Welcome to the Earth! Now go home.

Given my habit of poking fun at the aliens-and-UFOs crowd, it may come as a surprise to you that I think it's very likely that there's intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.  I find the possibility breathtakingly cool -- to think that there are alien organisms out there, on a planet around another star, perhaps looking up into their night sky and wondering the same thing as we do, hoping that they're not alone in the universe.

It really seems pretty routine, forming life.  Many, perhaps most, stars have a planetary system of some kind, a significant fraction of those are small, rocky worlds like the Earth, and the basic building blocks of organic chemistry -- water, and compounds containing carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus -- appear to be abundant.  Once you have those, and some range of temperatures that allows water to be in the liquid state, organic compounds can be created, abiotically, in large quantities.  The first cell-like structures would probably appear post-haste once there are sufficient raw materials.

After that, evolution takes over, and it's only a matter of time.

The thing that fires the imagination most, of course, is contact with an alien race, a possibility that has driven science fiction writers for a hundred years.  The result has varied from the dreamy, benevolent, childlike aliens of Close Encounters of the Third Kind to the horrific killing machines of Alien and Starship Troopers, and everything in between.

The fact is, we don't know anything about what results evolution would have on a different planet.  A few features seem logical as drivers for any evolutionary lineage, anywhere -- having some means of propulsion; having a centralized information-processing organ; having sensory organs near the mouth, and basically pointed in the direction the organism is moving.  It's a little hard to imagine those not being common features for most species, no matter where they originated.

But other than that, they could look like damn near anything.  And how they might perceive the world, how they might think -- and more germane to our discussion, how they might look at us, should we run into one another -- is entirely uncertain.

This is why physicist Stephen Hawking raised some eyebrows a couple of years ago when he said that we should be afraid of alien contact.  In an interview, he said, "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet.  I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet.  Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.  If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans."

Hawking isn't the only one who is worried.  In his wonderful book Bad Habits, humor writer Dave Barry also weighed in on the topic when he found out that we had sent what amounts to a welcome message on the exploratory spacecraft Pioneer 10:

 Dave Barry thinks that the plaque, which was the idea of the late great astronomer Carl Sagan, was a colossally bad idea:

(W)hen they decided to send up Pioneer 10, Carl sold the government on the idea that we should attach a plaque to it, so that if the aliens found it they'd be able to locate the Earth.  This is easily the stupidest idea a scientific genius ever sold to the government...  (I)t's all well and good for Carl Sagan to talk about how neat it would be to get in touch with the aliens, but I bet he'd change his mind pronto if they actually started oozing under his front door.  I bet he'd be whapping at them with his golf clubs just like the rest of us.

Dave Barry even thought the choice of the art work on the plaque was ill-advised:

(The plaque) features drawings of... a hydrogen atom and naked people.  To represent the entire Earth!  This is crazy!  Walk the streets of any town on the planet, and the two things you will almost never see are hydrogen atoms and naked people.  Plus, the man on the plaque is clearly deranged.  He's cheerfully waving his arm as if to say, 'Hi!  Look at me!  I'm naked as a jaybird!'  The woman is not waving, because she's clearly embarrassed.  She wishes she'd never let the man talk her into posing naked for this plaque.

Well, for those of you who agree with Stephen Hawking and Dave Barry, let me tell you about something that may allay your fears.

A new Kickstarter project has begun called Your Face in Space, which has as its goal (if they can raise sufficient funds) saving the Earth from alien invasion by launching a satellite into space with a bunch of pictures of people making angry faces.  It will be an "awesome scary satellite," the website proclaims.  "Something that will make aliens think twice about invading us."  They're asking people to send them money, and also jpegs of themselves making mean faces.  (The website has a selection of some of the best they've received thus far.)  Plus, they've reworked the Pioneer 10 plaque into something more, um, off-putting to potential alien conquistadors:

Yes, the woman is wearing a horned Viking helmet and is holding nunchucks, the man has a bandanna, a Rambo vest with no shirt, a machine gun, and a "flying-V" electric guitar, and they're standing on top of a bunch of dead aliens.

And the American eagle is taking down a spaceship by shooting laser beams out of its eyes.

