Iraq's Deadly Dowsing Scam

Dowsing is one particular species of woo-woo you just don't hear that much about here in the United States these days. Sure, it shows up every once in a while on a gee-whiz television program or two, but here in the States we've largely moved on to other sorts of gobbledy-gook like psychic detectives and ghost hunting. Alas, in some part of the world dowsing lives on, albeit in a different guise.

In war-torn Iraq, the pockets of British company ATSC have been lined to the tune of $85 million via the sale of an expensive bit of nonsense called the ADE 651 explosives detector. This technological marvel was meant to provide a fast and accurate way of sniffing out IEDs and other explosives, and all for the low price of $56,000 each, largely paid for by American taxpayers. Unfortunately, there was one minor problem with this otherwise fine piece of equipment: it didn't actually do anything. I don't mean to say that it didn't work, I mean it literally didn't do anything, as in no moving parts whatsoever. Check it out.

Your tax dollars at work. $56,000 of'em.

You see, as everyone from the bloggers at Gizmodo to James Randi quickly pointed out, the ADE 651 (along with its kissing cousins the Sniffex and the Quadro tracker) is pretty much just the handle of caulking gun with a straightened coat hanger stuck through it. Sure, it's tarted up just a little bit more than that, but for all intents and purposes that's all it is. They're nothing more than glorified dowsing rods. Keep in mind that these devices are being sold by the hundreds to the Iraqi military and police, as well as the Afghan military, with the promise that they can keep both soldiers and civilians safe from bombs planted by the terrorists currently waging war against the Iraqi and Afghan governments...and they don't really do a thing.

Regular dowsing rods. Just as useless, but cheaper.

Let that sink in for just a minute. Innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan have been dying because a pack of greedy hucksters is selling their gullible security forces dowsing rods for tens of thousands of dollars apiece, and all this nonsense has been subsidized unwittingly by U.S. taxpayers. How many people have these devices killed? As far as I'm concerned, anyone involved in the manufacture and sale of these devices has blood on their hands.

After investigations proved that the closest thing to a working part in the ADE 651 is an anti-theft RFID tag stuck to the inside of the handle, the United Kingdom banned the export of these deadly little booby traps (and ultimately, what else is a useless bomb detector but a trap in and of itself?) in 2010, and arrested ATSC head Jim McCormick. Alas, McCormick, the owner and sole shareholder of ATSC, has been free on extended bail for over a year now. In a perfect world he'd be given one of his own devices and told to navigate a minefield. If he makes it across, he goes free. If not, then the problem has solved itself.

Jim McCormick at a 2009 press conference shortly after 127 Iraqis
were killed by a bomb his device failed to detect.

Horrifyingly, the ADE 651 is still in use overseas and still has staunch defenders in the Iraqi military. Interestingly, despite claiming to have nigh-infinite confidence in the ADE 651, Iraqi Major General Jihad al-Jabiri declined James Randi's offer to allow him to put the ADE 651 to the test for the Million Dollar JREF prize. There's happy news, however: News reports coming out of Iraq this weekend stated that al-Jabiri has been arrested on corruption charges related to the ADE 651. Although the Iraqi government isn't being too specific about the circumstances of his arrest, I can't help but wonder if he was getting some kind of cut from the sale of the things.

In any event, it would seem that the wheels of justice are slowly turning at last, but it's a sad commentary that even in the 21st century people are being taken in by a scam as old as dowsing, and with such deadly results.

Shooting Down the Saqqara Bird

Ever heard of the Saqqara Bird? Discovered in 1898, it's an Egyptian artifact believed to be about 2,000 years old. Made of sycamore wood, the bird may have been a ceremonial object, a toy, or even some kind of weather vane, but a lack of historical references to the bird means that we may never know exactly what it was intended for. The bird is a fun historical footnote, a minor mystery whose true purpose may never be known, but it doesn't represent anything earth-shattering...or does it? Anything remotely unexplained in archaeology serves as a lightning rod for crackpot theories, and the Saqqara Bird is no exception. For many years alternative history enthusiasts have been making some pretty incredible claims about the Saqqara Bird.

The Saqqara Bird in all its glory.

One of the hallmarks of the alternative history crowd is the idea that ancient civilizations possessed incredibly advanced technologies that were somehow "lost" to later generations. Pseudohistorians like Erich von Daniken and David Hatcher Childress have become famous by spouting falderal about ancient astronauts, long-lost super technology, and futuristic civilizations that have somehow vanished without a trace. Likewise, ancient Egypt, which boasted numerous legitimate scientific and engineering accomplishments, has long stoked the imaginations of kooks as diverse as Sylvia Browne and Richard Hoagland. Therefore it should come as no surprise that the Saqqara bird, wth its ancient Egyptian origin and tantalizing airplane-like shape, has been the subject of many far-fetched theories.

Specifically, there's no small number of folks out there who'd have you believe that the Saqqara Bird is a functional glider, or perhaps even a prototype model for a full-scale airplane. Nearest I can tell, the first person to claim that the bird was a model/prototype aircraft was Dr. Dawoud Khalil Messiha back in 1969, but the claim may have been most famously made by Hunter Havelin Adams III in the notoriously specious essay African and African American Contributions to Science and Technology. ¹ On pages 52 and 53 of this essay, Adams claims

The ancient Egyptian model looks contemporary and bears a strong resemblances to the American Hercules transport aircraft...[Although the glider] could sail through the air for a considerable distance with only a slight hand thrust it definitely was not a toy. It was a model for a full-scale glider! ...[Another source claims that] Egyptians used their early planes for travel, expeditions, and recreation!

Wait...what? The Saqqara Bird looks like a Hercules C-130? A Hercules C-130 is 97 feet long, and has four 4,300 horsepower engines. The Saqqara Bird is about seven inches long and doesn't even have a horizontal stabilizer on its tail. It looks like a modern plane only in the sense that it has wings. I'm also curious to know who Mr. Adams' source can make bold assertions about how the ancient Egyptians used their airplanes when we have nothing in the way of evidence that they had airplanes to begin with.

The History Channel, as part of it's continuing plan to completely discredit itself, recently ran an episode of the show "Ancient Discoveries" which purported to prove that the Saqqara Bird was capable of flight. Have a look.



