Science & Skepticism – Page 2

Luminescence at the Vancouver Aquarium

It’s been over a week, and I’m finally getting around to uploading my photos of the Vancouver Aquarium. I hadn’t been in… almost 5 years? Really? Damn. Well, it was high time I fixed that. The special exhibit was called “Luminescence,” and showcased what underwater critters look like under black light.

Turns out it wasn’t really one exhibit, but several, scattered all around, plus one very cool interactive display where you could make a swarm of jellyfish light up from a computer touch-screen.

In hindsight, I should have brought my regular camera with me. Though my new phone does better in low light conditions, it seems to be crap at focusing through glass. Also, the battery was draining way too fast. Which means I don’t have photographic evidence for the amazing discovery that scorpions totally luminesce! Really, under normal light, they’re this dark red-brown, but under black light they’re this weird soft blue colour.

The focus was on anemones, though. And holy cow are they pretty!

One of the Luminescence displays was an electric eel, which sadly didn’t light up anything unlike the one in Ottawa’s Sience and Tech Museum. It just sort of sat there at the bottom of its tank, not even zapping any prey or anything. Oh well.

The Aquarium doesn’t have just water-dwelling critters, though. The Amazon section has butterflies!

(With warnings to not let the butterflies out when we enter and leave.) And birds!

Back to the aquatic (or at least amphibian) beasts, we have frogs!

And penguins!

And if you’ve ever wondered what the underside of starfish looks like, well, wonder no more.

The Aquarium featured jellyfish both tiny and ghostly…

…and huge and sumptuous.

But you know what wins the prize for most memorable animal? The humble Dwarf Cuttlefish. I went to see it twice that day. The first time it was swimming among some rocks, too hard to see (plus, I think it’s got some kind of camouflage thing going on). The second time it was swimming right up to the glass, not trying to hide, but it kept drifting sideways, always angling up and to the left. Was that some kind of defense mechanism, trying to get higher than then big scary predator (ie: me)? Maybe. All I know is, on the only halfway good shot I managed to get, my damn phone just focused on the rocks in the background, leaving me with this weird blurry cuttlefish.

Then again, it’s kind of a pretty effect. I could tell people it’s engaging its cloaking device. Or that it’s really a Drakh cuttlefish. Anything’s possible with sci-fi!

(Except taking good pictures of otters, belugas or sharks. The former were too fast and hard to see, and the others just wouldn’t focus through glass or water. Yeah, next time I’ll bring a proper camera.)

My nerdiness has grown up: thoughts on the Science and Technology Museum

I’ve been in Ottawa for the last 9 days visiting with my parents. Today we were supposed to drive to Montreal, see a couple of museums and have dinner with my brother, but a major snowstorm was moving in, and we decided to call it off. (Good thing, too, because Montreal was hit really hard and we would have had a horrible time.)

As a consolation, my dad and I decided to go to the Science and Technology Museum. I don’t think I’d been there since my teens, and jumped at the chance rediscover all the cool sciency stuff that had thrilled me as a budding nerd.

I’ve been in Ottawa for the last 9 days visiting with my parents. Yesterday we were supposed to drive to Montreal, see a couple of museums and have dinner with my brother, but a major snowstorm was moving in, and we decided to call it off. (Good thing, too, because Montreal was hit really hard and we would have had a horrible time.)

It was kind of disappointing, to be honest. Most of the old hands-on exhibits designed to teach little kids about science were gone. I remember one place where you could measure your hand-eye reaction time, another where you could create an electric arc between two poles, by cranking a handle over and over. And there was another big huge pendulum thing, filled with sand, swinging over a large circular space, and as it swung it traced its arcs on the floor below, back and forth, left and right. (There may have been more than one pendulum, too, though I wouldn’t swear to that). I think that last one was replaced by an interactive exhibit and quiz on Canada’s energy policies. Where the pendulum/pendula used to be, is now a big planet Earth. Where you could fill up swinging buckets with sand, are now four or five monitors where you can answer simple questions about renewable energy sources, your energy consumption, whether or not politicians, corporations or individual people should make the decisions about Canada’s energy future, and so on.