Well, if that doesn't dissuade the aliens from invading Earth, I don't know what would.

So, anyway, as much as I would love to find evidence of alien life, and even have them contact humanity, have to admit that I sympathize with the worries that Hawking, Barry, and the originators of the Your Face in Space project have voiced.  While I would find it incredibly exciting to meet an alien race, I draw the line at letting them land their spaceship in my back yard and use their ray guns to vaporize my pets.  So maybe the Kickstarter project is a good idea.  In any case, I encourage you to donate to their project, or at least send them your photograph making a scary face.

You can't be too careful.

The alien genetic code, and the hazards of overconclusion

One type of scientific error I find my students frequently make is "overconclusion."  This is when you take data that supports a specific conclusion, and draw from it a far more general conclusion than is warranted.  As a simple example, if you have found that marigolds produce more flowers when given a high-nitrogen fertilizer, it is an overconclusion to claim that all plants will react that way.

Woo-woos, I find, are especially prone to this -- many "alternative medicine" therapies are good examples.  Acupuncture is reported by a friend of yours to have had success in reducing his pain from an injury, so you conclude that it must be good for everyone, regardless of the source of the pain, and also useful in treating everything from angina to warts.  Lycopene, an antioxidant found in tomatoes, is reported in some studies to reduce the incidence of cancer, so all antioxidants are cancer preventatives -- or cancer cures.  And so on.

The problem gets worse when the original data comes from a realm that hardly anyone really understands.  And I found an excellent example of that just yesterday, in a pair of articles -- one which uses an abstruse method on an unfamiliar data set to support a rather wild conclusion, and a second one that takes that conclusion and runs right off the cliff with it.

The first one, which was published on April Fool's Day but appears to be legitimate, is called "Is An Alien Message Embedded in Our Genetic Code?"  It describes the research of two Kazakh geneticists, Vladimir I. shCherbak and Maxim A. Makukov, who claim to have found in the human genome a "mathematical and semantic signal" that indicates the storage of non-functionally-based (i.e. not evolutionarily derived) information in our DNA.  "Simple arrangements of the code reveal an ensemble of arithmetical and ideographical patterns of symbolic language," they wrote in the journal Icarus.  "Accurate and systematic, these underlying patterns appear as a product of precision logic and nontrivial computing."  This, they conclude, is because we are the product of panspermia -- our genetic code originated elsewhere in the universe, and this is the signature of the alien species that seeded our DNA here.

My first thought: wasn't that the whole idea behind the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Chase?"

Definitely one of the best episodes -- but I was under the impression that the entire series was fiction, weren't you?

Now, other than that, I am drastically unqualified to comment upon whether the scientists have really stumbled upon something astonishing.  This is despite my training in evolutionary genetics -- which, you would think, would be enough.  In order to determine if shCherbak and Makukov have actually found evidence of life's extraterrestrial origins, you have to be able to show, mathematically, that an apparent encoded signal is meaningful.  This is decidedly non-trivial.  As I've commented before, given a sufficiently long string of characters, you can always pull a meaningful pattern out as long as you mess about with it long enough and are willing to change the rules as you go (see my post on the alleged "Bible Code" here).  And three billion base pairs is a helluva long string.

So, the bottom line is: unless you are an expert in information theory and mathematics, you are unqualified to comment upon whether shCherbak and Makukov are on to something, or whether they have made the same mistake as the one made by the yo-yos who said that the bible predicted the 9/11 attacks.  But that, of course, hasn't stopped anyone from commenting, especially the UFO and alien crowd, once they finished having multiple orgasms over the idea that terrestrial life might come from the stars.

So, here's where the overconclusion comes in, starting with an article in News.Com.Au entitled, "WE ARE STAR PEOPLE: Scientific Proof We Were Created By Aliens."  And from them we find out that the Kazakh scientists didn't just show that terrestrial life might have a signature in its DNA that indicates its alien origins, they showed that humans specifically were created by a superintelligent alien race:

Scientists from Kazakhstan believe that human DNA was encoded with an extraterrestrial signal by an ancient alien civilisation...  In a nutshell, we're living, breathing vessels for some kind of alien message which is more easily used to detect extra terrestrial life than via radio transmission...   So if we are just vessels for alien communication, exactly what kind of secret message are we carrying in our DNA?  And if we were the creation of aliens, who created them?

