Color me blue

There's been a recent surge in popularity of questionnaire-based tests that supposedly tell you which of four "personality colors" you belong to.  (Here's a typical example.)  You're given questions like:

When facing a big project, you are...

• deadline-driven

• worrying

• researching

• making it a group effort

And after twenty or so questions of this sort, you're sorted into one of four "color groups," a little like what the Sorting Hat does at Hogwarts, only less reliable.

I throw in the "less reliable" part not only because we are being given a schema that puts every human on the Earth into one of four categories (hell, even the astrologers admit there are twelve), but because the whole thing relies on self-assessment.  When you take these tests, you're not finding out what you're really like, you're finding out what you think you're like.

Which is clearly not the same thing.  We're notoriously bad judges of our own personalities.  In their 2008 paper "Faulty Self-Assessment: Why Evaluating One’s Own Competence Is an Intrinsically Difficult Task," Cornell University psychologists Travis J. Carter and David Dunning had the following to say:

(A)lthough the exhortation to ‘know oneself’ has a long and venerable history, recent investigations in behavioral science paint a vexing and troubling portrait about people’s success at self-insight. Such research increasingly shows that people are not very good at assessing their competence and character accurately.  They often hold self-perceptions that wander a good deal away from the reality of themselves...  (T)he extant psychological literature suggests that people have some, albeit only a meager, amount of self-insight.

And they quote Ann Landers's trenchant quip, "Know yourself.  Don’t accept your dog’s admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful."

So trying to reach self-discovery from a series of restricted-choice questions you answer about yourself has about as much likelihood of revealing some hitherto unguessed truth as those Facebook quizzes that claim to tell you what character from Game of Thrones you are.

What is more vexing is that despite the fact that these tests are only telling you what you think about yourself, the whole "color group" thing is gaining a lot of ground in the business world as a way of improving relational dynamics in the workplace.  Don't believe me?  Check out this article over at Knoji by M. J. Grueso, who tells us the following:

Most companies use a color personality test in order to better understand these personality differences and how to make it work for everyone.  Understanding the different personalities is important not just for big companies but for us as individuals as this will make it easier for us to learn how to better deal with colleagues and clients...  Experts have determined that there are four basic personality types. Yellow, Red, Blue and Green.  And it doesn't have anything to do with a person's favorite color.  As an individual, learning our color personality is also important.  First, because it helps us to better understand ourselves and why we react to certain situations a certain way.  Second, when we understand who we are, it allows us to open ourselves to at least try to understand others as well.

Which all sounds pretty nifty.  But then I started wondering, "Who are these experts?"  And I found out that the whole color-personality thing was the brainchild of one Carol Ritberger, who is the "renowned psychologist" mentioned in the link in the first paragraph of this post...

... but who actually isn't a psychologist at all.  She describes herself as an "innovative leader in the fields of personality behavioral psychology and behavioral medicine," but later goes on to say that her credentials are "a doctorate in Theology and a doctorate in Esoteric Philosophy and Hermetic Science."

Which are about as related to the science of behavioral psychology as alchemy is to chemistry.

But despite having no apparent training in medical science, she claims to have the ability to do what she calls "intuitive healing:"

Our mission is to provide programs that train participants in the science and art of intuitive diagnostics, qualified to work in concert with medical practitioners in the process of healing. 

We stand at the threshold of a time of compelling change-a positive major shift is taking place, and that shift is having a dramatic impact on our lives.  We are compelled to talk about it and to seek to understand it.  It is awakening a new energy force within each of us that is causing dynamic change to occur within the physical body and the human energy system.  We are changing to forms of light that are not as we have previously known them, and are becoming more vibrant, more radiant, and more empowered.  This new energy force is changing our way of thinking and is illuminating a whole new dimension of our persona.  It is creating the need for intense self-exploration and we are being nudged, pushed, and driven to learn more about who we really are.  It is fueling the desire to better understand ourselves-its energy is assisting us in seeking to get in touch with our very souls.  We are being guided to look beyond the obvious and that which our five senses understand.  This new energy force is sensitizing us to the need to develop our thinking while our mental processing remains the same, and the way we perceive our lives is going through a radical change.  Consciousness, as we have known it, is expanding... 

Medical intuition is both an art and a science.  It is a learnable diagnostic skill that provides insight into how the body, mind, and spirit connection interrelates with one's health and well being.

