Blue Collar Scientist

The ADN reports that a guerilla art group has put up a mailbox, some twine, clothespins, and some slips of paper on a tree in a downtown park. People write messages on the paper and hang the slips from the twine.

The next day, the comments had multiplied. Tourists with their shopping bags, polished ladies clicking by in high heels, rough types shuffling out of the 515 Club all stopped to clip something up.

Tourists with their shopping bags? Bzzzzzt. Not in March. It’s a picturesque turn of phrase, I’ll grant, but it’s fiction writing. A for effort.

A study done at Ohio State reveals that aromatherapy might be fun, but it won’t make you well. Researchers there subjected volunteers to two scents - lemon and lavender - or to distilled water over three half-day sessions. They were monitored for heart rate and blood pressure, a skin healing test was conducted, pain reaction was assessed, and psychological tests for mood and stress were conducted, and blood samples were taken.

The blood samples were later analyzed for changes in several distinct biochemical markers that would signal affects on both the immune and endocrine system. Levels of both Interleukin-6 and Interleukin-10 – two cytokines – were checked, as were stress hormones such as cortisol, norepinephrine and other catacholomines.

The results: Neither of the scents had a positive effect on the biochemical markers for stress, pain control, or wound healing; nobody benefitted in terms of heart rate or blood pressure; nobody benefitted from faster skin healing; nobody benefitted from lowered stress; nobody had a boosted immune system; nobody managed pain better.

But a few of the volunteers were in a better mood after being exposed to lemon.

This pretty much lines up with what I’ve thought about aromatherapy for a long time: It isn’t therapeutic. It is just an outgrowth of the potpourri movement, which came from the incense movement that preceded it. Some people find it fun, and if people find aromatherapy scents fun to play around with, that’s good enough for me. But some people think doing something merely because it is fun isn’t good enough, so they had to turn it into a Serious Medical Thing, and/or into a cash cow. Simple as that.

I’m looking forward to Orac’s treatment of the subject - I betcha he can get the paper without forking over $35 to Elsevier for the privilege of reading it.

BBC is reporting that researchers have discovered that certain biomarkers present in the blood are indicative of mood disorders, and that their concentration correlated with the severity of the disorder. The researchers hope the discovery will lead to a blood test that could be used diagnostically, and to objectively assess the impact of medication.

Lead researcher Dr Alexander Niculescu said: “This discovery is a major step towards bringing psychiatry on par with other medical specialties that have diagnostic tools to measure disease states and the effectiveness of treatments.”

Indeed. Psychiatry is vulnerable to a number of criticisms, some less valid than others, due to the relative lack of ways to quantitatively support a diagnosis. Even within the skeptical community, there is a diversity of opinion on the reality of various psychiatric diagnoses and the effectiveness of treatments. But with denialism of psychiatric medicine widespread in groups such as the Scientologists, one wonders whether this could become a new piece of evidence in the debate.

“Although psychiatrists have been aware that bipolar illness and other psychiatric conditions produced molecular changes in the brain, there was no way to measure those changes while the patient was living.“

That’s certainly a drawback.

The latest Skeptics Circle has been posted at Conspiracy Factory. Please go have a look!

USS Lake Erie launches a missile at USA 193. See more at the Department of Defense website.

The DoD has a press release stating that at 10:26 PM EST (6:26 Alaska time), the USS Lake Erie fired a missile that hit the errant National Reconnaissance Office satellite known as USA 193. The missile had no warhead, which supports the DoD’s assertion that they are concerned about an intact hydrazine tank re-entry, and not with preventing classified technology falling into unfriendly hands.

The DoD states that confirmation should be available within 24 hours that the hydrazine was released harmlessly in space. This will be apparent from the decay rate of the satellite’s orbit; with about the same surface area, but much less mass, the orbit will decay noticeably more rapidly than if the hydrazine had not been released.

