Goodbye Neil Armstrong (1930-2012)

As has been reported, the first person to walk on the Moon, Neil Armstrong, has died at the age of 82 in Columbus, Ohio (and I wasn't there).

Obviously his best known contribution to the human experience was traveling to the nearest large astronomical body, and that landing will be historic forever. His friend and the second person on the Moon with Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, also has great remarks. President Obama also made a statement.

He obviously helped the sciences move forward, paving the way to more missions to the Moon and bringing back and leaving materials to better study the body and thus the rest of the solar system. Armstrong also did some teaching after his historic mission at the University of Cincinnati for about a decade.

When it comes to skepticism, he wasn't so involved in debunking the Moon landing hoax, (Buzz did a lot of that, including punching one guy in the face), but Armstrong did take part of an expedition to Cueva de los Tayos which showed Erich von Däniken was dishonest, thus also helping kill the ancient astronaut hypothesis.

He will obviously be missed, but his efforts and adventures will live on as long as humanity exists.

The History Channel and Ancient AstroNOTs!

Several years ago I was flabbergasted by the History channel when it produced a show with such obvious pseudo-history and pseudo-science being done by west coast amateur nobodies trying to prove a theory of Chinese visitations of the western US before Columbus arrived in the Caribbean. But little did I know it was so low down on the totem poll of garbage that they were going to use.

For some time now, History (that's their new name) has presented the Ancient Astronaut "hypothesis" as legitimate, even though the primary advocate of it in the 1960s and 1970s, Erich von Däniken, was shown to be a terrible researcher and a fraud.

But fortunately, one of the things that killed his credibility was a BBC/PBS documentary that showed how flawed his ideas were and how unresearched they were and how he used fabricated data/artifacts to support his contentions, and that documentary is on YouTube, though it is a rip from a VHS tape not in great shape. But it does have a bit of rarely seen clips of the late Carl Sagan.

Some of the scientific assessments of things have changed in the 30+ years since this video was made, such as how the Easter Island heads (moai) were moved, or the purpose of the Nazca lines, but still in the realm of what normal humans can do. And there are still things to study, but the alien hypothesis hasn't been useful in explaining any of these things. But archaeology does a far better job, even where it's incomplete.

There are mysteries to solve, so let's use the methods that work!

Todd Akin and the GOP: Science and Ethics Failures

There has been plenty of coverage of the extremely stupid and dehumanizing statements of Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri's 2nd district about how "legitimate rape[s]" don't cause pregnancies. I mean, fuck, I hate even having to write what he said.

Rape is about the worst thing you can do to a person, perhaps even worse than murder because of the shame and guilt and weakness is causes the victim, not to mention potentially seeing your rapist again. And then having to raise a child due to the most horrific thing that could happen to you against your will? And by against ones will, I mean not being allowed to terminate the pregnancy.

Because that is what this crap is about from Akin and his acolytes. They want to end abortion in all cases. No matter how you became pregnant, be it through a passionate night with a failed condom or assault with a weapon and forced into compromising positions; all wish to be banned.

And how unfortunate that that statement is NOT an exaggeration. There have been numerous states submitting and something passing laws to limit access to abortion (Arizona passing law to make life begin effectively before conception; Utah producing legislation to make even miscarriages potentially illegal and acts of manslaughter), including language that has no exceptions, and now it's going to go Prime Time. Various news outlets and commentators have discovered that at the Republican National Convention part of the party platform will be the effort to make all abortions illegal. No exceptions. No compromises. The Republican VP also sponsored a bill that make all fertilized eggs persons, which means it would ban stem cell research and prohibit in vitro fertilization (IVF). So even medical needs, from future treatments to people actually wanting children, are restricted by such a bill. That all means the anti-abortion stuff is right at the top of the GOP, not something in their fringes.

Which of course makes all the people in the GOP that poo-poo Akin for saying what he did ring perfectly hollow. And Akin himself claims he misspoke, but he still wants abortion to always be illegal. Which means he isn't sorry about what he thinks, but he is sorry about the packaging he used to market his vile filth.

Moreover, he is not somehow isolated from the grassroots of the conservative movement in the US. His ideas about rape and conception actually come from "research" done by various duchenozzels. The Week nicely recaps the history of this line of argument, going even into the Middle Ages; however, the most recent version of this "theory" came into politics in about the 1980s with James Leon Holmes and state Rep. Stephen Freind. And it is clear that there is no scientific basis for it; an estimate puts about 32,000 pregnancies in the US as due to rape.

