The crossroads

I haven't exactly kept it a secret how completely, utterly fed up I am with media lately.

This goes from the miasmic depths of YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok right on up the food chain to the supposedly responsible mainstream media.  I still place a lot of the blame for Donald Trump's victory at the feet of the New York Times and their ilk; for months they ignored every babbling, incoherent statement Trump uttered, as well as the fascistic pronouncements he made during his more lucid moments, while putting on the front page headlines like "Will Kamala's Choice In Shoes Alienate Her From Voters?"

The idea of responsible journalism has, largely, been lost.  Instead we're drowning in a sea of slant and misinformation, generated by a deadly mix of rightward-tilted corporate control and a clickbait mentality that doesn't give a flying rat's ass whether the content is true or accurate as long as you keep reading or watching it.

While the political stuff is far more damaging, being a science nerd, it's the misrepresentation of science that torques me the the most.  And I saw a good example of this just yesterday, with a fascinating study out of the Max Planck Institute that appeared last week in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

First, the actual research.

Using data from the x-ray telescope eROSITA, researchers found that the Solar System occupies a space in one of the arms of the Milky Way that is hotter than expected.  This "Local Hot Bubble" is an irregularly-shaped region that is a couple of degrees warmer than its surroundings, and is thought to have been caused by a series of supernovae that went off an estimated fourteen million years ago.  The bubble is expanding asymmetrically, with faster expansion perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy than parallel to it, for the simple reason that there is less matter in that direction, and therefore less resistance.

One curious observation is that there is a more-or-less cylindrical streamer of hotter gas heading off in one direction from the bubble, pointing in the general direction of the constellation Centaurus.  The nearest object in that direction is another hot region called the Gum Nebula, a supernova remnant, but it's unclear if that's a coincidence.

The Gum Nebula [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Meli Thev, Finkbeiner H-alpha Gum Nebula, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The researchers called this streamer an "interstellar tunnel" and speculated that there could be a network of these "tunnels" crisscrossing the galaxy, connecting warmer regions (such as the nebulae left from supernovae) and allowing for exchange of materials.  How physics allows the streamers to maintain their cohesion, and not simply disperse into the colder space surrounding them, is unknown.  This idea has been around since 1974, but has had little experimental support, so the new research is an intriguing vindication of a fifty-year-old idea.

Okay, ready to hear the headlines I've seen about this story?

• "Scientists Find Network of Interstellar Highways in Our Own Galaxy"
• "A Tunnel Links Us to Other Star Systems -- But Who's Maintaining It?"
• "Mysterious Alien Tunnel Found In Our Region of Space"
• "An Outer Space Superhighway"
• "Scientists Baffled -- We're At The Galactic Crossroads and No One Knows Why"

*brief pause to punch a wall*

Okay, I can place maybe one percent of the blame on the scientists for calling it a "tunnel;" a tunnel, I guess, implies a tunneler.  But look, it's called quantum tunneling, and the aliens-and-spaceships crowd managed to avoid having multiple orgasms about that.  

On the other hand, given the mountains of bullshit out there about quantum resonant energy frequencies of healing, maybe I shouldn't celebrate too quickly.

But the main problem here is the media sensationalizing the fuck out of absolutely everything.  I have no doubt that in this specific case, the whole lot of 'em knew there was nothing in the research that implied a "who" that was "maintaining" these tunnels; the scientists explicitly said there was some unexplained physics here, which was interesting but hardly earthshattering.

But "streamers of gas from a local warm region in our galaxy" isn't going to get most people to click the link, so gotta make it sound wild and weird and woo-woo.

Look, I know this story by itself isn't really a major problem, but it's a symptom of something far worse, and far deeper.  There has got to be a way to impel media to do better.  Media trust is at an all-time low; a study last month estimated it at a little over thirty percent.  And what happens in that situation is that people (1) click on stuff that sounds strange, shocking, or exciting, and (2) for more serious news, gravitate toward sources that reinforce what they already believed.  The result is that the actual facts matter less than presenting people with attractive nonsense, and media consumers never find out if what they believe is simply wrong.

But saying "just don't read the news, because they're all lying" isn't the solution, either.  The likelihood of voting for Trump was strongly correlated with having low exposure to accurate information about current events, something that was exacerbated by his constant message of "everyone is lying to you except for me."

