Also, Karl Marx used a lot of run-on sentences

21 September 2009 — dan

It may say something about me that when I read this Global Post article about Scandinavian countries' prosecution of people who mutilate the genitals of their daughters, what I found most striking was the grammar.

The article contains this sentence:

Last year, at age 19, a Swedish court convicted the mother for those illegal acts, awarding the victim record demages.

Yes, "damages" is misspelled. What actually bothered me, though, was that this sentence contains what's known as a dangling modifier. And it's a really impressive example.

Usually, as Clive James points out here, a dangling modifier is just something like "at the age of eight, his father died in an accident". This stops your reading in its tracks until you figure out that the author meant that it was the father of an eight-year-old that died, not an eight-year-old father.

The Global Post example aims at that mistake, but manages to hit an even worse one. Literally, it says the Swedish court was 19 years old. So you apply your standard Dangling Modifier Corrector and conclude that the mother was the one who was 19 when she was convicted. And then you find you have to run the sentence through the de-dangler one more time, to get the correct interpretation that it was actually the girl who was "circumcised" who was nineteen years of age when her mother was convicted.

So this isn't just the usual dangling-modifier grammatical pothole. There are bamboo spikes in the bottom of it.

(Oh, and later in the article, there's "originally from Kenya where circumcision rates affect about 32 percent of the female population", which is also quite impressively confusing. I presume it meant to say that about 32% of Kenyan women are "circumcised" - that sorta-kinda lines up with this map from the Wikipedia article on the subject. But who knows?)

As I've said before, I only get really upset about misuse of language when a departure from Correct Usage damages the meaning of the words.

I find the American enthusiasm for calling Lego "Legos" irksome, but have no argument against it as far as meaning goes. But, to pick another oft-quoted example, the slide of the word "decimate" from meaning "kill one tenth of" to meaning "kill most of" is a damaging change. A modern writer will probably intend the second meaning, but you can't be certain - and people who read a contemporary account of the life of Napoleon that contains the word will have their comprehension impeded by the change.

You can't, of course, prevent the meaning of words from drifting. Relatively slow changes like the one affecting "decimate" aren't really a problem unless a word ends up with more than one meaning at the same time, and those different meanings cannot easily be discerned from context. Prescriptivist complaints about what a word "really" means are pointless if general usage says otherwise, and it's even sillier to complain about a word gaining numerous easily-distinguished meanings. English, like most other languages, is full of words that can mean several different things, but everybody still seems to be able to use words like "set" without difficulty.

Dangling modifiers can damage the meaning of the words, but usually don't. If someone was 30 years old when his father died in an accident, you could cruise right over a dangling-modifier account of the event and end up thinking the dad died at 30. Usually, though, the error is like one of the examples currently in the Wikipedia article about dangling modifiers: "As president of the kennel club, my poodle must be well groomed." After a brief double-take, you can see what that means; you don't have to try to work it out from context.

I think I need a new category for grammar problems like this. Down, I say, with lousy writing that can only sanely be interpreted one way, but which forces the reader to decode seemingly nonsensical statements, like the kennel-club one, before they can figure out what the writer actually meant.

(Since this post is completely off the topic of the actual article that triggered it, I invite you all to get back on that topic and have a big argument in the comments about all the wonderful ways in which people chop bits off of genitals. Look, I'll start it off: "Men don't have a clitoris at all, so obviously cutting the clitoris off your little girl is a great step forward in female equality!")

Posted in Language, Nerdery. 27 Comments »

It's never too late for SupCom eye candy

20 September 2009 — dan

Herewith, a promo video for the 4th Dimension mod for Supreme Commander:

(I think it's well worth getting the 214Mb AVI version.)

At first glance, this mod is just a particularly-well-done member of the "this game's OK, but it needs more humungous mecha" genre, but there's actually more to it than that. There's a version of 4th Dimension for the original Supreme Commander, but the current version requires SupCom and the the Forged Alliance expansion pack (which is sort of Supreme Commander v1.2).

If you ask me, SupCom is only becoming more attractive as it ages, for people like me who liked the original Total Annihilation (and, heck, Kingdoms too; Demigod is the SupCom engine's Kingdoms-equivalent). You can still reduce an arbitrarily powerful computer to one frame per second if you play a big enough game, but your standard four-person weekend LAN game is much more workable on current mass-market hardware than it was when SupCom was new, back in '07.

You can get SupCom and Forged Alliance together in the "Gold edition" pack, which is cheap on eBay. (Here's the same search on ebay.com.au).

Posted in Games, Nerdery. 6 Comments »

A queen among quacks

14 September 2009 — dan

I discovered yesterday that, early this month, Hulda Regehr Clark died.

In the same way that the Westboro Baptist Church and its astonishingly ghastly leader, Fred Phelps, are an excellent choice if you need an example of a religious organisation that pretty much nobody sane could like, so Hulda Clark was the archetypal example of an out-there quack. She wrote a number of books, which include The Cure for All Cancers, The Cure for HIV/AIDS and The Cure For All Diseases. And she was, so far as anyone can tell, quite sincere; unlike scam artists like Kevin Trudeau, Hulda really was telling us all how to cure every disease in the world, in her opinion.

