Missing the target

While reading my latest blog post, my wife suddenly burst out laughing.  Turns out, she wasn't laughing at my scintillating wittiness, however -- she was laughing at the ads clipped onto my post by AdSense.

AdSense, and other targeted-advertisement software, tries to pick up on keywords in websites, and using those cues, to choose advertisements that are appropriate for the audience.  The ads on my Facebook page, for example, often have to do with scuba diving, travel, and music, three things I have identified as hobbies in my profile.  This time, however, AdSense sort of backfired.

Yesterday's post, you may remember, was on how the pseudoscience of astrology is a fine example of something called dart-thrower's bias.  And the ads?  Yes, you've guessed it.  My blog yesterday was full of ads for horoscopes ("Find your destiny in the stars!") and for equipment for darts players.

That's the problem with targeted-ad software; it only picks up on keywords, but is unable to tell the context, and (more importantly) if those keywords are being cast in a positive or a negative light.  The first time I noticed this phenomenon was after I wrote a fairly virulently anti-religious post, and for the next few days was inundated with ads recommending I be born again in Christ ("visit this website to find out how!").  At first, I thought that AdSense had a pro-Christian bent and was monitoring my posts, and sending me evangelical advertisements when I went too far off the deep end.  But no, it's just a function of how the software works.

You never know what the software will notice.  I made a passing mention of Geordi LaForge in a recent post, and the next day, there were ads for Star Trek memorabilia.  I titled a post about optical illusions "Your Lying Eyes" and got ads for classic rock recordings, including, of course, The Eagles.  One of the funnier misses was years ago, when my blog was hosted on a different site, and I wrote about the USA's penchant for aggressive posturing on the stage of worldwide politics.  The title of the post was "Tomcat Diplomacy."

For weeks afterwards, there were ads for subscriptions to cat care magazines and websites with humorous cat photographs.

Some of the ads, however, are just plain weird.  I'm not quite sure how to take the one I saw a while back which said, "You're Not Ugly, You're Just Fat," and had a link to a diet site.  I think it should be evident from my profile photo that although I may have many physical flaws, obesity isn't one of them.  For a while I was getting periodic advertisements whose headline said it was "for the discerning gay gentleman."  I'm not sure about the "discerning" part; and although I'm definitely male, the "gentleman" part may also be up for debate.  However, I can say with some assurance that I'm not gay (though, to quote Seinfeld, "not that there's anything wrong with that!").  I haven't seen that one in a while, so whatever odd keyword the software picked up that led it to conclude that I am gay appears to be gone.

Being that this is a blog that is, at its heart, devoted to science (although I must admit that my attention wanders to other subjects rather frequently), I thought it might be interesting to use the scientific method and run an experiment to see if we can mess around with the targeted-ad software.  If it works, it'll be sort of like a computerized game of free-association.  I'll throw a few keywords at it, and see what ads it generates.  Here goes:  "wine, beer, scotch, bourbon, rum, tequila."  "Weasel, wombat, aardvark, lemur, lemming, wildebeest."  "Crystals, auras, energy fields, telepathy, clairvoyance, ESP."

That should do it.  I predict that I should start seeing advertisements for websites detailing how you use the psychic healing power of the mind to cure alcoholic wildlife.  I'll keep you posted.

Stars, darts, and basketballs

For those of you who are still reeling from finding out that you are not the astrological sign you thought you were, take some comfort in a study by David McCandless.

McCandless, who evidently has the patience of a saint, analyzed 22,168 horoscopes.  His contention was that if there were anything to astrology, there should be a statistically significant difference between the content of horoscopes for the twelve (or thirteen, depending on who you believe) astrological signs.  Using computer software, he first filtered out common and relatively meaning-free words like "and" and "the," and then arranged the remaining words on a wheel-diagram.  The size of the word on the diagram represents its relative frequency.  Check it out here.

As you can see, there is no difference whatsoever between the different signs.  "Feel," "sure," "love," "keep," and "better," are the most common words on all of the signs.  In fact, McCandless has out-horoscoped the astrologers, and has come up with a generic, all-purpose horoscope that anyone, of any sign, could read every day, and accomplish much the same thing as the "real" ones:

"Whatever the situation or secret moment, enjoy everything a lot.  Feel able to absolutely care.  Expect nothing else.  Keep making love.  Family and friends matter.  The world is life, fun, and energy.  Maybe hard.  Or easy.  Taking exactly enough is best.  Help and talk to others.  Change your mind and a better mood comes along."


Wow... I feel so... enlightened.   This especially speaks to me, being that I was a Scorpio and now am a Virgo.

