Risk, research, and red meat

Most people really don't understand the concept of risk.

Let me give you an example.  Let's say that there is a woman who has been identified as being at risk of having a stroke.  She goes to a doctor, who offers her one of three medications to reduce her risk of stroke over the next five years.

Medication A would increase her likelihood of remaining stroke-free from 91% to 94%.

Medication B reduces her risk of a stroke by 1/3.

Medication C reduces her risk of a stroke by 3%.

Which one should she take?

Most folks seeing this problem pick B, largely because it sounds better -- a reduction by 1/3 is a lot, right?  3% is a pretty paltry change, and 91% and 94% chances of remaining healthy are pretty close.

It comes as a big surprise to find out that all three of them are the same.

If she has a 91% chance of remaining healthy without the medication and 94% with it, her risk of stroke drops from 9% to 6%.  That's a drop of 3%.

It's also an overall 1/3 reduction in her risk.

Such mathematical monkey-business is why there's been such confusion over the WHO's recent declaration that red meat causes cancer (and processed meat, such as hot dogs and pepperoni, are even worse).   In fact, processed meat is now in "Group 1" -- "substances that cause cancer" -- along with tobacco, human papilloma virus, and asbestos.

[image courtesy of photographer Jon Sullivan and the Wikimedia Commons]

It's even accompanied by statistics that seem, frankly, pretty terrifying:

[M]eta analysis found that colorectal cancer risk jumps by 17 percent for every 100 grams (3.5 ounces) of red meat consumed each day.  Meanwhile with processed meat, colorectal cancer risk increases by 18 percent for every 50 grams (1.7 ounces) eaten each day.

Holy crap, right?  1.7 ounces a day (not much) translates to an 18% increase (a lot) in your chance of colorectal cancer (a disease that is high on most people's "Least Favorite Things to Think About" list).

Add that to another study that found that "2% of hot dogs contain human DNA," and it looks like we might see a lot of people finding other things for their summer barbecues.

The problem is that all of this stuff is misleading.  First, what does an 18% increase look like?  According to the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results Fact Sheet on colorectal cancer, current rates of diagnosis estimate the number of new cases at 42.4 per 100,000 each year.  An 18% increase brings that number up to a little over 50.

In other words, if 100,000 people ate 1.7 ounces of salami a day for a year, you'd expect there to be eight more cases of colorectal cancer in that group as compared to a comparable non-salami group of 100,000.

Here's another problem with the WHO information.  "Group 1" substances are said to be "known to cause cancer."  But all that means is "known to increase your risk."  It doesn't say by how much, nor what the risk was to begin with.  For example, cycling to work and swimming naked in a crocodile-infested river are both outdoor activities that are "known to increase your risk of dying in an accident."  So on the "Outdoor Activities Risk" list, these would both be classified as "Group 1."

Which one would you prefer doing?

At the risk of beating the point unto death, Casey Dunlop of Cancer Research UK cited statistics illustrating how silly it is to put tobacco and bacon in the same category.  Tobacco is a product that is toxic in any amount, confers no benefits whatsoever upon the people consuming it, and is directly responsible for 86% of lung cancers and 19% of all cancers combined.  Even assuming the worst-case scenario, daily consumption of processed meat is responsible for 21% of colorectal cancers and 3% of all cancers combined.

Puts things in perspective, doesn't it?

Oh, and about the human DNA in hot dogs thing; this doesn't mean that the hot dog manufacturers are incorporating Soylent Green into their meat.  Given the sensitivity of DNA tests, this probably means the presence of a few cells from a bit of dry skin or something.  And if you think that it's only hot dogs that have this kind of contamination, I have news for you.  The amount of extraneous cellular material (to put it euphemistically) that we consume by accident on a daily basis has not been tested, but is undoubtedly high.  If you are a pet owner, and don't think you consume dog and/or cat DNA every single day, well... either you clean your house far more frequently and thoroughly than I do, or you're living in a fool's paradise.

And amazingly enough, most of us are pretty healthy.  Funny thing, that.

Now, I'm not saying we should eat hot dogs and bacon and pepperoni with wild abandon.  Reducing your consumption of red and processed meat is definitely a good thing.  But everything has dangers; there are risks associated with every food out there.  The trick is to figure out which calculated risks are worth taking, and what the tradeoff is.

After all, as Chuck Palahniuk put it in Fight Club, "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."

