Marc Morano found and posted this wonderfully succinct response to Paul Krugman’s Twilight Zone claim on ABC Sunday morning that the emails and subsequent statements about the “loss” of original temperature records from CRU do nothing to merit questioning the IPCC’s “consensus” on AGW.

“Legitimate scientists do not doctor data, delete data they don’t like, hide data they don’t want seen, hijack the peer review process, personally attack other scientists whose views differ from theirs, send fraudulent data to the IPCC that is used to perpetuate the greatest hoax in the history of science, provide false data to further legislation on climate change that will result in huge profits for corrupt lobbyists and politicians, and tell outright lies about scientific data.”–Geologist Don Easterbrook

Mr. Krugman, here’s your badge:

Because You've Earned It

But even as Krugman and his ilk in the Red Estate do their best to cover up the scientific hoax of the century, people are getting around them. Though Google is still not prompting searches for “ClimateGate” as of this a.m., 12,600,000 searches have been made. On Bing, where the prompt is not restricted, searches are up to 62,200,000.

Your Data Disposal Experts

Gallows Humor–n. Humor arising from serious matters.

Considering what may happen to these scoundrels, that definition may be accurate on an entirely different level.

According to the Times Online, the geniuses at CRU pitched their original temperature data–leaving nothing in their files but the years of manipulations they had done to it–to save space. I can see the inquiry now…

“Yes, me lud. Well, we had to make a decision whether to keep our original temperature records or the years of manipulations, adjustments and “tricks” we’d used on them to get the results we wanted. Seemed an obvious choice.”

Check it out at Australian Climate Madness, from whence the logo as well.

Hot Air has it too, but curiously also has a piece saying East Anglia “agrees to release it’s data.” What precisely , if the data is gone, do they propose releasing?

BELA SCHEIBER RESPONDS

Larry Sarner’s claim to authorship of the subject article is demonstrably pretextual and unjustified. The SRAM article to which he refers is an update, with new material of two previously published articles. The first of these appeared, without by line, in the March/April 1993 issue of the Rocky Mountain Skeptic newsletter. The absence of a byline in that publication always indicates that the information it contains was the product of one or more individuals but that the article itself was composed by the editor. Furthermore, any article in that newsletter can be reproduced in its entirety anywhere provided that credit is given to the RMS newsletter, and the author if a byline is present.

Although Mr. Sarner was but one of the several individuals actively involved at the time of that publication, he never expressed any sense of ownership or concern over the lack of specific attributions for over five years. A more comprehensive article bylined by me in the April 1993 issue of Skeptical Inquirer (SI) credited RMS and those members who were actively involved, including Mr. Sarner. As the wording of all three articles clearly and consistently conveys the project that resulted in the evaluation and categorization of Janet Quinn’s reading list was a group effort by members of RMS.

It is true that Mr. Sarner devoted significant time and effort to a review of Quinn’s reading list, but he did this knowingly under the auspices of RMS. Furthermore, other members of RMS also received Quinn’s list and in a series of perhaps a half dozen meetings and conference calls over a period of several months, these RMS members  pooled their individual efforts and ideas that ultimately resulted in the previously mentioned article within the Rocky Mountain Skeptic.

Contrary to Mr. Sarner’s assertion that I added nothing to the original material, I personally made substantial contributions to the production of a bar chart presenting the results.

The fact that the evaluation and chart of Quinn’s list was an RMS group project is reflected in a published description of events written by Mr. Sarner’s wife, Linda Rosa, in which she wrote, “We were supposed to be impressed by the magnitude of it, but the skeptical recipients had the bad form to actually analyze the list. We even went so far as to produce a bar chart showing much much “fluff” the list contained …” (Skeptic Magazine, 1993: 3[1]:46] In that article Ms. Rosa never credits, or mentions, RMS or her husband, Mr. Sarner. In fact, her repeated use of “we” demonstrably indicates that she is aware of a group effort.

