In vino veritas

In some ways, it's no wonder that people these days distrust everything coming out of the media.

Look, for example, at the whole thing about "antioxidants."  To a lot of folks who are "natural medicines" aficionados, antioxidants seem like the next best thing to an immortality pill.  Consider some of the claims made about resveratrol, an antioxidant that occurs naturally in grape skins (and therefore in red wine).

From Fit Day:

The... health benefits from drinking wine have been proven to be from poly-phenolic flavonoids, which are better known as antioxidants. These antioxidants are found in grapes that are used in wine. More antioxidants exist in red wines than in white wines because grape skins, which are rich in antioxidants, are included in fermentation in red wines. The antioxidants that are most active in wine are resveratrol, quercetin, and the catechins.

These antioxidants neutralize harmful free radicals in your body, which can cause certain types of cancer, heart disease, stroke, immune dysfunction, and degenerative disorders such as dementia and Alzheimer's disease. Harmful free radicals are everywhere in our environment, but mostly caused by exposure to pollution, chemicals, radiation, pesticides, alcohol, unhealthy food, and even sunshine.

From WebMD:

A new study shows an antioxidant found in red wine destroys cancer cells from the inside and enhances the effectiveness of radiation and chemotherapy cancer treatments.

Researchers say the antioxidant found in grape skins, known as resveratrol, appears to work by targeting the cancer cell's energy source from within and crippling it. When combined with radiation, treatment with resveratrol prior to radiation also induced cell death, an important goal of cancer treatment.

From Wine Folly:

While your health-freak friends spend hundreds of dollars on weird miracle fruit juices, you can sit back and relax. As it happens, your red wine habit might just be the key to staying young longer.

The health benefits of red wine are greater than you might think. Besides having antioxidants, fermented foods are good for digestion and alcohol itself has also shown some surprising traits over long-term moderate use. Discover the health benefits of red wine and how much you should consume to live well.

Sounds pretty good so far, doesn't it?  Far as we can tell, the key to a long, healthy life might be inside your next bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon.

Dig a little deeper, though, and you begin to find that despite the hoopla about antioxidants in general, and red wine in particular, there is far from consensus on the subject.

From a study at the University of Copenhagen:

Researchers from the University of Copenhagen followed 27 men with an average age of 65 who were in good health.  Over an eight-week period, all of the study’s participants performed high-intensity exercises, but half received 250 milligrams of resveratrol each day, while the other half received a placebo.

For the men taking resveratrol supplements, it seemed as though the benefits they received from exercising had been reduced.

"We found that exercise training was highly effective in improving cardiovascular health parameters, but resveratrol supplementation attenuated the positive effects of training on several parameters, including blood pressure, plasma lipid concentrations and maximal oxygen uptake," said Lasse Gliemann, a researcher who worked on the study.

From an article by Harriet Hall, in the online magazine Skeptic:

What happens when we ingest more antioxidants than we need? Is the excess excreted? Does it just sit there doing nothing? Does it do something we didn’t intend? It would be nice to know.

There is good evidence that people who eat more fruits and vegetables are less likely to develop cancer, heart disease, and other ailments—and are likely to live longer. It’s easy to assume that the antioxidants in fruits and vegetables are responsible, but that might not be true. Other components of these foods (such as flavonoids) or the mixture of components in the diet might be responsible. Or maybe people who eat less fruit and vegetables are eating more of something else that causes those diseases.

If antioxidants in food do reduce the incidence of those diseases, it’s only logical to think that antioxidant supplements would reduce the incidence even more. Unfortunately, controlled studies have consistently shown that they either have no effect or make things worse. It’s not the first time reality has rudely intervened to spoil a great idea. Study after study has shown no benefit of antioxidants for heart disease, cancer, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, or longevity.

Well, I don't know about you, but I find that kind of disappointing.  I love red wine (I think it's in my genes, being of French ancestry), and it was nice to think that I wasn't just drinking it because it tastes good, but that it was doing something positive for my health.  Now, it seems like I might have to reevaluate my rationalization for my oenophilia (and yes, that's the real word for the love of wine).

The bottom line is, it's hard to establish health claims with any certainty, simply because human health is so complicated.  We do need some antioxidants; they break down free radicals (also called reactive oxygen species), natural metabolic byproducts that, left unchecked, can damage tissue.  But we not only get antioxidants in our diet, we produce them -- three well-studied ones are peroxidase, catalase, and superoxide dismutase.  Even if we did get some benefit from the antioxidants in red wine, how would we tease that out from the effects of other antioxidant chemicals in our diet (such as vitamin C and lycopene), and the action of our own self-generated antioxidant enzymes?