The Sesame Street vaccination conspiracy

A lot of you might have heard about the newest character on Sesame Street -- a little girl named Julia who is autistic.

It's a gutsy move by a show long known for its efforts to teach children about fairness and compassion and the effects of social stigma.  Its goal statement has included right from the beginning the intent to encourage children to "appreciate cultural diversity by modeling people who differ in appearance, action, or point of view playing together, working together, making friends, and resolving conflicts."  From its inception, there was a deliberate decision made to have minorities and people of various ages deeply represented, and not simply to have a token minority character or two.  They also never shied away from helping children to deal with difficult topics -- unusual in a kids' show.  For example, Sesame Street deliberately (and tactfully) addressed the concerns and fears children had after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.

So the move to include an autistic character was perhaps to be expected from the directors of such a thoughtful and forward-thinking show.  The author of the story introducing the character, Leslie Kimmerman, wrote, "More than 20 years ago, my beautiful son received the diagnosis of autism, and my world changed instantly and profoundly.  I knew nothing about autism, and it seemed that those around me — even the professionals — didn’t know much either.  Today, happily, that has changed."

She and the others involved in the creation of the character hope that this will bring awareness and understanding, given that non-autistic children watching the show will inevitably interact with autistic children in school, and also to help autistic viewers to feel more accepted.  Jeanette Betancourt, Sesame Street's senior vice president, said, "Children with autism are five times more likely to get bullied.  And with one in 68 children having autism, that’s a lot of bullying.  Our goal is to bring forth what all children share in common, not their differences.  Children with autism share in the joy of playing and loving and being friends and being part of a group."

Hard to see what's to criticize about that.  I have several friends with autistic children, and the response from them has been uniformly positive.  So imagine my surprise when I found out that the anti-vaxxers are saying that the move is actually an end run by "Big Pharma" to make autism seem normal, so that we'll continue to get vaccinated.

It'll probably come as no surprise that the person spearheading the claim is Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams, founder of Natural News.  Adams has repeatedly demonstrated that he doesn't have a very firm grasp on reality -- a quick perusal of the headlines on Natural News is usually sufficient to confirm that.  But this has revealed an uglier side of his narrative, one which the glitzy, health food polish of the site might hide.

Adams writes, "The rollout of autistic Julia is Sesame Street’s attempt to ‘normalize’ vaccine injuries and depict those victimized by vaccines as happy, ‘amazing’ children rather than admitting the truth that vaccines cause autism in some children and we should therefore make vaccines safer and less frequent to save those children from a lifetime of neurological damage."

Well, Mike, let's start out with the obvious.  (The more sensitive members of the studio audience might want to plug their ears.)

VACCINES DO NOT CAUSE AUTISM, YOU ANTI-SCIENCE, IRRATIONAL, WILLFULLY IGNORANT LOON.  What they do is they protect children from devastating diseases that used to kill or permanently injure thousands every year.  Just because every scientific study done on the topic has confirmed results that run counter to the mission statement of your company does not mean that there's a conspiracy to discredit you.

It simply means that you are wrong.

But second, and more encouragingly, I think Adams may have miscalculated this time.  To discredit an attempt to "normalize" autistic children -- his words, not mine -- puts him in serious danger of alienating the very people he's dependent on for support, namely parents of autistic children whom he has hoodwinked into believing that their kids' health issues were caused by vaccination.  Even if you are a parent of an autistic child who believes that modern medicine is responsible for autism, calling a television show that is trying to heighten awareness and understanding of your child's condition a conspiracy by the pharmaceutical companies doesn't seem like it would strengthen the anti-vaxxers' credibility.

More likely, it would bring up thoughts of, "Wait, I thought he actually cared about autistic children.  If so, why is he condemning a show that is working towards seeing them treated fairly?"

So as a PR move, it stands a good chance of backfiring, which is all to the good.

But it's also a bit puzzling, even coming from a guy who shows every evidence of having spent too much time doing sit-ups underneath parked cars.  Okay, in Adams's BizarroWorld, "Big Pharma" has fucked things up royally by creating vaccines that cause neurological damage in children.  If so, then why on earth would they respond by spending millions of dollars on a campaign to "normalize autism" on a children's show instead of simply making the vaccines safer?

Maybe it's because the vaccines are already safe, the scientists are right -- and Mike Adams has gone even further off the deep end than he was before, however impossible that sounds.

Defending the vegetarians

October must be International Confirmation Bias Month, or something.

