Randi is putting a million dollars on the line

Homeopaths have another opportunity to get rich quick: all they have to do is show that it works, and Randi will give them a million dollars.

This is what Randi demands:

Randi issued a one-million-dollar challenge to the manufacturers of homeopathic products to prove their claims, and challenged major drug retailers like CVS, Rite-Aid, and Walgreens to stop tricking consumers into paying real money for fake medicine.

I noticed that my local grocery store is selling generic chain-labeled homeopathic “remedies” for colds and flu and other common ailments. Somebody is making a lot of money selling sugar pills.

There’s more in the LA Times.

Peter Goodgold is a scam artist

I had no idea that ions combined to produce fungi and bacteria in water — I guess spontaneous generation isn’t dead after all. That’s one of the claims of a con artist named Peter Goodgold who sells magic water ionizers that cure all illnesses…because, as he says, there is actually only one disease, acidosis. It’s complete nonsense as the video below explains.

His gadget can’t work, and has to be doing a lot of things to the water that he isn’t telling anyone about. How does he respond to the demonstration of his incompetence and dishonesty? Why, he threatens to sue and files complaints to get any rebuttal videos taken down. The creator of the expose explain his situation here:

So yes, if you can, mirror the video. I’ll just do what I can to promote it and make sure that Goodgold’s bluster just means many more people will see him exposed.

It’s in the Daily Mail, so I’m confident it got everything wrong

Actually, I know they got a lot wrong. The Mail reports that a study “proves” students believe everything they read on the internet. They cite some work done with the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus site, which they claim was created as part of a study to test student gullibility. This is wrong; that site has been available for years, and it’s a satire and humor site; look at the rest of zapatopi.net to see what I mean.

Also, I actually use the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus every semester, in the first lecture of our introductory biology course! After giving an overview of the scientific method and how to ask good scientific questions, I use it as an example: I show them the page, read a few excerpts, and ask them what they think…and always the majority of students are skeptical. The few who will grant it tentative plausibility always follow up with specific questions about the site and about where they can get additional information to confirm it.

Then we discuss how to validate scientific information, what we look for to trust a source, and further, I ask them to think more deeply about how, if the website passed a routine sniff test, we’d also go on to test unusual claims in nature. My experience has been that students are much more rational and practical about evaluating material on the web than we’d give them credit for (of course, there are also always a few students who still turn in papers with wacky web sites cited as sources — but they’re a minority).

And speaking of sources that rely on the gullibility of readers for credibility…the Daily Mail should not be casting aspersions. If you want to know everything you need to know about the Daily Mail, read this horrifying story.

It’s an epidemic!

Several people have sent me messages of despair lately. They’re working in universities which, like every university in the country, is struggling with tight budgets and declining support from the state government, and a citizenry that seems to be a sucker for every pseudoscientific scam some scoundrel will sell, and what is the academic administration doing? They’re joining in the con!

Look here at the University of Maryland School of Medicine: they’ve opened something called the Center for Integrative Medicine, where prospective doctors can go to learn how to gather Qi, or how to relieve back pain by twirling little needles. It’s complete quackery operating under the imprimatur of a respectable university, and I guarantee you it’s better at gathering grant money from the privileged quack corners of our federal grant system than it is at finding any magic Qi.

The University of Michigan Health System is also propping up an Integrative Medicine department. Their big obsession is Anthroposophy, one of the bastard mystic cults spawned in the early years of the 20th century, and yes, it is total loony wackitude. We actually have institutions of higher learning promoting Rudolf Steiner? Madness.

Now if I were truly shortsighted, I could take some joy in the fact that competing universities are scuttling their intellectual credentials with this crap, except that the University of Minnesota is just as bad. We have a Center for Sprituality and Healing that teaches nurses how to diagnose and treat disease by waving their hands over their patients, and brings in speakers like Deepak Chopra and the Dalai Lama to say “Woooooooo” to large audiences. It’s a disgrace and an embarrassment.

One thing Americans can take pride in is the fact that we have a prestigious university system that draws in students from around the world — something that Obama even mentioned in his state of the union address. It is still true, and I can attest to the quality of the faculty at our universities (although I will refrain from jingoism — the United States is not unique in possessing great minds). However, what I also see is rot setting in. Universities are being starved by the government, and they’re abandoning rigor and standards of excellence to pander.

Pay heed. This can’t last. We can’t pretend to be world leaders in science and knowledge while our best schools are turning their back on reason and evidence to sell magic charms and superstition to the populace.

Aaargh, it’s international! Take a look at what the Science Museum in London is doing — whitewashing homeopathy.

