Cracking the code

Long-time readers of Skeptophilia may recall that a while back I did a post on the mysterious and beautiful Voynich Manuscript, a 15th century illustrated codex that has page after page of writing in an unknown orthography.  The manuscript, which is named after Polish book seller Wilfred Voynich, who purchased it in 1912, had resisted all attempts to decipher, decode, or translate its text -- or even give any certain information that it was meaningful writing.  The failure of the world's best cryptographers and linguists to make sense of it was, to me, a good indication that it was pretty but random -- i.e., most likely a Renaissance-era hoax.

Because, after all, the linguists are pretty damn good at what they do.  They even eventually succeeded in translating the odd Linear B script from Crete, when there was no certainty even as to what language it represented, or whether the symbols corresponded to words, syllables, or single sounds.  (The success was mostly due to the efforts of the brilliant Alice Kober and Michael Ventris; if you're interested in finding out more, I highly recommend the book The Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox, which is fascinating reading.)

Anyhow, the Voynich Manuscript proved to be an intractable problem, which is why it became a favorite of woo-woos who think that The Da Vinci Code is non-fiction.  It even inspired one guy, Veikko Latvala of Finland, to attempt a translation from "divine inspiration," producing results that sounded like what you'd get if Charles Darwin had attempted to write The Golden Guide to Flowers while on an acid trip.

A page from the Voynich Manuscript (this image and the one below courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

My sense was that it was probably destined to stay in the "intriguing but unsolved" column for the foreseeable future.  So I was pretty shocked when a friend and former student sent me a link a couple of days ago about some computer scientists at the University of Alberta who have used a decryption program on the text...

... and have found out that the manuscript is probably written in an encrypted form of Hebrew.

I say "probably" because at this point the scientists, Greg Kondrak and Bradley Hauer, have only the preliminary findings that the script is consistent with Hebrew, and a small piece of it has been translated into a sensible sentence, “She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people."

Which is a little odd, but it's better than the nonsense Latvala came up with, divine inspiration or not.

Kondrak says that 80% of the words they've translated are in the Hebrew dictionary, which is pretty good evidence they're on to something.  He and Hauer are hoping to team up with scholars of ancient Hebrew to try a complete translation.

So it looks like a long-standing mystery may, finally, have been solved.  The paper which details their findings, "Decoding Anagrammed Texts Written in an Unknown Language and Script," appeared in Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics.  So look for further developments soon -- with luck, either confirming their results and delving into translation, or a retraction if this turns out to be a blind alley.  In either case, it's nice to know that people are still working on one of the most enduring puzzles in linguistics.

Lunacy

Thanks to a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, I now have a large bruise in the center of my forehead from doing repeated facepalms.  I mean, this is not an unusual occurrence, considering the topics I write about, but the article that spawned this post might have the highest facepalm-to-wordcount ratio of anything I've ever read.

So naturally, I want to tell you all about it, so you can share in the experience.

It's entitled, "Why Eating Food During Lunar Eclipse is Harmful," by a guy named Sadhguru.  The whole thing probably came up because of the lunar eclipse we had this morning, but of course that means all of the advice he gives is a little late.  So my apologies if you already came to grievous harm from your cornflakes, or something.

Anyhow, let's take a look at what Sadhguru has to say.  It'll be fun!  Trust me!

During lunar eclipses, what would happen in 28 days over a full lunar cycle is happening in a subtle way over the course of two to three hours of the eclipse.  In terms of energy, the earth’s energy is mistaking this eclipse as a full cycle of the moon. 

So, all of this bad shit goes down because the Earth made a mistake? You'd think the Earth would have figured out about lunar eclipses by now, since they have occurred twice a year for the past 4.5 billion years.  I mean, it's not like at this point it should be a surprise.

Certain things happen in the planet where anything that has moved away from its natural condition will deteriorate very fast.  This is why while there is no change in raw fruits and vegetables, there is a distinct change in the way cooked food is before and after the eclipse.  What was nourishing food turns into poison.

