That rabbit's dynamite!

After dealing in recent posts with such topics as standardized testing, controversies over legislation allowing the teaching of creationism in public school science classes, and the consequences of civil disobedience, I'm sure what you're all thinking is, "Yes, but what about BunnyMan?"

BunnyMan is a cryptid I'd never heard of, that apparently haunts the town of Clifton, Virginia, in Fairfax County.  And according to an article over at Mysterious Universe, we're not talking some gentle, fuzzy little Peter Cottontail, here.  BunnyMan is more like the scary evil rabbit from Donnie Darko.

Author Brent Swancer, who is also the person who four years ago warned us about giant Sky Jellyfish attacking Japan, tells us that sightings of BunnyMan have been going on for over a hundred years.  The whole thing started with the escape in 1904 of two inmates from an insane asylum, Douglas Grifon and Marcus Wallster, in the woods near Clifton.  Wallster was eventually found, hanging from a bridge railing, with a note saying, "You'll never catch me, no matter how hard you try.  Signed, The BunnyMan."  Grifon was never found.  And thus began a century's worth of mysterious deaths and sightings of guys in bunny suits.

You may be laughing by now.  I know I was.  Swancer, however, is entirely serious, and describes numerous encounters with the long-eared lunatic.  And he tells us that this thing is the most foul-tempered rrrrrodent... -- well, let's hear an example or two in his own words:

Two of the most intriguing and bizarre accounts of the Bunny Man surfaced in 1970.  The first incident occurred on October 19, 1970, when an Air Force Academy cadet by the name of Bob Bennett was allegedly with his fiancée and parked his car on Guinea Road in Burke, Virginia, so that the couple could talk.  It was at this time that they noticed a white figure moving outside of the vehicle.  Moments later, the front window was smashed into a cascade of glass, and an ominous voice warned “You’re on private property and I have your tag number.”  The horrified couple sped away and as they screamed down the road they noticed a small hatchet on the floor of the car.  When questioned later by the police, Bennett would insist that the attacker had been decked out in a full bunny suit, and he told his superiors at the Air Force base the same thing.  As ridiculous as the story sounded, Bennett would continue to insist it was true long after the incident.

Then, later that same year, BunnyMan had another run-in over people trespassing in his private Carrot Patch:

Just two weeks after the Bennett incident, the Bunny Man struck again.  Paul Phillips, a private security guard for a construction company, reported that he had seen a man-sized rabbit in front of a house under construction.  When approached by Phillips, the rabbit was reported to have said “All you people trespass around here. If you don’t get out of here, I’m going to bust you on the head,” after which it started to furiously hack away at the unoccupied house with an axe.  Allegedly, when the startled Phillips went back to his car to get a firearm, the “bunny” swiftly escaped into the woods and disappeared.

Swancer's article is chock-full of other stories about people meeting this buck-toothed bad guy in northeastern Virginia.  In fact, the Colchester Overpass, the site of numerous suicides by hanging, has also been the site of so many appearances that it's supposedly called "BunnyMan Bridge" by locals who don't mind losing any credibility they might have had.

What strikes me about all of this is the proximity of Clifton, Virginia to the CIA Headquarters in Langley.  The two are only separated by twenty miles, as the rabbit hops, which I'm sure can't be a coincidence.  After all, I've watched historical documentaries in which Fox Mulder and Dana Scully found out about all sorts of horrible things the government was involved in, including alien hybridization experiments.  So the next step, evil-wise, would be hybridizing humans with various animals, some of which would inevitably escape and terrorize the countryside.  Just be glad it was BunnyMan.  It could have been WeaselMan, PigeonMan, or, god forbid, HornetMan.

I've been at this blog for five years, and by this time, I thought I'd run into every cryptid in the book; but I have to admit, before yesterday I'd never heard of this guy.  So thanks to Brent Swancer for another example of hard-hitting journalism, uncovering the depredations of a vicious rabbit only a stone's throw from our nation's capital.  I feel safer now.  As Elmer Fudd teaches us, forewarned is forearmed.

Swancer ends his article on a cautionary note:

Who, or what, is the Bunny Man?  Is this a case of a ghost, an unsolved crime, a psycho on the loose, some mystery animal, or merely the delusional human psyche working upon its inner fears to create a phantom construct in the real world in the form of scary stories and myth?  The story of a man-sized bunny running around terrorizing, even murdering, people seems to cross over the line from mystery into preposterousness, but many urban legends doubtlessly have their origins in some grain of truth, so who really knows?  For the case of the Bunny Man, no matter how ludicrous it may sound, it might be a good idea to stay away from the Colchester Overpass at night, just in case.

