Tetherd Cow Ahead

This just in from NASA:

On August 1st, almost the entire Earth-facing side of the sun erupted in a tumult of activity. There was a C3-class solar flare, a solar tsunami, multiple filaments of magnetism lifting off the stellar surface, large-scale shaking of the solar corona, radio bursts, a coronal mass ejection and more.

The solar flare has spawned a coronal mass ejection heading in Earth’s direction due to hit about the time you read this. Everybody duck.

What is is with techy people when they come across robots? It seems that a machine merely has to bat a servo-driven eyelid for normally sane, balanced geeks to completely drop their brains on the floor.

Take this recent article over at the usually-sensible Engadget.

The photo you see above is of Bina48, one of the most advanced humanoid robots around. Bina48 resides at the Terasem Movement Foundation in Bristol, Vermont, and while she doesn’t exactly excel at conversation, she’s far more coherent than many we’ve spied… her existence and nearly constant evolution is pretty impressive and we’re going to keep our eye on her as we move toward the future.

In case you couldn’t figure it out, Bina is the one on the left. I know, I know, the astonishing human likeness makes it tricky to pick the robot from the New York Times reporter, but you’ll have to take my word for it. The spastic wobbling head on a plinth is in fact a machine.

Engadget’s acknowledgement that Bina ‘doesn’t exactly excel at conversation’ is somewhat of an understatement. The New York Times reporter attempted to ‘interview’ Bina and the effect is less of a conversation than something like an attempt to interpret the ravings of a simpleton on peyote.

I encourage you to watch the video of the interview now, to experience the full effect of Bina’s striking humanness.

I fail to see how this is in any way more impressive than the numerous other ‘realistic’ robots we’ve examined previously on The Cow. Engadget really needs to get out more. Perhaps on a date with Aiko or Roxxxy, who, even if not as ‘anatomically correct’ as their makers would have everyone believe, at least have bodies.

The New York Times reporter starts out bravely with Bina, but realises in two sentences that she’s been sent out on one of those stories that has little salvaging.

“Hi Bina,” she says, cheerily.

“Er… so where were we?” asks Bina, like a junkie being roused from an opium dream.

“I’m Amy. I’m a reporter,” says the NYT girl, with the sinking feeling that she’d have been better off doing the kitten-stuck-up-a-tree story.

“There is probably more to you than just that,” interrupts Bina, with a sneer. ((Seriously – we are SO attuned to facial gestures that, in my opinion, it’s way better to just forget them than to take the risk that they will be inappropriate. Watch someone closely next time you have a conversation, and see how much of the intent is carried by facial movement. You may be surprised.))

Poor Amy cuts her losses by having the story go to a voiceover:

I had lofty goals for my interview with the Bina48 robot. I imagined me, the intrepid New York Times correspondent, communing on camera with a new kind of intelligent silicon species.

Yes, dear Amy, and I bet that’s just how your editor sold it to you. Well, you’ve learned your lesson about robots haven’t you? You could have saved yourself a lot of grief if you’d been a constant reader of The Cow. We’ve covered all this in depth on numerous occasions.

Amy persists, to her detriment. She asks Bina several times if she’s ready for a conversation while the robot wobbles its badly-wigged head around, doing an uncanny impression of Parkinson’s patient trying to get out of a straight jacket. It finally decides on the well-worn AI strategy of rephrasing the question, which Amy takes as an affirmation.

“Cool!” says Amy.

“Ambiguous,” replies Bina, in an astonishingly embarrassing 1950s ‘does-not-compute’ kind of way. “Cold weather or cold sickness?”

Oh dear. That’s a big fat ‘F’ for you on the Turing Test, Bina. ((Lesson Number 2: Make sure your robot knows the difference between literalness and colloquialism. My first question to a being who I suspected of masquerading as a human would be something like ‘How’s it hangin’ dawg?’))

