mechtopia

Why skepticism is like the M25

Analogies are great aren't they... They're an effective way to reinforce your flimsy misconceptions about something, whilst simultaneously taking attention away from the observable facts, but they have other uses too. Sometimes an analogy can provide us with a simple path to deeper understanding of an issue, like the use of imaginary numbers as a mathematical short cut, or the use of analogue electronics to model spring-damper systems. Will this be one of those occasions? Probably not, but here goes..

Groups

There are lots of groups out there in the world, many with a goal: Libertarians seek smaller governments, socialists seek bigger ones. Other groups seek a cure for a disease, or to ease the suffering of the afflicted. Some groups have already arrived at their destination, like a group for people with red hair, or a club for people who own a particular model of car. Some groups are trying to escape from somewhere, like from addiction, or from poor finances, or from Slough.

And?

So, I hear you ask, where's this all going? Well that's kind of my point. While most groups are defined by where they're starting from, where they're going, or where they've got to, skeptics, however, are united by little more than a method, a journey, an approach to handling situations.

What is the M25?

The M25 is an orbital motorway that loops around London, and provides a central hub for the traffic in the south east of England. When it's working well (which is an increasingly rare occurrence) it forms an important part of the means a traveller uses to get from any large town in the south east, to any other. Many people will use a short section of the M25 on a journey, but few have driven the road in its entirety, let alone in both directions - the M25 isn't a journey in itself, but it provides a structure by which people can get from A to B.

An M25 Club

Would you form a community of people that used the M25? If you took a random cross section of those using the road, you'd find a great variety of people, possibly with little in common, save for the fact that they all use a vehicle of some kind, and they're travelling on a road with the same name.. The chances that they'd agree about everything would be slim. If you asked two random people where they were going, or where they came from, you couldn't guarantee that they'd tell you the same thing (although you might find lots of people who were trying to escape from Slough)

Topics

If you did form a group for users of the M25, what would you talk about in idle conversation? Well, you could talk about how expensive it is to buy food at South Mimms, but hopefully you'd move on to something that's a little more interesting. If you were a regular user of the stretch between the M4 and M40 junctions, how would you react to someone that told you that to be a "proper" M25 user you had to be a regular user of the Dartford crossing? What if, quite frankly the Dartford crossing didn't figure in your everyday journey and didn't interest you?

So what am I saying?

I'm not saying that a community of skeptics isn't worthwhile, but you shouldn't expect it to behave like a normal group. You shouldn't be offended if people aren't going to the same place as you, or haven't come from the same place. What you should do is use your common dislike of the prices at South Mimms to build a rapport with your fellow traveller, and work together to keep the skeptical highway clear of traffic cones.

Conclusion

OK, that's as clear as mud isn't it, but hopefully you now realise why Atheists have to pay a toll at Dartford, and why people go insane if they try and drive the M25 all the way to the end. Next week: why Scientology is like the A404, and why Jesus is like a Ginsters pasty at the service station on the A12 at Chelmsford.

Posted at 10:39PM Aug 17, 2010 by ohp in Skepticism  |  Comments[0]

Edzard Ernst to Speak at Ipswich SITP

Professor Edzard Ernst is coming to speak at Ipswich Skeptics in the pub on the 22nd June 2010. More information at http://www.theoess.org.uk

Posted at 10:51AM Jun 15, 2010 by ohp in Skepticism  |  Comments[0]

The explanation behind the orbs photo

The explanation behind the picture with thousands of "orbs" was that although the environment wasn't dusty, there were thousands of tiny water droplets in the air. Here's the photo taken without the flash:

It was taken a few years back, and was one of those days when the fog was on the verge of forming large water droplets, when you get dew forming on your eyelashes. I took a number of pictures that evening, as it was a unique atmosphere for photography.

Posted at 03:04PM Jan 22, 2010 by ohp in Skepticism  |  Comments[0]

Is this the most haunted photograph ever?

Some would have us believe that orbs are the manifestations of spirits that appear in photographs. Scientists say that it's caused by the camera flash reflecting off dust particles in the air, but although the picture was taken with the flash gun, this picture was taken outside in an environment that was far from dusty.

So is this the most haunted photo ever, or do you think there's a more sensible explanation? What do you think? I will reveal the answer tomorrow.

Posted at 08:39PM Jan 04, 2010 by ohp in Skepticism  |  Comments[0]

Food advertising: what annoys me.

