Bloggers are officially too boring to be officially classified any more:

The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (due out in 2013, and known as DSM-5) has eliminated five of the 10 personality disorders that are listed in the current edition.

Narcissistic personality disorder is the most well-known of the five, and its absence has caused the most stir in professional circles.

Via Ann Althouse, who doubtless would have written more about it, had she not been so excited about being mentioned by Rush Limbaugh.

How else to explain Sergeant Jonathan Burke, of the Delaware County, Ohio Sheriff's Department, who arrested Melissa Greenfield for the crime of possessing a deadly "cell-phone gun."

Sgt. Jonathan Burke wrote that he repeatedly ordered Greenfield to place the "unknown" object in her pocket and keep her hands free. When Greenfield refused, she was arrested and charged with obstructing official business and resisting arrest.

Burke wrote in his report that he feared that Greenfield could have been holding a dangerous object such as a "cell-phone gun."

Here in present time, the cell-phone gun hasn't yet been invented. Our primitive technology has barely reached the cell-phone camera, which is what Greenfield insists she was pointing at Sergeant Burke. As he questioned her boyfriend, who was not arrested, for some reason.

Insidious time traveling woman!  Go directly to Time Prison!

It's good to know that brave officers like Sergeant Burke are on the scene to protect us from not-yet-invented weapons of mass destruction like the cell-phone gun. Of course some, foolish skeptics who probably also believe that the flat earth was created 6,000 years ago, might say that Sergeant Jonathan Burke is a liar who should be fired from his job, prosecuted for obstruction of justice, and sued for false arrest and malicious prosecution.

But I'm glad he's out there, protecting us all from wormhole loops, chrono-vortices, causal paradox anomalies, time meddlers who want to kill baby Hitler, and Daleks.

Michael Bellesiles, step aside.  Sure, you're America's most prominent academic fraud, but do you have a name as childishly humorous as "Anil Potti"?

Researchers have stopped three clinical trials that rely on the work of a Duke University scientist who may have falsely claimed to be a Rhodes scholar on applications he submitted for federal grant funding.

Overlawyered moment:  He either claimed to be a Rhodes scholar, or he didn't.  He either is a Rhodes scholar, or he isn't.  There are only four possibilities here.  Given that you're confident enough to print the story, you can avoid the "allegedly" and "may have" weasel words.

The problem with this country is that people don't say what they mean, and don't mean what they say.  Am I the only person who thought the funniest moment in the entire Journo-List scandal was pencil-necked dweeb Spencer Ackerman's suggestion:

What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

Really? You thought an audience of NPR producers and Washington Post bloggers would literally throw a right-winger through a window, take a snapshot of the corpse, and terrorize his family with photos of the gory mess?  At Christmas?

What in the Hell is wrong with this country, where everyone feels the need to put a "smiley" on sarcastic suggestions that one's political foes be killed by defenestration?  Edward R. Murrow wouldn't have been afraid to say that Joe McCarthy should be thrown out of a window, even though weasel words and emoticons hadn't yet been invented.

Anyway.

the three trials are testing the genetic findings reported by cancer researcher Dr. Anil Potti and his colleagues. Last week, Duke placed Potti on administrative leave after allegations arose that on grant applications he embellished his résumé with the prestigious Rhodes scholarship.

Enrollment in the trials was halted Sunday at Duke and elsewhere. The next day, a letter signed by 31 researchers at universities across the nation sharply criticized the work conducted by Potti and Dr. Joseph Nevins, another Duke cancer researcher, noting "serious errors" in their science.

Fortunately no one has died in clinical trials of Dr. Anil Potti's non-Rhodesian work.  I said before, many of them don't really care about you.  You're just a meal ticket, someone whose money is to be digested then flushed down the Anil Potti.

Scandals like this, Climategate, Journo-List, and too many others to name wouldn't be nearly as frequent if the professions would only police themselves.  But that's beside my main point.

The main point is that, somewhere out there, there's a fake Rhodes Scholar named Dr. Anil Potti.

The history of medical experimentation in America is not a pretty one. From the Tuskegee syphilis experiments to J. Marion Sims' experiments upon slaves to the U.S. Government's experiments with drugs and radiation and bioweapons, America has seen many grotesque abuses of the oblivious and the helpless.

Still, experiments occasionally have the capacity to shock us — particularly when they are related to, and conducted in support of, medical practices that still exist today.