After an hour of ‘exhausting’ rapport with Bina, Amy calls it quits. Bina has lolled her head around, ((Maybe if they programmed her to drool? It would complement the overall effect, that’s for sure.)) interrupted the conversation with baffling observations, misinterpreted questions, and advanced her ‘opinions’ on artificial intelligence in a completely unconvincing manner, all the while effectively demonstrating that she is anything BUT intelligent. Eventually, she attempts to explain her poor performance away on ‘having a bad software day’.

“You know how that is,” she pleads. ((The programmers are obviously going for wit here, but succeed only in bathos.)) NO WE DON’T, Bina. We are humans. We don’t have ‘bad software’ days. ((That excuse is going to go down really well when the first robot babysitter to drown someone’s child in the bath tries to blame it on ‘a bad software day’.))

As I see it, every day is a bad software day for Bina. I’m perplexed when things like this get wheeled out time and time again as evidence of how the robotic future is just over the horizon. Bina is really nothing more that a mechanical appendage of software routines that have been around for decades. There are a few ‘physical’ additions (Such as Bina’s attempts to smile which are so creepy that I think makers of horror movies would do well to take notes) but all in all Bina is no more impressive than Fake Captain Kirk or Eliza. Obviously Engadget has a very different idea to me of what the future with robots ought to be like.

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Thanks to Atlas for providing more robot-spotting fun.

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This extraordinary creature is a Benthic Holothurian. It was photographed swimming in the waters above the mid-Atlantic Ridge where scientists have discovered ten possible new species of marine life.

See more beautiful pictures by David Shale on The Guardian site, and marvel at the mysteries of our beautiful planet.

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Photograph: David Shale/University of Aberdeen/PA. Used respectfully without permission in the interests of promoting science.

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As we have seen in numerous posts on The Cow, pseudoscience veritably thrives in all those places where complex processes have subjective outcomes. It does especially well if those outcomes promise big rewards of money, fame or health. One outcome that is primed for exploitation is vanity, and although we’ve covered quite a few areas of jiggery pokery, one that hasn’t made an appearance up till now is the multi billion dollar cosmetics industry. Since it deals with highly subjective issues of appearance, youth and beauty, you can bet your lash-lengthening mascara that we don’t have to look very far in this field before we stumble across hogwash.

A couple of nights ago on tv I saw an ad for a skincare product by Estée Lauder called ‘Advanced Night Repair – Synchronized Recovery Complex’ ((You can almost feel the copywriters hammering that one out…)) that boasted that its wonderful skin revitalizing technology was ‘inspired by DNA research’. Hahahaha! ‘Inspired’ by DNA research! It was such a piece of waffle that it even had Violet Towne, Vermilion and Viridian hooting with derision. ((It has to be said that I’ve taught them well.)) The crux here of course is that ‘inspiration’ means absolutely toss-all as a credential. I could claim that Tetherd Cow Ahead is ‘inspired’ by Shakespeare but that doesn’t mean that it’s:

•As good as Shakespeare
•Similar in content to Shakespeare or, in fact,
•That it has anything to do with Shakespeare whatsoever.

It could simply mean that I read some Shakespeare and thought: ‘That old Shakespeare was a clever geezer, wasn’t he? You know what? That’s inspired me to start up a blog!’ You could never prove one way or another that this wasn’t the case. The trick is that the makers of this product can happily tell you that they were ‘inspired’ by DNA research (which sounds like it could be impressive) while simultaneously telling you nothing at all.

With that in mind, I did a search for beauty products ‘inspired by DNA research’ and came upon a treasure trove of nonsense. The first stop was a product called PerfectSkin™. Of course the first thing I did was visit the PerfectSkin™ science page, because, as we all know, the science pages of people who are trying to sell you fantastical promises are always good value. I suggest you go to the Perfect Science Labs™ page now and take it in. There will be a quiz when you get back.

OK. Did the pictures of serious (but attractive) women in lab coats and masks convince you? No? How about the blurb:

Perfect Science Labs worked with world renowned chemist and skincare scientist Dr. Ron DiSalvo to incorporate the most recent groundbreaking discoveries in skincare, including patented ingredients to create PerfectSkin’s miracle breakthrough 3D BioRepair Complex. This revolutionary complex inspired by DNA research contains a blast of powerful vitamins, antioxidants, and a patented newly discovered exotic plant enzyme, OGG-1 (8-oxo-guanine DNA glycosylase), that kill harmful free radicals, which attack and damage your healthy skin. ((All emphases in the original))

Jeepers creepers! That sounds like it’s the answer to all of humankinds’ most pressing problems, don’t it!

