Here It Is In Case You Were Waiting

The coolest scientific name for any creature anywhere. It is (drum roll):

Vampyroteuthis infernalis:

Vampyroteuthis infernalis is the scientific name for the vampire squid. This foot-long cephalopod takes its name from the red-and-black "cape" draped between its eight legs, thought to be useful in enveloping its prey before eating it. Science is really cool sometimes.

Now Go Vaccinate Your Children

The data in the study suggesting that the MMR vaccine causes autism was knowingly falsified. It was based on intentionally-selected, "chiseled" data. It was a lie. It was a lie with consequences:

...measles has surged since Wakefield's paper was published and there are sporadic outbreaks in Europe and the U.S. In 2008, measles was deemed endemic in England and Wales.

A preventable disease for which there is a known, effective, affordable, and plentiful vaccine, is spreading throughout industrialized nations with powerful medical services delivery infrastructures.

Why? Because of ignorance facilitated by lies dressed up to look like science, to be sure. Because Andrew Wakefield (no longer entitled to use the title "Doctor,"), the principal author of the original study, put a higher premium on grabbing the spotlight for himself than on scientific integrity.

Why? Because of irresponsible, sensationalistic journalism -- first in the UK, and later here in the US. I remember seeing the 60 Minutes story that sensationalized this bit of mythology, and wondering why the doctors in that story who called Wakefield's methods "irresponsible," were buried so far in the middle of it as to make me question whether I was watching tabloid TV or investigative journalism.

Why? Because an attractive celebrity, heartbroken over her son turning out to be autistic, chose to cope by latching on to this dangerous lie, with the result that thousands of children have fallen ill and hundreds have died, who need not have.

I'm preaching to the choir here, I'm sure. But this whole thing is a graphic, if deeply saddening, example of why a credulous approach to the world is not only wrong-headed but dangerous. Skeptics bear the brunt of a lot of prejudice because of their tendency to question things like religion. But this is part of why skepticism is in the public interest and a skeptical approach to the world, while admittedly less fun than one based on faith and hope and emotion, will nevertheless produce better results.

Vaccinate your children. It's a duty.

Miracle Of Medical Technology

Maybe you think Dick Cheney was a force for good, or at least for good government. Maybe you think the exact opposite. But hopefully even if you detested the man's politics, and even if you think he was corrupt, you can find a moment to think about his human condition and marvel.

See, Cheney has had a heart condition for many years now and has suffered heart failure. If this were the 1960's, the man would almost certainly be dead right now because the effects of all of this has been to render his heart too weak to pump blood throughout his body quickly and effectively enough to nourish it. So he is now fitted with a remarkable device:

His new mechanical pump, a partial artificial heart known as a ventricular assist device, leaves patients without a pulse because it pushes blood continuously instead of mimicking the heart’s own beat. Most pulse-less patients feel nothing unusual, but the devices do pose significant risks of infection. They are implanted as a last resort either for permanent use or as a bridge to transplant until a donor heart can be found. Mr. Cheney, who has participated in some of the nation’s toughest decisions for decades, now faces a crucial one of his own: whether to seek a full heart transplant. ... With most patients, a power line emerges about waist level and connects to a controller, a minicomputer that plugs into a pair of one-and-a-half-pound, 12-volt batteries. Patients wear a black mesh vest over their clothing that holds the controller and batteries.

He will never be able to take a shower again, unless he has a heart transplant, because of all that electronic equipment. A sponge bath will do for hygiene and odor control, which sucks, although if it came down to a choice between a life of only sponge baths and dying, I'd take the sponge any day.

The point here is not to do a pre-mortem on the man or his politics. Even if you detested the man, thought he was corrupt and evil, and couldn't wait for him to get out of power, that's not a reason to wish him death or wish that his family have to go through grief for him. And for now, they won't. No, the point here is to marvel that despite suffering repeated heart failures, modern technology has a way to keep him alive.