Case in point — the experiments of Dr. George Rekers. You might remember that Rekers, formerly a prominent member of the "being gay is evil, and we can cure you" movement — was caught, as dramatic and narrative convention now requires, hiring a rent-boy to go on a European vacation with him.

If you're wondering whether to view Rekers as sad and tortured, or overtly malign, consider the experiments he conducted in pursuit of his belief that being gay can be "cured":

In 1974, Rekers, a leading thinker in the so-called ex-gay movement, was presented with a 4-year-old "effeminate boy" named Kraig, whose parents had enrolled him in the program. Rekers put Kraig in a "play-observation room" with his mother, who was equipped with a listening device. When the boy played with girly toys, the doctors instructed her to avert her eyes from the child.

According to a 2001 account in Brain, Child Magazine, "On one such occasion, his distress was such that he began to scream, but his mother just looked away. His anxiety increased, and he did whatever he could to get her to respond to him… Kraig became so hysterical, and his mother so uncomfortable, that one of the clinicians had to enter and take Kraig, screaming, from the room."

Rekers's research team continued the experiment in the family's home. Kraig received red chips for feminine behavior and blue chips for masculine behavior. The blue chips could be cashed in for candy or television time. The red chips earned him a "swat" or spanking from his father. Researchers periodically entered the family's home to ensure proper implementation of the reward-punishment system.

After two years, the boy supposedly manned up. Over the decades, Rekers, who ran countless similar experiments, held Kraig up as "the poster boy for behavioral treatment of boyhood effeminacy."

At age 18, shamed by his childhood diagnosis and treatment, Rekers's poster boy attempted suicide, according to Gender Shock, a book by journalist Phyllis Burke.

The very people who condemn homosexuality and claim that it can, and should, be "cured" are philosophically disposed to assert that moral relativism is wrong, that some things are wrong and some things are right regardless of circumstances, and that there are both good and evil in the world. In the spirit of that philosophy, let me say this: this conduct is evil.

[Hat tip to Chris.

Stephen Hawking thinks that it's a bad idea to contact alien civilizations:

Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact. …

He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

While I agree that any aliens reaching the stars are likely to be similar to humans or worse, meaning chauvinistic and rapacious but more technologically advanced, the problem is that we've been contacting alien civilizations since the 1920s through commercial radio, which bleeds off into space.  The signals from Mexican border radio stations of the 1950s, designed to be heard loud and clear in Chicago and New York, are already introducing aliens to Buddy Holly and Little Richard, and will continue to do so forever.

And aliens can't dance.  "Bob" help us all.

A preposterous notion.  And anyway, it's all in the name of science.

Methods: Sixteen anesthetized Dorset sheep (26–78 kg) received 0.0 mg/kg (control animals, n = 4), 0.5 mg/kg (n = 4), 1.0 mg/kg (n = 4), or 1.5 mg/kg (n = 4) of methamphetamine hydrochloride as a slow intravenous (IV) bolus during continuous cardiac monitoring. The animals received the following exposures in sequence from a TASER X26 ECD beginning at 30 minutes after the administration of the drug: 1) 5-second continuous exposure, 2) 15-second intermittent exposure, 3) 30-second intermittent exposure, and 4) 40-second intermittent exposure. Darts were inserted at the sternal notch and the cardiac apex, to a depth of 9 mm. Cardiac motion was determined by thoracotomy (smaller animals, ≤ 32 kg) or echocardiography (larger animals, > 68 kg). Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and chi-square tests.

Translated to English, that means that scientists dosed a bunch of sheep with methamphetamine, then cut holes in their chests, then fired TASERs at them to learn whether the sheep would suffer heart attacks.  The goal was to learn whether firing TASERs at meth-addicted humans constitutes a safety risk.

Duh.  For what it's worth, the meth-addled sheep were given anesthetics before TASERs were fired at them.  I'll bet the sheep felt great the next morning.  For what it's also worth, the study was paid for by TASER, International.

I have little sympathy for the animal rights movement, which fritters its moral capital on frivolity.  I have little regard for sheep.  But the wanton cruelty and silliness of this study so offends me that I'm going to take a page from the PETA book, naming participating doctors and scientists after the jump.

