Seriously? You want me to believe that half the population of London actually think that see-through dead people float through the city rattling people’s drawers? I’m sorry, but that simply isn’t plausible to me. I know people are easily led and a bit gullible. I accept that. But I thought Theos said that 34% of people believe in Jesus and 33% say they’re not sure. You can’t simultaneously accept Christianity and believe in ghosts, and that only leaves 32%. Okay, so there are error margins on this but I don’t for a second accept that all atheists believe in ghosts — because I’m one and I don’t. Someone would have taken a photograph by now. I don’t think there’s anything that exists that hasn’t been photographed, aside perhaps from the Higgs Boson.

The director of Theos, Paul Wooley, said

The extent of belief will probably surprise people, but the finding is consistent with other research we have undertaken.

It’s consistent in that they all report implausibly high belief in ridiculous ideas, yes. Then he said

The results indicate that people have a very diverse and unorthodox set of beliefs.

…which I thought very charitable to the respondents.

I think what Theos are increasingly discovering is that surveys can’t be trusted. They are repeatedly finding that a sizable fraction of the population will say yes to anything you care to ask them. I’m quite prepared to believe that London is an unusually credulous city, but given that the 2001 survey tells me that 1.4% of its population is Jedi, I’m tempted to think it might also be a city that doesn’t poll well.

And astrology? Really? Surely by now everyone in the world knows that astrology columns are just written by whoever happens to be passing at the time, with no thought or reference to any source of knowledge, just like the science reporting. I don’t believe that 22% of the population think that the stars and planets control their lives. I don’t accept that a fifth of the people I see in the street really believe that the arbitrary shapes drawn in the sky by convention dictate their fortune.

Are they counting ‘I suppose there might be something in it’ as a yes? Are they excluding ‘I don’t know’ responses from the results? Did they phone round houses in the middle of the day? We don’t know, because Theos’ press release doesn’t say. But any of those seems more likely than 4 million Londoners believing in ghosts. Nobody believes in ghosts. It’s a lunatic fringe belief, like crop circles or fairies.

Andrew,

I have implied nothing. You just don’t seem to be able to read.

Nice. That’s class, right there, isn’t it? That was the response when I accused Vizzini of “[implying] that swine flu is a media-invented scare story like wifi or MMR or whatever”. Now obviously there are two sides to every story, and where one person reads clear implication another might read baseless inference, so I shall paste in the opening of Vizzini’s blogpost and let you be the judge:

Hi folks,

I am sick….sick of the swine flu. I have never seen so much hype over something so stupid.

Now I’d have said that that fairly clearly implies that swine flu is ’stupid’. A stupid thing to worry about. A silly little disease that poses no threat. Obviously I’m reading between the lines somewhat here, and you can’t really get all that from those two and a half sentences, so here’s a bit more:

The excuses have already begun. “Even if the swine virus doesn’t prove as potent as authorities first feared, that doesn’t mean the U.S. and World Health Organization overreacted in racing to prevent a pandemic, or worldwide spread, of a virus never before seen.”

Uh….yes it does. All these ‘experts’ are going to have egg on their face and now they are trying to justify scaring the crap out of your for no good reason.

photo credit: ■ Guerry

You see? His point, so he claims, is that people who wear facemasks because they’re scared of swine flu are stupid. I’ll come to that in a minute, but those people are not the same people as work for the WHO or the CDC. He’s veered off onto a tangent here and is mocking the epidemiology experts who have been working to prevent a H1N1 pandemic. That, to me, is not the action of a man who believes there is a risk of widespread infection. That is the action of a man who thinks we should let it run its course and see how many people die. He’s clearly betting on ‘not many’, and deriding people who disagree. That is an attempt to entirely debunk swine flu as a potential pandemic, and it’s simply too early to do that. Ben Goldacre refused to debunk it three times in the time it took him to write an article about how often he’s been asked to debunk it.

He may or may not have meant to imply it, but I think that he did. And given that Vizzini’s post and comments are riddled with non-standard punctuation and typos (to the point where he misspells ‘IQ’), and give the general impression that they were rushed off just as fast as he can type, it seems likely that I’ve read it more carefully than he wrote it and therefore probably the failure is on his end. Certainly he doesn’t use language in the most nuanced way I’ve ever seen. Here, for example, is a selection of his ripostes to my criticism (my emphasis):

You mean someone was so stupid that the nest [sic] they could do was make fun of a typo? Bet they were wearing a mask! … You just don’t seem to be able to read. … Run around terrified if you want to. … A mask is a very visible IQ test at this point. To me it is very much the same as people who pick a typo out of an article and use it to invalidate the article. Andrew….you failed that test. When you have to use a typo to make a point then you have run out of anything intelligent to offer. … Frankly Andrew you suck at debate. If points such as spelling are not relevant then don’t mention them. It makes you appear desperate and ill informed. … Just another example of your tendency to not be able to focus on the topic. I always find it funny that someone like you tosses out insults but then is so fragile when they get tossed back at you. Your mentioning a typo was arrogant and….stupid. If you can’t handle it then learn how to have civil disagreements without acting like a twit. … Stupid people tend not to be able to think for themselves. You have said nothing to contradict that assertion.

That’s right, he acts as if I’m wearing a mask. He literally cannot distinguish ‘I consider there is a chance of a pandemic in the future’ from ‘OH GOD OH GOD I’M GOING TO DIE WHERE IS MY FACEMASK?’. I have, for the record, never insulted him. I have criticised his arguments, and he seems incapable of distinguishing that from mindlessly abusing him, which, if I’m generous, explains his argument style. (Okay, maybe now I’ve insulted him.) For the record, here is my first comment:

That guy’s massively missed the point. Sure, wearing masks now is dumb, but the fact that 1000 people are sick is a worry because the disease might BECOME pandemic. He conflates the media whipping up a profitable panic with the WHO giving out expert advice, then has a go at them for taking measures to prevent a pandemic because they might work and then he can say ‘look, see, there was nothing to worry about’.