Of course, he misses one possibility, which is "people impersonating a figure from a local legend to stir up trouble," which I think is the most likely solution.  Given the propensity of pranksters to keep such stories going -- consider the copycat phenomenon in the case of crop circles -- it's no wonder that once BunnyMan started being a thing around Clifton, he continued to be seen over and over again.

Any notoriety is better than obscurity, I suppose.

So that's our hare-raising tale for today.  If you're ever down in Fairfax County, keep your eyes open, especially at night.  You might want to bring some carrots along as a peace offering.  I hear BunnyMan has quite a temper.

Knowing the score

One of the beautiful things about science is that it self-corrects.

If the data don't support the prevailing theory, you double-check the data to make sure you're not misinterpreting it, re-run the experiments to make sure they're well controlled, and then if you get the same results...

... you alter your model.

You have no other option.  Science is a method for understanding the world based upon logic and evidence.  If you accept that as a protocol for knowing the universe, you are dedicating yourself to following where it leads, even if you don't like the conclusions sometimes.

A pity, isn't it, that we can't introduce this approach into other fields?

Like, for example, education.  I'm a hard-core linguistics geek; in fact, my master's degree is in Scandinavian linguistics.  (Yes, I know, I teach biology.  It's a long story.)  So one of the things that galls me about education is the fact that we've known for decades that children learn languages better, more easily, and become more fluent the earlier you start them.  Kids put into language immersion classes in preschool learn a second language nearly as easily as the first, without tedious memorization of vocabulary lists and conjugations.

And when do most school districts begin language classes?  Middle school.  Right around the time kids' brains start getting bad at learning languages.

We don't need no scholarly research, educational leaders seem to be saying.  We've done it this way for years, and it's working just fine.

So with that scientific-method approach to analysis in mind, let's look at a piece of research regarding the current fad -- high-stakes standardized tests, now being used to evaluate not only students, but teachers, schools, and entire school districts.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Christopher Tienken, associate professor of Education Administration at Seton Hall University, has just published an interesting, and disturbing, paper in the Journal of Scholarship and Practice.  In it, he shows that he can predict how a school population will perform on standardized tests, using only U.S. Census data.

You read that right.  Give Tienken information on demographics, ethnic makeup, socioeconomic status, community size, and so on, he can tell you how the school will do on standardized tests before the students actually take them.  Tienken writes:

In all, our regression models begin with about 18-21 different indicators.  We clean the models and usually end up with 2-4 indicators that demonstrate the greatest predictive power.  Then we enter those indicators into an algorithm that most fourth-graders, with an understanding of order or operations, could construct and calculate. Not complicated stuff.

Our initial work at the 3rd-8th and 11th grade levels in NJ, and grades 3-8 in CT and Iowa have proven fairly accurate.  Our prediction accuracy ranges from 62% to over 80% of districts in a state, depending on the grade level and subject tested.

I hope you recognize how devastating this is to the claim that standardized tests tell you anything worth knowing about teacher competence.  If census data alone predicts student performance, then how are "underperforming" teachers supposed to improve their scores?  Tienken's research implies that poor teachers will suddenly become more competent... if they move to a different district.

Tienken doesn't mince words about the implications of his study:

The findings from these and other studies raise some serious questions about using results from state standardized tests to rank schools or compare them to other schools in terms of standardized test performance.  Our forthcoming results from a series of school level studies at the middle school level produced similar results and raise questions about the appropriateness of using state test results to rank or evaluate teachers or make any potentially life-impacting decisions about educators or children.

Now, Tienken isn't saying that teachers make no difference; we all, I think, can attest to the power of a truly skilled teacher in making a difference to a child's life.  I had three teachers who stand out as having turned the course of my life in some way -- my high school biology and creative writing teachers, and my first-year college calculus teacher.  Each of them engendered in me a passion for learning and a fascination with the topic, such that I looked forward to each and every class and wanted more when I was done.

But the point is, this sort of thing is not measurable with a standardized test.  The real value of truly gifted teachers is their capacity for making learning relevant and engaging, making dry academic subjects come to life.  And whatever standardized tests are measuring -- a point no one, even the policy wonks at the state and federal Departments of Education, seems to be entirely clear on -- they certainly don't measure that.