Still around, though: the Archimedes screw. Also still around: the gravity well simulator, where you could roll a little metal ball and watch it circle around the central hole as though it were actually orbiting it. They’ve got a similar device at Science World in Vancouver. But this one, in Ottawa, doesn’t use balls anymore (it used to, right? I think it did), instead using coins. And yes, coins do work pretty much as balls do—except loonies, their corners slow them way down—but that’s just weird. Did they run out of little balls at some point? Were toddlers swallowing the balls or something?

I didn’t actually use money, but I saw a family try it. I hope they were able to collect their money afterwards.

Other familiar stuff: the big locomotives. In my mind’s eye I kept seeing them as absolutely gigantic, five storeys high at least, instead of the 12–15 feet high they really are. We got to climb in the engine rooms and figure out what all the levers and gauges were for, and imagine what life must have been like for these men, zooming along at almost 100 miles an hour, only a couple tiny windows allowing you to see ahead, constantly having to monitor the health of this metal monster you’re riding, and shovelling coal in its maw…

Oh, and the Crazy Kitchen is still there. Always popular with the kiddies, even though back then I was too sensitive to motion sickness to really enjoy it. But that’s not so much of a problem these days, and, well… just like the locomotives, the kitchen is way smaller than I remember. I went through it in just a few seconds, and it never occurred to me to stay and enjoy the spatial distortion.

But here’s the thing: what if the museum had remained completely unchanged from the days of yore? And what if I found out the old games and exhibits weren’t quite as awesome as I remember? The Archimedes screw kept me amused for all of 10 seconds and a couple photos. The big locomotives were better, since I could read up on their history and enjoy them on more levels than as a kid.

Likewise, the new exhibits: on the Canadian space program, the cool science that came out of it; on cars, from the very oldest to the newest and coolest electric ones; on Canada’s energy use and resources, kind of didactic but overall very good; on communications, networks and connections, featuring old-timey phones, radios, computers and TVs (plus, interesting history and Canadian milestones); other interesting science instruments. All of that was very, very awesome and educational, and—nerdy and precocious as I was—I don’t think I could have appreciated what they had to offer when I was younger.

I realise now I was doing the museum a disservice by seeing it only through my nostalgia goggles, and not giving the new stuff a chance. Things change, and that’s okay. I’ve changed, and that’s more than okay. Nowadays I get to enjoy googling Anik satellites and lovely arithmometres (so deliciously Steampunk!), tagging Flickr photos and of course blogging about it. My nerdiness has grown up, that’s all.

On the way out I donated $5, all the cash I had on me. Though the museum doesn’t have the magic I remember, it has a different magic, and is still just as kick-ass as it ever was. Although, my biggest disappointment? The gift shop didn’t have the cool phrenology head that was on display alongside other 19th-century paraphernalia. Now that would have been a hell of a souvenir!

Pride and Curiosity

Vancouver celebrated Pride this weekend. And that means a lot of things, some familiar and some not.

First, the Davie Street Dance Party. To kick off Pride weekend, the Vancouver Pride Society takes over four or five blocks of Davie Street, puts in a couple of stages with DJs and performers, food and drinks booths, and then fences the whole thing up and charges an ungodly amount of money to get in. Seriously, a lot of people were less than pleased at what they considered a shameless money grab. $20 to basically enjoy what you’d get at any club, except you get a smaller selection of drinks and it closes at 1AM? Yeah…

Still, I went. Got there early when there was still some light out, paid my $20, and wandered around until I ran into friends. Then I ran into some more friends. Hugs, hugs, catching up, wishing each other “happy Pride”—really, the only reason I was out tonight. Then the crowds grew fiercer and the music got louder, and it got a bit less fun. I danced for a bit, but the party was just too exhausting for an introvert like me, and I called it a night around 11:30.

