Winged Chupacabras and naked Sasquatches

Here at Worldwide Wacko Watch, we're keeping our eyes on two stories that will be of interest to cryptozoology buffs.

First, from Chicxulub Puerto, in the state of Yucatán, Mexico, there are reports of an "unknown big, black, ugly, and winged creature" that is terrorizing innocent citizens.

The Yucatán Times reports that a gas station worker named Alejandra was attacked last week, but that she's not the only one.  The same creature has been seen in the middle of the town, and Alejandra's coworker Julio has reported that he's heard strange whistling noises coming from the lagoon.

"All this information combined with the fact that many domestic animals have been found dead and dismembered lately in Chicxulub and surrounding areas, are generating the rumor that the 'Chupacabras' might be on the loose in this part of the State of Yucatán," said the writer for the Times. 

Admit it.  You knew it'd be Chupacabras.

This one doesn't have wings.  Maybe it's a different species of Chupacabra.

So it seems like once again we're confronted with a mystery beast who has been seen only by a couple of people, plus reports of noises that could have any number of explanations, plus some animal deaths that could be from a variety of causes.  Myself, I don't think this amounts to much, but then, I have to admit that it takes a lot to convince me.

Apparently, it was also a considerable task to convince a Washington County, Oregon man that he wasn't a Sasquatch.

KOMO News reports that 58-year-old Jeff McDonald, of Banks, Oregon, was out hunting last Thursday, when he was accosted by a naked man who proceeded to hit McDonald with a rock.

When McDonald, predictably, objected to this, the man, who has been identified as 20-year-old Linus Norgren, also of Banks, started yelling that he was the last of a long line of Sasquatches.

Okay, that explains your behavior entirely, Mr. Norgren.

An Oregonian Not-squatch

So anyway, McDonald fought off the rampaging non-Bigfoot bravely, despite the fact that Norgren continued to pelt rocks at him, and at one point, tried to strangle McDonald with a piece of clothing.  McDonald eventually triumphed, although he suffered broken fingers, bruises, and an eye injury (happily, he's expected to make a full recovery).  Once Norgren was subdued, McDonald held him at bay with his hunting rifle and blew a whistle until deputies arrived.

Norgren is now being held on charges of strangulation, assault, and menacing, with the bail set at $250,000.  Apparently the sheriff's office has looked into his antecedents, and found that he's not a Sasquatch at all, but the son of a "well-known mushroom picker."

So that clears that up, and perhaps explains Norgren's bizarre behavior.

And that's our news from the cryptozoological world,  unless you count the fact that Melba Ketchum is still at it, trying to convince the world that her Sasquatch Genome Project is producing valid science.  Her latest attempt garnered her an interview on that stalwart bastion of support for scientific research...

...Fox News.

I'm not making this up.  You should check it out.  Fox News takes every opportunity to claim that intelligent design is real and climate change is false, and then interviews a Sasquatch researcher whose results have been discredited at every turn.

Which, now that I think of it, makes some sense, doesn't it?

Moon tracks

My friend and fellow blogger Andrew Butters (of the wonderful blog Potato Chip Math, which you should all check out) recently sent me a couple of links that are interesting by virtue of what they almost certainly won't accomplish.

Jesus Diaz, writing for Gizmodo, tells about a question he asked to Grey Hautaluoma, of the NASA Department of Public Affairs.  Diaz asked if the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was going to be taking photographs of the lunar landing sites.  Hautaluoma responded, "Yes, it will. We don't have a timeline yet for viewing the Apollo sites, but it will be in the near future."

And Diaz, in his Gizmodo piece, said, "Suck it up, conspiracy theorists, because soon your cuckoo stories about the US simulating the Moon landings will be over forever."

And sure enough, eventually the LRO did get photographs sharp enough to do that.  Here is one:

 The lines are the paths of the LRV (the "Moon Buggy") and the paths of footprints of the astronauts!

The problem is, there is no way this is going to silence the conspiracy theorists.  Nothing will.

