Cool Science – Nicolas Demers

Imagine No Religion 4, day 3 part 2

Christine Shellska

A very short and not especially engaging talk about using rhetoric as a tool to advance skepticism. It was mostly a how-to on how to construct an argument, a list of logical fallacies and whatnot.

But then it was followed by a pleasant little song about hypothenuses, so that was all right.

Margaret Downey

Margaret Downey, the founder of the Freethought Society spoke about “journey stories.” Essentially, coming out. I know all about coming out stories, and yes, I know how valuable they are. Sharing your life in writing, or in conversation, will create connections with your audience, let them know they’re not alone.

It started out as general advice: what to include, how to present and structure it… I wasn’t too grabbed. But then, she shared her own journey.

It’s a story of growing up amongst ignorance and bigotry—a sickly child, taken to an Oral Roberts revival for healing and almost dying of an asthma attack from the heat and cigarette smoke; seeing her fine Southern neighbours treating her Black half-sister like crap and knowing even then that it was wrong.

It’s a story of abandonment: her father left their family when she was young, and never sent money back or even made contact. The god that people was as silent as her father, so she started feeling that He started seeing was as absent as him too.

But she survived, and grew stronger through adversity. From tricking tricking gullible relatives during seances to suing the Boy Scouts of America for kicking her son out because he came from a nontheist home, to making trouble for arrogant Catholic priests, hers is a fun and inspiring story.

Seth Andrews

I think I remember Seth Andrews from a past INR… and today, we’re learning all about Christian Rock. He himself started out as a Xian entertainer as a young age, essentially used by his family as a recruitment tool. Xian Rock folks in the 70’s and 80’s were desperate to be taken seriously by youth, so they emulated the hair bands of the time—and you ended up with bands like Stryper, who got their name from Isaiah 53:5 and sang about being “Soldiers Under God’s Command”. But it wasn’t just the hair bands, anyone big automatically had a Xian version. Sheena Easton, Cyndi Lauper, Enya—Wait, Enya, really? Yep. I guess she was too pagan-ish for some people’s tastes. That’s the thing about Xian pop music, they were always playing catch-up, desperatly trying to be cool and relevant to grab the kids’ attention. They couldn’t even be bothered to create a charity supergroup on their own, We Are The World did it first (well, first in North America). So of course, a Christian response sprang up.

It’s not just music, though: there are Christian versions of Dungeons & Dragons, Magic: the Gathering (with a lot of Biblical characters, it looks like), YouTube, even Facebook. Not to mention the ripping off of logos and trends like Hunger Games. Apparently $5.6 billions’ worth of Xian-branded ripoff products circulate annually, the IP owners either unaware, or afraid of doing anything for fear of being called anti-faith.

What’s the point of all this? It’s to cordon people (especially young people) off so they don’t wander off into mainstream culture, where they could be exposed to sin and naughtiness and conflicting viewpoints. And this isn’t new: Xians historically co-opted local holidays like Hallowe’en and various solstice celebrations, or local holy spots to build churches.

In the end, Seth opines, culture is how Xianity will survive, not as dogma but as fads & fashions. I can sort of see it now, I know a couple of people with Xian-themed tattoos—crosses and angels and whatnot—who aren’t themselves Christians.

Damn entertaining talk, though it’s sad that so many people are trapped in such a cultural wasteland.

Keynote: Eugenie Scott

Eugenie Scott is the former (as of 2013) Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education. Among many other things, the NCSE was involved in the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, serving as consultant to the plaintiffs. The topic of Dr. Scott’s talk was Why do people reject good science?, focusing specifically on two scientific topics: evolution and anthropogenic climate change.

She started out by bringing up the fact that there is a whole spectrum of opinions in the public: Some believe that nothing evolves, ever. Others, that the physical universe evolves, but not living things. Or that living things evolve, but not humans. There’s a similar range when dealing with climate change, regarding how much change is really happening, who’s responsible, and what we can (or should) do about it.

The big sticking point is usually the consequences of evolution or climate change with people’s particular beliefs. If evolution is true, there’s no heaven, no god, etc… and we lose big.
If climate change is true, it’ll be socialism and government intervention.