I hate it when my grilled cheese sandwich turns into poison, don't you?  Ruins my whole day.

Anyhow, Sadhguru goes on to explain what a poison is, in case you didn't already know:

Poison is something that takes away your awareness.  If it takes away to a certain minor level, that means you are dull.  If it takes away your awareness to a certain depth, that means you are asleep.  If something takes away your awareness completely, that means you are dead.  Dullness, sleep, death – this is just a progression.  So, cooked food will go through the phases of its deterioration much more rapidly in a subtle way than it does on a normal day.

So, let's see.  Cooked food will subtly but rapidly deteriorate during an eclipse, because the Earth got surprised again, and if you eat it, you'll either die, fall asleep, or "feel dull."  Got it.

But I'm sure what you're wanting to ask by this point is, "Yes, Sadhguru, but what about raw food?  Can we eat raw carrots or something without poisoning ourselves into dullness?"  Fortunately, he addresses that very point:

If there is food in your body, in two hours’ time your energies will age by approximately twenty-eight days.  Does that mean you can eat a raw food diet on such a day?  No, because the moment food goes into your body, the juices in your stomach attack and kill it.  It becomes like semi-cooked food and will still have the same impact.

Well, I sure as hell hope your stomach acid kills your food, although I do question why you're eating things that are still alive.  I mean, we're not Klingons snarfing down live gagh or something, fer cryin' in the sink.

I mean, I'm not.  No judgment here if that's what you do.

But what do we do about all of this?  I mean, I don't want to have 28-day-old live chickens in my stomach, or anything. not to mention eating poisonous banana pudding, or whatnot.

When the body is in a confused state, the best thing is to keep it as empty as possible, and as conscious as possible.  One of the simplest ways to be conscious is to not eat. Then you will constantly be conscious of at least one thing.

Yes.  Being really hungry.  But do continue.

And the moment your stomach is empty, your ability to be conscious becomes so much better.  Your body becomes more transparent and you are able to notice what is happening with your system much better.

I don't think I want my body to be transparent.  As I recall, this caused problems in the historical documentary Hollow Man, wherein Kevin Bacon turned himself invisible by stages, and it not only looked extremely painful, it was seriously puke-inducing to anyone watching.

In any case, we don't have anything to worry about, given that the lunar eclipse is already over, and we don't have to think about this stuff again until the next one on July 27.  Me, I'm going to throw caution to the wind and go fix myself some nice bacon and eggs for breakfast.  It may be subtly deteriorated lunar poison, but it's really tasty.

The natural way

I'm always hesitant whenever I am considering posting something negative about alternative medicine.

I mean, sometimes it's clear.  I have no problem saying homeopathy is grade-A bullshit.  A meta-analysis of 1,800 studies intended to determine if there are positive effects from homeopathic "remedies" found no results -- as one would expect from a "medicine" that has been diluted past Avogadro's limit and which relies on nonsense like "frequencies" and "energetic imprints" to explain how it could work.

I always feel a little shakier when the target is naturopathy.  A great deal of what you hear from this branch of alternative medicine seems to me to rely on the naturalistic fallacy -- if it's natural, it must be good for you.  (And the converse, if it's artificial, it must be bad.)

That said, there are a great many therapeutically useful medicines that do occur naturally.  Aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) is found in willow bark, vincristine (used to treat Hodgkin's disease) in the sap of the Madagascar periwinkle, and an extract of the venom from the deadly cone snail shows great promise for treating intractable pain.

But to disabuse yourself of the notion that natural = good for you, look no further than the quack remedy "laetrile" made from apricot pits that supposedly destroyed cancerous tumors -- and which contained dangerous amounts of cyanide.

So I'm definitely of two minds regarding "natural medicine."  Just taking something because it's "natural" could have no effect on whatever's ailing you, or worse, might kill you.  But ignoring a potentially valuable substance because it comes from the annals of naturopathy is no better.

