2010 – Page 4 – Nicolas Demers

Vancouver Queer Film Festival Review: The People I’ve Slept With

Oh my fucking gawd, that was amazing. I was a little hesitant to like it, since just before the screening I learned that director Quentin Lee also directed the short Little Love, which I wasn’t that crazy about. But good news, it looks like his forte is light comedy! 2% serious and 98% pants-wettingly hilarious, it hits every cliché in the gay-com and rom-com books with shameless abandon and makes it work. And I won’t even mention the over-the-top silly scenes, like Angela collecting her DNA samples.

Props to the actors (except the guy playing Lawrence, who was cute but bland) for their great work and especially the physical comedy. And though the comedy was heavy on clichés, it never descended into shallow stereotypes: all the main characters are nicely fleshed-out; we’re (mostly) laughing with them, not at them. A great job all around!

Vancouver Queer Film Festival Review: Pornography: A Thriller

Well, that was a mindfuck and a half! Hot porn stars, a mythical snuff tape and urban legends collide in this creepy nightmarish thriller. From the synopsis I expected weird horror, and at first that’s what it looked like I was getting. The first act, dealing with the life and disappearance of porn star Mark Anton, was really disturbing but had no overtly supernatural elements.

Well, that was a mindfuck and a half! Hot porn stars, a mythical snuff tape and urban legends collide in this creepy nightmarish thriller directed by David Kittredge. From the synopsis I expected weird horror, and at first that’s what it looked like I was getting. The first act, dealing with the life and disappearance of porn star Mark Anton, was really disturbing but had no overtly supernatural elements. The second act, following Mike’s research into porn stars of yesteryear, ramps up the horror with possession, mysterious photographs, disappearances, desperate phone calls, and our first glimpse at Anton’s snuff film.

The third act takes it up to 11 and twists off the knob, as past and present and reality and fiction collide, porn-star-turned-director Matt plans to recreate Mark Anton’s most famous video (though it came to him in a dream), but keeps getting glimpses of the past and various shadowy presents.

I expected Porn: A Thriller to be closer to The Ring, with the mysterious deaths, curses and deep dark secrets. But in fact it’s closer to House of Leaves in that it plays fast and loose with the fourth wall, and multiple layers of stories. That’s just fine by me, though not everybody thought so. From what I understand, this was an extremely polarising movie, with half the audience either confused or bored, and the other half enjoying the feel of their minds getting a good fucking. Me, I was in the second camp. I’ve read House of Leaves and love it, so I was ready to just sit back and go with the flow. I give this movie two (scared, shaky) thumbs up.

Vancouver Queer Film Festival Review: Strong and Silent Types

My first show of the festival was a collection of five short films about—as the name implies—men and masculinity. A little uneven, it was still a very good kickoff to my VQFF experience.

Last Call

A neat little fantasy of a broken man who, upon dying, must make peace with his messed up life before he can move on. The symbolism is clear: Gavin’s purgatory is a bar, perfectly fitting since alcoholism had been his actual purgatory for the last 2 years of his life. And his paradise? his first meeting with Mark. He’ll get to live a perfect moment forever, or possibly (this just occurred to me) get the chance to take his life in another direction. The ending’s deliberately ambiguous, and that’s okay.

Little Love

That was a miss, I feel. The love triangle story was predictable, the characters forgettable, the voiceovers annoying with their exposition of plot and inner feelings. Show, don’t tell!

Disarm

Take one butch, musclebound jock, comfortable in his gayness but lonely and withdrawn; add one somewhat-less-butch hustler, obsessively straight-acting and sneering at femmy guys; put them together, and you get a blisteringly intense conversation about masculinity, gay-bashing, identity, goals, repressed pain and being true to yourself. Overall I liked this film very much, the acting was quite good and the subject matter dense and engaging, though the writing felt forced at times, jumping from topic as though it had a long checklist to cover, and temporarily snapping me out of the story. Shame; with a little more editing, I think this could have been a real winner.

Promise

That was pretty fucking disturbing, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. On the even of their wedding, the long-simmering tension between the two protagonists comes to a head in abuse and rape. Neither of the men comes off looking good: Stuart cheated on Chris, is a shameless attention whore and deliberately pushes his buttons, but Chris is also revealed to be a controlling dick and, well, ends up doing the raping. I don’t think we’re supposed to take sides—they’re both terribly flawed, and have to decide on their own where to go from here.

