Blogs / Bad Astronomy

I was going to write about how Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and John Kerry (D-MA) were trying to somewhat slimily slip a provision into the health care bill about paying for prayer-based health services, but then wouldn’tyouknowit, Steve Novella (who apparently does not need to sleep or eat or breathe) beat me to it. Besides his take-down of the odd and wholly unrealistic beliefs of Christian Scientists, I’ll note that is has been pretty definitively proven that prayer doesn’t work in healing. So not only is this provision unconstitutional, it’s just an all-around bad idea.

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.]

One of the problems with being an ideologue who abandons reality is that it makes for very, very strange bedfellows.

For example, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh — two guys who would rather soul kiss Michael Moore than be identified as lefties — have both jumped on the antivax bandwagon. Beck is spouting long-debunked paranoid antivax rhetoric, and Limbaugh is, well, he’s just being Limbaugh. He’s long planted his flag in knee-jerk anti-government silliness, never admitting that maybe, just maybe, sometimes the government is right.

I don’t know who this speaks worse for; the antivaxxers or the talk show bloviators.

In the end, though, we all lose. Because either way, this shows that nonsense doesn’t have political boundaries. Once you step off that narrow path that is reality, you’re surrounded by antireality in every direction. So it doesn’t matter if you face left or right; you’re still wrong.

If you want arguments rebutting the offal flying from the above group, go to Antiantivax, Joe Albietz’s swine flu FAQ, and Steve Novella’s antivax FAQ.

This is pretty cool: tonight, President Obama will have a bunch of professional and amateur astronomers over to the White House to show the First Family and a group of middle schoolers the sky. The event coincides with the International Year of Astronomy and World Space Week.

And may I say? It’s so so cool to finally have a President who respects science. Yay!

I’ve linked to this before, but did you know that you can browse a gajillion NASA images at the aptly named NASAImages website? They also have high-def videos, a cool timeline, presentations, and a search engine which actually works pretty well. You can even embed things, like this:

[Update: I removed the embed because it was autoplaying, and I found no way to turn that off.]

How cool is this?

Remember Anna Falling, who ran for mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma, under the platform that there just plain ol’ wasn’t enough religion in government?

Yeah, she got 10% of the primary vote, way behind her competitors. I don’t know much at all about her competitors, but I have to think that running on the single plank she did, with hardly anything else to go on, couldn’t have helped.

On the other hand, one out of ten Tulsans voted for her. Think on that.

Tip o’ the ten gallon hat to Hemant over at Friendly Atheist.

Before reading any further, PLEASE read my post on religion and politics. I’ve had lots of people wondering why an astronomy blog is not only about astronomy. That post will clear things up.]

Yesterday I wrote an empassioned article about the mainstreaming of ridiculous and frankly crazy rhetoric from extremely fringe groups, people who think Obama is literally like Hitler, yet are being treated as if their opinions are well-reasoned and worthy of debate.

I made myself pretty clear, I thought. My rant was not against Republicans in general, for example. The main thrust of my post was not taking on any political party — yes, I did take a swipe at Bush, but that was not because he was a Republican, it was because he was clearly and provably antiscience, and again that was secondary at best to my main point. I do not say anywhere in that post that if you disagree with Obama, or if you’re opposed to what’s in his speech, then you’re a whackjob (though I do think you’d be wrong).

What I was saying is that nutsoid fringe craziness is getting way too much airtime and consideration, and is being presented as a reasonable stance. The people making claims that Obama is Hitler and the like are not very different from people who say they have alien babies, or that the Apollo landings were faked. They are way off the path of reality, and most people in this country and this planet know that. Putting people like that on TV and engaging them (except the way Barney Frank did) makes rational discourse nearly impossible, as it lowers the signal to noise ratio to essentially zero. We have real trouble in this country, and we need real debate. Pandering to the fringe makes that impossible, and many media outlets are simply trying to foment discord and perhaps push their own agenda.

Yet many of the comments left on my blog, on Twitter, on other blogs, and on Digg are just adding to the noise. They accuse me of being an Obama sycophant, or of denying people’s freedom of speech. These claims are patently false, and obviously wrong to anyone who actually read what I wrote, instead of reading their own blind prejudices into my words.

Examples abound. This guy got what I said completely wrong, and says I’m claiming we should have more Obama. He seems to think I am rah-rahing Obama (I did in fact support the speech, but — repeat after me — that’s not what the post I wrote was about). This guy calls me an idiot, though he never really says why. I assume he thinks it’s obvious, but the irony in his words is not hard to find. This guy accuses me of attacking straw men, then creates a cornfield full of ‘em.

Noise, noise, noise.

I could debunk these point-by-point, but it doesn’t matter. I certainly can’t reason with people who don’t want to be reasonable, and for people who are reasonable the flaws are easy to see.

To be clear and succinct: my point was not about political parties. It wasn’t about liberals, or conservatives (I have issues with liberal commentators such as Randi Rhodes, for example, as well as with neocons like Rush Limbaugh; opposite ends of the political spectrum and both just as often as far from reality as the other). It wasn’t about other speeches in the past. It wasn’t even really about the content of Obama’s speech, though I agree with it, and the speech’s content was what the craziness was about.

My post was about clearly lunatic rhetoric being taken as reasonable discourse, and how that demeans real discussions of real problems. I can’t make it any simpler than that.

The very fact that so many people chose to ignore this basic premise of what I wrote and to spin, fold, and mutilate it to increase the noise in the conversation ironically proves my point. And to them I say: Those of us who are reality-based see through you, and you are the very people we won’t let drag us down.