Of course, the good thing is that science has a way of evaluating claims of this type.  It's called a "controlled study" and it's the gold standard for testing this sort of thing.  Many naturopaths, however, claim that the game is rigged -- any substance that could be therapeutically useful that was not developed by the pharmaceuticals industry (or, in their lingo, "Big Pharma"), or which wouldn't make them lots of money, gets summarily ignored.

Myself, I've always thought that objection was a little dubious, given the fact that medical researchers have done 1,800 controlled clinical trials of freakin' homeopathy.  If they're willing to give something ridiculous like that close to two thousand tries to prove itself, it's hard to see why they'd balk at testing some potentially useful plant extract.

What I didn't realize, however, was that the naturopaths themselves have their own problems with dubious practice.  A long-time reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link a couple of days ago to an article in Vice about a former naturopath who has completely flipped her perspective -- and become a whistleblower for cases where naturopaths have used unapproved drugs, suggested useless therapies for ailments, and worst of all, conspired to cover up their own failures.

The article, "The Former Naturopath Who Became a Whistleblower on the Industry" by Kaleigh Rogers, is an interesting if disturbing read.  The naturopath in question, Britt Marie Hermes, was trained at Bastyr University, one of the best known naturopathic medicine teaching facilities.  She threw herself into it full-throttle -- until what she was seeing around her pulled her up short.

"It was world-crushing," Hermes said.  "I came to the conclusion that naturopathy is rife with unethical practices and undertrained professionals.  It was really hard to process...  I guess I have become a thorn in the profession's side."

Which highlights what I was saying earlier; we do have the means to test claims, it's just that the naturopaths often don't do that (or, as with homeopathy, don't believe the results even when we do).  It's a shame, because that means that any potential good discoveries -- the next generation of substances like vincristine -- gets lost under tons of confirmation bias and defensiveness.

It's why we need people like Britt Hermes.  It keeps us honest.  It keeps us from trusting our gut instead of peer-reviewed science.

But it does raise hackles.  I get more hate mail when I criticize alternative medicine than I do when I criticize young-earth creationism, and that's saying something.  People feel strongly about this, which is why Hermes herself is facing a defamation lawsuit by a German naturopath who took exception to her slamming dubious and poorly-tested "cures" (such as intravenous baking soda to treat cancer).  The bottom line is that we have a tried-and-true method for determining the efficacy of potential drugs.

It's better known as "science."

Or, as Tim Minchin put it, "There's a name for alternative medicine that works.  It's called... medicine."

It's that time again

It's been a big week for time travelers.

I suppose it makes sense.  If you're gonna come back to 2018 from the future, dropping in en masse means you're not just a lone voice shouting about how Donald Trump really does act a lot like a Morlock.  On the other hand, the four time travelers who surfaced last week didn't really have much in common, so it might have been better to stagger their appearances, all things considered.

First we have "Mona," who says she comes from the year 2100, when she was given the official job of Time Traveler, and chose to come back here.  She says she was born in 2060, and when she was little, she always wanted to get good grades so she'd "get rich when she was an adult."  But that idealistic goal was thwarted when "two men in black suits" left a note on the door that only Mona was allowed to read.

Spoiler alert:  It was not an invitation from Hogwarts.

She was given instructions for where to go, and again admonished not to let anyone (including her parents) know what she was doing.  So she did as she was told, and was welcomed into the Time Traveling Division of the US Government.

[image courtesy of photographer Guilhem Vellut and the Wikimedia Commons]

Now, I don't know about you, but I think it would be wicked cool if the government had a Time Traveling Division.  I mean, we do have the Department of Education, which under Betsy DeVos's leadership is attempting to transport us back into the Middle Ages, but that's not really the same thing.

