Blogs / Bad Astronomy

My bud Neil Tyson was on Jimmy Fallon’s TV show the other day, and they asked him a series of questions. It’s worth watching:

About some people’s total credulity when it comes to ridiculous doomsday scenarios, Neil says:

It’s a profound absence of awareness of … how nature works. They’re missing some science classes in their training in high school or in college that would empower you to understand and to judge when someone else is basically full of it.

I actually disagree with Neil here; it’s not that students missed that part of science class, it’s that it was never taught in science class to start with. It’s very, very rare that science is taught as a process, as a way of knowing. Instead, it’s taught like a compendium of facts, as dry as a dictionary, and like a dictionary only pulled out when needed. In fact, the methods of science are a way of understanding everything in the whole Universe, and so can be used all the time, whether it’s when you’re deciding to eat a sandwich or when you’re trying to figure out why gamma-ray burst beams are collimated so tightly.

Being skeptical, asking for evidence, examining that evidence, and diagnosing it compared to the whole of learning that goes on around it is the way to go. That’s how you distinguish sense from nonsense. It takes work, and sometimes hard work, but it’s worth it. The prize is understanding.

And I do agree strongly with Neil when he says,

Sceince is basically an inoculation against charlatans.

Yup. One of many, but still the best.

[Update 2: According to Bob Jacobs, NASA Deputy Assistant Administrator for Public Affairs, the Sunday Express article I link to below "is a fiction". Sounds to me like I got duped, and I apologize to everyone for forwarding this story. Hopefully more info will come out soon, and I’ll update as I hear it.]

[Update: folks at CollectSpace are saying this article is a hoax. I have no evidence either way, which is why I wrote this post using the "allegedly" format. Hopefully more evidence one way or another will come out soon.]

On July 20, just weeks from now, it will be the 40th anniversary of the moment a human stepped foot on another world.

You’ve seen the footage: Neil Armstrong in his bulky suit, stepping off the lunar module’s footpad. Ironically, though, for such a momentous occasion, the video looks awful. Noisy, low-res, and washed out. Well, it turns out that’s because this iconic scene, shown millions of times in the ensuing years, is not the original footage. It was actually taken using a 16mm camera aimed at a screen at NASA’s Mission Control room. And the screen was only showing highly compressed data, so the end result is the lousy stuff we’ve grown used to.

ZOMG! I can see right through NASA’s lies! And through Neil Armstrong, too.

But all that may now change. The UK Sunday Express is reporting that the original tapes have been found! This means that we may finally, after four decades, get the high-quality footage of Neil Armstrong’s small step that we’ve always wanted.

The deal is this: the video stream from the Moon was of a decent quality, but far too large too be able to be be sent to TVs around the country and the world. Using the Parkes radio telescope in Australia, astronomers recorded the video beamed from the lunar surface in high quality, but what they transmitted to NASA was necessarily compressed. It’s the latter we’ve all seen. The thing is, the high quality tapes were then lost somehow. NASA admitted it a few years ago, and the search was on! According to the article the tapes were finally found recently in a storage facility on Perth.

This is very exciting, and I certainly hope it’s true. I’d love to see this moment once again, but this time with a beautiful clear picture!

And of course, me being who I am, I have to add this part:

Crucially, [the tapes] could once and for all dispel 40 years of wild conspiracy theories.

That is so wonderfully naive! First, conspiracy theories about the Moon landings aren’t based on facts. If they were, the hoax idea would have dried up and blown away 30 years ago. They have no facts. All they have is a zealous fervor and a gross misunderstanding of reality. Finding the tapes won’t help; you could fly a conspiracy theorist to the Moon and show them the equipment lying on the desolate surface, and they’d accuse you of drugging them. My advice: if you try this, leave that goofball on the Moon. That’ll give him plenty of time to think over his ideas.

Second, the use of the word "crucial" made me laugh. I’ve talked with dozens of people at NASA about the Hoax theory, and it’s hardly something that’s critical to them. They all regard it as an irritant, like a tiny pebble in your shoe or a pesky fold in your underwear you can only feel when you sit a certain way. Ignorable, but irksome when you’re reminded about it. And though they’d never admit it, I bet every single person at NASA loves how Buzz handled it.

And third, what the article author forgets is that, to a conspiracy nut, everything in the whole Universe is part of the conspiracy. So the fact that the tapes were missing is evidence of a coverup, and NASA finding the tapes is due to the massive pressure of the hoax community, and if the tapes aren’t exactly as promised that’s because NASA has doctored them, and if they are pristine and perfect then you can look just there and see the wires holding up the astroNOTS, and you still can’t see stars in the footage, and and and.

