A chocolate war

I spend a lot of time on this blog railing at the internet as being a conduit for nonsense.  But today, I have a positive story, a wonderful story, about a Norwegian skeptic, some woo-woo chocolate makers, and an unsuccessful attempt by the latter to bully the former into silence.  [Source] [Source]

Xoçai is an American chocolate company.  Besides having a brand name that sounds like a Klingon death threat, they have a seriously New Age/alternative health slant on their marketing, and make a variety of wild claims about what their product can do for you.  The following advertisement was widely distributed in Norway:

Here's the translation:

DO YOU LIKE CHOCOLATE?
Millions of people all over the world eat chocolate every day. Unfortunately not all chocolate is healthy, but a healthy alternative does actually exist. Xoçai chocolate products don’t just taste nice; they’re also very healthy because of the high antioxidant-content.
XOCAI HEALTH CHOCOLATE:
- Three bites cover your daily need of antioxidants
- No preservatives
- No added wax or fillers
- No artificial coloring
- No artificial sweeteners
- No refined sugar
- Caffeine and sugar free
- Beneficial for diabetics
- Gluten and lactose free
- ORAC and Kosher certified
ANTIOXIDANTS:
- Strengthen the immune system
- Help against fatigue and give extra energy
- Improve memory and concentration
- The antioxidants catechin and phenols, as well as the vegetable antioxidants flavonoids, can prevent different forms of cancer, heart disease and the formation of blood clots
- Balances blood glucose levels and are beneficial for diabetics
- Can help against skin disease, e.g. psoriasis.
- Cleanse the body of toxins and improve digestion
- Can help against osteoporosis and calcium deficiency
- Can help against depression and early aging
- Prevent inflammation of blood vessel walls
- Prevent infections
- Can stabilize blood pressure

Yes, Xoçai is actually claiming that eating their chocolate is "beneficial for diabetics" and "can prevent cancer."  I suppose that at least we should be thankful that at least they didn't include "helps to remedy the aftereffects of Dementor attacks."

Anyhow, a Norwegian blogger, who (for reasons that will become obvious) has preferred to remain anonymous, challenged these claims.  (My sources, links posted above, gave him the pseudonym "Morten" and I will stick with that to avoid confusion in case you are interested in reading further about this.)  Morten questioned not only the unsupported medical claims but also Xoçai's sales model, which is an Amway-style MLM (Multi-Level Marketing) approach.  Shortly after he wrote his piece, he received the following email:

Hello,

As an association for over 9 000 Norwegian Xoçai-members, we have over the last year received over a hundred complaints from our members concerning your blog www.[anonymous].no

Most of our members seem to think enough is enough when it comes to your defamatory claims about the product and brand name Xoçai, the company MXI Corp. and the representatives of the company – thus everything you have written on your blog for some time now has been sent to the company’s lawyers in the USA – where these are currently preparing a lawsuit on the grounds of your untrue claims that have damaged the brand name and product Xoçai, the company MXI Corp. in the USA and the company’s representatives.

From the signals we have received it will be a seven digit lawsuit, and that’s not in Norwegian «kroner». This because the company now wishes to make an example once and for all, and such create precedence for other countries in Scandinavia and Europe.
We have also been asked on numerous occasions to account for your blog and person on our website, which we now have done on the grounds of information sent by our members. You can read more on: www.sjokoservice.no

We are of course aware that the company [anonymous company] doesn’t have any responsibility for your blog – but as it can be documented that a lot of your activity on the blogpage has been during work hours, we assume it is with your employer’s [anonymous company] knowledge and blessing in accordance with your terms of employment.

In the light of your cynical activities it must be admitted that this isn’t the best advertisement for the company [anonymous company] and your co-workers, neither now nor when the process starts.

Best regards

Foreningen Sjokoservice Norge

The email was also sent to his employer and various coworkers.

Sjokoservice Norge, the Norwegian legal arm of Xoçai, followed this up by a post on their own website that included Morten's name, place of employment, telephone number, and address, and a sly suggestion that Xoçai employees might want to "contact (him) directly."

Then it got worse.  Sjokoservice Norge sent Morten a second email, with an attachment that included Morten's address, the names of his parents, siblings, and wife, and a direct statement that the information was being sent out to nine thousand Xoçai employees!

