September 2008 Archives

One of the things that I rarely see used in online play are charge moves. Most characters have at least one move that can be charged up, prior to releasing. Once you've fully charged the move, it will automatically execute, and usually the properties are altered in some way. Usually these are automatic guard stuns, meaning that even if the opponent blocks the movie, they will still be staggered and have their guard broken.

Using a charge move requires a little bit of finesse, and is not something that you want to use frequently. At best, the move should be used sparingly, and as a way of mixing up the rhythm of your fighting pattern.

Let's touch on that for a second. Every match in Virtua Fighter, at its core, has a particular rhythm behind it. Combo strings follow a certain rhythm and timing, and most players learn to anticipate and react based on this timing. As you get to know the characters a little better, you learn where their combos can be broken, and where you need input your own counter-attacks to recapture the advantage in a round. Good players learn to feel this rhythm, even if they're not explicitly aware of it, and to adapt to the rhythm that the opponent is using. Great players take this one step further, and learn to change up there rhythm to increase the difficulty in reacting to their actions.

It should be obvious at this point where charge moves fit in - they offer one more way for you to mix-up your rhythm and keep your opponent from adapting to your pattern and timing.

So, how do you use them? The first step in a game like Virtua Fighter is to establish a baseline of expectation for your opponent. What I mean is that you start by using combos and moves that are generally safe, and do not provide a lot of room for your opponent to punish you. For Brad, some of these moves and combos are PPK, PP into stance, KP, and 6P. These moves provide safe options to begin your offense from, and do not leave a large amount of room open to be punished.

The reason that you want to establish a baseline of expectation using moves like this are so that your opponent becomes trained to expect them. Good strategy in Virtua Fighter 5 involves training the opponent to expect certain things, and then deviating from those expectations to catch the opponent off guard and punish them.

Our ultimate goal in setting this baseline, is to get the opponent to start robotically blocking each part of the sequence. After getting hit with the third hit in the PPK series over and over, the opponent is gradually going to become trained to block low after seeing two punches. It is at this point that we start to introduce new moves. Remember the golden rule - don't change what is working. If your opponent is not able to deal with what you are doing, then you should not change it. Let them adapt first, and then change up your gameplan.

Once you've managed to get your opponent to block each part of the sequence, mix things up by introducing a charged move. Brad's charge move fits in fairly well with the above mentioned sequence, and the new string to introduce is PP, 6, K (charge). This comes out as two punches, then entering into his ducking stance, and lastly, fully charging his knee. If you have trained your opponent correctly, they will sit their blindly waiting for the last kick, only to eat a fully charged knee and then be comboed.

Why not just use a throw instead? This is a good question - the short answer is because this is different than a throw. The long answer has many reasons. A succesfully charged attack like Brad's knee will break either standing or ducking guard. The knee will enable a combo, whereas a throw will not. Perhaps most important of all, it's good to do different things. The more varied you can make your attack, the more difficult it will be for your opponent to figure out how to deal with it.

You want to use charges sparingly, and mainly as a way to prevent your opponent from getting comfortable with any particular method of blocking. Make the opponent uncomfortable defending, and you will be one step closer to winning the match.

The alternative to fully charging is to partially delay your attacks. This will not alter the properties of the move, but it does provide another alternative to mix-up your rhythm. The ideal situation that you are aiming for is to unload your move right as your opponent realizes that they have a chance to strike and knock you out of your combo. If you have correctly judged your opponent, you will be awarded a counterhit, and can punish accordingly.

Charge moves can also provide the opportunity for good okizeme. That is - wake up games. Each time you knock your opponent down, a guessing game begins. Will your opponent rise with a mid or low kick? Will they roll away? Will they tech roll? Or will they stand up and block. When I've knocked my opponent down, I'm aiming to train them to rise and block. By punishing them for rising and attacking, you can set imbue your opponents with the need to block when they rise. Once you've accomplished this, you can start introducing charged attacks, once again, as a way to punish your opponent for rising and blocking.

Charge attacks should be used sparingly, and when the time is right, you'll feel it. I find myself using them at most once every 3 or 4 matches, simply because they put you at a high risk, and you need to know that you have got your opponent pegged correctly on their block.

That's all for now, but I'll post again soon with the other aspect of rhyhtm and mix-ups that are important - throws.

This is the first cross-post from my other blog, related to Virtua Fighter, a fighting game that I play, built with a rich-decision tree and a very well-defined, but complex strategy behind it.

Posts that I make related to Virtua Fighter 5 will all be tagged with the corresponding category, so feel free to ignore them if you don't know what the game is about, or aren't interested.

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If there's one thing that you need to become accustomed to, in order to continue improving, it is failure.

A player that I have come across a number of times, named V MIRZA, has written in his XBox Live Bio that "I know my skill level.  If you're better than me, I won't try".  After the second match that we played in which he just gave up, I grew frustrated, and messaged him.

"Why do you play VF5?" I asked.

His reply was something to the effect of "Because it's a game requiring skill, is good quality and isn't flashy or stupid like DoA".

An excellent reply I thought - these are the key reasons someone should play.  So "Why don't you try to actually play then?" I returned.  His repsonse was telling.  "I get worried that I'll lose and won't get better".

There it is.  Loss and failure are funny things.  In many ways, they are counter-intuitive to the way we think about improvement.  If I'm improving, why do I keep failing?  In every skill-based pursuit I've ever tried to improve at, I have found that the formula is inevitably one step backwards, and two steps forwards.  The tricky part is that we often greatly perceive the step backwards, and only slightly notice the movement forward.

A loss  only truly becomes failure when we are unwilling to take stock of why we lost, and how we can improve from it.  Every single loss that you experience during your quest to improve and grow, as a VF5 player, is an opportunity to learn about your own weaknesses, and a chance to grow as a skilled fighter.

V MIRZA's comment is a common attitude.  There are a lot of people out there that will avoid losing in many ways.  Some players will do what V MIRZA does, and simply give up.  If you've given up, you can then take comfort in the claim that your loss wasn't because you tried your best and lost, it was simply because you weren't trying.  Some players will blame their losses on luck, or lag.  Some players will make ridiculous comments like "I prefer fighting people with variety, instead of canned combos".  This just means that they enjoy fighting people that they can beat.

If you truly want to become the best player possible, it is essential that you be willing to look at your own losses with a honest introspection.  There is nothing that will provide you greater insight into how you can improve, than by reviewing your own matches, and seeing what your opponent is exploiting.  

Over at VFDC, people have made complaints about a player named Unico711.  Unico plays a very unique Brad.  He doesn't approach Brad the same way I do, and uses a very limited moveset.  The first time I played him, I couldn't understand why his level was so high - the first round that we fought, all he did was 2P me.  After I adapted to that, he changed up his attack, and started using DM P+K, and full circular sweeps.  And so on.  People complain about the fact that all he does is low sweep spam, and DM P+K spam.  But this isn't something you should ever complain about.  You should either determine why you are losing to someone that is spamming moves, or look to this player as someone that you can hone your skills against.  Next time you lose and are tempted to say something like this, stop yourself, and ask why you really lost.  We don't lose because our opponent was "cheap" and just used 2P.  We lost because we were unable to adapt to that method of attack.