"But Cheney is really, really rich," you say, "and someone like you or me could never afford this miraculous technology if we had the same condition he did." Well, right now that's true. And yes, it is fortunate for Cheney that he is personally wealthy and so the cost of all this technology is well within his grasp. But you're not taking a long view to lodge that sort of protest. Yes, it's always the wealthy who get this sort of stuff first.  They buy the technology at a premium price, which enables the developers of that technology to both recoup their startup costs and thus offer it for sale in the future at a lower price, and it creates an incentive for even more science, research, and technology to be developed in the future.

This is why I like both science and economics so much. They save lives.

5 Questions From 2 Christians 4 Atheists

This one seems to be making the rounds on the Intertubes. It may not be particularly philosophically deep, but it is seemingly popular. I'm not about to make a video response as the authors solicit, although this guy's video response ends on a charming note. So I'll do a written response instead.


1.  What kind of evidence would it take for you to believe in God?  Not what would be a good start, but what evidence would actually convince you?  And when we say "God," we're talking about a mind which is all-loving, all-powerful (meaning he can do everything but what is logically contradictory), all-knowing, and eternal.

Notice the rhetorical twist in the question: "We Christians can't seem to convince you atheists of the existence of God. So instead, please try to convince yourselves." Sorry; it doesn't work that way; this isn't Moot Court. As proponents of the claim that God exists, you bear the burden of proof. What that proof might be, I haven't a clue. Maybe such evidence exists; I haven't seen any after forty years of life but then again, I don't know what you've got to offer. So hit me with your best shot.

2.  Is there anything I can do that would convince you that God exists?  Like, could any argument we could make have the potential to sway you?

See my answer to question #1, above. One thing I'd suggest you do before trying is to see if your new, wonderful argument is really new and wonderful. And sorry, chances are that it isn't. In fact, chances are good that your argument is some variant of either the ontological argument or the cosmological argument, and I find neither to be convincing.

3.  If you realized that an all-loving God existed, would you desire to have a relationship with Him?  If you said "yes" to that question, would you want to have a relationship with Him just to get into heaven or for some other reason?

An all-loving God would be a nice friend to have for all sorts of reasons, the best reason being to enjoy and reciprocate the love and friendship offered. Now, note that according to your definition, God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving. As such, an all-loving, omnibenevolent God would put everyone into eternal paradise and bliss in the afterlife, regardless of whether they were sinners, apostates, or whatnot. So if an all-loving God existed (as you've defined Him), I wouldn't be worried about getting in to heaven at all; that God would put me in Heaven no matter what because He loves me the same way He loves you.


4.  Have you ever met a Christian that lives their life in such a way that it is clear that they believe in an all-loving God?  (Onscreen disclaimer: "I am not insinuating that only Christians can be moral")  Meaning they live a life that is impressively kind, loving, and selfless.

Yes, I have met and known and in some cases formed warm friendships with many Christians whose kindness, capacity for love, and selflessness have impressed me and touched me deeply on an emotional level. Those friendships have deeply enriched my life. Similarly, I've met and been morally impressed by people who identify as Jewish, atheist, agnostic, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, or in the case of my favorite roommate from college, Zoroastrian. I do not think one's religiosity has any more relationship with one's moral worth than does one's shoe size.

5.  Has the presence or lack of presence of such a person had any impact on your atheism?

None whatsoever. My love for my friends, and their love for me, does not change the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever to justify or even inspire belief in the supernatural, any more than such love (or the lack of such love) would change the speed of light or the force of gravity. The universe is utterly and absolutely indifferent to your feelings about it. God either exists or does not exist, regardless of whether Christians are good people or bad people.

It Was Just A Contrail

A contrail is a thin cloud left behind an object moving high in the sky. Typically caused by an airplane, rockets and meteors can cause them too.  Anything moving fast enough or which is heavy enough will cause the thin air around it to condense, making water vapor visible. These are quite common and most people, even in areas of the country where aerospace is not the primary industry, find them unremarkable.

Which does not explain why it seems the entire blogosphere -- particularly folks from Orange County and therefore with some bleedover into the right-wing blogosphere (credit where it's due; there is an update) -- went so suddenly nuts assuming that a perfectly ordinary contrail left behind a perfectly ordinary flight, which an educated guess identifies as U.S. Air Flight 808, from Honolulu to Phoenix. There are cool heads out there in the O.C., and others who have pointed out that this wouldn't be the first time an ordinary contrail has caused a panic.

