Tetherd Cow Ahead

Good morning Acowlytes. Today on The Cow we are going to have a science lesson. No, no, sit down there Joey, it’s not the kind where we make a miniature volcano and gas all the eighth grade on the top floor of C Block with sulphur – this is a lesson about science. Specifically, about how science works, and why it is different from, oh, just making stuff up.

As usual for a science lesson, I have some visual aids.

First of all here is a rabbit’s foot: ((Rabbit’s foot picture borrowed from The Skeptiseum – I didn’t think they’d mind))

A rabbit’s foot is what most rational modern people regard as a superstitious curio. The rabbit’s foot accrued its status as a ‘lucky’ object because in very ancient times the European Celts considered rabbits as sacred animals. Using a kind of logic that is mostly these days reserved for young children, the Celts figured that if the rabbit itself was lucky, then bits of the rabbit were lucky too.

Of course, there is no science at all behind this notion. A rabbit’s foot is an object that, no matter what people convince themselves to believe, does absolutely nothing at all. ((…well, after it’s removed from the rabbit, obviously.)) You can tell me you think it brings ‘good luck’, and even that you did a scientific study that shows, to your satisfaction, that it does what you claim, but (here’s the crucial thing about science): until your study is reproduced, under controlled situations, and in double-blind experiments by a third (preferably unbiased) party your claim is absolutely meaningless.

What exactly does all that mean? Let’s look at the bits:

Reproduceability: Well, obviously, if I can’t get the same results as you do, there is something seriously wrong with your idea; if you say your rabbit’s foot brings luck, and I don’t experience any luck while holding it, then how do we explain that?

Controlled Situation: This has a very rigorous meaning in science. Scientists spend a LOT of time perfecting controls, because they are crucial to experimental protocol. To put it simply, a good control is one that is completely free from the possible effects of the experiment. Not only that, a good control must be free of other artifacts that could be mistaken for possible effects of the experiment.

Double-Blind Procedure: When you have a vested interest in proving that your hypothesis is valid, you may, consciously or unconsciously, effect the outcome of the study. For this reason, scientists have come up with a very clever concept which ensures that neither the person conducting the experiment, nor anyone involved in collating the results of the experiment, know exactly what data they are handling until after the experiment is concluded. At that time, the double-blind protocol is decoded and the data is matched to the experimental procedure.

An Unbiased Third Party: Being able to convince others that your results are persuasive is a crucial part of the scientific method. That’s why the protocols I’ve outlined above are so important. If two or more groups of experimenters conduct the same study under the those conditions, and they get results that match yours, well then voila! – you have yourself a nicely working model! The really great thing about science is that if you disagree with someone’s hypothesis, you can perform the experiment yourself, under the same conditions! This is how we know so much of what we now know – this is why we no longer have smallpox, why diabetics can live a normal life, and why we know to keep ourselves clean to avoid contracting disease.

We could easily design an experimental protocol to test if rabbit’s foot charms are really ‘lucky’ but I think most normal people will accept that they are nothing more than a diverting superstition. But the lure of the talisman or amulet is a very strong one.

Which brings us to my second visual aid:

It is called a Shoo!TAG™ Essentially, until some scientific proof to the contrary is forthcoming, ((Hahahahaha! It is to laugh!)) the Shoo!TAG™ is exactly the same as the rabbit’s foot, ie, a functionless tsotchke. This is despite the personal testimony of its inventors, no matter how enthusiastically they spruik it:

As a founder and co-developer of the Shoo!TAG™ I was looking for a non-toxic “green” alternative for controlling fleas and ticks on our dogs and cats and flies and mosquitoes on my horses and milk cow. When the finished prototypes were ready, I picked two dogs and one horse and cow for the first trials and put a Shoo!TAG™ on them. Within 36 hours, the dogs wearing a Shoo!TAG™ had a noticeable reduction in fleas and ticks. In addition, those pests still on the dogs were staying on top of the hair, moving slowly and easily picked off. I also observed that the dogs with a Shoo!TAG™ did not scratch or bite at themselves, unlike the two dogs not wearing a Shoo!TAG™ . The horse and cow wearing a Shoo!TAG™ had a dramatic reduction in flies. After two weeks observation, I tagged the other animals so they could receive the same comfort and benefit. Again, after 36 hours, all newly tagged dogs, horse and cow demonstrated the same reduction in pest problems as the test group did. I knew then we had a winner!

