Tetherd Cow Ahead

Do you have your tin foil beanies on this morning Acowlytes? Have you supped well on your goji drinks, rubbed your ShooTag and cleansed your bowels thoroughly with colloidal silver? No? Well you might want to get used doing all those things and more, because that is certainly the future which awaits us if the current trend by some science magazines plays out to its inevitable conclusion.

The latest issue of New Scientist runs a cover article headlined ‘Ghost DNA; Nobelist claims he can ‘quantum teleport’ genes’. I can’t begin to convey to you how much this kind of half-baked pap passing as ‘science’ journalism pisses me off. ((This is the second of two New Scientist articles that have really gotten up my nose in recent months. The first was their uncritical reporting of the so-called statistical evidence for existence of precognition revealed in experiments conducted by ‘psi’ researcher Daryl Bem. The Bem work is so filled with problems as to be laughable, and has been subsequently comprehensively picked apart by scientists and statisticians alike. Experiments replicating those carried out by Bem have, predictably, not shown the same results he claimed to have found. But where is the New Scientist followup revealing all this? Not as headline-grabbing as ‘Evidence we can see the Future?’, I suppose.))

The story, in a nutshell, is that Luc Montagnier, a scientist previously awarded the Nobel prize for his work with AIDS, has published results of an experiment that he says shows that DNA can be remotely ‘imprinted’ in water. He further contests that the imprint can then be reconstituted into actual DNA via polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Writing it down like that makes it seem so patently stupid, that I had to go back and check that this was, in fact, what Montagnier claims. And yes, it is.

You can read the full process of Montagnier’s experiment here, if you can make sense of it. Essentially, Montagnier contests that when an electromagnetic field is applied to a flask of DNA, that field somehow picks up something from the DNA that can be somehow transmitted to an adjacent but isolated flask of purified water, somehow transferring something into the water. PCR is somehow able to amplify this something which results in actual real DNA being created in the previously-pristine flask. ((My initial response as a person with zero training in genetic chemistry was to want complete assurance that Montagnier’s experimental protocol had completely excluded the possibility of contamination. PCR experiments are notoriously prone to contamination problems. Occam’s Razor dictates here that, in the face of one experiment by one scientist who already holds partisan homeopathic views, the most likely explanation for Montagnier’s results is the actual explanation: that his ‘pristine’ flask was contaminated.)) As you can see, that’s more somehows and somethings than your average episode of Ghost Hunters.

Montagnier offers no mechanism that might allow DNA to be able to be recorded or transmitted electromagnetically in this manner, nor any method by which water might be able to receive this transmission and retain it. He also fails to offer any explanation of a process via which this ‘ghostly’ DNA could become corporeal DNA. Instead, his notes make reference to discredited homeopathy researcher Dr. Jacques Benveniste, and calls on the concept of ‘water memory’, a flimsy pseudoscientific notion that has resisted numerous attempts to give it any credence. All in all, there are so many hallmarks of fruit-loopery throughout Montagnier’s proposition that you really have to ask yourself why ANYONE is giving this ridiculous fluff the time of day. Well, of course, it is Montagnier’s Nobel credentials that are the angle here. He’s a Nobel laureate, so he has to be an all-round genius, right? Wrong. Having a Nobel prize doesn’t prevent you from being an idiot in some other area. New Scientist is indulging in a favourite tactic of woo-mongers: an appeal to authority. Montagnier’s controversial Nobel prize relates to work he did on HIV/AIDS. This does not make him an expert on everything. ((The New Scientist editorial attempts to evoke fairness by pointing this out. It’s a journalistic trick that truly annoys the crap out of me – stick in a bunch of reasonable objections to ‘show’ that you can see the logical flaws in your argument, but then go ahead and ignore what you just did by plastering ‘Nobel Prize Winner’ in the headline of your article. Scumbags.))

New Scientist’s editorial in defense of their decision to publish this information is the real killer, though. It is disingenuous and unctuous. They open with this:

As the old saying goes, it’s good to have an open mind but not so open that your brains fall out. This week we report claims about the way that DNA behaves that are so astonishing that many minds have already snapped shut.