So, a few weeks before the 40th anniversary of this incredible moment in history, here’s what I think about the Moon Hoaxers: screw them. Let them gripe and moan and try to pee in the punch bowl of NASA. In reality, that punch bowl is way, way over their heads. I can see the magnificent achievement of Apollo for what it was, and I think the vast majority of people out there do as well.

Tip o’ the spacesuit visor to Fark.

Last week I wrote about how the British Association of Chiropractors put out a laughable press release about their law suit against Simon Singh, who had the audacity to point out that some of the claims made by the BCA were "bogus".

As dictated by the Streisand Effect — making a stink about something trivial will itself turn it into big news — people all over the world are now talking about "alternative medicine" and its unhealthy dose of quackery.

That includes my dear friends the skeptics in Australia, who have been relentlessly and heroically pounding the altmed movement Down Under. The latest shot is against the very thing the BCA is talking about: chiropractors inflating their credentials and making claims not at all based on solid evidence. Check out that link, poke around the website, and show Dr. Rachie (a real doctor, folks) your love.

There’s more: you may have heard of Daniel Hauser, a young boy who has Hodgkin’s lymphoma. His parents don’t "believe" in real medicine and were treating him with nonsense therapies like using herbs and vitamins.

Here’s a hint, people: you don’t get to choose to not believe in medicine, just like you don’t get to choose to not believe in gravity. You can not believe in either all you want, but when the time comes, your belief may kill you.

A judge agrees: he issued a court order to the family to make them have Daniel undergo chemotherapy. And guess what? His tumor is shrinking.

Now, if you’re familiar with the zealot-like belief system some people have in altmed, the next bit won’t surprise you at all: his family claims that it’s not the chemotherapy shrinking the tumor, it’s their altmed supplements. Yes, even though for months their "treatment" did no good at all, and after a few sessions of chemo the tumor shrank, of course it was the vitamins that did the trick.

Sigh.

You know what? It would make me sad, but if, as an adult, and after doing due diligence to research a problem, you decide to take vitamins to cure a fatal disease, that’s your choice. But when it comes to your kids things are different. You can choose to dress them funny, or give them terrible haircuts, and even choose what religion they will be and how they will be educated. But you don’t get to choose to kill them. And when there is evidence — rock-solid and with thousands of examples — that your idea of medicine is quackery, and that withholding of real medicine will let your child die, your rights as a parent have been abrogated.

As a parent, that’s a hard thing for me to write. You may say, what if the government wants to take your kid away for what you feel is a capricious reason? The difference here, the critical difference, is that this isn’t capricious. It’s based on solid evidence.

If you decide to sacrifice your child upon an altar to Zeus, or tie them to railroad tracks to cleanse their chi, or set your little girl on fire to purify her of demons, then guess what? The State has a right to step in to protect that child.

The right to swing your beliefs ends at a child’s nose. The problem is, far, far too many people think their beliefs are untouchable rights. They’re not. And those of us in the reality-based community will continue to pursue this as long as people who aren’t based there continue to hurt their kids.

I love me some Captain Disillusion. He does a great job debunking the bunk, and his sense of humor slays me. And in this particular video, well, he’s simply Amazing.

Captain D will be at TAM 7, I hear. Doesn’t that make you want to attend even more?

In the video, you can see my book over his shoulder. Awesome! And I’m dork enough to know he got the music at the end right, too.

I’m not a big fan of doomsday nonsense (even the real stuff has a very low chance of doing us in), and so you can imagine the dim view I take of people claiming that a Mayan prophecy says we’ll all die in 2012. I have yet to see one claim about this stuff that is either a) remotely true or 2) not made-up crap.

Still, I do love disaster movies, so I’m torn about Roland Emmerich’s "2012" which comes out this summer. He did "Independence Day", a movie I love (yes, I do: it’s fun and silly and doesn’t take itself too seriously) and "The Day After Tomorrow". The latter was pretty bad; the science was awful, but it was also really overwrought.

So what of this new movie? See for yourself:

I love that it’s wrong right from the start: the Mayans were not the earliest civilization; Sumerians had them beat by four thousand years. Also, while the fireballs hitting was cool, small rocks won’t make it to the ground moving quickly enough to be burning like that.

And what’s causing that tsunami? A giant impact? A Richter 15 earthquake? Smug?

