Hooray! Dan Brown has published a new book!

I will never read it. I’ve only managed to read one chapter of one of his books before getting annoyed with his bad writing and freakish quirks. But when Brown shits out a new turd, it means the season of Dan Brown reviews is upon us, and we get another horde of appalled English majors forced to wade through the sewage and write out disbelieving summaries. Poor Matthew Walther had to read Origin, and then attempt to write a summary. If I wanted to dissuade students from going for an English major, this is what I’d show them. It’s analogous to scaring away potential biology majors by plopping down a noisome week-old roadkill in front of them and telling them to trace the major vessels of the circulatory system.

Nor, finally, would anyone who is not going out of his way to subvert the very notion of suspense as a factor that might conceivably motivate us to turn pages attempt even as a joke what must be the most banal chapter-ending cliffhanger in the history of fiction: “‘This getaway car was hired,’ Langdon said, pointing to the stylized U on the windshield. ‘It’s an Uber.'” Nor would he dream of opening the next chapter by announcing that a police officer has responded to this utterance with “a look of wide-eyed disbelief” at “the quick decryption of the windshield sticker.” Decryption! Code-breaking! Rare feats of professorial intellect, like knowing what corporate logos are! Imagine what further wonders Langdon might perform if only his creator allowed him to visit a certain international hamburger chain or glance down at the anagogic white fruit staring up from the bottom of his cellphone. (Unimprovably, Brown follows up this masterclass in symbology from Langdon by noting himself that “Uber’s ubiquitous ‘on-demand driver’ service had taken the world by storm over the past few years. Via smartphone, anyone requiring a ride could instantly connect with a growing army of Uber drivers who made extra money by hiring out their own cars as improvised taxis.”) If this guy is trying to write thrillers, then this article is actually a piece of SpongeBob Squarepants fan fiction.

It’s terrible, but you also get an inkling of why he is popular. His hero is supposed to be this super-smart, highly educated professor in some field so esoteric that no one has ever heard of it, yet he recites banalities as if they were profound. The truly stupid reader can follow this story and assemble superficial trivia as if they were insightful…as if they too were as brilliant as Robert Langdon supposedly is. If you are reading a book to affirm that you are clever enough to be able to read a book at all, then Dan Brown will pat you on the back on every page and coo reassuringly that yes, you are just as intelligent as a Harvard professor.

Penis goes in, penis goes out. You can’t explain that!

Bill O’Reilly is god’s puppet — he isn’t even responsible for his own actions. He settled a sexual harassment suit for $32 million, and he’s mad at god for making him…do something. It’s not clear what.

You know, am I mad at God? Yeah, I’m mad at him. I wish I had more protection. I wish this stuff didn’t happen. I can’t explain it to you. Yeah, I’m mad at him.

…

If they could literally kill me, they would, we didn’t kill him, so we’ve got to kill him again.

If I die tomorrow and I get an opportunity, I’ll say, ‘Why’d you guys work me over like that? Didn’t [you] know my children were going to be punished? And they’re innocent.’ But then I think about people who have it much, much rougher than me. And you know, I’m a big mouth. I’m a target. They’re not targets.

So they came back with another bunch of garbage. I talked to them this time just to see the devil that I was dealing with. And I truly believe that these people at the New York Times are out to hurt people with whom they disagree. They don’t want me in the marketplace. That’s what this is all about.

So he’s mad at god, and wishes “stuff” didn’t happen. What stuff? That he harassed women? Or that the NY Times exposed that he harassed women? That he harassed Lis Wiehl, or that the case against him was so strong he had to cough up $32 million? Is he acknowledging that he is guilty, when he makes the point that his children are innocent? Is it god who makes his children declare that they don’t want to live with him anymore?

Who are the “you guys” he’s blaming for working him over? Since he’s going to be meeting them after he dies, I assume he means the administration in heaven. Or is he talking about the ghosts of NY Times reporters and editors? Wouldn’t that imply he’s going to meet them in hell?