Not a simple task.  Which is why, unfortunately, the media has tended to cling desperately to the simple answer -- "red wine is good for you."

But it's understandable why this is a popular position, isn't it?

The truth, as usual, is far more complex than that.  And despite my doubts that red wine has any significant benefits to my health -- which is my conclusion, after having read a good bit of the research on the topic -- I'm not going to give up drinking the stuff myself.  I'm of the opinion that a glass of bold California Syrah next to a rare t-bone steak is just about one of the finest things in the world.

Whether or not it extends my life.

Deep waters

There's something about water that is mysterious.  It comprises, by some estimates, an average of 65% of the mass of living tissue.  We're drawn to it, and not just because we need a steady source of it to remain alive.  Look at how attracted we are by lakes, rivers, and oceans; consider how much more people will pay for houses with a view of a body of water.

Even the chemists tell us that water is weird.  It has a number of odd properties, including high polarity, specific heat, and heat of vaporization, and is (to my knowledge) the only common substance that expands when it freezes.  (If it weren't for this peculiarity, ice would sink, and bodies of water would freeze from the bottom up -- so there would probably be a permanent ice layer at the bottom of the world's lakes and oceans.)

So I guess it's no surprise that the woo-woos love making claims about water.  It seems like lately I've been seeing more and more of them -- mostly advertisements for devices that allegedly make your water... better.  Or healthier.  Or more nutritious.  Or waterier.  It's hard to tell, sometimes, exactly what they are claiming, because they don't seem all that sure about it themselves.

Take the "MRET Water Activator," offered for sale by the Sound & Consciousness Institute of San Francisco.  Here's the claim:

The patented i-H2O Activation System is the most effective hydration technology available today. This easy-to-use wellness breakthrough allows you to transform ordinary, filtered water into ultra-hydrating, "living water" within 30 minutes. During the automated i-H2O activation process, the chaotic structure of water molecules is transformed into a single-file alignment, mimicking the body's own natural state of healthy cell water, thereby creating optimally energized, bio-available water.

I don't know about you, but the idea of my water molecules marching along in single file is a little... creepy.  But no worries, because they put you on notice right away that they haven't the vaguest idea what they're talking about:

This device infuses the Schumann Resonance (7.83 hertz) into the water. The Schumann Resonance is an electromagnetic frequency that resonates in our atmosphere between the earth and the ionosphere. It is triggered by lightning, which strikes every second somewhere on the planet. Based on the laws of brainwave entrainment, this frequency entrains every brain on the planet (including animals) into this state, which is right on the threshold of the brainwave states of theta and alpha. In fact, over millions of years, we have become addicted to this frequency and it is a core part of who we are as humans. However, the problem is that this frequency gets obscured in cities by all of the ambient electromagnetism. NASA has found that astronauts actually get sick when they go outside of the atmosphere and don't receive the frequency. Currently, all astronauts now receive this frequency electromagnetically.

What is it with these people and the Schumann Resonance?  They love the Schumann Resonance.  For those of you who aren't aficionados of obscure features of atmospheric physics, the Schumann Resonance is an ultra-low-frequency electromagnetic standing wave in the ionosphere.  Here's how Wikipedia describes it:

This global electromagnetic resonance phenomenon is named after physicist Winfried Otto Schumann who predicted it mathematically in 1952. Schumann resonances occur because the space between the surface of the Earth and the conductive ionosphere acts as a closed waveguide. The limited dimensions of the Earth cause this waveguide to act as a resonant cavity for electromagnetic waves in the ELF band. The cavity is naturally excited by electric currents in lightning. Schumann resonances are the principal background in the electromagnetic spectrum beginning at 3 Hz and extend to 60 Hz, and appear as distinct peaks at extremely low frequencies (ELF) around 7.8 (fundamental), 13.7, 19.6, 25.5, 31.4, 37.3 and 43.2 Hz.

It has nothing to do with brainwaves.  It is not "obscured in cities."  NASA doesn't "give this frequency to astronauts."  And we are not "addicted to this frequency."

Oh, and there's no way to "infuse a frequency" into water.

If you keep reading, though, the claims just get wilder and wilder.  "Activated water" that has been "infused with the Schumann resonance" has the property of "super liquidity."  It's "bio-available."  (As opposed to ordinary water, which is just "available.")  And then after telling you how all of this nonsense has to do with the special properties of water, they tell you you can use their device to "activate" other substances...

...such as oil.  Which last I checked doesn't have much water in it.