First we had the conspiracy theorists saying that a probably-Photoshopped photograph of a floating city was evidence that Project Blue Beam was targeting China with a death ray.  Then religious types claimed that there was a miraculous artifact from 9/11, in the form of a bible page "fused to a melted steel beam," despite the fact that paper, being flammable, would be awfully hard to fuse to a red-hot piece of metal.  Then we had people falling for a snake-oil cure-all called "ORMUS," one version of which turns out to be peppermint-flavored dried grass clippings.  We had a hum in Taos, New Mexico that everyone is freaking out about but which probably is nothing more than tinnitus, some erosion patterns on the Great Sphinx that have convinced some scientists that it's 200 times older than it actually is, and finally people still vehemently believing that birth order determines personality despite a study of 377,000 people that says that it doesn't.

Awfully pervasive, confirmation bias.  Not to mention frustrating.  Which is why the latest example caused me to do multiple facepalms.

It all started, as so many bogus news stories do, with Fox News.  A couple of weeks ago they ran a story called "One-third of Vegetarians Eat Meat When They Get Drunk," which claims that a study shows that 37% of British vegetarians eat meat -- and then won't admit it afterwards -- when they've been imbibing.

Well, this story got some serious traction on social media, especially amongst that subsection of meat eaters who like to think of vegetarians and vegans as holier-than-thou hypocrites.  More than one has brought up the Larry Groce song "Junk Food Junkie," about the guy who leads a double life, wearing natural fibers and eating macrobiotic health food during the day, and going out secretly for a cheeseburger at night:

In the daytime I'm Mr Natural
Just as healthy as I can be
But at night I'm a junk food junkie
Good lord have pity on me

The story fit the narrative so well that it wasn't even questioned.

The problem is, it turns out that the study wasn't done by any kind of scientific team, it was done by a  "U.K.-based discount code website" called "VoucherCodesPro."  Initially, this wasn't said explicitly in the story, but very quickly (some) people caught on that we weren't talking about cutting-edge science.  We weren't, in fact, talking about science at all.   Even after Fox edited the article to include the source in the first paragraph, people still spread it all over the place, hee-hawing about how funny those hypocritical vegetarians are, and almost none of them questioning whether the source itself was valid.  An exposé over at the vegetarian/vegan blog The Avocadbro put it this way:

When you see all of these news outlets report the same thing, you have to assume at least one reporter—if not two, three or all of them—spent some time verifying the study. Apparently none of that happened.  Again, I’m still holding out a small percentage of hope that I’m wrong about this.  But I’m just some random Internet blogger.  It’s up to one of the many reporters who passed along these surveys to scrutinize their sources... How, apparently, did not a single one of these reporters, after they typed (or copy and pasted) the words “a survey by coupon website Voucher Codes Pro,” stop and think to themselves: What?  Is this a legitimate source?

Well, yeah.  Exactly.  And you should read the post over at The Avocadbro in its entirety, because it takes apart the Fox News claim one piece at a time -- leaving you questioning not only the results of the poll, but whether there was a poll conducted at all, or if the people over at "VoucherCodesPro" simply made the entire thing up.

Look, I'm not a vegetarian myself.  I think a t-bone steak with a glass of fine red wine is one of the real pleasures in life.  I have nothing against the farming of animals for meat as long as it's done humanely, and hunting as long as it's done responsibly.

But my personal dietary preferences shouldn't lead me to accept without question an accusation of hypocrisy against people who make different choices.  Especially when the accusation is based on information that is almost certainly specious.

And man, I wish there was some way that applying the "Check your sources" rule could become mandatory before being allowed to post anything on social media.

Exploding the birth-order myth

How often have you heard a friend mention an odd characteristic of a mutual acquaintance, and follow it up with a statement like, "Well, he's a middle child," leaving you both nodding knowingly as if that explained it?

Conscientious, strong-willed eldest children.  Lost, rebellious middles.  Immature, demanding youngests.  Then there's my situation -- the spoiled, tightly-wound only children, who were doted upon by their parents and had their every whim met immediately.

I know that wasn't really true in my case; far from being overprotected, my youth was more a case of free-range parenting.  After school, and all summer long, my parents' style could be summed up as "Be back by dinner and try not to break any bones.  Either yours or anyone else's."  So I knew that at least from a sample size of one, there was something wrong with the birth-order-determines-personality model.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Even seeing other exceptions here and there never left me confident enough to contradict the prevailing wisdom.  After all, the plural of anecdote is not data.  But now a pair of studies has conclusively disproven the connection between birth order and... anything.

