Skeptophilia

Wednesday, February 6, 2019

You can't win, you can't break even

It's bad enough when laypeople misuse scientific terms and are too damn lazy even to read the Wikipedia pages on scientific topics. What's absolutely maddening is when a science publication does the same thing.

I'm referring to New Scientist, which is no fly-by-night pay-to-play predatory journal, and should surely know better. It's been around since 1956 and bills itself as the home of cutting-edge research, never shying away from a controversial topic -- but that's no reason to give unwarranted legitimacy to nonsense.

Of course, this isn't the first time they've pulled this sort of crap. A sensationalized article about the now-discredited "EM Drive" (a thruster that requires no propellant) drew condemnation from a number of sources, leading then-editor Jeremy Webb to state in defense, "this is an ideas magazine—that means writing about hypotheses as well as theories."

That may well be, but "writing about hypotheses" is not the same thing as misrepresenting actual science. Which is what an article from last week by physicist Paul Davies, called "Life's Secret Ingredient: A Radical Theory About What Makes Things Alive" did, resulting in a lot of bad language and repeated face palms from yours truly.

Okay, let's look at the reasonable stuff first. It is honestly not simple to determine what we mean by "a living thing;" the various characteristics of life all have exceptions that are clearly considered living by most people (for example, the characteristic of "able to reproduce" is not found in hybrids like mules, and viruses are exceptions to just about the entire list). The article is basically a long summary of Davies's new book The Demon in the Machine, wherein he proposes that what makes something alive is not the "one or more cells, uses energy, responds to its environment," etc. that you learned in high school biology, but the presence of complex information.

In an interview with The Guardian, Davies explains more fully:

The basic hypothesis is this. We have fundamental laws of information that bring life into being from an incoherent mish-mash of chemicals. The remarkable properties we associate with life are not going to come about by accident... When you look at a living system, the way information is managed is very far from random. It will show patterns that could lead us to a definition of life. We talk about informational hallmarks and these might be used to identify life wherever we look for it in the universe.

So far so good. An interesting idea -- biological complexity as information. But then Davies says something that made me shout, "You're a physicist! You should know better than that!"

The fact is, on our current understanding, life is an enigma. Most strikingly, its organised, self-sustaining complexity seems to fly in the face of the most sacred law of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, which describes a universal tendency towards decay and disorder.

No. No no no no no.

Life doesn't in any sense "fly in the face" of the Second Law. The Second Law of Thermodynamics describes what happens in a closed system -- a system in which neither energy nor matter crosses the boundaries. Your organized, self-sustaining complexity would break down pretty damn fast if I turned you into a closed system. The fact is, what the Second Law says is that you can decrease entropy locally and temporarily if you meet two conditions: (1) there is a constant input of energy, and (2) the entropy decrease in the system is exceeded by the entropy increase somewhere else. For example, you have grown from a simple single cell into a highly complex multicellular organism by having a continuous input of energy from your food, but your extraction of that energy has disordered those food molecules completely -- far more than any increase in order in your body.

As my long-ago thermodynamics professor put it: "The First Law of Thermodynamics says you can't win. The Second Law says you can't break even, either."

I may seem to be overreacting, here, but this is one of the most common things I see on sites devoted to pseudoscientific "proof" that evolution is incorrect. The creation of ordered living things from a disorderly primordial soup, they say, is prohibited by the Second Law, so requires an Intelligent Designer. It's the same misunderstanding; complex macromolecules, and later cells, could be formed abiotically because there's a continuous energy source (the Sun). Turn that off, and things grind to a halt fast.

So my frustration here is that someone who is a trained scientist and an internationally-known writer should not be misrepresenting scientific law. Especially this one; the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics are some of the most extensively tested models in all of science, and there has never been a single exception found to either one. This is why patent applications for perpetual motion machines are thrown away by the United States Patent Office without review.

The Laws of Thermodynamics are strictly enforced in all jurisdictions.

Anyhow, that's today's annoyed rant. I probably should lighten up, or at least direct my ire toward other more deserving targets. Heaven knows there are enough of them in our own government. But really, if you can't count on the scientists to represent things correctly, who can you count on?

