Tag Archives: SkeptiCamp

SkeptiCamp Kentucky, Part 3

Posted on by

This post is a continuation of speaker summaries and my review of SkeptiCamp Kentucky 2012.

Space elevators – Bob Malcolm

Bob Malcom’s talk was about space elevators–how they would work in principle and how they could be used to make space exploration cheaper and more efficient. Space elevators work by using a line suspended by a platform in geostationary orbit.

Cost of transporting a cup of water via space elevator versus traditional means of transport.

Bob then discussed  how heavy elements are created in supernova explosion. Most of those elements in the earth are probably in the center of the earth, but some of these elements on the surface came from meteorites. One argument for space elevators is that they can be used to help mine asteroids. NASA, Google and Japan have plans to mine asteroids. Even now, calls have been sent out by those who are planning such trips to find people who are willing to spend the rest of their lives of Mars.

Parasites – Melody Ward

Melody is fascinated with parasites,  not just for the gross factor, but for their amazing and crazy adaptations to their hosts.

Several examples are given, such as the pain killer and anticoagulants in leeches used to prevent detection, disinfect the blood (to keep the food good for itself, but it also helps prevent infection), and prevent the blood from clotting.

The tapeworm has different life cycles for living in vector and in host.

Sacculina is a barnacle that paritisitizes a crab. It uses the crab female to protect and groom it’s eggs, and then controls the male crab to make it act like a female to build and groom an egg sack.

Cymothoa exigua actual replaces a body part of its host.  It kills the tongue of the host by sucking the blood out of it until it falls off and then the parasite becomes the tongue.

Next are nest parasites, such as the brown-headed cowbird. They lay their heads in another bird’s nest. The impostor egg is easy to point out because it is black speckled. However the host bird still cares for it with the others. This is an important adaptive behavior for the species because cowbirds are adapted to follow cattle herds and they cannot take their nests with them.

Coocoo birds, another nest parasite, will actually push the other eggs out of the nest before they hatch. Also will push out the other chicks if they are small.

Leafcutter ants and the Phorid fly. Fly lays it’s egg inside the ant. The flies have been used for fire and control. Leafcutter ants use guards to protect against the flies.

Parasites are especially interesting from an evolutionary perspective when you see the ways in which they are constantly needing to adapt to their hosts, as their hosts adapt to fight them off. The Red queen hypothesis states that parasites and hosts have to continue to adapt (keep running) just to stay at an equilibrium with each other.

Parasites have also played an important role in our own evolution. Sickle cell anemia, for example, is a defense against malaria parasite. Chloroplasts in plant cells and mitochondria in animal cells were once parasitic bacteria that developed a symbiotic relationship with the cells of other organisms. (This is why mitochondria have their own DNA.) Retroviruses, which use parasitic genes which insert themselves into the host’s DNA, are inherited though the family line can can be used to trace a species’ ancestry.  Autoimmune diseases which affect many of us such as allergies and arthritis evolved as a response to parasites.

One of the most interesting points made in Melody’s presentation is the way that  parasites can be involved in the development of social behavior. There is a monkey that lives in an area where it could be a parasite called a screwworm in any opening in it’s skin.  This prevents the monkeys from fighting since they don’t want to get scratches due to the risk of screworms, and leads to a much more peaceful environment than might have otherwise developed in the monkey colonies.

Review and Conclusion

There were more speakers after this, however, I was not feeling well on that day and opted to leave a bit early, I have only provided summaries of the speakers that got a chance to hear. The time that I spent there was a good time, I learned a lot, and I am looking forward to next year.

SkeptiCamp Kentucky 2012, part 2

Posted on by

Continuing with the speaker summaries and reviews from part 1…

Brian Barnes

Brian Barnes spoke about a model for critical thinking provided by the Foundation for Critical Thinking. Most people do not closely examine their own thought processes and rather blindly adapt them from others in their social groups. A main point in his presentation is that we need to examine our own thought processes to ensure that we are not being blinded by our own biases and missing the truth. Using a model such as what is provided by the Foundation for Critical thinking can help to accomplish this goal.

Ed Hensley

Ed Hensley’s presentation was titled Evidence of Evolution for Non-Biologists and focused on pictorial evidence that points towards the common ancestry of all life on Earth. Such examples included the movement of the blowhole in fetal dolphin from the front of their face (as in other mammals) to the back of their head, humans with tails or multiple functional breasts, and the strange path of the recurrent laryngeal nerve in mammals which is explained by their commend ancestry with fish.

Why would cave fish have non-functioning eyes unless they descended from fish that could see?

Carla Bevins

Carla Bevin’s presentation was titled the Humanities’ Contribution to Skeptical Inquiry.

Skepticism normally focuses on the hard sciences crowd. Carla asks “What do the humanities have to do with skepticism? Skeptical humanities study the human experience.

Carla demonstrates how this works by examining the this statement: “Faith is like wifi–it is invisible but has the power to connect you what you need.”

