Welcome to the slippery world of logical fallacies. In this case you’ve fallen for the old post hoc argument.

This fallacy follows the basic format of: A preceded B, therefore A caused B, and therefore assumes cause and effect for two events just because they are temporally related (the Latin translates to ‘after this, therefore because of this’). (theskepticsguide.org)

Well, what’s actually going on then? Mathematically the odds seem to be incomprehensibly stacked against you — 1:10,000,000 or more! But if you look at the big picture, it seems that someone at random wins every other week. So the odds for just any random person winning are about 1:3, which are much better odds. When push comes to shove, the numbers don’t really care what they’re doing. It does seem magical when it happens to you, but really you have just witnessed a truly random event, one of many such events that happen to you all the time; the only difference is your emotional investment in this particular one.

Let’s look at some other random events that you may take for granted that could be just as magical if you make it all about you.

Magic rain

You’re standing outside and a single drop of rain lands on the very end of your nose. “It’s about to rain,” you think, and seek shelter. But consider, if you will, the sheer amount of space that single raindrop had to travel through, and how many wind currents guided it to its final destination at the end of your nose. It’s almost like someone guided it to land perfectly and exactly in that spot. NASA would have a hard time doing the math on that one. Seems almost impossible that one raindrop would pick that exact place to land in order to warn you of the weather, but it did. In terms of odds, it’s much more likely that you’d win the lottery.

Now the rain starts and you don’t find shelter in time. You are getting pelted by rain and wind. The odds are the same for each individual raindrop hitting you as for the first one, but now you’re only able to see the raindrops as a downpour; you don’t consider them to be individual drops anymore. You have 1:1 odds of getting hit by just any rain drop. Has it lost its magic yet?

Prayer

You pray for a sick loved one and they get better, so you feel somewhat responsible. But how many prayers do you make on behalf of people that don’t come to fruition? Do you make excuses or move the goalpost to allow the prayer to be answered, even if it’s not what you asked for? Prayers are tricky for this reason. What you expect is a collaboration between you and a spiritual entity of your choosing; therefore, you can dismiss a negative outcome as the entity simply saying “no” rather than putting the blame completely on yourself. But it’s impossible to prove that there was any spiritual involvement either way. Your emotional investment in the outcome makes it seem to you that there was a connection made, but it’s more plausible to accept that people get better or worse on their own, without your spiritual sway if you don’t have actual evidence beyond emotion to back up your claim.

Precognition

You have a dream that comes true, or a daydream that seems too real and the events are unfolding just as you had pictured them. But how many dreams do you have that you can’t remember or that don’t come true? How many thoughts or daydreams do you have in a day or week? Do all of them come true, or was it just this one? When you try to count every thought or daydream, these numbers can be staggering. If you look at the figures, you are wrong infinitely more often than you are right. But let’s say you were correct in your predictions — how many of the details are accurate? Often dreams deal with familiar scenes or behaviors but the details are surreal: “In my dream I was driving toward my childhood home with my deceased father, and he kept weeping jewels from his eyes. Then we got into an accident. Two weeks later, I had a real car accident. I can’t help but think my father was trying to warn me.”

Which part of the dream came true exactly? The driving part? I drive every day, so there’s nothing significant there. The accident part? Everyone has anxiety about getting in an accident, car accidents are the number one cause of death among adults under thirty, and they are in the news almost every day — that could have affected the dream. Heading toward my childhood home? Technically, every time I travel in an easterly direction I’m heading toward my childhood home. Did the jewels symbolize financial loss from the accident? Well, the jewels could mean anything at all. If the accident happened six months or a year later instead of two weeks later, would it still be considered prophetic? You can see here how pretty much anything in the dream can be interpreted as an accurate prediction, regardless of how mundane the circumstance.

There are a number of things at play when making dream predictions:

1. We are creatures of habit; most of our days follow a routine; only the finer details of each day change for us.
2. Because dreams are loosely based on your waking life, you are bound to find parallels between the two states.
3. Your mind is constantly running hypothetical simulations drawing from everything you’ve experienced in life; that’s how we’re able to make cogent predictions based on careful observation. However, it works against us sometimes. It’s only a matter of time before the random sequencing of your unconscious mind generates an outcome based on the details of your routine-based waking life and superimposes a set of anxiety-causing situations that might have some amount of plausibility — and with seemingly apt timing. It won’t happen for everyone, but it does happen more than you would expect.

