We, as a nation, have to ask ourselves “What the hell is going on?

Apparently this woman’s water has been contaminated with electromagnetic radiation.

Via Fark.

While in Costa Rica, I had a brief discussion (with a poker website employee) about the likelihood that a computer will eventually be able to beat any human player (at which point it’s pretty much useless to play poker on websites; you can be assured that everyone there will be an unbeatable computer player). That came to mind when I read this:

100 trillion brain cells and most of us can’t reliably multiply a pair of two digit numbers. If computers had invented humans as part of a BI program (biological intelligence), humans would have been tossed aside as barely having achieved perfect game play at Tic-Tac-Toe. What use is 100 trillion brain cells that can’t reliably compute a 15% tip after a heavy lunch? Many computers would like to know.

From Poker Program Battles Humans In Vegas on SlashDot.

Twelve years ago, Homer Simpson said:

I got kicked out [of the audio-visual club] ’cause of my views of Vietnam. Also, I was stealing projectors.

Ben Stein and the intelligent design movement are also trying to “steal some projectors” with their new movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Besides trying to promote the validity of intelligent design / creationism over evolution and tie Darwinism to the Holocaust, it also claims that the mainstream scientific community has persecuted those who do not believe in evolution — including firing various academics for publicly making anti-evolution statements.

Depending on your exact definition of “persecute”, part of that last statement may well be true. The major problem is that the cases that the movie cites as examples are basically exaggerated or otherwise misrepresented.

It’s important to see Expelled for what it is: a propaganda piece intended to win converts in order to gain power (and probably not a little bit of money). The evidence for this lies not only in analysis of the movie’s content but in analysis of the marketing campaign for the movie:

“Expelled” is spending millions to succeed, huge for a documentary. It’s hired four PR firms. It’s running a sweepstakes for church groups, offering a cash prize to the one that sells the most tickets. It’s paying up to 10 Grand for schools to send their students. The movie even staged a songwriting competition.

SONG: If you challenge evolution, you get expelled!

Oh, and Ben Stein traveled across the country on a bright red bus for “Expelled, the Road Show.” This is mostly the work of Motive Marketing’s Paul Lauer. He’s the guy who made “Passion” [ed: "of the Christ", the Mel Gibson movie about Jesus] into a phenomenon by harnessing the power of this country’s 160 million Christians.

PAUL LAUER: How do you get this big amoeba to flex its muscle? When it flexes, it’s enormous. The challenge has always been, How do you get those people to activate.

Expelled’s message is that the scientific community is using indoctrination, obfuscation, and coercion to push it’s agenda. The irony (hypocrisy?) is that, in reality, those are the very tactics being employed by Expelled and the rest of the intelligent design movement. Skepticism and rebuttal are the ways to counteract this, and those are the goals of the scientific community — not its opponents.

Another good Freakonomics article states what you probably already knew: weather forecasters are pretty much full of crap, especially when making predictions past “tomorrow”.

For all days beyond the next day out, viewers would be better off flipping a coin to predict rainfall than trusting the stations on days where rain was possible.

This was a U.S. study, both of TV stations (i.e.: “We use Doppler Radar even though we have no idea what that means.”) and the NOAA, the official government weather service. I would very much like to see the same study done in Canada; Environment Canada gets a lot of respect out here, and it’s important to see whether it’s actually deserved.

In related news: Calgary has been hit with yet another April snowstorm.

This Slashdot post is very much in the same vein as my earlier blog post on the size of humanity relative to the size of the earth. Here’s the jist:

If you moved every single person in the world to the land area within Texas, we’d have less population density than New York City.

The water outflow of the Columbia River would provide each and every person with nearly 26 gallons of fresh water per day

We could feed all those people - about 500 square meters per person - with the existing farmland within the US

Essentially, we could live mid-density, and feed and provide potable water for every single person on the face of the earth, and not require a single person living outside of Texas - no one on the other 6 continents, the oceans, or any other State. No one in Canada or Mexico.

We could feed everyone without a single acre converted from farmland - wouldn’t need to touch a single acre of forest, nor city, nor ocean, nor park.

The earth can support a LOT of people; the problem is distribution of the resources. And that is a purely political issue. Concerns about too many people on earth are demonstrably false.

