Sam scores an interview with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson!

Houston Skeptics Society member, Skepchick Blogger, and snappy dresser Sam Ogden recently interviewed Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson in Houston.   Dr. Tyson is a well-known scientist, host of PBS’s Nova Science series, director of New York’s Hayden Planetarium, former keynote speaker at the James Randi Educational Foundation’s The Amaz!ng Meeting, and once voted “sexiest astrophysicist” by People, sat down with Sam for a few minutes.  Enjoy!

Part one:

Part two:

Interview with Dr. Eugenie Scott

Skepchick blogger and Houston Skeptic Society co-organizer Sam Ogden recently sat down with Dr. Eugenie Scott last month when she was in town to lecture at the Houston Natural Science Museum.  Society member Chris of Dropframe Video (cmalachi@hotmail.com) did a fantastic job of capturing and editing the interview, which is presented on You-tube.  Part one of the series can be found here, from where you can link to the subsequent parts to allow for easier uploading. Enjoy!

Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day

Below is an adaptation of a talk I gave as part of a panel at DragonCon, called “How to Combat Woo”.  My fellow panelists included Phil Plait, PhD, also known as the Bad Astronomer, D.J. Groethe of the Center of Skeptical Inquiry and host of the podcast “Point of Inquiry”, Jeff Wagg, Communications and Outreach Manager of the James Randi Educational Foundation, and Maria Walters, founder of the Atlanta Skeptic Society and columnist on the Skepchick.org blog.

My son attended the Naval nuclear power school a few years ago, including a crash course in chemistry, physics, electronics, thermodynamics, other subjects needed to operate and maintain a nuclear power plant. The students tend to be top achievers, interested in science and math, and would frequently ask for the theory. They wanted to know WHY not just how. The instructors would answer “this is outside the scope of this course, please just accept this so we can move on.” So my son and his classmates drew large black dots on the backs of their calculators, with Sharpies. When they were told to accept information for the sake of expediency, they’d ‘push’ this button and say “I believe.”

I told you that story so I can tell you this story. All of us have a button labeled “I believe” that we push. The button may be as simple as “I believe that my spouse loves me.” Or “education is a positive thing for society.” But most people of the world have other buttons that they push. I believe in magic, ghosts, witches, homeopathy, aliens, psychics, conspiracy theories, or one of a hundred versions of a god. And that button might as well be drawn in Sharpie, because it doesn’t work anymore, it is ALWAYS pushed.

I’m an engineer by training, and like to draw diagrams and pictures. I can’t think without a pencil or marker in my hand. If you’re like me, you think that if you can just explain something, a scientific topic for example, clearly enough, that your audience will nod their heads and say ‘oh, yes, now I see! You’re right, and I will adjust my thinking.”

The problem with those buttons that are painted on, they have to wear off. We, as skeptics, want to slice right through the armor that believers have plated up around themselves, which have built up by custom, upbringing, anecdotes, personal experiences, fuzzy thinking, and from lack of exposure to the scientific method.

It took me almost three years to get my own mother to check Snopes before she forwarded emails to me. I’m her daughter, you think she would trust me, but I still have to carefully work with her on issues with her health. Just this week, she told me, rather reluctantly, that she had gone to a chiropractor for some lower back pain, because ’she was desperate”. This, from a woman with chronic kidney disease that reads my blog posts. I had to persuade my aunt to throw away her bowel cleansing kits and pills to ‘improve her liver function” even though she couldn’t tell me what her liver function was supposed to be functioning as. But, now they check Snopes, and were at least embarrassed to tell me about the chiropractor. These are intelligent women, but they have been told their entire life that these things work.

And, indeed, they DO feel better after a visit to the chiropractor. It’s a bit harder to explain the concept of ‘regression to a mean’ to them. But I could not do it AT ALL with a single clear, simple, unemotional explanation.

Rather than creating the Grand Canyon in a 40-day flood, presenting skepticism to those with a painted-on “I Believe” button is more a process of rain beating the mountains down into the ocean, of the weeds splitting the foundations. It is slow, it is one-on-one, and it can be frustrating. However, this is how we teach, one person at a time.

Paper or Plastic?

(This is a brief overview of the manufacture of paper and of plastic, and is not intended to be comprehensive, or a chemistry class.)

How do you answer?  If you give what you think is the ‘correct’ answer, you say ‘paper’ or you’ve brought your own bags.  Let’s examine that choice.