Morten contacted Xoçai's representatives, asking them to elaborate on which claims he had made that they considered incorrect, and saying that if they could prove that he had misspoken, he'd amend or remove the post.  Sjokoservice Norge said that it was too late, that they had already initiated a lawsuit, but hinted that they might be willing to stop pursuing legal action if Morten deleted his posts and removed all mention of the company from his blog.  Morten caved, and removed the posts.

So far, I guess the message is: "don't make a woo-woo mad."  And at this point in reading the source material on this story, I'm remembering all of the snarky posts I've done in the past about various weird claims, and wondering if maybe I should change my name and move to a small uncharted island off the coast of Mozambique.  But then, I continued reading, and found that a wonderful thing happened.

Have you ever heard of the Streisand Effect?  It occurs when someone attempts to censor or suppress a story on the internet, and as a result causes the story to become viral.  (The name comes from a 2003 lawsuit by Barbra Streisand that attempted to force photographer Kenneth Adelman to remove an aerial photograph of her California mansion from an online photograph collection; the photograph was viewed six times before the lawsuit was filed, and 420,000 times afterwards.)  Well, in their heavy-handed, mafia-style bullying of a blogger who asked too many questions, Xoçai may have triggered the same thing.  Morten's original posts, which he removed when Xoçai threatened him, have been translated and posted on a mirror site (read them here and here).  As far as Sjokoservice Norge, which was acting as Xoçai's brass-knuckles organization in Norway, chairman Terje Babsvik and his brother, Jon-Atle Babsvik, have denied any knowledge of the threatening emails to Morten, and Roger Meyer, Sjokoservice Norge's spokesperson, has "gone on vacation" and "is impossible to get a hold of."  The whole thing has bounced into the skeptics network worldwide, and has been featured on The Baloney Detective, Letting Off Steam (you should definitely check this one out and read the responses by Xoçai drones; they come off sounding like scary Scientologists), and Sharon Hill's wonderful site Doubtful News, among many.

Of course, a rich corporation like Xoçai is probably not going to be seriously harmed by this -- although it'd certainly be nice if they stopped making unsubstantiated (and almost certainly false) medical claims in their advertisements.  And Xoçai has attempted to put the quietus on the story by flooding Google with stories that use the keywords "Xoçai," "threatens," and "blogger," but lead you to links that basically state how wonderful their product is, and how it "threatens" rival and inferior chocolate brands, so much so that many "bloggers" mention it.  Thus far, I'd have to call this Chocolate War a draw.  But even if it doesn't knock them back as hard as I'd like, it does lead me to one cheering conclusion; given the chance, the internet can be a force for rationality.

Oh, and also: don't piss skeptics off.  We generally know how to do research, and we're pretty good at arguing from a factual basis.

The stars of Wall Street

Last week, Marketplace ran a story entitled, "Astrology Guides Some Financial Traders."  Thinking that the headline couldn't possibly mean what it seemed to mean, I read the article, and found that yes, in fact, it did.  The author, Heidi Moore, reports, in all apparent seriousness:

(T)he course of true investing never did run smooth, and there are some traders who look to the stars to tell them what to do. Financial astrologers like Karen Starich say traders know they're up against a lot of rich, smart people.

"They want to have that edge," she says. "They want to know what the future is."

Starich chargest $237 annually for her newsletter... (which contains) news of what will happen to the stock prices of companies, or even bigger, to the Federal Reserve.

So, we have the people who are responsible for managing investments, who are the heart and soul of the Stock Exchange, making their decisions based on... horoscopes?  Apparently, yes:

(Starich) sees dark times ahead in the Fed's horoscope.

"They now have Saturn squared to Neptune, which is really bankruptcy," Starich explains.

Neptune represents money. But when Saturn shows up in a chart, it indicates restriction. So for the Fed, that means the "fiscal cliff is here, and there’s no place to go except to print more money or unravel these financial institutions," Starich says.

