Author: Techskeptic

I fully endorse the mockery of religion, especially larger religions that expect people who do not share their beliefs to pay attention to their silly rules. Disallowing people to draw historical figures, like Mohammed, is an idiotic rule. If you like the rule, don’t draw him. However I will:

This is my rendition of mohammed with his ceremonial blade, just after he hacked off one of his wife’s head after giving a sermon of how peaceful Islam is.

P.S. I am fully aware that my rendition of Mohammed looks like an Amish serial killer. I never said my artistic skills weren’t outdone by a 3rd grader.

Saw this in the Make Magazine Facebook feed. Seemed like I should post it here.

I’m sure I don’t have to link to the thousands of articles and blog posts about the iPad both praising it and bashing it. Just do a google or twitter search and you will find both rather easily. One thing I still remain a bit puzzled with is the continued reaction to the device about what it doesnt have and can’t do. Primarily from techies who would never buy one. Neither would I, at least not yet. The thing that keeps coming across to me from these folks is a complete lack of understanding about what its for.

Consider the electric car for a moment. Pure electric, not hybridized. It only has a range of about 40 miles. It’s small. Its does 0-60 mph in like a whole minute. I can totally imagine the exact same conversation about one of those happening:

Steve: I’m thinking about getting an electric car.
Bill: Why would you ever do that?!?
Steve: What do you mean?
Bill: An electric car has such a limited range, 40 miles or something, what if you need to really go somewhere!
Steve: for 75% of the population, myself included, have a daily commute, including shopping, less than 40 miles. So why is that a problem?
Bill: Well it goes so slow!
Steve: Its not like I’m going drag racing or expecting performance vehicle, I just need to get from here to work and back. When I want to have some fun driving , I’ll use my Tesla. (snarfs)
Bill: But you have to plug it in every night and wait for it to charge. What if you need to drive when that is happening?
Steve: uh, Bill, I’ll use my car with the, you know, gas engine in it. As I will do when I need to go on long trips.
Bill: Well then if you need two cars, how is it worth it?putzes
Steve: We need two cars anyway. During the week, I only drive to work and back. During that same time, my wife has to drive the kids to Timbuktu and back so she gets the Hummer. And on the weekend, we may go on a long trip, so I’ll drive the Hummer then while she scoots around town in the electric car.

It’s true, if you live in the burbs, or out in the country it make no sense at all to have an all electric vehicle as your only way to get around. The electric car, as it stands right now, would only be an efficient method to supplement your driving needs.

The same sort of gripes are being made about the iPad. It doesnt have USB. It doesnt have a camera, it’s not upgradable. You can’t add memory or replace the battery. You can’t run more than one 3rd party app at the same time. You are stuck with Apple blessed software. Yes the limitations are large. But no one expects this thing to be your only computer.

It’s a supplemental computing device. It performs 90% of the tasks that average Joe and Jane needs. Email, internet (web based porn I am sure for many customers), it holds contacts and provides a great information source for a variety of needs. One that wont crash, won’t get slower as you use it, not prone to any viruses. Plus all the apps, many of which are actually useful. But yeah, if you need to build a website, you probably need a computer. Want to print to a USB printer, you probably have to transfer the file. etc etc. For those of you that do things the iPad can’t do more than 10% of the time, know two things:

1) The iPad isnt for you.
2) You are in the great minority of people in the world

As I said, I wont be buying one for myself (although I like the iBook stuff), but its perfect for my wife (and mom and sister), all of whom hate computers and live a frustrated life with those evil machines. I have no doubt the next iPad will have a camera, and other goodies. Maybe I’ll jump in then, maybe not.

I gotta say, I didn’t expect the world of homeopathy to say “Alright, you caught us, we’re full of shit”, but I did perhaps expect some reflection, some semblance of introspection, some effort on their part to even try to understand why the scientific community thinks they are full of it.

Nope, in fact just the opposite. Check this out, from George Vithoulkas, Homeopath Extraordinaire: He issued a challenge to the sceptic’s in response to the 1023 campaign.

I propose the remedy to be Alumina 200C ( a dilution far beyond the Avogadro number) and I promise them that in the end of 60 days a considerable number of them (up to 10% or more) will be suffering with slight to severe constipation.
.
.
.
You need to find 40 sceptics for this experiment.

So, what you are saying Georgie, is that after 2 month of drinking a little water, every day (doesnt mattere how much apparently according to him, 4 people will have anything from “slight” to “severe” constipation.

Why not claim “slight” to “severe” itching? Or “slight” to “severe” dry mouth?

Constipation is the most common gastrointestinal complaint that there is. 1.5% of people complain they are constipated “most” or “all of the time”. So how many people have “slight” constipation?

Why just 10% Georgie? Why doesn’t you magic water affect 50% or 100%? If I give a real drug, say morphine it has some effect on almost 100% of the people. Why does your magic water only affect people in the same percentage as your would expect anyway? How will you measure “slight” constipation?

More importantly George, if the skeptics did perform your clearly ridiculous test, and show that water performed exactly as you would expect water to perform, would you then come out and say “oops, looks like I was wrong”? What are the ramifications to you if your test was performed?

As far as I can tell, looks like you just want to waste people’s time.

I wanted to take a moment to remark on the fact that there is quite a dearth of skeptical software as iphone apps (and therefore I presume a dearth of android and blackberry apps). I’ll go over what is out there that I have found, the good and the bad (or perhaps not as good), and how you can make your own app, even if you dont know any programming at all!

Searching the iTunes store for things like "skeptic", "evolution", "vaccination" and so forth bring me to the following applications.

Skeptic’s Bingo: Yeah that one is mine, I thought I’d plug it again, go buy it and leave a constructive comment. This is a bingo game, with tiles that cover about 30 common claims from various arenas, such as evolution, vaccines, CAM and so forth (although I have only completed evolution for now).

Skeptical Science: Wow, this guy John Cook, spent a great deal of time pulling apart common global warming dissident claims and presenting them in a clear, easy to navigate app. The graphic design is clean (apparently his wife did it, can she help me clean up my program?). All I can say is: Nice work John! He also has put in some interactivity that lets you mark down when you hear a certain claim. I’m presuming that he is collecting data on what the most common claims are, as these may change with time.