One of the people that I respect the most for this approach to gaming is David Sirlin.  His blog/book about playing to win advocates an approach like this one, where you do not blame your losses on something like the moves your opponent used, or their attitude, but solely focus your view inwards, and attempt to resolve any issues from there.  You can read more about his point of view in his excellent book (freely available on his website), here.

That's all for now.

It's the little things that get to me..  I guess I'm a fairly observant person, and as such, the minutiae that often passes under most people's radar seems to stick up on mine.  Here are just a few quick things you can do to avoid looking silly to the 0.01% of the population that are like me.

• Eg vs Ie

This is a common mistake that a lot of people make. Eg is used when you are providing an example, such as: There are many brands of t-shirts that the common douchebag wears these days.  Eg. Xtreme Couture

Ie is used to indicate that you are providing another way to say the same thing.  When you see the letters Ie, read them as saying "Also known as", or "That is to say".  As an example: "Of all my friends that punch goats (Ie, Davey, Graham, and Davin), Davey definitely gets the most satisfying bleat out of them".

• For all intents and purposes

Make sure you read the phrase above clearly, because it looks pretty dumb when people I work with send out e-mails that tell me what we should be doing for all intensive purposes.  This is simply a problem derived from the fact that many people have heard this phrase used colloquially, but never actually read it in a book.  If you think about it, it doesn't make a tremendous amount of sense to have a set of "intensive" purposes.

• LOL

LOL sucks.  Stop using it (lol!).

That's all for now.

Looks like I'm following a trend here. One of the things that critical thinking is very applicable to is cinema. We documentaries are a very popular form of disseminating information these days, and for every good documentary by people like Al Gore and Errol Morris, there are poor documentaries made to support an agenda with very little fact checking and reliable research.

Filtering through these documentaries can be confusing, and rich media content like feature-length movies are very evocative.

Esoteric Agenda is the second movie that my friend recommended I watch. Based on Zeitgeist, this movie was even more of a challenge to avoid approaching with a bias. However, a good skeptic doubts, rather than denies, and so that is the approach that I have to take.

The first piece of information that is covered by the movie is the Mayan calendar. Let's get the elephant out of the room. There has been a lot of fuss made lately about the Mayan calendar, and the fact that a bunch of people believe that they predicted the world would end in December 2012. This is not in any way accurate, and even if they did make that prediction (they didn't), there is no reason whatsoever that we should place any value in this prediction.

There are often lots of claims made that we are supposed to believe because "it comes from an ancient civilization". This is the fallacy of argument from antiquity - that is, the belief that we should accept a claim simply because it comes from an ancient civilization or source. This is actually opposite to the way science works. As time continues to pass, we continue to test new hypotheses, and add to our body of knowledge.

If you're genuinely interested in understanding how the Mayan calendar operated, and what this misinformed claim of a prediction is based on, Brian Dunning of Skeptoid has written an excellent (and succint) explanation here.

The next claim made is that Nostradamus actually predicted the end of the age in December 2012, just like the Mayan calendar. Problem number one: there is no source whatsoever provided for this information (a pattern that will soon start to repeat itself). Problem number two: claiming Nostradamus successfully predicted something is just not going to work. Nostradamus's so called predictions were written out in a book as sets of quatrains - four lines of text for each quatrain. These were written in French, a bit of Italian, some Greek, and also some Latin thrown in. Not only that, but Nostradamus intentionally obscured the meaning of each quatrain through the use of metaphor and symbolism.

If you take an honest look at the claims made by people saying Nostradamus predicted something, you can see that the claim of Nostradamus successfully predicting something is unfalsifiable. His quatrains are frequently interpreted to fit any prediction the person stating a claim wants to make, and if an event occurs that would contradict one of his quatrains, it's simply brushed off as not being the event that was predicted by that quatrain.

The next bit is about clocks being made to imply that time is something external. I'm not even sure what the point of that is, but I do know that clocks are simply a way for us to make the passage of time something that is tangible, rather than an abstract concept. It is very difficult to get a mental grasp on a concept as illustrious as time. Clocks help us do that. I guess you could look at clocks as evil, if you wanted to, but I'm not sure why you would.

I'm now ten minutes into the movie, but so far all that I've been treated to is a speech that has been prepared by someone, along with images on the screen. There have been no sources cited, and nothing to actually back up the information that is being spewed out at me. This, in itself, is a red flag. A red flag doesn't mean that what is being said is incorrect. A red flag is just a reason to turn up your skeptical sensors a little bit higher and continue to question what you're being told.

Because this movie is produced a lot more cheaply than Zeitgeist was, it's a lot more difficult for me to maintain focus on the movie. As such, I'm switching in and out of it, and taking notes as I hear something worthy. An interesting sound bite caught my attention as I was vacuuming, and I had to turn off and rewind to listen again. That was this:

"If this is your first time hearing about the ocult, pay close attention"

First off, why aren't you paying close attention in the first place? It's almost like the makers of the film are acknowledging how dull their movie is. That aside, the insinuation is that we haven't heard about the upcoming information because it's groundbreaking news. Now, that's a little odd. First of all, why would this news only be getting revealed in a movie like this one, that didn't even make it to theatres? Maybe a better question, though, is: Why is this is the first time I'm hearing about this? Which is more plausible, that the occult is that secret, and that the only people that were able to "break the news" are the guys behind Esoteric Agenda, or that this is a pretty fringe claim being made?

Honestly, even secret societies like the Skull and Bones club of Harvard has an entry in Wikipedia documentating a lot of stuff about it. Wikileaks releases tons of information on a weekly basis that is supposed to be "highly secret", most recently the contents of Sarah Palin's Yahoo E-mail account. Ask yourself, if the occult was that serious, and had their hands in that much stuff, would they really be able to keep it that secret?

We're finally given a source, and it's an IRS document called IRS publication 6209. I opened this up to look through it, and holy man, it's huge and dense. I tried to read through some of it, but we're not told where in the document the information is that purports to show things like how we dont' have to pay income tax, income tax is illegal, we're not protected by the constitution (well, I'm not anyhow, since I'm Candian, but you get the point). For a good explanation of one of the more applicable (but still wrong and not valid) ways that income tax could be evaded, check out the Straight Dope entry on the matter here.

We're told that the CIA, FBI, NASA, and one other organization were never part fo the US govenrment, and that the government only holds shares in these organizations. I'm not even sure how shares would operate, since these are not corporations or companies, and do not have stock that would be traded around. What is true is that the FBI, based on what I was able to research on the internet, is in fact a part of the US government, but does in fact act outside of the jurisdiction of the government. The reasoning behind this is actually fairly sound, in that the FBI does in fact need to be able to do things like investigate the president and other aspects of the US government, should that be where the trail of a case leads them.