The only thing we can definitely extract from that mess of a statement is that Bill O’Reilly doesn’t consider himself accountable for his own behavior, and is reduced to blaming god. I suggest that the only possible recourse he has now is to sue his god. He’s got deep pockets, he ought to be able to get a substantial settlement out of it.

Not the ‘cell phones cause autism’ crap again

OMG, babies have thin skulls! They can be pierced!

That’s the kind of nonsense we get in bad popular science articles — a True Fact that is cited as demonstrating a real danger to children. Buzzfeed points to the sensationalist media hype over a terrible article that claims cell phones are warping babies innocent helpless brains.

The journal Child Development published what was described as a “review article” –an assessment of existing literature – by Cindy Sage and Ernesto Burgio. It was titled “Electromagnetic Fields, Pulsed Radiofrequency Radiation, and Epigenetics: How Wireless Technologies May Affect Childhood Development”, and was published in a “special section” of the journal addressing technology risks.

The paper got picked up by the UK national media. An article in the Express, published in May, asked: “Could wireless technology be causing MAJOR health problems in your children?”

It said: “Wireless mobile phones, laptops and tablets could be causing major health problems in children and contributing to autism and hyperactivity, a new study warns,” and said that these devices, “which even include baby monitors, emit radiation and electromagnetic fields that pierce thin skulls, harming memory, learning and other mental skills”.

However, a new paper published in the journal PeerJ by Dorothy Bishop, a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Oxford who specialises in developmental conditions such as autism, and David Robert Grimes, a medical physicist also at the University of Oxford, has issued severe doubts about the study. They said its claims are “devoid of merit” and “should [not be] given a veneer of legitimacy”.

The Child Development paper claimed that phones, Wi-Fi, and other sources of electromagnetic fields (EMFs) “are widely documented to cause potentially harmful health impacts that can be detrimental to young people”.

The actual article in Child Development isn’t quite that sensationalist, but it’s bad in other ways. As is usual in this kind of article about the horrors of electromagnetic radiation, I always wonder if, after they get rid of our cell phones, they’re planning to get rid of that great big thermonuclear-powered source of radiation and electromagnetic fields in the sky — after all, it’s silly to go after the piddling sources of feeble EMR while ignoring the many orders of magnitude greater zapper of rays that is bathing our whole planet in a seething stew of wavelengths and photons and rays and all that sciencey crap.

I wonder what the mechanism might be that causes autism in response to EMFs. This is always the problem with these kinds of ‘studies’ — they’re long on hypotheticals, and weak on the causal links that might be testable and might actually give some substance to the vapor. The Bishop and Grimes paper does a good job on dismantling their arguments there, too, because I was really annoyed when Sage and Burgio trot out their “Plausible Biological Mechanism for EMF/RFR Effects” and it’s…epigenetics. Epigenetics is the new buzzword that gets inserted in place of “magic” nowadays, and it’s getting obnoxious. You have to do real experiments and measurements of epigenetic phenomena to be able to make that claim — and simply noting that DNA repair is slower when your cells in culture are exposed to low-intensity non-thermal radiation, which might make them more prone to cancer, does not imply “epigenetics did it”. I don’t even know what they mean by epigenetics! It seems that whenever they observe an effect for which they have no causal mechanism, they just label it epigenetic and call that the mechanism, as if that explains anything.

Bishop and Grimes summarize it well.

Sage and Burgio make liberal use of epigenetic terminology, but in a nebulous and non-specific fashion, being deployed as an apparent deus ex machina to attribute negative health effects to WiFi in the absence of any evidence. Epigenetics is a term used to refer to the case where environmentally-induced modifications persist across generations, but Sage and Burgio treat it more as a synonym for gene-environment interaction. This usage is common among advocates of complementary and alternative medicine, but unhelpful as it confuses rather than clarifying the role of environmental effects.

Anyway, relax. There is no plausible mechanism for cell phones or WiFi to fry your baby’s brain, so go ahead, pierce their thin little skulls with radiation. I’m a big fan of holding babies close so that the infrared radiation you are emitting from your chest (more wattage than is coming out of your phone!) toasts their little heads with warmth. I think we humans have been doing that for a few hundred thousand years, so it’s probably not harmful. Probably. Studies pending.