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Humans have a morbid fascination with things that are big and powerful and can kill you. Look at the number of movies made and books written about tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanoes, not to mention hordes of predatory dinosaurs picking people off the streets. But in the "horrifically dangerous" category, nothing can beat black holes -- collapsed stars with a gravitational field so strong not even light can escape. If you fell into one of these things, you'd get "spaghettified" -- stretched by tidal forces into a long, thin streamer of goo -- and every trace of you would be destroyed so thoroughly that they'd not even be theoretically possible to retrieve.

Add to that the fact that because light can't escape them, you can't even see them. Kind of makes a pack of velociraptors seem tame by comparison, doesn't it?

So no wonder there are astrophysicists who have devoted their lives to studying these beasts. One of these is Shep Doeleman, whose determination to understand the strangest objects in the universe is the subject of Seth Fletcher's wonderful book Einstein's Shadow: A Black Hole, a Band of Astronomers, and the Quest to See the Unseeable. It's not comfortable reading -- when you realize how completely insignificant we are on the scale of the universe, it's considerably humbling -- but it'll leave you in awe of how magnificent, how strange, and how beautiful the cosmos is, and amaze you that the human brain is capable of comprehending it.

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

Tuesday, February 5, 2019

Dyatlov revisited

Seven years ago, I wrote a post here at Skeptophilia about one of the most enduring mysteries of the twentieth century -- the deaths of nine hikers in the Ural Mountains in 1959, at a spot that later was named after the leader of the nine -- Igor Dyatlov.

The "Dyatlov Pass Incident" has all the hallmarks of an episode of The X Files. The nine hikers set out in late January, almost exactly sixty years ago, with no inkling of what would happen. When the group still hadn't showed up by the end of February, a good two weeks after their projected return date, a rescue team was sent out.

What they found is nothing short of extraordinary. The members of the hiking group showed a variety of horrifying injuries, and a few had what looked like radiation burns. More than one had removed most of their clothing -- and then frozen to death. The tent they'd slept in was slit open, as if they were so desperate to get out they didn't even have time to unzip the flap. (There are more details on my original post, if you're curious.)

The upshot of it all is that it's never been definitively established what exactly happened. The more prosaic explanations, for example that the hikers stumbled onto a Cold War Russian weapons test, have been categorically denied by the Russian government. (At which point the conspiracy theorists waggle their eyebrows significantly and say, "Of course they denied it.") The more out-there explanations include an attack from the Ural version of the Abominable Snowman and/or aliens.

The reason this all comes up is not just because just last week we passed the sixtieth anniversary of the Dyatlov team's departure, but because of a surprise announcement by the Russian government that they're reopening an investigation into the incident. Aleksandr Kurennoy, the official spokesperson of the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation, released a statement on the Efir Internet channel regarding the resumption of the case. "Our goal is to establish which of the 75 existing theories could be confirmed by reliable evidence," Kurennoy said. "Between March 10-20, employees of the Sverdlovsk Region Prosecutor's Office will fly to the site of the incident together with geodesy experts and employees of the Emergencies Ministry. The procedural deadlines have expired for all the other competent bodies, but this is not the case with prosecution agencies. Apart from that, a new law has come into force that authorizes the prosecution to commission special expert evaluations as part of a probe."

I'm a little surprised about this in a couple of respects. For one thing, the Russian government is not exactly well known for transparency, and it's odd that they want an investigation into a mystery where one of the possible solutions is shady dealings by the Russian government itself. It's entirely possible, of course, that they'll release a report that makes them look good regardless what they find, although it does bring up the question of why they'd stir things up in the first place. Seems like letting sleeping dogs lie would be the more prudent course.

Second, though, is what on Earth they could hope to find now, sixty years after the incident occurred. There wasn't that much evidence to start with; in fact, the bodies of four of the nine were only recovered during the spring thaw when May came. Heading out into a snow-covered wilderness, six decades after the fact, is unlikely to uncover anything new one way or the other.

