Ghost spotting

My wife and I just got back from a trip to Boston -- my first visit to that fascinating and historical city.  And as part of our visit, we got to participate in a ghost tour.

I thought of it as an "undercover mission."  My wife, on the other hand, thought of it as a prime opportunity for me to be obnoxious in public.

"Before I buy tickets for this," she said last week, her finger poised on the "Enter" button on her laptop keyboard, "you have to promise me one thing."

"What's that?"

"That you'll BE NICE."

So I reluctantly agreed, she bought the tickets, and Monday evening, we dutifully showed up in the chilly, windy evening in front of Faneuil Hall.  There we met our guide, Jim, who represented Boston Ghost Tours -- and also a "real" ghosthunting group, RTS Paranormal Investigations, of Wrentham, Massachusetts.

I decided right away that I wouldn't blow my cover and announce my status as a doubter.  I played along, even generating some naive-appearing enthusiasm at the beginning of the tour as Jim told us that Boston was one of the "most haunted cities in North America."  It was kind of a heady experience, being a spy, although the fact that Jim was dressed in Revolutionary War garb kept reminding me of what happened to Nathan Hale.

The first thing Jim told us was that there was no guarantee that we'd see a ghost.  Ghosts, he said, were notoriously unpredictable and uncooperative.  "After all," he told us, "ghost hunting isn't like whale watching."  Which, technically, is correct, because whales exist.  But I didn't mention that.

So off we went.  Our first stop was the site of the Boston Massacre, which we observed from the warmth of the glassed-in foyer of Bank of America.  We were told that bunches of people had seen the ghost of Crispus Attucks, one of the first victims of the Revolutionary War, and that the likely reason Attucks had appeared in the early years of the 21st century (he apparently hadn't been seen before then, and hasn't been seen in the last couple of years) was that they were renovating the area.  Ghosts, apparently, don't like renovations, which I can sympathize with.  We just finished remodeling our bathroom, and it was a nuisance.  Why ghosts care, I don't know, but apparently they do, and Crispus Attucks dealt with his frustration by dying over and over in front of the Old State House.  I guess everyone handles stress in his own way.

After that, we went to the Old South Church, where we heard about a British soldier who shot at a ghostly priest and then got flogged for discharging his weapon without orders.  After this rather cautionary tale, we went to the Omni Parker Hotel, "the most haunted building in Massachusetts."

We went up to the second floor, which seemed to mostly be comprised of meeting rooms and was empty unless you counted the three-dozen-odd middle school students, all in eye-damaging yellow t-shirts, who were touring the place.  So the ambiance wasn't exactly what it could have been.  We waited until the teenagers had departed and the airborne hormone levels had returned to normal to view the main attraction -- the "Charles Dickens mirror," a gilt-framed mirror in which many people have seen ghostly reflections.  Some have even taken photographs of it, only to find that there's the ghostly image of a man in the picture -- a man who hadn't been there when the photo was taken.  So, naturally, my wife had to give it a try herself:

And lo and behold, if you look carefully, you can see -- to the left of her (you can't see her face as it's being obscured by the camera flash) -- the figure of a ghostly man wearing a brimmed hat, staring into the mirror!

Oh, wait, that's me.  Never mind.

So we didn't see a ghost in the mirror, and believe me, I tried.  I stared into that thing like a madman, but all I saw was my own rather questionable face.

Afterwards, we went out into a large open space on the second floor, and Jim regaled us with tales of "Room 303," which "some of the hotel staff deny even exists."  They apparently tell people it's a broom closet.  But then he told us that it still gets rented out, which seems odd, for a broom closet, but what do I know about hotel administration?  In any case, Jim said we couldn't go up to room 303, but if we did -- man, there is one malevolent spirit there.  It grabs people's ankles while they're sleeping, and one time slapped one of the hotel staff across the face.  But even though we couldn't visit room 303, as a consolation prize we would get to see if there were any ghosts about -- using equipment, and everything.

So Jim got out a flashlight and an electromagnetic field detector (he said that an electronic stud finder, or even a compass, would also work).  He turned the flashlight on, and handed the EMF detector to a teenage girl who was on the tour and told her to ask any ghosts who were present to show themselves by turning off the flashlight or making the detector light up.

