SIXinternational.txt

This is the best post I’ve ever seen detailing why complementary and alternative medicine is more or less complete bunk when compared with actual, studied medical science. Dr Novella goes through the list and explains the main problems with each of the more prominent on-the-cusp-of-acceptance treatment modalities, including chiropractic, acupuncture, and homeopathy, and details how they “bait and switch” their victims.

A quick clip from the conclusion:

All of these modalities fall under an artificial category - so called “complementary and alternative” medicine (CAM) or “integrative” medicine that was created as the ultimate bait and switch.

The deception is largely two-fold. The first is to include modalities within this false category that are legitimate, like nutrition, exercise, physical therapy, relaxation, etc., - and then claim that these legitimize the entire category of CAM, even the far-out stuff like homeopathy. This is just a higher-order version of including physical therapy modalities within the umbrella of chiropractic, for example.

…

The second kind of deception created by the category of CAM is in the language used itself - “complementary” and “integrative.” What, exactly, are CAM modalities integrating? On close examination it is quite clear - the movement is an effort to mix unscientific, disproved, and dubious modalities into scientific medicine. The bait is that CAM offers legitimate alternatives, the switch is that it primarily promotes treatments that don’t work or are at best untested and highly implausible.

If there were truth in marketing then we would have the Office of Implausible Medicine, the Journal of Bad Medical Science, the Center for Rejected Therapies, and the Institute of Dubious Medical Claims - all under the umbrella of unscientific medicine. It used to be called, even more simply, “health fraud.”

If you’ve got the time to sit down and read it, particularly if you don’t know much about the subject or if you just want to bone up a bit, I can’t recommend this post (and the rest of the blog as well, in addition to Steve’s other blog NeuroLogica) enough.

This item was slashdotted this morning:

in some instances, Apple is charging 200% more for upgraded components, such as memory and hard disks. Either there’s a serious difference in the quality of components being used, or Apple is quite literally ripping off those who aren’t able to upgrade hardware themselves.

This is part of why I’ve railed against Apple for the past ten years or so. Everyone thinks they’re this great, consumer-friendly company that just wants to make things so nice and easy and helpful. And heh heh they do it so much better than PC manufacturers, right guys, heh? It’s all marketing, and it’s working incredibly well. Rather than allow you to just buy the system and upgrade and maintain it yourself (like quite literally every other computer manufacturer in existence), they force you to send everything in for even the most minor upgrades or replacements at double the cost to the consumer. Or, as in this case, even upgrading the parts before it’s being  sent out costs three times as much. Quite the price just to have a nicer case and a more visually pleasing OS.

But hey, it’s worth it so you can have appealing aesthetics, right? I mean what’s more important than that, honestly? What’s that about fools and their money? Sorry, I missed what you said, I was too busy applying these awesome stickers.

A most amazing observation, one predicted by natural selection/evolution, and about the 847th nail in the coffin of creationism (via New Scientist):

Twenty years ago, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University in East Lansing, US, took a single Escherichia coli bacterium and used its descendants to found 12 laboratory populations.

The 12 have been growing ever since, gradually accumulating mutations and evolving for more than 44,000 generations, while Lenski watches what happens.

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But sometime around the 31,500th generation, something dramatic happened in just one of the populations – the bacteria suddenly acquired the ability to metabolise citrate, a second nutrient in their culture medium that E. coli normally cannot use.

Indeed, the inability to use citrate is one of the traits by which bacteriologists distinguish E. coli from other species. The citrate-using mutants increased in population size and diversity.

“It’s the most profound change we have seen during the experiment. This was clearly something quite different for them, and it’s outside what was normally considered the bounds of E. coli as a species, which makes it especially interesting,” says Lenski.

Even more exciting than observing that, the researchers were able to revert to previous generations and watch the bacteria re-evolve the same trait!

To find out which, Lenski turned to his freezer, where he had saved samples of each population every 500 generations. These allowed him to replay history from any starting point he chose, by reviving the bacteria and letting evolution “replay” again.