So the whole thing is more than a little puzzling. As much as I'd like to know what happened at Dyatlov Pass in the winter of 1959, my hunch is that we probably will never know enough to make a certain determination. What's clear, though, is that this has renewed interest in the incident, especially amongst the conspiracy theorists, who are hoping like hell to get more fuel for their various fires.

Which they'll probably claim no matter what the Russians find.

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Add to that the fact that because light can't escape them, you can't even see them. Kind of makes a pack of velociraptors seem tame by comparison, doesn't it?

Monday, February 4, 2019

Ruby slippers and tachyon energy

One of the most frustrating types of woo-woo belief is the kind that is out of the reach of any sort of experimental testing. Fortunately, it's a rare thing; most odd, unsupported claims are at least theoretically accessible to controlled scientific investigation. Psychics, mediums, dowsing, aura manipulation, homeopathy, astrology, cryptozoology... all of those have been the subjects of scrutiny by actual scientists using the lens of experimentation (and all, by the way, have failed thus far to generate any results that would be convincing to a skeptic).

But a claim that is inherently untestable isn't common, and that's including if you throw in religious belief. I mean, even the creation and "great flood" stories from Christian myth can be analyzed on the basis of evidence. So it takes a special talent at woo-woo thinking to devise something that you couldn't test experimentally even if you wanted to.

I ran into a good example of this yesterday on a website sent by one of my loyal readers, a page on the website School of Awakening entitled, "Tachyon." At first, it would seem that they're just using the word "tachyon" to mean the same old tired "life force energy vibrational frequencies" you see on so many woo-woo websites:

Tachyon, a Greek word meaning ‘swift’, was coined by physicist in the 1960’s to describe a faster than light particle which according to physics is “beyond velocity, omni-present, carries 100% potential of all form, beyond time, eternal, and formless.” Tachyon is considered by quantum physics to be the ‘messenger’ of the Zero Point Field, which is what people commonly think of as ‘source.’ Both the Zero Point Field and Tachyon have a ‘negative entropy’ effect, which translates as; bringing order out of chaos. Entropy is the process of decay and dying. Negative entropy is life in a state of rejuvenation and renewal.

Interesting that they start out, as so many woo-woos do, by borrowing terms from theoretical physics. The word tachyon was coined in 1967 by physicist Gerald Feinberg to describe a hypothetical particle that travels always faster than light and therefore breaks the laws of causality (i.e., if it existed, you could use it to send signals into your own past). Most scientists consider the tachyon only an interesting fiction -- no evidence for its existence has ever been found, and there are a great many compelling arguments against it.

But that doesn't stop the School of Awakening people:

Tachyon, being a non-frequency type of healing method, cannot push our bodies out of balance. ["Tachyonization" inventor] David Wagner tells us that our bodies absorb this rejuvenating source energy, turn it into the physical frequency we need, and only take in as much as is needed in that moment. It is the body’s own intelligence which determines the amount of Tachyon we absorb.

So all of this sounds awfully nice. An anti-entropy, age-reversing medication you can't take too much of because your body's intelligence tells you exactly how much to absorb.

Then they tell you about some "tachyonized" products they're selling that can bring "tachyons" into the water and food you consume, or even directly into your body:

The Tachyonized™ products which David Wagner manufactures at his factory go through his machines in a process which takes 14 days to complete. At the end of this time, they have become permanent Tachyon antennae and can be used on, in or around the body and the environment to maximize regeneration and wellness. See Tachyon Products and see Tachyon Vortex Pendants for information on the tachyon pendants available to people who have attended tachyon training workshops.

This, then, causes changes in an energetic system that everything in the universe can detect and interact with... except for humans (presumably because we're just kind of dumb):

All energy systems, except humans, are connected vertically with the Source and HIS/HER inexhaustible flow of universal life force energy, maintaining what we call the energetic continuum... This structure we find with all life forms as a basic energetic matrix, which keeps our entire universe interconnected.

