A Magician’s Lament: America the Nutty

A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.  (David Hume)

I’ve written here from time to time about some of the notable appeals to unreason that seem to gain some public currency, such as the Mayan calendar doomsday prediction, scheduled for December 21 of this year.  (Think of the money you can save with no holiday shopping!)  A group of doomsday forecasters was honored with the 2011 Ig®Nobel Prize in mathematics, for illustrating the need for care in using mathematics to make predictions — of the end of the world, for example.

The “Wired Science” blog at Wired has an entertaining new opinion article by James Randi, in which he discusses our love affair with the irrational.  Randi is a retired professional magician, and the founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation, which investigate claims of paranormal, supernatural, and occult  ideas.

I’m a magician by profession, now retired and dedicated to communicating the facts about the so-called paranormal and the occult, and the supernatural people, claims, and stories that abound.

Randi cites a poll conducted by National Geographic that found that almost one-third of Americans believe the Mayan doomsday predictions are “somewhat true”.  He also points out that some common beliefs, while clearly wrong, are not especially pernicious: many people think that whales are fish, or that we only use about 10% of our brains.

There are some irrational beliefs, though, that are potentially harmful, especially when they affect significant decisions.

Now consider this: Some 70% of Americans believe in some aspect of the paranormal — ESP, devils, ghosts, homeopathy, and spiritual healing. More than 25% believe there are humans who can “psychically” predict the future.

There are doubtless a number of factors that contribute to this, as Randi points out: ignorance, cultural influences, flawed cognition, and emotional instability all probably play a part.  The answer is not blind faith in “science”, but a healthy degree of skepticism about all novel claims.

Clueless Celebrities, 2010

Once again this year, the British charity Sense about Science has published its review [PDF] of especially silly statements made by various celebrities about science during the past year.   (My post about the 2009 review is here.)   As always, there are some striking new contributions to the world’s stock of lore.

Each year at Sense About Science we review the odd science claims people in the public eye have made – about diets, cancer, magnets, radiation and more – sent in to us by scientists and members of the public. Many of these claims promote theories, therapies and campaigns that make no scientific sense.

This year, for example, the pop singer Sarah Harding told a magazine interviewer that she always sprinkled charcoal over her food, in order to “absorb all the bad, damaging stuff in the body.”  (She should have met my great aunt — most of her meals included charcoal already, especially her famous “black bottom” fried eggs.)   Another dietary tip comes from Naomi Campbell, Ashton Kutcher, and Demi Moore, who periodically eat nothing but maple syrup, lemons, and pepper for periods of up to two weeks; this is supposed to “cleanse” the body.  David Beckham, Robert de Niro, and Kate Middleton all use a “Power Balance” silicone bracelet embedded with a hologram, which supposedly improves strength, energy, and flexibility.

All of this is not terribly surprising, considering the average level of scientific ignorance among the population.  Many of these claims are for diets and gadgets sold by the same sort of appeal to pseudo-science that is employed to sell “magical” hi-fi equipment.  Of course these folks are entitled to their own preferences, silly though they may be; but the rest of us should remember that having a pretty face does not mean that anything of very great value is going on inside.

WD-40: Canny Marketing

Today’s Washington Post has an article about a new social marketing campaign being launched by the WD-40 Company, for its eponymous product.  The product, WD-40, is a familiar sight in many workshops.  It was originally developed as part of “a line of rust-prevention solvents and degreasers for use in the aerospace industry”; according to the product lore, the “WD” stood for Water Displacement, and the formula was supposedly the 40th one tested.  The company has introduced a commemorative “Twin Pack”, with one modern can of WD-40, and one can with a “retro” design from the 1950s, complete with the company’s original name, Rocket Chemical Co. (the product was apparently originally developed for the Atlas Missile program)

WD-40 Twin Pack, courtesy WD-40 Co.

There is even a WD-40 Fan Club at the company’s site, where users are invited to contribute their favorite applications of the product.

Although you will find a can of WD-40 in many serious mechanics’ shops, the product has also acquired the reputation of being, like duct tape and baling wire, a favorite tool of the un-handy handyman.