But Clark was more than just a good example of a sincere quack. Fred Phelps is a raving loony with very little popular following, but Clark's similarly deranged ideas have attracted a surprising number of true believers, and a steady stream of desperate people heading to her clinic (relocated, after some unpleasantness, from the USA to Mexico...), to piss away the last of their money and/or life.

Hulda's ideas included a firm conviction that vast swathes of human disease are caused by liver flukes, and that the flukes can be killed by a little electrical "zapper" device of her own invention. Whereupon your nonresectable pancreatic cancer will go away. This very clear sort of objectively-provable cause and cure makes Clark's theories a useful example of whacko quackery; in order to believe Clark, you're required to be utterly ignorant of, or convinced of the invalidity of, fundamental elements of scientific medicine that've been around for at least a hundred years.

Orac of Respectful Insolence has put old Hulda pretty comprehensively to bed in his Requiem for a Quack, so I'll try not to ramble on too long about What This All Means and how it's another example of why critical thinking is important and yadda yadda yadda.

(I bought another couple of copies of Why People Believe Weird Things the other day. One is already earmarked for a young relative.)

As Orac says at the end of his post, and as many other people have said - where are the people Clark cured, if she ever cured anyone? There ought to be hundreds, maybe thousands, of people who were once gravely ill but are still alive and well today, because of her.

It's like faith healers. If they really are healing people of their lameness and diabetes and who knows what else, there ought to be tons of these healed people all over the place, happy to leap up on their de-withered and even re-grown legs and testify with all the wind their now-cancer-free lungs can deliver regarding the validity of their chosen televangelist, Christian Scientist or psychic surgeon.

But faith healers are famously reluctant to even keep lists of the people they've healed.

You'd think that healed people would be the very best candidates for the donations that so many faith healers seem so perpetually to need. But nope.

(There's an ingenious subversion of the follow-up idea, in which the faith healer solicits testimonial reports of healing miracles from followers, but carefully avoids the awkward process of seeing if the "healed" people even had the disease they reported in the first place, much less whether any real diseases are really cured.)

Hulda Clark had a neat solution to the tiresome problem of following up on her "cures".

The Cure for All Cancers has a bunch of "case histories" in it, you see, which include 103 people who allegedly had their cancer cured by Clark. The way she verified that a cure had taken place, though, was by a blood test for a growth factor which, according to Hulda, indicated the presence of the deadly-liver-flukes-that-cause-all-cancer in the patient's body.

If you tested positive for that growth factor, you had cancer, even if regular doctors couldn't find it.

(The majority of patients in Hulda's case studies were only diagnosed as having the disease by means of Hulda's unusual blood test.)

If you tested positive, and Hulda Zapped you, and you subsequently tested negative, you were now cancer-free, again regardless of what conventional medicine might think.

And since you were now definitely 100% cancer-free, there was no need for Hulda to waste her valuable time looking into five-year survival rates, or any of that other nonsense to which the brutal and chaotic practitioners of Conventional Oncology are reduced.

If a patient died of cancer a year after being cured by Hulda, after all, then it must have been because the liver flukes re-infected him! If Clark told other patients about this, all it'd do is fill them with unjustified uncertainty about the validity of the treatments which Clark knew, with absolute religious certainty, worked!

I think this is quite a succinct version of the impregnable circular logic that supports all sorts of weird beliefs.

UPDATE: According to Hulda's death certificate and her own Web site, the woman with the Cure for All Cancers, the Cure For All Advanced Cancers and the Cure for All Diseases did, indeed, die of cancer.

Clearly, this can only be another example of the terrible power of malicious animal magnetism.

Posted in Scams, Science, Strange Tales. 15 Comments »

Fuel scams: An Australian tradition

7 September 2009 — dan

Gerard Ryle is the Sydney Morning Herald journalist who did most of the work of exposing the Firepower fiasco (it was linking to Ryle's SMH articles about Firepower that got me tangled up in the whole thing).

Ryle was on the Radio National mini-show Ockham's Razor the other day; Robyn Williams called his book "riveting". (Unfortunately for Gerard's bank balance, that's Robyn Williams the Australian science journalist and host of Ockham's Razor, not Robin Williams the comedian and movie star.)

Ryle's paraphrasing his book in the Ockham's Razor piece (available as a text transcript and a less-than-15-minute podcast), but he hardly talks about Firepower at all, and isn't just trying to get you to buy the book. Instead, he gives some highlights of the long and miserable history of fuel-saving gadgets here in Australia. Even in just this one country, there have been several stops on this particular railway to nowhere.

It's not all pills, magnets and crystals, either. There's also that hardy perennial, the Miracle Engine.

