Squatchery antics

Some free advice to any woo-woos who complain that we skeptics don't take their claims seriously: try not to act like a bunch of raving lunatics.  Turning your chosen field of study into some kind of bizarre street theater does not improve your credibility in the eyes of those of us who aren't already convinced.

This suggestion comes too late for the Bigfoot enthusiasts, who created a piece of performance art last week that was Harry and the Hendersons meets "the Keystone Kops."

The whole thing started on May 16 with a claim that some hunters in Pennsylvania had shot a Bigfoot.  Here's how it appeared in Cryptomundo:

This is unconfirmed at the moment and we’re still trying to figure out what exactly transpired here.

According to our source, PBS is looking into a possible shooting of Bigfoot somewhere in Pennsylvania. “It has been all over the police scanner in the area,” our source tells us, but he will not confirm the exact location.

Last month, a surge of Bigfoot sightings In Clearfield PA prompted police to put up traffic signs in an area where they were alerted to “increased animal activity.”

PBS, I hasten to point out, is not what you were thinking.  It's the "Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society."

They went on to add:

We think we know where this Bigfoot shooting claim originated from. About 4 hours ago, Daniel C. left the following message on the Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society’s Facebook page:

“You guys might want to check out the somerset county state police call log. I heard a call come over my scanner about a gobbler hunter shot a bigfoot this morning and they did find a body. This is no joke that call was real.” – Daniel C. On Twitter, received a message from @pabigfoot saying the shooting probably took place north of Altoona (either Clearfield or Tyrone). It’s unclear how this person got the information. Altoona is a city in Blair Country, and it’s popularly known as “the Mountain City.”

 Why throwing in Altoona's nickname was considered important, I don't know.

So, anyway, now we had a real, verifiable claim -- that the police in Somerset County, Pennsylvania had received a call that a turkey hunter had shot a Bigfoot.  So, naturally, the police were contacted, and they stated unequivocally that they had received no such call.  So, what do the Bigfoot chasers do?  They decide that they were simply looking in the wrong state.  Here's what happened next, according to the site Bigfoot Evidence:

Johnny Bigfoot just posted on his blog that the alleged "Bigfoot shooting" probably took place in Somerset WI -- not Somerset PA or North of Altoona, Pennsylvania as we reported Tuesday.

Right!  Because (1) a claim becomes more plausible if you can't even figure out what state you're talking about, and (2) we should give a lot of credibility to someone named "Johnny Bigfoot."  I mean, really.  If I were to claim that I'd seen a live Woolly Mammoth, and someone asked me where, and I said, "I saw it in Ogunquit, Maine!  Or maybe Poughkeepsie!  Or possibly Nebraska!", you'd be perfectly in your rights to guffaw in my face.  Especially if my name turned out to be "Mikey Mastodon."

Anyhow, the Squatchers all went running off to Wisconsin, where they found a report of a guy who had been shot by some turkey hunters:

SOMERSET TOWNSHIP, Wis. - A Washington County Sheriff's commander is recovering at a Twin Cities hospital after being shot while scouting for a turkey hunt in western Wisconsin. St. Croix County deputies were called to the 1900 block of 80th Street in Somerset Township just before 7:30 a.m. Tuesday on reports someone had been shot. When they arrived on the scene witnesses told deputies that a group was hunting turkeys when one hunter fired a shotgun and struck 53-year-old Commander Jerry Cusick. Washington County Sheriff Bill Hutton says Cusick, a 28-year veteran of the department, was unarmed and was walking an area where he often hunts when he was shot.

Cusick was transported to Regions Hospital in St. Paul; The Pioneer Press says he is reported in good condition. St. Croix County investigators and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) are looking into the shooting to determine if criminal charges will be filed. 

So, the story of a Bigfoot being shot in Somerset County, Pennsylvania turned out to be completely correct, as long as you changed the word "Bigfoot" to "guy" and the word "Pennsylvania" to "Wisconsin."

And they wonder why we're unconvinced.

