The stories we tell ourselves

Often, when I respond to a piece of art work, it's because of the stories that it evokes in my brain.

When I was in college, and took an art appreciation class, I fell in love with Édouard Manet's painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.  And it wasn't because of any knowledge of French Impressionism, and how Manet's work fit into the artistic movements of the time; nor was it really about the style, or the skill of the painter, although those certainly played a role in the capacity of the painting to touch me.  The whole thing was about emotion, and how it brought stories bubbling up from the depths of my brain.

Who is this girl with the despairing expression?  I imagined her as a country girl who'd come to the city, allured by its lights and excitement, and is having to support herself as a barmaid -- and now she's there, trapped and disillusioned, her mind and her heart a million miles away.  The painting struck me then as terribly sad.  And it still does.

All of this comes up because of a conversation I had with a friend who is working toward his Ph.D. in philosophy.  His dissertation is on the subject of phenomenological idealism, which is (as far as I understand it) the idea that the universe is a construct of the mind -- that reality is solely experiential, and may or may not have any external existence.  (Kant said that we "cannot approach the thing in itself" -- all we know is our experience of it, so that's what reality is.)

Anyhow, my friend told me a bit about what he's studying.  I did try my best to understand it, although I don't know how successful I was -- and it must be admitted that I am not entirely certain I have the brains required for such an esoteric subject.  But insofar as I understood him, I found myself disagreeing with him almost completely.

That said, I'm not going to try to craft an argument against idealism.  For one thing, I am wildly unqualified to do so.  My background in philosophy is thin at best, and my attempts at understanding classical philosophy in college were, on the whole, failures.  What interests me more is the immediate reaction I had to my friend's description of his philosophical stance.  It wasn't an argument; it was purely an emotional reaction that, if I put it into words, was simply, "Oh, now, come on.  That can't be right."

So I started thinking about why people respond the way they do to belief systems.  Why, apart from "I was taught that way growing up," does anyone believe in a particular view of the universe?  Why does a theistic model appeal to some, and others find it repellent?  Why do I find materialism "self-evident" (which it clearly is not -- from what my philosopher friend has told me, it's no more self-evident than any other view of the world)?  Why, within a particular religious worldview, do some of us gravitate toward viewing the deity as harsh and legalistic, and others as gentle, kind, and forgiving?

I suspect that it all comes down to the emotional reactions we have.  I'd bet that very few of us ever do the kind of analysis of our concept of the universe that my friend has done; for the vast bulk of humanity, "it feels right" is about as far as we get.

And I can lump myself in with that unthinking majority.  I'm drawn to the mechanistic, predictable, external reality of materialism, but not because I have any cogent arguments that that worldview is correct and the others are false.  I accept it because it's a solution to understanding the world that I can live with (and that's even considering the bizarre, non-intuitive bits, like quantum mechanics).  But for all that, I can't prove that this view is the right one.  Being locked inside my own skull, even the solipsist's answer -- that he, alone, in the world exists, and everything else is the product of his mind -- is irrefutable.  Why don't I believe that, then?  Because it doesn't "seem right."  Hardly a rigorous argument.

Now, I still think you can make mistakes; once you've accepted a rationalist view of the world (for example), you can still commit errors of logic, misevaluate evidence, come to erroneous conclusions.  But why is the rationalist worldview itself right?  You can't argue that it is, using logic -- because to accept that logic is valid, you already have to accept that rationalism works.  It's pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.   The only reason to accept rationalism is because it somehow, on a gut level, makes sense to you that this is the way the world works.

It's a little like my experience with art.  A Bar at the Folies-Bergère appeals to me because of the emotions that it evokes, and the tales I tell myself about it.  I wonder if the same is true in the larger sense -- that we are drawn to a worldview not because it is logically defensible, but simply because it allows us to sleep at night.  Beyond that, all we do is tell each other stories, and hope like hell that no one asks us too many questions.