Miracle Engines share with perpetual motion machines - and ordinary everyday automotive technology, come to think of it - the handy quality of being difficult for laypeople to understand. Especially if you make 'em complicated enough. There are plenty of unusual engine designs that actually do work quite well, after all; those workable engines provide useful cover under which bogus Miracle Engines can sneak up on the consumer. The Miracle Engines often don't look any less plausible to the average Joe, or even to the experienced mechanic, than a Wankel rotary - but they often don't work at all, let alone actually have the potential to revolutionise the whole field of automotive blah blah blah.

As with perpetual motion machines, Miracle Engines have been devised that contain every conceivable combination of rotors, pistons, opposed pistons, free pistons, swing pistons, shape-changing combustion chambers, exhaust turbines, planetary gears and a whole Victorian engineering textbook worth of other mechanisms and linkages.

Miracle Engines have the great advantage that, if a misguided-engineer or plain-old-scam-artist goes to the trouble of making a not-quite-working model of one, nobody can easily test his claims and show them to be bollocks. Sellers of magic fuel pills have to make sure people never actually test their products, but Miracle Engine inventors can just keep sucking up "development" money from investors and quite plausibly string said investors along, explaining that there's still a niggling little problem with the panendermic semi-boloid stator slots, but that's all that still stands in the way of the 500-horsepower 200-mile-per-gallon automobile you've been promised, and it's nothing another hundred thousand dollars can't solve!

First in Ryle's short-list of Aussie fuel-saving ventures is the essentially useless Sarich orbital engine (I was going to edit in some links from one or both of those little Wikipedia articles to the radio-show transcript, but then I detected a certain similarity between the two already, which suggests that such a reference would be circular...). The Orbital company still exists, selling a fuel-injection system that seems to have been the only part of the Sarich engine that actually worked. (Ralph Sarich himself cashed out years ago, but the legend of his engineering genius and the automotive-industry conspiracy that kept the poor man down will never die. Note that the definition of "poor man" here includes "a personal worth of several hundred million dollars". Almost makes me wish I could invent an engine that doesn't work.)

And then there was Rick Mayne's "Split-Cycle Technology", another miracle engine that amounted to nothing. Mayne had the balls to enlist Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs to help promote his technology; this sort of grand cheeky gesture seems to be common in the automotive miracle business.

Splitcycle.com.au has been around for more than ten years now; it was promising great things in 1999, then passed to the ownership of someone unimpressed with Rick Mayne who promised a "Re-Emergence of SplitCycle Engine Technology" in 2005. But now the site is sadly reduced, to what appears to be an empty server.

(Is the Michael Papp who wrote that splitcycle.com.au editorial the same Michael Papp who went on to sell "Spark EV" electric vehicles that didn't, if you want to get all nitpicky and technical about it, exist? Apparently, as of June this year, the Spark EV story was due to "get very interesting in the next month or so", and the electric cars did too exist, and all the mean kids who made fun of Michael Papp and Spark EV would be so, so sorry. As of September '09, spark-ev.com is completely gone.)

A little bit further into Ryle's tale of woe we encounter "Save The World Air Inc", which offered a little fuel-saving nasty-emission-eliminating gizmo allegedly invented by Pro Hart, of all people.

Regular readers may remember Save The World Air from this post, in which I started out thinking that a new "electrorheology" fuel-saver idea actually didn't look like just another textbook scam, since it was plainly presented with all the information necessary for other researchers to attempt to replicate the alleged findings. But then I noticed that the gadget had been licensed to Save The World Air, which dropped it straight back into the "obvious scam" category, if you ask me. And lo, here we are a year later, and electrorheological combustion enhancement ain't changed the world yet.

Ryle couldn't do a piece like this without mentioning Aussie racing legend Peter Brock and his religious belief - maintained right up until his 2006 death in a racing accident - in the "Energy Polarizer". The Polarizer added crystals to magnets, to allegedly achieve the usual wonderful things. (The only measurable effect the Energy Polarizer ever actually had was on Brock's relationship with Holden.)

Perhaps, one day, all this nonsense will have faded away like patent medicines - but I doubt it'll happen soon. Even if we're all driving electric cars that're charged by too-cheap-to-meter solar or fusion power - or being driven around in autonomous electric cars - there'll still be carpetbaggers selling magnetic crystals that're meant to improve motor power.

With any luck, though, the sheer size of the stinking jet of bloody phlegm that sprayed all over Australia when the Firepower boil was finally lanced will at least slightly dampen enthusiasm for the next couple of fuel-pill scams.

In other Firepower-related news which I have shamelessly scraped from Gerard Ryle's blog, there's been some pleasing developments in the life of the delectable John Finnin, former Austrade official, former CEO of Firepower, et cetera.

One, the fact that this gentleman's full name is "John Cornelius Alphonsus Finnin" has become public knowledge.

And two, Finnin's been found guilty of 23 child-sex charges, and gone down for eight to twelve.

(This may or may not have something to do with the fact that Finnin brillantly decided to represent himself in court.)

I actually think eight years, followed by the usual Registered Sex Offender life-ruining, is a bit of a rough sentence for someone who's only been found guilty of having a consensual relationship with a 15-year-old rent boy. But Finnin played a big, and it seems to me obviously knowing, role in the shovelling of taxpayers' and naïve investors' money into his own, and Tim Johnston's, pockets.