So teacher evaluation, astonishingly enough, is best done by a competent administrator, who knows the teacher, the subject, and the students, not by some paper-and-pencil exam.  Who'd'a thought.

And it'd be nice if the people in charge would look at Tienken's research, and do a forehead smack, and say, "Wow!  We were wrong!  Better reconsider how we're applying standardized test scores!"  But given that scientific rules of validity and analysis don't seem to apply to education, I have the feeling that the result of Tienken's study will be: nothing.  We will almost certainly keep moving down the same road, letting test scores drive more and more decision-making, up to and including teacher salaries and retention.

Can't let a little thing like facts get in the way of educational reform, after all.

The problem with Seymour

A few months ago, I made the point that the fallacy called appeal to authority is not as simple as it sounds.

On the surface, it's about not trusting authorities and public figures simply because they're well-known names.  You can convince anyone of anything, seemingly, if you append the words "Albert Einstein said so" after your claim; it's the reason I fight every year in my intro neuroscience class with the spurious claim that humans use only 10% of their brains.  You see this idea attributed to Einstein all the time -- although it's unlikely that he ever said such a thing, adding "apocryphal quotes" as another layer of fallacy to this claim, and the claim itself is demonstrably false.

The problem is, of course, there are some areas where Einstein was an expert.  Adding "Einstein said so" to a discussion of general relativity is pretty persuasive, given that relativity has passed every scientific test it's been put through.  But notice the difference; we're not accepting relativity because a respect physicist thought it was true.  Said respected physicist's ideas still had to be vetted, retested, and peer-reviewed.  It's the vindication of his theories that conferred credibility on his name, not the other way around.

The situation becomes even blurrier when you have someone whose work in a particular field starts out valid and evidence-based, and then at some point veers off into wild speculation.  This is the core of the problem with an appeal to authority; someone having one or two right ideas in the past is no insurance against his/her being wildly wrong later.

This is the situation we find ourselves in with Seymour Hersh.  Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist whose work on exposing the truth about the My Lai Massacre and the torture of prisoners of war by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib was groundbreaking.  His dogged determination to get at the facts, even at the cost of embarrassing the American government and damaging the reputation of the U.S. overseas, earned him a well-deserved name as one of the giants of journalism.

Seymour Hersh [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The problem is, Hersh seems to have gone badly off the rails lately.  His latest piece, which he's pursuing with the tenacity of a bloodhound, is about the claim that the public version of the death of Osama bin Laden is a complete fabrication -- that the United States had captured bin Laden all the way back in 2006, and with help from the Saudis was using him as leverage against al Qaeda.  When his usefulness began to wane, they had him killed and then faked a raid against his compound in Abbottabad, then made public the story of the brave soldiers who'd risked their lives to take down a wanted terrorist.

The problem is, as is described in more detail in an article in Vox, the claim is supported by little in the way of evidence.  Hersh's two sources admittedly have no direct knowledge of what happened.  The story itself is fraught with self-contradictions and inconsistencies.  And then, to make matters worse, Hersh has recently begun to claim that the United States government has been infiltrated by members of Opus Dei (a Roman Catholic spiritual organization made famous, or infamous, by The DaVinci Code), that the chemical weapons attacks in Syria were "false flags" staged by the Turkish government, and that the U.S. is training Iranian terrorists in Nevada.

None of these, apparently, have any evidential support beyond "an anonymous source told me."  Hersh, seemingly, has slipped from being a hard-hitting investigative reporter to a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist.

He's not backing down, however.  He granted an interview to Slate in which he reiterated everything he's said.  He seems to spend equal time during the interview defending himself without introducing any further facts, and disparaging the interviewer, journalist Isaac Chotiner.  "What difference does it make what the fuck I think about journalism?" Hersh asked Chotiner.  "I don’t think much of the journalism that I see.  If you think I write stories where it is all right to just be good enough, are you kidding?  You think I have a cavalier attitude on throwing stuff out?  Are you kidding?  I am not cavalier about what I do for a living."

And only a moment earlier, when asked a question he didn't like, he said to Chotiner, "Oh poor you, you don’t know anything.  It is amazing you can speak the God’s English."

This is a vivid, and rather sad, example of why a person's reputation isn't sufficient to establish the veracity of their claims.  No one -- including both Albert Einstein and Seymour Hersh -- have the right to rest on their laurels, to expect people to believe something just because they've appended their name to it.