And we're given a list of positive results that will occur from all of this hocus-pocus:

Dissolve pain
Reduce stress
Harmonizing and re-opening of the chakras
Balancing harmful electromagnetic waves from computer and mobile phone use
Bring wellness and youthing to the body
Optimise sports performance
Charge water with life enhancing energy
Raise consciousness

Now, so far, how is this different from any other woo-woo nonsense out there? Wouldn't this still fall into the realm of the testable? The answer is no, and here's the really clever bit that sets them apart from your run-of-the-mill purveyor of pseudoscience:

A human system naturally goes through cycles of order and chaos on its path of evolution. When it is unable to adapt to more stress in its life the crisis comes to a peak. This is called a Bifurcation point.

At this point the body will either go into chaos (begin manifesting an illness which may have been latent for years), or it will move to better health. Using Tachyon will speed the energetic blockage to a bifurcation point and transform the problem, which may bring insights or understanding of the underlying cause.

See what they did, there? You're supposed to buy all of the "tachyonized" crystals and disks and everything, because they (1) emit a particle that is inherently impossible to detect, which interacts with (2) an energy system in your body that is inherently impossible to detect, and that will result in (3) any physical conditions you have either getting better or worse depending on which path you needed to take at the "Bifurcation Point."

Oh, but by all means, you should buy the crystals and disks and all. They have case studies. They have testimonials. All you have to do, apparently, is believe, and you can return to Kansas any time you want.

What bugs me here is that there are people with legitimate medical conditions who are being suckered by hucksters like this, and who aren't going to get the treatments they need because they would rather waste their money being "tachyonized." And in some sense, the people who are convinced by these snake oil salesmen are gullible enough that they have no one to blame but themselves if they get fooled.

But part of me still gets angry. Getting rich off of people who don't understand how science works, who are swayed by big words and subtle pretzel logic, just isn't nice. I know that there is no way to stop them; they've been too clever at crafting their argument so that it is experimentally irrefutable. Staying with The Wizard of Oz theme, some days it'd just be nice if there was a skeptic's version to the Flying Monkeys, that could just... take care of things for me.

But honestly, I suppose that isn't nice, either.

The only answer, as always, is in getting people to understand how science works. So toward that end, I'd better wrap this up and go off to have my un-tachyonized coffee and take my slower-than-the-speed-of-light car to school, where I can hopefully do my part in immunizing my students against falling for this sort of unscientific bullshit.

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Add to that the fact that because light can't escape them, you can't even see them. Kind of makes a pack of velociraptors seem tame by comparison, doesn't it?

Saturday, February 2, 2019

Jungles in Antarctica

It's hard to imagine Antarctica as anything but a frozen wasteland. Bitterly cold even in summer, barely any precipitation (if it were warmer, Antarctica would be classified as a desert), much of the continent buried under a sheet of ice hundreds of feet thick. The central "dry valleys" of Antarctica were used as a proving ground for the Mars rovers -- because it was the place on Earth that's the most like Mars.

It's kind of cool that H. P. Lovecraft, writing early in the twentieth century, recognized that this icy and inhospitable land might not always have been that way. In one of his best short stories, "At the Mountains of Madness," we find out that the continent was once inhabited. And by "once," I mean tens of millions of years ago, long before Homo sapiens appeared on the African savanna. The denizens of the place -- the "Elder Things" -- were bizarre beasts with five-way symmetry and brains far more advanced than ours, and they built colossal edifices (invariably described as "eldritch") which, in the context of the story, are the subject of a scientific investigation.

And being that this is Lovecraft we're talking about, it did not end well.

Even more interesting is his story "The Shadow Out of Time," wherein we find out that the Elder Things amassed the information they have by using their eldritch (of course) technology to switch bodies -- they can flip their consciousness with a member of another sentient species anywhere in time and space, spend a year or two learning about the species and its culture, then flip back and write down what they found out. And pertinent to the current topic, Lovecraft describes the Elder Things as living in Antarctica a hundred million years ago, at which time the frozen continent was a warm, lush, humid jungle.

