Awesomely-stupid Infomercials

I'm watching the Science channel, and I've seen a couple of hilarious commercials.

The first was for a quit-smoking device called Zerosmoke, which is a "gold-plated" magnet you wear on your ear. It uses "auricular" technology to release dopamine in your brain! The best was as they said that in the commercial, little sparkles went from the magnet to a brain, as if it were magic! Except instead of magic, it's bullshit.

The second was for an "ancient Japanese" detox system called Kinoki, it removes toxins through your feet, just like a tree! Because humans are just like trees! And there are lab tests to prove it, complete with bad chemicals! They did a study! This one had the typical laundry-list of complaints that modern medicine isn't good at solving but tend to respond well to placebos, you know: headaches, back pain, etc.

Actually that reminds me, there was another one too. This one was a table that flipped you upside down, to "decompress" your spine. It gets rid of all those things too (back pain, headaches, etc), and makes you feel young again!

I really wonder if anyone buys this crap. I guess they must, but it's mind-boggling. Especially since it's on the Science channel, you'd think that people who specifically seek out science would be less inclined to believe in bullshit. Oh well, at least it provides me with some humor.

There's Ghosts in them thar hills!

This is why people are so stupid. Or maybe I've got my cause-and-effect backwards, it's hard to say. Either way, CNN running a story about ghosts is just ridiculous.

Read the article, it's laughable. It's a totally credulous treatment of an idiotic topic, without a single skeptical word. Not to mention that the author is a professional ghost-buster. And this drivel is on a leading news site.

I've even heard of some kind of magic show, dedicated to charlatans peddling their idiocy.

It's a really depressing time to be a skeptic.

Religion, imaginary elves, and the Philippino judiciary

Via Denialism Blog I find this story about a judge in the Philippines who has three imaginary elf friends, and was fired for it. The entire thing is pretty funny (the people love him, and he's using his newfound influence with the media to try to get his job back), but this quote is simply the best:

Mr. Floro says he never consulted the invisible elves over judicial decisions and the fact that he puts faith in them should make no difference to his career. "It shouldn't matter what I believe in, whether it's Jesus, Muhammad, or Luis, Armand and Angel," he says in an interview.

That's exactly what I thought when I read the article. How is this any worse than a judge who consults Jesus about his decisions, and we know that they exist? I don't think it is at all, the only difference is that there's only one person who believes in the trinity of elves, and there are two billion who believe in the trinity of Christ. I'm not saying he should get his job back, I'm absolutely indifferent about what happens to him, but he doesn't seem any more crazy to me than any other religious believer. Of course he absolutely could be, but we don't know that he is for sure.

What's a little bit unsettling is how the public has rallied around him. Get a load of this:

The day after Mr. Floro's first appearance on television last year, hundreds of people turned up at his house in a dusty Manila suburb hoping he could use his supernatural powers to heal their illnesses. Now Mr. Floro, who travels by bus, is regularly recognized on the street.

I looked into it, and the Philippines has a similar education system to the US. Something must be going wrong if people think that a man who sees elves can cure them. I seriously wonder why people always think that they can be healed by magic, perhaps it's because all healing seems to be magic (think about how antibiotics quickly defeat infections, without any knowledge it seems like magic). Still, if this is the supernatural instinct that skeptics are fighting against, then we have one hell of a fight against us. Education is the key to defeating superstition, but it doesn't always work. People are believing machines, and I doubt we'll ever eradicate belief in stupid things.

But if you find belief in stupid things funny, please read the whole article. It includes one of the elves purging the corrupt judiciary. It's good stuff.

Why do cranks love Quantum Mechanics so much?

From a Bad Science post about homeopathy I found this interesting quote, from Peter Chappell.

"Modern quantum physics is confirming resonance works on all levels of existence."

First off, why do quacks love Quantum Mechanics so much, and why do people buy it? I guess it's developed this mythology as being completely unintelligible and mysterious, as well as complicated, bizarre, and counterintuitive. People are used to hearing about tunneling, the uncertainty principle, and other concepts that are perfectly comprehensible and mathematically precise, but they they don't understand. These things come down from high and seem to be magical, and so they get the feeling that QM is all about strange results that sound like magic. So when someone selling snake-oil that can only work by magic justifies it with QM, it just makes sense!

Besides all this, the people who actually understand quantum mechanics (physicists and determined intellectuals) are the kind of fuddy-duddies who just rain on parades, and no one listens to them anyway (incidentally, this is infuriating). So all these quacks can get away with peddling their bullshit and the people who can call them on it don't get listened to (besides Bad Science, is there any other weekly newspaper column dedicated to debunking bullshit? There's that Penn & Teller show, but that's all I know about).