(The poster provides links for all of these claims; see the post for URLs. They’re mostly raw factual/wikipedia links with one Vegan Society link to support the food production claim).

When we Westerners hear the adjective “Tantra”, we generally think “hour-long orgasms“, not “black magicians trying to kill people on primetime TV“. Fortunately my blog is here to broaden your horizons.

James Randi might have put up a million dollars, but this guy staked his whole life (twice) that the paranormalist in question was full of crap. Needless to say, he won. The best part was near the end though:

After nearly two hours, the anchor declared the tantrik’s failure. The tantrik, unwilling to admit defeat, tried the excuse that a very strong god whom Sanal might be worshipping obviously protected him. “No, I am an atheist,” said Sanal Edamaruku.

Via Fark

Platonia dilemma

A similar game, referred to as a “Luring Lottery”, was actually played by the editors of Scientific American in the 1980s. To enter the contest once, readers had to send in a postcard with the number “1″ written on it. They were also explicitly permitted to submit as many entries as they wished by sending in a single postcard bearing the number of entries they wished to submit. The prize was one million dollars divided by the total number of entries received, to be awarded to the submitter of a randomly chosen entry. Thus a reader who submitted a large number of entries increased his or her chances of winning but reduced the maximum possible value of the prize. It can be shown mathematically that one maximizes one’s average winnings in this game by submitting a number of entries equal to the total number of entries of others. Of course, if others take this into account, then this becomes a dubious strategy.

…

Although the magazine had previously discussed the concept of superrationality from which the above-mentioned algorithm can be deduced, many of the contestants submitted entries consisting of an astronomically large number (including several who entered a googolplex). Some took this game further by filling their postcards with mathematical expressions designed to evaluate to the largest possible number in the limited space allowed. The magazine was unable to tell who won, and the monetary value of the prize would have been a minuscule fraction of a cent.

In related sightseeing, I just read that a real-life experiment found that 40% of participants will take the “cooperate” (ie: irrational) option in Prisoner’s Dilemma.

Here’s a video of James Randi debunking a professional astrologer. This vid is all kinds of awesome for several reasons:

• It shows Randi doing what he does: putting the paranormal to the test in a reasonable, honest, and palatable way. He gives his subject a chance to explain himself and what he does.
• It shows a true believer in action. The astrologer stands behind his beliefs and is willing to have them tested in front of an audience. It’s important to show that not all paranormalists are outright frauds: many (most?) are well intentioned but misinformed. This makes the real frauds stand out even more.
• It shows the true believer rationalizing his failures and his attempts at (self) deception.
• It’s a real-life demonstration of the Forer effect, on which astrology is heavily based. In video form it’s easily accessible to everyone, and it’s shown both in action and in verbal description by Randi.
• It highlights the contrast between science and pseudoscience. The astrologer looks to his beliefs for insight about a subject; the scientist (here represented by Stephen Fry) looks to the subject itself.
• It features Dr. House himself, Hugh Laurie, with a (fairly rare) glimpse of his off-screen personality (and accent for that matter). (By the way, Randi is being ironic when he says that Laurie “hardly knows” Fry; the two were a Britcom comedic duo for over 20 years.)
• The video page has a bunch of links to other similar videos where Randi debunks several other types of paranormalists and peseudoscientists.

(Courtesy Shvetz in this Fark thread.)

I’m sorry to say that the James Randi Educational Foundation One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge is coming to an end as of 2010.

James Randi is a stage magician who has spent the latter part of his career debunking paranormal claims and charlatans (most famously spoon-bender Uri Geller and TV psychic Sylvia Browne). His claim is that “paranormal” powers are often nothing but the same illusion techniques used by magicians and other entertainers — and that they should be recognized as such.

To further this goal, Randi and his supporters created the “One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge” as a “put up or shut up” incentive for paranormalists. To win the prize, all someone had to do was:

1. State (with specificity) what paranormal powers the challenger has, including what constitutes a successful demonstration of those powers.
2. Demonstrate those powers in a controlled, scientifically-valid setting in front of independent witnesses

Depending on your point of view, the challenge has not had a lot of success.