If you're interested in the subject, learn more about contrails here. If you were having fun panicking, don't let anything I've said here slow you down. But no one is in any danger from U.S. Air Flight 808. This was not a mysterious missile. This website has an image of what a west coast missile launch looks like; notice how it is clearly visible from Inyokern, a small community 160 miles east by northeast of the Vandenburg AFB launch site. My own experience -- and I'm the sort of guy who regularly looks up into the sky -- was that I haven't seen anything remarkable up there for weeks since the last F-35 test flights. There is nothing to panic about, yet people seemed eager to panic and indeed, to politicize it. I wonder what sort of free-floating anxiety is out there that fed this silly, irrational panic.

Cosmos

I've been watching Cosmos, the science miniseries series that originally aired on PBS back in 1980. You can see them all for free on hulu. Some of the science is old news now, the graphics and the hairstyles and the clothing are definitely dated. But it still holds up as an enjoyable way to spend your time.

The stagings of historical events hold up and help bring to mind some idea of what the progress of science must have been like to the people of the periods when it happened. The soundtrack by Vangelis remains beautiful, even if electronic music has advanced considerably since the Eighties.

Most of all, there is the writing and narration of Carl Sagan. Sagan was a remarkably effective ambassador for science to the popular world. Cosmos stands as a brilliant paean to the joy of knowledge, learning, clear thought, and most of all the power of science. If the science is old news now, it makes no bones about that -- the science was new when the series was made but Sagan was clear that he fully expected the work of future generations to surpass what he was describing. At the end of the day, he describes science as a process, as an attitude. And it is an attitude full of awe, wonder, hope, and joy.

This Post Is Full Of Win

Sometimes a blog post is just perfect. It starts with a good title. It includes a properly evocative photograph. Its content is well-written and understandable, without talking down to the lowest common denominator. It is factually dense, informative, and leaves you smarter than you were before you read it. And it makes you laugh while you read it. This is such a post. Via.

Exurbs Are No Place For Astronomy

Jupiter is making its closest approach to Earth since before I was born and will not be this close again for twelve more years. So I go outside to take a look and there is so much light pollution I can't see a single star. Most discouraging.

Amway For The 2010's

The other day I was escorting a prospect through the firm's lobby. There were several people there, including another attorney who was talking with an attractive woman in her forties, and this attorney said, "You might want to talk to TL here about that, it seems like the sort of thing he might be interested in," and practically shot out the front door. So I was left talking with this woman who first established that we had some common social acquaintances, and then proceeded to pitch me on MonaVie.

A quick glance at the glossy 8 by 14 sheet of written material revealed to me that 1) it was badly out of date in that it indicated that "very few baby boomers are now in their 40's,"* 2) the product in question was fruit juice, and 3) this was a multi-level marketing scheme. Is MonaVie a scam? If you ask me, anything sold through a multi-level marketing mechanism becomes a scam sooner or later. There are certainly appreciable numbers of people who have stuck their necks out to explain why they think it is a scam.

Now, it's not hard to see how when you sell fruit juice for forty dollars a quart you can get to a fairly high amount of revenue in the first place or how there would be considerable profit left over for the various tiers in your marketing pyramid. As a business model, I approve of huge profit, all other things being equal. But I have real doubts that this is a particularly ripe business opportunity.  The real flaw I see here is that competing products are readily and cheaply available. Who the hell is going to pay forty dollars for 750 ml of something they can get in a 2 liter bottle for about a tenth of the price at their supermarket, bearing a label that reads "Ocean Spray" instead of "MonaVie"? Suckers, that's who. So how are you going to sucker them?