Anyhow, after joining up, she lived in an "underground bunker in the middle of nowhere," where "the only thing [she] had for education-wise (sic) was how to become a time traveler."  She had injections that slowed her aging down by ten percent, which would certainly be nice.  Then she traveled back to "the early 2000s and even back to the 1950s," where she was instructed to "take notes on tragedies."

This was extremely boring, Mona says.

Then she gets to the most important stuff, which is what's going to happen in the future (at least, what will be the future to you and me).  No flying cars, she says, which sucks.  The roads, she said, were "solar powered, which reduced crashes," which doesn't make a lot of sense to me.  I mean, roads kind of just sit there, and I don't see how making them out of solar panels would help out the cars or reduce the number of accidents.

Global warming, she said, happened as per the scientists' predictions.  "The sea level rose," Mona tells us, "and omigod it's hot."  So that sounds like concrete proof, right there.


Second, we have Clara, who went forward to the year 3780, and then came back here to tell us all about it.  She was lucky, she says, because other people had been sent forward and weren't able to come back.

Why?

Because, of course, in 3780 there was a catastrophic war between humans and robots.

People, she says, designed robots for the purpose of making them coffee (I'm not making this up), but then the robots understandably decided they were sick of being baristas, and tried to overthrow humanity.  And they succeeded.  Humanity was totally defeated, probably because without coffee, many of us could not defend ourselves effectively, or necessarily even realize there was a robot aiming a laser pistol at us.

Her instructions, she said, were to bring back some 40th-century robotic technology to 2018.  Why is unclear.  Maybe she wanted to get the robot rebellion started early, figuring that given the state our government is in now, not waiting until 3780 to turn it over to our robotic overlords might be an improvement.

Anyhow, she said that the time machine's name was "Isaac" (for the record, I am still not making this up), and it was made of a "collaboration of metallic chairs, human beings, and series in physics of electricity and frequencies of time."  Whatever the fuck that means.

How it works, Clara says, is that the needles "inject electricity" into the time traveler's body, and "the whole thing is control [sic] by formulas."

At that point, I was laughing so hard I couldn't hear what Clara was saying, so I turned the video off.  (The whole thing is 22 minutes long, and I got through five.  Maybe you're made of sterner stuff than I am, and will persevere.  If so, I doff my hat at you, acknowledging your greater bullshit tolerance.)


Third, we have an unnamed guy in a bright blue Columbia jacket who said he jumped from the 1990s to the year 6000.  (So I guess we survived the Great Robot Rebellion of 3780 after all.)  In 6000, he says, there's artificial intelligence that runs the whole world, and humans are "spreading our consciousness throughout the universe."  Which sounds pretty good.

Then he brings forth the pièce de resistance -- a photograph of a city in the year 6000.  (If you understandably want to skip to the good part, he pulls the photograph out at 5:45.)  I'll warn you, though; the photograph is a little... disappointing.  It looks like a blurry view of the Chicago skyline.  The blurriness, he says, is because "time travel causes photographs to get distorted."

So that explains that.

Then he tells us the story of a friend of his who he had to leave behind in 6000.  He has to stifle a sob more than once, even though, he says, the friend "is in a good place... because the future is a utopia."


Last, we have a guy who made it all the way to 9428.  By this time, I was getting a little tired of hearing about how it sounded unbelievable but it was all true, and I kind of stopped listening.  (However, he did say something about the time machine being "a metal chair suspended over a huge swimming pool... filled with blue jelly."  Which if nothing else was an interesting mental image.)

Anyhow.  That's today's news from the world of woo-woo.  Me, I'm just glad we're going to make it to 9428, because at the rate we're going, I figured it was a flip of the coin that we'd survive to the end of 2018.  I doubt I'll still be around, but maybe they'll come up with those anti-aging drugs Mona takes, and I'll have a shot at making it at least to 2100 and seeing how solar-powered roads work.

Lending a hand

After seven years in the business of writing six times a week about bizarre beliefs, it's a little astonishing that I can still run across ones that I've never heard of before.