Wow - those guys put a model of the bird through a wind tunnel AND a computer simulation and they say it can fly! That's conclusive proof, right? Wrong. Watch the video again and pay attention - these guys aren't testing the Saqqara Bird, they're testing a balsa wood model fitted with a large horizontal tail surface. The real bird has no horizontal tail at all and is made from sycamore, which is something like three times as dense as balsa wood. The real conclusion here is that if the Saqqara Bird was made of different material and actually shaped like an airplane, it could fly. How much does that prove?

This is Big Fluffy Puss-Puss, and he can fly...
Or he could, if only he were shaped like this:

More to the point, a few years ago model airplane enthusiast Martin Gregorie tested the flight capabilities of a model of the Saqqara Bird and his results were far less less enthusiastic. Unlike our friends with the History Channel, Gregorie notes that the original bird's wings are of unequal length and are not level with the rest of the body and the vertical tail is actually set at an angle. ² Take a look at this picture and see for yourself. In order to get a more thorough picture of the bird's potential capabilities, Gregorie experimented with various slightly different configurations for the object's wing and tail structures. He fashioned two wings for his model, one that was curved like the original bird's (which he calls a "scale wing") and one which was flat. He also created two horizontal tail surfaces, a "scale tail" shaped like the wings of the original bird, and a "big tail" that was flat and, er, big. He also experimented with adding additional ballast to the model.

Gregorie's conclusion when launching the model without an added tail surface was as follows:

The model will not fly without a tail...The result is always a pitch up if the model is launched at its gliding speed and a pitch down if launched faster, followed by a tumbling motion. Adding ballast to the nose to move the balance point forward has no effect.

He found that the "scale wing" (which, as you'll recall, closely mimics the wing of the original bird) is somewhat less effective than the flat wing at sustaining a glide, noting that "the scale wing section is rather inefficient and the anhedral built into it makes the model laterally unstable." Directly refuting the earlier claim that "the model could soar through the air with only a slight hand thrust" Gregorie states that:

Even unballasted, the model's flying speed is fairly high. It does not soar and cannot be launched "with a slight jerk of the hand"...Attempts to do so merely result in the model flopping to the ground in a level attitude. It needs a full-arm launch at a fairly high speed to fly at all.

His final conclusion consists of three simple bullet points and reads thusly:

The performance of this model proves conclusively that the Saqqara Bird never flew. It is totally unstable without a tailplane. A cursory inspection of the photos shows that it never had one.

Even after a tailplane was fitted the glide performance was disappointing. The Saqqara Bird was certainly never a test piece for a low speed, cargo carrying aircraft.

The model makes an excellent weather vane. It points directly and steadily into the wind and does not veer from side to side.

I imagine the History Channel couldn't sell as many advertisements for a show talking about how the ancient Egyptians made awesome weather vanes as they could for a show claiming that they soared above the pyramids in fully functional gliders that we've no other archaeological evidence of. The fact of the matter is that the Saqqara Bird cannot fly. It also cannot be jury-rigged to fly without significant changes to the design of the wings and tail and the addition of a horizontal tail surface that nothing save wishful thinking impels us to believe it originally had.

Saying that the Saqqara Bird could possibly have been an ancient weather vane may not be nearly as exciting as claiming that it was the prototype for an Egyptian airplane, but it's almost certainly closer to the truth


______
1.) The Adams essay is especially troubling because it was distributed to schoolchildren as part of a series of essays about African and African-American history. An extreme Afro-centrist, Adams was willing to throw legitimate African-American scientific contributions under the bus in favor of grandiose pseudohistorical nonsense. See this Skeptical Inquirer article to a full discussion of Adams' bizarre claims.

2.) Gregorie notes that the unequal length of the wings may be due to breakage and subsequent reassembly of the bird.

Remembering Martin Gardner

Martin Gardner

1914-2010

Another hero is gone. Martin Gardner, the world's most famous "recreational mathematician" and a titan of critical thinking, passed away Saturday at the age of 95. A true polymath, Gardner was the author of dozens of books and articles about a bamboozling array of subjects ranging from L. Frank Baum to L. Ron Hubbard. His book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, though dated a bit by its specific subject matter (How many folks here in 2010 have ever heard of Alfred Lawson?) is one of the best works on pseudoscience available and has remained in print almost continuously since 1957. If by some chance you've never read any of his work, I heartily recommend the aforementioned Fads and Fallacies, as well as two of his more recent books, Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? and When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish.¹

With Martin's passing we've lost not only one of the most articulate proponents of critical thinking, but also perhaps one of the most interesting men on the planet. He'll be sorely missed, but his legacy will live on through his five decades of literary work and the countless lives his writings have touched.


____________
1.) Did Adam and Eve Have Navels has a special place in my heart, as it kept me sane through two weeks of jury duty a couple of years ago.

Ken Ham's ham-handed response to James McGrath

I'll admit that I don't normally hang out at very many Christian blogs, but Exploring Our Matrix, written by Butler University religion professor James McGrath, is certainly worth having a look at. McGrath is a progressive Christian, and while he's a spiritual man, he's far more concerned about issues of social justice and the advancement of humanity than pretending that the Bible is literally true.¹ A couple of weeks ago he took Ken Ham, owner of the Creation Museum and Kentucky's most famous creatard, to task for aggressively peddling his wild pseudoscience rather than actually working to help people in need or otherwise live up to the supposed tenets of his faith. McGrath wrote:

[Young-earth creationism is] an attempt to distract from the fact that Christians aren't treating the Bible as the Word of God, taking it literally, or doing any of the other things Ken Ham and others like him claim to stand for - not when it comes to the Bible's teaching about economic and social justice, concern for the poor and oppressed, renunciation of wealth, and most other matters of practice.

Those are strong words, and they point to an obvious question that Dr. McGrath is too polite to ask directly: Why have Mr. Ham and his backers seen fit to spend so much money and time building a gaudy pseudo-museum designed to convince people of the scientific accuracy of The Flintstones when those resources could have been much better spent on a worthier cause? After all, Ham proclaims that he's doing the work of Jesus, and Jesus was all about healing the sick and clothing the naked²...but wasn't nearly as hung up on singing asinine songs about dinosaurs as Ham and his cronies.

According to the Christian Website MinistryWatch.com, Ham's Answers in Genesis organization generated over $22 million in revenue in 2007.³ Do you have any idea how much good you can do in the world for $22 million? How many TB vaccinations would that buy? Conversely, how many animatronic cavemen riding dinosaurs would it buy? I have a feeling Ken Ham knows the answer to one of those questions.