This provides yet another confirmation of the government’s story that amateur observers can make: Assuming that the satellite is largely intact and still visible, in the event the hydrazine has been released, the satellite should show up later, and on a track that is more westerly, than predictions with the current elements indicate. However, there isn’t much time - the bulk of the orbiting material is expected to re-enter within two days. Heavens Above is still providing easy-to-use predictions on the satellite’s visibility.

UPDATE: DoD says that nothing bigger than a football survived - so much for that! Also, I replaced the picture of USA 193’s launch, to a picture of the launch of the missile that hit it, from the DoD website.

I was interviewed a few days ago by a local radio journalist who was asking whether the interception would be visible from southcentral Alaska. My polished and very educational answer was edited down to a succinct “No, it won’t” for airing. The interest seems to have been generated by the occasional visibility of missiles fired from Kodiak Island, but the ships doing this work were too far to the south and west in the Pacific Ocean, and the satellite much too low, for the interception to be visible.

In an example of breathtaking cowardice an ISP called Netcetera has unilaterally cancelled the Quackometer blog, because some guy who promotes nutritional supplements threatened to sue them. Quackometer was devoted to telling the truth about non-evidence-based and potentially dangerous health practices.

Netcetera has written to the owner of Quackometer with the explanation:

We do not wish to be in a position where we could be taken to court, and incur the loss of time and expense that would involve. Consequently Netcetera have decided to suspend the Quackometer website, with reference to our Acceptable Usage Policy, the first part of which is quoted below.

….

1.1) Netcetera reserves the right to suspend or cancel a customer’s access to any or all services provided by Netcetera, where Netcetera decides that the account has been inappropriately used.

Apparently Netcetera believes that calling out scam artists and promoters of dangerous practices masquerading as “medicine” is improper. I can only presume that the Netcetera offices are awash in homeopathic remedies, Noni juice, and and special high-powered antioxidant supplements.

Despite having all this amazing snake oil to hand, the people at Netcetera nevertheless don’t have the magic elixir that would grow them a spine.

The BBC is reporting that Russia is claiming that the United States’ plans to “shoot down” an uncontrollable spy satellite in a decaying orbit is a cover for “testing of an anti-satellite weapon.”

“Speculations about the danger of the satellite hide preparations for the classical testing of an anti-satellite weapon,” a statement reported by Itar-Tass news agency said.

“Such testing essentially means the creation of a new type of strategic weapons,” it added.

Russia is wrong. Here’s how you can know this.

1. There really is a satellite in this decaying orbit. It is called USA 193, and you can go outside and see it if you want to. Observations have been reported all over the place, there are even pictures to be found, if you go looking, and video of the satellite has been played on the news in the United States, at least. Heavens Above has a page about the satellite that provides information about where the satellite is now, and how its orbit is decaying. As I write, it looks like the satellite just passed south of Anchorage and was probably pretty close to being visible from where I’m sitting.
2. If you can see something in the sky, you can measure its position. And if you can do that, you can calculate its orbit. I used to do this every clear night for asteroids. You take a few pictures, measure the asteroid’s position in each, and then do some computations that result in a description of where that asteroid is in space. Calculating the orbit of an asteroid is pretty hard, but there are freeware software programs that will do all the hard work for you. It turns out there are also similar programs that observers of Earth satellites use. So while the National Space Science Data Center has no real information about USA 193, at least one person has put the observations together and calculated an orbit. Orbits for Earth satellites are described in a standard format, and the numbers, called elements, at this page are in that standard format. They can be taken and plugged into SkyMap Pro or Starry Night or almost any other astronomy software to generate observability predictions for the satellite.
3. More to the point, you can take those elements and see that, indeed, this asteroid is orbiting in a very low orbit, and indeed, it really will decay and deorbit, probably sometime in March, if nothing is done about it.

In other words, this satellite is not a made-up thing. We can go out and look at it, and we know, for sure, certain things about it, and we know this from our own eyes, our own calculations - in other words, we know this by doing things that any reasonably-well informed space enthusiast can do - specialists and government spooks not needed.