But... but... really?  Are we talking about only one or two wingnuts, here?  The answer is no.  Three hundred Wall Street traders subscribe to Starich's newsletter; her rival, "financial astrologer" Arch Crawford, is even more successful, and has a newsletter that is delivered monthly to a readership of over 2,000.  Crawford is also predicting setbacks in the nation's finances, but not because "Saturn is squared to Neptune;" no, he says we're in for trouble "because Mercury is in retrograde:"

Crawford warns his 2,000 subscribers particularly against the dangers of Mercury in retrograde, a time when the planet appears to be going in reverse across the sky. The phenomenon, which happens three times or more a year, indicates a month when communications will be screwed up. He warns his subscribers never to start anything new during that time. He points to the fact that Knight Capital launched a new software program in August, when Mercury was in retrograde, and the brokerage firm nearly went out of business. He also notes that most major market glitches have happened while Mercury was in retrograde.

Can I just point out here that Mercury isn't really traveling backwards?  That it's just a sort of optical illusion based on the relative motion of Mercury and the Earth?  That there is no possible way it could have any effect on events anywhere?  That since it happens three or four times a year, for several weeks each time, that of course there will be times when "market glitches" occur during those periods?

That there is this thing called confirmation bias?

Crawford reports that some traders are cautious about letting people know they're making their decisions based upon the stars, and one even asked Crawford if he could have his newsletter delivered "wrapped in brown paper."  At least this is a hopeful sign; on some level, at least a few of these people are aware that what they're doing is ridiculous.

I don't honestly know what about this story appalls me more; that serious financial professionals are relying on astrology to make their decisions, or that a respected and credible media source published this article and treated its subject as if it were completely plausible, with only the weakest of caveats at the end that "...most people would say... (astrological predictions coming true are due to) coincidence."  What's next?  Tarot card readings by stock brokers?  Seances to consult deceased economists?  Sacrificing a goat to assure a good return on investments?

If so, I'm sure Marketplace will be the first to tell us all about how well it works.

Some days I just despair.

Anti-blasphemy laws and the right to criticize ideas

Goaded by the recent riots in the Muslim world over a YouTube video ridiculing the prophet Muhammad, representatives of a 57-country coalition are planning to propose a measure to the United Nations General Assembly that would criminalize blasphemy.  [Source]

The move has been tried before, unsuccessfully.  This year, the coalition is led by Turkey, a country with significant clout at the UN.  Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, plans to speak at the General Assembly, demanding international legislation making it a crime to defame religion.  Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has given some indication that he is in favor of such a move, saying that there should be limitations on free speech if it is "used to provoke or humiliate."

This is, unequivocally, a terrible idea.

Let me be clear about this.  People deserve respect.  Human beings have the right to have their basic needs met, and to be able to live without fear of persecution.  We also, in differing ways and to differing degrees, should respect and protect animals, plants, and the environment.

On the other hand, there is no good reason to demand that everyone respect ideas.  Ideas only deserve respect insofar as they merit it.  If you believe in something wrong, foolish, harmful, counterfactual, or dangerous, there is no logical reason in the world that I should be required to respect it just because it happens to be your belief.  Enacting anti-blasphemy laws is a way of putting religious beliefs out of the reach of criticism -- which is equivalent to giving carte blanche to anyone, for saying or doing anything, as long as the phrase "and thus sayeth the precepts of my religion" is appended to it.

The bottom line is that your beliefs have to earn my respect, based upon (1) how they are manifested in your treatment of others, and (2) their consonance with the facts about the world that we have discovered from science.  If your beliefs lead you to oppress women, if they encourage you to blow yourself and others up, if they demand that you suppress free speech and dissent, if they impel you to foist your mythological and erroneous views of the origins of life on children, then your beliefs are not worthy of respect.  And your saying, "but it's my religion!" is entirely irrelevant.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying we should silence people from voicing these beliefs.  That's as wrong-headed as the proposed anti-blasphemy laws.  You have every right to trumpet your beliefs from the rooftops, if you want to.  However, no one, myself included, has the right to demand that his opinions, once voiced, be immune to criticism.  Or ridicule, either; ridicule may not be nice, but it is powerful, and satire can be a potent force for positive social change (think of the impact that Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal had).  So, you may not like it if I or others make fun of your beliefs, but your taking offense cannot trump my right to speak.  If it does, it sets up a dangerous precedent, creating a world where every word has to be sifted through the mesh of "Will This Bother Anyone?"