Professor Godoy

Math nerdery and intergenerational attraction between teacher and student combine in this nice, slow-paced Brazilian film. Unfortunately, for me it doesn’t go beyond “nice”. The characters were cyphers, and the story feels very by-the-numbers. I wanted to like it, especially since the director was in the audience, but… no, it just didn’t do it for me.

Learning jQuery: toggleClass( )

I’m still a novice at jQuery, and recently had a chance to learn a little bit more, for a project I’m working on.

Here’s the HTML (classes and ids simplified a bit):


  Toggle

And here’s the desired behavior: when the link is clicked, the parent div (ie: #base) should switch its class between “black” and “white”. What actually happens to the styles, we won’t get into here. My first attempt went like this:

$(document).ready(function(){
    $(".black a#toggle").click(function() {
      $("#base").removeClass("black");
      $("#base").addClass("white");
    });
    $(".white a#toggle").click(function() {
      $("div#base").removeClass("white");
      $("div#base").addClass("black");
    });
  });

But that wasn’t working. One click did toggle #base from “black” to white”, but a second click wouldn’t toggle it back to “black”. It looked like since the page was loaded with “black” as the div’s actual class, the click function was only bound to “.black a#toggle”. After a bit of experimentation and research, I found the answer: toggleClass(). So my code read like this:

$(document).ready(function(){
  $("a#toggle").click(function() {
     $("div#base").toggleClass("black");
     $("div#base").toggleClass("white");
  });
});

And that worked. Ah, but there’s a better way! toggleClass() (just like addClass() and removeClass(), as it turns out) can take a space-separated list of classes as its argument; each one of these classes will be toggled in the selected element(s). So, to switch between “light” and “dark” I just need a single line:

$(document).ready(function(){
  $("a#toggle").click(function() {
     $("div#base").toggleClass("black white");
  });
});

Easy-peasy! toggleClass() can do more than what I’ve show here, though! Read the official documentation for the full story.

Ghosts of Old Victoria

As I said in my previous post, during my recent trip to Victoria I went on a ghost walking tour. It was fairly entertaining (our guide was quite a good storyteller), and I learned quite a bit about the history of Victoria, though of course it didn’t convince me that ghosts are real.

The Empress Hotel
Burial Boxes and Floating Heads
Haunted Kitcken
Waiting for the Flood
The Steamship Valencia
Cradles and Ley Lines
The Hanging Judge
Helmcken Alley

Starting Out

We started out near the harbour. Our guide—an older gentleman with a nice hat and a cane topped by a silver skull–got the ball rolling by asking, “What are ghosts?” He went on for a bit about how ghosts are energy, and the law of conservation of energy says they never go away, so we’re surrounded by ghostly energy all the time. Sometimes we see ghosts, sometimes we hear them, or feel a cold breeze, or something. And anytime you don’t know exactly where some random sensation comes from, you should ditch logic and consider the supernatural. Seriously, this was a textbook Argument from Ignorance.

Sigh. I guess I expected the bullshit pseudoscience and broken logic, but this wasn’t really getting me in the mood. I wanted gory tales of death and dismemberment and ghostly torment, dammit! Everybody else seemed to be eating it up, though, especially once he gave us instructions on sensing ghostly energy with the palm of our hands. The trick is to rub the thumb on the opposite palm quickly (do this with both hands), then sort of feel around, or slowly put both hands together, and if you feel a tingling or prickling it’s totally that you’re sensing your own energy. No other possible explanation!

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The Empress Hotel

Anyway, on to the ghost stories! Our first stop was on the harbour, in front of the Empress Hotel. The Empress, dontcha know, is one seriously haunted hotel.

Apparently almost every room and corridor has a story attached to it, but our guide focused on two. First, the eighth (and topmost) floor of the West tower is haunted. Apparently, in the 60’s when that whole wing was under construction, a workman was up in the unfinished 8th floor and saw weird moving shadows, of a body swinging back and forth, but there was nobody there! The man was scared out of his gourd, and immediately quit. Further investigation revealed that a worker had hanged himself there about a year (I think) previously, but management had hushed up the whole thing so as not to scare away employees or guests.