At this point i’d like to point out that PZ Myers posted about an iphone app, counter-creationism Handbook, that basically had the Talk Origins website in it. I was also going to make an app like that but I did know the copyright ramifications of doing that, and I didn’t know who to get in touch with over there. However, this app, presently seems to have disappeared. I am not sure why.

I’ll stop here for a moment because that is essentially it for skeptical iPhone apps, that are actually like, you know, applications. There are a couple of more apps from the skeptical community.

Skepticality: for $1.99 this app basically offers a conduit to the podcast.
Skeptoid: for $1.99 this app basically offers a conduit to the Skeptoid podcast. Its layout and functionality is identical to the one above (and made by the same folks).

Making your own app
These last two apps point out that, basically, if you have a blog (or a podcast) for a small amount of money you can have an app. This is exactly what Answers in Genesis did when they made their app. Turns out, there is a service out there who provides software to turn you blog into an app. For a couple of hundred dollars, the AppMakr folks will turn your blog into an app and submit it for you into iTunes. The software seems pretty robust, so if you have a popular blog, there is no reason not to follow Swoopy, Derek, and Brian’s lead and make an app out of it. Maybe you can make a buck or two. Or you can follow the AIG model and make it free.

But what if you don’t want to make a conduit or just transform your blog. What if you want to make a real app? Well, thats what I wanted to do, so I’l tell you the process.

Well, this is more difficult and/or more costly.

You could learn to program it yourself. You need to buy a mac (you can get a mini for about $550, I got a macbook for about a grand. Then you need to drop about 100 bucks to become a developer. Then you get all the programming tools (no extra cost), and Apple’s developer website is filled with forums, sample code, and documentation to get you going. There is a lot there, so much that it is a little overwhelming.

You also need to learn objective C. That’s the programming language that is used for iPhones (and Macs in general). There are a number of good books on the subject, plus Stanford has a podcast in itunesU that is their entire course on iPhone programming.

This is the path I started down. But man, I ended up not really having time (work, landlording, two kids, two dogs, you get the picture). So what do we do when we can’t do a job ourselves? We pay someone.

There is an excellent, but rustic, website called rentacoder.com (there is another one, I think, called guru.com, but I didn’t evaluate that one). On this website you can describe what you want to do, and have people bid on it. I used it for Skeptic’s Bingo, but I also used it for having someone make Excel macros for me for work. It’s an excellent service.

However, if you want to make a full application and put it up for bid at rentacoder.com, I STRONGLY suggest that you take the time and come up with a detailed software specification (you can google that to see an example) that fully describes the app, each screen and what each button does. This way, when people bid on it, they really know what they are getting into. Prices?

Well let’s say, I had someone in Russia doing Excel macros that had to collate data and graph things in a flexible manner and that cost between 30 and 80 dollars. Skeptics Bingo cost about 3000 dollars for an american programmer, and the he didnt do ANY of the content or artwork. This is why I’m charging a buck, I hoping to recoup that cost, and be able to pay a graphic designer to clean up the app so it doesnt look like a left handed engineer made it.

My programmer did the bingo functionality, the flexibility for me to expand the program myself (so I can add new bingo games like vaccines and CAM), he did the zooming functionality and the in-app purchase.

One other difficulty in doing this yourself is that due to iTunes store security there is a lot of barely intelligible stuff you got to do to your program to get it on iTunes. I did this part myself because I want to update it in the future without the help of someone else, but you can get the programmer to get it in the app store himself. Someone who does it often probably will have an easier time. To do it yourself, you must have the dev kit, create things like Provisioning Profiles, set stuff up in the AppStore conduit (called Connect) and a number of other steps.

Then you have to get past their approval folks. Yak! This is where I stumbled a lot. Sometimes I screwed up, sometimes it was because they didn’t understand how to use the software (even though the help button really spells it out).

That’s a lot of work! Why bother?
It is a lot of work, time, and expense to design a game or utility. There is no doubt (unless you are just "Appifying" your blog). So why? Well my opinion is that I would really like to see more skeptical applications on iPhones, iTouches, androids, and iPads. It puts a vast array of information in your pocket, in a format that is better than using the internet. It’s more concentrated, more accessible if done right.

Further, perhaps some of you creative skeptics can make something fun?

I also challenge you to look through the AppStore. Never mind the unending versions of bible apps. Never mind the Answers in Genesis app I mentioned above. Check these out:

There are 5 acupuncture apps.
There are 5 traditional chinese medicine apps.
There are 4 chiropractic apps.
There are at least 2 "Natural Cures" Apps.

Taking a look at the "health & fitness" category yields many, many apps filled with utter nonsense. Some of them claim to heal you by putting hte iPhone near you! It would be nice to see some more rationally based apps out there that have similar keywords so they show up in similar searches, are based on actual scientific information, and are 1 dollar or free.

What is Skeptical Software?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I hate to admit this, but I really don’t know. I have not come to a good conclusion of what it might be. Skeptic’s bingo is obviously software geared to the skeptical community. The Mad Scientist mentioned Aardvark (vark.com). Sometimes you get a good answer (like I asked what the 3 best arguments for creationism were, and all three answers was "There isn’t any", but when I asked about vaccines schedules, I got a bunch of hocus pocus).

It would be great if you could focus your questions to particular groups of people with that. you can crete a circle of friends, but I would rather ask a cloud of christians a specific question, or ask a cloud of epidemologists a questions rather than just putting out to a general cloud.

So, I guess a source that lets you retrieve information efficiently could certainly reside within the bounds of whatever "Skeptical Software" is. But is that it? Any topic that includes scientific investigation? Consumer protection? What about new topics that arise? What about the podcast and blog conduits?

Further, as skeptics we like to analyze and take apart problems and situations looking for "reality" or how something really works. This same characteristic is embedded into RPG games like World of Warcraft when you take down boss monsters. It a puzzle, it takes trial and error, it takes observation. But would I say that WoW is skeptical software? No, while some of the skills may arise, I certainly wouldn’t put it in that category.

