Tetherd Cow Ahead

One of the big topics in the skeptical community at the moment (like everywhere else I guess) is the climate change issue. It’s a subject that is as fraught with debate as that of Evolution vs Creationism, and indeed, has many of the hallmarks of that particular tussle. What makes it particularly volatile in this setting, though, is that many of the people who claim that there is no need to worry about global warming paint themselves as climate change skeptics, and take the position that they offer a rational approach to the debate. What they are in fact doing is voicing opinions that are in contradiction to MOST of the world’s knowledgeable climate scientists. Though they like to think of themselves as skeptics, this stubborn entrenchment in a belief system has earnt them, instead, the badge of climate change deniers.

I pretty much stay out of the climate change argument, just as I stay out of the Creationism debate. It’s not that I don’t have a strong view on global warming. I think the scientific evidence is conclusive that we have a looming disaster on our hands, and that it’s a disaster of our own making. Bothering to argue with the deniers though is the mental equivalent of jabbing a sharp pencil repeatedly into the back of your hand – a sensible person stops doing it pretty quickly.

The main problem is that, as with evolution, climate science deals with concepts that don’t come easily to the natural human way of thinking. With evolution it has to do with vast amounts of time (which we’re not good at comprehending) and the complexity of the vectors that come to bear on natural selection. With climate science, it’s all in the maths. I’m going to attempt in this post to show you why, even if you haven’t kept up with all the marginalia of the climate discussion, you should be afraid of what we’re doing to the planet.

At the outset I will state that my essay takes one idea as a given: that global warming is a human-instigated phenomenon. You should understand that a cornerstone of the denier’s ‘argument’ is that it isn’t, but I will stand behind the overwhelming scientific viewpoint on this matter. ((If the deniers are right on this and global warming is an inevitable natural process, then we’re in a handcart to hell anyway, and it doesn’t matter what we do. So we may as well make efforts to ameliorate the situation as not. An argument of financial imperative (‘it will ruin our economy’) is quite irrelevant because in a hundred years there won’t be an economy.))

OK. We’re going to talk about math in this, but you don’t need to understand numbers. And I promise you, it won’t be dull. This is a very scary story. I’m going to divide it into three chapters.

Chapter 1: Boiling the Frog

There is an old fable – it’s probably apocryphal but for our purposes it doesn’t matter – that says that if you take a frog and put it in a bowl of water over a burner and slowly raise the heat, the frog, unable to feel the very slow rise in temperature will make no effort to leave the water and happily sit there until it is boiled to death. In other words, it either doesn’t realise there is a problem, or, by the time it does, it’s too late.

The story illustrates a psychological phenomenon called ‘creeping normalcy’ (or in science, the ‘shifting baseline’ problem). Put simply, it says that if you have changing reference points, you can only judge what is ‘normal’ by what you’re familiar with at any given time. In this way, familiarity changes the baseline of ‘normal’ to whatever you get used to, and if things change slowly enough, ‘normal’ can wander an awfully long way from ‘acceptable’.

The first step towards understanding why the climate issue is so deadly is to understand that humans think like this as a default. Our brains don’t work well on timescales in excess of a few years. Our horizons are small. I’m not the first to mention the Boiling Frog concept in relation to the climate change situation, so its appearance here is no big revelation. But you need to keep it in mind as we head off to chapters 2 & 3:

Chapter 2: The Big Clock

I recently saw a comment on an article in The Conversation from one John Dodds, a ‘retired engineer’:

First a philosophical point: Climate Change is claimed to be complex. I claim it is NOT. It is simple physics – add more energy and the world warms up.

Mr Dodds’ opinion typifies the way in which most people believe that the planet’s climate system behaves – something like a Big Clock. A wheel here, a cog there, a spring yonder – all ticking away in a simple predictable manner that can be completely described if you do the right calculations. Most people think, therefore, that if we’ve caused some kind of problem with the climate, then all we need to do is to ‘oil the gears’ on the clock and everything will go back to the way it was. They believe that the problem is proportionate to the actions we take to correct it.

This is a massive and perilous failure of understanding. It’s a mechanical Newtonian notion of the way things work that is fine for pipes and balls and clocks, but breaks down catastrophically when applied to something like climate behaviour. To grasp why, we have to venture into the frightening, mind-bending and completely unintuitive world of complex systems.

First, let’s consider the pendulum in our Big Clock. As physical systems go, this is about as unadorned as you can get. A swinging pendulum exhibits what is known as simple harmonic motion ((For small angles of swing. As the angular acceleration increases things become a little more complicated, but for our purposes we can assume true simple harmonic motion.)) and it is a very reliable behaviour that allows us to build a clock that will behave predictably and dependably. A simple pendulum is mathematically very straightforward. Its properties can be described completely in terms of the length of the ‘rod’ of the pendulum, gravity, the mass of the ‘bob’ on the end of the pendulum and the angle of swing. If you know these things, you can predict exactly how this pendulum will behave. This uncomplicated mechanism works great for a clock, and it’s fairly tolerant of perturbations in the system: if you push the pendulum a little hard, it will dampen down to its normal swing pretty quickly. You need to be pretty violent to cause the clock to have problems big enough to effect its function.