Claims stand or fall on the basis of one thing; the evidence.  And what Hersh has brought forth thus far is of such poor quality that about the only one he's convincing is Alex Jones.

Ethical lawbreaking

One of the topics we discuss in my Critical Thinking class is when taking a stand on an ethical issue trumps law.

Civil disobedience, in other words, crossing the line into potential arrest and prosecution.

I ask this question because two days ago, I was arrested for being part of a blockade of Crestwood Midstream's natural gas and (proposed) liquefied petroleum gas storage facility alongside Seneca Lake.  As I have described in previous posts, the facility uses geologically unstable salt caverns for this storage, risking catastrophic failure that would result in environmental devastation of the region and almost certainly loss of life.  The plan is, to put it simply, reckless and dangerous, driven by the profit motive of an out-of-state corporation that could simply up stakes and move back to Texas if the unthinkable happens.

We, on the other hand, live here and would have to deal with the consequences.

Yours truly being loaded into the police van after arrest [image courtesy of photographer Carol Bloomgarden]

The fact that Crestwood's plan is wildly irresponsible is not just fanciful or alarmist.  Dr. Robert Howarth, professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, had the following cautionary words:

The stakes are high.  Industry and government march blithely ahead, ignoring the growing risks of extreme energy development: deep offshore oil and gas, Arctic oil and gas, tar sands, shale gas… and the risky storage of methane and propane proposed for the salt caverns below us here.  We hit 400 ppm carbon dioxide this winter, for the first time in the past few million years; and another greenhouse gas -- methane -- is also at its highest level in the last several million years.  We are near the point of no return, where a much warmer Earth will be with us for the next several thousand years.

Schneising et al. showed in 2011 that the methane in the atmosphere is largely from shale gas and shale oil drilling.  The methane signature they found from this human activity is so large that it was visible from data obtained from satellites.  And methane has a hundred-fold higher impact on global temperature than carbon dioxide does -- making this enterprise even more foolhardy. 

So the impact of what Crestwood is doing here goes far beyond the local damage that a catastrophic mishap would cause.  Simply put, the fossil fuels need to stay in the ground.

And it's not as if there aren't solutions, solutions that could be put in place now if there was the will and the farsightedness to do so.  Howarth writes:

We already have the ability to make the switch to electric vehicles, and electric heat pumps for heating and cooling.  Their efficiencies are far greater than gasoline and diesel driven vehicles, or furnaces and water heaters than run on natural gas or fuel oil.  This would result in a 30% reduction in total use of energy, just from this transformation.  And that electricity should come from renewable sources.  Crestwood is placing our lives and our homes at risk, and moving us closer to global ecological disaster, because of a determination to keep using an energy source that should have been phased out decades ago. 

Switching to energy primarily from wind and from solar has a lower cost today than using fossil fuels, if the health costs of fossil fuels are considered.  In NY, there are 4,000 deaths each year from air pollution caused by fossil fuels, at a cost of $33 billion per year.

Making entire state free of fossil fuels costs $570 Billion. The cost savings from reduced illness and death from fossil fuels over the next fifteen years is enough to pay for the entire cost of the transition to renewables.

The "natural gas is about jobs" argument is equally specious.  Crestwood's projection of the number of jobs created for locals is outweighed fivefold by the jobs available in renewable energy in our region.  Joe Sliker, president of Renovus Solar Energy, said:

The solar industry complements the existing, thriving, and growing winery and tourism industries.  Solar is cleaner, safer, and a more prosperous path forth for families and even for all of the Crestwood employees. 

So, I'm here today for all of the good men and women who risk their lives every single day for their jobs.  I'm here for the welders, the pipe fitters, the electricians, the truckers, and all of the hard working people who go to work every day to provide for their families.  I'm here for those people who lay their lives on the line every morning when they wake up, for those people whose hands bleed while they work, and for the families that love and worry about them. 

I'm here to offer them a choice.  I'm here to tell them that we don't have to support a dangerous facility and risk our lives and the lives of our loved ones in order to have good paying jobs. 

I'm here to offer all of those people a better job.  Today.  Right now.  Our Renovus HR manager is here with a stack of applications.  Come talk to us. 

Solar is rapidly expanding and Renovus is a thriving regional business. In contrast to the eight to ten permanent jobs promised by the gas storage facility, Renovus has added over 50 new permanent jobs just in the past year.

