Da Vinci Days 2006 -- O4R booth

Da Vinci Days 2006
Follow up Web pages for Oregonians for Rationality booth
Children's Pavilion
Email webmaster

handout

Details
Explanations
More puzzles
Pictures
Illusions and deceptions
Limits of human perceptions
Other animals who know better
and quite a bit more
at
explorepdx.com
(Explore Portland Community)

WEB VERSION of the above handout
(distributed at Da Vinci Days 2006)
With links.
Let Mario Bunge be your guide thru important territory that is unfamiliar to most who must be intimate with it.

2 posters

Some things anyone can do to better understand science and math.

Disconfirmation
Abstractions
Oversimplification
The undeniable
Relevance--Irrelevance WEB VERSION of the above poster; with links.

Science is not what it seems at first glance.
.
WEB VERSION of the above poster.

Let Ralph Estling be your guide thru the countryside around Porlock.

links

Previous years at O4R booth
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005

For detailed puzzle explanations go to the blue, "Numbered exhibits" chart on the 2003 page,

But the puzzle-solvers page, that is, no answers or big clues, is HERE.

These follow-up pages have links into the science sections of the explorepdx.com web site and the Knowledge for Use web site. The links are interconnected to form a mini-web: different approaches lead to the same science concepts from different directions.

On the web pages, many of the pictures are active links: Click on them.

Da Vinci Days, 2006 is now past, and these web pages remain to help those who wish to stretch their experiences. Much of what was in the O4R booth is intended to arouse curiosity. There's a huge territory which that curiosity can lead into. Click away!

Two recent articles in Skeptical Inquirer address the problems of psuedoscience with particularly cogent arguments:

Mario Bunge, “The Philosophy behind Pseudoscience,” Skeptical Inquirer, July/Aug, 2006.

The points made by this leading philosopher of science describe the thinking that makes science successful and delineates the boundaries between science and pseudoscience.

We can examine any science discussion or pseudoscience presentation and look for these six simple points:

Logical consistency.
Meanings of words are agreed upon by all.
Mere wishes and wispy fictions are not sensed as real.
Conclusions follow testing by scientific procedures.
Ethics addresses the welfare of all: harm is avoided.
Advancing knowledge is done in communities

Philosophy of Mario Bunge

Ralph Estling, "The Wrong Questions." Skeptical Inquirer, March/April, 2006, p. 59.

Much modern thinking, much of it in academic circles, does not procede in the ways of the scientists and engineers who are making the advances. The points in the column to the left don't match the thinking.

This is the pesky (to almost all working scientists) realm of the Post Modern, the radical constructivist, the relativist (who falsely thinks Einstein was one of the team),--or whatever name it goes by at the moment.

The prominent idea is that reality is not "out there" but rather is something constructed in the human mind, or something constructed by the society; something that does not have to be tested against material phenomena. This is the source of the "wrong questions."