Also, he misspelt ‘IQ’.

You can see how I clearly relied on that one typo to invalidate his argument. Clearly there’s no way that could be a throwaway comment, a joke if you will, finding humour in an unfortunately placed transposition error.

But enough of such frivolity. The main thrust of his argument, he tells me, is this:

If you own a business and someone shows up with a mask on….fire them. They are too dumb to work for you. They have no common sense. In a way this is an QI test [see?] for your company.

…

It is stupid. The people in masks are stupid. … The masks are a visible sign of how stupid they are. … If you own a business and one of your employees shows up in a mask…find a reason to get rid of them. They are too stupid for whatever job you hired them for.

You see how he doesn’t toss out insults or come across as arrogant at all. But still, is he right? Certainly with the number of cases of swine flu so much lower than the number of cases of regular seasonal flu, and given that facemasks don’t actually work all that well, wearing them is a bit stupid. (Well, unless you wore them before swine flu. That’s fair enough. The tube is gross.) But his claim is not ‘it is a stupid thing to do’. It is ‘the people who do it are stupid’. As I said to him,

The media, the tabloids particularly, love to scare people, because scared people buy tabloid newspapers — and they’ve got very good at it, largely by refusing to be hampered by inconvenient details such as facts. I know that. You know that. Not everyone knows that. I mean, I think it’s stupid to use Microsoft Word as an HTML editor, but I appreciate that some people don’t know better and that doesn’t make them stupid. I think it’s pretty stupid to imagine that God exists, but I certainly don’t think all religious people are stupid.

For the record, his response to this was the phrase ‘just another excuse for stupid people’ followed by the last six sentences of the torrent of abuse I quoted earlier. You see how I’m ‘[tossing] out insults’ there, using inflammatory phrases like ‘that doesn’t make them stupid’ and ‘I certainly don’t think [they're] stupid’.

I just think that if you say ‘people are stupid’ and leave it at that, it’s defeatist and misanthropic, condescending and unhelpful. If you engage with them you can change their minds. If you see the bigger picture you can see where the weaknesses are that we can fix and improve matters. If you just write off humanity as too thick to survive then you become a small part of the problem. His solution is to make them all unemployed. That’s what we need, a lot of uneducated people with no money. That will definitely solve both swine flu and the credit crunch. I want to think it’s meant in jest and he’s actually more progressive than that, but I’m really not convinced.

I’ll be interested to see if Vizzini replies to this.

First of all was the story of Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, the Archbishop of Recife’s decision to excommunicate a woman who helped her daughter get an abortion. The daughter was nine. She needed an abortion because her Catholic stepfather raped her. The rapist was not excommunicated. The Vatican supported all of this, so the only way these actions make any sense is if the Vatican considers abortion worse than raping a nine-year-old girl. And that nearly makes sense, except that the girl would probably have died in childbirth, so even if you consider her twin fœtuses ‘people’ you still have to be pretty warped to expect her to die for the crime of being raped. (Warped, or Muslim.)

After that, the Vatican calmed down a little and celebrated International Women’s Day, by — I know, this has to be gold, doesn’t it? — by publishing an article asking the question “What in the 20th century did most to liberate Western women?” and reaching the rather brilliant conclusion that it was probably the invention of the washing machine. Not the right to work. Not women’s suffrage. Definitely a machine that makes cleaning clothes (which clearly is Women’s Work) easier. I mean, even if that’s pragmatically true (which it isn’t) don’t say so right after you’ve okayed raping small girls.

It’s lucky the Pope isn’t at all utterly terrifying.
photo credit: openDemocracy

After that piece of light-hearted batshit whimsy, the Pope decided to refocus his efforts on Catholicism’s core competency: ruining innocent people’s lives with arbitrary and idiotic dogma. This time, it’s Africa’s turn. Speaking about the AIDS epidemic there, the Pope himself, not a lackey this time, said “the distribution of condoms… aggravates the problems”. The Telegraph have found themselves a priest to defend him — and let’s mention now that I’m only inferring he’s a priest from his photo. Nowhere do they bother to actually mention that he works for the Pope, because that might be a bit too much like declaring one’s interests for the mainstream media. Their priest, George Pitcher, rehashes the same old argument I’ve heard over and over again: “that the Church’s historic teaching that chastity outside marriage and fidelity within it would prevent the spread of killer diseases such as Aids”. And this is true, but alas irrelevant, because nobody is criticising that teaching. (At least, I’m not. At the moment.) What we are criticising is the Pope’s claim that distributing condoms will make the AIDS epidemic worse. This claim is demonstrably false. It turns out that if you grow up and go with the facts instead of just making shit up, you can actually make a difference and save some lives.

The problem I have with the Pope’s speech is not that he advocated abstinence: it is that he specifically lied about something that we know works. Even if nobody acts on his advice, if they believe the epidemiological claims that he makes then they will make bad decisions and people will die.

Andrew’s comments are no longer allowed on this blog. This is because he has a tendency to write opinions based on logic and not from experience or facts. He is a programmer by profession.

Dammit, I do have a tendancy to write opinions based on logic. Oh, she really nailed me there. ‘Zing’, I should think, and probably even ‘oh, snap’. And so forth. Feel free to visualise Jon Stewart-style gesturing if it helps.

Goodbye, then, anonymous homeopath. Live long and prosper.

Suppose you got a massive bucket of bricks that weighed more than all but the fattest bastard. Clearly it is a bad thing to weigh more than it. Say then that every year you removed a brick, until it weighed the same as someone merely fairly chubby. It is clearly still bad to weigh more than the bucket of bricks. It is still true that those heavier than it die younger than those lighter. Only now, loads more people are heavier than it — primarily because it’s so much lighter than it used to be.