Well, whatever Skeptical Software is, I have two or three more ideas that I would like to implement, some of them are iPhone apps, and some of them are web based information sources. I hope my app get bought enough that I can pursue these other avenues of developing skeptical software, I hope you come along for the ride.

Update:

Well now this is interesting.

this week Apple told Mobile Roadie, a company that provides templates for clients to build iPhone apps, that the App Store would no longer accept “cookie-cutter” apps — apps made with app-generating services that do little more than reproduce websites or pull RSS feeds from the internet.

Looks like apple feels similarly to Skeptico in the comments below.  That is quite a blow to those companies making blog conversion software. There is another interesting comment in that article.

If you are like me, you use your smartphone a lot. I use mine for engineering work, snapshots and photo editing, tweeting, reading pdfs while on the road, listening to podcasts….oh and its a phone too.

I am pretty enamored with the state of these devices, growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, the common iPhone, blackberry or Android phone really seem like a device from the future. As you probably know, there are well over 100 thousand apps for the iphone (and most of them are junk, really).

Well it’s time to get some real skeptical software on these machines! One message I took away from the last NECSS conference, was from Rebecca Watson. A great time to help spread the skeptical viewpoint of various subjects is to go to presentations by creationists, antivaxxers, and so forth, and ask sharp questions. You aren’t trying to convince the presenter, that person is probably already lost (you’d know this if you ever watched Jenny McCarthy flail around defending her ridiculous ideas about vaccinations). However the audience is generally a little more prone to being jarred if someone pointedly makes remarks that are logical or data driven refutations of items that were presented. If you are anything like me, you feel better having actual data in your hand, well here it is.

In this vein, I created a game for your iPhone. Skeptic’s Bingo. Its not a brilliant game. Its pretty obvious. But I have at least made something that you can use to pass the time during one of these lecture. However more importantly, it presents information about common tripe that is usually put forward in various areas like creationism, anti-vaxers (well thats coming next), and other areas (which I will add as time goes on).

The website for the game is here.

Mark the things that you have heard so you can come back to them later. Use the information provided to formulate a good question that puts the presenter on the spot. get out there and get good information into the heads of the people listening there with you.

At least I hope you will download the game, pay the measly dollar for access to the functionality that flips over the tiles for the information (this money will go toward the improvement of this game and the skeptical community).

And please, rate the program before angry creationists “pharyngulate” my reviews. Have you seen how many bibles there are in the app store?

Coming soon as updates to this app:
Vaccine Bingo
Refined Layout
List view of claims (as opposed to bingo board)
Psychic Bingo
CAM Bingo

Basically if people show interest in this app, I’ll get right on these items. Right now, I only have the evolution one.

I dont usually have a lot of crude language on this blog. But sometimes there is simply no other word that fits someone.

In case you haven’t been following the Shorty Awards (I never even heard of this thing). Both Dr. (cough) Mercola and Mark Adams from Natural News were ahead in the health section. The skeptic community got together and moved Dr. Rachie ahead. She is now winning both from this push but also from the fact that a huge number of the votes for both Mercola and Adams were fraudulent, i.e. Twitter accounts created to vote for them.

So Adams, loses first place, in fact got disqualified for this, and start whining, threatening lawsuit (please do), and finally launching the most uninformed and just plain old stupid post about the skeptic community.

I was going to take apart his post, but I have to admit that not only did Tom Foss beat me to it, but he wrote essentially what I would have.

Well I guess I could alway shoot at second worst with his utterly whiny facebook entry.

This overweight non-physician has arrogantly bashed nearly every alternative therapy and encourages reliance on drugs

I like shoveling snow.

Well, I don’t really like th actual act of shoveling, especially since the sidewalk in front of my building is so uneven. But I do like the opportunities shoveling snow affords me. Snow shoveling is a cheap, easy way to help out and maybe show you care.

For example, the building next to be is vacant. So no one really shovels there. When I am out there shoveling in front of my building I just look over to the next one and I imagine a little old lady or kid coming down the sidewalk there, slipping and falling and hurting themselves. I can’t stand the idea, so, I shovel that building.

I don’t get any extra credit. The owner isn’t there to thank me. The little old lady who didn’t fall down isn’t going to thank me and leave me with her estate after she passes. Nope, I just like the feeling I get when I have done something nice.

Some days, if the storm is real bad, I’ll go around and help two or three people dig out their cars. I get offered money, I get asked what I want. I tell them I don’t want anything, I just want them to help someone else out some time. Yeah, I saw the movie “Pay It Forward”. I think its a pretty good idea, even if the reality is that almost no one pays it forward.

Today, perhaps I went a little overboard. I shoveled my place, then I walked one block to the YWCA one block over and salted the icy patches. Then I walked another block over to clear out the sidewalk in front of a friend of mine who happens to be christian who is going through a tough time. I cleared out her sidewalk, salted it and built two snow heads (they sort of look like Sesame Street character heads) for the kids. I’m waiting to see if she claims that God gave her a gift.

The point is that you are already out there with a snow shovel. You are already bundled up. A little extra work goes a long way. It’s a great feeling to help someone out who really needed it.

Go forth and shovel.

There’s a couple of articles circling about (I like facebook for this, my friends post stuff they are concerned about and I get a little free pulse of the population) about high fructose corn syrup, which for the life of me, I can’t figure out why people consider it to the the bane of their existence.

Of all the sweeteners to worry about, a sweetener made out of naturally occurring molecules like fructose and glucose, seems hardly a problem, it should be falling neatly in the “its natural” category since both sugars are found naturally. But apparently, if you dont serve the sugars in their natural form (much like table sugar BTW) it becomes the bane of humanity and is the cause all of our health problems.

This attitude is evidenced by the media’s response to a recent study.