Would the same population evolve Cit+ again, he wondered, or would any of the 12 be equally likely to hit the jackpot?

The replays showed that even when he looked at trillions of cells, only the original population re-evolved Cit+ – and only when he started the replay from generation 20,000 or greater. Something, he concluded, must have happened around generation 20,000 that laid the groundwork for Cit+ to later evolve.

Lenski and his colleagues are now working to identify just what that earlier change was, and how it made the Cit+ mutation possible more than 10,000 generations later.

In the meantime, the experiment stands as proof that evolution does not always lead to the best possible outcome. Instead, a chance event can sometimes open evolutionary doors for one population that remain forever closed to other populations with different histories.

Lenski’s experiment is also yet another poke in the eye for anti-evolutionists, notes Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. “The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events,” he says. “That’s just what creationists say can’t happen.”

Absolutely fascinating. This is so much more exciting than believing in magic and religion - this stuff actually works! I’m too dumb to add a comment of my own on this, but it’s just amazing the exponential progress that’s being made in our scientific knowledge on a daily basis. Keep up the good work, science!

(The movie’s subtitle irony is not intended, I’m sure.)

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is trying to do to evolution what Michael Moore did to guns in Bowling for Columbine, except with plenty more invocations of Godwin’s Law (even visible in the trailer - note the live-from-Dachau setting about halfway through). It is slated to be released on April 18th in theatres everywhere. Overview of the movie from their site:

WHO: Ben Stein, in the new film EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed

WHAT: His heroic and, at times, shocking journey confronting the world’s top scientists, educators and philosophers, regarding the persecution of the many by an elite few.

WHEN: Coming to a theater near you on April 18, 2008

WHERE: Ben travels the world on his quest, and learns an awe-inspiring truth…that bewilders him, then angers him…and then spurs him to action!

WHY: Ben realizes that he has been “Expelled,” and that educators and scientists are being ridiculed, denied tenure and even fired – for the “crime” of merely believing that there might be evidence of “design” in nature, and that perhaps life is not just the result of accidental, random chance.

To which Ben Says: “Enough!” And then gets busy. NOBODY messes with Ben.

Besides the thought of Ben Stein getting busy, there’s plenty to be disgusted at with this movie. The essential thesis is that reasonable scientists who support creationism/intelligent design are being blacklisted because they have the audacity to question “big science,” which is composed of an elite cabal of “Darwinists” who refuse to let anyone question their authority. They’re being denied their freedom of speech! Could it get any more un-American than this? This is, of course, completely false. The IDers have been allowed to speak, write, pontificate, and whine all they want, but the reason they are getting blacklisted is not because they dare to question science but because of their complete ignorance of science, inability to base their hypotheses in any sort of natural evidence, and inability to provide any sort of falsifiable proof during their research. It is all the more ridiculous when realizing that questioning science is fundamental to its core - the reason Einstein won the Nobel Prize is because he questioned Newton’s laws, but the key is that he also used falsifiable evidence to prove himself.

Here’s a good summary of the movie, its saga, and its controversy from Dr. Steven Novella via NeurologicaBlog / Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe:

But the core of Expelled, and the claim from which it derives its title, is that Darwinists are ideologues who are oppressing anyone who holds a contrary view and are systematically repressing academic freedom, free speech, and any fair discussion of legitimate scientific skepticism of Darwin’s ideas. This is, in fact, the latest propaganda tactic of the ID crowd. It is also utter hogwash.

Creationists have long gone out of their way to misinterpret any statement by a scientist as to the high degree of confidence we have in the theory of evolution as dogma. Now this strategy has been expanded to argue that if an academic is criticized for making ignorant statements about evolution, then their free speech is being oppressed. If an academic displays scientific incompetence by making blatantly pseudoscientific statements or publishing abject nonsense, and their career fairly reflects this incompetence, then the ID crowd cries for “academic freedom.”

