On doubt.

I am a scientist. I am unable to separate the doubting part of my scientist training from the rest of my daily life. Take this little anecdote:

When my son was about 9 months old, Mrs. Factician was playing with some little plastic animals on the coffee table with him. When she said, "Where is the giraffe?" he reached for the giraffe. We were astounded (he was 9 months old, mind you, and hadn't shown an indication that he knew which animal was which prior to this point). She put the animal back, and asked him again, "Where is the giraffe?". Again, he picked up the giraffe.

Mrs. Factician and I started to talk about this. She was of the opinion that he had now learned which animal was the giraffe.

I was a bit more skeptical (perhaps not a good thing for a father, to be skeptical of his son, but like I said, I am unable to turn off doubt when I go home from the lab).

So I tested him. I moved the animals around. "Where is the giraffe?". Again, he reached for the giraffe. Wow, 9 months and he's already demonstrated an ability to identify animals. I was absolutely floored. Every test so far had shown that he could identify the giraffe. But still, I had nagging doubt.

I moved the animals around again. "Ok, now where is the monkey?" He reached for the giraffe. He hadn't identified it with the sound "giraffe" at all. A few repeats of the experiment verified it. The giraffe was merely his favourite animal. It would be weeks still until he positively understood the word "giraffe".

A scientist's life is like this. Constant doubt. Constant testing. Constant experimentation with appropriate controls. Re-evaluating old data. Talking about experiments with other scientists.

The new movie "Expelled" will try to make the point that we have stopped testing evolution by natural selection, and have (as scientists) accepted it as some gospel truth. This is total and complete nonsense. We have continued to doubt it, to test it, and to run experiments with controls. But every test, for over 150 years, has come back confirming that evolution by natural selection is true. That's a boatload of data. That's an amazing amount of confirmation.

While it remains possible that there is another, better explanation, but data suggesting that has not been forthcoming. For now, evolution by natural selection is the best description of the data.

James Randi, audioskeptic

I'm an audio and videophile. We have a fantastic high definition TV set up with (slightly aged) stereo sound equipment. It's fantastic. I've got wires under the floor to reach all the speakers, so it doesn't look like a college dorm room. But I'm not ridiculous. Most of the cables for this system are pretty thick gauge, generic Radio Shack cables. Copper is an excellent conductor, and there is no detectable difference for a home audiophile in the conduction over short distances.

Ok, so take these cables, being marketed to audiophiles with more money than God (a.k.a. William Henry Gates III). For the low, low price of $7250, you can get a 12 foot cable that:

In extended listening sessions, I found the cables' greatest strength to be its PRAT. Simply put these are very danceable cables. Music playing through them results in the proverbial foot-tapping scene with the need or desire to get up and move. Great swing and pace—these cables smack that right on the nose big time.

Beg pardon, what??? Danceable cables? You, my friend, are certifiable. And as it happens, James Randi thinks so, too:

We see that the Pear Cable company is advertising a pair of 12-foot "Anjou" audio cables for $7,250; that's $302 a foot! And, as expected, "experts" were approached for their opinions on the performance of these wonders ... Well, we at the JREF are willing to be shown that these "no-compromise" cables perform better than, say, the equivalent Monster cables. While Pear rattles on about "capacitance," "inductance," "skin effect," "mechanical integrity" and "radio frequency interface," - all real qualities and concerns, and adored by the hi-fi nut-cases - we naively believe that a product should be judged by its actual performance, not by qualities that can only be perceived by attentive dogs or by hi-tech instrumentation. That said, we offer the JREF million-dollar prize to - for example - Dave Clark, Editor of the audio review publication Positive Feedback Online.

And I thought Monster Cables were crazy expensive... Step up, get yourself a million dollars (you'll need it if you want to buy those cables).

Hat tip, Gizmodo.

Michael Shermer on the Colbert Report

Despite the risk of becoming a Stephen Colbert fansite
I post below the interview below of Skeptic Magazine editor Michael Shermer:



Colbert is becoming the cool place to be for skeptics.

A skeptical fable.

The Wall. By PZ Myers.