Lovecraft's prescience was shown when plate tectonics was discovered, twenty years after the author's death. Antarctica wasn't always centered at the South Pole, and in fact had drifted in that direction from somewhere far nearer to the equator. Fossils of temperate-climate organisms were found in abundance, indicating that the climate had shifted dramatically. And just last week, paleontologists working collaboratively between the University of Washington and the University of Witswatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa) published a paper about an Antarctic fossil archosaur -- a group related to the earliest dinosaurs -- from 250 million years ago.

"A Novel Archosauromorph From Antarctica and an Updated Review of a High-Latitude Vertebrate Assemblage in the Wake of the End-Permian Mass Extinction," by Brandon Peecook and Christian Sidor of the University of Washington and Roger Smith of the University of Witwatersrand, describes a new species and genus of dinosaurs -- Antarctanax shackletoni, touchingly named after Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, which was around in the very early Triassic. This puts it at the point where dinosaurs were just beginning to diversify following the largest mass extinction in Earth's history, wherein an estimated 95% of species died.

"This new animal was... an early relative of crocodiles and dinosaurs," said Brandon Peecook, lead study author and Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago) researcher. "On its own, it just looks a little like a lizard, but evolutionarily, it's one of the first members of that big group. It tells us how dinosaurs and their closest relatives evolved and spread."

The A. shackletoni fossil, from 250 million years ago

What's most interesting about it is how different it is from other archosaurs of the time. "The more we find out about prehistoric Antarctica, the weirder it is," Peecook said. "We thought that Antarctic animals would be similar to the ones that were living in southern Africa, since those landmasses were joined back then. But we're finding that Antarctica's wildlife is surprisingly unique."

As befits the strangeness of the continent itself. But it's a cool discovery nonetheless. I find it intriguing to picture what it was like in the distant past -- and the more we find out about it, the more we show the truth of the old adage that "there is nothing as constant as change." My imagination balks at thinking of Antarctica as a jungle, but we're finding that Lovecraft's imagined picture of the paleoclimate of the frozen continent was spot-on. I just hope he was wrong about the Elder Things and their pet Shoggoths. Because those things are freakin' creepy.

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In 1983, a horrific pair of murders of fifteen-year-old girls shook the quiet countryside of Leicestershire, England. Police investigations came up empty-handed, and in the interim, people who lived in the area were in fear that there was a psychopath in their midst.

A young geneticist from the University of Leicestershire, Alec Jeffreys, stepped up with what he said could catch the murderer -- a new (at the time) technique called DNA fingerprinting. He was able to extract a clear DNA signature from the bodies of the victims, but without a match -- without any one else's DNA to compare it to -- there was no way to use it to catch the criminal.

The way police and geneticists teamed up to catch an insane child killer is the subject of Joseph Wambaugh's book The Blooding. It is an Edgar Award nominee, and is impossible to put down. This case led to the now-commonplace use of DNA fingerprinting in forensics labs -- and its first application in a criminal trial makes for fascinating reading.

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

Friday, February 1, 2019

Going down with the ship

This past week I've been watching with frank bafflement as Donald Trump and his cronies try to steer their ship back into the harbor of evangelical Christianity, after a month that has been, all things considered, disastrous for this administration. A government shutdown accomplished nothing but losing a shitload of money, and ended with Trump receiving a big old dent in his "I'm a champion negotiator who always gets what he wants" persona. His support is dwindling in pretty much any demographic you choose, and one of his staunchest supporters -- Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell -- gave his own party an inadvertent punch in the balls a couple of days ago by admitting publicly that if it were easier for American citizens to vote, more Democrats would win.

In other words, his strategy for Republican victory is voter disenfranchisement.

All in all, it's been a tough month for the Right, so I suppose it's only natural they'd retreat toward a group who has been doggedly loyal -- the evangelical Christians. First we had a rather baffling non sequitur from Trump himself, that there were efforts in "many states" to have biblical literacy classes in public schools. "Starting to make a turn back?" he said on Twitter (of course). "Great!"