Our guide claims to have worked at the Empress during the 60’s, but got the story second-hand through another employee; he never spoke to the worker who saw (or claimed to see) the apparition. Maybe there never was such a worker. Maybe the whole story is just urban legend. Who knows? This happened 45 years ago, and the top floor (supposedly) remained vacant or unfinished since then. 10 years ago they converted the floor to luxury suites. I don’t remember if those suites are said to be particularly haunted. But they probably are.

He also told us about a ghostly old woman who haunts the 6th floor of the same wing. You’ll hear a knock at the door, and open to an old lady in pajamas, who seems lost and confused. You try to help her find her room, and she leads you to the elevator. Then about that point, she vanishes. The story goes that she was a winter guest at the hotel many years ago, who simply died of natural causes. Her spirit stayed in the room, but got brutally evicted when that room was torn out to make room for the elevators. Now she wanders around lost, unable to rest because ghosts don’t like change.

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Burial Boxes and Floating Heads

Moving a little bit up the harbour, the guide pointed out the Inn at Laurel Point, clearly visible across the bay at night with its green neon “L” sign. This is the setting of the next story. The Songhees people (the Nation whose traditional territory includes the Victoria area) have a custom of burying important people in boxes either placed high up in trees, or buried in the ground. One such burial site was at Laurel Point, but was torn up by an evil enterpreneur who built his house and shop on the desecrated site. Soon after, the shop went up in flames. The owner’s wife is said to have seen something emerge from the flames, but it’s not clear what. She got sick and died a few weeks later; the coroner’s verdict was that she “died of fright”.

The land was sold to William Pendray (one of the biggest industrialists in Victoria then) and a factory was built on the site. But a string of weird accidents and occurrences kept happening; Pendray’s son died when his horse spooked and threw him off and somehow his head was cut off by a cart wheel. Four years later, Pendray himself died while inspecting his factory when a pipe fell on his head. Pendray’s house is now part of Gatsby Mansion, an upscale little hotel right by Laurel Point. The spirits don’t try to kill people anymore, but it’s supposedly still haunted. If you stay in room #5, you will see two ghostly heads emerge from the walls and sort of circle each other. They may try to talk, but their words are impossible to make out. These heads are Pendray and son, haunting the places of their untimely deaths.

PS: the deaths of the Pendrays are documented fact, though I suspect details in the guide’s story are exaggerated. For example, all the sources on the Net mention only that Pendray Jr. was thrown from his horse.

PPS: there’s a simple way to disprove the haunting story. The guide said that anybody, even skeptics, will see these heads if they stay the night in room #5.

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Haunted Kitchen

Next stop: Nautical Nellie’s. The kitchen is said to be haunted, with various poltergeist-y activities: rattling cookware, occasionally thrown objects, that sort of thing. What’s odd is that there are no records of murders or violent deaths in that spot, which is usually an indicator of restless spirits.

The real (for certain values of “real”) story is this: back in the 1850’s, the spot was part of Fort Victoria, with the palisades, fur storehouses… and cannons. In 1846 those cannons were used to shoot at a chief’s house across the bay, whose subjects were hostile and needed to be intimidated; thankfully, nobody was home and nobody died. In 1853, Governor Douglas was coming into the harbour; as he rounded Laurel Point, the fort fired its cannons to greet him. Some guy (I forget his function, either a junior officer or civilian) was leaning too close to the cannon and didn’t hear the warning, and got his hand shot off. The story goes that Douglas saw this hand fly overhead, and the crew of his ship unsuccessfully tried to retrieve it.

It is apparently this hand that’s haunting Nautical Nellie’s kitchen.

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Waiting for the Flood

Right next door to Nautical Nellie’s is Red Fish Blue Fish, another fine seafood restaurant. It is also the former old Customs House, built in 1875 and still standing to this day. At the time, the customs house was generally hated by Victoria’s population because it was a symbol of broken promises. When BC joined Confederation in 1871 Victoria was promised a railway, but the terminus ended up in Vancouver instead. I’m not really clear how politicians expected the train to cross the water, but hey. Worse, the customs house took a cut from all the commerce coming into Victoria—and there was a lot—and sent it out to faraway Ottawa.