Secondly, QM is all about the small. Its effects disappear on the large scale, otherwise it wouldn't be so weird. So how on earth could anyone make the statement that "resonance works on all levels"? You don't need to know anything about QM except that it works only on small scales, the most trivial thing to know about it, to debunk this ludicrous statement. But people fall for it. And this is without going into the rest of the statement, which is new-age word salad.

It's so depressing to see that crap like this actually works, that people are really that uneducated, uninformed, incurious, and gullible. All the more justification for better skeptical education

The Chemtrail Conspiracy

There's a nifty show on the Discovery channel during the day called Best Evidence that takes conspiracy theories and debunks them. It does a pretty good job at it, from what I've seen, although I think it gives the theories too much credit at the start.

Right now the episode is about chemtrails, which is the absolutely loony theory that government agencies are putting additives in jet fuel to do all sorts of different things, from changing climate to making people sick. My favorite part so far was the beautiful confirmation bias William Thomas, a journalist who investigates this, showed when he was talking about increasing reports of sickness in areas with contrails. How stupid does someone have to be to realize that any outbreak of sickness can be linked with contrails? They're everywhere!

And there's a woman named Rosalind Peterson (and "environmental activist") who claims that the diversity of contrail patterns is evidence of manipulation. My favorite of her claims was when she thought that rainbow patterns in the contrail are abnormal, has she never seen a rainbow? It's the same damn phenomenon. In fact, everything that she showed was easily explained by differences in atmospheric conditions, making her look like nothing but a crazy crank.

I think my favorite part of the whole show was the claims about climate change. Because the Bush administration is actively trying to combat climate change. I could believe that they have enough of a reckless disregard for the environment to try large-scale climate manipulation, but of all the things they'd try to do combating climate change is the least probable.

Then they tested the jet fuel in a lab, and of course they've found nothing unexpected. Another good test was using a spectrum analyzer pointed at some contrails that showed nothing unusual at all (the nitric acid struck me as weird, but apparently that's a byproduct of jet fuel).

Something else that strikes me as odd with this thing is that everyone says contrails are would increase warming. I thought that, if anything, increased cloud cover decreased warming, since clouds reflect sunlight back (increase the earth's albedo). While cloud cover could trap heat, contrails don't seem substantial enough to do that, and every little bit helps albedo. But I'm no expert and could easily be wrong about that.

UFO video a hoax

Do you remember that video? Everyone thought it was the most convincing evidence of the UFO phenomenon to date. I have to admit, when I see something like that I usually try to debunk it, but that one was well beyond my scope. It would have taken some kind of reporter to debunk. Luckily, one did.

Turns out it was just a guy who's very, very good at making CG movies and has an idea for, get this, a couple of guys who make a UFO hoax that spirals out of control, and wanted to test his idea.

The best part of the entire article, though, is the end:

The scary part, he said, was that in spite of the evidence, "many people refuse to believe it's a hoax."

Yes, it is funny how no matter what evidence is presented to the contrary, UFO believers never let the matter die (if you want some evidence of this, just look at crop circles. They're entirely man-made, but that doesn't stop "croppies"). Believe me, it would be spectacular if we were being visited by intelligent life forms. But we aren't, there's almost always a much simpler alternative explanation for every "sighting". I've never seen a case where the "official" or skeptic line was less plausible than alien visitation (and believe me, I've seen all of the History Channel specials on these things). We're almost certainly not being visited, end of story. At least until the next hoax (or video of a misunderstood phenomenon) comes along.

Loch Ness Monster Insurance

Apparently organizers of a duathlon in Scotland have taken out a one-million-pound insurance policy against attack by or sighting of the Loch Ness monster, seriously. They say that they want all their bases covered, but this is just silly. I wonder if it's not just a dumb PR move, and I honestly hope it is.

What will be interesting if someone actually does "see" Nessie (or a floating log or a large wave or a duck or...), what it would take for the policy to pay out. I bet it would be quite difficult to convince the insurance company, after all, they have more invested in the outcome than intellectual skepticism.

This story reminds me of another one I blogged last year, and that was second-coming insurance, also in Scotland (but not by the same insurance company). Two young girls took out the policy just in case they became pregnant with the Christ. It caused a bit of a furor, but I'm not sure why.

I wonder if it would be possible to tally how much money people spend on stupid things, like energy crystals, homeopathy, other woo, ridiculously implausible insurance, etc. I'd be interested in seeing that number, and I bet it's one hell of a lot of money.

Seeing angels in reflections

This is a great example of how people see more than they should when they look at things. Humans naturally assume intent behind events, and we naturally see agents in innocuous places.

Here's the backstory:

When retired policeman Andy Key went on a trip to Rome, he was struck by the beauty of sunlight streaming through a window in the Vatican.

As the Pope made an address nearby, he decided to capture the stunning image on his camera.

But it was only when Mr Key, 48, and his wife Susan, 44, returned home and and downloaded their photographs that they noticed a strange apparition in the picture.