Upon completion of our evaluation, I decided that the results warranted publication. I first approached Mr. Sarner and suggested that he be the one to write an article for submission to SI, but he declined. Subsequently, with the approval of all involved, I wrote and published my own description of the RMS project in our group’s 1993 newsletter and with greater elaboration composed an article for publication in SI and again for publication in SRAM.

To the best of my knowledge, the first time Mr. Sarner published a categorization of Janet Quinn’s reading list was in 1996, three years after my original publication. As the president of RMS I was responsible, and thus de facto chair of all ad hoc committees, which included the TT project. While others had specific leadership roles I had the specific responsibility of bringing information together so that decisions could be made by the ad hoc committee. The data subsequently published by the couple in 1996 has been modified from that which I published in 1993, and they have added some original commentary which is substantively dissimilar to that in the articles that I authored.

Whereas Mr. Sarner now claims there has been no attribution for his personal contribution to the categorization of Quinn’s reading list, either in SRAM or “elsewhere,” my article in SI specifically thanked those who contributed as follows: “Many thanks to members of the Rocky Mountain Skeptics who helped with this report: Linda Rojas [Rosa], Bill Aldorfer, Carla Selby, and Margin Tobias, and with special thanks to Larry Sarner.”

At the time, to my surprise, Mr. Sarner actually expressed displeasure at having been identified in the credits for that article. My SRAM article clearly references all relevant publications including Ms. Rosa’s and the SI article that does give attribution to Mr. Sarner. Since much of my SRAM article contains material not published elsewhere, and the rest being modifications and clarification of the categorization of the early work, the attributions were omitted. One can argue that everyone involved with the original TT project should be explicitly thanked in any and all articles that make use of the information that resulted, but surely proper references to previous articles containing these should satisfy reasonable readers.

Bela Scheiber
Consulting Editor of SRAM and Skeptical Inquirer
Member of Executive Council of CSICOP
President of the Rocky Mountain Skeptics

I got an email the other day from Paul Sparrow-Clarke who works in the mysterious reaches of the “7th floor” at the U. of L. (where the president’s offices are), letting me know that they have booked the speaker for the fall 2010 Owen G. Holmes  lecture.

Mark Sept. 23 on your calendar!

Michael Shermer

Author of “Why People Believe Weird Things”.

Shermer is the  e Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American.

Here is a cut and paste blurb about his books from his blog,

Dr. Shermer’s latest book is The Mind of the Market, on evolutionary economics. His last book was Why Darwin Matters: Evolution and the Case Against Intelligent Design, and he is the author of Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown, about how the mind works and how thinking goes wrong. His book The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Share Care, and Follow the Golden Rule, is on the evolutionary origins of morality and how to be good without God. He wrote a biography, In Darwin’s Shadow, about the life and science of the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace. He also wrote The Borderlands of Science, about the fuzzy land between science and pseudoscience, and Denying History, on Holocaust denial and other forms of pseudohistory. His book How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God, presents his theory on the origins of religion and why people believe in God. He is also the author of Why People Believe Weird Things on pseudoscience, superstitions, and other confusions of our time.

Whoot! When’s it gonna be September?

Here he is at a TED lecture. Its about 14 minutes long, but then, we’ve got time, haven’t we?

Anyway, in the video, Shermer mentions Katie Melua, so here is the video of the tune he mentions.

Technorati Tags: Michael+Shermer, Univerisity+of+Lethbridge, science, pseudoscience, skeptic, Katie+Melua

I just wanted to share in this quick post with everyone a video I saw this last summer at The Amazing Meeting 7 in Las Vegas.  During the convention, our pals at the Skeptics Guide to the Universe shared their first effort at skeptical movie-making, a spoof of “ghost-hunting” shows which have become so popular these days.  For a more detailed analysis of why ghost-hunting is a load of woo-woo, click here. I hope you enjoy the show!

The G Hunters: Episode 1, Part 1

The G Hunters: Episode 1, Part 2

What are my issues with pseudoscience? With antiscience? Why bother with promoting science and skepticism? What’s the harm in believing what just feels good? Who cares whether or not it’s true?