The paper bags used in grocery stores begin in the forest, with the timber industry.  Even though trees are a renewable source, there is more to producing new paper than planting new trees.  The paper industry is one of the dirtiest industries around.   The chemicals used in the paper pulp process include sulfur, bleaches, and acids.  The process uses huge quantities of water, which must be treated and cleaned, a process which also uses chemicals.  According to a representative of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, paper manufacturing also receives a larger number of complaints than refineries on ‘nuisance odors ‘ which is a term meaning that the facilities emit very strong, disagreeable odors, as unpleasant to live near as a feedlot.   Processing facilities must control odors to the same extent that they must control pollutant emissions. Odor is a non-trivial pollution problem.

Paper has a limited ability to be recycled.  On each trip through recycling, paper must be chopped and shredded, which shortens the fiber length.  Eventually, the fibers become too small to use and must be discarded into landfill, as do many of the manufacturing byproducts from paper manufacture.

What about plastic?  Grocery stores bags are made of polyethylene, which begins as the ethane component of natural gas.  The primary emission from polyethylene manufacture is from natural-gas fired heaters, which supply heat or steam for the process.  Natural gas is the cleanest burning fuel, and natural gas wells are clean and low-profile – a valve sticking up out of the ground as opposed to the ‘pumping units’ associated with oil wells.  The conversion of ethane into polyethylene is close to 99% efficient.  The feedstocks for ethylene are basically ethane – clean and odorless, and steam.  Additionally, polyethylene can be recycled almost infinitely.  Even though the molecular weight of the polymer chains will change with recycling, it’s still plastic and can be reused.   It is also inert- in some locations, polyethylene has been chopped into sand-sized bits and incorporated into heavy clay soils, to lighten them as you would do with sand.

The manufacture of polyethylene requires about 6% of the water that paper manufacture requires.  As our population grows and the supply of fresh water becomes increasingly scarce, industrial usage of water becomes an important consideration in the chain.

Transportation adds more cost to the paper product than to plastic.  Paper is heavier, so trucking costs, for a given ‘carrying capacity’ of the bag, are higher, as is the amount of pollution from the gasoline needed to transport the denser product.

Frequently, the public’s attitudes and beliefs about environmental consequences of our choices are shaped by sound bites and pictures from the media.  Pictures of sea turtles with a plastic grocery bag stuffed into their throat, or a sea mammal with a set of six-pack rings caught around its head, are moving and emotional.  These items do end up in the oceans, due to sloppy handling.  However, legible newspapers from 70 years ago have also been mined from landfills. Searches on the EPA’s website will turn up studies showing that the TOTAL environmental impact from the manufacture and long-term landfill storage of paper bags exceeds that of plastic bags – from the mining of the raw materials (trees or natural gas), through manufacture including energy requirements, pollutants, water use, and hazardous wastes, to the volume of a bag in the landfill.

As skeptics, we must look at the entire picture.  The issue is more complicated than I can discuss in a short blog post, but critical thinking skills can be used on these issues just as readily as they can on issues of quackery and pseudoscience.   I posted this article in a slightly different format on a well-known skeptic website a few months ago, and was attacked for either being a shill for Al Gore or a shill for Big Oil. I’m not sure how I can be both at the same time, but it shows the knee-jerk reaction of people on hot-button issues.  Although most people wanted to disagree with my statement that plastic is a better choice (as compared to paper), the only evidence given was that sometimes “bags end up in the ocean and get caught on bird beaks or swallowed by whales”.  This is true, but the answer is not to ban plastic over paper, but to handle any bag properly through reuse, recycling, and proper disposal.

The option with the least environmental impact is to carry reusable shopping bags, or carry personal bags.  However, if you are faced with a choice between paper or plastic, plastic is the environmentally responsible decision.

Alternative Medicine Gimmick of the Week #1: Pen Power!…..

Pen Power!!!

 

According to the website for this product, a pen which represents a spine bent by chiropractic subluxations,

“the “Subluxated Pen” is a trusted and proven way to promote your practice. Your personalized information is imprinted on the bent part of the pen. The bend in the pen attracts attention in a unique, fun and powerful way. Using the Bent Pen is the inexpensive and professional method for building your patient community.”

