Let's think about this... Skeptically.

It's a bit like a religion in that you see a lot of foaming mouths and general intolerance. You also see the some of the big names being totally awesome and spouting the kind of socially responsible stuff that you can't fail to be impressed by.

For me, this is something I fell into from just reading a lot and thinking a bit. I'm not sure I'm a Sc/keptic (Honestly, this is one time I think the American spelling is better - the British one makes me think of an infection), I just have made a start on promoting critical thinking. In my professional role I think it is a responsibility that I work within the bounds of my own knowledge and with an evidence base. I think the world is also more interesting if you make a stab at getting to grips with the scientific understanding of how things work. Worst case scenario, you don't understand anything better than you did when you started. Best case scenario, a rainbow is even more beautiful because you understand what is happening to the light to make the colours.

Being a skeptic and practicing critical thinking doesn't have to take the fun out of the world, which is the argument my girlfriend always levels at me. Just because I don't believe that the guy actually distorted space and time to make my card rise to the top of the pack, doesn't mean I'm not in awe of whatever skill he used to do it. I see magic tricks performed and my first thought is (and I suspect this is true for most people) "How did they do that?" Because I don't think many people's first reaction is "Oh, it must be magic".

But when it comes to things like health care or government conspiracies or big oil oppressing the Free Energy crowd, our latent skepticism suddenly vanishes. Suddenly we want a certain kind of honey to cure all ills, or we always knew the government was capable of x, y or z or we weren't the least bit surprised that big oil has been suppressing solar power tech. We fall victim to confirmation bias (you believe evidence that supports your point of view and disregard anything else) and we fail to read the story and just go for the headline or else we start perpetrating logical fallacies (It's ancient wisdom! Everyone knows this to be true! Because the people get arrested we are turning into a police state!) with gay abandon.

Another argument that get levelled at me is that skeptics are out to disprove the existence of God. Now, I'm pretty sure that's not true. Indeed you can still have a theist belief and call yourself a skeptic. Science isn't going to disprove the existence of God because that's not science's realm of purpose. You want to tell me the earth is 5,000 years old or that it is flat? Fine, I'll drop some science on you. Tell me that you believe that God started it all or that we are the dream of another being, well that I can't disprove. In fact that brings up another neat aspect of living with the scientific method - you suddenly realise you don't have to be a devout follower of a certain concept. You are allowed to say "Oh, that evidence disproves the previous theory, let's change too". It's great. You don't lose any face in the act, you're just working with the best evidence to date.

I see it as a chance to develop my understanding of some of the worst aspects of human psychology and how to try and avoid them. I also see it as a chance to promote better thinking in others, and it can be a very simple thing such as asking the question "why do you think that?" I'm not sure who first said it, but human psychology is pretty comfortable with the notion of people making up their minds and then rationalising it later. You've done it yourself and I've done it too. It's not necessarily a bad thing but wouldn't it be better to recognise it and look at the reasons why you did something. I'm pretty sure that's a neat way to develop as a person. And you don't even need to sign up to an expensive seminar.

Which leads me onto a major reason I am a skeptic. Because a lot of people make a lot of money out of promoting the misery of others. Be it telling them that they are ill because they have displeased God or that vaccinations are the cause of autism or that your vitamin cocktail is better than anti-retroviral therapy for HIV/ AIDS. This happens way too much for my liking and the worst bit is that although you might not believe the big lies you might end up saying things like "Well, it might not cause autism, but can all those injections at such a young age be a good thing?" or "Just because Western medicine can't find the meridians, doesn't mean Acupuncture is total rubbish." Stuff that has little in the way of supporting evidence and is fuelled because their is a kernel of truth in every lie, right? Getting involved in promoting pseudoscience and its ilk is pretty easy and very insidious. And it is something we should be on our guards for at all times.

Don't believe me? Find some evidence that your 1-a-day vitamins are improving your health or preventing you from suffering from a deficiency.

Friday the 13th: Part all of them

I'm sure I'm not the first person to have thought of such a list, but given that I've just watched Friday the 13th parts 1-6 I felt inspired to make this Friday the 13th drinking game:

Drink when reference is made to Jason being dead
Drink when wholesome teens are warned about the dark history of Camp Blood
Drink when the monogamous couple are established
Drink when the monogamous couple have sex
Drink when illicit drugs are used
Drink when someone poops and neither washes their hands nor wipes
Drink when someone showers
Drink for first blood
Drink when someone is stabbed with something and the other end is shown poking out the other side
Drink when someone has their head crushed
Drink when someone has their throat slashed
Drink when you see a Volkswagen Beetle
Drink when it starts to rain
Drink when a car won’t start and Jason is after the driver and/or passenger
Drink someone is thrown through a window (either direction; being pushed through and pulled back counts as twice)
Drink when someone is killed and someone in the room says “Ohhhhh, that’s clever”
Drink whenever someone says “I’ll be right back”, or some variation
Drink when someone asks “who’s there?”
Drink when someone finds their sexual partner dead
Drink when a moronic adult dies
Drink when it is established that Jason cannot be killed by conventional means

I'm not saying the series is formulaic or owt, but, y'know...