So, you know, screw that guy.

(In case you were wondering, Tim Johnston himself continues to Skase it up overseas, deaf to the cries of creditors large and small.)

Posted in Cars, Firepower, Scams, Science. 7 Comments »

Now do crosswords

23 August 2009 — dan

Hans Andersson is a fellow who made a Lego Rubik's Cube solver (which, amazingly enough, is only one among many).

He has now gone one better.

Possibly quite a lot more than one better, actually.

Yes, this is a Mindstorms NXT robot that solves sudoku. It's got pretty good penmanship, too.

Like the Lego 3D scanner, Andersson's new creation isn't what you'd call the fastest of robots. But if you're not in a hurry, I'd say this robot does its job considerably better than the also-amazing Lego movie projector.

(Via, once again, the excellent TechnicBricks.)

Posted in Nerdery, Toys. 8 Comments »

Today's sermon will be delivered by Firefox 3.5.2

20 August 2009 — dan

Firefox makes a suggestion about Answers in Genesis

Yeah, that figures. I wouldn't trust 'em either.

I'm not sure exactly how I got to this oddly apposite error, though I do know why it happened, and will bore those of you intrepid enough to make it all the way through this latest Wall-O-Words™ post with an explanation.

It all started when I read An Evolutionary Biologist Visits the "Creationism Museum", which is by PZ Myers, the Pharyngula guy and well-known desecrator of all that is holy.

The Creation Museum is a product of Answers in Genesis, or AiG, not affiliated with the other AIG, but similarly untaxable. AiG was founded by Ken Ham, an Australian-born evangelist whom we exported to the USA in 1987.

You're welcome.

(In case you were wondering, there also exists a Web site called "Answers in Revelation". It's pretty much what you'd expect - a little like "The Lord's Witnesses", but less apologetic.)

AiG's Creation Museum is a place which surely ranks among the Seven Wonders of the Whacko American Christian World (there obviously isn't really a Christian world outside the USA; it's like the World Series). The Museum is up there with the Crystal Cathedral, the even-more-gigantic Lakewood Church, the sadly-diminished Precious Moments Chapel, Touchdown Jesus and... actually, that's all I've got, off the top of my head. I'm sure commenters will help me out, here, with some more examples of the various US Jay-sus-uh enterprises' attempts to top each other in visible-from-geostationary-orbit violations of Matthew 6.

PZ Myers' article linked to the Christian page of this Cracked piece about baffling Web comics. One of the less peculiar comics told its readers to visit Answers in Genesis for the answer to one of the real posers of the Book of Genesis.

I speak, of course, of the bit where the recently-Marked Cain suddenly acquires an (un-named) wife. This is a bit surprising, seeing as the Bible has to this point mentioned a world population of exactly four people, the only female among them being Cain's mother, Eve.

Christians who bother to address a silly creation-myth plot-hole like this fall into two camps.

The first camp asserts that there were other, pre-Adamic humans, and Cain married one of them. Many white-supremacists hold that these pre-Adamic "mud people" are the ancestors of modern-day black people, who are therefore subhuman pre-Genesis prototypes on their ancient mother's side, and on their ancient father's side cursed by God. So, uh, you needn't feel bad about lynching, raping and/or enslaving 'em, 'cos they're not really people at all.

Answers In Genesis rightly deny this outrageous calumny.

They, instead, belong to the camp which reckons that Cain's wife "was either his sister or a close relative".

Because, for reasons having to do with Original Sin, AiG are certain, to the point of putting up a display on the subject in the Creation Museum, that it is impossible for any humans alive today to not be descended from Adam and Eve, and Adam and Eve alone.

Well, unless AiG's whole huge edifice of biblical literalism is to collapse.

(Given the extreme ages people allegedly lived to back in Genesis, and the parallel and unconnected Sethite and Cainite lineages, it's conceivable that Cain's wife was not actually his sister, but could have been his great-great-great-grandniece. Which is much less disturbing, I'm sure you'll all agree. Note that the completely unconnected Sethite and Cainite lineages each contain a dude called Enoch and another dude called Lamech, not to mention about four other pairs of guys with very similar names; there are actually only four people out of 16 who don't seem to have been struck by this extraordinary nominative correspondence. AiG assure us all that there's no way this could just be two differently-Chinese-Whispered versions of the same list of names. Obviously, the real question is if, when and how angels cross-bred with humans!)

Reading on through An Evolutionary Biologist Et Cetera, I had to admit that the Creation Museum has got some pretty cool displays. I mean, check out this awesome Noah's Ark diorama! And it's not nearly their whole Ark exhibit; they've got plenty more, including a recreated chunk of the Noah's Ark Construction Site! Don't miss the dinosaurs!