-Kathy M. Heiney, Wimberley, TX
Developer and Founder of Energetic Solutions, Ltd. and Shoo!TAGâ„¢

This, explicitly, is not science. Merely saying ‘you saw’ some results is exactly the same as saying “My lucky rabbit’s foot won me the lottery!” Until you set up a controlled, double-blind experiment, you’re not offering evidence, you’re just tendering an anecdote.

Nor is any of the ‘explanation’ of the supposed mechanics of Shoo!TAG™ offered on the Shoo!TAG™ site under the tab called ‘Science’, actually anything of the sort. You don’t get to call yourself a scientist just because you know words like ‘quantum’ and ‘electromagnetic’. ((It is significant, in my opinion, that since I criticized the Shoo!TAG inventors’ claim to have had their science published in the (non-existant) Quantum Agriculture Journal, they have removed all references and links to the pdf which purportedly originated in that journal. Their allegiance to the dubious ‘Professor William Nelson’ has also evidently waned – he no longer features as their ‘voice of authority’ anywhere on the site.))

Lately I’ve been pretty much resolved to letting Shoo!TAG™ take its place in the Museum of Cow Lore – something for us all to wheel out every now and then as an in-joke. Dumb pieces of pseudoscientific trash like Shoo!TAG™ tend to flourish in the United Flakey States of America, where 45% percent of people believe the Bible is the literal word of God, and some 20% believe in angels. It truly belongs there.

But this week Atlas informed me that Shoo!TAG™ now has an Australian web domain, and I see on it that they have some several dozen Australian suppliers, as well as Australian offices and representation.

They’re on my turf now.

If you’ve ever spent any time in Australia over Summer, you will have heard the unmistakeable shrill chirruping of cicadas. These noise from these insects can be so deafening that I’ve known Summer events to be forced to retreat indoors in order to escape from the ear-crushing sound pressure.

But they don’t appear every Summer. The life-cycle of the cicada (of which Australia has over 200 species) is interesting in that most of it (anywhere from 3 to 17 years) ((In most cicada species this period is defined by a prime number. No-one is quite sure why, but it is probably to do with surviving predation)) is spent underground. After this interminable period in the dark, feeding on nothing but tree sap sucked from a convenient root, the cicada climbs to the surface in crysalis form, breaks free of its drab brown shell and emerges in colours of emerald green, burnished bronze, buttery yellow and even polished coal black. It then makes its way to the branches of a leafy tree to commence a short (but cacophonous) period of mating and reproduction.

Except if it gets squashed in a sliding door.

An unbiased poll at Tetherd Cow Ahead finds that Stephen Conroy is officially a dunce!

Australia has really only two poisonous spiders of note, and this is one of them. It is called the Redback (after the red patch you can see on the end of its abdomen). Redback spiders hardly ever kill anyone anymore – the last certified recorded death was in the 1960s (although a bite from one would probably hurt and make you sick).

I found this one under our verandah. We have a lot of them. If I had to choose to have a lot of Redbacks under my house though, I would rather have this kind:

Well, dear Acowlytes, as promised a post or two back I[tippy title=”*”]Actually, Violet Towne did the acquiring…[/tippy] acquired over the weekend a jar of the new Kraft product provisionally known as ‘Name Me’, in order that I could taste-test and review it for you in time for the launch of the official moniker next Monday.

As you can see, it comes in a jar that is similar to Vegemite, and sports the Vegemite logo. On opening, the main thing I noticed is that, unlike regular Vegemite, this is a vacuum-sealed product. As all Australians know, after you open a bottle of normal Vegemite it will keep pretty much forever in the cupboard without any fear that it will either go off or get eaten by bugs. Vegemite is one of the incorruptibles.

Not so with ‘Name Me’. It needs to be kept refrigerated and is ‘best consumed within 4 weeks of opening’ – a legacy of the cheese base, I guess.

The most disconcerting thing about the new Vegemite product is the appearance. It looks exactly like melted chocolate or Nutella. I can already see this as the basis for numerous schoolyard practical jokes and school lunch tragedies. Not to be daunted, and mindful of my service to The Cow, I spread some on a piece of crusty bread and gave it a go.