Not only is this satellite not made up, but it is obviously not what you’d use to test an antisatellite weapon. If someone wants to shoot down a satellite in a real war, they’re going to go after surveillance or positioning system satellites in low Earth orbit, or communications satellites in very high orbits. If you look at USA 193, its considerably lower than a standard low Earth orbit. And it is losing altitude at a very high rate - not something you will find a useful satellite - a plausible target - doing.

In other words, this whole thing just doesn’t have the profile of a good antisatellite weapons test. Anyone designing a test, who ended up doing this, instead of putting a target into a standard low Earth or geosynchronous orbit, has come up with a very bad model of real-life conditions.

Not only that, but the reasons that the United States is offering for destroying this satellite make sense. The United States government says that there is hydrazine on this satellite, used as a propellant. This is quite plausible - hydrazine is used on hundreds of satellites, including in thrusters for the Space Shuttle, Russia’s own Soyuz manned spacecraft, and aboard the International Space Station.

The problem with hydrazine is twofold:

1. It is very toxic. At quite low concentrations, breathing it causes lung irritation and scarring. At higher concentrations, breathing it causes tremors, convulsions, and death. If it gets in your water and you ingest it, you can add nausea, neurological symptoms, and drowsiness to that list. It’s a carcinogen so it can kill you with a tumor years after exposure. It can damage or destroy your liver and kidneys, and screw up your reproductive organs and cause birth defects.
2. Tanks containing satellite fuel have a fairly high probability of surviving re-entry intact. They have large surface areas compared to their mass, and they can slow down very rapidly and fall to earth without burning up in the atmosphere. If that happens in this case, wherever that tank lands becomes a toxic substances dump, without any of the environmental controls or monitoring that real toxic substances dumps have. If that happens to be my backyard, I’d be really ticked off. (Edit to add: The Bad Astronomer points out that Astroprof has an excellent post about hydrazine, if you want to consult it.)

Oh - don’t believe me that fuel tanks can survive re-entry intact? You don’t have to. There are pictures:

That’s from this NASA page, but if you google this topic, there are dozens of examples you can turn up.

So it seems likely that the reasons given for shooting at this satellite are sound - it is full of a very hazardous substance, and poking some holes in it before it comes down will release that substance into space before re-entry. And that’s what you’d want to do if you had a big tank of hydrazine coming down.

Not only that, but there’s no apparent motive for shooting the satellite down if those tanks aren’t full of hydrazine. Hundreds of classified US satellites have de-orbited in the last few years, and none of them were blown up with an antisatellite missile. The main difference? USA 193 was launched recently, and was never able to be controlled. That means its fuel tanks are pretty full. All the other satellites that de-orbited worked properly, and their fuel was empty, or close to it, when it re-entered. It isn’t plausible that the US wants to blow up the satellite to keep secret technology from falling into enemy hands. Of the thousands of satellites with secret technology that have de-orbited since the space age began fifty years ago, hundreds must have landed in cold-war Russia and other places not friendly to the US. Why weren’t any of them “shot down?”

Besides, a smart engineer designs secret components in such a way that they are sure to destroy themselves in re-entry. (And fuel tanks aren’t secrets.)

Finally, there’s one more clue that Russia is promoting baloney on this issue:

“The decision to destroy the American satellite does not look harmless as they try to claim, especially at a time when the US has been evading negotiations on the limitation of an arms race in outer space,” the statement continued.

That’s right, they have an ulterior motive. They have teamed up with China and are badgering the United States to participate in treaty talks to limit or ban space weapons. Russia wants the United States to look like the bad guy (and maybe the US is - I haven’t really thought through an opinion on whether we should be involved in these talks).

I suppose it is worth pointing out that China has actually blown up satellites in viable orbits with advanced antisatellite weaponry that they acknowledged openly they were testing, and to date, the United States hasn’t - and the Russians are teamed up with China. They just want to take advantage of the circumstance to score political points. Otherwise, why would they say that the United States is “creating a new type of weapon,” when China has already has one?