The pharmaceutical greenhouse

Three hundred years ago, a lot of the medicines that were used to treat human conditions were identified using the "Doctrine of Signatures."  The idea was, if something -- especially a part of a plant -- looked like a human body part, it must be useful for treating diseases of that part.  It also gave a lot of plants their names; most of the plants that have names that end in "wort" (from the Old English wyrt meaning "herb") come from this idea, and it's why we have plants like lungwort, spleenwort, liverwort, ribwort, bladderwort, navelwort, and nipplewort.  And, for the record, I didn't make any of these up.  It's also why a lot of plants have scientific names that come from human body parts, such as the orchid.  Orchis is Greek for "testicle."

I didn't make that up, either.

I should probably mention at this juncture that a lot of the patients who were treated using the Doctrine of Signatures died.  It did lead to the discovery of some plants that did have important therapeutic use -- such as digitalis -- but more often than not, the various worts are useless, and some are actually toxic.  So it's a good thing for those doctors that they lived before the concept of "malpractice lawsuit" was invented.

The problem is, some purveyors of "natural medicines" are still using the same sort of argument today, and people are still falling for it.  Take the whole "pine pollen extract" thing that has been making the rounds lately.  Given that pollen is the male spore of a plant, and produces the sperm cells, guess what they say it's used for?  Yup!  Got it in one!

Raw pine pollen is the richest seedbed of testosterone derived from plants; since it is the male sperm of pine trees, it fosters plush growth in all living creatures, from trees and plants, to animals, to humans. Some experts claim that pine pollen is an ingredient in certain pharmaceuticals designed to treat low testosterone levels in both men and women.  [Source]

I'm not sure if I want to experience "plush growth," myself.  The whole thing reminds me way too much of the Moss Guy from the movie Creepshow.

Be that as it may, is there any evidence that pine pollen actually works to make you, um, Stiff Like The Mighty Pine Tree?  The answer seems to be "not much."  I did a fairly intensive search, and found one source that said that I should use it because my "manhood is grumbling with hunger... for nature's invincible transmitter of life energy;" another that said that pine pollen is "adaptogenic, so it will cater to exactly what your body needs and treat any area of distress;" and a third that said that after a pine pollen cocktail, you might radiate so many Sex Vibes that you'll end up having your leg humped for 45 minutes by a female dog.  Although why that's a selling point, I have no idea.

Then, of course, you have your anti-aging cream made from "raspberry plant stem cells," which works because "(p)lant stem cells are equipped with regenerative properties, and can 'self-renew.' They can either form a large reservoir of unspecialized cells, or upon stimulation grow into 'differentiated' plant elements and become a new root, leaf, flower or other part of the plant."  I'm assuming that they're talking in some vague way about parenchyma, the unspecialized tissue that all plants have (and which is usually used for starch storage, as "filler" cells in stems, and for regrowing damaged tissue).  The idea here being, I suppose, that if plants have cells that regenerate organs, if you smear those cells on your face, you'll regenerate youthful skin, or something.

It bears mention that I also looked for any peer-reviewed research that showed any results for either pine pollen or "raspberry plant stem cells," either for or against.  No luck.  My sense is that the people who are selling this stuff are making up the whole thing as they go along.  So, who knows?  Maybe the next big seller will be a kiwi fruit extract for male pattern baldness, I dunno.

So, anyway, that's our modern-day answer to the Doctrine of Signatures.  In today's litigious society, though, sellers of snake oil have to be a little more careful than the people who sold Decoction of Lungwort for bronchitis three hundred years ago.  This is why, on virtually all of these products, you'll see a tiny little label that says "Not intended to treat, cure, diagnose, or prevent any disease or ailment."  Which will protect their asses quite nicely.  No application of Salve of Buttockwort needed.

Okay, I did make that one up.

Opening your mind to mummified baby aliens

Well, the targeted ad software has done it again.

It's my own fault, really.  I shoulda known that having two posts in a row about aliens was a bad idea.  On the other hand, it'd be nice if the software that chooses ads for my blog would give the same weight to words like "bullshit," "nonsense," "foolishness," and "wingnut" as it does to "aliens," "UFOs," "psychics," and "ghosts."

In any case, almost as soon as I hit "Publish" on the second post, I began to get reports from friends who are regular readers, informing me of a couple of ads that keep popping up that are... interesting.

