Category Archives: Antiscience

Crackpottery, woo, superstition

Hang Your Head in Shame, NPR

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I ran across this twaddle at NPR: Scientists Take Quantum Steps Toward Teleportation, thinking perhaps there was some new result being described. There wasn’t, and furthermore, it’s a giant turd of a story, hitting all the “highlights” of teleportation reporting, along with the misendorsement of Michio Kaku. This isn’t the first time that Kaku has spouted nonsense about teleportation; it left a bad taste in Chad’s mouth not too long ago.

From the NPR story:

“Quantum entanglement” may sound like an awful sci-fi romance flick, but it’s actually a phenomenon that physicists say may someday lead to the ability to teleport an object all the way across the galaxy instantly.

It’s not exactly the Star Trek version of teleportation, where an object disappears then reappears somewhere else. Rather, it “entangles” two different atoms so that one atom inherits the properties of another.

To use an epithet I learned in the navy: Not only no, but f#@k no. Quantum teleportation does not teleport objects, it teleports information. It is not exactly the Star Trek version of teleportation in the sense that it’s nothing at all like Star Trek. Mentioning Star Trek (or just Scotty, and this story does both) is greatest hit #1 in any teleportation story.

And: Physicists say? Which ones? I want names!

“An invisible umbilical cord emerges connecting these two electrons. And you can separate them by as much as a galaxy if you want. Then, if you vibrate one of them, somehow on the other end of the galaxy the other electron knows that its partner is being jiggled.”

This is what Kaku has gotten wrong before, and is hit #2. Entanglement does not tell you this — it tells you that when you measure particle 1, you will instantly know what state particle 2 is in. You haven’t changed the state of 1, because is wasn’t in an eigenstate to begin with — you’ve collapsed the wavefunction, and gotten all of the information about the state of the system in doing so. Wiggling the electron at that point does absolutely nothing to its formerly-entangled partner.

Kaku’s getting it wrong, and needs to STFU about it.

Hit #3 takes us into crackpotopia

It could one day lead to new types of computers, and some even think entanglement may explain things like telepathy.

What is there to explain about telepathy? That it’s nonsense? You have to confirm that a phenomenon actually, objectively exists before you could even think about trotting entanglement out as an explanation for it. This is a slimy tactic — don’t even address that the phenomenon in question is on decidedly shaky footing, and instead propose that you have an explanation for it. The reader gets the impression, though, that the phenomenon is real and has the endorsement of mainstream science, and that we are merely looking for the mechanism of how it works. And you also used the “some think” schtick. Are you using anonymous sources?

NPR, you got hoodwinked by someone who didn’t know what he was talking about and got really lazy about checking up on he facts.

All of Steve Jobs's Men

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Those who visit the tech world are probably aware of the iPhone4 antenna issues and all the media hoopla surrounding it. I have no real dog in the fight, horse in this race or cliché in this idiom. I don’t own an iPhone and I’m not shilling for Apple. But it pains me to see a bunch of tech-savvy people making crappy emotional arguments about something that should be quantifiable,and/or making crappy technical arguments because they don’t look at what the data are (or aren’t) telling them.

Apple had to respond, of course, and there are a number of articles out there explaining the business psychology of this; in some sense it’s already too late — once the idea that Al Gore invented the internet is out there, actual facts will do very little to change things, so the undercurrent that the phone is a dud cannot truly be slain (the best you can do is a flesh wound). There is no Vorpal blade for persistent myths of the internet. Some people will believe that because they heard it, and others will repeat it because they love to hate Apple. But you have to try, and so a solution was proposed. Free bumpers for everyone. Feel free to discuss whether Steve Jobs was not apologetic enough to suit you, or whatever.

That’s not my point.

My point is that people kept making this out as a technical problem, when all along it has been a PR problem, and a lot of people not employed by Apple kept insisting otherwise (except that perception is reality, hence the solution mentioned above). I’ve seen it called a design flaw and also called a defect. The latter is flat-out wrong — the problem is not with the phone itself being faulty, as if swapping it out for another phone would solve the issue. The problem is user-specific. Is it a design flaw? Yes and no. It is, in the sense that there is degradation in performance that can be avoided with a technical fix, but then you have to call any sub-optimal performance a design flaw. You have to insist that cheap technology suffers from a design flaw if it doesn’t work as well as a more expensive technology, and I think that this is not what we mean by flaw. It is a trade-off, a natural and expected offshoot from optimizing on multiple variables, including price. You want better performance? Spend a few extra bucks. In what industries is that not the case?