It puts me in mind of a now-famous demonstration James Randi did in a high school classroom.  (You can see a video of it here.)  He gave out horoscopes to the students, and told them that they were predictions based upon detailed information about the time and place of their birth.  Each student was given time to read the horoscopes, and then asked to grade them on a scale of one to five, the score being assigned based upon how accurate it was, how well it applied to each of them personally.

The results were amazing.  There was not a single student who gave their horoscope a grade of one or two; there was a single three; everyone else graded it at a four or five, with five being by far the most common score.  So on the face of it, it seems like astrology fared pretty well, in this experiment.

Until you find out that all of the horoscopes were identical.

Astrology relies on an observational phenomenon called dart-thrower's bias -- something to which we are all prone.  The name comes from a thought experiment; picture yourself in a pub, having a nice pint of Guinness with your friends, chatting about whatever.  In the corner is a dartboard, and several bar patrons, all strangers to you, are having a friendly game of darts.

The question is:  when do you notice the darts game?

The answer, of course, is:  when one of the players scores a bullseye.  Or, perhaps, misses the dartboard entirely and skewers the bartender in the forehead.  The point is, we have evolved to notice outliers -- data points that are extreme.  We tend to over count the hits (or wild misses), and simply ignore all of the average, background clutter.

This was brilliantly illustrated by an experiment performed some years ago, in which a large number of test subjects were asked to watch a video clip of a lone man shooting a basketball.  That was all it was; just a guy shooting baskets.  Sometimes he missed, sometimes he didn't.  The subjects didn't know what they'd be asked about afterwards -- they were just told to watch the clip carefully.

There was a single question after the video was shown:  what was the guy's hit rate?

The people who had made the clip had arranged it so that the guy had an exactly 50% hit rate -- not bad, for an amateur.  What blew away the researchers was that not a single person who watched the clip -- not one -- estimated his hit rate at under 50%.  Several went as high as 80%. 

The explanation is that we give more weight in our memory to the times that the ball went in than the times it missed.  The evolutionary reason for this is simple, and persuasive; if you are a proto-hominid on the African savanna, which is more dangerous -- to pay attention to a stimulus that may not be important (weighting the hits) or to ignore a stimulus that actually is important (weighting the misses)?  Clearly it's the latter, especially if the stimulus is the sound made by a hungry lion hiding in the grass.

We're programmed to notice the hits, even when they're not really very impressive.  Astrology, then, is one massive game of dart-thrower's bias.  But the fact that it has no basis whatsoever in science, or even logic, doesn't stop astrologers from fleecing the gullible public for millions of dollars annually.

Not that this will probably convince anyone, because belief in astrology also relies heavily on confirmation bias -- the acceptance of any evidence, however puny, in support of an idea you already believe to be true.  So I'm probably tilting at windmills, here.  So whatever it is that you end up believing about astrology, do take to heart David McCandless's advice:  Keep making love, and remember that family and friends matter.

Alien spotting

NASA's orbiting space telescope, Kepler, has just provided data that identified 54 planets in the "Goldilocks Zone" -- the distance from their parent sun that is "just right" for life, allowing for water to be in its liquid state.

This is certainly encouraging for exobiologists such as myself.  We've been waiting for years for this.  Up till now, exobiologists have been a little like the Camel Spotter in the Monty Python sketch, who's been watching for a year and has spotted "almost one" camel.  Now that we have conclusive evidence that small, rocky planets in stable orbits, a comfortable distance from their stars, are apparently rather common in the universe, it is only a matter of time before alien life is detected and we exobiologists can go off of our extended sabbaticals and actually have something to study.

That is, if alien life doesn't get here first.  *cue suspenseful music*

First, we have a report from Glasgow, Scotland on January 17, that an amateur astronomer named Paul Brown saw a UFO over the Parkhead Forge Shopping Center.

"It was heading east and at first I looked up and thought it was helicopter spotlight," he reported.  "It moved at similar speed as an emergency helicopter would if low in sky, but this was very high - as high as a jet.  I watched for the lights of plane or helicopter, but nothing. It continued to travel east, shimmering like a star in winter sky, a tangerine kind of glow, round-shaped."

Unfortunately, Mr. Brown had no camera handy, and is the only one who saw it, despite the fact that it was allegedly spotted at 8 PM over a shopping center in a large city.  So we apparently have to set that one aside on the basis of lack of evidence, and we hope that Mr. Brown won't take it amiss if we include a gentle suggestion that he lay off the single-malt whisky.