You now understand logic better than The Christian Institute:

A new in-depth study has added to mounting evidence that being born outside of marriage damages children. The report, compiled by researchers at the University of Essex, says that 44 per cent of babies are now born to unmarried parents. Cohabitees are estimated to make up three-quarters of those parents.

Well, technically, but hold on…

A new in-depth study has added to mounting evidence that being born outside of marriage damages children.

What? The study does no such thing. It says that co-habiting parents are more likely to split up than married ones (a fact which has many interesting causes, none of which involve Jesus), that children whose parents split up are worse off than those whose parents stay together, and that more children are being born out of wedlock.

Well yes, but unmarried couples are staying together longer than they used to: because the point at which the average couple marry — the number of bricks in the bucket — is changing. It’s not an illusory problem, and I’d hate to imply that it is, but the simplistic spin put on it by the Christian Institute (”The Christian Institute exists for the furtherance and promotion of the Christian religion in the United Kingdom”, so no agenda there) is just pathetic. To support that conclusion, you want a large cohort study, with a group of children of married parents and a matched group of unmarried ones — with similar incomes, social class, inteligence, location, and so forth, as any of those and other factors could affect odds of break-up and children’s welfare. That wasn’t even hinted at in any account of the report I can find. (I don’t think a RCT where the participants are unaware whether they’re legally wed would be particularly useful, but it would certainly be funny.)

And remember: the CI is a charity. Every time someone donates to them, the income tax paid on that is handed to the CI. So you funded this article. And so did I. And I’m cross about that, because it’s like everything I hate most rolled into one.

You may know already that I’m a fan of Ben Goldacre, but it’s not him. I found his style of agument quite conservative and traditional: people have been trying to win arguments by pointing out the gaping holes in their opponents’ ideas for centuries. Ancient people used evidence to draw conclusions. There’s nothing new there.

No, his opponent, Dr Sigman, is the genius here. I have, in retrospect, seen his argument elsewhere, too, but he has formalised it further than most. Here it is in a nutshell:

1. We disagree and are talking.
2. Therefore, There Is A Debate.
3. Therefore, the cautionary principle applies.
4. Therefore, whatever I dislike should be banned.

That’s just not on. Apart from the fact that creationism is anti-science enough without trying to trump psychology as well as biology, geology and astrophysics, this kind of thing is displacing real therapy that can actually prevent these deaths. But the hell with that — why bother preventing deaths if they can be used to promote an ideology?

An obvious question that may have entered your brain by now is “what on Earth does creationism have to do with suicide prevention?” and the answer is of course “nothing”, so a better question is “what does Chaplain Biscotti think creationism has to do with suicide prevention?”. Well. Apparently he has identified a Problem:

• In the last two years, completed suicides have escalated throughout the Air Force
• …
• The Air Force did not use spirituality as part of their suicide prevention briefing until 2005

It seems that he read that and thought that the solution was to add more spirituality. I cannot fathom how even the most religiously retarded mind could reach that conclusion from that evidence. So what’s his solution?

Dr. Rick Warren’s book, The Purpose Driven Life,  provides a powerful model for Suicide Prevention, developing leaders, and making troops combat ready and effective.

No, it provides a pack of bullshit. (I haven’t read it, but I can easily surmise it’s a load of rubbish from the fact that Rick Warren wrote it.) After that are a series of laughably inept slides that are reproduced in the Kos article so I won’t bother here. Suffice to say that atheism (specifically, humanism) is equated with selfishness and then The Dreaded Communism, to the point where Darwin is inexplicably listed as one of the leaders of the USSR. It also uses the story of Pat Tillman, an atheist (as far as we know) who was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan, to push the idea of faith in general, including faith in oneself. That’s probably basically good advice, were it not displacing real therapy and attached to the rest of this pro-Christianity propaganda.

Chaplain Biscotti is not the Crackpot of the Month. That honour falls to those in secular roles above him, who allow and promote this, who push religion both as a way of reducing suicide and in general. I’m starting with Rod Bishop who seems to have compiled the presentation that contained Biscotti’s slides. Beyond that it seems to be so systemic as to make naming names as pointless as it is impossible.

Luckily the Military Religious Freedom Foundation is suing the US Military over this. How that lawsuit will go is unclear. I have no idea what the rules are on such things, not that that has anything to do with the result of any lawsuit with religion anywhere near it.

[BPSDB]

Neither is fun to read. Quacks do love to go on, possibly because simply saying a lot of things is an effective way to stop sceptics from being able to counter them all — it takes a second to say ‘miasmas exist’ without a reference but it takes a good five minutes to properly explain why they don’t. Throw in a stock ‘reference’ and a response might take an hour to craft. Of course, you can just say ‘prove it’ but that won’t convince anyone who doesn’t already have a healthy respect for science. It also doesn’t help that the English is somewhat broken. Possibly it is a second language. (In the quote below I have refrained from adding ‘[sic]‘ after errors, as it would be appended to every other sentence and just look like Vithoulkas had been at the sherry.)

Apparently, Randi fell ill and the challenge had to be postponed, by which time a change of management meant the centre would not be willing to participate. I can sympathise with this — the research unit I work for has this kind of problem all the time. Almost exactly this has happened at least once. That’s one of the problems, unfortunately, with doing proper science: everything has to be planned so meticulously that the slightest detail can throw it out and cause long delays. Vithoulkas claims that this was a trick to avoid ever having the experiment:

In 7.4.2006 Mr. Gindis wrote to Mr. Randi in order to signal to him that the homeopathic team was ready to start… But instead Randi suspended all activities of the experiment attributing it to his supposedly state of health!

Mr. Randi knew very well that this period was crucial for us to start the experiment and we had made this urgency explicit by sending several e-mails urging them that it was necessary to go ahead immediately. But Mr. Randi needed …six months “to recover” denying to assign a collaborator.

James Randi is 80 years old. Is it really that hard to believe he might be ill?