There is a saying that is widely used amongst skeptics, that "you can't logic your way out of a position that you didn't logic your way into."  Now, let me be up front that I don't think that's always true.  Logic, and inductive reasoning, are marvelous ways to bootstrap yourself up out of error, and none of us came into this world pre-fitted with a logical view of the world.  Erroneous ideas, after all, are easy to come by -- our perceptual apparatus is notorious for getting it wrong, and between that and wishful thinking out of fear or desire, it's no wonder we sometimes don't see the world as it is.

But the aforementioned cliché does get it right in one sense; if on some level you don't buy logic and evidence as the sine qua non of understanding, then you and I aren't even speaking the same language.  It's why it is generally futile to argue with the devoutly religious.  Faith is, at its heart, not a logical process.  We're not accepting the same basis for how you "know" something, and pretty quickly the argument devolves into either pointless bickering or "well, you can believe what you like, of course."

And the same is true of conspiracy theorists.  Theirs is a different non-logical basis for understanding, but as with the devoutly religious, it has little to nothing to do with evidence.  The foundational idea for the conspiracy theorists is that there is a giant disinformation campaign on the part of Someone (the government, the Illuminati, the Reptilians, the Russians, the Muslims, the Vatican, the Jews -- or some combination thereof).  Because of that, you can't trust anything that comes from them or from anyone in cahoots with them (which, after all, could be anyone).

After that, there is nothing you can do.  Nothing will ever convince them, because any evidence you bring out -- such as the above photograph of the Moon's surface -- will be judged as altered, Photoshopped, faked.  If you claim that you've analyzed the photograph and it shows no signs of having been doctored, the response is, "They're a pretty clever bunch, those Conspirators."  If you insist, you're considered a dupe or a pawn.  If you really insist, you must be... one of them.

So with conspiracy theorists as with the Borg, Resistance Is Futile.  That's why conspiracy theorists are the only group of people I enjoy arguing with less than I enjoy arguing with Young-Earth Creationists.  The creationists are at least demonstrably wrong.

With the conspiracy theorists, you can't demonstrate anything.

So the LRO photographs, unfortunately, haven't accomplished much, and the Moon-Landings-Were-Faked crowd is still going strong.  I continue to hope that one day they'll give it up and admit their mistakes, but the only way that will happen is if they change their criterion for belief to "whatever the evidence supports."

It could happen, but I'm not holding my breath.

Marked by fate

I'd really like to understand better what drives people to embrace divination.

Well, not why, precisely.  To some extent, I get why.  People are anxious about the future; they want to know what is in store for them.  They want to understand their family members, lovers, friends, and themselves better.  I can certainly empathize with the desire to get information about matters that are hidden or inaccessible or mysterious.

What I don't get is how people can actually think that it works.  I mean, take the most common divination tool -- astrology.  Whenever I hear someone try to explain how astrology works, often using quasi-scientific terminology, I can't help but laugh at how ridiculous it all sounds.  Astrology, Tarot, palmistry, the I Ching, and more obscure forms -- casting runes, looking at the entrails of slaughtered animals, throwing down handfuls of bones or sticks and reading the patterns -- none of them have ever seemed to me to have the slightest connection with reality.  All rely on a combination of wishful thinking, confirmation bias, and dart-thrower's bias for their (seeming) successes.

Today, however, I ran into one I'd never heard of before.  Called Tung Shing (or Tung Shu), it's a divination method that tells your future based on the position of moles on your face.

Myself, I just thought that moles were little unsightly blobs of melanin, harmless at best and harbingers of skin cancer at worst.  But little did I know that there's a whole school of divination that determines your fate based upon your particular collection of birthmarks.

For example, a mole at position #4 (low center on the forehead) tells you the following:

You are an impulsive person, often acting with a flamboyance that gives you charisma and a sparkling personality, but you can be difficult when there are too many opinions. You tend to be rather argumentative, but never to the point of holding grudges. This mole tends to give you an explosive temper and should you decide to remove it, you will find yourself becoming calmer and more at peace with the world.

So not only do the moles tell you about your personality -- but unlike other forecasts of your fate, this one is something you can change with a half-hour visit to the dermatologist.  Reminds me of the line from the wonderful Laurie Anderson song, "The Monkey's Paw:"  "Oh, I went into the Body Shop, and I said to the guy, 'I want stereo F/M, and stars on my teeth; and take this mole off my back, and put it on my cheek!  And while you're at it, why don't you give me some of those high-heel feet."

