What IS it, my Preciousssss???

Dear loyal readers,

This will be my last new post for a couple of weeks, as I'll be on vacation through July 12.  But fear not -- to keep your appetite for woo-woo silliness and skepticism sated, I've lined up a series of reposts of some of the most popular articles from Skeptophilia in the past four years.  I hope you enjoy them... and be ready for some new posts on Monday, July 14!  Keep sending your comments and suggestions -- they are most appreciated.

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Sometimes, I marvel at how little it takes to get the woo-woos going.

Take, for example, the article that appeared a few days ago in The Telegraph, that told the story of an "unnamed holiday maker" who was hiking in the hills of Huairou, north of Beijing.  He had gone off, he said, in search of a place to take a piss, and happened upon the following menacing-looking creature:

Well, the first thing I thought was that if I had been the one to run into this thing, that would have taken care of my need to pee right there.  Be that as it may, he evidently retained some of his presence of mind, at least at the time.  He said that he took out his cellphone and "took a few pictures of it," but that "now I am terrified."

What, he wasn't terrified at the time?  You just happen to run into a mostly-naked evil-looking humanoid with huge floppy ears, and calmly whip out your cellphone and snap a few shots -- and then days later, you look at them, and you scream, "Dear god, what is THAT?"

Well, despite the rock-bottom reliability of the story -- from the way it was reported, to the lack of names, to the fact that neither Gollum nor Dobby the House-Elf has ever been known to visit China -- this story's path through the interwebz resembles a giant pinball game.  I've seen it three times on Facebook, at least ten times on Twitter, and it's made four appearances on the various sites catalogued on Area51.org.

But the story didn't end there, as most of them do -- with a weird, blurry photograph and some unsubstantiated claims.  Because shortly after the original story began to make the rounds, someone stepped in and said, "Hey, y'all, calm down, this isn't real!" (as if that was in any doubt).  An "online commentator" (also unnamed) said that he and some buddies had been up in the hills making "a mini sci-fi film" and that this was just him in costume.  He also had gone off to pee, and got caught.

"And when I was having a pee," he wrote, "a person popped up and took pictures of me and shot away."

So one guy taking a piss came upon a guy in a monster suit taking a piss, and hilarity ensued.

Maybe.  Who knows?  Given that the debunker also didn't leave his name, or any real proof that what he was saying was true, he could be lying, too.

So all we really have is the photograph, which is hardly convincing, in these days of Photoshop and other digital editing software.  I'm morally certain that this isn't an alien, or a cryptid, or any of the other possible non-solutions people have been suggesting.  It's either a hoax or an accident (if we're to buy the actor-having-a-pee answer).  As for any other possibilities -- we're not buying them, Precioussss... no, not at all.

Spam, spam, spam, eggs, and spam

Yesterday I got a spam reply on one of my old Skeptophilia posts.

It happens pretty often, and I usually just ignore them, being that (1) I'm not stupid enough to reply, and (2) I have no particular interest in black-market anabolic steroids, penis growth pills, or helping out exiled Nigerian princes.  But this one was so funny that I read it aloud to a student of mine who happened to be hanging around, and we both had a good enough laugh that I thought I should share it here.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So here it is, along with some interspersed editorial comments from yours truly.

ATTENTION TO THE WHOLE WORLD:

Not just me, eh?  You want the whole world's attention?  That's pretty ambitious.

Hello and blessed are you who found me.

Well, you found me, technically.  But hello back atcha.

My name is DR SHAKES SPEAR, and am here to help you change and transform your life in the most positive way possible.

Is that William Shakes Spear?  Huh.  I thought you had Shuffled Off This Mortal Coil four centuries ago.  Shows you what I know.

I use the power of white, black craft and Wicca and voodoo spell casting to help people just like you they get the love they want and the money they deserve.

Did you even read my blog, dude?  You are seriously barking up the wrong tree.

My love spell offer amazing and quick results. Do you want to find your soulmate?

Already have, thanks.

Do you want to reunite with a past lover and make him or her love you again?

Merciful heavens above, no.  My past lovers are past for a reason.