Which was longer than I’ve ever lasted, when I think about it. Once or twice I skipped the whole thing entirely: 2008, especially, because I’d been laid off that day and I just wasn’t feeling sociable. But generally, I just don’t last very long at all; I don’t like the club scene, and the street party is basically like one big open-air club with an outrageous cover price. If I’m not with people I know, or don’t immediately run into them, I’m more likely to ditch the whole thing. So hey, I guess I’m getting more outgoing!

Saturday was the Dyke March. I’d never gone, and I didn’t really have any plans until a friend in the Rainbow Marching Band invited me to tag along. I ended up helping to carry the banner, but I didn’t mind. The Dyke March is a great event, full of energy, very small and informal compared to Sunday’s parade, with much more of a sense of community. Individuals can walk along, groups carry hand-made banners, participants are invited to sign or initial the main banner (they make a new one each year and keep the old ones). No gigantic truck floats for WestJet or Royal Bank or Celebrities. No politicians that I could see, either. It reminded me of Ottawa’s Pride marches when I came out in the early-mid-90’s, back before it got all corporate.

Sunday was the Pride Parade. Corporate or not, you didn’t think I’d miss it, did you? As I’ve done for the last several years (since I moved downtown, in fact) I volunteered walk with the VGVA float; we’d be handing out freezies (insanely popular), suckers (not so much), a few of us would pass balls around, a few more would spray water at the crowd or just wave. Good times. And I got kudos on my control of the ball—because the last thing you do is have it shank off into the crowd.

Dinner, nap, shower, and I was off to the Vancouver Men’s Chorus Big Gay Sing. I’ve been going for the last 3 years (since it started, in fact) and it’s always tons of fun. We get to sing along to classics (the Sound of Music medley is always a favourite) and new material (Lady GaGa, Call Me Maybe) with cute little skits and clever costumes and production numbers.

Then after the show, I hurried home to follow Curiosity’s landing live (well, live minus the light-speed delay). I’d already seen the Seven Minutes of Terror video and knew that as crazy-awesome as this crazy-awesome plan was, it could still fall apart so easily. But that didn’t happen; atmospheric entry happened without a hitch that I could see, everything went perfectly smoothly. And when they received word Curiosity had touched down, the control room just went crazy. Don’t ever think scientists can’t get emotional! This was the culmination of years of work, one of the first steps on the road to the stars.

Then they started receiving images, and the room went fucking nuts again.

It’s times like this I feel Humanity can do something to rise above its present condition, to be more than it is now. People could say that we should hold off exploring the cosmos until we’ve solved our problems here on Earth—but, first, all the deep-space telescopes and Mars landers and particle accelerators only cost a fraction of what we spend on wars or filthy rich CEOs’ tax breaks. Second, endeavours like this give us (or some of us) some much-needed perspective. Astronauts on the moon saw the Earth rise above the Lunar horizon, a pretty swirl of blue and white, no national borders in site. In 1990 Voyager 1 snapped a picture of Earth from 6 billion km, a barely visible blue pixel in the vastness of space.

So yes, Curiosity is important, pun intended. This weekend I celebrated my pride in myself and my beautiful queer community, and I am just as proud of America’s achievements. Here’s to a bright future!

Imagine No Religion 2

It’s been more than a week since the Imagine No Religion 2 conference in Kamloops. I’d never been to Kamloops, and in fact had only ventured into the Interior a couple of times. So hey, this was a little closer to home than TAM, a lot of the local skeptical crowd would be there, why not go too? It’d be like a 2-day long Skeptics in the Pub.

May 18

Road trip! We left Vancouver in the late morning, and decided to take Highway 1 to Kamloops. Longer, but more scenic. We stopped for lunch in Hope, snapped some pictures, and moved on.

After that, it gets a little confusing. I took lots of pictures but for the most part I only have a vague idea of where I actually was. One stretch of Hwy 1 looks pretty much like another, and I had very few landmarks to guide me. Still, it was a great experience. How often do I get to see a semi-arid landscape like this? Don’t think I’d want to live there (I do like the green), especially with nothing but tiny-ass town for miles around, but it’s nice to visit.