It appears that when you’ve run out of words like ‘quantum’, ‘magnetic’, ‘energy’ and ‘vibration’ to describe your new dubious product, the newest, hippest, most phantasmagorical epithet you can now add is that it’s ‘3D’. Just excuse me while I fall on my corkscrew. Could there be any more meaningless a grab for credibility? Well, yes, I guess the quickly following ‘inspired by DNA research’ shows us that there can. And if you’re looking for enlightenment in the next bit where ‘OGG1 kills harmful free radicals’, well, let me save you the effort – there ain’t any.

OGG1 is an enzyme implicit in cell repair but evidence for its efficacy as a topical agent is dubious at best. It certainly doesn’t ‘kill’ free radicals. Being about as chemically simple as you can get, free radicals are not actually alive under any interpretation of the concept. ((The terms ‘free radicals’ and ‘antioxidants’ have become buzzwords. If you ask most people about those things they will almost certainly have the view that they are things that are not good for you. But if you ask them why they think that, you’ll find without any shadow of a doubt that they have inherited the notion from the advertising of cosmetic and ‘health’ related products. Try it. You’ll see how right I am!)) And anyway, there is much debate about the role of free radicals in respect to human health. The evidence that they cause the kind of aging damage that was once suspected is currently being challenged.

Elsewhere on the PerfectSkin™ site we find the ubiquitous testimonials page. As we have seen with other purveyors of pseudoscience like Shoo!TAG, testimonials are absolutely indispensable when you don’t have actual science on your side. I’d like to reproduce one of the ‘Before & After’ comparisons here for you, but intellectual property issues cause me to err on the side of not getting sued. Go there now and look at any one of the testimonials before reading on.

Without exception, every one of these ‘Before & After’ examples is deceitful.

•Before: Ambivalent expression; bad lighting; shiny face; no makeup.
•After: Happy expression; flattering lighting; professional makeup job; in some cases, digital retouching.

My personal feeling is that if someone is prepared to lie to me quite so badly that I can detect it in seconds, why would I trust anything else they have to say, especially when it invokes technical concepts that are complicated and leave acres of wiggle room?

This kind of deception is not only common in the cosmetic industry, it almost seems de rigueur. Searching further on our term ‘inspired by DNA research’ brings up all manner of doublespeak and flim flam. There is so much of it that I could probably start up a blog completely dedicated to the subject. You can venture on for yourself if you so desire. But before we finish, I’ll leave you with one more colourful example:

This is Morrocco Method Simply Pure Sea Essence Shampoo.

This synergistic blend of enlivened, charged botanicals and hand-picked herbs are mixed, blended, and bottled according to the moon cycles used by ancient farmers.

For the Morrocco Method Sea Essence Shampoo we go to the sea waters off the coast of Brittany, said to be among the cleanest waters on earth. We combine ocean water with living sea plants: algae, kelp and seaweed. Ocean water is practically identical to human blood plasma. Sea vegetables have a uniquely high level of DNA, RNA, and nucleic factors, the building blocks of life itself. As well, this shampoo is chock full of silicon which promotes healthy growth.

Bwahahahaha! What fun. Let’s deconstruct that, shall we:

•‘This synergistic blend of enlivened, charged botanicals…’

What the fuck does that even mean?

•‘…bottled according to the moon cycles used by ancient farmers.’

And that is efficacious… how?

•’…the sea waters off the coast of Brittany, said to be among the cleanest waters on earth’

‘Said’ by whom? Your mum?

•‘Ocean water is practically identical to human blood plasma.’

Well, yeah, depending on your definition of ‘practically identical’. As in ‘Tetherd Cow Ahead is practically identical to the combined works of Shakespeare.’

•’Sea vegetables have a uniquely high level of DNA, RNA, and nucleic factors, the building blocks of life itself.’