If you didn’t own or couldn’t identify the right tool for the job, there was always WD-40 and a hammer.

If lawnmowers wore cologne, it would smell like WD-40, the Old Spice of the two-stroke engine.

WD-40 is to bad handymen what cream of mushroom soup is to bad cooks.

It is handy, and often seems a good short-term fix for things like squeaky hinges and stubborn locks.  But the temptation is to overuse it, and in places where it is not the right tool for the job.

Back in the 1990s, when USENET discussion groups were still active, and had not yet been rendered almost entirely useless by spam, I was a frequent participant in the rec.bicycles.tech group.  A question that came up regularly there was whether WD-40 was a good lubricant for bicycle chains.  The consensus answer is no, although it can be useful for cleaning really crappy chains.  In these discussions, it was almost inevitable that various more or less fanciful ideas would be advanced about what was actually in WD-40.  One of these discussions led to my own small contribution to the group’s FAQ:


Subject: 8a.8 WD-40
From: rgibbs@XXXX.com (Rich Gibbs)
Date: Wed, 09 Sep 1998 04:03:00 GMT

There have been many opinions posted here on WD-40's composition, but here is what the Material Safety Data Sheet [MSDS] says (it's from Oct 93, the latest I could find):

50% Stoddard solvent (mineral spirits) [8052-41-3]
25% Liquified petroleum gas (presumably as a propellant) [68476-85-7]
15+% Mineral Oil (light lubricating oil) [64742-65-0]
10-% Inert ingredients

(The numbers in square brackets '[]' are the CAS numbers for the ingredients, as listed in the MSDS.)

Mostly, WD-40 is a solvent, with a bit of light oil mixed in. It doesn't contain wax (except incidentally, since it's not exactly a reagent-grade product).

Personally, I use it sometimes for small cleaning jobs, but it's not a particularly good lubricant for anything that I can think of, offhand.


The composition of the product is still proprietary, although it does seem that it might have changed slightly, looking at the current MSDS [PDF].

Still, there is always a can of WD-40 in my toolbox, because sometimes anything that works is better than unobtainable perfection.

Clueless Celebrities

Since 2007, the British charity Sense About Science has published an annual review of especially silly statements about scientific topics that were made by politicians and celebrities in the preceding year.  The New Scientist has an article on the latest review, which summarizes some stunning new contributions to the world’s stock of “lore”. (The review itself, in PDF format, can be downloaded here.)

Overall, the main message from scientists to celebrities this year is nutrition is neither the cure nor cause of everything.

Some of the celebrity advice is very much to the point; for example, Roger Moore, who played James Bond in a few movies, has discovered that foie gras consumption is the cause of Alzheimer’s disease.  According to model and charity campaigner Heather Mills, if you eat meat, “it sits in your colon for 40 years and putrefies, and eventually gives you the illness you die of.  And that is a fact.”   There are several similar pearls of wisdom in the review.

Given the general level of ignorance about science in the population at large, I guess it is not too surprising that these celebrities are no less clueless.  But someone should tell them that being pretty ought to be enough — it is not just cause for public pontification.

Overall, the main message from scientists to celebrities this year is nutrition is neither the cure nor cause of everything.

Doomsday Again

Back in May, I wrote about the stories being circulated on the Internet about the possible end of the world, which, according to the stories, would be brought about because the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] at CERN would create a black hole that would swallow the Earth.  In one gentleman’s novel approach to probability, he figured that the disaster either would or would not happen, and therefore the probability of its happening was 50%.

The LHC has had its problems getting completely up and running, but fortunately there is a new theory of ultimate disaster available for those folks that seem to thrive on these tales.  Yesterday’s New York Times has an article about the new putative end of the world, now scheduled for December 21, 2012.  (Don’t forget to mark your calendar!)  There has been growing chatter about this date on the Internet, late-night talk radio (a medium almost totally populated by the insane even 40 years ago), and other well-known sources of reliable information.  This prediction is based on an enormous farrago of nonsense involving the Mayan calendar, a supposed massive invisible planet Nibiru colliding with the Earth, an “alignment” of the Sun with the center of the Milky Way, a reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field (sometimes accompanied by the Earth’s crust, and the continents, rotating 180 degrees around the Earth’s center), and even the Sun spiralling into a black hole at the center of the galaxy.