We live in a world where science and its applications have given us amazing abilities, in the process making us the most powerful species on Earth, the only one at this moment of history that can potentially preserve or destroy it, or at least ourselves.

The problem is this: Not only do we have incredible potential as a result of science and technology, more than we’ve had in over 99% of our history as humans, not only does the vast majority of the population have easy access to this potential, but we’ve put real understanding of the relevant science and its implications into the hands of a comparative tiny handful of people.

This is a hazardous combination of often willful ignorance and power that is very likely to get us all killed in the next hundred years or so if not abated.

Even if not, especially when promoted for ideological reasons or those of personal gain, the spread of pseudoscience, because real science is sometimes difficult and pseudoscience is superficially more appealing, causes the bad science to crowd out the good.

Because many pseudoscientists and antiscientists promote their agendas using force or deception, since they do not have evidence or logic on their side–if they did, they’d be scientists–and often have a need to control others using dishonest tactics, ‘lying for the Greater Truth™’ rather than letting others come to their way of thinking by way of full understanding and freewill, aside from any apocalyptic considereations, the unchecked spread of irrational beliefs results in the spread of fear and confusion in a society, which potential dictators and theocrats delight in, for this keeps the people from thinking, and allows easy control over the masses.

Tyrants don’t like it when people can think for themselves, and people who try to keep you from doing so are never your friends.

I live in a country where the current Adminstration, after eight years of incompetence with often failed attempts at secrecy and suppression of civil liberties by the previous one, has once again permitted debate and dissent to be patriotic, as should be the case in a free nation.

I think that these are more than adequate reasons for the existence and purpose of this blog, and I challenge anyone to show me otherwise…hello?…hello?

I thought not.

(Last Updated 21:58, 11/27/2009, Grammar Correction)

It never ceases to amaze and amuse my evil Troythuluness at the lengths to which pseudoscientists will distort, selectively omit, and even outright lie to support their ideology, though this level of guile and deception is something I’m becoming more acquainted with in poking around various fringe sites on the Web.

Nor does it surprise me that many fringe apologists believe that you can prove claims of fact with logic and argumentation alone (outside of pure mathematics, that is…).

Sorry, pseudo-dudes, but things don’t work that way in science. Pure logic all by its lonesome proves nothing but its own coherence–science needs data as well…

I remember an episode of the podcast Point of Inquiry, when one of the guests interviewed was Disco Institute poster boy Mike Behe, who stated (not an exact quote, by the way…) that intelligent design couldn’t be proved by looking at the data, that you had to go by the argument, essentially admitting that ID is not supported by the data, and therefore pseudoscience.

This demonstrates nicely the disregard for facts and evidence by those whose views simply are not supported thusly (eldritch titter).

(Last Updated 15:12, 11/27/2009, Meaning Unchanged)

“There are 30,000 scientists trying to sue this bum.”

Better still, Captain Corpulence’s carbon empire could collapse.

Ah, I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like…

Global Warming appears to have been man-made in Hobbit Land in just the same way as at CRU.  H/T Anthony

These guys, at least, admit they “adjusted” the numbers. They say they did it to compensate for some temperature stations being higher above sea level, and thus recording cooler temps. Right.

So the “modern” records had to be adjusted up while all the old records, say pre-1970, had to be adjusted down? What–were they below sea level?

Armed Geek has a lay-man’s analysis here.

A follow up to my initial post here on what is becoming known as Climategate.  Now news comes from New Zealand about massaging of data by global warming proponents.

The New Zealand Government’s chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn’t there.

The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain’s CRU climate research centre.

In New Zealand’s case, the figures published on NIWA’s [the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research] website suggest a strong warming trend in New Zealand over the past century.

We compared raw data for each station (from NIWA’s web site) with the adjusted official data, which we obtained from one of Dr Salinger’s colleagues.

Requests for this information from Dr Salinger himself over the years, by different scientists, have long gone unanswered, but now we might discover the truth.

What did we find? First, the station histories are unremarkable. There are no reasons for any large corrections. But we were astonished to find that strong adjustments have indeed been made.

