Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.

Thursday, January 31, 2019

Alien ranch sale

If you think you've got problems, at least you're not trying to get rid of a huge Arizona ranch at a $1.5 million loss because you're sick and tired of being attacked by aliens.

At least that's the claim of John Edmonds, whose land in Buckeye, Arizona, about an hour and a half from Phoenix, has (he says) been the site of a huge amount of extraterrestrial activity.  He and his wife foiled an attempted kidnapping, and over the twenty years they've been there, he's killed eighteen "Grays."

With a samurai sword.

I'm torn between thinking this is idiotic and completely badass.  I mean, if I knew I was under siege by hostile aliens, I'd probably arm myself with more than a sword.  Especially if I lived in Arizona, where everyone over the age of two is packing heat.  And you'd also think the aliens would be armed, wouldn't you?  Laser pistols are a lot more accurate, long-range, than samurai swords, unless you're a Stormtrooper, in which case it probably doesn't matter either way.


What's oddest about the samurai sword thing is that the guy says he owns an AK-47, which he used to defend his family when the aliens tried to abduct his wife.  She barely escaped -- "it came down like a cone of light," Edmonds says, "and she began to rise up in to the cone...  So I grabbed my AK-47 with a double banana clip in it, went outside, and opened up."  So apparently if your spouse is being levitated into the air by a tractor beam, the solution is to fire a gun in some random direction.

So why he doesn't use the AK-47 to defend himself against the aliens rather than a sword, I don't know.  You may also be wondering why, if he's killed all those aliens, where the bodies are.  I know I was.  If I killed an alien (in self-defense, of course; in the interest of interstellar amity, if they Come In Peace, I'm more than happy to have them here), I'd definitely keep the body as evidence that I wasn't just a raving loon.  Edmonds says that the bodies vanish, which sounds awfully convenient.  He does have a photo in the video showing what he claims is alien blood from one of his kills, which makes me wonder why if the bodies disappear, the blood doesn't as well.

One of those extraterrestrial biological mysteries, I guess.  But Edmonds goes on to say that you have to "cut off the head, and disconnect the antennae, or they instantly 'phone home' -- even with a razor-sharp sword, it's nearly impossible to decapitate them in one swing."

As far as why the aliens are targeting him, he says it's because his ranch is so large that it gives the aliens room to "open up portals... that are large enough for triangular crafts, wings, or orb-like shapes to pass through."

"These objects leave the space around the ranch, and other objects pass through the portals in the other direction," Edmonds adds.

Despite his success at fighting off the invaders, Edmonds hasn't come away unscathed.  He says the Grays gave him scars (which you can see on the video I linked above), not to mention "symptoms like radiation poisoning."  More troubling, though, is his claim that the previous owners "simply disappeared -- all their stuff was still in the house, leading to speculation that they were in fact abducted by extraterrestrials."  So I guess it's understandable that he's fed up, although it does bring up the question of who sold him the ranch.  He and his wife are selling, and are asking five million dollars for it -- a million and a half less than what he says it's valued at.

If I had the money, I'd definitely buy it.  For one thing, I love Arizona and have always wanted to live in the desert.  Especially now, when we're sitting here in upstate New York in the middle of the "polar vortex," and the current wind chill is -25 F.  For another, I would love to have first-hand evidence of extraterrestrial life.  I'd appreciate it if they wouldn't abduct my wife, though, because I kind of am attached to her, you know?

But hey, if they Come In Peace, they're welcome.  I wouldn't even object if they wanted to take over the government.  Couldn't be worse than what we currently have.

**********************************

In 1983, a horrific pair of murders of fifteen-year-old girls shook the quiet countryside of Leicestershire, England.  Police investigations came up empty-handed, and in the interim, people who lived in the area were in fear that there was a psychopath in their midst.

A young geneticist from the University of Leicestershire, Alec Jeffreys, stepped up with what he said could catch the murderer -- a new (at the time) technique called DNA fingerprinting.  He was able to extract a clear DNA signature from the bodies of the victims, but without a match -- without any one else's DNA to compare it to -- there was no way to use it to catch the criminal.

The way police and geneticists teamed up to catch an insane child killer is the subject of Joseph Wambaugh's book The Blooding.  It is an Edgar Award nominee, and is impossible to put down.  This case led to the now-commonplace use of DNA fingerprinting in forensics labs -- and its first application in a criminal trial makes for fascinating reading.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]





Wednesday, January 30, 2019

Miraculous mathematics

I've blogged before about "miraculous thinking" -- the idea that an unlikely occurrence somehow has to be a miracle simply based on its improbability.  But yesterday I ran into a post on the wonderful site RationalWiki that showed, mathematically, why this is a silly stance.

Called "Littlewood's Law of Miracles," after British mathematician John Edensor Littlewood, the man who first codified it in this way, it goes something like this:
  • Let's say that a "miracle" is defined as something that has a likelihood of occurring of one in a million.
  • We are awake, aware, and engaged on the average about eight hours a day.
  • An event of some kind occurs about once a second.  During the eight hours we are awake, aware, and engaged, this works out to 28,800 events per day, or just shy of a million events in an average month.  (864,000, to be precise.)
  • The likelihood of observing a one-in-a-million event in a given month is therefore 1-(999,999/1,000,000)1,000,000 , or about 0.63.  In other words, we have better than 50/50 odds of observing a miracle next month!
Of course, this is some fairly goofy math, and makes some silly assumptions (one discrete event every second, for example, seems like a lot).  But Littlewood does make a wonderful point; given that we're only defining post hoc the unlikeliness of an event that has already occurred, we can declare anything we want to be a miracle just based on how surprised we are that it happened.  And, after all, if you want to throw statistics around, the likelihood of any event happening that has already happened is 100%.