They were amazed to see what looked like the image of a guardian angel above the heads of other visitors to St Peter's Basilica.

Mr Key, from March, Cambridgeshire, said: "It looks like an angel hovering on the people's heads.

"No-one can explain it - there's nothing on their heads for the light to bounce off."

Here's the angel:



Being the skeptic I am, I had to figure out what was really causing this. I'll admit, in that picture it's a bit hard to see what's going on. Look at the zoomed in one, it's the dead giveaway:



From here it's clear. This is just a reflection coming off of something in front of the crowd. You can see how the "head" is just the same pattern after it has gone over a corner, making it look offset. The "wing" and mid-body have a similar effect, but it's harder to notice. My bet is that it's some kind of baptismal or holy water container reflecting the light back up, something circular, elliptical, or rectangular and filled with water (or made of metal). It's no angel, it's just a reflection following the contours of the wall that looks like it could be vaguely person-shaped.

Mr Key, from March, Cambridgeshire, said: "It looks like an angel hovering on the people's heads.

"No-one can explain it - there's nothing on their heads for the light to bounce off."

I just explained it, and I think fairly convincingly. It's really easy to see how it's just following the contours of the wall. You can't see what it's reflecting off of, but it's obviously something.

So I did a bit of googling, and I think I found it (larger version pops):



I can't be sure, but that big pool of water in the middle of the aisle leading up to the area under the dome may just be the source of the reflections onto the wall behind it. I can't be sure, but I'm pretty damn close. (And for the record, I found this after I guessed it was a holy water-fountain (or whatever they're called). Go me.)

So Mr Key, do I get a reward for explaining the so-called "angel"? I know I won't, but I think I should!

Let this be a lesson to you about seeing agents or intent where there is none to be had, lest you make a reflection into an angel.

Politicians for Saving Bigfoot!

This is probably the stupidest thing you will hear all week:

Canadian MP Mike Lake... has called for Bigfoot to be protected under Canada's species at risk act, alongside Whooping Cranes, Blue Whales, and Red Mulberry trees.

"The debate over their (Bigfoot's) existence is moot in the circumstance of their tenuous hold on merely existing," reads a petition presented by Lake to parliament in March and due to be discussed next week. "Therefore, the petitioners request the House of Commons to establish immediate, comprehensive legislation to affect immediate protection of Bigfoot," says the petition signed by almost 500 of Lake's constituents in Edmonton, Alberta.

There is no debate over whether he exists. There's no evidence for it (at least that couldn't have been easily faked and/or misinterpreted). I suppose in all fairness it's possible, but really freaking unlikely. Calls to preserve a population that we don't even know exists is, well, insane.

Although I'd rather have politicians who want to preserve nonexistent species than most of the ones we have.

[Via Reason]

Why I'm Skeptical About Anthropogenic Global Warming

I’ve always been skeptical about anthropogenic global warming. Something about the concept just doesn’t seem right to me. All right, the earth has gotten hotter since the industrial revolution. Do we know it wouldn’t have happened anyway? All right, Carbon Dioxide does trap more heat than normal air. But do small changes in its concentration make a big difference? It very well might, but something just doesn’t seem right, at least to me.

A recent article gave some merit to my doubts. If Christopher Monckton, the author, is correct, then human-made CO2 has very little impact on climate, and far less than most people think. He’s not the only person who espouses this position, over the last year I’ve collected a good number of articles all giving good reasons to doubt the anthropogenic global warming (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

Climate is an emergent phenomenon. As such, it’s incredibly hard to predict. There are so many variables, and in order to build a comprehensive model they all have to be taken into account and weighted accurately. This is a nearly impossible task, given that we don’t even have a complete list of variables yet, let alone a good weighting system.

This is highlighted very well in the fact that the sun’s role in controlling the Earth’s temperature now seems to be very large, much greater than previously thought, and we appear to be in a particularly active period right now. It’s entirely possible that most of the warming we’re seeing is due to increased solar activity, as many of those articles point out.

Another problem that I’ve always had with CO2 warming is that every ounce that we release from burning fossil fuel was once in the atmosphere. Maybe this is me being naive, but the earth managed just fine back when plants were freshly converting that CO2, why shouldn’t it now? I’ve also read that ninety percent of the non-living organic material on earth is in unusable sediments, which would mean that we’d hardly be resetting Earth’s CO2 meter at all. Again, I might be misunderstanding the situation, but just from an arm-chair thought-experiment perspective, it doesn’t add up.

The final problem that I have with anthropogenic global warming is the little ice age. This was a period of colder-than-normal temperatures, lasting from about the 14th to the mid-19th centuries. This covers the entire history of recorded temperature, and its end coincides with the start of the industrial revolution. Perhaps our baseline is off, because we had five and a half centuries of unusual cold, and we’re just now re-entering normal temperatures. As Monckton points out, before then it was actually hotter than it is now (I’ve heard that 2,000 years ago it was a full 2 degrees Celsius hotter).