Giggling nervously, the girl did as Jim requested.  Silence fell in the group, as we looked around us at the opulent carpeting, the old woodwork, the empty halls receding into shadow.  And then... suddenly...

... nothing happened.  And after a while, nothing continued to happen.  There was one momentary tiny blip on the EMF detector, which Jim said was probably caused by the building's WiFi.  "Always look for the rational explanation first," he said, which seemed like good advice to me.  In fact, my rational explanation for no results is that there's nothing there, but Jim disagreed, apparently, and asked a couple of other members of the group to request that the ghosts make themselves known.

Which they did.  But the ghosts weren't cooperating that night, so we reluctantly packed it in, and Jim walked us all out of the hotel and back to the MTA subway station.

Anyhow, all in all, it was an entertaining evening, and I encourage any of you who are visiting Boston to check it out (you can make reservations at the link I posted above).  Maybe you'll have better luck than I did.  You'd almost have to, actually, given that I didn't see a damn thing and nearly froze to death on the outdoor part of the tour.  But I have to say that Jim is quite a storyteller, and even if I'm not the most receptive of audiences, I did enjoy myself and hardly rolled my eyes at all.

Well, a little, but I tried to keep it to a minimum.  You never know how ghosts are going to react to being laughed at.  For example, I suspect that the one in room 303 would not be amused, and however much I'd like to see a ghost, I think I'd prefer not to get slapped in the face by one.

Rainbows over Antarctica

So, in the past couple of days we've looked at the scientific evidence of some rather unexpected medical modalities, with their possibility of opening up new avenues for diagnosing and treating human disease.  Today we're going to look at a more pressing issue, namely: did Martians build a city out of Legos in Antarctica?

You may think I'm joking, but yesterday I ran across an article that claimed exactly that.  I try not to spend much time in this blog writing about things that are simply ridiculous, but this one was so far off the deep end that I just had to.  I kept thinking that it had to be a spoof, but once again, Poe's Law has bitten me on the posterior.  Mike Perry, the author of "The Rainbow City Built by Martians in Antarctica," seems entirely serious.

Here's what he says about this amazing place:

Rainbow City is an ancient Martian City right here on Earth, most of it is made from a form of plastic, a bit like Lego perhaps.

And where is this city? Somewhere hidden beneath the icy wastes of Antarctica. It's actually only one of network of Martian cities built over two and a half million years ago. The other cities are now abandoned but Rainbow City remains inhabited by a few of the original colonists who made their way to Earth.

It is said that warm springs keep out the cold and ice walls 10,000 feet high guard it from intruders.

Believable so far?

Um, no.  Thanks for asking.  But please do continue.

Millions of years back Mars was an okay place to live but their ancients realised that the planet was dying and it's oxygen and water was getting in shorter and shorter supply. It became a necessity to move, so they packed some of their bags and headed for Earth.

The Great Ruler of Mars sent a fleet of spaceships to Earth and they settled in the area we now know as Antarctica. Here they built seven cities each of a different colour but Rainbow City, the greatest of them all, was made up of all of the colours of the rainbow.

At the time Antarctica was a good, warm place to live, but a great catastrophe of some sort occurred and the Earth was tipped on it's [sic] axis. The survivors of this disaster had to abandon all but the Rainbow City and tmany [sic] settled in the northern hemisphere and gradually lost there [sic] technological knowledge.

Only Rainbow City remained - and remains to this day.

And to my delight, we're treated to a picture of this Eighth Wonder of the World:

Now, my question is, why on earth, other than having a mild mental illness, should anyone believe that this is true?  The answer, Mr. Perry tells us, is the Hefferlin Manuscript, which tells us all about it.

So what, other than "fiction," is the Hefferlin manuscript?  It's a document that was written by William and Gladys Hefferlin of Sheridan, Wyoming in the 1940s, which alleged the colonization of Antarctica by Martians.  A colony of Martians was still there, they said, and could travel all over the world via a network of tunnels, one of which conveniently ended in Sheridan.  The Hefferlins had been in contact with a Martian named "Rani Khatani," and he'd given them the information in the manuscript.