I still think that it would be wonderful if people were kinder.  "Don't go out of your way to be an asshole" is still a pretty good guide to behavior, and I believe that a lot of the recent deliberate provocation of Muslims is mean-spirited, crass, and frankly unwise, given how devout Muslims generally respond to such goading.  But my saying "it isn't nice," or even "wow, that was a dumb thing to say," is a far cry from "you are forbidden by law from saying that."  So, what the filmmaker had to say about Muhammad on his YouTube video might have been banal, crude, foolish, disgusting, and worthy of a hundred other disparaging adjectives.

But he did have the right to say it.  And no one, up to and including Ban Ki-moon, should be able to tell him that he can't.

Shifting your moral magnetic north

Most of us are pretty certain of our own moral compasses.  Circumstances might change, the attitudes of those around us might waver, but at least we know right from wrong -- and why we believe what we do.

A new study, headed by Lars Hall at Lund University in Sweden, seems to indicate that we're not as rock-solid in our beliefs as we think we are. [Source]

The experiment took 160 volunteers and asked them to fill out a two-page survey rating how strongly they believed each of twelve statements on the morality of certain issues, from the ongoing struggles in the Middle East to prostitution to covert government surveillance of its citizens.  The researchers, however, employed a magic trick; the surveys were actually composed of two sheets lightly stuck together, and the clipboard had a dab of adhesive on it.  When the subject turned the sheet over to answer the back, the top sheet stuck to the clipboard and pulled away, revealing the second sheet.  The participants' answers were also recorded there (presumably using some sort of carbon paper to impress the answers onto the page as the subject wrote) -- but the second page had two questions that were different.

For example, sheet one (the questions originally answered by the subject) might have the statement, "Large-scale governmental surveillance of e-mail and Internet traffic ought to be forbidden as a means to combat international crime and terrorism."  The subject then rated how strongly they agreed or disagreed with that statement.  The second sheet had the same statement, with the word "permitted" substituted for "forbidden."  So, if the subject strongly agreed with the first statement, you'd think (s)he would strongly disagree with the second, and would recognize that the statement had been altered.

That's not what happened.

When showed their responses to the original statements marked on statements that had the opposite meaning, half of the subjects did not notice any changes -- even when they were asked to read the statements, and their answers, out loud.  Only 31% noticed every change that had been made.  A full 53% were willing to argue in support of their answers on one or both of the statements that had been altered to mean the opposite of the statement they had actually responded to.

Hall and his team call this "choice blindness."  Once we are confronted with evidence that we made a certain choice, many of us internalize that information even if it's in conflict with what we really believed at the time the choice was made.  And after that, we are perfectly willing to argue in favor of our new opinions.  Memory, of course, is plastic and unreliable, as a multitude of experiments have shown, and any good book on optical illusions can illustrate how easy it is to baffle our sensory apparatus.  Now Hall's clever little experiment shows that our moral sense might be as easy to fool as our memory centers and sensory organs.

I find all of this simultaneously creepy and reassuring.  I've always felt that on those topics I have strong moral opinions about, I wouldn't flex just because I'm around someone with different attitudes.  I've always had the impression that my ethical sense is rooted in concrete.  Okay, there are gray areas; but some things are simply wrong, and they'll always be wrong.  It's kind of scary to think that if a sneaky researcher convinced me that I'd answered a question the opposite way to how I actually feel, that I could be tricked into arguing for something that (minutes ago) I'd disagreed with.

On the other hand, maybe it is a good thing that the human mind is as open as it is.  After all, it's raging dogmatism that is now ripping the Middle East to pieces, after a moronic filmmaker made a banal fourteen minute film insulting the Prophet Muhammad, and devout Muslims worldwide have responded by blowing themselves up and setting stuff on fire.  Maybe the fact that we have such play in our moral compasses is a hopeful sign, that if we're somehow forced into considering opposing viewpoints, we might actually be capable of seeing the other side of the argument.

Dream job

Are you interested in research?  Do you like hiking and camping?  Are you knowledgeable about technical equipment?  Do you have a desire to spend your time looking for a creature that may not, technically, exist?