This is the kind of path we could expect the bob on the simple pendulum in our clock to trace. Every time:

Unfortunately for us, the climate system isn’t driven by a simple pendulum.

Let’s consider a physical system only a tiny step away from our Big Clock’s single pendulum: the double pendulum. A double pendulum makes one small alteration to the simple pendulum model – instead of a simple bob at the end of the pendulum, you add another pendulum. This very unassuming variation has sudden and profound effects.

Here’s a computer simulation of the path traced by the tip of a double pendulum:

If that looks weird and science fictiony to you, let me assure you that double pendulums behave exactly like that in reality. There are dozens of YouTube videos that show them in action.

You can see how this one small change to our pendulum quickly throws a simple harmonic oscillation into a volatile and complex motion. The double pendulum system can be very easily described, ((We still know the lengths of the rods, the mass of the bobs and the gravity coefficient.)) but its ultimate behaviour cannot. Each time you set it swinging its bob will trace a completely different path in space because, crucially, a double pendulum is very sensitive to initial conditions. Unlike our clock’s pendulum, we can’t accidentally give it a bit too much of a shove and have it simply settle back into its predictable ol’ groove.

Imagine, now, that you have a pendulum with n arms, each with a bob with a mass that is a variable coefficient ofn, n points of articulation on each arm, and variable gravity. It doesn’t take much of a leap of imagination to understand how wildly such a device will behave. In fact (and this is where most people fall off the bike), for surprisingly small values of n, no amount of computing power in the universe can ever predict the path of motion it will describe!

Well, the Earth’s climate is exactly such a system.

Unfortunately one thing that tends to be a little confusing with this is that climate scientists often speak of ‘climate modelling’ and to many people this sounds again like they’re talking about some kind of Big Clock: you stick in all the variables into your computer and ‘ping’ – out comes the behaviour that the Big Clock will exhibit. If it were only that easy.

When you look up a weather report on your i-Device of choice, you’re seeing climate modelling at work. One thing I probably don’t have to tell you, is that you shouldn’t rely on the information more than a few days ahead. That’s the state of the art in climate modelling. We’re just not very good at predicting the behaviour of complex systems (like weather) even a few days in advance. Here’s the kicker: it’s not our fault! These systems are inherently unpredictable. Even if we had super-super-super computers, we couldn’t do it. Even if we had a computer that could take ALL the variables – and that’s a HUGE amount of variables – and then run the simulation in real time to see what it did, it would do us no good – we would get a different outcome every time we ran the program. Just like its very simple distant relative, the double pendulum, a complete detailed model of a complex system like the climate is critically dependent on initial conditions. (We actually do have such a computer – it’s called ‘Reality’. The only accurate simulation of what the climate will do is the climate itself).

So, when you hear scientists talk about modelling the climate, you should not understand that to mean they are trying different kinds of wood for the clock case, or a new type of oil to make the gears run smoother. They mean they are making their best educated guess at the Big Picture of what might happen if they picked enough of the right factors to plug into their equations. Just like you understand the weather man to be doing when he tells you that in a week’s time it looks like rain (are you starting to get nervous yet? No? Then you’re not following me).

So what’s the problem, right? We don’t know what the weather will do – why is that different from any other period in our history? Why are we suddenly worrying now? Well, one of the things that modelling can predict pretty confidently is trends. Just as we can say that a double pendulum pushed gently is unlikely to do the crazy loop-the-loops that we see in the same system dropped from a higher angle, models can tell us that when we change something in the climate system too much, we’re likely to see unpredictable behaviour. In recent times (the last few million years or so) the climate has been ticking along like a gently-pushed double pendulum; little flurries here, little irregularities there, but for the most part, predictable enough for life-forms to have evolved strategies to cope. Things do change, but they change slowly. The system keeps itself in check through millions of years of self-modification that has allowed it to reach a relatively stable, though delicately balanced, equilibrium. The evidence is clear, though, that over the last few hundred years (a VERY short period by geological standards) humans are swinging the pendulum’s arc wider and wider by the simple act of burning things. We’re taking carbon that has been for eons locked up in the biosphere and chucking it into the atmosphere where it has started to imprison the Earth’s heat. We can, therefore, state with a high degree of confidence (based on an enormous amount of accumulated data) that the planet is heating up monumentally faster than it ever has before, and that that heating-up is concomitant with the technological period of humans. ((We’re excluding events that happened in geological times of many hundreds of millions of years ago, where lots of weird climate events happened. They are not relevant to our argument because we weren’t involved. If we had been, we’d be dead, which is of course the issue at hand.))

But when climate modelling scientists make a ‘prediction’ that the temperatures will rise 3 or 4 degrees by the end of the century, you should not think of that as a jolly nice warming of the winter months, and the odd extra scorcher in July (or January, depending in which hemisphere you live). You should instead interpret it to mean ‘We figure the whole system is going to heat up, but how it delivers that heat, and to whom, depends on the swing of the double pendulum…’ What you should expect is periods when the weather seems just as it always has, interspersed with occasional outbursts of extreme behaviour. For a while this will seem normal, and you will be as happy as a frog in a warm pond. But this extreme behaviour itself will start to interfere with the system – it’s another phenomenon of mathematics which those in the know approach with respect: feedback. And that feedback will almost certainly affect the system in ways which we can’t even imagine. ((We don’t really have much of an idea of the way the climate system is held in such delicate check anyway – global atmospheric behaviour is without doubt one of the most complex systems we know. All we can say for certain is that that if it changes much, we are in trouble.))