We are at a crossroads, just not the kind the headline-writer was talking about.

Honestly, I don't know that there is an answer, not in the current situation, where we no longer have a Fairness Doctrine to force journalists to be even-handed.  And the proliferation of wildly sensationalized online media sources has made the problem a million times worse.

At this point, I'm almost hoping the people who reported on the astronomy story are right, and we are in the middle of an alien superhighway.  And they'll slow down their spaceship long enough to pick me up and get me the hell off this planet.

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A matter of truth

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The echoes of Carrhae

Back on the ninth of June, 53 B.C.E., seven legions of Roman heavy infantry were lured into the desert near the town of Carrhae (now Harran, Turkey) by what appeared to be a small retreating force of Parthian soldiers.  It was a trap, and the leader of the Roman forces, Marcus Licinius Crassus (who was one-third of the First Triumvirate, along with Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great) fell for it.  Well-armed and highly mobile Parthian horsemen swept down and kicked some legionnaire ass.  Just about all of the Roman soldiers were either captured or killed, and Crassus himself was executed -- in some accounts, by having molten gold poured down his throat.

Not the way I would choose to make my exit.  Yeowch.

A bust thought to be of the unfortunate Marcus Licinius Crassus [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sergey Sosnovskiy, Bust of a Roman, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, CC BY-SA 4.0]

In any case, very few soldiers from Crassus's seven legions made it back to Italy.  They didn't all die, though, so what happened to the survivors?

This is where it gets interesting -- not only because historical mysteries are intrinsically intriguing, but as another example of "please don't believe whatever you see on the internet, and more importantly don't repost it without checking it for accuracy."

The Battle of Carrhae comes up because a couple of days ago I got one of those "sponsored" posts on Facebook that are largely clickbait based on what stuff you've shared or liked in the past.  With my interest in archaeology and history, I get a lot of links of the type, "Archaeologists don't want you to find out about this ONE WEIRD HISTORICAL FACT," as if actual researchers just hate it when people hear about what they're researching and love nothing better than keeping all of their findings secret from everyone.

In any case, the claim of this particular post was that the survivors of the Battle of Carrhae were absorbed into the Parthian Empire (plausible), but never were accepted there so decided after a while to up stakes and move east (possible), where they eventually made their way to northwestern China (hmmm...) and there's a place called Liqian where their descendants settled.  These guys were recruited by the Chinese as mercenaries to fight against the Xiongnu in 36 B.C.E., and when the Xiongnu were roundly defeated the grateful Chinese Emperor allowed the Romans to stay there permanently.

This idea was championed by historian Homer Dubs, professor of Chinese history at Oxford University, who as part of his argument claimed that the "fish-scale formation" used by the Chinese army against the Xiongnu had been copied from the Roman "testudo formation" -- a move where legions go forward with their shields overlapping to prevent spears and arrows from their opponents from striking home.  The Romans had taught the Chinese a new tactic, Dubs said, and that's how they won the battle.

So far, I have no problem with any of this.  There's nothing wrong with researchers making claims, even far-fetched ones; that's largely how scientific inquiry progresses, with someone saying, essentially, "Hey, here's how I think this works," and all his/her colleagues trying their best to punch holes in the claim.  If the claim stands up to the tests of evidence and logic, then we have a working model of the phenomenon in question.

But the link I got on social media pretty much stopped with, "Hey, some Romans ended up in China, isn't that cool?"  There was no mention of the fact that (1) Dubs made his claim in 1941; (2) because there has never been a single Roman artifact -- not one -- found near Liqian, just about all archaeologists and historians think Dubs was wrong; and (3) a genetic test of a large sample of people around Liqian found not the slightest trace of European ancestry.  Everyone there, apparently, is mostly of Han Chinese descent, just as you'd expect.

And the genetic tests that conclusively put Dubs's claim to rest were conducted seventeen years ago.

Look, it's not that I don't get clickbait.  These sites like "Amazing Facts From History" exist to get people to click on them, boosting their numbers and therefore their ad revenue, irrespective of whether anything they're claiming is true.  In other words, if they can get you to click on it, they win.

But what I don't understand is the number of people who shared the link -- over five thousand, at the point I saw it -- and appended comments like, "This is so interesting!" and "History is so fascinating!", apparently uncritically accepting what the site claimed without doing what I did, a (literally) two-minute read of Wikipedia that brought me to the paper from The Journal of Human Genetics I linked above.  Not a single one of the hundreds of commenters said, "But this isn't true, and we've known it's not true for almost two decades."