What's pretty clear is that the whole thing was a publicity stunt from the get-go.  In 1946 the Hefferlins sent the manuscript in to the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, which published it in October of that year.  The readers were, by and large, outraged by what they saw as woo-woo nonsense infiltrating a magazine whose purpose was to publish good short fiction.  One of them wrote in that he could only "heartily suggest that Mr. Hefferlin buy a good book on radio and electricity and learn a little about the subject before he writes any more articles...  I honestly cannot see how anyone with a high school education could read Mr. Hefferlin's article without laughing."

So the whole thing seemed to be pretty much a non-starter, and it's astonishing that there are still people around who take the whole thing seriously.  And they do, judging by the comments that follow Mike Perry's post.  Here's a sampling:

• Fascinating post and well, who can say for sure, right?
• The Easter Islanders (when you can get them to stop telling you what you want to hear) claim to have come from Antarctica, before the cold. They say it's the source of 'The Mana" that was used to move the moai.   From the book, "Mysteries of Easter Island" by Francis Maziere.
• todays [sic] post was v interesting for me. some of it could be true :-)

All of which makes me want to sob softly while pounding my forehead on the desk.

Anyhow, that's it for today.  I don't know what else I could possible add, here, other than to mention that according to Mike Perry and others who buy the Hefferlin manuscript as gospel, the Hefferlins themselves were taken to "Rainbow City" when they got old and have been rejuvenated and are living there still as "wise immortals."  Which sounds nice enough, until you realize that this means they have to spend eternity in freakin' Antarctica.  I mean, I think upstate New York is cold enough.

Seizure dogs

Yesterday I looked at a possible "alt-med" treatment modality that may actually work -- "Intranasal Light Therapy."  Today, I want to look at another odd claim, and one that also seems to have some sound research to back it up: the idea that some dogs are able to sense when people near them are about to have a seizure.

I have a personal connection to this one, because our neurotic border collie, Doolin, has a strange ability to recognize when my wife is going to get a migraine.  Now, Doolin's behavior is peculiar at the best of times, but in the hours before a migraine strikes, she becomes even weirder -- following Carol around, staring at her mournfully, and whenever she comes to a complete stop, Doolin presses herself up against Carol's leg.  Once the migraine hits -- which it invariably does -- Doolin won't leave her side until it abates.

Doolin, the Migraine Dog, with one of her diagnostic instruments

Now, I know that one anecdotal report doesn't prove anything, especially that "dog behavioral weirdness" is hardly a quantifiable dependent variable.  But there have been peer-reviewed studies done (read two of them here and here) that indicate that some dogs are able to detect seizures before they begin, and potentially give their owners advance warning.

Here's the thing, though.  Once there are claims like this, the woo-woos get involved, and you get all sorts of wacky explanations flying around.  Here are a few that I saw, after perusing woo-woo sites as long as I could stand to:

• Dogs are in psychic contact with their owners, and are sensing the oncoming seizure through ESP.
• Dogs can see auras, and seizures cause changes in the color or configuration of the aura.
• Dogs have a special god-given talent for protecting their owners from harm.  The whole thing is "spiritual."
• Dogs are living in "several different realms simultaneously" (whatever the hell that means) and get their information about our medical conditions from some other "astral plane."

So.  Yeah.  Predictably, I think all of the above are unadulterated horse waste.  But assuming that there is something going on, here -- and it very much appears that it is -- what are the dogs picking up on?

It's pretty well established that dogs can be trained to detect when a diabetic's blood sugar is too high, and the likely cue is that high blood sugar triggers ketoacidosis -- and results in chemicals being expelled via the breath that the dog could detect by smell.  While it's unlikely that seizures (or migraines) result in a chemical in the blood, and therefore in the sweat or breath, that a dog could sense, it's a possibility.  On the other hand, it's been suggested that dogs may simply be picking up on changes in mannerisms that occur prior to the onset of the seizure.  Dog behavior, and particularly their sensitivity to human expressions, has been studied extensively, and it's not too far a stretch to think that changes in a patient's demeanor prior to a seizure might be detected by a dog who knew the person well, resulting in changes to the dog's behavior that the owner might be able to learn to recognize.