I’m not saying that the climatologists have generated this controversy for their own gain. Maybe they did, but I doubt it. They almost certainly firmly believe that human emissions will cause massive global warming. But are they right? Or is there merit to Monckton’s objections? It certainly looks like there’s some.

I’m also not saying that we should do nothing about curbing emissions and pursuing alternate energy sources. Oil will run out, and when it does we’ll need some form of energy. Investigating our options now will make the technology that much better when it does run out. We might even discover something better than oil and coal.

What I am saying is that I think it’s best to be skeptical about complicated issues that are difficult to fully resolve (which is why I’m also skeptical about free will and the nature of consciousness). Once the evidence is truly unambiguous, then I’ll be sold. But until then, I’ll be on the sideline of this debate, Al Gore be damned.

(In case there are any more would-be commenters who don't know what skeptic means, I'm not saying that anthropogenic global warming isn't happening. I'm also not saying that it is. I'm saying that based on what I've seen, I'm not convinced either way. I've teetered back and forth on this issue for quite a while, and am currently leaning back toward "it is happening" based on all these links. My position after reading a whole bunch of the stuff that has been posted will most likely be "it is probably happening". But I still prefer to wait it out. Also, to the people who say "the thousands of scientists say it's so, so it must be so!": that's not evidence. That's not a reason to believe something. Several of the articles I linked to were by an MIT climatologist. I realize that most climatologists believe firmly that warming is happening, but that doesn't make them right. The evidence they has does. Which is why I'm currently looking at that.

Also, no need to be nasty because you think I'm an idiot. If you disagree with me, just point me toward realclimate.org or somewhere that has good explanations and data quickly available. Don't be an asshole. Besides being totally unnecessary, it won't help you any.)

No Better Than Chance

Every now and then I feel a sensation, quite like a cell phone’s vibration, on my right leg, right about where my pocket is. That’s exactly where, for the past four years, I have kept my cell phone, which is always set to vibrate.

But my cell phone isn’t always ringing when this happens. I can’t count how many times I’ve reached into my pocket, pulled out my cell phone, and no one had called.

Interesting thing is, a couple days ago I got a new phone, and started keeping in my left pocket. Today I got that feeling in my right leg, reached in for my old phone out of habit, then my new phone rang.

That got me thinking about all the other times the feeling had come before my phone ringing. Almost as if my leg someone “knew” I was getting the call.

But as I said before, there were far more times where it happened and there was no call. Sometimes the feeling “got lucky” and got a hit, most of the time it didn’t. If I had kept rigorous, detailed notes of the phenomena, it would have faired no better than chance.

It reminded me of all the anecdotes I’ve heard, where someone has a dream foretelling some terrible event, or a case the doctors had given up on gets better after some vigorous praying on his behalf. The thing that you never hear is all of the failed prophecies, all of the people who are prayed for and died. And how, if they had kept rigorous, detailed notes of these phenomena, that they would find it was no more than chance.

Problems With Documentaries

I watch the History Channel frequently. There are a lot of good documentaries on it, and you can really learn a lot from just a few. However, I’m consistently disappointed by the documentaries that investigate more radical claims.

A recent one on the Bible Code comes to mind. There codes have been thoroughly debunked (this is a collection of such debunkings). The people who still think that Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Bible produce prophecies are deluding themselves and ignoring all of the evidence. But somehow, a program about the Bible Code gives them most of the time. Skeptics get a soundbyte, and proponents get the rest of the show. This makes it sound like these claims have a foot to stand on, when they really don’t.

Continue reading...The same is true of every sensational topic, including a recent show on “The Exodus”. The Biblical exodus didn’t happen, “from the period within which the Exodus should have happened -- the 16th-13th centuries BCE, in the broadest definition -- there is no evidence whatsoever of an exodus of the people of Israel from Egypt.” But the program brought up crazy ideas, like Israelites going to Minoan Greece and being buried there, along with stories of the parting of the Red Sea on graves and golden images of the Ark of the Covenant. It was essentially a crazy interpretation that relied on nothing but one guy’s opinion. How can you make such outrageous claims with essentially no evidence backing it up? It’s irresponsible.

Whether the topic is UFOs, the Lock Ness Monster, other “monsters”, the Holy Grail, the Exodus, the Bible Code, or any other controversial topic, skeptics get less time, and people could walk away from the show believing a position that is countered by all the evidence. We live in a country where the majority of people believe that evolution, a scientific fact, is wrong, where horoscopes based on nothing are published in newspapers and widely read, and where people believe the ludicrous over the evidence. I would hope that popularizers of Science and History should get their facts right rather than be sensationalist and contribute even more to this problem. They have a responsibility to the public, and they air documentaries such as these, they fail in that responsibility.