UFO rants are fun.

Posted by on February 6, 2009 No comments
Three people enjoy the summer sky over the Del...
Image via Wikipedia

Since I enjoy rants against those holding beliefs with no basis in reality, I enjoyed this little post on Skeptic Blog.

I had to laugh when I read fellow Skeptologist Brian Dunning’s article about the UFO True Believerâ„¢ Stan Friedman hating him. What an elite club! Friedman is no fan of me, either. A few years ago I wrote an article for Sky and Telescope magazine about UFOs, basically making the same claim I made here last week: if all these UFO sightings we hear about were real, the majority of them would be seen by amateur astronomers.

Friedman took exception to that (shocker, I know). In his internet newsletter (subscription required), he said: “Plait among other gems says about Amateur [sic] astronomers [sic] ‘Logically, they should be reporting most of the UFOs’. This is logic?”

Um, yeah, Mr. Friedman, it is. Maybe you should acquaint yourself with it. Note that this is all he said, just dismissing my point without actually saying anything about it. I know, it’s hard to believe that someone with such stature in the UFO community would make a claim with no evidence, and dismiss a claim that does have evidence!

Be sure to click on over and read it all.

HFCS and your health

Posted by on February 4, 2009 No comments

New data: High-fructose corn syrup no worse than sugar – USATODAY.com

Now, the tide of research, if not public opinion, has shifted. This week, five papers published in

Mexican Coke. Made with real cane sugar inste...
Image by slworking2 via Flickr

a supplement to Clinical Nutrition find no special link between consumption of high-fructose corn syrup and obesity. One paper was written by Barry Popkin, a co-author on the original 2004 paper.

I’m sure this won’t convince many on the anti-HFCS bandwagon, but some of us prefer to live in the world of evidence. The evidence points to no ill-effects. Sorry, Charley.

Of course, we all consume too much sweetener. Period.

Get fit with running, sit-ups, and push-ups

Posted by on January 30, 2009 1 comment
Uploaded by: Frank C.
Image via Wikipedia

This past fall I started this running program.

If you’ve done a lot of walking, but you’ve never run before, you might feel a bit intimidated to get out there and start running. This 8-week plan will help you ease into the sport. Before you get started with running, get familiar with how to do the run/walk method.

I’ve been idly looking for something else to do during the cold weather. Via Lifehacker I recently came across these two programs which I’m going to try implementing simultaneously.

one hundred push ups

If you’re serious about increasing your strength, follow this six week training program and you’ll soon be on your way to completing 100 consecutive push ups!

two hundred sit-ups

Think there’s no way you could do this? I think you can! All you need is a good plan, plenty of discipline and about 30 minutes a week to achieve this goal!

No doubt some of you can already do 100 consecutive sit-ups, but let’s face it, you’re in a big minority. Most of you reading this won’t even be able to manage 20 sit-ups. Actually, I’m sure many of you can’t even do 10.

I’ll update with some info as I try to implement these. This quote holds so true for these sorts of goals.

Three events do not an “issue” make.

Posted by on January 28, 2009 No comments
Xbox 360 Wireless Controller
Image via Wikipedia

Referring to a few stories they’ve done about violence associated with gadgets, in this item on Gizmodo, Sean Fallon asks:

In the last few months we have seen a runaway teenager die after having his Xbox 360 taken away, a teenager kill his parents over Halo 3 and 30-year old brothers stab each other over a PS2 controller. Naturally, this begs the question—what the hell is going on here? Is this a parenting issue, a social issue, or a scary psychological disorder that needs to be taken more seriously?

This paragraph seems to imply there’s some sort of pattern to analyze here.  Three examples don’t show a pattern.  Especially given the hundreds of millions of gadgets out there.

“I told you so” is stupid.

Posted by on January 24, 2009 No comments

Everything is a probability.

When I say Event X is going to happen, I of course don’t know this with 100% probability.

When you say “No, Event Y is going to happen.”, you do not know this with 100% probability, even if you think you do.

If Event Y happens, the fact that it happened says little about your “rightness” at the time of your prediction.  If I think Event X has a 75% chance of happening and Event Y has a 25% chance of happening, but Event Y is what actually ends up happening, that doesn’t mean my estimates at the time were wrong.

This is why “I told you so” is stupid.  It doesn’t increase your stature as an accurate predictor.  The only things that should increase your stature as an accurate predictor is a history of predictions that match with events that happen.  For bonus points your predictions calibrated probabilities should match the real events.

As an aside, the problems related to this include our societies reliance on ‘pundits’.  There is no central clearinghouse for recording well-defined predictions which matches those with their results.  Such a mechanism would help us better pick our leaders and those who advise our leaders.

For love of reading

Posted by on January 12, 2009 No comments

she really did read the impossible-sounding 462 books in 2008. Those 462 books marked a personal record — she’s been keeping a formal list since 2005. Below, she explains what it’s like to be a super-speedy reader.

From the LA Times.

462 books in one year.  Pretty impressive to me.  Granted, she’s a book reviewer so she has more time to read than some of us, but that’s still over a book per day.

One of my goals for this year is to read more.  Bare minimum, I’d like to read one book per week.  Since the 1st of December I’ve read the following:

  • Consider Phelebas by Iain M. Banks
  • The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds
  • The Butlerian Jihad by Brian Herbet and Kevin J. Anderson
  • The Machine Crusade by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson
  • The Battle of Corrin by Brian Herbet and Kevin J. Anderson

I need to step up the pace a bit…

Quoted

Posted by on December 22, 2008 1 comment

The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.

St. Augustine

Automatic MP3 organization using AutoIt

Posted by on December 22, 2008 4 comments

Somebody on the Something Awful forums asked me about my code that automatically organizes MP3’s I download, so here’s how it works…
Read more »

How I recovered my photos and much of the metadata with a few tools (Part 2)

Posted by on December 19, 2008 1 comment

This is a continuation of another post detailing how I recovered thousands of photos from an accidentally formatted hard drive. Read that post here.

The Problem – Part 2

At this point, I was definitely breathing easier, but there was still a lot of problems to deal with.  The problem with what PhotoRec does is that, it doesn’t look at the data on your hard disk at the file/directory level.  It looks at the raw data on the hard drive and recognizes if it’s a picture and then restores it to the location of your choice.  This means that filenames and directory structure are lost.  This also means, that nearly every jpeg file on the formatted hard drive was recoved…including tens of thousands of images from Firefox’s cache along with hundreds(thousands?) of other various images like wallpapers that I’ve downloaded over the years, with no obvious way to distinguish between them and actual photos.
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Spock is a lie

Posted by on December 5, 2008 1 comment

Spock
Image via Wikipedia

Spock has done a horrible disservice to the rationalist.  Let me explain…

I’ve had discussions with people who, after being shown their side of the argument didn’t hold, would respond with:  “You’re just being too rational.”  As if there can be such a thing.  I suspect what they really mean is that they feel like I’m not addressing their emotional need.

Spock has convinced the world (or at least some of it’s inhabitants) that rationality is the flipside of emotion.  This is far from the case.  Being rational doesn’t mean being emotionless or disregarding other people’s emotion.

When deciding what to believe, or what course of action you should take, the rational thing to do is consider how other people would react, how you would react, how you would feel.  Emotional responses are just another part of the environment in which we live, to not account for them in our reasoning is folly.