High Fructose Corn Syrup Proven to Cause Human Obesity! Proven! Proven I say!
Child diabetes blamed on food sweetener We have found the answer!
For the first time – Scientists Link Fructose to Obesity, Diabetes in HUMANS That right folks, for the first time ever, sugar has been linked to obesity. Who would have known?
Fructose: Cause Of Childhood Diabetes That’s right folks it’s THE cause
How Sweet It Isn’t: High Fructose Corn Syrup Proven to Cause Human Obesity Proven!

A little more reasoned approach came from Grist only after the author of the article got knocked in the head by one of the study’s authors.

I make a little fun because its a rare instance in science when something is actually proven to be so. Usually what we get is evidence for or against a hypothesis. That very evidence is usually recorded in probabilities. As we will soon see, this is also the case here.

Every one of these headlines references a single study that recently came out. As a responsible consumer of media information, who wants ot have an informed opinion onm this topic, it is your job to go to the source rather than just imbibe the predigested conclusions thrown at you by the advertising hungry media outlets.

Here it is.
Go read.
Then lets discuss.

Stanhope et al, rounded up 16 people (this makes this study extremely small) in a first of its kind study (which means the results of this study have yet to be verified or validated by anyone) which took a crack at evaluating the effects of one kind of sweetener over another. Its basically trying to get rid of the concern that we heard so often from the smoking lobby that results based on animal testing don’t necessarily apply to humans.

When you read the abstract, know that I am in the same position as you about all the sciency sounding multisyllabic words the get thrown around. I honestly have no idea what they mean, nor will I go get a medical degree to find out. More on this later.

Let’s start with the basics. Skeptoid has already gone over a lot of the hullabaloo of High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS), so I wont repeat a lot of it here.

I found this list of sweeteners and their relative sweetness. I checked the numbers around the internet and found it to be accurate. Let me just put out some of the important ones here:

In this chart, sucrose, which is table sugar is given a ‘sweetness’ of 1. You can see that glucose is less sweet than table sugar. Fructose is 1.75 times more sweet. The artificial sweeteners are amazingly sweet, which is why they are in low calorie drink, you need very very little of them to achieve the same sweetness (never mind that I think they taste like crap).

Glucose, fructose and sucrose are naturally occurring sugars. sucrose is a molecule that is simply a glucose molecule bonded weakly to a fructose molecule. When you eat table sugar, the first bond to go is the one holding these together, leaving your stomach with fructose and glucose separately, in about equal propostions.

• Corn syrup is pure glucose, it is not as sweet as table sugar.
• High fructose corn syrup is called that because it actually has fructose in it
• Glucose is a chemical you body readily converts giving you a blast of energy (or conversion to fat)
• Fructose is an atomically identical molecule that your body does not digest readily, giving you a more sustained flow of energy (or conversion to fat)
• Fructose, in pure form, is not a sweetener that we use in any product.
• High fructose corn syrup comes in a variety of blends of glucose and fructose. The most common blend HFCS-55 is about 55% fructose, matching the sweetness and calories of table sugar. It will deliver about the same amount of fructose to your body as table sugar does once you have ingested it.

OK, I think we have enough background to discuss this paper now.

Lets start witht he sugar intake: from the study

To assess the relative effects of these dietary sugars during sustained consumption in humans, overweight and obese subjects consumed glucose- or fructose-sweetened beverages providing 25% of energy requirements for 10 weeks

Since the caloric intake of glucose and fructose is about the same (4 kcal/gram – note kcal is what we call “calories”), these folks drank beverages with about the same amount of sweetener, in grams. That means that one group had drinks that were over twice as sweet as the other group.

The population of the study were all similar in size, weight, and other aspect. There is no contention there. All the participants were an average age of around 54. There were some slight differences between the males and females, but these were matched pretty well in both groups. One of the groups (male, fructose) had a significantly lower starting LDL level, but that may not matter with respect to the results, lets see.

We’ll just accept the procedure, although if I really doubted the veracity of the study, which I don’t, this would also be something to delve deeper into. The results after the 10 week period came in as follows:

• No differences in blood pressure between the two groups
• Both groups gained a similar amount of weight (slightly more for glucose)
• Both groups gained a similar amount of body fat (again, the glucose groups scored higher)
• Both groups gained a similar amount in waist circumference (Fructose winning here but by very little)

These facts are extremely important when trying to assess the veracity of a hypothesis like “fructose causes obesity).

The main differences, and they are significant, is in where the fat appeared. The fructose group showed significantly more abdominal fat. Plus the fructose group showed far higher amounts of LDL cholesterol (the bad one), and a variety of other things that are bad for you. Again most of this list is beyond my knowledge, but I accept the conclusion that most of the bad actors here are higher in the fructose group.

So lets be clear here: there is no doubt that pure fructose is not a good or healthy sweetener. It is well known that glucose and fructose are different molecule that are metabolized differently, by different mechanisms, with excess energy stored differently. This study neither contradicts this data, nor does it provide any evidence that sweeteners the combine both glucose and sucrose are any different from one another. This study is not the one that came to any of these conclusions first. There is a large body of evidence supporting this. This study weaned out some specific responses that the body has when overfed these sweeteners and proposed a metabolism model for them.

The authors themselves explain that they did not study sweeteners as they are used in our food:

Foods and beverages in the US are typically sweetened with sucrose (50% glucose and 50% fructose) or high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which is usually 45%–58% glucose and 42%–55% fructose, rather than pure glucose or fructose.

The authors have also previously reported that they have not found a difference in the response to the sweeteners that are actually consumed by the public.

We have reported in a short-term study that the 23-hour postprandial TG profiles in male subjects consuming 25% energy as HFCS (55% fructose) or sucrose were elevated to a degree similar to that observed when pure fructose–sweetened beverages were consumed.

So where is the evidence, as the media articles claimed, that this study has something to do with HFCS and childhood obesity?

This study says nothing about childhood obesity since all participants were an average of 54 years old.
This study says nothing about the use of HFCS since it only studied intake of pure glucose and pure fructose
This study says nothing about the superiority of table sugar or honey to high fructose corn syrup since none of these sweeteners were tested, alone or against each other.