Ah, I looked up the basis for these claims, and as you would expect, they're far from watertight. First off, this entire claim, which, I think we can accept, is a very significant claim. Bordering on extraordinary. We would expect a claim like this to have some pretty significant evidence. Instead of that, we get two court cases. One of which relates to trying to determine whether an individual working for one of these organizations was in fact working for the Federal Government, or a private corporation (more of an issue of semantics than anything else), and the other case being about an attempt to determine whether or not one of these organizations could be sued under the Federal Tort Law. These cases are not the kind of cases that would determine such a massive exemption as that which they are being cited in support for. You can read the summary of the second case here. Don't worry, that's a short read. Main fact to remember? We'd need to see much better evidence before it was reasonable to just toss our chips in with this claim. Next.

Still not convinced? No worries. It turns out, these claims are actually based on an e-mail that's been getting sent around for quite some time. As it typical with this kind of thing, you can find the urban legend quoted in many many many different places, but actually finding any good skeptical writing on the item is tough. I searched and found that someone had already taken a critical walk through the whole thing. Take a look at this page and you can see that most of these claims are based on poor understandings of the law, or precedence cases. That page is available here. It's unfortunate that it's always the misinformation that seems to get passed around from inbox to inbox, rather than the corrective details. If only the makers of Esoteric Agenda had bothered to do the same kind of research I just did, they would have been able to avoid quoting fallacious material to support their agenda.

Now we get mention of the Skull and Bones club, and how meetings of these types happen often, but no word of it reaches the public, even though, we are told that major media is present at these events.

Everything I have read suggests that these events ARE secret, and media is not present. Which is more reasonable - that the media are present, but somehow are paid off enough to prevent even one whistleblower from blowing the lid off of this, or, that this information is not factually accurate? Which of those two items is more plausible? It doesn't matter what we want to believe, we have to seek out the answer that is the most plausible.

Finally we get to the first thing that I believe to be accurate in this film: The statement that "In order to win a game, you should use strategy and secrecy to achieve your victory. Why would it be any different in the global political arena."

I agree with this, but this heuristic alone does not explain anything in particular, and is simply stated to attempt to give weight to the other claims being made. Nothing about this fact actually helps us prove the veracity of the claims being made - it is simply being used to increase the mental bias that you have and to make you feel more supportive of their statements.

Now we get crappy footage of some guy that is using the strategy of a chess master to attempt to further the above. He's claiming that the one world order has patience and have been planning this for 50,000 years. Wow. If you look back at any single prediction of the future, even 50 years back, it's pretty hilarious how far off they got a lot of things. To believe that people could plan something over the course of 50,000 years is a pretty massive stretch of the imagination.

This guy also tells us that the ancients knew about astrology, which we have not forgotten. Astrology is completely pseudoscientific, and gives us nothing at all. Rolling in your beliefs with this really doesn't do you any benefit. And once again, the fallacy of argument from antiquity.

Now we're told that every US president has a direct blood line relation to a British monarch. That's quite a claim. What would we say that a direct bloodline actually means? We're told that George W. Bush is Queen Elizabeth's 13th cousin. I don't even know what a 13th cousin would be, so I looked it up. Here's what that means:

George W. Bush and Queen Elizabeth shared one great great great great great great great great great great great great grandparent. WOW. That is some loose criteria for a direct bloodline. If we're going to go back 13 generations, I bet you that I can find some pretty crazy relations that I have with various monarchs or royal families. Is this really that significant? It certainly doesn't strike me as very good evidence to support the claims that the movie makes for "only family members in the new world order get to be in control of the governments".

Another gem - we're told that the same emblems are shown on every single military uniform, such as:

• Fleur De Lis
• Skull

These are pretty loose criteria for emblems. There's also many possibl reasons for why the emblems could have a lot in common. To think of one, skulls would be a good emblem because they represent death, and could strike fear into the hearts of your enemy. The film doesn't bother looking into any other claims, and just jumps into the assumption that these are all indications of a new world order and a one world government. This is lame, and also falls victim to the same question that I asked of Zeitgeist. Are they really smart and organized enough to pull the wool over everyone's eyes, but make the mistake of using the same emblems on their uniforms? Come on...

Here's another classic quote: "Connecting the dots is up to you, but make your own decisions, instead of settling on the conclusions that are being placed in front of you."

This movie is guilty of exactly the kind of thing it is warning you against accepting and settling on in the quote above. Do not just accept what is being said here. QUESTION it (please).

There is an important distinction to be made here and one that both Zeitgeist and Esoteric Agenda get wrong. Critical thinking doesn't mean that you just accept the opposite point of view to that of the mainstrea. It means that you have to question claims made on both sides, and then analyze and select the best and most plausible of those claims.

Zeitgeist and Esoteric Agenda also both commit the fallacy of presenting a false dichotomy. This is where you present two potential explanations for a given piece of evidence, and then argue as though those are the only two plausible explanations. In Esoteric Agenda, they make claims, and then, when their own (poor) analysis shows that it doesn't fit with the mainstream point of view, they assume that this is proof of their own point of view. This is not how science works, and not how good research is conducted.

In summary, just because the government lies about some things (and I think we can all agree that this happens) doesn't mean that what this movie claims is true.

The movie makes the claim that by searching for New World Order on Google, you will be overwhelmed by the number of people trying to get information out there. However, this amounts to nothing more than the bandwagon fallacy: the fallacious attempt to convince us that something is correct or accurate just because a bunch of people believe it. Claims need to stand up on their own, regardless of how many people do, or do not believe in them (yes, the bandwagon fallacy works in both directions).

We're told by Esoteric Agenda to look past the common claims that we are told. This is an excellent idea. However, the movie wants you to stop looking any further as soon as you arrive at the same convoluted conclusion that it is putting forth. Critical thinking is good, but only if you apply it equally to everything that you are told, rather than just the mainstream opinion.

The movie pulls a cute trick here, by stating that the points of views expressed within will be labelled with the term Conspiracy Theory, which has negative connotations, and that this is simply a means used to discredit the movie. This is a classic appeal made in many situations. Often, mainstream scientists will refer to someone that is proposing the latest perpetual motion or free energy machine (a feat that is impossible under the second law of thermodynamics - one of the most fundamental and proven laws observable in our universe) as a crank. These people will then turn around and say that they are being dismissed out of hand, and not being given a fair chance. The fallacy here lies in the assumption that that label is the only means by which they are being dismissed, and likewise, the same applies to Esoteric Agenda's special pleading. The reality is that most of the claims made in Esoteric Agenda are either ridiculously convoluted (and thus fall victim to Occam's Razor, at least until we see actual good clean evidence to support these extraordinary claims), or are patently false.

The summary? Esoteric Agenda's claims are mostly baseless, leaps in logic, or already disproven, AND the claims essentially amount to one massive conspiracy theory.