By touting your product as possessing magical qualities, that's how. The marketing material dwells on the pseudoscience of antioxidants as an anti-aging measure. Drink MonaVie and you'll never get old! Well, sorry, but you will. Fruit juice may contain a large concentration of helpful nutrients and essential vitamins, but super fruit juices sold on the strength of their antioxidant content are the modern version of snake oil and there are potential harms -- there are hints that certain kinds of antioxidants in large enough doses can actually suppress your body's immunodefense system; the most commonly-touted antioxident, resveratrol, may actually increase the risk of the very harms it is deployed to mitigate or prevent when not used appropriately. A morning of looking around the science available on the internet tells me that there is no substantial scientific consensus on any of the purported health benefits of any particular antioxidant, much less that of an antioxidant cocktail like MonaVie. There may be some health benefits, and there are some hints of real promise and progress to be made. But "science" doesn't know for sure that any of the four varieties of antioxidants (ascorbic acid or "vitamin C"; tocopherols or "vitamin E"; polyphenols like resveratrol; or carotenoids like lycopene from tomatoes) does anything even resembling the claims made in fundamentally dishonest marketing materials associated with products.

My conclusion after a very brief survey of scientific literature is that MonaVie sells sweet, purply woo at forty dollars a bottle. Your mileage may vary, but no sane consumer of even average intelligence would buy the stuff without having first had their critical thinking skills suspended through the use of dishonest claims (largely based on testimonials rather than cited scientific reports in peer-reviewed journals) about its purported health benefits.

The real proof, though, is that most any MonaVie representative you come across has a day job. The woman I spoke to was employed as a mortgage broker. If she was really making such good money selling a healthful product that actually excited her and gave her joy, why would she keep her day job? No, at best this is a sideline and most likely she got suckered in by a sales pitch from her upline in the MLM pyramid and bought hundreds of dollars worth of this fruit juice, realized that she can't sell the product and that the only way to do anything worthwhile is to sell "the system" instead, and therefore is now looking to unload these bottles of grossly overpriced blueberry smoothies on the next, greater fool.

Who isn't going to be me.


* Really? Very few boomers left in their 40's?  What is this, the Clinton Administration? A baby boomer is someone who was born in the several years after World War II ended, from around 1945 to some indeterminate, arbitrary date in the early 1950's. As I can personally attest, the children of baby boomers are now entering their 40's. Boomers are entering retirement age although thanks to the financial crash of 2008, many are postponing retirement for a few years so as to recover their assets before ceasing work, and who could blame them?

† According to the corporate website, the ingredients are a proprietary blend of: "Açai, white grape, apple, acerola, aronia, purple grape, cranberry, passion fruit, prune, kiwi, blueberry, wolfberry, camu camu, pomegranate, lychee fruit, pear, banana, cupuaçu, and bilberry." Cupuaçu is probably the trendiest ingredient in that list; açai used to be almost totally unknown ten years ago but now you can get açai juice fairly cheaply and without much difficulty at grocery stores all over California. Not that MonaVie cares about that, particularly.

Take Off Your Tie, Doc

I just learned yesterday that it may well be that one of the most dangerous things a doctor can do is wear a tie around patients. This is unfortunate, because wearing a tie lends a degree of gravity, authority, and respect to a man, and a doctor is in a position where such a badge of authority is an important facet of the doctor-patient relationship. Many of a doctor's customers (as distinguished from his "patients" who may be the same person but sometimes are not) expect him to wear a tie as such a badge of his position.

It's not conclusive that silk ties can transmit disease; if they can, the lab coats  may well serve the same function, particularly if they are not laundered frequently. But it makes sense. Shirts, pants, undergarments, and possibly the traditional white lab coat can be put through a washing machine with some frequency. But ties are typically made of silk or some other delicate material, and therefore not laundered often because it is expensive to do that. Most guys gradually acquire a collection of ties, some of which can grow to prodigious sizes, but as a practical matter they run through a rotation of between ten to fifteen ties in a cycle because the favorite ties, or the ones that are known to look good with a particular coat and shirt combination, get worn more often. I'm certainly guilty of that.

Typically, I only send my ties to the cleaner when I spill a visible amount of soup or sauce on them.  But that doesn't mean that just because I come home with a clean-looking tie, I've managed to avoid smaller amounts of organic material getting lodged in there - and if there is organic material in there, maybe other stuff is eating it, like dust mites or molds or other unpleasant beasties. Beasties that you wouldn't want to be spreading around to other people, especially if you were in the business of healing them. Not all that many at any one location or time, but after a while, it can add up.