Well, a nonprofit in upstate New York has a job for you.  [Source]

Apparently, a Bigfoot research group based in Whitehall, New York, has an advertisement in the "Help Wanted" section of Craigslist, inviting interested parties to apply for a position as a research assistant.  Here's the main body of the ad:

Not for profit organization, located in Whitehall, NY is a high-energy, team-oriented research entity that is involved in the tracking, documenting, and study of cryptozoological creatures, with a deep interest in the study and search of bipedal primitive apes.

We seek an experienced researcher with a deep understanding of cryptozoology, primatology, with a good background with scientific research and interest in great apes. The ideal candidate must be able to work both autonomously and as part of a large team. The individual must also be able to solve problems creatively, communicate effectively, and collaborate well with project leaders and team members.

Duties and Functions:

• Develop actionable tracking program in designated geographic area.

• Investigate, document and interview individuals with reported Bigfoot sitings.

• Occasional travel to remote areas of Adirondacks including spending several nights in the wilderness, checking motion cameras, collecting hair and dung samples for laboratory analysis amongst other related activites.

• Must have own transportation, four-wheel drive a plus.

** Serious Inquiries only **
Compensation: based on experience, this is a grant funded position and is expected to last 6 months with the possibility of renewal.

This sounds like a job made in heaven for me -- the combination of the hiking and backpacking aspects, the biological research aspects, and the cryptozoological aspects, not to mention that this is veritably in my back yard, seem to cry out that I apply.  Of course, there's the downside that this job is only guaranteed for six months, and I'd have to quit my other gainful employment, which I suspect both my principal and my wife would have an opinion about.  But come on -- a Bigfoot research assistant?  In the Adirondacks?  How cool would that be?

Of course, I do have some questions.  First, the salary is based on experience?  Experience with what?  Actually finding Bigfoot?  Because if so, this is looking like it could be a volunteer position.  Also, you have to wonder who is actually funding this whole thing.  I tried to find out more about it, but whoever is behind it seems to be keeping their names out of sight.

Also, I had no idea that the Whitehall area was as much of a hotspot for Sasquatches as it is.  I knew about the Connecticut Hill Monster, which is even closer to my home (a mere thirty miles) than the Adirondacks; but I hadn't heard of the sightings around Whitehall.  But evidently this is a seriously squatchy area, with tales of giant apelike creatures going back at least a hundred years, perhaps more.  In 2008, the Glens Falls Post-Star did a story on the whole phenomenon:

For Whitehall, the pivotal year for sightings seems to be 1976. The country was celebrating its bicentennial, but Bigfoot was the local center of attention that summer and fall.

[Paul] Bartholomew details the encounters in his book.

On Aug. 24, three Whitehall teens reported seeing a 7-to-8-foot-tall brown, hairy creature in a field off Abair Road. The teens allegedly saw the figure two times that night. They also claimed to hear a noise that sounded like a "cross between a woman screaming and a pig squealing."

The next day, a farmer found "big, human footprints" nearby and a ravaged deer carcass.

That night, a local off-duty police officer, who was a brother of one of the teens, went to the site with a New York State Trooper.

Around midnight, the police officer spotted a pair of red eyes reflecting off his headlights. He shut off his lights and radioed the trooper, who put a spotlight on some nearby bushes.

The police officer said he turned his headlights back on when he heard something crashing through the shrubs. He claims to have seen an almost 8-foot-tall creature that he estimated weighed 400 pounds.

He didn't fire his gun because he said the figure looked too human. The creature then vanished into the bushes.

Later that year, a village police sergeant reported hearing an "eerie, high-pitched yell" while hunting in the same area.

A few days later, a man from Granville reported shooting at "Bigfoot."

For the record, Paul Bartholomew is also the guy who spearheaded the successful effort ten years ago to get Whitehall to pass a law designating the forests around the village "protected Bigfoot habitat."

So anyway, the whole thing sounds pretty interesting, and I'm bummed that I won't be able to apply.  I do wish the best of luck to whoever gets the job, and hope that they get some hard evidence, something that has been sorely lacking in all previous efforts.  As I've said before, I see nothing scientifically impossible about the existence of Bigfoot, but I'm certainly not going to throw myself in with the True Believers with only uncorroborated eyewitness testimony and fuzzy photographs as proof.  If more data surfaces, however, I'm perfectly willing to consider it, in the spirit of skepticism, and also because it would be wicked cool if it actually was true.

