Video: Big History

David Christian, a professor of history at San Diego State University, recently delivered an excellent talk at TED about "big history". The video is embedded below and the direct link is here.

Video Aluminum cast of ant nest

One of the most enduringly popular post on this blog is "A cement cast of an entire ant colony", a video of an ant nest cast. Embedded below (direct link) is another video of a beautiful cast, this time made using metal.



(H/T: Mike Breytenbach).

Video: Optogenitics is Nature's Method of the Year

Long-time readers will remember a guest post by my friend Hugh Pastoll about optogenetics. I didn't catch it at the time, but Nature declared optogentics its 'Method of the Year' for 2010. An explanatory video below (direct link):



(Video found via Ed Yong).

Video: Hymn to evolution sung by an innocent child

Genius.


Evolution Made Us All from Ben Hillman on Vimeo.

Video: Penn and Teller on Vaccinations

The most excellent Penn and Teller (of Bullshit fame) destroy anti-vaccinationism (direct link)...

Video: Ben Goldacre on the nocebo effect

This is fantastic and Must Be Watched. It's the incomparable Ben Goldacre on the amazing scientific research into the placebo and nocebo effects. The video is embedded below, or click here for the direct link.

Video: Tooby & Cosmides

Reason.tv (a project of Reason.com, a prominent libertarian publication) has an extended interview (embedded below, or click here) with Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, two of the founders of evolutionary psychology. There are all sorts of interesting tidbits and it serves as quite a good introduction to the field. It might do some of the more extreme critics of evolutionary psychology some good to see what actual (and responsible) scholars in the field think.

One thing: I can't say I was a fan of Cosmides and Tooby's foray into economics. The video can still be enjoyed, though.

Three Radio Shows You Should Listen to as a Podcast

Podcasts are one of the coolest and most useful products of Web 2.0: I think I've learnt more from podcasts over the last five or so years than I have from nearly any other source. In case you're a touch behind the times, a podcast is essentially a radio show syndicated over the web - but, thanks to the long tail the web makes possible, there are podcasts on nearly every conceivable topic, the vast majority of which would never make it onto radio. (Hint: use iTunes to subscribe to your podcasts).

Luckily, the rise of the wonderful amateurs has not put the professionals out of work - well, at least not yet. And since many stations now release their radio shows online as podcasts in addition to broadcasting them, it's possible to listen to radio shows from anywhere in the world and at a time of your convenience. Here are three great podcasted radio shows I highly recommend:

• In Our Time is the single most unabashedly cerebral show I've ever come across. In a typical episode, the host Melvyn Bragg gathers half a dozen or so Oxford and Cambridge dons, who then discuss some topic in history, science, philosophy or art. Bless the BBC. There have been episodes on Darwin's Origin of Species, Munch's "The Scream", the Battle of Agincourt, Machiavelli and the Italian City State, the Zulu Nation, and much, much more. I simply cannot recommend this show enough. (Bonus: you get to laugh at British academics' preposterous affected accents). 
• Like In Our Time, Material World is a BBC production, but its host Quentin Cooper takes himself far less seriously, and the show is a lot lighter as a result. Indeed, I suspect I love listening to it as much for the comedy as for its interviews with working scientists at the heart of important recent developments. It's as entertaining as informative, so it's an absolute joy to listen to. 
• Radio Lab is hard to describe. Produced for NPR and hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, this show is into telling stories and doing so compellingly. Not just fascinating, wonderful stories (it's not This American Life), but fascinating, wonderful stories about science. I'm not sure how to describe it further, so here are some episodes I particularly liked: "Placebo", "Limits", "Parasites" (featuring the wonderful Carl Zimmer), and "Famous Tumors". 

Oh, and just for the hell of it, my Top 5 (non-radio) podcasts:

• The Skeptics Guide to the Universe. (My all-time favorite - hosted by the incomparable Steven Novella. Listen to this podcast. Srsly).
• Astronomy Cast. (All things astronomy, hosted by professional astronomer Pamela Gay and Universe Today publisher Fraser Cain).
• Skeptoid. (I wasn't a huge fan of Brian Dunning's popular offering until recently, but it has really grown on me. Short, sharp and impeccably researched). 
• Point of Inquiry and For Good Reason. (I list two here because I recommend Point of Inquiry until DJ Grothe left and started For Good Reason. The early Point of Inquiry interviews are just wonderful). 
• Nature Podcast. (The podcast of the journal Nature consists of interviews with authors of recent Nature papers, news and so on. Highly recommended. Science, by the way, also has a - somewhat less good - podcast). 

(Hat tips: Simon Grest for introducing me to In Our Time; Clint Armitage for telling me about Radio Lab and some random commentator on a Facebook atheist group many years ago for telling me about The Skeptics Guide - the very fist podcast I listed to). 