It is less surprising, perhaps, that the source of this claim was the inimitable Nick Redfern, whose inquiries into ghosts, the paranormal, and cryptozoology has made him something of a frequent flier here at Skeptophilia.  This time, though, he came up with something pretty unique:

That a road in Dartmoor, Devonshire, England is haunted by a pair of gigantic hairy hands.

According to the legend, the road between the villages of Postbridge and Two Bridges is fraught with peril.  People driving along it (or, in an earlier day, riding a horse) were putting themselves at risk of being accosted by a pair of disembodied hands that appear out of nowhere, grab the steering wheel (or reins), and cause the car (or horse) to veer off the road.  The tale is interesting enough that Redfern has actually written about it twice, first back in 2011, and most recently last week.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I will leave you to check out Redfern's accounts of the Hairy Hands causing accidents, some of which go back to 1910, and will just quote one -- an encounter that allegedly happened in 2008:

Michael Anthony worked, at the time, for a supplier of photo-copying machines in Britain, and spent a lot of time traveling the length and breadth of the country meeting clients and promoting – and hopefully selling and/or leasing – his company’s products.  Late on the night of January 16, 2008, Anthony was driving along the B3212 road when he had a terrifying encounter with the unknown... 

According to Anthony, it was around 11.00 p.m., and he had been visiting a customer in Postbridge.  The evening had gone very well, a deal had been struck, contracts had been signed and exchanged, and a pleased and satisfied Anthony was now homeward bound to the city of Bristol... 

Anthony had barely left Postbridge, when his skin began to feel distinctly cold and clammy, and a sense of dread and fear completely enveloped him...  He explained further that perhaps two minutes after the atmosphere in his car became oppressive, fear-filled, and even somewhat malevolent, he felt his hands begin to “go numb.”  He added: “I actually thought I was having a stroke.”  Fortunately, it was no stroke.  In some ways, however, it was far worse. 

Anthony could only look on in both complete horror and disbelief as, just as had been the case so many decades earlier, a very large pair of hair-covered hands, or “paws,” as he intriguingly described them, encased his own hands, and then suddenly attempted to forcibly steer the car towards the edge of the road and skidded onto the cold, moonlit moors.  To his credit, Anthony struggled valiantly with the wheel and, on three occasions, fought off the actions of the spectral, hairy intruder in his midst. 

Interestingly, after the third attempt, said Anthony, the hands simply vanished into thin air, amid a brief flash of light.  The shaken driver floored the accelerator and did not stop until he reached one of the service stations on the M5 motorway.

So there you have it.  I can say with some certainty that, skeptic though I am, if this happened to me, I'd scream like a little girl and wet my pants.  Because although I'm a skeptic about the paranormal, I'm also a great big coward.

Be that as it may, I'm a little disappointed that I only found out about this now, because I was in England two summers ago and took a train right through the middle of Dartmoor.  Had I known about the Hairy Hands legend, I would have definitely made a detour to Postbridge, and dared the Hands to do their worst, even knowing that if the whole thing turned out to be true, I'd have certainly regretted that decision.

But still.  So near and yet so far.

Anyhow, there is is -- a paranormal legend that I'd never run across.  You should definitely check out Redfern's accounts, which are highly entertaining reading.  I wasn't able to find out where the Hands supposedly came from -- whether they're supposedly from a ghost, a werewolf (the hair, right?), or something else.  Whoever they belong to, however, might want to consider driving lessons.  Better safe than sorry.

Life out of balance

As anyone who is a regular reader of Skeptophilia knows, I have a bit of an obsession with alien life.

My students know this, too, not because I bring it up in class, but because I have a poster from the Roswell UFO Museum, the Fox Mulder "I Want to Believe" poster, and a ceramic pot shaped like an alien head in my classroom.

I also have a lot of Bigfoot-related stuff, but we'll save that for another time.

