And Slaters Go Plop

A false dichotomy (also known as a false dilemma) is where you are asked to choose an option when there are, in fact, more options available.

An example of this would be where I may tell you that Bob claimed he got an email from Jane saying that she is a Librarian. Here I would then ask you if you believed that Jane was:

• A genuine Librarian
• A lair
• A lunatic

You are being made to choose from a selection of options that do not cover all the possibilities. What about:

• The email might have been spam that looked like Jane sent it
• Jane might not exist
• Jane might have misspelled “Libran”
• Bob might have been lying to me
• Bob might have misread “Libran”
• I might have been lying to you
• And so on

It’s important that when you are presented with a finite number of choices that you make sure that those are the only choices available before jumping on any bandwagons.

It’s always good to end on a quote from a great thinker:

“Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. (Applause)”. - George Dubya Bush

Applause.

I found lots of these critters in the sludge in the bottom chamber of my worm farm. They don’t have legs and wriggle around very slowly. In the same area I found hundreds of quarter-ant-sized, white larvae-type things. Are these queens of some kind? Does anyone out there know what these are?

(The ant is only there for size reference)

———

**update**

They are Garden Soldier Fly larva or Black Soldier Fly larva (Stratiomyidae) and apparently they totally rock when it comes to composting. They hatch as harmless flies that only live long enough to mate. All of their eating is done in the larva stage and they get on well with worms but produce more liquid than worms do. I guess I’ll leave them to it then.

After a recent conversation with a friend who has been quite taken by a couple of the many water-powered car / free energy concepts I decided to research the topics properly.

Common traits amongst people who make free energy claims are:

• There is a grand conspiracy - the CIA has been making people ‘disappear’ or some such
• Scientists are too set in their ways to accept revolutionary ideas
• Big industry is suppressing the technologies

Something else all of the free energy people have in common is that they are not willing to release their discoveries to the general public for verification.

Here’s my advice to any would-be free energy proponent: Make your discovery public.

It’s that simple. If you reveal your secrets all your problems with the CIA will go away, scientists will be put to shame for being so hard-headed and the big petro-chemical corporations will be brought to their knees.

You’ll win eternal fame. Your name will be held in higher esteem than Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein. You will change the planet (for the good) for all time.

I guess what I’m saying here is “Put up or shut up”.

Most of us know that a good password is one that is longer than eight characters and contains upper- and lower-case letters as well as numbers. We also know that we shouldn’t use the same password on too many different sites or applications. If you use the same password in Hotmail as well as your bank account it makes it a lot easier for someone who has hacked your Hotmail account to get into your bank.

The problem with this is that keeping track of lots of jumbly passwords is a nightmare. So we generally end up going for the easiest, but least secure, option.

Well, I’ve got a solution that I’ve been using for a few months now and, in the interests of better security, I’m going to share it with you:

• First, pick a couple of weird words that you’ll remember. For example SlatersPlop is nice and weird.
• Now turn a couple of letters into numbers: Slater5Pl0p.
• This is now a pretty strong password in its own right. It’s got numbers and upper- and lower-case letters and it’s eleven characters long.
• Now you need to make the password relate somehow to the site or application you are using. In this case if we were using the password to log in to Hotmail I’d put an “h” (for “hotmail”) into it somewhere: Slater5hPl0p. If I wanted to use it to log into Windows I might use Slater5wPl0p
• As long as you use a consistent location to insert your contextual letter it becomes a breeze to remember which password you used for which site.
• Now the only thing to do is to change it from time to time. I’ve decided to do it on a yearly basis which would probably horrify some security people.

“In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.”

- Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP Keynote Address

Oh, and a few years ago I thought it would be cool if there were another habitable planet directly opposite us on the other side of the sun. It could be a similar size and distance from the sun as the earth.

Don’t you just hate that? A month or so ago I had an of idea for a sci-fi storyline but today, as I was continuing my massive 100-hour catchup of all the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast episodes, I discover that people have already been thinking about it for some time. This kind of thing happens to me a lot and I’m beginning to wonder if I’m inadvertently reading or hearing of ideas that I promptly forget and later “come up with”.

Anyway, I still think it’s a great concept for a story:

I was thinking about how impossible it is to travel to other potentially habitable solar systems (as you do) and considering how absolutely vulnerable we would be if we were to detect a super-large asteroid approaching us. We don’t have the technology yet to safely freeze ourselves for a long-haul flight through space. We don’t know how to produce food in space to sustain a group of people for any length of time. If a sizeable asteroid were to hit we’d have next to no chance of surviving the weeks or months following the impact regardless of where we were located on the planet.

I got to thinking about how we are able to freeze embryos indefinitely and figured that if we had a year or two’s notice of impending doom it might be possible to scramble together as much technology as possible to create thousands of identical small pods containing frozen embryos and fire them in all different directions out into space. I wasn’t sure whether it would be feasible to have the pods contain artificial ‘wombs’ and the materials for a biosphere that are activated upon contact with an alien planet.

Perhaps nurturing humans from frozen embryos is the most feasible option we have at our disposal for human survival across journeys that would take millions of years.

This basic premise gives you a lot of room to play with the psychology of children bought up without human parents, the sheer enormity of discovering that their biological parents have been dead for millions of years, the challenges of seeding life in a new environment, the mechanics of a life support system capable of ‘growing’ and supporting infants, the possibility of regaining contact with other pods.

It would be quite fun to be drawn along with the story only knowing as much as the children know about how they got there and what happened to earth.

Unfortunately I don’t have the skills or inclination to go ahead and turn this into a story but I implore anyone reading this who is a writer of sci-fi to take this concept and turn it into a novel. And please tell me about it! I’d love to read it.