Video: Bad Universe

So the most excellent Phil "the Bad Astronomer" Plait  has a new Discovery Channel show coming out called "Bad Universe". It seems to be based on his book Death From the Skies! about all the ways the universe could snuff us out. The first episode is on asteroids; and it looks frekkin awesome. Embedded below, or click here for the direct link.

Picture: Zapiro's follow-up

In all the hullabaloo over Draw Mohammad Day, I forgot to point to cartoonist Jonathan "Zapiro" Shapiro's follow-up cartoon. You'll recall that this cartoon of Zapiro's - in my view one of the best drawn for Draw Mo Day - caused quite a stir, and Shapiro even received death threats. Anyway, Zapiro followed-up with the following (click for a bigger version):

Video: Saving Africa's Witch Children

Update: I see the video I embedded has been removed. There is, *cough*cough*, a torrent available...

A documentary (embedded below, or click here) on one of the greatest tragedies of our time: witch hunts in Africa. The only appropriate response is burning indignation. (Note: you can download this video by following the link and creating an account with Vimeo).


Saving Africa's Witch Children from Africa's Witch Children on Vimeo.

See also my posts: "Human Sacrifice in Uganda" and "Witch Trials in Africa".

Video: Michael Spencer defends skepticism and science

Journalist Michael Spencer, author of Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, has an excellent TEDTalk out (embedded below or click here). It's a defense of science and rationality delivered with passion, verve, humor and a touch - appropriately - of anger. Highly recommended.

Video: Instantiated Turing machine

The Turing machine, first described in Alan Turing's classic paper "On Computable Numbers", is a seminal thought experiment that led directly to the machine you're currently using to read this. The Turing machine was never really meant to be built, but now some guy (not an academic, from what I can tell) has gone and built one, and it's capable of performing actual computations. Awesome.



Note: I've discussed Turing (once) before, and noted he had some daft ideas...

Picture: Why global warming can't be a conspiracy...

A nice graphic, from Going on a Bear Hunt.

(via PZ Myers).

Climate denial and arrogance

I recently became a bit more active on Twitter (find me at @michaelmeadon) and today I had an argument with one Ivo Vegter (@ivovegter), a South African journalist and, more to the point, climate denialist. Vegter is a staunch critic of climate science and he's penned several columns espousing his views, on Climategate, Copenhagen and one answering his critics (among others). I don't have either the time or the inclination to document all the misconceptions, false statements and fallacies Vegter makes in his columns, but I do want to hold forth on intellectual arrogance and share an analogy I put to him regarding expertise. Vegter, you see, is a journalist: he not only has no training in climate science, he has no scientific training at all. He is, apparently, "reasonably familiar with scientific subjects, and ha[s] read...a great deal on the subject of climate change." (Though this does not include, at least from what I can see, reading the scientific literature like respected science journalists do - c.f. Carl Zimmer and Ed Yong). Oddly, he claims "no particular expertise, nor qualifications to challenge professional scientists on matters of high science" but then does exactly that when taking sides between denialists (often non-climate scientist) and proper climate scientists.

As regular readers will know (I keep reminding you...) I recently wrote a long piece praising intellectual deference. The key premises of my argument there was (1) that the universe is hypercomplicated and (2) that intellectual rigor demands robust epistemic justification before forming an opinion. My conclusion was that, given (1), (2) is extremely difficult to fulfill. Intellectual responsibility, then, demands either agnosticism or deference to expert consensus when (2) is not fulfilled. I think it should be obvious that climate science is in fact preposterously complicated. To make up your own mind, all by yourself, about whether human activities cause global climate change, you would need to understand, at a minimum and as far as this particular non-expert can tell, the relevant physical and chemical processes that happen in the atmosphere and how they change, the history of and variations in climatic conditions, the extent and history of anthropogenic greenhouse gasses, and the mathematics that underlie climate models. To form justified opinions about these, in turn, you’d have to know and understand, including all the technical details, a vast body of literature about things like dendroclimatology, meridional overturning circulation, the net radiative forcing of anthropogenic aerosols, and the quasi-biennial oscillation.

Vegter, as far as I know at least, understands none of the above, let alone at an expert level. Yet he espouses an opinion contrary to scientific consensus. (While there is plenty we don't know, the vast majority of the relevant experts agree climate change is anthropogenic). Without properly understanding the methods of science, he claims, absurdly, that "Climategate" shows there is a warmist conspiracy. He adjudicates arguments between scientists and denialists - usually in favor of the latter. All of this, I think, is irresponsible and arrogant in the extreme. As I pointed out in my deference piece:

It is extraordinarily arrogant to have (independent) opinions on complex questions without being willing to pay your dues first – that is, without studying the question for years, reading the scholarly literature, mastering the relevant techniques and mathematics, and so on. Thinking you are entitled to an opinion without paying your dues is the very epitome of intellectual arrogance. And it is especially arrogant – mind-bogglingly so – for a non-expert to have opinions that contradict the consensus of the tens of thousands of intelligent, diligent and dedicated people who have spent decades studying, debating, doing research on and thinking deeply about their respective disciplines. The bottom line: be an expert, defer, or suspend judgment.