You have the Right

There is so much that is good and just about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it's just a shame that work-shy, bottom-feeding, morally-bankrupt sorts have abused it to the extent that it is now filed under "things wrong in this world" by Daily Mail readers.

Is it secret? Is it safe?

Put on your tinfoil propeller hats, kids - it's time to talk about privacy. 

This is one of several posts I'm planning on doing that is going to cover a little bit about maintaining privacy online, because it is becoming ever more clear to me that more and more people are failing to give two short craps about either covering their tracks or just protecting their privacy. I'm going to cover some of the basics in crypto, passwords, programs to use and common sense, because as someone once said: "common sense isn't all that common".

Firstly, I guess we should address why you should be caring about this. I'd suggest looking to issues such as the recent Sarah Palin email debacle or the coming of Phorm to the UK or to the fact that you wouldn't walk down the street with all your contact details on the back of your coat. Or maybe you would. I'm suggesting that this isn't such a great idea, though.

Google yourself. Do you turn up on the first page? Maybe even the first hit? Why? I'm not going to suggest that this is necessarily a bad thing. Maybe you're the Prime Minister. Maybe you are an Astronaut. If, however, you're a private citizen with nothing more to recommend them than a collection of holiday postcards, why are you there? 

Maybe your Facebook account or MySpace account is the explanation. If you have one, that's your choice - Some security experts suggest staking your claim to an account in your name, just to prevent people cyber-squatting your ID on whichever network you choose. Just sign up, put the bare minimum of details about yourself on there (ideally, no picture) and sign out. Now, I know a lot of people have Facebook accounts and use them as their main conduit between themselves and their friends. If you do this be sensible: don't use it for transmitting important information or for "privately" hosting pictures of yourself having sex with your best friend's significant other. Now I know you probably wouldn't do that that, but be aware that just because you label something private, doesn't mean it won't get out in the open. Facebook accounts get hacked. MySpace accounts get hacked. You don't want any picture of you In flagrante delicto floating about the 'net in a torrent.

And don't think for a moment that because you are a small fish in a big pond, you are safe. Security though obscurity is at best a delaying tactic. You need to take an interest in these matters.

So, Common Sense: Have you got an account name for some service that involves your first name and your month and year of birth? Hopefully not. Are all your passwords written down on a sticky note, stuck to your monitor? I hope not. Do you have one password for all your accounts? One PIN for all your cards? Is is 4 of the same? Do you have this number written down in your wallet? I hope the answer is no to all of these. Another piece of what I consider common sense (and feel free to disagree with me on this one) is having multiple email accounts. Quite a few site, such as social networking oriented ones or messaging aggregating ones, will say "If you give us your email password, we'll aggregate your contacts". While this is neat for getting everyone you know under one umbrella, I would question the sanity of doing it. Privacy disclaimers aside, your email address is very much your one stop shop for resetting passwords. And if you use IMAP (for instance, in gmail) and a bad person gains access to your account, then it doesn't take a lot of work to find out which sites a person has accounts on and ask for new passwords. My argument is, no matter how much a site promises not to store you login details, giving up your email is not a great idea for security. Unless, you have one email address you use for frippery and another you use for the important stuff. Even then, I'd suggest asking how much you really want to use the aggregation functionality.

Let's talk a little about what makes a good password. Dictionary words are right out. Likewise names. Length should, ideally, be dictated by the length the field will accept - the longer, the better. Don't repeat characters if possible; keep it upper and lower case, put in numbers and, if the field will allow, special characters (punctuation and the like). An absolute best is if the field will allow you to put in several words. Apparently this makes life that much harder on anyone who tries to brute force your password. In Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson has a character who generates a pass-phrase from a sentence in a book. For that one off pass-phrase (I prefer pass-phrase because "word" doesn't really encapsulate a string of near-random letters, numbers and symbols.) a sentence from a book might work well, but in the long run you're going to have trouble remembering numerous sentences, so you need to think of a secure way of storing multiple passwords. You might want to try the "perfect passwords" page on grc.com to generate as near to random as possible a pass-phrase.

If you run Linux or Mac OSX your operating system will have a keyring. This is a file that store passwords you enter into programs such as your IM client or web browser for later use. When you shut the computer down or log out of your account it "locks" itself and when you fire the computer up, it will "unlock" itself when you log into your account. Again, ideally this keyring should be locked at all times and require you to enter your account password everytime to access it. Real-world, this is just an annoyance. So just don't let someone run off with your computer when you have it open. I mentioned Linux and OSX as they are the operating systems I am familiar with. Windows, I would imagine (I hope), does something similar.

You can use software to regulate access to the keyring, programs such as 1Password or KeePass, allowing your to generate and store strong passwords and access them easily. And to back them up securely in case of emergency. I would argue that with a set-up like this, all you need to know, and perhaps should know, off the top of your head, is the key to your password manager and the login for your main, account associated, email address.

Next up: Basics of using crypto for daily living.