I mean, really.  First we had Melba Ketchum going off the deep end trying to defend her claim that she'd found Sasquatch DNA, and now we have these folks.  It's enough to make a cryptozoologist sing the blues.

The new, eviscerated AP Biology exam

You would think that, after spending 26 years as an educator, I would have figured out that whenever an educational oversight group says, "We are restructuring and reconfiguring this, for sound pedagogical reasons, in order to improve it," this really means, "We are going to scramble this for no good reason whatsoever, and the result will be something far worse than what you started with."

It happened with the New York State Regents Examinations, which (for those of you who do not live in New York) are the high-school-level course exit exams.  The rallying cry was "Raising the Bar," which makes it a little hard to explain why the biological sciences Regents examination is now so easy that it can be passed by anyone who has three working brain cells.  This exam was passed by a student who, on a quiz on human anatomy, incorrectly labeled the "anus" as being on the left arm.

Oh, but there was one major outcome of the exam restructuring: they changed the name of the course from "Regents Biology" to "Regents Living Environment," which raises the bar by virtue of having more letters.

So, when the College Board decided to restructure the curriculum and examination for AP Biology -- a course I've taught for twenty years -- I should have expected the same to happen.  Here's their rationale, as per the 2011 announcement of the planned changes on the College Board website:

“The revisions were enacted to address a challenging situation in science education at a critical juncture for American competitiveness,” said Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board. “The body of scientific knowledge is constantly expanding. The revisions will help science educators ensure that their instruction is fresh and current and that students develop not just a solid knowledge of the facts but also the ability to practice science and think critically about scientific issues.”

The revised AP Biology course and exam align with the knowledge and skills that many rigorous college-level introductory biology courses now seek to nurture, emphasizing the development of scientific inquiry and reasoning skills. Lab work is a critical component of the course, requiring students to master such skills as posing questions; collecting, analyzing and evaluating data; connecting fundamental concepts; and then defending their conclusions based on experiments.

“The revised course objectives will enable teachers and students to explore key topics in depth and will help students learn to reason with the rigor and objectivity of scientists,” said Trevor Packer, vice president of the Advanced Placement Program at the College Board.

So, I dutifully resubmitted my curriculum, and had it approved by the powers-that-be at the AP Central.  "How different can the exam be?" I thought.  "Biology is what biology is; the concepts are the same.  I already teach a rigorous course, that helps students to draw connections between disparate fields of science, that has an emphasis on application, reasoning, and synthesis, and that uses a strong lab component.  I'm told every year by students returning to visit from college that my class was a good preparation for college-level science.  It will be fine."

Optimism is a losing proposition, sometimes.

My students sat for the exam on Monday.  As you are undoubtedly predicting by now, I was not only wrong, I was so far wrong that it has made me question whether I should even offer this course next year.

The New and Improved AP Biology exam -- of which I only ever get to see the free-response section, the multiple choice section is hardly ever released to teachers for analysis -- was, in my opinion, a vague, confusing muddle that left students wondering, "is that all they're looking for?"  Here are four examples, which I will describe rather than quote in their entirety, for the sake of brevity:

1) A question in which fruit flies are placed in a "choice chamber" and given the choice of flying toward a dry cotton ball or one soaked in glucose solution.  Students are asked to "predict the distribution of the flies after ten minutes, and justify your prediction."  (As a student said to me after the exam, "A central principle of the animal world is that 'some food is better than no food.'")

2)  A question showing a "simplified carbon cycle" that looked, more or less, like this (but without the words in blue):

Students had to correctly label the arrows with "photosynthesis" and "respiration," and state that an example of an organism that does both processes is "a plant."

For reference, the unsimplified carbon cycle I use in my class is shown below:

3)  A question regarding the evolution of the earliest amphibians (363 million years ago) from lobe-finned fish (observed in rocks that are 380 million years old), that asked students to predict when, in geological history, you would might find fossils of the transitional species between the two groups.