Confirmation bias, and the story of Jesus' wife

In well-done science, conclusions are based on one thing and one thing alone: the quality of the evidence.  When physicists announced a few months ago that they had data that seemed to support the conclusion that neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light, every high-energy physicist  in the world began to sift through the evidence, looking for flaws, looking for inaccuracies, trying to see if the data supported such an earthshattering outcome.  And after rigorous analysis, the result did not stand -- Einstein's fundamental speed limit on the universe seems to have been vindicated once again.

Contrast that to how conclusions are drawn in other realms, where vanishingly small pieces of evidence are considered enough to support any conclusion you happen to favor.

This whole thing comes up because of the recent announcement that a small fragment of papyrus, covered with faded Coptic script, seems to indicate that Jesus might have been married.  [Source]  The finding, which has been analyzed extensively by historian and ancient language scholar Karen King, is the subject of a paper that was presented Tuesday in Rome at an international meeting of Coptic scholars.

Of course, the first question asked was, "Is the artifact a fake?"  And the conclusion was: probably not.  The script was examined by experts, and looks authentic.  The phrasing of the text seems consistent with other early writings in that language.  While the piece is too small to carbon-date, there is apparently some talk of a non-destructive spectroscopy on the ink that could give a rough estimate of its age.  One phrase begins, "And Jesus said, 'My wife...'" and then is cut off.  A later phrase on the piece says, "... she should be my disciple."

So: what we have here is a small fragment of paper, of unknown age, with two incomplete (but admittedly provocative) phrases.  And that was all it took.

Already we have people who are against the Catholic policy of celibacy for the clergy saying that this should change church law.  If Jesus was married, why shouldn't priests be able to?  Folks who want women to be priests jumped on the second phrase; the lack of a clear mention of female disciples in the bible is the only justification for church policy on the issue, they say, and this fragment clearly supports the ordination of women.

Then the woo-woos got involved.  Fans of Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code and Martin Scorsese's controversial 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, both of which claimed that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, are saying that the fragment supports that contention.  Many of these people seem not to realize that the book and the film both reside in the "fiction" aisle.

Even wilder stories have started up.  Take a look at this article, that claims that the piece of papyrus is a clear vindication of the wacky ideas from Laurence Gardner's The Bloodline of the Holy Grail, in which Jesus survived the crucifixion, lived another hundred years in which he traveled to Tibet, and his wife and children ended up in France where they founded the Merovingian dynasty and ultimately ended up on the throne of Scotland. 

And to all of the above, I can only say: will you people please just chill?

There's a name for taking a tiny, questionable piece of evidence, and pretending that it trumpets support for an idea that you already agreed with; it's called confirmation bias, and unfortunately for the proponents of married priests, female priests, and Jesus being the ancestor of the Kings of Scotland, it's a logical fallacy.  Meaning that thinkers who are being honest should not engage in it.  The evidence we have is flimsy at best; Karen King, who is clearly a scholar of some repute, isn't even willing to hazard a firm opinion about the piece's provenance, but has given a guess that it probably dates from the Fourth Century.  So even if it is authentic, the thing was written three hundred plus years after Jesus died.  At that point, anyone could have written anything, and it wouldn't necessarily have any bearing on the truth of the matter.  The piece of paper could state that Jesus had blond hair and was left-handed and liked to eat donuts for breakfast, and there's no reason to conclude that those statements have any relevance to what the real man was like, since it was written long after anyone who actually knew him had died.

But, of course, unlike in science, that's not how these things work.  The married-priest cadre will certainly be harping on this finding for a while, as will the female-priest cadre.  The Dan Brown Writes Non-Fiction Society is probably also going to continue making little excited squeaking noises about all this, and any woo-woos further out on the plausibility scale will have a field day drawing conclusions from what in any other field would hardly constitute any evidence at all.

As I've observed before: confirmation bias is these people's stock in trade.  So honestly, I shouldn't be surprised.  But I still am, somehow.

Wheat from chaff

Yesterday, I looked at the general idea of separating science from pseudoscience, and my conclusion is that any sufficiently educated person can learn to distinguish the two.  The main hallmarks of good science are (1) the characteristic of prediction and falsifiability, and (2) reliance on mechanisms that are consistent with already-verified science.