This coupling of complex behaviour and feedback is the thing which frightens the scientists, because it’s something with which the world of science has become very familiar in the last fifty or sixty years. We know that a complex system exhibiting instability and feedback can suddenly and capriciously become chaotic. That is, the system is likely to reach a point where even modelling is completely useless – it just goes completely berserk.

Trust me when I say that we really don’t want to see our climate system go chaotic. If we hit that point, it is likely that the great majority of the human race will suffer. ((It should be understood here – because I often think that it’s not – that the planet is indifferent to this problem. You hear climate deniers putting forward ideas like ‘Well there have always been periods of global warming’ or that ‘Sea levels have changed many times though the Earth’s history’. Well, sure. But mostly, there were no, or few, humans around, and other creatures were affected by these events, often in the form of species-wide extinctions. The Earth was once a giant greenhouse, covered with plants. But WE could never have lived in it. The planet would probably survive quite extreme results of our global warming efforts – it’s just that we wouldn’t.))

Chapter 3: Jenga

The kind of critical instability that I’ve just described is a lot like the game of Jenga. The Jenga tower will remain upright as long as the system is stable around its centre of gravity. If you lived on top of the Jenga tower, you would probably be aware of nothing at all as pieces are removed. Maybe the tower might wobble a bit, but, hey, things look pretty normal. Every removal of a Jenga tile is exactly the same kind of small effort, but each one of these small efforts moves the system closer and closer to critical instability. When the Jenga system reaches this point, the collapse into chaos happens rapidly and catastrophically, with little warning.

Well, that’s where we are right now. The tower is wobbling a bit, but everyone is saying ‘Hey, the tower has wobbled before and we were OK – what’s the problem? Worse, we continue to slide out the pieces, because that’s what we’ve been doing for years and it’s been just fine.

Unfortunately, this kind of situation is the very worst sort of thing to try to get resolved by a ‘popular vote’. When you combine the Boiling Frog situation with the Big Clock scenario and stir in a whole lot of poorly educated ((I say ‘poorly educated’ because I think that even the great majority of people who are literate do not have a good grasp on science, nor on rational ways of thinking. Any of you who have been reading TCA for a significant period of time will understand exactly what I mean here.)) points of view, you just get lots of personal assessments of the problem – or debates about even whether or not there IS a problem – and a bucketload of total inaction. The grim truth is that it’s a state of affairs that seriously needs everyone on the planet to be in complete agreement, or we will, without doubt, plod our way into extinction.

The way it stands at the moment is that the vast majority of people are either uninterested or confused, a small minority is in denial and beset by superstition and petty agendas, and another small minority is informed but frightened, frustrated and powerless. I think that what we are seeing here are the ramifications of a massive failure as a species to improve ourselves by putting emphasis on the capacity to understand our world through observing it properly. That is, through science. It is of no use to put an appropriate course of action to a popular vote in this instance, because the holders of a popular vote aren’t equipped to understand what it is they’re voting on. And frankly, I think we’ve run out of time to get them up to speed. Added to that is the negative influence that whatever we need to do will, most likely, cause great inconvenience to a large number of people, and will include increased poverty, loss of jobs, deprivation of luxuries (and maybe even necessities for many) and a general willingness to just suck it up and take a beating. It doesn’t take much insight to see that we’re never going to get people to volunteer for that, unless they become very afraid indeed (by which time – I emphasize once more – it will be way too late).

If ever there was a time for the leaders of our nations to listen to the science, and act decisively and quickly for the good of human race, this is it.

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Image of the Earth courtesy NASA and the Visible Earth project.

Do you remember, Faithful Acowlytes, the amazing prowess of that catchily-titled web tossing marvel of mechanical law enforcement that we covered way back in 2009, the Tmsuk ‘T-34’? What a piece of robotic genius that was, eh! Well then, it is my absolute pleasure to bring to your attention this morning another robotic wonder from Tmsuk. This time, in association with the Showa University Department of Orthodonics, they have let loose upon the world the toothily-endowed Showa Hanako, a humanoid robot that is designed to be used by dental students to practice their drilling and filling.

Showa Hanako can realistically simulate all kinds of possible dental patient behaviour such as discharging saliva, shifting in the seat, choking, sneezing, gagging and making incomprehensible dialogue-style noises. ((I wonder if it can simulate shock at seeing the numbers on the bill?)) You really have to see that choking action for yourself:

Disappointingly, there is no evidence of realistic screaming and panicking action, which is what I tend to exhibit when in the dental chair.

I am awesomely impressed that they make a big deal about Showa Hanako’s realistic tongue and mouth being made by Orient Industry, a maker of ‘love’ dolls. Yeah, I’m not even going there. I wonder if Orient has done a contra-deal to get teeth for their own product?

Acowlytes, mark my words: it’s only a matter of time before some crazed lunatic robot scientist decides to combine features of Showa Hanako, ReplieeQ1, Aiko, HRP-4C Gynoid and the Telstra fembot to create some spastically-jerking, head-lolling, wheelchair-bound, sex-crazed condescending robot bitch with big gnashing chompers. The idea disturbs me so greatly that I am in complete accordance with YouTube commenter Shketri for the final word on this:

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Thanks to Sir Joey for finding this one!