Premature questions to ask, don't you think, given that the mathematicians haven't yet weighed in on whether shCherbak and Makumov are correct?  And if they're correct, what it actually means?  Man, I just can't wait to see what Diane Tessman and Dirk VanderPloeg are gonna do when they find out about this.

So, that's it for today.  It'll be interesting to see whether anyone sits down with this data and goes through the hard work of checking the paper's conclusion.  If I were a betting man, I'd be putting my money on a statistical analysis of the "message" showing that it is very likely to be random -- i.e., not a message at all, but an artifact of the algorithm they used.  As appealing as the idea in "The Chase" was, I always thought that it was more of a justification by the writers of Star Trek as to why all of the aliens, who had evolved on other worlds Where No One Had Gone Before, just looked like humans with rubber alien noses and strange accents.  If their idea pans out, it would be pretty earthshattering -- but even then, we'll have to figure out what the message actually means, both literally and figuratively.

Or, as Gul Ocett said in "The Chase," "As far as we know, it might just be a recipe for biscuits."

Ruby slippers and "tachyon energy"

One of the most frustrating types of woo-woo belief is the kind that is, by definition, out of the reach of any sort of experimental testing.  It's a rare thing; most odd, unsupported claims are at least theoretically accessible to controlled scientific investigation.  Psychics, mediums, dowsing, aura manipulation, homeopathy, astrology, cryptozoology... all of those have been the subjects of scrutiny by actual scientists using the lens of experimentation (and all, by the way, have failed thus far to generate any results that would be convincing to a skeptic).

But a claim that is inherently untestable isn't common, and that's including if you throw in religious belief.  I mean, even the creation and "great flood" stories from Christian myth can be analyzed on the basis of evidence.  So it takes a special talent at woo-woo thinking to devise something that you couldn't test experimentally even if you wanted to.

I ran into a good example of this yesterday on a website sent by one of my loyal readers, a page on the website School of Awakening entitled, "What Is Tachyon?"  At first, it would seem that they're just using the word "tachyon" to mean the same old tired "life force energy frequencies" you see on so many woo-woo websites:

Tachyon is the energy of existence, without it there is no life on earth. Tachyons are sub atomic particles, which travel faster than the speed of light. Scientists refer to this as Zero Point Energy.

Tachyon is also known as universal or source energy, or cosmic consciousness. Tachyon has a negative entropic effect, which means it brings order out of chaos. It is constantly regenerating and harmonising by transforming chaotic, energetic structures into new levels of order.

Interesting that they start out, as so many woo-woos do, by borrowing a term from theoretical physics.  The word tachyon was coined in 1967 by physicist Gerald Feinberg to describe a hypothetical particle that travels always faster than light and therefore breaks the laws of causality (i.e., if it existed, you could use it to send signals into your own past).  Most scientists consider the tachyon only an interesting fiction -- no evidence for its existence has ever been found, and there are a great many compelling arguments against it.

But that doesn't stop the School of Awakening people:

The more stagnation or blockages we have, the weaker our energetic system, and the less we are able to regenerate. The result is entropy (premature ageing [sic]). Tachyon can boost the energetic system by regenerating and reversing ageing through its negative entropic qualities.

Well, that sounds awfully nice!  I'm 52 and no great fan of aging, frankly.  

Then they tell you about some "tachyonized" products they're selling that can bring "tachyons" into the water and food you consume, or right directly into your body:

Tachyonization™ is the process of transforming normal products into Tachyon antennae. These products are then used in a treatment, for instance: Tachyon cells (small, flat, triangular shaped, coloured glass) are attached to painful points in the body and Tachyon Life Crystal (TLC) bars (fist sized chunks of clear crystal which are used to sweep the body from head to feet)... You don’t have to be ill to have a Tachyon treatment or to benefit from using Tachyonized™ products. As Tachyon increases the life-force and youthfulness in cells of the body, Tachyon CD-shaped disks can be used to vitalise food or water. Placed on the fuse box they can neutralise electromagnetic frequency (EMF).