The last time I went to see a doctor, he was wearing surgical scrubs, a white lab coat, and running shoes.  I didn't think anything of it since the doctor I saw is a surgeon. I noticed the lack of tie, but didn't think much of it since scrubs seemed an appropriate thing for a doctor to be wearing -- obviously "medical," easily-laundered, and permitting substantial freedom of movement while treating patients. But now that I think about it, if he was either coming from or going to surgery after treating patients for several hours in his office, shouldn't he have changed his scrubs coming in to or going out of the OR? Doctors, help he out here. Those scrubs he was wearing when he saw me must have been for office wear only; he wouldn't go in to surgery wearing the same scrubs that had absorbed whatever microorganisms I had exhaled onto them earlier in the day, right? Or is this something that doctors, being human, sometimes forget about?

I don't think there's much of a counterpart to the necktie for women. Some women's suits include silk scarves or frilly collars on the blouses, which I guess could be like a man's tie. Sometimes there are shirts or blouses that go up to the neck on a woman's suit, but mainly they seem to be open-throated. A woman wearing a necktie is making a fashion statement,* and doctors are not in the business, usually, of making fashion statements like that. Like all professionals, they wear what they wear to stick in, to conform, to demonstrate that they are part of the establishment.

But these are not as important goals for doctors to have as protecting the health of their patients. So more scrubs, doc; I for one am not going to forget that you are a doctor even if you leave the tie at home.


* I include servers at the Olive Garden in this. The women servers, seaters, and bartenders wear ties similar to the men, as part of the server's uniform. The statement there is one of uniformity. Nor is wearing a tie a bad fashion statement for a woman to make; more often than not I've been pleased with the look.

Stop Making Your Bed

While you sleep, you sweat, and that leaves water in your mattress.  Unmade beds dry faster than made beds because the water has more places to escape to the air.  So if you make your bed every morning, you'll wind up with more of these nasty things living in it because making the bed leaves the bed damper for longer, instead of letting it dry out faster unmade.  Which can be a problem if you suffer from a particular kind of allergy.  If you like the feeling of straightened, flat sheets when you sleep, make the bed just before you get into it.

Aurora Alert

Tonight and tomorrow night, if you live in the northern hemisphere (particularly a more northerly latitude), be sure to go out and look for the aurora borealis.  A strong sunspot has ejected a jet of plasma directly towards the Earth and it's supposed to hit us soon.  It should be spectacular.

And It Works, Bitches

Obama's First Oval Office Address (UPDATED)

I caught the tail end of the President's address from the Oval Office tonight on NPR as I drove home.  It's hard to believe that he's been in office over a year and not before used this vehicle for communicating with the nation.  Three things struck me about what he said.

First, he sure invoked religion a lot.  He talked about the "blessing of the fleet," and the Hand of God guiding us and showing us the way out of our problems, and invoked the blessings of God on the nation in our difficult hour.  God, however, is not going to solve the problem of the oil spill -- human beings are going to solve that problem, or not, using science, technology, ingenuity, money, and labor.  God isn't in that picture, so far as I can see.  And the fact that Obama's proposed solutions to the problems we face includes a healthy dose of relying on a nonexistent God worries me.

Second, he indicated that the posture of the regulatory agencies overseeing industrial activity would become more adversarial and less cooperative.  That may or may not be a good thing -- we don't want regulators cozying up to the regulated industries, either in mining or anything else, but we also don't want to regulate industries out of existence or even out of the ability to post healthy profits for their investors.  I would hope for a balanced rather than an adversarial approach.

Third, he pointed out that we need to make a commitment to a long-term shift away from an economy where it makes sense to drill for oil in deep water.  True enough.  But the solutions he mentioned -- more energy-efficient buildings, wind and solar power, and incentivizing research by the energy industry -- left out two rather important, and achievable, pieces of the energy puzzle.  He didn't mention the word "nuclear."  We need more nuclear power plants, and he is wrong to back down from that important part of the array of options available to power our nation.  He also didn't discuss shale oil extraction, which is technology approaching the cusp of economic profitability and which contains the potential for the United States and Canada to both become bigger oil exporters than the Persian Gulf States and Russia combined.  Maybe that's something encompassed by his elliptical reference to R&D, but I doubt it.