One of my favourite places on teh intertubes is the massive US Patent Database. You really could, if you were so inclined, spend an entire rainy afternoon traipsing down its digital corridors and uncovering all manner of bizarre, and sometimes clever ideas. Along with hundreds of thousands of approved patents, you can also find in these dim dark recesses, an enormous slush pile of hopeful patent applications – the wannabees and the has-beens of the entrepreneurial universe.

It has to be said, though, that whoever is in charge of the USPTO doesn’t make the traipsing easy. If you’re looking for something in particular the system seems to do its very best to evade any kind of sensible search procedure. If it was my job to sort it out, I’d approach the people who do the database programming for, oh, Amazon, for instance, and get them to look into a better system for the filing, archiving and retrieving of patents and applications. Because the USPTO sure needs one.

On the other hand, maybe the impenetrable and unfriendly process suits aspiring entrepreneurs quite well, if, let’s say, a punter like myself is in search of a… certain item of interest. It’s quite possible that secretive inventor types hope that the labyrinthine process will cause potential patent sleuths to give up before they can steal any precious ideas, or, as is my particular intention today, before they can bring them out of the musty digital recesses of patent database anonymity and into the bright light of rational public scrutiny. ((I want to point out that there is absolutely nothing illegal about doing this – US Patent Applications are publicly available to anyone who wants to see them.))

The item of interest I have in mind is this one: US Patent Application #20100243745 for an APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR REPELLING AN UNDESIRED SPECIES FROM A SUBJECT SPECIES. Its inventors are listed as: Heiney; Kathryn M.; (Wimberley, TX) ; Dubounet; Desire; (Budapest, HU); Rogers Melissa M.; (Austin, TX). The document was published on September 30, 2010.

Yes, that’s right. You have surely recognized it as the patent application for ShooTag. ((ShooTag is also now being promoted as ‘ShooBug‘. New name, same old woo.)) And just in case I need to draw a line under the name, the patent application for ShooTag is jointly owned by Melissa Rogers, Kathy Heiney, and Desiré Dubounet, aka ‘Professor’ William Nelson.

As you will recall, I have previously demonstrated indisputable links between Nelson and ShooTag, in my post ShooTag; Waterloo, despite Melissa Rogers’ & Kathy Heiney’s apparent efforts to erase any associations between themselves and Nelson and his crackpot notions. ((Nelson is nowhere mentioned on the ShooTag site at the time of this writing, although he featured very prominently on their ‘Science’ page when ShooTag first came to my attention. In addition, Google links to Heiney and Rogers’ attendance at one of Nelson’s QXCI conferences in Budapest have been rendered invalid and are only retrievable via Google’s cache.))

To recap, William Nelson was indicted in 1996 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on nine counts of felony fraud charges in relation to various ‘bioenergetic’ healing devices sold through his companies (these machines go variously under the names ‘QXCI’, ‘SCIO’, ‘EPFX’ and others, but they are all basically similar flavours of the same woo. They are implicated in the deaths of several people and the prolonged illnesses of many more). To evade prosecution, Nelson abandoned his home in the USA to take up residence in Budapest, Hungary, where he currently resides in the persona of Desiré Dubounet, and is still actively promoting his/her odd beliefs and his dangerous ‘medical’ machines. ((Where he claims, in the manner of so many charlatans of medical pseudoscience, to have fled because of persecution by ‘Big Pharma’. The reasoning presumably goes that his wonderful machines have solved all the medical problems known to humankind and if the word got out, the pharmaceutical companies would go bust, and they won’t let that happen by hook or by crook. Of course, when it comes down to concrete results, Nelson’s machines don’t deliver. They are at their most ‘effective’ on those maladies that have vague symptoms and subjective outcomes – just like all pseudoscientific medicine. The deaths attributed to these dangerous gadgets are mostly the result of critically ill people being hoodwinked into using them rather than seeking proper medical care. And, folks, in some cases you get so sick that you will die, no matter what anyone does. Modern medicine can’t cure everything, but it has a damn better chance than a silly box fuelled by ‘trivector frequencies’.))

The reason that Heiney & Rogers and their company, Energetic Solutions, don’t want any public association with him/her is, to most observers, pretty obvious I think. Nelson/Dubounet is a wanted criminal and an out-and-out fruitcake, and Energetic Solutions finds him/her and his flaky ideas a liability to the sales of its product. ((It’s probable that Heiney and Rogers aren’t able to determine that Nelson’s ideas are flaky, but I think that they, or perhaps their PR people, are keenly aware that a cross-dressing woo-spouting mad ‘scientist’ does tend to come across as a complete lunatic to most people. One has to assume that originally, in their addled ‘quantum-fractal-Schumann-Wave-bioenergetic-magnetic’ enthusiasm, Heiney and Rogers were all for Nelson’s mad ideas, but somewhere along the line they realised that maybe it was better that they just gave him his cut of the profits and kept him in the closet.))