Vithoulkas and his team refused to accept this change to the schedule and have decided to do the experiment without Randi, which Randi.org quite accurately described as a withdrawal from the challenge. Randi points out that as his foundation is the one offering a million dollar prize, he gets to set the terms. Vithoulkas has decided that this is unfair and then, brilliantly, written Randi a retraction for him to post. He hasn’t. It seems to me that as a homeopath Vithoulkas is unfamiliar with the problems faced by real scientists doing actual clinical trials and is presumably used to ploughing on in an ad-hoc fashion and knocking the whole ’study’ out in a week.  I can see how in that case Doing It Right might look like stalling.

Still, whoever is right, I presume that since homeopathy4health is now in the business of chastising sceptics who she feels are shirking from a challenge, she will be immediately getting six bottled remedies and negotiating with Andy Lewis to find a trusted third party so she can participate in his far easier, lower-stakes challenge.

Otherwise frankly she’s fooling nobody but herself (and that’s only because herself is so very credulous).

I can’t personally vouch for this teaching: I had much of it drummed into me when I started my PhD (because it’s important), but it’s clearly expressed and illustrated with a range of examples somewhere between lavish and obsessive. The examples also show how universal the methods are: the chapter on Homeopathy also explains about good experimental methods, overuse of antibiotics, superstition, detox programmes, acupuncture, and meta-analysis and its role in assessing the effectiveness of steroids. It’s a structure I like a lot: interestingly varied without seeming like a collection of unconnented anecdotes, and with a strong theme to each chapter and a sense of progression through the book.

The book features chapters themed around the ideas used by Gillian McKeith and Patrick Holford, which discusses their own various publications. McKeith’s, he says,

have an air of ‘referenciness’, with nice little superscript numbers … but when you follow the numbers, and check the references, it’s shocking how often they aren’t what she claimed them to be in the main body of the text

and of Holford’s,

If Professor Patrick Holford is a man of science, and an academic, then we should treat him as one, with a scrupulously straight bat.

I heartily agree. I think that is, in part, why Goldacre’s book, as well as telling you things, shows you experiments and references you can use to check it all yourself (although the references are ferreted away in an appendix where they belong, rather than gaudily paraded in the body text, looking authoritative but basically just getting in the way). I think this is also because the book strongly agrues against the depiction of science as “didactic truth statements from… arbitrary, unelected authority figures”, and that would look pretty silly if presented with no evidence. (Although Goldacre makes a point of never claiming any authority: he doesn’t put “Dr” on the front cover — he doesn’t even have a capital ‘G’.) Transparency is the key to good science, a topic touched upon every time a quack mentioned in the book refuses to publish their research methods.

Holford’s book is also of interest, because Goldacre picks apart his reference list in great detail. Not out of malice or to make fun of him, but because as we know,

If Professor Patrick Holford is a man of science, and an academic, then we should treat him as one, with a scrupulously straight bat.

Okay. Let’s do that.

Goldacre’s book has fourteen pages of notes and references (at least the first edition does). I selected one from each page at random, and checked that it said what he says it said: 2 I couldn’t read, 1 was a note only, the other 11 checked out ane way or another, so that’s basically a 100% hit rate. I didn’t critique the referenced articles, mostly because I don’t have the time or inclination, but none of the research says anything very controversial anyway. Anyone who has read chapter 12 will realise that I am biased here, but that’s why I’m being transparent so you can check up on me too if you like: I’ve put the list of references I looked up, and a brief verdict on each, after the fold.

The other main theme of the book is the problems with ‘dumbing-down’ (a depressingly autological phrase) of the world of science and health: miracle cures, medicalised syndromes for everything, reports of conclusions rather than evidence, and so on. I think this was my favourite passage on that theme:

Nobody dumbs down the finance pages. I can barely understand most of the sports section. In the literature pull-out, there are five-page-long essays which I find completely impenetrable, where the more Russian novelists you can rope in the cleverer everybody thinks you are. I do not complain about this: I envy it.

I’d love to hear what someone with no scientific training thought of this book. But I expect they would learn a lot about the nature of evidence and the mental traps that make it so, acquire a lot of useless trivia about the proponents of pseudoscientific bullshit, learn to spot future nonsense, and have a good laugh along the way. I rate that as worth the price — not least because if you pay attention then the book will pay for itself the first time you don’t buy a pack of useless pills.

Since we’re talking transparency, the author declares that he received his copy of Bad Science free from the publishers and that, not being what you’d call a professional critic, the novelty of this kind of thing hasn’t worn off even a bit.

The references I checked:

1. Schultz et al, p46: I can’t read the paper with my university login, but the abstract agrees with the book and even I recognise one of the author’s names — an impressive feat for a statistician.
2. Shang et al, (PDF) p56: This is a hugely well-known paper. It says what we all know it says. I especially like the funnel plots: like Goldacre’s book, they don’t make drug companies look all that great either.
3. Giona F, p70: This paper is still in press and I can’t find it. To be fair, the claim it supports is of sufficient irrelevance to be in brackets.
4. S Wolf, p78: This seems to support Goldacre’s precis (at least to the extent that I’m reading these, which is much less than I would were I doing real science here).
5. Buske-Kirschbaum et al, p80: This is a great paper, and one which doesn’t seem to have been misrepresented.
6. H Frankfurt, p89: This is a book which I have not read, but is quoted in the main body, so you can judge it for yourself.
7. Moynihan et al (open-access), p153: This is provided more as further reading: the title is enough to justify the ‘claim’, such as it is.
8. p164: This is a note and not a reference.
9. S Mayor, p183: This doesn’t require much reading to check. Yes.
10. Curfman, et al, p202: Again, pretty unequivocal. Yes.
11. Nathan et al, p203: This is also an unequivocal yes.
12. Manning et al, p262: This article describes what the book says it describes, albeit briefly.
13. B Deer, p280: I couldn’t find the relevant information on this page. I would have referenced this page on the same site instead.
14. Grilli et al, p307: This (guardedly — this is Cochrane) supports the claim.

