Blogs / Bad Astronomy

Looking for a little skeptical spookiness to add to your Halloween this year? The James Randi Educational Foundation will be holding a seance to contact the spirit of Harry Houdini live on the internet!

Houdini was a hero to James Randi, and he famously said that if there were an afterlife, he would do whatever he could after he died to contact his wife. She held a seance, and… nothing happened. However, when you have people like Randi and magician Andrew Mayne involved, why, anything can happen!

OK, maybe not anything. Like, say, actually contacting a dead spirit. But I bet this will be a very fun event, and I encourage all skeptics and believers — especially believers — young and old to drop in. For more info, stay tuned to Randi.org and WeirdThings.com.

The SETI Institute’s latest episode of the podcast Are We Alone is now up, and I talk with Seth Shostak about the idea that somehow, forces unknown (God? The Universe Itself? The Doctor? Tony Newman and Doug Phillips?) have tried to sabotage the Large Hadron Collider… from the future!

Personally, I’m not buying it, but it’s an interesting idea. The authors of a published study say that we should perform some sort of experiment before turning the LHC on to see if someone from the future is trying to contact us. But I have a better idea: let’s turn the LHC on and see if it works. If it does, then we’re done with this idea. And if it doesn’t, hand me my sonic screwdriver. There’s work to do!

[Edited to add: Well, the folks at CERN have been injecting particles into the LHC stream since Friday. They'll be ramping it up to full speed in the coming weeks, so we'll know soon enough about all this!]

I have been getting email from people talking about a possible meteorite impact in northern Latvia yesterday. I had a blog post all ready to go saying this whole thing sounded extremely fishy to me, and before I could post it I found out this story has been confirmed as a fake. Here’s the scoop:

Some reports indicated that there were eyewitnesses to a fireball around 17:30 local time yesterday (for example, here and here).

That’s fine, but what had me very suspicious was the report of a crater about 20 meters or so across. In general, small impact don’t leave craters; or atmosphere slows meteoroids down, so anything in the meter or smaller size wouldn’t be moving quickly enough to dig a big crater. Pictures were posted to a blog; while there was nothing initially I could point to that screams "FAKE!" to me, my spidey sense was all a-tingle. Here’s one picture:

It shows the center of the crater, and again, it just didn’t look real to me. The crater is too deep for its width (most impact craters are shallower). Also, the rim is too piled up, and there’s no ejected rock or dirt sprayed out as you’d expect from an impact. Then, better pictures were posted and I could see immediately I was right; the crater simply doesn’t look real. It looks more like what someone thinks a crater should look like than what one actually does look like.

And that turns out to be the case: geologists from Tartu University confirmed the crater is not from an impact, and they even found shovel marks around the edge.

Oops!

I am always skeptical of reports like these (too bad CNN wasn’t, though, incredibly, the Daily Mail seems to have gotten this right; wonders never cease), but what really triggered my skeptalarm was this YouTube video of the supposed crater from the impact:

I didn’t believe this video at all. Look at the crater: the rim just looks like it was dug; the grass just outside it isn’t disturbed at all. Wouldn’t a flaming meteor at least singe the ground? And if I didn’t buy the crater, I really super duper didn’t buy the flaming rock sitting in the center. Meteorites tend not to be hot on impact! They decelerate violently as they come in, compressing the air in front of them. That’s why they get hot. But that happens in a few seconds, and stops while the rock is still a hundred kilometers up. It falls at terminal velocity the rest of the way for several minutes before impacting the ground.

So the meteoroid (the name for the solid part of the meteor) is falling through ice-cold air for a while before it hits. That’s why smallish meteorites are not hot. In fact, many are found to be cold right after impact!

So I was almost completely positive the video was a fake right after seeing it, and I’m glad to see my instincts were correct.

There was more reason to be suspicious, too. A rock a half meter for more across would make a fireball so intense that there would be thousands of witnesses especially given that it was late afternoon when it happened. The media reports don’t indicate it was seen by many people. No pictures of the actual fireball came out, either.

And now all of this makes sense because it’s a confirmed fake. So the only questions remaining are: why was this done? To promote tourism, as a joke, to sell tickets? And, of course, was Richard Heene involved?

Tip o’ the Whipple Shield to Mihkel Kama and Anna from StarSpace who was the first to tip me off to the story in the first place, as well as let me know it was fake.

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.

I just found out that my friend, fellow skeptic, multiple TAM speaker, and top-notch magician Jamy Ian Swiss will be performing his Heavy Mental show on Saturday at the HQ for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (!) in Washington, DC. I’ve seen this act before, and it’s a terrific mentalism performance. The show starts at 7:30 p.m. on October 24.

Also, earlier that day at 1:00, Jamy along with my friends and fellow skeptics D. J. Grothe and Chip Denman will be doing a lecture/workshop called "Science, Magic, and Skepticism: A Natural Relationship". They’ve been doing this together for quite some time and it gets rave reviews. You’ll learn a lot about critical thinking if you go.

If you’re in the DC area on Saturday and looking for something to do, then this is what you want. For a taste of Jamy’s abilities, check out this video interview I did with him at TAM 5.