The bottom line is that it’s not that bad. It tastes more of plain ol’ Vegemite than anything else – just as if you’d put a bit of actual Vegemite on some very buttery bread. I was happy to eat it, and the whole jar will no doubt get consumed in due course. The real sticking point for me as a potential customer, and the hurdle that I think Kraft has to jump, is that I don’t really see the point. It doesn’t offer anything that I wouldn’t get with my usual Vegemite hit, but it has the drawback of needing to be kept in the fridge, and looking like it should taste sweet and chocolatey. It is the Paris Hilton of toast toppings; it is all appearance and no substance. Its reason for existence is completely questionable.

Add that to the fact that we already have a number of products that more than fill the salty yeast-extract niche, and my projection is that in a year or two’s time ‘Name Me’ will be nothing more than an evolutionary dead end in the taxonomic record of breakfast comestibles.

Anyway, come Monday ‘Name Me’ will actually have a name, and that should be entertaining. I’m sure that Kraft is desperately hoping that, like the competition run for the name of the original Vegemite back in 1922, it will whip up a truckload of consumer interest and go on to make them megabucks. I predict that they won’t have the gumption to stick out ten or more years though – the period of time over which Vegemite languished until it finally took off in the late 1930s. I bet they won’t have the guts to pick the name out of a hat, either, like they did with the Vegemite name competition. That would be anathema to the control-freak culture of modern advertising.

If they did have a hat it would have to be a big one though, and these are some of the names that would be in it – a random selection from over 13,000 suggestions on the ‘Name Me’ site – along with my estimations of their likely success:

•Cheese Plus (Too much like Cheese Pus)
•SpreadEzy (Yawn)
•Super-fun-mite (What?)
•AusCream (Eww)
•Creamdelight (Double Eww)
•Vethen (Vethen? What are you smoking?)
•Score!!! (So you got some of what they’re smoking too…!)
•YamYam (No No)
•Lunch Mate (Snore)
•Sloppymite (You’ve never worked in advertising, have you?)
•VevletMite (And you never finished school, did you?)
•I LOVE IT! (OK, calm down. I’m sure you do, but we’re looking for a name here…)
•Stampede! (Oh – on account of the sloppy brown appearance? I think not)
•Hero (No – we don’t need another one)
•Grail (Steady on there Crusader! Don’t overreach)
•Downunder (Er… again, not good connotations, given the appearance)
•Chanuw (That thing’s a keyboard – you’re not meant to hammer it randomly with your fists…)
•Moorishmite (Did you really mean to spell it like that?)
•DivinityVegiDip (Yup – that really rolls off the tongue)
•Magic Mono (You’re not supposed to inject the stuff, pal…)

Someone stop me! 13,000 of the damn things! I’m beginning to see the kind of daunting task that Mr Kraft and his troops face! Stay tuned to The Cow for the real name when they announce it. It can’t be worse than any of these.

Can it?

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*Actually, Violet Towne did the acquiring…

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Because we’ve ventured back onto the topic of Bonox, it occurred to me that many of you across the various ponds may be interested in the most recent news from Bonox’s creators, Kraft, who I’m sure you will know better for their much more famous product Vegemite (we’ve discussed it before here).

Vegemite has been around in Australia since 1922, and has remained virtually unchanged. A year or so back, though, Kraft did a survey on their website to find out what Australians ‘wanted’ in their Vegemite, quite obviously with an eye to boosting the sales of their atramentous spread. This notion that you can somehow ‘improve’ an already perfectly acceptable product, is, it has to be said, a quintessentially American one. Australians don’t tend to think like that.[tippy title=”†”]Well, Australians who don’t subscribe to nutty ever-accelerating economic models, anyway.[/tippy] So it will come as no surprise to you at all to know that Vegemite is now 100% American-owned. Like most of the rest of Australia. But I digress. Vegemite occupies that most privileged of positions on the supermarket shelf, alongside strawberry jam and peanut butter; it is what it is, and trying to make it into something else ‘more successful’ is really only the kind of fluffy dream that fills the restless sleep of advertising people.[tippy title=”‡”]Yeah, I know what you’re going to say – peanut butter comes in crunchy and smooth, but I really don’t want to contemplate a crunchy Vegemite.[/tippy]