Then we had White House Spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders saying that God "wanted Donald Trump to become president." "I think he has done a tremendous job in supporting a lot of the things that people of faith really care about," Sanders said.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

As I said, on the one hand, this is a pretty logical strategy; the ship is foundering, so hitch it to the solidest thing you have handy. But on a deeper level, it's puzzling that anyone who claims to believe in the basic tenets of Christianity could still support Trump and his policies. The bible's kind of unequivocal on a few points, you know? Love thy neighbor as thyself. Care for the poor and oppressed. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

Then there's that awkward "judge not, lest ye be judged" part, most poignantly described in Matthew 7:5: "Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."

But more peculiar still is that the Religious Right continues to think that Trump is the next best thing to the Second Coming of Christ, despite his being a serial adulterer who lies every time his mouth is open and whose biggest claim to fame is embodying all Seven Deadly Sins in one person. The pastor of the church Trump at least nominally belongs to said last week, "I assure you, he had the ‘option’ to come to Bible study. He never ‘opted’ in. Nor did he ever actually enter the church doors. Not one time." So Trump's crowing about bible studies classes in public schools is kind of strange, especially considering that during the campaign in 2015 he said that the bible was his favorite book, but when pressed couldn't remember a single quotation from it.

I mean, hell, I'm an atheist and I'd have been able to come up with something on the fly. Maybe a verse from Two Corinthians, I dunno.

But Sarah Huckabee Sanders's comment is the one that bugs me the most, because it's obvious that she (and presumably a lot of other evangelicals) don't see what thin ice they're skating on when they start claiming to know the divine will. How does she know that God wanted Trump to win? Because he did, obviously. So I guess God also wanted Obama to win. Two terms, no less. Any time you say something's God's will simply because it happened, you're going to have some explaining to do. Did God intend the Holocaust? The Stalinist purges? The massacre of Native Americans by the European colonists? The Inquisition? Frankly, I'd be happier with a shrug of the shoulders and the response, "God works in mysterious ways" than I am hearing that God actually intended the horrible deaths of millions of innocent people at the hands of amoral monsters.

So I don't get how even people who buy the main tenets of Christianity can stand there and nod when Sarah Huckabee Sanders says she has a direct pipeline to the divine will. Or when evangelist Franklin Graham says that he can excuse the 8,100-plus documented, fact-checked lies that Donald Trump has uttered because "the president is trying to do the best that he can under very difficult circumstances."

If I didn't know better, I'd think that the Religious Right was callously and cynically supporting the Trump presidency because it achieves their ends -- pro-life legislation, eliminating equal rights for LGBTQ people, and ensuring the hegemony of white Christians -- and honestly don't give a rat's ass whether the president himself is Christian, or even moral.

I know it's presumptuous of me to try to parse the motives of a group whose beliefs I don't accept, but the whole thing still strikes me as baffling. I keep wondering when the Religious Right will finally say, "Enough with this guy already," but at this point, I don't think it's going to happen. I can't help but think that this strategy is going to backfire badly, and sooner rather than later. People are at some point going to wise up and start asking how they can support this administration and still claim to be the moral arbiters of the United States, notwithstanding any kind of mealy-mouthed "God can work with a broken tool" nonsense.

The evangelicals, I think, are in the unenviable position of having hitched their rowboat to the Titanic.

**********************************

In 1983, a horrific pair of murders of fifteen-year-old girls shook the quiet countryside of Leicestershire, England. Police investigations came up empty-handed, and in the interim, people who lived in the area were in fear that there was a psychopath in their midst.

A young geneticist from the University of Leicestershire, Alec Jeffreys, stepped up with what he said could catch the murderer -- a new (at the time) technique called DNA fingerprinting. He was able to extract a clear DNA signature from the bodies of the victims, but without a match -- without any one else's DNA to compare it to -- there was no way to use it to catch the criminal.

The way police and geneticists teamed up to catch an insane child killer is the subject of Joseph Wambaugh's book The Blooding. It is an Edgar Award nominee, and is impossible to put down. This case led to the now-commonplace use of DNA fingerprinting in forensics labs -- and its first application in a criminal trial makes for fascinating reading.

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

Thursday, January 31, 2019

Alien ranch sale

If you think you've got problems, at least you're not trying to get rid of a huge Arizona ranch at a $1.5 million loss because you're sick and tired of being attacked by aliens.

