Phil Plait, an excellent skeptical blogger, blogged about a heartbreaking exposé broadcast in Australia about the troubling decrease in childhood vaccinations. Phil Plait has a highly trafficked blog, much more than mine, so I considered not passing this message along, but no matter how few new people get the information, it’s worth it. The anti-vaccination movement is spreading and it’s hurting people. It’s killing people. Don’t let it win. Don’t let the unscientific ramblings of Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey sway you, or anyone you know, from getting childhood vaccinations. Fight back with the truth.

Don’t wear the shirt if you don’t mean it. Of course it’s not your fault, vapid girls. The real problem is that the shirt should be saying something else, the thing you really mean: “I ♥ Nerds… If They’re Hot.” You’re not actually interested in nerds per se, you’re after what’s called a superficial relationship. Wow, you like hot people? Me too! Of course, my interest in that person is tempered by my interest in their personality but you don’t need to worry about things like that.

You see, what you’re really saying is that you care so much about looks and so little about the personality of your partner that a nerd “will do.” Nerds have a stigma as the guys who take whatever they get; if you’re a girl who can stomach our eccentricities and sit through our nerdly monologues we won’t care. Maybe if you were someone with actual ideas in your head you’d realise that having a cardboard cutout to talk to isn’t really the same as having an actual conversation.

Now I sincerely apologize to any interesting girls out there who happen to wear the shirt. This isn’t aimed at you. (Though if you’re really interested in the eclectic and quixotic characteristics we nerds imbue, you’d be wise to pick up a more subtle shirt like one of the great ones over at xkcd. If there’s anything that gets a nerd interested its obscure references.) I’m here simply to let girls know that wearing a shirt isn’t enough.

Wow, you ♥ nerds? Well I’m a nerd. What are your interests? Getting wasted at frat house keggers? Hmm… well I’m gonna go watch Babylon 5. Have fun.

See what happened there? Once you got my attention, you lost it. Now I’ve got a lot of t-shirts that are ostensibly there to entertain so I’m being a tad hypocritical, but at least my shirts are representative of my personality. You’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover but we do. The least you can do is be honest about who you are. If you’re an A&F girl who loves guys who pop their collar and drive Honda Civics then don’t pretend that nerds are of any interest to you.

This post has gone through a number of revisions. First I discussed why the actors in the upcoming film Watchmen need to really understand and embrace the atypical nature of Watchmen the comic to ensure the film doesn’t fall into the trap of becoming a “comic book movie” but with the recent announcement of (most of) the cast I’m relatively at ease regarding that. Then this post was to be a rant on Zack Snyder, the director of the film, his lack of experience, and his dogmatic relience on the original comic for visual details. Then Comic-Con came around and Zack Snyder represented himself as someone who knew what the fuck he was talking about and that eased. (He still seems to have some issues with deviating from vision of the text for the purpose of retaining the message of the text, but at least he’s shown that he’s a real fan of the comic and understands why it’s great.) So I figured I’d discuss the reason I began to write this post in the first place.

Watchmen is a great comic. It’s a zeitgeist for a time which our world managed to avoid, filled with mounting conflicts on a global scale and the constant fear of mutually assured destruction. Watchmen is set in a world where superheroes really fight crime through vigilante justice; most of them are good-hearted people who want to make a difference in their city. The key difference from the classic superheroes is that they have no mythic origins, they have no extraordinary powers. They saw this terrifying world and decided to make any difference they could. These are people who took on a battle larger than themselves not because they thought they could win but because it had to be done.

All except for one. Doctor Manhattan is a God among men. His powers seem limitless and we are to him little more than particles of dust flitting about in Brownian motion. He has all the trappings of superheroism but because he is inherently inhuman he becomes a complex compelling character whose decisions sometimes impress and often horrify. But the story of Watchmen isn’t about Doctor Manhattan. It is the story of the people who didn’t wake up one day with superpowers and then decide they should fight crime. They didn’t need a convoluted catastrophic event like an uncle being killed by the robber they could’ve stopped earlier to make them take the leap into the selfless, unforgiving, and sometimes overpowering, world of crimefighting. These people walked down a street one day, saw a mugging that everyone else ignored, and stepped in.

Watchmen is quite probably the greatest comic ever made. Because the characters feel real, and because the questions of morality and power are substantive and have a real, though ambiguous, contribution to make. And for reasons which are intrinsic to the paper; it must be read to be understood. So when I heard about a Watchmen movie I first felt elation. The idea of it happening was fantastic. Of course then I realised it’s the implementation that would destroy it. The odds of the film doing justice to its source material are so mindbogglingly high that anyone genuinely and purely excited without a hint of doubt or hesitation isn’t a true fan of Watchmen.