Another attempt to turn evidence against the movie's claims into positive evidence for them is the the statement that: If a global secret needed to remain hidden, but emerged among the public, embellishment and adding fiction to it would be the best way to deal with it. Again, we are dealing with the problem of falsifiability. How would you ever prove these claims wrong if you can just flip any negative evidence into evidence that supports your pet theory? Good research doesn't start with an assumption (there is a massive conspiracy), and then shoehorn the available evidence to support that answer. It starts with questions, and builds a hypothesis based on where the available evidence leads it.

Next up we get treated to some woman that is talking at a nutritionist convention, but we are not told anything about the convention itself, nor about this woman. She is every bit as dubious as the voice-over that has been narrating the movie thus far, but those two credentials (that she's a nutrionist, and at a convention) are put on the screen to suggest that she has some credibility.

We need better evidence, to support claims like this, than one lone person on the screen making claims on top of a podium. I can put a guy in a lab coat and tell you he's a doctor, and then make him claim that brushing your teeth gives you cancer. Would you question that claim? How is that any different than this woman's claim? Maybe the answer is that you want to believe in this conspiracy theory. If that's the case, you should ask yourself - what would be more rewarding, believing in a conspiracy theory bceause it's compelling theory, or because you've actually analyzed the claims it makes and determined that they are the absolutely most plausible way to explain the world arround us?

Honestly, it's alright to think that conspiracy theories are neat, and that it would be cool if there really was some power that had this kind of control, but while maintaining that line of thinking, you still need to be willing to look at each piece of evidence, on its own, and see if that evidence being presented is plausible and stands up on its own. As it stands, this lady's testimony doesn't really do anything for us without more context to frame what she is saying.

Conspiracy theory #29123219 introduced is that fluoridizing our water supply is a massive conspiracy to kill off large numbers of people. This is an extraordinary claim, so we would, again, expect to see some really good evidence to back it up. Unfortunately, we get one interview, and information provided to us by the narrator. If you do some research online, you can see that there is in fact some valid debate on fluordization. On one side, the American Dental Association states many prominent organizations that endorse this practice, include the World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the American Medical Association. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to this Wikipedia article here, list water fluoridation as one of the 10 greatest public health achievements in the 20th century.

On the other hand, you've got what appears to be some decent clinical trials showing that the amount of fluoride present in water could pose health risks to people that consume large quantities of water, and to newborn babies. Fair enough, this sounds like it is worth conducting some further studies.

Does this alone provide any evidence to support that water fluoridization is being done to kill off masses of people? Nope. There's no good evidence to support this whatsoever, and it's an astounding leap in logic.

The next person shown talking and presenting claims is someone called Michael Shaw, who is talking about how the goal of the new world order is to destroy the middle class. First of all, this is a silly proposition, and would be nigh impossible to achieve. There exists a middle class because you need people to carry out certain duties. As an example, you can consider a large portion of any government bureaucracy to be the middle class. Without all of these people, there would absolutely be no "One World Government". If you think that having just one government to oversee all of the world would reduce bureaucracy, you don't understand how bureaucracy works. Secondly, I recommend checking out Michael Shaw's website, or at least a website that seems to be strongly supporting him, here. A very nice site. I wasn't able to find very much on the internet about Michael Shaw, at least the one talking in the video, but what I did find amounted to poorly thought out rants about the US government taking down our society, creating a one world government, etc.

Essentially, Michael Shaw is just one more person that holds the same views as this movie, and really doesn't offer any new evidence. His presence does nothing to lend credibility to the claims in the movie.

The last piece that I have a note about is related to the so called "Climate Change Conspiracy". The notion that climate change is being pulled over our eyes as a means to fool us further. The film even makes note that there is a petition with 19,000 scientists signed on to it that disagree with the climate change findings.

Let's take a quick tangent here. Climate change is a complicated topic, the least of which being because it is so heavily political right now. There are many different approaches to it - Is it actually happening? Is it caused by humans? Is this something that has happened in the past? Is it happening faster than most? etc. The scientific consensus is that climate change is in fact progressing towards a warmer client, and that we are responsible for that change, at least to a significant degree. There will always be fringe scientists that degree with the main consensus, and there will also always be differing opinions on what mechanism is actually causing the observed phenomenon. However, the main consensus is as stated above.

Now, This may sound like a bandwagon fallacy - just because a bunch of scientists believe something, why should I? This is a fair question to ask, and is a difficult one to deal with. In essence, the scientific consensus is an opinion that is reached, independantly, by many different scientists. We have a limited capacity of knowledge, and ultimately have to entrust certain aspects of our knowledge base to certain individuals. In this case, we have to throw in our lot with scientists that study this kind of thing on a daily basis. While it would be weak reasoning to simply follow along with one scientist, a scientific consensus has been reached independantly by the majority of scientists working in a field, and this is the key aspect that separates it from the bandwagon fallacy.

Anyhow, the claim that there are 19,000 scientists that have signed a petition doesn't hold a lot of water, without telling us how many people exist on the opposite side of the fence. Are these 19,000 just a dedicated part of the fringe? I don't know without more details. You can read more about this petition project here on Wikipedia. As that article tells, this petition has certainly had it's share of surrounding controversy.

Anyhow, the movie droned on further, but did not cover a lot of new ground. The best part about this movie, I think, is that it makes Zeitgeist look good in comparison. Unfortunately, this is a pretty bland movie that is fairly poorly produced. It doesn't really cover any additional ground that Zeitgeist didn't already try to cram into its 2 hours of screentime, and this could probably be more accurately viewed as a summary of every conspiracy theory that is currently floating around on the internet.

The bottom line is that, at the very least, we should all take this kind of information with a skeptical eye, and do some of our own research. Although writing this blog entry took me about 6 hours (8 if you include the 2 hours I spent watching the film), actually performing the research was as simple as opening up a web browser and searching for some of the claims and names that were presented on screen during the movie.

Bottom line - do your own research. That doesn't mean watching a movie like this, thinking about the fact that this goes against the mainstream and may initially seem compelling, and then throwing your chips in with this point of view. It means thinking critically about the information presented on both sides of the debate, and looking into the claims that are being put forth.

Time consuming as these kind of things are, it's actually pretty rewarding to go through a movie like this and debunk the claims, and as a result of the research that necessitates, it certainly provides the opportunity to learn a lot more on the fly. I should also mention that I'm although I thought both this movie and Zeitgeist were pretty terrible excuses for documentaries, I'd like to thank my friend Dan for bringing them to my attention. Just because I thought a movie was bad, or take the time to debunk it, doesn't mean that it wasn't worth spending some time analyzing.

If anyone else has movies of this nature that they think would be worth being put through the skeptical lens, please add a comment or e-mail me and let me know.

A friend of mine recommended that I watch a movie called Zeitgeist. I wasn't sure what it was, but he told me it was a documentary about 9/11. Now, most of the ground has been covered for 9/11 these days. The things that remain are usually either related to the consequences and aftermath of the attack, or loony conspiracy theories.