It's such a shame that 99% of UFO claims are made by lone individuals, and the evidence, if you can call it that, is usually no more than a single photograph or video clip of a bright light.  Wouldn't it be nice if just once, a UFO could be filmed from two different vantage points at once, which presumably would be much harder to hoax?

Funny you should ask.

Just last Saturday, a pulsating ball of light was filmed, from two different points in the city, hovering over the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.  (See the clip here.)  From the audio, apparently the people who made the videos were even of different nationalities.

Unfortunately, there are some discrepancies with this video that make me a little doubtful.  The major one is that the light from the object, which is clearly very intense, seems not to reflect from anything in the city -- including the gold-plated roof of the Al Aqsa Mosque over which the thing was supposedly hovering.  Another analysis, by Benjamin Radford of Discovery News, finds that using careful measurements of the image on the clip, the object itself would have to be fairly small - "definitely no bigger than a limousine, and probably a lot smaller," Radford said.  Which would make for a rather uncomfortable trip from the depths of interstellar space, unless our aliens are, like the G'Gugvuntts and Vl'hurgs in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, of a size that could be accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

Other analysts have found an anomalous amount of shudder in the second video, which is indicative of someone digitally altering the clip.  Also, given that Jerusalem is a huge city, with thousands of tourists in addition to its regular residents, it's rather curious that no one reported the light over the Dome of the Rock except the people who made the video clips.

So, interesting as the Jerusalem video clip is, that one looks like it's probably a fake, too.  Too bad.  All of this waiting around for the actual scientists to discover life on other planets is such a drag -- it would be ever so much more convenient if the aliens would just save us the trouble and drop by for a visit.  The Scottish and Israeli stories, unfortunately, don't seem to be the real deal.

I guess we exobiologists can stand down red alert, and go back to our sabbaticals.

Jesus wept

A small religious library in Reading, Ohio is reporting that their statue of the Virgin Mary is crying.

One visitor said, "I believe it's true. They were there. I saw them. It's true. I would imagine it's a miracle."

The library has been flooded with visitors, some of whom have been so moved by the phenomenon that they've cried, too.

Cameras are not allowed in the library, so there are no images of the statue.  And as you might expect, explanations of the phenomenon vary.  Of the ones who believe this to be a genuine miracle, most believe that the statue began to weep when a rosary that had belonged to Reverend James Willig, a Reading priest who died ten years ago, was put into her hands.  Most, however, don't seem to worry about what started it; one Reading resident who viewed the crying statue said, "You hear about it in other countries and then it's here in Reading of all places. It is a miracle."

Well, maybe.

Weeping statues, usually of Jesus or Mary, have been reported in hundreds of locations.  Sometimes these statues are weeping what appear to be tears; others weep scented oil, or (in a number of cases) blood.  When the church has allowed skeptics to investigate the phenomenon, all of them have turned out to be frauds.

One of the easiest ways to fake a crying statue was explained, and later demonstrated, by Italian skeptic Luigi Garlaschelli.  If the statue is glazed hollow ceramic or plaster (which many of them are), all you have to do is to fill the internal cavity of the statue with water or oil, usually through a small hole drilled through the back of the head.  Then, you take a sharp knife and you nick the glaze at the corner of each eye.  The porous ceramic or plaster will absorb the liquid, which will then leak out at the only point it can -- the unglazed bit near the eyes.  When Garlaschelli demonstrated this, it created absolutely convincing tears.

What about the blood?  Well, in the cases where the statues have wept blood, some of them have been kept from the prying eyes of skeptics, like our crying Madonna in Ohio.  The church, however, is becoming a little more careful, ever since the case in 2008 in which a statue of Mary in Italy seemed to weep blood, and a bit of the blood was taken and DNA tested, and was found to match the blood of the church's custodian.

Besides the likelihood of fakery, there remains the simple question of why a deity (or saint) who is presumably capable of doing anything (s)he wants to do, would choose this method to communicate with us.  It's the same objection I had to the people who claim that crop circles are Mother Earth attempting to talk to us; it's a mighty obscure message.  Even if you buy that it's a message from heaven, what does the message mean?  If a statue of Jesus cries, is he crying because we're sinful?  Because attendance at church is down?  Because we're destroying the environment?  Because the Saints didn't make it to the Superbowl this year?  Oh, for the days when god spoke to you, out loud, directly, and unequivocally, from a burning bush...

In any case, I'm skeptical, which I'm sure doesn't surprise anyone.  I suppose as religious experiences go, it's pretty harmless, and if it makes you happy to believe that Mary is crying tears of joy because she's got Father James' rosary, then that's okay with me.  If you go there, however, take a close look and see if there's a tiny hole drilled in the back of her head -- which still seems to me to be the likeliest explanation.