Do you need to bind a troublemaker from causing problems in your relationship?

Unless you count the fact that my dog takes up way more than his fair share of the bed, I think I'm fine in that regard.

With my spell casting service, I can cast a love spell on your behalf that will help all of your wishes and dreams come true. I also do other custom spells, such as money spells, job spells, friendship spells, and good luck spells.

Versatile, that's you!  But you have to wonder why, if you can just cast money spells, you are trying to bilk money from a poor struggling writer.

You may have already tried the power of spells and prayers to get what you want.

No, "hard work" and "a reasonable supply of brainpower" have always worked for me.

Although it is true that everyone has the ability to cast spells and perform magic, spell casting is like a muscle.  Everyone has this 'muscle' but the more you use it, the stronger it gets, and the more things you are able to do with it.

Well, that's a mighty fine sales pitch.  However, the muscle it mostly made me think of was the gluteus maximus, because you seem to be talking out of your ass.

If you are not an experienced spell caster, your spell may not be as strong, and the results not as quick as you may desire. GET YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVE HERE AND BE FREE!!

Ooh, I can't wait for my problems to be solve!

Hello to people that want to be Great,

Hi there.

Note: This Spell casting do not have any effect on any one, But just to get your problem solve ok.

Ok.  But if it do not have any effect on any one, how the hell do it get my problem solve?

Get your problem solve in master...You can get the bellow problems solve here.

Yes, those bellow problems can be a bitch, it's true.

1. Bring back lost lover, even if lost for a long time

Cf. my previous comment about lost lovers.  They can stay lost, thanks.

2. Remove bad spells from homes, business & customer attraction etc.

Now you're talking.  If you could cast a spell that would make 9th graders less annoying, I'd be much obliged.

3. Get promotion you have desired for a long time at work or in your career.

Promotion?  To what, administrator?  That'd be a big "nope."  For me, being an administrator falls into the "just shoot me now" category.

4. Remove the black pot that keeps on taking your money away

So that's where it's going!

5. Find out why you are not progressing in life and the solution

If you could progress one of my novels to "bestseller" status, I'd take back everything I said about you.

6.  Ensure excellent school grades even for children with mental disabilities

Who needs the Common Core, when you have Dr. Shakes Spear?

7. I destroy and can send back the Nikolos if requested

I'm not going to request, because I have no idea what the fuck that even means.

8. We heal barrenness in women and bad issue and disturbing menstruation

I'm disturbed just thinking about this one.

9. Get you marriage to the lover of your choice

Too late, because I took care of that one myself.  But it's a nice offer.

10. Guarantee you win the troubling court cases & divorce no matter how what stage

Shouldn't #10 come before #9?  Just saying, you know, as a pitch.  As is it seems like getting the cart before the horse.

11. Mental illness & bewitched

What about them?  

12. Extreme protection for those doing dangerous jobs like security guards, Bank manager, cash transporters, etc

Not teachers, eh?  No "extreme protection" for us?  Just your ordinary, garden-variety protection?

I can help you, and I want to help you. Read through my words and CONTACT ME VIA:shakesspear23@yahoo.com OR shakesspear23@gmail.com AS MY POWERS ARE SO STRONG AND VERY EFFECTIVE AND HAS NO BAD EFFECT INSTEAD IT HAVE A VERY GOOD RESULT AFTER CASTING THE SPELL.

Maybe you should work on a spell for getting your caps lock unstuck.

So, there you have it.  A tasty meal of spam, courtesy of Dr. Shakes Spear.  I strongly recommend against sending anything to the email addresses, because of course that only would alert Dr. Spear that (s)he has a fish on the line, and pretty likely result in your being inundated by further offers.  So unless you have a particular need for steroids or penis growth pills, or are feeling a sudden desire to help down-on-their-luck Nigerian princes, it's probably best just to press "delete" and forget about it.

Ouija wackiness south of the border

Ouija boards have been around for a long time -- since 1890, in fact -- but they've only really hit an upswing in popularity (and a commensurate downward spiral amongst the highly religious) in the last couple of decades.  In fact, I've dealt with them before, and wouldn't be back on this topic again if it weren't for our dear friends at The Daily Fail.