I don't know about you, but if I've got some sort of medical condition, psychological or otherwise, I'd prefer to be treated by an individual with the proper training and credentials, rather than by someone who diagnoses me through "intuition" and babbles about undefined "energy forces" that are "changing our physical bodies" and "expanding our consciousness."

So the whole what-color-are-you thing (1) doesn't tell you anything you didn't already believe, (2) is only as accurate as your own ability to self-assess, and (3) was developed by someone whose grasp of science sounds tenuous at best.

Be that as it may, you'll probably want to know that I'm a "Blue."  "Blues" are tightly-wound, orderly people with good attention to detail, but who tend to be fretful, quiet, pessimistic, and sensitive to criticism. We need to be "more open about our feelings" and "more willing to try new things."

All of which would be immediately apparent to anyone who's known me more than five minutes.  So as a step toward Socrates's ideal of "Know thyself," it doesn't really get me very far, not that I expected it to.

May Texas be safe from tigers

Well, this is it, folks.  Jade Helm 15, the two-month United States Army training exercise in Texas and New Mexico, has begun.  The guillotining of innocent civilians should begin presently.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

At least, that's apparently what a significant percentage of Texans believe.  There are numerous conspiracy theories regarding what appears to be a completely legitimate military operation, under the supervision of senior officers who assure us that every effort will be made to prevent the exercise from interfering with the lives of ordinary citizens, to the point that an article about the various angles on the conspiracy appeared in Army Times online magazine.  The author, Kyle Jahner, outlines them thusly:

1. FEMA-sponsored dome-shaped hurricane shelters are actually being used to imprison non-sheeple who "foment insurrection," i.e., object to Jade Helm and the declaration of martial law that is soon to follow.
2. The dead bodies of said insurrectionists are going to be carried to their final resting place in BlueBell Ice Cream trucks.
3. The command centers for planned takeover of Texas are some abandoned Walmart buildings that were observed to have razor wire on their roofs.  (Walmart spokespeople have said that the razor wire was to prevent break-ins.  Ha.  They would say that.)
4. The whole martial-law thing was motivated by NASA's discovery that there's going to be a major asteroid strike in September of this year, which will result not only in a great big smoking crater, but in the southern United States turning into something that resembles Mad Max: Fury Road, only better armed.  And we can't have that.
5. The Russians are secretly funding the secessionist movement in Texas, because they'd like to see America crumble.  So the people who are against Jade Helm are actually fighting against the evil Rooskies, or something.  (Yes, I know that makes no sense whatsoever.  Don't yell at me.  I'm not the one who believes this.)
6. Ultimately, the whole thing will lead to Barack Obama coming out with the fact that he has never intended to step down in 2016, and his crowning as Exalted Emperor Barack I.

Far be it from Texans to take any of that lying down.  So it will probably surprise no one that a group in Texas has formed a "Counter Jade Helm" citizen surveillance group, intended to keep an eye on things and report back when decapitations start occurring in Walmarts and the headless bodies are carted away in ice cream trucks.

The whole thing is being run by a guy named Pete Lanteri, a dubiously-sane former Marine who claims he founded Counter Jade Helm in order to keep an eye on things and make sure that there was someone watching what the government was up to, but whose recent behavior makes him sound like a dangerous lunatic.  When Lanteri got trolled on Facebook -- because that never happens, right? -- he responded both on Facebook and Twitter with a string of invective that certainly doesn't help his case any.  He began by closing the Counter Jade Helm Facebook page to the public with the following friendly message:

Since the huge media attention Counter Jade Helm is receiving, the fb page is being attacked by libs, conspiracy nuts, and the other 90% of useless fucking Americans.  To fix this I am creating individual state group pages closed to the public.

When a supporter responded, "They are causeing [sic] such a division in this GREAT NATION a second REVOLUTION IS NEEDED VERY BADLY," Lanteri said that basically, he couldn't agree more.  "I can't wait to kill thousands of these fucks, man!!!" he wrote.

In other bons mots from Lanteri, we have:

Here's hoping we're in a shooting war to save this country by next Fourth of July!!!!  Semper Fi Patriots!!!! 

People you should all be making lists of commies/marxists/islamists in your neighborhoods.  All the teachers, school board members, politicians etc. who are anti US Constitution need to be identified and addresses known so when it comes time to round them up we know exactly where to start looking.  They will be arrested and tried for treason!!!! 