And then we got to Kamloops. A pretty little town!!

There wasn’t much going on Friday night except a debate (not covered by conference fees, because it was open to the public). You know the drill: two atheists and two theologians debate the age-old question: does God/Gods exist? Actually, they only debated the Judeo-Christian God, with the same lame arguments you’d expect: Prime Mover, the fine-tuning argument, the argument from absolute moral values, atheism requires omniscience, if you consider the evidence with your heart you’ll see it, etc… All of them have been debunked, all of them show these theologians have never debated in front of a mainly skeptical audience. Not surprising, really. The other debaters, Matt Dillahunty and Christopher DiCarlo took them on and demolished their medieval arguments, though of course no minds were changed. Oh well.

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TRIUMF

Last Sunday—yes, I’m just getting around to blogging about it—I went on my third tour of TRIUMF. Fortunately indoor vball season’s over, and grass only starts next month, so I was free to bask in SCIENCE!

I already knew how it was supposed to go, but it was good to go over the basics: a scale model of the installation, a broad overview of what TRIUMF does, going through the offices where we looked at old pictures of the cyclotron’s construction, and peeked at the control room. The Starship Enterprise hanging from the ceiling was a nice touch, though it was a little spoiled by one of the monitors showing Wheel of Fortune. Well, they gotta kill brain cells somehow, right?

The magic starts in the ion creation chamber, where hydrogem atoms are bombarded with electrons; the negative / positive ions are separated by the chamber, with the positive ones (I think) repelled from the chamber walls and funnelled towards the cyclotron. Though my pictures don’t show it (the apparatus was in a very crowded room), the Ion Source has very smooth metallic walls with rounded corner, very old-school. It’s not to look pretty, though: sharp corners of any kind would distort the electrical field around the walls, leading to arcs and sparking, and nobody wants that.

Then, the cyclotron itself. Of course it’s covered in meters of concrete so we outsiders couldn’t look at the actual machinery, but there was still some pretty cool stuff to play with. Mostly, the paperclips. Though the concrete protects us from the radiation, there’s still a bit of a magnetic field around, enough to make paperclips stand on end.

Then we moved on to the projects: what does TRIUMF do with all these particles?

First, they produce medical isotopes, to use in PET scans and so on. Since they have a very short half-life, those are used exclusively by the UBC Hospital. I think they even have a special conduit to deliver them directly. Makes sense, it’s not like you could carry them around in a paper baggie.

Second (and this is a new one to me) TRIUMF is a center for proton therapy. Normally it’s impossible to treat tumours growing in the back of the eye. You could try to remove the eye and clean it up, but you couldn’t put it back. Shooting gamma rays is also a bad option: a beam strong enough to burn out the tumour would also destroy the eye, and damage what’s right behind the eye—ie: the brain. Heavy particles like protons, though, have a very different absorption pattern. Most of the energy would be deposited at a specific depth. The eye would get a bit of it, but not much, and the brain would get none.

Melanoma of the eye is very rare (TRIUMF gets about 10 cases / year) and other forms of cancer can be dealt with using other methods. As the guide pointed out, no for-profit corporation would have developed proton therapy, it took government-funded research centres to make it work.

Then there’s DRAGON (“Detector of Recoil and Gammas Of Nuclear reactions”). And yes, one piece of machinery had a poster of a fantasy dragon on it. Basically it’s a project to figure out what went on in first-generation stars. Those stars were composed only of very light elements: hydrogen, helium, and a bit of lithium. As I understand it, DRAGON’s research involves shooting beams of these different elements at each other and seeing what comes out.

Funny thing: University of Notre Dame has recently completed a competitor for DRAGON. They call it St. George. Oh those wacky physicists!

Over dinner I learned about a little lookout off SW Marine, with a great view of Iona Jetty and the airport. You can bet I took lots of pictures!