Mail.  The Daily Mail, is of course what I meant.  They've once again reinforced their reputation for high-quality, groundbreaking journalism with their story entitled, "Three Americans Hospitalized After Becoming 'Possessed' Following Ouija Board Game in Mexican Village."

In this story, we hear about twenty-something siblings Alexandra and Sergio Huerta, and their cousin Fernando Cuevas, who were visiting relatives in the village of San Juan Tlacotenco, Mexico, when they decided to whip out the ol' Ouija board and see what the spirits had to say.  And of course, as with most cases of the ideomotor effect, the spirits very likely didn't have much of interest to say other than what the participants already knew -- until Alexandra Huerta went into a "trance-like state" and started growling.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Then the two boys began to "show signs of possession, including feelings of blindness, deafness, and hallucinations."  So all three were taken to a nearby hospital, where all three were given "painkillers, anti-stress medications, and eye drops."

Because you know how susceptible demons are to eye drops.  Whip out the Visine, and Satan is screwed.

Interestingly, Alexandra's parents called a local Catholic priest for an exorcism, who refused because the three were "not regular churchgoers."  I guess as a priest, your job fighting the Evil One is contingent on the possessed individual belonging to the church Social Committee, or something.

But so far, all we have is the usual ridiculous fare that The Daily Mail has become notorious for -- a non-story about three young adults who either were faking the whole thing for attention or else had suffered panic attacks and some sort of contagious hysteria.  Worthy of little attention and even less serious consideration, right?

Wrong.  You should read the comments, although you may need some fortification before doing so, because I thought that the comments on CNN Online and the Yahoo! News were bad until I started reading this bunch.  These people bring superstitious credulity to new levels.  Here's a sampling, representing the number I was able to read until my pre-frontal cortex was begging for mercy:

I've had plenty of experience.  Like us, there is both positive and negative charges amongst, let's call it, the spiritual realm.  The most common cause of error is to act like it is an actual game with no consequences.  I assure you they are quite real.  I assure you that regardless of positive or negative matter (let's call "spirits" ), they can do some mind boggling things i.e. dimming candles, creating areas or pools of water in places that couldn't possibly form etc.  AND yes, if you blatantly agree to invite them in with you it could potentially shock you into a "possessed" state.  LIKELY, it was the shock of being witness to paranormal activity as nothing can really prepare you for it.  Rule #1: Be of the most steadfast, clear and pure mind and you will have an opportunity to experience something you would never be able to otherwise.  Rule #2 ALWAYS be respectful (which also may explain this possession scenario) to them!  Most are quite nice and knowledgeable! 

Only a true exorcist Catholist [sic] priest can really rid someone of a possession.  Not all Catholic priests have this special "training" if that is even the right word to use (probably not).  It's serious stuff and the Catholic Church takes it seriously.  Perhaps we're not getting the full story on that priest's decision.  If the 3 young people were indeed "possessed," they likely still are...as sedatives won't fix that.  They need to try the C.C. again.  There is a procedure to be followed. 

We just bought a house and there was a board in the closet.  I threw it out instantly and prayed for the Lord to protect the house, I asked Jesus to bless all who enter.  My mother played with one as a teen and it answered many questions correctly, she and her friend asking the other one's question to prevent guiding of the piece.  My God-fearing farm-raised Epispocal [sic] grandma walked by and the piece stopped abruptly-all I need to know. 

Oh, so NOW you WANT a priest.  This is so sad you blame a priest, for not responding to what could be a physically (or life-) threatening situation, at night, brought on by the free will of consenting adults.  Out of many possible suggestions for this sad state of affairs, as a remedy, I can suggest daily praying the Rosary of our Blessed Mother.  Because, "when you fill your mind with Holy thoughts, the demons will flee upon approaching you as they see that you are not fertile ground for them." 

This is NOT fake!  I know this for a fact.  After dealing w/ one, there were spirits and slamming doors in my house.

Good grief, people, will you just calm down?

