Cart both before and after the horse

Let's end the week on a happy, if surreal, note with a new experiment in quantum physics that calls into question the arrow of time.

The "arrow of time" has bedeviled physicists for decades -- why time only flows one direction, while in the three spatial dimensions you can move any way you like (up/down, backwards/forwards, right/left).  But with time, there's only one way.

Forward.

The causality chain -- that events in the past cause the ones in the future -- certainly seems rock-solid.  It's hard to imagine it going the other way, Geordi LaForge's weekly rips in the space/time continuum notwithstanding.  Although I must admit I riffed on the idea myself in my short story "Retrograde," about a woman who perceives time running backwards.  It's going to be in a short story collection I'm releasing next year, but you can read it for free on my fiction blog.

But in real life, we take the arrow of time for granted.  It's why no one was especially surprised when Stephen Hawking threw a champagne party in 2009 for time travelers, but mailed the invitations after the event was over... and no one showed up.

In any case, the arrow of time and causality chains would seem to make it certain that if there are two events, A and B, either A preceded B, A followed B, or they occurred at the same time.  (I'm ignoring the wackiness introduced by relativistic effects; here, we're simplifying matters by saying the observation and both events occurred in the same frame of reference.)

So far, so good, right?  The order of two events is a sure thing.

An experiment performed at the University of Queensland (Australia) has just proven that to be wrong.

In a paper called "Indefinite Causal Order in a Quantum Switch" that appeared last week in Physical Review Letters, by Kaumudbikash Goswami, Christina Giarmatzi, Michael Kewming, Fabio Costa, Cyril Branciard, and Andrew G. White, we find out about research that blows away causality by creating a device where a beam of light undergoes two operations -- but in our choices of A following B or B following A, what actually happens is...

... both.

[Image is in the Public Domain}

The setup is technical and far beyond my powers to explain in a way that would satisfy a physicist, but the bare bones are as follows.

Light has a property called polarization.  In effect, that means it vibrates in a particular plane.  As an analogy, think of someone holding a long spring, with the other end tied to a post.  The person is jiggling it to create a wave in the spring.  Are they waving it up and down?  Side to side?  Diagonally?

That's polarization in a nutshell.

(An interesting side-note: this is why polarized sunglasses work.  Light reflecting off a surface gets polarized in the horizontal direction, so if you have a material that blocks horizontally-polarized light, it significantly reduces glare.)

Anyhow, what Goswami et al. did was to rig up a device wherein a horizontally-polarized photon goes down a path where it experiences A before B, while a vertically-polarized one a path where it experiences B before A.  But here's where it gets loony; because of a phenomenon called quantum superposition, in which a photon can be in effect polarized in both directions at the same time, when you pass it through the device, event A happens before event B, and B happens before A, to the same photon at the same time.

Okay, I know that sounds impossible.  But in the quantum realm, seriously weird stuff happens.  It's counterintuitive -- even the eminent Nobel laureate Niels Bohr said, "[T]hose who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it."  Thus we have not only loopy ideas like Schrödinger's Cat, but experimentally-verified claims such as entanglement (what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance"), an electron being in two places at once, and the fuzziness of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (that the more you know about an object's velocity, the less you know about its position -- and vice versa).

Which is a deliberate setup for my favorite joke of all time.  Ready?

Schrödinger and Heisenberg are going down the highway in Schrödinger's car, Heisenberg at the wheel, and a cop pulls them over.

"Buddy," the cop says, "do you know how fast you were going?"

Heisenberg says, "No idea.  But I can tell you exactly where I was."

The cop says, "Okay, if you're gonna be a smartass, I'm gonna search your car."  When the cop opens the trunk, there's a dead cat inside.

The cop says, "Did you know there's a dead cat in your trunk?"

Schrödinger says, "Well, there is now."

Ba-dump-bump-kssh.  Ah, nerd humor is a wonderful thing.

But I digress.

As impossible as quantum mechanics sounds, it seems to be true.  John Horgan, in his book The End of Science, writes, "Physicists do not believe quantum mechanics because it explains the world, but because it predicts the outcome of experiments with almost miraculous accuracy.  Theorists kept predicting new particles and other phenomena, and experiments kept bearing out those predictions."

Which is a nicer way of saying that if your common sense rebels when you hear this stuff, sucks to be you.