This, then, causes changes in an energetic system that everything in the universe can detect and interact with... except for humans (presumably because we're just kind of dumb):

All energy systems, except humans, are connected vertically with the Source and HIS/HER inexhaustible flow of universal life force energy, maintaining what we call the energetic continuum...  This structure we find with all life forms as a basic energetic matrix, which keeps our entire universe interconnected. 

And we're given a list of positive results that will occur from all of this hocus-pocus:

Applications

• Dissolve pain
• Reduce stress
• Bring wellness and youthing to the body
• Optimise sports performance
• Neutralise harmful electromagnetic fields
• Neutralise the harmful effects of mobile phone use
• Charge water with life enhancing energy
• Raise consciousness

Now, so far, how is this different from any other woo-woo nonsense out there?  Wouldn't this still fall into the realm of the testable?  The answer is no, and here's the really clever bit that sets them apart from your run-of-the-mill purveyor of pseudoscience:

A human system naturally goes through cycles of order and chaos on its path of evolution. When it is unable to adapt to more stress in its life the crisis comes to a peak. This is called a Bifurcation point.

At this point the body will either go into chaos (begin manifesting an illness which may have been latent for years), or it will move to better health. Using Tachyon will speed the energetic blockage to a bifurcation point and transform the problem, which may bring insights or understanding of the underlying cause.

See what they did, there?  You're supposed to buy all of the "tachyonized" crystals and disks and everything, because they (1) emit a particle that is inherently impossible to detect, which interacts with (2) an energy system in your body that is inherently impossible to detect, and that will result in (3) any physical conditions you have either getting better or worse depending on which path you needed to take at the "Bifurcation Point."

Oh, but by all means, you should buy the crystals and disks and all.  They have case studies.  They have testimonials.  All you have to do, apparently, is believe, and you can return to Kansas any time you want.
 

Of course, what bugs me here is that there are people with legitimate medical conditions who are being suckered by hucksters like this, and who aren't going to get the treatments they need because they would rather waste their money  being "tachyonized."  And in some sense, the people who are convinced by these snake oil salesmen are gullible enough that they have no one to blame but themselves if they get fooled.

But part of me still gets angry.  Getting rich off of people who don't understand how science works, who are swayed by big words and subtle pretzel logic, just isn't nice.  I know that there is no way to stop them; they've been too clever at crafting their argument so that it is experimentally irrefutable.  Staying with The Wizard of Oz theme,some days it'd just be nice if there was a skeptic's version to the Flying Monkeys, that could just... take care of things for me.

But I suppose, honestly, that that isn't nice, either.

The only answer, as always, is in getting people to understand how science works.  So, toward that end, I'd better wrap this up and go off to eat my un-tachyonized breakfast, and take my slower-than-the-speed-of-light car to school, where I can hopefully do my part in immunizing my students against falling for this sort of unscientific bullshit.

The backfiring demons of Romania

Here at Worldwide Wacko Watch we're keeping a close eye on a story out of Romania.  It's got all of the necessary elements -- some religious guys who are a little loony, a true believer who is even loonier, and a supernatural entity with an unfortunate problem.  [Source]

The whole thing began when Madalin Ciculescu, a 34-year-old lawyer from the town of Pitesti in Romania, enlisted the help of four priests in ridding his business of demons.  According to Ciculescu, the problem wasn't just the presence of the evil spirits, but that they had a rather... um... malodorous gastrointestinal condition, the results of which were making it impossible to do business.

"When I am at home," Ciculescu told reporters, "they switch the TV on and off all the time, they make foul smells that give me headaches and basically roam unhindered around my house and my business."

So, anyway, the priests dutifully showed up to show the farting demons the door, and performed the ritual exorcism to remove them.  Unfortunately for Ciculescu, though, the whole "vade retro satana" routine didn't make any difference, and the disturbances continued.

And Ciculescu sued the church for "religious malpractice."

