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Tag: "physics"

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Halloween: Whence the pursuit of horror?
By Erich Vieth on October 27th, 2009

Halloween: Whence the pursuit of horror?

Some of the neighborhoods near my house in St. Louis have already celebrated Halloween. For instance, my street celebrates Halloween on the Sunday afternoon prior to Halloween. Celebrating in the daylight makes it easier for us to visit with little neighborhood children and their parents. The nearby Compton Heights neighborhood celebrates Halloween on the Saturday night prior to Halloween. Our family was invited to venture over to Compton Heights a few nights ago, and we weren’t disappointed. head

Amidst all of the traditional candy-giving, we stumbled upon one particular house where the family had put together its own haunted house. The family owns a big old house, but also owns a separate large two-story carriage house in the back. They hired an electrician to wire up the carriage house with sophisticated lighting and they assembled a team of 20 friends and family to pose as various types of dead people inside the house. Not typical dead people, mind you. Dead people who stand still in the dim lighting and come alive just when you are convinced that they are mannequins (and there were quite a few mannequins too, some of them dismembered). When selected dead people came alive, they yelped, or they screamed; some of them reached out and grabbed you. There were ghouls and ghosts, a vampire, a mummy, floating bones, a guy with a “chainsaw,” and a beheaded guy who suddenly moaned, all of this horror looking rather real and all of these characters lurking carefully amidst the dim lighting as we toured this incredible house.

front-of-haunted-houseEach of the photos in this post is from this house. Note that it’s not always easy to take photos in a darkly lit haunted house. While I was taking a photo of a decapitated head on a table, for instance, a dead man reached out and tugged on my sleeve, smudging the long exposure.

How good was it? I stood outside for 30 minutes after I toured the haunted house, and every ten minutes or so, I saw a panicky grown child running from the haunted house crying. Bravo! I then learned that the haunted house family has been putting on this magnificent show, for free, for 15 years. Double Bravo!

But as I walked away from the haunted house, I wondered two things.

American Culture • Communication • Culture • Featured • Media • Psychology Cognition • Religion • Science
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Richard Dawkins discusses The God Delusion on Minnesota Public Radio
By Erich Vieth on March 17th, 2009

Richard Dawkins discusses The God Delusion on Minnesota Public Radio

Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and author of The God Delusion, has spent countless hours defending his positions before lay audiences. What’s really impressive about Dawkins is the way he keeps his cool under fire (I was first impressed with Dawkins’ composure when I viewed this episode, involving Dawkins’ interview of the gay-bashing hypocrite, Ted Haggard).

Consider this condescending interview conducted 3/4/09 by Kerri Miller of Minnesota Public Radio. You can listen to the entire one-hour interview here. At the beginning of this interview, Miller could barely hide her disdain for Dawkins. Many of the people calling the show to ask questions were much more open-minded than the host–they certainly didn’t pick up the host’s mocking tone.

Miller began the interview by branding Dawkins a failure because people weren’t running to convert to atheism, despite Dawkins’ hope (expressed in The God Delusion) that people reading his book would be caused to rethink their beliefs in religion. Dawkins explained that he did hope that people would rethink their beliefs, but that his book didn’t fail merely because people didn’t abruptly quit their religious affiliations. Here’s the hope Dawkins expressed when he wrote The God Delusion:

I hope to persuade . . . a substantial number of middle of the road people that there’s nothing wrong with a disbelief in God … there’s nothing outlandish about it. It’s probably what they’re like anyway, whether or not they admit it to themselves.

Miller then worked to corner Dawkins with a belief expressed by theist John Polkinghorne that there are no hard and fasts truths. Dawkins agreed with Polkinghorne on this general point, but advised Miller that this doesn’t mean that we have no understanding of anything.

Evolution • Featured • Human animals • Religion • Science • ignorance
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Science is Taught Backwards In Schools
By Dan Klarmann on May 28th, 2008

Science is Taught Backwards In Schools

I started thinking about the the “reductionist attitude” in presenting science when I read Erich’s Post To deal with “arrogant” scientists we need to move beyond reductionism and break the “Galilean Spell” (from May 7, 2008). Curricula seem to begin with biology, work through chemistry, and finally introduce physics. If English were taught categorically as [...]

American Culture • Education • Evolution • Science • ignorance
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By Erich Vieth on August 09th, 2007

Personal ads indicate you’re not as free as you want to believe

Are you sure you want to be “free”?  Freedom is such a strange concept. I’ve never understood it in the context of personal decision-making. 
Americans claim to love “freedom,” but how much freedom can you stand?  Freedom implies occurrences that are unhinged from naturalistic laws.  Freedom implies a mechanism that is not hooked into the laws [...]

Culture • Evolution • Psychology Cognition • Science • Sex
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By Erich Vieth on June 02nd, 2007

What turns children into science-resistant adults?

In the May 18, 2007 edition of Science (available only to subscribers online), Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg consider why so many adults resist science.  They cite a 2005 Pew Trust poll finding that 42% of people believe that humans have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.  Most people who [...]

American Culture • Education • Evolution • Politics • Religion • Science
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