People like AiG, who believe the Noah story is literally true, have had to enlarge their Ark size estimates. The Bible clearly says that the Ark was 300 cubits long, but it doesn't say how long a cubit was. The road is therefore open for people like AiG to discover ever-larger sizes of "cubit", and thereby make their Ark bigger and bigger as those troublesome scientists keep discovering more and more species.

I'm not sure why AiG feel this is necessary, since it's also normal for people presenting the literal-Flood argument to say that God preserved the Ark from harm, helped to steer it to Mount Ararat, after the Flood helped the koalas make it to Australia and the polar bears make it to the Arctic, and possibly also helped Noah with the gigantic engineering task of building the Ark in the first place.

(Check out how long it takes for the average backyard boat-builder to make a small vessel; adding more family members and making it a full-time job helps, but making the project about a thousand times the size would still leave Noah and family felling trees, dressing wood, hammering, sawing, carrying and caulking for decades, at the very least.)

So I don't see what the big deal is about God making the Ark into a TARDIS as well, so it could hold as many animals as necessary without having to be as long as HMS Dreadnought, and much wider. This whole subject is a bit like discovering that there are people developing serious theories about how it was that Little Red Riding Hood failed to recognise a wolf dressed as her grandma, or calculating exactly how large a cottage could be built out of gingerbread.

But AiG reckon the Ark had to be big enough for all of the animals (and yes, they've got a Genesis Answer for the freshwater fish question). So the Ark had to be really, really, really big.

Different pages on the AiG site appear to disagree about how big the Ark was. I think the minimum is 450 feet - 137 metres. This measurement agrees with the New International Version's, uh, version.

But then, there's AiG's printable "Kids Answers Noah's Ark Bookmark" (PDF), which I consider as authoritative as anything else on the AiG site. The bookmark puts the Ark's length at a magnificent 510 feet, 155 metres. They also have a page for adults which concurs, and they proudly present an analysis from the Korea Association of Creation Research (by an extraordinary coincidence, the biggest megachurch in the whole world is in Korea...). The analysis concludes that a 135-metre Ark would have been seaworthy. With a bit of encouragement, I bet it'd stretch another 20 metres.

In the boring old secular world, the SS Great Western was, as I've mentioned before, the biggest properly seaworthy ocean-going wooden ship ever built, and its hull was about 65 metres in length (including the bowsprit, it was more than 70 metres). Even this size was too much for wood alone; Brunel used iron bands to hold the ship together.

Wooden ships bigger than the Great Western have been built on several occasions, but none dealt well with waves, and they often disappeared on their maiden voyages. No wooden ship even close to the size of even a mere 450-foot Ark has ever ventured to sea. Nobody can prove that the Ark wouldn't have worked just fine, of course, because nobody knows how it was built; there may be some amazing construction method lost to the ages, and proving there isn't is impossible.

Ark-believers like to bring up the subject of other ultra-gigantic wooden ships from the pages of history. Or, at least, from the pages of books that say they're history.

See, for instance, AiG's buddies at worldwideflood.com, who've got this awesome Flash size-comparer, which assigns the "most likely size" for Noah's Ark as a displacement of a mere "17000-28000 tonnes".

So, from the Graf Spee to the 1915 Revenge. I can totally see a family building something that big out of wood. How hard could it be?

The most impressive wooden vessels, besides the Ark itself, in the WorldwideFlood comparer are the two greatest hits in the world of mythical giant ships. First, there's Ptolemy IV's "Tessarakonteres", a mega-trireme alleged to have been rowed by four thousand oarsmen. And then, there's the Chinese eunuch admiral Zheng He's treasure ships, which were presented as vast beyond the imaginings of the Western world in that bestselling book by Gavin Menzies.

(Menzies' claims received a less than entirely friendly response from those tiresome empirical-evidence fetishists.)

The Tessarakonteres and another outrageously large wooden ship also allegedly owned by Ptolemy IV, the 115-metres-if-it's-an-inch "Thalamegos", have a peculiar tendency to only be taken seriously on Web pages that also argue for the existence of Noah's Ark. I'm sure the total absence of any substantive evidence that either of the Ptolemaic ships was ever paid for, built, crewed, sailed, sunk or salvaged has nothing whatsoever to do with the sad lack of orthodox academic interest in these extremely plausible ships about which it would be a terrible slander to say they're as physically practicable as building an Empire State Building out of pine.

(Or larch.)

For comparison, consider historically-supported large wooden vessels like the Syracusia, which ended up in the possession of Ptolemy III, or Caligula's giant round barge and "Nemi ships". The Syracusia probably existed, but is only said to be a - possibly exaggerated - 55 metres in length. And Caligula's ships pretty definitely existed, but were really just huge lake pontoons, that would have broken up at sea.

I can, at this juncture - quite a bit before this juncture, actually - hear readers begging me to stop poking at this nonsense and finish the review of that new computer you all bought me. But I think there's something more to engaging with preposterous speculations, like AiG's mania for persuading us all that the world began in the late Neolithic, than the mere sideshow-freak quality of the exercise. I think there's a significant educational value to chasing these silly rabbits. It leads you directly to basic philosophy-of-science questions like, "how do we know something is true?", and "what is truth, anyway?", and "what is sufficient evidence for a given claim to be treated as true?"