It's a toy.  The thing was invented back in the 19th century as a kids' game.  There are no demons to call up, and even if there were, I doubt that a little piece of plywood with some poorly-stenciled letters would be sufficient to get them to pay a visit.  There have been tests run on people trying to mess with a Ouija board while blindfolded -- you'd think that demons wouldn't care, right? -- and it turns out that the only satanic messages these subjects spell out are things like, "kdolwicmsalpomng," which may mean something in the Language of Hell, but doesn't really mean much to the rest of us.

So the whole thing is kind of idiotic, which is what the original click-bait story on The Daily Mail intended.  They don't really care if what they say is well-written, or informative, or even true, as long as people give them hits.  (And for those of you who would like to read the original without contributing to TDM's share on search engines, the link I provided goes through the wonderful service DoNotLink.com, which allows you to see content without adding to their hit profile.)

Anyhow, that's our dip in the deep end for today.  My advice: don't go out of your way to throw out your Ouija board if you have one, but also don't expect it to tell you anything but random nonsense.  In that way, it's a little like The Daily Mail itself, isn't it?  Mildly entertaining, but mostly garbage, and gets boring pretty quickly.

The writing brain

As a writer of fiction, I have wondered for years where creative ideas come from.  Certainly a great many of the plots I've written have seemed to spring fully-wrought from my brain (although as any writer will tell you, generating an idea is one thing, and seeing it to fruition quite another).

What has always struck me as odd about all of this is how... unconscious it all feels.  Oh, there's a good bit of front-of-the-brain cognition that goes into it -- background knowledge, visualization of setting, and sequencing, not to mention the good old-fashioned ability to construct solid prose.  But at its base, there's always seemed to me something mysterious about creativity, something ineffable and (dare I say it?) spiritual.  It is no surprise, even to me, that many have ascribed the source of creativity to divine inspiration or, at least, to a collective unconscious.

But now, Martin Lotze, a neuroscientist at the University of Griefswald (Germany), has taken the first steps toward understanding what is happening in the brains of creative writers -- and the results that he and his team have uncovered are fascinating.

One of the difficulties in studying the creative process is that during any exercise of creativity, the individual generally has to be free to move around.  Writing, especially, would be hard to do in a fMRI machine, where your head has to be perfectly still, and your typical writing device, a laptop, would be first wiped clean and then flung across the room by the electromagnets.  But Lotze and his team rigged up a setup wherein subjects could lie flat, with their heads encased in the fMRI tube, and have their arms supported so that they could write with the tried-and-true paper-and-pencil method, using a set of mirrors to see what they were doing.

[image courtesy of Martin Lotze and the University of Griefswald]

Each subject was given a minute to brainstorm, and then two minutes to write.  While all of the subjects activated their visual centers and hippocampus (a part of the brain involved in memory and spatial navigation) during the process, there was a striking difference between veteran and novice writers.  Novice writers tended to activate their visual centers first; brainstorming, for them, started with thinking of images.  Veteran writers, on the other hand, started with their speech production centers.

"I think both groups are using different strategies,” Lotze said.  "It’s possible that the novices are watching their stories like a film inside their heads, while the writers are narrating it with an inner voice."

The other contrast between veterans and novices was in the level of activity of the caudate nucleus, a part of the brain involved in the coordination of activities as we become more skilled.  The higher the level of activity in the caudate nucleus, the more fluent we have become at it, and the less conscious effort it takes -- leading to the conclusion (no surprise to anyone who is a serious writer) that writing, just like anything, becomes better and easier the more you do it.  Becoming an excellent writer, like becoming a concert pianist or a star athlete, requires practice.

All of this is also interesting from the standpoint of artificial intelligence -- because if you don't buy the Divine Inspiration or Collective Unconscious Models, or something like them (which I don't), then any kind of creative activity is simply the result of patterns of neural firings -- and therefore theoretically should be able to be emulated by a computer.  I say "theoretically," because our current knowledge of AI is in its most rudimentary stages.  But just knowing what is happening in the brains of writers is the first step toward both understanding it, and (possibly) generating a machine that is capable of true creativity.