About half the adjustments actually created a warming trend where none existed; the other half greatly exaggerated existing warming. All the adjustments increased or even created a warming trend, with only one (Dunedin) going the other way and slightly reducing the original trend.

The shocking truth is that the oldest readings have been cranked way down and later readings artificially lifted to give a false impression of warming, as documented below. There is nothing in the station histories to warrant these adjustments and to date Dr Salinger and NIWA have not revealed why they did this.

One station, Hokitika, had its early temperatures reduced by a huge 1.3°C, creating strong warming from a mild cooling, yet there’s no apparent reason for it.

We have discovered that the warming in New Zealand over the past 156 years was indeed man-made, but it had nothing to do with emissions of CO2—it was created by man-made adjustments of the temperature. It’s a disgrace.

NIWA claim their official graph reveals a rising trend of 0.92ºC per century, which means (they claim) we warmed more than the rest of the globe, for according to the IPCC, global warming over the 20th century was only about 0.6°C.

NIWA’s David Wratt has told Investigate magazine this afternoon his organization denies faking temperature data and he claims NIWA has a good explanation for adjusting the temperature data upward. Wratt says NIWA is drafting a media response for release later this afternoon which will explain why they altered the raw data.

“Do you agree it might look bad in the wake of the CRU scandal?”

“No, no,” replied Wratt before hitting out at the Climate Science Coalition and accusing them of “misleading” people about the temperature adjustments.

Manipulation of raw data is at the heart of recent claims of corrupt scientific practice in climate science, with CRU’s Phil Jones recently claiming old temperature records collected by his organization were “destroyed” or “lost”, meaning researchers can now only access manipulated data.

Go here to read the whole story.  Climategate is rapidly becoming a very big story indeed.

His Wholly Reluctance says HE will SAVE THE PLANET. He will tell fellow conspirators in Copenhagen that U.S will cut emissions by 80 percent by 2050–when he is old and gray or looooooong gone. Why didn’t he pull some even more insane numbers out of his ass–it doesn’t matter? The fact that he is ignoring the revelations coming out of East Anglia makes him look oh so much more omnipotent.

I’m sure the numbers came from Holdren or Hansen, who by February should either have hanged themselves or be responding to lawsuits about their complicity in the global warming scam that was finally uncovered by the CRU data release.

But Omaba is not alone, sundry other Ecotards and AGW zombies are releasing papers they’ve had planned for months to gin up more AGW catastrophe hysteria right before Copenhagen. The fact that their cause has been reveled as a titanic hoax isn’t going to stop them now.

These imbeciles are warning–right on cue–that AGW is accelerating and that arctic Ice is melting faster than ever!!!!!

Really????? Nice try asswipe.

Then again, they probably got their data from RealClimate or straight from Harry.

Which reminds me, Anthony has a version of the Harry_Read_Me.txt file for us non-techie types up on his site. My favorite line so far:

There is no uniform data integrity, it's just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they're found.

UPDATE: Inhofe going to Copenhagen with “truth squad.” H/T Weasel Zippers

Here are links to several articles, the first on the Skeptical teacher Blog..

Global warming Deniers Get a Double-Dose of Pwnage

The Second on NeuroLogica Blog…

Evidence in Medicine: Correlation and Causation

…and Third, on Massimo Pigliucci’s Blog…

The Logic of Skepticism

By Columnist Harry Trunckles

The other day, I was talking to my wife Anna about that no good asshole she left me for and she said “He’s light years beyond you Harry, don’t even compare yourself to him!”

I just slapped her face right there. First of all, anyone who thinks that light years are a unit of measurement for how poor of a husband I am clearly doesn’t understand the basics of physics. Light years describe how time is relative to light. This is similar to using “dog years” to describe your beloved pet’s rapid decrepidation. And a light year is roughly the length of time it takes for the universe to begin and then end. Kind of a useless measurement for us humans in my opinion.

