There’s no accounting for taste

Jason Thibeault, 6 Comments

When I was in early grade school, I was placed in a program called “Enrichment”, where because I was too smart for my own good and was disrupting classes’ ordinary learning-flow, I was taken out of the “easy” classes and taught separately about topics of my choosing.  I believe the first of my chosen topics was the human body — I wanted to know all about how the various cogs and gears fit together and worked in unison.  One of my first scholastic memories involves being corrected on the spelling of “away” on my labelling of the ventricles of the heart, in fact.

Another of my earliest scholastic memories involves a further module in this same topic, wherein I was taught where on the tongue the taste buds for various types of tastes were located.  They even devised an illustrative experiment where they had a series of little unmarked bottles with eye droppers and clear liquid, and used the eye droppers to place a droplet of one type of liquid or another directly on different spots on my tongue.  The teacher was surprised when I recognized the tastes regardless of where they were dropped, but then hand-waved it off proclaiming that it must have been because the drop spread out across my whole tongue.  The fact that this experiment didn’t work out as planned has stuck in my mind since then, as it was one of the first times I was exposed to the concept of experimentation used to prove or disprove dogmatic beliefs.

sciencemotivator-tonguemap
Of course, some years later, I discovered that the commonly held folk-wisdom that there were four delineated taste-regions was completely and wholly without any scientific merit whatsoever (never mind that we recently also discovered umami is separate and distinct from sweet, bitter, sour and salty, meaning the map originally made by D P Hanig would have had to be revised).  What sticks in my craw to this day is, the teacher was presented with evidence through experimentation that challenged her dogmatic belief that the taste buds were localized, and yet rather than stirring her curiosity or leading to a real experiment with proper scientific controls, or with overturning the commonly held precepts of taste bud maps, she simply waved it off with a facile explanation invented from whole cloth.

Science, as you must know by now from my myriad postings on the topic, is subject to revision when new evidence comes along that refutes the hypotheses of the day.  There is no scientific “belief system”, you do not take science on “faith”, and you do not accept scientific “dogma”.  You can trust that the theories postulated by scientists are well-evidenced and make testable predictions that have been borne out, but you should never take what someone says as dogmatic truth without being presented with that evidence or those tested predictions.  Also, if you have evidence that refutes a theory, that theory is (rightly) overturned and after new hypotheses are postulated and experimented against, a new theory that better fits the facts is created.

So that’s the story of how it will likely bother me to the end of my days that I was taught folksy bunkum in my “enrichment” program, and will forever question pretty well everything I’m expected to believe by rote.  I hope you learn from my lesson.

There’s no accounting for taste
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How to cheat at Youtube

Jason Thibeault, , , , 3 Comments

If there’s one thing I hate in this world, it’s a cheater. No, I’m not talking about using a cheat code so you can blow through the last stage of Doom 3 to beat the end boss and see the ending sequence after a long weekend of slagging your way through demons the old fashioned way — I mean, cheating where it counts, where cheating affects another human being negatively.  And where those internet-keyboard-brigade creationists are concerned, while all of their actions are objectively negative, those actions that can safely be described as “cheating” are especially deplorable.  This is the story of how those same creationists are cheating at Youtube.

Continue reading “How to cheat at Youtube” →

How to cheat at Youtube

Happy 1234567890!

Jason Thibeault,

Check this out, Unix / Linux / Mac users. You know how Unix time is measured as the number of seconds since January 1, 1970, Coordinated Universal Time? Throw this in a terminal to see what Unix time 1234567890 equates to… it’s today. For you Windows users, ignore this post. It’s not only too geeky for your likes, you can’t do this anyway since Windows doesn’t measure its time in the “standard” manner.

perl -e 'print scalar localtime(1234567890),"n";'

This should be scheduled to post at the exact time, in fact, give or take a few seconds, depending on how my web host syncs their time.

Happy 1234567890!

(Hat tip to Phil Plait for the Perl code, saving me the effort of writing it myself. Wow… And I thought I might scoop HIM on something for once. Very sad. Shoddy, Jason, shoddy.)

Happy 1234567890!

Happy Darwin Day!

Jason Thibeault, , ,

The finches are nailed to the mantle, the Tree of Life is set up in our living room, and the halls are decked with toy tortoises in preparation for the grand day of feasting, debauchery and licentiousness!  Look on every street corner, and you’ll see a young lad or lass singing praises to Our Exalted Chuck, with their hearts filled with the joy of the knowledge that all life is related and every piece of it is but a small piece of one long chemical reaction that started some four billion years ago.

If only we could name the first <a href=
If only we could name the first Tiktaalik fossil Darwin.

Except, that’s not how science works — that’s how religions work, and you know it.  Jodi and I are celebrating today, Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species, by watching the BBC series The Voyage of Charles Darwin on Youtube. I’ll try to embed the full playlist, so you can watch, and get an idea of the real story (or as close as anyone’s ever gotten on camera, at least), behind Charles Darwin’s journey of self-discovery, wherein he stumbled across the idea that would become the foundation of the theory of evolution.  While his ideas were obviously flawed, having not been formed with the benefit of the hundreds of thousands of fossils that have since been discovered, nor the advances in geology that have since been uncovered to adequately date these fossils, nor any concept of inheritance via gene theory, nor plate tectonics to explain population separation, nor epigenetics to investigate the punctuated equilibrium observed in speciation, he sure did get a lot right — enough that the theory of evolution was cobbled together and has since been able to make predictions regarding what would be discovered after the fact.  Long story short, no matter what problems people have with his ideas because his findings contradict their faiths, he got it pretty close to right, as close as anyone could have come given the knowledge of his day.