So with all that, do you really stand out that much among your peers with your ability to channel random events to your favour, or does it just seem that way because you have an emotional investment in the final, random-chance outcome? In all these events (lottery, prayer, psychic predictions, etc.), the magic relies on a simple set of self-deceptions — either confirmation bias or hindsight bias. Both force you to ignore all the times when things didn’t work in your favour and cherry pick the best outcomes to prove the magical truth. These beliefs can be very comforting because they can offer a sense of control in a situation where you had none. But be warned: if you rely on this type of magical thinking to get through life, you’re not really living in reality. Putting too much faith in this kind of magical thinking can actually do more harm than good because you might believe that merely concentrating on a problem can make it go away, when in fact you should be acting to affect the situation in a real way.

It seems that, the only way to make an argument against either side is to throw a straw man arguments at your opponent hoping the opposing side will burst into flames, since both sides refuse to deal with the core arguments of the other. Allow me to illustrate:

Science side: Everything I’ve uncovered shows that we, as a species, are the result of a hugely complex system that evolved over billions of years. And billions of years before that everything was born from a single point of space and energy. A “Big Bang” if you will.

Intelligent Design side: What about all the stuff you haven’t uncovered yet? You can’t prove that the stuff you don’t know didn’t come from God!

Science side: B-but, I didn’t even mention Go…

Intelligent Design side: Let me stop you right there, you are talking about things I have no interest in and therefore reject as being a part of my reality. God created everything, this is what I KNOW!

Science side: How do you know? Can you come up with a single piece of evidence to support this claim? Can you write it down in an equation and predict a real-world outcome, to backup a statement like that? I have no interest in things that can’t be measured, therefore I reject your reality. I don’t yet know what created everything, but I’m going to keep looking.

Intelligent Design side: STOP LOOKING, God exists! I KNOW IT! Be humbled by my knowledge. You can’t measure Love, but it exists, you can’t measure pleasure or pain… or time! The earth is 6,000 years old! And to deny THAT is to pay for, and stamp, a one way ticket to H. E. Double hockey-sticks!

Science side: Why are you yelling at me?  And what’s this business about time? You can’t expect me to belie…

And so on… You get the picture. The arguments are coming from completely separate worlds. People can speak the same language but completely misunderstand each other, because the context of the arguments is so far removed from each side’s experience. One’s life is based on careful observation, record keeping and patience, while the other is based on tradition, obedience and emotion. To both parties, the world they live in is absolutely real, and the other’s is a work of fantasy and delusion. The irony is both sides fear the other is leading our whole species toward certain doom by corrupting the minds of our youth.

Now, I must admit, I do lean toward the science side of the spectrum, but I also remember my days as a born-again christian (seems like a lifetime ago); as much as I hate to admit it, the religion side has a point when viewed from their perspective. Join me there for a moment please, this will all make sense in the end.

Narrator: Meet Joe Christian. He’s an average man, with a good job 2.5 kids and a loving wife. He’s thankful for the level of comfort he enjoys in his life and shows his thanks every Sunday in church with his family. His church community has frequent fund raisers and gives their time and money to charity on a regular basis. Joe’s family and his community is running in a beneficial way for the rest of the people in this world, and as long as he walks the strait and narrow, works hard and only asks questions when necessary, Joe will have a long and happy life.

One day Joe meets Charles at a bus stop. Charles doesn’t go to church, doesn’t have a family and lives very successfully as a scientist at the local chemical plant. Just on a whim Joe strikes up a conversation with Charles by asking him how his walk with the Lord is going. Charles looks back astonished at the friendly yet forward question and answers honestly, by saying “I don’t believe in God, so my walk is going rather smoothly, a little quiet at times but not too bad over all.”

Joe now has mixed feelings, how can Charles say he doesn’t believe in God? To Joe, who never questioned his religiously peppered education or his place in society, and who lived a pretty privileged life, God was responsible for everything he held dear. That’s like saying he doesn’t believe in air, or light. It doesn’t make any rational sense. So, what should he do with this information?

