Blogs / Bad Astronomy

I am no fan of pseudoscience, as you may have guessed. Dowsing is a practice that falls squarely in that field. It’s the idea that you can detect an object — usually water, but sometimes gold, or people, or whatever — using a y-shaped branch, or copper tubes, or some other simple device. Dowsers never really have a good explanation of how their devices work, but they tend to claim 100% accuracy.

However, James Randi has tested dowsers many, many times as part of the JREF’s Million Dollar Challenge. Not to keep you in suspense, but the money still sits in the bank. In other words, time and again, the dowsers fail. When a real, double-blind, statistical test is given, dowsers fail. Every single time.

That’s all well and good, and you might think it’s just another silly idea that nonsense-believers adhere to despite evidence. If someone wants to waste their money on a dowser, well, caveat emptor.

But what if your life depended on it? What if thousands of lives depended on it?

Such is the case in Iraq, where the military there is using what is essentially dowsing techniques to try to detect bombs in cars at military checkpoints. Let’s be very clear here: they are using provably useless antiscientific nonsense to try to find terrorists who carry explosives. They may as well use tea leaves, or palm reading, or seances.

This story just got major press; a reporter in Iraq wrote about it in the New York Times. It’s impossible to overstress how bad this situation is. Iraqi Major General Jehad al-Jabiri, who is the head of the Ministry of the Interior’s General Directorate for Combating Explosives, is a whole-hearted believer in this crap. He is such a believer that the Iraqi military are abandoning proven methods such as sniffer dogs.

Instead, the Iraqi have purchased hundreds of these so-called bomb-detection wands from a company called ATSC in the UK. The cost? Millions of dollars. Millions. On technology that James Randi has come right out and called "a totally fraudulent product". Bob Carroll of the Skeptic’s Dictionary agrees with Randi.

The NYT article also has expert advice from several explosives and military authorities (including long-time friend of the JREF Air Force Lt. Col (retired) Hal Bidlack), all of whom conclude that this device does nothing. Given the product description on the company’s own web page, I agree as well. The description makes no scientific sense at all; it claims it can detect ions from a distance without ever coming in contact with them, and that includes through lead, concrete, and more.

In other words, it’s magic.

This, however, won’t stop al-Jabiri, who chalks up any successes to the detector, and any failures to the operator. In a situation like that there is little hope he can be convinced him he’s wrong, especially when he says things like "I don’t care about Sandia or the Department of Justice or any of them. I know more about this issue than the Americans do. In fact, I know more about bombs than anyone in the world."

Really? Then why, as the NYT article indicates, did that dowsing wand fail on October 25, when terrorists detonated two tons of explosives killing 155 people? Four thousand pounds of explosives apparently got right past the magic wands’ sniffer. But at least they’re fast! Again, from the article:

Checking cars with dogs, however, is a slow process, whereas the wands take only a few seconds per vehicle. “Can you imagine dogs at all 400 checkpoints in Baghdad?” General Jabiri said. “The city would be a zoo.”

I suspect a zoo would be better than a slaughterhouse.

It’s arrogance and blind faith like that which has and will get people killed. And the people we’re talking about in many cases are our fighting men and women, people who have to put their own trust in the leaders in Iraq. This is not a game, not some lark. It’s real. And in this case, antiscience kills.

[This post, with minor variations, has been cross-posted on the JREF Swift blog.]

In Russia, thousands of Muslims are flocking to see a baby who has verses from the Koran mysteriously appearing on his body:

I’d like to be very clear here: this is not pareidolia, our ability to see patterns in random objects. The verses are clearly there, and not just random. As one pilgrim said, "It’s proof that Allah exists, that he is all-mighty…"

However — and perhaps this is just me here — it seems far more likely that instead of an actual miracle, someone is maybe, y’know, writing the verses on the baby. The mother says the baby is cranky when the words appear, which (if she’s being truthful) you might expect if someone is scraping or otherwise irritating the baby’s skin to make the words appear. I’ll note that the words fade with time, too, just as expected if this is a fraud.

If this whole thing is a fake (and the JREF has a million dollars on the line to say something about that) then I don’t know what’s worse: the parents or whoever is behind this doing this to the baby, or the crowd who simply believes it.