That’s not the ghost story, that was just a bit of history to put us in the mood. And honestly, as a tourist I do appreciate all these little tidbits of Victoria history. But here’s the ghost story:

Emily Carr (yes, that Emily Carr) was born in 1871, the same year BC became part of Canada, not far from where the customs house would be built. As a young child (it’s said) she hung out on the docks in this very spot by the customs house, listening to tall tales from an… uncle? family friend? I don’t remember and my notes aren’t clear. Anyway, there was one particular story she loved, of a great wave coming in from the sea and washing over the buildings. She’d spend hours at the window (of the customs house, apparently) watching out for this fantasy tidal wave. It’s said she’s there to this day. The guide pointed out one window on the ground floor of the customs house, where a ghostly image of the child Emily may sometimes be seen.

Carr died on March 2^nd 1945, at the James Bay Inn, which at the time was operated as a hospital. It is said she still haunts room 115, where she died. I don’t remember what the guide said about apparitions in that rooms, but they’re probably not frightening. Incidentally, this means that Carr is haunting two places at the same time. This makes sense if you think of ghosts as echoes, projections, as opposed to disembodied consciousnesses, but the guide never brought that up—maybe hoping the group wouldn’t pick up on the apparent contradiction. I guess ghosts can be whatever you want them to be, and the more stories the better.

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The Steamship Valencia

We walked over to the north end of the wharf, and the guide related the sorry tale of the SS Valencia.

On January 22^nd, 1906, the Valencia was coming in from San Francisco when she got lost in the fog, hit a reef near Pachena Point and ran aground. Though they were in sight of land, the waves and cold meant that few of the crew made it to shore to signal for help. Rescue ships could not approach the wreck but managed to pick up some survivors in lifeboats. On January 24^th a large wave washed the wreck off the rocks, killing all remaining passengers on board. In all, out of the approximately 150 passengers and crew, only 37 men survived (and no women or children).

Since then, there have been a number of rumours and ghosts sightings of the Valencia or her dead crew. Sometimes the ship itself is seen reenacting its destruction; one time, a lifeboat is claimed to be found with skeletons on board but always disappears before an investigation can be mounted. According to the guide the Valencia “wants to be remembered”.

PS: interesting factoid, it seems the Valencia is the only ghost ship in the area.

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Cradles and Ley Lines

The supernatural isn’t all about suicides and tragic deaths. Some of it is positive. Songhees Point (opposite Laurel Point, and together with it forming the entrance to Victoria’s inner harbour) was known to the local people as “Place of the Cradle” or “Cradle-board.” This name came from the tradition of leaving infants’ cradles in that place as soon as they were old enough to walk, to give them luck and long life.

Then the guide went off on a tangent about Stonehenge; why is it there, out in the middle of nowhere? Turns out it aligns perfectly with other special landmarks, all the better to carry energy or something. Oh crap, I thought, he’s talking about ley lines.

Yes indeed. Did you know there’s a ley line in Victoria? It’s several city blocks wide (really) and about 5km long, stretching from Place-of-the-Cradle through Bastion Square, St. Andrew’s Cathedral, and ending at the 7th fairway of the Victoria Golf Course. No, really. Naturally, that fairway is haunted—by a woman who was murdered there, though my notes don’t have any juicy details.

I know what you’re thinking: do these places actually line up? Well, sure… as long as you accept that the ley line is “several blocks wide”. Songhees Point is almost exactly due west of Bastion Square. That might or might not be a problem, since the Square isn’t exactly aligned east-west, pointing more towards the Delta Victoria Inn. Likewise, St. Andrew’s is pretty much due east of Bastion Square, so those line up okay. But the golf course, and especially the 7th fairway (which I believe is at the southern end of the course, hugging the coastline), is way off. You’d really need to stretch to align that with the other 3 landmarks. The Oak Bay Marina is a much better fit, but I guess there aren’t any murder stories associated with it.

And really, in a city with such a rich history that kind of mystical math isn’t hard to do. Take a halfway regular street grid, a good mix of Native and colonial landmarks, give yourself enough leeway, and you’re good to go.

At this point we got away from the harbour and crossed into Bastion Square. The guide pointed out the Commerce Canoe, a recently-commissioned piece of art. It definitely looked like a reference to the old Songhees custom of burying their dead in canoes up in trees, but the guide hinted that there was more than that. The canoe, he said, pointed towards Laurel Point.

Part of another ley line? Did he get it confused with Songhees Point? Because the Commerce Canoe most definitely does not point towards Laurel Point, that’s too far south. As I remember it, and as my photo suggests, it’s pretty well aligned with the street, which means it points a bit north of due west.