In the first, a trio of psychologists at the University of Leipzig analyzed personality assessments for a huge sample size (they had data for over 20,000 individuals), looking for how they scored on what are called the "Big Five" features of personality -- extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and imagination.  They found no correlation whatsoever between birth order and any of those.  In their words:

[W]e consistently found no birth-order effects on extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, or imagination.  On the basis of the high statistical power and the consistent results across samples and analytical designs, we must conclude that birth order does not have a lasting effect on broad personality traits outside of the intellectual domain.

A similar, but much larger study done at the University of Illinois -- this one of 377,000 high school students -- also found no correlation whatsoever:

We would have to say that, to the extent that these effect sizes are accurate estimates of the true effect, birth order does not seem to be an important consideration for understanding either the development of personality traits or the development of intelligence in the between-family context.  One needs only to look at the “confounds,” such as parental socio-economic status and gender, for factors that warrant much more attention given the magnitude of their effects relative to the effects of birth order.

So if there really is nothing to the birth-order effect, why is it such a persistent myth?  I think there are two things going on, here.  One is that during childhood, older children differ in maturity from their younger siblings because... well, they're older.  Of course a fifteen-year-old is going to be more conscientious and articulate than his seven-year-old brother.  There'd be something seriously wrong if he weren't.  So we tend to see any differences that exist between siblings and interpret them in light of the model we already had, thus reinforcing the model itself -- even if it's wrong.

Because that's the second problem -- our old arch-nemesis confirmation bias.  Once we think we know what's going on, our confidence in it becomes unshakable.   I have to wonder how many people are reading this post, and thinking, "Yes, but for my own kids, the birth-order effect works.  So I still believe it."  It's a natural enough human tendency.

On the other hand, I think you have to admit that your own personal family's characteristics really aren't going to call into question a scholarly analysis of 377,000 people.

So that's pretty much that.  No more blaming your appreciation of fart jokes on being an immature youngest child.  And my friends and family will have to cast around for a different explanation for why I'm as neurotic as I am.  There probably is an explanation, but my being an only child isn't it.

Rethinking the Sphinx

Can we get something straight, here?

The statement, "Some radical ideas have proven true" is not equivalent to "if an idea is radical, it must be true."  There are many, many ideas out there that are simply batshit crazy, and the experts think they're wrong for a reason.

And you do not improve your case by bringing up the fact that "they disbelieved Einstein at first, too."

This comes up because of a loony idea that appeared over at the site Ancient Code that claims that the Egyptian Sphinx is 800,000 years old.  And no, I didn't slip and put in too many zeroes.  There are apparently a couple of geochemists over at the National Academy of Sciences in Ukraine who analyzed erosion and wear patterns in the rock from which the Sphinx is built, and concluded that the only possible explanation is that the Sphinx is 200 times older than archeologists are telling us.

This just brings up two questions:

1. You do realize that 800,000 years ago, there were no modern humans?
2. Where did you get your degrees from, Big Bob's Discount Diploma Warehouse?

So at first I thought this was some kind of hoax.  But no, the two scientists, I. Vyacheslav Manichev and Alexander G. Parkhomenko, are apparently serious. "The absolute mark of the upper large erosion hollow of the Sphinx corresponds to the level of water surface which took place in the Early Pleistocene," Manichev and Parkhomeno write.  "The Great Egyptian Sphinx had already stood on the Giza Plateau by that geological (historical) time."

The article, which quotes extensively from their paper, describes their argument, which seems to be based on an assumption that the weathering of the rock from which the Sphinx is built couldn't have happened in 4,500-odd years.  Plus, as the Sphinx is thought to have spent at least part of that time covered in sand and thus protected from damage, there's no way all of the erosion we see can be due to processes that have occurred in that time.  We then hear about the geological history of the area around Giza, including the presence of a freshwater lake 800,000 years ago that could account for the condition of the Sphinx.

No mention is made of the fact that the builders of the Sphinx could have constructed it from rock that was already partially weathered.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But it's only at the very end of the article that they admit the worst problem with all of this:

Some might say that the theory proposed by Manichev and Parkhomenko is very extreme because it places the Great Sphinx in an era where there were no humans, according to currently accepted evolutionary patterns.  Furthermore, as it has been demonstrated, the two megalithic temples, located adjacent to the Great Sphinx were built by the same stone which means that the new dating of the Sphinx drags these monuments with the Sphinx back 800,000 years.  In other words, this means that ancient civilizations inhabited our planet much longer than mainstream scientists are willing to accept.