Little did Laurie imagine that by doing that, she'd be adding a spot at position #24, which would change her as follows:

You will achieve fame and fortune in your young age and you are advised to use this period to safeguard your old age, as people with moles here tend to have a harder life as they get older.

So that sounds pretty good. 

And of course, I'm sure you're all wondering about where I fit in with all of this.  I have a mole underneath my right eyebrow, at position #7.  So let's check the Tung Sheng:

Moles under the eyebrows indicate arguments within the extended family that cause you grief and unhappiness.  This will affect your work and livelihood.  It is advisable to settle any differences you have with your relatives if you want peace of mind to move ahead.

Well, hell.  Doesn't that just figure.

Actually, I'm not really worried.  For one thing, I get along with my extended family pretty well, at least the ones who don't mind my eccentricities.  For another, I'm of the general opinion that divination is nonsense.  However nice it would be to get a bead on the future from cards or bones or lines on our palms or moles on our faces, any "information" we'd get that way that wasn't simply wrong would be so sketchy and vague as to be useless.   You'll find out about the future soon enough anyway -- you'll just have to travel into it at a rate of one minute per minute, like everyone else.

Allegedly, the Tung Shing also tells you how to find out the weight of your soul, although I haven't been able to find out any details of how it's done.  But regardless, that's just cool.  I wonder, do all souls weigh the same?  Is having a big soul genetic, kind of like the big-nose gene that seems to run in my family?  Or do devout people have more massive souls?

If that's true, we might need a pretty sensitive scale to measure mine.

The problem with Michele

Today I'm going to ask two questions that are probably going to rub some people the wrong way:

1)  Does there come a time when a political figure's statements become so completely loony that they should be removed from public office?
and
2)  Is there a point where "being religious" crosses the line into being a mental illness?

If the answer to both of those is "yes," then it seems like Michele Bachmann may be the index case.

(Photograph courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons and photographer Gage Skidmore)

She's already distinguished herself by making statements that are completely batshit crazy, to wit:

About President Obama:  "He has a perpetual magic wand and nobody's given him a spanking yet and taken it out of his hand."

About natural disasters:  "I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?'"

About the men who framed the Constitution:  "We also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States."

About gay rights:  "And what a bizarre time we're in, when a judge will say to little children that you can't say the pledge of allegiance, but you must learn that homosexuality is normal and you should try it."

On climate change:  "[Pelosi] is committed to her global warming fanaticism to the point where she has said she has even said she is trying to save the planet. We all know that someone did that 2,000 years ago."

On minimum wage:  "If we took away the minimum wage — if conceivably it was gone — we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level."

But now, she seems to have crossed some kind of threshold of insanity in a recent interview on the Christian radio show Understanding the Times.  She implied that President Obama is Muslim (he isn't), and that he's working hand-in-glove with Al Qaeda in Syria (he isn't), but it only got worse from there.  Here's the relevant quote:

This happened and as of today the United States is willingly, knowingly, intentionally sending arms to terrorists.  Now what this says to me, I’m a believer in Jesus Christ, as I look at the End Times scripture, this says to me that the leaf is on the fig tree and we are to understand the signs of the times, which is your ministry, we are to understand where we are in God’s End Times history.

Rather than seeing this as a negative, we need to rejoice, Maranatha Come Lord Jesus, His day is at hand.  When we see up is down and right is called wrong, when this is happening, we were told this; these days would be as the days of Noah.

I... okay.  What?

I'll say, as I've said before, that I have no issue with people believing what they like, as long as they don't try to push their beliefs on others, or decide that it's okay to lop folks' heads off with a machete if they disagree.  But... this woman is an elected official.  She helps to frame policy.  She is speaking publicly, and influencing people.  For cryin' in the sink, she is on the House Intelligence Committee, which should somehow have made it into Alanis Morissette's song about irony.

