Shermer Coming to Kepler's!

I am already jittery at the thought of meeting author Michael Shermer, who will appear at Kepler’s Bookstore Sept 9 at 7:30pm to sign his latest book, Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design. I hope to be more articulate than my last encounter with a celebrity atheist.

Shermer is the editor of Skeptic Magazine, and founder of the Skeptics Society. He contributes a monthly column to Scientific American, and hosts the Skeptics Distinguished Lecture Series at Caltech, having featured Stephen Jay Gould, James Randi, Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. He produced the Fox Family TV series Exploring the Unknown, and he has written many life-changing books on science, including The Science of Good and Evil, Denying History (deconstructing Holocaust denial), The Borderlands of Science (debunking pseudo-science), Teach Your Child Science (a fun gift for parents), and—my first exposure ever to critical thinking—Why People Believe Weird Things.

An excerpt of his latest book is available here, in which Shermer explains logically why, according to a 2005 Pew Research Poll, 42 percent of Americans express strict Creationist views. Rather than try to un-convert the converted, Shermer proposes to reconcile evolution with theology (in a gesture that I find overly appeasing to superstition).

In fact, Shermer has long been an effective champion of fostering science education, which has come under fierce attack by Intelligent Design advocates, who all coincidentally happen to be highly vested in their religions. (Shermer, raised a Christian Creationist, had the intellectual courage to step out of line.) He should be encouraged by this week’s profile of brilliant skeptics titled The New Naysayers that appears in Newsweek, which has long pandered to the church.

I hope to see you at Kepler's on Saturday!

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They Stood at the Foot of the Mount

Disneyland is truly magical. Nibbling away at it for 50 years, Mickey has really perfected the process of managing enormous crowds, and crafting an incredible backdrop to enhance the user experience. Scenic facades obstruct every view of industrial Anaheim so that the eye cannot see past the Magic Kingdom. Even the staff's costumes and the waste baskets' decorations are interesting and contextual for their locations. Furry critters entertain you at the breakfast table, and their nightly parade--watch it as many times as you can from different points along Main Street--is followed by fireworks that will ruin your July 4th.

My family and my sister's weren't the only ones there for a last hurrah of summer, so Line Management was top of mind. The FAST-PASSes (reservations for the rides) worked great in the California Adventure Park, the newer part of Disneyland that has (i) better rides than the original Magic Kingdom park (and a great stage performance of Alladin), (ii) a direct entrance from the Grand Californian Hotel, and (iii) much shorter lines.

But FAST-PASSes don't work well in the Magic Kingdom park--the reservation times would stretch out 6 or 7 hours, and each ticket can have only one outstanding reservation. So even though the kids really wanted to ride Splash Mountain, none of us were up for the 90 minute line. Who has time for this?

Fortunately, our kids were creative, scientific, and motivated. They "scanned the ports," discovering an unmarked Singles Line with a 2 minute wait. They also observed that the passenger logs careening through the mountain have only single seats anyway. So we rode the attraction three times in a span of 25 minutes.

As we left, we saw the same poor souls in line, with little progress to show. My son asked me why they don't do what we did. So as we walked along the line we shared our observations, repeating, "TWO-MINUTE WAIT IN THE SINGLES LINE! TWO-MINUTE WAIT IN THE SINGLES LINE!... "

I guess I didn't expect all of them to move, but I was surprised to see NONE of them budge. They heard our words, they looked, and they just stood there. Having already invested 30, 45, or 60 minutes in their folly, cognitive dissonance clouded their faculties. They didn't even dispatch a family scout to investigate our claim. They just stood their ground, silently and creepily resigned to their fate.

As we approached the beginning of the line, finally one man perked up at our news. Animated, he turned to his group to re-consider their strategy. I couldn't hear the content of the consultation, but a few seconds later he visibly slumped, quietly and literally falling back into line. Oh well.

Skepticism is hard when it demands the concession of long-held notions. The more time and energy invested in a belief, the more challenging it is to shake it. I have seen entrepreneurs bang their heads against the wall 5 years after the market ruled against them. And we have all seen how hard it is to acknowledge even overwhelming evidence that vacates age-old mythologies.