There is, I've noticed, an odd inconsistency in lay arrogance about science. I doubt very much Vegter would grab the knife away from a neurosurgeon and start cutting away himself. I doubt Vegter would tell an engineer she's Doing It Wrong and redraw her plans for a bridge. And yet Vegter seems perfectly willing to yell 'bunkum!', 'conspiracy!' and 'fraud!' when it comes to climate science, despite the fact that the topic is arguably much more complicated and the stakes several orders of magnitude higher. Why not watch MegaStructures on Natural Geographic and start an engineering firm? Why not browse through Gray's Anatomy, read a bit of Oliver Sacks and then branch out to neurosurgery? He's done neither physics nor physiology, but seems willing to advise climate scientists on the strength of his ignorance on the former, but not neurosurgeons on the strength of his ignorance in the latter. Why?

The scale of the universe

I've linked to a video that puts the scale of the universe into perspective, but that started with Pluto and worked its way up. Now Newgrounds user Fotoshop has created an awesome interactive flash animation showing the scale of the universe from the very smallest - the Planck scale - to the very largest - the universe itself. It is made entirely out of win. Check it out. Srsly. (Below is just an image of the thing, click here to go to the animation).

(Via James, via Phil Plait).

Video: Holy Shit Man Walks on Fucking Moon

Okay, so I've probably been posting too many videos of late, but this is just awesome. It's video rendition of the Onion piece (in Our Dumb Century) on the moon landing. It's embedded below, and here's the direct link:



By the way, if anyone wants to make me really happy, buy me a framed copy of the piece from the Onion store... :-)

(HT: David Spurrett).

Video: Dara O Briain on quackery

Dara O Briain really gets it. And he's damn funny to boot. Check this out (or click here):



(HT to Hugh Pastoll).

Video: Human sacrifice in Uganda

Human sacrifice is an ancient and culturally widespread practice that - preposterously, mind-bogglingly, burning indignation-invokingly - survives to the present day. BBC reporter Tim Whewell recently traveled to Uganda and produced a deeply disturbing film for Newsnight about a seeming rise in child sacrifice in that country. Watch it and be shocked.

Uganda, it is important to note, is a scarred country: the religiously-inspired Lord's Resistance Army (led by the batshit crazy Joseph Kony) has engaged in armed rebellion since the late 1980s. And the LRA is seriously bad news: they've committed a panoply of human rights violations, including a systematic campaign of torture, rape and mutilation. Obviously, also, Uganda has a complex history, and, like many other African countries, was an artificial creation of colonialism. Pinning Uganda's current problems on any one cause, then, is folly. I can't help but notice, though, that superstition, religion, magical thinking and other vices are unmistakably implicated in the evils that are so widespread in the country. Whatever other social, economic, cultural, and psychological causes we identify, it is obvious that people having idiotic premodern beliefs will be part of the explanation, and perhaps even a necessary condition for the occurrence of such horrors as ritual child sacrifice. (Having dumb beliefs is certainly not sufficient though).

I found it interesting, also, that even those who campaign against child sacrifice - former witch doctors, government ministers and so on - buy into the superstitious belief system that underlies the sacrifices. This reminds me of a great quote from the famed anthropologist E. E. Evans-Prichard. In Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande, Prichard wrote:

The Azande see as well as we that the failure of their oracle to prophesy truly calls for explanation, but so entangled are they in mystical notions that they must make use of them to account for the failure. The contradiction between experience and one mystical notion is explained by reference to other mystical notions (p. 388).

So entangled in religious bollocks is a former witch doctor who now campaigns against child sacrifice (and admits to ~70 killings), that he explains his previous behavior, not by rejecting the underlying stupid belief system, by but invoking yet more bollocks: he claims to have been possessed by a demon while he committed his atrocities.

(See also: Jourdemayne's piece on the killings at The Lay Scientist).

Fun with fossils

So the fiancée, her family and I had a lovely holiday in Clarens (Google Maps) over the December holidays. While there, we took a day trip to the Golden Gate National Park (go if you have a chance, it's gorgeous) and to everyone's delight, I discovered some fossils! Well, I think they're fossils - they certainly look like fossils to me. But, obviously, I'm no paleontologist so I might be entirely wrong. (Angela, the aforementioned fiancée, already blogged about the incident by the way). Anyway, some of the best pictures are below the fold.