Continue Reading »

Imagine that you lived in a world where a crazy neighbor could steal thousands of dollars from you. Imagine that you might, if you were lucky, limit the amount of money your crazy neighbor could steal — maybe limit it to thousands or tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands — but ultimately you couldn't stop it all, because the law viewed it as your crazy neighbor's right to steal from you, and your duty as a citizen to live with it.

Guess what, my friend — you do live in that world right now.

We've joked before about the lunatics who think that wi-fi signals impair their health and interfere with their Druidic rituals, despite an utter lack of scientific evidence to support their claims. When people are just pestering their local city council or school board, who probably deserve it, their lunacy is funny.

But when their lunacy takes the form of lawsuits, which costs their victims money and peace of mind in their home, it's not so funny.

We've already blogged about Arthur Fristenberg, who has previously found wi-fi junk science to be an excellent route to lots of attention. Now he's sued a young neighbor, and sought a preliminary injunction against her, for the tort of scrambling his brain with her awful wi-fi signals.

But last October, when a friend of his rented a house on the next block that backed up to Firstenberg's property, the familiar waves of nausea, vertigo, body aches, dizziness, heart arrhythmia and insomnia returned — all, he says, because she was using an iPhone, a laptop computer, a wireless router and dimmer switches.

Firstenberg, 59, wanted Raphaela Monribot to limit her use of the devices. "I asked her to work with me," he said. "Basically, she refused."

So he sued Monribot in state district court, seeking $530,000 in damages and an injunction to force her to turn off the electronics.

There's no science to support it. But you can hire a "doctor" to say anything:

Dr. Erica Elliott, who treated Firstenberg and testified at a hearing on a preliminary injunction, said she signed the wireless petition because she's convinced electromagnetic hypersensitivity is a real disorder that may affect the nervous system.

Mainstream scientists object to the notion that microwaves and radio waves emitted by consumer electronics could cause the reported health problems.

Oh, you "mainstream scientists" and your peer review and facts and scientific method. What do you know about how people feel about science? Thank goodness for people like Dr. Erica Elliott:

Dr. Elliott has been referred to affectionately as the "Health Detective," drawing from a wide range of disciplines, both mainstream and alternative, in order to diagnose and treat chronic illness.

No word on whether Dr. Elliot will offer expert testimony on your behalf if the CIA is beaming bad thoughts into your head, but I'm sure it won't hurt to ask.

Hopefully the judge here will do the right thing and, under New Mexico's equivalent of Daubert, throw the case out.

But even if the judge does so promptly, Raphaela Monribot will be out the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars it took to defend herself. She'll have suffered the stress of having a crazy neighbor use the court system to inflict his delusions upon her. She'll suffer that because she has the misfortune of living near a nutcase, and living in the same community as snake-oil salesman Dr. Elliott, who is willing to testify under oath conflating belief with science. She'll suffer it because our system offers very little disincentive to people like Fristenberg and Elliott to do it. Yes, Monribot could sue for malicious prosecution. That would be uncertain, expensive, and time-consuming.

In a more just system, when the judge dismisses this junk-science case, he or she would have the power to order Fristenberg, his lawyer, and his "expert" Dr. Elliott to pay Monribot's full attorney fees. And if they don't pay immediately? Well, Fristenberg has a house — and that's what court-ordered public auctions are for.

Scientists have found a jellyfish that is functionally immortal. Using the same basic principle that Salamanders use to regenerate a limb, this jellyfish can alter every cell in it's body to roll back aging.

The jellyfish can move back and forth from polyp to adult repeatedly, altering it's entire cellular structure. That is pretty darn cool. Although, I'd say immortality is somewhat mitigated by spending it as a jellyfish. That can't be too exciting a life.

"Dr." Christopher Maloney, meet Barbara Streisand. Yes, as in the "Streisand Effect." Babs, meet Chris. Charmed.

Who is Christopher Maloney? Well, the State of Maine allows him to call himself a doctor. But he's actually a naturopath. Which is why he gives advice like this:

Parents waiting for vaccinations can provide their children with black elderberry, which blocks the H1N1 virus.

My father smells of elderberries, and he's never had H1N1, so I think this is true.

Anyway, some haters and devotees of soulless "science" think that naturopathy is junk science. One such hater is a guy named Michael Hawkins, a student who wrote a letter to the editor in response to "Dr." Maloney and blogged about him. You could read the blog yourself. Except WordPress yanked his blog because "Dr." Maloney complained about it. [Edit: in the updates, someone else takes credit for doing this.]