Did you spot it? Yep, there’s New Scientist, a magazine that is supposedly offering proper science journalism, jumping on another defense beloved of practitioners of pseudoscience: ‘If you don’t immediately give credence to some outrageous claim, you have a closed mind’. New Scientist editors, double shame on you. ((And, I might add, making this statement in this context is a damn good illustration of exactly what you’re purporting to be declaiming with it – your ‘open’ mind is quite publicly leaking your brains all over the carpet.))

After a meandering attempt to appear like they’ve given the decision some thought, they arrive at their compelling reason for carrying the story:

We decided to go ahead because any bona fide experimental result is worthy of scrutiny, and the claims are nothing if not interesting.

No, let’s just have some honesty here. You decided to go ahead because this is the kind of thing that sells copies of your magazine. If you are pretending to any level of scientific credibility at all, you don’t just up and publish any old crap on the pretext that it has ‘interesting’ claims. If you were truly sincere about informing people of the science behind this story, you would have waited for some of the additional results from third party researchers that you admit are necessary for this experiment to have any validity. Of course, when that happens it will be a non-story (as I submit you are fully aware) and the headline ‘Scientists prove AGAIN that the concept of water memory is a crock of shit’ will not be nearly as lucrative on the news stand as some spurious one-liner involving ghosts, teleportation and ‘quantum’ magic. I further contest that if science was really your priority, you would have offered a little more depth on Luc Montagnier’s bona fides, including his predisposition towards believing in homeopathy (something you, yourselves have – quite hypocritically we must conclude – denounced previously as pseudoscience when it suited your headline).

I suggest that this quote from Luc Montagnier taken from an interview with Science magazine last month, might have added some context to his experiment:

I can’t say that homeopathy is right in everything. What I can say now is that the high dilutions (used in homeopathy) are right. High dilutions of something are not nothing. They are water structures which mimic the original molecules.

This shows us one thing very clearly: Luc Montagnier didn’t get his Nobel Prize for logical thinking. As is trivially easy to demonstrate, the high dilutions offered by homeopathy ARE, in many cases, nothing. After a certain level of dilution, a homeopathic substance is likely to contain not even one molecule of the original substance. What Montagnier wants us to believe, though, is that, by a mechanism that is pure speculation at best and has no basis in reality whatsoever, it’s not the molecules themselves that matter, but ‘something’ they leave behind. It’s crucial to understand that Montagnier is not building on any previous science ((All good science comes riding on the coattails of other science. In the 21st Century it is rare to the point of extraordinary for a major scientific discovery to pop out of nowhere.)) to assert this. It’s merely a magical belief. ((And it’s a belief that seems so simplistic and the counter-arguments so self-evident that I won’t even bother to tread that ground again. I’ll just point out once more that every glass of water you drink has ultra-diluted something in it. Pick anything: cyanide; sugar; apple juice; cow piss; snake venom. Whatever it is, its effects will be in operation in that water according to homeopathic ‘reasoning’. If you want to follow the ultimate absurdity of Montagnier’s experiment, you’re buying into a notion where you don’t have to even dilute the water in the first place – things can get ‘transmitted’ into the water from elsewhere! With all that dilution and transmission going on, there’s so much stuff in water that it’s a miracle it’s drinkable!))

All that being as it may, what Luc Montagnier is claiming to demonstrate with his experiment does not equate with claims of homeopathy anyway. ((Well, not with anything that homeopathy has claimed so far – I’m sure they’ll find a way to incorporate this new wonderful mechanism.)) Let me clarify: homeopaths contend that, by dissolving substances (whose efficacy is determined by nothing more than superstition) into extreme dilution in water they can achieve advantageous human health outcomes. The mechanism by which this is supposed to happen has no rational basis and can’t be scientifically shown to have any effect. But Montagnier’s experiment is (supposedly) demonstrating something else entirely: that he can transmit, via a process for which he has no explanation, something into water that wasn’t there in the first place and then reconstitute a biological product from it. He’s conflating a bizarre idea with an outlandish idea and then asserting that this makes BOTH ideas reasonable! What extraordinary nonsense.

New Scientist also neglects to mention that Montagnier’s Nobel Prize was the subject of prolonged antagonism, that (while Montagnier certainly contributed to the effort) the scientist who is actually now credited with demonstrating that the HIV virus causes AIDS was not Montagnier but Robert Gallo, and that one of the biggest issues in the controversy surrounding the Prize was sample contamination inside Montagnier’s lab – all factors that have bearing on the article at hand.

