Skeptic’s Circle #18
The 18th Skeptic Circle is now online over at Wolverine Tom’s place.
Archive for September, 2005
Banned Book Week
It’s banned book week. Go out and read a banned book today.
The American Library Association has published a list of 100 most frequently challenged books. Here are the ones I’ve read:
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
- A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
- The Witches by Roald Dahl
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Which ones have you read?
Metals, Diamonds and Hydrogen
Last night I went to the second in a series of eight Food for Thought lectures about Energy. This one was presented by Dr. Janusz Kozinski, a researcher at McGill who created the Energy & Environmental Research Laboratory.
Here are some things I learned:
- One way to explore Mars and come back again is to harvest energy from the surface of Mars. Energy is most abundant there in the form of aluminium and magnesium
- When water is heated to 374 degrees centigrade at a pressure of 218 atmospheres it becomes “supercritical”. Supercritical water is a good solvent. So good that reactors using supercritical water must be made from something tough, like diamonds or platinum. Supercritical water reactors can be used to break down organic compounds to produce hydrogen.
- A portable reactor now exists which can break down natural gas into hydrogen and carbon. This may be used in the near future residentially by feeding the hydrogen into a fuel cell to produce electricity. The carbon waste would have to be sold to make this cost-effective.
- Biomass such as willow, switchgrass or paper/pulp byproducts could be used to produce enough hydrogen to serve our energy needs without causing pollution. No efficient way has been found to do this yet.
- The large oil companies own most of the patents for hydrogen fuel cell technology.
Is Webster wrong?
A conversation about atheism over at Stupid Evil Bastard got me thinking about my own atheism. I went over to Websters to find out how they defined atheism. I was a little perplexed by their definition:
Main Entry: athe·ist
Pronunciation: ‘A-thE-ist
Function: noun
: one who believes that there is no deity
I’m not sure that is correct. I call myself an atheist because I do not believe in a deity. That does not necessarily mean I believe there is no deity. I do not believe in a deity because there is no evidence that a deity exists. For me to “believe” something, I need some evidence. Therefore I can’t believe there is no deity unless there is some evidence that there is no deity. As you can’t really produce evidence for the absence of something, there is no way to believe that something does not exist. You can only assume that something doesn’t exist unless evidence presents itself to tell you otherwise.
So my assertion is that the correct definition of atheism should be:
one who does not believe in a deity.
Did Merriam-Webster get it wrong?
Shirt/Shoes update
I got a stripy shirt! Horizontal stripes, blue and brown. Sadly it has crappy writing on the back, but I don’t have to look at that. I also got a pseudo-stripy pair of shoes. I’m happy.
Turf War!
There is gang warfare on the streets of Montreal today. The two rival gangs are patrolling the streets, even handing out propaganda to passers by. They have gang uniforms of course. One gang is wearing white t-shirts with blue writing, the other gang members are wearing white t-shirts with green writing.
The blue writing says “Jews for Jesus”.
The green writing says “Jews for Judaism”.
I hope none of them are dyslexic and colour blind.
As soon as I find out where the big rumble is happening I’ll let you know.
And I still haven’t found my stripy shirt. The one in the punk/goth/emo store had Billabong all over it. Ugh.
The Blogger’s Handbook
Here in Canada we are lucky enough to enjoy the freedom to express ourselves. I can write just about anything I want on my blog without fear of persecution or prosecution (yes, there are exceptions but we still rank in the top 10 most free countries in the world).
People in other countries are often not so fortunate. Reporters Without Borders have released the Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents, mainly aimed at those people living under repressive regimes, but it also looks useful for other bloggers. From their introduction:
Blogs get people excited. Or else they disturb and worry them. Some people distrust them. Others see them as the vanguard of a new information revolution. Because they allow and encourage ordinary people to speak up, they’re tremendous tools of freedom of expression.
Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure. Only they provide independent news, at the risk of displeasing the government and sometimes courting arrest.
Reporters Without Borders has produced this handbook to help them, with handy tips and technical advice on how to to remain anonymous and to get round censorship, by choosing the most suitable method for each situation. It also explains how to set up and make the most of a blog, to publicise it (getting it picked up efficiently by search-engines) and to establish its credibility through observing basic ethical and journalistic principles.
Sex on Campus!
McGill has just announced the opening of a ‘One-stop shop for sex talk‘, complete with cheap condoms and dental dams, to ‘make safe sex cool again’. Wasn’t it cool already? I think this kind of thing would be more useful in high schools than in universities, but it’s a step in the right direction.
The name ‘Shagalicious Shop’ sounds like something a forty year old thought up thinking teens would find it cool though. Apparently it is ‘designed to look like a 21st-century shag pad’. I have to go find out what a 21st century shag pad looks like now.
Are You Emo?
The music is ok, but the accompanying ethos is worthy of ridicule. (turn your speakers on).
Serious Education
The McGill community calendar is advertising the following lecture today:
Desperate housewives: Some notes towards a historical genealogy
3:30 PM | Rhodri Hayward, Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine
I’m intrigued.
Stripes
I’ve had an obsession with stripes lately. Specifically I want a stripy shirt and some stripy shoes.