So, what do I believe? I believe there is a secret satellite in a decaying orbit that has hazardous materials aboard and that the United States is going to punch some holes in the tanks containing the materials, and otherwise break up the satellite so that it falls harmlessly to Earth. I think the notion that we’d have to blow up secret technology on the satellite is insane. I think the Russians are just playing politics with their statement. And I think you should go outside and look at USA 193 so you can say you did!

Science Daily reports on a study looking into inaccurate information about breast cancer online. The study was devoted to finding out whether web pages were reliable sources of breast cancer information, or not. Emphasis mine:

[The study] determined that while most breast cancer data found online was accurate, one in 20 breast cancer Web pages featured inaccuracies and sites displaying complementary and alternative medicine were 15 times more likely to contain false or misleading health information.

It comes as no surprise to me or millions of other rational thinkers that sites that purvey “complementary and alternative medicine” were so much more likely to purvey false information about a potentially deadly cancer. It isn’t surprising, because we’re used to it. Almost all of us have either experienced health problems personally, or know someone who has had health problems, and have encountered a veritable storm of woo and crank beliefs about the disease at issue, almost always at the hands of someone trying to cure it with “complimentary and alternative medicine” and keep you away from the “chemicals” that doctors prescribe, to boot.

The term “complimentary and alternative medicine” (CAM) itself is misleading. The term might have a place if it were used of procedures and substances that are unproven but do have some physical mechanism that has some small hope of working, but this is generally not the case. For example, CAM is a term used to describe homeopathy, which doesn’t work. Period. It is as simple as that. We know this because every study that has been done has shown that it does no good. Even without the benefit of clinical trial, we can be pretty sure of this because homeopathy’s methods - which basically amount to selling water or sugar preparations having no other ingredients - have no remotely plausible mechanism by which they might work. And finally, we can get a big hint about this because homeopathy has wealthy trade organizations that work hard, with PR, lobbying, and litigating, to preserve a quarter-billion dollar industry in the US and a multi-billion dollar business globally. The Society of Homeopaths has even gone so far as to respond to criticism by threatening legal action against ISPs when their users write facts that are uncomplimentary to the industry.

Not that protecting your market is a sign of illegitimacy. But protecting your market aggressively, stomping on peoples’ civil rights in the process, and suppressing and covering up evidence that your product doesn’t work? That’s a sign of illegitimacy.

The same calling-out can be done of dozens of other “complimentary and alternative medical” practices: colloidal silver, chelation “therapy,” ear candling, iridology, vaccine denialism, exorcism, faith healing, repressed memory therapy, and dozens of other popular, and expensive, “treatments” for what ails you. All of which have been shown either not to work, or not to work nearly as well as, you know, real medicine.

Sure, we’ll all grant that colloidal silver does have microbe-killing properties, but anyone doing a minimum of research will find that antibiotics from your local pharmacy are far more powerful, and have much less severe side effects.

The question I have is, why are we using the term “complimentary and alternative medicine?” There are many things I’ve learned doing science outreach, and one of them is this: The words you use convey values. The phrase “complimentary and alternative medicine” conveys the warm and positive values of health, healing, and peace.

That is not what people promoting these practices bring to their victims, though. What they bring is ineffective, often outright silly treatments, which keeps the patient sick so that they may make ever more money on a chronic disease. They bring their patients great expense. They bring their patients pain. They bring their patients dangerous “side effects” without giving them therapeutic benefit.

It is time to ditch the phrase CAM and recognize that there is only one kind of medicine: The kind that works, regardless of who is selling it. We can figure out what works and what doesn’t by doing correctly designed experiments. In humanity’s ongoing quest for knowledge, at any given moment any particular health preparation or practice might fall into one of three categories, depending on what we know about it:

1. It has been proven to work. It’s medicine.
2. It has been proven to not work. It is quackery. And it should be considered malpractice if a doctor, nurse, hospital, or similar entity practices it.
3. It may or may not work - it either hasn’t been studied, or experiments were inconclusive. It is an unknown.