Whatever is going on here, however, it's a pretty cool phenomenon.  I know that I feel more at ease knowing the Doolin the Migraine Dog is on the job.  On the other hand, most of what she spends the rest of her time doing is pacing around the house, looking guilty, sneaking onto the recliner when no one's looking, and bossing around our other dog, Grendel, so I'm not sure that her migraine-detection skills are quite enough to put her in the "useful" column just yet.

Nose lasers redux

One of the nice things about science, and skepticism in general, is that it self-corrects.  Properly applied, skepticism leads you along based upon one thing and one thing only; the data.  Hard evidence is always the ultimate arbiter.

Now, you can still go astray, especially with complex data sets or experimental protocols that require extreme precision.  And there are the unfortunately unavoidable pitfalls that come from having a fallible human brain that can sometimes take all of the right information and still put it together wrong.  But with sufficient time, effort, and energy, and usually helped by having many pairs of eyes trained on the same question, science usually arrives at a pretty solid answer.

That self-correcting mechanism, however, means that we skeptics have to eat crow sometimes.  A few weeks ago I posted a rather sardonic piece about "Intranasal Light Therapy," to the effect that the practice of aiming a beam of light up your nose couldn't possibly generate any positive therapeutic effects.  A couple of days ago I got a very courteous response to the post, informing me that the procedure had, in fact, been double-blind tested and was found to have results that definitely land it in the "hmmm, interesting" department.  The gentleman who responded sent me some source material, and asked me to study it and reconsider my position.

The most interesting link he sent me was to a paper published in the International Journal of Photoenergy, entitled "Randomized, Double-Blind, and Placebo-Controlled Clinic Report of Intranasal Low-Intensity Laser Therapy on Vascular Diseases," by Liu et al.  I encourage you to take a look at it.  The researchers postulate that the laser light used might be generating its effects via stimulation of the olfactory nerve, but they were up front that there are other possibilities.  What made me sit up and take notice is that the findings were statistically significant, with patients in the experimental group showing reduction in blood indexes associated with inflammation, including plasma viscosity, red blood cell aggregation, and low-density lipoprotein levels, as compared to the control group.

So far, it's suggestive that there is "something going on here" beyond the usual woo-woo placebo effect that I have written about so many times before.  I do have two quick caveats, though, neither of which may be all that significant, but which are still enough to keep me from being sold 100%.

First, the lead author of the study, Timon Cheng-Yi Liu, is the science adviser for MedicLights, Inc., the company that is in business to sell intranasal light units.  This doesn't exactly constitute a conflict of interest -- many scientists have connections to industry, and it would be cynical indeed of me to think that they were all biased because of it.  But it is interesting that Liu listed in the "affiliations" section of the paper his connection to South China Normal University, and not his connection to MedicLights, Inc., given its relevance to the topic at hand.

Second, and more troubling (to me at least) is a mention in the introduction that the effects of intranasal light therapy may be mediated through the "meridians" that are described in traditional Chinese medicine.  As far as I can tell, "meridians" don't exist.  According to a 1997 statement from the National Institute of Health,

Despite considerable efforts to understand the anatomy and physiology of the "acupuncture points", the definition and characterization of these points remains controversial. Even more elusive is the basis of some of the key traditional Eastern medical concepts such as the circulation of qi, the meridian system, and the five phases theory, which are difficult to reconcile with contemporary biomedical information but continue to play an important role in the evaluation of patients and the formulation of treatment in acupuncture.

Which sounds pretty unequivocal to me.  So bringing in claims from a system of questionable medical knowledge hardly earns any validity points in my estimation.  Still, it must be said that even when people medicated themselves with herbs and credited the improvement in their conditions to spirits that inhabited the plants, the effect was there even though the explanation was wrong.  So I'm not willing to jettison the entire thing because they decided to dip their toes into the rather muddy waters of traditional Chinese medicine.

Anyway, there you have it.  At least a partial retraction, and a desire to learn more.  Woo-woos are fond of quoting Hamlet -- "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."  Usually, it's meant to throw a literary version of "You don't know everything" at skeptics -- a statement that is literally correct, but that doesn't give you license to claim that any damnfool thing you came up with has to be true because of it.

