Have you been properly Mirandized?

The next time one of your woo-inclined friends or family tell you that they're buying a woo-product to cure their illness, make sure you point them towards the fine-print. "These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease." As PalMD points out:

There are three ways to look at this: the truthful way, the sinister way, and the bat-shit insane way.

1. Truth: Anyone who wants to sell you something that’s a load of crap must use this statement to cover themselves legally.

2. Sinister: Variation of above–someone wants to sell you something that you are supposed to believe is medically useful, but at the same time they tell you in fine print that it is not medically useful. When it doesn’t work, they don’t get sued. I wonder why anyone would buy something with that disclaimer attatched to it? When I treat someone for a medical problem, I pretty much say that I intend to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent a disease. Why would I say otherwise? It would be a lie. Also, who would go to see a doctor that told you that they didn’t intend to diagnose or treat disease. The whole thing is bizarre.

3. Bat-shit insane: The FDA and Big Pharma are in cahoots with the AMA to keep you from learning all the simple ways to treat diseases. They want you’re money, and they’ll do anything they can to get it from you, including suppressing the knowledge than anyone can learn to heal cancer.

I can’t really help the people who believe #3, but people who are willing to suspend their paranoia should read #’s 1 and 2 a few times. Unless you’re being arrested, no one should be reading you your rights. The Quack Miranda Statement is the red flag that should send you running.

Make sure people know their rights. And they have the right not to buy a product that fully acknowledges it doesn't work.

Creation Science 101

Phil Gillette over at Skeptic Friends has written up the logistics of the Noah's Ark story. In practice:

I'm just taking what they claim and agreeing it to death.

Some folks have tried to simulate the ark, and found it rather difficult to build:Let us begin with simple logistics.

The Ark is alleged to have been somewhere between four and six hundred feet long, depending upon which version of the cubit one might prefer — there were several in use at the time, varying widely in dimension. A vessel of this description is not all that easily built.

It would require saw pits, smithies, foundries, rope-walks, cranes and other heavy-lifting devices, and all of the other facilities found in a large, early shipyard. It would have required a master shipwright and a construction crew with experience. And it would require a vast amount of timber to be harvested and processed in a land not noted for its forests. And lest we forget, in the days of the Ark there was little more than Bronze Age technology.

The largest clipper ship ever built is said to have been the Great Republic. She was somewhere, depending upon whose account you read, between 320 and 350 feet long with quite a wide beam to increase cargo space. She was relatively slow and in spite of oak construction, iron bracing and multiple keelsons, her hull hogged and sagged enough to render her a chronic leaker. She was only moderately successful and ultimately was lost in a tropical storm when the sea came in through her sprung hull strakes. There was some 15 feet of water in her holds when her crew abandoned her.

Bit of a problem there. For more of the interesting problems with the Noah's Ark myth, head on over and read it yourself.

I thought Dembski didn't believe in reincarnation...

If ever you wanted a shrine to the Galileo Gambit, head on over to William Dembski's newly re-incarnated Evolutionary Informatics Lab.

The force will protect you.

[Luke:] I can’t believe it.

[Yoda:] That is why you fail.

Erm. What I mean to say, is all you have to do is believe.
hat tip Pharyngula.



From Neurotopia:

Woo also permeates the martial arts. If one's chi is properly aligned, supposedly the practitioner can make their body do amazing things such as selectively exploding an opponent's internal organs when struck, or sometimes inducing a time-delayed killing sickness. My old kung fu instructor even tried to demonstrate that chi existed by having us hold our hands right up next to a mirror after a workout, supposedly when our chi is flowing maximally. He claimed you could see the visible effects of chi which manifested as a mist traveling up the mirror away from our hands. He was right: the mirror did fog over. I imagine it had more to do with the mirror being at a significantly lower temperature than our hands, which were sweaty and radiating heat, which caused condensation to appear on the mirror and radiate upward away from our hands with our body heat. Oh well.

Quote of the day

It's a long one:

The only value woo woo like accupuncture offers is that it serves as a measure of how comfortable/disaffected patients are with science-based medicine. I watched Dawkins' "Enemies of Reason" series and was struck by the point he made, namely that "alternative" medical practitioners spend a full hour with their "patients" and palpate them, ask them lots of questions, pay them attention and generally make them feel special and important. Contrast that with a visit to a real doctor, and it looks like medical costs, dealing with insurance paperwork, and poor bedside manner has a lot to do with what makes woo attractive.

If I were puking with chemo, I'd hire a hot 19-year-old to wear a cheerleader outfit and massage my feet while showing me lots of cleavage. My guess is it would cost about the same and it'd be an equally effective course of therapy. Perhaps services like that could be offered under the alternative therapy banner. Having a crowd of people keening, wailing, and rending their garments outside my death-chamber would be kinda cool, too. If I still have a memory when I'm getting close to going, I'll see if I can do that one. That might be fun. "What's going on?" "the prophet is dying!!! *wail*" "Huh?"