What I learned at Straight Camp

Ted Cox is an ex-Mormon missionary who found reason and now spends much of his time writing and talking about evangelical subcultures. In particular, he has gone undercover (posing as a gay man) to “ex-gay” retreats and workshops. His talk last night, sponsored by UBC Freethinkers, PrideUBC and the Secular Student Alliance, gave us a peek into the weird world of ex-gay ministries. Plus, it was his very first talk in Canada. Woo!

We started out with a brief history. The ex-gay Xian movement as we know it today has its roots in the “Jesus Freak” culture of the 60’s and 70’s, where basically a lot of hippies found religion. Apparently it’s in this culture that the notion of a personal saviour was invented, a Christ that loves you and wants to save you but that you have to personally accept before the magic can work. Interesting, that. I would have thought it was a lot older, dating back to the turn-of-the-century fundamentalists.

Add reactionary anti-feminist & anti-gay politics, a dash of outdated pseudo-scientific stereotypes (sexual deviancy is caused by overbearing mother / absent father / past sexual abuse) and there you have the anti-gay movement. From Love in Action (founded in 1973) to Exodus (founded in 1976, still going strong) to various Catholic, Mormon and Jewish groups that got in on the act, and you’ve got a weird, weird mix of subcultures that must be pure hell for any budding queer folks.

Predictably, no two groups can agree on the desired outcome. Catholic groups (who don’t believe in being born again) aim for lifelong celibacy. Evangelical groups might also limit themselves to celibacy, or they may claim to turn people straight, with opposite-sex marriage being the ultimate goal. They do seem to agree that, whatever Lady Gaga says, gays are not born this way; same-sex attraction is just a symptom of deeper emotional wounds (see: absent father, etc…), just like, e.g.: alcoholism. You need to address these wounds before you can conquer your same-sex attraction.

Mind you, that’s just for the groups that try to talk the scientific talk. All bets are off with the really loopy churches that will try to exorcise the demon of homosexuality from you. Cox showed us an incredibly disturbing clip of a group doing just that.

Even for the groups that pretend to scientific literacy, workshops and retreats are led by people with no formal training or certification. Books are written by quacks like Richard Cohen who were kicked out of their professional organisations for various reasons (in Cohen’s case, multiple ethics violations). The scientific consensus is that “ex-gay” therapies don’t work, can cause additional emotional damage, but these groups continue plugging merrily along, peddling their dogma.

You don’t even have to listen to scientists (who of course are all godless socialists, so what do they know?). Let’s ask John Paulk, or Ted Haggard, or George Rekers (he of the luggage-carrying rentboys.com escort). Pretty much all the success stories go gay again, publicly or on the sly.

Cox took us through a few Bible verses about homosexuality and women (Lev 18:19–22, the bit with Lot’s daughters in Sodom & Gomorrha) and concluded that, really, it’s not that God hates fags. It’s that God hates women. The problem homophobes have with gays is that they’re transgressing gender roles. Men are for fucking, women are for getting fucked, and when you mix that up, there’s no end to the anarchy that can result.

And just for fun, he took a few of us through “Healing Touch Therapy”, a “technique” he learned in one of the straight camps. It involved one guy (in this case, me) surrounded by 3 other guys and held in a warm but nonsexual way. The counselor (in this case, Cox) babbles a lot of nonsense about the walls inside myself, and how they kept me alive all this time, and he honours those walls, but now it’s time for the walls to come down. And then leads the audience in an inspirational singalong.

So yeah, it’s all in good fun, but I can see how it’d be a huge mind-fuck for vulnerable people. Guys steeped in a culture that frowned on any kind of male-male contact except chest bumps or brief manly hugs, who suddenly got permission to touch like that, even in a non-sexual way, would probably experience massive emotional releases. And indeed they do, but more often than not it just leads them away from the ex-gay scene. Apparently groups like that are a part of the coming-out process for many Evangelical Xians. And I am very, very glad I never had to go through that.

PS: The Healing Touch therapy didn’t work. Oh well, you get what you pay for.

