How hard is that SF?

I got a request to collect participants for an online survey on science fiction — take a look and help out if you want. It’s long, and a little depressing: it’s a list of science fiction movies and TV shows, and you’re supposed to rate their scientific accuracy. I think I’m rather picky about that, so just about all of ’em got slammed when I did it.

I am conducting a small pilot-study on the properties of various sci-fi works (focusing on film and TV in particular). For the purposes of this study I designed two web forms (Web-form 1 & Web-form 2) that ask participants to rate sci-fi works in terms of different sci-fi properties. Web-form 1 asks how accurately a sci-fi work portrays scientific facts and Web-form 2 asks what the work’s general attitude towards science is. The number of sci-fi works that a participant is supposed to rate (121) is substantial (one needs about 20 min to complete one web-form) but it is necessary for the kinds of analyses I’d like to be able to do.

I am in dire need of study participants, as you might imagine. Specifically people who are above average in terms of scientific literacy and who are also fond of sci-fi. I’m more than certain your blog would provide me with just the right sample population- if you’d kindly »nudge« your »hordes« to go and fill out the two web-forms I provided:

WEB-FORM #1: Soft vs. Hard sci-fi
If you were born on an ODD day of the month (say the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th etc.) then please fill out VERSION 1 of web-form 1:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dDZXTmM0dFJnQm1sV2ZzWl8yblpkWHc6MQ#gid=0

If you were born on an EVEN day of the month( say the 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th etc.) then please fill out VERSION 2 of web-form 1:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dDBSYWstbDB0bzlhM1FUMXkyZDBBTFE6MA#gid=0

WEB-FORM #2: Optimistic/Utopian vs. Pessimistic/Dystopian
If you were born on an ODD day of the month (say the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th etc.) then please fill out VERSION 1 of web-form 2:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dDNuWE9NdnBzeVpXeEdjcDVkVUxWM2c6MA#gid=0

If you were born on an EVEN day of the month( say the 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th etc.) then please fill out VERSION 2 of web-form 2:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dExsMDhtWkRqbTN5b1J6aENYU1preGc6MA#gid=0

Important EXTRA instructions for participants:
Each of these two web-forms asks you to rate 121 different sci-fi works. While this may seem a lot it is also a prerequisite for a certain type of data analysis I’d like to do so please bare with me. The works are all English-language movies and TV series made in the period between 1950 and 2009. If one is at least a casual watcher of sci-fi most of these titles should be quite familiar. You will need about 20-25 min to complete one web form.

I’d kindly ask you to complete one web form in a single “run” (do not take big pauses when you are in the middle of it). You can complete the other web form after a break (even say the next day), but please do not forget to fill out BOTH forms or your input will be of very little value.

Please only fill out the forms once and please only fill out the VERSION appropriate for your birth date. The only reason for the different versions is so certain biases in the way the data is gathered will average out. The versions otherwise gather the SAME data and ask the SAME questions.

I hope I am not asking for something completely out of order and that you can help me gather enough participants. I am currently tethering on the edge of 30 respondents but this is nowhere near the number I’d need to get valid results.

With kind regards,
Jurij Dreo
Ljubljana, Slovenia

Episode CXXXXIV: He had it coming

Don’t say I never do you any favors, acolytes of the endless thread. I’m about to spare you the need to see the latest cheap, unimaginative Hollywood dreck to hit the theaters by showing you the ending of the new Yogi Bear movie. Bring the kids around, tell ’em to see what the new kiddie movie is all about, and watch their little faces fall and the tears flow and the screaming begin.

Of course, if they get really excited and demand to go see it right now, you’ll also know that you need to book a psychiatrist, stat.

(Current totals: 11,523 entries with 1,215,620 comments.)

The commonality of bad movies and bad religion

Face it. Star Wars sucked. Even the original movie, which I remember fondly and vastly enjoyed watching, was horribly written — that George Lucas did not have an ear for dialog, and once he drifted away from a simple mythic archetype couldn’t put a plot together to save his life, was something that became increasingly evident throughout the series.

And Star Trek? Embarrassingly bad science, hammy acting, and an over-reliance on gobbledygook and the deus ex machina. There was maybe a small handful of episodes that were more than cheesy dreck.

So why do people adore those shows so fanatically?

Here’s one interesting explanation: cult movies plug into the same cognitive keyholes as religion does. The article is a bit superficial — comparing Star Wars to Catholicism, Star Trek to protestantism, and the recent Star Trek retcon/reboot to Mormonism is stretching the analogy way too much. But there’s something to it.

The Star Wars/Star Trek phenomena are a bit odd; I watch bad movies sometimes for entertainment, but I never lose myself in apologetics for them. They’re bad movies. They’re fun for the comic opera klutziness of them, and half the pleasure is being able to stand above them and outside them, and appreciate the sincerity of the exercise in slapping together a weird piece of crap in spite of little obstacles, like a lack of money or talent. But Star Wars/Star Trek have serious fans who devotedly study the lore and get into arguments about which is better, and even think they represent some high quality story telling.

I will boldly predict that some people will be arguing for that in the comments. Of course, they’re wrong. They sucked. Just like religion.