So, like the Hallmark cards say, Miracles Do Happen.  In fact, they're pretty much unavoidable.

Peter Paul Rubens, The Miracle of St. Ignatius (1617) [Image is in the Public Domain]

You hear this sort of thing all the time, though, don't you?  A quick perusal of sites like Miracle Stories will give you dozens of examples of people who survived automobile accidents without a scratch, made recoveries from life-threatening conditions, were just "in the right place at the right time," and so on.  And it's natural to sit up and take notice when these things happen; this is a built-in perceptual error called dart-thrower's bias.  This fallacy is named after a thought experiment of being in a pub while there's a darts game going on across the room, and simply asking the question: when do you notice the game?  When there's a bullseye, of course.  The rest is just background noise.  And when you think about it, it's very reasonable that we have this bias.  After all, what has the greater evolutionary cost -- noticing the outliers when they're irrelevant, or not noticing the outliers when they are relevant?  It's relatively obvious that if the unusual occurrence is a rustle in the grass, it's far better to pay attention to it when it's the wind than not to pay attention to it when it's a lion.

And of course, on the Miracle Stories webpage, no mention is made of all of the thousands of people who didn't seem to merit a miracle, and who died in the car crash, didn't recover from the illness, or were in the wrong place at the wrong time.  That sort of thing just forms the unfortunate and tragic background noise to our existence -- and it is inevitable that it doesn't register with us in the same way.

So, we should expect miracles, and we are hardwired to pay more attention to them than we do to the 999,999 other run-of-the-mill occurrences that happen in a month.  How do we escape from this perceptual error, then?

Well, the simple answer is that in some senses, we can't.  It's understandable to be surprised by an anomalous event or an unusual pattern.  (Think, for example, how astonished you'd be if you flipped a coin and got ten heads in a row.  You'd probably think, "Wow, what's the likelihood?" -- but any other pattern of heads and tails, say, H-T-T-H-H-H-T-H-T-T -- has exactly the same probability of occurring.  It's just that the first looks like a meaningful pattern, and the second one doesn't.)  The solution, of course, is the same as the solution for just about everything; don't turn off your brain.  It's okay to think, at first, "That was absolutely amazing!  How can that be?", as long as afterwards we think, "Well, there are thousands of events going on around me right now that are of equally low probability, so honestly, it's not so weird after all."

All of this, by the way, is not meant to diminish your wonder at the complexity of the universe, just to direct that wonder at the right thing.  The universe is beautiful, mysterious, and awe-inspiring.  It is also, fortunately, understandable when viewed through the lens of science.  And I think that's pretty cool -- even if no miracles occur today.

**********************************

In 1983, a horrific pair of murders of fifteen-year-old girls shook the quiet countryside of Leicestershire, England.  Police investigations came up empty-handed, and in the interim, people who lived in the area were in fear that there was a psychopath in their midst.

A young geneticist from the University of Leicestershire, Alec Jeffreys, stepped up with what he said could catch the murderer -- a new (at the time) technique called DNA fingerprinting.  He was able to extract a clear DNA signature from the bodies of the victims, but without a match -- without any one else's DNA to compare it to -- there was no way to use it to catch the criminal.

The way police and geneticists teamed up to catch an insane child killer is the subject of Joseph Wambaugh's book The Blooding.  It is an Edgar Award nominee, and is impossible to put down.  This case led to the now-commonplace use of DNA fingerprinting in forensics labs -- and its first application in a criminal trial makes for fascinating reading.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]





Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Warming up for disaster

In today's installment of Ruminations About Science That Should Scare The Piss Out Of You, we have: the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.

This event, that occurred about 55 million years ago, is the peak of a slow climb in average global temperature that began around the time of the Cretaceous Extinction (the one the knocked out the dinosaurs), and ended with the Earth's temperature a good seven degrees warmer than they started (and an estimated eight degrees warmer than it is now).

The result was catastrophic, especially for some life forms that aren't exactly charismatic megafauna -- the foraminifera.  These are protists, related to amoebas, that are part of the "zooplankton" -- small, free-floating organisms that form a lot of the underpinning of the oceanic food web.  During the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, over a third of them went extinct, with predictable results for the rest of the life in the oceans.  The thought is that the extinction wasn't just because of the heat, but because the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused oceanic acidification, a drop in the pH of ocean water that would have caused any organisms with shells made of calcium carbonate -- like many foraminifera -- simply to dissolve.

What kicked off the warming is uncertain, and at first it was relatively slow.  But new research out of Pennsylvania State University, published last week in Nature - Geoscience, suggests that once it began, it triggered some positive feedback cycles that intensified the effect.  "What we found in records were signatures of carbon transport that indicated there were massive erosion regimes occurring on land," co-author Shelby Lyons said.  "Carbon was locked on land and during the PETM it was moved and reburied.  We were interested in seeing how much carbon dioxide that could release...  We found evidence for a feedback that occurs with rapid warming that can release even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere."