McGrath contends, without quite saying so, that Ham is turning the spiritual passions of his followers towards useless ends. After all, a fervent Christian can "stand up for the faith" by spewing forth nonsense about a 6,000 year-old earth without having to think very hard or put forth all that much effort. Actually reaching out to the disadvantaged in a meaningful way or standing up for the rights of the truly oppressed requires a little more work. Meanwhile Ham is leading his followers on little more than a self-righteous snipe hunt. They get to seethe with indignation about all those evil scientists and atheists, but they don't really have to stick their necks out for anyone either. It's a stinging accusation, and I'd be curious to know what Ham's rebuttal is.

Unfortunately, while Ham has responded to McGrath's post, he hasn't worried himself with answering the claims McGrath has leveled against him. Instead, after tossing out a rather meaningless disclaimer that he doesn't consider the authority of the Bible to be "conditioned upon the age of the earth"⁴, he trots out the tired old "he's not a real Christian" routine and tries to wish McGrath away. Ham quotes extensively from one of McGrath's own entries in which he discusses faith, then huffs that

...I do not know what Dr. McGrath believes about the gospel. It certainly does not sound like orthodox Christianity to me. Sounds to me like some intellectual assent to some aspects of Christianity, but he gets to pick and choose the parts he likes. There is no hint in what he has written that he understands or believes what it means to be truly born-again...

Ham also goes to great pains to point out that Butler University also has an atheist professor on staff. He does so to drive home the point that McGrath is from a dangerous outgroup and therefore his position is invalid by fiat. After all, if he works with those evil atheists and doesn't adhere, with no exceptions, to fundagelical biblical literalism, then he can't possibly have a salient point. Sorry Ken, that's not how it works. You still haven't refuted his claim. Why is peddling young-earther nonsense more important to your Christian ministry than doing "Christian" work like helping the poor? We're still waiting for your answer.


Post Script - Early in this post I asked how many kids could be vaccinated against TB for $22 million. The low-end answer, based on figures from the World Health Organization, is that $22 million would provide vaccinations against TB, diphtheria, pertussis, polio, measles, hepatitis B, and Hib for 55o,000 children. But hey, all those robot dinosaurs are cool too.


__________
1.) McGrath kind of reminds of Ken Miller, the Catholic biologist who has worked so hard in recent years to combat the arguments of young-earth creationists.

2.) Well, Jesus was also pretty concerned with following the tenets of Judaism to the letter and preparing for a fast-approaching, cataclysmic divine intervention that never occurred, but those are topics for another day.

3.) Though it also had expenses in excess of $20 million.

4.) Yet Ham goes on to state in the next paragraph "If a person has to reinterpret the clear teaching of Scripture to fit in millions of years (e.g., reinterpreting the days of creation), this clearly undermines the authority of God’s Word." So which is it, Ken? Is the authority of the Bible "not conditioned upon the age of the earth", or does acceptance of an ancient earth "undermine the authority of God's Word"? Make up your mind, man.

The History Channel Loves Ghosts

At work today I ran across an awesome article from the Onion entitled Science Channel Refuses to Dumb Down Science Any Further. I got a laugh out of it, forwarded it to my brothers, and went on my merry way. Great story, huh?

Fast forward to 6:36 PM EST - While flipping stations I paused on the History Channel at the sight of two guys standing around with a FLIR camera. A-ha, I thought, if anyone on TV has a FLIR camera, then they must be looking for ghosts. Sure enough, the Mystery Quest narrator soon began a grim intonation:

The average temperature of the room was measured at 72 degrees...but the anomalous spot on the wall measures nearly 80 degrees. With power cut off to the house, the hot spot on the wall cannot be explained. Investigators believe that it is a vortex, a portal through which spirits enter our world.¹

Wow, really? Apparently it's the case that temperature fluctuations in a powered down office building can only be explained by way of portals to another dimension. Nevermind the possibility of variations in wall density, electrical current being passively drawn to unlit light fixtures or other machinery, or even the remote possibility of an animal moving around inside the walls, clearly the most plausible explanation is a heretofore undiscovered portal to another plane of existence.

Putting aside all other arguments for a moment, I'd also like to point out that FLIR cameras, for all their versatility, are not built to detect portals to the afterlife. I checked the official FLIR website to make sure. They are used for "building diagnostics" - not to diagnose hauntings, but to diagnose irregularities in insulation, air and gas leakage, electrical problems, plumbing issues, and structural damage. Watching some of the promotional videos on the site, it becomes pretty obvious that if you go through any empty building with a FLIR camera you're going to see a lot of "hot spots" and irregular heat patterns, the sources of which may not be immediately obvious to someone who isn't trained to interpret the readings from the camera. I fear I must suggest that some ghost hunters may not be using their FLIR equipment with quite the level of sophistication that, say, a structural engineer or building inspector might.

There are plenty of mundane explanations for temperature fluctuations within a building, they just aren't sexy enough to get people to watch a TV show.² Also note the fallacious line of reasoning we've been fed by our dear announcer: "Wow, there's no explanation...except we have the explanation." That's just not true. We actually have a ton of possible explanations: Gas leaks, bad insulation, an opossum, even (just maybe) a "vortex". Just finding something weird isn't science in and of itself, it's only observing the presence of a phenomenon. The real task, the actual science to be done, is to identify and subsequently eliminate, through experimentation, as many of the potential explanations for the phenomenon as possible in order to say "X is most likely caused by Y."

Unfortunately our ghost hunter friends seem to have mistaken the beginning of an investigation for the ending. They began with the assumption that an empty, unpowered building would have no naturally occurring anomalous heat patterns. When they found a hot spot, they wiped away all natural explanations by simply saying "well, it can't be anything normal"...and thus it must be supernatural. And, conveniently, they arrived at just the conclusion they were hoping for.

The History Channel may not have stooped quite to the level of the "Science Channel" in the Onion's wry piece, but these days it's not too far above it.

_______
1.) As usual, this is paraphrased from memory.
2.) Here at home the bedroom is generally about 10 degrees cooler in the winter than the rest of the apartment, even with the heat turned on and all of the vents open. It's not a ghost, it's shoddy insulation.

The History Channel is Really Laying on the Woo...