If "MRET Activated Water" isn't bad enough, just today I ran into another claim, this one that we should all be drinking water in its "fourth phase."  What the hell could that mean, you might ask?

Well, you all learned in grade school how substances usually exist in one of three states -- solid, liquid, and gas.  (As you'll see in a moment, that is a dramatic oversimplification.)  But these people claim that these phases somehow aren't good enough, that we should be drinking water in a "fourth phase:"

4th Phase is a liquid water purifier!

It removes and renders harmless an enormous number of contaminants that are commonly found in water, whether from natural or man-made sources. It then puts water into what scientists are now calling the fourth phase of water (a liquid that has a beautiful, crystalline structure to it).

Ah, yes, those conveniently anonymous "scientists," always ready and waiting to be trotted out to support whatever idiotic claim is being made.

So what, exactly, is this stuff?  Check out the FAQs, and you find out:

4th Phase is a concentrated, water based solution of ionic minerals. The mother concentrate is made by extracting mineral salts from the stone, biotite mica, which are then diluted in purified water, bottled and sold, primarily as a liquid based water purifier. The resulting minerals are in sulfate form rather than the chloride form that most companies offer (The requirement for sulfur is nearly twice the requirement for chloride in the human body).

This, they tell us, comes out of the work of Dr. Gerald Pollack of the University of Washington, who tells us the following:

Dr. Pollack asserts that water, in it’s [sic] maximum potential as a substance that enlivens and hydrates us, needs to be highly energized and it reaches this high energy state through a variety of ways, one of which is that it creates this liquid crystalline structure when it is in the presence of external energy sources like light (sunlight, for example.) When water is in this high energy state, it mimics the water that surrounds our cells and is found throughout the body, and it has many other properties as well.

I'm so relieved to hear that now the water in my body will have many other properties!  That sounds great!  I'd hate to think that my water had "few properties."

What's interesting is how these people are using half-truths, incorrectly interpreted research, and out-and-out falsehoods to sell a product.  For example, the whole premise of a "fourth phase" of water, a mystical and energized phase, ignores the fact that the chemists have known for decades that water can exist in at least eighteen different phases (fifteen solid phases, plus liquid, vapor, and supercritical fluid), depending on temperature and pressure:

And unfortunately for these claimants, here at sea-level atmospheric pressure and typical room temperature, we're stuck in one boring old phase: liquid.

Now, Dr. Pollack himself, as far as I have been able to find, seems to have some degree of credibility in his field, and has been the author of a good many peer-reviewed papers.  On the other hand, the fault may not lie entirely with the purveyors of "4th Phase" hijacking Pollack's work.  At least one of Pollack's colleagues, neurobiologist Alexander Stein, has given an evaluation of Pollack's research that is nothing short of scathing:

Dr. Pollack is an embarrassment to his field and his University. This book [Cells, Gels, and the Engines of Life] is a collection of old results (from as far back as 50 years ago) that puzzled the world's scientists at the time they were first published. There has been much progress in the intervening decades that Dr. Pollack would do well to read and understand. All of the ancient science upon which Pollack's argument depends has since been explained or refuted. People are entitled to write, or say, whatever they choose. However, that doesn't necessarily make it true. Before purchasing this book, people should browse Dr. Pollack's publication record. They should note that in those instances when his science has escaped the peer-review process, references to his ridiculous opinions about cell biology have been omitted. Prospective buyers should also note that this book was published using the private funds of Pollack's family, and not solicited or endorsed by any scientific organization. I fully support anyone who wishes to read this comedy of ignorance, provided they then turn the pages of a good cell biology textbook. This book may change the way you look at the world around you, but so will psychoactive drugs and head trauma. Pollack is a laughing-stock. He will tell you that he is a persecuted genius. It is important to remember, though, that sometimes people are laughed at because they are genuine fools.

Ouchie.  So suffices to note that Pollack himself may not exactly be the solidest foundation on which to rest your claim.

Now, I'm not a chemist, and I would be unqualified to comment upon Pollack's research into the properties of water; but I do teach biology, and I can say without particular fear of error that the claims of the "4th Phase" people with respect to the biological effects of this Magic Water are bogus.  The bottom line: save your money.  Plain old tap water (in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, at least) is safe, hydrates you just fine, and has the additional advantage of being cheap.

So, there you have it; yet another example of combining "a fool and his money are soon parted" and "there's a sucker born every minute."  Myself, I think you can solve the whole thing by switching to red wine.  Except... uh-oh...

Tomorrow: Do the antioxidants in red wine actually prevent cancer?  Or do people just like getting drunk?