Unfortunately this one falls into the latter camp. Out of respect to my friend, I made a mental note that I wouldn't go online and read anything about it before I started watching it. Although the 9/11 conspiracy theories fly blatantly in the face of good science and logic, they are still an opportunity to practice critical thinking skills, and I wanted to use this as an opportunity to do exactly that.

I took notes as I watched the movie, and then wrote out my thoughts on each item. As a result, some parts of this entry will flow a little more than others, but I think it all works out in the end. I could spend more time editing this, as I would do in the past, but doing so means that I just won't end up publishing it, so I think I'm better off just getting this out the door.

Onwards with the movie.

The movie starts out right at the start with a MAJOR premise:

We've been lied to by religions, education, and governments. Ironically the movie asks us not to accept authority as truth, but to accept truth as authority, and then goes about setting itself up as an authority on these matters that we should just trust.

Next up we open into a George Carlin standup routine where he jokes about religion and how religions have managed to do a great job pulling the wool over the public's eyes. In many ways this is probably a fairly accurate statement, but it is definitely a generalization, and, regardless of that, why is George Carlin the first real voice that we hear in this movie? Is he meant to be considered some kind of authority? This doesn't mean the movie isn't going to be on point or anything, but it definitely makes me wonder what the intent is of putting a potentially inflammatory comic routine at the start of a movie that purports to be a documentary.

Now we're moving into the actual meat of the claims of the first part of the movie. These claims revolve around what, to me, appear to be attempts to discredit Christianity by proving that its story isn't original or accurate. Before going any further, I should point out that I am not religious, but my wife is, and we both feel that if you're basing your faith around the fact that your religion of choice comes from a book that was legitimately handed to us by god, you are kind of missing the point.

Due to a similarity in the zodiac shorthand for the chart and the Christian cross, we are supposed to make the leap in logic that Christianity is and always has been based on the stars, constellations, and the zodiac. Is it reasonable to make the assumption that because the Nazi's took the swastika from Hindu and other Eastern religions, we should assume that the entire facist Nazi movement is actually based on those religious beliefs? We can see pretty quickly that this analogy breaks down, and is more of an interesting coincidence than anything else.

Of course, the movie tells us this as though it is fact (in the disembodied voice of the narrator, who we have no knowledge of, nor where this supposed fact is drawn from other than a hunch).

We follow this up with a nice example of cherry picking data - pulling religious quotes out from the bible that support the statement above, but without showing any of the many pieces of scripture that would counter this. Ironically, many non-Christians criticize those that are by saying that they often cherry pick their own lines of scripture to support their own claims (which some do, and yes, this is also invalid).

The movie meanders further and now mentions ancient civilizations that were supposed to be very aware of the zodiac cycle, and the precession of the earth. Who cares. Ancient societies believed many things, but I'm pretty happy with modern medicine, thanks. Trying to argue that they were right just because they were ancient is the fallacy of Argument from Antiquity - suggest that that which is older is more likely to be correct.

More arbitrary and unsupported claims: apparently Jews blow the ram's horn because they were prominent during the era of the Ram, in the zodiac cycle. We're just expected to accept this fact. It doesn't really prove or disprove anything, but even so, I don't see any compelling reason to believe in this over any other reasoning for it.

Likewise, we're told that Christians use a fish to represent Jesus and their belief, but we're supposed to believe that's because Jesus's birthdate was purported to be around the same time that the age of Pisces is started. Not surprisingly, they don't make any mention of the fact that almost all modern historians (generally a much more reliable source of information than a theologian) agree that Jesus was born a few decades earlier than 1 B.C.

The movie now goes into showing the similarities between Christianity and Egyptian beliefs, scrolling a big wall of text up the screen with similarities between the two, claiming they are staggering. I paused so I could read them. Here are some of the gems:

• Horus the fulfiller <-> Jesus the fulfiller
• Horus the founder <-> Jesus the founder
• Horus the chaser of boastfulness <-> Jesus the humbler of the proud

Aren't these pretty mundane similarities? Isn't it reasonable to expect that the main figure of a given religion is going to be endowed with certain properties that inspire awe, such as fulfilment, founding the universe and cosmos, humbling those that are self-righteous, etc.?

I'm not arguing against the fact that many religions have commonalities with each other, and it's actually one of the most interesting parts about religion, but this isn't a reason to jump to the conclusion that Christianity is based off of Egyptian beliefs, nor that both of them are necessarily based off of astrological beliefs.

The movie also takes some liberties in what they call a "literary similarity", such as assuming that The Mysteries in Egyptian texts has the same meaning as as The Miracles in Christian texts. Maybe... but we're not provided any context with which to make that judgment ourselves. Not only that, but these would be translation from Egyptian Hieroglyphics - that's pretty tough translation on top of all that. I can cherry-pick quotes and data out of my older blog entries and not show any context in order to imply the same relationship. Without any context, this information doesn't do us a lot of good.

There's a good deal of time spent showing that a lot of the bible is plagiarized or influenced by earlier epics, poems, and stories. If you, like I, don't regard the bible as a book handed to humans by a god, but as a work of man, this isn't a shocking revelation. We would naturally expect that new works would be influenced by older ones (indeed, we see this happening in all creative aspects of our modern society). Again, many religions share commonalities. What does this prove?

And now more stand-up? Jeez. Come on guys. The movie provides more stand-up as a voice over while it shows pictures on the screen ridiculing what the bible says. Hey, it's pretty easy to do that, I'll try:

People that made the movie Zeitgeist actually believe that all religions are caused by the stars, and that 9/11 is a giant conspiracy cover up, even though anyone that has ever worked in any capacity with a government knows that if there's two things a government can't do, it's:

• Act efficiently
• Keep secrets

Blah. If you're going to make some allegations, get on with it. Anyone can sling mud.

The movie claims to analyze the number of historians that have written about Jesus, dismissing three of the four they note outright, because they refer to him as Christ, or "The Annointed", which is a title rather than a specific reference to Jesus Christ himself. The fourth they dismiss on the grounds that he has been discredited. I don't see any sources or citations that support these claims.

However, if I go to Wikipedia and type in "Historical Jesus" in my search bar, I'm presented with a page that has many links, sources and citations, and discusses, in a balanced manner, the accuracy and likelihood of Jesus as a historical figure, and what his live may really have been. If you are actually interested in this subject, this is a really interesting page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Jesus

And now even more voice-overs. Who are we listening to? Are we expected to just take everything that is being told to us in voice-over as fact, or as some kind of authority? We haven't yet seen one of these voices attached to a talking head, or with a name or credential supplied. Maybe they're just telling a story, but it'd sure be nice to see something to let us in on that fact.

Now we enter part 2 of the movie, and things start to get kah-razy.

Looks like we're entering a 9/11 conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories are interesting, but that's about as far as they usually go.