When I first saw this picture I was certain that it couldn’t have been Pareidolia, it looked so much like a face. Over the years I heard the explanations of how wind and erosion and similar actions could have made the face but they never truly convinced me. But recently, I’ve been listening to The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast and they have, on numerous occasions, derided the Face on Mars as obvious pareidolia; I was amazed by their audacity! This picture was burned into my memory and I was certain that it was indeed a face… then I looked into it. I have to admit that looking back on the picture the shadows concealing half of the face made it easier to see the face but even then it seemed quite clear that it was not an entirely natural formation. Of course then I read those little squiggles below the picture; some people call it text. Anyways, I read this “text” and it informed me that the picture taken in 1976 was from a pretty shitty camera. It then showed a comparison of a picture by said shitty camera and one taken in 2001 by a more advanced space probe. The 1976 picture in the comparison is not the same one as displayed here but it is similar enough to see how, depending on the lighting at the time, they were the same. The newer picture was much a higher quality photo which showed the same hill with higher definition and looking nothing like a face. It actually stunned me that I had to fight to find the structures of the hill that were perceived as a face in the older picture. The real problem was that I was living on old information; I had never seen these new photos which show how obviously it is a natural formation and was oblivious until I investigated. If only people with similar assuredness in their beliefs could look into things before baselessly berating the detractors; I suppose that’s asking too much.

Well, I recently went out to the theatres to see ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ which I felt was going to be a Michael Moore biased-as-fuck “Documentary” and my fears were in many ways confirmed and in many ways belied. Ignoring the fear, uncertainty, and doubt flashed about in the movie, I was glad there was research behind the film. Now allow me to put my butt-face on.

Before this movie I had swung back and forth on Global Warming a couple of times and was cautiously optimistic regarding the whole subject. I had read a few articles from either side: some supporting some decrying the alarmist views regarding global warming. First I want to make something clear: Al Gore posits that because of 928 peer-reviewed scientific articles, 928 agree that global warming is happening and, presumably though not explicitly stated, caused by human intervention. While, this sounds very convincing and it does indeed show that some very smart people agree on this topic, it does not state the topics of said articles. Just because an evolutionary biologist thinks global warming is anthropogenic doesn’t make it more credible; a climatologist has drastically more clout on this subject. Before I sound like an evidence ignoring fundamentalist, I have to once again clarify that I am aware this does not invalidate his point: many very smart people agree on the subject. In fact, Michael Shermer (founder of the Skeptics Society) has just recently flipped on his stance regarding global warming in part because of Gore’s slideshow. Some of the things which shocked and scared Shermer don’t have quite the same effect on me. I don’t personally care about the beauty of glaciers so seeing some well known ones receding didn’t have much significance. Not mentioning that these glaciers could be receding from the end of the last ice age; we have limited knowledge of the scope of ice ages and the timeframe under which they work. Granted, seeing the ice atop the Himalayas disappear was a surprise to me and it did indeed make me question what the doubters had been saying. So I took it upon myself to re-examine the doubting statements; time to get angry.

In one of the skeptical articles I read, they stated that 650 thousand years ago the CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere was three times higher than the current levels and it was the coldest time in the recorded history we have available as of yet. This is, as far as I can tell, complete bullshit. I found an article which discussed the new core sample (circa Nov 2005) extending our ice history back 650 thousand years. The article confirmed that our current concentrations are an anomoly and that our current concentrations are 27% higher than any previously recorded values. In a different article it was stated that while the Arctic ice shelf is receding in some areas it is actually thickening and growing elsewhere. This is another statement for which I can find no corroborating evidence; all the evidence points points to the shelf thinning and receding fairly quickly. What the fuck?

Being skeptical is one thing but lying to make your “point” is just wrong. So I decided to take a fresh look at the facts. Even without people lying their asses off, there is indeed a healthy dose of reasonable doubt awash on this entire issue. However, as a responsible skeptic, I follow the facts and so I have to admit that I’m leaning toward the global warming argument now. It could be simply anger at the skeptics lying to me but there is also a healthy body of evidence supporting Global Warming whereas every solid disproof I’ve heard of disappears under further scrutiny. It sucks to have to admit to yourself that you were bamboozled into a certain opinion through indirection and lies but if I just continued to deny Global Warming blindly, I’d be no better than the fundamentalist.