I'm so glad my kids are smarter than that. Thanks to their critical thinking, we all enjoyed a couple extra doses of Disney magic.

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Cross Wits With a 7-Year-Old

My son, a math genius much smarter than his father, periodically pesters Papa for puzzles. So yesterday I created for him this CrossNumber puzzle, in which the empty squares must be filled with the proper numerals. I'm proud to report that he solved it on his own, with occasional help from Google. (His mother had removed IE and Flock from his PC as a protective measure, but he has since figured out how to RDP into my PC whenever he needs a browser).

Across
1	(2+7) * (475 - 468)
3	Declaration of Independence
7	(10-1)2 - 12
8	11 in base 3
9	x	÷	x
10	79, in base 8
11	2*x2 = x+1
12	Binary: 110 - 101 = ?
14	Roll dice 72 times. How many 7's?
15	US Route near home
16	The power of Googol
17	Crosses Stanford Linear Accelerator
18	-3, 0, 3, …
Down
1	0, 2, 4, …
2	Days in April
3	Your age, to a computer
4	1st successful commercial jet
5	23 * 32
6	I am my name
10	Emperor Henry V invades Italy
11	Two minutes
13	James Bond's successor
14	Meitnerium
16	Pawns on board

A solution grid is available upon request.

Fluid Enforcement of Airport Security

This morning I flew out to Phoenix for a meeting just a couple of hours after Britain foiled the terrorist plot to destroy several airliners with liquid explosives, and the TSA implemented its new ban on bringing liquids on board US flights.

Now I'm back in Phoenix Airport awaiting my flight home, with time to worry about terrorists. While I wouldn't expect Al Qaeda cells to attack on a day when security is at level Red, I am not generally comforted by the TSA's implementation...

-- The passenger in front of me was allowed to board with a bottle of alleged cough syrup because she had a prescription with her.

-- I was joined in Phoenix by my colleague Brian Neider who was allowed to bring his contact lens fluid on board because he "REALLY needed it."

-- a passenger on Brian's flight smuggled liquid onto the plane in his pocket, undetected by the metal detectors and out of sight of the X-ray.

I hope the terrorists never think of putting explosives in their prescription bottles, or pocketing the bombs, or insisting that they REALLY need their bombs. (I might feel a little better if passengers had to somehow ingest their fluid before allowing it on board, but only if the explosive liquid was sure to kill them before they were airborne.)

OK, attendant is making me shut off my phone...

Blink: The Nonsense of "Thinking Without Thinking"

As my regular readers know, no muse better inspires me to find Time For This than the large scale suspension of thought. For example, I have ranted about Creationism, alternative health scams, and bullshit products. Today’s plea for logic is yet another book review of an allegedly non-fiction bestseller (now the longest-running title on the NY Times list). Malcom Gladwell's "Blink" attacks reason itself, threatening to sap our collective intelligence for years to come. I confess I did pay for this book, but hopefully I can save some of you the frustration, time, and $26 that it cost me. Sorry if I’m too late.

In the pursuit of serendipity (which is arguably an oxymoron, but also my day job), I often supplement my reading list with books collected on shopping sprees through Kepler’s Bookstore. So stacked near the cash register, Gladwell’s book caught my eye on a day I was pre-disposed toward impulse purchases. Having heard many references to the book (e.g. Brad’s reading list), I grabbed it before a second Blink of the eye.

The book's premise is that experts can make instant decisions--synthesizing inputs and knowledge into intuitions that yield better results than long, painstaking, thoughtful analysis. So if you want to be an expert, learn to trust your instincts. Always go with gut feel.

Gladwell backs up his fortune cookie thesis with a smorgasbord of anecdotes that are anything but consistent. Sometimes the subject clearly, consciously understands the elements of the decision (e.g a military commander), and sometimes not (e.g. art dealers wary of fraud). Some happen literally in the blink of an eye (e.g. the tennis coach who can sense a bad serve coming), while others take 150 blinks (e.g. the marriage therapist who plays Let's Guess Who Will Get Divorced). Many are simply lucky guesses validated by time, like the ravings of any psychic who inevitably hits paydirt. And based on Blink, you'd think no one has ever guessed wrong.