However, interpreted correctly, I think the quote from Hamlet is quite right.  You never know what curve ball nature will throw at you next, and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that science is always capable of surprising me.  There are far weirder ideas than improving your health by shining a laser up your nose -- and although it very much remains to be seen what exactly the laser is doing, just the fact that it's doing something leaves Intranasal Light Therapy filed under "this deserves further investigation."

Scientific names, Indigo Children, and Alpha Thinkers

Most people are, by nature, categorizers.  We like to put labels on things, sort the world into neat little boxes.  For many of us, this drive is integral to our understanding of the world.

An example from my own field is the concept of species.  The definition seems simple enough: a group of morphologically similar individuals that are capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring.  It seems, on the surface, that given this definition, it should be trivial to determine whether two individuals are, or are not, members of the same species.

The problem is, the world is messy, and doesn't often acquiesce to our desire to paste labels on various bits of it.  The word species is actually one of the hardest to pin down definitions in biology.  Ring species, fertile hybrids, morphologically distinct populations that can interbreed, morphologically identical populations that cannot, and so on, all point up that we're trying to draw firm distinctions in a realm where those distinctions probably don't exist.  As my long-ago vertebrate zoology professor once said, "The only reason that humans came up with the concept of 'species' is that Homo sapiens has no near relatives."

It's funny how serious taxonomists get about this, however.  There are fierce arguments over whether species should be "lumped" or "split" (particularly contentious amongst birdwatchers, who often bump up their lists with no hard work if what was once a single species gets divided into two or more).  There are endless arguments even about what names species should be given, and every month taxonomic oversight groups publish lists of name changes, to the chagrin of biologists who then have to go back and alter their records.

The same urge to divide a messy reality into neat compartments pervades a lot of other fields, too, and the results are sometimes more pernicious than the biologist's need to decide whether some plant or another is a new species.  In psychology, for example, it has driven the use of diagnostic labels on groups of behaviors that might not actually be conditions in the clinical sense.  ADD and ADHD, for example, are diagnoses that even the experts can't agree upon -- whether or not they are actual medical conditions, how (or if) cases should be medicated, and inconsistencies in how they are diagnosed have all led to significant controversy.  (There's a nice overview of the arguments here.)

Then, there's the urge to relabel in order to give a previously stigmatized group a more positive spin.  The adoption of the word "gay" to mean "homosexual" in the 20th century was, in part, to find a positive word to identify people who have throughout history been the targets of the worst sorts of epithets.  In the 1990s, a group of atheists tried the same kind of rebranding, and settled on calling themselves "The Brights" -- a move that to many people, including myself, seemed so self-congratulatory as to be cringeworthy.

More recently, there have been two rather interesting examples of this same sort of thing.  One is the idea of "Indigo Children," which is an increasingly popular label given to kids who are "empathetic, sensitive, intelligent, and don't fit in well."  I can understand the difficulties that parents of sensitive children face -- one of my own sons certainly could be described by those words, and he had a hell of a time making it through the teasing and bullying that seem to be an entrenched part of middle school culture.  But labeling these kids, even with a positive term, doesn't help the situation, and might even make it worse if the label makes the child feel even more different and isolated.  Add to that a pseudoscientific twist that you often see on "Indigo Child" websites -- that "Indigo Children" frequently have paranormal abilities -- and you have a fairly ugly combination of a non-evidence-based false diagnosis with a heaping helping of New-Agey condescension.  (For a particularly egregious example of this, go here -- and note that the article begins with a statement that the easiest way to identify "Indigo Children" is that they have "indigo-colored auras.")

Just yesterday, I found another good example of this -- the idea of the "Alpha Thinker."  Eric Schulke, who wrote the article I linked and who works for the "Movement for Indefinite Life Extension," tells us that Alpha Thinkers "... are creatives, innovators, pioneers. They acutely and agilely navigate an abundance of diverse, fallacy aware thinking. The alpha thinker can’t bring themselves to live at the last outpost and not venture further. They cannot resist poking their finger through the realm of subatomic particles. They can’t stay on this side of the atmosphere. They look into biology and the elements. They want to know why we are here, why the universe and all of existence is here, how far it goes, what is out there, what the hell is going on. Alpha thinkers are the universe’s way of creating the devises [sic] needed to help bring out all of the potential in its elements."