The magazine further tarnishes its image by including this spurious quote, as, geez, I dunno, some kind of ‘food for thought’ or something:

‘If the results are correct,’ says theoretical chemist Jeff Reimers of the University of Sydney, Australia, ‘these would be the most significant experiments performed in the past 90 years, demanding re-evaluation of the whole conceptual framework of modern chemistry.’

This kind of cheap sensationalism is breathtaking in its banality and has no place in a science journal. It’s a quote that means FUCK ALL. It’s a speculation that’s logically equivalent to saying ‘If pixies exist, we may never have to do the dishes ever again!’ It’s a NON quote. It’s vacuous journalism at its most pathetic.

Acowlytes. I’m sure you can feel my anger about this fairly radiating out of your computer screen. When a magazine like New Scientist runs an article lending plausibility to half-baked pseudoscientific concepts, they have an enormous detrimental effect on the already depressingly slow progress of critical thinking. We don’t need ‘scientists’ giving credence to every stupid idea that comes down the pike under the pretext of ‘it’s a valid experiment until the results prove otherwise’. The fact is that some ideas start out plain stupid, and never do anything more than traipse downhill into the vast bog land of Suck. It is the responsibility of periodicals like New Scientist, as purveyors of science news, to make decisions about framing a scientific world-view for their readers, not to encourage the flimsy philosophies and elliptical thought processes of those who espouse magical thinking by giving their silly ideas ‘scientific’ credibility.

What happens after an article like this appears is predictable and depressing. Searching the web for ‘luc montagnier’ in conjunction with ‘homeopathy’ delivers a flood of links to sites claiming that science has at last ((Or ‘again’, depending on how you look at it – homeopaths claim scientific endorsement of the stupid idea at the drop of a hat, and neglect ever to mention all those times when science has shown it to be a pile of horseshit.)) endorsed homeopathy. From the predictable brainless spew of Dana Ullman in the Huffington Post gushing that Luc Montagnier, Nobel Prize Winner, Takes Homeopathy Seriously, to the slack-jawed critical-thinking-free crowing of the various homeopathy advocates that Luc Montagnier Foundation Proves Homeopathy Works the woo-web is awash with brains-on-the-floor excitement.

For the sake of a salacious news stand headline, one dumb misstep by the Science press has all but undone the great work of skeptics over the last few years in demonstrating to the public just what a bunch of hokum homeopathy is.

Great work guys. And every year you run whiney op-ed pieces about how science funding is being slashed. In case you haven’t managed to figure it out, that’s the logical outcome of dumbing down the world.

UPDATE: More fuming! Because I’ve been away, I’m working my way through back issues of New Scientist that have accumulated in my absence. This used to be a pleasurable pursuit, but it’s turning out this time to be a lolly-grab of stupidity. Last night I read this editorial, in which we find NS criticizing NASA for hyping up the science behind the search for extraterrestrial life.

IT’S life, but not as we know it,” trumpeted one headline. “Alien life may have been discovered – right here on Earth,” gasped another. Even The New York Times declared “Microbe Finds Arsenic Tasty; Redefines Life”.

The breathless write-ups followed NASA’s teasing announcement of a news conference “that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life”. And although the discovery of alien life, if it ever happens, would be one of the biggest stories imaginable, this was light years from that.

Oooh. They wouldn’t be anything like headlines that scream ‘Ghost DNA; Nobelist claims he can ‘quantum teleport’ genes’ or ‘Evidence we can see the Future?’, would they now you fucking hypocrites?

The editorial concludes:

Perhaps it (NASA) thinks that all publicity is good publicity, but one day the appetite for sensationalist alien life stories may be sated.

At which point I suggest that New Scientist might like to start fishing around for the log in their own eye rather than looking for the mote in their neighbour’s.

Whilst texting Violet Towne from Los Angeles airport last week, my iPhone’s auto-correct decided to add a word to my vocabulary:

I assumed, of course, that it wasn’t just pulling the word ‘poundal’ out of its digital ass, so I looked it up. Wikipedia defines a poundal ‘as the force necessary to accelerate 1 pound to 1 foot per second, per second. 1 pdl = 0.138254954376 N exactly.’