Particle Physicists (More like particle suckacists! Zing!) have debated about the nature of light for the last few years. Is it a particle or is it a wave? Since this question isn’t being hotly debated by wave physicists, I am going to assume that the particle physicists are a bunch of biased bastards. There has actually been a number of rigorous studies done to determine this. Some indicated it was a wave. Some indicated it was a particle. The lazy conclusion they came to was that light was both a particle AND a wave. Ok, before you call them all idiots for arriving at such a counterintuitive notion, let me tell you about how they found this out. You’ll laugh even harder.

Anyway, let me go into the detail of this horrible Freudian-projected nightmare. The scientist would tell you that if you have a photon entering two slits, then it could theoretically interfere with itself if you do not observe it. If you do observe it, then the photon will not interfere with itself. This is all just some bullshit fantasy that if your wife doesn’t observe you having sex with two other women, it’s okay, since there’s some kind of penile (represented by photons) interference. Jeez scientists, grow up!

Its so patently obvious that this is the Freudian expression of the scientist’s desire for an adulterous threesome. One in which his penis interferes with itself. Guess what science guys, I tried that excuse, but my wife still won’t return my calls. Kind of punches a hole in your logic, don’t you think?

Back in the day, scientists wanted to know if there was this luminiferous ether that light travelled through. They never found the luminiferous ether! No shit, you particle dumbassicists! Didn’t you read Genesis chapter 1? God spoke and He bespoke light. Clearly light is supernatural in origin. You dipshiticists. However, to be fair, science was right about there needing to be a medium for light to travel through. You see, sound can’t travel in a vacuum. And since light is composed of God Voice Particles (GVP), any over-arching theory of cosmology has to include something like deity air (not some stupid ether!) for the sound particles to travel through.

My colleagues, occasionally secular godless science can be right. One thing physicists got right was when they said that at the speed of light (you know, 9,999 miles per hour), time does not pass, so light experiences no aging just like God. So clearly light could have only originated from God. My goodness, what do these jerks at MIT do all day not to realize that ageless particles prove their own origin – their own origin being that of God!

Speaking of time coming to a stop, there’s this stupid theory called Relativation Theory (you’d think it would be about relatives or something) that says that time slows down as you approach the speed of light. Let me tell you, I tried driving really fast in my car, and not only did time not slow down, but it actually seemed to pass faster as it didn’t take as long to get to my work. I was 20 minutes early! Wow, who came up with such a terrible theory?

Another claim by physicists is that light can’t escape a black hole. How absurd! Being the natural skeptic that I am, I went into my backyard where there are plenty of holes. I tossed a mirror down one and shone my flashlight into the hole. The beam of photons bounced right back out. Maybe the scientist that came up with this theory fell down a crevasse as a kid or was just really scared of the dark. Seems like astronomy might be a bad field to work in for you guys.

Light is actually not as complex as people think it is. The mainstream opinion is that humans only percieve a limited spectrum of light known as the “visible” and that there is also “Infrared”, “Ultraviolet,” “Radio,” “X-Rays,” and a bunch of other satanic beams of light rays. The truth is that scientists saw their funding drying up after they discovered Red through Purple and went ahead and made up some new kinds of light.

Let me conclude on this note. A particle physicist once asked me if a cat in some box was dead or alive due to some quantum mechanical mumbo jumbo aptly named Schumaker’s Cat. What a stupid question. I kill my neighbor’s cats routinely by boxing them up and tossing them into a river. So I’m fairly certain that most of the time when a cat is in a box, it is dead. Especially after I run it over with my Ford truck! In the interest of testing this ridiculous claim, I took the litter of kittens my neighbor was trying to find a home for and put them all in a box. Well, big disappointment. They took a whole day and a half to die, and no matter how many times I observed them they never came back to life.

Do you really want to believe a bunch of eggheads who are afraid of the dark, like to cheat on their wives, think cats can come back to life literally, and ask you stupid riddles about dead cats?