These questions are absolutely fundamental to critical thinking for everybody, not just professional scientists. But I don't think they're on a lot of school curricula.

(Did any of you readers receive lessons in critical thinking before tertiary education, or even then? You'd think that there'd at least be room, somewhere in the school year, for a half-hour on the different levels of evidence needed to make plausible the claims "I own a cat", "I own a horse", "I own an elephant" and "I own a dragon"...)

Everybody, young and old, needs to know this stuff, and one of the most entertaining ways of learning critical thinking is by examining the writings of people who don't quite get this whole "science" thing. (I think a kid could pretty much copy and paste this post into a history and/or science assignment and get a decent mark, as long as their teacher wasn't a Young-Earther.)

The Creation Museum really does seem to be, as Myers says, the very opposite of an actual museum. If you want to read about what real science museums do, I suggest Richard Fortey's excellent Dry Storeroom No. 1, (out in paperback soon!). As Fortey explains in his idiosyncratic wander through just a few of the numerous paths that exist in just his one museum, and as the Wikipedia article on museums also currently says, a museum acquires, conserves and researches the heritage of humanity and its environment. People who work in the parts of proper museums that visitors never visit devote their entire lives to collecting, collating, categorising and analysing stuff from the real world. Fortey writes of several museum employees who, after their retirement, keep coming in and working for free, so dedicated are they to the pursuit of knowledge.

I presume the Creation Museum has some actual fossils and such, and every now and then there's another News of the Weird story about hopeful fundamentalists heading off on yet another doomed trip to find the big floating Ark or the little magic one. But such efforts have all the actual substance of a dolls' tea party. The Creation Museum is, like AiG, nothing more than a great steaming heap of ad-hoc hypotheses, built on faith and making no predictions (if you don't count failed prophecies about the end of the world). The Creation Museum performs no real research, has nothing to conserve but what their exhibit-builders constructed, and is uninterested in the acquisition of new evidence, because they've already got the primary source to end all primary sources.

The Creation Museum even manages to, as Myers also notes, get the layout of a real museum wrong. Instead of letting visitors pick their own path, it funnels them through its didactic exhibits in sequence, like a haunted house or Ikea shop. (Or like a Hell House, for that matter.)

Once again, the Bible-thumpers have approximated the form, but failed to deliver the content, of the scientific endeavour. This is pretty much the definition of "pseudoscience"; pseudoscience is to real science as patent medicines were to real medicines.

Actually, that's a little unfair to patent medicines, which often contained desirable substances like alcohol, opium or cocaine. But I suppose people in hopeless situations could gain just as much comfort from religious hoo-hah as they could from opium.

Oh yes. The funny error. Remember the funny error that kicked off this bulging tumour of a post?

Firefox makes a suggestion about Answers in Genesis

The error happened because I followed a link, from some damn place, to https://www.answersingenesis.com/something_or_other, which attempts to use the SSL encryption certificate for https://www.answersingenesis.org/, whose suffix doesn't match the one in the certificate - and hey presto, there's the snigger-inducing error.

The main Answers in Genesis site is answersingenesis.org, but they also own answersingenesis.com, thus protecting that domain from being hijacked by the vile Satanists who dare to question AiG's Answers. AiG do actually have their act together as regards this stuff; if you go to answersingenesis.com it redirects you to the .org site, and neither of them try to use SSL so no certificate error appears. http://www.answersingenesis.com/anything redirects, not entirely elegantly, to the home page of answersingenesis.org, but that and the .com/.org SSL certificate thing is the only other bug I've found.

And now a reminder for any intrepid readers who've made it this far: Please nominate further Wonders of the American Religious World, and/or tell us all who, if anyone, taught you critical thinking!

Posted in Religion, Strange Tales. 39 Comments »

Another unrequested Firepower update

12 August 2009 — dan

The major focus of attention since the collapse of magic-fuel-pill company Firepower, with which I had such fun, has been the scam artist in charge, one Tim Johnston. Tim's lavish lifestyle was as unsustainable as the rest of the Firepower debacle, so he dragged his carpet-bag full of cash off into the night some time ago.

Now, another Firepower collaborator has bobbed to the surface of the treatment pond. His name is John Finnin.

John Finnin was the guy who gave Austrade grants to Firepower. Then, as is traditional among the parasitic worms who've burrowed their way through the vital organs of the world economy for so many years, Finnin became Firepower's CEO on a $AU500,000-a-year salary, while still greasing the wheels for taxpayers' money to flow from Austrade to Firepower.

(Well, I think he greased them. It might actually have been some sort of mucus. Lab tests are ongoing.)

Shortly after golden-parachuting into Firepower, though, Finnin was accused of child sex offences, and quit the CEO job.

At the time, this was all just part of the rich tapestry of tawdry dodginess that was the Firepower saga. (After a while, I was expecting Erik Prince or L. Ron Hubbard to be involved somehow.)