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The Hanging Judge

The website advertised “narrow streets and back alleys of Old Town”, but up to that point, there hadn’t been any back alleys. Now that was about to change! Our guide first pointed out the BC Maritime Museum, which is—you guessed it—haunted. Many people have reported feeling pressure (not just slight, but a strong shove), seeing a strange “burly man”… sorry, my notes aren’t too clear on this. Bottom line: haunted. He took us on a side alley, turning only a couple times but that was enough to completely lose me. We ended up in a little courtyard behind the museum (I think), and there we went inside.

It was a little side room, with a dozen or so chairs, and some weird decor I’ll get to in a moment. We sat down and he regaled us with some old tales of the museum from when it was a courthouse and gallows. There was a particularly nasty judge, lots of hangings, and since we’re talking criminals here, a lot of them didn’t have anyone to claim their body, so they were buried on the premises.

The room we were in was either designed to play up the “ghost” theme, or else it was co-rented by a coven of cheap gothy Wiccans. The only illumination came from a couple windows and a couple lamps with very dark lampshades. In one corner was a sort of Hallowe’en graveyard display, with cardboard tombstones and a sad plastic skeleton with a missing leg.

One girl sitting by herself at the very back seemed… kind of spaced out. She looked either still cold or really nervous about the whole ghost thing, and I kept waiting for her to scream that she saw a ghost. Honestly, I couldn’t help wondering if she was a plant, there to ramp up the spooked-out atmosphere and thus make everybody else more likely to “see” something.

Nobody did, unfortunately, even those that went into the very dark corner that was lousy with ghost energy—or so the guide said. You’d be likely to feel physical pressure or strong tingling on the palms of your hands that you just rubbed with your thumbs. Unfortunately, that was kind of a bust too.

We went back out into the (comparatively better-lit) night for the last leg of our trip.

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Helmcken Alley

The big attraction here was the haunted well. It seems that in the spring of 1858, during the Gold Rush, a group of miners were camping out in what’s now Helmcken Alley, just outside the site of Fort Victoria. One of them lost a ladle (according to my notes) down the well, and bribed a boy to retrieve it, but the boy fell and died. The well remained, but was eventually covered by subsequent buildings until 1975, when it was rediscovered, then nicely bricked up and made the focal point of the lobby. This apparently ticked off the boy’s spirit and now he causes… actually, I’m not sure what, my notes don’t say. But it’s not good. Apparently if you look at night, or take pictures without a flash, you see… something. Which I thought was very silly, because what you’re seeing is reflections on the glass outside the lobby.

The alley just outside the building is also said to be haunted. Long ago, chain gangs used to march back and forth down this alley. One of them was murdered by the guards. Some say you can hear the clang of chains. Sometimes.

In Conclusion

Okay, so that was pretty entertaining, a nice way to spend an hour and a half in a city you’re not too familiar with. And aside from the supernatural stuff it was quite educational—gotta say, Victoria packed a lot of history in a mere century and a half. But for me, all the pseudo-scientific babble actually worked against suspending my disbelief, because I could spot the faulty logic. If it had been a straightforward “here’s what people are saying, here’s what they believe” tour, or a bunch of way over-the-top tales of tragic deaths and vengeful spirits, it would have been easier to swallow. Oh, well. So when I get another chance, I doubt I’ll go on another tour to try different routes.

Skeptics in Victoria

It was totally a last-minute thing. Some of the the Skeptics in the Pub crowd had been talking about a weekend trip to Victoria, but that had been scheduled for mid-July, then rescheduled to… later. Then, at New Bright Lights on Friday I heard that it had indeed been rescheduled, for that weekend. Well, fortunately my plans for the weekend had fallen through, so it was an easy decision. Rides, a place to stay, a clean pair of underwear in my bag, and I was good to go.

I figured I had to be back in Vancouver by noon because I was taking care of grass dropin volleyball and I couldn’t find someone else on such short notice. Then again, it would probably be raining, which let me off the hook. Then again again, what if it didn’t? Then again again again, you only live once.

So I was up early on a grey Saturday morning, off to take the ferry to Victoria. A few other skeptics were on board, so we hung out and—well, honestly, half the time we were all playing with our respective iPhones / iPads. But in a hanging-out sort of way.

