Using Me!

Busy busy and lazy, but I did make it to TAM London!

Yeah I really have been busy lately. I’ve been on holiday to the Lake District which was fantastic. I’ve been to TAM London which was awesome. I must blog about that … now!

TAM was an affirming experience. It was incredible to be around so many people who share the same view of the world as I do. It was also an absolute pleasure to listen to what the speakers had to say.

Funny story in a kind of had-to-be-there way. I was sharing a room in the city with Jumile and on arrival on Friday night we both refused a wake-up call confident in the knowledge that our iPhone’s had alarms on them. Well I turned mine off knowing that Jumile’s was set. However thanks to his inability to drive an iPhone and the fact that there was no natural light in our room we overslept. That is to say he overslept and I overslept, we did not oversleep ‘together’.

So we missed Brian Cox’s talk first thing on Saturday. I’m really annoyed because I think he’s a great bloke and everyone said how much they enjoyed it. But on the face of it, given that I have a Physics degree it’s probably the talk I could most ‘afford’ to miss. Lesson learned though – don’t rely on one iPhone or one driver.

So we arrived just as Jon Ronson came on to talk. He was… FUNNY! He regaled us with tales of his research into his latest book, The Men Who Stare at Goats, which will shortly be in our cinemas, having been adapted as a screenplay and starring George Clooney!

I won’t bore you with the content of the entire weekend but let me tell you that it was a fantastic weekend. Every speaker was brilliant and was well received by the attendees. Two ‘acts’ were given standing ovations to my memory – Simon Singh and Tim Minchin. Simon received this accolade before he even took to the stage as those of us present back his bid to defeat the BCA’s Libel suit with every fibre of our brains. Simon also received the JREF Humanist of the Year award or some similarly titled accolade – sorry I can’t find the proper name/link right now! Of course James Randi himself received a similar ovation but he was unfortunately only able to be with us by Video link as he is recovering from Chemotherapy for his cancer.

For legalese updates on Simon’s battle with the BCA please see JackofKent’s blog. It’s had some interesting turns lately, not least the appeal court’s decision that he has the right to appeal the original ruling on ‘meaning’. JackofKent is a lawyer and he explains all of this very carefully.

Richard Wiseman was the compere/MC for the weekend and while it was a shame that he didn’t give a talk he was very amusing. The chicken towel trick was brilliant, but I did work out the number square long before the applause had died down – now you know Richard… towels>Maths. For anyone who didn’t work it out yet… take four numbers that add to your chosen number ‘A’. Now add X to one, subtract X from another, add Y to a third and subtract Y from the last… place them in another quadrant. Now repeat with new X and Y for the other two quadrants. I’ll leave it to you to work out how you place them correctly to form the precise magic square. I may have oversimplified just a fraction to keep the mystique.

My favourite two speakers of the weekend were Phil Plait and Ben Goldacre.

To take the latter first, I have been working my way through Bad Science since I got back from France this week and although I thought I understood controlled trials and placebo effects already he has enlightened me immensely. But what made his talk so good was the humour and attitude he presented. I’m absolutely sure that if Mr. Wiseman hadn’t interrupted he would have been happy to talk for the rest of the day and the enthralled audience would have sat and listened way past closing time at the local pub. I cannot recommend his book highly enough and for those of you who are less skeptical than I am, I can assure you that this is not a book about lack of faith. It is entirely about being rigorous in one’s research and proclamations. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence as they say, but even ordinary claims require more than just an anecdote. I’ll just point out that his book has been out for quite some time and TAM is weeks past now and the book is still number 29 on the Amazon bestseller lists as I type this. If you’ve heard that something is good for you or bad for you or that an injection causes AIDS or a lipbalm causes Herpes this is your one stop shop for how to determine what medical advice is bogus.

A mention must go here to the Cochrane Collaboration. I think this is what Ben would want. The Cochrane Collaboration perform Systemic Analysis on medical research to make individual studies into larger studies which reveals more reliable results. By weighting results based on the properness of the studies and combining studies together to form larger data sets for better accuracy this group is the ultimate resource for the concerned patient worried about any medical procedure.