I can almost hear the objections.  What's the harm of believing an odd claim about ancient history, even if the (very strong) evidence is that it's false?  To me, there is actual harm in it; it establishes a habit of credulity, of accepting what sounds cool or fun or weird or interesting without any apparent consideration of whether or not it's true.  Sure, there's no immediate problem with believing Roman soldiers settled in China.

But when you start applying that same lack of critical thinking to matters of your health, the environment, or politics, the damage accrues awfully fast.

So please do some fact-checking before you share.  Apply skepticism to what you see online -- even if (or maybe, especially if) what you're considering sharing conforms to your preconceived notions about how things work.  We can all fall prey to confirmation bias, and these days, with the prevalence of clickbait sites run by folks who don't give a rat's ass if what they post is real or not, it's an increasing problem.

Check before you share.  It's that simple.

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Scientific clickbait

I know I've said it before, but I hate the way media represents science (and hooks readers with inaccurate, misleading clickbait titles).

I ran into a good example of this, and saw numerous examples of people coming to the wrong conclusion because of it, in Business Insider a couple of days ago.  The article was called "A Chemical Used to Make McDonald's Fries Could Help Cure Baldness, Japanese Scientists Say," by Rosie Fitzmaurice.  And you'd think people would realize that saying that a chemical in McDonald's fries can help with baldness is not the same as saying eating McDonald's fries cures baldness.

You'd be wrong.  As of this time, I've seen four people crowing about how their diet of Big Macs and large fries is going to make them keep their hair (or grow it back), and one that, no lie, proposed rubbing McDonald's fries on your head.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What's worst about all of this is that if you read the actual research, you find out that the chemical in question -- dimethylpolysiloxane -- isn't even what's stimulating the hair growth in the lab mice, it was merely used as an inert matrix in which to grow the stem cells that produced hair follicles.  (If you're curious about how it's ending up in french fries, it's because it's used as an anti-foaming agent in the cooking oil.)

So the article's bad enough, but along with the ridiculous title, it amounts to "How to completely misunderstand some scientific research in under five minutes."  It reminds me of the moronic article that appeared a couple of years ago over at (surprise!) Fox News Online called, "Study Says Smelling Farts Can Be Good for You."

I hope I don't need to tell you that no, that's not what the study found.  If (once again) you go to the actual research, you find out that one of the chemicals in farts (hydrogen sulfide) is also used in vanishingly small amounts as an intercellular chemical signal.  A new drug candidate called AP39 is showing potential therapeutic use because it causes the targeted release of hydrogen sulfide into your mitochondria, showing promise for treating a lot of age-related disorders that are associated with mitochondrial slowdown or malfunction.

In short: you do not experience the same effect if you take a deep breath when your coworker rips a big one.

Last, we have an article that appeared over at CNN this week (although I've read a bit about this research before) with the title, "Hot Tea Linked to Esophageal Cancer in Smokers, Drinkers," which isn't wrong so much as it is misleading.  This makes it sound -- and the article itself does little to correct that impression -- that a guy like me, who often has a beer or glass of wine with dinner, and likes a nice cuppa in the morning -- is boosting my risk of cancer of the esophagus, one of the deadliest of all forms of cancer.

If you're in the same boat, allow me to put your mind at ease.  What the research actually found was that people who drink "burning hot" beverages of any kind, not just tea, run the risk of esophageal cancer, especially when coupled with the esophageal damage caused by two other bad habits, smoking and heavy drinking.  It's been known for years that smoking and heavy alcohol use are the prime risk factors in what's called "Barrett's esophagus," where the esophagus becomes scarred and partially replaced by tissue similar to the stomach lining -- a condition that often presages cancer.  (Other risk factors are severe untreated or intractable reflux disorder, and being overweight.)  So it's unsurprising that if you already have predisposed yourself to esophageal damage by other habits, you're only going to make it worse by gulping down boiling hot liquids.

But that's not what the article implies.  What the article implies is that it's the tea that's the problem.  Which, of course, is much more likely to make people click on the link and give the website ad revenue than if they'd portrayed the findings correctly.