It goes on to give some mathematical examples and further introduces the concept of the ‘slug’: ‘one pound-force will accelerate one pound-mass at 32 feet per second squared; we can scale up the unit of mass to compensate, which will be accelerated by 1 ft/s2 (rather than 32 ft/s2) given the application of one pound force; this gives us a unit of mass called the slug, which is about 32 pounds mass.’

But one should take heed:

Note: Slugs (32.174 049) and poundals (1/32.174 049) are never used in the same system, since each exists to solve the same problem and will cancel each other out; both should not be used together.

Got that? Don’t mix up yer poundals and yer slugs. They will cancel one another out and we’d be back exactly were we started.

In the lounge.

Ah, reminds me of the good ol’ days.

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Snaffled from the Fourmilab libraries, with thanks and apologies for copyright infringements if any.

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The Huffington Post is carrying an article at the moment which is headlined:

Japanese HOLOGRAPH Plays Sold Out Concerts;
Science Fiction Comes To Life

The caps are theirs. Needless to say, once again this is not a holograph. Or a hologram either. In its typical air-headed style, the HuffPo goes on to delineate the fizz of the story while entirely missing the interesting bits:

In what is surely a terrible omen not only for musicians but also the continued existence of the world as we know it, holographs are now playing sold out concerts in, where else, Japan.

Firstly, I’ll reiterate (because stupid journalists just can’t seem to understand this) – the Hatsune Miku performances are NOT HOLOGRAMS. As I’ve said before on The Cow, we currently have no technology to allow anything like this as a holographic projection ((You will notice here that I have used the correct forms of the words ‘hologram’ and ‘holograph’. You’d think journalists would take the time.)) The giant avatars are simply projections on a screen. There is nothing three dimensional about them, as would be the case for a genuine hologram. Here’s a still frame from Hatsune Miku’s video Romeo and Cinderella, in which you can plainly see the flatness of the character, and the screen on which it’s projected:

It’s an impressive technical display, for sure, but it’s just a very bright projector and a piece of clever animation. You could, if you were motivated, achieve the same thing in your lounge room.

Of course, the Huffington Post, could have carried a story about what is actually happening here, which is far more interesting than their stupid and inaccurate ‘Look at those wacky Japanese and their holographs’ fluff piece.

The ‘live’ Hatsune Miku concerts are in fact the culmination of what was originally a promotional concept for the Vocaloid 2 speech synthesis engine. Vocaloid 2 is software developed at Pompeu Fabra University in Spain with funding by the Yamaha Corporation. The application takes snippets of real human voice and arranges them in such a way that the many complex parts of human speech can be controlled, via simple programming, to make coherent speech and song. In 2006, Vocaloid 2 was acquired from Yamaha by a the Japanese company Crypton Future Media, who, with exceptional insight, packaged it for sale to consumers as a ‘personality’: Hatsune Miku, ‘an android diva in the near-future world where songs are lost.’ The name Hatsune Miku is literally translated as ‘future sound’. Miku’s voice is generated from recordings of voice actress Saki Fujita. Using Vocaloid, musicians are able to program the Miku voice to sing whatever lyrics they choose along with their music.

When CFM released the software, they had the idea of creating several ‘mascots’ to anthropomorphize the Miku personality, and it wasn’t long before a programmer named Yu Higuchi released a freeware application, MikuMikuDance (MMD), which allowed users to easily create 2D and 3D animations based on the these mascots. A huge fanbase rapidly grew around this concept, with thousands of users interacting on Nico Nico Douga (a kind of Japanese YouTube) to produce videos of Hatsune Miku performances. The phenomenal success of Miku has spawned a family of new Vocaloids, such as Rin and Len Kagamine, Megurine Luka, Gackpoid, Megpoid and numerous ‘fan-created Vocaloids like Neru Akita and Teto Kasane.

Here is a video of Miku’s more sophisticated sister Megurine Luka, ((Megurine Luka is the first bilingual Vocaloid. Calm down Atlas – I said bilingual.)) singing ‘Just Be Friends’:

The live Miku concerts with the 12 foot tall all-singing all-dancing projections of the character avatars are a natural result of the extraordinary popularity of the Vocaloid characters and their music.