And there she still sits, babbling on about leaves on fig trees and End Time Prophecies and the days being like the days of Noah (not to mention basically making up her "facts" as she goes along; I swear, if the woman said the sky was blue, the probability of it being some other color is nearly 100%).  A lot of her detractors just laugh -- there are whole websites dedicated to "crazy things Michele Bachmann has said."  But at some point, don't we have to say, "Okay, time to step down and get some psychological evaluation?

Worst of all, she is going to other countries, on the public dime, and making idiotic statements that should embarrass every American -- such as her recent trip to Egypt, with fellow raving wingnut Louie Gohmert, where in a speech that should go down in the annals of condescension, she said, "We have seen the threat that the Muslim Brotherhood has posed here for the people in Egypt.  We have seen the threat that the Muslim Brotherhood has posed around the world.   We stand against this great evil.  We are not for them.  We remember who caused 9/11 in America.  We remember who it was that killed three thousand brave Americans.  We have not forgotten."

Allow me to point out that 9/11 was perpetrated by Saudi nationals who had been living in Afghanistan.  But one Scary Mooslim is pretty much like any other Scary Mooslim, right, Michele?

Now, I'm the first to admit I'm no expert in politics.  It's why I tend to stay out of political discussions entirely, except where they cross into areas I do know something about (such as evolutionary biology).  But we seem to have here an example of someone who has so clearly lost whatever grip on reality she ever had that she is unfit for public office.

I know it can't be easy to remove someone from an elected position, especially since she hasn't done anything explicitly wrong except for being a complete wackmobile.  And the good news is that I learned on her website that she won't be seeking reelection.  But heaven help us, that leaves another year's worth of damage to our global reputation that she can potentially do.

Makes you almost pine for the days of Ronald Reagan, doesn't it?

In vino veritas

In some ways, it's no wonder that people these days distrust everything coming out of the media.

Look, for example, at the whole thing about "antioxidants."  To a lot of folks who are "natural medicines" aficionados, antioxidants seem like the next best thing to an immortality pill.  Consider some of the claims made about resveratrol, an antioxidant that occurs naturally in grape skins (and therefore in red wine).

From Fit Day:

The... health benefits from drinking wine have been proven to be from poly-phenolic flavonoids, which are better known as antioxidants. These antioxidants are found in grapes that are used in wine. More antioxidants exist in red wines than in white wines because grape skins, which are rich in antioxidants, are included in fermentation in red wines. The antioxidants that are most active in wine are resveratrol, quercetin, and the catechins.

These antioxidants neutralize harmful free radicals in your body, which can cause certain types of cancer, heart disease, stroke, immune dysfunction, and degenerative disorders such as dementia and Alzheimer's disease. Harmful free radicals are everywhere in our environment, but mostly caused by exposure to pollution, chemicals, radiation, pesticides, alcohol, unhealthy food, and even sunshine.

From WebMD:

A new study shows an antioxidant found in red wine destroys cancer cells from the inside and enhances the effectiveness of radiation and chemotherapy cancer treatments.

Researchers say the antioxidant found in grape skins, known as resveratrol, appears to work by targeting the cancer cell's energy source from within and crippling it. When combined with radiation, treatment with resveratrol prior to radiation also induced cell death, an important goal of cancer treatment.

From Wine Folly:

While your health-freak friends spend hundreds of dollars on weird miracle fruit juices, you can sit back and relax. As it happens, your red wine habit might just be the key to staying young longer.

The health benefits of red wine are greater than you might think. Besides having antioxidants, fermented foods are good for digestion and alcohol itself has also shown some surprising traits over long-term moderate use. Discover the health benefits of red wine and how much you should consume to live well.

Sounds pretty good so far, doesn't it?  Far as we can tell, the key to a long, healthy life might be inside your next bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon.

Dig a little deeper, though, and you begin to find that despite the hoopla about antioxidants in general, and red wine in particular, there is far from consensus on the subject.

From a study at the University of Copenhagen:

Researchers from the University of Copenhagen followed 27 men with an average age of 65 who were in good health.  Over an eight-week period, all of the study’s participants performed high-intensity exercises, but half received 250 milligrams of resveratrol each day, while the other half received a placebo.

For the men taking resveratrol supplements, it seemed as though the benefits they received from exercising had been reduced.

