whatever! Good Math, Bad Math has excellent take-downs of the practice here, here, here, and here, as well as numerous other places.

The Slashdot piece — and the original journal article — is claiming something similar: That Plato, the “Einstein of Greece’s Golden Age” whose “work founded Western culture and science” left a bunch of Da Vinci Code-esque secret messages that “are set to revolutionise the history of the origins of Western thought.” I’m sorry, but when a university press release makes claims like that about its own researchers, I’ve got to call bullshit. Further:

The hidden codes show that Plato anticipated the Scientific Revolution 2,000 years before Isaac Newton, discovering its most important idea – the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. The decoded messages also open up a surprising way to unite science and religion. The awe and beauty we feel in nature, Plato says, shows that it is divine; discovering the scientific order of nature is getting closer to God. This could transform today’s culture wars between science and religion.

Well, shit! As long as we’re not taking our research too seriously! “It also cures cancer, gets your whites whiter, and freshens your breath!” (OK, I made that last bit up.) But it does also claim that these ground-breaking results were published in “in [a] leading US journal.” Mm-hmm. Let’s just check into that, shall we?

This “study” was “published” in the “journal” Apeiron, which I’ve never heard of, but which is described by Wikipedia as covering “studies in infinite nature” [emphasis in original, and I have no idea what that means], publishing “theoretical and experimental work in a wide variety of fields within physics,” and being “especially noted for publishing alternative theories of cosmology, relativity and quantum mechanics.” Oh shit — alarm bells sounding. Furthermore:

Apeiron is applying a peer review system involving internationally established researchers, most of whom, however, cannot be regarded as mainstream. Apeiron has become a forum for “dissident” researchers and opinions not accepted by the conventional system.

Again, emphasis in the original. I did not thoroughly go through the history of the article, but there were some interesting tidbits in there (for instance, the final clause of that last-quoted paragraph was originally “mostly on the plea of speculation and fringe science.”) Also, this “leading US journal” (seriously, I know the UK has a low opinion of us, but come on!) doesn’t appear on the first page of a Google search for “Apeiron,” and it’s webpage looks like it was designed by a third-grader on GeoCities in 1996. I mean seriously, what credible journal quotes Anaximander of Miletus on its front page? Read: “I couldn’t get published anywhere reputable.” [Note: I've since found out that this article may be published in UT Austin's Philosophy Department journal also titled Apeiron, though I haven't been able to confirm it, as I can't find its articles online.]

Well, OK, let’s not be too hasty in judgement — what does the article itself have to say? Well, first of all, it’s practically impenetrable postmodernist deconstructionist bullshit. Next, it frequently tries to associate its Platonic numerology to Pythagoreanism and the Golden Mean — red flag alert! Next, the article is pretty much nothing but numerological BS about dividing various dialogues into 12ths and deriving some significance from that. It makes lots of mention of the fact that many historical authors included mathematical relationships in their writings. And it’s true that, for instance, Dante’s Divine Comedy had three 33 canto books plus and introduction, to make 100 sections; that each book ended with the word “stars”; and that the work was filled with many other numerical gimmicks and symmetries (as well as hidden literary meanings that couldn’t be safely politically expressed at the time). And Homer, Vergil, Ovid, and Shakespeare used line length (an obvious thing for a poet to do) to “encode” meaning — though I think it would be more fair to say they used cultural shorthand to convey an obvious message to their readers, not that they were secretly trying to get messages out past religious or societal censors. However, how much information do you think could be conveyed if, say, you decided at the age of 25 to have an overarching plan that contained your ultimate meaning in all of your writings for the next 50 years. If, as this paper claims, it’s in vague “meanings’ of each 12th part of each of your works, the answer is: not a whole hell of a lot.

And that’s the most surprising thing about this paper: There are no results! I mean, not a damn one result that accounts for all these grandiose claims! The paper can basically be summed up as saying: 1) Many of Plato’s dialogues can be divided into 12 sections of equal numbers of lines. If you use the right scribal copy (the oldest manuscripts for many of Plato’s dialogues are from 895AD — but that’s OK: I’m sure nothing got corrupted in 1300 intervening years). And translation. And break points. 2) Some of these same-numbered sections in different dialogues have similar themes. 3) Greek music theory used a 12-note scale! 4) Also, Golden Ratio! 5) Therefore Plato was a secret Pythagorean encoding universal truths too powerful to be exposed to the Ancient world.

“This is the beginning of something big. It will take a generation to work out the implications.”

Yeah, good luck with that.