So as bizarre as it is, we're forced to the conclusion that the universe is a far weirder place than we thought.  Myself, I think it's kind of cool.  Despite my B.S. in physics -- and let me tell you, I was no great shakes as a physics student, and I'm convinced some of my professors passed me just so I wouldn't have to retake their courses -- my mind is overwhelmed with awe every time I read about this stuff.  I wonder, though, if it's even possible for the human mind to truly conceptualize how quantum mechanics works; we are so locked into our ordinary, classical, three-dimensional world, where first you turn the key in the ignition and then your car starts, we're completely at sea even trying to think about the fact that on some level, we can't take any of those things for granted.

So this is looking like opening up a whole new area of study.  Very exciting stuff.  And it may be naive of me, but I'm still hoping it's going to lead to a time machine.

First thing I'm going to do is crash Stephen Hawking's party, temporal paradox or no.  It may cause the universe to end, but that's a risk I'm willing to take.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and especially for you pet owners: Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  In this short book, the famous Austrian behavioral scientist looks at how domestic dogs interact, both with each other and with their human owners.  Some of his conjectures about dog ancestry have been superseded by recent DNA studies, but his behavioral analyses are spot-on -- and will leaving you thinking more than once, "Wow.  I've seen Rex do that, and always wondered why."

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Apathy, voting, and the lesser of evils

In further evidence that we've been transported from 2018 back to 1830, the Republican nominee for the North Carolina General Assembly (House District 48) has said -- direct quote -- that "God is a racist and a white supremacist."

His name is Russell Walker, and the only heartening thing about this story is that when his claims went public the North Carolina Republican Party immediately withdrew their support for him.  "Based on recent behavior and previous statements, the North Carolina Republican Party is unable and unwilling to support the Republican nominated candidate for North Carolina House District 48," GOP chairman Robin Hayes said in a statement Tuesday.  "The NCGOP along with our local parties in Hoke, Scotland and Robeson Counties will be spending our time and resources supporting Republican candidates that better reflect the values of our party."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ardfern, Stamp Out Racism, Belfast, August 2010, CC BY-SA 3.0]

But I do mean that is the only heartening thing.  Walker beat his competitor, John Imaratto, carrying 65% of the vote in his district.  And it's not like the claims about the man are new, or that he's kept them under wraps, or anything.  (So the Republican Party's sudden disavowal of Walker has an unpleasant tang of "we knew all along, but once it became public knowledge and started to reflect poorly on us, we had to say we were against him.")  He runs a website that is rife with white supremacist ideology, wherein we can read passages like the following:

• What is wrong with being a white supremacist?  God is a racist and a white supremacist.  Someone or group has to be supreme and that group is the whites of the world... someone or something has to be inferior...  In all history in sub-Saharan Africa, no two-story building or a waterproof boat was ever made.
• God made the races and he is the greatest racist ever.
• Jews are not Semitic they are Satanic as they are all descended from Satan.
• MLK wanted to destroy the Caucasian race through mixing and integration.  He was an agent of Satan.

So yeah.  It's not like we're talking about subtle stuff, here.  Oh, and if we needed more, Walker's also an anti-vaxxer, too.  On his campaign website, he says that he is "convinced that vaccinations, especially for young children, create a favorable climate for Autism."

I find it profoundly baffling that here in the 21st century anyone can make statements like this without being shouted down, much less that someone like him could win the fucking nomination.  Look, I know that being a white guy, I'm bound to be less aware of racism than someone who has to deal with it day in, day out.  But for cryin' in the sink, I thought we'd come further than this.  Are we really in a place where 65% of the voters in a state district look at a man like this and think, "Yup, that's who I want to represent my views in the Assembly"?

Walker is facing Garland Pierce, an African American minister, in the general election in November.  Pierce is the incumbent, which makes me hopeful that Walker won't win.  But this is not the only race that's got some seriously eyebrow-raising candidates.  Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera is running in Florida to replace outgoing Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in the 27th Congressional District, and... she says she's been on an alien spaceship.  And that the aliens have contacted her multiple times during her life.  

"I went in," Rodriguez Aguilera told a reporter for The Miami Herald.  "There were some round seats that were there, and some quartz rocks that controlled the ship — not like airplanes."

Oh, and we have five convicted criminals running for Congress, too.  Those are:

• Don Blankenship of West Virginia (convicted of conspiracy to evade safety laws, resulting in the deaths of 29 coal miners)
• Michael Grimm of New York (convicted of tax evasion)
• David Alcorn of New Mexico (convicted of stalking)
• Greg Gianforte of Montana (convicted of misdemeanor assault)
• Joe Arpaio of Arizona (convicted of contempt of court; should also have been convicted of being a complete asshole, but unfortunately that's not illegal in the United States)

C'mon, people, is this really the best you can do?