4)  A question describing an experiment in which rats are given alcohol, and it is found that their urine output increases over rats that are given water.  Students were asked to "pose one scientific question that the researchers were most likely investigating with this experiment" and then "describe the effect of ethyl alcohol on urine production."

And so on.

Understandably, my students were pretty frustrated by gearing up for an examination that turned out to have been eviscerated of virtually all of its technical content.  And when you have a bunch of students who are pissed off because an exam isn't hard enough, you know there's something wrong.

Here are some direct quotes from some of my students:

"You needed to have barely any actual knowledge of biology in order to take this exam.  A few of the terms from Regents Biology would have been enough to get by on."

"I had worked hard and prepared for this exam.  I'd read the new curriculum and course outline, and I worked hard in class.  I felt like I had this material down.  This test was an insult to all of the hard work I put in."

"The reading passages and experimental design descriptions were too long to justify the extremely simple questions we were asked about them."

"The rat pee question wasn't even at the Regents level, it was below Regents level.  We already knew alcohol is a diuretic -- we discussed it in class when we were learning about the kidney.  If I had proposed to my Regents Biology teacher to do this as a final project, she would have said, 'You can do better than that.'"

"My brother is in college, and is taking biology.  I've looked at his textbook and lab manual.  And if I'd taken a course that prepared me to be successful on this exam, that course wouldn't have prepared me to be successful in the college biology course he's taking."

"I felt like even though they were shooting for a more conceptual approach, I wasn't being asked to apply concepts at a very high level.  The carbon cycle question, in particular, was not at a college level.  We knew that amount of detail in seventh grade."

Allow me to interject at this point that this group of 29 young people ranks amongst the top three AP biology classes I've ever taught in terms of drive, curiosity, and depth of understanding.  We're not talking about a bunch of slackers, here.  They had good mastery of the material, and are ready to make the jump to college science classes.  The fact that they ended the school year this way is a crashing letdown, and will remain that regardless of what their scores turn out to be.  (And interesting, too, that one of my best and brightest, who aced damn near every quiz and test I gave her this year, when I asked her what score she thought she got, replied, "I could have gotten a one.  I could have gotten a five.  I could have gotten a three.  I really, honestly have no way to tell how successful I was on this exam.")

So, there you have it.  The College Board has fulfilled its educational goal of taking a test that was, on the whole, rigorous but fair, and turning it into a hash.  Again, I shouldn't be surprised; that's been the result of virtually every educational shift I've seen in the last twenty years.  Oh, and one other thing I'm expecting: not only do educational oversight agencies take their Great Leaps Forward by mucking things up royally, they never admit afterwards that they screwed up.  So expect to see press releases soon from the College Board about how wonderful their New and Improved exam was, and how teachers and students everywhere are singing its praises to the skies.  Look, too, for them to begin to "improve" the exams in all of the other AP courses.

I hope I'm retired by then.

The Welsh measles conspiracy

If, as I do, you have strong feelings about the irresponsibility of the anti-vaxxer movement, and the mountain of science that they ignore in order to bolster their beliefs that vaccination is dangerous, I recommend not reading this post.  Just reading the background material for it means that I'm probably going to have to double up on my high blood pressure medication today.

Because now the anti-vaxxers are claiming that the measles epidemic in Wales this year, in which 700 people were sickened and one killed by a disease that is 100% preventable, was faked.

Yes, you read that right.  Heidi Stevenson, writing for Gaia Health, has a stomach-turning "exposé" that begins as follows:

The Great Measles Epidemic of Wales—the one that’s being used to stampede sheeple into vaccine clinics for the MMR jab—never happened. Seriously! It was faked. The actual data from the Welsh government on cases of measles proves it.

Here's her "proof:"

The fact is that, though 446 measles notifications were made between 1 January and 31 March of this year, those were merely reports. The reality is that only 26 cases were actually confirmed!

You may have noted that this faux measles epidemic started in November, and the figures for last year weren’t included. However, that doesn’t help make the case for an epidemic, or even come close to the claim that 83 people had to be hospitalized for measles. You see, the total number of confirmed measles cases in Wales for all of 2012 was 14. So, adding 14 for all of 2012 to 26 for the first three months of this year, we get a total of 40 confirmed cases of measles—less than half the falsely reported 83 hospitalizations!