So, if some model of geological weathering requires that an archeological artifact be 200 times older than anyone thought, it must be all of the other archeological, historical, and biological evidence that is wrong, not something amiss with the model itself?

You'd think this would be a case where most everyone would read this and say, "Yeah, right," and walk away, snickering softly.  But as we've seen before, people love an iconoclast.  All you have to do is claim that you've shown that the fancy-pants ivory-tower scientific experts are wrong about something, and you'll have wingnuts of all descriptions swarming to your defense.  This claim showed up on Reddit, over at the r/conspiracy subreddit, a few days ago, and here are a few of the responses posted:

As someone who has always been into history and science (and the popularly accepted ideas in those fields), lately I've been really interested in alternate, extended human timelines and alternatives to Darwin's theory of evolution (which as described in The Origin of Species, is actually much rougher and less accurate than mainstream education would have you think, don't get me wrong we can watch viruses and even plants and animals adapt and "evolve" on a small scale, but Darwin's theory goes a lot further than that). 

Look into the Thunder Bolt Project, pretty interesting.  A lot of shared culture, mythology, cave paintings can be traced back to electrical events witnessed in the sky, by cultures that never spoke to one another. 

Get into any meaningful science discussion about the true nature of reality, and fairly soon the discussion will go toward "14th dimensional hyper-strings" and "wave/particle duality" or "multiverses".  Point being, is that eventually it all becomes philosophy / metaphysics.  And all of it is beyond our level of comprehension.  This is whats [sic] so frustrating in speaking to the "Bill Nye" science types.  You know the ones, with a simple childlike answer for everything.  They are truly no more inquisitive nor intelligent than the average bible thumper.  Instead of quoting John 3:16, they simply reflexively quote their overly simplistic 5th grade science book.  What's so sad is they go through their life actually believing that they have some sort of lock on the objective nature or reality. 

If all possibilities exist, then what we see as our past and the course of evolution up until this point is precisely the way things had to happen in order that we be here right now, no matter how improbable. That, I believe, is the explanation for the seemingly magical leaps in evolution and indeed the genesis of life in this universe itself.  It happened that way in order for us to be here now, and why we are here now is not a question that we can answer. 

Science and scientists want to have all of the answers, they want to have everyone just bow down and believe, they're worse than the religions, look at how they treated Einstein, first he was crazy, now everyone thinks that relativity is gospel.

The last one is the one that made me facepalm the hardest.  Not only is the author an odds-on favorite for a gold medal in the Olympic Comma Splice Event, (s)he apparently doesn't realize that Einstein has one other thing on his side besides blind devotion: evidence.

Relativity has been tested every which way from Sunday -- pressed harder, honestly, than a lot of other scientific models, because its conclusions are so counterintuitive.  And every time, the evidence has supported Einstein.

And where is the support for there having been modern, monument-building humans in the Nile Valley 800,000 years ago?

*crickets*

I'm waiting.

*more crickets*

Thought so.  You can't just make a claim, and then state that your explanation is the only possibility, so fiat lux and q.e.d. and so on.  It has to explain all of the relevant data, or there's something wrong with your model.

Just being a radical swim-against-the-current type isn't enough.  "Many great thinkers were criticized at first" is not logically equivalent to, "I'm being criticized, therefore I must be a great thinker."

And if any further evidence is uncovered that the Sphinx is 800,000 years old, I'll eat it for breakfast.

Zap!

Four days ago, I wrote about a new study that appears to show that trans-cranial magnetic stimulation of the posterior medial frontal cortex of the brain causes a decrease in belief in god.

As I mentioned in the post, the effect was small, the sample size was small, and the whole thing is a lot flimsier than the media seemed to treat it.  Headlines like "Scientists Use Brain Stimulation to Make You Stop Believing in God" vastly overplay the actual results of the research, turning a mildly interesting psychological study into hyped, sensationalized clickbait.

But there is never a misinterpretation of scientific research so skewed that you can't respond by misunderstanding the misinterpretation, and making it way worse.  Conservative talk radio host Joe Miller, in interviewing Cornell adjunct professor of statistics William Briggs, put forth the opinion that such a technique could be used to suck religion out of the devout.