I thought I'd rant about food advertising. When I watch the TV, some adverts make me seethe with the amount of careful language manipulation that goes on. Quite frankly, I'd rather they tried to entertain me, than mislead me. Here are some of the methods I've seen used to peddle food to the masses.

They tell you what's not it it, when what's in it might be more important.

What do I mean? Well, what's completely natural, has no artificial colours, flavours or preservatives, is 100% sugar free, and forms part of a healthy, balanced diet? Lard, that's what. When you listen to a food advert, whatever they don't mention that could be in the food, that's probably what's in the food. If it's full of fat, it's natural and has no chemical additives. If it's completely artificial, then it's low in calories. Even some of the worst things can be spun to seem good by one measure or another: Product X: now 100% arsenic free!

Distancing yourself from a claim.

Reading this blog post could help prevent death by shark attacks (but it probably won't). Smearing butter on your forehead might help you get a job (but it probably won't) Eating product X could help support your immune system that might help keep your heart healthy (You fill in the gaps).

Pretending to sell to the baby.

Yeees, who is a gullible consumer? coochy coochy coo! This food is full of vitamins, isn't it liddle babby, wabby woo! Putting a baby in shot is license to treat the consumer like an idiot, and hope they'll fill their tummy wum wums with your prodddy woddy wuct.

Random Statement.

Why not round off your advert with a random statement that doesn't follow from anything you've said, but a viewer might confuse with the narrative? Product X. Because you're not a mass murderer.

Statistical jiggery pokery

The trick of reversing the percentage is getting a bit old now. You used to see claims of things being "95% fat free", which is just another way of saying "this product is 5% fat!" but consumers are getting wise. A newer approach with percentages is, in my eyes even less useful to the consumer: the "made with" claim. "Product X is made with 100% chicken" might suggest that the product is all chicken, but the crucial word here is "with" and not "from" - by saying that it's made "with" 100% chicken, all you're saying is that if your food is 30% chicken, 100% of that 30% is chicken. By replacing the 30% statistic with the word "with" you free yourself from the burden of facts.

So what annoys you about food advertising?

Posted at 04:42PM Dec 04, 2009 by ohp in Skepticism  |  Comments[0]

The great HDMI Scam

It always annoys me when people are sold unnecessary electroncs. Often people are bamboozled into purchasing components that are way overspecified for the task in hand. One recent example that I have been noticing is as new high definition equipment is coming onto the market, people are being sold overpriced HDMI cables, and are being told that it improves the picture quality

In the early days of video cables, you’d need to link up using RGB, component, or VGA: all analogue formats, and it was important to preserve the signal quality by using good cables for long cable runs.

HDMI is a newer cable designed for consumer video, and supports high definition video. Basically the designers took DVI-D (a system for connecting computers to monitors), implemented content protection (HDCP), added audio channels and squeezed it all into a compact connector.

So what’s the point?

Well, HDMI is a purely digital connector. This means that whatever interference is picked up by the cable en route, the receiving device can separate out the digital signal, and reconstruct it, exactly as it was before it was sent down the line.

Will buying a more expensive cable make the picture quality better?

Well, do you think this web site would look better with an expensive ethernet cable? Do you think that if you had a gold plated modem lead, then online photos would look crisper?

Digital transmission changes the way in which failure occurs. If your cable was bad enough to break up the signal it would break up entirely, like Digital TV, or when you're on a GSM mobile phone, and you travel through a tunnel. It wouldn't slowly degrade like in an analogue system, where you'd experience hiss as the signal degraded. Even really cheap HDMI cables will carry a signal way above the threshold required for a perfect image.

My advice is, don't spend any more than £5 on a short HDMI cable (in the order of 1m) and no more than £30 on any cable under 10m without built in electronics (some really long cables will use repeaters, for example).

Posted at 12:20PM Sep 30, 2009 by ohp in Skepticism  |  Comments[1]

Brianspredictions.com - did he predict the UK lottery numbers?

This article was originally posted to the jref foundation forum in February 2007. Additions have been made in red

I was googling for something entirely different (boring techy stuff) when I came across this site:

http://briansprediction.com/

Well, I thought I'd have a laugh, so I dug about a bit. There's a small bit of text at the top that says "More than 4000 confirmed dream predictions"

Uh oh, I thought. This is the old scattergun approach, where you write down a load of gibberish, and wait until some of it matches. Ultimately much of it seems to be the case, but I came across this bit:

http://briansprediction.com/dd/5050.htm

Wow. He predicted the outcome of the lottery draw on the 3rd of January, in a dream on the 2nd! Not only that, but he guessed the bonus ball too.