The real metric for seeing if this is a “flaw” is to do a proper analysis of performance and the analysis, for the most part, was absolute crap. Most of it concentrated on how much the signal dropped when you held the phone the “wrong” way, and went no further. BFD. That’s a science fair project. When you attenuate a signal, it goes down. When you short out an antenna (or at least change the capacitance or change the resistance of it, whatever was actually happening), you will lose signal. What the analyses lacked is any sort of context for these numbers, and while careful data-taking is important, the real tough part about science is in proper interpretation — figuring out what the data mean. And few of the stories did that. Diminished signal is not proper context, because all phones do that when you cover the antenna. All that these numbers show is that the phone works better when you don’t cover the antenna. Confirming this is not going to get you to Sweden.

You can’t compare it to a different phone on another network, because everyone knows AT&T sucks. Their network has made them infamous, like El Guapo. The real comparison of any validity would be to properly compare the phone to the one it replaced. Because the real question is this: Is the new one better? I haven’t done any exhaustive cataloging of all the stories on the iphone4, but of the dozens I’ve read, I have seen just one technical analysis that addresses this (though there are undoubtedly others). The conclusion? The new phone holds calls at a lower signal strength than the old one.

The other bad comparison was the number of drpped calls form the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4. The new phone drops more calls — that’s bad, right? What if I told you that I did a survey and found 25 people liked a name brand of soft drink, but another one found that 100 people liked Crappa-Cola? Do those numbers mean anything? What if I had to survey 10,000 people to find the 100 who liked Crappa-Cola, but only 50 to get the result for the name brand? The numbers would be meaningless as a direct comparison — we have to normalize the responses. That’s just basic science analysis. So a direct comparison of the numbers of dropped calls is just as meaningless without knowing that we are similarly normalizing the data.

When John Gruber of Daring Fireball reported those numbers, I sent an email to point this out to him. I had to mention that this isn’t an Apples-to-Apples comparison (and, of course, I’m using the obvious pun, because that’s what I do. It was low-hanging fruit. Damn, I did it again) I wrote, in part,

What is important is the comparison to the previous version of the phone: does the iPhone4 drop calls that the 3 or 3GS does not? And the answer that seems to be, for the most part, “no.” It’s hard to tell, because most of the Geekmedia aren’t looking at it that way, and much of the remaining evidence is anecdotal.

In Antennagate Bottom Line, you mention the comparison of numbers of dropped calls, but I argue that this is not the right metric. What one needs to know is if the iPhone4 drops a call that would not be dropped by a 3GS. If the additional drops are in areas that the 3GS would have never connected in the first place, then the statistic isn’t telling us what everyone claims it is. All that would mean is that there is a large drop rate in regions that were previously regarded as dead zones. That’s an improvement, not a regression.

Without that information, one does not truly know how to interpret the statistic.

And not only did he made a post addressing that, he frikkin’ quoted my email! (and this little ego-boost is the whole reason for finally writing this up. I’ve been quoted by Gruber and linked to by Kottke. In your face, world!)

Dissecting the Problem

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A simple way to get the antiscience crowd to come around?

Maybe if those in the media and popular press would stop treating us like a different species, “the people” who we don’t reach would feel less wary about trusting us when the data we generate challenges their preconceptions. Maybe if the media would stop treating everything like a “controversy”, and stop giving free air time for dissemination of misinformation, we wouldn’t have to spend our time debunking crap that was debunked 150 years ago (in the case of evolution) and could focus more on education. Here’s an example; anybody even remotely familiar with the “controversy” surrounding mercury and autism knows who Andrew Wakefield is. He gets mentioned in practically every article and gets the media’s “equal time” treatment, even though the guy is a total slime and we’ve known it for years. How many legitimate medical researchers, on the other hand, get more than a two-sentence quote? How many autism researchers fighting the good fight get profiled to the extent that Wakefield does? If you’re not in the field, can you even name an autism researcher on the other side of the line from Wakefield?

I read this before reading Chris Mooney’s op-ed, but I think this, in particular, is spot-on. One of the many ways the battle is biased against science is the ease by which one can make a false claim, and the difficulty in debunking the claim, because science is complicated. The artificially forced bilateral symmetry common in stories and debates works against us. I don’t know how much of a solution this ends up being, but it is part of the problem.