The funny thing about the piece, which is about ten minutes long and is well worth giving a listen, is that Briggs starts out by making precisely the same objections to the study that I did -- that the number of test subjects was too small to show an overall effect, that self-reporting as a means of getting data on psychology is inherently flawed, and that trying to come up with a metric for a complex behavior like religious belief is somewhere between difficult and impossible.  But instead of coming to the conclusion that because of all of this, the study probably isn't worth worrying about, Briggs and Miller went the opposite way -- that this is just the first of many attempts by evil progressives to "use any aggressive tactics" to destroy faith.

Miller also brought up the inevitable role of the "transgender agenda" in pushing such abuses of technology.  This agenda, according to Miller, involves "no parameters on sexual acts of behavior," and requires the destruction of Christianity to achieve its ends.

Notwithstanding the fact that the transgender people I know seem more concerned with living their own lives free of ridicule, criticism, and threat than they do with telling anyone else what to believe, Miller paints progressives  in general and LGBT individuals in particular as wanting to achieve a no-holds-barred attitude toward sex any way they can, up to and including "zapping people's brains with magnets" in such a way as to destroy their belief in god.  And, Miller adds darkly, along the way leaving them "incapable of adding two plus two."

So we start with a study that most likely didn't demonstrate anything of interest, and we end up with evil transgender people attaching magnets to the skulls of the devout to suck Jesus out of their brains.

What I find most interesting about this fear talk is that it glosses over one little fact that Briggs actually let slip during the interview (and Miller jetted past without a mention) -- 3/4 of the people in the United States are still Christian.  Just about every public office in the land is held by a Christian.  Despite the fact that Article VI of the Constitution states, "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States," one of the quickest ways not to get elected in the United States is to admit to being an atheist -- or, worse, to hint that religion might wield too much power over politics.

So the idea that even if the trans-cranial magnetic stimulation did reduce religiosity (it probably didn't), and the effect was permanent (it wasn't), you'd still have to zap something like 240 million people to produce an effect.

That, my friends, is a shitload of magnet-wielding transgender people.

But of course, it's pretty obvious why people like Miller traffic in such fact-free paranoia.  Fear tends to make people close ranks, circle the wagons, and double down on what they believe.  The surest way to get voters to espouse a view is to make them afraid of what will happen if they don't.  "Vote conservative," Miller is saying, "unless you want transgender people sneaking into your home and zapping your brain with magnets."

How someone could believe something like this is a question worth asking; but as we've seen so many times before, when you engage the emotions -- especially fear -- the logic centers of the brain pretty much go offline.

Which means that Miller has also succeeded in brain zapping, without using even a single magnet.

Hums, bloops, and snores

Today I was perusing the online news and happened to note a link to LiveScience called "The Ten Top Unexplained Phenomena."  Contrary to its name, LiveScience seems to specialize in catchy little blurbs on stuff that hardly qualify as actual science, but do attract the attention because they're either about stuff that most everyone is interested in even if they won't admit it (e.g. sex) or stuff that many of us are curious about even though some of us think it's nonsense (e.g. the supernatural).  This particular "top ten list" was predictably ordinary, and listed several things as "unexplained" that I have a fairly good explanation for, such as psychic phenomena (explanation: people are gullible), UFOs (explanation: people are gullible), Bigfoot (explanation: people are gullible), and mysterious disappearances, such as that of Jimmy Hoffa (explanation: don't fuck with the Mafia).  But the last unexplained phenomenon on LiveScience's list was one I'd never heard of, so of course that caught my attention.

It's called the "Taos Hum."  The Taos Hum is, as you presumably have already figured out, a pervasive humming noise heard near Taos, New Mexico.  (Check out the Taos Hum Page if you're interested in more information, or in signing up for the Taos Hum email listserv. Of course there's a listserv.)  The Hum was featured on the television show Unsolved Mysteries a while back, wherein they tried to capture the hum on recording equipment and failed, so they instead created an audio clip that was what the hum allegedly sounds like, to people who can hear it.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

However, as anyone knows who's ever seen Unsolved Mysteries or other shows like it, they completely downplayed that the audio clip wasn't actually a recording of the real hum, but a simulation of a sound that may or may not exist in the first place.  It didn't stop them from acting all amazed and freaked out when they were listening to it, which made me want to scream, "You people just made this idiotic recording, and you're acting like it's real!  Are you crazy, or just stupid?"  But I didn't, because yelling at a video clip would make my family members ask the same question about me.