Hogging the spotlight

So, today's the day that Americans prove once again that when given the choice between a scientific model, reached by the consensus of hundreds of climatologists and amply supported by evidence (e.g. climate change/global warming) and the prognostications of a rodent, they'll go with the rodent every time.

Today is Groundhog Day, which is the day that winter-weary northerners wait eagerly for Punxsutawney Phil, a groundhog who lives in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to emerge from his burrow.  The idea is that if Phil sees his shadow, it scares him back into the burrow and we'll have six more weeks of winter.

Living in upstate New York, I've always found this grimly amusing, because up here, six more weeks of winter would be good news.  This would mean that spring would arrive in the third week of March, right around the equinox.  (Up here we don't call the equinox "the First Day of Spring" because all that does is call attention to how miserably cold it actually is.)  In upstate New York, we still have hard freezes at night at the end of April, and I remember twice having snow on Mother's Day.

In any case, let's assume that we give up on the "six more weeks of winter" thing, and just call it "sees the shadow, long winter; doesn't, short winter."  How well does it work?

Tim Roche, a meteorologist with Weather Underground, has analyzed the 99 years' worth of records of Phil's predictions, and compared them to the actual weather that occurred that year.  He found that when he predicted a short winter, he was right 47% of the time; when he predicted a long winter, he was right 36% of the time.

Me, I find this significant, especially in his predictions of a long winter.  Note that his predictions of a short winter are right around where you'd be if it were a completely random flip of the coin -- just what I'd expect.  (Yes, I know that "long winter" and "short winter" are relative terms, and there are "medium-length winters" and so on, but just play along, okay?)  But look at his predictions of long winters -- he does considerably worse than you'd do if you just flipped a coin.  I haven't done the statistical analysis, and honestly probably won't bother to, but I'm guessing that that deviation from a random 50/50 split is actually statistically significant.  Does it count as a paranormal phenomenon if a psychic predicts an outcome wrong far more often than you'd expect?

Be that as it may, the whole Phil phenomenon is fantastically popular, and in fact has spawned a number of spinoffs.  I know of two in my own home state of Louisiana.  There's Pierre C. Shadeaux of New Iberia, who is a nutria, not a groundhog (if you don't know what a nutria is, picture a huge brown rat with orange teeth, and you've got the idea; they're sort of like the Rodents of Unusual Size from The Princess Bride, only less cute).  Another nutria, T-Boy, is in the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans, presumably in the "Dear God What The Hell Is That Thing?" exhibit, and he is also coaxed out of his home early on February 2 to see if he sees his enormous, hairy, fanged shadow, which in this case will give us six more weeks of nightmares.

Of course, I know the Phil foolishness is all in fun, and I'm perfectly willing to take it in that spirit.  And if you're curious, this year Phil came out in the middle of one of the worst storms to hit the East Coast in the last five years, and because of the cloud cover, he didn't see his shadow.  Thus we have the results:  Huge Snowstorm = Short Winter.

Makes perfect sense to me.

Rocking the boat

New from the "News That Is Way Weirder Than Anything I Could Make Up" department:  Baywatch star Donna D'Errico is planning on climbing Mount Ararat to search for Noah's Ark.

D'Errico, who played the character Donna Marco in order to obviate the need of her having to remember that her character had a different first name than she did, brought several acting talents to the series, the most notable of which was a set of bazongas that left you wondering how she managed to walk upright.  She reports that she has had a dream of finding Noah's Ark ever since she was in Catholic school at age ten.

"I read different stories about how people thought they'd found the cages," she said.  This evidently being all the evidence she needed, she has organized an expedition to Turkey this summer in order to scale the mountain and look for the boat.

I don't know about all this.  The Great Flood story has always sounded mighty fishy to me (rimshot!).  I know that when I was ten years old and in Catholic school, I wasn't buying it, and peppered Sister Ursula with a good many uncomfortable questions.  I wondered, for example, if the whole world was flooded, so that no land was exposed anywhere, where did all the water go afterwards?

And, of course, there's the whole problem of how some dude in ancient Palestine went to the Canadian tundra to bring back two caribou, to Australia to get a couple of kangaroos, and to South Africa for some rhinoceroses, and got them all safely back after the whole incident was over.  Did Noah seriously go to California and bring back some pumas?

When I was eleven, my parents transferred me to public school.  Funny thing, that.

In any case, the question of "how could this story possibly be true?" doesn't seem to bother D'Errico terribly.