One counterexample would be my hasty decision to buy this book. Had I blinked enough times to at least judge this book by its cover, I'd have evaluated the full title, "BLINK: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking." Of course, logic dictates that for any X, "The Power of X Without X" is nil. As usual, the Power of Thinking With Thinking (please excuse the redundancy) would have served me better.

Rather than enumerate every problem with this book (Who Has Time For This?), I can simply refer to Univ. of Chicago Professor Richard Posner's in-depth review in New Republic, which concludes:

...these literatures demonstrate the importance of unconscious cognition, but their findings are obscured rather than elucidated by Gladwell's parade of poorly understood yarns. He wants to tell stories rather than to analyze a phenomenon. He tells them well enough, if you can stand the style. (Blink is written like a book intended for people who do not read books.)

Do you really want your doctor making instant decisions based on first impressions? What about the structural engineer of your home, your child's school teacher, your pension fund manager or your nation's President? My own sickening gut feel is that the man whose finger is on The Button has read Blink (or at least looked at the pictures). Apparently, Stephen Colbert agrees, as he observed in his speech to the National Press Club Dinner about President Bush:

We're not so different, he and I...We're not some brainiacs on the Nerd Patrol. We're not members of the Factinista. We go straight from the gut, right sir? That's where the truth lies--right here in the gut. Did you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. Now I know some of you are going to say "I did look it up and that's not true." That's because you looked it up in a book. Next time look it up in your gut.

Now I hate to always be a spoilsport, so here's an alternate book for your summer reading list: A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore (which Brad also reviews here). Moore authored such classics as Island of the Sequined Love Nun and Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff (indisputably Moore's best work). Excerpt:

"Why do you call this dog Mohammed?" asked the bearded man.
"Because that's his name."
"You should not have called this dog Mohammed."
"I didn't call the dog Mohammed," Charlie said. "His name was Mohammed when I got him. It was on his collar."
"It is blasphemy to call a dog Mohammed."
"I tried calling him something else but he doesn't listen. Watch. Steve, bite this man's leg? See, nothing. Spot, bite off this man's leg. Nothing. I might as well be speaking Farsi. You see where I'm going with this?"
"Well, I have named my dog Jesus. How do you feel about that?"
"Well, then I'm sorry, I didn't realize you'd lost your dog."
"I have not lost my dog."
"Really? I saw these flyers all over town with 'Have You Found Jesus?' on them. It must be another dog named Jesus. Was there a reward? A reward helps, you know." Charlie noted that more and more lately, he had a hard time resisting the urge to fuck with people, especially when they insisted on behaving like idiots.

Like Blink, A Dirty Job is fictional, and it's a dollar cheaper.

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Separation Anxiety

This week my 3-year old boy started summer camp, and so we had to deal with separation anxiety, of a sort.

I delivered him that first morning to the classroom, where most of the kids were crying, clutching onto their parents. Chaos overwhelmed the two counselors, who tried to appease the screaming campers and relieve the parents who were late for work. They didn't have much time to greet my son, or show him around. So I found him a seat at a crafts table and brought him some crayons, paper, and play-doh.

My son looked around, confused. He didn't know any campers. No one was paying any attention to him. The room was strange and cacophonous. How could I simply walk out and leave him there? Should I stay? Help him make friends? Hold his hand? Take him home???

He gestured for me to come close so he could talk to me. But what could I possibly say to re-assure him and make him feel comfortable here? I leaned down, and got real close, so I could hear him in the noisy room.

He kissed me and said, "Bye, Papa." He started coloring, and I mustered the courage to walk out of the room, thinking that just maybe everything would be okay.

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Slow News Day for the Wall St Journal

I must admit that when I picked up the paper on Saturday and saw my picture front and center, my first thought was Shit, have I been indicted for something?

Apparently, though, I'm just a nerd. Big news.

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