It’s all a deceitful dodge. The truth is the creationists/ID proponents do not like evolutionary theory because it conflicts with their ideological beliefs. They therefore are doing everything they can to make evolution controversial and keep it out of the schools, while inserting their religious views as science. Failing that they want their distortions and lies about evolution to be treated as if it were legitimate scientific discourse. ID is no more science than astrology, geocentrism, the expanding earth theory, or homeopathy. None of it has any place in the world of science, except as object lessons in pseudoscience.

For most of us familiar with Creationism v. Real Science, this is all the same kind of things we’ve seen plenty of times before. It’s just another sham to try to create a spectre of controversy around the whole thing where none exists just so kids don’t come into contact with anything that might cause them to question the theology dogmas their parents can’t answer back at home.

But then the fun part begins… there are plenty of Real Scientists and evolution stalwarts in the movie, including Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Eugenie Scott, etc., who were tricked in order to get them to appear with their guard down. The company said the movie was called “Crossroads”, was being produced by Rampant Films, and was about the controversy between evolution and ID. The film and the company were made up, as the domain for Expelled was already registered months before any interviews took place. This “Rampant Films” had a fake site put up with fake movies that they had done to appear legitimate.

Even more fun is when PZ Myers legitimately signed up to attend a preview screening of the movie at the Mall of America in Minnesota. These previews had typically been shown mostly to believers in order to raise a grassroots excitement about the film. PZ signed up legitimately through the site, received his pass (along with a number of guests), provided identification upon arrival… and was promptly pulled out of line and expelled from Expelled. But upon evicting PZ Myers, they apparently neglected to check his other guests’ identities, or they would have also caught… Richard Dawkins himself, who managed to get in and watch the entire thing, as well as ask a question! Again from Neurologica:

At the end of the movie, during a Q&A, Dawkins got up to ask why Myers was expelled from the movie.

…

In response to Dawkins’ question, Mathis said that Myers was thrown out because the screening was by invitation only and he was not invited. This is not true - it was not by invitation and Myers did sign up online just like everyone else, using his real name. Then Mathis implied that PZ was being unruly (not true), and that he let Dawkins in because he was “honorable.” Now he is saying that “I banned pz because I want him to pay to see it. Nothing more.”

Dawkins also posted a predictably scathing review and description of the event on his website, which is well worth a read for paragraphs like these:

The whole tone of the film is whiny, paranoid — pathetic really. The narrator is somebody called Ben Stein. I had not heard of him, but apparently he is well known to Americans, for it is hard to see why else he would have been chosen to front the film. He certainly can’t have been chosen for his knowledge of science, nor his powers of logical reasoning, nor his box office appeal (heavens, no), and his speaking voice is an irritating, nasal drawl, innocent of charm and of consonants. I suppose that makes it a good voice for conveying the whingeing paranoia that I referred to, so maybe that was qualification enough.

Also be sure to enjoy the review from the Orlando Sentinel, written not by a scientist but by a film critic.

All in all, it’s a sign that Kitzmiller v. Dover didn’t put a nail in the coffin of intelligent design like most of us had hoped. It’s amazing and shameful to see the lengths the IDers continue to go to in order to manufacture this controversy to stop real science from being taught.

I’ve never had an affinity for Apple products. I don’t understand what gets people’s hearts all aflutter over their hardware or software and what inspires such love for a corporation. My iPod works fine, but the interface is laggy for what it is. I’m considering flashing my firmware to rockbox but I don’t want to risk damaging the device… we’ll see. iTunes is crap. It eats memory for what it does - foobar is light years better in terms of responsiveness and customization. Also, for whatever reason, anytime I try to close iTunes on my computer, the thing never closes right and just hangs and waits for me to kill it manually. Quicktime also sucks, mpc is better. I was always kinda hoping that iTunes would just sit idly on my computer and not bug me too much, but now I get daily reminders that I really really should update my browser to Safari 3.1 for Windows and oh what a handy dialog box we have here for you to click ok to and start using our wonderful browser. Because apparently Firefox isn’t any good, or something.