At this point, I can't give up on politics entirely, as much as I'd like to; I've never liked discussions over politics, because half of them seem to be about things that appear to me to be blitheringly obvious (like whether LGBTQ people should have the same rights as everyone else) and the other half about things that are completely unsolvable (like trying to balance the federal budget to everyone's satisfaction).

But I've been drawn into writing about politics because apathy seems to me to be completely unconscionable.  I still find it beyond appalling that 43% of Americans didn't vote in the 2016 presidential election.  That's 65 million people who went, "Meh," and stayed home.

And look where that's gotten us.

If we don't want idiots and crazy people running the show, we have got to table our apathy and get involved.  Political races should never require a choice between the lesser of evils.  Look, I don't care if you agree with me on how to govern the country, but I sincerely hope you agree that we want the best people we can find to be in charge.  If you differ from me on issues of policy, that's fine.  That, we can discuss.

But if you support a crazed white supremacist, or a delusional woman who thinks she's in contact with aliens, or a convicted criminal for public office -- I don't think we have any common ground whatsoever.

Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article178813586.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article213937944.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article213937944.html#storylink=cpy

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and especially for you pet owners: Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  In this short book, the famous Austrian behavioral scientist looks at how domestic dogs interact, both with each other and with their human owners.  Some of his conjectures about dog ancestry have been superseded by recent DNA studies, but his behavioral analyses are spot-on -- and will leaving you thinking more than once, "Wow.  I've seen Rex do that, and always wondered why."

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

The grand plan

When I'm teaching the unit on evolution in my biology classes, one of the hardest ideas to expunge from my students' brains is that evolution is goal-oriented.

Take, for example, the worn-out example, used in every seventh-grade life science textbook, about giraffes' long necks.  Why do they have these outlandish proportions?

So they can reach food higher up in trees, of course.

The subtle error here is that it implies that a bunch of short-necked giraffes were standing around on the African savanna, looking longingly up at the tempting foliage higher up, and one said, "Dude.  It'd be nice if we could reach higher, don't you think?"  And another said, "Well, we're kinda screwed, because we're short.  But if we had longer-necked kids, that'd be cool, yeah?"

The other giraffes agreed, and lo, they had long-necked kids.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Universalwin1222, Lamarckian inheritance- Giraffes, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Okay, I'm oversimplifying, here, but the gist is correct.  The assumption of goal-orientation puts the cart before the horse; that there was some sort of end product evolution had in mind, so organisms headed that way.  Of course, the truth is both simpler and more complex.  What Darwin actually said was that organisms vary from some other cause (being pre-Mendel, he didn't know about genes and mutations), and the environment selects the ones that work the best.  The others die off, taking their deleterious genes with them.

No goal necessary.

The ultimate in goal-orientation, of course, is strict creationism, which posits a designer who created everything as it currently is.  The immediate problem with this -- besides the fact that there's no evidence for it whatsoever -- is that there are a lot of things that seem, well, poorly designed.  The creationists are fond of trotting out some examples of complex structures that work pretty well (such as the eye) and conveniently ignore some examples of seriously poor design (such as the male urinary/reproductive system, which routes the urethra through the prostate gland, making a lot of older guys seriously unhappy).

All of this goal-orientation is known to philosophers as "teleological thinking" -- the attribution of a final cause or goal in natural processes.  And just last week, a paper came out of some research in France that suggests teleological thinking as a commonality between creationism... and conspiracy theories.

The study, done by Pascal Wagner-Egger, Sylvain Delouvée, Nicolas Gauvrit, and Sebastian Dieguez, found an interesting set of correspondences:

Although teleological thinking has long been banned from scientific reasoning, it persists in childhood cognition, as well as in adult intuitions and beliefs.  Noting similarities between creationism (the belief that life on Earth was purposefully created by a supernatural agent) and conspiracism, we sought to investigate whether teleological thinking could underlie and associate both types of beliefs. First, we sought to establish whether teleological thinking, classically associated with creationism, was also related to conspiracist beliefs. College students filled a questionnaire including teleological claims and conspiracist statements, as well as measures of analytical thinking, esoteric and magical beliefs, and a randomness perception task.  Promiscuous teleology — the tendency to ascribe function and a final cause to nonintentional natural facts and events — was significantly... correlated with conspiracist beliefs scales.  In addition, teleological thinking was negatively related to analytical thinking, and positively to esoteric beliefs, which in turn were both related to acceptance of conspiracist beliefs.

The results are perhaps not terribly surprising, although I don't know if anyone previously has linked them this way.  Both creationism and conspiracy theories imply a belief in a Grand Plan -- benevolent in the case of creationism, malevolent in the case of conspiracy theories.  Adherents to either tend to be repelled by the idea of chaos, that things just happen because they happen.  (Thus "even when bad things happen, God has a plan" from the former, and the steadfast refusal by the latter to believe that any unpleasant event might just be random bad luck.)