The hype has been fed by the publicity for a new movie, 2012, which opened last Friday, and features scenes from the predicted destruction of the world.  (My personal favorite is the one in which a tsunami throws an aircraft carrier into the White House.)  Now, anyone who takes seriously everything put out by way of movie publicity is already a few sandwiches short of a picnic, but some of the marketing for this movie has taken advantage of the background hysteria.  According to an article discussing the issue on NASA’s web site,

The film publicity includes creation of a faux scientific website (www.instituteforhumancontinuity.org/) for “The Institute for Human Continuity”, which is entirely fictitious. According to this website, the IHC is dedicated to scientific research and public preparedness. Its mission is the survival of mankind.

As the article goes on to point out, the request by some people that NASA, or someone else, “prove” that the Doomsday idea is false, is ludicrous: if someone claimed that 50-foot tall purple elephants were strolling through Cleveland, he would (correctly) be considered a nut case.

Nonetheless, some folks at NASA are trying to inject some sense into the discussion, with a FAQ page on the topic; they also have posted an article, which originally appeared in Sky & Telescope magazine,  by E.C. Krupp, Director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, about the story and some of the history behind it.  (Some readers may remember the supposedly significant alignment of the planets in 1987, the so-called “Harmonic Convergence”, which turned out to be more of a Moronic Convergence.  Some of the same True Believers are still around.)

I have never quite understood the appeal of these end-of-the-world stories, but clearly the appeal is there.  I suppose eventually, if the end is predicted often enough, it might even happen.  I’ll try to remember to have my camera ready.

 

Balloon Boy

By now, unless you have been spending your time in an abandoned mine or something, you have heard about the saga of the “Balloon Boy” in Colorado.  A spate of breathless news stories (like this one from CNN, via YouTube) reported that a six-year-old boy, Falcon Henne, had gotten into a balloon (which was sometimes referred to as an “Experimental Aircraft”) that was moored in his back yard, had managed to release it from its tethers, and was flying across Colorado.

The early reports described the craft as a “hot air balloon”.  One of the reports showed a picture of the craft (in the backyard, presumably) with a person standing next to it.  From that picture, it was obvious that the “hot air balloon” story was, well, hot air.  The smallest hot air balloons capable of carrying a person (without a gondola or any other equipment) have an envelope containing more than 20,000 cubic feet of hot air; from CNN’s size estimates, the Balloon Boy’s contained less than 1,600 cubic feet, not nearly big enough to lift even a child.  For comparison, a typical hot-air balloon used to give rides for 3-4 people at festivals, fairs, etc., has an envelope volume of about 100,000 cubic feet.

Later, the report was updated to say that the balloon was actually filled with helium.  This would, of course, allow the use of a much smaller envelope, because the difference in density between helium and air (mostly nitrogen and oxygen) is substantially larger than that between hot air and cold air.  The “GeekDad” blog at Wired has a post on this, in which he calculates that an envelope holding 1,571 cubic feet of helium could provide enough lift to carry a 50-pound child.   However, as he points out, the aircraft is a balloon, not a dirigible (which has a rigid structure), and there is no evidence in the photos that the shape of the envelope was deformed at all by any weight it was carrying.

Now it is suggested that the whole thing was a hoax, created by the Henne family in an attempt to get a gig on a “reality TV” show.   It’s also another disappointing demonstration of the gullibility and scientific ignorance of many members of the media.

Afterthought

The whole phenomenon of so-called reality TV seems to me, on one level, to be pretty weird.  When I’ve asked a few people why they liked these programs, the answer was something along the lines of, “Well, I’m interested in people.”  In some cases, I am reasonably sure that the person in question would only sit at an actual sidewalk cafe (say, Les Deux Magots in Paris) and watch actual people — you know, what we used to call “reality” — if “persuaded” at gunpoint.  Evidently watching a bunch of amateur actors being paid to be followed around by TV cameras supplies something that reality lacks.