How homeopathy works

Follow this link to the amusingly bizarre webcomic about homeopathy behind it. I’ll just share with you the story behind the artwork:

So this might seem to make very little sense at all. Fair enough, it’s sort of supposed to. But this did actually happen to me at work — A guy came in to buy some homeopathic tablets, and was quite insistent that I not let them touch the large tub of ice-cream that he was also purchasing. Assuming that it had something to do with astronomically minute quantities of poison that such remedies are reputed to contain (they don’t, by the by — it is entirely water,) I assured him that there was no threat of contamination.

He then proceeded to explain to me, as a primary school teacher would an infant, that homeopathy works due to molecular vibration. Being a mere layman, I will try to explain this process to the best of my limited ability. The water molecules vibrate with the same resonance as the poisons that give them their efficacy. This in turn causes human molecules to vibrate upon ingestion, curing one’s ills. Close contact with the tub of ice-cream will cause the vibrations to shift to the new medium, resulting in an ineffective medicine.

The comic does not explain the specific details of homeopathy — it’s more like an artistic rendering of the spirit of homeopathy. And like all great art, it reveals the deeper truth. In this case, that homeopathy is gullet-gibbering, brain-blitzing insanity that has gone beyond evidence into the realm of childish delusions.

That’s just what they don’t need

Africa is suffering through the global AIDS pandemic — tens of millions are infected with HIV. It’s good that wealthier nations are sending resources to the continent, but do they really need a quack homeopath and chiropractor to travel to Tanzania to treat AIDS with homeopathy?

Wait…there are areas of North Africa where the water shortages are chronic and acute. Maybe she’d be more useful if she went there with her magic vials.

Tempest in τ, ζ, σ, φ, λ, ε, δ, η and γ2 Sagittarii

Dara O’Briain and Brian Cox aggravated a great many astrologers when they announced on a UK television program that “astrology is rubbish” and “astrology is nonsense”. The Astrological Association of Great Britain was so incensed that they created a petition demanding that the BBC commit to “making a fair and balanced representation of astrology in the future” — which left me amusedly discombobulated that there is a formal Astrological Association of Great Britain, and that they don’t realize that tossing their whole goofy discipline in the rubbish heap is a fair and balanced representation.

Now we get a whole new level of foolishness, though: Martin Robbins has posted a criticism of the skeptics from a serious historian who doesn’t get it. She demands that we take astrology more seriously and respectfully, and explains that many astrologers are intelligent people who study astronomy (you know, the real science), and are fully aware of concepts like precession and the actual physical arrangements of the stars in the sky, and have quite sophisticated explanations to account for superficial discrepancies like the absence of Ophiuchus from the official list of zodiacal constellations, and that they are right to be annoyed when they are portrayed as unaware of obvious physical phenomena.

This is all true, but stupid.

I’ve had long conversations with Very Serious Astrologers; early in my skeptical career, I spent a fair amount of time engaging them, and I’m familiar with the diverse ways in which their brains work. They were generally engrossed with the behavior of those lights in the sky; if you wanted to know what constellation you could spot on the horizon in the western sky in August, you could ask an astronomer and get a good answer, or you could ask a dedicated astrologer and they’d tell you the same thing, and they were certainly far more reliable sources for that sort of information than I am. I’ve played with some of their software, and it is intricate and elaborate and uses genuine astronomical data that they gather from astronomical databases.

But so what? It’s still all rubbish. There’s more to science than mastering mechanics, there’s this little thing called “understanding” that is absolutely essential. A great piano tuner is not necessarily a good musician, and memorizing the periodic table of the elements does not turn you into a chemist. Imagine a conversation with your mother: “I’m sure your father can fix the electronic ignition system in your Honda, dear…why, he managed to drive from Owatonna to the Mall of America last week, and he only got lost once!” One thing does not have anything to do with the other. Knowing a bunch of solid facts about stars does not justify explanations about magical influences that are antagonistic to known processes and which are built, not on the trustworthy foundation of that data, but on unfounded beliefs in magical influences from distant objects.

This is especially true when that specialized scientific knowledge is used as part of the pseudo-scientific patter marshalled to justify their supernatural explanations. Science is window dressing to modern astrologers; they don’t get to fulminate indignantly by pointing at the astronomy element they’ve incorporated into their delusions when someone points out that their conclusions are all wrong and completely unwarranted. Those don’t matter. Their rationalizations are like ‘sophisticated theology’ — vapor and noise that they make flashier by throwing in a few modern scientific terms.

Rebekah Higgitt wants to claim that astrologers are justified “if they are presented as idiots who don’t understand precession and do nothing but write newspaper horoscopes that cover around a twelfth of the population in one go.” OK. Then we should present them as idiots who don’t have a mechanism for their claimed influences, ignore all the logical arguments and empirical evidence that shows astrology doesn’t work, and abuse astronomy to put up a phony façade of scienciness.

They’re still idiots.