Well, that's just fine and dandy, but how do you know if someone is an "Alpha Thinker?"  It turns out that you more or less have to wait for them to do something smart:  "It is not a college degree that signifies the alpha thinker. As the alpha thinker knows, its [sic] an abundance of fallacy-aware thinking that signifies it...  Alpha thinkers control the elements. They are cosmic titans, the leaders of humankind, the explorers of the universe setting sail with fierce urgency."

Spinoza, Newton, and Thomas Paine, we are told, were "Alpha Thinkers," which strikes me as kind of an odd trio to choose, but I guess there's no denying these three men were bright guys.  Then, we are given two curious pieces of information: (1) whether or not you are an "Alpha Thinker" can be determined by an electroencephalogram; and (2) from "historical times" until now the ratio of "Alpha Thinkers" to ordinary folks has increased from 1 in 99 to 1 in 6.

So, I'm thinking: how can you know that's true, given that the EEG machine was only invented in 1924, and most people in the world will never have an EEG done during their lifetimes?  It seems to me that the label "Alpha Thinker" is just a new way to say "smart person," and Schulke is pulling made-up statistics out of his ass in order to support his point that there's something inherently different about them.  Further evidence of this comes at the end of the article, where Schulke gives the whole thing a New Age twist by saying that "Alpha Thinkers" are here to guide us into the next stage, the "Transhuman Revolution."

Oh, and of course, throughout the article Schulke makes it clear that he's an "Alpha Thinker."  As if there were any doubt of that.

So, there you are.  Today's musings about human nature.  I suspect that all of the above really, in the long haul, does minimal damage, with the possible exception of the misdiagnosis of individuals who are actually mentally ill and who don't receive treatment because they are labeled "Indigo Children" or "Alpha Thinkers," or whatever.  But it is a curious tendency, isn't it?  I think I'll wrap this up here, because I need to go update the database of my birdwatching sightings and see if any of the scientific names have changed.

Moral relativity

Once you accept a given non-evidence-based belief system, be it homeopathy or fundamentalist Islam, I see why that would require you to disbelieve in certain realms of scientific understanding.  If you are embracing something based on faith, and it comes into conflict with rationality, one or the other has to go.  It's time to surgically remove the source of the conflict.

I do, however, find it curious how selective the surgery can be.  The same people who object to biological science's understanding of evolution are frequently the same ones who are perfectly willing to take medicines and undergo medical procedures, all of which were developed by the same scientific framework that generated the theory of evolution.  It's a little hard to see how science can be so far right in one way, and then lead you so far wrong in another.

Be that as it may, I do get why the jettisoning of fact-based science happens.  But sometimes the specific bits that get rejected are a little hard to fathom.

Most of you have probably heard of Conservapedia, the crowd-sourced wiki project begun in 2005 by Andrew Schlafly to counter the "liberal bias" he found in Wikipedia.  His idea was that everything in the project would be written and supported from conservative and Christian ideals.  As a result, the page on Barack Obama is entirely negative; the page on climate change states that, basically, it isn't happening; the page on Jesus unquestioningly accepts his divinity; and so on.

All in the name of "eliminating bias."  Oh, and did I mention that its motto is, "The Trustworthy Encyclopedia?"

But so far, none of this is all that surprising.  It's hardly to be marveled at that conservative Christians embrace conservative Christian viewpoints.  But I just stumbled a couple of days ago onto two pages on Conservapedia that really, truly, mystified me.

Because apparently they find the Theory of Relativity, and Einstein's mass/energy equivalency formula (E=mc²) to be "liberal claptrap."  (Direct quote from the page on E=mc².)

And I'm thinking, "Okay.  I can see rejecting evolution, cosmology, and plate tectonics, because all of those strongly support the antiquity of the Earth.  But what in the hell is the problem with Einstein?  All that Einstein has done is to show that matter and energy can be converted back and forth, and how objects behave when they are traveling at a high rate of speed."  Neither one, I would think, would be first on the list of Theories Conservatives Shouldn't Like.