Despite my obsession, I recognize the problem with the claim that extraterrestrial life has been detected, or (even more) that alien intelligence has made it here to Earth.  I've examined a lot of claims for both, and none of them have held up to scientific scrutiny.  It's too bad, really; I think one of the best moments I've ever seen in a science fiction movie was when Zefram Cochrane shakes hands with the Vulcan at the end of Star Trek: First Contact.

I've imagined myself many times in the position of being the first human to welcome a friendly alien intelligence to Earth.  The sad truth is that, without warp drive, the interstellar distances are simply too large.  Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which sets the speed of light as the ultimate universal speed limit, has never been shown to have an exception -- nor that there's some kind of technological workaround.

Dilithium crystals notwithstanding.

So we're kind of stuck here, meaning that if we do detect life on other planets, it'll have to be remotely.  And now three scientists, from the University of Washington and the University of California-Riverside, have shown us how we might do that.

In a paper that came out in Science:Advances this week, titled, "Disequilibrium Biosignatures Over Earth History and Implications for Detecting Exoplanet Life," astronomers Joshua Krissansen-Totton, Stephanie Olson, and David C. Catling have developed a method of figuring out whether an exoplanet hosts life -- by simply analyzing the spectral lines from its atmosphere.

The idea here is that life keeps Earth's atmosphere out of balance -- more specifically, out of chemical equilibrium.  The most obvious example is the presence of diatomic oxygen, which is highly unstable (it is, unsurprisingly, a strong oxidizer).  If all life on Earth were to vanish, the amount of atmospheric oxygen would decline until it was very close to zero, as it interacted with (and was chemically bound up in) rocks and sediments.

As has been so often pointed out in seventh-grade life science classes, without photosynthesis, we'd be monumentally screwed.

So what Krissansen-Totton, Olson, and Catling did is to figure out how far out of chemical equilibrium an atmosphere would have to be to be a significant indicator for the presence of life.  The authors write:

Chemical disequilibrium in planetary atmospheres has been proposed as a generalized method for detecting life on exoplanets through remote spectroscopy.  Among solar system planets with substantial atmospheres, the modern Earth has the largest thermodynamic chemical disequilibrium due to the presence of life.  However, how this disequilibrium changed over time and, in particular, the biogenic disequilibria maintained in the anoxic Archean or less oxic Proterozoic eons are unknown.  We calculate the atmosphere-ocean disequilibrium in the Precambrian using conservative proxy- and model-based estimates of early atmospheric and oceanic compositions.  We omit crustal solids because subsurface composition is not detectable on exoplanets, unlike above-surface volatiles.  We find that (i) disequilibrium increased through time in step with the rise of oxygen; (ii) both the Proterozoic and Phanerozoic may have had remotely detectable biogenic disequilibria due to the coexistence of O2, N2, and liquid water; and (iii) the Archean had a biogenic disequilibrium caused by the coexistence of N2, CH4, CO2, and liquid water, which, for an exoplanet twin, may be remotely detectable.  On the basis of this disequilibrium, we argue that the simultaneous detection of abundant CH4 and CO2 in a habitable exoplanet’s atmosphere is a potential biosignature.  Specifically, we show that methane mixing ratios greater than 10−3 are potentially biogenic, whereas those exceeding 10-2 are likely biogenic due to the difficulty in maintaining large abiotic methane fluxes to support high methane levels in anoxic atmospheres.  Biogenicity would be strengthened by the absence of abundant CO, which should not coexist in a biological scenario.

So that's what is known, in scientific circles, as "pretty freakin' cool."  The SETI Project and other programs designed to detect electromagnetic signals from ET are awesome, but the problem is, it tells us nothing about forms of life out there that for one reason or another might not use electromagnetic transmissions.  In fact, some scientists think that the era of using EM carriers for information might be fairly short -- for us here on Earth, it began about 120 years ago, and could well be drawing to a close already because of better technology.