Stop and examine the idea. It may sound plausible on the surface, but when you dig in deeper:

WiFi is invisible? It is invisible, yet unlike faith we have evidence for it.
Wifi is unseen but unlike faith understandable and predictable.
But faith is belief in something that is unknown. We know wifi exists.
And what does “connect us to what we need” mean?

Like that statement, often the things that resonate the most are the things that seem the most “simple” common sense but rely on a lot of untested assumptions.

We respond viscerally when a new idea either
-Fits easily in an existing schema that we are familiar with.
-Confounds us by not fitting anywhere into our existing way of thinking.

To critically engage a text or statement is to engage in the humanities.

Carla and Robert Bevins concluded the presentation with a  bonus powerband demonstration.

To be continued…

Skepticamp Kentucky 2012, Part 1

Posted on by

Here is the promised post from three weeks ago about SkeptiCamp Kentucky 2012. I will be reviewing the speakers that I heard, though unfortunately I wasn’t feeling well that day and missed the last four talks.

First, an explanation of what a SkeptiCamp is. These are small mini-conferences put on by skeptics groups all over the country. Rather than calling in big names from out-of-town for speakers, the organizers of these conferences call on local volunteers who would like to research and present on a topic of their choosing. As a result these conferences are very low-cost to host, and attendance is typically free. For more information on SkeptiCamp, and to see if there are any in your area, visit the SkeptiCamp Wiki.

SkeptiCamp Kentucky 2012 was the second annual SkeptiCamp hosted by the Louisville Area Skeptics. Local guest speakers presented on topics including how to think clearly, global warming, parasites, and the challenges faced by atheist kids in southern Indiana schools.

Darshwood the Conjurer

The first speaker was Darshwood the Conjurer, and the topic of his speech was “Making the Impossible Possible.”In his talk, he explains how anyone can accomplish seeming impossible tasks using the MUST system: Motivation, Understanding the problem, using a system System, and having Time to prepare. He demonstrated this principle by reciting the alphabet backwards fluently, and then showing how it could be done using a story about a “Man named ZY who is an X Warrior Viking…” and so on. It went a bit too fast for me to get the whole story in my notes. Anyway, the idea is that if you could remember how the story went (and stories are always easier to remember than a string of numbers) then recalling the story in your head would allow you to recite the alphabet backwards with no mistakes.  A volunteer from the audience accepted the challenge and did succeed in using the story system to recite the alphabet backwards from the stage.

Darshwood Handing Out Cards

Darshwood Handing Out Cards

Christopher Graney

Next in line was Christopher Graney, who spoke about a classroom study of climate change in Kentucky that was conducted using basic data analysis from physics to analyze climate science data.

Christopher Graney

Students checked for trends in temp and precipitation in Frankfort, Bowling Green, and Williamstown though they found no major overall changes in temperate over 120 years. The practical conclusion from this is that the average Kentuckian has no personal experience of climate change within their lifetime. Most people either accept or reject climate change based on the authority of scientists or media (mostly media).

Christopher also had a point to make about passion and data. While the experiment was in progress, both a student who is a climate change denier and one who strongly supports climate change stated that they would not change their opinions regardless of what the data says. I would understand anyone thinking that the results of this experiment would not be conclusive either in favor or not of the existence of climate change, so some skepticism of the results as expressed by these students is understandable. However, it would be hard to deny that there are political and social factors that play a huge part in whether anyone accepts or denies climate change regardless of what the scientific data actually says. This is a bias that we all need to be aware of.

Shelly Henry and Sarah Henry

Shelly and Sarah are a mother/daughter pair who gave the next presentation for the day. Their talk was on countering religious bullying in public schools.

They started off with a brief history of court cases that touch upon the question of the separation of church and state in public schools such as

  • Engel v. Vitale (1962)
  • McCollum v. Board of Education (1948)
  • Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe (2000)
  • Good News Club v. Milford Central School (2001)
  • Ahlquist v. Cranston (2012)

After the brief history lesson, they came to what I found to be the most interesting and engaging part of their presentation: Sarah’s own experiences of being an atheist in a Floyd County public highschool. In one incident, Sarah got a “letter from god” in her locker which was targeted at her as a atheist. School administrators would not consider it as bullying even though such religious bullying is acknowledged in school policy. The person who did it was caught on camera, but the school administrators ignored the incident because it was not done with “malicious intent.”

The discussions of Sarah’s experiences lead to a discussion among audience members about what does and does not count as religious bullying. It was generally agreed that merely discussing religion and religious belief is not bullying. Sarah even mentioned having mutually respectful discussions about religion with Christian classmates on her track team. However it does cross the line into bullying when the offender tries to force a discussion, makes threats like “you’re going to hell,” or covertly leaves religious artifacts or letters in the atheist student’s locker. Basically, whatever leads to a chilly or threatening environment for the atheist (or other minority) student counts as bullying.

At the end of their presentation Shelly and Sarah offer advice to parents and students for dealing with religious bullying:

  1. First know the bullying policies of your school.
  2. Then make the schools comply with the bullying policies, even though religious administrators may not understand why students pushing religion on a non-believing student would be a problem.

More on SkeptiCamp Kentucky coming up in my next post!