Movie Review: The Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a gorgeous journey into the past, both inspirational and evocative. The film takes us on a tour of the Chauvet-Pont-D’Arc cave, filled with gorgeous neolithic cave paintings dating back 30,000 years. With the help of the researchers currently studying the cave, we attempt to understand the people who created and used these works of art, and the world they lived in.

Werner Herzog’s The Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a gorgeous journey into the past, both inspirational and evocative. The film takes us on a tour of the Chauvet-Pont-D’Arc cave, filled with gorgeous neolithic cave paintings dating back 30,000 years. With the help of the researchers currently studying the cave, we attempt to understand the people who created and used these works of art, and the world they lived in. A little over-the-top and fanciful in parts, it still weaves a fascinating and moving story.

Chauvet has been sealed off for at least 20,000 years, during which time all its treasures have remained pristine. And what treasures! The repeated ocher palm imprints in one alcove
(all done by the same person, as evidenced by the same small deformity of his/her pinky finger); the lion couple rubbing up against each other (solving an interesting mystery: namely, did male European lions have manes? The answer is no); the groups of horses and ibexes, suggesting swift flowing motion. These old humans may have been primitive but they were not stupid: they were keen observers of the world around them, and filled their art with precise and exquisite details.

But what were they for? Probably religious/spiritual ceremonies of some kind. It was pointed out that there were few paintings near the entrance of the cave, which would have been filled with sunlight back in the day. This shows at least a division of space, even if Cro-Magnons didn’t actually live in the cave they must have used it for shelter at least part-time. One scientist suggested that the paintings were parts of shadow plays. Why not? It’d be a visually striking way to interact with the animals on the walls.

The movie also took us into the wider culture in which these ancient artists lived. We looked at other artefacts from around that era, including a lovely leopard-man statuette and many, many Venuses similar to the Venus of Willendorf. The were made of different materials and varied in some details, but they all had the same basic design. Whatever they represented (fertility charms? prehistoric porn?) they were a common element of a very wide-ranging culture.

The leopard-man was interesting, too. It seemed to suggest a belief in the fluidity of life, that animals could transform into humans and vice-versa, and the walls between species were very thin. Makes sense, really: there are people today who believe this.

One of the researchers said that Cro-Magnons (and we as well) should not call ourselves Homo Sapiens, but Homo Spiritualis. There were some groans from my (skeptical & atheistic) friends at that point, but… y’know, he has a point. I’ve long believed that the revolution in art and technology starting 50,000 years ago or so must have been accompanied by religion (assuming that wasn’t around before). The ability to conceive and draw these gorgeous cave paintings goes hand-in-hand with the ability to tell stories about them, and I bet the first stories would have been about gods and spirits and whatnot.

Oh, and I finally learned how spear-throwers work!

Vancouver SkeptiCamp 2011

Another SkeptiCamp, another day of mingling with other smart folks, and learning some interesting stuff. Here are the highlights:

Magnetic Putty, nanodots and a sextant

Carrie brought along a batch of goodies from the Langara Physics lab, for participants to play with during breaks. These included a real old-school sextant, a bunch of nanodots (tiny spherical magnets that can be strung together into attractive shapes) and some kind of weird dark-grey putty that reacts to magnets. Place a magnet nearby and the stuff will—very slowly, we’re talking on the order of 5 to 10 minutes here—move to engulf it. It’s amazingly cool in a “grey goo” kind of way.

A New Cosmology

This spot was supposed to be about “Psychological and Rhetorical Pitfalls in Oppositional Dialogues” but the speaker canceled on account of the flu. Instead we got Michael Jones showing us a pamphlet some crackpot gave him on the skytrain, about how all scientists are wrong and a new cosmological paradigm is just around the corner. Because if I had a revolutionary scientific paradigm, the skytrain is totally the forum I’d publish in. On a scale of 0 to Crazy, it was a bit less nutty than Timecube, but still pretty damn entertaining.