Why can't Geraldo Rivera, aka twatwaffle, be in a church when it gets shot up? 

More dead equals more dead dems.

About African Americans in general, he had the following to say:  "War on White People continues!!!!  [Blacks are] a Failed Race."  He even attacked Pope Francis, regarding his stance that weapons manufacturers were complicit in the escalating worldwide death rate from guns, saying, "Fuck this asshole!!!  EVERY ASPECT OF AMERICA NEEDS A FUCKING PURGE!!!!"

[N.B.:  I may have miscounted the number of exclamation points, but otherwise, these quotes are as written.  And yes, apparently he does think that Pope Francis lives in the United States.]

So here we have a man who is apparently in favor of murdering members of a political party that makes up about half of American citizens, who is apparently a vicious racist, who wants anyone who disagrees with him tried for treason, and who is hoping for a violent revolution, leading a group that is monitoring heavily-armed military men engaged in a Special Ops training exercise.

Nope, I see nothing whatsoever that could go wrong with that.

So we've got to make it till the end of August without an incident, which I hope fervently will be the case.  But you know what's craziest about all of this?  If what military leaders are saying is true -- that Jade Helm really is just a training exercise -- and nothing untoward happens, all it's going to do is reinforce Lanteri's conviction that it was their vigilance that prevented the Evil Convoy of BlueBell Ice Cream Trucks from doing their dirty work.  Because you can't win with these people, you know?  No matter what happens, they never shift their ground.

Just yesterday, in fact, I saw a post on Facebook about how during Obama's presidency, the number of gun sales has increased.  The comment was something like, "Ha!  Obummer's efforts to repeal the Second Amendment and pass laws to take away everyone's guns sure have been successful!"

Or maybe, you moron, he never intended to repeal the Second Amendment in the first place.  But of course, I'd never expect you to admit that.

It's like the old story about the guy who would show up at his friend's house for a visit, but before entering the house would fold his hands in a prayerful attitude, close his eyes, and say, "May this house be safe from tigers."  This went on for some time, and finally the friend had had enough.

"Come on," he said.  "Tigers?  This is Ohio, for pete's sake.  There's probably not a tiger within a thousand miles of here!"

And the guy gave him a contented smile and said, "It works well, doesn't it?"

Networked minds

I'm all for scientific advances, but sometimes I read things that are just plain scary.

This week's installment of "You Do See How Badly This Could Go Wrong, Don't You?" comes to us courtesy of a team led by Miguel Nicolelis, a neuroscience researcher at Duke University.  Rahwan, Nicolelis, and their team have achieved something pretty spectacular -- they have hooked together the brains of four rats via a computer interface, and demonstrated that the conjoined brains could learn (quickly) how to team up and work collaboratively.

In other words, the four minds were pooling resources and working as a unit.

They did the same thing with two monkeys, linking them via a computer interface hooked to a robotic arm.  The trick was, one monkey could only move the arm vertically, and the other only horizontally, so they had to learn to work together to accomplish a task and get a reward.

"They synchronise their brains and they achieve the task by creating a superbrain – a structure that is the combination of three brains," Nicolelis said.  "We send a message to the brains, the brains incorporate that message, and we can retrieve the message later."

Nicolelis calls this linked group of brains a "brainet."

Other scientists were quick to point out that what Nicolelis and his group had accomplished was similar to parallel processing by computer systems.  "In order to synchronise, the brains are responding to each other," said Iyad Rahwan, computer scientist at the Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi.  "So you end up with an input, some kind of computation, and an output – what a computer does."

Andrea Stocco, researcher in the Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, was impressed by what Nicolelis and his team had done.  "This is incredible," Stocco said.  "We are sampling different neurons from different animals and putting them together to create a super organism....  Once brains are connected, applications become just a matter of what different animals can do.  We can expect a great deal more from human minds connected in this way...  Sometimes it’s really hard to collaborate if you are a mathematician and you’re thinking about very complex and abstract objects.  If you could collaboratively solve common problems [using a brainet], it would be a way to leverage the skills of different individuals for a common goal."

Which all sounds great, until you start considering the possible ways this could go wrong.  Maybe I'm a pessimist, but my first thought wasn't about transmitting my abstruse mathematical arguments to another person -- it was about loss of privacy, and (worse) the potential for one person to control another.  If it becomes possible to link two human minds together, what's to stop one of them from manipulating the other, unwittingly or deliberately?