Self-revelation through social media

There's a sense of being anonymous, or at least one step removed, on electronic media.  We post statuses, comments, and "tweets," and it feels very much like talking in an empty room -- that the likelihood of anyone hearing what we're saying, or that if they did hear, that they'd pay attention, or (especially) that we'd reveal something we didn't intend to, is slim.

Two recently released studies have shown that we are as transparent to others while online as we are in person -- perhaps more.

The first, done by H. Andrew Schwartz et al. of the University of Pennsylvania, is called "Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach."  In it, the researchers used computer software to analyze 700,000 words from the Facebook status updates of 75,000 volunteers, who also agreed to take a battery of personality tests.  The software then calculated word frequencies for all of the words in the statuses, and then matched up word frequencies with personality markers.  Here's a piece of what they concluded:

Our analyses shed new light on psychosocial processes yielding results that are face valid (e.g., subjects living in high elevations talk about the mountains), tie in with other research (e.g., neurotic people disproportionately use the phrase ‘sick of’ and the word ‘depressed’), suggest new hypotheses (e.g., an active life implies emotional stability), and give detailed insights (males use the possessive ‘my’ when mentioning their ‘wife’ or ‘girlfriend’ more often than females use ‘my’ with ‘husband’ or 'boyfriend’).

Which thus far is interesting but not particularly alarming.  What I found more curious, and perhaps troubling, came up when I saw how many times word frequency could be related to other factors -- age, gender, degree of extroversion, and so on.   The age breakdown, I thought, was particularly interesting.  The 13 to 18 crowd unsurprisingly had "school," "homework," and "tomorrow" as their most common words; the clear winner from 19 to 22 were the various tenses and forms of the word "fuck;" by 23 to 28, there was a shift to "work," "office," "wedding," and "beer."  (The absence of swear words in this age bracket is likely to reflect an awareness of how public Facebook is, and not wanting to get fired for posting something inadvisable online.)

Males of all ages have a great many macho words in their statuses, involving video games, movies, and sports.  Unsurprisingly, "fuck" makes a reappearance in the male statuses.  Women's statuses were almost stereotypically girly -- "shopping," "boyfriend," "love," "yummy," and "my hair" being some of the most common words.

While none of these were particularly surprising, I think this raises two questions -- one of them more serious than the other.  The less serious one is whether our online presence is more revealing who we'd like to be seen as than who we actually are -- after all, we create these statuses, so the macho masculine statuses and girly feminine ones are just projections, ghosts of real people that we've built and then put on public display.

A more serious concern is how this sort of thing could be turned against us.  Now, please don't think that I've suddenly turned conspiracy theorist; I'm not particularly worried that the government is going to start data mining my Facebook looking for some reason to lock me away.  But think of the usefulness of this to marketing firms, who are always looking for ways to hook into demographic information so that they can focus their ads better.

If we reveal who we are even by the word choice in our status updates, that certainly is going to be something that advertisers are going to use.

The second study used Twitter, and the author, Burr Settles, came up with an algorithm (again based on word use) to sort out "geek" tweets from "nerd" tweets.  As settles sees it:

In my mind, “geek” and “nerd” are related, but capture different dimensions of an intense dedication to a subject:

• geek - An enthusiast of a particular topic or field. Geeks are “collection” oriented, gathering facts and mementos related to their subject of interest. They are obsessed with the newest, coolest, trendiest things that their subject has to offer.
• nerd - A studious intellectual, although again of a particular topic or field. Nerds are “achievement” oriented, and focus their efforts on acquiring knowledge and skill over trivia and memorabilia.

Similar to the study by Schwartz et al., Settles tried to group words together that seemed to indicate something about the demographic that produced them -- resulting in a graph (you can take a look at it on the link posted above) that sorts our tweets out by character.

I see this one as a bit more lighthearted than the first study, but still, it says something very interesting; that we reveal ourselves online every time we post anything, whether we want to or not.

Of course, all of this made me go back and check my own status updates and tweets, just to see what I'd inadvertently told the world about myself.  Ignoring what most of my social media activity is about -- posting links to cool stuff -- I found, in the last couple of weeks, a status mourning the death of my 16-year-old cat, Puck; a status that described my elation at finding out that my high school creative writing teacher (who, amazingly, hasn't retired yet!) is teaching one of my novels in her English class this year;  and a status about how much I enjoyed getting to see Laurie Anderson in concert.  As far as tweets, I had to go a lot further back to hit one that wasn't just posting a link to something, but I did find one expressing frustration about the teacher evaluation scheme in New York State, and another one about the last day of school that used up a good many of the 140 character limit with the word "YIPPEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!"