"If they (the priests) represent the way of God, then God's ways are crooked.  They did not remove the demons that made these bad smells as they promised to do, and I still see all sorts of demons in the form of animals, usually crows but also other such things, that are making my life miserable."

He included the bishop of the diocese, Constantin Argatu, in the suit, alleging that since the bishop was supposed to be overseeing what the priests were doing, he was guilty of malfeasance as well for not instructing them properly.

Now, you can see how to an atheist, this is all kinds of funny.  A guy plagued by nonexistent evil spirits call priests who are supposed to get a nonexistent god to expel them, and then is surprised when nothing happens.  The flatulence adds a whole extra middle-school-level humor to the whole thing, but I'm not so sophisticated that I can't laugh at a good fart joke.

Ciculescu wasn't laughing, though, and at his court date brought his mother as a witness.  I'm not sure that she helped his credibility, though.  On the witness stand she agreed that her son was plagued by flatulent demons (so far, so good).  But then she added that she sees a "black shadow" following her around, said that the evil spirits liked to hang out in the fridge, and mentioned that her hair dryer was "possessed."

Okay, mom, thanks for helping... you can get off the witness stand, now.

The outcome of the case is interesting.  The courts found in favor of the church, which is unsurprising from the standpoint of "who is richer and more powerful?", but which casts a rather harsh light on the church's claims.  Do evil spirits exist?  The church is the one who is claiming that they do.  Can priests perform an exorcism, or is the whole thing a pointless ritual?  I thought the whole Christian idea was that god is more powerful than the devil, and that you can accomplish anything in god's name.  So, do you people really believe in what you're preaching, or not?

The double standard is curious, and it doesn't just apply here.  Consider all of the biblical stories of god telling so-and-so to smite various people.  The Old Testament in particular is full of references to "holy men of the lord" killing the unworthy, in several places even the children (I'm remembering especially the lovely line from Psalm 137, "Happy the man who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rock").  And they got nothing but approval for these actions.  Today, if a person kills somebody, and then tells the authorities they did it because "god told them to," they're referred for psychiatric evaluation.  No Christian I've ever heard has spoken up and said, "Wait, god told him to do that!  That makes it okay!"  What, doesn't god like his followers to kill the unworthy any more?  Why was that kind of thing edifying (and justifiable) 3,000 years ago, and now it means you're crazy?

Or does it just mean that deep down, you know that god isn't really talking to anyone?

Anyway, Ciculescu lost his suit, and he and his mom have to return to dealing with farting demons in the house.  You have to feel at least a little sorry for them; they obviously believe that their house is possessed (not to mention the fridge and hair dryer).  Also, being around someone with GI problems is no picnic.  I have a dog, Grendel, who gets periodic gas attacks that can clear a packed room in five seconds flat, and that's bad enough.  I can only imagine how much worse a demon would be.

You know, sulfur and brimstone and all.

Don't drink the water

So, in our last installment of Learning About Chemistry From People Whose Last Science Class Was In The Seventh Grade, we found out that breathing air causes all of the diseases known to man.  Today we will hear about how drinking water is slowly killing us all.

Man, with all of the air we breathe and water we drink, it's a surprise that the human race isn't extinct by now.

This latest sermon from the Church of Wingnuttery ties into the whole anti-fluoridation movement.  You probably are aware of the controversy surrounding fluoridation of water to prevent tooth decay; despite multiple peer-reviewed studies that have shown that this is safe and effective (read two of them here and here), there are people who think that fluoridation is basically the government's way of slowly murdering us all.  (Of course the government wants to kill all of its citizens.  Don't make me use the word "sheeple" in your general direction.)  Further, because of the presence of fluoride minerals in soils and bedrock, fresh water is naturally fluoridated, with a concentration averaging around 0.2 ppm.  Seawater has concentrations ten times higher than that, and aquatic animals seem to be able to tolerate it just fine.

So, fluoride is pretty safe, in low doses, and will save you the cost and trauma of multiple trips to the dentist.  But don't take my word for it.  Don't take the scientists' word for it, either.  No, instead, you should trust the likes of "April," who wrote an article for the website Starseed411 called "How Does Your Drinking Water Affect You?" that should be inscribed forever in the annals of Making Shit Up.