So the question is why do people cling to them…and it seems to me that our brains are equipped with a kind of ideological inertia, which is probably a good thing, since you don’t want to too casually flip-flop on ideas before you’ve worked out their viability. But sometimes we seem to be prone to a pathological degree of attachment, where because once we favored some strange object of worship, whether it’s Jesus or Spock or America or the Green Bay Packers, we can’t let go. Changing our minds would be an admission that we were wrong and could be wrong about something we regard as important in our lives, and there’s a reasonable fear that opening the door to that kind of uncertainty might lead to chaos.

There’s also a peculiar inability to separate the parts from the whole. You can like classical sacred music without endorsing the silliness about magic crackers and Original Sin, just as you can enjoy a light sabre battle on the screen without getting goofy over The Force.

So what is religion? It’s a parasite on a couple of useful features of how the mind works, its tendency to try and model the world around us as a coherent whole and its reluctance to abandon models that fail to work. It’s a particularly successful parasite because it can be introduced early, with mother’s milk, well before they get plonked down in front of the boobtube, and so it generally outcompetes Captain Picard…and it also gets relatively little pushback from the culture once the child leaves the breast to spend more time with outsiders, who are all praising the same mysterious being, and so far Yoda worship isn’t very common.

Pallacken Abdul Wahid is back!

You just can’t shut this crank up. You may recall that he earlier published a paper in an Elsevier journal claiming that all of genetics is wrong, oh, and by the way, the Quran and Bible are right because chromosomes look like ribs. He has a new paper out (only it’s actually the same old word salad, freshly tossed), Molecular genetic program (genome) contrasted against non-molecular invisible biosoftware in the light of the Quran and the Bible.

The current perception of biological information as encoded by a chemical structure (genome) is critically examined. Many features assigned to the genome are violations of chemical fundamentals. Perhaps the most striking one is that a living cell and its dead counterpart are materially identical, i.e., in both of them all the structures including genome are intact. But yet the dead cell does not show any sign of bioactivity. This clearly shows that the genome does not constitute the biological program of an organism (a biocomputer or a biorobot) and is hence not the cause of “life”. The molecular gene and genome concepts are therefore wrong and scientifically untenable. On the other hand, the Scriptural revelation of the non-molecular biosoftware (the soul) explains the phenomenon of life in its entirety. The computer model of organism also helps understand the Biblical metaphor “Adam’s rib” as chromosome, the biomemory of the cell. The Quran provides ample insight into the phenomenon of human biodiversification. It also reveals the source of biological information required for creating biodiversity in human population. The Scriptural revelation of the invisible non-molecular nature of biosoftware rules out the possibility of creating life from chemical molecules without involving a living cell (or organism) in the process. Claims of creation of “synthetic life” or “synthetic forms of life” employing living cell in the process cannot be accepted as creation of life from non-life as non-molecular biosoftware can be copied from the living cell to the prosthetic cell. Instead of chemically synthesizing a cell from scratch to prove life is a material phenomenon, biologists can as well resort to a more practical and convincing method by restoring life to a dead cell (which carries all the hardware structures including the genome but lacks the biosoftware) by chemical means. The failure of experiments to produce life through purely chemical means or to restore life to a dead cell would in fact invalidate the molecular biological program (genome) concept. More importantly, the failure would confirm the Scriptural revelation of non-particulate nature of the divine biosoftware and the existence of God.

It’s nonsense through and through, and it’s even recycled nonsense — there’s nothing new in here that you can’t find in his previous paper from Bizarro land, except this one seems to emphasize his claim that the impossibility of restarting a dead cell proves the existence of a creator.

The man is a flaming crackpot, but the real shame here is that he is regularly getting published, even if it is in bottom-tier journals. This one was in “Advances in Bioscience and Biotechnology“, which bills itself as an international journal of bioscience, very broadly defined. I suspect it’s a money-making racket. It says “A fee will be charged to cover the publication cost” (which is not at all unusual in science, and many of the very best journals charge a page fee to authors), but it also says the papers “are subject to a rigorous and fair peer-review process”, a claim clearly given the lie by Mr Wahid. This is a paper that could not have survived a cursory glance, let alone a rigorous review.

I’m sure Ken Ham is grateful

Ken Ham is humbly appreciative of the coverage his Giant Wooden Box project is getting.

We were notified late this morning that AiG’s latest project, the Ark Encounter, will be featured tonight (Monday) on ABC-TV’s evening newscast, World News with Diane Sawyer. Check your local listings for the ABC affiliate station in your area and the time of broadcast. (See the ABC-TV news site.) Also, here is a link to the article about the Ark project that appears in the New York Times today: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/us/06ark.html.

The website for the Ark Encounter is ArkEncounter.com.

We are grateful to God for all this media coverage.

And well he should be. I looked at the NY Times coverage, and was appalled.

I have to explain something to the Times. Some guy building a little theme park in Kentucky is not news. It’s something for the state and local news, sure, but not something that warrants a good-sized spread and a big image of the proposed park in the N freaking Y frackin’ Times.