Now I will emphasize strongly, as I have done before, that merely associating with a criminal does not make a person themselves a criminal. It is not William Nelson’s crimes that concern us here. We can, however, legitimately ask whether there is any link between Nelson/Dubounet’s pseudoscientific beliefs – beliefs that underpin her machines and the practices which have been found fraudulent by the FDA and the law – and the supposed basis for the working mechanism of ShooTag.

With that thought in mind, let’s take a look at some of the ShooTag patent application.

The first thing that probably doesn’t have to be said is that there is an encyclopaedic volume of utter crap in this document. It leaps, like a frog on LSD, from one crazy lilypad of gibberish to another. It is, in fact, a version of the ‘science’ that was originally expounded on the ShooTag website, and which has been subsequently removed (presumably because it made no sense to anyone who knew anything about science).

And we see immediately some of the trademark ideas of William Nelson: ‘cyclic voltammetry‘ and ‘trivector signatures‘. Nelson/Dubounet has expounded upon these ideas all over the web, and the ‘trivector’ concept is focal in the machines he sells. The patent application offers up a flow chart of how the inventors propose that ShooTag would work:

Already we are in pixie land. ‘Determine’ the trivector signature for the species concerned? Now how, exactly, should one go about doing that? Well, Fig. 4 throws some light on that question:

Aha! A network connection to a ‘trivector database‘. Now, I wonder where someone might find such a database? Plugging the term ‘william nelson trivector database‘ into a search engine returns hundreds of results related to Nelson’s QXCI/SCIO/EPFX machines just like this one:

What is the EPFX (Electro Physiological Feedback Xrroid) Quantum Biofeedback Device ?

It is the most accurate and sensitive technology of its kind for identifying stress reactions to over 10,000 trivector voltametric algorithmic signatures stored in it’s ((Ah yes, unsurprisingly, these sites are a tour de force of bad grammar, spelling and punctuation.)) database, such as those taken from nutritional items, emotional imponderable formulas, allersodes, toxins and more.

And elsewhere, on William Nelson’s very own ‘Imune’ website:

•Every substance has its own unique trivector (voltammetric) field signature, and it seems that when a substance with a voltammetric field signature is introduced to the body, it can provoke a change in the field of the body.

•This voltammetric field has a virtual photon effect, which also influences the body and changes its electrical readings. Thus, the trivector signature of an organism will change when the trivector of a stimulus is introduced electrically via device. With this, Nelson realizes an innovation in electrophysiological reactivity (EPR) testing.

• A system is developed for recording thousands of 3-Dimensional trivector “shapes” of individual substances, such as organs, toxins, allergens, nutrients, and others

I think we can very reasonably infer that the ‘trivector database’ specified in the ShooTag patent application is the very same ‘trivector database’ referred to in connection with Nelson/Dubounet’s fraudulent machines. How that database is determined is impossible to know. We can be quite certain there is no published science that explains what these ‘trivector substance signatures’ are. In my opinion, the patent should be refused on that basis alone; even nonsensical homeopathy ‘treatments’ are at least available for public perusal.

My assessment is that the QXCI/EPFX/SCSI/ShooTag ‘trivector database’ is nothing more than a big heap of spurious numbers that have no real meaning whatsoever. Of course, I can be proved entirely wrong about that with the offering up of some properly presented scientific evidence. I have no fear, however, that any such evidence will ever come my way.

The patent application goes rambling on over four dense pages of ‘explanation’, often repeating much of the same daft silliness in different wording. It comes from the school of ‘If-you-don’t-have-facts-throw-in-lots-of-baffling-sounding-terms’ thesis writing. The whole lot could be simply summed up in one brief paragraph:

‘We have a card with a magnetic strip upon which is encoded some numbers. Via some completely unspecified mechanism, some of those numbers refer to insects, and some of those numbers refer to pets. Via some other completely unspecified mechanism, the numbers working together cause the insects to avoid the pets.’ ((You can make it even shorter, in fact: ‘It’s a magic card that keeps bugs away.’))

That’s it.

Of course, the ShooTaggers know full well that they’d never have even the remotest chance of getting a patent if they said it like that, hence the mind-numbing verbage and circumlocutious gobbledygook. One hopes that the patent examiners are so used to seeing this kind of thing that the red pen comes out well before the end of the first paragraph.

Elsewhere on the patent application, we find other enlightening information. To set the scene: you will remember that a little while back we comprehensively decoded the ShooTag data and exposed the silly magical thinking inherent in the information encoded on the card. Not long after that, ShooTag added a question to the FAQ on their site in an obvious (if risible) attempt to deflect this exposure: ((Presumably their thought process was that people would search for ShooTag, find our deconstruction of the data, and then be mollified by the pat explanation in the FAQ. Nice try, folks.))

How do I know if my tag is still working?

This is a fun one. We encode shoo!TAG® tags with a frequency embedded in the magstripe located on the back of the tag. Customers can take their shoo!TAG® to any retailer that carries a magstripe (credit card) reader and swipe it through. The type of tag (i.e. fly, mosquito, tick) will show up when scanned. If there is no name, then the shoo!TAG® tag has lost its efficacy.

Yeah, that really is a fun one because we’ve caught you with your trousers down again. Let me quote you from your very own patent application (and it’s said not once, but three times, in different places):

…the trivector data stored on the three tracks is not readable by a conventional credit card reader.