At least that's the claim of John Edmonds, whose land in Buckeye, Arizona, about an hour and a half from Phoenix, has (he says) been the site of a huge amount of extraterrestrial activity. He and his wife foiled an attempted kidnapping, and over the twenty years they've been there, he's killed eighteen "Grays."

With a samurai sword.

I'm torn between thinking this is idiotic and completely badass. I mean, if I knew I was under siege by hostile aliens, I'd probably arm myself with more than a sword. Especially if I lived in Arizona, where everyone over the age of two is packing heat. And you'd also think the aliens would be armed, wouldn't you? Laser pistols are a lot more accurate, long-range, than samurai swords, unless you're a Stormtrooper, in which case it probably doesn't matter either way.

What's oddest about the samurai sword thing is that the guy says he owns an AK-47, which he used to defend his family when the aliens tried to abduct his wife. She barely escaped -- "it came down like a cone of light," Edmonds says, "and she began to rise up in to the cone... So I grabbed my AK-47 with a double banana clip in it, went outside, and opened up." So apparently if your spouse is being levitated into the air by a tractor beam, the solution is to fire a gun in some random direction.

So why he doesn't use the AK-47 to defend himself against the aliens rather than a sword, I don't know. You may also be wondering why, if he's killed all those aliens, where the bodies are. I know I was. If I killed an alien (in self-defense, of course; in the interest of interstellar amity, if they Come In Peace, I'm more than happy to have them here), I'd definitely keep the body as evidence that I wasn't just a raving loon. Edmonds says that the bodies vanish, which sounds awfully convenient. He does have a photo in the video showing what he claims is alien blood from one of his kills, which makes me wonder why if the bodies disappear, the blood doesn't as well.

One of those extraterrestrial biological mysteries, I guess. But Edmonds goes on to say that you have to "cut off the head, and disconnect the antennae, or they instantly 'phone home' -- even with a razor-sharp sword, it's nearly impossible to decapitate them in one swing."

As far as why the aliens are targeting him, he says it's because his ranch is so large that it gives the aliens room to "open up portals... that are large enough for triangular crafts, wings, or orb-like shapes to pass through."

"These objects leave the space around the ranch, and other objects pass through the portals in the other direction," Edmonds adds.

Despite his success at fighting off the invaders, Edmonds hasn't come away unscathed. He says the Grays gave him scars (which you can see on the video I linked above), not to mention "symptoms like radiation poisoning." More troubling, though, is his claim that the previous owners "simply disappeared -- all their stuff was still in the house, leading to speculation that they were in fact abducted by extraterrestrials." So I guess it's understandable that he's fed up, although it does bring up the question of who sold him the ranch. He and his wife are selling, and are asking five million dollars for it -- a million and a half less than what he says it's valued at.

If I had the money, I'd definitely buy it. For one thing, I love Arizona and have always wanted to live in the desert. Especially now, when we're sitting here in upstate New York in the middle of the "polar vortex," and the current wind chill is -25 F. For another, I would love to have first-hand evidence of extraterrestrial life. I'd appreciate it if they wouldn't abduct my wife, though, because I kind of am attached to her, you know?

But hey, if they Come In Peace, they're welcome. I wouldn't even object if they wanted to take over the government. Couldn't be worse than what we currently have.

**********************************

In 1983, a horrific pair of murders of fifteen-year-old girls shook the quiet countryside of Leicestershire, England. Police investigations came up empty-handed, and in the interim, people who lived in the area were in fear that there was a psychopath in their midst.

A young geneticist from the University of Leicestershire, Alec Jeffreys, stepped up with what he said could catch the murderer -- a new (at the time) technique called DNA fingerprinting. He was able to extract a clear DNA signature from the bodies of the victims, but without a match -- without any one else's DNA to compare it to -- there was no way to use it to catch the criminal.

