Young Australian Skeptics

The Pseudo Scientists — Episode 49

Richard, Belinda, and special guest panelist Laura Henderson discuss ‘vagina’ (walrus), a new leadership study, tuberculosis in India, and a dystopian future Civilisation. Also, Belinda had a bad day, and the much overlooked classic Troll II.

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This week’s “Houston, We Have A Problem” clip is Joe the Plumber running for office on the ‘never check your facts’ platform.

To support the show (and support Jack’s fragile ego) you can purchase the Young Australian Skeptics’s Skeptical Blog Anthology — available in paperback or ebook!

Follow Laura on Twitter, at @laurahidesinbox.

If you have feedback for the show, get in touch via our Contact page or send us an email: youngausskeptics(at)gmail(dot)com.

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The Pseudo Scientists — Episode 48

Elliot, Richard, Belinda and Jack discuss the transit of Venus, electrical avalanche discharges and the intelligent design themes in “Prometheus” (spoiler free) and other sci-​​fi films. And like Jason last week, Elliot has some (slightly less sad) news…

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This week’s “Houston, We Have A Problem” clip is ID proponent Jay Richards not being entirely persuasive about design detection.

To support the show (and get a great book, but that’s secondary, right?) you can purchase the Young Australian Skeptics’s Skeptical Blog Anthology — available in paperback or ebook!

If you have feedback for the show, get in touch via our Contact page or send us an email: youngausskeptics(at)gmail(dot)com.

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Join the RSS feed in the side bar!

Subscribe via iTunes or Libsyn RSS!

Become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter!

Hello there skeptics,

This month, June, is marking a very special occasion. It was 120 years ago that Hendrik Lorentz published his paper, which is now known as the conception of the electron. The electron is one of the most pivotal ideas in physics, and is crucial to our understanding of electromagnetism, but it was only an idea for most of the 19^th century.

Read more »

The Pseudo Scientists — Episode 47

Jason, Jack and Richard discuss a mysterious burst of cosmic radiation in the 8^th century, the genetics of ultra-​​conserved elements in animal and plant genomes, and a billboard campaign arguing against Richard Dawkins. Plus, Jason has some sad news…

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This week’s “Houston, We Have A Problem” clip is a lesson in “seeing energy”. Don’t hurts your eyes, guys, I hear it can be quite powerful.

Sean Carroll’s blog post on electromagnetic radiation in your eyes can be found here.

You can check out the Doubting Dawkins website mentioned in the show here.

If you’d like to express an interest in writing for the revamped YAS blog in late July, as we mention at the end of the show, let us know via our Contact page or send us an email: youngausskeptics(at)gmail(dot)com.

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Over at Nature Education’s Student Voices blog, The Pseudo Scientists panelist and editor Jack Scanlan has a new post up on the inherent tediousness of studying humanity in a biological context, arguing that most, if not all, other organisms are worthy of our interest and admiration, especially insects and bacteria — creatures you most likely forget exist some of the time.

Make sure you check out “I’m not a speciesist, but…”, and don’t be afraid to leave a comment! Here’s a little taste of it to get you in the mood:

Let’s start close to home. We are mammals: we lactate (from aptly named mammary glands), we have fur and we’re endothermic (able to produce our own body heat). But we’re very average mammals. Most of our closest relatives, such as the chimpanzee and the gorilla, are much stronger than us — we wouldn’t last two seconds in a fight. Moving further away, bats have evolved the incredible ability to reconstruct their environment using sound waves, and are able to hone in on and catch their erratic prey — insects — in a stunningly accurate fashion. Most of us can’t even catch a fly with chopsticks, and those of us who can aren’t born with this ability.

Whales taunt us from the sea in bodies forced into streamlined forms, and some of them even do so from up to 3 kilometres below the surface of the ocean. And teetering on the edge of mammalian classification, platypuses have ten sex chromosomes (our two pale in comparison), and males have spurs that deliver a shot of venom to anyone or anything that gets too close. The best we humans can muster is a mildly irritating scratch from our fingernails or a moderately annoying bite from our flimsy jaws. Yes, that hyena over there, with its ability to crush bones, is laughing at you, and rightly so. You look ridiculous trying to eat that steak.

Hello there, skeptical brothers-​​in-​​arms,

Today I am going to be blogging about some of the superstitions in sports, some of their implications, and how people continue to believe their superstitious rituals actually affect their game. I will start by listing some of the common superstitions held by professional sports people.

In baseball, when a pitcher is hot, nobody is allowed to talk to him. During play-​​off runs or winning streaks, many sportsmen wear the same socks or underwear, without washing them, for every game. Sportsmen often have lucky charms or rituals of some sort, and there are plenty of performance enhancing jewelery options out there for any sportsperson, from wrist bands to necklaces.