I don’t think they have a clue what they’re talking about here: ‘a uniquely high level of DNA’? What does that even mean? And anyway, by inference, WHAT, exactly?

•‘As well, this shampoo is chock full of silicon…’

If it was ‘chock full’ of silicon it would be a bottle of sand (and anyway – isn’t it already chock full of DNA?). ((I have a suggestion for the makers of Morrocco Method – why not consider homeopathy? Then the product doesn’t have to be chock full of anything. In fact, the less chock full it is, the better!))

•‘…which promotes healthy growth.’

Silicon promotes healthy growth? Why? There’s no silicon in your hair! We’re carbon-based lifeforms you idiot.

Yes folks, no matter how many flavours of silliness you want, the cosmetics industry has them all!

Anomalous Radar Activity Around Melbourne
I just love it when event transpire such that I can bring you two of my favourite subjects in one Tetherd Cow Ahead post. Today’s is such a post and it’s brought to you by the Melbourne Age which is carrying an article that combines the stupidity of the newspaper business with the beliefs of a loony. It runs under the headline ‘Weather has conspiracy theorists strung out’

INEXPLICABLY odd images ((Why, why, why do reporters continue to use this kind of language? The images are ENTIRELY explicable in any number of ways. They are ONLY inexplicable in the mind of Colin Andrews. Stephen Cauchi, you are an IDIOT.)) on Bureau of Meteorology radar. Cyclones off the Australian coast and the most intense storm to hit Melbourne in living memory. A controversial US military facility in Alaska suspected of research into weather control … It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi conspiracy thriller.

Yes, there’s no quibbling there – that’s exactly what that hodge-podge of unrelated factoids sounds like (although I’d be inclined to add the word ‘bad’ just before ‘sci-fi’). So the implication here is that it’s going to turn out to be The Truth, right, as opposed to the fiction of a ‘sci-fi conspiracy thriller’? Well, you’d be totally wrong if you were thinking that.

The story goes on to detail the following points:

•The Bureau of Meteorology radar has been recording ‘a number of very strange patterns – rings, loops, starbursts’ around Melbourne.

•There have been some big storms here.

•The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) facility in Alaska has powerful transmitters and radars.

From this, the correspondent spins up a vacuous story that says in essence that websites ‘specializing in pseudoscience’ have ‘leapt on the notion’ that the three things above are connected and the ‘government’ is trying to control the weather.

Is anybody else feeling the need to stick their head in a bucket of ammonia?

To simplify: this is a story which is actually just a free plug for the nutty ideas of lunatics, while all the while pretending to ‘news’ by distancing itself from aforementioned lunatics. And, to put the icing on the cake, the story is embellished with an image of the recent SpaceX Falcon 9 launch, which has exactly NO relevance to anything at all.

As I’m reading this, I find myself thinking ‘Who the hell is responsible for this guff and how do they get to be working on a news desk?’ So I scroll up to the byline. It will probably come as no surprise to you at all to find that the literary genius behind this story is none other than reporter Stephen Cauchi, who has provided us with much mirth previously here on The Cow with his non-news style of journalism.

Which brings me to the second of my favourite Tetherd Cow subjects – insane people. Mr Cauchi’s main source for the above-mentioned conspiracy turns out to be someone who is very familiar to anyone who’s spent time around the pseudoscience traps – a fellow who goes by the name of Colin Andrews. Now, just to set you up, Mr Andrews has about ZERO credibility as any kind of authoritative source. In fact, if you were actually trying to find a less credible spokesperson (for anything except nutty ideas I guess) you’d have your work cut out for you.

Colin Andrews first came to prominence as an ‘expert’ on crop circles back in the 1980s, and contrary to all common sense, still believes that they are made by ‘aliens’. Since that time, he has advanced all manner of implausible conspiracies across numerous disciplines. In this case, Mr Andrews’ ‘government weather control’ paranoia centers on some ‘anomalous’ radar screen captures from earlier this year when the south coast of Australia suffered some unusually fierce storm activity. This is a couple of them:

Well, yeah, sure, these ones are from the Bureau of Meteorology radar in Broome in Western Australia, but close enough, right?