 The manufacturers of this promotional product tout the results of a 2008 study performed by ASI (Advertising Specialty Institute) which appear to show that Bent Pens are “the most effective and least expensive form of advertising.” I noticed some shady business when comparing the provided information on the website and the actual report from ASI. Most importantly, the report only mentions writing instruments. It does not specifically look into the effectiveness of Bent Pens themselves. That may not be a distinction that matters, but it could be that people don’t like novelty writing instruments with caps, instead preferring conventional click-top pens. It is unfair to make claims about a specific product based on the data. Despite this fact, the graph used by H.W. Industries on the Bent Pen website, which compares the cost per impression of Bent Pens (using the data based on writing instruments in general) with such advertising entities as magazine ads, prime time television spots and billboards, is made to look as if it came directly from the study. It did not. There is a section which lists the cost per impression of various types of advertising, however. In it, one can easily see that writing instruments, while cheap compared to national magazine ads for example, are no better than caps or bags in this regard.  

In addition to the misleading graph, there is a section on the website which is cut and paste verbatim from the ASI study summary of conclusions. Well, almost verbatim. It curiously left out the part which revealed that of all the studied promotional products, wearable bags delivered the most impressions. The same wearable bags which had an equal cost per impression to writing instruments. Writing instruments provided only the fourth highest number of impressions per month. I guess Bent Bags are too difficult for even chiropractic technology to produce though. Of course a better form of advertising might be actually treating a legitimate medical problem.

To be entirely fair, H.W. Industries is not a chiropractic practice building company. They just seem to sell gimmicky crap, and they are apparantly no less concerned about twisting data to improve their profits than chiropractors are. But I probably shouldn’t be making fun of this at all considering I hand out fetus shaped keychain flashlights.

Skeptical Pearls #2: Beware the Testimonial…..

Faster than a speeding case report. More powerful than a double-blind, placebo-controlled study. Able to leap peer review in a single bound. Look! Up on the internet! It’s a story. It’s an anecdote. It’s a testimonial!

Every implausible and unproven quack therapy, from acupuncture to quantum healing, comes bearing testimonials of its effectiveness. These stories are typically brief, to the point, extremely powerful and, across the board, absolutely worthless. To anyone with a decent skeptical filter in place, the reliance on testimonials is an obvious sign of a complete lack of credible support for one’s claims. Yet to far too many people there is no introductory phrase more meaningful than “In my experience”. And no amount of published contradictory data or number of explanations from critically minded experts can match the effect from just one of the seemingly neverending supply of these uncontrolled, unblinded, and often tall, tales.

Sadly, even outright harm and suffering, or the complete lack of achieving the claimed benefit, are often unable to shake the faith of one who has stepped over the line that seperates credulity from a more critical approach to one’s health. It is far too easy to rationalize away these failures, placing the blame on themselves or the medical community, when the stranger whose gout was cured by taking goat urine supplements is trusted more than the family doctor. Perhaps the believer doesn’t realize that the near totality of the testimonials seen on television or on the internet are fabricated. Maybe they don’t realize that a significant number of them, as is often the case with fraudulent cancer cures, even when provided by real people are found to be the former words of the now deceased, victims of their disease process, their lack of critical thinking skills, and the bastards profiting off of them. It is more likely, however, that the undue influence of testimonials is hard-wired in the human brain, a remnant of something which at one point bestowed a survival advantage on our primitive ancestors.

There is a reason why quacks rely on testimonials. And that is because they don’t have science in their corner. Sure they will jump on poorly designed studies, usually coming out of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine and published in biased pseudojournals, and tout them as proof of their legitimacy. But they will just as quickly denigrate methodological naturalism and the methods of so-called “western science” when better studies come along revealing their pet delusion to be a charade. The testimonial circumvents this problem, rendering science irrelevant. This is a recipe for disaster, or at the very least a lighter wallet.

Proven treatments don’t need stories. In my line of work I often am faced with parents who refuse recommended practices such as vaccines and the administration of intramuscular vitamin K for newborns. When I am discussing the care of a child with parents, and presenting them with treatment options or evidence-based prophylaxis regimens, I don’t tell them about the time I used a particular treatment and how it cured the patient, or how I had this one kid who suffered a poor outcome because they didn’t get something I recommended. There are too many uncontrolled variables in most clinical situations to trust such anecdotes.  I have to rely on good data, which should not consist of anecdotes regardless of how many I might collect over my career. I would be no better than the quacks I often rant about were I to attempt to manipulate parents with emotional testimonials.

Breaking it Down: How Americans are Special Pleading…..

14%- “Of course doctors don’t think it works. You can’t expect to understand my healing powers with western science!”