Anyhow.  I know I'm accomplishing nothing by bitching about this (what my dad used to call, appropriately enough, "a fart in a windstorm").  But it's really maddening.  If I can reach a few people, and encourage you to find the original research before you buy what the clickbait headline is telling you, that'll be enough for me.

Now, if y'all will excuse me, I'm gonna have a cup of tea.

Bubble physics

I'm going to ask you for a favor, and yes, this applies even to anyone reading this who is a non-science type: before you post and/or comment excitedly upon the latest popular-media article about some scientific research, go to the original research and see if it's really what the popular media are claiming it is.

I mean, at least read the abstract.  That's often enough to convince yourself that no, NASA hasn't developed warp drive yet; no, almost no reputable astronomers think that the mysterious light-intensity wobble from "Tabby's Star" is due to an alien megastructure; and no, the Yellowstone Supervolcano is not going to have a cataclysmic eruption soon (unless you consider "some time in the next 100,000 years" soon).

All, by the way, claims that I've seen posted on social media in the last month.

The latest example of this, however, comes from some research published a couple of months ago by physicists at the University of Rochester, in which they are said to have "created a device that generates 'negative mass.'"

This resulted in a number of near-hysterical articles about antigravity and "unknown forces in nature" and "rewriting everything we know about physics."

To which I respond: just hang on a minute.

Let's go to the original paper itself, which has the remarkably unsexy title, "Anomalous Dispersion of Microcavity Trion-Polaritons," which appeared in Nature: Physics.  Here's the abstract:

The strong coupling of excitons to optical cavities has provided new insights into cavity quantum electrodynamics as well as opportunities to engineer nanoscale light–matter interactions.  Here we study the interaction between out-of-equilibrium cavity photons and both neutral and negatively charged excitons, by embedding a single layer of the atomically thin semiconductor molybdenum diselenide in a monolithic optical cavity based on distributed Bragg reflectors.  The interactions lead to multiple cavity polariton resonances and anomalous band inversion for the lower, trion-derived, polariton branch—the central result of the present work.  Our theoretical analysis reveals that many-body effects in an out-of-equilibrium setting result in an effective level attraction between the exciton-polariton and trion-polariton accounting for the experimentally observed inverted trion-polariton dispersion.  Our results suggest a pathway for studying interesting regimes in quantum many-body physics yielding possible new phases of quantum matter as well as fresh possibilities for polaritonic device architectures.

Got all that?  Frankly no, neither did I, and I have a degree in physics.  But if you go through it carefully, and look up a few terms like "exciton" and "polariton" and "optical cavity," you find out that the researchers didn't invent a new sort of matter with "negative mass," as at least some of the popular-media summaries claimed.

It turns out that an "exciton" is related to a concept I ran into when I was taking a course in electromagnetism as an undergraduate; that you can treat the absence of an electron -- a "hole" -- as an actual particle, map how it moves, interacts, and affects other electrons or holes in the vicinity.  No physicist claims that these holes are actual things; simply that you can model how electrically-charged particles act by treating them as if they were.

In that sense, they're a bit like bubbles rising in water.  You can model the behavior of bubbles as if they are made of some exotic negative-mass object being repelled by gravity, and come up with completely consistent physics about their behavior; that doesn't mean they actually have negative mass.

They simply behave as if they did, so it's convenient to look at them that way.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The problem, of course, is that this is not nearly as thrilling to the general public as saying that bubbles represent some strange new form of matter that experiences antigravity and will lead to Star Trek-style transporters and faster-than-light travel.  And since clicks and/or subscriptions are what keep popular media in business, you can be certain that they're going to characterize it whatever way it takes to make you click the link.  The vast majority of media outlets honestly don't give a damn what happens after that, up to and including whether you actually end up understanding what you read.

So please, please go to the source.  Look, it's not like I'm perfect in this regard myself all the time.  I get carried away by wishful thinking and confirmation bias, especially with regard to warp drive, which I really really REALLY want to be real.  But try to hold your preconceived notions in abeyance for at least as long as it takes to find the original research and see if what's being claimed is what the scientists actually said.

Then, and only then, decide whether you want to share the link.

My guess is that this would cut the amount of spurious media sharing by about 90%.  Of course, it's not like I've done any research on this myself.  Only a supposition based on no particular empirical evidence.

I.e.  I pulled the 90% figure out of my ass.