Now isn’t that a lot more interesting than the Huffington Post’s (and others, I might add) flippant dissing of this story as an oh-my-god-singers-are-going-to-be-replaced-by-holograms-bring-back-the-good-old-days piece of sensationalism? Their silly take on it does nothing more than expose their white-bread middle-American sensibilities, and make them look like the insular conservatives they really are. The Hatsune Miku phenomenon might be slightly oblique to Western sensibilities, but one thing is very clear – here are large groups of passionate music fans having a genuinely good time. What the hell is wrong with that?

And besides, the music was made by musicians, not robots, people. And it’s damn catchy.

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Thanks to Joey for the find.

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A few days ago in my post iPods Will Kill You! a couple of commenters thought I might be over-analyzing the current trend for the Fairfax media (among others) to be engaging in Apple-bashing. Naturally enough, my antennae have been quivering ever since, on the lookout for some further substantiation of my claim. Indeed, the ink was hardly dry on that post before Universal Head pointed out another instance in the Sydney Morning Herald the very next day.

And this morning, this, under the headline ‘Smart phone, pity criminals are proving even smarter’:

The global obsession with the iPhone is not only becoming a threat to security: an entire criminal industry has sprung up around it, says the head of the Australian Crime Commission.

The story goes on to detail how the head of the ACC, John Lawler, ‘said’ at an Australian Institute of Criminology conference, that Apple’s iPhone was a veritable treasure trove of criminal opportunity.

Only thing is, if you read the article carefully, Mr Lawler is never quoted once as having said anything of the sort. He never specifically names the iPhone in any of his attributed quotes. He certainly mentions ‘personal communication devices’ and ‘instant services’ but these are catchall phrases that cover a lot of ground

Now, I’m not saying that Mr Lawler didn’t actually mention the iPhone during his presentation, but there is no evidence of that in this article. The thing is, the piece is written in such a way that a casual reader could easily come away with the impression that he did.

Applying a little critical thinking to this story reveals it to be a wonderland of misdirection. Let me guide you through:

The global obsession with the iPhone…

The ‘obsession’ with the iPhone is no more an obsession than is the desire to own any other popular product. This so-called obsession is an invention of the media. People like their iPhones because they are useful and appealing. Why is that obsessive? Popularity doesn’t equal obsession, it just equals popularity. If anyone is obsessed with the iPhone, it’s the newspapers. They’re the ones obsessively telling us at every opportunity about how we’re obsessed with the iPhone.

This year Apple’s chief financial officer told a shareholder meeting that more than 70 Fortune 100 companies were either using or trying out iPhones, and it was rapidly replacing the BlackBerry as the must-have business phone.

This sentence follows quickly on the heels of Mr Lawler’s quote, deftly conflating the two paragraphs to give the inference that this was also said by him. The intention is obviously to imply to the reader that he also went on to say, in the next paragraph:

But unlike the BlackBerry and other smartphones, the iPhone does not allow a company’s IT staff to install and upgrade its own security software, leaving business networks at risk of penetration.

Whether nor not these are Mr Lawler’s thoughts (and this is far from clear), a discerning person can only respond SO WHAT? The banality of this statement is profound on so many levels. How many people with BlackBerries have security software installed by their IT department? I’d wager next to none. And, even if they do, what the heck does that entail? Some password protection? You can do that on the iPhone. Encrypted files? You can do that on the iPhone. A kill switch? The iPhone has that. What we’re supposed to believe here is that IT departments are the be-all and end-all of security – a myth kept in circulation largely by IT departments. The ultimate security on any system has to do with user responsibility. If the IT departments of corporations are really concerned about security they would do well to spend less time trying to solve problems with tech fixes and instead devote some serious energy to teaching their users some basic computer hygiene. My iPhone is secure. You can’t get my data if you find and steal my phone. And if you did steal it, I would remotely kill it (if you hadn’t already done it yourself by attempting to circumvent the security). Does the ACC think this is impossible on a iPhone? I don’t believe they’re that naive.

And anyway, let’s say the contention is true. Do we really want to compare it to the security of the open-system Android, or the plethora of Nokias, Samsungs and Sonys out there? Or perhaps the new Windows 7 phone? (Windows – now there’s a secure and virus-free environment!) The fact is that, as popular as the iPhone is, it is still well and truly outnumbered by other brands. This being the case, rather than be concerned with the security-catastrophe-that-is to-come when iPhones rule the planet, why is this story not about the security disaster that is already in place?

Mr Lawler also said the increasing ubiquity of the phone meant that criminals were finding more and more opportunities to use it to intrude, to steal and to defraud.