There are three “pillars of rejection”: science, ideology, and culture. The first is simple, and it’s all about questioning the science, sowing doubt, and cherry-picking data. Tobacco companies have been doing it for decades.

Ideology is about being part of an in-group. For evolution, it’s being a conservative Christian. However, for global warming the in-group is political conservatives—a distinct group, though there’s a lot of overlap—who hold a strong belief in capitalism, small government, etc… Also libertarians, though in practice I’m really not clear on the distinction.

Culture is a much broader topic, but I guess it can cover any meme that helps blur the line between bad science and bad, but isn’t overtly questioning the science or propping up the ideology: a good example is those “academic freedom” bills that are in fact only used to restrict the teaching of evolution and more recently climate change. Dr. Scott made the excellent point that underneath their pretty rhethoric they blur the line between the role of students and scientists. Normally scientific ideas get tested, then accepted, then eventually trickle down to schools. But anti-creationists and climate-change deniers want ideas to go to the schools right away, without testing, thus bypassing the hard work of actual scientists.

She concludes that the science is necessary, but not sufficient. Denial comes from ideology and culture, and those can’t be changed so easily. Deniers, in addition to thinking of the questions in very black-and-white terms, usually also see them as a zero-sum game: they have to give up something if “the other guy” wins.

For a message to be more easily accepted, the consequences can’t be too bad, and the bearer has to be someone they trust. Therefore it’s important to build connections with open-minded political moderates and conservatives, as well as evolution-accepting Christians, so that they in turn can connect to members of their groups.

That caused a fair amount of discussion afterwards amongst my friends. On the one hand, it can seem like ignoring freethinker groups who do a lot of the dirty work of stopping bullshit from spreading. But on the other hand, I think it’s a very necessary pragmatic move because the NCSE’s mandate is not to spread atheism, but to support science education. Mind you, a lot of that will involve going against fundamentalists, but for that we need religious allies to talk the talk and swell our numbers. Atheists alone won’t cut it.

One way to see it is like the queer rights movement. It’s well-known through surveys[citation needed] that one tends to be much more supportive of queer rights if one has a queer friend or loved one, no matter what your original view or ideology. And the movement, then and now, needs the support of those straight & cis allies otherwise it really couldn’t go very far.

Imagine No Religion 4, day 3 part 1

Dan Barker

Dan Barker is another minister turned atheist, who also found his calling as a teenager. However, his story (which I’d never heard before) is very different.

He started out as a really harsh fire-and-brimstone end-of-the world type, doing a spot of faith healing here and there (which actually worked once, apparently: he healed a friend’s sore throat, which was probably a laryngeal spasm—a very temporary seizure of the vocal chords). Discovering a talent for music he transitioned into songwriting, playing the piano, and singing, as well as preaching about his life, all of which brought him into contact with a larger cross-section of the Xian world.

And it was there that his deconversion process began. Some of the other Xians didn’t believe in a 100% literal Bible. Some—gasp!—even believed the story of Adam and Eve was a metaphor. Heresy! But he found he could get past it, and he turned into a moderate who could “fellowship” with people who didn’t quite share his beliefs. But then the questions began: what else in the Bible is a metaphor? If even one story wasn’t 100% true, where do you stop? Maybe Yahweh was also a figure of speech?

But, he asked, why did nobody come up to him when he was a preacher, witnessing on the bus? At least he would have known there was disagreement. As it was, everybody agreed with him. He would have liked skeptics to have said something to him—even ridicule can go a long way.

The thing is, ministers don’t know what they’re talking about; they say nothing, but they say beautifully. And as hard as it is for normal people to say, “I was wrong,” it’s 10x harder for pastors. More than that, it’s deeply frightening, because you’re not just questioning facts or your own perceptions, you’re questioning the very core of you identity and your connection to a supposedly omniscient being.

And realising you’re all alone is not such a bad thing. Before and during his talk, Barker sang a number of little songs accompanied by his keyboard, very sweet and low-key, feeling very Cole-Porter-ish. My favourite is “Adrift on a star”, about the loneliness of drifting in a chartless universe full of questions—and each other.