The way police and geneticists teamed up to catch an insane child killer is the subject of Joseph Wambaugh's book The Blooding. It is an Edgar Award nominee, and is impossible to put down. This case led to the now-commonplace use of DNA fingerprinting in forensics labs -- and its first application in a criminal trial makes for fascinating reading.

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

Wednesday, January 30, 2019

Miraculous mathematics

I've blogged before about "miraculous thinking" -- the idea that an unlikely occurrence somehow has to be a miracle simply based on its improbability. But yesterday I ran into a post on the wonderful site RationalWiki that showed, mathematically, why this is a silly stance.

Called "Littlewood's Law of Miracles," after British mathematician John Edensor Littlewood, the man who first codified it in this way, it goes something like this:

Let's say that a "miracle" is defined as something that has a likelihood of occurring of one in a million.
We are awake, aware, and engaged on the average about eight hours a day.
An event of some kind occurs about once a second. During the eight hours we are awake, aware, and engaged, this works out to 28,800 events per day, or just shy of a million events in an average month. (864,000, to be precise.)
The likelihood of observing a one-in-a-million event in a given month is therefore 1-(999,999/1,000,000)^1,000,000 , or about 0.63. In other words, we have better than 50/50 odds of observing a miracle next month!

Of course, this is some fairly goofy math, and makes some silly assumptions (one discrete event every second, for example, seems like a lot). But Littlewood does make a wonderful point; given that we're only defining post hoc the unlikeliness of an event that has already occurred, we can declare anything we want to be a miracle just based on how surprised we are that it happened. And, after all, if you want to throw statistics around, the likelihood of any event happening that has already happened is 100%.

So, like the Hallmark cards say, Miracles Do Happen. In fact, they're pretty much unavoidable.

Peter Paul Rubens, The Miracle of St. Ignatius (1617) [Image is in the Public Domain]

You hear this sort of thing all the time, though, don't you? A quick perusal of sites like Miracle Stories will give you dozens of examples of people who survived automobile accidents without a scratch, made recoveries from life-threatening conditions, were just "in the right place at the right time," and so on. And it's natural to sit up and take notice when these things happen; this is a built-in perceptual error called dart-thrower's bias. This fallacy is named after a thought experiment of being in a pub while there's a darts game going on across the room, and simply asking the question: when do you notice the game? When there's a bullseye, of course. The rest is just background noise. And when you think about it, it's very reasonable that we have this bias. After all, what has the greater evolutionary cost -- noticing the outliers when they're irrelevant, or not noticing the outliers when they are relevant? It's relatively obvious that if the unusual occurrence is a rustle in the grass, it's far better to pay attention to it when it's the wind than not to pay attention to it when it's a lion.

And of course, on the Miracle Stories webpage, no mention is made of all of the thousands of people who didn't seem to merit a miracle, and who died in the car crash, didn't recover from the illness, or were in the wrong place at the wrong time. That sort of thing just forms the unfortunate and tragic background noise to our existence -- and it is inevitable that it doesn't register with us in the same way.

So, we should expect miracles, and we are hardwired to pay more attention to them than we do to the 999,999 other run-of-the-mill occurrences that happen in a month. How do we escape from this perceptual error, then?

Well, the simple answer is that in some senses, we can't. It's understandable to be surprised by an anomalous event or an unusual pattern. (Think, for example, how astonished you'd be if you flipped a coin and got ten heads in a row. You'd probably think, "Wow, what's the likelihood?" -- but any other pattern of heads and tails, say, H-T-T-H-H-H-T-H-T-T -- has exactly the same probability of occurring. It's just that the first looks like a meaningful pattern, and the second one doesn't.) The solution, of course, is the same as the solution for just about everything; don't turn off your brain. It's okay to think, at first, "That was absolutely amazing! How can that be?", as long as afterwards we think, "Well, there are thousands of events going on around me right now that are of equally low probability, so honestly, it's not so weird after all."

All of this, by the way, is not meant to diminish your wonder at the complexity of the universe, just to direct that wonder at the right thing. The universe is beautiful, mysterious, and awe-inspiring. It is also, fortunately, understandable when viewed through the lens of science. And I think that's pretty cool -- even if no miracles occur today.