• There have been no prize winners. If you’re James Randi’s accountant, that’s a good thing. James Randi himself would have a lot of explaining to do if someone did manage to win the prize, but I think that he’d be excited (even pleased) if someone did manage to demonstrate real paranormal phenomena under reliable testing. He’d certainly get a lot of personal attention in any case. On the other hand, the fact that nobody has won gives him some credibility. The lack of success is definitely a bad thing for those who claim paranormal powers.
• There have been over 1,000 challengers. That’s a good thing for Randi, as it lends some legitimacy to his challenge. It’s a good thing for the paranormalists, because it shows that they’re not afraid and/or not faking: they’re ready to stand up to scrutiny.
• None of the challengers so far have gotten past the initial rounds of testing (before the main event in front of witnesses and the rest of the world). Some have tried and simply failed. Some won’t agree to a testing procedure (which both Randi and the challenger must agree to; it’s designed to be scientifically valid and prevent “cheating”). Some are rejected by Randi because their claims would put themselves in mortal danger (one claimed to be able to survive on nothing but air for months; testing that would almost certainly kill the challenger and open JREF up to legal action). Some can’t even explain what it is they can do with any degree of accuracy. Randi writes:
  

  Our expectations at first were that we’d attract major personalities by this means, but they’ve avoided having to take the test by simply not applying; those who have actually applied are generally honestly self-deluded persons who have difficulty stating what they can do, which can be understood if they really don’t know what they’re experiencing; we at JREF have gone through involved procedures to help them recognize their problems. Usually, they have indicated that they don’t know what real scientific rules are, when it comes down to their actually being properly tested.

  This is bad for the challengers, as it destroys their credibility. It’s good for Randi as it validates his claims.

• None of the big uncanny fish (Geller, Browne, John Edward, or any other celebrity) have applied to take the challenge. This cuts both ways for both Randi and the paranormalists. Avoiding the challenge suggests that the big names are faking (since they won’t prove that they have their purported abilities), but they’re not shown to be frauds outright, and thus can continue to dupe the believers. Randi gains some credibility by demonstrating that the celebrities are scared of the challenge, but misses the big payoff of finally exposing one of them as charlatans.

Since the last point is what the challenge was supposed to accomplish, it’s failure means that the challenge as a whole is very much tarnished. Randi has now decided to move on and use the cash to fight the battle on other fronts.

I think that that’s probably the right move, but I still feel disappointment at the news. Having a million dollar prize available was a great tool for forcing the hand of paranormalists: if they were confident in their supernatural abilities then they should be willing to demonstrate them, especially when there’s a big financial reward involved.

We live in an age of prizes. The X Prize (for getting to space without government money; recently won by a team lead by Burt Rutan) is the poster child for the new wave of competition focused on achieving humanistic goals. There’s now many such prizes, including several new X Prizes, the DARPA Grand Challenge, and the Philanthropists are getting involved too, as they’re finding that they get better results from prize competitions than they did from outright grants. Even upstart NetFlix has gotten into the game.

Seeing the JREF Challenge die is a sorry thing. I hope that someone else creates something similar in its place. Even if it never draws a serious challenge, its existence is still valuable to humanity.

Or, at least, moreso:

With this realization came another: that standard emergency-room procedure has it exactly backward. When someone collapses on the street of cardiac arrest, if he’s lucky he will receive immediate CPR, maintaining circulation until he can be revived in the hospital. But the rest will have gone 10 or 15 minutes or more without a heartbeat by the time they reach the emergency department. And then what happens? “We give them oxygen,” Becker says. “We jolt the heart with the paddles, we pump in epinephrine to force it to beat, so it’s taking up more oxygen.” Blood-starved heart muscle is suddenly flooded with oxygen, precisely the situation that leads to cell death. Instead, Becker says, we should aim to reduce oxygen uptake, slow metabolism and adjust the blood chemistry for gradual and safe reperfusion.

From To Treat the Dead, via JWZ. Also:

Becker also endorses hypothermia�lowering body temperature from 37 to 33 degrees Celsius�which appears to slow the chemical reactions touched off by reperfusion. He has developed an injectable slurry of salt and ice to cool the blood quickly that he hopes to make part of the standard emergency-response kit.

“Give me 10CC of IV margarita mix, stat!”