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Well, the month-long festivities are finally winding down. Given the parades and national press coverage, it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't know that 4 November marked our first anniversary. I’m sure everybody has a story of how they celebrated the Ottawa Skeptics Day break with their family, what gifts they gave each other and where they travelled on their time off.
At our meeting this month, Jon gave a state-of-the-organization address to mark our accomplishments for the year, but we almost let the month go by without posting about it. So let's have a self-indulgent look back.
A year ago, no one had a clear idea where we wanted to go with the group or how to get there. All we knew was that we wanted to make a difference in the community, promote science and critical thinking, and meet fellow skeptics in the area. Some of our initial ideas were to create a website, host a discussion forum, do local investigations, write articles, start a podcast and generally make a name for ourselves. I remember thinking that, if we could accomplish one or two of those things, we would be doing well. A year later, we have achieved all of them.
This week the crew discuss the 45th anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination (and the lingering conspiracy theories), the science of pesticides and cancer (should you worry?), and the inaugural episode of "as if you need more evidence for evolution".
This week the regular crew discuss the trouble with astrology, the double standard applied to scientific medicine with respect to prevention, and we reexamine the claim that sea captains can perform marriages. This episode we're trying a shorter format, please let us know what you think.
....or at least for a long time. A very, very long time.
A couple of weekends ago, I visited the Nature of Diamonds exhibit currently showing at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Being a science-geek, I was more interested in the chemistry and geology displays than in the jewelry. Of course, my Inner Creationist (an imaginary friend I acquired from reading way too much talk.origins back in the mid-90s) kept cringing every time a placard matter-of-factly referred to some rock or formation as being so many hundreds of millions, or billions, of years old. Because diamonds are really old: they form deep beneath the oldest chunks (called "cratons") of continental crust, because it is only there that both temperature and pressure are right for carbon to crystallize in that particular way, and are later erupted to the surface by volcanoes. We find diamonds in the solidified remnants of the magma column. Mining them often involves digging enormous circular pits, crushing the rock and separating out the tiny fraction that is wanted. The yield of gems is miniscule -- on the order of grams per tonne of rock excavated.
So you can see how finding diamonds depends on understanding the processes by which they form and are emplaced. It's a historical narrative, placed within the larger context of plate tectonics and earth history. And of course, similar tales can be told for all the other economically important minerals -- the ores of gold, silver, copper, aluminum and iron; for petroleum; etc, etc. Tectonic action; long periods of heating and compression; penetration by hydrothermal fluids; exposure to weathering at the surface, followed by deep burial -- these are the processes that form the diverse minerals of which the crust is made, and concentrate them to the point that we can extract useful materials.
Now, young-earth creationists are always talking about their "alternative" view of earth history; about how both creationists and evolutionists are looking at the same evidence, but interpreting it differently due to their respective presuppositions. I'm not clear on what the creationist view is -- as far as I know, there isn't a single worked-out account accepted by a broad consensus of "creation scientists", but they all seem to agree that the Genesis Flood played a big part in it. But surely, there should be some test we could perform that would tell us which general paradigm was the right one!
Well, the month-long festivities are finally winding down. Given the parades and national press coverage, it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't know that 4 November marked our first anniversary. I’m sure everybody has a story of how they celebrated the Ottawa Skeptics Day break with their family, what gifts they gave each other and where they travelled on their time off.