Many years ago, so-called “Facilitated Communication” was thoroughly debunked. The idea was that those unable to communicate such as those in a vegetative state or low functioning autistics could do so with the aid of a specially trained facilitator holding their hands and guiding them to a keyboard. All of sudden it seemed like a miracle as those without a voice were suddenly seemed capable of not only communicating but doing so with incredibly sophisticated speech…and using words they never learned. And for a while people bought into all this. In fact, parents were even thrown in jail for child abuse based on the alleged testimonies of the uncommunicative children via a facilitated communicator. Of course, once skeptics started asking questions and the miraculous power of facilitated communication seemed to completely vanish whenever the facilitator was blindfolded, not privy to information only told to the child in private, or you know, didn’t speak the same language as the patient, the jig was up.

It’s not necessarily that the facilitators were deliberate hoaxers. It’s more likely that they were suckered in by the same ideomotor effect seen in dowsing and Quiji board operators. They may very well have been fooling themselves. But that was way back in the 1990’s and as far as I’m concerned, whose who are still passing off facilitated communication as a legitimate practice are either deliberate charlatans or simply have no excuse to still believe this nonsense.

What’s really embarrassing is that CNN was duped by such an obvious delusion. This video clearly shows the facilitator doing more than a little guiding of the Belgian patient’s hand and half the time the patient’s eyes aren’t even open enough to see the keyboard, leaving me to conclude that he’s either strong with The Force or he’s just a six-foot-tall paper weight with no motor function at all.

As Bunk noted in the comments to the Harry_Read_Me post, CBS, that bastion of evenhanded news reporting, has actually reported on the repercussions of the CRU data release–including the significance of Harry. Well, color me yellow and squeeze my lemon:

CRU wields outsize influence: it claims the world’s largest temperature data set, and its work and mathematical models were incorporated into the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 report. That report, in turn, is what the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged it “relies on most heavily” when concluding that carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health and should be regulated.

But wait–There’s more. This morning, Chris Horner announced that on behalf of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, he had filed three notices of intent to sue NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies for failing to honor FOIA requests about AGW data going back three years. But the real comedy is Horner’s request for documents…

relating to the content, importance or propriety of workday-hour posts or entries by GISS/NASA employee Gavin A. Schmidt on the weblog or “blog” RealClimate, which is owned by the advocacy Environmental Media Services and was started as an effort to defend the debunked “Hockey Stick” that is so central to the CRU files. RealClimate.org is implicated in the leaked files, expressly offered as a tool to be used “in any way you think would be helpful” to a certain advocacy campaign, including an assertion of Schmidt’s active involvement in, e.g., delaying and/or screening out unhelpful input by “skeptics” attempting to comment on claims made on the website.

This and the related political activism engaged in are inappropriate behavior for a taxpayer-funded employee, particularly on taxpayer time. These documents were requested in January 2007 and NASA/GISS have refused to date to comply with their legal obligation to produce responsive documents.

BWUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

And I actually have data. Thanks to everyone who came by on Sunday, and especially Monday, and who are still coming in what–until yesterday–would have been record numbers. Thanks for the 6,178 hits the blog totaled, and the 4,770 hits to The Harry_Read_Me File post alone for Nov. 23. Today’s running total for Harry would have also been a new high for the blog…last week. So, hey, keep ‘em coming. I’m not going anywhere.

All you newcomers, please stop by again. Though I doubt I will ever have anything of such import to impart, there’s always the humor, the rampant foul language and, of course, the naked women that are, sadly, inexplicably absent from so many scientific treatises.

As always, thanks to my loyal cadre of irregular regulars for their snark and commentary. And, of course, major thanks to Glenn, who tipped me off to Harry in the first place. He already knows about the naked women.

Image via Wikipedia

Every couple of weeks the lifestyle or health section of every major newspaper in the world will feature an article about this month’s latest superfoods – the foods you should be eating as they contain a chemical that fights cancer or melts fat or some other amazing health benefit.

The latest superfood article that is doing the rounds of the world’s major newspapers is about Surprising Superfoods – foods that everyone thinks are  bad for you but actually have good qualities.   My main problem about this article is not that the information is incorrect as I have no way of knowing the factual content of this article because the studies aren’t listed, but because this article offers conflicting information.