Günter who?

I don’t know who Günter Bechley is, but apparently he writes for the Discovery Institute, and he despises me.

I despise the dogmatic and sometimes even fanatical stance of some evolutionists like P.Z. Myers (Pharyngula blog), Laurence Moran (Sandwalk blog), Jeffrey Shallit (Recursivity blog), Jerry Coyne (Why Evolution is True blog), freelance writer John Farrell, the anonymous coward behind The Sensuous Curmudgeon blog, and other infamous web activists against Intelligent Design and religion.

If you follow the link, you’ll discover he’s one of those people who thinks the theory is in imminent danger of collapsing, because scientists keep learning new things, and babbles about new discoveries in hominid evolution. Just two little problems there: the details of the timeline of human history are not the theory part of evolution, and a willingness to accommodate new evidence is a good thing.

I guess he’s just going to have to keep on despising me, but it’s OK when the despisers are so absurdly wrong.

Suspension of disbelief caught fire and exploded

I didn’t like the premiere episode of the new Star Trek at all. I was so repelled that I felt no desire at all to see the second — but I know, other people feel otherwise. Even some scientists are still enthusiastic. For instance, Jeremy Yoder lists all the bad biology in past and present episodes of the show, and still recommends it, even after the galactic fungus and space-hopping tardigrade story, which makes me nauseous to even listen to the video clip explaining it with outrageous technobabble. I guess his ability to suspend disbelief is far more robust than mine.

So, honestly, it’s hard to watch almost any episode of Star Trek without my biology-sense tingling. But here’s the thing: the bio-bollocks is often deeply entangled with what makes Trek great. The episode of Voyager in which two characters are temporarily transmuted into one touches on questions of personhood, and what makes us unique, self-determining individuals. The shape-shifting villains of Deep Space Nine created innumerable opportunities for stories about paranoia and power in wartime and the risks of trading freedom for security. The biological impossibility of Mr. Spock’s parentage makes him a touchstone for anyone who’s lived with dual identities or a sense of alienation from their community. The de-evolution virus … well, okay, that one I can’t justify. But by and large, when Star Trek has stretched and often broken the limits of biological realism, it’s done so to tell stories that are worth the telling — and that inspired many a nerdy kid to stick with science long enough to learn how fictional Star Trek really is.

I agree that the pseudoscience isn’t the point of a Star Trek story. I just feel like, if the writers cared, they could take the time to get the science right, and that good science wouldn’t detract from a good story.

Halloween explained…with Chick tracts!

Here’s a roundup of the best Chick tracts to hand out on Halloween. You know you’re an awful person when you think these are a good idea.

Everyone knows you’re supposed to hand out full-size candy bars — none of this ‘fun-size’ nonsense, and no, candy corn is not a treat — because we’re supposed to fatten up children with gluttony and sloth, both so they’re juicier for the barbecue and because they’ll meet our Dark Lord Satan even sooner.

Hmm. Now I have to think. What would be the most sweetly lethal kind of candy I should give out on Halloween night, that would most thoroughly serve the Evil Atheist Agenda? If feminist candy were richer chunks of chocolate, that might work.

This is an ad for CNN?

I guess it’s supposed to be a sneaky critique of the “alternative facts” crowd, those Trump surrogates who appear on TV to twist the facts and lie — people like Kellyanne Conway and Jack Kingston and Jeffrey Lord and Kayleigh McEnany and Omarosa Manigault and Sarah Huckabee.

But now I’m confused. Who gave those folks plenty of airtime? CNN. Who loves to throw one of those clowns into a panel to watch the sparks fly? CNN. Who has their own collection of in-house apologists for the status quo, like Wolf Blitzer and John King? CNN. Who has a point of view that is barely distinguishable from that of Fox News? CNN.

Who promotes banana propagandists in their own programming? CNN.

I am not impressed. I’m not persuaded by someone announcing, “we state only the facts,” but would be more favorable towards someone who actually states the facts and criticizes the lies.