Now, this is a bit of a statistical nightmare to work out, but the chances of winning the national lottery are 1 in (49!/(43!*6!)) = 1 in 14 million. Add the bonus ball prediction, and I believe that comes to 1 in 588 million.

Watch out Mr Randi... your million dollars might be at stake! Oh, wait, anyone that can predict the national lottery numbers doesn't need a million dollars!

In light of this amazing power, I thought I'd poke around a bit more...

The first thing that is odd is the order of numbers. The plain text of the prediction (oh, and there's a silly face there too) was

"394613174749 48 UK SH"

When you compare this with the actual results:

13,17,39,46,47,49 Bonus Ball: 48

You can see that the difference is that the middle two numbers had been switched to the front in the prediction. So what? you might say, perhaps they were drawn in that order...

well, they were drawn in this order:

17,46,49,13,47,39 bonus ball: 48

You'd expect a psychic to read them out in the order of the draw wouldn't you? Well, perhaps I'm making too many assumptions.

OK, so what about the time of the prediction?

There's a link above the image with floatover text that reads

"This documents creation date has been confirmed"

This takes you to a site called ymlp.com, which appears to be a mailing list provider. There is an archive of posts. the one we're interested in is:

http://www.ymlp161.com/pubarchive_show_message.php?brian2179+733

If you take it on face value, these predictions were posted at "2.3.2007 1:28 PM EDT USA" which is, if I'm not mistaken, is 5.28pm GMT (UK time) on 3rd February.

So when was the draw? The UK national lottery site doesn't have the actual time of the draw, so I called them up to find out. They could only tell me the usual time, even after referring me to their line manager. They suggested that I call the BBC. When I called the BBC all they could tell me was the draw was between 7.50pm and 8.35pm on the 3rd February. (the draw occurs during a panel game style quiz show)

Wow. This posting was made around 2 hours and 20 minutes before the lottery draw!

As one final check, I checked to see that the image files are part of the mail itself, as an attachment, so I know that the image files were mailed out at the same time as the post itself. The crucial one in question has the following URL:

http://briansprediction.com/pri/FEB20097.jpg

Ah. Looks like it's pointing back at Brian's site. Well, it's just an innocent mistake isn't it? we all know this image was created at the same time as the post, don't we? How can we tell?

There's a thing with http called the last-modified: header that most web servers will take from the file date stamp on the filesystem. When you download a file with the wget utility, it will preserve this date stamp on the file you downloaded. Now, it's not foolproof, but if it shows a date before the predicted event, then either this bloke is a bit clever with web sites, or he's psychic. If it's after, then he's either a faker, his server's clock is wrong, or he didn't upload the premonition until after the lottery results, which is odd, as the mailing list post that references it was posted at 5.30pm.

here's the techie stuff.

basically, I telnet to the web server, request the header for the file, disconnect, then check the time to ensure that it matches the remote server.

# telnet briansprediction.com 80
Trying 74.52.8.230...
Connected to briansprediction.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD /pri/FEB20097.jpg HTTP/1.1
Host: briansprediction.com

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 08 Feb 2007 15:35:30 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.36 (Unix) mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.4
FrontPage/5.0.2.2635.SR1.2 mod_ssl/2.8.27 OpenSSL/0.9.7a PHP-CGI/0.1b
Last-Modified: Sat, 03 Feb 2007 22:26:48 GMT
ETag: "1380c5-14799-45c50c28"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 83865
Content-Type: image/jpeg

Connection closed by foreign host.

I checked the clock was correct from a server header response.. yes, it shows the current time, so the server clock isn't wrong.

So what's the time stamp of the image file I hear you ask?

Drum roll please....

3rd February at 10.26pm, GMT, around 2 hours after the national lottery draw.

Update: Brian's site is still running, and he's still documenting his dreams. When I get a moment, I'm going to take a look at what he's currently predicting. A casual inspection of the files shows that the files were re-stamped on the 22nd March 2009 (probably a change of hosting provider, or a file re-organisation), meaning analysis using the above method is impossible for anything posted before that date.

Being able to predict the future is an appealing concept (although, I'm sure not without its downsides) Sadly I've not yet seen any evidence to show that Brian has any ability to predict the future. I would reccomend that he uses a more reliable way of independently verifying his predictions, so that it's easier to see how good they are. I'd be quite happy to suggest some methods that could be used.

Posted at 11:06AM Sep 30, 2009 by ohp in Skepticism  |  Comments[1]