My feeling is that once that link is established, the two minds thus conjoined would never be the same again -- even after the link was severed.

It's why I've always thought that of all the alleged psychic phenomena out there, telepathy has to be the scariest.  Think about it: would you really want someone to have access to your thoughts?  I'm pretty sure that the chaotic, bizarre, and sometimes not very nice thoughts that come to my mind aren't that far out of the norm, but I still would prefer to keep them to myself, thank you very much.

But what about the potential for speeding up information transfer?  I still remember when I saw the movie The Matrix the first time, how much I wanted one of those portals in the back of my skull.  You know, just stick a USB cable up there, and click "Download Japanese," and voilà, I'm fluent.  It'd sure be nice to gain knowledge that way, rather than by the hard work of memorization, study, and figuring things out, however it would put us teachers out of a job.

But once you become able to put stuff into brains -- whether downloaded from a computer, or accessed from another person's mind -- there arises the trenchant question of who gets to decide what information goes where.  How do you assure that what is being passed to you is true?  When we learn, the slow, painstaking way, each of our brains not only acts as a sponge, it acts as a filter.  We consider what we're learning, ask questions, make judgments.  If we're being fed information through a computer interface, at what point in the transfer process do we get to ask, "Does this make sense?"

Don't get me wrong.  I don't think these ethical questions should halt the research Nicolelis and his group are doing, and I don't mean to denigrate his accomplishment.  But as tempting as it is to rush headlong into linking up human minds into a "superorganism" or "brainet," I'm certainly not going to be the first one to volunteer.

Call me suspicious, but the only one I want in control of what I'm thinking is myself.

Shenanigans in space

Well, you knew it was gonna happen.  I mean, I didn't think it'd be this fast, but I figured it was gonna happen sooner or later.

People are already saying that NASA is faking the images from Pluto.

Yes, I know.  The question of "Why would they do that?" appears to be unanswerable.  But as we've seen before, there is nothing that is so completely idiotic that there won't be conspiracy theorists who think it's true.

First we've got YouTuber Crow777, who has put together a video calling NASA out on their shenanigans.  As proof, he shows a photograph of Jupiter he took from right here on Earth with his own telescope, and then a fuzzy photograph of Pluto from the New Horizons probe.  "If this is all real," he says, "why can I get a clearer image of Jupiter in my backyard at four hundred million miles than NASA can get of Pluto at nine million miles?... Now this is just an insult to your intelligence."

Let's start with the fact that (1) Jupiter is bigger, (2) Pluto is much further from the Sun and therefore reflects less light to a camera regardless where you are taking the picture from, and (3) they did get much clearer pictures than the one that Crow777 used for his comparison.  But those were all faked, too, apparently.  How do you know that?  Because they are.  Stop asking questions.

[image courtesy of NASA]

And Crow777 is not just a lone wacko.  Well, maybe that's not true; he's a lone wacko, but there are many like-minded lone wackos out there.  Twitter erupted with tweets under the hashtag #NASAHoax like the following:

Pluto? You all having fun with this fake cgi pic !!! #NASA #NASAHoax biggest lie in history!!!!! #WakeUpAmerica they lied about that to 

Lmao so their other fake as hell satellite is able to take a photo of the #pluto inbound satellite. #gullible much? #NASAHoax 

TOO BAD ALL #NASA MISSIONS ARE FAKE HOAX.............. #PLUTO DON'T BELIEVE THE HOLOGRAMS , AT LEAST STAY CONSISTENT WITH THE IMAGES SMH #NASAHoax

Then we have a whole different sort of crazy over at Scam.com, courtesy of a poster going by the handle TruthIsNeverTooHorrible.  And Mr. Horrible has the following to say:

To get this mockery of the "space travel" simulated reality to terminate the show:
Pluto was the first celestial body created by the illuminati, decades before the creation of the space travel hoax, as exposed first by Last Prophet... 

Any celestial body that can not be observed with a telescope located ON Earth, is fake.  This one basic fact implies that for instance Pluto (the first example among millions) is an invention created by the illuminati.