21%- “God organized fossils that way to make it look like evolution is true…..as a test.”

25%- “My psychic abilities are always blocked whenever a skeptic is around.”

13%- ”Recent high definition images of the surface of Mars don’t show any evidence of alien civilization because NASA is covering it all up!”

15%- ”We haven’t found any physical remains of Bigfoot because it is an elusive creature and it is rare for fossils to form in the first place. So it is unreasonable to ask for that kind of proof that Bigfoot exists.”

12%- “Other researchers may be easily fooled but I have over thirty years experience in investigating ghostly visitations. I can tell the difference between a hoax and the real thing.”

Opti-Wash Redemption Contact Solution…..

Are you tired of protein deposits, irritated eyes, and wickedness?

Fear of corneal ulceration and eternal torment in a lake of fire got you down?

Redemption is finally at hand!

OPTI-WASH Redemption contact solution maintains a thin layer of righteous moisture on the surface of your lenses, so they feel fresh and moist for divine comfort throughout the day. And only new OPTI-WASH Redemption, with its complex blend of lubricants, moisturizers, preservatives, and holy water, washes away both lens debris and the day-to-day build up of sin.

When contact lenses are soaked in OPTI-WASH Redemption contact solution, the surface of the lens is reconditioned and blessed every night by adsorbing a proprietary reconditioning and sanctification system. This allows a layer of moisture from your natural tears to be formed on the lens surface, and for the accumulation of transgressions to easily rinse away .

OPTI-WASH Redemption incorporates new ingredients to a disinfection/purgation system that has been used for nearly 2,000 years. Alcon, in cooperation with the Catholic Church continues to develop biblically based technology to care for the new types of contact lenses available. This focus has allowed OPTI-WASH Redemption to continue to achieve a high level of disinfection against both bacteria, fungi, and iniquity.

Always use the contact solution prescribed by your eye doctor or priest. Ask your eye doctor or priest if OPTI-WASH Redemption is right for you. Remember, only your eye doctor or priest can determine the contact lens, solution, and reconciliation combination that is right for you.

Little Tykes Playhouse Foreclosures Reach Record High…..

Oshkosh, NE-According to an exhaustive survey of backyards and rumpus rooms across the country, the number of preschool aged children going into foreclosure on their Little Tikes Playhouses hit a record high this week, and playtime experts are predicting that the crisis will continue throughout the current year.

“All indications are pointing towards a worsening trend as more and more children ages 2 years and up with subprime loans are simply unable to make payments on their Classic Castles, Country Cottages, and Endless Adventures Patio Playhouses,” Timmy Duncan, senior analyst for the Federal National Mortgage Association’s Toddler Division, explained. “Their Piggy Banks are emptying fast and it is no wonder that many are turning to afternoons of crime.”

As growing numbers of these houses are going into foreclosure, suburban police forces are adapting to the resulting increases in toddler crime. Many are installing child car seats within patrol car suspect transport enclosures and Fisher Price Corn Poppers are fast becoming standard-issue equipment. A race to develop profitable non-lethal methods of incapacitation and containment are being developed by both Lego and Play-Doh.

Facebook Group Secedes From the United States…..

Cambridge, MA-In a suprising move earlier today, administrators of the Facebook social group, “1,000,000 People Who Love Kittens!!!”, officially declared their secession from the Unites States.

The group, started by New Jersey homemaker Jeannie Baker in August of last year, currently consists of Jeannie, Jeannie’s best friend Luanne Watkins, and a man listed only as Steve. Displayed in the group’s photo section are nearly three hundred pictures of Jeannie and Luanne’s cats, Monsieur Muffin and Señor Whiskers respectively, as well as a number of drawings of cats by Steve.

President Obama, upon learning of the secession, reacted by ordering an immediate review of the groups submitted secession paperwork. “I immediately put my best people on this,” Obama explained. “But after a thorough review, it’s all there and the administration’s hands are tied on this.”

Constitutional scholar Mort Fishbein agrees. “This isn’t the first time a small group of organized citizens has left the Union. Of course we all learned a powerful lesson from Reagan’s 1983 thermonuclear strike on the Greater Newark Dungeons & Dragons Club. Diplomacy is really the way to go here.”

When told of the groups secession, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed regret but also understanding. “I can’t say I didn’t see this coming. My girlfriend told me that one day my free-access social networking website was going to end up tearing this nation apart.”