Category Archives: Antiscience

Crackpottery, woo, superstition

Cheat Sheet

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How Scientific Papers Get Retracted

The peer-review process, where editors and scientists vet the research and conclusions of scientific papers, is an important one. But even bastions of good science can be duped by an ethically impaired scientist. Studies suggest that the pressure to publish, especially in support of a hypothesis, can motivate even the most brilliant researchers to plagiarize, fudge data and play lose[sic] with their methods. And on the rare occasions that they do, it’s a quick trip to retraction and banishment from the science community.

In principle, cheating should be at a minimum. If you falsify data and the result is unimportant, there will be little effect but little notice paid. If the result is important, then other researchers will attempt to duplicate the result and/or build on them, and those experiments will fail. That will be important news, and eventually you will have to explain the anomaly.

Theory, Theory, Who's Got the Theory

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Built on Facts: The Theory of Theory

Matt’s commentary on the idea of “just a theory” at the Language of Bad Physics Blog (to which I linked recently) along with a quick example.

I put “theory” in scare quotes not because amateurs can’t make contributions to physics – they can and do – but because there’s a heck of a lot of cranks out there with theories that aren’t actually theories. In physics, if you want to come up with a theory at minimum it has to:

1. Generate numbers.
2. Match those numbers consistently with observation.

If there’s one widespread trait among cranks, crackpots and other related species, it’s not understanding or accepting the concept of falsifiability, and why if one is wrong, one must be verifiably wrong. I suspect that they simply don’t accept the possibility that they could be wrong.

Woo From the Great White North

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Paul Hellyer defends aliens after Stephen Hawking’s warning

Former federal defence minister Paul Hellyer, 86, believes not only that aliens have visited Earth but also that they have contributed greatly to human technological advances.

So he can’t quite understand why the world renowned astrophysicist views them with such trepidation

[…]

“Microchips, for example, fiber-optics, they are just two of the many things that allegedly — and probably for real — came from crashed vehicles,” Hellyer said.

If I had been involved in the development of the microchip or fiber-optics, I’d be rather insulted by the notion that it’s so far beyond our capabilities that it must have come from aliens. It’s been observed (can’t remember he source offhand) that from the descriptions given by the “eyewitnesses,” aliens are always just a little more advanced than were are. They didn’t give us fusion, or a propulsion system that would actually allow interstellar travel or anything like that. A hundred years ago, they didn’t give us lasers. They “gave” us technology that fits right in with the cutting edge of science and technology of the time.

Miracles? Ain't No Such Thing, You Clown

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The Buzz On “MIRACLES”

Yes, most of the miracles we mention can easily be explained away by science, that’s why we say the line “fuck scientists.” Their factual findings sometimes explain away the Earth’s cool mysteries. Part of me wishes they were lying. Part of me doesn’t want to know how they really make crop circles. My imagination wants to believe it’s aliens or somethin’. If people can’t relate to that, then that’s their loss. I mean, seriously, it must truly suck to have no imagination about these things. Us Juggalos have deep imaginations, and an awesome sense of humor.

There’s more in the interview, along the lines of how if things aren’t miracles, then they aren’t amazing, and if you think they aren’t miracles, then you aren’t showing appreciation for them. Which is the gist of the lyrics of the song.

To borrow a little from Andy Dufresne: Do you know how to read, you ignorant fuck?

Ignorance truly is bliss, isn’t it? Stupidity must be heaven. I do not, do not, do not understand the position that understanding something destroys the beauty or wonder of nature. I’ll tell you what blows a scientist’s mind — seeing something cool and then figuring out what’s going on. Scientists don’t ignore “miracles,” we try to understand them, because as wondrous as the sight might be, there’s just so much more going on, if only you’d look under the surface. Calling them miracles is the lazy way out.

Endorsing the Scientific Method

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Boobquake determined to prove cleric wrong

Dressing immodestly on April 26th, in order to disprove the statement by a cleric:

“Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes,” Sedighi said.

Unfortunately, a single test is not enough, since there may well be an earthquake in close temporal proximity to the event. We need lots of statistics.

Update: Jen recognizes this

And yes, I know I need a larger sample size to make this good science. Maybe I’ll include Mardi gras in my calculations.

Bad Sex

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Saw this in an infographic (I was just looking, really).

prostitution info

Wait, what? The number of men + women arrested doesn’t add up to 100%? Is there a third gender, called “customers?” Or, all customers are hermaphrodites?

Nutty Bolt Analysis is Screwed Up

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I see that the The Math of the Fastest Human Alive has been zombified, as it has been reprinted in a few places, most recently being Esquire magazine and on ESPN. The article bothered me when it first came out and it bothers me still.

Ethan plotted the world record times for the 100 meters and fit them to an exponential

Okay, first off, mathematically, it looks like the theoretical limit of how fast humans can run the 100 meter dash is somewhere around 9.2 seconds, but it looks like we won’t get there for hundreds of years.

Yes — mathematically. From the standpoint of an ad hoc fit to an exponential, it’s OK as far as it goes. It’s not a particularly great fit, but the problem is that there’s no justification for the fit — no mechanism. It’s meaningless, and furthermore, it’s wrong. Because it should really predict in both directions, and it doesn’t. The fit shows that after you remove the 9.2 sec offset, it should take about 70 years to cut the time in half. i.e. ~10.4 sec in 1920 is 1.2 seconds above the baseline. So one should get to 0.6 sec above the baseline — 9.8 sec — in about 1990, and to 9.5 sec in 2060. Pretty close for eyeballing it.