Lets look at the TimesOnline article since that was the first one out:

Scientists have proved for the first time that a cheap form of sugar used in thousands of food products and soft drinks can damage human metabolism and is fuelling the obesity crisis

No, they did nothing of the sort. They showed that pure fructose, with the exact same caloric intake as pure glucose provide similar gain in weight. They showed that there are differences in metabolic response to sweeteners in a form that on one currently consumes.

It [fructose] has increasingly been used as a substitute for more expensive types of sugar in yoghurts, cakes, salad dressing and cereals. Even some fruit drinks that sound healthy contain fructose

Couldnt be more wrong. HFCS is substituting sucrose, which has the same amount of fructose in it. “Natural” fruit drinks (whatever that means) ought to have fructose in it, since fructose occurs naturally in fruit.

researchers at the University of California who conducted the trial, said the levels of weight gain among the fructose consumers would be greater over the long term

Unless the TimesOnline interviewed them and failed to provide quotation marks and source, this is simply a baseless claim and not in the study at all.

Fructose bypasses the digestive process that breaks down other forms of sugar. It arrives intact in the liver where it causes a variety of abnormal reactions, including the disruption of mechanisms that instruct the body whether to burn or store fat

This may be true, so what? No one eats pure fructose as a sweetener. Its completely irrelevant.

what is going on here? A huge logical fallacy called equivocation. Fructose is bad in high quantities, therefore high fructose corn syrup is bad in any quantity. They are simply not the same thing, and as I have pointed out, there is no reason to believe that HFCS would do anything different in your body than table sugar would.

Now let’s check out the alternet article:

We finally have the smoking corn cob, as it were: the studyprocessed-food foes have been waiting for, indicating that highfructose corn syrup may be the cause of the huge upswing in childhood obesity and diabetes

I dont really know anything about alternet, but if this is how they put together their information, I think we can pretty much discount anything they say. This is a digestion of a predigested article. They dont link to the study, they link to the times article! the is no smoking gun here, there is no evidence to support the idea the HFCS alone, has anything more to do with obesity than sugar does.

The rise in childhood diabetes and obesity roughly corresponds to the period of time in which food processors started using high fructose corn syrup with such prevalence.

And here we have out second largest logical fallacy of the day: Correlation-causation fallacy. Know what? Obesity also corresponds to the increased used of smartphones, what is your point? It’s not the HFCS, its the calories. Average caloric intake of american has increased year over year since the 70’s. It doesnt matter where you get your calories from, its how many you have. It especially doesnt matter since, and I sound like a record here, HFCS has the same amounts of fructose and glucose and table sugar.

Further, this study says nothing about childhood anything.

But this new finding is the first involving humans, and its results point to a different truth: high fructose corn syrup can actually damage human metabolism.

Bzzt. Sorry, it specifically does not say that. It says nothing about high fructose corn syrup, this is what happens when you get your information predigested from someone else who is trying to make headlines.

The control group of volunteers on the same diet, but with glucose sugar replacing fructose, did not have these problems.

Fine, but both groups got equally fatter… which is what obesity is. In fact, the glucose folks scored higher there.

Here is the rub on the whole study, the part that gets me the worst with all this nonsense reporting. HFCS is sweeter than glucose. Twice as sweet. If we banned sweeteners with fructose in it, then all we would have left are artificial sweeteners, glucose, and some sweeteners that are even less sweet than glucose.

People don’t care if its fructose or glucose in the cookies and soda. They crave the sweetness or the taste that the sweetness makes. If you get rid of the fructose, then you have to put in twice the calories to get the same sweetness with glucose. Even if we just used sucrose, you would still need 75% more sugar and calories to acheive the same sweetness.

Wanna see obesity? Lets try that experiment.

* I was unable to find an exact energy count for fructose, but most sources said 4 calories, virtually the same as glucose and sucrose

I find winter solstice to be an extremely uplifting day, so we celebrate it. To me, it feels like the weight of the long nights and short days and cold weather gets lifted off of me because we turn the corner towards spring. I like it a lot.

This mood gets me into the giving mood. So a couple of years ago I started listing secular charities and compiled a list. Sadly, for me, this year I was unable to refresh it. I kept putting it off and now I am pretty swamped with work (I have not been home for any decent amount of time for 3 weeks), and a skeptical project I am working on. So while I have intended to redesign the list to make it easier to read and navigate, I fear I must simply refer you to the old post, much like I did last year.

PLEASE add your favorite secular charities in the comments section! If any links are dead, please report them. I will get around to doing a real refresh before next year! I promise.

Here is the list of secular charities.

I saw this headline today at Discovery News.

CHILDREN’S SWINE FLU VACCINE RECALLED

Uh oh. Is it an outbreak of the dreaded Guillain-Barre syndrome? Is it high levels of dreaded toxins in the vials? Is it that they killed too many fetus’ to get the serum? Are children dropping off the table dead after they get the shot? Are there now masses of people who have to walk backwards to get anywhere from strong cases of dystonia?

No, this is why I like our system with all its warts. People check that stuff is working as they expect. In this case, Sinofi-Pasteur, the maker of the recalled live virus nasal sprays, recalled the vaccines because, for a reason not understood (yet), the strength of the vaccine drops after it leaves their facilities (since its a live virus, couldn’t it just be that the virus is dying for some reason?). But, they actually checked. Any CAM people checking that their stuff meets their claims before and after the supplements or exotic berry juices leave the plant? Any homeopaths, checking the “strength” of their dilutions before and after the water leaves their facilities? (lol, I can see that, “Oh good, still looks like pure water!”)

I have not seen anything from the fear mongerers yet over at Natural News or Age of Autism. I’ll keep an eye out.

I like R&D magazine. I get little technology blurbs from them every day. 9 times out of 10 I see some new cool nanoscale idea. Some new sensor, some new actuator. If you are a high tech junkie, beyond the latest car stereo or lego system I highly recommend the daily newsletter. Its a quick read, you mentally throw out most of it, and take in 1 or tow goodies for the day.

But alas, I found this article.

Here is an early paragraph:

In contrast to "every man for himself" interpretations of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychologist and author of "Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life," and his fellow social scientists are building the case that humans are successful as a species precisely because of our nurturing, altruistic and compassionate traits.