Apparently they are, though.  The Conservapedia folks go to great lengths to say how both of them are suspect, that any "dissenting views" by scientists who doubt Einstein are "suppressed as heresy," and how neither relativity nor E=mc² has ever been experimentally verified (in fact, they state in several places on the page for the Theory of Relativity that it has been "rejected," "is not entirely successful or proven," and contains "clear contradictions").

Amusingly, on the page for E=mc², they then follow up this criticism with a bunch of evidence that completely supports its validity, and state outright that in an experiment done all the way back in 1932, mass/energy equivalency was supported to an accuracy of ±0.5%.  I guess that's not enough to count as "verification," for some reason.

Only at the end of the page on the Theory of Relativity do we get an inkling of what is going on here.  Einstein's ideas, they say, promote moral relativism:

Some liberal politicians have extrapolated the theory of relativity to metaphorically justify their own political agendas. For example, Democratic President Barack Obama helped publish an article by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe to apply the relativistic concept of "curvature of space" to promote a broad legal right to abortion.  As of June 2008, over 170 law review articles have cited this liberal application of the theory of relativity to legal arguments.  Applications of the theory of relativity to change morality have also been common.  Moreover, there is an unmistakable effort to censor or ostracize criticism of relativity.

So, yeah.  A mathematical system describing how matter behaves at extremely high speeds has anything to do with abortion law.

In any case, I decided to do a little digging, and find out what they hell they could possibly be talking about regarding the Tribe article showing that the General Theory of Relativity was pro-choice.  And I found the source; a paper from the Harvard Law Review in 1989 called "The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers Can Learn from Modern Physics," in which Tribe used Relativity as a metaphor:

The Roe v. Wade opinion ignored the way in which laws regulating pregnant women may shape the entire pattern of relationships among men, women, and children. It conceptualized abortion not in terms of the intensely public question of the subordination of women to men through the exploitation of pregnancy, but in terms of the purportedly private question of how women might make intimately personal decisions about their bodies and their lives. That vision described a part of the truth, but only what might be called the Newtonian part. ... [A] change in the surrounding legal setting can constitute state action that most threatens the sphere of personal choice. And it is a 'curved space' perspective on how law operates that leads one to focus less on the visible lines of legal force and more on how those lines are bent and directed by the law's geometry.

So, now I'm thinking, are you people just idiots?  Or what?  When conservatives branded Bill Clinton with the nickname "the Teflon president," did you throw away all of your non-stick cookware?  Do you think that a "puppet government" is run by Pinocchio, Charlie McCarthy, and Howdy Doody?  When reporters call North Korea "the Hermit Kingdom," does that mean that we should immediately round up and imprison all of the hermits?  Or possibly hermit crabs?

Do you think that rainbows literally taste like Skittles?

You know, in this blog I've deliberately taken up the cause of clear thinking, and tried to do battle with those who promote ridiculous ideas and pretzel logic.  But sometimes, honestly, the muddy water seems to run too deep.  If you are that delusional, that much of a blithering moron, I just don't know that there's anything I, or anyone else, can do about it.

Einstein showed that morals are relative.  I mean.

The doggit on trial

There's a story developing in California that has me casting a wary but curious eye in that direction.

Joseph Mastropaolo, a former biomechanics and kinesiology teacher who "found Jesus" and gave up his career to advocate for various young-earth creationist causes, has dreamed up a contest in which a YEC/anti-evolution proponent and a proponent of science and evolution would each pony up $10,000, and would then present their positions (and evidence) before a judge.  (Mastropaolo has said that he himself will fund the YEC proponent's ante.)  The judge would decide whose case merited the win, and the victor walks away with the whole $20,000.

My first thought was, "What a nitwit.  I hope he has $10,000 to lose."  The weaker sister to creationism -- intelligent design -- has already gone to trial, in 2005, in the Kitzmiller vs. the Dover Area School Board case, and even it was found to be a stance that in the words of Judge John E. Jones III, who decided the case, was "breathtakingly inane."  He said, in his decision,

ID's backers have sought to avoid the scientific scrutiny which we have now determined that it cannot withstand by advocating that the controversy, but not ID itself, should be taught in science class. This tactic is at best disingenuous, and at worst a canard. The goal of the IDM is not to encourage critical thought, but to foment a revolution which would supplant evolutionary theory with ID.