All of that, of course is far in the future, and Lotze himself is well aware that this is hardly the end of the story.  As for me, I find the whole thing fascinating, and a little humbling -- that something so sophisticated is going on in my skull when I think up a scene in a story.  It brings to mind something one of my neurology students once said, after a lecture on the workings of the brain:  "My brain is so much smarter than me, I don't know how I manage to think at all!"

Indeed.

There's a word for that

I've always had a fascination for words, ever since I was little.  My becoming a writer was hardly in question from the start.  And when I found out that because of the rather byzantine rules governing teacher certification at the time, I could earn my permanent certification in biology with a master's degree in linguistics, I jumped into it with wild abandon.  (Okay, I know that's kind of strange; and for those of you who are therefore worried about my qualifications to teach science classes, allow me to point out that I also have enough graduate credit hours to equal a master's degree in biology, although I never went through the degree program itself.)

In any case, I've been a logophile for as long as I can remember, and as a result, my kids grew up in a household where incessant wordplay was the order of the day.  Witness the version of "Itsy Bitsy Spider" I used to sing to my boys when they were little:

The minuscule arachnid, a spigot he traversed
Precipitation fell, the arachnid was immersed
Solar radiation
Caused evaporation
So the minuscule arachnid recommenced perambulation.

Okay, not only do I love words, I might be a little odd.  My kids developed a good vocabulary probably as much as a defense mechanism as for any other reason.

All of this is just by way of saying that I am always interested in research regarding how words are used.  And just yesterday, I ran across a set of data collected by some Dutch linguists regarding word recognition in several languages (including English) -- and when they looked at gender differences, an interesting pattern emerged.

What they did was to give a test to see if the correct definitions were known for various unfamiliar words, and then sorted them by gender.  It's a huge sample size -- there were over 500,000 respondents to the online quiz.  And they found that which words the respondents got wrong was more interesting than the ones they got right.

From the data, they compiled a list of the twelve words that men got wrong more frequently than women.  They were:

• taffeta
• tresses
• bottlebrush (the plant, not the kitchen implement, which is kind of self-explanatory)
• flouncy
• mascarpone
• decoupage
• progesterone
• wisteria
• taupe
• flouncing
• peony
• bodice

Then, there were the ones women got wrong more frequently than men:

• codec
• solenoid
• golem
• mach
• humvee
• claymore
• scimitar
• kevlar
• paladin
• bolshevism
• biped
• dreadnought

There are a lot of things that are fascinating about these lists.  The female-skewed words are largely about clothes, flowers, and cooking; the male-skewed words about machines and weapons.  (Although I have to say that I have a hard time imagining that anyone wouldn't recognize the definition of "tresses" and "scimitar.")

It's easy to read too much into this, of course; even the two words with the biggest gender-based differences (taffeta and codec) were still correctly identified by 43 and 48% of the male and female respondents, respectively.  (Although I will admit that one of the "male" words -- codec -- is the only one on either list that I wouldn't have been able to make a decent guess at.  It means "a device that compresses data to allow faster transmission," and I honestly don't think I've ever heard it used.)

It does point out, however, that however much progress we have made as a society in creating equal opportunities for the sexes, we still have a significant skew in how we teach and use language, and in the emphasis we place on different sorts of knowledge.

I was also interested in another bit of this study, which is the words that almost no one knew.  Their surveys found that the least-known nouns in the study were the following twenty words.  See how many of these you know:

• genipap
• futhorc
• witenagemot
• gossypol
• chaulmoogra
• brummagem
• alsike
• chersonese
• cacomistle
• yogh
• smaragd
• duvetyn
• pyknic
• fylfot
• yataghan
• dasyure
• simoom
• stibnite
• kalian
• didapper

As you might expect, I didn't do so well with these.  There are three I knew because they are biology-related (chaulmoogra, cacomistle, and dasyure); one I got because of my weather-obsession (simoom); one I got because my dad was a rockhound (stibnite); and one I got because of my degree in linguistics (futhorc -- and see, the MA did come in handy!).  The rest I didn't even have a guess about.  (I did look up "genipap" because it sounds like some kind of STD, and it turns out to be "a tropical American tree with edible orange fruit and useful timber.")

