If there is one thing that has been abundantly obvious over the last week, is that skeptics are just as susceptible to human foibles as anyone. We skeptics have biases, we screw up, we escalate conflicts, we have a hard time admitting we’re wrong, and perhaps most importantly these days, we have a hard time saying we’re sorry. We’re human.
I’ve been writing a lot more lately, attempting to write an article a day up until TAM 2012. We’ll see how this goes. I wanted to take some time to write about something that happened to myself and my brother almost twenty-five years ago. It remains a totally unexplained event to this day, despite the thousands of pages on identifying UFO’s that I’ve read. I’m not saying what I saw was extraterrestrial, but it was certainly strange.
The years was 1987, the month was June. My brother and I were in our tiny room, each trying to sleep. I was almost thirteen, my brother Josh had turned eleven just a few months before. It was around the Summer Solstice, which means it was still really bright even around nine pm. Sometime during the early night, a low flying helicopter flew over the house. We didn’t see at first, but the sound was unmistakably close by. For a few minutes, the helicopter circled the neighborhood seemingly right over our house.
At some point, wide awake from the noise, we went to our window to see whatever was out there. A large pine tree blocked our view of part of the sky, but out from behind this pine tree, a bright glowing light moved into view. It was a classic cigar shaped light, silhouetted clearly against the sky. Because it was June, the sky was not so much black, but dark, dark blue. Following the light was a helicopter, an army helicopter I guessed by the shape. It was following the light.
The light then moved up and over the helicopter and back in the direction it came. At this point, the helicopter maneuvered to turn around, and also move back in the direction from where it came. It was clearly visible against the dark blue sky, I could see everything. My brother thought he could see guns on the helicopter, but they could just as easily been antennas. What did we definitely not see? Lights on the helicopter. It was just dark from where we saw it, and if not for the time of year and night, I don’t know that I could have know it was there. The dark blue sky gave us a good background to see it. Both the light and the helicopter moved away out of our sight and the whole thing was over.
To this day, I have no explanation for what I saw. People have told me it was a spotlight, or the ionization of gas generated by the blades, or that I saw another helicopter. As I’m a skeptic, I’m embarrassed that I don’t accept any of these explanations. As for the spotlight, the light was clearly disconnected from the helicopter, so that wasn’t it. The ionization of gas is interesting, but I’ve not see any photographic evidence to know what that looks like to compare. I doubt it could have been another helicopter judging by the fact that we only heard one helicopter and we could see the actual helicopter so clearly.
Did I see some military drone that had flown off course in the Hudson Valley? Are my memories so jumbled after twenty five years that I’m not remembering it clearly? My brother and I have remarkably similar memories even to this day, but we could also be reinforcing each other. The fact is, nothing I’ve read or seen matches what we saw, and I find this absolutely fascinating as both something to explore and as something to keep me grounded when other people have experiences they can’t explain. It happened to me, it happens to lots of people. As the great skeptical investigators Ben Radford and Joe Nickell have said, always treat people with respect because they honestly did see something they sincerely couldn’t explain. I’ve been there, and well, I’m still there.
While I don’t regularly read PZ Myer’s Pharyngula blog, I am intrigued by the “Why I’m an Atheist” posts that he puts on there. Recently Greta Christina asked her audience for stories on coming out as an atheist. I’ve thought about submitting my story on becoming an atheist to either blog, but once I sat down to write it out, I realized I have a problem. I have no idea what it means to become or to come out as an atheist. Allow me to explain.
I was never baptized and I’ve only ever gone into churches for weddings, funerals, and field trips. Some of my earliest memories of reading are reading about every species of mammal from A-Z when I was six years old. I remember being a sickly child watching television shows about atoms and molecules. By the time I was seven or eight, I’d read a number of books on astronomy, dinosaurs, and time travel. At no point in my youth, was I ever taught about religion.
When I was nine years old a kid in my class said something that could be called “using the Lord’s name in vain.” When he apologized to the teacher, I remember laughing out loud, because, duh, the Lord wasn’t a real thing. I just thought “god damn” and “jesus christ” were phrases that people used, and I had no idea where they came from. It wasn’t until I was twelve years old that I learned that there “Ten Commandments”. Looking back, it seems hard to believe I could be that ignorant about the existence of religion, but there you have it.
I’ve said since at least I was eight that I didn’t believe in God. It never occurred to me that there was any other way to go. When I was nine years old I attempted to read the bible. I started reading Genesis, and I couldn’t get past three pages. Immediately, it seemed so out of place from all the science that I’d read. Adam and Eve populated the earth? Really? The “science” in the Bible was pretty bad, and honestly, the story wasn’t that interesting. By then I’d already read a lot of HG Wells, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, etc, and those stories were a lot more interesting to me at the time. My experiment of reading the bible lasted less than fifteen minutes.
As I got older and read more books about science while at the same time learning more about religions, my feelings of atheism never wavered. There was never a reason to believe in god(s) and all the answers seemed to flow out of science eventually. This leads to something else that is relevant to the atheism/skepticism debate. While at the same time I was an atheist, I believed in ghosts, bigfoot, UFO’s, the Loch Ness Monster, etc. I was an atheist without the proper tools to evaluate all the science I was reading.
It was in high school that I read a book by Philip Klass that changed my view on the paranormal forever. He went through many high profile cases and picked them apart one by one. I clearly remember the feeling I got reading his book. It was a feeling that “hey, this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s saying UFO’s aren’t real.” It was tough medicine to take. After all, I had seen two UFO’s in my life, and one experience is still vivid in my head after all these years. It also remains unexplained, but I’ve come to realize that while it was legitimately one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had, I really must be missing a key piece of information that would explain it. That’s the difference between me at 37 and me at 12.