Indeed. That statement tallies perfectly with my own experience: swiping a brand new ‘Tick’ card in a conventional card reader at my local shopping centre merely resulted in a ‘Card Read Error’. Maybe the ShooTaggers will want to amend that FAQ again, to erase this little untruth as well. Of course, this circumstance suits them down to the ground – if any ShooTag card is swiped, it will always come up as non-functioning (as it always literally is, I might point out). This is a ruse quite plainly intended to persuade unsuspecting customers to buy another one. Make no mistake, these people never miss a trick when money is involved.

So, what are we to make of this attempt by Energetic Solutions to obtain a patent? It’s not like they need it for any particular legitimate reason. The patent process exists in order to invest the intellectual property rights ownership of an invention with legal protection, so that someone else can’t take a good idea and just steal it. But here’s the thing – how do you protect an ‘invention’ that has no rational basis for doing what is claimed? ShooTag says their invention uses ‘trivector frequencies’ to achieve its stated purpose, so even if they had a proper patent, there would be nothing at all to stop me from creating a similar pet tag that uses a different method of operation to repel fleas, such as, oh, ‘overmodulated photonic recursion’ or something. When you just make shit up, holding a patent for it has no meaning.

But.

If your aim is to try and get authentic sounding endorsement for a product that can’t get any legitimacy via the path of factual evidence, then holding a patent is certainly a good PR tool. In other words, if you haven’t got any science to back up your claims, hoodwinking an official body into giving you an official seal of approval will undoubtedly buy you some mileage. ((It strikes me also that these people are prepared to put in a huge amount of time, effort, and, one assumes, money to try and establish their patent. Is it not a telling indication of how they view their product that they aren’t prepared to put the same kind of commitment into proper scientific trials? And wouldn’t you think you’d do the scientific investigation first? All legitimate product development happens that way round…))

I think most people trust that an organization such as the US Patent Office scrutinizes a document like the ShooTag application and files it where it belongs – under ‘N’ for ‘Nonsense’. Sadly, that trust would be misplaced. The USPTO rubber stamps some pretty stupid stuff. Take Patent #5,603,915 ‘Process for manufacturing homeopathic medicines’. Its inventors are listed as Carmel Kiely and a certain William Nelson. This ‘invention’ basically calls for the application of an electric current to a homeopathic medicine solution to ‘increase its efficacy’. Its rationale goes on for seven pages of ridiculous garbage.

And folks, the US Patent Office saw fit to award it a patent in 1997.

This enables William Nelson to boast, as he does whenever given the opportunity, about the many patents he holds. For people who don’t know better, it will undoubtedly sound impressive. This, I propose, is the sole reason that Energetic Solutions desires their patent for ShooTag. Not to protect its ‘clever technology’, but simply so they can use it as another advertisement. It’s exactly the same ploy that they’ve used with the ‘scientific experiment‘ that they tout on their website.

When you don’t have actual facts on your side, all you’ve got to play with is smoke and mirrors, and man, do these people know ALL the tricks.

Still, if they do get their patent approved, we will have something to look forward to. Melissa Rogers promised us that:

When we go from patent pending to full patent protection, then all of our sceince (all three applications) will be disclosed.

Well, Ms Rogers, such is my confidence of that ever happening that I’m applying for a patent to cover the event:

OMG! ACOWLYTES!! Mobile phones are KILLING OUR BEES! The FOOD CHAIN is going to COLLAPSE and we’re ALL GOING TO DIEEEEEEEE!!!!!!

What’s that you say? That’s not news? You already heard it ages ago? Ah, yes, Faithful Acowlytes, the hoary old idea that bee Colony Collapse Disorder is caused by radiation from the cellphone network has, of course, been reported, sensationalized and thoroughly found to be wanting years ago, but that doesn’t stop it from rising once more like a zombie hopped up on homeopathy to chew on the brains of the stupid. Twice today I came upon this story, once in my local newspaper and once via a Facebook posting. Both times, the ‘accredited’ source was this credulous gaping by Inhabitat reporter Lori Zimmer.:

More Scientific Studies Indicate That Cell Phones are Harming Bees

Scientists may have found the cause of the world’s sudden dwindling population of bees – and cell phones may be to blame. Research conducted in Lausanne, Switzerland has shown that the signal from cell phones not only confuses bees, but also may lead to their death

The original title of this article was It’s Official – Cell Phones are Killing Our Bees (as you can still see in the story’s URL) but the editors have evidently been kicked soundly in the bollocks and told that it’s not actually official at all, at least unless your interpretation of the word ‘official’ is ‘I pulled it out of my ass’.

The Daily Mail carried the story as Mobile Phones ARE to Blame for Killing off the World’s Bee Populations as is nicely preserved in the digital amber that is the remnant Google search link: ((Ah, don’t we LOVE teh intertubes, where stupidity and duplicitousness is forever preserved!))

Presumably someone gave them a good swift kick in the testicles as well, since they have now amended it to: Why a mobile phone ring may make bees buzz off: Insects infuriated by handset signals.

So, what does the ‘research conducted in Lausanne, Switzerland’ actually show? Well, you can read the full text of researcher Daniel Favre’s findings here, if you’re so inclined, but, as is my wont, I have done the legwork for you.