But why even think something so awful and patently untrue? Because an excuse is required to keep a straight face when proposing a ban on all possible pregnancies. It's cognitive dissonance run wild! It also shows a contempt for women, since it means that if they are pregnant they must have wanted it. How different is that from the crass statement that drunk women in miniskirts are asking for sex (and potentially raped)? No, no, no. She must have wanted it to happen, and it's her fault for not controlling her vagina correctly (oops! I just caused my blog to be censored in Michigan). Yet, the premises are delusional, far worse than merely false, and clearly anti-woman, and thus anti-human.

What also belies the GOP saving face is that there are figures in the right wing who still support what Akin said, claiming he was right all along. Bryan Ficsher of American Family Association (AFA) and the radio program Focal Point on American Family Radio tweeted this:

Mike Huckabee is also helping Akin, saying how even people conceived by rape can become contributors to society and be great. As if anyone is saying a child born but conceived under un-ideal circumstances is less a member of the community. No, the problem is forcing a woman to carry a child after she was forced in into sex and having the worst experience on her life. It also destroys any sort of family planning, meaning the child is less likely to have a stable home. And it looks like Mike has never heard of the philosophical mental experiment of the violinist.

Another ass of the Religious Right, D. James. Kennedy, who is Akin's spiritual leader (no wonder he is dead to human compassion) also believes women invite rape; they had it coming because they wear clothing that's attractive. Everyone, get your women burkhas, and don't let them leave the house without a male escort. It's what they deserve for having breasts, you know.

And you can guess where all things shit is derived: preachin' from the Bible. And even though the book has rather little to say on abortion, it is religiosity that has done the most to prop up such anti-woman policies. It basically sacrifices the autonomy of the woman to religious dogma; it parallels all too well the sacrificing of Isaac by Abraham for his deity of choice (who just happened to be testing him). Put human compassion and well-being on the alter, for the fires create a perfume to the imagined sycophant.

What makes this worse is that the arguments promulgated by these nuts also infect the rest of secular society, including the atheist community. Do 20-week-old fetuses feel pain? There is not a consensus that favors it, mostly because the neural network of the body isn't properly developed until later; the nervous system isn't developed well enough until about week 27 to have some control of body functions, and studies seem to place the time to potentiality feel pain at about the seventh month (third trimester). How about a link between abortion and breast cancer or depression? Bullshit. And so on.

But if you are one to think that a fetus at any age is fully human and deserving of rights, that abortion is murder, and you wish to minimize deaths, then also consider this: the abortion rate in a country where abortion is legal is about the same or lower than a country where abortion is illegal (as determined by the World Health Organization). But worse, in the nations were abortion is illegal, it is much less safe, and that means women die in the process. That means no saved babies and more dead women. Abortion laws save none and kill others.

Now, this is not to deny that there are no circumstances in which abortion may be immoral; I do not claim to know what is necessarily right on the fringe ends of what could happen. However, it is very much the case that the sorts of laws that the folks in the GOP are trying to pass do only harm, save no one (not even babies), and demote women to second class citizens. Again.

This makes all this Kuhscheiße anti-humanist. It demotes human values, human suffering, human desires for a dogma not backed up by facts or the well-being of the people we know and care about (and know for a fact are sentient). And that means it should be against the values of what is being called Atheism+, elaborated on by Greta Cristina, and philosophically considered by Richard Carrier (Dan Fincke, another philosopher, has some useful observations as well). This needs to be the new wave in the atheist movement, one that actually cares about human rights. And human rights include women's rights unless you a misogynist, in which case you are not a humanist. Same way a racist cannot be a humanist.

Being too kind, Obama campaign. The policies are pre-1900!

That makes the talks I showed in my blog post the other day, especially the one by Annie Laurie Gaylor, so very important. Women's issues must be the sorts of issues of caring, compassionate, decent human beings, and all the flak that people like Rebecca Watson, Natalie Reed, and so many others have received is worse than unjustified--it's down-right immoral and hurting everyone. This also means that when it comes time to vote, there is no way I can vote for anyone that associates with a party that in its platform and in its major candidates promotes legislation that will hurt everyone. "Babies" will still die; women will die; the sick will find less hope for treatment, and wanting couples will remain without the child other women are forced to have. Everyone loses. Add to that the anti-contraception bullshit that also seems to be going through the GOP this year, which will only increase the number of sought-after abortions, and you have a party of ignorant thugs. A vote for anyone associating with this party is a vote against humanism. And I don't usually vote straight ticket, and I don't want to this time either (I need to consider some of the other politicians more closely this year, at least at the local level), but with my added Ohio powers, I must do what I can to make sure this country doesn't return to the 19th century.

