Alien espionage cats

Because I'm known around my school as the resident Skeptic Guy, I get into some really weird conversations with students sometimes.  They, like my readers, feel they are duty-bound to tell me the latest bizarre claim they've run across.  I'm certainly appreciative; it means I rarely have to fish around for topics for Skeptophilia.

But it does result in some odd discussions in the hallway.  Like the one I got into last week with a student who asked me if I knew that cats are actually aliens.

At first, I thought I'd misheard him.  "Cats?" I said, attempting to keep the incredulity out of my voice with only partial success.  "Like, meow meow?"

Never let it be said that I do not inject scientific rigor into the questions I ask my students.

"Yeah," he answered.  "Cats.  There's a conspiracy to keep us from finding out that cats are alien spies."

"The conspiracy isn't working very well," I observed.

"No, I guess not.  Who knows, maybe I've just made us both the targets of the Cats in Black."

This last bit resonated with me as I was until recently the owner of two black cats.  I use the term "owner" guardedly, as one of these cats in particular made sure to let me know that he was in no way obliged to do what I wanted him to do.  My sense of his personality is that he kind of hated everyone with the possible exception of my wife, and viewed the rest of humanity as barely sentient providers of cat chow and occasional petting.

Sadly, both of our cats died of honorable old age in the last two years, Geronimo (the aforementioned humanity-hating one) at the age of 18.  Or maybe they just teleported back to the Mother Ship.  I dunno.

Anyhow, as usual I felt like I couldn't let an opportunity like this slide, so I googled "cat alien conspiracy."  And despite my initial incredulity, this search was wildly successful, generating just shy of three million hits.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The first site on the list was the aptly-named Cat Alien Conspiracy, which gives us significant details about how our feline house guests are actually spies in disguise.  I am uncertain whether this site is a spoof.  While the rational part of me thinks that, given its content, it would have to be, recall that in my last post we discussed sites claiming that Jesus was an interdimensional space traveler, so I'm reluctant to assume that anything is so impossibly ridiculous that someone won't believe it.

Anyhow, the site is kind of a Wall O' Text, so I'll admit I didn't make it all the way through.  Here's how it begins, though:

Since as far as we know the beginning of man, aliens have been using cats to try to stop us from progressing to the reasonably advanced race that human beings have become.  They do this because they aren't allowed to directly kill us, however they don't want us to catch up to them or even become as advanced as their race. 

The aliens originally took the approach of placing large cats like tigers, lions, jaguars, etc.  Here to kill off our ancestors to slow us down before we even had a chance to start.  This back fired on them, though it did kill off a lot of them that had intelligence however not the muscle needed to actually use the weapons that they were trying to invent.  They did not kill all of them and we managed to push forward.

Myself, I find this an odd way to try to wipe out a less-technological species.  They're superpowerful aliens, right?  Seems like stirring up a massive storm or earthquake would be a lot more efficient, unless you could combine the two and make, like, a Catnado.  That would be terrifying, but also kind of awesome.

Anyhow, the big cats didn't succeed, so the aliens decided to use their smaller cousins to keep an eye on us:

At this point they decided the only way to find out how all of this happened was by placing spies.  This is when they left us with a smaller more intelligent form of cat to watch, learn, and hopefully even do somethings to sabotage the humans technological growth.  They gave them specific instructions, to act cute, go in to the areas that the humans lived in and allow them to think that they had domesticated them like they had domesticated dogs long ago.  They equipped them with telepathy abilities so that they could both communicate the reports to the aliens, which try to be invisible to us however with some of us they fail and appear to be ghosts.

We also learn that cats like to sleep in the sun because they are "solar-powered," and the reason they try to get between you and your computer monitor is because they are "reading what's on the monitor for their own purposes."

But this is far from the only site about this claim.  Vice did a piece on it a while back, called, "Are Cats Spies Sent by Aliens?" by Austin Considine.  In this article we find out that one of the main pieces of evidence for cats being of alien origin is that the Egyptians called them "gifts of the gods."  Also, scientists "are baffled as to how purrs are produced," and their almond-shaped eyes look just like the huge and terrifying eyes of your typical Gray Alien.