"We found that exercise training was highly effective in improving cardiovascular health parameters, but resveratrol supplementation attenuated the positive effects of training on several parameters, including blood pressure, plasma lipid concentrations and maximal oxygen uptake," said Lasse Gliemann, a researcher who worked on the study.

From an article by Harriet Hall, in the online magazine Skeptic:

What happens when we ingest more antioxidants than we need? Is the excess excreted? Does it just sit there doing nothing? Does it do something we didn’t intend? It would be nice to know.

There is good evidence that people who eat more fruits and vegetables are less likely to develop cancer, heart disease, and other ailments—and are likely to live longer. It’s easy to assume that the antioxidants in fruits and vegetables are responsible, but that might not be true. Other components of these foods (such as flavonoids) or the mixture of components in the diet might be responsible. Or maybe people who eat less fruit and vegetables are eating more of something else that causes those diseases.

If antioxidants in food do reduce the incidence of those diseases, it’s only logical to think that antioxidant supplements would reduce the incidence even more. Unfortunately, controlled studies have consistently shown that they either have no effect or make things worse. It’s not the first time reality has rudely intervened to spoil a great idea. Study after study has shown no benefit of antioxidants for heart disease, cancer, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, or longevity.

Well, I don't know about you, but I find that kind of disappointing.  I love red wine (I think it's in my genes, being of French ancestry), and it was nice to think that I wasn't just drinking it because it tastes good, but that it was doing something positive for my health.  Now, it seems like I might have to reevaluate my rationalization for my oenophilia (and yes, that's the real word for the love of wine).

The bottom line is, it's hard to establish health claims with any certainty, simply because human health is so complicated.  We do need some antioxidants; they break down free radicals (also called reactive oxygen species), natural metabolic byproducts that, left unchecked, can damage tissue.  But we not only get antioxidants in our diet, we produce them -- three well-studied ones are peroxidase, catalase, and superoxide dismutase.  Even if we did get some benefit from the antioxidants in red wine, how would we tease that out from the effects of other antioxidant chemicals in our diet (such as vitamin C and lycopene), and the action of our own self-generated antioxidant enzymes?

Not a simple task.  Which is why, unfortunately, the media has tended to cling desperately to the simple answer -- "red wine is good for you."

But it's understandable why this is a popular position, isn't it?

The truth, as usual, is far more complex than that.  And despite my doubts that red wine has any significant benefits to my health -- which is my conclusion, after having read a good bit of the research on the topic -- I'm not going to give up drinking the stuff myself.  I'm of the opinion that a glass of bold California Syrah next to a rare t-bone steak is just about one of the finest things in the world.

Whether or not it extends my life.

Deep waters

There's something about water that is mysterious.  It comprises, by some estimates, an average of 65% of the mass of living tissue.  We're drawn to it, and not just because we need a steady source of it to remain alive.  Look at how attracted we are by lakes, rivers, and oceans; consider how much more people will pay for houses with a view of a body of water.

Even the chemists tell us that water is weird.  It has a number of odd properties, including high polarity, specific heat, and heat of vaporization, and is (to my knowledge) the only common substance that expands when it freezes.  (If it weren't for this peculiarity, ice would sink, and bodies of water would freeze from the bottom up -- so there would probably be a permanent ice layer at the bottom of the world's lakes and oceans.)

So I guess it's no surprise that the woo-woos love making claims about water.  It seems like lately I've been seeing more and more of them -- mostly advertisements for devices that allegedly make your water... better.  Or healthier.  Or more nutritious.  Or waterier.  It's hard to tell, sometimes, exactly what they are claiming, because they don't seem all that sure about it themselves.

Take the "MRET Water Activator," offered for sale by the Sound & Consciousness Institute of San Francisco.  Here's the claim:

The patented i-H2O Activation System is the most effective hydration technology available today. This easy-to-use wellness breakthrough allows you to transform ordinary, filtered water into ultra-hydrating, "living water" within 30 minutes. During the automated i-H2O activation process, the chaotic structure of water molecules is transformed into a single-file alignment, mimicking the body's own natural state of healthy cell water, thereby creating optimally energized, bio-available water.