Given that modern society seems to be pretty sure that inappropriately touching one small boy is a worse crime than burning down a hundred fully-occupied hospitals, I'm not crazy about the publicity that child-sex accusations always attract. If you baselessly accuse someone of having interfered with children, then even if they're found as Not Guilty as anybody ever has been, the smell of the accusation will follow them around until they die.

But wouldn't you know it - Finnin's been found guilty of a total of 23 charges, which include repeatedly molesting a 15-year-old-boy. His lawyer has courageously asserted that there's an "element of entrapment" to the case, since the boy concerned was - he says - perfectly happy with prostituting himself. That's not what entrapment means, of course, but I'm sure the court will give this argument all the consideration it deserves.

This prosecution all kicked off after some different child-sex claims, which were allegedly what caused Austrade to allow Finnin to "resign quietly and return home", and thereby stop - again, allegedly - using Australian embassy privileges to help him participate in an international child-sex ring. Austrade are adamant that they didn't actually tip Finnin off about the investigation, and that their previous internal investigation of Finnin's activities did not in fact involve a "child sex ring". Austrade just allowed Finnin to give lots of public money to a man with a previous career of fuel-pill scams who then hired him as CEO of his new fuel-pill scam. So that's all right, then.

There'd been a bit of a lull in Firepower-related news before this delectable little detail came along. Gerard Ryle, the Sydney Morning Herald journalist most likely to be depicted on Tim Johnston's dartboard, published an unassumingly-titled...

Firepower book

...book about the company a little while ago. Ryle has been doing interviews and publishing excerpts. (He's got a blog, too. He's less than totally impressed with Austrade.)

It's possible that, a mere year and a bit after Tim Johnston skipped the country, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission will actually, finally, file criminal charges against Johnston. Don't hold your breath, though; it's got to take a while to figure out how to bust Johnston without bothering the various governmental worthies who were so proud to be associated with him a couple of years ago.

(There's been a civil case against whatever-remains-of-Firepower crawling along for more than a year now. ASIC has also awarded an eight-year ban to one of the several financial planners who told their clients Firepower shares were a great investment, when the shares weren't actually even legal to sell. The investors who ended up holding Firepower's toilet-paper shares continue, hopelessly, to try to get their money back.)

You can expect official regulatory bodies to take this long to dot all the i's and cross all the t's, and taking a while to do so certainly doesn't mean such bodies are useless. But it does serve as a reminder that you shouldn't expect the government to prevent rip-offs from being perpetrated, even large-scale and immensely audacious ones. Indeed, the bigger a scam is, the more likely it is to have some government officials actively helping it, either knowingly - as, I presume, was the case with Finnin - or as gullible marks - which I suppose the fresh-faced Stephen Moss might have been. (I bet Stephen's dad knew what was going on, though; Stephen claims he ended up being owed money by the vanished Mr Johnston, but his father cleared a 1.6-million-dollar profit when he sold the soon-to-be-bankrupt Sydney Kings to Firepower.)

The State government here in New South Wales has also recently banned four more bogus fuel-saving devices, not including the previously-mentioned Moletech thingy which is I think still technically legal to sell in NSW.

Among the now-banned gadgets are the "FuelMAX" and "Super FuelMAX", which are magnet devices, banned by the US FTC in 2005, but still apparently on sale from some Australian dealers. Then there's the "Magnoflow", another magnet, which the manufacturers say breaks down "fuel clusters" to allow more complete combustion, for a claimed "20% or more" mileage improvement. Which is of course BS, because modern engines burn 98% or more of their fuel already. The Magnoflow people seem to have given up on Australia, which is a terrible shame, since this gadget's US list price appears to be $US159 or more, but it was only $AU129 here in Australia.

Also now-banned-in-NSW is the "Prozone Fuelsaver" - which allegedly gives lucky buyers a magnet and a "catalyst"! (Astonishingly enough, the Prozone Fuelsaver never seems to have been tested by the catalyst enthusiasts at "California Environmental Engineering".)

Four down; only several dozen more to go.

In Australia alone.

Hurrah.

Posted in Cars, Firepower, Scams, Strange Tales. 9 Comments »

Authoritarianism: It's bad for your health

31 July 2009 — dan

I'm busy writing stuff, so let's see if I can't get you all to generate a bunch of content for me in the comments.

So I'm spinning the Wheel of Contentious Topics, buzz buzz buzz, around and around it goes, it's slowing down now... "gun control", "abortion", "religion", "Kirk or Picard"... and it's stopped on "health care in the USA"!

The previously-mentioned TechSkeptic just wrote an excellent post about the bizarre US health-care-reform situation. In brief, opponents of real reform are standing next to their rusted-out AMC Gremlin and insisting that all it needs is a lick of paint and some new seat-covers to be as good as any other car in the world today. And you shouldn't believe what people from other countries tell you about the cars over there, because that's all Communist propaganda.

I'm on the other side of the planet, and so don't actually spend a lot of time thinking about the plight of sick Americans. But I do watch The Daily Show, and the US health-care situation is an interesting example of a common problem.