I think this also ties in with science needing to step up its PR game, though I think there are problems inherent in non-scientists becoming spokespersons; the more links you put between the people that best understand the research and the people interacting with the public, the greater chance you have of simplifying the science to the point it’s wrong. Somebody simply reciting talking points can’t interact and answer questions, which means that Evil Monkey’s point about scientists getting out and engaging the public is the best approach, and we scientists (and administrators who are our bosses) have to recognize the value of outreach. The other thing that bothers me about external PR that strays from the Sgt. Friday script (just the facts) is that appealing to emotion swings both ways. I think it would be much better if a person could sniff out false claims themselves, rather than having to rely on a PR firm to tell you. If you can be convinced by a persuasive but non-fact-based argument that something is true, you can also be convinced that it’s false. And then there’s the trump card — the antiscience crowd often wins the battle not by having great spokespeople, but having ones that are willing to lie, and science can’t go down that path.

One thing that all this ignores, however, is that many of the targets who disagree aren’t doing so because scientists aren’t putting forth a compelling argument. They made up their minds long ago — facts aren’t going to sway them, but neither is a smooth talker with a pretty face. I think that you have to recognize that there are people who will never be convinced — there is no strategy that will work. They are not interested in the facts, or in honest debate, and if what you have to say disagrees with Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh, you’re just flat out of luck. Confirmation bias is real.

Design

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I found another site that has a slightly more complete answer for how the “fridge of the future” is supposed to work. Nano bio robots upconvert IR into visible light, and send it out of the system. (No, it doesn’t. We call this magic, when we’re in a charitable mood. At other times what we call it involves the biology of used food, sometimes incorporating a male bovine)

But I’ve already said all of that.

The other thing that bothers me about this is that it’s part of Electrolux’s Design Lab competition, and I think they should be embarrassed to have included it. Design is not just aesthetics. If something serves no other function than to evoke a response based on how it looks, it’s art. We like art because it’s pleasing to the eye, or it arouses a certain emotional reaction, or make you think (or some combination thereof). But this wasn’t an art competition. It was a design competition, ostensibly meaning you want the best design. Design brings with it an additional requirement: it has to work.

Design incorporates a lot of things, and it’s not like experimental physicists are routinely mistaken a great designers. We tend to swing to the other end of the spectrum; if it works, who cares what it looks like? We’re the only ones who are going to use it, so why make the controls intuitive? Our experiments typically involve duct tape, parts held together with bits of wire and cables everywhere, and few labels. If you want design, you need to talk to an engineer — s/he will make it work, and do so in a more efficient fashion, put it in a box and make it (somewhat) easier to use. We than measure the quality of design by the attractiveness of the package and the level of user-friendliness, and great design is hard because you are trying to optimize for multiple variables, with often conflicting constraints — one demand might be that it’s small, but another requirement needs it to be big, etc. It’s hard to do all that. But the unspoken part of all of this is that the box has to do what it’s supposed to do — if it doesn’t meet spec, we tend to get mad and demand it be fixed, or give us our money back.

So an item that can’t possibly work can’t be an example of good design. It shouldn’t even get in the door.

The Refrigerator of the Futurama

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Zero-Energy Fridge Uses Gel to Preserve Food

No, I don’t think it does. All of the links I found eventually lead back to an Electrolux design competition, which is short on detail. I think “design” here is code for “engineering a bonus but not necessary”

The closest I could find to an explanation of how it works is this:

The zero-energy concept relies on a biopolymer gel that uses luminescence to preserve food items.

I think they dropped the “which hasn’t yet been discovered,” because cooling something to below ambient temperature requires energy. Those ornery laws of thermodynamics are quite insistent on this. And the sad thing about the discussions on tech sites I’ve read is that the main focus is on the goo and whether it would really be odor-free and not sticky, with very little mention of it relying on magic to work.

But it’s easy for me to get a mental image of Fry reaching into a glob of green goo and pulling out a can of Slurm.

UPDATE (6/22): found this

Bio nano robots absorb heat (infrared radiation) and emit it in the visible spectrum – luminescence. In addition, they protect from ultraviolet radiation that can damage the products.

No, they don’t. While it is possible to combine low-energy photons to emit higher-energy ones, the real process does not violate the second law of thermodynamics.