Anyhoo, Kraft got all kinds of suggestions about how Vegemite could be improved – there was a website you could visit and put in your threepence-worth about how you’d like to see it combined with muesli or salmon paste or whatnot. There were a lot of rather nauseating suggestions and I speculate that Kraft neglected to understand that they were not really seeing a proper representation of the Vegemite-buying public, but rather a whole bunch of people who evidently thought it had some kind of defect (although there were some like me who visited the site and left comments to the effect that they should simply leave it alone). As it turns out this led, eventually, to the announcement of a wonderful new product which has been sitting on supermarket shelves for the past few months sporting the moniker ‘Name Me’. Yes, that’s right, in a transparently sad grab for publicity, the people who run Kraft’s advertising campaign have attempted to rope in the hoardes of loyal Happy Little Vegemites to come up with a name for the new stuff.

This is not the first time that Kraft have tried to spin Vegemite off into something else. You’d have thought they’d have learnt their lesson about fiddling with an iconic cultural lynchpin after their merger of Vegemite and cheese in the 1990s failed to gain traction in the world of toast-topping comestibles.

But no. Now they’re doing pretty much the same thing again – this time it’s Vegemite and cream cheese. And, my prediction is that it will follow the same ignominious trajectory of the 1990s effort, particularly in light of what I’m now about to tell you.

You will have noticed that I haven’t linked to anything Vegemite so far in this post. And it’s not going to happen. Because, when I was doing a bit of legwork for y’all to read about the grand Vegemite saga, I came across this incredible disclaimer on the Vegemite website:

All other use, copying or reproduction of any part of this Site is prohibited (save to the extent permitted by law). Without limiting the foregoing, no part of this Site may be reproduced on any other internet site, and you are not authorised to redistribute or sell the material or reverse engineer, disassemble, or otherwise convert it to any other form that people can use. You are also prohibited from linking the Site to another website in any way whatsoever (emphasis mine).

Putting it succinctly, Kraft expressly forbids you to link to the ‘new Vegemite’ site!

There are few things quite so sad as business people who just completely fail to grok the zeitgeist. I can’t say whether it’s Kraft or their advertising agency who has prompted the instigation of Vegemite v.2 and this harebrained web campaign, but I know where I’d put my money. Mr Kraft, if you’re reading this, sack those goobers. NO-ONE in this early part of the 21st century makes a website that you are not allowed to link to and protects it with a legal rider! That’s the internet equivalent of building your retail outlet in Upper Siberia and then posting security guards with tasers at the front door just in case anyone does find you.

I can only surmise that Kraft is so nervous about their new product that they really don’t want to attract attention to it. Either that or they have arrived at the quite unbalanced conviction that someone might want to steal the idea. Really, I can’t think of one single sensible explanation for why you’d want to prevent people from wording up your spread. Or spreading your word.

I haven’t tried the new ‘Vegemite’ and I had no real intention of doing so. I like Vegemite just as it is, and I miss it if I can’t get it (like when I visit… well… anywhere…). But as you know I will pull out all the stops in the service of science, so I make a pledge to you Acowlytes – this weekend I will throw off my cultural preconceptions and try the new ‘Name Me’. This will allow me to post an appropriate food review to coincide with Kraft’s Grand Reveal of the new name on September 21.

I’d link you to where you can find out all about that, but hey – my hands are tied.

ADDENDUM: It’s been pointed out that the legal rider on the Vegemite site is probably intended to stop users in the Vegemite ‘community’ from posting links from inside the forums to other places. If this indeed the case, for a legal document it’s sloppily ambiguous (viz: ‘in any way whatsoever’), still dopey and in all likelihood just as unenforceable. And it’s madness that you are compelled to agree (via an irksome and irritatingly flakey Flash crawler) to a set of legal requirements before you can even read the ‘No Name’ site – something pretty much unparalleled on any commercial site I’ve ever visited, and again vividly demonstrating Kraft’s lack of web acumen.

ADDENDUM #2: The Flash User Agreement has now vanished from the Vegemite site. Obviously its ridiculous nature has been pointed out to someone. The site still retains all the conditions in its Terms of Use though, so nothing has really changed, other than that you’re not forced to agree to them before you can view anything.

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†Well, Australians who don’t subscribe to nutty ever-accelerating economic models, anyway.

‡Yeah, I know what you’re going to say – peanut butter comes in crunchy and smooth, but I really don’t want to contemplate a crunchy Vegemite.

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