I was flipping channels last night when, lo and behold, I saw Phil Plait on the History Channel discussing gamma ray bursts. Naturally I stopped to have a look, since Phil's recent book Death From the Skies was 31 delicious flavors of awesome. It's apparently "Armageddon Week" on the History Channel, so I dared to entertain a brief hope that they'd produced an entire show about Death From the Skies. How cool would that be? No such luck. After Phil spoke for a few minutes about what GRBs are and discussed how the earth may well have been in the path of one in the distant past, the narrator solemnly intoned the following howler¹:

So now we know a gamma ray burst could destroy the earth, but the Bible says the sun and the moon will both go out at the end of the world? How could a gamma ray burst fulfill this prophecy?

It turns out I was watching " Seven Signs of the Apocalypse", a show in which, according to the History Channel website "[e]xperts decode [the Book of Revelations] and come to a startling conclusion: there is now scientific evidence that many of these catastrophes could, in fact, be occurring." I watched it for quite a while, and I emphatically did not see any scientific evidence that the Book of Revelation is true. What I saw was a series of vignettes that followed a pretty regular pattern:

1. The narrator would mention something scary from Revelation
2. A scientist would talk about something that actually exists, be it gamma ray bursts or the red tide.
3. Some "prophecy expert", conspicuously never shown alongside the scientist, would jump out and say "See? That scientist just said it's true!"
4. The narrator would confirm that yes, in fact, we know have scientific proof of the apocalypse.

The History Channel is apparently not content to run a show about something as utterly freakin' fascinating as real (if remote) doomsday scenarios without tarting up the discussion with a thick coating of woo-woo. It actually makes me wonder if Phil Plait knew what the show was about when he was filming his segment (or if his segment was culled from another show somewhere), since he's absolutely not some kind of nonsense peddler and has, as recently as last week, railed against turning discussions of GRBs and super novas into "disaster porn".

Remember back when the History Channel actually ran shows about history rather than unapologetically peddling in hokum?
_____
1.) Paraphrased from my admittedly feeble memory.

Turns Out Animals Are Dangerous...

I saw a weird article on Cryptomundo today to the tune of "Hmm, seems like there's been lots of animal attacks in the news lately. Maybe it's because of the full moon."

Right.

The article points out five animal attacks that have made the national news between September 27th and October 5th:

1. 1.) A guy got mauled by a grizzly bear after climbing into its cage at the zoo.
2. 2.) An old lady got badly bitten by big pile of raccoons while chasing them off her porch.
3. 3.) Another lady got kicked by an emu she was trying to subdue for transport to an animal sanctuary.
4. 4.) A third lady was killed by her pet bear while cleaning its cage while the bear was still inside.
   
5. 5.) Some Canadian fella' was mauled by a tiger after climbing into its cage at the zoo.

Now is it just me, or are none of those things particularly surprising? See, it turns out that bears, tigers, raccoons, and emus are all dangerous. They all have pointy parts and don't especially like hanging out with human beings. Therefore, I'm not at all stunned that five people who initiated contact with wild animals got injured for their troubles. All of these animals are doing exactly what they could be expected to do.

But wait! What about the "clustering" of these events around the full moon? Surely that means something!

No, wait, it doesn't. Animals, adorable though they may be, bite people all month long regardless of the phase of the moon. According to a website that specializes in dog bite laws (aptly named DogBiteLaw.com), domestic dog bites send an estimated 1,000 Americans to the emergency room daily. Read that again so it sinks in. 1,000 dog bites requiring emergency room visits per day. And dogs are man's best friend! Bears, tigers and emus are -at best- man's casual acquaintances from the office.

Though round and fuzzy at first glance,
raccoons have numerous sharp bits.

Odds are that someone, somewhere is getting mauled by something pretty much every hour of every day. With that in mind, our friend at Cryptomundo pointing out five newsworthy maulings in an 8-day span hardly seems to prove that the moon has mysterious, mind-altering powers.

Hoagland's Heroes

Chances are that if you've ever listened to Coast to Coast AM or any watched any History Channel shows about aliens you've run into Richard Hoagland. He's best known to the public as the fellow who's always going on about the "face on Mars", but his repertoire is rather more widespread than that. You see, Hoagland has a superpower: When a mortal man looks at grainy old photos from 30 year-old NASA moon missions he just sees a picture of the moon; If Richard Hoagland looks at the same photo, he sees cosmodromes, dead aliens, the severed heads of robots, and the Moon Kingdom from Sailor Moon.

My favorite part about Hoagland, and the "space photo-analyst" species of conspiracy theorist in general, is that he obviously isn't taking his own pictures of the surface of the moon or Mars. He's just looking at NASA pictures that have already been analyzed, touched up, etc. and that were then released to the general public. Does he honestly think that NASA (or rather the evil version of NASA that he imagines to exist) accidentally released a bunch of photographs of secret moon towers and alien artifacts? Apparently so.

Hoagland's "theories" have already been flogged to death repeatedly over the years by better folks than myself. I bring this up only because I stumbled upon a copy of Hoagland's 2007 book Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA while looking through the Science section at my local bookstore yesterday. A quick shuffle through the pages convinced me that I just couldn't pass it up. In it we "learn" that NASA, which Hoagland appears at this point to be claiming is run by sorcerors, has managed to conceal photographic evidence of alien civilizations in our solar system so perfectly that only the mighty and learned Richard Hoagland has managed to see through their foul web of obfuscations. We also learn that NASA and its shadowy masters may have assassinated JFK to foil his attempts to cooperate with the Russians in regard to the space program.* Oh, and apparently because Apollo 16 landed on the moon on the 20th of April it's secretly tied by crazy occult mysticism to Adolf Hitler's birthday? (That bit is really italicized in the book.)

Needless to say I couldn't catch sight of a pile of woo this big and steaming without putting on my gloves and digging in. Even as I type this post the book is speeding to me by way of Amazon. In a couple of weeks I'm going on vacation to the wild hinterlands that are rural Pennsylvania, and while I'm there I'm going to type up a full review. Bet you can't wait...

*Nevermind for a moment that the U.S. and Soviet space programs at the time were in no small part big dick contests during which each side was trying to show the other that it possessed superior ballistic missile technology. Seriously, does every so-called conspiracy have to go back to the JFK assassination?

Concentrated Daftness...