So the more carbon dioxide was dumped into the atmosphere, the more processes were initiated that dumped carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  The result: the melting of every ice sheet and glacier on the planet, and sea levels four hundred meters higher than they are now.

Meaning that here in upstate New York, I'd have beachfront property.

Coastline loss on Assateague Island, Maryland/Virginia [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of the National Park Service]

The pertinence of this research to today's fossil-fuel-happy society is obvious.  We're sending carbon into the atmosphere that has been sequestered underground for 250 million years, triggering warming at a phenomenal rate.  It's not that there haven't been thermal ups and downs for all of Earth's history; but the speed with which this is happening is unprecedented.

Oh, and I didn't tell you the scariest part.  The research from Penn State found that once that maximum had been reached, 55 million years ago, it took a hundred thousand years for the planet to recover.  "One lesson we can learn from this research is that carbon is not stored very well on land when the climate gets wet and hot," study co-author Katherine Freeman said.  "Today, we're pushing the system out of equilibrium and it's not going to snap back, even when we start reducing carbon dioxide emissions."

Of course, I doubt this is going to have any effect, given that the current administration here in the United States is bound and determined to ignore scientific research and hard evidence in favor of hand-waving wishful thinking and short-term expediency.  You'd think that terrifying people into recognizing the peril for the long-term habitability of the Earth would impel them to act, for their children's and grandchildren's sakes if not for people here and now.

But no.  I guess being in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry has that effect.

So that's today's research about the past that has scarier-than-hell ramifications for the present.  Me, I'm going to keep writing about this stuff in the hope that someone influential is listening.  Because if not, I'm afraid we're in for a very hot time.

 **********************************

In 1983, a horrific pair of murders of fifteen-year-old girls shook the quiet countryside of Leicestershire, England.  Police investigations came up empty-handed, and in the interim, people who lived in the area were in fear that there was a psychopath in their midst.

A young geneticist from the University of Leicestershire, Alec Jeffreys, stepped up with what he said could catch the murderer -- a new (at the time) technique called DNA fingerprinting.  He was able to extract a clear DNA signature from the bodies of the victims, but without a match -- without any one else's DNA to compare it to -- there was no way to use it to catch the criminal.

The way police and geneticists teamed up to catch an insane child killer is the subject of Joseph Wambaugh's book The Blooding.  It is an Edgar Award nominee, and is impossible to put down.  This case led to the now-commonplace use of DNA fingerprinting in forensics labs -- and its first application in a criminal trial makes for fascinating reading.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]





Monday, January 28, 2019

Pearls of wisdom

I swear, sometimes it seems like the universe is listening.  And laughing at me.

You may recall from Saturday's post, about people thinking that drinking distilled water can cure and/or kill you, that a few days previous I'd wondered what happened to all the alt-med woo-woos, that it seemed like we hadn't heard anything from them in a long while.  Then a loyal reader sent me the distilled water link, and I found out I was wrong.

But apparently pointing out that the quacks hadn't quacked in a long time has now opened the floodgates.  Because a different loyal reader sent me another link yesterday, this one worse than the distilled water one.

This site claims that there's a "herbal remedy" that -- and I promise I'm not making this up -- can be stuck into a woman's vagina to "detox the imprints left behind by her ex-boyfriend."

The product, which is called "Goddess Vaginal Detox Pearls," is a little lump of various herbs wrapped in a piece of cloth that supposedly can reduce menstrual cramps, increase libido, kill parasites, and "detox your ex."  The head of the company that sells these things, Vanessa White, explains that every time a woman has sex, the man leaves an imprint on her "yoni, womb, and uterus area."

The "pearls," she says, have a "vibrational energy" that can somehow sync up with the bad vibes left behind by your former lover and pull those out.  "I remove (insert person’s name) from my womb area during this cleanse," is what you're supposed to say, instead of what seems more reasonable to me, which is, "I wish like hell I had a higher IQ."

Oh, and you're supposed to leave the thing up there.  For days.

So, okay.  I have a few reactions to all of this, as follows:
  • If having sex leaves a mark on your uterus, you're doing it wrong.
  • The only "imprints" I can think of left behind from consensual sex are the possibilities of pregnancy and STDs, and I don't see the "Goddess Pearls" doing anything about those one way or the other.
  • Sticking random, non-sterile objects into your various bodily orifices seems like a good way to end up with toxic shock syndrome.  I know I'm male, so my perspective on this might be a little off, but I think I'd prefer still having the vibrational energy frequencies of previous lovers hanging around than I would dying in horrible agony of TSS.
  • If you have parasites in your vagina, you may want to see a doctor.
  • "Ewwwww."
Worse still, you should read some of the comments left by reviewers.  Wait, cancel that; many of these reviews came with photographs, and despite being a biologist and relatively inured to gross stuff, I think I'm going to need some therapy to get over looking at them.  As I read along, my expression got closer and closer to this:


Women who have used these things have had burning pain, various sorts of discharge that I would prefer not even thinking about, and -- in at least two cases -- have lost pieces of their vaginal lining.