I don't know about you, but the idea of my water molecules marching along in single file is a little... creepy.  But no worries, because they put you on notice right away that they haven't the vaguest idea what they're talking about:

This device infuses the Schumann Resonance (7.83 hertz) into the water. The Schumann Resonance is an electromagnetic frequency that resonates in our atmosphere between the earth and the ionosphere. It is triggered by lightning, which strikes every second somewhere on the planet. Based on the laws of brainwave entrainment, this frequency entrains every brain on the planet (including animals) into this state, which is right on the threshold of the brainwave states of theta and alpha. In fact, over millions of years, we have become addicted to this frequency and it is a core part of who we are as humans. However, the problem is that this frequency gets obscured in cities by all of the ambient electromagnetism. NASA has found that astronauts actually get sick when they go outside of the atmosphere and don't receive the frequency. Currently, all astronauts now receive this frequency electromagnetically.

What is it with these people and the Schumann Resonance?  They love the Schumann Resonance.  For those of you who aren't aficionados of obscure features of atmospheric physics, the Schumann Resonance is an ultra-low-frequency electromagnetic standing wave in the ionosphere.  Here's how Wikipedia describes it:

This global electromagnetic resonance phenomenon is named after physicist Winfried Otto Schumann who predicted it mathematically in 1952. Schumann resonances occur because the space between the surface of the Earth and the conductive ionosphere acts as a closed waveguide. The limited dimensions of the Earth cause this waveguide to act as a resonant cavity for electromagnetic waves in the ELF band. The cavity is naturally excited by electric currents in lightning. Schumann resonances are the principal background in the electromagnetic spectrum beginning at 3 Hz and extend to 60 Hz, and appear as distinct peaks at extremely low frequencies (ELF) around 7.8 (fundamental), 13.7, 19.6, 25.5, 31.4, 37.3 and 43.2 Hz.

It has nothing to do with brainwaves.  It is not "obscured in cities."  NASA doesn't "give this frequency to astronauts."  And we are not "addicted to this frequency."

Oh, and there's no way to "infuse a frequency" into water.

If you keep reading, though, the claims just get wilder and wilder.  "Activated water" that has been "infused with the Schumann resonance" has the property of "super liquidity."  It's "bio-available."  (As opposed to ordinary water, which is just "available.")  And then after telling you how all of this nonsense has to do with the special properties of water, they tell you you can use their device to "activate" other substances...

...such as oil.  Which last I checked doesn't have much water in it.

If "MRET Activated Water" isn't bad enough, just today I ran into another claim, this one that we should all be drinking water in its "fourth phase."  What the hell could that mean, you might ask?

Well, you all learned in grade school how substances usually exist in one of three states -- solid, liquid, and gas.  (As you'll see in a moment, that is a dramatic oversimplification.)  But these people claim that these phases somehow aren't good enough, that we should be drinking water in a "fourth phase:"

4th Phase is a liquid water purifier!

It removes and renders harmless an enormous number of contaminants that are commonly found in water, whether from natural or man-made sources. It then puts water into what scientists are now calling the fourth phase of water (a liquid that has a beautiful, crystalline structure to it).

Ah, yes, those conveniently anonymous "scientists," always ready and waiting to be trotted out to support whatever idiotic claim is being made.

So what, exactly, is this stuff?  Check out the FAQs, and you find out:

4th Phase is a concentrated, water based solution of ionic minerals. The mother concentrate is made by extracting mineral salts from the stone, biotite mica, which are then diluted in purified water, bottled and sold, primarily as a liquid based water purifier. The resulting minerals are in sulfate form rather than the chloride form that most companies offer (The requirement for sulfur is nearly twice the requirement for chloride in the human body).

This, they tell us, comes out of the work of Dr. Gerald Pollack of the University of Washington, who tells us the following:

Dr. Pollack asserts that water, in it’s [sic] maximum potential as a substance that enlivens and hydrates us, needs to be highly energized and it reaches this high energy state through a variety of ways, one of which is that it creates this liquid crystalline structure when it is in the presence of external energy sources like light (sunlight, for example.) When water is in this high energy state, it mimics the water that surrounds our cells and is found throughout the body, and it has many other properties as well.

I'm so relieved to hear that now the water in my body will have many other properties!  That sounds great!  I'd hate to think that my water had "few properties."