These are the ‘inexplicably’ odd radar images to which Mr Cauchi refers in his first paragraph. Rather than conclude (as might any rational person) that the radar images are simply quite explicable as imperfections in the way that a meteorological radar functions, Mr Andrews’ brain oscillates to the most wildly improbably alternative – that the images are some kind of government weather control experiment that has been cunningly contrived to appear like a radar imperfection.

Mr Andrews persists in this belief even when told as much from someone who works for the Bureau of Meteorology:

Re: The round radar prob in WA, it is a BOM Radar unit which has its lower rain level threshold setup too low, ie, too sensitive, which gives the noisy radar reading like that. Nothing to do with HAARP, which, as you know, is in Alaska. I see images like this a lot, as I work for the Bureau of Meteorology in QLD.

And you know what? You too can see images like this on Australian meteorological radars if you feel like clicking on every radar station that the BOM offers. If you think like Mr Andrews, you’re likely to find a LOT of government hanky panky. It’s a wonder the government has any time for actual governing.

After giving plenty of airing to Colin Andrews’ hair-brained ideas, the Age article goes on to seek opinions from authoritative skeptics, who quite reasonably call the idea ‘silly’. We could have started with that conclusion and made the whole story one sentence long, viz:

We asked a sensible person, Mr Tim Mendham (president of the Australian Skeptics), what he thought of noted loony Colin Andrews’ idea that the government is controlling the weather, and he said it was silly.

I guess that doesn’t make for ‘pizazz’ but the content is exactly the same as the story as it stands.

Anyhoo, after a lot of stupid waffle, the article rounds off with:

The Sunday Age tried to contact Mr Andrews, who is based in the US, but there was no reply. That could be because, according to his website, he was in Oregon for last weekend’s 11th annual UFO Festival.

Smirk smirk smirk. Well if that’s your attitude Mr ‘cynical’ Stephen Cauchi, why are you making this nitwit’s ideas out to have any credence at all?

It makes me feel quite nauseous to note that this was No. 1 on the ‘most read’ list of Top National Articles in The Age today.

Well done Melbourne Age! Another pin on the board for the Great De-Braining of the Human Race. ((Or, one optimistically hopes, another nail in the coffin of the old news media.))

UPDATE: At the time I wrote this yesterday, there were no comments on the article. Now there are 19. After reading them I actually feel like walking over to the train line near my house and throwing myself in front of the 10:15 to Flinders St Station. WHY WAS I BORN INTO A WORLD WITH THIS MUCH STUPID?!

The comments are now closed and the one I left was evidently deemed unsuitable for inclusion – evidently it made a little too much sense.

I’ve been asked by a couple of people if I could make a summary page for all the TCA links in the Shoo!TAG (also ‘ShooBug’) saga, so without further ado, in chronological order…

•And So Ad Infinitum… April 1, 2009: In which I discover ShooTag for the first time and completely fail to make a single joke about April Fool’s Day.

•WooTagâ„¢ April 14, 2009: In which Melissa Rogers from ShooTag takes me to task for not being ‘disaplined’ in quantum physics, calls me ignorant and uses terms like ‘fractal’, ‘crystals’ and ‘energy fields’, and promises that the world will get to see the ‘sceince’ ((Maybe ‘sceince’ is something different to ‘science’? That would explain an awful lot.)) behind ‘all three’ ShooTag applications when they go from patent pending to full patent protection (yeah, like that’s ever going to happen). ((There are no records for a US patent application for anything that resembles ShooTag. I propose that a patent has never been submitted.))

•EXTRA: World’s Zombies Starving! April 17, 2009: In which Melissa Rogers uses her superior knowledge of quantum physics to rewrite Einstein’s famous mass/energy equivalence formula, but somehow fails to be nominated for a Nobel Prize.

•EMF – It’s Not What You Think! August 29, 2009: In which Kathy Heiney and Melissa Rogers ‘explain’ the workings of Shoo!TAG in their own baffling words. Don’t worry if you are more confused after you listen to them – everybody is.