 The actual reason for the discrepancy was picked up on almost immediately, with one of the first comments on the story reading as follows:

Note that only the minority of measles test samples are sent to Welsh labs.

So in conclusion it shouldn't be surprising if the lab confirmed figures are low at present because the majority of samples are sent to English labs for confirmation and are not included in the All Wales reports.

You're drawing conclusions based on at best incomplete data.

Stevenson went on the attack in the comments section, responding to the above commenter with, "But the reality is that this is not an epidemic and even if every reported case had proven to be genuine measles, it would not amount to an epidemic - nor has it amounted to anything that anyone needs to fear."  She responded to another person who objected to her stance with, "You're a shill.  Goodbye."  To another, who had mentioned herd immunity and that it was "thought that a 95% vaccination rate was enough to protect the population from epidemics in most cases," Stevenson snarled back:

What garbage! It's isn't known, it's merely "thought that". The belief in how high the rate of vaccination must be to stop a disease keeps changing - it keeps going up. The fact is that no one knows if there is even such a thing as herd immunity. It's an idea, not a fact. And that 95% figure is something that was pulled out of the air. It's meaningless - nothing but a coverup for the fact that the vaccines are nowhere near as effective as they'd have you believe.

Regarding learning math: The fact is that you've just spewed out figures that prove nothing in relation to this particular issue, and most assuredly do not demonstrate that you have any knowledge of the topic - just that you are able to spew out published figures.

You aren't actually providing any information that elucidates the topic at hand - the fact that the actual number of cases of measles is a small fraction of the reported number, though the reported number has been used to declare an epidemic and push for vaccination.

 Oh, yeah, and to further trivialize the Welsh epidemic, she threw in the following "photograph:"

Hmm, herd immunity is "meaningless?"  That would certainly come as a surprise to Dr. Paul E. M. Fine, whose 1993 paper on epidemiological modeling (available here) is considered the go-to source on how a sufficient pool of immunes in a population can prevent epidemics from taking hold.  Research by Thomas L. Schlenker et al. (available here) on measles in particular concluded that "Modest improvements in low levels of immunization coverage among 2-year-olds confer substantial protection against measles outbreaks. Coverage of 80% or less may be sufficient to prevent sustained measles outbreaks in an urban community."

And on a more emotional level, perhaps Ms. Stevenson would like to discuss the matter with Cecily Johnson, an Australian woman whose unvaccinated daughter Laine Bradley contracted subacute sclerosing panencephalitis as a complication of a measles infection, and lingered for five years, unable to speak, unable to feed, clothe, or wash herself, before dying at age twelve.

The long and short of it is that the actual research shows what we've known for years.  Vaccination has an extremely low rate of complications, while the complications from what are now entirely preventable diseases -- measles, polio, diphtheria, typhoid -- are often debilitating and sometimes fatal.  No medical intervention is 100% safe, and if you scour the records you can find cases of bad side effects (mostly allergic reactions).  But if you weigh those against the millions of people who are now alive because of vaccines, the choice is obvious.

At least, it is to me.  It apparently isn't to Stevenson and others in the anti-vaxxer movement.  Maybe it's because any quantification of the lives saved by vaccines is always going to be a guess -- it's not like you can look at someone and say, "If you hadn't been vaccinated, you'd have died at age six of diphtheria."