While we are here I’ll just mention how astonished I am by the ways in which a study can be skewed and the ways in which the placebo effect works. It bears writing an entire article or book, or encyclopaedia. But read ‘Bad Science’ and you’ll know everything I do.

And as for Phill Plait? Well he introduced me to the fact that in 2029 an asteroid will pass incredibly close to the earth. In fact it will be so close that it will pass between us and the Moon’s orbit. Consider how vast space is… that is REALLY close. However it will miss. We know this. Everyone has done the numbers. It will miss.

Ok… so not such an interesting talk after all… NO! The problem is that when this asteroid passes us it will, of course, be perturbed from its orbit by our gravitational field. Because we can only determine its path with a certain degree of accuracy though we don’t know exactly where it will go next. On one side of its potential path it will be catapulted into the sun, never to be seen again. On the other side it will be catapulted out of the solar system, never to be seen again. In a very small area somewhere inbetween though it will be shifted into an orbit that means in 2079 it will come back and collide with us.

This is not a small object. It won’t cause a nice light show and burn up in the atmosphere. It won’t cause a tunguska like incident. It will however cause an explosion equivalent to around 1 BILLION tonnes of TNT. This is somewhere in the order of the same asteroid that current theory believes caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. This would be an event from which you can’t hide. Probably humanity would survive but most of us would die. You’ve seen all the apocalypse films… it would really be not such fiction. Dark skies for years? No Crops? Most of the world’s population dead? Doesn’t sound like a place you want to be.

So what are the chances of that? According to the best mathematical calculations it’s 1:14,500. That seems pretty unlikely right? Well do you play the lottery? It’s 1000 times more likely than you winning the lottery in any week. It’s about the same as you winning the lottery in the next 20 years. This one will get you… it’s more than 1000 times more likely than you dying WHILE watching one episode of the lottery.

So can we do anything about it? Yes we can. All we have to do is send up a spaceship to sit alongside the asteroid for a few years. The relatively tiny mass of the spaceship will, over those years, shift the asteroid just enough to mean that there is NO chance that it will be deflected into an orbit that could be dangerous to us. We are technically able to make a ship to do this now. However NASA and the ESA are not prepared to spend funds to do it. They have limited funds naturally and everything they do is no doubt important to scientific progress but would you not think that this is the most important thing they should do? I beg you to petition your MP/Senator/other-political-representative to get on to this NOW!

At this point you might think well let’s wait and see. When we know whether it’s in that particular path that will cause us a problem we’ll do something about it right? WRONG! By the time it’s possible to determine whether it’s going to deflect in just that certain way, it’ll be too late. It will take years to build the spaceship we need for this job and it will take years for its effect on the asteroid to be large enough to save us. By the time we know whether we need this doing or not there will not be enough time to do the job.

Hopefully this has persuaded you that this needs to be done. But perhaps a few of you still aren’t convinced. Perhaps the cost/benefit analysis in your mind makes it a waste of money? So I’ll end this with one last fact. The ship we could build to perform this job would not be used up in the work it would do. It would be perfectly functional and ready for the next threat. And believe it… sooner or later a direct strike by an extinction-event sized asteroid will happen. On the law of averages we are WAY overdue for one.

On Saturday evening we were entertained by Robin Ince and friends. It was a lot of fun but I won’t pretend that there weren’t a lot of scars caused by the rapid assembly of the entertainment. My favourite act, ignoring the brilliant Chris Cox, was the guitarist and singer who’s name I have totally lost. I hope he will forgive me as describing him as the ‘middle aged chap’… can someone help me out here and supply a name?

A memory that won’t leave me very quickly was from Sunday evening. At the Black Friar pub just around the corner from the event I could look around me and there were Richard Wiseman, George Hrab, Brian Cox, Phil Plait, Chris Cox, Simon Singh and others who had educated and entertained us all weekend.

I’m very grateful to all of them for giving of their time and effort to help the rest of us skeptics get our heads in gear.

I’ve quit smoking – clean for 8 weeks now!

I’m off to see Tim Minchin at the Hammersmith Apollo tomorrow night!