If that doesn't make you stay in a protective crouch for the rest of the day, you're made of sterner stuff than I am.  And that's even considering that, as aforementioned, I'm male.

But of course, there's the usual "this product is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any medical condition" disclaimer, which apparently is meant to mean, "We can ask you to do any idiotic thing we want in the name of health and still get off scot-free.  We could ask you to stick cow shit up your nose.  We could ask you to stand on your head outside, stark naked, in the middle of January, and sing the National Anthem.  We could ask you to stare straight into the Sun to absorb its healing rays directly into your retinas.  And the reason we can do this is because: many of you would do it without question.  And afterwards, claim that the quantum vibrations of your auras were much improved or some fucking thing.  And then look around for the next 'cure' we're peddling."

So, yeah: if I haven't made the point clearly enough, (1) do not stick random stuff into your orifices unless you're sure they're sterile and won't burn your insides so bad your tissue starts sloughing off.  (2) Having consensual sex does not leave an imprint on your internal body parts.  And for cryin' in the sink, (3) please exercise a little critical thinking before you buy the latest thing from the alt-med gurus.

**********************************

In 1983, a horrific pair of murders of fifteen-year-old girls shook the quiet countryside of Leicestershire, England.  Police investigations came up empty-handed, and in the interim, people who lived in the area were in fear that there was a psychopath in their midst.

A young geneticist from the University of Leicestershire, Alec Jeffreys, stepped up with what he said could catch the murderer -- a new (at the time) technique called DNA fingerprinting.  He was able to extract a clear DNA signature from the bodies of the victims, but without a match -- without any one else's DNA to compare it to -- there was no way to use it to catch the criminal.

The way police and geneticists teamed up to catch an insane child killer is the subject of Joseph Wambaugh's book The Blooding.  It is an Edgar Award nominee, and is impossible to put down.  This case led to the now-commonplace use of DNA fingerprinting in forensics labs -- and its first application in a criminal trial makes for fascinating reading.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]





Saturday, January 26, 2019

Cool clear water

I was thinking a couple of days ago that it'd been a while since I dealt with a new crazy alt-med cure, and that maybe the woo-woos had run out of ideas.

Optimism, sometimes, is a losing proposition.

As it so often happens, I found out how wrong I was at the hands of a loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  She sent me a link with the text, "I guess this is kind of homeopathic Nirvana, isn't it?  As dilute as you can possibly get."  And the link took me to a site that claims that all human diseases can be cured...

... by drinking distilled water.

Distilled water, as I probably don't need to mention, is water that has been put through the process of steam distillation to remove any trace impurities.  It's useful in sensitive medical and scientific applications where even small amounts of dissolved minerals might interfere with the results.

What these people are claiming, though, is that ordinary tap water isn't... watery enough, or something.  Here are a couple of quotes from the site, so you can get the flavor of it:
When one drinks impure, dirty water, the body acts as a filter, trapping a percentage of the solids suspended in the water.  A filter eventually becomes clogged and useless – fit only to be thrown away. The human body might well face the same fate. 
But the basic point – that only distilled water avoids mineral buildups in the body – is an inarguable one.  The deposits, which build up in a teakettle from repeated use, are traces of minerals left behind as the water evaporates.  Distilled water leaves no such traces – in a teakettle or in the human body.  It is true that in most hospitals distilled water is used for newborn infants; distilled water is prescribed for heart patients in many cardiac wards.  And it is true that kidney stones and other mineral-like buildups in the body are much more common in the areas where the drinking water has high levels in inorganic minerals – and distilled water has none of those at all.
Thinking that minerals build up in the body the same way boiler scale forms on a teakettle is patently ridiculous.  The minerals collect on a teakettle because you've boiled the water away; you would only be at risk for similar buildup if someone boiled your blood plasma, which would be problematic in other respects.  Your kidneys are perfectly capable of coping with tiny fluctuations in mineral content in your food and drink, which is fortunate, because you get a great deal more in the way of minerals from the vegetables you eat than from your water.  According to a study in 2004, average tap water in the US provided greater than one percent of the recommended daily intake for only four minerals -- copper, calcium, magnesium, and sodium.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

And as far as minerals in water causing kidney stones, a 1997 study suggests that calcium and magnesium enriched "mineral water" actually reduces the incidence of kidney stones in individuals who are prone to them.

Then we have this:
I cannot emphasize enough the importance of drinking distilled water for cleansing the blood stream, for reducing arthritic pain and lowering blood pressure.  It has also been known to reduce cholesterol and triglycerides. In fact, the only effect on the body is health. 
There are rules of thumb on how much water to drink.  The rule of thumb on a normal day is one half your body weight in ounces per day.  If you are sweating and exerting yourself you should drink more, not less.  We have a tendency to grab pop, coffee, Kool-Aid and juices, but we need to get back to the habit of grabbing distilled water.
Okay, how much water, now?  The phrase "one half your body weight in ounces per day" can be interpreted two different ways.  For example, I weigh 160 pounds, so if I drank half my body weight every day, that'd be 80 pounds, that's 9.6 gallons of water.  (The recommendation, by the way, is about a half-gallon for a typical adult.)   It's possible, though, that what it means is the number from half my body weight, but in ounces -- so 80 ounces of water.  This is closer to the mark but still seems like a lot to me.  And, of course, you'd get a different answer if you calculated my weight in kilograms, slugs, pennyweights, grains, carats, or solar masses.