Couple this with the fact that "religious freedom" statutes, which would coerce teachers to give "alternate explanations" to evolution in biology classes, have been found unconstitutional every time they have come to trial, and Mastropaolo's idea seems like a good way to lose $10,000.

But I wonder if it'll be that easy.  According to the rules of the game, the goal is to pit a "literal Genesis advocate" against a "non-literal Genesis advocate."  In other words, people like me, who consider the Book of Genesis mythology (i.e., false), might be excluded from the outset, because I don't advocate for the Bible at all, either literally or non-literally.

Second, the two have to agree on the judge.  This may or may not be a problem; for example, in the Dover case, Judge Jones is a self-professed "Republican and Christian," and yet he still decided against the School Board in his decision.

Third, and more troubling, is the requirement in the rules that the "non-literal Genesis advocate" prove his/her case before the judge, using "objective, valid, reliable, and calibrated" evidence.  This would seem immediately to favor the advocate of science, given that the amount of reliable evidence that supports young-earth creationism is exactly zero.  But the problem, I believe, hinges on the word "prove."  When is a scientific theory proven?  The rather facile answer is "never;" as a possibly apocryphal quote from Einstein goes, "A thousand experiments could never prove me right, but one could prove me wrong."  Theories are supported, but are always subject to revision with better data -- one of the strengths of science.  Proof, in the sense that we prove a theorem in trigonometry, is out of reach of the inductive scientific method.

So I can easily see the case going something like this:

Scientist: The evidence is that the universe is billions, not thousands, of years old.  For example, we see light from galaxies that are far more than six thousand light years away; if the universe were only six thousand years old, the light from those galaxies wouldn't have arrived yet.

Creationist:  God created the light en route.  You can't prove that the entire universe wasn't created, with the light already part of the way here, six thousand years ago.  Or maybe the speed of light has changed in the last six thousand years.  You can't disprove that conjecture, either.

Scientist:  But what about radioactive dating?  The geologists and paleontologists have calibrated radioactive decay rates, and they all agree with each other.

Creationist:  If all of the decay rates are changing simultaneously, the fact that they're calibrated against each other means nothing.  If everything in the world were expanding, including the meter sticks, you'd have no way to tell.  So again, the rate of decay could have been different in the past, just like the speed of light.

Scientist:  But... fossils?  Genetic homology?  Structural homology?

Creationist:  All created that way by God.

Scientist (desperately):  The Lenski experiment?  Examples of rapid speciation?  Bacterial antibiotic resistance?

Creationist (smugly):  That's microevolution, not macroevolution.  There are no intermediate forms, and no changes in "type."  Show me something halfway between a dog and rabbit, and I might be convinced.

Scientist:  *faceplant*

So, I think the whole thing might hinge on some judge demanding that the scientist (or "non-literal Genesis advocate," or whatever) be able to come up with evidence to meet every potential objection that the creationist could bring up.  This, of course, isn't possible, because the creationist just has to fall back on "god did it that way," to which there's no possible scientific answer.  (And lest you think that I'm joking about how ridiculous this can get, the picture I linked above came from a creationist site, Fish With Trish, wherein we find out that supposedly evolutionists believe in transitional forms like the "doggit (a mix between a dog and a rabbit)," and that "the purpose of fossils is to speak about death and God's judgment.")

So, I can easily see the whole thing going awry -- not because there's any chance that evolution is wrong and creationism is right, but because proponents of science and religion essentially don't speak the same language.  Their standards of evidence and proof differ; their understanding of how we know something is true or false differs; their entire way of comprehending the world differs.  It is to be hoped that a judge would side with reason, but I'm not confident enough of it to risk $10,000.

So, it'll be interesting to see what will happen.  A couple of the skeptical sites I frequent had folks pawing at the ground saying, "Lemme at him!"  So maybe someone will take the bait.  Myself, I'm not entirely sure that's a good thing.  But in my optimistic moments, I can see such a trial going very right -- which would certainly be a victory to celebrate.