The proposal by Krissansen-Totton et al. might give us a means of detecting life of all sorts -- not just intelligent life.  Which, as a biologist, I find tremendously exciting.  I mean, if a Vulcan ship isn't going to land in my back yard, I'll take what I can get, you know?

Foundations on sand

I try to be polite, but there are times that there really is no reasonable response to a person other than, "I hate to have to point this out, but you're lying."

Surprisingly, I am not talking about either Donald Trump or Sarah Huckabee Sanders.  Even more surprisingly, I'm not referring here to any politician.  I'm referring to a story that I ran into yesterday where people are taking seriously the claim by a Lithuanian woman named Stanislava Monstvilene that she not only has lived on, but has cured her own stage-4 brain tumor with, a diet composed solely of wet sand.

I know I say this a lot, but I wish I was making this up.  Sadly, this is true, and what's worse, there are some natural-diet alternative-medicine types who think this is really (1) possible, and (2) a good idea.  But let Monstvilene speak for herself:

I had a late stage brain tumor.  They said I wouldn’t last long.  My hemoglobin level was 60 [some five times over the normal range].  I was passing by and once an idea came to my mind – take the sand and eat it.  For the first time I choked but then I got used to it.  You should not mix it with food or water.  You should not eat anything else, otherwise you will feel sick.  And the water should not be drunk.  I used to eat wet sand so after it I do not want to drink.

Just reading this makes me want to drink, and I'm not talking about water.  But six AM is a little early for a double scotch, so I'll just soldier on.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

There is a condition where people feel compelled to eat non-food materials, especially dirt, chalk, stones, hair, and paper.  It's called pica, and is associated with mineral deficiencies, anemia, and mental instability.

And although some of those substances -- particularly dirt and chalk -- are mineral-rich, your body is generally incapable of handling minerals in that form.  Most minerals (such as calcium, iron, zinc, magnesium, cobalt, and so on) that are necessary for health are only absorbed easily if they're chelated -- bonded to an organic compound.  (This is why, for example, zinc supplements are usually in the form of zinc gluconate, and you will not achieve the same effect by chewing on a galvanized nail.)

So pica might result in a compulsion to eat weird stuff, but there's no indication that eating the weird stuff does anything for the underlying condition that caused the pica.

But back to the Sand Lady.  Because she's not just saying she's supplementing her diet with wet sand; she's saying that wet sand is all she eats.  Ever.  (Or drinks.)

To which I respond: bullshit.

Sand, and it pains me even to have to state this, has zero calories.  Most sand is finely ground silica and various types of feldspars (the exactly composition, naturally, depends on the kind of rock the sand was eroded from).  But in no case does sand contain enough nutrients to survive on.

So at the risk of appearing as a scoffer, I'm 100% sure that Ms. Monstvilene is chowing down on sand when the reporters are around, and when no one's looking, she's sneaking out for a cheeseburger with extra mayo.

It's a bit like the couple who claimed to be "Breatharians" (living on nothing but air and the "energy of the universe") and the Seattle woman who said she was going to spend a hundred days "living on light" (this didn't work out so well, as her health deteriorated from the combination of starvation and vitamin deficiency so much that she had to discontinue the stunt on day 47, at which time she had lost 20% of her body weight).

You can't subsist on light and/or dirt for the very good reason that you are not a plant.  Now, I know that loony people make loony claims, kind of by definition.  But that doesn't mean you need to believe them, or necessarily even consider them seriously.  There is enough out there that deserves investigation and is actually scientifically verifiable; last thing we need is to spend our time trying to figure out how some woman in Lithuania is living on a sand diet, when in fact, she is not.

(The irony that in writing this point, I am spending my time addressing this situation, is not lost on me.)

So there you are.  There are times when it is perfectly justifiable to respond "You are talking complete horse waste" to a claim.  Now, you'll have to excuse me, because all of this talk of eating is making me hungry.  Not for dirt, fortunately.  I'm thinking more of bacon and eggs.