I've been laying it on pretty thick with the political posts on here lately, so I thought it'd be a nice change of pace to throw some more peculiar conspiracy silliness your way. Embedded below is a video from the Youtube user PlanetXNews that's sure to be worth a giggle. For the first minute or so this video could be any old creatard yarn: "No transitional fossils, no such thing as macroevolution*, scientists lie". By this point one might be expecting to hear some quotes from Ken Ham or Kent Hovind, but then we get a swerve - Religious creationists, she says, are also wrong. Humankind is all the work of freakin' aliens!



You see, this lady claims that aliens came to earth long ago and genetically engineered humans as slaves. (Like in that H.P. Lovecraft story At the Mountains of Madness.) It's just the usual "ancient astronauts" sort of stuff, and in this case it all comes from the "work" of a fellow named Zecharia Sitchin. Sitchin claims that ancient Sumerian artifacts record the story of how mankind was created by super-beings from Nibiru, a planet with such a long elliptical orbit that it rarely mingles with the rest of the planets in the solar system. (How an advanced alien civilization could have arisen on a planet that spends thousands of years at a time so far away from the sun that it would be frozen solid is never really addressed.) According to Sitchin, the Old Testament is just a wholesale corruption/simplification of these Sumerian stories and the Biblical creation myth incorrectly refers to our mighty alien taskmasters as angels. Sithcin also apparently supposes that his degree in economic history somehow allows him to translate ancient Sumerian better than, I dunno, every other Sumerian-reading scholar of antiquities out there who says that he's either mistranslating things or making them up from whole cloth.

Interestingly, Sitchin himself has fallen out of vogue with some ancient astronaut buffs, but some of his ideas have been adapted into the occasionally popular conspiracy theories about rogue planets propagated by folks like Nancy Lieder, a lady who runs a website in which she also details her exploits psychically channeling the voices of space aliens. For those of you lucky enough to have missed out on the rogue planet craze, it's an end-of-the-world scare about a gigantic planet with an extremely elliptical orbit that is, conveniently, soon to come crashing pell-mell through the solar system and kill us all. (Actually it was supposed to do that back in 2000 or so, but when that didn't happen the True Believers™ "recalculated" the date, as they always do, to 2012.) Different individuals tend to use the terms "Planet X" and "Nibiru" interchangeably, but at this point it seems that "Nibiru" is more popular.

A thorough discussion of rogue planet theory is a better left to people with actual backgrounds in astronomy, for they are better equipped than I to explain why it's asinine. For an in-depth discussion of the Lieder's role in the Planet X craze, as well as a breakdown of the physical impossibilities of such an arrangement, check out Phil Plait's enormously informative dissection of the matter here. For a look at the more current "Nibiru" incarnation of the whole mess, I recommend David Morrison's article in the current (September/October) issue of Skeptical Inquirer.

Rogue planet, schmogue planet - Everyone knows the real danger from Planet X is King Ghidorah.

Back to our Youtube friend's evolutionary claims, I'm a bit confused as to why, if the aliens specifically made humans as slaves, there would also be no transitional forms (as she claims) between other, non-human, species. According to this lady's logic, it would make sense if there were no transitional forms leading from ancestral primates to modern humans (There are plenty, of course, but just for the sake of argument...), but why would the aliens bother to engineer things like giraffes or sloths? Her argument is further boggled by her apparent lack of understanding of what a species is. When she's talking about how horses "change and develop their shape and form" (Isn't that evolution?), she's displaying as evidence a chart of different species of horses even as she saying that there aren't different species of horses! I think she's trying to make a sort of "kinds" argument, like a regular creatard, but that she doesn't quite know how to express it.

I've long been curious as to why "Intelligent Design" groups don't welcome folks of this particular bent with open arms. After all, this lady really isn't saying anything about human origins that Bill Dembski doesn't also prattle on about. Since ID is supposed to be non-religious, you'd expect to see more of these Erich Von Däniken-types hanging out at the Discovery Institute. Curiously though, it turns out that all of the Discovery Institute's henchmen happen to be religious Christians, with nary a Nibiru-descended, genetically engineered space slave among them. Regardless of the reluctance of regular creatards to accept space creatards into their ranks, life is made convenient for skeptics because both groups remain wrong for essentially the same reasons.

For one, fossil evidence of transitional forms is much, much stronger than either group will admit. See for example this video that discusses transitional forms from the evolution of whales. Secondly, in either the case of a supernatural god or super-advanced aliens, we have an issue as to where they came from. Anything on that order of complexity would have to have either evolved through natural selection or, for the sake of argument, had an equally (or more) complex designer of its own. If we go with the second option we, of course, run into a problem of infinite regress.

Now, a canny space creatard might make the argument that they aren't saying that no evolution occurs, only that humans didn't evolve naturally. Perhaps our alien overlords did evolve by natural selection, they might say, but humans themselves did not. Unfortunately for our current friend, her argument is is rooted in the premise that progressive evolution does not occur, so she has effectively disallowed herself from making this argument. Even if she did make the claim that aliens evolved but humans did not, acknowledging the possibility of complexity arising from natural selection cuts out the need for alien interference in the rise of man. Since the only evidence she appeals to are the "ancient stories" that Sitchin concocted about Nibiru, she must find some way to back up the claim that this particular set of "ancient stories" is the correct one. There are lots of ancient creation myths. Even if the Nibiru thing wasn't just made up by Sitchin - That is to say, if the ancient Sumerians really did think that aliens made them - how does one reach the conclusion that the Sumerians were actually right? What really makes it more believable than say the Norse myth of the frost giant and the cosmic cow?

Finally, a clever space creatard might try to argue that the chromosome fusion demonstrated by human chromosome 2 is evidence for artificial modification of the human genome by those clever spacemen. (See here for details on human chromosome 2 and why it's devastating to the creationists' case.) In some bizarre way "aliens did it to cause us to evolve from other primates" almost sounds like it makes it a little more sense than "God did it so it would look like we evolved from other primates". Indeed, if humans were the only creatures to display chromosome fusion maybe that argument would at least carry a little rhetorical weight. Now, our friend doesn't make this argument (Though I've seen other space creatards make it.), but if she did, one would only have to point out that the phenomenon of chromosomal fusion in other species is well-documented. There's no need to resort to alien intervention to explain something that is known to happen through natural processes. To make a claim that "well, maybe it happens naturally in crickets but in humans it was caused by aliens" is pure special pleading.