Add it all up.  Crestwood Midstream, and other companies like them, put the lives and livelihood of ordinary people at risk for one reason; to boost their profits and pay their stockholders.  The alternatives are real and affordable and viable.  What is being proposed amounts to reckless endangerment, yet our local and state governments refuse to step in and stop it.

So it was time for me to act.

I know that my arrest, by itself, will have little effect.  I'll appear at court, and likely face a fine, and that will be that.  But the symbolism of people who are willing to risk prosecution for a worthy cause has a far greater reach than that; it is the actions of individuals that make the difference.  And that means all of us who know enough to care about what is happening.  As the amazing Australian singer/songwriter Judy Small put it in her song about social activism, "One Voice in the Crowd," "In the end it's all the same; the buck stops where you are."  (Listen to the whole song at the link below.)

So it's not about the futility of a few people standing up to the actions of a huge corporation.  It's about doing the right thing, and as Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai put it, "Keeping our feeling of empowerment ahead of our feeling of despair."  It's about being willing to put yourself at risk, because the alternative is to accept blindly a far worse risk, one whose consequences may still be felt a thousand years from now.

We all need to act, and the time is now.

*****************

To support what is happening here, please "like" the We Are Seneca Lake Facebook page, write your congressperson and/or Governor Andrew Cuomo (here's his contact information), and share this post around.  This message needs to move, and quickly.

Quantum homeopathy

In response to my post a couple of days ago about the tendency of people to believe loony ideas if they're couched in ten-dollar vocabulary, a loyal reader of Skeptophillia sent me a link to a paper by one Lionel Milgrom, of Imperial College (London), that has turned this phenomenon into an art form.

The name of the paper?

"'Torque-Like' Action of Remedies and Diseases on the Vital Force and Their Consequences for Homeopathic Treatment."

ln it, we witness something pretty spectacular: an attempt to explain homeopathy based on quantum mechanics.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I'm not making this up, and it doesn't seem like a spoof; in fact, the paper appeared in the open-access Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.  Here's the opening paragraph:

Within the developing theoretical context of quantum macroentanglement, a mathematical model of the Vital Force (Vf) has recently been formulated.  It describes the Vf in terms of a hypothetical gyroscope with quantized angular momentum.  This enables the Vf's state of health to be represented in terms of a "wave function" derived solely from secondary symptom observables produced in response to disease or homeopathic remedies.  So far, this approach has illustrated the biphasal action of remedies, resonance phenomena arising out of homeopathic provings, and aspects of the therapeutic encounter.

So right out of the starting gate, he's talking about using quantum interactions of a force no one has ever detected to explain a treatment modality that has been repeatedly found to be completely worthless.  This by itself is pretty impressive, but it gets better as it goes along:

According to this model, symptom expression corresponds to precession of the Vf "gyroscope."  Conversely, complete removal of symptoms is equivalent to cessation of Vf "precession."  However, if overprescribed or given in unsuitable potency, the curative remedy (which may also be formulated as a wave function but this time derived solely from changes in Vf secondary symptom observables) may cause the Vf to express proving symptoms.  Thus, with only observation of symptoms and changes in them to indicate, indirectly, the state of a patient's Vf, the safest treatment strategy might be for the practitioner to proceed via gradual removal of the symptoms.

When I read the last line, I was lucky that I wasn't drinking anything, because it would have ended up splattered all over my computer.  Yes!  By all means, if a sick person comes in to visit a health professional, the health professional should proceed by removing the sick person's symptoms!

Because proceeding by making the symptoms worse is kind of counterproductive, you know?

His talk about "overprescription" made me chuckle, too.  Because if you'll recall, James Randi has demonstrated dozens of times that the result of consuming a whole bottle of a homeopathic remedy is... nothing.  On the other hand, since the homeopaths believe that the more dilute a substance is, the stronger it gets, maybe "overprescribing" means "prescribing less."

Which reminds me of the story about the guy who forgot to take his homeopathic remedy... and died of an overdose.

And if this isn't enough, Dr. Milgrom (yes, he has a Ph.D., astonishingly enough) has also published other papers, including "The Thermodynamics of Health, Healing, and Love" and "Toward a Topological Description of the Therapeutic Process."

What's next, "The Three-Body Problem: A Classical Mechanics Approach to Handling Love Affairs?"