The cats' eyes, not the scientists'.

Oh, and when your cat jumps up and suddenly runs out of the room, it's because (s)he just got a transmission from Feline Mission Control and doesn't want to respond to it while you're around.  Kind of the Space Cat version of hearing the "you've got mail" ding on your computer.

Anyhow.  That's just scratching the surface, but frankly, I think that's all I want to do.  My own experience with cats does not support the idea of their being aliens.  They're more like dubiously-useful home decor items that poop in a box in the laundry room.  I kind of like the big cats -- if I had to pick a favorite animal, I think it'd be the jaguar -- but even they strike me as your usual terrestrial mammal, not a denizen of the planet Gzork.

So that's the result of my latest conversation with a student.  I hasten to add that he himself doesn't think cats are aliens, he just wanted me to know that there are people who do.  Frankly, I'm beyond being surprised by this.  It does make me wonder what other animals might be of extraterrestrial origin.  Personally, I'm suspicious of possums.  Although you'd think that superpowerful alien spies who had crossed intergalactic space would be better at avoiding moving cars.

Cosmic Jesus

Sometimes I sow the seeds of my own facepalms.

It happened just yesterday, when on a lark I clicked on the link to Skeptophilia's Google data, to see how people have been arriving here.  And one of the search queries that got four people to Skepto was...

... "was Jesus from an alternate universe?"

My first thought was, "I don't think I've ever written about that."  And scanning down the first two pages of hits (there were over 314,000 hits, something I don't even want to think about), I didn't see a link to my blog.  So either it was further down the list, or else they took a circuitous route to get here.

My second thought, of course, was, "What the actual fuck?  Four people wanted to know if Jesus was from an alternate universe?"  Given the number of hits, however, the amazing thing is that there weren't more of them.  Evidently, the idea of Jesus as having side-slipped here through a rip in the space-time continuum is something that has come up more than once.

314,000 times, in fact.

Something else I found in my Google search.  I was going to respond to this image, but after sitting here for some minutes, I got nothin'.

I share a besetting sin with Rudyard Kipling's "Elephant's Child," namely, an insatiable curiosity.  So even though a part of my brain was shouting at me that I did not want to go down this particular rabbit hole, I started clicking on the links on the first page of the Google search.

And all I can say is: merciful heavens, do people have no critical faculties at all?

Well, okay, as you might expect, that's not actually all I have to say.  In fact, in the interest of sharing the experience, I'm going to tell you about a couple of my better finds from the realm of Star Trek Jesus.

First, we have an article that appeared in (I shit you not) Huffington Post called, "Is Jesus in a Parallel Dimension?"  This brings up my pet peeve, which is the way woo-woos use "dimension" to mean "a world we can't see," when in reality it means, "a measurable extent in physical space."  So when the author, Dustin DeMoss, asks if Jesus lives in another dimension, it leaves me picturing the Lord and Savior as inhabiting, for example, "width."

But that's a mere quibble.  DeMoss explains what he means, as follows:

We live in four dimensional space while quantum physics suggest there are 11 dimensions.  We understand one instance of time as it is always going forward but in the Bible it says that God experiences time like this, “a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by.” (Psalm 90:4)...  Jesus could materialize and dematerialize while his body was still tangible (Luke 24:39-40, John 20:19, 26) and he could foretell the future (Matthew 24).  He suggested parallel realities open up to us, “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” (Matthew 18:20)

And did Jesus speak of other dimension [sic] when he said, “My kingdom is not of this world.  If My kingdom were of this world, then My servants would be fighting so that I would not be handed over to the Jews - but as it is, My kingdom is not of this realm.” (John 18:35-36)

Welp, predictably I don't think any of those biblical passages has the least thing to do with quantum physics.  And, conversely, quantum physics doesn't have a damn thing to do with Jesus "dematerializing."  So I'm not seeing anything from modern physics as enlightening us with respect to biblical exegesis.