My guess is that this trend of figuring out our demographic information from our electronic presence is only going to get more sophisticated.  Should we be worried?  My sense is probably not; just as with the conspiracy theorist's concern that the government is monitoring his whereabouts (and text messages and phone conversations), if they were doing this for everyone it would be such a mammoth amount of data that it would be impossible to manage.  At least for now, I think this sort of thing will only be of interest to marketing firms.

And it's not like they haven't already been doing this for years, starting out with targeting advertisements to particular demographics on television (compare the ads on daytime soap operas and the Syfy channel, if you want a particularly good example).  If you have a Facebook, check the ads along the sidebar -- no surprise that mine frequently have to do with travel, scuba diving, wine, and pets, is it?

So as long as we think before we post (which we should already be doing), this sort of thing may not make much difference, except in what sorts of things we're encouraged to purchase.  At least I hope so.  Last thing I want is the government keeping track of what concerts I go to.

Well, that should take care of your "Bieber Fever."

So San Francisco made it through yesterday without being obliterated.  I'm pleased about that, because San Francisco is a great place and it would suck if it was destroyed by an earthquake even if it is a hotbed of "sexual immortality" (as one of the prophecies of doom called it).

Of course, the same bunch of prophets also called it a "Bowl of Iniquity," which is just funny.  It sounds like the breakfast they serve in hell's deli, doesn't it?  ("Hey, hon, can I have another Bowl of Iniquity, with some milk and sugar?  Thanks.")

But of course, this failure of the Lord to keep his word and smite the hell out of California isn't going to stop the prognosticators of doom from moving on to the next Holy Warning.  In fact, a reader told me we already have one that has cleared the starting gate, and it's a doozy.  Ready?

FEMA has been caught in the act of sending shiploads of plastic coffins and other corpse-transport devices...

... to Puerto Rico...

... because there's going to be an asteroid impact in the Atlantic Ocean...

... causing an enormous, 200-foot-tall tsunami...

... in order to kill everyone at the October 19 Justin Bieber concert in San Juan.

Well.  I certainly can't top that.  And I have to state, for the record, that I can understand why the Lord might want to smite Justin Bieber.  Destroying Puerto Rico in order to do it sounds like it might be a bit of an overreaction, however.  On the other hand, if you read the Old Testament you'll find that this sort of thing happened all the time, with the Lord having a bad morning and smiting the shit out of everyone who happened to be in the vicinity, so I guess there's precedent.

The Lord Works In Mysterious Ways, after all, and if killing everyone in Puerto Rico is his way of dealing with Justin Bieber, then who am I to question it?

So, there you have it.  The next prophecy to look forward to.  Much more creative than a silly old earthquake, don't you think?  And just think!  If it's true, we'll never have to hear "As Long As You Love Me" again.

Smiting San Francisco

I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but if you're a reader in the San Francisco area, you're doomed.

Today, in fact.

I know, I know, I should have warned you all sooner.  But I didn't even know until yesterday, and at that point, it seemed kind of late to start a wholesale evacuation.  So this is sort of a "thanks for your readership, hope you don't die too painfully."

You might be wondering how I know all of this.  It's a good question, and of course, the answer is that we have some self-proclaimed Prophets of the Lord who have said that God Almighty has told them that he's about to find downtown San Francisco on Google Maps and then press "Smite" on the Holy Keyboard.  The result, we are told, is that there will be an earthquake along the San Andreas Fault that will measure 9.7 on the Richter Scale (making it the strongest earthquake ever recorded), and a subesquent tsunami will pretty much obliterate anything that survives the initial shock.

Of course, in the scientific world, we always look for corroboration, don't we?  If I claim to have made some kind of groundbreaking discovery, then my fellow scientists will try to replicate my findings.  So just listen up, you naysayers: no less than three prophecies of doom have spelled out clearly that San Francisco has been Naughty In God's Sight, and as a result, the city is more or less screwed.

First, we have "Adam H.:"

This video is about what my mom has been telling me for the last day and a half.  She has been having dreams and visions about a large earthquake off the west coast of the United States.  She has had something like this happened to her once before.  It was right before the Japan earthquake and tsunami.  She basically predicted it.  It was pretty intense.  It was about two days before the event.  This one though she says she has seen numbers and dates and times.  It is early October in the daytime, sometime in the morning, on a Thursday.  The warning we are hearing is a 9.7 earthquake on the West Coast.

He was reluctant to pin down the date, but in the comments section he came out with it -- and today is, in fact, the day.