Despite religions coming around to evolution finally, obviously the concept that a four-thousand-year-old book written by a bronze-age Middle Eastern tribe might not contain the absolute canonical story of the creation of the Earth is threatening to some backward-minded individuals.  This led a particular creationist by the name of Elizabeth Hope to make stories up about his deathbed conversion, a completely spurious claim that is parrotted to this day despite being discredited even in Answers in Genesis (probably the only time I’ll ever link that site).  In actuality, he started out studying theology, and eventually, bit by bit, came around to a rational mindset.  He simply opened his eyes to the evidence all around us of the real story behind our wonderous planet.

Join us in watching this, and if you’ve got it, drink a dram to Our Sainted Chuck.

Happy Darwin Day!

I see Martian people… ALL THE TIME.

Jason Thibeault, , 1 Comment

I don’t think I’ve ever fully elucidated my thoughts on the possible existence of extraterrestrial life, have I?  Well, I’ll put off my Python evolution project a little longer, and write about it now — no time like the present.

Assume first, as I do, that the abiogenesis (or “primordial ooze”) theory is correct.  For those of you not in the know, this theory suggests that life on Earth began when certain organic chemicals organized through known means into amino acids, which in turn self-organized into proteins, which in turn used lipids to form the first cell barriers, and gained the ability to pull the components necessary to catalyze RNA from their surroundings.  These became the first proto-cells, which populated the world (in the RNA-world theory at least), and competed with one another for these organic molecules and in self-replication naturally selected for structures that would be better equipped at obtaining these molecules before their competitors.

Continue reading “I see Martian people… ALL THE TIME.” →

I see Martian people… ALL THE TIME.

I shoulda said POSSIBLE life on Mars

Jason Thibeault5 Comments

But not necessarily “probable”, or “strongly implied”, as my previous headline “HOLY SHIT, LIFE ON MARS?!” indicated, regardless of the fact that my blog entry itself stated it was only a possibility.  I write this because, in having titled my post as I did, I’m now tangentally related to asshats who declare “life on Mars” like it’s absolute canon truth in 72-point font.  And I should rightly be chastised for my use of the prophylactic question-mark, a tactic made famous most recently by Fox News.  The media has cocked this one up but good, as is the norm when it comes to anything scientific.   And the blogosphere, as always, ranges from the near-perfect, in their coverage of this event as with every other event that’s come before it, through to actually managing to get it more wrong than The Sun.

I really do hope it turns out to be life, however I will not, under any circumstances, apply my world view to the hypothesis.  A real scientist detachedly observes the results of an experiment and learns the truth from them, rather than shoehorning the results into his or her belief system.  Science only works if you’re objective enough to leave your damn belief systems at the door.

Incidentally, it’s why religious folks hate science so much — because they demand that you turn off the credulity for a few minutes, which is obviously a few minutes too long.  I will be better than that, at least.

I shoulda said POSSIBLE life on Mars

HOLY SHIT, LIFE ON MARS!?

Jason Thibeault, , 2 Comments

no srsly guyz

I don’t care that it’s going to be difficult to dig deep enough to verify if this is the case, given Mars’ harsh climate.  We NEED to verify or falsify this.  We can’t go around for the next twenty years saying “well, there’s MAYBE life on Mars”, we need to know for sure, ASAP, because it changes everything.  If life evolved (or was germinated, for those of you who believe in panspermia) right in our backyard, then that’s proof positive it’s gotta be out in the rest of the galaxy, and the rest of the universe as well, because there’s a shitload of stars out there, and chances are a shitload of them can support life.  We may well be one amongst thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of sentient life-forms in this galaxy — remember, there are two hundred billion stars in our own galaxy alone, and we’re finding exoplanets daily.

Recent experiments in creating chemicals that self-replicate, compete for resources, and are subject to natural selection, have proven that a critical step in the evolutionary abiogenesis theory (or the “primordial ooze” theory for laymen, and that theory that people mistake for the Theory of Evolution all too often) is quite possible.  Proof that pre-biotic life even managed to form on Mars, if verified, would suggest that this universe may well be teeming with instances of life having grown from “nothing” (by which I mean, having grown from chemicals with the potential to become self-replicating if arranged correctly by chance — not really “nothing” as the creationists suggest), and the only thing that makes this planet unique amongst our neighbors is not only that we had the right chemical soup to start the endless chain reaction that is biology, but that we’ve also had long enough for life to fester on this planet to get to the point where we’re sentient and curious about the nature of the universe.

For those who say science strips away all the wonder of the universe, by removing magical sky-men who made us in his evidently flawed image, they’re missing the bigger picture.  And that bigger picture is the universe itself, in all its splendour.  There’s only one way to find the truth behind this universe — and that’s empirically.

HOLY SHIT, LIFE ON MARS!?

Science: It Works, Bitches

Jason Thibeault

I just watched a video on Evolving Thoughts that perfectly captures what I have struggled to explain to some of my longer-term readers (specifically, those with whom I have regularly sparred even prior to my blogging days).  That is, what science is, why it is different from faith, why it is not dogmatic or aimed at proving a particular idea over others, and why I believe in it and believe that it is the only way to gain any understanding of the universe.  It also captures perfectly why those who would refute any aspect of science because it contradicts their personal beliefs should either put up (by doing some real research) or shut up.  You need to watch it.  It will lend you a lot of insight into my thought processes and why I have come to believe the things that I do.

Science: It Works, Bitches