I want stripes.
Yesterday we went clothes shopping and I almost found my stripy shirt, but they didn’t have my size. I got pants instead. They’re not stripy.
I need stripes.
A shop I see on my way to work has a stripy shirt in the window. I’m going in there this week to buy it. It’s a trendy teen skater goth punk kind of shop, but I don’t care, it has a stripy shirt.
The stripy shirt will be mine. Not so sure about the shoes.
Brit Invasion
I got my first taste of the music of Athlete this morning (on CBC of all places, that lockout seems to have improved their music selection). I was quite impressed, I should really try to keep more on top of the Brit music scene. So Britfolk, what else should I be listening to?
Nobody’s Fuel
Last night I went to Macdonald Campus for the first of eight “Food for Thought” lectures about energy and fuel. The lecture was delivered by Douglas Lightfoot, a retired Mechanical Engineer and a member of the Global Environmental and Climate Change Centre at McGill.
Here are some things I learned:
- Sometime between now and 2040 we will start using more oil than we are producing.
- Two fifths of all fossil fuel is used to generate electricity, one fifth is used for transportation.
- There is a direct relationship between income and energy usage.
- Energy conservation helps, but not much.
- Improving energy efficiency helps, but not much.
- Ethanol is no good (it costs 1 unit of fossil fuel to make one unit of high grade ethanol).
- Kyoto doesn’t really work (much).
- The world uses over 450 exajoules of energy per year and rising.
- Over 380 exajoules of that comes from fossil fuels
- 1 exajoule = 28 billion litres of gasoline.
- Renewable sources provide less than 40 exajoules/year.
- Owning an SUV is the equivalent of owning four dogs.
- There is no viable alternative to fossil fuels at this time, except maybe nuclear fission.
Those statements are mostly based on solid scientific data, but 3, 4, 5, 7 and 13 are partly opinion based.
Planes, Trains and GM Food
Skeptico has been posting recently on GM Food, his stance is a little more radical than mine but for the most part I’m in agreement with him. I decided to take a look at some of the common “complaints” about GM food and try to imagine the same arguments applied to manned flight:
It’s “playing god” or unnatural.
Man wasn’t supposed to fly! Those Wright Brothers are playing God by trying to give us wings!
The playing god argument has been used for so many things that it has become meaningless. It assumes the existence of a god and it ignores all the other times that we as a species have “played god”.
It’s wrong to mix genes from radically different organisms.
It’s wrong to be suspended in mid-air!
If you’re going to say that something is wrong, you really should give a reason. Just saying that something is wrong doesn’t make it so.
Religious and vegetarian groups would object to genes from some species.
Hot Air balloonists will object to these new-fangled winged chariots!
There will always be a group of people who object to something. If you object to planes, don’t fly in them. If you object to GM foods, don’t eat them (This brings up the labelling issue. Yes, I think labelling needs to be carefully handled).
Do we really know what we’re doing?
Do those Wright Brothers know what they’re doing? Someone could die in that contraption!
The Wright Brothers probably weren’t entirely sure what they were doing, that’s why they were experimenting. Unless we experiment, we won’t get any closer to knowing what we’re doing.
Have we evaluated the risks sufficiently?
People high in the air seems risky to me, they could all die if something goes wrong!
Well yes everything carries a risk. We can only hope that the risks have been evaluated effectively and that the worse-case scenarios have been considered.
Do we need genetically modified food?
Do we need aeroplanes? People managed for thousands of years without them.
We don’t need planes, but they sure are handy. We probably don’t need GM foods, but there’s a big chance it could solve a lot of problems, especially as our population grows and food resources become more scarce.
It is just going to provide luxuries for rich, and won’t feed the Third World.
Planes are just for rich people, the poor won’t be able to fly!
Commercial airlines, for the most part, service the rich. But look at all the other flight industries. Air ambulances, bush pilots, disaster relief, military backup, search and rescue. Flight has benefited the rich, the poor and the threatened. GM food can do the same.
Agriculture is already too technological. This will only make it worse.
Travelling is already too complicated, flying will just make it worse.
Surely only a Luddite would object to something purely because it is “too technological”. What does that even mean? Ever since agriculture began, tools have been developed to make it easier. Technology is not inherently evil, nor is it inherently good. It just is.
There are better ways to improve resistance and reduce chemicals on the land.
There are better ways to travel!
Better is very subjective isn’t it? Someone I work with prefers trains to planes, but I’d much rather get to where I’m going as fast as possible. Whether GM food is better or worse than any alternative is just an opinion unless there is hard evidence one way or the other.
Lost Losts
We missed the first showing of the spooky adventure show Lost, but we heard so many good things about it that we decided to watch the reruns.
Unfortunately ABC suck at showing reruns. They don’t seem to think it would upset viewers if they skipped about 8 out of the 24 episodes. They were obviously doing this to squeeze the reruns in before the new season starts, but showing two episodes instead of one every week would’ve solved that problem. Or maybe they were doing it so they would sell more of the DVDs… No, they wouldn’t do that, would they?
Luckily the Lost website has episode synopses, but they’re a poor substitute for the real thing.