Looking at the list of foods that people assume are good for you, but apparently aren’t – we have 6 entries – Tofu, Orange Juice, Apples, Smoothies, Wholemeal bread,  Yoghurt and Sushi.  Of these 6, the major problem with 4 of them (OJ, Apples, Smoothies, Wholemeal bread and Yoghurt) is the amount of sugar contains in these products (most of it naturally occurring by the way).   The article states that even those these foods are packed with vitamins and other essential ingredients for good health, they are very bad for you cause they are high in sugar.  You get the impression that you would be lucky not to slip into a diabetic coma from eating one apple.  Wholemeal bread also gets singled out for not only being “laden” with sugar but the fibre in it is very bad if you are constipated making it an extreme danger food, one would imagine, for the constipated diabetic .

Now after you are done rolling your eyes at the stupidity of labeling food as bad because it contains naturally occurring fructose and glucose, you head over to the good food list.  Topping the list is Jam which they admit in the first three words is  “undeniably high in sugar”, but due to the cancer fighting properties of pectin it is okay to ignore all the added  sugar in this food.   This is my WTF moment about this article.  How can you go on for a whole section about how bad sugar is and why you shouldn’t basically eat fruit high in sugar and then say that it is perfectly fine to eat jam even though it contains lots of added sugar??  Either eating food high in sugar is bad thing regardless of whether that food contains good stuff like vitamins or it is okay to eat food high in sugar because it does contain good stuff – you can’t have it both ways.

Articles on so-called “superfoods” annoy me because they usually focus on one small chemical property contained in the food and claim that it will cure cancer or make you lose weight.  Rarely, if ever, do they actually explain how much of that chemical is in the food and how much of the food you would need to consume to get any cancer fighting or weight loss benefit from it – now that would actually make an interesting article.  Then the next month, the amazing superfood from the previous month is completely forgotten and is replaced by a brand new superfood with an even more amazing health benefit. The best thing to do is to ignore these “superfoods” and just eat a balanced diet containing a wide variety of foods.  However, if you do need an excuse to eat that bar of dark chocolate feel free to assign it a random health benefit as I am sure that there will an article just around the corner proving it.

Well, I’m healthy enough to be annoyed, so I guess that’s something.

I found this news story this morning, and skimmed it briefly, but didn’t pay a great deal of attention, and I was at work so I didn’t watch the accompanying video clip. It was a slightly unsettling piece about some guy who’d been in a coma for years, decades even, and apparently turned out to have been conscious but paralysed the entire time.

An idea that makes you shudder that much is bound to make for a great hook. It’s pretty scary to think of, being trapped in your own body but unable to move or communicate in any way, still awake but helpless as everyone assumes that you’re essentially asleep, unconscious, or braindead. It was unnerving, but I wasn’t in a mood to take a particular interest in it. I wondered briefly about just how much of a recovery he’d made, what state he was in now, whether he’d really been talking at length about his ordeal, and how he’d retained anything resembling sanity after living through such a trauma as constant and complete immobility for more than twenty years, and then I got on with some filing.

Well, the skeptical blogosphere brought the same story back to my attention later in the day, and I took a little more notice this time.

Turns out it’s almost certainly complete bullshit.

The coma guy isn’t actually any more awake or conscious or active than he ever was. If you can watch the video in that BBC article, you’ll see the method by which he’s been “communicating” about what he’s experienced over the years. (If it won’t let you see it because you’re not in the UK, have a YouTube link). See where that woman holds his hand and moves her hand with his as his finger presses those buttons? The bit where, if you didn’t know what was going on, you’d be forgiven for thinking that she was just using the guy’s fingers to press the buttons herself, and she should really stop doing that as it’s in rather poor taste?

Yeah.

This is called “Facilitated Communication”, and no solid evidence has yet been found to demonstrate that it’s anything more than utter, utter bollocks. And people have looked for the evidence where it ought to be, and still come up short. This is one of those times where an absence of evidence really is pretty good evidence of absence.

I’m going to prioritise FC for a full Skeptictionary entry, but you can get a reasonable gist by just watching it in action. It’s in worryingly common use with autistic children, and involves the “facilitator” providing “support” to a subject, allowing them to type their thoughts on a keyboard in a way they would otherwise be unable to.