If that's not enough, try this:
Now as to the argument that distilled water leaches out minerals.  This is true, and this is exactly what we want it to do.  The minerals it leaches out are of the unusable, ionic form and we want these to leave the body rather than be deposited and cause disease.  Distilled water does not leach out significant amounts of biologically available minerals because these are quickly taken up by the body on an as needed basis.  If they are present in excess then they are filtered through the kidneys and this is exactly what needs to happen with all things which are in excess in the circulation.  Distilled water cleanses the body through promoting healthy kidney function.
Um... no.  You do not want to leach minerals from your body, whether or not they're in "ionic form."  (And some of 'em damn well better be in ionic form.  Such as sodium.  The alternative is elemental sodium, which is a soft, malleable metal that explodes when it touches water.  So consuming non-ionic sodium would be about as advisable as boiling your blood plasma.)  As far as leaching minerals away being good, that's also a nope.  Getting rid of sodium too fast can put you in hyponatremic shock, which can cause dizziness, disorientation, nausea, and severe headaches.  And leaching calcium from your body is what causes, for instance, osteoporosis.

Also not recommended.

And let me reiterate how little in the way of minerals we're talking about, here.  A 2002 study that surveyed the municipal water of a hundred cities in the United States found that Baton Rouge, Louisiana -- the city that was in first place for quantity of minerals -- had a total of a little over eighty parts per million for all the minerals measured combined.

In scientific terms, that's called "ain't much."  And for the other cities, it was all down from there.

Worse still, the "distilled water is wonderful" link she sent me is not one isolated site.  I did a quick search and found dozens of sites touting the health benefits of drinking distilled water, including curing arthritis, chronic headaches, high blood pressure, and (of course) cancer.

After all, what would be the use of a quack cure if it didn't cure cancer?

Oh, and if this isn't sufficient, I also found sites claiming that drinking distilled water would kill you because it leaches out all the minerals in your cells.  Thus proving a sort of Newton's Third Law of Idiocy, that every moronic idea has an equal and opposite moronic idea.

(Incidentally, if you don't believe me -- being a layperson at all -- check out what they say at the site Drinking Water Resources -- neatly debunks both the claims that distilled water is wonderful and that it's deadly.)

So the loyal reader who sent me the link is right; these people are out-homeopathing the homeopaths.  We've gone from serially diluting a chemical past Avogadro's limit to suggesting we drink water that has everything removed from it but the water ahead of time.  At least it's cheaper than most homeopathic "remedies;" last I checked, a gallon of distilled water at my local grocery store was about a buck and a half.

Of course, it's sold in plastic bottles, which I'm sure has to be relevant somehow.

In any case, don't bother with the distilled water.  Plain old tap water is just fine.  Don't count on it to provide your daily mineral needs, though.  The usual advice -- eat well, exercise, don't smoke, don't drink alcohol to excess -- is still the best thing around for optimizing your health.

**********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a brilliant look at two opposing worldviews; Charles Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet.  Mann sees today's ecologists, environmental scientists, and even your average concerned citizens as falling into two broad classes -- wizards (who think that whatever ecological problems we face, human ingenuity will prevail over them) and prophets (who think that our present course is unsustainable, and if we don't change our ways we're doomed).

Mann looks at a representative member from each of the camps.  He selected Norman Borlaug, Nobel laureate and driving force behind the Green Revolution, to be the front man for the Wizards, and William Vogt, who was a strong voice for population control and conversation, as his prototypical Prophet.  He takes a close and personal look at each of their lives, and along the way outlines the thorny problems that gave rise to this disagreement -- problems we're going to have to solve regardless which worldview is correct.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]




Friday, January 25, 2019

Booms and glitches

There's a pair of stories that to my eyes don't seem to have much to do with one another, but which put together are inducing multiple orgasms in the conspiracy theory crowd.

First, we have reports of a series of booming noises that have been heard in three locations in eastern North America in the last few weeks.  The first one, which occurred late in December, found residents of Scranton, Pennsylvania being jolted out of bed by noises "like fighter jets flying overhead."  The noises continued off and on for about an hour.  Spokespeople for the Lackawanna Energy Center, a gas-powered electrical plant near Scranton, were quick to claim responsibility, saying it was a steam release from an emergency pressure valve, and that it generated "the loudest noise we've ever heard" but was not an indication of anything malfunctioning, nor was it a cause for safety concerns.

Two weeks later, residents on Davis Island, near Tampa, Florida, were awakened at four AM by the same sort of noises.  The cause, apparently, was...

... steam venting from an emergency pressure valve, this time at the TECO Bayside Power Station.  Nothing to be concerned about, officials said, sorry for waking y'all up.

Then, just a few days ago, the town of Salisbury, North Carolina experienced much the same thing, with a sound like a combination of "a locomotive and a space shuttle taking off."  Dogs and coyotes went nuts barking, and -- thus far -- no local power plants or other agencies have admitted responsibility for the uproar.

So this already had conspiracy theorists raising their eyebrows in a meaningful manner and saying, "this can't be a coincidence."  Which, of course, is exactly what you call it when events coincide, but we can overlook the semantics for the time being.  Because said conspiracy theorists started jumping up and down, making excited little squeaking noises, when another series of stories started making the rounds, once again from three different locations.