April starts out with a chemistry lesson:

We have all known all our lives that our drinkng [sic] water supply is H20, 2 parts hydrogen and 1 part oxygen. There is an old book called Natural Philosophy by: G.P. Quakenbos, A.M., entered according to act of Congress in the year 1859, by G.P. Quakenbos, the Clerk Office of The District Court of The United States, for the Southern District of New York. This book states that towards the end of the 18th century water was found to be a compound substance made up of a combination of oxygen and hydrogen, combined in the proportion of 1 to 8. Meaning 1 part oxygen and 8 parts hydrogen. H80.

I knew it!  I knew there was something wrong with my well water!  It just isn't hydrogen-y enough.

So, anyway, if water is supposed to be eight parts hydrogen to one part oxygen, how did it end up as familiar old H₂O?

The answer, of course, is fluoridation:

Fluoride was infused into the water to destroy and remove 6 parts hydrogen. Our water supply affects us by hardening our pineal gland, by age 12 the pineal gland is calicified [sic], and by adulthood it is atrophied.

That nasty old fluoride!  Stealing away 75% of the hydrogen from our water, and hoarding it all for itself!  And making our pineal glands go all... crusty.  Terrifying!  But what effects does this have, and what can we do about it?

The pineal gland (third eye) is the seed of our soul and our connection to the spiritual, physical world, and higher frequencies. This gland is our power source. The pineal gland is like a built in wireless transmitter. when the pineal gland becomes awaken, learning abilitys are heightened; enhanced creativity; intuition; triggered psychic abilities, and experience bliss. Fluoride in the drinking water seals these capabilitys [sic]. You can awaken your pineal gland through eliminating bad sugars, processed foods, and fluoride from your body.

Well, that explains why I've experienced so little bliss lately.

Now, lest you think that "April" is just one aberrant wacko, take a look at the highly scientific editorial "Water is Poison" (gist: fluoride rots your bones, destroys your immune system, and is being used by the government for purposes of "eugenics"), not to mention "Fluoride: The Lunatic Drug" (which reads like a compendium of anti-scientific craziness ranking right up there with the best of David Icke).  The upshot: fluoride doesn't prevent cavities.  It causes cancer, osteoporosis, Alzheimer's disease, and kidney problems, not to mention making you "stupid, docile, and subservient."

In any case, let's clear a few things up.  Fluoride, in the miniscule doses you'd get from either naturally or artificially fluoridated water, is completely harmless, and has little other effect than strengthening your tooth enamel.  This has been repeatedly demonstrated to the satisfaction of panels of scientists trained in human physiology.  Of course it's poisonous in large doses; so are a great many other things, including caffeine, aspirin, and table salt.  If you don't understand how this works, there's this thing called a dose-response curve that you might want to investigate that will hopefully clarify the point.

Also, it bears mention that if fluoride is as horrible as these people claim, there should be a fairly strong correlation between living in a community that fluoridates its water and terrible health.  So, take a look at this map, from the National Center for Health Statistics:

Percentage of communities, state-by-state, that fluoridate their water

So, from this map, we should expect the greatest number of sane and healthy people should be in states like New Hampshire, and that the citizens of New Mexico should be... worried.  But take a look at this map of cancer incidence, from the Center for Disease Control:

Do the words "no correlation" mean anything to you?  And none of the other diseases the anti-fluoridation crowd wants to attribute to fluoride in the water -- Alzheimer's, osteoporosis, type-2 diabetes, and kidney failure -- show any greater degree of correlation.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find maps showing the incidence of being "stupid, docile, and subservient."  Maybe the Center for Disease Control isn't putting that data out there because it's too damning, I don't know.

Anyhow, that's about all I have time for today.  It's amazing to me that there are people who swallow this stuff (figuratively speaking; I hear that anti-science nonsense is toxic in high doses!).  But judging by the controversy that erupts every time a community puts fluoridation up to the vote, apparently there are a great many people who aren't swayed by research, and instead are convinced by alarmist rhetoric.  I suppose I can't do much about that, but I do hope that they have their dental insurance paid up.