•How Science Works December 7, 2009: In which we examine how the scientific process works and why ShooTag is not related to it in any way.

•Shoo Polish? April 16, 2010: In which we learn that the ShooTag sisters started out by attempting to sell ‘homeopathic stress relieving creams’. Which, all things considered, comes as no surprise.

•Kookaburra or, perhaps… Galah? April 17, 2010: In which someone involved with ShooTag (even though he pretends not to be) attempts to pass himself off as an Australian to our substantial amusement. When we expose his shabby ruse, he turns nasty and calls me names.

•Another Science Experiment May 3, 2010: In which we learn a simple trick for making visible the encoded magnetic data on a credit card. We apply it to a ShooTag in an effort to see just what’s on that sucker.

•Shoo!TAG Unplugged May 19, 2010: In which we reveal, thanks to our intrepid readers, that the ShooTags are encoded with a handful of numbers and the words ‘tick’ and ‘flea’, thus illuminating the simplistic magical thinking of the ShooTag creators. ((Truly, using the same logic, if you hung a bit of cardboard around your pet’s neck with the words ‘Go away fleas!’ written on it, you’d see exactly the same results as you would with a ShooTag.))

•Shoo!TAG: Waterloo May 24, 2010: In which we disclose the full bona fides of the ShooTag creators, including the basis of their pseudoscientific beliefs and their links with the criminally indicted fraudster ‘Professor’ William Nelson.

•Shoo!TAG: Bitchfight June 27, 2010: In which we learn that The Finnish Olympic Team is allegedly endorsing ShooTag, and that the European rollout faces competition from a nemesis, Tic-Clip.

•Advertising Charity Begins at Home November 27, 2010: In which we find that ShooTag is being shipped to Haiti to help control malaria. As if Haiti doesn’t already have enough of a problem.

•Tell Aura I Love Her February 25, 2011: In which we encounter astounding scientific proof of Shoo!TAG’s amazing effects. If you consider pretty rainbow coloured auras as science, that is.

•Shoo Us the Science (Project) February 28, 2011: In which Energetic Solutions, the creators of ShooTag, show the world how much they know about science. Which isn’t very much, needless to say. Oh, and they tell some more lies and make some more exaggerations.

•Shoo!TAG: Crime Against Humanity April 26, 2011: In which Energetic Solutions shows how truly stupid and dangerous they are by boasting about shipping $30,000 worth of Shoo product to Zambia to ‘help fight malaria’

•Shoo!TAG: Patently Absurd June 7, 2011: In which we examine the ShooTag patent application and notice that Professor William Nelson/Desiré Dubounet still has a finger in the Shoo pie.

•Science Schmience September 9, 2011: In which we notice that amazing scientific evidence in support of Shoo!TAG has mysteriously vanished from their website, only to be replaced by more grandiose claims with much flimsier credibility. If that’s even possible.

•Misty Watercolour Memories… September 10, 2011: In which we investigate the way in which the people behind Shoo!TAG doggedly rewrite history to cover up their mistakes, their lies and their general lack of science acumen. With pictorial examples!

•Shoo!TAG Pants Down October 19, 2011: In which the Shoo!TAG claims of endorsements from Texas State University mysteriously disappear from their site, and I publish an open letter to Melissa Rogers.

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And, as added extra value, here are a few other links of relevance on other sites:

•ShooTag review and testing on dog complete May 2, 2010: Darcie, from The Dish, videotapes a test of the ‘tick’ Shoo!TAG on her dog Oliver. Even though Darcie followed the manufacturer’s instructions to the letter, the results are less than impressive. Ticks are plainly not affected by the Shootag.

•Decoding magnetic strips May 17, 2010: Dewi Morgan’s detailed record of how he analysed the data on the Shootags.

•shoo!Tag testing human mosquito complete May 24, 2010: Darcie, from The Dish, tests the ‘human’ mosquito tag and videos the results. Again, the tag fails to have any effect.

•Shoo!TAG Entry at RationalWiki

•Small piece of plastic magnetic strip achieves what entire planet can’t! Great review of ShooTag at Amazon.