It’s time to start being clear about some of these things by eschewing language that gives legitimacy to items in the second category. We shouldn’t refer to “homeopathic medicines.” We should call some of them “dilute industrial chemicals.” For others we should use some phrase that doesn’t give away the farm. We shouldn’t call it “Ayurvedic medicine,” we should call it “Aayurvedic imagination,” and we ought to mention that in the US at least, it seems to be a fast-track path to lead poisoning as well. And so forth.

All of which leads to the real point of this post. If you are doing outreach, you’re going to encounter these people. Most of them maintain their “thing” works, whatever their thing is - the last time I encountered this, it was a reiki practitioner. So you have the discussion, and you put the evidence out their that their “thing” doesn’t work, and they pull an all-too-familiar rhetorical maneuver. Dodging the problem of their woo not working, they ignore efficacy and pull the wool over the audience’s eyes by saying something like, “well, maybe we don’t have all the complicated science behind us yet, but even if it doesn’t work, what’s the harm?”

As a skeptic, I think that being disconnected from reality is harmful in and of itself. But it is also obvious that the harm is (a) it takes money out of the pockets of innocent victims¹, and (b) it causes people to eschew treatments that really work.

Here’s the thing: if you say this, you’ve basically lost the argument. Audiences do not find this theoretical consideration very compelling. The prospect that someone might fail to seek real treatment for their problems isn’t compelling. Too many people in the audience are willing to condemn such imagined people as stupid for doing that, and deserving of whatever happens to them. Others will tell you they believe people won’t be so foolish. Others will simply dismiss what you’ve said because it is theoretical - unless you can give them a concrete example, it simply doesn’t exist for them. In any case, your task - which is winning over the audience, the people that are watching you argue with the true believer² - is failing. You are at this point looking weak and kind of petty, and it is quite possible that someone in the audience will say you have some sort of stick or rod inserted in a certain part of your anatomy.

But now, there is a new resource - an aggregator of instances of harm to individuals caused by false beliefs, called What’s The Harm? And sadly, this is going to be immediately helpful to outreach on these issues. The site has a long list of children who have been victims. This is sad and tragic - nobody will say a child deserved a death or disability that resulted from woo forced upon them by adults. And this provides an obvious, and in my opinion much-needed opportunity for dealing with the dishonest and misleading rhetorical devices of the woo-meisters. Now when we are asked “what’s the harm,” it will be a good deal easier to answer that question as though it were an honest one. Maybe by taking such questions seriously, and offering stark, clear-cut examples in response, we can help prevent the list of victims getting longer.

1. innocent, because a powerful marketing campaign is used to defraud these people of their money, and nobody who is being deliberately deceived with sophisticated methods can be said to be guilty [↩]
2. You can count on never being able to convince the true believer. Never. The purpose of the argument is to convince the undecided onlookers. Never forget that - it should be considered Rule One of science outreach. [↩]

Some Alaskans - in particular those who have political favor to pass around - are obsessed with killing wolves. One of the old stories about wolf hunting is that the Natives, back in the day, used something called the “blood knife” to do the job. The idea was, you smear a knife with the blood of a prey animal, stick the knife in the ground or freeze it in a big block of ice so that the blade sticks up, and walk away. Eventually, a wolf will come by, lick the knife, cut its tongue, and bleed to death.

Wolves in Alaska, you see, have no clotting factors. Or platelets.¹
The Anchorage Daily News, which isn’t really known for running evidence-based stories, nor for doing any sort of investigative journalism, has run a story skeptical of the myth. Columnist Craig Medred, the long-time outdoor writer, talked to several scientists and then performs the takedown.

Kudos, ADN.

1. Obviously, I am making this up. [↩]