I wonder if the USA will ever find its way out of this mess, where elected representatives choose talking points that are blatantly counterfactual, safe in the knowledge that a bunch of right-wing authoritarian voters (I strongly recommend Bob Altemeyer's book The Authoritarians, which is a free download) will believe them. This "authoritarian follower" population gives the cheerful promulgators of all sorts of lies guaranteed support from that ironclad 30% of the US public that never gave up on Dubya. And, often, a lot more than 30% of the US voting population fall into line.

(The 2008 presidential election had a very large voter turnout, by US standards, but almost four out of every ten eligible voters still didn't care enough to turn up. Here in Australia we probably have just as many people who don't care who gets elected, but we make them vote at least pretend to vote anyway, if they want to avoid a small fine.)

I don't mean to suggest that purest BS raining from on high upon a grateful populace is a phenomenon limited to the USA. The whole world has always had this same problem. But mass acceptance of definite and objective governmental lies seems to me to have reached its fullest flower during the Dubya administration, and it hasn't died back much now that he's finally gone.

(While I'm recommending books you can read for free, allow me to point you to Harry Frankfurt's much-less-frivolous-than-it-sounds On Bullshit. Every modern human should also own a copy of How to Lie with Statistics, but I'm afraid you'll probably have to pay for that.)

Right-wing authoritarians, as described by Bob Altemeyer, do actually understand the concept of being lied to, and also understand that their chosen authorities are often motivated to lie to them. But, often, authoritarian followers simply ignore this knowledge when they're listening to their chosen authorities.

This is the same sort of compartmentalisation that allows so many Americans to be perfectly fine with food stamps, bank-deposit insurance, unemployment benefits, Social Security and the threadbare safety net of Medicaid - especially if they're the beneficiary - but vehemently opposed to "socialism". The broadness of the definition of socialism that people use in these arguments makes pretty much every taxpayer-funded, universally-available government service technically "socialist", and therefore presumably abhorrent. Nobody seems to have a big problem with fire brigades, garbage collection, highways, bridges or public libraries, though. But, just as a segment of the US population would be perfectly happy to be ruled by a king (or a Bond villain, for that matter) as long as he wasn't called a king, many Americans are perfectly happy with "socialist" policies as long as nobody calls them socialist.

Apply no "socialist" government controls to any market you like and the result will invariably be corruption, cartels and frank fraud, giving rise to endlessly repeated boom-and-bust cycles, a minor example of which you might just possibly have noticed recently.

(On this subject, Upton Sinclair's classic The Jungle is another free book you might like to read. See also Charles Mackay's even older Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.)

There's a lot more behind the weird American authoritarian hatred for anything-called-socialism than mere common-or-garden cognitive dissonance, though. Bob Altemeyer has, for more than 40 years now, been doing psychological research on why authoritarian followers and their usual leaders, "social dominators", behave in the way that they do. He's ended up with a very large stack of evidence of far higher quality than is usual in the social sciences, and discovered some very surprising things. Once again - read the book. I found it entirely fascinating, and often blackly hilarious.

Aaaaanyway, getting back to the subject of the USA's adoration of dreadful health care, it is obvious that the USA could randomly throw a dart at a list of other countries in the developed world (and a few less-developed countries...), adopt the health-care system of whatever country they hit, and have a guarantee that it'd work better than what they've got. Provided, that is, that the USA actually managed to implement the new system properly. All bets are off if the new system turns into one of those military-industrial-political boondoggles the USA is so good at, where Congressmen and Senators secure re-election by making sure that every state gets a finger in every pie. The EU bows in awe at America's ability to add such amazing amounts of open avarice to every kind of normal bureaucratic friction.

To people in other countries, like for instance Australia where I live, it's difficult to even believe that for a significant fraction of the US population, the best health-care option available is to join the crowd in the hospital emergency room - whether or not your condition actually constitutes an emergency, of course - and hope for the best. We foreigners are similarly staggered by the fact that for an even larger segment of the US population, contracting a serious illness makes it probable that you will end up bankrupt.

We Aussies have a pretty standard underfunded-but-more-or-less-functional public-health safety-net. We pay half as much per capita for health care as the USA, and outlive you by around 2.8 years. I don't think it's just the Vegemite that's responsible for this.

The UK's population only outlives the USA's by a bit less than a year, but despite that segment of the UK's population who use the free ambulances as taxis, their National Health Service only costs them about 41% as much per capita as Americans pay.

And the list, of course, goes on. And on. And on.

So, despite what I now know about authoritarian believers, I'm still staggered by the sheer balls of the legislators and other talking heads who claim that the US health-care system is actually a good one.

It's as if they're standing up and baldly declaring the USA to be a Buddhist nation, and all of their buddies are going along with it.

Hmm. It's possible that my "get readers to write stuff so I don't have to" strategy has gone slightly awry. Commenters may have some difficulty in out-rambling the above.

Do, nonetheless, feel free to try.

Posted in Science, Strange Tales. 140 Comments »
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