A good energy policy is a good environmental policy and a good economic policy, all at once.  Unless all those pieces of the puzzle fit together, it's a patchwork, panicked reaction to adverse events rather than an intelligent and effective response to a crisis.  Last week, President Obama suggested that the oil spill was his 9/11.  Having suspended diplomatic travels and effectively chained himself to the Oval Office and the site of the disaster until it is solved, having early intervention attempts to resolve the process fail miserably and publicly, and facing an ongoing and readily-quantifiable count of the ever-increasing measure of the disaster, it looks a lot more like Obama's Iran Hostage Crisis to me.  Which dovetails nicely into my thoughts that Obama is really Jimmy Carter refashioned for a new generation.

(UPDATE:  Apparently I wasn't the only one underwhelmed with the Oval Office address.)

The Sixty Second Patriot #9

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy challenged America to adopt a national goal of sending people to the Moon and bringing them safely back to Earth.

Over the next eight years, many different parts of the government, and a lot of private companies, and a lot of scientists, worked very hard to make that happen.  Along the way, they invented all sorts of things to help put a man on the Moon, from things that seem ordinary like instant orange juice to transforming computers from things that took up entire floors of office buildings into things that would fit into a person's pocket.

Also along the way, they learned how to build very large rockets.  At the time, no one could be really sure how the rockets would work, and every time one went up with astronauts in them, they could never be sure that they were going to get back home safely.

But after eight years of research and ten test missions, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed a tiny spacecraft called the Eagle on the Moon on July 16, 1969.  More than one-fifth of the entire people of the world watched on television at the same time as American astronauts became the first people ever to walk on the Moon's surface, and come home again to tell about it.  They became the first of six American missions safely to the Moon and back.  The moon landing is one of America's proudest moments.


The Sixty-Second Patriot series of posts is intended to provide teachers who are required to engage in patriotic exercises with truthful, age-appropriate, meaningful, educationally-rich, non-controversial, secular alternatives to rote recital of the Pledge of Allegiance, as well as brief meditations on American history, civics, and values accessible to all people. Suggestions and contributions to this series from Readers are welcome.

The Sixty Second Patriot #8

Norman Borlaug was a scientist from Iowa, who has probably saved more lives than anyone else in history.

Norman came from a farm family in Iowa, and went to college on an athletic scholarship during the Great Depression. He studied forestry and the kinds of diseases that attack crops, while he saw a lot of hard working people starving for lack of food.  So after he finished his education, he devoted his life to doing something about it.

He got both the government and private companies to support his experiments with different kinds of crops, especially wheat. Eventually he researched a kind of wheat that would grow in cold temperatures, and found a way to make it grow very fast so farmers could grow two crops a year.  Then, he found a way to make his wheat resistant to diseases and insects, so more wheat could be harvested every crop with fewer pesticides.  American farms, and after them farms all over the world, were able to triple their output within a year of starting to use Norman's wheat -- and today nearly all of the bread we eat is made from seeds that he developed

More than a billion people who otherwise would have starved to death lived instead, because of a farm boy from Iowa who combined education, hard work, and compassion to work and made the whole world a better place for it.


The Sixty-Second Patriot series of posts is intended to provide teachers who are required to engage in patriotic exercises with truthful, age-appropriate, meaningful, educationally-rich, non-controversial, secular alternatives to rote recital of the Pledge of Allegiance, as well as brief meditations on American history, civics, and values accessible to all people. Suggestions and contributions to this series from Readers are welcome.

But I Don't Think Of Myself As Liberal!

And here I was today beginning to question the limits of my intelligence.  Not so fast. TL!

Self Affirming World Views

You are not immune to this.  Neither am I, neither is anyone.  Your cultural world view shades, often overtly and powerfully, what you think is real.  In other words, facts have ideologies.  But it's more than that.  Nudge-like, the manner and context in which information is presented will influence the way you rate a fact's ideology.  Particularly in the U.S., there are two dominant world views, with ill-defined but widely-intuited constellations of positions on issues, which are largely diametrically opposed to one another.  Depending on which camp you are in, this will tell you what is true and what is not.