We start off being treated to a bunch of news clips, most of which appear to be right at the scene of the event, as people are being rescued. These people are making claims about what has just happened and most of the claims we're presented with relate to Zeitgeist's side of the story. Again, with no context as to how many people there were citing the other side of the claims that the legitimate investigations have determined to be true. We have to understand that many of these kind of testimonies are going to be colored with fear, terror, shock, and adrenaline. All of these elements have been proven to affect our memories and the way we remember things.

We end the montage with someone saying "It was like there were explosives in the building" (a claim that was analyzed by Popular Mechanics and shown to be highly unlikely, given that all of the actual recorded evidence (non-testimonial) was consistent with the findings of a structural collapse caused by the weakening of the supporting structure of the building, and not explosions). Lastly we're treated to a black screen with white text, that has the heading "The 911 Myth". I guess we know which avenue this movie is going to take.

Before going further, it's important to note a fallacy committed by the film makers, and that is the fallacy of the strawman attack. They phrase it as follows: (I'm paraphrasing) "The 9/11 damage was caused by planes hijacked by terrorists, under the direction of Osama Bin Laden...". So far we're consistent with what has been determined by independant committees. At the bottom, they include something that has already been rejected - that there were no warnings for these terrorist attacks. The same commission that confirmed the damage as the cause of the hijacked planes also confirmed that there were indeed warnings about the attack, and that the government did not adequately heed these warnings.

This is a strawman fallacy because they are building up a metaphorical strawman for their opponent - one that contains some legitimate claims and some already proven false claims. The claim that there were no warnings (along with the other stuff that was true) is then knocked down easily, and then it appears that the whole set of claims were proven false. This is disingenuous, and not what we want to see from good documentaries.

One of the things that irk me with conspiracy theories is that there is never any room for coincidence. Every thing that may be a valid coincidence (example, Bush family eating breakfast with other high-powered families, such as the Pakistani leader), immediately lends support to the theory in question.

We have to ask ourselves - what would prove this theory wrong? For it to be a valid rational pursuit, we need to have clear ideas as to what proves them not just correct, but also incorrect. This is how we do science. The problem is that conspiracy theories pick and choose their evidence - they choose the positive evidence and coincidences that support the theory, but discard any of the many other coincidences that do not, and even go as far as suggesting that the lack of evidence is proof of the theory, since the government must have covered that up. Once you've gone this far, you can no longer call what you are doing a theory - it's bad investigation and junk science.

One hilarious claim the movie makes is that evidence of Osama Bin Laden on a tape that was revealed as potential proof that he was behind the terrorist act was planted because the person in the video has darker skin, and fuller cheeks. Of course, in this case, the American government, who have so far been capable of orchestrating the greatest cover up the world has ever seen (anyone here ever worked with or in the government? We know how likely this is...), but they forgot to hire someone to do proper makeup. This is classic conspiracy theory - the people behind the theory are absolutely brilliant at orchestrating the theory, but they always seem to make these bumbling kind of mistakes. Again, let's use Occam's Razor here to slice away the fat. Which is more likely - that Osama's appearance, the lighting in the video, and his health have changed between various footage and images of him, or that the government planted this evidence to frame him, and that they messed up his make-up. Did you guess government cover-up? Really? Stop reading this blog and go eat some sand.

Here's another classic exmaple given: George H.W. Bush was meeting with Osama's older brother, Shafig bin Laden, on the morning of 9/11 at a Carlyle Group function. Wow, really? Another bumbling mistake! How on earth did these guys manage to pull together something this huge, gather together the massive amount of financial resources needed (there is massive overhead to stuff like this - $100,000 from a bunch of countries is not going to cut the costs you would see from planning, overhead, and hush money on this order), and STILL screw up and forget that it's happening on this day. Doh! Why didn't we think about having George senior go and do something totally unrelated to the massive thing we've been planning for years. Boy, is there egg on our face. Is it possible that this is just a coincidence? That certainly seems more likely to me.

Next up are comments about the Pentagon and terrorists flying them, theories of explosives, firemen making claims about the way floors would fall in a building in this situation (which we really have not ever had good evidence to watch - we can't pretend to know exactly how something like this is going to happen), and more classic claims of the many 9/11 theories. This subject has already been covered very well by Popular Mechanics, so I won't bother wasting time getting into it.

Ah, nice, and now I hear the guy's from Loose Change talking over the footage we're given. These guys actually debated the people that investigated their claims from Popular Mechanics, and came off as aggressive and angry, but without a lot of good science to backup their claims. If you want to catch that excellent debate, I recommend watching it here. That is a much better analysis of the 9/11 conspiracy that this film is.

We also hear a lot of voice-overs that say things like "There was absolutely no evidence that a plane had hit the building", but we are never given any idea who that is that is talking. Soundbites are a great way of punctuating footage, but they do not act as valid evidence, and we should always always be skeptical when we're treated to footage and a soundbite without being given the source. You can tape record my voice and make it grainy, and then play that over footage of your choice to make your own point. Be skeptical. Don't accept things like this on faith.

Blah blah blah William Rodriguez talking about an explosion from the basement of the WTC tower. The only credential providing for this guy is that he worked in the building for 20 years. Well, that's reassuring. I'm sure he's a good candidate to judge how a sub-basement explosion would feel differently from that of a plane smashing into the building.

Now we get really nutty, and the truth is revealed. The United States government staged the attack as a false flag attack on its own citizens in order to manipulate the public towards its own ends. Let's look at the claim here. The claim implies that the attacks were staged because the public could not be manipulated, as effectively, without making a false flag attack. For example, staging an attack on our own soldiers in foreign soil. Or just using propaganda effectively. Or anything else. Aren't there other options? If the only goal was to manipulate the populace, wouldn't it make more sense to do something that slightly less chaotic and random? You can't really guess at how the public is going to react to something like this. What if riots broke out and general pandemonium occurred? What if the terrorists caught wind of this, and chose to make their own attacks in addition to the ones that the government was supposed to be making. You could argue that with so much of the US infrastructure going towards supporting their own false flag attack, they would have scarcely had any resources left over to deal with legitimate terrorist attacks.

The movie starts to move into claims based around the central banking system of the US, and implying that there is a necessary cycle of creating debt, followed by producing more money to pay off that debt, followed by creating even more debt, etc. People that have any economic background know that this is a pretty sophomoric understanding of the way banking works, and although my own background only goes towards a few classes I took in my undergrad, and the podcasts and financial websites I read these days, I can tell that the view being presented is over-simplified and naive. This is consistent with most of the questions have been asked, and the way most of the evidence has been presented thus far.

A quote is presented by Woodrow Wilson, but is taken out of context, and also leaves out some significant parts. In Woodrow's quote, he was relating to the statesmen of the US congress how significant a role each of them played in ensuring that banking was not abused - not a condemnation of the country's banking system. Woodrow actually was responsible for enacting some fairly important changes to the way finance was dealt with in the states, but that's neither here nor there.