When I read that, I had so many thoughts at once my brain started vibrating.

• Most often I hear about how darwinism leads to socialism. And yet here they claim that darwinism is pure free market.
• Darwin never, ever claimed “every man for himself”, it was always about populations.
• Never mind the fact that this is hardly a new understanding of evolution

However the rest of the article is an interesting read. Sadly I don’t have the resources (time mostly) to follow up on all the claims in the article.  I realize tha thte first paragraph was probably just intended to light a fire for the rest of the article. But still I would have written something more like:

Contrary to the layman’s interpretation of evolution, there are wide swaths of research that show that some of the success of the human race has sympathy and altruism to thank for it. But until recently, we have not understood much of the actual physiological mechanisms for it. Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychologist and author of "Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life," and his fellow social scientists have provided some new insight into these traits.

Or something like that…

Do you really think this is real?

How many times have you thought about what the result would be from a different set of choices? How do you know that there isn’t another you somewhere thinking about what would have happened if he or she had made the choices that you actually did?

How do you know you are real and your experiences are real?

Take the red pill and start a journey that explores your current experiences and sets out new choices for you to make and relish and relive. At each new stage, feel your new experience flow within you, let your choices at each stage be honest and inquisitive. You will be given new pills at each stage.

Or you can claim that you are fine, that you have no need or desire to explore new experiences in detail. You simply want information handed to you in bulk, with no desire to fully experience the color and exposure to things that you may or may not already know. For this, the blue pill is for you.

CHOOSE

In case you didn’t get it: take the Red Pill, look for comments by me for links to other posts for this skeptic circle. When there are no comments the circle is over

This video has been making the rounds.

so I have two quick comments then a present.

1) Dear awesome student. You are awesome and there are many people in the blogosphere who would have loved to have been you for those few minutes.
2) Dear fucking trumpet player. Fuck you, you fucking fuck

Anyway, on the pharyngula comments about this video, one man, DorkMan, transcribed the video to text. I beleive he is a masochist. Anyway, via Dorkman, I give you the transcription:

Female Student: [Unintelligible] saying, “Origin of the Species! Go evolution!” So, when somebody —
Kirk: [Unintelligible]
FS: Yeah, you did, I heard you. And I was like, “What? Kirk Cameron’s believes in evolution?” Are you being ironic or –?
Kirk: No, I didn’t say “go evolution,” I took a picture and I said “Everyone say ‘Darwin’!” And I said “Darwin!”
FS: Oh, okay.
Kirk: I did say that.
FS: Okay. I’m sorry. But that’s not important. Anyways, so when a passerby is getting that book, and they don’t know about you, they haven’t seen your videos, and they don’t know who you are, they think, “Oh, okay, this is the book,” so when they read it, they’re not aware that the information is coming from a group that has a special interest in dissuading people from evolution.
Kirk: Okay. Okay, fair enough.
FS: It’s like hidden propaganda. Which you, like — atheists groups would never, like, hand out the Bible saying, like, “This is not true and this is all the scientific information” —
Male Student 1: I think you could have been more honest if [unintelligible].
Kirk: (to Female Student) Can I respond to what you’re saying?
Cameraman: (to MS1) Say it louder.
MS1: I think it would have been more honest you had just distributed the introduction by itself —
Kirk: I — I heard you earlier. (to FS) So, here’s my thought. I used to be — used to be an atheist, and studied evolution, and the Darwinian, the Neo-Darwinian [unintelligible], to the point where I’m, I’m convinced that it is not science, that Darwinism is atheism masquerading as science. That’s —
FS: Darwin wasn’t an atheist, actually. He was really hesitant to publish his work because he knew that it would go against the beliefs of, you know, the church.
Cameraman: And I kind of feel that’s undermining the faith of people who do accept evolution and who are Christian.
Kirk: (ignoring Cameraman, to FS) Well, why do you believe that?
FS: Because he has journals and because, like, you know, he took a long time — it wasn’t ’til Wallace said, like, “Hey, check this out!” and he’s like “Oh, boy,” you know, “I should probably publish what I’m doing.”
Kirk: Okay, have you heard… Okay. Here’s, here’s, here’s the other important…um…(lengthy pause) I believe that Darwin was absolutely…that the end game was to make God…was to remove God from…the, the worldview of… I think that that was his end game. Um. And if you read — I don’t know if you’ve read the introduction in here, yet.
FS: No, I have not yet. But I will.
Kirk: You’ll find things you maybe haven’t read before.
FS: I probably have never read what you wrote, no.
Kirk: In my, my… I think that it is…very, uh… dishonest, and extremely —
Trumpet: “When The Saints Go Marching In”
Kirk: — for, for…for teachers, in the name of science, to push an atheistic worldview. Which — and they use Darwin in order to do it.
FS: I don’t understand how… you’re combining atheism — because not all scientists are atheists, like, I would not say I’m an atheist.
Kirk: Yes, alright, but —
FS: But I, I, I…
Male Student 2: Francis Collins.
FS: Yeah.
Cameraman: I bet he knows about that.
FS: I don’ t understand [unintelligible]. Why is science an atheistic endeavor? I don’t understand that.
Kirk: Okay, let me —
FS: I don’t understand the problem.
Kirk: Why is science an atheistic endeavor?
FS: Yeah, and why is — particularly, um —
Kirk: You have to ask [unintelligible] of atheism being taught in the science classes to answer that question. I mean, look at Dawkins, for instance, look at Dawkins —
FS: I love Dawkins.
Kirk: …okay, so —
FS: But other science —
Kirk: But if you look at those who are the loudest proponents for, uh, Darwinism, and evolution, you’ll find that they are absolutely on the mission to demonstrate that God is irrelevant and doesn’t exist. And they’re atheists.
FS: What Dawkins argues is that God and science should not be in the same argument, because science is based on evidence, whereas religion is based on faith. And so —
Kirk: So is Darw —
FS: They don’t explain…
Kirk: But Darwinism is extremely based on faith, not on evidence.
FS: Not really, it’s based on a lot of evidence. He made, he made assertions that were based on faith, he didn’t have evidence for yet, but he had a lot of evidence. Later on now, scientists are, you know, doing research. And in fact, current scientific thought doesn’t accept, uh, plain Darwinian evolution. In fact now, there’s like a lot of different, uh…
Cameraman: It expanded over the years.
Kirk: Sure.
FS: It expanded, so —
Cameraman: Especially with genetics and that sort of thing.
FS: Yeah. So Darwin was the basis, but it is not, uh, what actual evolutionary biologists, you know, uh… go with. And in science, there’s no like “Okay, this is the FINAL ABSOLUTE TRUTH,” it’s always changing because —
Kirk: Correct.
FS: You know, all the evidence either against it, or that should show different things.
Kirk: So, what… so, what — I understand that — so, so I’m pro-science, I love science.
FS: Why not this specific branch of it? Because —
Kirk: Which branch are you referring to?
FS: I’m referring to biology.
Kirk: I love biology.
FS: Except the part where it says that — do you believe in micro-evolution?
Kirk: Are we talking about, um, adaptation?
FS: Yeah, that’s why you get a different vaccine every year because —
Kirk: Yes.
FS: — you know — okay.
Kirk: Yes, but to extrapolate that into speciation and macro-evolution by saying it takes lots of time —
FS: No, not if you accept, not if you accept that it does take — okay, so if you believe in micro-evolution, you believe that it continues happening, it just doesn’t happen in like, two minutes and then it’s done, it continues happening. The Earth is not six thousand years old, and even if it were six thousand years old, in that span of time, continuous micro-evolution would have added up to something, right? Even if you believe the literal Biblical, uh, idea that the Earth is not old, it would’ve still added up. Not to what we have here…
Kirk: Do, do you — I understand what you’re saying, [unintelligible] I think that they do change over time, but we don’t, but we don’t see speciation as a result of adaptation. We don’t see —
FS: Because we don’t have enough time. And in fact they are —
Kirk: Okay, but you have to, but you then have to concede, though, that that’s a presupposition that you’re assuming that it happened, even though we don’t have enough time to observe it.
FS: Well, it’s not — it’s because of geological evidence. What happens in science, is you bring different branches of knowledge together, and it’s not, it’s not isolated. You don’t just say, like, “Okay, biology proves it.” Because biology doesn’t prove anything. There’s evidence that there’s a biological process, but combining that with geology, physics, and —
MS2: Astronomy.
FS: Other sciences — astronomy, yeah.
MS2: They all agree.
FS: Then you, you combine that knowledge, right? And that’s how you think, like, “Okay, if this is happening now, and if we know that the Earth has been, you know, this old and this, like, many changes have happened” — all of this knowledge, then you — it, it is a safe, logical assumption to make that conclusion. For instance say, like, “Micro-evolution has been happening for this long, and it’s added up.” Whereas with, uh, a belief in a certain faith, particularly in this case the, the Christian persuasion, all the evidence that you have is based on the Bible, and that would be circular logic, because you think, “I believe in the Bible because the Bible says it’s written by God.” (draws a circle in the air) It doesn’t — there’s no outside body of evidence, there, there’s no conjecture —
Kirk: That’s not true.
FS: What other body —
Kirk; History, geology, cosmology, biology…
FS: So, okay, so history —
Cameraman: Do you mind if I ask you a question about geology, really quick?
Kirk: Hang on a second.
Cameraman: Okay, sure.
FS: How does history disprove evolution?
Kirk: How does history disprove evolution?
FS: Yes.
Kirk: Well, I didn’t say history disproves evolution, I said that history —
FS: Okay. Then give me another line of evidence other than the Bible that disproves evolution.
Kirk: Um, I would say evolution disproves — D, Dar — I would — (pauses) Evolution, talking about, we’re talking about speciation, I would say that, that…that Darwin’s theory, nor — and ANY theory — does not sufficiently, uh, account for speciation, apart from the existence of God. You don’t find the fossil record, you don’t find —
FS: Okay, what about the difference between bonobos and chimpanzees? Which are very similarly related, they just have —
Kirk: I’m not familiar with, what?
FS: Okay, bonobos are essentially chimpanzees, except they’re smaller, and they’re more, uh, friendly with each other. Whereas chimpanzees are, like, very aggressive —
[END OF VIDEO]

Thanks awesome woman, Thanks Awesome Dorkman.

I saw these news blurbs about a man in Belgium who allegedly was awake for 23 years although the doctors thought he was in a coma. This story brought so many thoughts ot my head I though I would try to get them down.

• I have a living will that tells my loved ones to pull the plug if I go in a vegetative state
• I think we are going to see more and more stories about medicine going wrong in countries with socialized health care
• This sort of thing give more inflated, uncouched ammunition to CAM practitioners
• I’m not convinced that this guy is actually saying anything.

Living Wills and Vegetative states
I am an engineer, not only by trade but “by life”. When I see things that are cool I want to know how they work. But more importantly, I get an large amount of joy when I build something, write something, or perform something. I love life, I love my abilities and to use them (even if I bitch and moan sometimes during the process). My biggest fear in life, is to come out of a long coma, which unlike in the movies, people do not come out of the same way they went into. It is crippling. You only need to look at the video above.

It’s not like losing a hand, or an eye. I could probably deal with that (both hands would be extremely debilitating to me though). Its an all over muscular loss. I simply do not want to live like that. And no, hearing about the one or two people who not only come out of a long coma but also regain mobility and speech does not provide any comfort to me when that is the extreme exception.

Socialized Medicine
We’ve already seen it from Fox in some respect when they did some ridiculous reporting about how The Netherlands are in a state of anarchy, reveling in a mire of smut and drugs, implying that this is what we can expect if those damn liberals get in charge. I expect we will see more and more of isolated cases where medicine went wrong (as if that has anything to do with how the medicine is paid for) on the news as we move towards, you know, a new healthcare system that is also not socialized.

Strengthening CAM
I also bet we are going to see cases like this used to strengthen the canard of “Doctors don’t know everything”. You see, the “logic” goes like this, if doctors screw up somewhere on the planet, then homeopathy works. Isn’t that clear as day? Take a look over at NaturalNews or HuffPo in the next few days, I have little doubt that this case will be made.