Take global warming. If the policy proposal is limits on industrial growth or caps on carbon emissions, a conservative person is likely to suggest that anthropic global warming is an unlikely and unproven hypothesis.  But if the policy proposal is more nuclear power plants, that same person is likely to cite the risks of global warming as a serious issue.  The converse would be true for (some? most?) liberals.

How do you make decisions on their merits, then?  Well, that's the rub, isn't it!  You have to shed your ideology, remove yourself from party and tribe and personal prejudice.  And guess what, that's really difficult.  Some of your ideology comes from your education, which itself taught you how to reason and evaluate and make judgments.  You can't shed those skills.  So that means you also need to teach yourself how to separate fact from opinion, how to distinguish the objective from the normative.  At this point, we've reached a high enough level of abstraction, level of meta-analysis sophisticated enough that the vast majority of people are simply never going to bother to complete it.

Which means that if you are trying to get people to agree with you about something, you're going to have to do that meta-thinking for them. For politicians, lawyers, policy advocates, and anyone else who wants to simultaneously inform and persuade others, care and thought should be given to the manner of presentation and the way in which the proffered information will fit in to both likely constellations of opinions.

True Stumble

I've literally no idea how I found this story.  But it sent chills up my spine.

Christopher Maloney is a Cowardly Quack (UPDATED)

It's never a sign of the strength of your scientific idea when you have to resort to censorship to prevent criticism of it.  Which is the first clue that perhaps elderberries do not actually provide any material protection against the H1N1 virus, despite the spurious-sounding claims of a "naturopath" to the contrary.  If you want to claim that elderberries are effective against H1N1, great.  Go round up some pigs, set up a double-blind test, and publish your results in a medical journal -- the way a real scientist would do it.

More importantly, the bigger picture is that these dispensers of so-called "alternative medicine" consume money and resources that could better be spent on actual medicine, grounded in real science, and not inducing a false sense of confidence and well-being that conceals a real problem.  As a commenter on P.Z. Myers' blog inspiring the title of this post points out:

Naturopaths divert people from seeking proper medical attention. If that vague unease and intestinal distress you're feeling is cancer then the time you wasted taking herbal supplements just might mean your death. The anti-vaccine nonsense has killed or disabled how many children? Naturopaths are no better than homeopaths.

Which is exactly right.

While I hesitated to title the post as I did for fear of defaming this Maine naturopath responsible for that oddly-colored video linked above, in fact the contents of the title suggested by Prof. Myers are true.  Christopher Maloney misused the law to censor someone who had offered legitimate scientific criticism of his proposal, rather than to defend his claim on its merits, which makes him a coward.  And hHe sells woo instead of medicine, which makes him a quack.  And even if those are not objectively-verifiable facts, they are well within the scope of legitimate expression of opinion.  So I think I'm good here.  Sue me, dude.  I dare you.  And remember, you have to come to my forum to do it, so you probably ought to read this before you talk with the clerk of court.

UPDATE (complete with actual science goodness):  Maloney responded to Prof. Myers, which response is reprinted in full, here. Most of it is whining, but as to the scientific merits of his claim, he says:

In terms of poor maligned elderberry, the medline citation is "The H1N1 inhibition activities of the elderberry flavonoids compare favorably to the known anti-influenza activities of Oseltamivir (Tamiflu; 0.32 microM) and Amantadine (27 microM). (Phytochemistry. 2009 Jul;70(10):1255-61) While this is a test tube study only, please keep in mind that we had no vaccine and were at the peak of the pandemic here in Maine. I never suggested elderberry as a vaccination but as a possible home treatment for sick children.

Prof. Myers responds by pointing out that a single test-tube study is simply insufficient evidence for prescribing treatment regardless of the level of desparation; at most a single study "shows promise" for future kinds of treatment.  But there is some suggestion that a third party from South Carolina, and not Maloney, was the person who got the original critical blog pulled off the internet rather than Maloney himself, so for now, I'm striking out the references to the "cowardly" bit -- because it's not clear whether this person was Maloney himself, an agent or a proxy for Maloney, or was a true officious intermeddler.