Posted Wednesday, December 16, 2009 by
Techskeptic
I find winter solstice to be an extremely uplifting day, so we celebrate it. To me, it feels like the weight of the long nights and short days and cold weather gets lifted off of me because we turn the corner towards spring. I like it a lot.
This mood gets me into the giving mood. So a couple of years ago I started listing secular charities and compiled a list. Sadly, for me, this year I was unable to refresh it. I kept putting it off and now I am pretty swamped with work (I have not been home for any decent amount of time for 3 weeks), and a skeptical project I am working on. So while I have intended to redesign the list to make it easier to read and navigate, I fear I must simply refer you to the old post, much like I did last year.
PLEASE add your favorite secular charities in the comments section! If any links are dead, please report them. I will get around to doing a real refresh before next year! I promise.
Here is the list of secular charities.
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Posted Monday, November 02, 2009 by
Techskeptic
Looks like things are slowing down a bit here at Effort Sisyphus. There are a number of reasons for this such as:
- I have a big skeptical project I am working on, news to come
- I have real life things that are interfering with my blogging time
- I am preparing the Atheist Charities post to be a little more user friendly for release in December
- I'm suffering writer's block, but have been tweeting on little things I see here and there, feel free to follow (techskeptik)
I have three posts jogging around in my head I'd like to find a few hours to attack, unfortunately it is currently impossible to schedule time for them that they require.
Well now you know. This place is not dead, I am in a temporarly slow down that should recover again soon.
Stay Tuned!
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Posted Tuesday, September 08, 2009 by
Techskeptic
Well I was not one of the lucky thousand who had time and opportunity to go to TAM. However, the upcoming NECSS is actually within reach for me both financially (I grew up in NYC, mom still lives there) and timing-wise (Lady Tech has agreed to watch the homefront and corral the kiddies). So I am off to the North East Conference on Science and Skepticism!
Looks like a good gamut of speakers. Here is the schedule:
09:30 AM - Doors open
10:00 AM - Welcome
10:10 AM - Speaker: Paul Offit - Communicating Science to the Public
11:00 AM - Live SGU Podcast taping (w/guest Richard Wiseman)
01:00 PM - Break for lunch
01:10 PM - 01:40 - George Hrab lunchtime musical performance
02:15 PM - Panel: Skepticism & Media - Rachael Dunlop, Howard Schneider, John Snyder, John Rennie (moderator)
03:40 PM - Panel: Why is it So Difficult to Be a Skeptic? - Richard Wiseman, Massimo Pigliucci, Kaja Perina, Michael De Dora (moderator)
05:00 PM - Speaker: Carl Zimmer
06:00 PM - Exit
Looks like fun. James Randi was supposed to be there, but looks like he is going to have to take a pass on this one until his health gets better. To add to the grooviness there is a Drinking Skeptically event at Dewey Flatiron on friday at 8, which I will also be attending. I want to see how this is done, so I can start a Skeptic's in the pub in my area (albany area in NY).
Anyway, if there any questions or things you might be interested in at this event, leave a comment and I'll be sure to follow up for you.
I'll also twitter anything useful I see from this event. You can follow me if you wish at TechSkeptik (yeah careful of that last letter, i'm pissed someone took my normal handle).
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Posted Thursday, August 27, 2009 by
Techskeptic
A really nice thing happened to me today and I wanted to share. If you have been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that I kinda started getting into this skeptical thinking stuff due to the nonsense that a particular company was putting out. Some time later this year, I'll have a wrap up post on Medis. The full story is here, here and here.
For the last three years, along with blogging, I have been a presences on the yahoo board for Medis. Poking fun at Medis lemmings who were so married to the hype, they watched their money drop from $35/share down to below $0.35/share. What a nose dive. Totally predictable.