In any event, all our friend has really succeeded in doing is packing an enormous amount of silliness into four short minutes. In a way it's almost impressive - she's managed to create an extraordinarily tangled web of utter wrongness.

*Macroevolution and microevolution are false creatard distinctions designed, I contend, to allow creationists to admit the most undeniable examples of evolution while trying to claim that true speciation doesn't occur. Sorry, but it's all evolution, baby.

A Friendly Challenge...

Phillip O'Donnell, who I've mentioned previously on here in this post about pterodactyls and as a snarky aside in my recent post about Ed Mitchell's alien silliness, has contacted me and proposed a debate between the two of us. Readers will remember O'Donnell as the YECer who wrote a book about living dinosaurs when he was just 14 years old. He now runs website called Living Dinos on which he attempts to show evidence for the modern existence of dinosaurs, as well as the reality of dragons and a 6,000 year-old earth, in the hope that advancing these positions will challenge the conclusions of evolutionary biology and provide support of a Biblical literalist view of reality.

Phillip has proposed that we do a recorded phone debate, which I admittedly don't have much interest in because I've no desire to, among other things, pay for several hours of long distance charges. I have instead suggested that, rather than debating privately over the phone, we should set up a formal, public debate over at the Internet Infidels Discussion Board. As with all the formal debates on that forum, this would be a moderated one-on-one debate with a mutually agreed upon topic and rules and would consist solely of Phillip, myself, and a moderator. There would be no dog-piling by supporters of either side. Naturally, more specific details about the debate would need to be worked out before IIDB moderators would approve it, but I've no reason to suspect that it would be difficult at all to put such a thing together.

I look forward to Phillip's response and eagerly await the opportunity to debate him on his evidence for the existence of modern dinosaurs.

Is Criminal Profiling Just "Psychic" Shenanigans..?

About six or seven years ago one of my buddies and I went to Minnesota to hang out with some chick he'd met on the internet. My role in the whole thing was basically just to be there as a back-up in case she turned out to be some kind of face-eating monster like in that lame movie Species. Other than that, I more or less just stayed in the hotel room and watched reruns of Darkwing Duck. One night we all went to some discount bookstore to pass the time, and while I was there I bought a copy of Journey Into Darkness by John Douglas.

Douglas was among the first generation of criminal profilers to come out of the FBI and he collaborated on two important works, The Crime Classification Manual, and Sexual Homicide - Patterns and Motives. The idea behind both of these books, and the entire enterprise of criminal profiling, is that it's possible to deduce clues about a killer's personality(and ultimately identity) from various aspects of a his modus operandi and signature. How "organized" or "disorganized" was the crime? Did the killer bring his own weapon or acquire one on site? Did he mutilate the body, display it prominently, or cover it up remorsefully? According to Douglas, and other profilers, examining these behavioral clues could yield valuable insights into the mind of the killer, giving investigators a direction in which to look or, sometimes, fingering someone outright.

I was fascinated by all this. My dad's a psychologist and I briefly toyed with the idea of majoring in the subject in college. Reading Douglas' tales of using psychological profiling to catch serial killers was invigorating - after all, using social science to better society seemed like one hell of a noble endeavor. I plowed through Journey Into Darkness in a matter of hours, then promptly mauled through the rest of his mass-market books (Most prominently Obsession, The Cases That Haunt Us, and The Anatomy of Motive ) over the course of just a few months. I went through a prolonged period of interest in criminal investigations, reading books by profiler Robert Ressler, forensic examiners Henry Lee, James Starrs and Michael Baden, and watching (and it's almost embarrassing to think of it now) tons of Court TV's info-tainment crime shows. I even read historian Philip Sugden's massive work on Jack the Ripper.

Slowly, however, something changed. While forensics was still an incredibly interesting subject to me, something about the idea of criminal profiling seemed, by and by, familiar. It took me a long time to articulate it, especially because the macro-level crime classification methods that Douglas and others like him had pioneered in and of themselves seemed to be pretty robust and workable. At the individual case level, however, I gradually came to the conclusion that something was up. Re-reading some of my profiling books, it seemed to me like some of the profiles being provided by Douglas and his kin were actually pretty generic, somewhat valid perhaps, but applicable to, say, any given violent schizophrenic or any given violent pedophile. The remarkable precision with which Douglas seemed at first blush to zero in on his targets appeared, after a while, to be more along the lines of a flood lamp than a laser. In short, it started to come across to me like cold reading.

Again, the macro-level classifications and the assumptions that come with them seem like they work pretty well. It seems plausible to determine from a crime scene, for example, whether the killer was acting in a crazy fit of rage or in a cold and calculating fashion. Beyond that though, on the level of revealing individually identifiable characteristics about a criminal, profiling now seems to me to be a sketchier sort of enterprise. Some of Douglas' and Ressler's works would recount how even the criminals themselves would note how little they matched the profiles provided for them, but there was always some "a-ha" twist wherein it would turn out that they really did, for example, have a bad relationship with their mother, except it was really with a girlfriend they saw as a mother figure. In short, it was retrofitting based on very generalized statements. This was reinforced to me by reading back through their profiles for killers who committed similar crimes: Serial killers, for example, were almost uniformly described as white males in their 20s-30s, either unemployed or underemployed (possibly employed below their skill level), with difficulty relating to women, etc. Numerous killers were described this way (and the statistics indicate that this is the case), but how much individually identifiable information does this provide? How much expertise does it take to tick off a stock list of probable characteristics and then retrofit them to the individual who's eventually accused of the crime?

There was no better illustration of this than the attempts made to profile the so-called Beltway Sniper back in 2002. Skippy the amateur profiler made approximately the same set of stock predictions listed above. So did most professional profilers (Who, I might add, make a lot more money than your pal Skippy). I, along with, to all appearances, the entire profiling profession, expected the sniper to turn out to be a 20-30 year-old white guy. I certainly didn't expect two black guys, one of them 41 and the other 17. Criminal profilers totally dropped the ball on this one, but to my surprise there was little in the way of public discussion about their methods. Indeed, it seemed to become even more prominent in the popular culture, with shows like Body of Evidence, based on the work of Douglas-trained profiler Dayle Hinman, premiering just a couple of months later.

I'm skeptical of criminal profiling, not because I think that it is entirely devoid of merit, but because I think that it has been glorified beyond its actual ability to tell us specifics about any given case.