I have to admit, though, that there's something almost charming about this guy's attempt to bring pseudoscience under the lens of physics.  His blathering on about imaginary "vital forces" and the precession of microscopic gyroscopes as a mechanism for disease is, if nothing else, creative.  While what he's claiming is complete bollocks, Dr. Milgrom's determination to keep soldiering on is kind of adorable.

The good news, of course, is that his papers are unlikely to convince anyone who isn't already convinced.  The only danger is the undeserved veneer of credibility that this sort of thing gives homeopathy in people whose minds aren't yet made up.  One can only hope that the thorough debunking of this fraudulent practice that has been done by actual scientific researchers will prove, in the end, to be more persuasive.

Science, heresy, and cherry pie

The battle over the LSEA just took another weird turn.

The LSEA is the Louisiana Science Education Act, a 2008 law that introduces "teach the controversy" and "academic freedom" provisions into state science education guidelines as a way of levering in creationism, intelligent design, climate change denialism, and other loony anti-scientific ideas that are currently in vogue with the powers that be.  Every year there's a push to have the law repealed, and every year it fails to achieve the requisite number of votes, despite the trenchant comment by science education activist Zach Kopplin, "We don't give teachers the academic freedom to teach that 1 + 1 = 3."

In 2013, the defense of the law reached a new height of bizarre desperation, with State Senator Elbert Guillory saying that the LSEA protected multicultural approaches by allowing science teachers to tell their classes about witch doctors.  (I swear I'm not making this up; the entire quote is in the link provided.)  And this year, Guillory made another baffling statement in defense of the LSEA, this time from the standpoint of historical precedent:

There was a time, sir, when scientists thought that the world was flat.  And if you get to the end of it, you’d fall off.  There was another time when scientists thought that the sun revolved around the world.  And they always thought to ensure that anyone who disagreed with their science was a heretic.  People were burned for not believing that the world was flat.  People were really badly treated.  My point, sir, is that not everyone knows everything.  And in a school, there should be an open exchange of ideas.  Knowledge only grows when people can talk about [sic], and have this intellectual back-and-forth, and discourse, with all ideas on the table.  To restrict ideas is against knowledge and against education.  

Okay, where do I start?

First, I think you're confusing "scientists" with "religious leaders."  There has never been a Scientific Inquisition, wherein anyone who disbelieves in the Law of Gravity is found guilty of heresy and burned at the stake.  You are free to disbelieve in science all you like, in fact; this doesn't make you a heretic, it makes you an idiot.

It was scientists who disproved the flat Earth and geocentric models, actually; Eratosthenes accomplished the first, all the way back in the third century B.C.E., and Nicolaus Copernicus the second with his De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium in 1543.  Any serious opposition to these ideas came from organized religion, which by and large taught that knowledge comes from the bible and from divine revelation, not from experimentation and logic.

Then there's Guillory's claim that we're somehow stifling knowledge by telling biology teachers that they can't teach their students creationism.  "An open exchange of ideas," Guillory says, is critical.  On the surface, he's right; we do need to be able to talk about all ideas, and that's how our knowledge grows, and wrong ideas are winnowed out.

It's that last piece that's missing from Guillory's statement, and therein lies the problem.  Because if creationism and climate change denialism are "put on the table" for honest discussion, it becomes abundantly clear that there's not a shred of evidence in favor of either one.  What Guillory seems to want is not that all ideas are considered, but that all ideas are accepted. 

So a geology teacher is supposed to "put on the table" the claim that the Earth's mantle isn't made of liquified rock, but of cherry pie filling?  And that the crust is actually made of graham crackers?

Just in the interest of "intellectual back-and-forth," you understand.

I'm sorry, Senator Guillory; the claims that the LSEA shoehorn into the state science curriculum are simply wrong.  The only reason that creationism is being pushed into biology classrooms is religion; the only reason climate change denialism is being pushed into earth science classrooms is political expediency.  Neither view has the least thing to do with science.

None of that apparently mattered, as the repeal-the-LSEA measure failed again, having been killed in committee on a 4-3 vote.  The reality-denying CherryPieologists won the day.

I live in hope, however, that the tide is turning, however slowly, and that eventually we'll have educational oversight by people who trust scientific research over the philosophical meanderings of a bunch of Bronze-Age sheepherders.

But as Aragorn said, "That day is not today."

Toxic waste

If there's one word related to health issues that makes me cringe, it's the word "toxin."