So please don't quote me on that.

Stopping the rumor machine

Twenty-six people are dead in yet another mass shooting, this one in a Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, a small community 21 miles from San Antonio, Texas.

The killer, Devin Patrick Kelley, died near the scene of the crime.  He had been fired upon by a local resident as he fled the church, and was later found in his car, dead of a gunshot wound.  It is at present undetermined if the bullet that killed him came from the resident's gun, or if it was a self-inflicted wound.

Devin Patrick Kelley

Wiser heads than mine have already taken up the issue of stricter gun control, especially in cases like Kelley's.  Kelley was court martialled in 2012 for an assault on his wife and child, spent a year in prison, and was dishonorably discharged.  All I will say is that I find it a little hard to defend an assault rifle being in the hands of a man who had been convicted of... assault.

I also have to throw out there that the whole "thoughts and prayers" thing is getting a little old.  If thoughts and prayers worked, you'd think the attack wouldn't have happened in the first place, given that the victims were in a freakin' church when it occurred.

But that's not why I'm writing about Kelley and the Sutherland Springs attack.  What I'd like to address here is how, within twelve hours of the attack, there was an immediate attempt by damn near everybody to link Kelley to a variety of groups, in each case to conform to the claimant's personal bias about how the world works.

Here are just a few of the ones I've run into:

• Someone made a fake Facebook page for Kelley in which there was a photograph of his weapon, a Ruger AR-556, with the caption, "She's a bad bitch."
• Far-right-wing activists Mike Cernovich and Alex Jones immediately started broadcasting the claim that Kelley was a member of Antifa.  This was then picked up by various questionable "news" sources, including YourNewsWire.com, which trumpeted the headline, "Texas Church Shooter Was Antifa Member Who Vowed to Start Civil War."
• Often using the Alex Jones article as evidence, Twitter erupted Sunday night with a flurry of claims that Kelley was a Democrat frustrated by Donald Trump's presidential win, and was determined to visit revenge on a bunch of god-fearing Republicans.
• An entirely different bunch of folks on Twitter started the story that Kelley was actually a Muslim convert named Samir al-Hajeeda.  Coincidentally, Samir al-Hajeeda was blamed by many of these same people for the Las Vegas shootings a month ago.  It's a little hard to fathom how anyone could believe that, given the fact that both gunmen died at the scene of the crime.
• Not to be outdone, the website Freedum Junkshun claimed that Kelley was an "avid atheist" named Raymond Peter Littlebury, who was "on the payroll of the DNC."

And so on and so forth.

Look, I've made the point before.  You can't stop this kind of thing from zinging at light speed around the interwebz.  Fake news agencies gonna fake news, crazies gonna craze, you know?  Some of these sources were obviously pseudo-satirical clickbait right from the get-go.  I mean, did anyone even look at the name of the site Freedum Junkshun and wonder why they spelled it that way?

And for heaven's sake, Mike Cernovich and Alex Jones?  At this point, if Cernovich and Jones said the grass was green, I'd want an independent source to corroborate the claim.

So it's not the existence of these ridiculous claims I want to address.  It's the people who hear them and unquestioningly believe them.

I know it's easy to fall into the confirmation bias trap -- accepting a claim because it's in line with what you already believed, be it that all conservatives are violent gun nuts, all liberals scheming slimeballs, all Muslims potential suicide bombers, all religious people starry-eyed fanatics, all atheists amoral agents of Satan himself.  It takes work to counter our tendency to swallow whole any evidence of what we already believed.

But you know what?  You have to do it.  Because otherwise you become prey to the aforementioned crazies and promoters of fake news clickbait.  If you don't corroborate what you post, you're not supporting your beliefs; you're playing right into the hands of people who are trying to use your singleminded adherence to your sense of correctness to achieve their own ends.

At the time of this writing, we know next to nothing about Devin Patrick Kelley other than his military record and jail time.  We don't know which, if any, political affiliation he had, whether or not he was religious, whether he was an activist or simply someone who wanted to kill people.  So all of this speculation, all of these specious claims, are entirely vacuous.

Presumably at some point we'll know more about Kelley.  At the moment, we don't.

So please please please stop auto-posting these stories.  At the very least, cross-check what you post against other sources, and check out a few sources from different viewpoints.  (Of course if you cross-check Breitbart against Fox News, or Raw Story against ThinkProgress, you're gonna get the same answer.  That's not cross-checking, that's slamming the door on the echo chamber.)