The first one is entitled "16 Powerful Extraterrestrials Message to Humanity," which tells us that having a conversation with an alien is easy:

What if it was possible to have a conversation with a highly advanced, benevolent extraterrestrial being? What kind of wisdom would this entity have for humanity?

Extraterrestrials do not need to land on your front lawn to share their wisdom. There are other, more subtle, yet far more effective ways to convey their very important messages.

Its been happening for quite some time. We invite you to open your mind…

My general feeling is that these folks' minds are so open that their brains fell out, but maybe I'm just not highly advanced enough to understand all this.

So, what if I was to open up my consciousness to aliens?  What would I learn?  Here's a sampler:

Many of these should resonate with you, here are a few:

• Consciousness creates matter.
• Each individual creates his or her own reality through thoughts, beliefs and expectations.
• There is no death. Consciousness exists forever.
• We all are one, from the same divine source.
• We are spiritual beings but have chosen to exist as physical humans.
• In this life there are no victims, only opportunities to evolve.
• We can control reality through the powers of the Universal Mind.
• Our spiritual purpose is to choose from selfishness or altruism.
• Souls reincarnate to eventually experience God-realization.
• Feelings & Intuition are more important as a source of guidance than intellect.
• We are here to remember what we already know.
• Physical reality is an illusion.
• Light cannot exist without the dark. One cannot understand one thing unless he or she understands its opposite.
• God is self-experiential, in that it is the nature of the Universe to experience itself.
• God is not fear-inducing or vengeful, only our parental projections onto God are.
• The very best way to maximize your evolution while on this planet is through regular meditation.

The extraterrestrials messages are amazing! It feels like I already naturally knew some of these.

Consciousness creates matter, and physical reality is an illusion, eh?  Let me just throw a rock at your head and see if you still believe that afterwards.

And the whole thing about "evolution" just torques the hell out of me.  Can we get one thing straight, here?  Thinking you are in contact with an alien isn't evolution, it's a symptom of a mild mental illness.

But if my obviously poorly-evolved reality doesn't convince you, you can buy what they're selling (of course they're selling something) -- "Equi-Sync Brain Wave Meditation Software."  Starting at only $58.  Heckuva deal.


The second ad was a promo for an upcoming film release for something called Sirius.  I didn't know about it, so I did some research, and found this.  It turns out that the premise of the film -- which alleges to be a documentary, i.e., true -- goes something like this:

UFOs have been in contact with humans throughout history.  The military knows all about this, and is trying to stop us from finding out about it because the aliens have promised us an unlimited source of free energy, and that would be bad for the military.  For some reason.  There's a baby alien that has been discovered, that looks like this:

Its DNA has been analyzed, and it has been shown to be extraterrestrial in origin.

Now, you'd think that'd be enough.  But no, there's more:

The director of the film, Amardeep Kaleka, made it public that he was raising funds for his show along with Steven Greer, of the UFO Disclosure Project -- and shortly after, Kaleka's father was killed in the Sikh Temple shooting near Milwaukee.  Was the government trying to shut Kaleka up by killing one of his family members?

*cue scary music*

In a word: no.  The killer, Michael Page, was a white supremacist.  End of story.  As far as the other claims: according to some skeptics who've looked at the photographs, the "baby alien" is almost certainly a mummified baby spider monkey; given that we have no alien DNA to compare it to, the assertion that a certain sample of DNA is "extraterrestrial in origin" is ridiculous; and there's no such thing as "free energy," as the Second Law of Thermodynamics is strictly enforced in most jurisdictions.

But of course, I predict that this won't affect the movie's success one little bit.  I predict that people will love Sirius, with the result that more "baby alien" websites will pop up everywhere, and I'll be hearing about it for the next ten years.

Anyhow, that's all I've got for today.  I encourage you to keep your eyes on the ads on my blog -- in my estimation, they've missed the target far more often than they've hit it.  Maybe one day they'll improve the software, and I'll start getting ads for books by Richard Dawkins and Neil deGrasse Tyson videos.  Now that I could "open my mind" to.

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.