I hear that the big American Atheists conference in Austin had an attendance of about 900, which is a good number, and of course, let’s not judge the quality of an event by the number of attendees. By all accounts, it was an excellent conference (I keep seeing these gushing comments on twitter about AC Grayling’s talk, making me very envious.)

But…perspective. I’m at a middling-to-good-sized SF convention, which is one of the larger regional events.

Attendance, I’m told, was about 3000 people. Costs for the two events were roughly comparable to attendees. There’s absolutely no comparison with the big national events like Comic-con and Dragon*Con.

I’m sorry, but I think secularism, humanism, and atheism are of greater relevance to people than comic-books. What can we do to grow our audience?

We’re doing an impromptu hangout this afternoon. Point and laugh!

Thanks, Nic, for ruining my afternoon. Now I’ve got to spread it around and sadden everyone else, too.

At this stage of my life, I must get out and walk at least a mile every day, or my tendons start to calcify and lock up, and every step turns into an agonizing process in which a little homunculus scurries about in my blood vessels and uses a pointy hammer to shatter the crystallized pulleys and levers and get the joints moving again. It’s not fun. It’s better if I make a daily effort to keep the limbs supple and well-oiled, and then everything runs smoothly all the time.

My next life-stage? I’ll either be constantly moving, restlessly shark-like, or I’ll be frozen stonily, a kind of Morris Giant. In the latter event, at least my wife will be able to sell me to a freak show, or even charge admission to see the terrifying antediluvian hominid.

Anyway, so I have to take a lubricating constitutional every single day. One catch today is that we’re in the waning phases of a blizzard…but that does not stop me. I don my layered apparel and brave the fierce assault of the frozen north lest I face the dreaded tendon-freeze. External frigidity is better than internal rigidity.

So I wandered through the drifting snow, waded over roads empty of all but snow-clearing vehicles, fought against chilling wind-blasts, felt the ice build up in my beard, was occasionally blinded by flurries stirred up by the fitful gusts, to end up here, in a coffee shop, thawing. Also typing as an act of procrastination — when I finish this, I have to swaddle, zip, and button up and stagger out again to fight my way home again. Right now I’m alive and limber and warm, but that could change. Everything could change. Nothing ever stays the same and it’s always bracing to do battle with one thing or another.

The alternative is that career as freak-show statue, I suppose, which at least sounds restful.

So…SXSW had a panel yesterday about Reddit, with Farhad Manjoo, Adrian Chen, and Rebecca Watson. It went about as well as you might expect.

I like to imagine Reddit as great wide open restaurant with a lot of appealing stuff, and unfortunately, a lot of appalling stuff. It wouldn’t be so bad if it had a culture dedicated to making it better, but it seems to revel in wallowing in the crap instead. If my hypothetical Reddit restaraunteur were to discuss the content of his place, it would go about like this:

Fan: At our buffet, we have ripe peaches and pears, freshly tossed salads, New York bagels flown in expressly that morning, smoked salmon, baba ghanoush, churros, tureens of borscht and gumbo, a small mountain of fresh picked tomatoes, baklava, risotto, Chesapeake soft shell crab, spaetzle, sliced honeydew melon, an assortment of curries, paella, key lime pie, a large pungent vat of shit slurry, pho, barbecued ribs…

Critic: Wait, what was that you said after the pie? Shit slurry?

Fan: Yes. But I said we have peaches and pears, tossed salads, bagels…

Critic: I know. But why would you ruin the whole spread with something so noxious?

Fan: Some people love to splash fecal material over their food. What is this, Red China?

Critic: Maybe it would be a good idea for you to seriously think about what makes a good buffet.

And of course, once you suggest that they could be even better and that the shit is really nasty, they get all defensive and immediately stop listening. That’s what you get when you have no interest in adapting. Well, that’s the first thing you get. The second thing is extinction.

Harriet Hall and Amy Roth have reconciled. I’m pleased to hear it; I wasn’t worried about Amy, but Hall was going to hit mantle at the rate she was digging. It is a great relief that she stopped, looked around, and considered her situation thoughtfully, and then responded well.

Sometimes, you just can’t make this stuff up. But there’s actually a video clip of the Fox News dolts sitting around expressing dismay at 6th graders learning about algebra.

Fox News host Eric Bolling on Wednesday accused some schools of “pushing the liberal agenda” for teaching an algebra lesson about the distributive property.

…

“But even worse is the way some textbooks are pushing the liberal agenda,” the Fox News host explained, pointing to an algebra worksheet that Scholastic says gives students “[i]nsight into the distributive property as it applies to multiplication.”

“Distribute the wealth!” Bolling exclaimed, reading the worksheet. “Distribute the wealth with the lovely rich girl with a big ole bag of money, handing some money out.”

Co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle explained that the algebra worksheet had put her on “high alert” for the liberal agenda in her 6-year-old son’s curriculum.

Wait. These clowns don’t understand the distributive property in elementary arithmetic, and they confuse it with some kind of Communist plot? I think we’re done here. Where’s the hook? Can someone just yank these idjits off the stage?