This series of odd occurrences weren't anomalous noises, but anomalous radar traces.  First, in early December, National Weather Service meteorological radars picked up a strong signal from a broad area in Illinois, Kentucky, and Indiana, which looked like a massive thunderstorm -- on a completely clear night.  Two days later, similar (but smaller) oddball signals were recorded on weather radar stations in Maine and Florida.

Brett Tingley, over at Mysterious Universe, said the most reasonable explanation is that it was chaff -- particulate aluminum that is released by military aircraft when they want to confuse enemy radar.  The difficulty with this hypothesis is that from the radar traces, it was released at a greater height (10,000 feet) than is typical for chaff tests.  Also, the chaff cloud (if that's what it was) held together for ten hours, far longer than usual, and no one has reported any trace of the stuff on the ground.

Of course, the military is neither confirming nor denying these reports.  Which is fuel to the fire for the aforementioned conspiracy theorists.

So these stories were bad enough independently, but when people started putting them together, in the fashion of a kid adding two and two and getting twenty-two, things got out of hand.  All of this stuff cannot be a coincidence.  It's got to Mean Something.  What exactly it's supposed to Mean is not all that clear, but here are a few explanations I've seen, if I can dignify them by that name:
  • The military is using hypersonic aircraft (thus the loud booms) to create chemtrails to kill us all.
  • Saboteurs are screwing with our radar and our power stations in an attempt to bring down the American government.  My feeling about this one is that at present, saboteurs are kind of unnecessary, because the American government is already doing a pretty good job of bringing down the American government.
  • It's the End Times.  Admit it, you knew the hyper-Christians would get involved somehow.  Their argument seems to go something like, "Blah blah blah seven trumpets of doom in the Book of Revelation."  (I paraphrase slightly.)
  • The Air Force is testing a super weapon that will cause systematic malfunctions in our power grid, and simultaneously spread toxins over the entire landscape.  Why they thought it was a good idea to test this over suburban areas, I have no idea.
  • And, of course: Aliens.


My hunch is that none of these things have any connection.  Power plants make loud noises sometimes, and it doesn't mean they're about to blow up, or any of the other panicked ideas I've heard.  Radar anomalies also occur, sometimes because of meteorological events, sometimes from natural or man-made causes (the first recorded radar glitch occurred back during World War II, when technicians monitoring the skies for aerial invasions from Germany freaked out over what turned out to be a flock of migrating birds).

So anyhow, I'm not ready to ascribe all this to nefarious causes, much less link together the loud noises with the radar glitches.  I mean, if they are connected, why did they happen so far apart?  The only state that had both was Florida, and they didn't happen at the same time.  Otherwise, we have Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, and Maine on the one hand, and Pennsylvania and North Carolina on the other.

Pretty uncoordinated aliens, seems to me.

Of course, I'm saying all this without much in the way of actual information over what was reported by eyewitnesses, so maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe this is a sign of the American military trying to destroy civilization, or an alien invasion, or the End Times, or whatnot.  I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.  I figure if it turns out to be the end of the world as we know it, I'll find out eventually.

**********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a brilliant look at two opposing worldviews; Charles Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet.  Mann sees today's ecologists, environmental scientists, and even your average concerned citizens as falling into two broad classes -- wizards (who think that whatever ecological problems we face, human ingenuity will prevail over them) and prophets (who think that our present course is unsustainable, and if we don't change our ways we're doomed).

Mann looks at a representative member from each of the camps.  He selected Norman Borlaug, Nobel laureate and driving force behind the Green Revolution, to be the front man for the Wizards, and William Vogt, who was a strong voice for population control and conversation, as his prototypical Prophet.  He takes a close and personal look at each of their lives, and along the way outlines the thorny problems that gave rise to this disagreement -- problems we're going to have to solve regardless which worldview is correct.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]




Thursday, January 24, 2019

The interstellar lighthouse

I must admit to having a fascination with aliens.

I recall being the tender age of five years old and sitting spellbound watching the impossibly ridiculous aliens on the television show Lost in Space -- and being only a couple of years older and being positively captivated by the marginally-less-ridiculous aliens on the original Star Trek.  Even now I still have a soft spot in my heart for bug-eyed little gray guys, and I have the posters on my classroom wall to prove it (including a replica of Fox Mulder's famous UFO poster with the caption "I Want To Believe").  I also once paid a visit to the International UFO Museum of Roswell, New Mexico, with interesting results:


So I suppose it's to be expected that I was pretty excited about a new project called "SpaceSpeak" that aims to transmit messages to nearby star systems with habitable planets.

SpaceSpeak says, on its home page, "Whether it's a poem, a prayer, a message in support of a cause, or a note to any intelligent life forms that may be listening, your text, image, or audio clip will be broadcast into space with our radio transmitter.  Check back later to see how far it has traveled!...  Do you have a cause you believe in?  Want to reach to the peoples of other worlds?  We'll help you get your message out in a way no one else can.  So make the world a better place and let the universe know about it!...  SpaceSpeak will take your message, encode it, and beam it out into space where it will travel the heavens for millions of years.  Long after the Earth is gone, photons from your message will be racing across the cosmos in silent testament to your thoughts."

