Look at this image and ask yourself which vertical red line would be longer if measured with a ruler on the photograph.

Phil Plait uses this image to give an explanation of the ‘moon illusion’, that refers to the phenomenon that a full moon that lies low on the horizon appears to be much larger than [Read more…]

We’ve all been in situations where the traffic is moving along smoothly and suddenly there is a backup for no apparent reason. Computer simulations suggest that this can be caused simply by one driver slightly braking, causing the driver behind to brake and [Read more…]

I have written before (here and here) about how babies, even before they speak, have an intuitive sense of justice and fairness, suggesting that [Read more…]

Whales and dolphins playing together.

Suppose someone presents you with some data in the form of numbers in tables. These numbers may have been used as evidence to support some contention. Can you judge whether those numbers are authentic without actually repeating the entire study?

There have been cases in the past where people have reviewed other people’s data and found suspicious numeric patterns that would have been unlikely to occur naturally. One of the famous cases is that involving Cyril Burt’s studies of twins that purportedly showed that genetics played a far greater role in a person’s development than had been previously thought. In 1974, soon after Burt’s death in 1971, Leon Kamin analyzed Burt’s data and found that they were likely not correct because the statistical correlations he reported stayed stable up to the third decimal place, despite being obtained from different sample sizes. The odds of that happening naturally are extremely low. (Not in Our Genes by R. C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin (1984) p. 103.) [Read more…]

Such a question had never occurred to me but if asked, my initial response would have been “A lot”. But I would have been wrong. It turns out that the number is surprisingly small and that I had (once again) been misled by the deceptive power of geometric progression.

I’ll let readers have the fun of guessing for themselves (assume that you can have a piece of paper of any size to start with) and then they can read this New Scientist report about a group of students who worked on this question for seven years before breaking the previous record.

It turns out that there is some fascinating physics involved in crumpling paper.

They have started a new science section and Arianna Huffington says this of her hopes for it:

I’m particularly looking forward to HuffPost Science’s coverage of one of my longtime passions: the intersection of science and religion, two fields often seen as contradictory — or at least presented that way by those waging The War on Science. A key part of HuffPost Science’s mission will be to cut through the divisions that have resulted from that false war.

Rather than taking up arms in those misguided, outdated battles, HuffPost Science will work in the tradition of inquisitive minds that can accommodate both logic and mystery. It’s a tradition exemplified by Brown University biology professor Kenneth Miller, who, when I visited with him last year, told me that he sees Darwin not as an obstacle to faith but as “the key to understanding our relationship with God.”

Ah, yes, the old “accommodate both logic and mystery” ploy, as Inspector Clousseau would say. Expect to see full-bore accommodationism that tells you that magical thinking is perfectly compatible with science, as long as you throw in sexy sciency words such as ‘quantum’ and ‘indeterminancy’ to mask the woo that lurks beneath. I don’t know why they don’t call it the ‘Deepak Chopra section’ and be done with it.

One of the common criticisms that one hears against us science-based atheists is that our search for naturalistic explanations of hitherto mysterious phenomena, coupled with a relentless assault on irrational and unscientific thinking, results in all the wonder being drained from life. We are told, for example, that to explain that the rainbow is the product of multiple scattering of light by water droplets in the air is to somehow detract from its beauty or that when gazing at the billions of twinkling stars on a beautifully clear cloudless night, to be aware that they are the products of nuclear fusion reactions that took place billions of years ago is to reduce their grandeur.
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