1. He can follow up with Charles and ask him to clarify his statement.
2. He can end the conversation and forget about everything.
3. He can get offended with Charles and try to teach him a thing or two about God, to try to show him a little humility.

No matter what the outcome, the damage is done. Joe’s faith has been shaken with one simple statement from an outsider. Now if Joe starts to investigate further into this matter, he’s going to have way more questions crop up than answers, those questions lead to talk, and then more and more people in his community will be asking questions that the church can’t answer. The church will eventually lose is members, and the members will lose their common bonds and all the good they did in the past will cease. All because, one person asked too many questions.

Thankfully most good creationists aren’t like Joe, in that the fear they have for their immortal souls keeps them from digging too deep into the control mechanisms of the Church, and most of them can go on living somewhat fulfilling lives, never knowing, and never wanting to know a more complex and beautiful world. It’s this fear that keeps them in check, and it’s this fear that makes them respond with anger when challenged.

If a person is going to be receptive to an argument from the side of science, then they will have already dealt with some serious doubt and would be on the fence with their faith already. In a world where faith is seen as a blessing and a strong character trait, there aren’t many who have the courage to make it that far down the rabbit hole of science, without running screaming back into the blissfully ignorant and comforting arms of the church.

For me, looking back, I remember a time when I was certain God was watching over us all, and I took comfort in “knowing” all rhetorical questions had absolute answers. I thought I knew it all. But I see now, that the world is much larger and more intricate than I ever imagined. I finally understand the power of unanswerable questions. Take, for instance, the question “Is there a God?”. The only suitable answer to this question for me now is … stillness. I find a lot of comfort in that reflection.

I think you have to be a certain kind of person, if you’re going to be a scientist. Or a science enthusiast. You need to have a rare and innate curiosity, that most people lack. These precious few are the ones keeping our progress running forward instead of backward. The depths of science shrouds the true intentions of our actions to the people who live very surface lives. This seemingly enigmatic existence scares the hell out of a lot of people and leads to conspiracy and rumor.

What’s the point of debating with group of people who have no intention of listening? I think we need each other; with each debate both sides walk away with a clearer understanding of what they’re fighting for. So, we fight to hone our own skills, but if we intend to win the battle of science vs. ignorance, we need to remember that we aren’t dealing with people who want to learn. Therefore the dance steps need to be different when dealing with these arguments. They attack because they feel you are contradicting everything they believe to be true. You seem like irrational fools when compared to the awesome power of a deity they’ve deluded themselves into seeing everywhere.

I know, nothing irks me more than some some low-brow chuckle-head laughing at my “arrogance” (book smarts), thinking he’s out witted me with a non sequitur God bomb, when in truth he’s only proven his own limitations. It doesn’t make him evil, or crazy. Just limited… held back and misguided, and standing up for what he believes to be right.

A battle of wits is best won in even tones, not loud retorts. It’s not up to us to change their minds or educate them, just plant a single seed of doubt and see if it takes root.

I’ve been looking at different complex systems lately; I’m becoming more and more fascinated with a term called “Emergence”. It’s when you perceive a complex and beautiful pattern from a huge amount of individual, simple objects guided by simple rules.

You see this in flocking birds, insect swarms, ant colonies, blizzards, etc… . Long wispy filaments and diaphanous undulating clouds, complex subterranean architecture and in sheets of rain or snow, even consciousness could be an emergent pattern given the simple actions of individual neurons, and the overwhelming complexity of a central nervous system. It’s all around us, inescapable, and inexhaustible in the never-ending fractile of nature.

But one place I haven’t seen the beauty of all these complex systems is in the crappy 1940′s to 1990′s era television snow. That is, until now. This humble and annoying side effect of technology can be as majestic as a perfect night sky if you understand what you’re looking at.

So what is television snow?

Now-a-days most, if not all viewing devices, filter out the background static of bad reception, and instead display a relaxing, and often blinding, blue screen; but reaching back into my childhood I remember the infamous television snow and white noise that accompanied my two channels of cathode ray escapism. I lived way out in the country, so the two channels we did get had spotty reception at best. Leaving the rest of the channels open to receive messages from beyond.

What causes it?

Now here’s where it gets cool. Background radiation. But not just any background radiation, like from the mantle of the Earth or from the Sun, this stuff is as old as time itself and is known as “Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation” left over from the big bang.