M. Favre and colleagues have conducted an experiment that suggests that bees don’t really like active cell phones being close to them. That is THE SUM TOTAL of what they have found. To synopsize, M. Favre showed that when mobile phones were place directly underneath bee hives (that is, within mere centimeters of the bees living environment), and the phones were dialled, the bees acted strangely. Now, while this is very interesting, it is hardly surprising. It has been demonstrated that honeybees are at least aware of magnetic fields ((Daniel Favre says in his report: ‘It is known that honeybees possess magnetite crystals in their fat body cells and that they present magnetic remanence. These magnetite structures are active parts of the magnetoreception system in honey- bees. Importantly, it has been shown that honeybees can be trained to respond to very small changes in the constant local geomagnetic field intensity.’)) so there is a likelihood that they are also affected to some extent by electromagnetic radiation. We already know that cell phones emit electromagnetic radiation ((including microwave heat to some extent)) (that’s why almost all cell phone manufacturers advise you not to hold them close to your ears for long periods of time), so an educated speculation says that having a strong EM field radiating at them from centimeters away may well annoy them at least a little. M. Favre’s experiment tends to confirm this. THAT’S ALL.

What Daniel Favre’s trials explicitly don’t show is that the cell phone network in general (including its broadcast towers) has any effect on bees, or that, even if it did, that such an effect has anything at all to do with bee Colony Collapse Disorder. Journalists just made that shit up because their brains go like this: ‘Bees… oooh… cell phones… ooooh… sciency stuff… ooooh… COLONY COLLAPSE DISORDER IS OFFICIAL!!!

I don’t know who teaches journalists to think like this, but it is plain that it must be part of their training because so many of them do it. Here is a very funny cartoon from Zach Weiner’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal that illustrates in pictures, a typical journalist-meets-science scenario: ((With thanks to Zach for generously allowing it to be linkable.))

But I digress. Back to the science…

Daniel Favre’s experiment is reasonably sound as far as I can tell – if the aim is to find out what bees do if you put a phone in their hive. His protocol seems reasonable, and his results appear to be methodically tabulated. Where he wanders a bit off track is his further hypothesizing, prompted, one has to speculate, by an already-formed agenda. In his own words (my emphasis):

“We should ask ourselves, whether the plethora of mobile phone masts also have an impact on the behaviour of the honeybees”

To which I reply: Sure, let’s ask away, and while we’re at it, let’s also ask whether they have an impact on kangaroos, pigeons and water buffalo. Questions don’t cost anything. But for the question to have any meaning at all in relation to the experiment at hand, M. Favre has first to show that what mobile phones do when they receive and transmit calls is in some way relevant to the kind of behaviour that cell phone transmitter masts exhibit. ((Speaking personally, I don’t have a clue. For all I know, cell phone towers work in an entirely different manner to the way my iPhone does when they send and receive signals. Daniel Favre cannot just make an assumption that the two things are equivalent. Furthermore, as a scientist it is irresponsible of him to allow that assumption to colour the experiment in question, especially when he is presenting it to untrained minds. If he intends to make a case for cell phone towers having an effect on bees, he must show that cell phone towers are having an effect on bees, not simply demonstrate that an affiliated piece of technology has an effect on bees. Science is like that – it has strict and unforgiving expectations of thoroughness.)) This being established, he would then need to demonstrate that the signals are actually strong enough to affect bees. ((It’s kind of curious that it seems that, given his expressed concerns, M. Favre has conducted his phone experiments in an environment that was not actually isolated from the cell phone towers (‘Beehives were located either in the beekeeping and apiary school of the city of Lausanne (altitude, 749 m) or in a second site used by beekeepers north of the city of Morges (altitude, 510 m; both locations in Switzerland’). If the nominal ground state for ‘normal’ bee activity is taken to be one in which cell towers are present, then, ipso facto, the cell towers are not having any significant effect…)) Having done that, his next step would be to show how such an effect is related to bee Colony Collapse Disorder, if at all.

Do you see how that works, Acowlytes? There is no reason at all to suspect that cell phone networks play any part in CCD. It is a speculation that was raised years ago as one of dozens of possibilities and has, for some reason, fired up the paranoid fantasies of the media and the brainless. For it to gain any ground at all, numerous pieces of a a puzzle must be locked together in such a way that they make sense. To put it another way, why cell phone radiation in particular? Why not rising C0² levels, increasing UV levels, increasing ambient noise, decreasing night-time sky visibility or any of a thousand other things?

Daniel Favre knows this. In his own words, again:

“Among other factors such as the varroa mite and pesticides, signals from mobile phones and masts could be contributing to the decline of honeybees around the world ; I am calling the international scientific community for more research in this field. ”

Once more, I’ve emphasized the points that you should attend. I think it’s pretty clear that M. Favre is in no way putting his conclusions forward as ‘official’. And what he doesn’t say, but should know if he’s doing research in this field, is, that among apiarists and scientists, pretty much every other speculated reason for CCD is considered more likely than cell phone signal radiation. In fact, it is beginning to appear that the number one contender for Colony Collapse Disorder is our love for convenience and the satisfaction of our cravings at a cheap price. In other words, the thing that is most likely killing off the bees is our creation of a vast honeybee monoculture. Hives are weakened by expedient farming practices and a lack of genetic diversity and so become highly susceptible to environmental stressors such as pathogens, pesticides and parasites. A recent USDA report says:

…based on an initial analysis of collected bee samples (CCD- and non-CCD affected), reports have noted the high number of viruses and other pathogens, pesticides, and parasites present in CCD colonies, and lower levels in non-CCD colonies. This work suggests that a combination of environmental stressors may set off a cascade of events and contribute to a colony where weakened worker bees are more susceptible to pests and pathogens.