The Greenwashing of Lightbulbs

Marilee and Douglas Welch detailed some of the bogus claims around modern lightbulbs, in particular their health benefits. Surprisingly (though I guess it’s not that surprising when you think about it) “full-spectrum” lights have less effect on SAD and circadian rhythms than cool spectrum lights. The reason is that since we evolved outside, under a blue sky, our eyes and our brains respond more to blue light. Neat!

Greg Bole

Darwin impersonator Greg Bole is a common fixture at SkeptiCamp. He covered a few aspects of the creation/evolution debate, and showed us a picture of himself with a bronze statue of Darwin. Hey, young Darwin was a hottie! I’d totally hit that

How to Not Be A Dick

A surprising number of talks focused on the dialog between skeptics and atheists, and everybody else. One talk (by an ex-Mormon) dealt with Mormons in particular, with the bottom line that when you’re discussing someone else’s beliefs you need to make damn sure you know what you’re talking about. Another, “Friendships, Skepticism and Social Media” detailed an instance of woosters defriending a woman who posted a skeptical / anti-homeopathy note. Interesting overall, and I like how Phil Plait’s “Don’t Be A Dick” speech is still causing waves in the skeptic community

And then a bunch of us went for dinner at The Cove on 4th Avenue. Followed by watching the fireworks from Jericho Beach. The show was pretty enough, but the music frankly sucked and the group of loud drunk assholes didn’t help at all.

I Overdosed Twice

This Saturday I took part in Vancouver’s 10:23 Challenge (“Homeopathy – There’s Nothing In It”) A bunch of CFI people on the steps of the Art Gallery, doing a homeopathy demonstration (complete with whacking the magic elixir against a leather-bound Bible, which is what Hahnemann apparently preferred), and some of us overdosing on homeopathic medicine. Or I should say, “medicine,” with sarcastic quote marks.

Arnica Montana (30C dilution)

I was told this was a muscle relaxant, but according to homeopathic web sites I consulted later (emphasis theirs):

Produces conditions upon the system quite similar to those resulting from injuries, falls, blows, contusions. Tinnitus aurium. Putrid phenomena. Septic conditions; prophylactic of pus infection. Apoplexy, red, full face.
It is especially suited to cases when any injury, however remote, seems to have caused the present trouble. After traumatic injuries, overuse of any organ, strains. Arnica Montana is disposed to cerebral congestion. Acts best in plethoric, feebly in debilitated with impoverished blood, cardiac dropsy with dyspnoea. A muscular tonic. Traumatism of grief, remorse or sudden realization of financial loss.^(source)

Apparently Hahnemann “found it helped heal everything from baldness and impotence to incontinence, cramps, bruises, general soreness, forgetfulness, travel sickness, sleeping problems, gout, rheumatism and emotional problems”^(source)

The directions on the bottle were “5 pellets, 3 times per day or as directed by your health care practicioner.” I took around 80 in one shot, and sadly didn’t develop a Wolverine-like healing factor.

Silicea (200C dilution)

Imperfect assimilation and consequent defective nutrition. It goes further and produces neurasthenic states in consequence, and increased susceptibility to nervous stimuli and exaggerated reflexes. Diseases of bones, caries and necrosis. Silicea can stimulate the organism to re-absorb fibrotic conditions and scar-tissue.

[…]

Ill effects of vaccination. suppurative processes. It is related to all pustulous burrowings. Ripens abscesses since it promotes suppuration. Silica patient is cold, chilly, hugs the fire, wants plenty warm clothing, hates drafts, hands and feet cold, worse in winter. Lack of vital heat. Prostration of mind and body. Great sensitiveness to taking cold. Intolerance of alcoholic stimulants. Ailments attended with Pus formation. Epilepsy. Want of grit, moral or physical.^(source)

An abundant mineral in the earth’s crust, silicia has a profound cleansing effect on the body. Long neglected and persistent ailments respond well to silicea therapy.