How, though, do you make the distinction between pseudoscience and valid, "emerging" science?  New ideas in science are frequently ridiculed, especially before the mechanisms governing them are completely elucidated; even such rock-solid (pun intended) models as plate tectonics were considered to be foolishness before the magnetometer data discovered in the late 1950s showed that the ocean floor was spreading.  Some ideas that fly in the face of what is currently known will turn out, on analysis and through experiment, to be verified science.  How do we know that by labeling something as pseudoscience, we're not tarring good ideas and bad with the same brush?

Here are a few things that seem to be general characteristics of pseudoscience.  Note that not all pseudoscientific theories have all of these traits -- but this will at least provide a few general rules-of-thumb for recognizing it when you see it.

1)  The reliance on undefined, or poorly-defined, terms.  I've harped on this one so many times that it doesn't bear much more description than that.  Watch out, especially, for terms that are firmly defined in one realm (e.g. physics), but are being used in a fluffy, non-specific way.  Favorites are frequency, vibration, quantum, energy, field, wavelength, and resonance.

2)  Any idea that claims to contradict a thoroughly researched and experimentally verified model.  If someone starts by saying, "My theories overturn the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics," I pretty much stop listening.  Take a look at the webpage of The Thunderbolts Project, which claims that pretty much everything we know about physics -- gravity, electromagnetism, particle physics, convection, heat flow, quantum mechanics, nuclear fusion -- is wrong.  Instead, the universe is linked by "a web of electrical circuitry connects and unifies all of nature, organizing galaxies, energizing stars, giving birth to planets and, on our own world, controlling weather and animating biological organisms."  While it is always possible that new data could force a revision of a pre-existing model -- look at what Einstein did to Newtonian mechanics -- the chance of a few "progressive scientists, researchers, and laypeople" trashing all of physics in one blow is unlikely in the extreme.  If you take a look at the video clips put out by these people (such as this one) you find that mostly they are relying on the fact that physicists' models are themselves incomplete.  While no reputable physicist would argue that point -- after all, if their models were complete, they'd all be out of a job, because there'd be nothing left to research -- our ignorance about how some features of the universe work doesn't mean that the framework of science itself is faulty and needs to be replaced.

3)  A theory that blurs the distinction between a model and the reality.  This one can be pretty insidious, because scientists use models (especially mathematical ones) all the time, and frequently explain their ideas using analogies.  On its crudest level, we have people like the Rosicrucians, who think that because much of the universe is describable using mathematics, that the universe is numbers (and those numbers have mystical significance).  A subtler example is the work of Stephen Wolfram, who has modeled systems behavior using a construct called a cellular automaton, but who seems to me to cross the line from stating that cellular automata can model many observable processes (this model has been used in everything from developmental biology to particle physics), to stating that the universe is composed of cellular automata.  While the first statement is no doubt true, the second remains very much to be demonstrated.

4)  Experimental claims that no one else seems to be able to replicate.  Replicability is one of the most important characteristics of good science, which is why any peer-reviewed paper is expected to give thorough detail about the experimental protocol used.  Examples of this abound: three well-known ones are the famous "polywater" debacle, "cold fusion," and Cleve Backster's claim that he'd done an experiment proving that his house plant was aware of his emotional state.

Of course, there are many other good questions to ask that can help separate good science from bad.  Is there a profit motive involved in the claim?  Does the researcher have an ideological bent that is biasing him/her to ignore contrary evidence?  Are the results published in a journal that has adequate peer review?  Is anyone who questions the results viewed as hostile/biased/closed-minded?

Given the number of crazy ideas out there, it's absolutely critical that we learn how to recognize what constitutes a scientifically sound idea, and what characteristics should raise red flags that we're looking at pseudoscience.  Millions of dollars of hard-earned money are wasted every year on homeopathic "remedies," psychic and astrological readings, crystal therapy, chakra and "energy field" realignment, and so on.  The methods of science aren't error-proof, and scientists are fallible humans, just like the rest of us; but if you're looking for the best way to gain a solid understanding of how the universe actually works, science is the only game in town.