(This post is mostly quotes, for which I make no apology because the easiest way to mock this kind of nut-job is simply to hand him sufficient rope.)

The ‘Kadir-Buxton Method’ is a treatment for mental-health problems which he invented “decades ago”:

The procedure stuns and resets the brain of the patient, so that the patient returns to a normal condition. The Kadir-Buxton Method is done by making a fist of both hands, and striking both ears of the patient atexactly the same time–

Do not do this. It is very dangerous.

–and pressure with the soft part of the inner hand which is where the thumb joins the hand. The arrow in Figure 1 shows this point for your ease of use.

…

At this point I would like to explain the difference between a stun and a punch. With the Kadir-Buxton Method, a patient standing on one leg whilst holding a rose would still be standing on one leg and holding a rose when they were cured. With a punch, the patient would be lying prone on the floor, and could well have dropped the rose. And just to add insult to injury, they would still be mentally ill. Try it for yourselves if you do not believe me.

Oh, yes, this guy’s proper crazy. Because you see, he doesn’t just cure mental health issues…

My method of unblocking fallopian tubes should be taken up by the NHS. It would increase the success rate of fertility treatment drastically, and also cut down on more expensive treatments.

He’s keen on NHS adoption. He’s even petitioning the Prime Minister to ear-box mental patients.

Many years ago I came up with the idea of feeding breast milk to old people who had suffered from immune system collapse. I got the idea when I found an obscure reference to Ayurvedic practitioners… My method was successful, the most famous person who was treated for it was the Queen Mother, then in her seventies, who went on to live for another twenty years or so.

Having cured mental illness, infertility and old age, all these people will need clean electricity:

Thus a 50% cut in Carbon emissions is achievable with the use of Buxton Geothermal Turbine Generators.

That’s not totally crazy, but this is:

The Kadir-Buxton Jump Start (formerly Buxton Jump Start) … is so called because when it is used on a [dead] patient the [now living] patient immediately sits up with a start.

After that it starts to get really strange:

Primary Menstrual Cramps can be a debilitating problem for some 10% of women. … Orgasm from masturbation has been found to relieve the painful symptoms of menstrual cramps. … In order to do this one simply has to clench and then relax the vagina repeatedly for five minutes. With this method no one need know of the discomfort being suffered, and the pain soon goes. … Do not try this whilst driving or operating heavy machinery.

No shit?

I had been instructing women in the Hands Free method of controlling Primary Menstrual Cramps since I was a school boy.

…Is that allowed?

The Buxton Handclap Method of delivering babies that minimises birth trauma to both mother and baby is used in various Third World countries, and according to one statistic quoted in ‘New Scientist’ would lead to an improvement in IQ of 15 points over natural child birth, and thus minimise intellectual impairment caused by difficult child birth.

Of course, if you don’t want to have children at all, he can help with that, too:

In the 1980s I fended off an unprovoked attack. … I gave the [now unconscious] person a bruising slap round the buttocks. When the attacker came to it was said that the experience was even better than sex. I knew at once I was on to another invention. Whilst paralysed… the sensation of pain is replaced by super enhanced pleasure. As Governments around the world have been looking for a safe alternative to sex this appears to be it.

Specifically, David Blunkett is looking for that. Although he does say “it is not an alternative to contraception as the sexual act is also far more fun”. I’m inclined to agree.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that he reads the Daily Express, on whose website he makes up yet more stuff he’s never defined:

The best way to redistribute wealth is to end mental illness. This would free up £100 billion a year in the UK alone. The Kadir-Buxton Method cures the mentally ill in just thirty seconds and a local practice nurse can do it. 

We then use the five Buxton Coefficients of Unemployment at a local level to create jobs for them, and suddenly we have ridden out the economic crisis and can look forward to another four years of Gordon Brown. Go for it Gordon.

I’m sure that you, like me, want to know how one man can achieve such pre-eminence in so many diverse fields. Well, Andy Kadir-Buxton is willing to share his amazing secret:

IQ can be increased slightly by the educational system. It is only slight because most education revolves around memorising facts, which increases eidetic memory rather than leaning logic which increases IQ. … An IQ of over 150 brings with it the bonus of being able to invent which can be economially useful.

I always tell people that the best way of learning logic is to study and analyse the character Mr Spock in ‘Star Trek.’

So now you know. All those hours of watching Star Trek were increasing your IQ all along. Who knew?

[BPSDB]

Today’s g2 contains a dull and ill-thought-out article about whether or not animals feel grief, by Justine Hankins, who used to be the Guardian’s “pets editor”. It’s perhaps to be expected, then, that she is eager to think animals have human feelings. It’s nice to see her questioning the rest of the media for taking this too far, but personally, I’m not sure she’s quite got the hang of it yet…

Photographs of Gana, an 11-year-old gorilla in Munster Zoo, holding the lifeless body of her three-month-old infant… have prompted headlines such as “Heartbreaking” and “A Mother’s Grief”. … Are we too quick to project human feelings onto animals, particularly our closest ape relatives?

…René Descartes believed that… animals are no more capable of higher emotion than a clock. But, as anyone who has been watching Richard Dawkins’ Channel 4 series The Genius of Darwin will recall, evolution favours any species with strong enough parental instincts to see their young through infancy. Animals invest time, energy and genetic material into their young, just as we do, and they naturally want them to survive.—

Let’s be careful with the word “want”. Once you say “want” you’re kind of begging the question: anything that “wants” has emotions. I think you’re being too quick to project human feelings onto our closest ape relatives again. If you start bandying words like “want” about then before you know it you’re going to say something like

Is it too much of a stretch to imagine that they would also feel loss when their young die?

Yes.