Plans for the day were left deliberately vague. We had talked about going up to the Observatory, but that wasn’t happening in this weather. So, first order of business: lunch. Then, the Royal BC Museum. I’d only been there twice, and not for a long time. When was the Leonardo da Vinci exhibit? I think I was even still in school back then. So yes, a long time.

I went through all the exhibits: Natural History, First Nations, Century Hall, and took hundreds of pictures of the fossils, the skeletons, the bugs on pins, the sculptures, everything. I drank everything in, recording (or attempting to record) every single detail of my visit. Of course, most of my pictures didn’t turn out so great, and some just weren’t that interesting the day after. Why on earth did I take pictures of rows of dragonfly specimens—pretty though they were—and the signs identifying their species and sex? I mean, points for completeness, but I think I crossed a line somewhere.

Though if I did, I think the museum crossed it too. Now that I think about it, that exhibit is called “Behind the Scenes”, and all those shelves full of specimens and fossils and snakes in jars are supposed to give us a glimpse of science as it is actually practiced. Good job!

After a couple hours of this, a few of us went to see the IMAX movie on the Hubble space telescope. Frankly I was a bit scared of motion sickness—I’d had bad experiences in IMAX theatre—but everything was fine. And the movie itself? Awesome beyond words. I don’t know what impresses me more: the guts of the people who strap themselves to a giant controlled fireball to lift themselves out into the blackness of space, the ingenuity of the people who designed said fireball, the Hubble, and all the instruments to maintain it, or the breathtaking beauty of the universe as revealed through the telescope.

Some of the Hubble images, like the Pillars of Creation, are pretty common nowadays. Others, like Saturn’s Aurora Australis, a little less common. But what this movie showed us was beyond anything I’d ever seen, beyond the wildest sci-fi because it’s not just beautiful and awesome, it’s also true. That faraway stellar nursery (whose name I forget, could have been the Orion Nebula) whose newborn stars have carved out a deep canyon in the surrounding gas with their fierce solar winds; the faraway galaxies, pretty spirals or weird distorted shapes; a fantastic assortment of light and colour, all in 3D.

And then the gift shop had to spoil it for us by selling healing crystals to realign your chakras and increase your spiritual energy or whatever else. I notice they don’t have any stone to cure your gullibility.

After that we went out to hang with Daniel Loxton (author of the excellent children’s book Evolution and editor of Junior Skeptic magazine) in his cluttered and awesome studio, where Transformers posters competed with dinosaur models and old UFOlogy books. After dinner I and a friend decided to go on a ghost walking tour of downtown Victoria—hey, I’d never been on one, and they promised “narrow streets and back alleys” and a bunch of ghosts. Sounds like fun even if you don’t believe in ghosts.

UPDATE: And here it is

New Bright Lights: Magic and the Lying Brain

The New Bright Lights lecture series started off this morning with the topic of memory, perception and self-delusion. Three fascinating presentations, though one really rubbed me the wrong way.

Lon Mandrake

Lon Mandrake learned magic at his father’s knee, and has cultivated a sense of wonder about the natural world since childhood. As a teacher, he uses magic tricks to both instill the same sense of wonder in his students, and to get them to think scientifically. Magic tricks are followed up with encouragement to come up with hypotheses and experiments, to try to get at the truth. As he stressed during the Q&A session (in response to a question about fake psychic vultures like Sylvia Browne), he prizes openmindedness. He was a little less emphatic in condemning that evil harpy than I’d like, but sure, I’ll go along with it.

He performed a couple of amusing tricks (one of which went wrong, but the subject was a good sport), but it would have been awesome if he’d focused more on science-related demos and less on mentalism.

Rob Hadley

Rob Hadley is a hypnotist, performing on stage, working on patients in a therapy setting, as well as consulting for video game companies to make the gaming experience more immersive. He talked for a bit about the theory of hypnosis, how it was just an altered state of consciousness, with no real trick or magic to it, and then brought a few people from the audience up on stage to be hypnotised. That was kind of fun, and I for one let myself go with the “you are feeling very relaxed, your eyelids are very heavy” bit; out of the four audience members only one really went under, which looks pretty much par for the course.