Except there’s no evidence that it does that. And it really ought to look dubious to you from the outset. For one thing, that guy’s typing fast. He’s barely even looking at the keyboard, but he’s able to make little micro-movements with his hand (consistent with total paralysis, remember) at such a rate, and with such precision, that the woman holding his hand can feel exactly where he’s trying to point and hit the right keys several times a second. That’s really impressive. I think I’d have trouble matching that kind of speed with just my finger, and I’m a professional typist who’s not even in a coma.

I also hope it’s occurred to you how easy it should be to test something like this. You may also have noticed that the “facilitator” has her attention fully on the screen the entire time she’s helping the guy type. What would happen if she couldn’t see where he was typing, but he could? Or if a question was written down and shown only to him, not her? Would it still work? It ought to, right? Why not give that a try?

The heroically amazing Randi has written about this, and recounted some of his experiences testing FC with autistic children some years ago. The phenomenon failed every test of authenticity put to it, and it seems to be exactly the same thing going on in this new story.

Even if this is a real effect, you would (because you’re a smart person, I can tell) expect coma guy to be happy to comply with some basic tests of his abilities. Surely he can imagine more clearly than anyone the horrors of having someone trying to speak for you, and making fraudulent or delusional claims to have special powers to communicate with you, while you are helpless to contradict them or deny it. And you can’t deny this possibility unless you’re a raving ideologue. Of course someone could pick up a coma patient’s hand, use their fingers to type, and claim to be facilitating their communication. I bet it’s really, really easy. Why would you not ask more questions to make sure that that isn’t what’s really going on?

If you’re a grieving mother desperate to believe that your child is still with you, then there are a number of acceptable answers to that question, but if you’re a medical professional or a news-gathering organisation then there’s no excuse.

I’m running out of steam, but this is genuinely pissing me off. I’m yet to see even a token skeptical comment in any of the mainstream reporting on this, despite its obvious implausibility. Gah. Well, at least I’m writing again.

Edit 26/11/09: And before too long, Orac’s all over this.

Love the ironic title. Got this from reader, Glenn. I’m out of my depth trying to read the code–and apparently so were several folks at CRU. If what he, and the techies at the links, say is true, it’s no wonder they had to spin this for 10 years–it’s all absolute bullshit.

Here’s Glenn’s take with links:

The hacked e-mails were damning, but the problems they had handling their own data at CRU are a dagger to the heart of the global warming “theory.” There is a large file of comments by a programmer at CRU called HARRY_READ_ME documenting that their data processing and modeling functions were completely out of control.

They fudged so much that NOTHING that came out of CRU can have ANY believability. If the word can be gotten out on this and understood it is the end of the global warming myth. This much bigger than the e-mails. For techie takes on this see:

http://www.tickerforum.org/cgi-ticker/akcs-www?post=118625&page=13

http://www.neuralnetwriter.cylo42.com/node/2421

To base a re-making of the global economy (i.e. cap-and-trade)on disastrously and hopelessly messed up data like this would be insanity.

Send it far and wide.

Steve has it up on his mirror site–see blogroll–with the first link. Bwuhahahaha.

Though some of you already have it, Glenn has another techie comment link. Have fun.

Comment of the day, so far: I’ve seen better annotation and tighter routines in virus source code!–Steamboat McGoo.

A common argument against past human achievements – that they are either fraudulent, or the result of superhuman intervention – is the supposed impossibility of those achievements. The Nazca lines, the pyramids, astronmical discoveries, Stonehenge etc.  A whole field of woo, starting with von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? is based on the premise that past humans could not have been clever enough to do things, simply because we, today, don’t know exactly how they did it.

The argument devolves to “I can’t figure it out, so how could they figure it out?” or, more simply “Nobody in the past could possibly be smarter than me.”

That’s why I love this TED video. It shows a simple device invented millenia ago, but I would wager far fewer than 1% of people alive today – especially in the developed world – could figure out how to make one.