All I need is the air that I breathe

I think my most common thought, while reading a lot of woo-woo writing, is "Learn some damn science before you pretend you know what you're talking about."

Okay, I know that sounds pretty arrogant of me, as if I always know what I'm talking about.  I don't; I make mistakes as often as the next guy.  But one thing I do try to do is research what I'm writing about, find out what science and experimentation have shown, before I launch off into thin air.

I use the "thin air" metaphor deliberately because of a website discovered by a student of mine, a frequent Skeptophilia contributor with a sharp eye for searching out nonsense.  And this time, she found a doozy.  The title of this website, "CO2 and Oxygen in Evolution of Air on Earth and Health," by itself caused some puzzled eyebrow-raising, but nothing like the actual content -- because its author, Artour Rakhimov, seems to be in serious need of basic training in human physiology.

The gist of this website is that all of the medical problems you've ever experienced were caused by having too much oxygen, and too little carbon dioxide, in your tissues.  Yes, you read that right.  Furthermore, we "hyperoxygenate" during times of high activity because we evolved during a time when there was less oxygen in the air, and we had to breathe harder.  Now, hyperventilation is killing us:

Appearance of the first vertebrates (about 550 millions years ago) and the development of prototypes of human lungs took place when air was made up of only about 1% O2, while having much higher percentage of CO2 (Maina, 1998), likely over 7%. Normal air today has many times more O2  (about 20%) and only a fraction of the CO2 (0.03%). However, our cells now still live in the air that existed hundred millions years ago: “But the cells of animals and humans need about 7 % CO2 and only 2% O2 in the surrounding environment. This is the way how our cells live: cells of the heart, brain, and kidneys” (Buteyko, 1977).

Yup.  We still live in "hundred million year old air."  That's why my knees hurt and I have sinus problems.

Anyhow, there we were, millions of years ago, happily consuming our "main nutrient" -- yes, this is what he calls carbon dioxide -- when along came plants to mess everything up:

However, the main parameter of our environment, our air, had dramatic change during later stages of our evolution due to advance of green life that transforms CO2 into O2 during photosynthesis.  We can see that air had dramatic change during evolution. It now has too much oxygen and almost no CO2. Hence, the chief parameter of our environment (we can survive for days or weeks with no water or food, but only for minutes with no air) became abnormal in its composition. It is only existence of our lungs that protected us from extinction. Nature could not anticipate this cardinal change in air, but it did provide us with the means for survival.

No, apparently he doesn't know that photosynthesis predated aerobic respiration as an evolved metabolic pathway.  How exactly our ancestors could have evolved to use oxygen before there were photosynthesizing organisms there to produce oxygen, I have no idea.  Nor do I know how they survived.  I have this strangely amusing image of dinosaurs crashing about in a completely plant-free ecosystem, gasping for breath, and cursing the fact that they'd appeared too soon.

In any case, now that we've established what the problem is, what do we do?   Well, Artour Rakhimov has the solution -- learn to breathe more slowly, or use a "Frolov Breathing Device" -- a thing that basically gets you rebreathing exhaled air.  Oh, and by the way, Rakhimov is selling "Frolov Breathing Devices."  Did I even need to mention that?

Could there be any truth to this?  The answer is "no."  Raising carbon dioxide levels in your blood is called "respiratory acidosis" (carbon dioxide in solution in your blood plasma creates a weak acid, carbonic acid, dropping the blood pH).  This, in turn, is the signal to your brainstem to speed up your breathing rate.  Put simply: carbon dioxide levels, via their effects on your blood pH, are how your body keeps track of how fast you need to breathe.  Slowing down your breathing, or rebreathing exhaled air, will just make you feel uncomfortable, and stimulate the unpleasant sensation that you need to breathe faster.

Don't believe me?  Check out sources here and here -- the latter source stating that humans start showing signs of hypercapnia (carbon dioxide toxicity) at an inhaled air concentration of 3%, and that at 7% -- the level recommended as healthy by Artour Rakhimov -- you will experience "labored breathing, headaches, tinnitus, as well as impaired vision... You are likely to become confused in a few minutes, followed by unconsciousness."