Then, we have the prophecy by "Pastor Joel:"

I received a call from a sister in the Lord (Kelly) who was frightened at a vision she had recently seen. She saw the upcoming date as October 3, with the Golden Gate Bridge breaking in half and going vertical, a huge tsunami covering San Francisco, an earthquake 9.7 in the city and water flooding the valley. Many souls perished. She felt compelled to warn people. Her fear came largely because she had seen a vision of the Boston Marathon Bombing the night before it happened.

As I was sharing these two events with my wife, she reminded me of a call she had received two weeks before. An intercessor friend (Margaret) from the East Bay area had warned Georgia not to go into San Francisco starting the last week in September through the first three weeks of October. Margaret had seen a tsunami and a devastating earthquake in the city, in a vision. Today Margaret told Georgia that many other intercessors have recently seen the same type of warnings.

Earlier this week, I was sharing some of this with our Tuesday Prophetic Luncheon Group. One of our sisters (Barbara) told me that the Lord had spoken to her clearly recently. He said that the “bowl of iniquity of San Francisco” was now full to the brim!

I didn't know there were "Prophetic Luncheons," did you?  What do you do at a "Prophetic Luncheon?"  Eat cold cuts and potato salad and jello mold, and speak in tongues?  What if you have a "Prophetic Luncheon" and the Lord is otherwise engaged?

It'd be kind of embarrassing to have a "Prophetic Luncheon" and then just sit around, munching potato chips for an hour, before finally giving up and deciding that if the Holy Spirit has anything to say, he would just have to wait until next month.

Then, finally, we have the alarming message from "Cindy Page:"

Wow! I have been given a date to “be prepared” (from the Lord) by October 2nd! In my dream there was chaos and madness going on. I asked the Lord when I should be ready. Will it be early October or late October? He told me the 275th day of the year, which is 10/2. I took that to mean the Lord wanted me to be ready by October 2nd.

In my heart I feel that shortly after October 2nd we are going to experience a great earthquake in California and we need to have food and water stored up. If possible, we should have enough for at least a month or two. If possible, be out of the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay area by October 1-3 and again on October 23-24.

Of course, the danger in all of this -- for the prophets, not for San Francisco -- is in pinning down a specific date.  Especially a date that is really soon.  Because if you put it far enough ahead, you can stir people up for a long while before they get any kind of verification of whether you were correct or not, while if you say that disaster is going to strike today, you damn well better be right or you will lose any credibility you had.

Not that these folks have much anyway, of course.  I mean, even the seismologists can't predict earthquakes very accurately -- they can tell when a fault is showing signs of seismic stress, but they can't say anything close to, "And it's going to give tomorrow morning at 8:30."  Even the non-wingnuts don't quite get that, sometimes -- which is why six Italian scientists were jailed for malfeasance last year for failing to predict the L'Aquila earthquake of 2009, which killed 300 people.

The wingnuts, though... wow.  They just eat this stuff up.  If you don't mind doing repeated headdesks, go to the link I posted above, and read some of the comments.  A few of them questioned the prophets -- one even pointed out how many times (as in, 100%) that such prophecies have been wrong.  But the majority yammered out their thanks to god and to the prophets for giving them warning.  One will suffice, to get the flavor (spelling and punctuation is as written):

If you have made it here or have been led by Holy Spirit to this site, and this article be thankful and prepare. If any Christian will read thru the old testament you will see a pattern of the cause and effect of straying from the laws put in place by God. Sexual immortality, idol worship, and many other sins by the examples given in the Bible all resulted in judgement. We are blessed to know what is coming so we can prepare. We are supposed to stand thru the storm with a peace that only comes by knowing Jesus Christ. Our fellow brothers and sisters who may not be not be saved should be wanting what we have because we have peace thru the storm. Instead of criticizing take prophetic words to the Lord in prayer. .the Lord just may be trying to alert us to be ready so His light can shine thru us.

So, on the whole, they are wholly in favor of an earthquake obliterating the Bay Area.  But these are the same people who think that the whole Noah's Ark thing, with god wiping out virtually every human on Earth (infants included!) for some unspecified "wickedness," is an edifying story, suitable for telling children in Sunday school.

So I don't think this should come as any sort of surprise.

Me, I'm not worried, and I wouldn't be even if I lived in San Francisco.  An earthquake at some point is probably going to hit along the San Andreas Fault, plate tectonics being what it is, but the chances of it happening today are slim.  Of course, that is unlikely to shake the faith of the aforementioned wingnuts, who seem to forget about such failures nearly instantaneously.  And the next time god tells one of their prophets something -- a typhoon, maybe, headed toward Omaha on December 8 -- they'll be right back to believing it and thanking Jesus for warning them in time.