In summary: fuck that.

Safari is a terrible browser - it must be bad for even Mac users to want to switch to Firefox. But for Windows, Safari is even worse. They didn’t even try to make the hotkeys match Windows standards - you need to use Ctrl + Shift + [ or ] to switch tabs versus Ctrl + Tab or Ctrl + Shift + Tab - and it’s not remappable. You have to resize the window using the lower right corner only. And of course, their awful, awful anti-aliasing which makes the fonts look fungus-covered. Add that to the awful crashing problems and recent devastating security concerns and you’ve got a recipe for disaster, particularly compared to the consistently awesome Firefox.

But to top it all off? Using Safari on Windows is in violation of their own EULA (via Slashdot). Installing Safari is only legal on Apple-branded hardware. Let the lawsuits commence for all the suckers who blaze through those things without reading them, right?

Regardless, my real complaint is that I hate being annoyed by little “install me!!” buttons popping up all the time. I hate when Windows tries to automatically update and I hate even more when software I only use with my nose pinched tries to unload more of its crap onto my hard drive. That’s a step above malware practices.

Science is the culmination of humanity. It is our collective brain, engaging the logic and rationality of any interested member in the entire species to solve problems and define the rules and laws of our universe. It is our greatest achievement, with the discovery of science allowing us to grow by leaps and bounds. Science allowed us to become meaningfully educated and grow our society’s health and wealth by exponential leaps and bounds.

It is for these reasons that I believe fully that science must be our primary focus in both education and government funding, and that NASA should receive at least triple the relatively small budget it has now ($16bn versus currently $490bn for defense spending). Yes we should go back to the Moon, yes we should explore other planets with robots and probes, yes we should colonize Mars, yes we should invest in high speed space exploration vehicles. We must do this not just to expand our knowledge of the known universe, but to increase the speed at which we get off of this Earth. Sooner than we know, we’ll be facing major shortages in food, water, fuel, and living space. Our footprint on this Earth is massive - though we can fit 8 million people into 300 square miles in New York City, it takes an additional 2000 square miles of upstate watershed land just to keep the city quenched. We can’t sustain this type of living for the three to five billion more people we’re going to add over the next 40 years.

I have heard people say that we should not explore space until we’ve fixed the problems we have on our planet. I find this to be illogical - we will never live in a society without poverty, hunger, disease, or death. It is noble to invest in AIDS and cancer research, it is noble to try to extend and increase happiness found in human lives, it is noble to fight the elements that cause social injustice. It is noble, but it is ultimately futile and short-sighted. There is only so much that can be done; we will never live in Utopia. But our world will become drained of arable land and fresh water reserves, and no one knows exactly when. Or maybe we’ll face multiple nuclear bombs or a wayward asteroid like all of those movies predicted in the late ’90s. The only way to survive this or any other crazy, unthinkable, yet completely plausible event is to focus on finding new colonies to settle our species upon. By staying on Earth and Earth alone, we are keeping all of our eggs in one chaotic basket. I think this is irresponsible for anyone who cares about our future.

The only logical argument I see against this is that trying to build light-speed devices with current technology is Columbus begging the Queen of Spain for funding to research the dual-core processor. I don’t know how far away the goals of extra-solar travel are, but at the very least we must begin to lay the groundwork for these goals with extensive government funding of science and a much greater improved focus on science education. We should be ashamed to live in a country where 51% of us think that God created humans in their present form.

I know science is a difficult subject to become involved in without a preexisting interest in it, but if anyone is interested in expanding their world view, especially in terms of our place in the universe, the starting point is always the same: Carl Sagan. A quick quote on perspective from him based on looking at this last image ever sent from Voyager I in 1990 looking back at Earth:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Yes, for the moment, Earth is where we make our stand - but hopefully not for much longer. We’ve already begun discovering solar systems similar to our own (one found after six tries with a new method - I’d say that’s a pretty good chance there’s habitable areas out there), all that’s left is the will to take us there.