Interestingly, as I was preparing this post I happened to have a look at the website for Skeptic Magazine and I was surprised to note that the upcoming issue contains, of all things, a discussion about the merits of criminal profiling. Once again, this clearly proves that I'm magic.

Head On - Apply Directly to the Trash Can...

In much the same way that the phrase "A Sci Fi Channel Original Film" actually means "crap", the word "homeopathic" is actually a codeword for "useless". I bring this up because I'm sitting here looking at a tube of Head On (apply directly to the forehead) that has come into my hands through the capricious machinations of fate. Head On is a homeopathic preparation that allegedly cures headaches - most people know it from an series of remarkably annoying commercials that ran incessantly a few years ago. Like essentially all homeopathic treatments, Head On is a con, a way of selling people inert binders in the guise of medicine for $3 a tube.

Homeopathy is in some sense alchemy's uglier little sister. It is predicated on the twin beliefs that "like cures like" and that (somehow) the more diluted an ingredient is in a solution, the more powerful it becomes. That is to say, a material that causes, say, explosive vomiting when taken directly will actually cure explosive vomiting if taken in a very diluted form. Except for the fact that this simply isn't the case it makes perfect sense...

When you look at the package of a homeopathic preparation, you'll note that every active ingredient is a.) some compound you've never heard of and b.) is follow by a number accompanied by the letter X or C. X represents a dilution of 1 part active ingredient into 10 parts inert material, while a C represents a dilution of 1 part active ingredient into 100 parts inert material. Remember, however, that in the crazy world of homeopathy dilution = strength. Make sense? Didn't think so.

Turning back to my tube of Head On, I note that it has 2 active ingredients - kali bichromicum and bryonia alba. Some quick Google Fu indicates that kali bichromicum is a toxic chemical used to finish wood and bryonia alba is actually a poisonous plant called White Bryony. The website Plants for a Future says that eating it will cause "death within a matter of hours". Scary. And yet Head On says you can apply it as much as you want with no risk of side effects. How can that be? Let's have a look.

The kali bichromicum is found in Head On in a 6X solution. That means one part of that stuff is suspended in 1,000,000 parts inert material. That's right, one part KB diluted into a million parts of bollocks. It gets better though, because the bryonia alba is diluted to a 12X solution - one part active ingredient in a trillion parts inert suspension. And yet it gets even better, because the first ingredient is also only 0.05% of the product and the second is only 0.04% by weight. That is to say, we have this tube of junk that is 99.91% nothing, just binders, and the two ingredients that make up the other 0.09% are diluted to one part in a million and one part in a trillion, respectively. Most of a stick of Head On is actually an anti-microbial preservative called diazolidinyl urea, which is classified as a known human carcinogen according to the World Health Organization.

Check out the embedded video below to see James Randi give a much longer explanation of homeopathy, but before you laugh, remember that people are wasting money on this stuff that they could be using for real treatments.

Pterodactyl Attack!

Pterodactyls* are pretty cool, that much is certain. They're also extinct, and have been since the great extinction at the end of the Cretaceous. I'm pretty sure that much is also certain. But, of course, there are a few weirdos floating around out there who are foaming at the mouth to prove that pterodactyls are alive and well and coming to your hometown. Bizarre even by cryptozoologist standards, the two biggest mushrooms growing out of the steaming pseudoscientific turd that is living dinosaur theory are David Hatcher Childress and Philip O'Donnell. Better put some gloves on - this one's going to get messy.

Rodan, a modern super-pterosaur

Childress is an archaeologist in much the same way that I'm a professional wrestler - We've both seen real ones on TV and thought "Gee whiz, that'd be cool". The only difference is that I don't go around telling people I'm a pro wrestler, but Childress, who has (at most) a single complete year of college under his belt, tries to pass himself off as an archaeologist. This goon has found a home among paranormal TV shows like Sightings, where they rarely present the fact that he's basically just a guy off the street. He's big into Erich von Däniken-flavored alternative history, wherein aliens have been interfering with life on Earth since the beginning of time, Atlantis was the place to be before it sank into the ocean, and the ancient Egyptians hung out in the Grand Canyon.

He enjoys a lot of support among "esoterics", which is to say ding dongs who, to paraphrase Aristotle, cannot entertain a thought without accepting it. Any version of history that seems cooler than actual history appeals to them. They're also prone to making loud arguments from incredulity** that are dripping with implicit racism. "How else but through intervention by the spacemen," they collectively ask, "could all those primitive brown people have built pyramids and temples and worked out functional calendars?" Childress also owns his own publishing house, the Adventures Unlimited Press, which he uses to peddle his enormous horde of books. His literary output largely consists of tales about his various adventures uncovering, singlehandedly, ancient secrets of anthropology that have eluded, well, the entirety of the world's actual trained anthropologists and archaeologists.

Linked here is one of Childress' pterodactyl articles, in which he argues, among other things, that El Chupacabras is actually a live pterosaur. His other arguments consist of reminding us that folks in medieval times had legends about dragons and wyverns and whatnot, and thus (obviously) such things (or a kind-of-but-not-quite equivalent) must've existed at the time. Following that sort of logic would lead me to lock my doors at night to keep Jason Vorhees at bay while downing cup after cup of coffee stay awake so Freddy Krueger doesn't get me in my dreams.

Childress also appeals to a mysterious old photo of cowboys with a dead pterodactyl. This photo is extra amazing because no one has ever seen it. People just hear about it and then...remember it. Spooky. There is not, so far as anyone can tell, even a single actual copy of the thing in existence, and yet Childress paints it as powerful evidence. Childress cites John Keel (Yeah, the Mothman Prophecies guy.) as his source that vouches for the authenticity of the photo. The quest for the magic photo is complicated by a handful of fakes (showing Civil War guys instead of cowboys) that got floated around the internet a few years ago as part of a viral marketing campaign for a now-defunct TV show called "Freaky Links".***

Pterosaur photo from the Freaky Links viral website.

Philip O'Donnell is the author of Dinosaurs: Dead or Alive? He's also known online as "Living Dinosaur Man for Christ", which should give you a bit of a sense of foreboding. Oh, did I mention that when he wrote his book he was 14 year-old home-schooled kid? He makes a weird argument (Which, judging by the favorable reviews on Amazon, people are buying into.) that the existence of living dinosaurs today would disprove evolutionary theory (He never really says how.) and show that the earth is really only...wait for it...6,000 years old.