Thoughts:

1. Increasingly, one of the most prominent attributes of junk-science peddlers is that they are aggressively censorious. Junk scientists sue, subpoena, and suppress because they can't refute. [Edit: this point remains, as the person now taking credit for getting the blog pulled is definitely a junk-science fellow traveler.]

2. This blog uses WordPress software, but thankfully is not hosted on WordPress, which apparently either (1) has an extremely unreliable system for determining which posts should be pulled down, or (2) is run by spineless shitweasels.

3. Hat tip on this post to PZ Myers. He is unable to address anything related to religion without sounding like a preening, self-satisfied taint, and his angry obsession with marginalizing the morals, intellect, and social worth of people like me is just precious, like a very angry toddler with a lisp. But he would never, never try to have this blog shut down for saying so.

Edited on February 18, 2010: Someone purporting to be Christopher Maloney appears in the comments to respond (well, technically, he's responding to PZ Myers, but it's applicable here.) He (1) defends his assertion about elderberries, and (2) claims he did not seek to have the blog censored. Read it and draw your own conclusions about someone who thinks that being criticized on the internet is like the Salem witch trials.

Further edit: this is an interesting discussion of why Mr. Maloney's assertions lack adequate scientific basis, to which Mr. Maloney responds with the same spammed comment.

Further edit: An entirely different and more nutty quack — a guy who thinks that cancer is primarily caused by self-esteem issues — says that it is he, not Maloney, who got Hawkins' blog pulled. To the extent that Maloney is merely a quack and not a censorious one, I apologize to him. However, he's a twit for comparing being criticized on the internet to being persecuted in the witch trials.

I've used the crutch of cool volcano videos before, but this time there's at least a little content. Researchers at the University of Washington brought a remote control sub within 10 feet of an underwater volcano as it erupted! The 2 videos on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association website give a remarkable view. Since the pressure at that depth supress some of the explosive power of the eruption, the sub was able to get super close. I highly recommend spending a few minutes watching these videos.

Actually, I'm not feeling fat today. I'm wearing a suit that I haven't worn in a while, and thanks to losing about 28 pounds, it's hanging sort of loose. I look like David Byrne on the cover of Stop Making Sense.

But in perspective, of course, I'm hugely, unimaginably fat. At least that's the impression I get by looking at this extraordiarily cool University of Utah widget that helps you visualize the size of microscopic and atomic thingamajigs in comparison to things we can see. Check it out. You're fat too. No, not as fat as me.

Hat tip: Neal.

Certain people are impressed by the credentials issued by professional organizations like state bars, medical boards, and other professional licensing boards. By "certain people," I mean "people not particularly familiar with how professional credentialing agencies work." Certainly professional credentialing agencies do some good. They occasionally manage to kick the most egregious wrongdoers out of their respective professions, and they enact standards of practice that are not entirely lobbyist-written and that are sometimes even enforced. For the most part, though, they are guilds, formed and operated to perpetuate themselves and to squelch competition. That's why state bars (for instance) devote a disproportionate amount of their time and resources going after a few schlubs who try to practice law without a license.

Yet people tend to look at a certificate from a fancy-sounding professional organization and conclude that (1) the service that this person is offering me must be worthwhile, because it is backed by a licensing organization, and (2) this person must really be qualified. Add to that our susceptibility to junk science, and you've got a potent marketing tool for snake-oil salesmen.

Trust someone just because they have a professional license? You might as well trust the cat.

And here I mean that quite literally.

BBC journalist Chris Jackson decided to investigate the various entities that offer credentials to "hypnotherapists." Oh, he didn't apply himself. That would be silly and embarrassing. He applied in the name of his cat, George.

In the UK, George was registered with the British Board of Neuro Linguistic Programming (BBNLP), the United Fellowship of Hypnotherapists (UFH) and the Professional Hypnotherapy Practitioner Association (PHPA).

In fact, believe it or not, George was not technically eligible to be a hypnotherapist under the regulations promulgated by any of these entities. For one thing, he has not been spayed. And he's a cat.

The entities have said they are sorry, and it won't happen again:

A PHPA spokesman said the organisation makes great effort to ensure every applicant is a fully-qualified hypnotherapist.

Well, that explanation is a bit regrettable. What great effort did they make here? I can see the examination report now. "Cons: tends to lick own anus, is a cat. Pros: v. mesmerizing eyes and purr, good manner with patients."