But this is far from the only source weighing in on this topic.  We have the delightfully loopy site Echoes of Enoch, wherein we read the following:

What if I could show you that the Bible tells us and Jesus alluded to the very fact that this mortal life, our linear existence is actually an altered dimension separated from the eternal one and yet existing at the same time!  Sounds too weird?  Consider just what the scripture above is saying.  Our past and our future have already been, and God requires an account of what is past!  The implication is that to God everything is already past history and he requires an account for it all!  It is not that God, sitting up in eternity has the plan all figured out and knows what he will do, it’s already been done!  You can’t hedge around this one.

This site also has a highly entertaining passage about how the Serpent got cursed to slither around after tricking Adam and Eve into eating the forbidden fruit, a small part of which I excerpt below:

He [the Serpent] is said to be subtler that all the other creatures created by God.  Subtle means intelligence applied in a crafty or manipulative manner.  This certainly is not talking about the reptile we know as a snake.  In Gen 3 we get the illustration that because the serpent deceived Adam and Eve he would be made to crawl on his belly and eat dust for the rest of his life.  Again by going back to the original language and redefining these words in light of 21st century knowledge, the story takes another very realistic twist.  The Hebrew, "al gachown yalak" for upon the belly and life can actually mean, "from above a reptile, (as superior) from the issue of the fetus as being outside the belly you will continue on in your material life."  Only in modern times could this scripture be understood for what it might imply.  A superior reptilian form that carries on life outside of normal reproduction can be by the means of cloning!  A seraphim is an order of angelic being.

Right!  Sure!  I mean, my only question would be, "What?" It does, however, put me in mind of a possibly apocryphal story about some scholars of the works of John Milton who were discussing how the Serpent got around prior to being cursed, and one of them suggested that he may have bounced on the coiled end of his tail.

Another scholar exclaimed in outraged tones, "Satan is not a fucking pogo stick!"

Last, we have the site Hidden Meanings weighing in on the topic.  The guy who writes for this site evidently knows a little science, but takes it and soars right out into the aether with it.  "Cosmology is not science," he states.  "It is a pagan philosophy."  As for as what we should believe instead, besides (obviously) the bible, we're told that quantum entanglement means that if you tickle one of a pair of twins, the other one will laugh, which then clearly leads us to the story of Jacob and Esau, as I'm sure you could have predicted.

After that, it gets a little weird.

So, there you have it.  Jesus in space and entangled twins from the Book of Genesis.  Which will teach me to try to track down how people arrive here at my blog.  I guess I should be glad that, however they got here, they did finally make their way, but I honestly don't want to know how many folks came away still believing that the Ascension had anything to do with quantum indeterminacy.

Quantum fuzziness

I'm of two minds when laypeople write about science.

On the one hand, I applaud anyone who is willing to delve into the often deep waters of scientific research.  To put it bluntly, science ain't easy.  After all, by comparison to actual researchers, I'm a layperson myself, despite a degree in physics and the fact that I've taught biology for 31 years.  So to any non-specialist who puts in the time and effort to truly understand something from actual scientific research, I have nothing but admiration.

Also in the positive column is the incalculable benefit that has come from popularizers, people like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson.  While they themselves are scientists, they've made abstruse topics accessible to the masses -- something for which they are sometimes criticized, a stance about which I've written before and which I truly cannot understand.

However.  The problem with laypeople leaping into science writing is their potential for getting things wrong, for interjecting fuzzy-headed ideas, and thus misrepresenting the science itself.  It's usually done with the best of intentions; unlike some of the people I write about here, it's seldom about self-aggrandizement or making a profit.  But it does create the difficulty that a person can read an article and actually understand less about the science involved when they're done than they did before they read it.

I ran into a particularly good example of this in the online magazine Medium a couple of days ago.  The article was "Quantum Mechanics and Existentialism: Removing my Fear of Death" by Alex Vervloet.  It starts off promisingly enough; a description of Vervloet's curiosity about subatomic physics and quantum mechanics, which spurred him to do some research and reading on the subject.  (The book he chose to read, Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli, is one I'm unfamiliar with, but Rovelli himself is a theoretical physicist and one of the founders of the theory of loop quantum gravity, so he certainly has sterling credentials.)