Otherwise you are not only falling for nonsense, you are directly contributing to the divisiveness that is currently ripping our nation apart.

As the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman put it: "You must be careful not to believe something simply because you want it to be true.  Nobody can fool you as easily as you can fool yourself."

Crash course

As if we needed one, there's another clickbait sort-of-sciencey-or-something site that I should warn you about.

It's called the Mother Nature Network, and it bills itself as follows:

MNN is designed for people who want to make the world a better place.  Its content is engaging, non-political, and easy-to-understand and goes well beyond traditional "green" issues — encompassing topics that include family, health, home, travel, food, and community involvement. It has been labeled “The Green CNN” by Time, “The USA Today of Sustainability” by Fast Company, “Green Machine” by Associated Press, and “one of the hottest web properties out there” by NBC News; highlighted on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon; selected “Best Idea” at Fortune Magazine’s Green Summit; and chosen as a “Top Pick” by Newsweek.

Well, that may be, but it makes me wonder about how Time et al. are deciding who to laud.  MNN is even a cut below I Fucking Love Science as regards to sensationalized headlines, shallow analysis of actual science stories, and the usual smattering of "the world of the bizarre" kind of articles (as an example, on of their "trending stories" is "Weird Things We Stuck In Our Bodies in 2016").

My objection, though, is not that there's another clickbaity website that exists solely to grab ad revenue -- heaven knows those are a dime a dozen, and include sites that claim to be legitimate media, such as The Daily Mail Fail.  My main beef with these places is the misrepresentation of science.  Because, heaven also knows that given the general low comprehension of actual science by the voting public, we do not need media making it worse.

As an example, check out their story from this past Wednesday called "A Whole Other Star Is On a Crash Course With Our Solar System" by Bryan Nelson.  Well, don't actually check it out unless you want them to get another click's worth of advertising money.  But let me tell you the gist, and save you the moral dilemma.

First, what the hell is with the headline?  Is Bryan Nelson in third grade?  "A Whole Other Star?"  So, it's not Part of Another Star?  Or the Whole Same Star As Before?

But we'll let that pass.  The topic does sound alarming, doesn't it?  But when you read the text, you find that we've got a while to prepare:

[I]n around 1.35 million years, that's close to what might happen.  Scientists have been plotting the course of a rogue star, Gliese 710, which currently sits in the constellation of Serpens some 64 light years from Earth.  Turns out, it's headed straight for us.

And "close to what might happen?"  What the fuck does that even mean?  Turns out Bryan Nelson isn't really sure either:

The star isn't scheduled to collide directly with Earth, but it will be passing through our solar system's Oort Cloud, a shell of countless comets and other bodies in the outer reaches of the Sun's gravitational influence.  You might think that's a safe distance, but the star is likely to slingshot comets all over the solar system, and one of those could very well have our name on it.

So a star is going to be in our general vicinity over a million years from now, and it might disturb some comets, which are likely to get flung in toward the inner Solar System, and one of them might hit the Earth.  Or not.

But that's not all:

Scientists calculated that Gliese 710 is the star that's expected to come closest to us within the next 10 million years (which is as far ahead as scientists could project), but it's not the only close encounter.  As many as 14 other stars could come within 3 light-years distance in the next few million years, and there are numerous fainter, red dwarf stars with unknown trajectories that could be headed our way too.

So we shouldn't just worry about Gliese 710, we should also worry about other stars which might or might not come close to the Solar System in the next few million years, not to mention other stars which might or might not exist and could do indescribably bad things if they do.

"Hoag's Object" -- the remnants of a collision between two galaxies [image courtesy of NASA]

I decided to do a little research, and find out where all this stuff had come from.  I found a paper in Astronomy Letters from 2010 (i.e., actual research and not hyped silliness) called "Searching for Stars Closely Encountering the Solar System" by Vladimir V. Bobylev, and it included the following:

Based on a new version of the Hipparcos catalog and currently available radial velocity data, we have searched for stars that either have encountered or will encounter the solar neighborhood within less than 3 pc in the time interval from −2 Myr to +2 Myr. Nine new candidates within 30 pc of the Sun have been found. To construct the stellar orbits relative to the solar orbit, we have used the epicyclic approximation. We show that, given the errors in the observational data, the probability that the well-known star HIP 89 825 (GL 710) encountering with the Sun most closely falls into the Oort cloud is 0.86 in the time interval 1.45 ± 0.06 Myr. This star also has a nonzero probability, 1 × 10−4, of falling into the region d < 1000 AU, where its influence on Kuiper Belt objects becomes possible.