I'm not entirely sure what all this tells us, other than what we started with, which is that words are interesting.  At least I think so, and I'm pleased to say that my kids still do, too.  My younger, who is now 23, was home for a visit recently and wanted to know if we'd gotten any movies from the popular DVD-rental company.  He phrased it, "Do we have any Netflixen right now?"

Only someone in my family would think "ox-oxen, Netflix-Netflixen."

Your days are numbered

Most people have heard of the placebo effect.  The name comes from the Latin word meaning "I will please," and refers to the phenomenon that people who are given an ineffective medication after being told that it will ameliorate their symptoms often find that the symptoms do, indeed, abate.  The mechanism is still not well elucidated -- it has been suggested that some of the effect might be caused by the brain producing "endogenous opioids" when a placebo is administered, causing decreased sensations of pain, feelings of well-being, and sounder sleep.  But the fact is, we still don't fully understand it.

Less well-known, but equally well-documented, is the nocebo effect.  "Nocebo" means "I will harm" in Latin, and it is more or less the placebo effect turned on its head.  If a person is told that something will cause pain, or bring him/her to harm, it sometimes does -- even if there's no rational reason why it would.  Individuals who believe in voodoo curses, for example, sometimes show actual medically detectable symptoms, even though such curses are merely empty superstition.  Nevertheless, if you believe in them, you might feel their effects.

Naturally, this further bolsters the superstition itself, which ramps up the anxiety and fear, which makes the nocebo more likely to happen the next time, and so round and round it goes.  And this seems to be what is happening right now in Uganda -- a bizarre phenomenon called "numbers disease."

In "numbers disease," an affected individual suddenly notices a raised pattern on his/her skin that looks like a number.  The number that appears, it is said, represents the number of days the person has left.  Once the number shows up, the individual begins to sicken, and when the allotted time is up, the person dies.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Dr. Thomas Lutalo, of the Ugandan Ministry of Health, says that he is seeing a rapid increase in the incidence of the "disease," and has suggested that much of the hysteria might be due to relatively harmless skin infections like ringworm that worsen because of improper skin care.  Ringworm rashes are often irregular, meaning that if you're looking for a pattern (e.g. a number) you're likely to find one, especially given that any number will do.  Then, the superstition that gave rise to the "disease" lends itself to superstitious "cures" that often make some easily-treatable disease become more serious.

The worst part is that this one-superstition-leads-to-another thing is generating an upswing in the belief in witchcraft, and is giving local religious leaders another tool for converting the fearful.  "Unfortunately, some Pentecostal pastors are already using the fear of the strange disease as a beacon for luring more followers to their worship centres with promises of a 'cure,'" said Dr. Harriet Birabwa, a psychiatrist at a hospital in the city of Butabika.  "It is a myth that needs to be dispelled immediately as very many people are dying because of harboring such baseless beliefs."

Which is all well and good to say, but as we've seen over and over, superstitions are awfully difficult to combat.  In my Critical Thinking class, I ask, "How many are you are superstitious?", and usually about half the class will cheerfully raise their hands -- despite the fact that it's hard to see how self-identifying as "superstitious" could be a good thing.  This generates a discussion about what they're superstitious about and why, and how we come to such conclusions despite there being little evidence for their veracity.  Fortunately, most of the superstitions I hear about in class are minor silliness -- on the level of a lucky keychain, a special pen to take tests with, or making sure that they put their left shoe on first because otherwise it'd be "bad luck."

But the whole superstitious mindset is counterfactual and irrational, and that in and of itself makes it worth fighting.  Why subscribe to a worldview within which sinister forces, over which you have no control, are capriciously doling out good and bad fortune, and for which (more importantly) there is no evidence whatsoever?  As we're seeing in Uganda, superstition is sometimes not as harmless as it seems, and can lead to fear, anxiety, physical harm, and allowing yourself to be manipulated by the unscrupulous.