What's interesting is how these people are using half-truths, incorrectly interpreted research, and out-and-out falsehoods to sell a product.  For example, the whole premise of a "fourth phase" of water, a mystical and energized phase, ignores the fact that the chemists have known for decades that water can exist in at least eighteen different phases (fifteen solid phases, plus liquid, vapor, and supercritical fluid), depending on temperature and pressure:

And unfortunately for these claimants, here at sea-level atmospheric pressure and typical room temperature, we're stuck in one boring old phase: liquid.

Now, Dr. Pollack himself, as far as I have been able to find, seems to have some degree of credibility in his field, and has been the author of a good many peer-reviewed papers.  On the other hand, the fault may not lie entirely with the purveyors of "4th Phase" hijacking Pollack's work.  At least one of Pollack's colleagues, neurobiologist Alexander Stein, has given an evaluation of Pollack's research that is nothing short of scathing:

Dr. Pollack is an embarrassment to his field and his University. This book [Cells, Gels, and the Engines of Life] is a collection of old results (from as far back as 50 years ago) that puzzled the world's scientists at the time they were first published. There has been much progress in the intervening decades that Dr. Pollack would do well to read and understand. All of the ancient science upon which Pollack's argument depends has since been explained or refuted. People are entitled to write, or say, whatever they choose. However, that doesn't necessarily make it true. Before purchasing this book, people should browse Dr. Pollack's publication record. They should note that in those instances when his science has escaped the peer-review process, references to his ridiculous opinions about cell biology have been omitted. Prospective buyers should also note that this book was published using the private funds of Pollack's family, and not solicited or endorsed by any scientific organization. I fully support anyone who wishes to read this comedy of ignorance, provided they then turn the pages of a good cell biology textbook. This book may change the way you look at the world around you, but so will psychoactive drugs and head trauma. Pollack is a laughing-stock. He will tell you that he is a persecuted genius. It is important to remember, though, that sometimes people are laughed at because they are genuine fools.

Ouchie.  So suffices to note that Pollack himself may not exactly be the solidest foundation on which to rest your claim.

Now, I'm not a chemist, and I would be unqualified to comment upon Pollack's research into the properties of water; but I do teach biology, and I can say without particular fear of error that the claims of the "4th Phase" people with respect to the biological effects of this Magic Water are bogus.  The bottom line: save your money.  Plain old tap water (in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, at least) is safe, hydrates you just fine, and has the additional advantage of being cheap.

So, there you have it; yet another example of combining "a fool and his money are soon parted" and "there's a sucker born every minute."  Myself, I think you can solve the whole thing by switching to red wine.  Except... uh-oh...

Tomorrow: Do the antioxidants in red wine actually prevent cancer?  Or do people just like getting drunk?

Self-revelation through social media

There's a sense of being anonymous, or at least one step removed, on electronic media.  We post statuses, comments, and "tweets," and it feels very much like talking in an empty room -- that the likelihood of anyone hearing what we're saying, or that if they did hear, that they'd pay attention, or (especially) that we'd reveal something we didn't intend to, is slim.

Two recently released studies have shown that we are as transparent to others while online as we are in person -- perhaps more.

The first, done by H. Andrew Schwartz et al. of the University of Pennsylvania, is called "Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach."  In it, the researchers used computer software to analyze 700,000 words from the Facebook status updates of 75,000 volunteers, who also agreed to take a battery of personality tests.  The software then calculated word frequencies for all of the words in the statuses, and then matched up word frequencies with personality markers.  Here's a piece of what they concluded:

Our analyses shed new light on psychosocial processes yielding results that are face valid (e.g., subjects living in high elevations talk about the mountains), tie in with other research (e.g., neurotic people disproportionately use the phrase ‘sick of’ and the word ‘depressed’), suggest new hypotheses (e.g., an active life implies emotional stability), and give detailed insights (males use the possessive ‘my’ when mentioning their ‘wife’ or ‘girlfriend’ more often than females use ‘my’ with ‘husband’ or 'boyfriend’).