That list is just a list of superstitions, I’m not writing to you all today to tell you that superstitious beliefs are ridiculous, all of my readers should know that all ready. I’m going to tell you why some people persist with their beliefs, and how they can see evidence when there really is none.

One of the most influential effects on sport superstition is, you guessed it, the placebo effect. Studies have been done on the Power Balance  band, one of the most famous performance enhancing items around (before its many law-​​suits), has had tests done on it. The results of which showed that a person could reach almost 5 centimeters closer to the ground, upon the wearing of a Power Balance band. Now, to any unscientific layman, this would sound like an astounding proof of the power of the Power Balance band. But, if you are familiar with the scientific method, you will know that tests must be blinded. These tests where not blinded, the test subjects knew wether or not they were wearing the Power Balance band, and they knew the hypothesis, that Power Balance bands will show an increased effect.

Any scientist looking at these results would say “Wow, the placebo effect is really that strong!” This effect is also known of in other sports, where players and coaches have their own rituals. If you can put yourself in the mindset of a player, who, for the last 5 years of his playing career, has always gotten up out of bed on the right side, every game day, and then one day, he accidentally gets out of bed on the left side. If I knew that was one of my rituals, I would start to get anxious, and nervous. Anybody can figure out that a baseball pitcher who is more worried about what side of the bed he got out of this morning than whether to throw a fastball or a splitter, is not going to play as well, he is not focusing on the game.

All of these rituals that sportsmen perform, might actually have an effect, but it is not how they think. Instead of warding of evil spirits, they are really just providing a comforting motion to perform to themselves, when there are 50,000 plus fans screaming yours and your teams names. These rituals provide something to calm the body down, in the nervous and high adrenaline sports arenas of today. Psychology has strange effects on humans.

The Pseudo Scientists — Episode 46

Jack, Belinda, James and Richard discuss the Australian and South African Square Kilometre Array telescopes, problems with a plan to help save the Murray-​​Darling river basin in eastern Australia, and the successful launch and docking to the International Space Station of a pioneering commercial space capsule, SpaceX’s Dragon.

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This week’s “Houston, We Have A Problem” clip is William Lane Craig saying some silly things about Christian apologetics.

If you’d like to express an interest in writing for the revamped YAS blog in late July, as we mention at the end of the show, let us know via our Contact page or send us an email: youngausskeptics(at)gmail(dot)com.

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Hello there, fellow bloggers, readers and browsers,

I was recently reading through my issue of Scientific American (which I subscribe to), and I came to the columns in the back of the magazine, and the one written by Michael Shermer really appealed to me. It is entitled ‘Climbing Mount Immortality’. The whole topic of the column was to discuss mortality and how it shaped our civilizations., but what really appealed to me was the topic of immortality itself. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go all spiritual-​​after-​​life crazy on you, I want to discuss the concept of Legacy.

Legacy is the only immortality a skeptic can subscribe to. Albeit a very partial immortality, it is the only one there is. If one believes that there is no afterlife, then the only way in which that person can survive in the minds of those around him, is by doing something to remember him for.

This concept is very readily visible for Alfred Nobel. You will be aware of the Nobel prize. If you are (you should, or you should stop looking at my blog right now), then you will know that it is an award given to scientists, essayists and peace activists for showing exemplary skills in their area, and making great discoveries. Seeing that 99% of people know about the Nobel prize, Alfred Nobel could say that he is a success.

What most people don’t know about Alfred Nobel is that he was actually the inventor of dynamite. He created this lethal weapon off war in the hope that ‘war would become so bad, that it would be done by nobody’. But this did not happen, wars just became bloodier and more violent, and you must feel for Nobel for having his invention turn into such a disaster in his mind. This is what inspired him to set up the Nobel prize.

He was worried that all of the world would see him as an evil man for thousands of years to come. So what he did was posthumously donate all his money to set up the Nobel prize. this has worked because now, instead of everybody seeing Alfred Nobel as a villainous person with sinister intentions, we see him as the most famous and prestigious prizes handed out to scientists.

The idea of legacy has an impact on me, I want people to remember me after I die, not just by my family for being a brother or a son or a husband or a father, but by the world as a person who changed a field for ever, like Einstein, Hawking or Nobel. This is the only way for me to stick around after my death, I wont be able to experience it, but my family will be proud, and so will I on my deathbed, knowing that I can be content with what I have done with my life.

I will leave you with a quote from Amanda from Saw II, “The answer is immortality. By creating a legacy, by living a life worth remembering, you become immortal.”

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Remember to check out my blog at The Skeptical Teenager.