So call to mind any superstitions you might fall prey to, and think about whether it might not be time to reconsider them.  Maybe it's time that irrationality's days are numbered... not yours.

Seeds of doubt

C'mon, people, it's time to grow up a little.

When we're toddlers, we accept things without question.  If our parents say something, we pretty much believe that it must be true.  (Whether we do what they tell us afterwards, though, is another issue.)  After a time, we start experimenting, and testing the world -- sometimes with unfortunate results, such as when we decide to find out why Mommy says that Mr. Finger and Mr. LightSocket can't be friends.

But this highlights an important principle, which is that our first and best way to find out about things is by finding evidence.  "Show me why" is a pretty important first step to knowledge.

It's not the last step, though.  After the "show me why" stage we should move on to "but how do you know it's true?", which is a deeper and more sophisticated question.  Okay, from the evidence of my eyes, it looks like the Sun is moving across the sky.  In order to move past that to the correct explanation, we have to ask the question, "What if there is a better explanation that still accounts for all of the evidence?"

And in this case, of course, it turns out that there is.

There are other facets to this mode of inquiry.  What confounding factors could there be?  What if there are uncontrolled variables?  What if the person who made the original claim was lying?  What if my preconceived biases made me misjudge the evidence, or (perhaps) ignore some of the evidence entirely?  What if there is correlation between A and B, but instead of A causing B, B causes A -- or, perhaps, some third factor caused them both?

This whole process is what is collectively known as "Critical Thinking."  What is unfortunate, though, is that a lot of people seem to be stuck at the "I see evidence, so it must be true" stage, which is probably why the whole WiFi-kills-plants thing is making the rounds of social media... again.  Just a couple of days ago, a friend of mine ran across it, and asked the right question: "can this actually be true?"

The claim is that five ninth-graders from Denmark had noticed that if they slept near their WiFi routers, they "had trouble concentrating in school the next day."  Because clearly, if ninth graders are distracted, it must be because of WiFi.  So the kids allegedly set up an experiment with cress seeds, placed some near a router, and had others in a "room without radiation," and had the results pictured above.

Well.  The whole thing is suspect from the get-go, because we're told nothing about other conditions the seeds were experiencing -- light, humidity, temperature, air flow, and so forth.  Was the "room without radiation" well-lit?  Were the seeds near the router warmer than the supposed control group?  There are a hundred things about this so-called experiment that we're not being told, and yet we're supposed to buy the results -- in spite of the fact that "control all variables but one, or the results are suspect" is the first thing taught in high school science classes.  (For a nice take-apart of this "experiment," take a look here -- and note, especially, that attempts to replicate the girls' experiment have not produced any results.)

What else?  First, it's from Spirit Science, a notorious peddler of woo.  Second, unless they were in a lead-lined vault, I doubt whether the control seeds were actually in a "room without radiation."  Even if you're some distance from the nearest router, you (and your room) are constantly being pierced by radio waves, which pass easily through most solid objects (if they didn't, old-fashioned (i.e. pre-cable) televisions and almost all modern radios would not work inside houses or cars).  Then there's the issue of how many thousands of WiFi routers in the world are sitting near perfectly healthy house plants -- for years, not just for thirteen days.  And even if WiFi did kill cress seeds, there's no guarantee that it would have the same (or any) effect on humans.  Don't believe me?  Go for a nice swim in the ocean, and then pour a cup of seawater on your marigolds, and see if the results are the same.  (In all seriousness, researchers face this all the time when developing medications -- therapies that work well in vitro or on lab animals might have different effects on human subjects.)

So to the people who are unquestioningly passing this around, just stop.  Exercise something past the You-Showed-Me-A-Picture-So-It's-True level of critical thinking.  If you see something that seems suspect, ask someone who might know the answer (as my friend did with this claim).  Or, in this day of information accessibility, you could simply Google "cress seeds WiFi experiment debunked" and you'll find everything you needed to know.

We all were toddlers once, and no harm done, unless you count unfortunate encounters with light sockets.  But let's exercise a little higher-level thinking, here, and not just accept whatever comes down the pike.