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If you enjoy science or a skeptical viewpoint you might be interested in the following (this is a brain child of Brian Dunning, who runs the Skeptoid Podcast)…

Friends – Here is a note from the director of the new TV pilot THE SKEPTOLOGISTS, starring Michael Shermer, Phil Plait, Steven Novella, Yau-Man Chan, Kirsten Sanford, and Mark Edward. We are shortly going to be out pitching it to the networks and are seeking as much email support as we can get.

Please consider posting this announcement, or any variation of it including the email address, to any blogs, podcasts, email lists or other resources you may have. Let’s get this show on the air!!!

Raise your voice! Let it be known that it’s time for a TV series that focuses on the real, the intelligent and important advances in science, critical thinking and skepticism. The Skeptologists will be pitched to major networks soon, and we want to give the programming executives a sense of what kind of support they can received if they invest in a TV series of this kind.

We have started an email campaign to have fans of the show write-in in support of this show idea and let us know why you would watch a show about critical thinking, science and skepticism! We will compile the emails and present to the executives along with our all-star cast, entertaining pilot program and solid production background to seal a great TV deal to give the Skeptics of the world a show they can stand behind, and be proud of!

Take a moment, and send a brief email to skeptologists@newrule.com. You email will be collected and will help support the show.

Today, while eating lunch with my friends/coworkers, we had an interesting discussion about morals in different situations. I remembered reading about a morality quiz a week or two ago. Some quick googling found the quiz at philosophersnet called Morality Play. I spent about two minutes flipping through some questions, and it made me squirm.

Before starting the quiz, I thought my own sense of morals was fairly rational and self-consistent. As I clicked through the questions,I could see my answers waver in response to very minor differences in what was fundamentally the same basic scenario. I found this both mildly disturbing and humbling. A few of my coworkers tried the quiz and became so uncomfortable that they had to stop part way through.

Sample Question

Q: A charity collection takes place in your office. For every UK£10.00 given, a blind person’s sight is restored. Instead of donating UK£10.00, you use the money to treat yourself to a cocktail after work. Are you morally responsible for the continued blindness of the person who would have been treated had you made the donation?

A. Responsible/Partly Responsible/Not Responsible

What do you find out?

If you complete the quiz, it presents a report of what factors you tend to consider when making moral decisions. The factors that this quiz measured are:

• Geographical distance (someone next door versus the other side of the world)
• Family Relatedness (your mother or child versus a stranger)
• Acts and Omissions (if performing an action is better/worse than doing nothing)
• Scale (hurting 1 to save 10 different than hurting 500 to save 50000)
• Cultural distance (someone from a similar culture versus a very different culture)

I really recommend you give the quiz a shot, it takes about 10 minutes and definitely will get you thinking.

I spent a bit of time this weekend watching some amazing videos from the TED conference archives. There is a wide range of topics available. I particularly enjoyed:

• Steve Johnson’s presentation on the story of a cholera outbreak in 1854 London and the major breakthrough in understanding about how cholera spread and could be stopped.
• David Gallo showing some bio-luminescent deep-sea creatures and mind-blowing examples of camouflage (the best parts are towards the end).
• Alan Russell talks about regenerative medicine, showing some really cool early results.

I also read an interesting NY Times article by Steven Pinker called “The Moral Instinct” that explores how morals differ from other opinions we hold about proper behavior and some questions that help you analyze your own values.

I’m on a number of (mostly-technical) mailing lists and forums and I frequently see people post questions asking for help.  Well in general thats what the mailing lists/forums are for, far too often people posting messages fall into one or more of the following categories:

* not having done any research (where a quick googling of the error string brings up an obvious solution)

* poorly labeled subject lines

* not providing sufficient background information (product versions, what has been tried already, etc)

which make it less likely the person will receive help, and also wastes additional time for the members of the mailing-list/forum that might be willing to try and help.

I found an article “How to Ask Questions The Smart Way” by Eric Raymond which is a good read covering the above problems and many more in detail. Even if you think your questions are well articulated, take a few mins and skim through the article.  I definitely picked up a few pointers.

I went to the public viewing tonight at the Astronomical Society of Harrisburg tonight.  I was hoping to get a glimpse of the Perseid meteor shower, but there too much cloud cover (apparently there was some good visibility of it last night).  The ASH had a bunch of telescopes in operation (some up to 17″), and the members were helping to orient them for the public.  I was able to get some nice sightings of Jupiter, including being able to clearly see some stripes.  I’m hoping to go back some other Sunday night when the sky is clearer.

There is a course at UC Berkeley called Physics for Future Presidents that is really interesting. You can listen to it for free via audio or video podcasts and the professor uses lots of neat examples that bring to life a variety of topics. The class uses very minimal math, so if don’t be scared away by a fear of complex equations.

Here are some neat stories/facts that I picked up while listening to the classes:

• A chocolate chip cookie has a lot more energy by weight than dynamite
• The solar energy that can be captured in a square meter is approximately 1 horse power
• There are sound channels in the atmosphere and ocean which carry sounds thousands of miles, allowing for some really cool uses like rescuing downed pilots or detecting nuclear tests

The San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the class.