The point to this, is that skepticism most certainly is not atheism, though I believe the two will always be intertwined in the minds of many for many years. Skepticism might help you arrive at being an atheist, but ultimately you will make the judgment based on your own values. I’m as guilty as anyone for conflating the two, but over the last couple years I’ve finally got my head wrapped around the differences. There are a lot of great writers in the skeptic community, but for learning about skepticism, the one I read the most to learn is Barbara Drescher. Her posts over the last year have been very instrumental in me finally getting it.
While posts on becoming an atheist or coming out as an atheist, are interesting, I feel like stories on why one became involved in skepticism are even more interesting. The world tempts you from many different directions to put your skepticism aside, ranging from books to government. Remaining vigilant to a process called skepticism that often doesn’t give you the answers you want to hear, now that is a story I’d like to read.
It’s less than 40 days from The Amazing Meeting 2012, and this is the time that I really start to think about the trip. Held in Las Vegas, the trip takes me away from Kansas City for about five days to soak in great talks, great science, and great people. This year I will be going alone, but I will have friends there to meet or to join up with again. Last year was the first time I’d ever socialized there, despite having been there six times previous. It made the experience a whole lot cooler for me.
That said, this year like last year, the skeptic community is involved in a sort of self-immolation ritual where hyperbole, ad hominem attacks, and quote mining dominate the skeptic blogosphere. Serious issues and concerns get buried under the massive lack of dialog and communication. I won’t comment on specific people or posts, but I would like to offer some persective.
Being a leader means sometimes taking a step back and evaluating whether or not you’re making the dialog worse. Sometimes it means recognizing you’re ratcheting up a conflict past the point where any reasonable dialog can occur. I speak from personal experience. At my job, I got myself into a situation where I was helping and leading a racheting up of a conflict between departments. At the end of the day, I had made things pretty contentious. Sure, I engendered some “cheers” from my team, but as I reflected later that night, I saw my failings.
While relaxing as I drank my favorite alcoholic drink (crystal-lite lemonade with butterscotch schapps) it was clear I screwed up. I’d made mistakes, even though on some level I was right. That doesn’t matter if you ruin the communication conduit so bad that nothing gets fixed. I immediately sent out emails to my co-workers acknowledging that I took it too far, and that the conflict ended right there and then. No more cheering, no more snark. Things didn’t go perfect after that, but a lot of real work got done and I did come to understand where the other side was coming from. While I used email initially, I also did some phone calls and face to face. As anti-social as I am, actual human interaction is the best way to show the other side where you’re coming from.
So my advice as a humble nobody in the skeptical movement, would be for any leaders of groups or organizations who find themselves in conflict, to take a step back, maybe take a day off from it, and then call the other party. Forget what you think the other party was saying, forget whether or not you think the other party should call first, forget the battle, and just call. Mind you, this does not mean compromise or “just make nice.” Not every disagreement or conflict can be resolved. However, real conflict does not get solved in comment threads on blog posts going back and forth.
If the UN operated by resolving conflicts via the blogosphere, the world would look like Mad Max within five years.
Sleeping Finnick
Sleeping Rennie
Sleeping dogs
One question I get a lot, is why my wife and I have so many animals. We currently have seven dogs, and one cat. For six months last year, we had two cats, but only five dogs. It does get a little crazy, but I don’t regret it for a second, the choices Kelly and I have made. I think it’s instructive, for others, to know why we ended up where we did. This post is just a summary of why we’ve adopted who we’ved adopted.
We had Ozzy, our beloved cat who passed away last year, because some person in Rochester, NY didn’t spay or neuter their cats, and then let the litter apparently run loose.
We have Ralphie, because a divorcing husband and wife didn’t want him any more.
We have Peedee because some breeders didn’t think he’d make a good breeder, so he was unwanted.
We have O-Ren because someone either didn’t care enough to find her when she went missing, or because someone didn’t want to take care of an active dog.
We have Kaylee and Jayne because a family moved out of their home and left them to fend for themselves for three weeks.
We have Lemmy because some neighbors of ours let him loose in the wild when they lost their home to foreclosure.
We have Mags and Finnick because someone didn’t want them anymore. This same someone neglected to treat Mags when her leg was broken.
All of these guys live with Kelly and I on our somewhat large property with good sized house and good sized fenced in backyard. One reason for our desire for home ownership was so that no one could ever tell us we couldn’t have so many animals. I don’t regret anything about them, and I go to sleep with a clear conscious.
This past week the popular iOS was release for Android. I’ve mocked a little the idea behind Instagram, which is downgrading your photo with effects and squarish dimensions, but with it now on Android, it was probably time to take a second look with an open mind. I installed the app and took my first Instagram picture:
http://instagr.am/p/I9qbJWLo6-/
I get the social aspect of now better than I did before, so I can see how iOS users like it, but the Android version just isn’t very good. The biggest problem is that the developers ignored the design language of Android and just attempted to copy the interface to Android. Maybe it works in iOS, but on Android it’s extremely clunky.
My biggest gripe is that they make sharing on the app more difficult than it needs to be. Since it’s inception, Android has always been better at sharing than iOS with it’s “Intents”. Almost anything can be shared via anything. Instagram virtually ignores this huge feature of Android and hides it behind clunky interface decisions.
Overall, it was pretty disappointing and I’m sure it will be used by Android haters as “proof” you can’t write good looking apps for Android, which is a shame. The release also highlighted (allegedly) a whole raft of classism by users of Instagram on iOS. I’m not sure how pervasive that all was, but in the end it just reflected poorly on iOS users. I hope the Instagram people go back to the drawing board and learn the proper design language. It’s a no-go for me otherwise.
From Trader Joe’s