But all you have to do is to look into historical records to gain that perspective.  One of my hobbies is genealogy, and being that my family is from the French part of southern Louisiana, I own several books of church and courthouse record abstracts from that region that I have used in researching my family history.  That was how I found out about the 1853 yellow fever epidemic that struck southeastern Louisiana, costing thousands of lives -- the records are there, the chronicles of individuals who were killed by that gruesome disease:

Boutary, Adela Marie, wife of Théophile Daunes, d. 10 Sept. 1853 at age 20 years during yellow fever epidemic (Thibodaux Church: vol. 1, death record #55)

Himel, Mélasie d. 17 Sept. 1853 at age 16 years during yellow fever epidemic (Thibodaux Church: vol. 1, death record #92)

Poché, Joseph d. 3 Oct. 1853 at age 19 years during yellow fever epidemic (Thibodaux Church: vol. 1, death record #151)

Any guesses as to why we don't even have yellow fever in the United States any more?  I'll leave you to figure that one out.

The Black Death, aliens, and the role of chaos in history

Yesterday's post, about the alien origins of humanity, generated a nice round of "you think that's a crazy belief, wait till you see this one!" from my readers.  The best contender in this game of Wingnut One-Upmanship came from another student, who found out that not only did aliens produce our species, they've been trying to kill us ever since.

I guess it's understandable, really.  Our stewardship of the globe hasn't exactly been praiseworthy.  It's no wonder that our superpowerful alien cousins, who still presumably live on our original homeworld (with its clement temperatures, 30-hour rotational period, and "no geomagnetic storms or glaciers"), would have some second thoughts about sending us here.  So it turns out that they've repeatedly tried to get rid of us.

This conclusion comes from a stellar piece of research entitled "Did Aliens Create the 'Black Death' and Other Diseases During the Middle Ages?  (And Are They Still Creating Diseases Today?)," which not only would win an award for the longest article title ever, but is yet another example of a piece of journalism that should say, in its entirety, "NO."  Unfortunately, the author doesn't take that route.  We're told that the 14th century plague has to be extraterrestrial in origin:

A great many people throughout Europe and other plague-stricken regions of the world were reporting that outbreaks of the plague were caused by foul-smelling “mists” and bright lights were reported far more frequently and in many more locations than were rodent infestations. The plague years were, in fact, a period of heavy UFO activity.

Well, I hate to be unimaginative, but the foul smells during the Middle Ages don't really require UFOs to explain them.  There was a fairly appalling lack of sanitation, particularly in the big cities.  Apparently just the amount of human waste lying around in heavily populated areas was enough to create a smell that would blow your hair back -- even 19th century London was a frightful-smelling place, according to Steven Johnson's wonderful book The Ghost Map (which chronicles the cholera epidemic of the 1850s, and how it led to the creation of an efficient city-wide sewer system).  And the fact that rodents weren't "reported frequently" is pretty certainly because of their ubiquity, not because they were absent.

But of course, it's not just the stinky mist and bright lights that are brought out as evidence:

A second phenomenon was sometimes reported: the appearance of frightening human-like figures dressed in black. Those figures were often seen on the outskirts of a town or village and their presence would signal the outbreak of an epidemic almost immediately. It appears that the “scythes” may have been long instruments designed to spray poison or germ-laden gas. Strange men dressed in black, “demons’ and other terrifying figures were observed in other European communities. The frightening creatures were often observed carrying long “brooms,” “scythes,” or “swords” that were used to “sweep” or “knock” on the doors of people’s homes. The inhabitants of those homes fell ill with plague afterwards. It is from these reports that people created the popular image of “Death” as a skeleton or demon carrying a scythe. In looking at this haunting image of death, we may, in fact, be staring into the face of the UFO.”

Right.  Because we're not talking about a superstitious, credulous bunch of people here.  They can't possibly have made this up to explain a terrifying event that they didn't have the science to understand.

 Maybe it wasn't rats or aliens.  Maybe it was the "saaaalmon mooouuussse."

But then we find out that it wasn't all aliens who were impersonating Death; it was only the crazy homicidal aliens who were responsible:

This Awareness indicates that what in Medieval times were termed demons, and what many of the Christian faith considered to be demons, are in fact what entities refer today to as extraterrestrial aliens. The Greys from Zeta Reticuli today are not precisely the same invaders as those of the Medieval times. The Medieval aliens were both Reptoid and also of the Grey community that now is underground and known as the Deros. The Deros underground are demented forms of Zeta Greys, which have been here for many thousands of years, living underground to avoid sunlight and to avoid communication with humans except on those occasions where they seek to make contact for one reason or another.