And in the "Insanity Creates Odd Bedfellows" department, the Pluto Truthers here in the United States got some unexpected support... from hardline Muslims in Malaysia.  Apparently the consensus over there amongst the extremely devout is that the NASA photographs are "poyo" -- the Malay word for "stupid."  The images of Pluto, they said, were created using a green screen.  (Because green screening an image, and then replacing the green with black, makes ever so much sense.)  One poster on the Malay Daily Facebook page went on a lengthy tirade about how the Quran explains everything you need to know about space, including the fact that the sky has seven layers "guarded by angels who do not eat or sleep," thus making space travel impossible.

And also proving that it's not just here in the United States that we have people who would like to see ignorant superstition based on a holy book controlling science education.

Other pious Malaysians stated that it's impossible that the United States achieved this given that Russia and China are so much further ahead of us technologically and they haven't gone to Pluto, and that travel to Pluto is impossible anyhow because it's ten thousand light years away.

The news from Southeast Asia isn't all dismal, however.  The scientifically-minded countered with arguments demonstrating that the aforementioned loons are wrong.  Not that they'll do much good, given our track record for success in arguing with creationists over here in the States.  "This is why we can't be a developed country," lamented one Malaysian, while another put it more succinctly:  "RIP, brain."

But maybe NASA didn't invent the images of Pluto.  Maybe they're real... and they're still covering stuff up.  Like alien bases and buildings and stuff.  "We have discovered something shocking on the heart-shaped ice cap on the north of Pluto," says YouTuber UFOUnionTV.  "It looks very much like an alien base...  There is a perfectly-shaped building, and a road leading to this base...  The shadows have edges, they aren't round...  This is completely explained by this structure being artificial."

As further proof, let's go to the scientific texts written by H. P. Lovecraft about the planet Yuggoth, which supposedly orbited the Sun beyond the orbit of Neptune:

Yuggoth... is a strange dark orb at the very rim of our solar system...  There are mighty cities on Yuggoth—great tiers of terraced towers built of black stone...  The sun shines there no brighter than a star, but the beings need no light.  They have other subtler senses, and put no windows in their great houses and temples...  The black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious cyclopean bridges—things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the beings came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids—ought to be enough to make any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell what he has seen...

So there you are, then.

You know, I wonder if back in the day there were people who thought like this.  When the first photographs of Jupiter and Saturn and so on were taken in the late 19th century, did people say, "No, those are faked!"  I mean, you can see Jupiter and Saturn with the naked eye, and see some details even with a good set of binoculars... but remember that there are people who think that the Moon is a hologram.

There probably were, but my guess is that they were laughed into oblivion.  One of the downsides of the internet is that anyone who has a computer can launch a website or a YouTube channel, and it puts everyone on an equal footing, access-wise (although hardly credibility-wise).  And given that there are folks out there for whom "I saw it on the internet" constitutes proof, it's not to be wondered at that the crazy stuff spreads a lot faster today than it did a hundred years ago.

But I live in hope that the same forces that spread bullshit like wildfire are also giving people better access to science than they've ever had before.  The availability of knowledge, free (or nearly so), to everyone -- this is also a new thing.  All we need to assure is that people have the critical thinking skills to sift the wheat from the chaff, the science from the nonsense, the Pluto from the...

... Yuggoth.

Smoke screen

When evaluating a claim, it's often as important to recognize which questions to ask as it is to understand the science behind the claim itself.  What information did the author leave out -- intentionally or unintentionally?

The reason this comes up is an online article sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia entitled, "Studies Reveal 'Smudging' Eliminates Dangerous Bacteria in the Air."  The article describes the practice of "smudging," the burning of sweet-scented dried plants, and claims that the smoke is beneficial because it kills bacteria.  (S)he cites an earlier study, published in 2007 in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, which has the following passage:

We have observed that 1 hour treatment of medicinal smoke emanated by burning wood and a mixture of odoriferous and medicinal herbs (havan sámagri=material used in oblation to fire all over India), on aerial bacterial population caused over 94% reduction of bacterial counts by 60 min and the ability of the smoke to purify or disinfect the air and to make the environment cleaner was maintained up to 24 hour in the closed room.  Absence of pathogenic bacteria Corynebacterium urealyticum, Curtobacterium flaccumfaciens, Enterobacter aerogenes (Klebsiella mobilis), Kocuria rosea, Pseudomonas syringae pv. persicae, Staphylococcus lentus, and Xanthomonas campestris pv. tardicrescens in the open room even after 30 days is indicative of the bactericidal potential of the medicinal smoke treatment.  We have demonstrated that using medicinal smoke it is possible to completely eliminate diverse plant and human pathogenic bacteria of the air within confined space.