I'd add one more piece to this, however, and that's the determination by both to avoid or explain away facts that contradict their favorite model of how the universe works.  Of course, that unites them with some other groups that aren't necessarily thinking teleologically, such as the anti-vaxxers.

Although the anti-vaxxers tend to believe that there's a huge coverup by "Big Pharma" of the horrific side effects of vaccination, so maybe there's some overlap there, too.

Anyhow, I thought the whole thing was interesting.  And it does bear mention that the students who are the most repelled by evolution for non-religious reasons tend to be the ones who hate the idea that so much of the world could be the result of randomness.  How can the biodiversity on the Earth, with all of its "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful" (to quote Darwin), be produced by chance mutations?

Of course, the universe is not compelled to be organized in such a way that it makes you comfortable.  The evidence is very much in favor of the idea that mutations plus selection have generated all of the life forms you see around you.  And since selection is a "whatever works" sort of process, it's unsurprising that sometimes it creates designs of dubious logic -- such as the urethra/prostate situation I mentioned above, which a friend of mine calls "routing a sewer pipe through a playground."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and especially for you pet owners: Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  In this short book, the famous Austrian behavioral scientist looks at how domestic dogs interact, both with each other and with their human owners.  Some of his conjectures about dog ancestry have been superseded by recent DNA studies, but his behavioral analyses are spot-on -- and will leaving you thinking more than once, "Wow.  I've seen Rex do that, and always wondered why."

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Foot bath cure

A few months ago, I wrote a post about a guy who claimed that all you need to do to purge your home of "negative energies" (whatever those are) is to place a glass of vinegar and salt on your windowsill.  Vinegar, which clearly has magical properties, will then de-negativize you and your house.

The whole thing made me wonder why you couldn't achieve the same effect with, say, a jar of pickles.

Anyhow, a couple of days ago, a good friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link with the note, "Hey!  Here's something else you can do with vinegar!  I thought you'd want to know."

So I clicked the link, and was brought to the site Delishist, specifically to an article called "Soak Your Feet in Vinegar Once a Week, and You Will See How All of Your Diseases Disappear."

I am not, for the record, making the name of this article up.

My first thought, of course, was, "All your diseases?  Like, if you have a brain tumor and Parkinson's disease and narcolepsy simultaneously, you can get rid of all of them by soaking your feet in vinegar?  That can't possibly be what they mean."

But yes, that is in fact what they mean.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sander van der Wel from Netherlands, (391-365) Relaxing in bath (6427571119), CC BY-SA 2.0]

It will at this point be unsurprising to any of you that the whole thing revolves around "toxins."  What these specific toxins are, we're never told.  Maybe it's elemental mercury.  Maybe it's DDT.  Maybe it's battery acid.  Maybe it's all three at once.  In any case, we're led to believe that whatever they are, they're bad, and not only can't your body get rid of them by itself, there's no way to take them out except through your feet.

Which seems to me a little odd.  Why the feet?  Could I, if I wanted to, soak my ass in vinegar?  (Let me state for the record that I don't want to.  But my question stands.)  I mean, the human ass is much more directly connected to the process of getting rid of stuff we don't want in our body, although to be fair, the gluteus maximus muscle that makes up most of it has very little to do with it.

So I'm baffled as to why the feet are what we should be soaking.  Maybe it's because the feet are generally below the head, and toxins are heavy, or something.

In any case, here's how the authors explains the process:

You can also use ionic foot bath to detoxify your body from toxins.  This bath is based on electrolysis, which is a method that uses electrical current to make a chemical reaction.  You should use warm water to open your pores and salt is used as an anti-inflammatory astringent. Ions are absorbed through the feet and your body is getting a detox.  If the salt water becomes dark, that means you are eliminating toxins from your body.

Okay, so the basic principle is ions = good, and toxins = bad.  Got it.

But what about ions that are toxic?  Like the cyanide ion, for example?  I don't care what Delishist says, I'm not soaking my feet in cyanide.

And they're right about the definition of electrolysis, but the problem is, combining it with a vinegar foot bath would be a seriously bad idea.  Another thing I'm not going to do is stand in a tub of vinegar and then run an electric current through it and/or me.  Yes, it'd generate some serious ionage.  The downside, however, is called "electrocution."