Oh.  Okay.  Because that makes sense.

You know, I think that the problem here is that people are uncomfortable with the chaotic, random nature of much of life, especially the bad parts.  If something bad happens, the immediate impulse is to look for someone, or something, to blame.  This explains so much woo-woo thinking, doesn't it?  Without even trying hard, I found three examples that were linked on Reddit in the last two days -- an article on the website of the Institute for Natural Healing that attributes all cancer to eating meat, a claim that the government is covering up how dangerous vaccines are, and an allegation that WiFi in schools is causing headaches in children. 

Somehow, we just can't accept that people get sick, sometimes for no obvious reason.  It's not enough to celebrate the astonishing advances in medical science over the last hundred years, that have generated new records in the healthy human life span -- because, unfortunately, they haven't eliminated all disease and suffering.  The fact that we still get sick, we still grow old and die, must mean that there is some insidious plan behind it all.

It can't just be that we live in a world that's kind of a rough place, a world where bad things happen sometimes.  Not even in the case of the Black Death, where we (1) have identified the bacterium that causes it, (2) know the vector that transmitted it, (3) have evidence from medical records of the time that the symptoms are consistent with subsequent outbreaks, and even (4) have tissue samples (bones) that show evidence of Yersinia pestis infection.  No, that's not enough.  It has to be the evil demented aliens causing it all.

Anyhow, however understandable it is to want there to be some kind of overarching reason why stuff happens, rationality forces us to concede the role that chaos has in human history.  No extraterrestrial epidemics necessary.

And in case any of you were considering trying to one-up this story, I have to request, with all due respect: if you know of anything loonier than this claim, you probably shouldn't tell me about it.  I've done enough facepalms over this one to last me a while.

Letters from the home world

In choosing topics for this blog, I try not to have it simply devolve into taking random pot shots at crazies.  Loony ideas are a dime a dozen, and given the widespread access to computers that is now available, just about anyone who wants one can have a website.  Given these two facts, it's inevitable that wacky webpages have sprouted up like wildflowers on the fields of the internet.

When an alert student brought this one to my attention, however, I just couldn't help myself.  Entitled "Did Humans Come From Another Planet?", it represents one of the best examples I've ever seen of adding up a bunch of facts and obtaining the wrong answer.  The only ones who, in my experience, do this even better are the people who write for the Institute for Creation Research, and to be fair, they've had a lot longer to practice being completely batshit crazy, so it's only to be expected.

Anyhow, the contention of the "Did Humans Come From Another Planet?" people can be summed up by, "Yes.  Duh."  We are clearly aliens, and I'm not just talking about such dubiously human individuals as "Snooki."  All of us, the article claims, descend from an extraterrestrial race.  But how can we prove it?

Well, here's the argument, if I can dignify it with that term.

1)  Human babies are born completely unable to take care of themselves, and remain that way for a long time.  By comparison, other primate babies, despite similar gestation periods, develop much more rapidly.

2)  In a lower gravitational pull, humans could fall down without hurting themselves, "just like a cat or a dog."

3)  Humans have biological clocks, and in the absence of exposure to the external day/night cycle, they come unlocked from "real time" and become free-running.  So, clearly we came from a planet that had a different rotational period.

4)  Humans don't have much body hair.  At least most of us don't, although I do recall once going swimming and seeing a guy who had so much back hair that he could have singlehandedly given rise to 80% of the Bigfoot sightings in the eastern United States.

5)  Geneticists have found that all of humanity descends from a common ancestor approximately 350,000 years ago; but the first modern humans didn't exist until 100,000 years ago.  So... and this is a direct quote, that I swear I am not making up: "In what part of the universe was he [Homo sapiens] wandering for the remaining 250 thousand years?"