Well, DUH. I can’t even comment on this, except to say that once again this is not a direct quote from John Lawler. Why is the reporter giving us Mr Lawler’s non-specific-brand terms like ‘communications devices’ in direct first-person quotes and yet attributing anything about the iPhone at second hand? I’ll tell you exactly why – because if Mr Lawler didn’t single out the iPhone by name in his talk, it’s very easy for the reporter to say he intended ‘the phone’ in a much more general sense (as in ‘the mobile phone’). With that in mind, read that paragraph again and you’ll see what I mean. The English language is a sublimely slippery substance.

In fact, the next direct quote from John Lawler again mentions only ubiquitous technology:

”With the explosive uptake of personal communication devices there are certainly already opportunities that appeal to organised criminals,” said Mr Lawler.

That’s a sensible, if very general observation. Organised criminals use mobile phones! So do librarians.

Even the desire for the phone is creating a burgeoning black market, he said.

Yes, as has the desire for PS3s, Gucci handbags and cigarettes. Black markets spring up anywhere and everywhere that there is an item of value that can be produced without imprimatur and sold for less than a legitimate vendor’s prices. This is perhaps a point of interest, but hardly the stuff of news.

The most disturbing thing about this whole pile of non-news is that in the course of less than one day it’s been disseminated so widely that trying to search for any actual information about what John Lawler might really have said at the Institute of Criminology conference turns up only myriads of requoted versions of the Fairfax article. Pretty much all of them bandying around headlines like ‘iPhone Poses Threat to Security!’ Hundreds of dumb zines and tech blogs have just taken the Fairfax article completely at face value without an ounce of critical appraisal. Most of them quote the article word for word. Some of them get opinions from their own ‘experts’ expounding the crumminess of the iPhone’s security. Many of them plainly have vested interests or agendas. ((If you have time, go read some of the ones linked in the Google search. It is an astounding (and depressing) eye-opening example of uncritical re-mouthing of something that has low information and high titillation value.)) If this is not about trying to denigrate Apple products, then it has that sum effect anyway. Everyone who uncritically picked up this story did so because it felt good to put the boot in.

I would sincerely like to know what John Lawler said at that conference. Did he single out iPhones as promoting such a large and serious security problem? If so, what were his reasons, given that iPhones are no less secure than many other devices on the market? ((I’m not claiming that iPhones are the Fort Knox of mobile phones, by the way – just that as security risks go – as devices – they’re neither here nor there. They could be better, sure, but they are decent enough if you take the trouble to use their security features properly.)) Or did he, as I suspect, merely mention the iPhone as one of a growing number of mobile personal communication and computation devices that should take security more seriously?

I will continue to investigate this as I am able, but if anyone was at that conference, or has any more information, I’d love to hear from you.

Crikey those Japanese roboticists are goddamned determined. Without even missing a balance-threatening beat after the cyberclockwork embarrassments that were Asimo and Aiko, they’ve wheeled a new proto-Terminator out of the lab. Now, the Japanese National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology is presenting to the world their all-singing, all-dancing HRP-4C Gynoid ((Gynoid? Now there’s an expression that I don’t see catching on.)) Hmm. HRP-4C. Not exactly a roll-off-the-tongue kind of nickname, is it, really? I think I’m going to call it Harpy.

The YouTube clip above shows Harpy on stage doing a song and dance with some human girls as backup. ((These Japanese tech folks need a bit of a refresher in marketing methinks. Demonstration Tip #1: don’t display your product next to something that is visibly superior.)) Harpy’s creators have managed the build a robot so astonishingly sophisticated that it can move and correct its balance throughout an entire dance routine without faltering. They have, at the same time, demonstrated an impressive inability to get her body dimensions correct. Can anyone say ‘man hands’? Wait – can anyone say ‘orangutan arms’?

It’s not that the inventors haven’t given any thought at all to Harpy’s anatomy – she’s also done a little bit of modeling on the fashion catwalk, where it is obvious that the NIAIST drawing board wasn’t all doodles of just hydraulics and micro-relays.

Just look at that shiny titanium ass! I can hear what you’re thinking – she’s so sexy you want to marry her! Well, you can.

It’s OK – it’s a wedding. You’re allowed to cry. ((Billy Jean? Why? Someone please tell me why?))