Silicea, derived from quartz or flint and an essential structural component of cartilage and bone, is used to treat chronic conditions that progress slowly over time. It is also very effective against seasonal ailments, such as colds. Like other homeopathic remedies, silicea is typically prescribed to relieve symptoms associated with particular personality types. Those most likely to benefit from silicea show such character traits as lack of direction, pliability, weakness, confusion, fear of failure and the kind of mental burnout seen in those who overwork to the point of exhaustion. Silicea is said to impart qualities that reflect its rock hard origins, structure in one’s life, clarity, steadfastness and reliability. Also referred to as silica, silicea has a powerful restorative and stabilizing effect on the human body.^(source)

The directions on the bottle were also “5 pellets, 3 times per day or as directed by the physician.” Again, I scarfed down 80 of the little buggers, and didn’t start looking like The Thing. Just as well, old Ben Grimm acts like he’s Blessed with Suck most of the time.

So that was kind of fun. What really struck me looking up these medicines is how vague their effects are supposed to be. Seriously, sudden realization of financial loss? baldness? forgetfulness? Want of grit, moral or physical? Still, that’s par for the course for faith healing.

SkeptiCamp 2010 II

On October 23^rd, 2010, several dozen skeptics descended on UBC for the second SkeptiCamp of 2010: a full day of science, education, questioning assumptions, and rap. Good times.

The Wisdom of Crowds

Jess Brydle had a jar full of candy corn at the back of the room, and attendants were invited to guess the number, with the closest guess winning a prize (an iPod Touch, I think). Though I tried to estimate the volume of a single piece vs. the volume of the jar, my guess (1050) was way off the actual number (around 770). On the other hand, it was almost bang on the average guess. Go me! Conformity over reality!

Google Maps

Jesse Brydle presented an interesting project: displaying bullshit and woo businesses on Google Maps. As you can see, there are a hell of a lot of them. If you look at the comments, (both on the map and Jesse’s blog post), it looks like it hit a major nerve with some of the local witch doctors—as well it should.

Reason Vancouver

Ian Bushfield presented an idea for a new Vancouver political party: Reason Vancouver. Though I approve of its mission statement of “developing policies based on reason and empiricism,” that still doesn’t tell me what those policies are going to be. Ethics (political or otherwise) is only partly based on reason and empiricism. Besides, I’m not convinced Vancouver needs an explicity secular party, since we all know facts already have a liberal bias. Still, it’ll be interesting to see how this develops.

Hamlet: The Skeptic Prince

Joe Fulgham made a good case for Hamlet being a good proto-skeptic. When the guards tell him they’ve seen a ghost that looks like his dead father, he accepts that ghosts may exist, but grills the guards, asks for details, and withholds belief until he sees the ghost for himself and talks to it. Even then, after he’s told explicit details of his father’s death, he decides to get a second opinion and trick the truth out of Claudius. The theme of Hamlet (as Joe explained, I’m only familiar with the basics) was that giving in to his passions is what destroyed Hamlet. If he had stuck to reason (and yes, skepticism), things might have been different.

I’m not totally convinced of his conclusion that Shakespeare himself was a proto-skeptic, and spoke through his characters, though. C.S. Lewis (just to pick one example) wrote a couple of skeptics in his Space Trilogy, but he himself was far from one.

Baba Brinkman’s Rationalist Rap

Meet Baba Brinkman, “the propaganda wing of skepticism.” He brought the house down with his rationalist anthem, “Off That!” Totally awesome.

I got witnessed to!

When I got back to my car in the pouring rain, I noticed a little soggy piece of paper stuck in my car’s windshield. For a second I was afraid it was a ticket (though I hear parking tickets at UBC are only a problem for UBC students), but it was something very different:

Why settle for “OK”?

And if you read the Bible, you’ll see Jesus is the most inclusive person ever.

With love,
A brother.

Sigh. Just like that hip-hop drive-by witnesser of years ago, here’s a guy who couldn’t help reacting to my “Born OK The First Time” and “Celebrate Diversity” bumper stickers. I’m slightly impressed that he took the time to write his note in the rain, but very unimpressed at his blinkered world view. Well, I didn’t get angry this time, just shared the note with my atheist friends at the pub afterwards and we all had a good laugh.