Now, take all of this, and add:

1)  Some nonsense about Sirius B and the Dogon tribe, including a bizarre contention that the Sun and Sirius once formed a double-star system, because this "doesn't contradict the laws of celestial mechanics;"

2)  The tired old "we only use 3% of our brains" contention;

3)  Adam and Eve;

and 4) the ancient Egyptians.

Mix well, and bake for one hour at 350 degrees.

The result, of course, is a lovely hash that contends that we must come from a planet with a mild climate where we could run around naked all the time, not to mention a lower gravitational pull so we could just sort of bounce when we fall down, plenty of natural food to eat, and "no geomagnetic storms."  I'm not sure why the last one is important, but it did remind me of all of the "cosmic storms" that the folks in Lost in Space used to run into.  And they also came across lots of weird, quasi-human aliens, while they were out there wandering around.  So there you are.

In any case, that's today's example of adding 2 + 2 and getting 439.  All of this just goes to show that even if you have access to a lot of factual information, not to mention the internet, you still need to know how to put that factual information together in order to get the right answer.  For that, you need science, not just a bunch of nutty beliefs, assumptions, and guesses.  So, as usual, science FTW.

Which, of course, applies to a good many more situations than just this one, but as I've already given a nod to the Institute for Creation Research, I'll just end here.

The power of prayer vs. the power of litigation

Today we have a rather ironic story out of Brazil.

Cabaret owner Tarcilia Bezerra, in the city of Fortaleza, wanted to expand his business.  He had experienced great success with his liquor-and-dancing-girls enterprise, and thought it was time to make the place bigger.  So he applied for, and got, a building permit, and construction began.

The local church, however, didn't think that was such a hot idea.  All of that skin showing and alcohol flowing was just sinful; the idea that the godly folks of Fortaleza had to put up with Bezerra crowing about how well he was doing, and making the place bigger and better, was just naughty in god's sight.  So the pastor (who was unnamed in the story) encouraged his flock to pray that god would intervene and smite Bezerra and his unholy Temple of Tawdriness.  Prayer sessions were organized morning, noon, and night for weeks, as the construction went on.

And then, only a week before the grand reopening, lightning struck the cabaret, destroying most of the roof and almost all of the new construction.

The pastor was overjoyed, as were the members of his congregation.  The pastor spoke in a sermon the following Sunday about this demonstration of "the great power of prayer."  The church members bragged all over town that their petitions to god had been heard, and that the lightning had been sent by god himself to strike down the wicked cabaret.

So Bezerra sued the church.

His lawsuit read, in part, that the church and its members "were responsible for the end of my building and my business, using divine intervention, direct or indirect, as the actions or means."

The pastor, of course, was appalled, but was forced to respond to the lawsuit.  His response, predictably, was to deny "all responsibility or any connection with the end of the building."

Now, wait a minute: isn't this backwards?  The cabaret owner is the one who believes that praying works, and the church pastor doesn't?

The judge in the case, which has yet to be decided in court, evidently agrees.  In his opening statement, he said, "I do not know how I'm going to decide this case, but one thing is evident in the records. Here we have an owner of a cabaret who firmly believes in the power of prayer, and an entire church declaring that prayers are worthless."

It all, somehow, makes me wonder how much folks really believe what they're saying.  I remember, during the Cold War, Americans praying for the destruction of the Soviet Union.  How would they have reacted if Moscow had been struck by a giant meteorite, causing millions of deaths?  People pray for political candidates, and sometimes sports teams, to win.  What if it actually happened, as per biblical miracles, with the losing candidate (or sports team) being eaten by a lion, contracting leprosy, or being "swallowed up by the earth?"  Each Sunday, there are thousands of prayers given asking for Jesus' return.  What if he just showed up, and said, "You rang, here I am!  Okay, leave behind your comfy house and all of your stuff.  Give everything away to the poor, like I told you to.  What, weren't you listening?"

Oh, I'm sure that there are some people who would be thrilled if this happened.  The members of the Westboro Baptist Church, for example.  But I'll bet that most ordinary churchgoing folks would freak out so badly that they might never freak back in.