Oh, wait! I know what’s worse: the reporter who did this story and the editor who approved it not injecting one single shred of skepticism into the report. There was no journalism here, no investigation. This was simple stenography, the credulous retelling of what is almost 100% guaranteed to be a hoax at best and a scam at worst. Not to mention child abuse.

People sometimes ask me what it’s like to be a skeptic all the time. Maybe I should simply answer, “nauseated.”

On Halloween, Justin Robert Young and my friend Andrew Mayne tried to raise the spirit of Harry Houdini in a seance at the James Randi Educational Foundation HQ in Florida. The event was live on the intertubez and and the recorded stream is on UStream. The whole thing is over an hour long, but well worth your time! A bunch of people (including Penn & Teller, David Copperfield, Michael Shermer, and me) were asked to send in secret words for Houdini to divine at the seance. This wasn’t a foolproof scientific experiment, but it’s fun.

Here’s the show below. Note: some NSFW language.

They picked my word starting at about 39 minutes into the video. And what was my word? Well, at the risk of generating the ire of Houdini’s shade, it was floccinaucinihilipilification, a word I remembered from when I was a kid and read the Guinness Book of World Records (it was in the list for, duh, longest words). It means "the act of estimating something as being worthless". I didn’t realize they were using a Ouija board at the seance, though, so perhaps choosing a word that’s about 30 letters long may have been a little irritating. However, I really wanted to make sure they wouldn’t pick it by chance. Infinite monkeys, and all that.

The Denver Skeptics divined my word as "shor". I have to count that as a definite hit.

I should have picked pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.

I actually am fairly tolerant of religious differences between people. Religious beliefs run very, very deep, and touch a part of us that is incredibly difficult to analyze rationally or with any sort of real self-skepticism. In general, a person’s religious belief is wrapped up in their own sense of self, so attacking that religion is akin to a personal attack on them.

But sometimes, just sometimes, a belief can be goofy enough — and damaging enough — that maybe a little bit of mockery is deserved. Certainly Pat Robertson has done so much damage in his lifetime that he gets no pass at all from me. My thoughts on him are clear and public (for example, he is "bigoted, small-minded zealot who will say anything to appeal to his base").

So it comes as no surprise that his website CBN is a haven for nonsensery at all levels. But a new post there about Halloween has even me scratching my head. Kimberly Daniels wrote a piece there about Halloween that is about as far from reality as it can be:

Halloween is a counterfeit holy day that is dedicated to celebrating the demonic trinity of : the Luciferian Spirit (the false father); the Antichrist Spirit (the false holy spirit); and the Spirit of Belial (the false son).

Really? I thought it was a time to have fun, let a little loose, eat candy, and just be silly. But I guess that’s just me.

… and about 300 million other Americans.

So we’ve established she’s a goofball. Fine. But then she goes too far:

During this period demons are assigned against those who participate in the rituals and festivities. These demons are automatically drawn to the fetishes that open doors for them to come into the lives of human beings. For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches.

Attacking Halloween is one thing, but attacking the candy?

Wow, it must be fun to live in an evidence-free world where you can simply assert whatever you want without proof or references or anything! Here, let me try: CBN is run by a TI 99-4a computer with buggy code that sometimes strings words together in patterns that almost make sense, if you squint and stand some distance away from them.

Hey, that was easy!

I think that it’s not only OK, but appropriate to shake your head and be somewhat dismissive of opinions stated as fact that aren’t within a glancing blow of reality. That anyone can take Robertson^* or his organization seriously is weird. The fact that they make money hand over fist is, well, not a crime since it’s legal, but a real shame.

And I wonder if anyone has told Ms. Daniels about the pagan origins of Christmas celebrations?

Anyway, as for me, I’ll happily be giving out my accursed Kit Kats and demonic Baby Ruths to all the satan-worshipping entrail-reading pagan evildoers in the neighborhood. And probably snitching the occasional hellspawned Tootsie Roll, too.

Hey, antivaxxers! I just wanted to send you guys a quick note of thanks for all the work you do.

For example, that whole thing about getting mumps to resurge due to lower vaccinations rates in the UK? That’s very cool. We all missed mumps so much.