Evolution probably doesn’t care too much what happens to mothers of dead infants. Evolving to stop caring for dead children is probably low down the genetic priority list, several items beneath keeping the children alive in the first place. There’s no reason to imagine that the gorilla’s behaviour is the result of grief. It could just as easily be well-meaning genes misfiring. Grief is totally unnecessary to explain any part of gorilla behaviour that I’m aware of.

Of course, they might. I don’t know. Hankins’ argument has utterly failed to convince me, but I really have no idea how gorillas work. I’ve not, say, been observing wild baboons in Namibia for years, but that’s probably why there’s a quote from a man who has, and he’s “reluctant to describe this as grief in the human sense”. That’s that settled, then, presumably…

Gana has a history of neglecting her young, and the infant’s death may have been a result of her poor parenting. So perhaps it’s not so much grief as guilt she’s exhibiting. Or maybe that’s an anthropomorphic step too far.

Yes it damn well is! Why must you persist in this? You’ve started by trying to explore quite a complex question in a 300-word column, and ended up saying nothing except “maybe”, and posing another, almost identical question. What possible use is that?

The article frustrated me mostly because it was 300 words of nothing, beyond raising a question that could have been just as easily posed in fifteen. The opening paragraph made it sound interesting, but there was no worthwhile discussion around the theme at all — a fact made even more annoying since she’d clearly interviewed someone who could have provided some. Hankins started out by observing that journalists liked to ascribe human feelings to animals and spent the whole column indulging in exactly the same wooly thinking.

Might as well have let Gana write the column for all the content we’d have missed out on.

I would love to look indepth at the media’s odd relationship with animals - but you get 300 words and a couple of hours and that’s it. I know it’s not perfect but it’s how the media works. I personally was quite shocked at how some of the media had protrayed this incident as if it was exactly the same as the feelings a human mother would have. I have a deep respect and affection for animals, but in general, this sort of sentimentality is not good for our understanding of animals and doesn’t apparently make us treat them any better.

With which I agree — she’s quite right to highlight the absurdity. My problem was that she also seemed to be indulging in it in the same column.

By ending the piece with the gorilla’s bad parenting record - I was trying to deflate the ‘heartbroken mother’ angle - sorry if it didn’t come off. If I ever get the chance, I’ll finish off the opening in a more challenging way!

After reading all of the above, I feel a bit bad and think that maybe the bit about evolution was misjudged, and came across (to me, anyway) as a genuine argument thrown in for balance, and that made the last paragraph read more like squirming than parody, a narrative trying to reach a conclusion that its own evidence won’t support.

At this point there’s not much I can do but sit here criticising the composition of the thing, which is well outside my comfort zone (besides which I’ve probably now written more words about this column than it contained, which is verging on tragic), so I think I shan’t bother. Anyone who’s used the internet for more than about an hour knows that it can be very difficult to detect irony in text — it says a lot for writers that most of the time readers understand them properly. In this case, whether my fault or hers, I didn’t read it as it was intended to read; let’s leave it at that.

These include a paper¹ whose principal conclusion “is that the regional distribution of the incidence of violent injury is related to the regional distribution of the price of beer”, one about restoring torn up documents², a mildly terrifying study in which scientists managed to work out what someone was looking at by reading the information from their brain with electrodes³, and a fantastic paper in which someone built a device that can rotate objects without touching them using angular momentum carried by sound waves⁴ — and somehow managed to resist the geek temptation and so rather boringly called it an “acoustic spanner” (and people say that the science in Doctor Who is unrealistic).

But my current favourite is one entitled “Housing in Pyramid Counteracts Neuroendocrine and Oxidative Stress Caused by Chronic Restraint in Rats”⁵. The gist is: take 52 rats, and split them into 4 equal groups (or suits). One group is left well alone, the other three are put in “restrainers” in smaller groups of 3 or 4. This is designed to piss them off. Then, you put one group’s restrainers inside a Pyramid. The pyramid is a wooden affair two and a half feet tall, with a window and a hole for ventilation.

The four triangular sides of the pyramid angled upwards at nearly 51° to the base and met at the apex of the pyramid.

My word, the triangular sides met at the apex? So it was a pyramid, then. They even have a picture, in case you’re somehow still unsure what a ‘pyramid’ might be:

Figure 1: Ratiphar had very feeew cares…

Another group’s restrainer is left in normal conditions (in a presumably-non-pyramidal laboratory), and the last is left in a square box about the same size as the pyramid, because this is a strangely well-conducted seeming study considering how completely fucking mental you have to be to imagine that a pyramid shaped box can reduce stress in rats simply by being pyramid-shaped. They even made sure to align the square box due north, as if that made any difference. The rats (in their restraining cages) were even put on little stools in the boxes, because

Maximum effect of the pyramid is believed to be exerted at one-third the height of the pyramid from its base.

I would have thought maximum effect would be at the apex, since that’s where you’re in the most pyramids. But what do I know of Pyramid Power?

The whole thing looks like ‘cargo-cult science’ to me, right down to the extensive list of references — of which there are fifty-four, although quite a lot of them come from the same couple of books, and at least one is a Geocities page which apparently no longer exists (presumably due to being stored in an insufficiently-pyramidal server room). This latter is cited to support the sentence “Pyramid exposure is believed to put the mind into an alpha state”. This comes hot on the tails of the even better sentence “Research has shown that the energy field within the pyramid can act as antistressor and thus protect the hippocampal neurons from stress-induced atrophy (10)”, in which the promising-sounding Reference 10 is a PhD thesis (not apparently available online) from the same university that ran this study. Probably one of the authors’ luckless students. Another few references discuss “bioresonance”, apparently as something reasonable, to ground the pyramid theory in something people will accept, which would work if bioresonance wasn’t also a load of made-up shit.

The strange thing is, though, that despite all the made-up woo in the discussion section, and despite the rather preposterous premise being tested, it looks like a basically okay experiment. I’d have liked to see it run as a crossover, so we could make sure it was the pyramid rather than the rats being tested, and the square box was three times the volume of the pyramid because they matched base area and height, so there’s a chance the pyramid rats got less air than the controls, but it’s not at all a bad design. Ooh, a control group not aligned to the compass would have been good, too.