Your message has to be under two thousand characters long, but that seems to be the only limitation.

SpaceSpeak is the brainchild of Dr. Peter Beery and his wife Nanette, who are both teachers (Peter of engineering, Nanette of environmental science).  Both have been deeply interested in the possibility of extraterrestrial life for years, and came up with the idea of sending messages into space to see who might respond a couple of years ago.  Creating an interstellar lighthouse, is what it amounts to.

I'm not entirely sure what I think about this.

First, on the positive side, there's the coolness factor.  The idea that we might be capable of sending a coordinated message to intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy is nothing short of thrilling.  Ever since watching Captain Kirk interact with Balok and the Andorians and the Salt Vampire, I've lived in hope of one day finding out that we really aren't alone in the universe.  To me, finding unequivocal evidence of life on another planet would be just about the most exciting thing I can imagine, even if they don't turn out to have blue skin and antennae.


The problem, though, is that this message is going to be composed by... random humans.  And I hate to point it out, and I say this with all due affection (being a random human myself), but when you put something like this in the hands of average people, the results can be kind of... dumb.  For example, take a look at a few of the messages queued up on SpaceSpeak's site:
  • ligma balls
  • ur mom gay
  • This is an official request for the Red Pill.  Please send promptly.  Thank you.  -A half-asleep citizen of Earth who wants to be fully woke
  • Yo what up my alien brethren, the humans down here are REAL conquerable, come and get em boys.  Also, follow my insta and snap: @oscarjt10,  If yall want help to take over this bum ass earth, hit me up.
  • Tub thub ubnivub: Tabubthub Emumub Corbrub Fibmub Shub Blubthub Wub Jub Lubnub Mubxibubcub Cubmub Thub arub oub bub
Okay, right. What?

I mean, come on, people.  Do you really want humanity to be the subject of a documentary on an alien world called The Derpinoids of Dumbass-3?

And of course, this opens up another, darker possibility, which is that if we do succeed in contacting extraterrestrial life, the results might be unfortunate for us.  (Especially with people like @oscarjt10 giving them a deliberate invitation to conquer us.)  No less a scientific luminary than Stephen Hawking weighed in on the possibilities almost a decade ago.

"To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational," Hawking said, in an interview with The Sunday Times in 2010.  "The real challenge is working out what aliens might actually be like.  We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet.  I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet.  Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.  If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the American Indians."

So, that's a little off-putting.

The other inevitable downside is the time it's going to take. Even if the messages reach intelligent life on a planet circling the closest star to the Sun (Proxima Centauri, 4.2 light years away), and they are capable of receiving and interpreting SpaceSpeak's message, and are able to send a response more or less immediately, it will take 8.4 years before we get it. By that time I'll be... well, kind of impatient.  A conversation that has a 8.4-year lag time between messages would be a bit on the frustrating side:
Us: "Hi Aliens." 
*8.4 years elapse* 
Them: "Hi, how are you today?" 
Us: "Oh, we're fine, how are you?  How's the weather where you are?" 
*8.4 more years* 
Them: "Can't complain.  Sunny and warm here, just took the kids to the beach.  Little Billy got sand in all six of his eyes, can you imagine?  Kids, right?"
Us:  "Ligma balls." 
*another 8.4 years* 
Them:  "Dafuq?" 
And so on.

Now, it's not that I'm actually against what SpaceSpeak is trying to accomplish, but it does seem like it has some pretty significant pitfalls.  Be that as it may, I hope the Beerys succeed in their wild scheme.  It would be cool if we humans would finally do something with our money other than designing bigger and better ways of torturing and killing each other.

So I encourage you to donate to SpaceSpeak, and also to log in and post a message.  It's nice to see that there are still a few people who have their hearts and minds turned toward the stars.

But if you do decide to send a message to the aliens, try to come up with something better than "ur mom gay," okay?

**********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a brilliant look at two opposing worldviews; Charles Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet.  Mann sees today's ecologists, environmental scientists, and even your average concerned citizens as falling into two broad classes -- wizards (who think that whatever ecological problems we face, human ingenuity will prevail over them) and prophets (who think that our present course is unsustainable, and if we don't change our ways we're doomed).

Mann looks at a representative member from each of the camps.  He selected Norman Borlaug, Nobel laureate and driving force behind the Green Revolution, to be the front man for the Wizards, and William Vogt, who was a strong voice for population control and conversation, as his prototypical Prophet.  He takes a close and personal look at each of their lives, and along the way outlines the thorny problems that gave rise to this disagreement -- problems we're going to have to solve regardless which worldview is correct.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]




Wednesday, January 23, 2019

Defining identity

In case you had run short of things to be outraged about, today we have a story that the Trump administration is trying to push a legal definition of sex as "a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth."

To a biologist, this is a little like the government passing a law defining pi is being "exactly equal to three."  You might not like the fact that pi is an irrational number, it might be annoying to have to use a decimal approximation to calculate the circumference of a circle, but all of that falls clearly into the "tough shit" department.  The universe is not arranged so as to make you feel comfortable, and if you can't handle that, well, that's too freakin' bad.