I suppose the take-home message, here, is "be careful what you pray for, because due to random chance, it might actually happen, and then you'll have to admit that you honestly didn't think anyone was listening."

Sleepless in upstate New York

Any regular reader of Skeptophilia who pays attention to the timestamp on my posts knows that I'm a bit of an insomniac.

I have suffered from chronic insomnia since I was a teenager.  It started with bizarre, vivid dreams, which often would wake me up (sometimes because I'd thrashed around so much I'd fallen out of bed).  Once awakened in the wee hours, it takes me long enough to fall back to sleep that I frequently just give up and get up.  Most of the conventional sleep aids haven't helped; the mild ones (like valerian and melatonin) are ineffective, and the stronger ones worry me because of their capacity to become addictive.  So mostly, I've just put up with it, living and working on a chronic sleep deficit, and trying to catch time to take catnaps whenever I can.

So, naturally, I was pretty intrigued when I ran across an article called "Life Without Sleep," by Jessa Gamble.  Her piece begins with a bit of a history of sleep deprivation, and includes the efforts by the military to come up with a way to combat fatigue in soldiers (most of which, by the way, were either ineffective in the long term or had dreadful side effects).  But my attention really perked up when she started talking about two potential therapies for chronic insomnia -- transcranial direct-current stimulation (TCDS) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) -- which work not by getting you to sleep, but by reducing the amount of sleep you need.

TCDS and TMS both work on the same principle; using an external energy source to trigger neuronal firing in the brain.  Both of these treatment modalities are, pretty much, what they sound like.  TCDS involves placing electrodes on the scalp, and introducing a electric current into the brain; TMS places the head in a powerful magnetic field.  Both of them have been used, with results that I'd file in the "interesting" column, to treat depression, anxiety disorders, and schizophrenia.  Both have no known long-term side effects, although TMS apparently has a low risk of causing seizure or fainting.  (For me, the main risk of TCDS is that I would spend the entire time worrying that I was participating in a reenactment of the climax of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.)

According to Gamble, both of these treatments show great promise in helping with insomnia.  About TCDS, she says:

After a half-hour session of the real treatment, subjects are energised, focused and keenly awake. They learn visual search skills at double the speed, and their subsequent sleep — as long as it does not fall directly after the stimulation session — is more consolidated, with briefer waking periods and longer deep-sleep sessions.

TMS apparently has shown similar results:

Using a slightly different technique — transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which directly causes neurons to fire — neuroscientists at Duke University have been able to induce slow-wave oscillations, the once-per-second ripples of brain activity that we see in deep sleep. Targeting a central region at the top of the scalp, slow-frequency pulses reach the neural area where slow-wave sleep is generated, after which it propagates to the rest of the brain...  TMS devices might be able to launch us straight into deep sleep at the flip of a switch. Full control of our sleep cycles could maximise time spent in slow-wave sleep and REM, ensuring full physical and mental benefits while cutting sleep time in half. Your four hours of sleep could feel like someone else’s eight. Imagine being able to read an extra book every week — the time adds up quickly.

What I'm imagining, at the moment, is not feeling chronically exhausted, and not having to worry about falling asleep at the wheel during my ten-minute drive home from work (a fear I deal with on more days than I'd like to admit).  I imagine not constantly wondering when I'm going to have time to take a nap so I can actually be wide awake after eight o'clock at night.

It's a happy picture.

Of course, the worrywart side of me wonders what the long-term effects of this might be.  We still understand very little about why animals need sleep, and less still about why they dream.  Messing about with a physiological system we don't fully comprehend seems rather foolhardy.  On the other hand, the tests that have been done so far support the contention that TCDS and TMS are relatively safe, are non-invasive, and show great promise in dealing with chronic insomnia, a condition which according to the National Sleep Foundation plagues 10-15% of adults.

I'd volunteer to give it a try, even given the iffy status of the risks.

But right now, I think I'd better wrap this up, because the coffee's done brewing, and given how little sleep I got last night,  I could sure use a cup or two.  Or five.