"I've been studying this for years and know where the sightings have been," she said in an interview. "According to my research, the ark lays broken into at least two, but most likely three, pieces. I believe that one of those pieces is in the uppermost Ahora Gorge area, an extremely dangerous area to climb and explore."

Asked about the dangers, she said, "Many inexperienced climbers have done it, but you do need stamina and, obviously, a crew."

Obviously.  With videocameras.  Because this is not in any sense a publicity stunt.  Sure.

"I am not doing a reality show," she claimed.  "I will document this for myself and my family."

In other words, look for it to appear on television.  It'll probably have a really creative name like "My Search For Noah's Ark, Starring Donna D'Errico."  Or maybe just "Baywatch: Turkey."

If it doesn't end up on the so-called "History Channel" by December, I will be astonished.  In terms of serious historical merit, it will  be right up there with their other offerings, such as "Monster Quest," "The Nostradamus Effect," and "The Bible Code: Predicting Armageddon."

The sins of the fathers

Christine Weston's novel Indigo, set in pre-World War I colonial India, chronicles the coming of age of three very different characters -- Jacques de St.-Rémy, the French son of an indigo planter; Hardyal Rai, the son of a wealthy Indian lawyer; and John Macbeth, a wry, tough Englishman, son of a colonel in the British army.  Weston does a masterful job of describing the slow-motion train wreck of the British occupation of India in an even-handed fashion, presenting the native Indians neither as noble savages nor as helpless victims, and their British overlords neither as evil exploiters nor as the emissaries of civilization.  Her characters are complex, three-dimensional entities, not easily pigeonholed.

The most interesting of the three is John Macbeth, who as a young teen at the beginning of the story mistrusts all native Indians, but through his friendship with Hardyal grows past his bigoted, black-and-white view of the world.  Nevertheless, when as a young man he joins the police force, he and Hardyal end up on opposite sides of the growing revolutionary movement, and Macbeth has no choice but to do the job his superiors expect of him and support the cause of the British occupiers.  Although he remains a man of his time and context, he represents the potential we all have for doing the best we can with what we're given.

Which brings me to Haley Barbour.

For those of you who are not newshounds, Barbour is the governor of Mississippi.  He gained accolades for his handling of the Katrina tragedy, and easily won a second term.  He is now considered a front-runner for the Republican nomination for president in 2012.

The pundits are already speculating about the extent to which his past, and his state's, will weigh him down if he does make a bid for the nomination, and as a result he has been peppered with questions about the South's racist past.  His replies thus far have seemed disingenuous at best.  When asked what he remembered about the civil rights era in Mississippi, he said, "Not much."  When a reporter mentioned the riots of 1961, he said that mostly what he recalled about that year was being on Yazoo City's winning baseball team as a thirteen-year-old.

"What I remember was more Mayberry than it was Mississippi Burning," the governor said.

Predictably, he's come under fire for these comments.  Some have referred to him as a racist who is attempting to whitewash the history of a state that saw some of the bloodiest violence of the entire civil rights movement. 

Barbour has tried, with little success, to counter these perceptions.  "I went to an integrated college," he said, when asked about his earlier comments.  "I never thought twice about it."  He told a story about sitting in a literature class next to a pleasant young African-American woman who let him borrow her notes.

None of this has done much to alter the views of his critics.

My question is:  what did you want him to say?

Barbour is 63; he was born in 1947.  He was a privileged white boy in the Jim Crow South, and went to a segregated high school.  He was seventeen when the Civil Rights Act was passed, twenty-one when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.  Many young whites, growing up in that era, accepted without question the prevailing attitudes of the time - just as we accept today's.

However, even if he once believed that whites were superior - a claim that seems to have no particular basis in fact, by the way - there is no indication whatsoever that he still does.  Of all of the news stories and editorials written about him and his past, no one seems to be able to find a single thing he has said or done that is explicitly (or even implicitly) racist.  That he's unwilling to engage in a dialogue about Mississippi's violent history may seem suspicious, but to me it speaks of nothing more than political expediency.  Barbour's claim "not to remember much" about the bloody protests of the civil rights era seems to be more wishful thinking than it is racism.  That all happened a long time ago; I was young then.  It's over.  Let's move on.

For the record, I don't particularly like Barbour's politics; I very much doubt I'd vote for him.  But to cast him as a racist for his reluctance to discuss something that happened fifty years ago when he was a teenager is ridiculous.  Like John Macbeth in Indigo, he is a person of his time and place -- as we all are.  But any time and place produces good people and bad, people who rise above the prejudices of their fellows and those who swallow them and sink.  It remains very much to be seen that Barbour is one of the latter type.