Rakhimov himself seems pretty confused on the topic.  Maybe he's been breathing too much carbon dioxide.

See why I yelled at my computer several times while reading all of this?  Of course, Rakhimov couldn't hear me, and it wasn't because of the tinnitus.  But still, I find the whole thing immensely frustrating, especially given the fact that this is hardly the only idiotic pseudo-medical idea out there -- in fact, I've got another one planned for Monday, to the effect that the problem isn't the air, it's the water.

It's got too little hydrogen in it.  Two hydrogens to one oxygen just isn't enough.

I can barely wait.

Establishing a state religion

There is something going in on North Carolina right now that I bet a lot of you haven't heard about.  It's gotten barely any press coverage, which is weird, because if it doesn't scare the absolute hell out of you, you're not thinking hard enough.

A bill, filed by two Republican lawmakers from Rowan County on Monday (and backed by nine others), had as its intent to supersede the United States Constitution with respect to the establishment of a "state religion."  The bill was written by Representatives Carl Ford (R-China Grove) and Harry Warren (R-Salisbury), and says, in part,

SECTION 1. The North Carolina General Assembly asserts that the Constitution of the United States of America does not prohibit states or their subsidiaries from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.
SECTION 2. The North Carolina General Assembly does not recognize federal court rulings which prohibit and otherwise regulate the State of North Carolina, its public schools, or any political subdivisions of the State from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.

Backers claim that the bill is in response to President Obama's moves to establish universal health care and to alter gun laws, and they characterize it as fighting "federal tyranny."

Now, before you start writing letters, allow me to mention that this bill died yesterday afternoon in committee.  But the fact that it got as far as it did is like a dash of cold water down my back.  And if you think that this is a feint, or a political move intended just to "send a message," consider what Michael Bitzer, a professor of political science at Catawba College in Salisbury, had to say about the bill: "[I]t is attempting to appease to a certain base of supporters here in Rowan County, but also probably throughout the state, that believe very firmly in the needs for religious liberty."

Now wait, Dr. Bitzer, let me get this straight: allowing North Carolina to establish an official state religion, and thus compel prayers in schools, prayers before governmental functions, and (presumably) state control over what can and cannot be taught in science classrooms, is a move toward religious liberty?  Can I just take a moment to remind you of what theocracies are actually like?

Because a move toward a Christian theocracy is what this is, of course.  No one in his or her right mind believes that all religions in North Carolina will be given equal respect.  This is just the old "America is a Christian nation" thing, rebranded as some kind of fight against the power of the federal government.  Take a look, for example, at the billboard campaign that has begun, in support of this move:

Many local churches have been vocal in their support of the bill, and vow to continue the fight now that this iteration of it will not be voted on.  "It's very exciting," minister Bill Godair of Cornerstone Church in Salisbury told WBTV on Wednesday.  "I was thrilled about it...  I know this money could have been given to the poor and I feel like we do so much and I feel like we elected these men, the fact that they're standing together unified, all five of them, I just feel like that we have to stand with them."

I find the whole thing profoundly frightening.  In this time, when there are large, organized, well-funded private groups that have as their official goal mandating the infiltration of religion into every aspect of our lives -- determining what we can do with our own bodies, how we have to teach our children, what we can and cannot say in public -- that this sort of thing is now being considered by government officials is horrifying.

And for those of my readers who are yourselves Christian, I hope you have the sense to recognize why this would be a terrible move.  Because, after all, it's not like Christianity is one thing; it is a diverse system of belief, a term that encompasses everything from the liberal, bible-as-metaphor approach of the Unitarian Universalists to the hard-as-nails biblical fundamentalism of the Pentecostals.  (Notwithstanding the fact that some of these sects say about the others that they are "not true Christians.")  So, if there's to be a state religion, which one?  If you take just that parts they all agree on, there won't be much left.  One of them has to be chosen as the actual state religion -- which should rightly terrify members of the others.

In any case, keep an eye on North Carolina, and other states in the "Bible Belt."  This fight isn't over yet.  And for those atheists, rationalists, agnostics, and freethinkers who somehow survive down there -- speak up.  Now.

Before it's too late.