Darrel Ray

Let’s talk about sex & secularism. Darrell Ray is a psychologist, founder of Recovering from Religion and author of Sex and God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality. He also did a survey about the relationship between people’s religion and their sex lives, level of sex education and sex-related guilt. The results are interesting, though not particularly surprising.

First, religious guilt and shame only reduce sexual behaviour by a smidgen: even members of very conservative religions (Jehova’s Witnesses, Mennonites, Mormons, 7th Day Adventists, Pentecostals) are almost as likely to be having sex, and start at around the same age. The big difference is that they’re far less likely to use condoms. Members of these religions also report their sex lives improving considerably after leaving the church.

The best Christian denomination? Unitarians. Those people have really got it together: great church sex ed programs for kids and teens of all ages, and the least guilty of all identified groups/denominations. Episcopalians are good too.

Carolyn Porco

Woo science! Carolyn Porco is the head of the imaging team on the Cassini project, which reached Saturn 10 years ago and provided a gold mine of amazing images and scientific discoveries about its rings, Titan, and Enceladus.

Saturn’s rings, to my amazement, are pretty much paper-thin—around 10 meters thick—and very sparse, with a total mass no bigger than, say, Enceladus. However, they show some very complex and fascinating features: the mountainous ripples 1–2 miles high around the tiny moon Daphnis; or these weird propellor-shaped structures. Dozens have been directly observed, and there may be millions more at any given time. They mirror the migratory movements that proto-planets made as the solar system formed. Imagine Saturnian rings as wide as the Solar System…

Titan is a very special place. Until Cassini got there, it was the single largest expanse of unexplored real estate in the solar system. Cassini could see down to the surface with infrared, and found darker patches around the equator that looked like seas, but they couldn’t be analysed properly. Unfortunately the Huygens probe landed away from any liquid bodies, and after some study the dark regions looked more like dunes, not seas.

It was at the North Pole that they found paydirt: a series of connected hydrocarbon seas, with a total area about equal to the Mediterranean. Beautiful

But the real kicker is Enceladus. It’s crisscrossed by cracks and chasms, but few craters, which suggests constant geological activity. Now, there’s a mountain belt near the south pole, with a bunch of cool-looking fractures nearby. Jets of water ice particles were discovered, and determined to be the origin of the E Ring. And here’s the kicker: those ice particles are salty, containing traces of ammonia organic compounds. Plus, they’re significantly warmer than the surface, and erupting from liquid water deep inside Encaladus. This suggests a liquid sea at least as big as the south polar region, with a rocky core (hence the salts). A liquid sea with some of the building blocks of life.

And I couldn’t leave out their newest “Pale Blue Dot” picture. Looking back at earth, just like our ape ancestors looked back at the forests whence they came…

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!

Shooting Stars

This Saturday I went out to watch the Perseids, at the Abbotsford Dark Sky Park. It was an amazing experience. It was too early to see many meteors, but a few did make an appearance.

This Saturday I went out to watch the Perseids, at the Abbotsford Dark Sky Park. It was an amazing experience. It was too early to see many meteors, but a few did make an appearance. In the meantime, we got to gaze up into a sky absolutely crammed with stars. I hadn’t seen a gorgeous sky like that since my trip to Tofino lo these many years ago, and it’s just as awesome and disorienting and humbling as ever.

(Since this was farmland, the other senses were kept busy too: I could hear the honking of ducks (there was a little river nearby, and I guess the cars and visitors kept them up) and the smell of manure (cos this was farm country). That’s how you know you’re out in the country!

I saw a couple of really spectacular meteors. I’ll never forget them: small dazzling white sparks with a soft smoky pearly trail, flaming out in a second or so. The light was perfectly steady, not like an oxy-acetylene torch or regular fireworks. It was otherworldly (well, literally, I guess), almost angelic, which is how it must have appeared to yesterday’s sky-watchers. What stories did Homo Erectus and Neanderthals tell about these dying stars?

And I discovered that my camera can actually take pictures of the night sky—as long as I crank up the exposure (15 sec), and improvise a tripod, I get something about halfway decent. I’ll need to practice more in the future.

PS: before we headed back, I saw two smaller shooting stars with perpendicular paths. I didn’t think that was possible. Aren’t they all coming from the same direction?

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!

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.