Letters from Ummo

I could write about a lot of things this morning, given the current state of world affairs.  I could write about US policy in Syria.  I could write about whether the world should believe the ostensibly rational overtures from newly-elected Iranian president Hassan Rouhani, given that most of what came out of the previous president's mouth could have qualified him for mental evaluation.  I could write about the way the current session of congress has devolved into "If you don't give me my way, I'm gonna take my toys and go home."

Instead, I think I'll discuss a topic that I know is equally pressing to all of you:  What the hell is an "Ummite?"

The question comes up because of a link that a reader sent me, along with the question, "What do you make of this?"  The link turned out to be to the website "Ummo: Ummite Physics and Metaphysics."  And we get an answer to the initial question right away, although all it does is invite more questions:

The Ummites claim to have landed on Earth in March 1950, in the area of Digne. Three crafts brought a crew from the planet UMMO that set up a base (see the summary in the book by J-P PETIT), probably on the Peak of Blache, between Digne and La Javie, in the south of France. They spent a certain time analysing our habits, walked around Paris (and undoubtedly elsewhere), and avoided drawing attention to themselves. In 1965, Mr. Fernando SESMA, the organiser of a slightly esoteric Spanish "association" which claimed to be in contact with other extraterrestrials, begins receiving letters. Other recipients also receive some. Contact is lost in 1970, then is regained in 1987, and continues until 1993 (at least, we do not have letters possibly sent outside these periods) with other recipients, particularly in France. We currently have approximately 200 to 300 pages of texts written by the Ummites but it is possible that many other letters exist. In a 1988 letter, reference is made to the existence of 3,850 pages, copies of which having been sent to several individuals represent the equivalent of 160,000 pages.

So I started to look through the "texts" that allegedly come from the Ummites of Ummo, and were treated to passages like the following:

During a conversation which you had with my brother on which I depend: DEI 98, son of DEI 97, you asked him for information about travel and the concept of SPACE. The topic is complex as you shall see in the documents that we will give you gradually. Of course, before describing the types of feelings we feel when we travel in a OAWOOLEA UEWA OEMM (lenticular vessel for intra-galactic displacement) it is better that you have a more precise idea of our concept of SPACE.

Until now in the many reports and conversations, we had spoken about the IBOZOO UU without explaining their meaning, and had limited ourselves to translating this phoneme by "PHYSICAL POINT." We also resisted the temptation to add a mathematical demonstration closer to our WUUA WAAM (mathematics of physical space), because that would require an initiation on your part to the to our UWUUA IEES (tetravalent mathematical logic); it is to the detriment of the scientific rigour of the concepts that we expose to you. 

I... okay... what?

I was particularly interested in the "tetravalent mathematical logic" part, though, because logic is kind of a special interest of mine.  And a little further along, I found an explanation of it, if you can call it that:

There is a reason: when it comes to analysing the properties of space, the normal postulates of mathematical logic, which is familiar to you and to us besides, are not useful to us. As you know, formal logic accepts the criterion you name "law of of non-contradiction" (according to which any proposal is necessarily true or false). In our WUUA WAAM (mathematics of Physical Space) this postulate must be rejected. One then has recourse to a type of multivalent logic that our specialists call UUWUUA IES (logical tetravalent mathematics) according to which any proposal can adopt four values indifferently:

- AIOOYAA (TRUE - CORRECT)

- AIOOYEEDOO (FALSE, ABSURD)

- AIOOYA AMMIE (can be translated: True outside from The Waam)
 
- AIOOYAU (untranslatable in Earth language).

So not only do these aliens not use Earth logic, they also apparently speak the same language as Charlie Brown's teacher in the Peanuts cartoons.

I also found an artist's rendition of an Ummite, which I know you'll all want to see:

 So the Ummites look, basically, like Jean-Claude van Damme.

Now, so far, all we have is a wacky idea, and as we've seen over and over in this blog, wacky ideas are plentiful out there.  What impresses me is how massive this wacky idea is.  There is page after page of prose like this:

To say that the IBOZOO UU are like small spheres or " that between them exists a vacuum " or that they "are tangent within a dense space filled with IBOZOO UU," does not make sense. Such mental images are those which appear to an UUGEEYIE when one speaks to him for the first time on UMMO about the design of SPACE composed by the IBOZOO UU. Its childlike mentality, accustomed to familiar perceptions, tends to materialise this concept of IBOZOO UU and to assign an existence to it.

So someone -- perhaps J.-P. Petit, the French gentleman whose name is associated with the first "contact" with the Ummites, decades ago -- actually had to sit down and write hundreds of pages of this stuff, with all sorts of formulas and diagrams (you should check out the mathematical parts; I minored in math and my eyes crossed after the first paragraph).