- Marcus J. Ranum

James Randi, audioskeptic

I'm an audio and videophile. We have a fantastic high definition TV set up with (slightly aged) stereo sound equipment. It's fantastic. I've got wires under the floor to reach all the speakers, so it doesn't look like a college dorm room. But I'm not ridiculous. Most of the cables for this system are pretty thick gauge, generic Radio Shack cables. Copper is an excellent conductor, and there is no detectable difference for a home audiophile in the conduction over short distances.

Ok, so take these cables, being marketed to audiophiles with more money than God (a.k.a. William Henry Gates III). For the low, low price of $7250, you can get a 12 foot cable that:

In extended listening sessions, I found the cables' greatest strength to be its PRAT. Simply put these are very danceable cables. Music playing through them results in the proverbial foot-tapping scene with the need or desire to get up and move. Great swing and pace—these cables smack that right on the nose big time.

Beg pardon, what??? Danceable cables? You, my friend, are certifiable. And as it happens, James Randi thinks so, too:

We see that the Pear Cable company is advertising a pair of 12-foot "Anjou" audio cables for $7,250; that's $302 a foot! And, as expected, "experts" were approached for their opinions on the performance of these wonders ... Well, we at the JREF are willing to be shown that these "no-compromise" cables perform better than, say, the equivalent Monster cables. While Pear rattles on about "capacitance," "inductance," "skin effect," "mechanical integrity" and "radio frequency interface," - all real qualities and concerns, and adored by the hi-fi nut-cases - we naively believe that a product should be judged by its actual performance, not by qualities that can only be perceived by attentive dogs or by hi-tech instrumentation. That said, we offer the JREF million-dollar prize to - for example - Dave Clark, Editor of the audio review publication Positive Feedback Online.

And I thought Monster Cables were crazy expensive... Step up, get yourself a million dollars (you'll need it if you want to buy those cables).

Hat tip, Gizmodo.

Peace is Dangerous - wait, WTF?

I try to keep the Factory out of politics (not always successfully). I'm not always successful in that regard, especially since I read some political blogs, and I just can't stand it when they lie.

Take Red State for example. They have a recent blog post suggesting that peace is dangerous, and the recent combat fatalities in Iraq are actually *not that bad*:

In the peaceful year of 1980, 2,392 servicemen died while on duty defending our country. In 2003, the start of the Iraq War, only 1,228 servicemen and women died. In 2004, the number was 1,874, it went up to 1,942 in 2005, and it dropped to 1,858 in 2006. [my bold]

Wow. More deaths in peacetime than during all out combat? That doesn't compute, but maybe it's true...

In fact, only during the Clinton years of 1996 into the Bush years of 2001 and 2002, during a period of time when the Clinton policy of refusing to defend our national interest was in place, do we see the number of military deaths fall below 1000 annually.

Wait, so if you exclude the most peaceful years of the last 25 years, then you can conclude that peace is dangerous? I'm rather reminded of the Princess Bride quote:

Humperdinck: Tomorrow morning [my guards] will escort us to Florin Channel, where every ship in my armada waits to accompany us on our honeymoon.

Buttercup: Every ship but your four fastest, you mean. Every ship but the four you sent.

Humperdinck: Yes. Yes of course. Naturally not those four.

Of course, if you exclude the peaciest years, then peace might have some bad points. But let's actually examine the data, shall we? (They're available here for those who want to dig them up).

Click on the graph to see it in nauseating detail, but there are really 3 data sets that I want you to look at. One is the total deaths, and that is in light blue. The folks at Red State aren't lying when they say that there were more deaths in the military in 1980 than in 2005. They're just being completely disingenuous. Underneath that, in red, is the number of accidental deaths (vehicle accidents, training accidents, plane crashes, etc). That has been more or less steadily decreasing over the last 25 years. That accounts for the vast majority of the decrease in deaths in the military, and has remained relatively stable throughout the Iraq conflict. Now look at combat deaths. That's in black. Combat deaths have spiked, account for the enormous jump in military deaths (as you might expect).

So they're comparing the early 1980s, when accidental deaths were a huge number of deaths, which through whatever means have been brought down to much lower levels, and saying that the military deaths now are "only" in the thousands.

Now, let's examine one more bit of disingenuousneses of their claim. How much of not a big deal is the fact that for every fatality, there are 7.6 people that are wounded and saved by modern technology. Compare this to the Viet Nam War, where 2.6 people were wounded for every death. This is because many more people are being saved.

Expressed another way, if America were fighting in Iraq using Viet Nam era medical technology, many of those wounded would be dead. Instead of 3000 American deaths in Iraq, it would be closer to 9000 deaths. But that's really not a big deal to the folks at Red State, who would have you believe that the deaths in Iraq are no big deal. (I'm going to save for another time the discussions of civilian dead in Iraq, which are a *much* huger deal). Or as they say:

The moral of the story is that peace is dangerous.

No, the moral of the story is that if you ignore trends in data, you are dishonest.