And there’s more exercise for the fainting couch!

Co-host Dana Perino also expressed concern over an effort to stop children from role playing “cowboys and Indians” at Thanksgiving because experts say that “the historic enemy of Indians was not cowboys, but the U.S. government.”

“So it starts in third grade and guess what happens?” Bolling remarked. “Through their whole educational experience, they continually get indoctrinated, even through college.”

It’s always fun to watch a bunch of rich white folks downplaying the government’s role in historic genocide, and calling it indoctrination.

“Everybody has anecdotal evidence of this,” co-host Greg Gutfeld agreed. “I think the only way leftism can survive is through indoctrination because its number one adversary is reality. So you got to get them young and it’s perfect for kids. Paul Krugman’s logic is child’s play: Share your stuff… A lot of this comes from the teachers. They get their news from The Huffington Post and their antiperspirant from a health food store. This is the way they live.”

Wait, wait, again. These guys are denying algebra and calling it socialist propaganda, while claiming the left is an enemy or reality? Forget the hook, just drop the curtain and close the whole damn show. This is ridiculous.

We will have a Google+ podcast this evening, at 6pm Central time — I’ll start sending out invitations around 5:30. You do not need an invitation to watch it live, or to leave comments during.

The general topic is bad science and quackery. To get us started, here are a couple of links to some examples beyond the usual homeopathy/magic healing stuff that is so blatant — it’s subtler stuff that we often ignore.

• Money interests promote bad science. Look at energy drinks: lies and hype.

  Promoting a message beyond caffeine has enabled the beverage makers to charge premium prices. A 16-ounce energy drink that sells for $2.99 a can contains about the same amount of caffeine as a tablet of NoDoz that costs 30 cents. Even Starbucks coffee is cheap by comparison; a 12-ounce cup that costs $1.85 has even more caffeine.

• The science media flops big-time and promotes bad science. One example: Sharon Begley oversells placebos.

  But while anecdotes are not science, it is stories of the placebo response that drive home its awesome power—much more so than reports in dry research papers.

  Jebus Christ. Enough said, maybe.

• There are legitimate concerns to discuss about GMO foods, but usually we hear little but knee-jerk ideological rejection at the idea of tainting our precious food (this in a country where it’s almost impossible to buy food that isn’t genetically tweaked and processed). A critic rethinks his position on GMO foods.

  I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.

• Bad science prospers when their topic is hidden behind shame and silence. Case in point: the abortion issue, which only has two voices, the strident shrieking about ‘baby-killers’ and muted, almost embarrassed silence.

  When abortion providers do not disclose their work in everyday encounters, their silence perpetuates a stereotype that abortion work is unusual or deviant, or that legitimate, mainstream doctors do not perform abortions. This contributes to marginalization of abortion providers within medicine and the ongoing targeting of providers for harassment and violence. This reinforces the reluctance to disclose abortion work, and the cycle continues.

This is not an exclusive list, but merely something that will get us started. And of course, people can warm up to it by discussing it here in the comments.

You know when I started really getting into science? It’s when a high school chemistry teacher chucked a big chunk of the curriculum and taught us practical math instead: how to use the power of estimation to get ballpark estimates of various phenomena. It really woke me up to the power of simple arithmetic and reason.

So here’s a really good example. A couple of people have been raising money to build a gravity powered lamp Just raise a bag full of dirt and let it slowly drop, and the power generated will drive a small reading light, or can be used to recharge batteries, they claim. It’s the same principle that drove my grandparents’ cuckoo clock; every morning they’d pull a chain to raise the weights, and over the course of the day they’d slowly descend, making the whole mechanism tick.

Which immediately made me suspicious — that’s all that pound or two of counterweights did, was make a precisely designed and balanced delicate clock mechanism work. You can really get that much energy, to generate a useable amount of light, with such a trivial amount of input? And then I saw the video, where they raise the weight and the light instantly comes on brightly, with no detectable descent of the weight. This can’t be true, I thought.

But then I read this site, where they whip out the metaphorical envelope and scribble some quick calculations, that same estimation technique my high school teacher showed us how to use. Nope, can’t work. None of the numbers make any sense.

They also highlight one of the creator’s comments:

With hand-cranked devices, it might require three minutes of turning a handle for half-an-hour’s return. With this amount of effort required from the consumer, it’s often not seen as a particularly attractive trade-off. The GravityLight just needs three seconds of lifting for 30 minutes’ return.

Think about that. Somehow, a quick lift of a 10kg weight is now energetically equivalent to three minutes of hard exertion. It does not compute.

I suspect their demo unit has a nice little slot for a 9V battery. And for that they’ve received $280,000. Now that’s the kind of return from input that really violates the laws of nature.

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OK, I’m going to back off on the implication of fraud. The commenters say that it would produce some minuscule amount of light; the question is whether it would be sufficient to be at all useful. It’s possible their only crime is exaggeration.