Anyway, I recently got a letter from someone who was given a "tip", to invest in Medis and spent some time on the Yahoo boards. He introduced himself and asked about medis. But then followed up with a general letter about nonsense. It went as follows:
I sometimes despair at the current state of our citizens ability to think for themselves.
Just consider Scientology, a belief that states that aliens live inside us. And the "E" meter, they use, nothing but the ohm meter you can buy at radio shack.
I blame it mostly on our educational system.
Obviously I am quite familiar with the claims of Scientology and this blog arose directly out of the sentiment of the first sentence. But I have come to really love the skeptical movement. I find most of the blogs smart, uplifting, funny. The podcasts I listen too do not delineate a bunch of cranky curmudgeons whining into a microphone. And I do not blame everything on our educational system. I wish it were just that easy. So I wrote back:
If you arent already familiar with the skepticism movement let me be the first to introduce you to it.
When I started blogging it was in response to needing a place to organize and present my thoughts on one single issue: Medis. When first heard about it it seemed like it could be OK. Another power source...great! But having a lot of experience with the battery market, it soon became obvious to me that things were not adding up. Whenever a quantifiable metric regarding the 24/7 was presented, li+ always clearly bettered it. Then I became aware of rationalizations that were being used to justify it. At the time I could not identify the problems, I just knew that it didnt make sense.
So I started a blog, pointing out the inconsistencies. But I didnt work on that blog for months after that first couple of posts. Then, while researching "The Secret" because of something my sister said, I came across this site. That then lead me to other sites. The author of that site personally encouraged me to write. And write I did.
Soon I came to realize that there is a whole segment of the population who were doing what I was trying to do: exposing fraud and nonsense. With utter nonsense like homeopathy, the secret, antivaxxers, and so on and so forth, you'd think this group of people would become disheartened like you are describing. Nothing could be further form the truth.
For the most part (but certainly not all the time) these are the smart geeks you knew in high school. Right now there have been millions of man-hours dedicated to the very same activities like I was doing exposing medis on a scientific level.
If you havent become part of the movement, even in its most passive form, I would recommend it. Here are some good places to start:
Blogs /sites
(you'll have to search, I dont wanna waste time by forming links for all these)
bad astronomy
New England skeptical society
Skeptico
jref
pharyngula
bad science
respectful insolence (who organizes the skeptics circle of blogs)
James Randi Educational Foundation
Pod casts
Skeptics guide to the universe
Digital Bits skeptic
Skeptoid
Conventions:
The Amazing Meeting (TAM)
This list is barely comprehensive and doesn't even come close to covering even the biggest resources. In this group you'll find thoughtful, respectful (and not very respectful), people who are scientists, musicians, comedians, and average joes like me.
In it you'll see that scientology is but a small portion of the nonsense out there. But you'll also find that it doesn't need to get you down. This movement is growing every year and that alone makes me feel great. Importantly, its not just education, its lazy thinking instilled by religion, parents, greed and well, laziness that contribute to this state of things. Most people simply are missing the motivation to ask "What if?" or "how?" and don't enjoy pointing out sloppy thinking from politicians, clergy, and purveyors of a whole realm of nonsense.
If this is new stuff to you, I hope you spend a little time becoming familiar with these resources. There is so much to learn, not just on one topic or another, but about people in general and the universe around us.
Good luck.
What do you think? Would you have written something different to get people involved?
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Posted Tuesday, July 28, 2009 by
Techskeptic
Phil Plait and others have debunked the idea that you can balance an egg on end only on the vernal equinox. He then shows that a little patience can lead to egg balancing on any day. Wanna see patience?
A local artist, Justin Zaremski balances lots of things like rocks and tools. He makes some of the most amazing balancing sculptures. He just sent me a new one which I thought was pretty amazing.
Wow.
I guarantee that this is not a photoshopped image, there is no glue involved, there are no tricks of any kind. Just patience and perseverance.