Of course, it's no big mystery why they're doing this.  The evangelical Christians, who have had a stranglehold over the Republican Party for years, have a remarkable capacity to look past all sorts of biblical injunctions such as the prohibition against infidelity, divorce, and usury (lending money at interest), not to mention more perplexing ones like the rules against eating shellfish and wearing clothes made of two different kinds of cloth sewn together.  On the other hand, anything remotely approaching sexual relations between two consenting adults other than a traditional, in-marriage male/female relationship, makes these people go into a complete meltdown.  (Other than the aforementioned infidelity, which apparently is okay, especially if it was Donald Trump engaging in it.)

I swear, these people are more concerned about what I do with my dick than I am.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ben Tavener from Curitiba, Brazil, São Paulo LGBT Pride Parade 2014 (14108541924), CC BY 2.0]

Here's the problem.  Even beyond the obvious issue of equal rights for LGBTQ people at the heart of the debate, this viewpoint is completely contrary to what biological science says.  "Gender" is a construct of a lot of different features -- anatomy, brain wiring (the "which gender do you feel like?" part comes from this), chromosomal makeup (XX or XY or, in some cases, other combinations), hormone levels, and sexual orientation.  What the people pressing for this redefinition would like is if those always lined up in exactly the same way.

They don't.

Gender is not simple, and it's clearly non-binary.  Let's just look at two situations that should illustrate that beyond doubt.

First, consider the condition XY androgen insensitivity.  In this condition, the embryo has the ordinary male configuration chromosomally (XY), but has a genetic mutation that prevents the formation of receptors for testosterone.  During development, all embryos looks female until midway during the second trimester.  If the baby has an XY chromosome configuration, at that point -- assuming everything is working the usual way -- testosterone takes effect, the testicles descend into the scrotum and the penis gets larger.  In other words, all of the things parents look for during an ultrasound when they want to find out the sex of their baby.

In XY androgen insensitivity, none of this happens.  The baby looks anatomically female.  A pelvic exam -- seldom done on young children -- would reveal that the child has no uterus, only the lower two-thirds of the vagina, and gonads that are still small and undeveloped, and are still in the abdominal cavity.  These children usually are identified when the age of puberty hits and they don't start to menstruate, but up to then, they are perfectly ordinary girls who have female external anatomy, and more important, feel that they're female.

Santhi Soundarajan, an Indian track star, is one of these.  Because many female elite athletes have very low body fat content, a good many of them don't ovulate, which is why her condition wasn't identified.  But she competed in the Olympics, won a silver medal in the 800 -- and only afterwards did she learn that her chromosomes were XY, not XX.  The Olympic committee stripped her of her medal and banned her from competition.

What would you do if you were told the one thing you loved, were passionate about, excelled at, was no longer an option?  Santhi Soundaraian attempted suicide.

Then there's 5α-reductase deficiency.  The issue with this condition is the hormone dihydroxytestosterone, which is what directly acts to produce the male anatomy.  Males have two copies of the DHT gene, one of which activates prenatally (causing the changes in a male fetus mentioned above), and the other at puberty.  People with a mutation in the first DHT gene are born looking female for the same reason they are in XY androgen insensitivity.  The thing is, the second copy of the gene -- the one that activates at puberty -- works just fine.

When that gene switches on, at age 13 or so, the child goes from being an anatomical female to being an anatomical male, in the space of about nine months.

Add that to recent studies of gender identification in which it was conclusively established that trans individuals' brains are wired like the gender they identify with, not the gender associated with their anatomy.  So all the people who have liked to har-de-har-har about "boys who think they're girls" and how ridiculous that is and how next thing you know, you'll have people identifying as rocks (yes, I actually heard someone say that) -- please do shut up.  All you're doing is establishing how ignorant you are of the biological facts.

The biology of gender is complex, and not fully understood.  We still don't know if sexual orientation is genetic -- it appears to have a genetic component at least.  It, too, is non-binary.  About four percent of people identify as bisexual, for example.  And if you think sexual orientation is a choice, ask yourself when you sat down and gave thoughtful consideration to each gender, and decided which you chose to be attracted to.

Basing gender designation on anatomy alone is not just simpleminded; it's flat-out wrong.  So basing policy on an arbitrary, government-mandated definition of gender is two steps removed from the truth.

Look, I'm sympathetic if there are some parts of reality that make you feel squinky.  There are parts of it I'm not especially fond of myself.  But that doesn't mean the bits you don't like aren't true.  And if you're using your own squinky feelings to make decisions about who other people are, what rights they should have, and what they should be able to do with their own bodies, you are light years away from anything that could be called moral behavior.

**********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a brilliant look at two opposing worldviews; Charles Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet.  Mann sees today's ecologists, environmental scientists, and even your average concerned citizens as falling into two broad classes -- wizards (who think that whatever ecological problems we face, human ingenuity will prevail over them) and prophets (who think that our present course is unsustainable, and if we don't change our ways we're doomed).

Mann looks at a representative member from each of the camps.  He selected Norman Borlaug, Nobel laureate and driving force behind the Green Revolution, to be the front man for the Wizards, and William Vogt, who was a strong voice for population control and conversation, as his prototypical Prophet.  He takes a close and personal look at each of their lives, and along the way outlines the thorny problems that gave rise to this disagreement -- problems we're going to have to solve regardless which worldview is correct.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]