And yet, apparently, it worked. The rats in the pyramid were about as stressed as the rats in ordinary cages, whereas all the other rats that had been put in restrainers were pretty pissed off about it. Apparently this is reproducible because reference 11 is an almost identical study to this (right down to the main author) without restrainers.

Of course, I’m not about to convert to pseudoscience and declare that therefore pyramid power is real, partly because the odds of even a hundred p<0.05 results coming up on the trot are still far, far higher than the odds that the shape of a pyramid works “at a hormone level”, and also a bit because the most reproducible result in science is one you just make up.

But this is still interesting — because if this is genuine research, then on some unconscious level these researchers have conspired to rig this experiment very subtly, and I for one would very much like to find out how they did that. The endless lies and deceptions that the human brain pulls on its hapless owners is infinitely more fascinating than the crystals and dowsing and pyramids that result.

1. Matthews et al, Violence-related injury and the price of beer in England and Wales Applied Economics 38, 661–670 (2008)
2. De Smet, Reconstruction of ripped-up documents using fragment stack analysis procedures, Forensic Science International 176, 124–136 (2008)
3. Kay et al, Identifying natural images from human brain activity, Nature 452, 352-355 (2008)
4. Skeldon et al, An acoustic spanner and its associated rotational Doppler shift, New J. Phys.10 013018 (9pp) (2008)
5. Bhat et al, Housing in Pyramid Counteracts Neuroendocrine and Oxidative Stress Caused by Chronic Restraint in Rats, eCAM 4, 35–42 (2007)

For the rights to republish information or theories from this website, please contact: hamish@thejoecell.com

Only cranks ever imagine they can own information or theories and legally stop people disseminating them.

First things first. A Joe Cell is a series of tins of water, arranged in a Russian Doll formation, kept at low pressure. Then you ‘charge’ it: hook the inner-most and outer-most metal cylinders up to a voltage and leave it for a bit. When you’re done, it becomes a never ending battery (which may explain why “Joe Cells are reportedly… prone to dying for no apparent reason”). But then they also say that you can test it by checking the pH of the water, which is just downright silly because it’s chemically impossible to make any pH above or below 7.0 using whole, pure water, because pH is a measure of how many H⁺ an OH⁻ ions there are and water is H₂O. That’s one of their saner ideas — they go on to say

Some people have claimed that the Joe Cell harnesses some type of magical life force energy referred to as Orgone. Others believe that it pulls energy straight from the very fabric on the universe – the aether.

That presumably being the same æther that was proven not to exist in the late eighties? Of the 19th century?

The website says the cell is “essentially a capacitor”, but one that doesn’t lose its charge as it, er, releases charge. This isn’t even bad science by this stage; this is a violation of basic maths. But the real genius lies on the “references” page. Highlights include Cold Fusion patent with similaries [sic] to Joe Cell.doc, Positive Electricity (doc), which explains that if you line up a load of protons, then “the positive charge of the hydrogen nucleus - a proton - passing rapidly down the chain by relay, without the proton actually moving down,” which is a lot like saying you can move the weight of a rock without moving the rock, and Water Car Instructions (PDF), which is just what it sounds like.

You should be careful when filling the Joe Cell, because

The Cells are reported to function only when a strong vacuum is created within the cell. For this reason, adding a pressure gauge is recommended. For the Cell to function properly, around 15 psi of vacuum will be required.

For reference, atmospheric pressure is a little over 14psi, so you will need some amount of negative gas in the cell. How you stop the water in there from instantly vaporising and thereby creating pressure I don’t know. I didn’t know atmospheric pressure in psi, of course. I read that claim and thought it sufficiently likely he’d just made the number up to warrant me looking it up on the off-chance. It paid off. Who knows how much of the rest of his site is nonsense I’m too ignorant to spot — or similar guesses that happened to be plausible?

Of course, what makes all this really perverse is that it’s designed to power a car. Even if they’d really discovered a way of getting more-than-100% efficient electricity, cars run on fucking petrol. They wouldn’t run better with a Joe Cell for the same reason that you don’t get a boost of energy when you swallow a AA battery and your car doesn’t run if you fill the petrol tank with brie. Even if it worked, it would only replace the car battery, and you won’t run a car long on batteries and no petrol (unless of course it’s an electric car). If you don’t put petrol in a car, it won’t drive from the starter motor until the battery runs out, it just won’t go. And if you modified the engine so it did, the motor would be destroyed before you hit second gear. Their “clean, green technology” is petrol. If this thing worked, he’d hook up eight of them to a copper and zinc electrode pair and run his entire house on a lemon.

In fact, he suggests having two in your car for “redundancy”, the idea presumably being that if the laws of physics don’t allow you to build a perpetual motion device, try try again. Apparently,

It would make sense to mount then on opposite sides of the engine bay, to reduce them interfering with each other’s magnetic field.

Hang on, what? What magnetic field? Beyond the same tiny field you get from any electrical current, I can’t see any part of the Joe Cell that would have a magnetic field, much less be influenced by one. He goes on to say that the water has to be utterly and completely pure. This is pretty well impossible, but he’s got an answer. Apparently you can mke 100% pure water using a device called a “conditioning cell”. Furthermore,

A conditioning cell is the same as a Joe Cell except it separate from the vehicle.

You’re just being deliberately silly now, aren’t you? Anything else it can do? Can it bringeth the rains to provide the water in the first place?

Because the Joe Cell is creating a cloud like condition on the ground, it makes sense that it could influence weather conditions.

Alright then.

Here’s a great bit explaining how to avoid interference. Also, it’s good advice for anyone who thinks the Joe Cell doesn’t yet look sufficiently ridiculous:

The charge state within the cell can be affected by electromagnetic interference from other electrical devices and power sources. This interference can be minimized by using insulating material to prevent shorting. Wrapping the Cell in Burlap (Hessian) and placing it in a plastic bucket, held in place with blocks of wood is recommended.