What’s it doing on our old TVs?

As it turns out, if you’re a ray of light traveling through empty space, the further you travel away from other forms of matter, the more stretchy and floppy space becomes. So as you travel through these vast intergalactic distances you become all stretched out as well. As it so happens, the big bang, as you can imagine, was unbelievably energetic; so energetic in fact that the gamma rays coming out of it caused most of the matter in the early universe to fly at almost the speed of light itself.

Since we perceive the observable outer edge of the universe to be about 13 billion light years away, it’s light has become all floppy and less energetic. It’s only coincidence that it happens to be stretched out to roughly the same frequency our television stations use to broadcast Three’s Company reruns.

So, what’s so beautiful about random static?

What you see as crappy reception is actually the outermost ripple in the endless cosmic pond. Silent and ever expanding into the void. It’s sole effect is tearing apart dimensions within the vacuum and creating our reality one quantum super string at a time.

The problem with our old TV sets is that they don’t supply a big enough window to see the true majesty of what we’re witnessing. Instead of watching a distant tornado slowly descend toward the ground and start kicking up debris, we instead see only the debris, flying straight at our heads. Not very pretty, but take a step back and watch it dance across the country side.

Perspective my friends, that’s all it takes to see the beauty in television snow.

You will notice the NASA ambassador interviewed in the video clip viewed the event as pretty minor and nothing to freak out about. But to read the article on this page associated with the video clip and you would think we’re all about to die! What’s more… The difference in tone between the written article and the video makes me feel that there is more to the story than meets the eye.

As I commented to fox news-All I have to say is, do your math people! When the space shuttle broke up in the atmosphere it was much larger than a bus, and didn’t cause devastating consequences for life on our home planet. The MIR space station was brought down and didn’t interrupt breakfast for anyone… Heck, we get thousands of meteors zipping through our atmosphere every day, some the size of basketballs to volkswagon buses, and none of them have been on the news.

You get one crackpot with a theory based on his own improper interpretation of data and and you’re ready to throw the doomsday switch into overdrive. Ask an astrophysicist if a meteor the size of a bus would ruin anyone’s day on a global scale. Try selling the news with the facts instead of the hype, and maybe we won’t be so freakin’ terrified to look up.

http://www.news3news.com/wpo4.html

http://www.channel7daily.com/

You may notice that every link you click on takes you to the same product page, regardless of whether you want to check the latest hockey scores or the local weather. This is known as a microsite or landing page. It’s a pretty common practice to have ads pointing to such pages so that companies can market their products in a more enticing way than a puny banner ad allows. Most of the time landing pages present clearly branded messaging so you know you have clicked on the correct ad.

In the case of the examples above, the landing pages offer testimonials for products that shouldn’t exist yet and try to convince visitors to click on links to “free trials.” Clicking on these links will result in the actual product page. And then the fun begins.

The site that the faux news article takes you to (http://www.antioxwine.com), actually claims in the fine print on the Terms and Conditions page that the product it is selling may do nothing for you at all (although they have complete faith in it):

“D. We do not warrant or represent that Our Products will provide You with any particular benefits, or that Your results will match those of others who consume Our Products. Individual results will vary from person to person.”

The product page is designed very cleverly and is completely legal. It has an almost hypnotic way of advertising one product while selling visitors another by confusing them with two completely different but similar messages. It talks about Resveratrol and ResVmax, never once claiming that Resveratrol is present in ResVmax. Their actual claim is: “One pill = approx. 1000 glasses of wine,” without actually disclosing the exact ingredient they’re pumping you with at 1000 times a regular dose. There is actually no nutritional information on the site at all.

When buyers place their order they must provide their phone number, mailing address, and e-mail address. The purveyors now have enough information to pummel you with unwanted outreach. Again, in the Terms and Conditions they claim (in legalese) that they will send your information to third-party companies and offer you no opt-out preference. Most likely, they’re compiling a list of gullible people and selling it to the highest bidder to use in shady marketing schemes. If you want a lot more spam, junk mail, and intrusive phone calls, then simply buy this product!

The “free trial” will cost you a paltry $3.95 for shipping and handling, but they really start price-gouging with their opt-out ordering plan. The extremely confusing ordering policy automatically charges CAD$240 per month if you don’t contact them within 15 days of placing your free trial order.