Is he really writing?
Before I actually read any of the articles about this case, I saw a few tweets from Michael Shermer.

So, I thought “What is Michael yammering on about?” So I saw the video above. What the hell? Is everyone credulous? Would it have been so offensive or so unethical to actually put some headphones on the woman moving that mans hand so we could determine if this is real or not.

I’m not saying that the guy is not awake, I’m not saying he didn’t suffer for 23 years. I’m not a doctor, I didn’t diagnose him, I haven’t seen any of the data suggesting he is not in a coma. I’m saying that it’s bullshit that he is typing out these words, that fast. Isn’t it just as unethical to force words down his throat in the form of typing things he may not actually be saying?

I do wish some modicum of skepticism would enter the media the first time, and not at the end of weeks of hype.

New Skeptics Circle is up at Beyond The Short Coat

Its simple but there is a lot of good reading in there! Include one from yours truly! Have a blast!

The next Skeptics Circle is right here at Effort Sisyphus!

UPDATE (December 1): I am afraid that I will be unavailable to work on this tomorrow. So I have to close this circle for submissions now. Sorry if you were trying to pop out one last entry, but have strength! The next circle is only 2 weeks away.

I’m writing this post because there is a lot of hoopla about vaccinations right now and I think one more anecdote to the pile of anecdotes out there about vaccinations is important.

My daughter, Bean (yeah, that’s not her real name), is going to be three really soon and I need to go into her history a bit to really be able to delineate her vaccination story effectively.

Bean was born about three years ago to two of the most loving parents on the planet, if I don’t say so myself. To this day I’m amazed at the changes your body and brain go through when you have a kid. I was always the kind of guy that thought kids were something my sister should have, I now have completely reversed that position.

Its amazing to me how you can love someone so much that just cries, needs to be fed, burps, pukes, pisses and poops. But you do, and each week that passes, I love her more and more. Bean learned to walk a little later than average, but not much later, 13 months. But she learned some basic sign language at 8 months (“more” was her first signed word).

Our household has 2 languages in it, I’m an English speaker trying to learn French. My wife is French who speaks perfect English. We decided that I would talk to Bean in English and she would talk to her in French.

With the signing and the dual languages we expected her to start speaking late and she did. But in time we started to realize that she still wasn’t speaking even after allowing for some extra time. There was a word here or there, but she was way behind in speaking. The inability to communicate lead to temperament issues and the all out tantrums were both common and severe. As new parents we had trouble differentiating between normal toddler tantrums and this. But looking at the pace of other kids, we slowly realized that Bean was behind the curve.

We further noted extreme discomfort in social situations. She did a little better with adults, but when it was other kids she would be very flustered and usually end up in a tantrum. Its so hard to see someone you love that much get so upset by normal social interactions that other kids are actually having fun with.

We also noticed that she was rarely smiling or happy. She didnt giggle like other little girls not near as often.

In time we got child therapists. New York State has a great program where therapists come to your house to help your child get up to speed. We have a speech therapist, an occupational therapist (not what it sounds like, the OC helps her negotiate new and different tactile senses), and a therapist to help with her social interactions. I really appreciate these programs available in my sate and now understand where some of the exorbitant tax money goes.

We also took Bean to a developmental psychologist. The autism word was thrown around, but it became clear that bean was probably not autistic. She was very ahead in some cognitive areas and very behind in others, but he didn’t think it was a case of autism.

I want to fast forward to the beginning of October now. Bean got her flu vaccination. It had thimerisol and everything. She had absolutely no physical reactions to it whatsoever: no fever, no swelling, no pain. However since the shot there have been some huge changes in her.

Bean was able to start school since then. She can be in a group of 7 kids in good comfort. This is totally amazing. She has been really fun to be around, really explorative, points out lots of new things here at home, at school and at our weekend house. She can talk well enough that we generally understand what she wants to say although there is still some baby talk that comes out that is hard to understand. She laughs at funny stories or when we joke around. She still has tantrums when she doesn’t get her way, but they are rarely for random or unintelligible reasons anymore. Basically it feels like ever since we got the flu shot for her, she has become a normal child for her age.

Everything in this post is 100% true and accurate as far as I can remember it. I am also 100% sure that if I ask my wife, she will have a different chronology and describe the severity of different aspects of Beans personality differently, but not differently enough that we couldn’t ascribe her improvement to the flu vaccination. You’ll notice that I went ahead and gave credit to the vaccination for her improvement and not the months of work the therapists did.

But I know its not the flu vaccination, of course it isn’t, because there is no reason to think that it is, just like the other way. Just because something happens hours, days or weeks after a vaccination doesn’t necessarily mean that it was because of the vaccination itself. The cause and effect must specifically be studied. To date there is simply no good reason to fear vaccines unless you have allergies to eggs, or some familial history of negative reactions.

I understand how vaccinations work with your immune system. I learned it in high school and relearned it to be able to understand this so called controversy. I have heard the claims by antivaxxers and have read the responses of medical professions on each and every one of those claims even as goalposts move. I then went and checked the claims of the medical professionals. You know what? the people who actually do science and medicine as a living are far better at explaining why they are right, backing up their claims with references that actually confirm what they are saying and have far, far larger datasets that they draw on to show the veracity of their claims. That is part of the years of training that went into their education to be a medical professional. Folks like Kevin Trudeau, Jenny McCarthy, and JB Handley have never had to deal with that rigor and are completely unequipped to back up anything they say without misrepresentation, conspiracy theories, and ad hominem attacks. Their delusions are no more probable, no more explainable, and no more real than the idea that my daughters extreme cognitive improvement came from the flu vaccine.

I love my daughter. I love her to the point that stepping in front of a moving train for her seems like a tiny inconvenience. Part of my love for her is to show her immune system what the bad guys look like, so it can fight them without causing suffering for her.

Oh, and by the way, I didn’t start speaking until I was near three. No, I don’t think any delays she had were from her vaccinations.