The website also suggests soaking in a bath to which you've added ginger and hydrogen peroxide.  This is yet another thing I'm not going to do.  First of all, wouldn't that bleach your pubic hair?  I mean, it's fine if that's the look you're after, but I thought I'd mention it.  Another, and more serious, problem is that hydrogen peroxide works as an antiseptic because it kills nearly everything it touches, and given long enough, that would include your skin.  I know a guy who used peroxide on a cut, but it stayed open, and he decided it was infected, so he kept applying more and more peroxide.  Within a week he'd turned a minor cut into a gaping wound -- not from infection, but because he was putting something on it that was killing his own tissue.  So applying peroxide to my entire body, including my sensitive bits, sounds to me like a seriously bad idea.

So thanks anyhow, but I'll pass on soaking my feet in vinegar.  I find that washing them periodically keeps them relatively clean, and as for "getting rid of toxins," my liver and kidneys are perfectly capable of that.  My advice is to go back to using vinegar for making pickles, because a lot of the other stuff it's supposed to be good for is USDA Grade-A horseshit.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and especially for you pet owners: Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  In this short book, the famous Austrian behavioral scientist looks at how domestic dogs interact, both with each other and with their human owners.  Some of his conjectures about dog ancestry have been superseded by recent DNA studies, but his behavioral analyses are spot-on -- and will leaving you thinking more than once, "Wow.  I've seen Rex do that, and always wondered why."

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

The problem with tradition

It is a frequent source of bafflement to me that so many people don't change what they do when confronted with incontrovertible evidence that there's a better way.

Sad to say, the educational establishment is one of the worst in this regard.  For example, it's been known (or at least, strongly supported) that a person's facility for learning a second language drops off significantly after puberty since 1967, when the research of linguist and neuroscientist Eric Lenneberg showed that the brain's plasticity with regard to language more or less goes away after age 12.  So for fifty years we've been pretty certain that the way to create bilinguals is by early immersion programs -- kindergarten or (better) preschool.

But how do we do it, fifty years later?  In my school district, which is forward-thinking in a lot of respects, we start teaching foreign language in grade seven.  I.e., we wait until the point that the human brain becomes really bad at it to start doing it.

When I tell my neuroscience students about this -- that if they had been put in an immersion program at age two, they could now speak whatever language they wanted, fluently, without once memorizing a conjugation table or vocabulary list -- they are pissed.

"Then why do we still do it this way?" they ask.

Good question.  "'Cuz it's the way we've always done it," is about the best I can do.  Which has got to be the crappiest justification for anything I can think of.

So my expectation is that the recent research done by Ethan Bernstein, Jesse Shore, and David Lazer, of (respectively) Harvard, Boston University, and Northeastern University, is going to impress a lot of people and have zero cumulative effect on how we approach anything.

Their paper, released last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is called "How Intermittent Breaks in Interaction Improve Collective Intelligence," and it proposes a novel approach to problem-solving: giving people a chance to work together interspersed with solitary work periods enhances the quality of solutions generated.

It's kind of counter to how we've been taught to work, isn't it?  In school, we're mostly instructed to work alone, that working together is "cheating."  The emphasis is on solitary work... except for very controlled situations of "cooperative learning" that are all too often exercises in frustration for the best students, because the individuals who are the most concerned about learning the concepts or getting good grades (or, hopefully, both) are highly motivated to do the lion's share of the work, while the less-engaged students have no particular incentive to do more than the bare minimum.  If I can think of a single teaching strategy that I have heard more students rail against than any other, it's "cooperative learning."  I can't tell you how many times I've heard kids say, "I'd rather just do it myself and get my grade rather than doing it myself and then giving my grade to five other students who sat on their asses the entire time."

But if you want true creative problem-solving, the Bernstein et al. study suggests, having people work alone isn't the best way to do it.  Neither is the throw-them-together-for-hours, let's-beat-the-problem-to-death approach.  It works best to have them work together for a while, divide up the task -- then reconvene to compare notes and integrate what each of them has accomplished, evaluate it, see what else needs to be done... and repeat as many times as needed.  The researchers write:

People influence each other when they interact to solve problems.  Such social influence introduces both benefits (higher average solution quality due to exploitation of existing answers through social learning) and costs (lower maximum solution quality due to a reduction in individual exploration for novel answers) relative to independent problem solving.  In contrast to prior work, which has focused on how the presence and network structure of social influence affect performance, here we investigate the effects of time.  We show that when social influence is intermittent it provides the benefits of constant social influence without the costs...  Groups in the intermittent social-influence treatment found... optimum solution[s] frequently (like groups without influence) but had a high mean performance (like groups with constant influence); they learned from each other, while maintaining a high level of exploration.  Solutions improved most on rounds with social influence after a period of separation.