Please, at least consider not doing the same.

Update: Awesome video from Mr. Deity on the subject: The Mourning After Pill, just in case you enjoyed your rape.

Note: this should and does NOT make fun of rape victims. It satirizes the idiotic arguments from the goons of the GOP and Religious Right. This is not Tosh.0.

The Star of Bethlehem & Zeitgeist - Video

As practice in my video editing and to make the material more viewable, I now have made my previous blog posts about the Star of Bethlehem and its treatment in the film Zeitgeist into a short YouTube video.

 

Hope you enjoy!

Powerful Crazy in the House--Bachmann is Clueless

It was recently Earth Day, so many had to "think green" because of environmental concerns. The biggest concern recently has been with the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. There is usually some level of equilibrium on sufficiently large scales of the gas in the atmosphere between production and consumption by things on earth, both biological and geological. If such an equilibrium were to be thrown off enough, it could lead to a warming trend in world temperatures which can lead to significant climatological problems for things that depend on its current state, including us humans. Human activity with the burning of fossil fuels, which return much of the stored carbon in the earth back into the atmosphere , has raised CO2 levels to a higher level than has been seen in history and far into prehistory.

It is the strong consensus of climatological scientists that CO2 levels have increased and are causing changes in the climate, that humans are a primary cause in the increase of CO2 levels, and that the effects will bring harm. However, the scenarios of what could happen do not include Armageddon. There may be increases of famine do to drying conditions, loss of property due to rising water levels, etc. Humans will survive the climate change; we just won't be happy, and the costs of such warming could very well outweigh any costs in trying to prevent or weaken this fate.

So, what the hell is up with Rep. Michelle Bachman (R-Minnesota)?



That is some powerful stupid.

CO2 is natural from nature, etc. Yeah, so is radium. So are tornadoes. So are plagues. What an example of the naturalistic fallacy.

No study to show that CO2 is harmful. Um, the problem isn't that CO2 levels will get to high to be poisonous. That would be a problem with something like mercury. (If the levels of CO2 were high enough, there would be problems, but that isn't the case for what industrialization is being blames for.) CO2 levels on the rise lead to problems with the environment, which then affects us. And if you want to see that CO2 can be harmful in itself, why do you think plastic bags say "Keep away from infants"? Because they will suffocate!

CO2 makes up ~3% of the atmosphere. Rep. Bachmann, ever hear of Wikipedia? If you had, you would know that you are off by two orders of magnitude. Not a trivial error. If she was right, we would all be dead.


Humans have increases CO2 by only 3%. Try ~30%.



And what is the most probable source?
CO2 levels are well away from natural levels for the last ~million years. Human activity is the most likely source, and the effects are becoming known.

So, which this many pictures, I have to include one more, taken from Bad Astronomy.

What Happened to the History Channel?

I am back home from college, finally completing my degrees at MSU, and so I am watching TV again (I didn't have one in my room on purpose). Often the stuff on television I find dreadful, especially the omnipresent commercials for things I could care less about. But, I figure there are channels that are worth while when it comes to things that are entertaining and educating, at least if I am interested in nonfiction. I really enjoy Mythbusters, and the science channels can have something enjoyable to me that is informative to an astronomer (with a BS). One of my favorite channels was the History Channel, which for a long time could have simply been called the World War II channel because most every show was either about the war or tried in incorporate stock footage of the war. I am sure that you could see the explosions of ships at Pearl Harbor at least once a day on that station. The channel had a lot of interesting series, such as Great Blunders in History, or more recently The Universe.

Unfortunately, the channel has been broadcasting nonsense as well. There have been numerous shows, old and new, about the prophecies of Nostradamus, who is referred to by Penn & Teller on Bullshit as a "French Fuck". Indeed, his "prophecies" were vague and were probably not created for readers in the 21st century but to make himself useful/popular in his own time. I think Michael Shermer has said that he may have used these quatrains for political purposes, containing hidden messages no different than John Swift with Guliver's Travels. Anyhow, the History Channel has brought this figure up too often, speaking as if there was something real in them, that Nostradamus produced genuine and accurate prophecies of the future. Sure, there is the token skeptic at the end, but there is still an hour of your brain on vacation. Things become all the worse with shows about the Bible Code, UFOs and abductions, and more pseudoscience nonsense.

