Skepticblog

The latest from No Starch Press is another in their series of Manga guides, three of which I’ve reviewed here before (The Manga Guide to Calculus, and the Guides to Physics and Statistics). The idea is a simple one: Teach a subject that’s normally dry and boring, but do it in a narrative comic book format that provides so much fun you’re not even aware that you’re learning. That’s the idea, anyway.

It’s a good idea, in my opinion, but executed in a, well, pretty thin way. I wanted to like these books a lot (as an anime fan), and they’re OK. The thing is that relativity and all its funky cool effects (time dilation, changes in mass, etc.) can make great plot points. I’d expect these stories to be action adventures, where the physics of what’s happening play active roles in the story, and the characters need to understand and predict what’s going on. Learning on the fly, with millions of lives at stake! (continue reading…)

I was in a big hurry and needed to pick up a strong cold medication for sinus congestion before going to a Skeptic Society meeting. Not knowing any better, I stopped a health food chain store in Pasadena—and was stunned by what I saw. Everything was advertised as “organic” (even though studies show no clear evidence that organic is significantly healthier, or that all foods labeled “organic” are indeed grown or raised that way). Everything was WAY more expensive than conventional grocery store prices. The place was crawling with yuppie couples in Birkenstocks and expensive designer clothes from Land’s End and L.L. Bean. It was a two-story chaos, with lots of dead ends and confusing and poorly laid-out aisles. It was almost like a casino, which is designed to slow you down and make you see as much of the floor space as possible. Consequently, it took me quite a while to find the cold products. By this time, I was running late. Because the clerk recommended it, I grabbed a box off the shelf called “Umcka cold care”. When I reached the checkout, I discovered it cost $17 for just 20 tablets!

When I got back to the car, I looked closer. In tiny letters, the box said “Homeopathic”! I guess I should have expected that in a heath food store, there would be homeopathic remedies, but I didn’t realize that they would ONLY have quack medicines. Readers of this blog are probably familiar with the problem with homeopathy. Most homeopathic medicines are diluted down so much that they contain few or no molecules of the active ingredient, and so they are literally just drinking water. In the case of these pills I bought, there is a long list of inactive ingredients, and just a tiny amount of the Pelargonium sidoides plant, a South African herb that MIGHT have some effect on reducing cold symptoms—although the medical studies are inconclusive, and most colds go away as our immune systems take care of the viral infection. (continue reading…)

In the last week I have received a flood of e-mails asking my opinion about an article, “Scientists cure cancer, but no one takes notice.” The sensational theme is a familiar one – scientists hit upon a cure for cancer, but since the drug in question is already off patent (or is “natural”) the pharmaceutical industry is not interested in developing it. The more conspiracy-minded take it a step further and declare that “Big Pharma” will keep anyone else from developing it either.

Most of those e-mailing me saw the skeptical red flags in this story, but still many found the idea intriguing. Like most urban legends – something about the story resonates with our hopes and/or fears. The story rides this emotional wave, now supercharged by social media.

In fact, this is an old story about DCA (which I will get into below). The article that has been going around is four years old – there is no date on the article itself, but I recognize the story from several years ago (it has made the rounds numerous times) and there are four-year-old comments on the article. But, someone posted the article on their Facebook page, and someone else tweeted it, and it was retweeted and linked to by other Facebook pages and voila – the magic of the internet has breathed life into a dessicated urban legend.

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It’s a question that’s asked a lot, and should be. Keeping our finger on the pulse of our own success lets us know when we need to turn up the heat, and where we should refocus our efforts. I’m reminded of a panel on which I sat at The Amazing Meeting Australia in late 2010 when that question was put to us. I felt somewhat lonely in that my answer to the question seemed to be much more doomier and gloomier than the others.

I said I thought skepticism is losing ground, and also that I expected that trend to continue and worsen.

Why? Primarily because of money. I see the public’s level of skepticism to be largely media driven. Those whose message reaches the most people are likely to win the battle of hearts and minds. Reaching people via the most common media requires money. And money is where skeptics are going to continue to lose ground. The reason is that skeptics are not selling anything; indeed, we caution consumers not to buy certain items. Conversely, the opposition — the charlatans, the hoaxers, the ripoff artists, and the honestly deluded — are there specifically to sell products. Miracle cures and magically easy solutions to every problem in life are the real enemy. And, so long as human natures encourages most people to throw their money in that direction, the promoters of those quack products and services are going to continue to be in the driver’s seat. If you have nothing to sell, as skeptics have, you have no economic engine driving your message. And this is why I believe we’re going to continue to lose ground. (continue reading…)

Hey Everybody within shouting distance of California (and beyond), The SkeptiCal 2011 Conference is just around the corner! It will be held at the Berkeley Doubletree on May 29, 2011. Tickets are available for purchase now. Last year’s conference sold out past capacity, so please buy your tickets as soon as possible! (continue reading…)

I am a vertebrate paleontologist. I have collected fossil bones out in the Big Badlands of South Dakota and many other places all over the western United States. Although I have collected plenty of dinosaur fossils, I don’t do research on them, but on fossil mammals that are equally cool, including North American rhinoceroses, horses, camels, musk deer, peccaries, and a number of extinct groups that only another mammalian paleontologist would recognize, such as oreodonts and dromomerycids.

