Blogs / Bad Astronomy

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.

Just a few things from here and there:

1) The 126th Carnival of Space is spacing it up at The Gish Bar Times (where I think they serve nice cold Gish Gallops). You know the deal: astronomy, space, blog posts, etc. Go there and read good stuff!

2) Speaking of good stuff, my Hive Overmind colleague Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance is taking antivaxxers to task, and got a visit by none other than JB Handley, head of the mouthfoaming antivax group Age of Autism. Handley left some spin in the comments, and I’ve taken him to task there, asking him some simple questions about studies which show that everything he claims is wrong. We’ll see what happens there.

3) I forgot to post Script PhD’s interview with the Mythbusters from Comic Con! It’s old, I know, but you might like it. Scroll waaaay down to get to it. Unless you’re a Lost or Fringe fan, then you can read the whole thing.

According to Wikipedia, the last naturally occurring incident of smallpox (Variola minor) happened on this date in 1977:

By the end of 1975, smallpox persisted only in the Horn of Africa. Conditions were very difficult in Ethiopia and Somalia, where there were few roads. Civil war, famine, and refugees made the task even more difficult. An intensive surveillance and containment and vaccination program was undertaken in early and mid-1977. The last naturally occurring case of indigenous smallpox (Variola minor) was diagnosed in Ali Maow Maalin, a hospital cook in Merca, Somalia, on 26 October 1977.

In the 20th century, smallpox is estimated to have killed hundreds of millions of people. Hundreds of millions. Imagine the United States — the entire country, from the Pacific to the Atlantic — empty, devoid of people, dead. Smallpox wiped out that many people with room to spare.

And yet, today, it’s gone.

Why do you think that is? Homeopathy? Detoxification? Thinking good thoughts?

Nope. Vaccinations. A global campaign was undertaken in 1950, and within 30 years smallpox was struck from the face of the Earth.

Hey Jenny McCarthy, Meryl Dorey, and all you antivaxxers and your ilk: got a response to this? Still want to claim vaccines don’t work? Still want to stop people from getting them? Do you want to see this happen to children all over the planet again (WARNING – SERIOUSLY! -VERY DISTURBING IMAGE). Because if you are successful in your campaign to stop vaccinations, that’s what we’ll be facing again.

Vaccines are perhaps the single greatest triumph of modern medicine. Yet a vocal minority willing to trash facts, spin the truth, and generally spout misinformation is putting not only themselves but you, me, and everyone at risk.

Happy anniversary, smallpox, gone these past 32 years. And may I add, good damn riddance. May reason, rationality, and science-based medicine do the same for every other threat to the health and well being of the human race as well.

Tip o’ the syringe to Reddit.

A couple of weeks ago, a chiropractor lodged a complaint with the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC) against the Australian Skeptics. Why? Because they had reprinted journalist Simon Singh’s article about chiropractic, which said that in the UK they were making bogus claims about how chiropractic can cure all manners of ills such as asthma and colic in babies, when it’s been shown it cannot.

Got that? This chiropractor, Joseph Ierano, complained against them because of someone else’s article! Brilliant.

The good news is that the HCCC just told the Skeptics they have dismissed the complaint. I’d love to report that, amidst howls of laughter, they said that Ierano’s complaint has no merit, his arguments were totally wrong, and not only has chiropractic been shown in many studies to have no efficacy against diseases like colic and asthma, it in fact can be a very dangerous practice.

Instead, however, it was dismissed because the Australian Skeptics group is not a health care provider, and is therefore not in the jurisdiction of the HCCC. So it was a technicality. That’s still good news, since the AS is not in any trouble, but as they say in that link above, they wish this could’ve been used by the HCCC as a larger scale means to investigate and publicly discuss the inefficacy of chiropractic in these cases. Too bad.

There is still a lot of publicity coming from this whole thing, since the British Chiropractic Association sued Simon Singh for libel due to his original article, instead of simply providing evidence that their claims were not bogus (and when they finally did try to support chiropractic, their claims were woefully off-target). The blogosphere erupted with support for Singh, as did a lot of mainstream press soon thereafter. A very cynical eye indeed has been turned to the practice of chiropractic of late. It’s long overdue.

From what I have read — including studies done by doctors as discussed in such books as Trick or Treatment and Bad Science — chiropractic’s only claim for helping is that there is some marginal evidence it can relieve lower back problems, but that’s it. It doesn’t cure toothaches, or anything carried by germs, or really anything else (excluding the placebo effect, which can be provided in any of number of other ways that don’t involve actual physical manipulation). And when the neck is manipulated, chiropractic can have serious side effects.

I am not a health care practitioner, but with what I know now, I would never go to a chiropractor. Some of them may understand the limitations of their practice, but clearly far too many do not. If you have some sort of health issue, go to your board-certified physician and ask them what they think of alternative practices, and ask them to be blunt.

We’re talking about your life here, folks. Don’t hand it over to someone who may not have a clear grasp of what their so-called alternative medicine can — and cannot — do.

What do you get when you mix homeopathy with astrology?

This.

I should say that I have to give a kudo to the author for trying to set up a scientific experiment to see what would happen, but the experiment itself is so hopelessly flawed!

In fact it’s so wrong it’s hard to know where to start. The lack of double blinding. The single blinding still being able to influence the testers. The fact that all the testers were believers, and able to influence each other. The starting supposition that a) homeopathy works, and 2) astrology works (when neither does). A lack of clear results predicted so that conclusions (either negative or positive) could be drawn. The very subjective observations. And so on.

It’s clear from the article that the homeopath/astrologer means well, and is actually curious about all this. I wonder if there is any reliable way to take that curiosity, that well-meaning intention, and redirect it toward science? If there is — besides slowly and methodically banging the drum of reason — I’d love to know. A lot of people who believe in things like homeopathy and astrology and all that really are naturally curious, intelligent people, but somewhere down the line they strayed off the narrow path that winds its way through reality, and it would be nice to find a good way to nudge them back in the right direction.

Tip o’ the precessed vial of distilled water to Krelnik.

I am of two minds about Facebook. It has its uses and can be fun, and I know a lot of people use it as their primary means of keeping track of friends, but I find the interface and messaging system clunky, and the constant barrage of app invites makes me stabby.

But the sponsored ads are über irritating (and I don’t mean just the blatantly sexist ones). I saw a Facebook ad today for the upcoming movie "The Fourth Kind", about aliens coming to Earth to um, probe humans (and I mean, seriously? If we finally develop warp drive and travel to other planets, will we get all hot and bothered by the indigenous six-legged slimy malodorous gelatin bags that live there?^*). Here’s the ad:

See the poll? It asks, "Do you believe in alien encounters?", and the answer choices are "Yes, I believe", "I have seen one", and "Not sure".

Um, Facebook/Universal Pictures, how about a more realistic choice, like one that says: After years of seeing UFOlogists collecting nothing but anecdotal evidence without a single shred of actual y’know, tangible evidence, there is no reason to think this is anything but a psychological phenomenon and not a physical one, and should be treated that way.

Or better yet, how about simply:

No.

I usually enjoy movies about aliens, monsters, flying saucers, and the like, but this kind of advertising leaves me cold, and plays into the public’s misconceptions about the UFO phenomenon. So I’ll probably skip this movie and take a nap instead. Someone please wake me up when we have real evidence.