Anyway, hard to say if the movie will be any good or not. I really like John Cusack and Amanda Peet, and Oliver Platt slays me, so who knows? But I know this: it really won’t help people like me and others trying to calm folks down and keep them from panicking over doomsday crap. Sigh.

The British Chiropractic Association may need to hire a chiropractor to work on themselves: they’re shoveling so hard they’re likely to hurt their backs.

Fifteen month ago, the BCA sued journalist Simon Singh for libel after he called some of their claims "bogus". Mind you, they didn’t say, "He’s wrong and here’s the stack of scientific tests that have been performed to show just how chiropractic works". They simply sued. In the UK, libel laws are such that defending yourself against them is time-consuming and very costly, a fact the BCA could not help but understand when they sued Singh. One might almost call this action "spineless".

After an uproar on the internet as well as in the media — with some predictable results — the BCA is now, over a year later, suddenly claiming there is evidence to back them up, and issued a press release about it. I read it with some amusement, as even to my non-medical eye I could see that many of the references were totally ridiculous. A study of colic in children with no control cases? Colic tends to go away after time on its own, so without a control group how do you know manipulating their spines is what did it? Why did the BCA reference its own code of practice as evidence chiropractic works? And why did so many of the references talk about osteopathy, which is different than chiropractic (though laden with its own share of dubious claims)?

I didn’t write anything yesterday when this came up because I figured others with more experience would, and would be able to give more details than I could. And that’s just what happened: chiming in are The Ministry of Truth, Zeno’s blog, DC’s Improbable Science, and of course the awesome Jack of Kent.

The BCA is struggling mightily here to make itself look like the victim, but it’s hard to see it any other way than them trying to bully a member of the free press into silence, and creating an atmosphere where other critics would be afraid to speak. Whether they were hoping to silence the media or not, what they’ve really done is let millions of people know just how thin their "supporting evidence" is, and set themselves up for a PR disaster.

I will reiterate my support of Simon, and for the right of journalists to freely investigate claims made by anyone without having to wonder if they are going to be sued frivolously or otherwise. And in this case, the claims are about not just the health of adults but of a questionable practice being applied to babies. I think the least we can do is ask for the usual standard of evidence to support those claims, and in fact they should be held to an even higher standard. The list given by the BCA… well, to be polite it leaves much to be desired.

Simon’s not backing down, nor should he. A lot is riding on this, so we need to keep shining a light on what the BCA is doing. Keep your browsers pointed to Sense About Science to stay on top of the latest news.

Well, antiscience is taking major body blows the past week or so, and it’s a wonderful, wonderful thing to see. It started with Newsweek taking down the quackery promoted by Oprah Winfrey, and has taken off from there:

1) Reader’s Digest jumped on the anti-Oprah ride… and when the milquetoast middle-of-the-road offend no one RD takes you on, it’s time to rethink your very existence.

2) Deepak Chopra — who couldn’t find reality with both hands, a compass and, evidently, the aid of centuries of scientific advancement — ran to Oprah’s defense, and, as usual, mangled more logic in one essay than can be humanly possible without the aid of quantum healing. Massimo Pigliucci magnificently takes him down, as did JREF’s Jeff Wagg at the Swift blog.

3) The Australian government has ruled that Arnica Montana, a homeopathy company, falsely advertised the efficacy of its product — which, in the case of homeopathy is everything they advertise — and they had to post a humiliating retraction. I weep non-diluted tears for them. Dr. Rachie has more info. Also, Steve Novella has written a lengthy and complete destruction of homeopathy on his NeuroLogica blog. If you are a homeopathic believer and feel you must spout your undiluted nonsense in the comments below, read his essay first, because if you make any of the claims he debunks I will allow everyone free reign to mock you. Because that’s better than allowing babies to die due to homeopathy.

4) Simon Singh is being sued by the British Chiropractic Association because he wrote about their "bogus" claims. BCA vice-president Richard Brown then posted a flailing essay titled In Defence of Chiropractic in New Scientist magazine, a piece laden to the hilt with astonishingly poorly thought-out logic. Apgaylard thoroughy dismantles the claims from Brown, leaving the emperor looking a little naked out there.

This kind of antiscience antireality antihealth garbage will always be with us, but I can hope to help amplify the chorus of voices being raised against them. It’s important, as I have been hammering home for months. They will never rest as long as people credulously accept their claims, so we need to make sure as many people as possible examine their claims as critically as possible.