Even before reading this study, it's the approach I've recommended for years to my AP Biology students for writing up labs.  Each of the labs we do is focused around a single question, often one that is simple to ask but not so simple to answer.  For example, our first lab approaches the question of enzyme reaction rate.  In every introductory biology class, you learn that enzymes speed up chemical reactions.  Our first AP lab asks the question, "By what factor?"  Does a typical enzyme double the rate of a reaction?  Make it go ten times faster?  A hundred times?  A thousand?

The lab procedure is designed to give the students enough data to answer the question, but getting from the raw data to a defensible answer isn't simple.  So my students work in teams, and I recommend to them that they break the task up -- one member of the team does the calculations and graphs, one writes up the procedure, one organizes the data into tables or charts, and so on.  Then they should get together, and look at what they've got, and see if they can solve the problem -- use their work to come up with an answer as a team that they can then defend.

The problem is, there's no way I can mandate this approach, and I'm afraid that some groups still end up with one or two students doing pretty much all the work, and the others going along for the ride (and because of that, not really learning much from the experience).  I simply don't have the time to have them do the lab write-ups during class, so I can't supervise them and make sure they're working on it consistently and fairly.  But I know from experience -- and the Bernstein et al. paper supports this conclusion -- that they clearly learn the most if that's how they approach the task.

And the paper also has implications for the corporate world.  In problem-solving on the job, it would improve solution quality to use a hybrid approach of teamwork and solitary work.

You have to wonder why people don't look at something like this and think, "Let's at least try this and see if it works."  But habit and laziness keep us doing the same thing over and over, even when it's been demonstrated (over and over) that what we're doing doesn't work, or at least isn't optimal.

Maybe after 31 years of teaching, I'm getting cynical.  I hope that's not true, but I have to admit my first thought on reading this was, "Wow!  Cool!  This won't change anything!"  I seriously hope I'm wrong about that.  Because there's a lot of truth to the old adage that if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and especially for you pet owners: Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  In this short book, the famous Austrian behavioral scientist looks at how domestic dogs interact, both with each other and with their human owners.  Some of his conjectures about dog ancestry have been superseded by recent DNA studies, but his behavioral analyses are spot-on -- and will leaving you thinking more than once, "Wow.  I've seen Rex do that, and always wondered why."

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Truth and non-truth

If there's one thing that could be a microcosm of the current administration, it was a short exchange yesterday between Rudy Giuliani and Chuck Todd on NBC's Meet the Press.

Giuliani, who is acting as Donald Trump's lawyer, said, "When you tell me that, you know, [Trump] should testify because he’s going to tell the truth and he shouldn’t worry, well that’s so silly because it’s somebody’s version of the truth.  Not the truth."

Todd replied, "Truth is truth."

You'd think Giuliani at this point would say, "That's not what I meant," or some other deflection, but no.  Amazingly, he replied, "No, no, it isn’t truth.  Truth isn’t truth.  The President of the United States says, 'I didn’t …'"

Todd, obviously shocked, said, "Truth isn't truth?"

Giuliani said, "No, no, no."

Lest you think Giuliani had an unguarded moment, or got cornered into misspeaking, this isn't the first time he's ventured into this territory.  Last week on CNN he took exception to Chris Cuomo's comment that "facts are not in the eye of the beholder."

"Yes, they are," Giuliani replied.  "Nowadays they are."

And in May, when Giuliani was being interviewed by the Washington Post on the topic of the Mueller investigation, he said, "They may have a different version of the truth than we have."

People have made fun of Giuliani over this -- in fact, yesterday Chuck Todd said about the "truth isn't truth" comment, "This is going to become a bad meme" -- but honestly, it encapsulates the Trump administration's entire approach.  Don't believe what anyone is telling you -- except me.  Doubt the facts and the fact-checkers.  

Hell, doubt your own eyes.  Trump himself said, just last month, "Stick with us.  Don't believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news...  What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening."

And the most frightening thing of all is that it's worked.  Last November, a CNN reporter interviewed a Trump supporter and asked about the allegations of collusion with Russia.  The man, Mark Lee, replied, "Let me tell you, if Jesus Christ got down off the cross and told me Trump is with Russia, I would tell him hold on a second, I need to check with the president if it’s true...  I love the guy."

Scared enough yet?  Let's add a quote from George Orwell's 1984 to bring the point home:

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.  It was their final, most essential command...  And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.  'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'

To me, the buffoonery and sideshow circus over Trump and his alleged dalliances with porn stars and prostitutes is completely irrelevant.  I don't honestly care who he has had sex with, or is having sex with now; it's between Melania and him.  (Although I do notice a crashing silence from a lot of the people who were apoplectic with self-righteous rage over Bill Clinton getting a blowjob from Monica Lewinsky.  Funny thing, that.)