This company is based in England, so if the order takes 16 days to arrive, you will automatically be charged $240. If you don’t contact them to cancel the order, they will continue to charge you every month.

This is a common scam, but it is worth reminding folks to always read the fine print!

Rod Weatherbie and Lidia Shaw join your intrepid host Dave Noel in a news discussion from their homeland of PEI. Summed up… Cell phone towers don’t cause cancer! Scoffing in the face of popular island opinion, we explore the science that backs our audacious claim.

Show Notes:

Findings from a long-term Danish study found in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Conclusions: The results of this investigation, the first nationwide cancer incidence study of cellular phone users, do not support the hypothesis of an association between use of these telephones and tumors of the brain or salivary gland, leukemia, or other cancers.

Resembling a palates ball with robotic spider legs, partially encased in concrete at the center of this huge facility, the reaction chamber is a rather intimidating looking blue sphere surrounded by portholes, and large long rectangular boxes all converging into a single point somewhere deep within the bowels of this megalithic construction. It’s hard to believe that all of this is needed to convert a 2 millimeter sphere of beryllium and deuterium into helium and a butt-load of energy.

Sleeping in the giant belly of the Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility, is the world’s first over unity nuclear fusion laser reactor (ignition scheduled for 2010). It’s expected that the overall energy output from this reactor will be anywhere between 100 to 1000 times the energy that was needed to start the initial fusion reaction. That would be equivalent to the entire electrical output of the United States power grid combined, for a billionth of a second.

A brief history of laser fusion:

This monumental effort represents the 4th attempt to achieve a fusion reaction at the facility over the past 35 years. The first was codenamed “Janus” in 1974. With an output of only 10 joules and built to study inertial confinement fusion it was considered to be a very high power laser. Utilizing almost 100 pounds of Neodymium² glass laser material, and filling a medium sized room, the dual infrared laser didn’t have enough power to create a fusion reaction.

Although fusion was not achieved in the Janus experiment, some serious number crunching led to the second attempt at laser fusion in 1977 codenamed “Shiva”. Named after the multi-armed Hindu goddess of destruction, this laser system, at the time, certainly lived up to it’s name. Utilizing 20 infrared lasers, this system was capable of generating 10.2 KiloJoules of energy (over 1000 times the energy of it’s predecessor). Fusion was not expected in this facility, it was built primarily as a proof of concept for a larger facility that was to follow.

In 1984 “Nova” came online with the expressed purpose of becoming the first fusion ignition system. With 20 beamlines and an output of 30 KiloJoules this system should have had the power to spark a fusion reaction. Ultimately it failed due to unforeseen magnetohydrodynamic instability, and minute inconsistencies in the laser outputs causing the fuel pellet to heat and implode unevenly. Although fusion was not achieved, the data collected during it’s operation between 1984 and 1999, proved to be both valuable and vital in the fields of high-density matter physics and nuclear weapons research.

After some major plans to upgrade the Nova systems, they were eventually rented to France and replaced by the “National Ignition Facility”. Now taking up the full space of both the Janus and Nova facilities, and incorporating 192 ultraviolet lasers and over 3,000 plates of Neodymium doped laser glass, this latest incarnation puts out an incredible 1.8 Million joules of energy making it almost 200, 000 times more powerful than the Janus experiment.

Now that’s one a-spicy meat-a-ball!

Footnotes:

¹In chemistry and manufacturing, electrolysis is a method of separating chemically bonded elements and compounds by passing an electric current through them. One important use of electrolysis of water is to produce hydrogen.

²Neodymium is also known as a “rare earth metal”, and has a wide array of uses from high power laser glass doping to super strong permanent magnets.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2009/05/gallery_nif

Sandia’ Z machine lab melts diamonds at 10 million atmospheres

Heavy super-dense deuterium atoms are the nuclear fuel of the future

The Cansolair Model RA 240 Solar Max.

Slammed with the sudden increase in oil during the winter of 2007, my spouse and I started looking at alternative energy sources for heating our home.

I noticed in a Canadian Tire flyer that they were selling solar panels for residential use. At almost $2000 they were pretty pricey and the wattage they put out might power a 60 watt light bulb and a small radio.