His basic premise is that (his non-existent understanding of) evolution predicts that dinosaurs cannot exist today, and thus the existence of a living dinosaur would disprove evolution. Keeping in mind that some well-adapted creatures, such as alligators, have experienced only minimal changes in body plans over the eons, there's no specific aspect of actual evolutionary theory that precludes the modern existence of dinosaurs. They were simply ill-equipped to deal with the situation created during the K-T extinction event (thought by many to have been precipitated by a large scale impact event) and were out-competed by proto-mammals and other creatures who were better adapted to the new environment. While evolutionary theory could be used to make basic predictions about what species might or might survive X change vs. Y change, it would not predict, ceteris paribus, that dinosaurs would go extinct and that mammals would thrive in a stable environment.

Pterosaur photo that appeared on the Freaky Links TV show.

O'Donnell, who also believes in the existence of dragons, lists as evidence on his website a pile of "Champ" lake monster photos, some pieces of art depicting dragons, an Ica Stone, and some photographs of skulls which he claims show anatomically modern humans in the Jurassic geological layer. Since he and his friends write the captions for their pictures themselves and offer no citation, it's not easy to track down where they even come from. He also has an "Answering the Skeptics" page that consists of, and I'm not kidding, a machine gun list of two sentence descriptions of dinosaur encounters with, as usual, no citation.

One of O'Donnell's most annoying habits is that of assuming his own conclusion. For example, the lack of dinosaur fossils after the late cretaceous means squat because the geological column is an evil evolutionist lie. How do we know? Because the earth is 6,000 years old and thus the geological column isn't real! How do we know? Because the old earth is an evil evolutionist lie! How do we know? We just do! Wait...what? He also likes to try and quote mine Alan Feduccia, the paleornithologist at UNC, as saying that there is no evidence that birds evolved from a prior form of creature.**** Feduccia is unusual among paleornithologists because he doesn't think that birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs, but that isn't because he doesn't think they evolved. He instead thinks that birds and theropods share a common ancestor further back in the timeline, but his arguments are unambiguously pro-evolution.

A common argument shared by both our friends is "Hey, coelacanths exist, and science thought they were extinct! Thus it is just as likely that pterodactyls still exist." Yep, there are two species of coelacanth prowling the oceans today, with the total number of individuals thought to be less than 500. They dwell at depths of up to 2,300 feet, and their eyes are so sensitive to light that they won't even rise to a catchable depth on nights when the moon is full. Yet they've still been captured, dozens of them. On the other hand, O'Donnell and Childress would have us believe that pterosaurs with wingspans of up to 45 feet are living in Texas and Mexico, attacking humans and animals alike, and have yet to be physically documented. They're shooting themselves in the foot by bringing up the coelacanth, because if a creature so elusive as that has been conclusively documented then there's no excuse for brazen, farm-raiding dinosaurs to remain unconfirmed.

As I've stated on here many times in the past, cryptozoologists are a strange lot, but even they tend to give loons like Childress and O'Donnell a wide berth. The idea of living dinosaurs in America pushes the conspiracy-mongering and wishful thinking that are endemic to cryptozoology to the point of self-satire.

*"Pterodactyl" is a generic term, and the creatures it is used to describe are more properly termed "pterosaurs". On the other hand, pterodactyl is a cooler sounding word. Pterosaurs, by the way, and not technically dinosaurs.
**Which, when you thinking about it, is pretty remarkable coming from folks who tout extraterrestrial visitors as the source of much of earth's technology.
*** FreakyLinks.com used to be the site for the show, so sometimes you'll see old forum posts that refer to it. Just keep in mind that the TV show ended in 2001, and FreakyLinks.com is now a porno site.
**** The section on his site in which this occurs is actually quoted wholesale (with credit given) from Creation Ministries International shill John Sarfati's book Refuting Evolution, so O'Donnell can be forgiven- it's unlikely that he's ever actually read a word of Feduccia's work that hasn't been through Sarfati's grinder. Sarfati, by the way, is a chemist, not a biologist.

Here's the Harm...

By the way, I justed wanted to point out a new site I've added to the links in the sidebar. What's the Harm? is a site dedicated to exposure all the injurious consequences of various pseudoscience and woo. It's easily worth a couple hours of your time, so check it out.

For a taste of the contents, here's a link to an article on there discussed something called facilitated communication. Those of us who work with the mentally disabled run into this bit of gobbledygook quite frequently - it's the process by which a "helper" tries to get an autistic person* to spell out words by putting a stylus in the disabled person's hand and then "supporting" it as he or she suddenly, miraculously, is able to use the stylus to type words out on a keyboard. It's essentially the same effect as using a ouija board, only substituting a human victim for the planchette. Amazingly, it appears that the disabled victims are always exactly as smart and knowledgeable as the person "supporting" their hand. FC chicanery has also resulted in more than a couple family-destroying sexual abuse claims.

*Sometimes people with other disabilities are exploited in this way, but the severely autistic are at particular risk by they generally possess extraordinarily poor communicative abilities.

The stupidity is just pristine...

I don't mean to steal topics from PZ Myers, but his discussion today about the retroactive intercessory prayer study out of the Rabin Medical Center in Israel really got me thinking, and not just about how patently laughable that is. My question is this: How in the hell does someone work up the nerve to ask for funding for that sort of thing? I have trouble convincing myself to ask for petty cash at work to buy food for the cooking class, so it is beyond me how anyone could prepare themselves to go before a grant committee to pitch an expensive study on the retrocausal effects of petitions to Yahweh.

The methodology went a little something like this - They pulled a bunch of 6-10 year-old patient files out of the hospital records room, shuffled them up, divided them into piles, and prayed over one pile for a beneficial outcome to something that already happened 10 years ago. I would expect something like this out of a 5th grader or, I dunno, a crazy guy, but not a doctor. Surprise, surprise, the results were "inconclusive". Mortality rates were identical, but the prayer pile apparently had slightly shorter average hospital stays.

Amazingly, the Dr. Leibovici who ran the study had the cast iron sack to state in its conclusion that retrocausal prayer (he glosses this over by using the term "remote" to imply a spatial rather than temporal distance) "should be considered for use in clinical practice."

Simply. Freaking. Amazing.