And a lot of what he's accused of -- colluding with the Russians to skew elections, pandering to dictators, doing whatever it takes to use his position to fill his personal bank accounts -- okay, that's some pretty awful stuff.  But we've been through this kind of thing before.  Corruption in government is hardly a new thing; Watergate, Teapot Dome, the Whiskey Ring, JFK's use of his position to avoid consequences for his many affairs, Eisenhower's turning a blind eye to McCarthyism, the acceptance by more than one administration of the atrocities of dictators as long as they were pro-US -- government is not a clean affair at the best of times.

But this is a qualitatively different thing.  This is a president who can stand there and say one thing one day, the opposite the next -- and his spokespeople say he was right both times.

And his followers believe them.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Paterm, Big Brother graffiti in France 2, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The fallout from scandals can take a while to clean up.  I was only twelve when the Watergate coverup was revealed, and I remember how it completely dominated the news, almost to the exclusion of everything else, for what seemed like years afterward.

But how do you fix this?  Orwell was right; once you convince people that everyone else is lying to them -- using state-controlled media (Fox News, anyone?) as the mouthpiece -- you can shortly thereafter have them believing that up is down and left is right.  They're effectively insulated from reality.  Much fun has been made of the whole "fake news" thing, but I'm not laughing; it's the scariest thing of all, and more so because the media themselves are complicit in it.  They played right into Trump's hands during the election, reporting every damnfool thing he said and every outrageous claim he made, because it got them viewers (and Trump, of course, ate it up; he lives for being in the spotlight, even if it's for saying something idiotic).  Skewed stories and biased reporting on both sides?  No problem as long as it kept people from changing the channel.

But the viewers weren't watching because they were laughing.  They were watching because they believed.  And so when Trump got elected, and then said that the media itself was lying, that the only ones who could be trusted were the ones who said Trump was the sole arbiter of truth, his followers turned against the media without a second thought.

Reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.  It is the final, most essential command.

The only possible response sane people can have is to demand the truth.  Not just from our leaders,  but from the media, from political spokespeople... and from each other.  People like Giuliani should be laughed out of the building for saying things like "truth isn't truth," and should thereafter be denied the opportunity for subsequent interviews.  He's destroyed his own credibility; why should we listen further?

Same goes for Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne "Alternative Facts" Conway.  They've established their propensity for lying without shame.  Done.  They've lost their spot on the stage.

Of course, I don't really think that's going to happen, any more than the media shut off the microphones once it was established early in the election season that Donald Trump is constitutionally incapable of telling the truth.  But maybe if we stop tolerating lies -- if we start turning off the media that supports these people, and demanding fair, fact-based reporting -- that will get their attention.

To end with another quote from Orwell: "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and especially for you pet owners: Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  In this short book, the famous Austrian behavioral scientist looks at how domestic dogs interact, both with each other and with their human owners.  Some of his conjectures about dog ancestry have been superseded by recent DNA studies, but his behavioral analyses are spot-on -- and will leaving you thinking more than once, "Wow.  I've seen Rex do that, and always wondered why."

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Waterworks

Thanks to a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, I now know that apparently there is a growing number of people who believe that water is not H2O.

Unsurprisingly, if you created a Venn diagram between these people and the people who believe the Earth is flat, there'd be a large overlap.  So not only have the scientists been lying to us about the shape of the Earth, they've been lying to us about the nature of water.  Who knows what else they've been telling us that's wrong?  Maybe DNA is actually made of tiny bendy-straws.  Maybe the stars are  fireflies that landed on the hemispherical glass sky-dome that covers the (flat) Earth.  Maybe our brains actually aren't neural tissue, but a couple of pounds of banana pudding with crushed vanilla wafers mixed in.

I know that's what my brain feels like at the moment.

Note for the record that I am not here addressing a philosophical argument that was in vogue a few years ago about the "nature of water," that contended (with some justification) that because an individual H2O molecule did not have the properties we associate with water -- clarity, wetness, ability to dissolve stuff, and so on -- that H2O was, in fact, not water.  And that some things we call water (e.g. ocean water) are not pure H2O.

That was a discussion about how we use words, which is an important enough topic, although sometimes it gets pushed far enough that it seems to me to be no different than arguing about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.  Which, I suppose, explains why I went into science and not philosophy.