But I became particularly outraged by a recent episode of Ancient Discoveries. The original three episodes talked about the ancient Mediterranean world, with inventors like Heron, or the great doctor Galen, and the amazing Antikythera mechanism--this was a planetary calculator before the Common Era. I was blown away by this data of the ancient world and loved the production. Recently, these series has expanded. What I saw at 10:00 PM on Cinco de Mayo what about Chinese shipbuilding, all from the Common Era I think. They talked about some rather interesting boats, including the Junk-style boat which is still used today. I found this all interesting and I probably would have been just as floored by this show in the first half hour if I was more awake at the time.

The second half of the show decided to take a different turn, buying a ticket to crazy town. Perhaps some have heard of the book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World. Produced by Gavin Menzies, a former submarine sailor (not a historian), this book proposes that China has reached the Americas in the 15th century with boats on a voyage of discovery before the time of Columbus. Menzies "evidence" consists of some maps he found in shops which he claims go back to 15th century China. Experts know better. Along with some bogus claims about DNA evidence backing up the claim for recent infusion of Chinese DNA, that is pretty much the evidence. This "theory" is dismissed by experts on China. After all, we have very good records from China because of the advanced and sophisticated bureaucracy of the government which make no mention of such a discovery of the Americas. One would think that would make the papers, especially in well-educated China (compared to Europe at the same time). There are also no ship finds on the Americas of 15th century Chinese ships, such as Junks, at all. The proposed ships for the travel are not even considered seaworthy for the Pacific Ocean.

And yet, this History Channel episode spent about half the time talking about this "theory", including an interview with Menzies and other supporters of this work. Spending this much time of this hypothesis of Menzies with little skepticism casts the light that this "theory" is on par with the consensus of scholars and historians that such a notion is bogus. Never mind that there is plenty online and in journals to debunk this book, making the presentation on TV without greater criticism intellectually dishonest, but how there is an attempt to prove the theory is even more disgusting.

In Oregon, some amateurs attempt to look for one of these Junk ships on the shore, going by Menzies work. Now, to find such a ship on the Western shores of the Americas is quite the trick; the coastline is so long how can you make a choice of where to look? Well, apparently they know how to find the ship and know its approximate size before digging it up. How?

Dowsing rods.

I kid you not. Taking a couples of metal sticks, which people have claimed for generations can find water, now can find 15th century Chinese treasure ships.

Maybe this isn't hitting you hard enough. These folks, with apparently no archaeological training, are trying to prove a pseudo-historical claim by using pseudoscience? Apparently astrology is part of the equation as well since apparently the Sun affects how the rods work.

There are even more problems with this "dig" as well. After figuring out where the "stern" of this "boat" is in the ground, they drill down into the sand of the beach using a plastic pipe and forcing a running hose into it to push sand away and get down deeper until they reach wood. Then they take a drill and bring up some wood for sampling and C14 dating. Um, how do they know that wood is from a Chinese ship and not, say, a canoe? Worse is that this method of getting the wood of the "ship" does not allow for any stratigraphy, the archaeological method of examining layers in the ground to get relative dating. If you cannot do this, you are wasting everyone's time when the matter is finding the correct date of the burial of this object. After all, even if this was a Chinese Junk ship, it could be from the 19th century instead of the 15th. Also, if you want to do C14 dating, you have to get samples from multiple parts of the "ship" to get reliable dates and recognize outliers in any statistics produced. One core sample is not enough, especially with such a crude method of extraction and preservation of the materials in question.

The entire second half of this episode was junk after talking about Junk ships. How could this have passed by any thinking executive at the History Channel. And this was no accident. Going to see the author of this book, to spend days with the diggers of this "ship" in Oregon, and to have the most minimal level of skepticism displayed by the expert on Chinese history, can only be deliberate. Either the creators of this episode were ignorant of the quality of Menzies' thesis, or were actively trying to save it from criticism. If they were ignorant about the history, they how can they have any right to do anything for the History Channel?

I am simply appalled that such utter crap scholarship has reached a mass audience, and now through the vehicle of Fox News. I already have a negative view on the contents of American television; do these networks have to go out of their way to make it worse? Sure I can make fun of this station talking about the modern marvel that is corn, but at least that has good history behind it. I don't want any woo with my shows, thank you very much. Not only do they waste my time, they harm the intellectual level of the people of the US. It is a well-informed public that allows for a democracy to work. Filling the heads of voters with utter garbage and no way to differentiate between crap and history/science/reality is a great way for things to go awry.

So please History Channel: Call back Roger Mudd and do more Hitler shows. How about a Modern Marvels episode about Hitler and Stalin's mustaches? It's at least more intellectual and honest that this Kuhscheiße I saw this evening.