By the way, Chris Jackson and George are not breaking new ground here. Dr. Steve Eichel did the same thing nearly 20 years ago in America with Dr. Zoe D. Katze, Ph.D., C.Ht., DAPA:

Dr. Katze's credentials look impressive. She is certified by three major hypnotherapy associations, having met their "strict training requirements" and having had her background thoroughly reviewed. She holds a Diplomate in psychotherapy from an association that claims to promote the highest standards among psychotherapists.

Zoe the Cat's qualifications appeared so impressive that she was eventually solicited to write a journal article.

Dr. Eichel's thoughts about credentialing as a business are well worth reading. And the tales of George and Zoe illustrate the peril of relying on credentials. There are people out there who make money by credentialing people. They make money credentialing people whether or not the people are qualified to do the work they are credentialed for, and whether or not the thing they are credentialed for has any worth to consumers. Caveat emptor. When you are considering paying for a service, there's no excuse for not Googling the service-provider's credentials, and for exploring whether the service is genuine or junk science to begin with.

If you don't, don't blame us when you shell out $150 per hour to be stared at by a cat.

As I've said before, I think orthodoxy to political movements and political parties is a recipe for stupid behavior. When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when you are invested in being a Republican/Democrat/conservative/progressive/whatever, everything looks like one of the bugaboos of that particular ideology. (By the way, I am not suggesting that I am immune to this problem.)

Case in point: the Telegraph runs a piece about an upcoming movie called Creation about Charles Darwin. It looks terrific. This is the Telegraph's uncritical thesis:

However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution.

Liberal blogs rushed to take the story at face value. The story was a nail to their hammer: it portrayed mainstream America — and religion — as intolerant and willfully ignorant.

Such critics, by and large, did not engage in critical scrutiny of the Telegraph's thesis or of the message that the film's producers were trying to promote. Fortunately, some people did. Take increasingly prominent science-fiction author and commentator John Scalzi, who writes a great blog. Scalzi is to the left of me; he's by no stretch of the imagination a conservative or someone sympathetic to pro-creationist anti-Darwinist sentiment. But he's also usually not an orthodox thinker. So he penned an awesome take-down of credulously accepting the premise that the film can't find a distributor because Americans are anti-science idiots:

Alternately, and leaving aside any discussion of the actual quality of the film, it may be that a quiet story about the difficult relationship between an increasingly agnostic 19th Century British scientist and his increasingly devout wife, thrown into sharp relief by the death of their beloved 10-year-old daughter, performed by mid-list stars, is not exactly the sort of film that’s going to draw in a huge winter holiday crowd, regardless of whether that scientist happens to be Darwin or not, and that these facts are rather more pertinent, from a potential distributor’s point of view.

Read the whole thing; I especially like his vision of the Will-Smith-vehicle Darwin biopic that would get distributed easily. Scalzi is enough of a skeptic that he suggests the same thing I immediately suspected — that this "halp halp Americans are idiots" notion is clever marketing at the movie's target audience. (That target audience, I submit, probably includes a sizable segment of people whose self-esteem is premised on being smarter, better people than the unwashed hordes of Middle America.) I frequently disagree with Scalzi's conclusions, but this openness to nuance is why I like to read him.

Credit is also due to frequent critic of religion and proponent of science P.Z. Myers, who also recognized that the film's situation might also not be all about American hostility to science.

As for the commentators who took it at face value — well, one has to wonder whether, in the days of William Castle's B-movie advertisements, they would have bought the advertised insurance policies in case they died of fright during the film:

Macabre (1958): A certificate for a $1,000 life insurance policy from Lloyd's of London was given to each customer in case he/she should die of fright during the film. Showings also had fake nurses stationed in the lobbies and hearses parked outside the theater.

Jean Michel Cousteau recently traveled with a group called Project Kaisei to the North Pacific Gyre, the huge swirling morass of trash floating in the Pacific. They brought back pictures and samples of the stuff there. It's pretty horrifying stuff. The worst part are actually the small particles that get ingested by marine life and cause irreparable damage.

Here's a lovely sample of what they brought back. This jar shows the massive amount of particles big and small floating there. The money quote from all this: "marine debris is the new man-made epidemic."

I present this incredible video of a volcanic eruption filmed from the International Space Station.