Which thus far is interesting but not particularly alarming.  What I found more curious, and perhaps troubling, came up when I saw how many times word frequency could be related to other factors -- age, gender, degree of extroversion, and so on.   The age breakdown, I thought, was particularly interesting.  The 13 to 18 crowd unsurprisingly had "school," "homework," and "tomorrow" as their most common words; the clear winner from 19 to 22 were the various tenses and forms of the word "fuck;" by 23 to 28, there was a shift to "work," "office," "wedding," and "beer."  (The absence of swear words in this age bracket is likely to reflect an awareness of how public Facebook is, and not wanting to get fired for posting something inadvisable online.)

Males of all ages have a great many macho words in their statuses, involving video games, movies, and sports.  Unsurprisingly, "fuck" makes a reappearance in the male statuses.  Women's statuses were almost stereotypically girly -- "shopping," "boyfriend," "love," "yummy," and "my hair" being some of the most common words.

While none of these were particularly surprising, I think this raises two questions -- one of them more serious than the other.  The less serious one is whether our online presence is more revealing who we'd like to be seen as than who we actually are -- after all, we create these statuses, so the macho masculine statuses and girly feminine ones are just projections, ghosts of real people that we've built and then put on public display.

A more serious concern is how this sort of thing could be turned against us.  Now, please don't think that I've suddenly turned conspiracy theorist; I'm not particularly worried that the government is going to start data mining my Facebook looking for some reason to lock me away.  But think of the usefulness of this to marketing firms, who are always looking for ways to hook into demographic information so that they can focus their ads better.

If we reveal who we are even by the word choice in our status updates, that certainly is going to be something that advertisers are going to use.

The second study used Twitter, and the author, Burr Settles, came up with an algorithm (again based on word use) to sort out "geek" tweets from "nerd" tweets.  As settles sees it:

In my mind, “geek” and “nerd” are related, but capture different dimensions of an intense dedication to a subject:

• geek - An enthusiast of a particular topic or field. Geeks are “collection” oriented, gathering facts and mementos related to their subject of interest. They are obsessed with the newest, coolest, trendiest things that their subject has to offer.
• nerd - A studious intellectual, although again of a particular topic or field. Nerds are “achievement” oriented, and focus their efforts on acquiring knowledge and skill over trivia and memorabilia.

Similar to the study by Schwartz et al., Settles tried to group words together that seemed to indicate something about the demographic that produced them -- resulting in a graph (you can take a look at it on the link posted above) that sorts our tweets out by character.

I see this one as a bit more lighthearted than the first study, but still, it says something very interesting; that we reveal ourselves online every time we post anything, whether we want to or not.

Of course, all of this made me go back and check my own status updates and tweets, just to see what I'd inadvertently told the world about myself.  Ignoring what most of my social media activity is about -- posting links to cool stuff -- I found, in the last couple of weeks, a status mourning the death of my 16-year-old cat, Puck; a status that described my elation at finding out that my high school creative writing teacher (who, amazingly, hasn't retired yet!) is teaching one of my novels in her English class this year;  and a status about how much I enjoyed getting to see Laurie Anderson in concert.  As far as tweets, I had to go a lot further back to hit one that wasn't just posting a link to something, but I did find one expressing frustration about the teacher evaluation scheme in New York State, and another one about the last day of school that used up a good many of the 140 character limit with the word "YIPPEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!"

My guess is that this trend of figuring out our demographic information from our electronic presence is only going to get more sophisticated.  Should we be worried?  My sense is probably not; just as with the conspiracy theorist's concern that the government is monitoring his whereabouts (and text messages and phone conversations), if they were doing this for everyone it would be such a mammoth amount of data that it would be impossible to manage.  At least for now, I think this sort of thing will only be of interest to marketing firms.

And it's not like they haven't already been doing this for years, starting out with targeting advertisements to particular demographics on television (compare the ads on daytime soap operas and the Syfy channel, if you want a particularly good example).  If you have a Facebook, check the ads along the sidebar -- no surprise that mine frequently have to do with travel, scuba diving, wine, and pets, is it?

So as long as we think before we post (which we should already be doing), this sort of thing may not make much difference, except in what sorts of things we're encouraged to purchase.  At least I hope so.  Last thing I want is the government keeping track of what concerts I go to.