So far, so good.  Assuming that the experiment was well-controlled and that there were no obvious design flaws invalidating the results, getting rid of pathogenic bacteria is certainly a good thing.  The author of the first article sums up thusly:

The basic concept is that by burning particular plants parts and resins, the energetic blueprint or spirit/intelligence of that plant is released, producing a medicinal smoke.  The smoke is then utilized to cleanse the energy of individuals, groups, spaces or object.  Herbs like Sage, Palo Santo, Copal, and Sweet-grass are common smudging herbs that are widely used for healing and to remove unwanted energetic and spiritual buildup and also to instill blessings...  Thanks to this amazing study we now know that smudging with sacred herbs is not only soothing to the mind and spirit, it is affecting the health and even safety of the actual environment in which it is done.

Setting aside the whole "energetic blueprint" and plant intelligence nonsense, there are a few questions that come to my mind that neither the author of the original study, nor the author of the post lauding its results, thinks to ask:

1. How many pathogenic bacteria were in the room to start with?  All we're given is the percent reduction (94%), which sounds like a lot -- but 94% of a tiny amount is an even tinier amount, and neither is significant.
2. If there are chemicals in smudging smoke that kill bacteria, could those chemicals be toxic to humans as well?  I'm reminded of all the articles that get passed around saying, "Substance X (usually some naturally-occurring compound) found to kill cancer cells!" -- and it turns out that yes, the substance kills cancer cells, but in vitro.  Whether it kills cancer cells in a human body, and does so without killing the human, remains to be seen.  After all, consider the fact that pissing in the petri dish will probably also kill cancer cells in vitro.
3. Are there other chemicals in the smoke besides the bacteria-killing ones that might be harmful?  In general, it seems like inhaling smoke of any kind is a bad idea.

So let's look at these questions one at a time.

For the first question, there were a lot of hyped-up articles like "There's a Time Bomb Ticking in your Household Dust" that presented a lot of scary stuff (like electron micrographs of dust mites, which look like a cross between a crab and that thing that burst out of the dude's chest in Alien) but little in the way of verifiable detail.  I did find an interesting article by Dr. Harriet Burge, director of aerobiology for EMLab P&K, a New Jersey-based indoor air quality assessment lab, and she had the following to say:

I generally do not recommend bacterial analysis of house dust except in a few unusual situations.  This is because we don't know how to interpret the results.  However, we do receive occasional requests for cultural bacterial analysis of house dust.  These analyses are done by dilution culture and data can be presented as total bacteria, general groupings of bacteria (i.e., Gram negative, Gram positive, Bacillus), sewage screens (total coliforms, Enterococcus, etc.) or species identification for the most abundant colonies.  Sewage screens usually involve presence or absence in house dust.  Otherwise, interpretation is based on the number of colonies present per gram of dust, and/or the relative composition of specific bacterial groups or specific organisms in the dust. 

Given that these requests are not rare, it seems appropriate to develop some interpretation guidelines, at least with respect to average or "usual" populations in house dust.  Unfortunately, few studies have been done documenting concentrations of total culturable bacteria or of any specific organism or group of organisms.  In my experience, these studies are rarely done because the dynamics of exposure to house dust are not clear, and because dust is not considered to contain human pathogens (or at least dust is not considered the primary source for human pathogenic bacteria).

So given that household dust isn't the most common source of transmission for human pathogens, it's unclear whether sterilizing the room would, under most conditions (i.e. we're not talking about an operating room here), lower the incidence of disease.

[image courtesy of photographer Christopher P. Michel and the Wikimedia Commons]

On to the second and third questions, which are related.  On a quick search, the first thing I turned up was a paper from Clinical and Molecular Allergy by Ta-Chang Lin, Guha Krishnaswami, and David S. Chi entitled, "Incense Smoke: Clinical, Structural, and Molecular Effects on Airway Disease" which had the following to say:

Incense smoke (fumes) contains particulate matter (PM), gas products and many organic compounds.  On average, incense burning produces particulates greater than 45 mg/g burned as compared to 10 mg/g burned for cigarettes.  The gas products from burning incense include CO, CO2, NO2, SO2, and others.  Incense burning also produces volatile organic compounds, such as benzene, toluene, and xylenes, as well as aldehydes and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).  The air pollution in and around various temples has been documented to have harmful effects on health.  When incense smoke pollutants are inhaled, they cause respiratory system dysfunction.  Incense smoke is a risk factor for elevated cord blood IgE levels and has been indicated to cause allergic contact dermatitis.  Incense smoke also has been associated with neoplasm and extracts of particulate matter from incense smoke are found to be mutagenic in the Ames Salmonella test with TA98 and activation.