In any case, Vervloet starts out right, both in his search for information and in his article.  But about halfway through, he had passages like this:

You and I are both made up of a seemingly countless number of particles, and those need energy.  Now, when I say energy, I’m not just talking about one thing — there are many different types of energy.  As early as Elementary School we learn about Kinetic and Potential Energy.  Later on we learn about Gravitational, Nuclear, Electromagnetic, Chemical, and other types of Energy.  Calories, sleep, sunlight and water are all converted into Chemical Energy for our bodies.  This in turn gets converted into Electromagnetic Energy for our nervous system, Heat Energy for our blood and skin, Kinetic Energy for our organs, and Potential Energy for our muscles.  Some of it remains chemical as well.

And my expression changed to something like this:

Amongst the many things wrong with this passage is the idea that we convert "calories, sleep, sunlight, and water... into chemical energy."  This is either some metabolic pathway I've never heard of, or else he's just making shit up.

My vote is for the latter.

He also throws in a mention of the Oscillating-Universe Model -- put simply, that the outward motion of the galaxies will eventually be reversed, and we'll have a "Big Crunch" followed by another Big Bang -- and treats it as if it were accepted science, when in fact it is at the moment a mere speculation.  (I could write a whole post on the subject of the mass of the universe, and the possibility of our expanding outward forever or eventually collapsing, which brings in some of the least-understood parts of physics -- dark matter and dark energy.)

Then he takes these pieces and runs right off the cliff with them, with his "theory" -- which I will quote rather than trying to describe, so you can get the full effect:

We know that when certain particles of mass combine, they create elements, and those elements make up the universe.  But what about energy?  What happens when certain energies combine?  Explosions. 

I believe this is the secret to our consciousness.  Just like the universe began with The Big Bang (or bounce), so did we.  Every human being is the product of a Big Bang.  The right combination of entangled energy particles combined into a sperm cell and ovum to create us.  Our body and consciousness explodes into existence and expands to adulthood, then shrinks until it reaches its inevitable death (every mass is eventually converted back to energy and visa versa).  It’s then either buried in the ground to be converted into energy for plants, cremated into heat energy, or donated to science, where the energy leaves the body, and another body can use its energy to power the part(s).

Oookay.  Where do I start?

"Combining energies" does not create explosions.  In fact, I'm not even sure what he means by "combining energies," given that he seems to be using the woo-woo definition of "energy" to mean "the cosmic interconnectedness of all beings" rather than the rigorous scientific definition of "what is introduced to a system either to heat it or to give it the potential to do physical work."  But then he goes even further off the beam with quantum entanglement causing consciousness, there being entangled particles in sperm and eggs, and that the energy in our bodies can be "converted into energy for plants" (which is wildly wrong; plants are solar powered, so while the materials of a dead body might be recycled into a plant, the energy in the body would be devolved as heat during decomposition).

He then goes off into cycles and reincarnation and various other odd tangents, but at that point I kind of stopped paying attention.

Okay, I'm not trying to be mean, here.  Vervloet sounds like his heart is definitely in the right place, and a lot of his muddled ideas could be fixed (and hopefully will be fixed) if he continues researching what the physicists are actually saying.  But what bothers me here is that the publishers of Medium chose to post his article, which is really just the meanderings of someone with a rudimentary grasp of the topic.  (As evidenced by his use of the word "theory" to mean "something I just pulled out of my ass and which could be wrong as easily as right.")

All of which makes me sound like a humorless know-it-all.  And I acknowledge readily that there are tons of topics about which I am mostly ignorant -- but I refrain from writing about them, because whatever I wrote would be irrelevant.  The problem is that a publication, even an online one, becomes a conduit of information, and this is giving a completely wrong impression of what the science actually says.

In any case, I hope Vervloet keeps reading and keeps learning.  It's certainly a fascinating, if difficult, topic.  Ignorance, after all, is a universal condition, but it's completely curable.  You just have to be willing to admit where your understanding falls apart, and find someone who knows more than you do to remedy the situation.

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.