So why is it given that much space and a purely vanilla description of the events and people involved, as if it is simultaneously a big deal deserving national attention and a weirdly blasé occurrence that requires no investigation — how can it be both controversial enough to warrant attention and so uncontroversial that the reporter can’t even be bothered to mention how ridiculous and anti-scientific this endeavor is?

It is an astonishingly insipid article. The only good (?) thing about it is that finally the NY Times breaks its bad habit of “he said, she said” journalism and didn’t even bother to contact a scientist to get the “other” side. You know, the rational, accurate, honest, scientific side.

I don’t have much hope for the Diane Sawyer story going on the air tonight, either. Anyone want to bet on whether Ham gets pitched some softballs and the park that encourages children to be stupid is treated as purely an economic development issue?

It’s Wikileaks Day

Today, Wikileaks begins releasing a huge collection of US embassy cables, and we’re about to discover the degree of skullduggery that’s been going on.

The cables show the extent of US spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in “client states”; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for US corporations; and the measures US diplomats take to advance those who have access to them.

This document release reveals the contradictions between the US’s public persona and what it says behind closed doors – and shows that if citizens in a democracy want their governments to reflect their wishes, they should ask to see what’s going on behind the scenes.

Every American schoolchild is taught that George Washington – the country’s first President – could not tell a lie. If the administrations of his successors lived up to the same principle, today’s document flood would be a mere embarrassment. Instead, the US Government has been warning governments — even the most corrupt — around the world about the coming leaks and is bracing itself for the exposures.

It is to be hoped that every major newspaper with some respect for its job has got people going over these documents carefully. The description above is correct: if we’re to deserve the title of democracy, we must have an informed citizenry.

But it’s the only good song on the whole CD!

It’s almost Thanksgiving, and you know what that means: the deluge of Christmas carols is about to commence. This is the time of year when I dread turning the radio on, because I know I’ll hear the same sets of songs over and over again, and the kind of uniform anti-eclecticism characteristic of Top 40 AM radio gets amplified and expanded and starts to spread everywhere. I’m always pleased to see something new, especially since it doesn’t happen very often…Lennon’s Happy Christmas (War is Over), Minchin’s White Wine in the Sun?

Some people get cranky about anything that isn’t sufficiently antiquated or sufficiently reverent, though. Now some people are freaking out over the inclusion of a song they don’t like.

A Christmas CD aiming to raise funds for a Christian charity has been slammed for featuring an anti-Christian song.

Faith and family groups have labelled the song, which includes the lyrics “I get freaked out by churches,” and “I’m not expecting a visit from Jesus”, as “disrespectful” and a “sick joke”.

But the executive producer of Myer’s annual star-studded Spirit of Christmas CD has defended his decision to include the song, White Wine in the Sun.

The song, written by atheist entertainer Tim Minchin, features alongside traditional Christmas carols such as Joy to the World and Little Drummer Boy.

I don’t know. I’m offended by both of those traditional Christmas carols — should I scream at WalMart and demand they be pulled from the store? Or, maybe, I should just look at the CDs and buy the ones with music I like, and understand that other people might want to buy Elmo & Patsy’s Grandma Got RunOver by a Reindeer on the Country Christmas CD.

Minchin’s song is quite nice. Here it is, if you hadn’t heard it before:

There is one thing in this story I find objectionable.

Profits from CD sales go to The Salvation Army.

Uh, what? Tim Minchin’s work is now being used to prop up a notoriously anti-gay organization? That sounds wrong.

An ethical dilemma!

It’s hard not to crack a cheerful smile at this story, but do try to take it seriously. A coven of Westboro Baptist anti-gay kooks went off to protest outside a soldier’s funeral in Oklahoma, and returned to their car to find their tires slashed. When they drove into town on the flat tires anyway, to try and get them repaired, they were refused any help at all.

There’s a grim part of me that feels a kind of satisfaction at that, I’ll admit. But I think it was wrong.

Don’t harm the WBC cretins no matter how awfully they prance. Do not vandalize their possessions. Don’t even threaten them. Even if they weren’t a lawsuit-happy group of parasites, they have a right to free speech and can protest all they want. This seems clear to me, with no ambiguity at all; and if I witnessed someone trying to slash the tires on a car with a “god hates fags” bumper-sticker, I’d try to stop them and alert the police. Somebody crossed the line in Oklahoma when they did property damage, even if it was to an odious gang of idiots.

I’m torn on the refusal to help them afterwards, though. If I were a tire salesman, and Fred Phelps came through the door and asked to buy a new pair of Firestones, what would I do? I despise the man and everything he stands for!

I think I’d sell him his damned tires. I think I’d even help him put them on his car. Oh, but it would pain me. It just seems to me that there is a principle at stake here, of an obligation to grant equal treatment to even the nastiest members of our society, and we violate it if we turn anyone into a pariah because of their beliefs.

So I can feel some schadenfreude here, and think Phelps actually deserves worse…but I’m also disappointed in the people of McAlester, Oklahoma who didn’t demonstrate that they were better citizens than the mad dogs of the Westboro Baptist Church.