I love cranks. I can’t help but.

I challenge George Monbiot to test out which is the most dangerous fuel - coal or nuclear power. I am prepared to go into a room full of CO2 [sic] for two minutes, if he is prepared to go into a room full of radiation for two minutes.

Okay, let’s try that. He can stand in “a room full of CO₂” for two minutes, and then, when the paramedics have resuscitated him and explained that you can’t breathe carbon dioxide, we can discuss what “a room full of radiation” might be.

Presumably he has in all his years seen at least one dimmer switch. He might like to explain at what point the room becomes “full” of light. Because you could easily endure a small amount of radiation for two minutes with no ill effects. You do exactly that every two minutes of your life. In the same way, you can endure a small amount of carbon dioxide.

So first we need to work out exactly how much of each thing each room will need to be “full”. Then we need to decide if Scargill will be allowed to supplement his CO₂ with any oxygen — bearing in mind that if there’s room for oxygen, it can’t really be “full” of CO₂ now, can it?

We should also decide what kind of radiation to use. We could use alpha, beta, gamma, or anything we like from the EM spectrum including long-wave radio, heat or visible light.

After we’ve done that, and Scargill and Monbiot have spent the required minutes in their respective rooms — personally I vote to up Scargill’s sentence to five minutes as it’s by no means unheard of for people to simply hold their breath for two and that’s cheating — we can discuss what the hell any of that was supposed to prove because CO₂ is dangerous because a sodding greenhouse gas, not because it’s poisonous.

Scargill’s challenge is like the NRA saying guns are safe and proving it by standing in a room full of bullets for two minutes and failing to die. Or a company showing their new Arsenic Sandwich is safe by sitting in a room with it for two minutes. Or Dan challenging the claim that cigarette smoke is more toxic than car exhaust fumes by challenging me to inhale thousands of times more of the latter than he willof the former.

Another interesting bit of his article is this:

…we live on an island with more than 1,000 years of coal reserves from which we can provide all the electricity, oil, gas and petrochemicals that people need, without causing harm to the environment.

I was going to mock him for this too, but I’ve looked into it, and it turns out he’s right. Modern coal-fired power stations are really quite clever. You don’t actually need to burn the coal. Instead, a kitten gently caresses the coal, and the coal starts to give off heat. This is used to drive a turbine and create electricity. Meanwhile magical pixies suck any CO₂ the kitten may have exhaled into magic pixie bottles, which then vanish in a puff of pure joy. It’s true.

…to ask [them] to investigate fully the plight of increasing numbers of people who have become electro-sensitive (ES) or electro-hypersensitive (EHS) in the UK due to electricity or the new pulsed microwave radiation technologies such as TETRA, mobile phones and masts, WiFi, radar, cordless phones and a host of “wireless” gadgets.

ES and EHS are made-up conditions. They’re technophobic knee-jerk idiocy kept alive by people like Alasdair Philips so that they can sell you utterly useless shit. At first it was “wifi is dangerous, phone masts are cancer factories, and so on” but when it became too obvious even for them that the population at large was bathed in radiation and still basically limping on okay they decided to say it was just some people and give it a name. The prefix “hyper” was added to the condition to make it seem like they were just more suceptible to microwave radiation, rather than having a whole new way of getting disease. That makes it seem more plausible.

They also want:

1. Demand independent research into this “FUNCTIONAL IMPAIRMENT CAUSED BY ENVIRONMENTAL TRIGGERS” - which does have a distinguishing feature from other illnesses/conditions with similar symptoms i.e. the ES/EHS CAN AND DO recover if they are isolated from the cause(s) of the sensitivity.

The research has been done. The condition does not exist^[1-3]. (The third abstract there includes the phrase “Sham-Math” and is therefore excellent.) I’ve never seen a petition before which so repeatedly strives to establish some objective statement of (supposed) fact. It’s as if they think people don’t believe EHS is a real condition.

2. Demand monitoring by personnel trained or researching in this field who are aware of the effects of pulsed microwave radiation/electricity.

You’re demanding monitoring done specifically by people who know the monitoring is pointless.

“Pulsed” microwave radiation is just regular microwave radiation that turns on and off quickly. That doesn’t make it somehow more dangerous any more than turning a light on and off a lot makes it dangerous (assuming you don’t have epillepsy, anyway). I assume they go after pulsed radiation because that’s what’s used for modern things like mobiles and wifi, whereas regular, continuous modulated radiation must be safe because the wireless was around when they were little and nothing was dangeous then because they didn’t have the Daily Mail then.

3 Ensure that the Human Rights of the ES/EHS are observed fully and recognise electro-sensitivity as a disability in the UK, as in Canada and Sweden.

Maybe we should officially recognise stupid as a disability while we’re at it.

4 Provide safe zones so that the ES/EHS have places to recover/live in OR replace pulsed microwave radiation with a safer technology.

A safer technology? Like what? I hope you’re not advocating yoghurt-pots-and-string, because that string, stretched tight across streets, is a real hazard to cyclists, especially when it’s dark.

Just… no. Go and do something else.

Part of me hopes they get a lot of names on this, so I can see the government response. You can only say “your concerns are imaginary and we fully intend to ignore them” so diplomatically.

1. Rubin et al, Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity: A Systematic Review of Provocation Studies. Psychosomatic Medicine 67:224-232 (2005)
2. Seitz et al, Electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) and subjective health complaints associated with electromagnetic fields of mobile phone communication—a literature review published between 2000 and 2004. Science of the Total Environment 349(1-3):45-55 (2005)
3. Lyskov et al, Provocation study of persons with perceived electrical hypersensitivity and controls using magnetic field exposure and recording of electrophysiological characteristics. Bioelectromagnetics 22(7):457-62 (2001)