So, while we may well be responsible for the collapse of the honeybee population (a population that we made unnaturally big in the first place) it’s not because we’re making phone calls. It’s just because we want something sweet and cheap for our toast at breakfast.

That, however, does not make for a much of a paranoia-inducing headline for the idiotic news media. And selling papers, is, after all, MUCH more important than giving people the facts.

Technology We Don’t Actually Need #1

OK, so this morning I’m driving along on the freeway and a question comes into my head. It’s not the first time I’ve asked this question, but I think now is the right time for the world to ask it with me:

What the hell are parking lamps on a car for?

Ponder this – when was the last time you used your parking lamps for parking? In fact, an even more pertinent question is: how useful are parking lamps in the process of parking anyway? If I tried to park my car using the pallid gleam of its parking lamps I think I’d end up parking myself into the rear end of another car. Parking lamps are wussy and dim. In the light from the average streetlamp, they may as well not even be switched on.

Of course, this is not the reason for which most drivers think parking lamps should be used in any case. Those who are even aware of their parking lamps (other than as the temporary switch position between OFF and HEADLIGHTS) think that they’re supposed to employ them when they’re driving along on a dimly lit or rainy day. BUT, my friends, if the point of this activity is to heighten visibility, then why not use your headlights??? Parking lamps are, in this capacity, a grudgingly marginal commitment to safety. It’s like wanting to be visible, but not too visible. ((It strikes me that it’s not unlike the floatation vest you’re supposed to wear in the event of a plane crash – sure, put it on if it makes you feel better, but when you hit the water at 800+ mph, a life vest is going to be about as useful as a banana in a swordfight.)) The driver of the car who was behind me on the freeway this morning may as well have been waving a birthday candle, for all the visibility his parking lights were offering. ((Seriously. Outside, in the overcast daylight, I couldn’t actually tell if they were on or off. I only knew they were on because we had previously passed through a tunnel.))

So, racking my brains as to any conceivable explanation for the automobile parking lamp’s purpose for being, I did what all hip 21st century netizens do and turned to the Font of All Knowledge, Wikipedia. Well. The first thing that must be said is that Wikipedia’s entry for Automotive Lighting is one of the longest and most comprehensive I have ever come across. You want lights, it’s got lights. And it has more footnotes than a Tetherd Cow Ahead article about ShooTag. If you need to know stuff about car lights, this is your one stop shop. Suck on that Encyclopedia Brittanica.

It throws scant illumination, however, on the topic of parking lamps. Oh, it has several paragraphs about them, alright, but nowhere is there any persuasive explanation for any practical utility.

So, even with the vastness of the internet’s information-gathering clout at my fingertips, I can draw no other conclusion than that the car’s parking lamps are nothing more than the automotive evolutionary equivalent of a vestigial tail or an appendix. It is my view that they serve no function other than to supply the makers of light bulbs with a nice reliable income stream.

Honk if you agree.

Charles Bonnet Syndrome is an unusual neurological affliction that causes mentally healthy people to see things that aren’t actually there. It is usually associated with advancing age and is thought to affect between 10% – 40% of people. Hallucinations seen by those with Bonnet’s Syndrome range from colourful patterns and textures on walls, through out-of-place objects such as bottles and vases of flowers, to animals and faces and people. Perhaps one of the strangest things about the affliction is that the hallucinated items often appear to interact with the sufferer’s real environment. Charles Bonnet, who first described the disorder, observed it in his 89 year old grandfather who hallucinated birds, horse-drawn carriages, animals and perhaps most disturbingly of all, a man who would come into his bedroom and smoke a pipe in the evenings, and who was still there the next morning when the old man awoke…

The British Medical Journal reports the case of an 87 year old widower who had, for six weeks previous to his diagnosis with the condition, been seeing people and animals in his house, including bears and Highland cattle.

He knew that these visions were not real and they didn’t bother him much, but he thought he might be losing his mind. The visions lasted for minutes to hours, and the cattle used to stare at him while quietly munching away at the grass.

Bonnet’s Syndrome occurs mostly in people with some kind of macular degeneration, and the most likely explanation for what is going on is that the sufferer’s brain, lacking the visual information it is accustomed to receiving, feels obliged to conjure up something to fill the space. That it chooses to integrate that ‘something’ with the world of the patient is perhaps the weirdest part of the illness.

The lesson here, in case this post seems somewhat obtuse, is that you quite literally can’t always believe your eyes. The strangeness of Charles Bonnet Syndrome illustrates profoundly how deeply etched into our being is the ‘need’ to make sense of the world in some way when deprived of the proper data. In the case of the sufferer of Bonnet’s Syndrome, the brain makes an unmistakeable and totally misleading judgment call.

If you’d like to read more about Charles Bonnet Syndrome there’s a great piece on Damn Interesting.

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Image (in part) by William Fox Talbot from Wikimedia Commons

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