So there's that.  I tried to find any studies of white sage (Salvia apiana) and sweetgrass (Hierochloe odorata) -- two of the most common plants in smudge sticks -- to see if either had been studied for toxic effects.  Nothing turned up.  There was lots of stuff about expelling negative vibrations, however.  So this one falls into the "we don't know" category.

On the other hand, it's pretty clear that smoke in general -- even wood smoke -- shouldn't be inhaled.  Incompletely-burned plant material contains polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, organic compounds that have been identified as not only carcinogenic and mutagenic, but also directly toxic.

So in the end, we're left with more questions.  On the one hand, incense and smudging smoke smells good and seems to kill nasty bacteria, which is good.  On the other, the bacteria that it kills almost certainly would never have made you sick in the first place, and the smoke is also potentially dangerous for you to inhale, which is bad.  In the final assessment, smudging your house if you have adequate ventilation is probably not going to hurt you, but isn't really going to do much to help you, either, unless you believe in "negative vibrations."

And in the even-more-final assessment, what we really should be doing, even more than burning dead plants in our houses, is asking questions.  Not simply buying whatever you read at face value -- in other words, recognizing that there are questions to be asked -- is the first step.

Mass eviction notice

Buoyed by the success last month of Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, Archbishop Emeritus of Guadalajara, who conducted an exorcism of the entire country of Mexico, a Catholic priest in Scranton, Pennsylvania is now suggesting that we do the same thing for the United States.

Monsignor John Esseff, who has been a priest for 62 years and an exorcist for 35, says that "Such exorcisms … have helped bring awareness that there is such a thing as sin influenced by Satan...  The devil has much to do with [influencing people in] breaking the law of God."

William Blake, Satan Smiting Job (1826) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Right.  Because things in Mexico are ever so much better since Íñiguez and his intrepid team of Satan-fighters expelled all the demons from the country.  Notorious drug cartel leader Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera escaped from jail last week, almost certainly with help, and is now in hiding.  A "killing surge" in the city of Monterrey three weeks ago left 25 people dead. Ruben "El Menchito" Oseguera Gonzalez, son of the Jalisco Cartel's leader, was arrested for the third time last week after already being arrested and released twice for complicity in "two cases of forced disappearance."  Officials have said, basically, that everyone knows he's guilty, but he almost certainly won't be tried and found guilty because of the culture of corruption, coercion, and fear that exists in the Mexican judicial system.  A study just found that Mexico has a gun-seizure rate twice that of Iraq -- and yet the violent crime is on the increase, with 2015 looking to set a record, just as 2014 did.

So the exorcism really worked well.  It's no wonder that Monsignor Esseff wants the United States to follow suit.

And if we can't get our act together to have a country-wide expulsion of demons, local bishops could still do a piece-by-piece exorcism.  "Every bishop is the chief exorcist of his own diocese," Esseff said.  "Any time anyone with the authority uses his power against Satan, that is powerful.  Every priest and bishop has that power...  During the exorcism of a diocese, the bishop calls on the power of Jesus over every court, every single institution, every individual and every family.  The whole country would have such power if bishops would exorcise their dioceses."

What strikes me as most bizarre about all of this is the seemingly complete lack of awareness by people like Esseff and Íñiguez that their Get Thee Behind Me Satan routine has no effect whatsoever. I mean, this is a lack of connection to reality on a truly colossal scale.  You'd think that the first time you had a flat tire, and you prayed to god to expel the demons from your steel-belted radials, and nothing happened, you'd go, "Huh.  What a goober I am.  I guess this doesn't work."

But no.  They keep doing their rituals and prayers and so forth, and nothing continues to happen, and they are for some reason completely undaunted by this.