Geothermal sounded great to us as it was a way of “getting off the oil tit” entirely. Unfortunately we live in an eighty-year-old house and the retrofit would have doubled the already hefty price (around $20,000) for the unit. And because it runs on electricity, your light bill goes up drastically.

Then we thought “Hey wind power! Of course!” but with local zoning laws and a low buy-back rate from the regional electric company for surplus electricity, we had to nix that idea too.

Supplementing oil heat with wood heat is very popular in our area and we considered this option as well. But with both of us working full time we couldn’t see us chopping wood and starting fires for hours a day. There’s also the storage and mess when dealing with wood that really killed our interest in pursuing it as an option.

Enter James Meaney of Dildo, Newfoundland and his company Cansolair, that manufactures solar panels for heating your home. Unlike conventional solar panels that convert solar energy into electricity used to heat up water using an electric water heater, the Model RA 240 Solar Max is a forced convection solar heating unit.

Cold air is pumped by a small fan from the bottom of a room through a small duct into the solar panel where it is heated up and then pumped back into the room. According to Mr. Meaney, all you need is fifteen minutes of sun an hour for the unit to start saving you money on your heating bill. The price was a draw as well — only $2500 per unit.

Most forms of alternative energy available to the average homeowner cost a lot of money to set up and don’t “pay for themselves” for around 20 years. It can be a major investment and is usually best done when the house is built. With some testimonials stating a savings of a tank of oil per Cansolair panel, the unit would pay for itself in three to six years.

Cansolair is currently building its distribution but has already been sold in Australia, Europe and North America. They are currently working on adapting their solar panel design for other uses like water heating. Good luck to this Canadian inventor. He’ll be hearing from us soon!

Geothermal power is extracted from the heat stored in the earth from it’s original formation. It can also be seen on the surface in the form of hot springs. This very old technology is now more than ever being looked at as a means to usher in the inevitable end of oil. The number of new geothermal projects in the United States alone has risen 25 percent since last August.

That number sounds very impressive, but geothermal still only counts for a very small percentage of the world’s energy output. 35% of it is from the United States but it only counts for less than 1% of their total energy.

So why the sudden interest? Well as I mentioned the worlds oil supply continues to deplete. We have reached peak oil (according to some) and deposits for this traditional power source will be more and more difficult to find. Another reason is the advancement in the technology. It used to be that in order for geothermal power to be of any major use, you’d have to live near one of Earth’s major fault lines to acquire the heat in a natural convective method. Enhanced Geothermal Systems do this through hydraulic stimulation. When natural cracks and pores will not allow for flow rates, the permeability can be enhanced by pumping high pressure cold water down an injection well into the rock. The injection increases the fluid pressure in the naturally fractured granite which mobilizes shear events, enhancing the permeability of the fracture system. Water travels through fractures in the rock, capturing the heat of the rock until it is forced out of a second borehole as very hot water, which is converted into electricity using either a steam turbine or a binary power plant system. All of the water, now cooled, is injected back into the ground to heat up again in a closed loop. These technologies are impressive enough to garner the attention of internet giant Google. In 2008 they invested 10 million dollars to further research this potential source.

That being said there are still plenty of untapped traditional geothermal sources and may be the safer bet in such a shaky economy. So far, it’s one of the only commercially proven renewable power source that can deliver baseload power ( minimum demands based on customer requirements )

To give you one example of how geothermal power can help. A company called Ormat, located in Reno, Nevada produces enough geothermal power to run that city. When you think of the electricity used to charge the entertainment landscape of Reno, it makes you wonder why we aren’t investing more heavily into this natural and renewable power source.

Show Notes:

Links:

Geophysical Electrophonics

NAET

Healing Light Sandwich

Corrections:

In an effort to ensure the facts presented in this podcast are as accurate as possible I’ve had to make some revisions to the original release. Please see the change notes below. The current version of the episode you’re listening to now is correct.

In the original release of this episode my explanation for the Microwave Auditory Effect was wrong. So I inserted a corrected explanation based on my additional findings.

Also, in the original release of this episode my musings about the 2 schools of Chiropractic were inaccurate, so I’ve removed that whole segment.

Credits:

Thanks to Jud Cameron for donating his place to record… and paying for pizza.