This term gets thrown around all the time.  I was given a gift card for a massage for my last birthday (which was wonderful, by the way), and afterwards, the masseuse told me that I needed to drink lots of water that day because the massage had "loosened up toxins" and I needed to drink a lot to "flush them from my system."  Just a couple of weeks ago, I was buying some fresh turmeric root at a local organic grocery, and a lady smiled at me in a friendly sort of way, and said, "Oooh, turmeric!  It's wonderful at detoxifying the body!"

What gets me about the use of "toxin" and "detoxify" is that the people who use those terms so seldom have any idea about what particular toxins they're talking about.  If I was just a wee bit more obnoxious than I am -- an eventuality no one should wish for -- I would have said to the masseuse and the lady in the grocery, "Can you name one specific chemical that massage and/or turmeric releases in my body that I need to be concerned about?"

Chances are, of course, they would not have been able to; even in supposedly informative articles in health magazines, they're just lumped together as "toxins."  The word has become a stand-in for unspecified "really bad stuff" that we need to fret about even though no one seems all that sure what it is.

And then buy whatever silly detox remedy the writer of the article suggests.

This all comes up because of an article I read in Science-Based Medicine called "Activated Charcoal: The Latest Detox Fad in an Obsessive Food Culture," by Scott Gavura.  In it, we hear about people dosing themselves with activated charcoal as a "detox" or "cleanse," because evidently our liver and kidneys -- evolved over millions of years to deal with all sorts of unpleasant metabolic wastes -- are insufficient to protect us.

No, you need "activated charcoal lemonade."

I wish I was making this up, but no.  People actually are adding gritty, pitch-black charcoal to their lemonade, in order to make it "soak up toxins."

The problem here, as Gavura points out, is that activated charcoal is used in detoxification, so there's that kernel of truth in all of the nonsense.  Actual detoxification, I mean, not this pseudoscientific fad-medicine horseshit; detoxification of the sort done in cases of poisoning.  I know this first hand, because of an incident involving a border collie named Doolin that we once had.  My wife and I had visited northern California, and dropped by the wonderful Mendocino Chocolate Company, makers of what are clearly the best chocolate truffles in the entire world.  We bought a dozen truffles of various sorts and brought them home with us, babying them through our travels during high summer.  We got them home successfully, and on the first day back...

... Doolin pulled the box off the counter and ate all twelve chocolate truffles.

As you undoubtedly know, chocolate is highly poisonous to dogs, so off Doolin went to the vet to get a (real) detoxification.  One of the things they did was feed her activated charcoal.  We found this out because on the way back home from the vet, Doolin puked up charcoal all over the back seat of my wife's brand-new Mini Cooper.

Doolin survived the chocolate incident, although she almost didn't survive our reaction to (1) the thousand-dollar vet bill, (2) black doggie puke all over the new car upholstery, and worst of all, (3) not getting our chocolates.  But she went on to live another six healthy years, thanks to modern veterinary science.

But I digress.

So charcoal does have its uses.  But you're not accomplishing anything by adding it to lemonade, except perhaps (as Gavura writes) having the charcoal absorb nutrients from your digestive tract, making whatever food you're eating less nutritious.  Because charcoal, of course, isn't selective about what it absorbs -- it'll absorb damn near anything, including vitamins and other essential nutrients.

Facts don't seem to matter much to the alt-med crowd, however, and now there's charcoal everywhere.  Over at the webzine Into the Gloss, writer Victoria Lewis tells us about taste-testing a bunch of different charcoal drinks, and her analysis includes the following insightful paragraph about "Juice Generation Activated Greens":

I decided to drink this ultra-vegetable-filled (kale, spinach, celery, parsley, romaine, and cucumber) juice for breakfast. It tasted exactly like a super green juice—a little salty but otherwise, totally normal. I did end up eating some granola afterwards (juice diets have never been for me), but this one felt good and extremely healthy.

Which, right there, sums up the whole approach.  Screw medical research; if consuming some weird new supplement "feels good and extremely healthy," then it must be getting rid of all those bad old toxins, or something, even if it tastes like vaguely lemon-flavored fireplace scrapings.  It's all about the buzzwords, the hype, and the feelings -- not about anything remotely related to hard evidence.

But of course, since now we have renowned nutritionalists like Gwyneth Paltrow getting on board, the whole "charcoal juice cleanse" thing is going to take off amongst people with more money than sense.

Makes me feel like I need to go eat some bacon and eggs, just to restore order to the universe.