Sigh

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iPhone city San Francisco is first in U.S. to demand radioactivity warnings on mobiles

The home city of the iPhone has passed a law requiring warning radioactivity warning labels on new mobiles.

San Francisco retailers will soon have to provide information on the specific absorption rate (SAR) of all handsets stocked.

Repeat with me: “Radiation” and “radioactive” are not the same thing.
The specific absorption rate in question is of radiofrequency radiation, which is non-ionizing, and in no way implies that the source is radioactive (i.e. comes from a spontaneous nuclear reaction), because it doesn’t.

On the other hand, it’s the Daily Mail. They apparently handle science no better than Robert Green handles weak shots-on-goal by Americans. (Bang!)

As far as the legislation goes, I think it’s antiscience being sold as informing consumers. But what information is being provided? I think specific absorption rate is being abused here, because it’s not being explained. If I have a mass of 100 kg, does a phone with an SAR of 1.6W/kg mean it is emitting 160 Watts? And for a user who has a mass of 70 kg, the power magically drops to 112 Watts? No. SAR is measured using a calibration standard of one gram of tissue (in the US; in Europe it’s 10 grams) meaning the gram of tissue absorbs 1.6 milliwatts of radiation from the source, under some geometry. The actual power emitted by a cellphone is of order a Watt. But even that information is almost useless without context; the human body radiates somewhere around 800-900 Watts in a more-or-less blackbody spectrum. Is that a cause for concern?

We're All Idiots, or Worse

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Over at Physics and Physicists, I saw the post entitled Graduation Speaker Perpetuates Myth, in which the old “science says bumblebees can’t fly” canard is reported, yet again. What gets me is about such stores is the willingness to accept that scientists are imbeciles — embracing the idea that we would advance models as truth, despite the fact that they are so trivially falsified. In science, if the theory does not match the experiment, you know something is wrong with the theory, so you change the theory. (in this case, a combination of the assumption about the rigidity of the wing and the nascent state of aerodynamic modeling limited a back-of-the-envelope calculation at a dinner party)

Worse, in addition to (or perhaps a subset of) the willfully ignorant, we have the conspiracy theorists. Not only is the science wrong, but we’re all actively covering up the flaws. Never mind that if any technology based on the science actually works, it’s a bit troublesome for their position. My favorite is the anti-relativity crowd scrambling to explain how GPS actually can work.

In light of that, it was interesting to read about what has been termed scientific impotence: When science clashes with beliefs? Make science impotent

What Munro examines here is an alternative approach: the decision that, regardless of the methodological details, a topic is just not accessible to scientific analysis. This approach also has a prominent place among those who disregard scientific information, ranging from the very narrow—people who argue that the climate is simply too complicated to understand—to the extremely broad, such as those among the creationist movement who argue that the only valid science takes place in the controlled environs of a lab, and thereby dismiss not only evolution, but geology, astronomy, etc.

So now we have the addition of science isn’t equipped to answer that question.

Screwball Spotting

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Hermits and Cranks: Lessons from Martin Gardner on Recognizing Pseudoscientists

Martin Gardner died Saturday. I’ve read some of his books, and I think also a few of his columns when I would read Scientific American in the science library in college. His description of crackpot characteristics is still spot-on.

(1) “First and most important of these traits is that cranks work in almost total isolation from their colleagues.” Cranks typically do not understand how the scientific process operates—that they need to try out their ideas on colleagues, attend conferences and publish their hypotheses in peer-reviewed journals before announcing to the world their startling discovery. Of course, when you explain this to them they say that their ideas are too radical for the conservative scientific establishment to accept. (2) “A second characteristic of the pseudo-scientist, which greatly strengthens his isolation, is a tendency toward paranoia,” which manifests itself in several ways:

(1) He considers himself a genius. (2) He regards his colleagues, without exception, as ignorant blockheads….(3) He believes himself unjustly persecuted and discriminated against. The recognized societies refuse to let him lecture. The journals reject his papers and either ignore his books or assign them to “enemies” for review. It is all part of a dastardly plot. It never occurs to the crank that this opposition may be due to error in his work….(4) He has strong compulsions to focus his attacks on the greatest scientists and the best-established theories. When Newton was the outstanding name in physics, eccentric works in that science were violently anti-Newton. Today, with Einstein the father-symbol of authority, a crank theory of physics is likely to attack Einstein….(5) He often has a tendency to write in a complex jargon, in many cases making use of terms and phrases he himself has coined.