Did you catch that?  The "nonzero probability" of Gliese 710 influencing the Kuiper Belt/Oort Cloud comets is 1 × 10−4.

For you non-math-types, that's one in ten thousand.

If you needed any more indication that the Mother Nature Network article was sensationalized clickbait, there you have it.

So add that one to our list of suspect media sources, along with the usuals -- Natural News, InfoWars, Mercola, Breitbart, Before It's News, and so on.  My general advice is not to go there at all.  But if you disregard this, whatever you do, don't click on "Weird Things We Stuck In Our Bodies in 2016."  You have been warned.

Political astrology

There is one word that makes me see red, skepticism-wise, and that word is "clickbait."

Clickbait articles, sensationalized bullshit that has as its only point inducing gullible people to click on links and therefore generate advertising revenue, are bad enough from an ethical standpoint.  But what really torques me about this sort of thing is the fact that many of the clickers end up believing what they read, regardless of the reliability of the source.  The strategy started with such dubious sites as The Weekly World News and Above Top Secret, but has moved its way into more mainstream media (The Daily Mail has adopted this approach to the extent that most of us refer to it as The Daily Fail).  And now, it has moved all the way up to the media source on which I found a clickbait article yesterday...

... none other than CNN.

The article in question, which required the collaboration of no less than three authors -- Pamela Boykoff, Alexandra Field, and Jason Kwok -- is entitled, "2016 Election: Which Candidate Will Triumph in the Year of the Monkey?"  And it is about -- yes -- using feng shui and Chinese astrology to predict who's going to win in November.

[image courtesy of photographer Jakub Hałun and the Wikimedia Commons]

The worst part about this is that it's not even in some kind of "Weird Stuff" category of CNN's webpage.  It's filed squarely under CNN Politics.  Let me be clear about this: this is not politics.  This is pseudoscientific nonsense.  Let me give you a taste of what's on it, so you don't have to click on the link and give them ad money yourself:

With the Year of the Monkey and the New Hampshire primary upon us, CNN asked Hong Kong fortune teller Priscilla Lam to divine the fates of the candidates battling it out for the U.S. presidency. 

A practitioner of feng shui, the ancient Chinese system of summoning good luck, she combined the art of face reading with analysis of the candidates' birthdays and current life cycles according to the Chinese Zodiac. 

She says the new lunar year will fuel good fortune for "earth dog" Donald Trump, while also lighting a fire under Hillary Clinton. 

Bernie Sanders' missing metal is a problem with older voters and the fighting elements of fire, and water might just leave Marco Rubio all wet.  And don't ask about Ted Cruz's face reading. 

Lam says she is "about 80%" confident in her predictions for the 2016 election. Those sound like pretty good odds.

So, yeah.  That's the level of political reporting we're seeing.  Trump's going to do well because he's an "earth dog."  Hillary Clinton's on fire.

And trust me, I don't even want to think about Ted Cruz's face, much less read it.

If we further peruse the article, we find out that Donald Trump has "a lot of sunshine in his favor."  that Hillary Clinton "has flexible lips," that Marco Rubio's "nose is okay -- it means management skill or power," and that Ted Cruz is in trouble because "in his birthday there is no wood... if you burn the wood, the fire can come up."

Whatever the fuck that means.

And the whole time I'm looking at this, I'm thinking, "how the hell is this news?"

The answer, of course, is that it isn't.  This is clickbait.  But the problem is, seeing such nonsense on a an internationally-known news media source gives it a veneer of authority, and reinforces the belief people have in such pseudoscientific claptrap.

So I'm really not able to laugh this sort of thing off.  I spend enough time, as a high school science teacher, trying to instill in students a good understanding of how the universe works, along with some skills regarding telling truth from falsehood.  Having something like this in mainstream media just makes my job that much harder, something I very much don't need.  Fighting the creationists and the climate-change deniers is bad enough; I really don't want to have to do battle with the Chinese astrologers as well.