The really worrying part came when he told us about a patient of his who he’d helped get rid of her budding alcoholism with a little hypnosis… and a homeopathic pill. Immediately the row behind me (all CFI skeptics) started grumbling. The grumbling got worse when Hadley defended homeopathic medecine, arguing that the pill he gave was meant to relax but he’d never told his patient that, therefore it couldn’t be the placebo effect, and concluding with “It just works.” During the Q&A one audience member really laid into him, calling out his, quote, “ignorance of medicine” and lack of ethics. Hadley got defensive (which… is understandable), but couldn’t defend his use of homeopathy except by vaguely quoting some UK studies which shows an efficacy far above the placebo effect.

While we’re talking about ethics, another audience member questioned why he consulted to make some games more immersive, thus making it more likely for players to get addicted, while also curing addictive behaviour. Hadley replied that he worked to make games more enjoyable, and while he agreed that some people would abuse them, he couldn’t be responsible for players with addictive personalities. Which I guess is fair, though still troubling.

Rob Teszka

Rob is a cognitive psychologist working in UBC’s BARLab, and his talk is all about how our perception, memory, attention, and cognition in general is way less reliable than we’d like to think. His talk was just an entertainingly presented string of studies, from the Adelson illusion to that famous video of the gorilla (a new one, actually, with more unexpected details, because too many people had seen the old one), to that guy with the severed corpus callosum (which I’d seen before, but was still damn cool). The brain’s a weird thing, and I’m glad there are people studying it like this!

PZ Myers in Vancouver

Biology professor and godless liberal PZ Myers was in town last Friday to give two lectures: one at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, in the afternoon, one at UBC in the evening. The advertised title for both was “Atheism in the Scientific Battleground”, but the focus in each was a little different.

Speaking in Abbotsford Prof. Myers focused on how religion, as an attempt to understand and gain knowledge about the world, has been a complete failure. It has never given us useful insights about the world, has never competed with science. He went on to give a few examples, starting with developmental biology (his specialty, after all): the Church-favoured preformation theory (ie: that beings already existed fully-formed in either sperm cells or ova and only needed to grow bigger) was only laid to rest in the 19th century when new scientific findings led to the conclusion that embryos emerge from an unformed mass of cells through a complex process.

“As you know, I’m a fairly aggressive atheist. Because somebody has to be.”

Yet these findings—at least in humans—is still not really accepted by pro-life folks. To them, since life and identity begin at conception, even a fertilised egg cell is already a full-fledged human being. PZ showed us pro-life billboards spouting inane platitudes such as embryos having ears and a nose at 3 weeks, therefore abortion is wrong. Mind you, these posters never show actual embryos, only cute smiling toddlers. And they don’t mention that though embryos at 3 weeks do have little bumps and ridges that will develop into actual ears and facial features, they also have proto-gills and tails.

Myers argues that it’s social science which must decide who’s protected. But religion has failed to provide good answers, and “life begins at conception and barely-humanoid embryos are already cute little babies” is not a good answer.

And then there’s evolution. I don’t think I need to go into too much detail about creationism, or the Creation Science Museum in Kentucky where PZ rode a triceratops, but let’s just say that PZ’s thesis holds up there too. The Biblical creation story is, quote, “Zoology written by a guy who doesn’t care about zoology”.

Lest people believe he’s always singling out Christianity, PZ had a few words about Islam—Quranic astronomy and Quranic embryology, both of which are quite worthless. There was one Muslim in the audience, who argued that Mulsims believe in God and evolution, and that Muhammed wrote about the Big Bang, but these are exactly the same arguments used by fundies desperate to see science in the Old Testament: interpreting vague bits of a creation story in light of current scientific theories. Nothing new here.

(Incidentally, this was my first time at UFV. It’s a pretty little campus and, even though I got there late, I’m glad I made the 90+ min trek from downtown. Snapped a few photos for your pleasure, including a killer view of Mount Baker.)

There are good reasons to be dogmatic about evolution.

The UBC lecture focused more on atheism. In fact, the title in his slides was “Science and Atheism: Natural Allies.” PZ started off talking about evolution, and how at this point nothing could prove it wrong. It’s never going to happen. Why? The theory certainly isn’t complete, there are still many unanswered questions and new data being discovered all the time. But it is not a tentative hypothesis. It’s a solid, well-established theory that’s withstood 150 years of criticism. If somehow some fantastic new findings came along that revolutionised the field, it would not lead to the death of evolution. It would lead to a more complete theory that would include the present one as a special case, just as the theory of relativity includes Newtonian mechanics as a special case.