There are other quotes listed, but I don't care to look them up as well, and this movie's credibility is already questionable enough that I don't find this particular evidence convincing.

There is a lot of time spent looking with hindsight back at the way the Federal Reserve responded to various economic crises. Again, anyone with any economic background knows that the economy is a fickle monster, and we are still trying to determine good theories (actual theories) to understand how it operates, and how we can achieve the desired results that we would like to see (minimize recession, maximize growth). Looking back in hindsight and applying post-hoc reasoning loses sight of the fact that during the great depression, the same amount of knowledge and experience that we now possess was not available.

If you want to actually learn about the way banking works, what causes many of the economic problems we are currently going through, and read good critical analysis of the banking and financial claims and statements that we are constantly seeing in newspaper headlines these days, I recommend reading the Long Run Blog. These guys do their research and have worked in and out of financial institutions. Don't get your economy knowledge from a movie like Zeitgeist.

Oh my god. Now we've hit on the claim that "There is no law, whatsoever, that requires you to pay income tax". Well, that's it. This movie is awful. Patently, completely, shitty. This issue has been covered on Boing Boing, Google News, and many other sites, and is just one more ludicrous claim that this movie vomits up into my eyes. There's actually some hilarious documentation and legal briefs that you can read related to morons like Wesley Snipes that have tried to get away with this evasive maneuver to avoid paying tax. You can bet that the US government doesn't agree with this movie. If you want to actually read about the history of US income tax, and how it all comes out in the wash, I recommend doing what most people do, and checking out the Wikipedia article for it, here. Now, I'm sure Zeitgeist would argue that "the people controlling the banks just change that article to suit what they believe" or something along those lines. This is the same problem I mentioned earlier with conspiracy theories - there's never any way to prove them wrong. Any evidence refuting them just becomes evidence supporting them. Garbage.

This whole movie is based on numerous faulty premises. It doesn't matter how well a theory is argued for if the premises upon which it rests are false. If I tell you that 2 is 3, and then spend two hours proving to you that as a result, 1 + 2 = 4, it doesn't matter, because my entire argument is based on the false premise that 2 is 3. Figure out why my argument is faulty, and you can skip watching this movie completely.

It's actually tragic in a way - this movie uses the downward slide of the US's quality of education as further evidence to support its own point. Ironically, if the quality of education was better, many more people would be looking at this movie critically and seeing how flawed it is. They even have the balls to talk about how people need to learn how to think critically. Geez. This movie would not exist without the problems that it takes issue with. This does not prove or disprove any of the specific points made in the movie, it's just an interesting tangent.

They end the film talking about the North American Union, and making grand claims about how you haven't heard about it because it's totally secret, and only one reporter has had the courage to talk about it. Of course, that's strange, when you can just look on Wikipedia, and see everything there is about this (not to mention that it has been acknowledged by all three governments, all of which have indicated that there's no plans to go ahead with this approach). You can read more about that here.

Lastly we get a nice long interview with some guy that was friends with one of the Rockefellers. This really means nothing. We recently have had a lot of press coverage about an astronaut that claims he has definitely seen UFOs, and seen covered up UFO documents. The skeptical community has barely bothered to yawn at this claim. Sure, you're an astronaut, but that doesn't mean that you have good critical thinking skills. Shows us the evidence, and then we'll take notice.

Oh, I'm corrected, they end with a quote from one of the greatest popularizers of science ever, Carl Sagan. Not only that, but Carl Sagan was an excellent critical thinker, and a huge boon to the skeptical community. He would tear this movie apart.

Summary: The people that made this movie have a clear agenda, and that is always something that should cause you to be skeptical. What is the other side of this? You've watched this film, but have you really analyzed the other side of things, in the same depth that this film has provided? At the very least, you owe it to yourself to watch that debate, and, ignoring the obvious such as the age difference, listen to the claims made by each side, and how that is being presented. What does the science tell us.

There can be no doubt that the government currently in power has turned the terrorist attack in their favour, and used it to allow them to roll back civil rights and other things. As well, they've also engaged in fear-mongering to continue doing this in the face of criticism. I don't think there are many people that would debate this. But to go from this and use this as evidence to support a theory that the 9/11 attacks were done on purpose by the ruling republican government is a non-sequitur. We do not get the benefit of looking back in hindsight, seeing how things have turned out, and then trying to cherry-pick our data to support that. The theory of an inside job must stand on its own, and it is completely irrelevant how the government has responded to this after the fact. What does the science tell us?

This movie is fairly well produced. I can see why that may entice some people. In terms of most of the conspiracies that it attempts to shoehorn together into one UBERCONSPIRACY, it doesn't do a particularly good job. Ultimately, nothing new is brought to the table. Illuminati type governments, war-mongering conspiracy theories, the 12 mega bankers that control all of our money, and controlling humans with microchips. This is all fairly well worn territory, and fairly boring stuff when it comes to critical thinking. Not only that but this thing is DAMN long. Two hours isn't that long when you're watching something exciting like The Bourne Supremacy, but for a movie that is conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory... ugh.

The one good thing about this movie is that it presents a lot of material to analyze critically, and practice your skills of skepticism. If you can sit through the whole thing, take it as an opportunity to do that and see if you can spot the many flaws and fallacies in the reasoning present.

And with that note, I'm free! Time to watch something exciting.

Alright.  I talked about it over a year ago, but I've chatted with Davin and asked what the easiest way to go about updating the look and feel of the blog is, and I now have a path to follow.

As you can see, the blog has now been updated to the latest edition of Movable Type, and as a temporary measure, I've changed the layout to use one of the defaults that are supplied with the software.  I think it's kind of ugly personally, but your mileage may vary.

Following on from that, I'm going to finish figure out what design approach to take, update the banners I had from the old site to work with that (I still like some of them so they will stay), and then I will begin slowly setting everything up with the new look and feel.  This will probably be a slow process, as I've got other irons in the fire at the same time, but at least it's good to be busy.  If you see the site going up and down, now you know why.

I anticipate one more update before I go into complete hermit mode, and that'll be related to a movie that was recommended to me this past weekend called Zeitgeist.

Wow, I'm astonished. I came across DropBox today, and if you don't already use it, I recommend you immediately kick yourself in the head and then download it.

Dropbox is a small application that sits on your computer, and upon install, creates a new directory for you called your DropBox. Anything that you put into this folder is automatically synced up over the web, and backed up on their servers. Any other computer that you use that also has Dropbox running will automatically (and almost instantly) sync up its own Dropbox with those same files.

Does this sound awesome yet? Let's use an example. You're at work, and you've just installed a little program that is extremely useful. With it you can write a script to automatically update your mail (or something similar). You know that you want to have the same thing when you get home, so you write yourself a todo item to remember to download this when you get home, and you also e-mail yourself the script that you wrote today. Now you've got to go home, remember to download the application, then remember to check your e-mail, and basically grab everything from a whole bunch of different places. And remember, this is just a simple operation.