All of this, of course, is not to say that the Hum may not exist.  There are peculiar sounds in the world, many of them without a current explanation, and not all of which have proven impossible to detect.  An unexplained hum in Auckland, New Zealand, for example, was actually captured in a recording.  It is an acoustic signal that peaks at 56 hertz, near the bottom of the range of audibility for most people, and has yet to be explained.  But this makes it all the more odd that the Taos Hum hasn't been detected on sound equipment, much less recorded -- the Unsolved Mysteries people made it sound like making recording devices detect in that range is extremely difficult, when in fact it isn't hard at all.  A typical cassette recorder isn't very sensitive in that range, no; but with professional recording equipment, it shouldn't be a problem.

Another problem is how few people actually report hearing it.  Even a website that clearly considers the Hum to be real, and suggests as an explanation something that would be worthy of an episode of The X Files -- they imply that the Hum is either of supernatural origin, or caused by some secret government technology -- admits that only 2% of Taos residents can hear it.  Most people who've allegedly heard the phenomenon, when asked to listen to recordings of various low frequency sounds and identify which is closest, perk up when they hear recordings in the 50-80 hertz range, which is definitely in the audible range for most people with unimpaired hearing.  This raises the question of why, if it's as powerful as hearers say it is (some even say they can't sleep when the Hum is going on), everyone in Taos who isn't deaf hasn't reported the phenomenon.

Still, 2% is enough people that it deserves an explanation.  I tend to lean toward the idea that it's some form of tinnitus, combined with a dose of confirmation bias -- in this case, accepting an appealing lack of an explanation, and interpreting further anecdotal reports as evidence of its being some kind of grand mystery.  Once you think that the low-pitched ringing in your ears is a real phenomenon that is audible by others, you (1) pay more attention to it, and (2) become more and more convinced that it's true every time it subsequently happens.

I also must add, however, that I've been to Taos, and not only did I not hear any humming noise, I was immediately struck by the fact that there seemed to be an inordinately large number of Purveyors of Woo-Wooness -- Tarot card readers, palm readers, sellers of crystals, and metaphysical book stores.  Even at the time, before I'd ever heard of the Hum, it seemed to me a population of people who were primed to interpret everything with a mystical twist.

Of course, I could be wrong.  It's been known to happen.  After all, the Auckland Hum was shown to be a real phenomenon, and researchers haven't been able to find anything that explains it.  There are lots of unexplained noises in the world -- the most famous being the Bloop, which has actually been recorded by subs.  Of course, with the Bloop, there's a perfectly rational explanation; it's the noise made by Cthulhu snoring.  You think I'm joking.  Apparently the most common projected origin for the Bloops recorded by subs is right near the spot where H. P. Lovecraft said, in The Call of Cthulhu, stands the majestic sunken city of R'lyeh, where the octopoid god lies snoozing peacefully.  This fact should put the quietus on storming in there with subs and recording equipment.  It's not that I'm for impeding the progress of science, mind you; it's just that we ought to be careful.  Cthulhu, as far as I've heard, is not a morning person, and resents being awakened suddenly.  He also tends to wake up hungry, and with a serious case of morning breath.

On the other hand, honestly demands that I mention that in the case of the Bloop, there's a more likely explanation than the snoring of aquatic Elder Gods.  Just last year, some scientists over at NOAA found pretty good evidence that the Bloop is the sound of Antarctic ice sheets breaking up, distorted by being transmitted for long distances underwater.  Which is kind of a relief.  As interesting as the Lovecraftian pantheon is, I'd prefer that they weren't real, given the frequency with which his main characters had run-ins with Yog-Sothoth and Nyarlathotep et al. and ended up missing valuable limbs.

But I digress.

Assuming the Taos Hum actually is a real, external phenomenon, and isn't just a case of collective tinnitus or a resonance generated by a critical mass of woo-woos, it definitely deserves some more careful exploration.  I'd volunteer, but it's getting kind of late in the year, and Taos is one place in the United States that is even colder and snowier in the winter than upstate New York.  So I think any investigative team I lead will have to wait until spring.  Call me a wuss, but freezing my ass off listening for a sound that only 2% of people can hear anyway doesn't sound that inviting.  So I'm not planning on a trip to Taos any time soon, and if you're a Taos resident, you'll just have to deal with it for the time being.  I'll do what I can on my next visit, but until then, you'll just have to hum along or else ignore it.