So yes, there are good reasons to be dogmatic about evolution.

Next, he asked: what would convince us that God exists? Weeping statues, Jesus or the Virgin Mary appearing on burnt toasts, a vision of a 900 ft. tall Jesus? But all these things have non-divine explanations, including (in the last case) “I’m going out of my mind.” So it looks like there’s no way to prove God exists (or, to be fair, does not exist). So given that, what does it mean to be an atheist? The dictionary definition’s no help, since it only talks about belief, or lack of, or belief in lack of. But there must be a reason for disbelief, just as there is for belief.

The atheism PZ is endorsing is based on scientific thinking. This is a positive thing, unlike popular perceptions of atheism, based on rebellion or nihilism or what have you. Science, when you get right down to it, is an error-correction mechanism for our flawed and easily-fooled brains, which evolved to find food to eat, avoid being eaten, and try to get laid. They were not evolved to write sonnets, build space shuttles or ponder quantum mechanics. Key to scientific thinking is the requirement for empirical evidence, plus rigorous and open reasoning.

Not to take away from PZ’s eloquence, but Terry Pratchett, Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart said it best in The Science of Discworld II:

This, then, is science. Questioning authority. Complicity between theory and experiment. And being within a community of like-minded people to question your work. Preferably accompanied by a conscious awareness of all of the above, and gratitude to your friends and colleagues for their criticisms. And what’s the aim? To find timeless truths? No, that’s asking too much. To stop frail humans from falling for plausible falsehoods? Yes—including those of people who at least look and sound just like you. And to protect people from their willingness to believe a good story, just because it sounds right and doesn’t upset them.

Oh, and after the lecture a bunch of us went for a bit and a drink at Moose’s Down Under downtown. At one point, the conversation somehow wandered into the topic of tentacle sex. (Why? FOR SCIENCE!) Did you know that Pharyngula comes up on the second page when you google “tentacle sex”? It’s true!

Vancouver Pride 2010: Liberate!

The day started out a little cool and overcast, and some were afraid it would rain (especially since it actually had rained for a little bit on Saturday). That would have been a first for me. The only rainy Vancouver Pride Day I remember was in ’96, and I wasn’t even in town for that. I’d moved to Vancouver in early August ’96, and remember seeing pictures of the parade in Xtra! West.

But no, there was no rain, and though the sun did come out in the afternoon, it never got terribly hot. Which was a good thing, because I had to move my ass for over two hours, either walking, dancing or volleying. I was with the VGVA group again this year; our setup didn’t change much, except for the lack of a net. That turned out to be a good thing, since it took up less space (an issue on crowded Robson Street), and we didn’t have to assign 2 people to hold it up. But the crowd-pleasers remained: dancers, volleyballs flying back and forth, and of course those two giant balls. They were too awkward to pass, so we just rolled them around and into the crowds. Kids love that, they push it back towards us, it gets them involved. It’s win-win!

A little after we turned on Denman, Symone joined us for a bit to toss balls around. I tell you, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a six-foot drag queen, dressed so fine, volleying with perfect form—she used to play in VGVA, dontchaknow! Just not in drag.

All those hours of listening to ABBA’s greatest hits finally paid off!

And is it just me, or are there a lot more straight people in the parade lately? Besides the usual sponsors and politicians, I mean. I’m thinking especially of CFI Vancouver and the BC Humanists, most (all?) of whom had never been in a Pride parade. And maybe it’s because I’ve got my ear to the twitterverse more, but it seems to me they’re talking about Pride not just in terms of a fabulous party, but also in terms of human rights. I approve of this.

After the parade, I took a few hours to rest and recuperate, then I was off to the Big Gay Sing. Is there anything gayer than a couple hundred men singing along to an ABBA medley, Over The Rainbow or I Will Survive? I don’t think so! I had so much fun, and the aforementioned couple of hundred singers around disguised how totally off-key I was. And I’m glad that all those hours of listening to ABBA’s greatest hits finally paid off!

Celebration of Light 2010: Tribute to China

Now that’s what I’m talking about! The 2010 Celebration of Light ended on a high note with our tribute to last year’s winner, China. Stunning and inventive visuals, great music, what’s not to love?