I think I’ve been to this talk. Hundreds of times.

Tip o’ the wattle to Blue Gal.

Winter is here.

That’s the view to the west from the second floor of my house. The foothills are still bare, but the "fourteeners" (mountains over 14,000 feet) are dusted. It’s gorgeous, and just a taste of what’s to come, I would think.

Last week we got hail. Lots of hail. Lots and lots. It woke me up three times in the night, plinking against the gutters. When I got up in the morning, our back yard was filled with little jujubee-sized frozen water pellets. It was actually pretty cool, and I wasn’t the only one to enjoy it. Canis Minor did too.

Update (Oct 1): Well, didn’t this spawn a minor firestorm. A lot of the comments below are interesting. Some are thoughtful, some are not. Some take me to task for things I didn’t say, and some take me to task for things I did. I love an interesting discussion. But this update really is to let you know that Crooks and Liars has more on the situation.

AT&T sucks.

Got that? AT&T sucks. And I can say that. Know why? Because I am not using AT&T service. If I did, then I would have to agree to their Terms of Service, which say:

5.1 Suspension/Termination… In addition, AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes … (c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.

So, if I used AT&T, I would not be able to post this blog entry.

You know what? That sucks. Not as much as gleefully acquiescing to give all their customer data over to the Bush Administration in violation of the Constitution, or censoring Pearl Jam, but it sucks nonetheless.

Hat tip to Slashdot.

Hey, this week is the 20th anniversary of the airing of Star Trek: the Next Generation!

Cool.

I was in my first year of grad school then. A bunch of us nerdy astro grads got together and watched it, and we liked it, though the giant Portugese Man-O-Wars in love thing was pretty silly. I didn’t like Q much either, which goes to show what I know (he later became a favorite, though ruined on Voyager and DS9).

Anyway, I’m glad it revived the series. Next time I’m in Vegas (next June for TAM6, baby!) I’ll go to Quark’s bar and hoist a Warp Core Breach in TNG’s honor.

Hmmm, Wil, you listening? You should come to TAM!

I usually keep things light on Friday, but sometimes news happens at the end of the week.

Yesterday, a group of students protested the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance at their school, Boulder High. They met peacefully outside the school during the weekly school recitation of the Pledge as a way of showing that they are against the Pledge being recited over the school’s PA system.

It’s clear that this is about the use of the word "God" in the Pledge. No matter how you feel about the Pledge, and about religion, it strikes me that adding the reference in is simply offensive. It was done in the 1950s as a way of weeding out those dirty red commies during the dark McCarthy years of the US government, which is reason enough to take it out. But it also implies that this nation is based on religion, which is patently false. The Founding Fathers were mostly deists, not Christians — Jefferson himself created his own Bible where he literally tore out all events he deemed as supernatural in the "standard" Bible. Imagine one of the Presidential candidates admitting to doing that today.

The truth is, no matter how you slice it, is that America is not "one nation under God". It just isn’t. We have a Mormon running for President, and we’ve had a Catholic and various other flavors of Christians as President. They would disagree quite strongly over the nature of God. Moreover, we have Muslims in this country, and Jews, and (gasp) non-believers too.

So, which God is it we’re united under?

According to the article about the Pledge,

Members of the student group say they have three main gripes with the way the traditional pledge is read at the start of second-period classes: It takes away from school time; it’s ignored or disrespected by mocking teens; and the phrase, “one nation, under God,” violates the separation of church and state.

I think a case can be made both ways for that last point, and I’ll let Constitutional scholars who are smarter than me fight that out. But I think it is entirely disrespectful of students to make them recite the Pledge, or force them to hear it. There’s a simple and logical way to look at it: what if it said "One nation, under Allah"?

Why is that idea ridiculous, but using the word "God" isn’t?

There is video of the protest, and I have to say that I am really proud of these students who are sticking up for their rights. At the end, they recite a version of the Pledge which, I think, is far superior to the one we have now.

Interestingly, there is another video from Daily Camera:

Notice the one student they interview who says that if people "have a problem with it", they should leave the country. You might excuse him for saying something so anti-American because he’s young, but note that the other students, sticking up for what America truly means, are the same age. Maybe Boulder High needs to review their social studies class curriculum.

I live in Boulder; we moved here a few months ago. We could have moved anywhere in the country, but we specifically chose Boulder because of the school system here. Boulder High is one of two outstanding high schools in this area (Fairview is the other one), and when the time comes — if the students are as active and thoughtful as they are now — I will be happy to see The Little Astronomer attending.

Tip o’ the flagpole to Too Many Tribbles.

The 70th Skeptics Circle of critical thinking blog posts is up at Conspiracy Factor… if you can believe it.

We here at Bad Astronomy Central (and by we, I mean me) have heard just about every silly claim you can imagine. Planet X, the Moon Hoax, astrology, creationism… you know the story.

It’s not just astronomy, of course. Ghosts, spirits, crystals, homeopathy, prayer… these all go totally against what we know to be real, what we know to be true.

But when I (or countless other rationalists) point this out to the True Believer^TM, we always get the same response: "Science doesn’t know everything!"

Well, duh. We never said it did. But it’s the best tool humans have to distinguish truth from fantasy.

And that’s what makes me even madder when I hear scientists or science journalists buy into the pseudoscience framing. How many times have you heard a scientist say, "We can’t test the supernatural"? The idea being that prayer, ghosts, what-have-you, are not subject to scientific scrutiny.

Bull.

The latest blurting about this comes from a scientist quoted in a book review. In the review, the science journalist says:

As scientists at Iowa State University put it last year, supernatural explanations are “not within the scope or abilities of science.”

This is 100% wrong. Any claim, any explanation of an event, definitely falls within the scope of science. That’s because science is a method of investigation.

If someone says prayer helps people get healthy, then there is a clear methodology to test this (double blind tests with statistically large samples, as has been done — conclusion: prayer doesn’t work). If someone says a ghost makes noises in their house, then that noise is recordable, and the house itself testable: it may be old and creaky, or has pipes which thermally disturb the wood, or has rats in the walls. Creationists say the world is 6000 years old. We know this can be tested, literally thousands of ways. The conclusion: well, you know the conclusion.

Let me be clear: if you say there is a cause for an event, then there is a way to test that cause. It may not be easy, and it may involve elimination (like destroying the Moon Hoax arguments one by one until the only viable conclusion left is that we did indeed go to the Moon). The only claims I can think of that cannot be tested are solipsism (which to me is an interesting idea to toy with, but an intellectual dead end since it tells you nothing) and the actual existence of God.

For the latter, I say that it may not be possible to test for the existence of God, but people do make claims about what God has done. If those claims are true, then they can be tested.

Anything that has a physical, measurable manifestation is within the realm of science.

Which leaves me to say the thing I have said so many times, but which so many people don’t seem to want to understand: there is no such thing as the supernatural. If something exists, then it is real, and it is natural.

I don’t expect people at large to pick up on this, necessarily, but I sure think scientists should.