Nor am I talking about hair-splitters who say that even pure water isn't pure H2O -- that in a glass of pure water, some of the molecules are dissociated into H+ (more correctly, H3O+) and OH- ions.  I call them "hair-splitters" because under ordinary conditions, out of every 10,000,000 molecules of water, 9,999,999 of them are in the form of H2O and 1 is in the form of H+/OH-.  (Which, for science-minded types, directly leads to why the pH of pure water is 7, something I could explain further if anyone's interested.)

But no, what I'm referring to here is the people who think that water molecules are not H2O.  In one example the loyal reader sent me -- and one is about all I can stand to look at in detail -- the person argues that water can't be H2O, it actually is O2.

Yes, diatomic oxygen, like the stuff that makes up 20% of the air we're breathing.  So if he was right, we could breathe underwater, which would be pretty fucking cool, but which I clearly refuted fifteen years ago when I nearly drowned in a scuba accident.  I can say from personal experience that what I was attempting to breathe was not oxygen.

Here's a small sample of the argument the person gives, if I can dignify it by that name.  Grammar and spelling has been left as-is, because you can only write [sic] so many times.

[W]ater, as oxygen molecule, is only formed by two oxygen atoms. We think the difference between water and oxygen molecules must be found at the different phase of variation of the intersected gravitational fields that creates their different electrical configurations and spatial symmetries. 

For us each material mass has its own gravitational field that vary – expands and contracts – with a specific frequency. When two gravitational fields – from two oxygen masses, by example – intersect, they create in their mutual intersection some new fields with different motions and pressures that are currently known as “chemical bonds”. 

I used above the term “mass” and non “atom” because here we are thinking about a different model of “atom”. For us material masses do not have electrical charges inside of them. Electrical charges for us are consequences of intersections of at least two gravitational fields that vary with the same or opposite phase. So, we think about electrical charges like fields that moves and create different pressures inside them... 

In our perspective water molecules do not have Hydrogen atoms. They only have 2 Oxygens. So we think that for transforming water molecules into Oxygen molecules and oxygen molecules into water molecules it is only necessary to change the phase of variation of one of their intersected gravitational fields to make equal or opposite.

Right!  Sure!  What?

To go through the scientific inaccuracies here would take me all day, but let me start out with the most egregious: nothing about the interaction between two molecules, or the atoms within a molecule, has the least thing to do with gravity.  Gravity is (by far) the weakest of the four fundamental forces.  If you compare gravity to electromagnetism -- which is the force that holds molecules together -- electromagnetism is 10 ^36 times stronger.

That's 1 followed by 36 zeroes, folks.

The only reason gravity seems so strong to us is that we're comparing things to the gravitational pull of the Earth, and the Earth is freakin' huge.  On the scale of molecules, gravitational interaction is so small that it is, for all practical purposes, zero.

The other thing that bears mention is that you can demonstrate that water is proportionally composed of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen by the simple experiment performed back in 1976 by me and my lab partner John in high school chemistry, namely running an electric current through water to break it up and collecting the gases in two separate test tubes.  You can show they're not the same by inserting a lighted wooden splint into the two tubes -- the one with the hydrogen will give a musical little "pop" as the hydrogen around the mouth of the tube ignites with the oxygen in the air; the one with the oxygen will begin to burn merrily.

Or, you can do what John did, which was to bubble the hydrogen gas into the oxygen tube, and then insert the lighted splint.  The result was:

BANG

... as the two gases, in exactly the right proportions, combusted back into water.  This left John holding the remains of a broken test tube, wearing a terrified expression, with his eyebrows singed off and his hair blown back in the fashion of a Looney Tunes character who has just had a gun fired directly into his face.

It also bears mention that this is the same reaction that did this:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

So the weight of the evidence is very much in favor of water being dihydrogen monoxide.  Just as well; rewriting all those textbooks would be a serious pain in the ass.

It's unsurprising, as I mentioned, that many of the Water-Is-Actually-Oxygen people are also The-Earth-Is-Flat people.  Once you've decided that (1) evidence and logic are inadmissible for determining the truth, and (2) all the experts are lying to you for their own nefarious purposes, the jig is up.

Now, I need to go have another cup of coffee, and see if I can reconfigure the banana pudding in my head back into neural tissue.  The vanilla wafer crumbs are making the inside of my skull itch.

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I picked this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation because of the devastating, and record-breaking, fires currently sweeping across the American west.  Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers is one of the most cogent arguments I've ever seen for the reality of climate change and what it might ultimately mean for the long-term habitability of planet Earth.  Flannery analyzes all the evidence available, building what would be an airtight case -- if it weren't for the fact that the economic implications have mobilized the corporate world to mount a disinformation campaign that, so far, seems to be working.  It's an eye-opening -- and essential -- read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]