We're talking about wingnuttery on a significant scale, here.

Anyhow, I encourage you to go to the link and look around.  It's well worth glancing through, even though most of it falls into the "clear as mud" department.  And as to whether any of it could be true, or even sane, my general reaction is "AIOOYEEDOO."

So thanks to the reader who sent the link, but in answer to the initial question, "What do you make of this?", I'm not entirely sure.  It's impressive, I'll say that, but beyond that, I was just kind of left shaking my head in disbelief.

Which, now that I think about it, is the same way that I responded to the current nonsense going on in congress.

It's the voodoo, I tells you!

I just found something new for the Do-It-Yourself crowd; a how-to for making your own voodoo doll.

The idea of voodoo dolls has been around for a long time, long before honest-to-Baron-Samedi voodoo made its way from Africa into the Caribbean, and later to Central America, South America, and the Gulf Coast.  The whole thing is a kind of sympathetic magic -- creating an image of someone, often incorporating something from the person into the image (hair or fingernail clippings were common), and then doing something to the image in the hopes that the real person would respond in kind.  It was by no means limited to the Afro-Caribbean voodoo tradition; similar practices have been found in many parts of the world.  And like most magic, a lot of it was centered around getting the person in question either to have sex with you or else die.

Funny how those two seem to come up pretty frequently in these discussions.

In any case, the whole concept has been around for a good while.  Consider the following picture of a voodoo doll that is at the Louvre (and I'm using the colloquial name even given that this isn't really voodoo in the strict sense), from 4th century Egypt:

(image courtesy of photographer Marie-Lan Nguyen and the Wikimedia Commons)

Check the pin placement.  Not too difficult to tell what this magician was after, is it?

In any case, we now have a DIY guide if you'd like to try the whole thing out for yourself.  Here are some highlights:

Since this is an authentic method, only naturally available items are used. All you need is two sticks, a string, strips of fabric, adhesive and something to stuff the doll with, such as grass, pine needles, etc. Also, if you want to dress up your doll you will require pieces of cloth, buttons, feathers, etc. Since the doll is intended to resemble a living person, it is best to use that person's own belongings to dress the doll. Once you have gathered the paraphernalia, here's how to make it: 

• Take a long stick and a short one. Place the short one perpendicular to the long stick about a quarter from the top of the long stick. Tie up the two sticks with a string in an X-motion. When done it will look like the image alongside.
•  The two ends of the short stick will be the doll's arms and the short end of the long stick will be its head, while its long end will be the body of the doll.
• Wrap your stuffings around the sticks: starting from the middle, then wounding around the head, then an arm, then back across another arm, then down to the middle and finally to the bottom.
• Cover the doll with pieces of fabric using glue and stitching to make them cling to the doll. But remember to keep some part of the stuffing exposed at the ends of the arms, the head and at the bottom.
• Give the doll a face. Stitch two beads or glue down two peas for the eyes and another bead for the mouth.
• Now dress up the doll. Since the voodoo dolls are intended to resemble somebody, you should use belongings of the person the doll is intended to resemble to dress the doll. You can even put a piece of that person's hair in the doll.

The next step is to baptize the doll in the name of the person you're trying to establish a link with.  You can consult the site for the exact words you're supposed to use.  Your doll is then ready to... um... use.

The writer seems to be having some misgivings at this point, because (s)he cautions, "(R)emember, using a doll for evil purposes has horrible consequences, since the person using the doll may suffer badly and even die for dark voodoo practices.  So you should never use voodoo dolls for anything wrong."  And later, (s)he puts in a rather comical disclaimer -- "Please note that I am not a vodouisan myself and this article is best read for informative purposes only.  Me or All About Occult will not bear any responsibility should you try to use the above mentioned method practically."

Righty-o.  We'll just let you completely off the hook, then.  But being fearless experimentalists, and also considering that the entirety of the foregoing is unadulterated horse waste, we here at Skeptophilia don't have the need for such disclaimers.  In fact, I not only give you my permission, I positively encourage you to make a voodoo doll with my image, and stick it full of pins.  I realize you don't have any of my hair or fingernail clippings (at least, I sincerely hope you don't, as that would be a little creepy), but maybe just having a reasonable facsimile of my fortunately rather unique face will be enough.  My photograph is over there in the right sidebar.  So have at it.  Feel free to skewer me, in effigy, to the wall, and I promise I'll post here to report any ruptured gall bladders or brain aneurysms I happen to suffer.

All in the name of the scientific method, you know.