So now let’s go in the other direction. In 1850, the time should be 2.4 seconds above the baseline, or 11.6 seconds. 1780 would be 14 seconds flat, and 1710 the fastest human alive ran the 100-meter dash in 28.4 seconds. Go back to around 1500 and it’s a full minute, which is walking speed for today’s humans. You’ll excuse me if I don’t believe that I can walk as fast as the fastest human could sprint 500 years in the past. The curve-fitting is meaningless without the next step of coming up with a mechanism, on which you could base a model. There clearly are limitations on how fast a human could run, but any resemblance of the physical prediction to the number from this analysis would be accidental. Whether it will take hundreds of years to get there is a specious claim.

But second off, you can also see that Usain Bolt is running much faster than humans ought to be running right now.

This is also crap. The numbers from the graph don’t give you an “ought to be” value. If it did, then those record holders from 1975 through Bolt’s recent exploits “ought to” have run faster than they did. Go tell Carl Lewis he was an underachiever. In reality, one would expect there to be noise in the numbers. One could measure this and see if Bolt is better than the prediction in a statistically significant way (I’m guessing yes). This would still be ad-hoc, but it would be a little more complete.

There are reasons one might expect some kind of statistical spread to the numbers; if sprinting ability has some random spread, you would expect the competitors to be the population many standard deviations out on the fastest end. The drop in world-record times is going to be a combination of improvements in health and training methods, along with sampling a larger fraction of the population due to both raw number increases and cultural and economic factors — sports is a leisure-time pursuit, and if your economic situation doesn’t allow it, you aren’t going to compete in track and field. We’re doing more sampling of the fastest times, and the number will get smaller as a result. The notion that

A runner capable of beating Bolt, he says, “hasn’t been born yet.”

may be true, but isn’t supported by this graph. It’s also possible that the runner has been born (and died), but he was born into poverty and/or war, or died over a hundred years ago and never got a chance to run track, or any other number of possible scenarios. We don’t sample all of the population. Maybe Bolt is really near the physical limit, and it’s just a statistical fluke that he’s running track here and now. We don’t really know. Sadly, though, the media has latched onto this analysis, and people might think it means something.

Where Are They Now?

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I know that weather is not climate, so the recent record-breaking highs around northern Virginia are not evidence of warming, but that is of little consolation. My apartment hasn’t been below 80 ºF since Monday or Tuesday and since I am thermodynamically efficient due to size, shape and r-value (though those are not all orthogonal variables), I don’t deal with the heat particularly well. I welcome the front that’s scheduled to move in shortly (Thursday night).

However, I can’t help but notice that all those folks who were proclaiming the death of global warming just two months ago, because we got some snow (in February!), have been silent on the whole matter now that it’s swelteringly hot out there. Just sayin’.

The $64,000 Question

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($64,000 being “big money” ages ago, before anyone who wanted to be a millionaire had a chance to be able to become one via a game show)

The context of the quote is really not all that important, though if you read the article in which it appears, an opponent of the recent U.S. healthcare legislation admits he’s unfamiliar with all the details he’s opposing. He says, “I can’t tell you exactly what the deal is.”

Then comes the money shot:

If you can’t tell us exactly what the deal is, why are you opposing it and fighting against it?

This applies to pretty much everyone who is in opposition to some scientific tenet, and especially to situations where the argument has gotten political. Anti-relativity cranks? They don’t understand relativity — invariably they will insist on a preferred reference frame or absolute simultaneity. Screw nature and what we actually observe. Quantum theory? Nah, God doesn’t play dice. Everything secretly really has a trajectory. My classical solution is just as good at solving this one problem. QM just can’t work that way, experimental evidence be damned. Evolution? Nope, the world is just 6000 years old. I’ve got a book that says so, Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs and besides, evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. Global warming? Bzzzt. Inhofe built an igloo after it snowed in Washington DC. It hasn’t warmed since 1995. Besides, Al Gore is fat.

This is painfully common — some of the loudest, angriest critics of the Affordable Care Act are also some of the least informed, most confused, embarrassingly ignorant observers anywhere. In this case, Cassell has become a national joke because he’s repulsed by a health care reform plan that he fully admits he doesn’t understand.

It’d be funny if it weren’t so pathetic

This turns into a template

This is painfully common — some of the loudest, angriest critics of the [Area of Science] are also some of the least informed, most confused, embarrassingly ignorant observers anywhere. In this case, [Name] has become a national joke because he’s repulsed by a scientific theory that he fully admits he doesn’t understand.

It’d be funny if it weren’t so pathetic

And that’s so true. It is pathetic that people can oppose something they don’t understand. They just know it’s wrong, dammit; who cares if they’re tilting at windmills? That they’ve been lied to, and they uncritically accepted (and perpetuate) the lie, because they can’t be bothered to think and/or become informed. We’re tempted to laugh, but there’s that sickening thought that these people vote, and the people they vote for think they can reshape scientific truth by decree, in order to align it with some ideology they possess.

So try and reveal the real truth of the matter:

Ask them what the deal is, and if they can’t tell you exactly what the deal is, ask them why they are opposing it and fighting against it. I fear it will do little good with people who refuse to think or become informed, but it’s worth shot.

Chemophobia

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Why ‘chemical’ has become a dirty word

Obviously, when dealing with more than 50 million known compounds, each requiring a unique name, complex terminology has to enter the picture. Chemists are thankful for the systematic nomenclature that has been worked out, but to the public, complex chemical names are frightening and tend to conjure up images of doom.

Some marketers try to capitalize on this fear by advertising “chemical-free” products. So we have “chemical-free” cosmetics, cleaning agents and, believe it or not, books about “chemical-free kids.”

The message is that chemical-free means safer, healthier, greener. Given that it is a nonsensical term, what are these products all about? Mostly, “chemical-free” refers to being free of synthetic chemicals. This insinuates that synthetic chemicals are more problematic than natural ones, an inference that is not valid.