Also, the way you guys dupe parents is simply brilliant!

You’ve been pretty effective getting the word out, especially the way you market yourselves as just trying to be questioning, just trying to get all the facts out. It works! You’ve been able to trick inquisitive, rational people into thinking maybe you’re onto something, when of course we all know you’re using outdated ideas, twisted facts, and sometimes out-and-out lies (which, of course, appeals to people prone to conspiracy thinking anyway). I mean, taking something that almost certainly has nothing to do with vaccinations but making that a meme spreading across the media? Great stuff! And the way you viciously attack people who disagree with you? Fantastic!

But you should really sit back and take a look at Suzanne Somers. Now there’s someone who takes incoherent nonsense about cancer and is able to market and spin it into quite an industry for herself. And who can blame her? She gets on Oprah, CNN, radio shows… and the only cost is a maybe a few thousand people dying of cancer because they tried her provably wrong "cures" instead of seeking real medical help. But hey! We all have to die someday! I mean, let’s have some perspective here. After all, what has science ever done for us?

Hat tip to Gerick Lee and many others for these tips.

A couple of weeks ago, thousands of people gathered at Knock Shrine in Ireland, gazing upward, looking for a vision of the Virgin Mary. Why?

Earlier in the week Dublin-based clairvoyant Joe Coleman predicted Our Lady would appear at the old parish church – scene of the 1879 apparition – at 3pm. Quite a number of those present were members of the Travelling community.

If people want to believe in something then that is their right, but doesn’t the Bible say a lot of things about divination and looking to the sky for signs?

OK, still, fine. But what we had here was several thousand people staring at the Sun. That’s a bad idea: it can cause temporary blindness, and permanent damage to the retina (though I know of no cases of both permanent and total blindness).

And of course it can cause you to see things. The retina floods with light and gets saturated, making you see afterimages with illusions of color, movement, and other weird things. And this is just what the pilgrims to Knock reported.

John Tunney, from Islandeady, Castlebar, said: “I’m 53 years old and I never seen the sun go like that before. I witnessed the sun go all different colours, yellow, red and green. Then it completely darkened and began shimmering. Sometimes the sun emitted a clean, bright light, then it would darken again.”

Mr Tunney’s wife, Nina, said: “The sun was spinning in the sky. I experienced a feeling of total happiness. It is a feeling I would love to experience again. It was amazing. I felt marvellous.”

Yvonne Rabbitte, from Dunmore, Co Galway, showed other pilgrims a photograph she had taken on her digital camera which showed vivid rays radiating downwards from the sun at the time the image was taken

The first two anecdotes sure sound to me a lot like illusions that happen when staring at a very bright object. And that last story is telling; that kind of thing will always happen when you take pictures of the Sun! I have lots of pictures with rays coming from the Sun that I have taken on days when a clairvoyant has not predicted the apparition of a religious icon.

As I have said here many times, people have the right to believe in what they want. However, I think they should at least try to educate themselves on the way the Universe works so they don’t leap to the wrong conclusions (as Richard Feymann once said, science is a way of not fooling ourselves)– and certainly the journalists out there have an obligation to do a little research when reporting on such events.

This is a case where I think people came to the wrong conclusion. I don’t know if the clairvoyant really believes what he says or if, like so many others, he’s got a somewhat different agenda. But either way the result is a self-fulfilling prophecy: people went outside hoping to see visions, and that’s just what happened.

Tip o’ the sunglasses to Padraig Cleary.

You know why science is hard and nonsense is easy?

Because as an adherent to reality, I’m not allowed to just make stuff up. Sadly, others need not follow that rule.

"An official announcement by the Obama administration disclosing the reality of extraterrestrial life is imminent", indeed. What does imminent mean? A year? 10? I’m guessing never. But as long as the antiscience advocates can use words like soon, imminent, and impending, they can keep their believers on the hook.

And why am I not surprised to see Richard Hoagland’s name in that article?

Every now and again I have to do that comical rapid-shaking-of-the-head accompanied by that wugga wugga wugga sound when I think that people actually buy into this, um, stuff. Wow.

Tip o’ the tin foil beanie to Sandra Prow.