People seem to think that my primary job is to collect new fossils and describe them, but in most cases, this is not true. I could spend dozens of man-years getting sunburned in the desert, and not find but a few really scientifically important specimens. Luckily for me and many other paleontologists, there have been many collectors over the past century who have done the hard work in the field, building up large collections in the major museums. What has been missing for a long time is people who want to spend the months and years figuring out what these new fossils are, describing and publishing them, and giving us a correct and up-to-date picture of what fossil animals lived when and where. This is called systematics, and although it’s not as glamorous as the “Indiana Jones”-”Jurassic Park” image of paleontology that most people think of, it is the most important job in paleontology. Without hundreds of hours of careful work in museums, measuring and studying and photographing and then publishing the fossils in highly specialized  monographs that only a few people can understand, all the computer-driven arm-waving about how many species lived at a given time, or what caused their extinction (all based on outdated names or incorrect identifications) is “garbage in, garbage out.”

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I’m excited to announce that Skeptic.com is going forward with a Fall 2011 sequel to our popular “Skeptics Mix Tape 2009″ — and to reveal the curator for the sequel, Desiree Schell (of Skeptically Speaking fame).

The Skeptics Mix Tape is a light-hearted outreach project that gives away selected songs of science and skepticism — what Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy hailed as “Music to appreciate reality to!”  — completely free. This use of the songs is donated by the artists, and the Skeptics Society charges nothing.

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In my opinion society is best served with open and vigorous debate about important topics of the day. Such debates are most effective, however, when proponents of opposing views are actually engaging directly with the claims and beliefs of the other side. This requires effort – to understand what the other side believes and why they believe it. This should be taught as a basic intellectual skill in school. Whenever confronted with a controversy, make a sincere effort to understand the best case that each side is putting forward.

In my (admittedly biased) experience, what I will call “fair engagement” is more the exception than the rule. It is easy to slip into accepting a straw-man caricature of the other side. We all do it to some degree. The danger for skeptics is to focus on the most extreme examples of a belief as if they are representative, while ignoring the more reasonable (if still wrong) end of the spectrum. But while there is a continuum, there are those who make a sincere effort to treat their opponents fairly, and those who are stramenticidal maniacs (sorry for my lack of Latin scholarship, but that’s as close as I can come to someone who likes to murder straw men).

The alternative medicine (CAM) community in particular seem to enjoy engaging with straw men of their opponents. It is partly a result of their genuine lack of understanding of our criticisms, but it is also a result of their propaganda. The CAM community (at least collectively) have mastered the marketing of their ideas. They manage to frame the discussion in a way that completely distorts the actual points that are in dispute – in their favor.

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We may have not had success getting our own prime-time network show with The Skeptologists, but skeptical outreach professionals are appearing more and more often on existing shows as featured experts.

Today I added another such contribution in a small way. Twice now I’ve appeared as a talking head on William Shatner’s Weird or What?, once before with Mark Edward, and now on the subject of the Bell Island Boom. I was gratified when their researcher told me their episode was largely based on my Skeptoid episode, so this will, hopefully, be a decent win for those who want to get the general public excited about what’s cool in reality. (continue reading…)

We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road—the one less traveled by—offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.

—Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

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As we marked Earth Day last month, there are disturbing trends of anti-environmentalism running through the political landscape. I distinctly remember the first Earth Day in 1970, and the ensuing decade when the country was very environmentally conscious. But lately, the powerful special interests who oppose environmentalism (especially the oil and coal industries and their lobbyists and politicians) have been fighting hard through the right-wing think tanks that they fund, and through right-wing oil-state politicians like Sarah Palin and James Inhofe, to gut the EPA (created by a Republican president, Richard Nixon) and create doubt and confusion about global climate change (see the discussion in my book Catastrophes!). I shuddered to hear them chant “Drill, baby, drill” at GOP rallies—never mind the fact that the remaining oil reserves in and around the U.S. (including Alaska) are at best enough to last us 2–3  years at our current rate of consumption (ignoring the environmental costs). I never thought I would see the day when people were happy to defend oil spills (like BP’s disaster last summer) and air pollution and strip mining whole mountains for coal as no big deal. But the strangest case of all has to be the weird attempt by right-wing zealots to demonize Rachel Carson.

Rachel Carson has long been considered to be one of the pioneers and a heroine of the environmental movement. Her book Silent Spring (1962) was an environmental classic, and helped galvanize the early environmental movement in the U.S. It popularized the research that showed that DDT sprayed indiscriminately to kill mosquitoes was also killing a wide variety of other harmless wildlife. In particular, DDT was destroying bird populations because of the increasing concentrations of the poison as it went up the food chain, so that apex predators like hawks, falcons and eagles were dying off at alarming rates. Historians regard the banning of DDT as an early environmental success story. At the time, the ban had widespread support from both Republicans and Democrats in Congress, and DDT was finally made illegal under Nixon’s Republican administration. Carson herself died in 1964, too soon to see how her efforts led to the banning of DDT and the birth of the EPA and Environmental Defense Fund and many other environmental movement organizations. (continue reading…)