Now the same scenario with Dropbox. You copy the .exe installer that you download at work, along with the script you wrote today, into your Dropbox directory. You get home, and turn on your computer. Its Dropbox syncs up, and you've got both files available. Done!

Dropbox is free, and allows you to sync up to 2GB worth of space.

If that sounds cool, there's one more thing Dropbox can do for you. In your Dropbox folder, you have a folder named "Public". Anything that you put into this folder can be right-clicked, and you can choose "Copy public link to clipboard". Once you've done this, you can just send any one of your friends this public link (it's in the clipboard now, so just hit Ctrl-V to paste it into your e-mail, IM, SMS text message, etc.), and they can click the link and download it, without even having to install Dropbox.

The only question I have is... Why didn't Google think of this?

Get it!

My new iPhone comes out of the box with the all-awesome, all-knowing Google Maps, which immediately prompted me to try and figure out how far Bay and I run, how much I walk to and from work every day, and other useless bits of trivia.

Once I started doing that, I figured I might as well compile a list of the daily exercise that I'm getting, and try and determine what my caloric requirements are. Why? I don't know, just because.

Here is my daily activity:

• Walk to and from work/downtown



Distance: 1.3 kms, each way
Calories burned: 65 calories, each way
Daily Average: 2.6 kms, 130 calories


• Climb up two flights of stairs



Amount: 4 times a day
Duration: 1 minute
Calories burned: 11 calories, each time
Daily Average: 8 flights of stairs, 88 calories


• Squash



Amount: 4 times a week
Duration: 1 hour
Calories burned: 1034 calories, each time
Daily Average: 591 calories


• Jogging



Amount: 1 time a week
Duration: 30 minutes (4.5 km)
Calories burned: 450 calories
Daily Average: 64 calories


• Biking



Amount: 1 time a week
Duration: 10 minutes (5 km)
Calories burned: 125 calories
Daily Average: 18 calories


• Weight lifting



Amount: 4 times a week
Duration: 20 minutes
Calories burned: 86 calories, each time
Daily Average: 49 calories

So, the grand total appears to be that on a daily average, I'm burning 940 calories each day of the week, when I average everything I'm doing for the week. Based on my at rest calorie burn rate of 2280, I need to eat an average of 3220 calories a day. I suspect I must be getting somewhere close to that figure, because although my weight rises and falls on a daily basis, it's usually fluctuating around the same point of 185-195 pounds.

I read recently some very basic tips for maintaining a blog and how to maintain a good readership. The simplest, and most important item was: update regularly. I suck.

Realistically I'm not sure where this blog lies. I had good intentions to update it a while back, in the hopes that it would rejuvenate my interest in sitting down and writing in it. Initially when I started out, this was an outlet for comedy and rants while I sat at my desk in a really boring job that didn't have much for me to do. Then it became an outlet for me to write about squash, poker, and other things I was actively pursuing. I still pursue those, but I just haven't had a lot of desire to write about them, and even more so, I don't feel like there's any audience for them (which is ridiculous in itself, because based on how often I update, I have a reader-base of zero).

The things that interest me now are the same, and much more. As stupid as it sounds, I love playing Virtua Fighter 5 on my XBox360 (now supporting online play, previously the biggest hurdle to owning a good fighting game on a home console), and I really believe that the depth of that game is on par with my other hobbies. I spend a decent amount of time practicing, seeking out advice, and sparring with friends in order to continue improving. I like to write in order to learn, and that is no exception, but this blog is hardly the place to write long detailed articles about strategy and frame advantages in a nitaku situation. That's a pretty small niche I'm writing for. So, I made another blog, and write about it there. That's good, but now I'm cutting down on the time I have available to write here.

What else is there? There's day to day things I can write about. Small updates about volunteering for the beer festival, or hanging out with friends, and things like that. I don't know why, but I've never enjoyed doing that. I hate it in fact. I can write three paragraphs at most before I lose interest and walk away from the entry. Maybe that's better suited to Twitter, or Facebook status updates. Working on the management team for VEMF this year was one of the more significant things I did in this half of the year, but you don't see any blog posts on that one. How come? There's half an entry written, but I can already tell you it's not going to get filled out any further.

I love skepticism and critical thinking. If there's one hobby that I apply on an hourly basis to my life, it's this one. Is this appropriate to write about? I think it is, and maybe that's the next direction that this blog goes in. I've always aimed to make this a tool that helped me learn, and in concert with that goal, provided other people a way to learn along with me, and avoid the mistakes that I've made.

The other piece of advice that I took away from the article on blogging was that you shouldn't restrict yourself to any one particular area. Be willing to blog about many different subjects, and let your audience choose whether or not they want to read about it. I guess this is the best approach, and maybe I just need to loosen up. Maybe some of the people that tumble past this website would be interested in reading about strategies in Virtua Fighter 5. It can't really be that much more obscure.

In this vein, I guess today's topic can be skepticism, and the theory is that I start improving my own ability to update. I sure wish it didn't take me so long to write out these soliloquies.

There are millions of different pieces of fudgy information that we're bombarded with on a daily basis. It can get pretty overwhelming without some kind of method to weed these things out. I find skepticism interesting for a number of reasons. First and foremost, authority doesn't generally like it. Anytime authority has a reason to look at something with a critical eye, I think it's worth trying to figure out why. Skepticism causes us to question what we are told is true. As a method, it asks only that we question what we are being told, and ask for evidence to support that. Good evidence. Can you think of a reason why we shouldn't make an effort to follow a method like this in our daily lives? I can't..

I love how empowering skepticism is. With this tool at your side, you can approach any claim pushed towards you, and you can determine for yourself how likely it really is. You can consider something that a politician has said, and really dig down and determine how likely that is to be true. Simply put, it's fun to figure stuff out. Everyone likes to understand how a magician is accomplishing their trickillusion.

"This is stupid, I'm skeptical!", you say. I agree, you probably are. A lot of people are skeptical, to some degree, in their everyday lives. But many of us reserve a special place in our head for our pet ideas and notions. For many of us, that's religion. For some of us, it's ideas that we think are neat and fun to believe in, like UFOs visiting earth. Sometimes its a belief in things that we've been raised to believe. We often don't even think to question something that we've held to be true since we were kids.

The best thing that skepticism and critical thinking can do for you, above all, is help you feel solid and concrete in your own beliefs and daily values. If you are able to go through your own beliefs with a skeptical eye, and question why you believe in them, what about the evidence you find compelling, and whether or not those beliefs are rational, you'll come out on the other side with the confidence and consistency that can only be acquired by turning a skeptical eye inwards. This is the type of confidence that allows you to discuss your own beliefs and opinions without getting upset, and without feeling insecure, rather than the type of confidence that is fabricated by buying lots of bumper stickers (support our troops!) and being fervently homophobic, etc.

Let's end with a simple piece of critical thinking advice for the day: The people that are the loudest often have the least to say, and are the least confident in what they're telling you. Maintain your cool (and drink milk).