When it comes to true disconnect with reality, though, they've got a good precedent in the bible itself.  "Truly I tell you," Jesus says in Matthew 17:20, "if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you."

Either that's simply not true, or else mustard seeds are setting the bar for faith higher than they appear to be.  Because the faithful pray for stuff all the time -- ordinary stuff, not mountains moving around -- and a great deal of it doesn't happen.

But "god works in mysterious ways."  Which, I suppose, covers damn near every failure I can think of.

So we'll see, over the next few weeks, if American bishops take Monsignor Esseff's advice and exorcise the United States.  I suppose the whole thing falls into the "No Harm If It Amuses You" department.  Myself, I'm not expecting anything to change much.  Life will go on, crimes will still happen, Donald Trump will still be running for president.  Just showing that some demonic entities are harder to get rid of than others.

Postcards from Pluto

I spend a lot of time, here at Skeptophilia, railing at unscientific, irrational views of the world.  Today, I'd like to celebrate a major accomplishment of humanity: this morning, virtually as I'm writing this, the NASA spacecraft New Horizons is making the closest-ever pass of a spacecraft to Pluto.

The magnitude of this feat isn't obvious at first.  Pluto is a small target -- its radius is estimated at about 1,180 kilometers -- and it's so far away that it's hard to picture.  Pluto's average distance from the sun is about 6,000,000,000 kilometers, although its orbit is so eccentric that it varies from a perihelion of 4.4 billion to an aphelion of 7.3 billion kilometers.  So how amazing a feat is this?

Let me give you an analogy.  This is like hitting an object the size of a tennis ball with an object the size of a speck of dust -- from 175 kilometers away.

Thus far, the information that has been coming back has been breathtaking.  Already we have seen that the surface of the planet is rusty-red in color and has a pattern on its surface shaped like a heart; that it seems to have ice caps of some sort; and that on its surface is a mysterious dark formation that's been nicknamed "The Whale," whose structure is as yet undetermined  We stand to learn more about Pluto's composition and history, and the characteristics of its moon Charon -- which, at a radius of about 630 km, is over half as big as the planet itself.  (In fact, astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted this weekend, "Pluto’s primary moon Charon is so large that their mutual center-of-mass lies not within Pluto but in empty space.")

Pluto, as seen from New Horizons on July 11, 2015 [image courtesy of NASA]

But even tiny Pluto -- one-sixth the mass of the Earth's Moon, and one-third its volume -- has four other moons.  They've been named Styx, Nix, Kerberos, Hydra, after other denizens of the Greek underworld (Charon, you'll remember, is the ferryman who brings dead souls across the River Styx).  Its surface seems to be made predominantly of various kinds of ice, including frozen nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide.  It's lightweight for its size -- its density is only about 2 grams per cubic centimeter, only twice the density of liquid water -- leading astronomers to conjecture that it has a rocky core, and a mantle composed primarily of liquid water and water ice.  If this is correct, Pluto may have the highest percentage composition of water of any object in the Solar System.

Pluto and Charon -- July 11, 2015 [image courtesy of NASA]

And the fun won't end with its closest pass this morning.  The probe is designed to keep sending back data for another sixteen months.  After that, it will continue sailing out of the Solar System, following Voyager 1, which was launched in 1977, and now zooming out into interstellar space, some 12 billion kilometers away.

Some naysayers -- and there are more than you'd think -- have asked why we put time, effort, and (lots of) money into such endeavors.  So we find out the composition of a celestial body five-some-odd billion kilometers away from us.  So what?  What good does it do us?

I think the reason is that knowledge, in and of itself, is a worthy goal.  Always looking at the profit motive -- what benefit will it bring? -- is ignoring the fact that the inspiration gained from reaching for, and achieving, a lofty goal has a worth that can't be measured in dollars.  How many young minds were inspired by previous successes in pure science -- the discovery of how DNA works, the first humans to reach the Moon, the uncovering of countless bizarre fossil animals by paleontologists, the first manned submarine to descend into the Marianas Trench?

And what did those minds go on to accomplish?

I look at the images coming back from New Horizons with nothing but a sense of wonder and curiosity.  Such missions represent one of humanity's most fundamental drives; the thirst for knowledge.  So when you see the images that are coming back from the furthest reaches of the Solar System, don't just think of them as pictures of a distant denizen of our Solar System.  Think of them as symbols of the highest aspirations of the human mind and spirit.