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Posted Thursday, June 11, 2009 by
Techskeptic
Short post here. I'm not going to do a detailed critique.
woot.com had a sale on a Roomba. I got one. Its awesome. Even my generally technophobic wife likes it. We have a pretty big place so we keep it confined to our bedroom where the two dogs sleep at night. Our room is about 25x25, I leave the door open to the bathroom and it finds our way into the walk in closet. Its really great. Neither of us like to vacuum (who does?), so now you hit a button in the morning, go to work, dump the dirt when you get home. Really, not a lot of work there.
There are two drawbacks using it. The first is that you have to roomba-size the room. That means taping down throw rugs with strong double sided rug tape (you get it at home depot), getting rid of clutter, push stray wires against the wall, and things like that. The second is that it is not methodical. For the most part it moves around the room in a random pattern. That means you can't expect it to do that same sort of job you would do with a vacuum. That is why you bend over and press the button every day. Yeesh, so much work! Its not really a drawback, its more of a shift in the way you have to think about vacuuming your room.
Our room looks very clean all the time now, but I am still amazed that it still manages to find dog hair and such (honestly, its a little gross that the dirt cartridge is transparent, you can see how much skin and dander it sucks up).
Every week it need minimal maintenance. You need to pop out the brushes (no tools needed) and pull out the long hair (not mine!) and threads that have rolled up into the brushes. Its a 5 minute job.
Anyway, even my mom wants one now. I think these are great and I want more for the rest of our house.
Now, Dear iRobot, could you please make the following:
Lawn mower that nibbles at the grass (i.e. no large lawnmower blades, something closer to small hedge clippers. Solar powered in a way it just charges batteries during the day and nibbles at night. GPS guided in a way that I can just walk around with the GPS module to create waypoints that define the mowing area. Provide a differential transmitter so that the accuracy can be good.
For 500 bucks, I'd buy this in 2 seconds.
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Posted Sunday, May 31, 2009 by
Techskeptic
As I have written before, I recently switched to a mac, but I am still trying to find blogging software that rivals LiveWriter. I tried Mars Edit and Ecto, both of whch pale in comparison. This post was written with Blogo.
Mars edit was functional, but kind of annoying to use. I preferred Ecto. However ecto has a horrible habit of adding line breaks, so the posts come out poorly, and dog forbid I want to edit a previously posted entry, the line breaks got even worse.
The preview works pretty well (better than ecto), although why cant it just let me edit in the actual blog template like Livewriter does (well to some degree)? One of the features of blogo that is supposed to be good is dealing with pictures.
OK, pulling an image from the net is nice, you just drag it in, you dont need to copy a link and paste it. even the word wrap seems to work OK.
Anyway, so far so good. easy to install, pictures are easy, and hopefully the preview will be accurate. Here is their tagline from the website (obviously I'm just including it here to check out how quotes come out).
Easily publish text, images, videos, slideshows and more. With a simple, intuitive interface and support for Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, Typo, Drupal, Joomla, and Expression Engine, Blogo is the best way to maintain your blog and spread the word with Twitter, Ping.fm and other supported services.
Obviously I have not checked it with all those blogging services, but for blogger and mac, to me, seems better than Mars or Ecto. Have a mac? What is your opinion?
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Posted Wednesday, May 06, 2009 by
Techskeptic
You may have noticed that the tumbleweeds have been blowing by here. I have not gone. I am not taking a hiatus. Sadly, this is another one of those times where real life is intruding on my ability to get posts out.
I have some good ones 1/2 written (still), and I am slowly working on some skeptical thinking projects, for web and I am starting to teach myself how to make apps for my iPhone. I have some snarky apps in mind.
This dumb post is a result of my buying a Mac (no other way to progrsm iPhone apps) and trying out MarsEdit as a blogging tool. I was very comfortable with LiveWriter, which seems better and easier to do what you want from the start. But then again I have been away from macs for 15 years and have been playing with this for 10 minutes. So it may be premature.
Anyway, bear with me, I'll be back soon
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