Science, Superstitions and Skeptical Life

From Richard Wiseman’s new blog (yes, check it out - he’s very chatty; he’s got about a handful of entries for every day… maybe he’s trying to catch up to other prolific bloggers out there - such as Derren Brown who has his own great blog!):

Quite a few people have sent the following illusion to me. Basically, as you look at the dancer, she will suddenly shift from moving in a clockwise to anti-clockwise direction. A few sites are suggesting that this is some kind of test of left and right brain thinking, which is obviously rubbish, but it is a nice effect. As yet, I have not been able to find out who actually created it, so if anyone knows, please drop me a line.

The illusion made the rounds after some of the Science Blogs started investigating it after it appeared on a newspaper site with the myth about right/left brain dominance. Psychology About reported:

“After it was initially created by Nobuyuki Kayahara, the illusion was mistakenly referred to as a scientific personality test of right brain/left brain dominance by numerous websites and blogs. In reality, the spinning dancer illusion is related to bistable perception in which an ambiguous 2-dimensional figure can be seen in from two different perspectives. Because there is no third dimension, our brains try to construct space around the figure. Similar illusions include the Necker Cube and the Reversible Face/Vase Illusion.

In a New York Times column, Thomas C. Toppino, chair of the department of psychology at Villanova University suggested, “What’s happening here to cause the flip is something happening entirely within the visual system. If we can understand why it is these figures reverse then we’re in a position to understand something pretty fundamental to how the visual system contributes to the conscious experience.”

Enjoy the rest of the illusions at Procreo Flash Design, Japan!

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Funny of the day - Ben Goldacre catches “detox” scammer in a lie, live on BBC Radio 4!

I was additionally amused to see the particular ‘detoxers’ on a Facebook group… oh dearie me, they didn’t expect this, I’m sure! Apparently in the interview, Nas Amir Ahmadi of detoxinabox.com tried to challenge the claims of her ridiculous product weren’t what they were…  from BadScience.net:

I promised on air that I would double check and post on badscience.net. It will not surprise you to hear that she is completely wrong, and I am completely correct.

EDIT: The Today programme, bless them, share my anality and clarified that I was right and she was wrong.

And in response to Goldacre’s pointing out their error? They tried to CHANGE the website!!

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Both winners as well!!

The Open Laboratory 2008 - the winning cartoon and poem

The poem: The Evolutionary Biology Valentine’s Day Poem

I remembered the cartoon:

…so, where does your particular career fit into it?

Speaking of a career - I have a whole lot of work to catch up on, so the blog will be on a hiatus for a bit! I’ll come back from a break at the end of the week.

In the meantime - please, click on the hard-working links in my Blogroll to the hard-working other bloggers out there. In particular, I’d like to promote the site Womb To Bloom, which will be launching this month (I’ll have to come up with a nice post about an issue they talk about to help celebrate).

Speaking of networking - thanks to Bruce Hood (who, if you’re looking for some very, very well written posts and even a book on superstitions called Supersense, you should check out!), I’ve discovered Alpha Inventions New Feature, which apparently uses the site alphainventions.com to promote blogs in a scrolling-through-kind-of-fashion. Found some nice links there to some very pretty blogs, so well worth checking out for a good time-using browse. It’s essentially a ‘mirror site’ of people who are linking to them.

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Seriously, I cried. I’m now waiting on the poem and cartoon as well, because this looks like such a great line-up of writers. I am so honored - Podblack Blog is in the Open Laboratory Science Blogging anthology for 2008!!

I know many of you are trembling in anticipation: “Did I make it this year?”. Well, it’s like the Oscars - the Academy Awards are kept tightly under wraps until the moment the envelope is opened.

The list of entries was long, and full of excellent posts - this was hard to judge! And, Jennifer Rohn, this year’s Editor, just handed me the envelope. Trust me - I have not seen the list of winners myself until now.

And, the winners are…..

Amongst them: Podblack Blog: Smart Bitches, Not Meerly Sex!

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Now, this song has been available for a while on the official Angry-Feet fan site for Tim Minchin, but there’s been some developments:

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Isaac Asimov (c. January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992)… was a Russian-born American author and professor of biochemistry, a highly successful writer, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Most of Asimov’s popularized science books explain scientific concepts in a historical way, going as far back as possible to a time when the science in question was at its simplest stage.

…Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 9,000 letters and postcards. His works have been published in nine of the ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal System (the sole exception being the 100s; philosophy and psychology).

…Isaac Asimov was a Humanist and a rationalist. He did not oppose religious conviction in others, but he frequently railed against superstitious and pseudoscientific beliefs that tried to pass themselves off as genuine science. - Wikipedia.

I’m a day late to celebrate it, I know! It was yesterday! But better late than never - I just didn’t want to let it go unmentioned, when it so beautifully linked with a request I got for reading advice.

I once tested as to whether I could really find Asimov’s books in nearly every section of the Dewey categories; I was a student who had access to half-a-dozen different libraries. These included Woodvale, Subiaco, Claremont, Fremantle, Tuart Hill and the one off Ocean Beach Road for which I can’t remember the suburb (but it was near the vet I quite liked and was the earliest library I could remember). It seemed fairly true that you could find his books everywhere in every section - although I didn’t end up using his investigations on Shakespeare for a class on British Writers, because the professor I had looked down upon ’science fiction rubbish’.

‘Science Fiction rubbish’ wasn’t an uncommon epithet when I was younger. Now we have the likes of sites like i09, claiming ‘2008: The Year Science Fiction Became Science Culture’:

Acclaimed scifi author William Gibson has already explained it in interviews about his latest novels, all of which read like literary science fiction but take place in the present day. He believes that the present has become so saturated by high tech and advanced science that we are effectively living in a science fictional era.

Gibson is asserting that what once seemed futuristic is now part of the present. But it would be more accurate to say that we now accept scientific speculation as part of everyday life. We haven’t lost the idea of a future that’s way freakier than today. It’s just that now everybody thinks about the freaky future, not just scifi fans.

…Perhaps we have finally reached the apotheosis of a revolution that began centuries ago with thinkers like Galileo and Newton. At last, science has broken free of the laboratories and universities to become a part of everybody’s common culture.

Depite the contribution of science fiction to pop-culture, common culture (and as the article goes on to claim, political nods with the recent US elections), et al., it’s still an issue to get young people into science and skepticism. I was very flattered to get this request from a reader:

btw any ideas how to get a 13 year old interested in science and skepticism?? I got my brother “Science is Golden” by Dr Karl for Newtonmas but I think I vastly underestimated just how apathetic he is towards the subject. He’s into computer games, sport and little else.

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