So it’s 2010. Time to put those new year resolutions into practice and get myself organised and in this futuristic decade what better place to start than my hi-tech internet blog. Granted it is now almost a week since New Years day but since I am technically still ‘on holiday’ in Japan I think getting the blog back in order at this early stage of the year can almost pass for an achievement!
Being in Japan at the moment I can’t help but feel like I am missing out on the predictable collapse of society that occurs in the UK following any unexpected weather. However, I can at least console myself by enjoying the sites of Tokyo and visiting the various bizarre cafes and bars that are littered across the city. This post is about one such venue called the ‘Christon Café’ which aside from being a nice place to eat also provides a pretty good illustration of the paradoxical attitude towards religion found throughout Japan of widespread indifference alongside a fascination with religious iconography and aesthetic.
There is certainly a lot of hype surrounding nanotechnology but most scientists involved in the field admit that we are still a long way from harnessing the full potential of this new technology. However, one thing that scientists do seem to already be quite adept at is creating nano-scale sculptures. These micro works of art are certainly a testament to human ingenuity and the wonders of modern technology but they also serve as a welcome reminder of how at heart we are still a very silly species.
A few days ago ‘Charles’ a chiropractor left quite an extensive comment on an post from a few months back about the Simon Singh case. Since his arguments are raised frequently I felt it would be useful to offer a response and I also decided that if I was going to compose a long response I might as well put it in a new post where it may be read (at least by someone).
So here is my response to Charles the chiropractor…
Over the past week there has been an ongoing ’evidence check’ by the ‘House of Commons Science and Technology Sub-Committee’ to see whether the governments current policies on issues relating to homeopathy were supported by scientific evidence. The manner in which the evidence is being checked largely revolves around a series of expert panels being questioned by a committee of MPs.
In the first of these panels which took place on the 25th November 2009 the panels of experts stacked up as follows:
Panel 1
Dr. Ben Goldacre- Medical doctor, writer and Guardian columnist. Merciless mocker of bad science and tireless advocate of good science. Tracey Brown- Managing director of science advocacy charity Sense About Science. Another tireless promoter of science who is a familiar face to all those following the Simon Singh libel case. Prof. Jayne Lawrence- Chief Scientific Advisor for the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain. Title says it all really. Paul Bennet- Professional Standards Director of well known pharmaceutical retailer, Boots. Present because Boots is one of the largest retailers of Homeopathic remedies in the UK. Robert Wilson- Chairman of the British Association of Homeopathic Manufacturers. Shockingly an advocate for homeopathy.
Panel 2
Prof. Edzard- Director of Complementary Medicine Group at Peninsula Medical School. Long term researcher into the validity of alternative treatments and co-author of Trick or Treatment: Alternative medicine on trial with Simon Singh. Dr. James Thallon- Medical Director of NHS West Kent. Not familiar with the chap but he seemed to be an advocate of evidence based medicine and hence less than impressed with homeopathy. Dr. Peter Fisher- Director of Research at Royal London Homeopathic Hospital. Hard to direct research at a homeopathic hospital without being a staunch advocate for homeopathy. A practising homeopath and a medical doctor. Dr. Robert Mathie- Research Development Advisor of the British Homeopathic Association. Another staunch advocate for homeopathy.
An interesting study (available online here) by a group of Danish researchers provides strong evidence that different types of prayer activate different areas of the brain and that some specific types of prayer activate areas of the brain usually associated with social cognition.
This may seem like fairly straightforward conclusions to begin with however the authors of the study point out “in fact most studies of the relation between brain function and religion assume the hypothesis that religious experience is fundamentally a uniform category of human experience” and illustrate this by pointing to examples such as the well publicised work of Dr. Persinger who claims to be able to be able to reproduce religious experiences by stimulating the temporal lobe.
To provide a more nuanced perspective and highlight the variability within the category of ‘prayer’ the authors designed a study to test whether different types of prayer were producing different patterns of neural activity. In order to discover this they took twenty young devout Christians from a Danish Lutheran sect, put them in an fMRI scanner and while they performed different types of prayer they collected images of their brain activity.
Thanks to investigative blogger gimpy I was made aware of an article published in an alternative medical journal a few days back by Lionel R. Milgrom, a prominent British homeopath. Gimpy will be producing a more detailed analysis 0f the lunacy in this article and the failures it represents in the (near?) future and when he does I’ll post a link to it (here it is) but until then I couldn’t let the sheer forehead slapping stupidity of this article pass without offering some comment.
I first wrote about Simon Singh’s legal woes with the BCA back on the 30th March 2009. It’s now coming up to seven months later and with Simon we’ve been through one preliminary hearing, one refused written application for permission to appeal and now one ACCEPTED oral application for permission to appeal. The fact that it has taken over seven months just to get to a point where Simon has gained permission to question the validity of Eady’s (bogus) interpretation of the meaning of his article is a testament to just how time consuming and complex legal cases, and libel cases in particular, can be.
However, before slipping right back into depression over the UK’s libel law and their plentiful, and all too apparent, problems I think it is worth celebrating the fact that a judge, in this case Lord Justice Laws (what a name!), seemed in making his judgement to take due account of all the arguments and evidence that Eady so casually dismissed as irrelevant. At present it seems that the actual judgement has not been published, or if it has then it has not yet been presented and explained in detail to us non-law folk by the estimable Jack-of-Kent, however by all anecdotal accounts it seems that the judge considered a) the relevance of the surrounding paragraphs- the all important context and b) how it would be all but impossible for Simon to know or prove that an entire organisation was being deliberately dishonest.
This is just one judges opinion but I think it is an excellent illustration of the value of persistence and a clear indication that Eady’s interpretation of the meaning is not necessarily an interpretation that a different judge would have made. This is important because and vindicates the position that the case is worth pursuing not just for its symbolic value. Simon may still win and we may still see a court case that addresses the alleged ‘plethora’ of evidence for the BCA’s claims.
It seems my earlier prediction from a few weeks ago that I would be back to a regular blogging schedule was a bit optimistic. Being in-between houses and temporarily living on a friends couch was not the most productive environment for producing good (or bad) quality blogging (although the couch was very much appreciated- thanks Neal!).
I’ve now moved and (mostly) settled into Oxford where I have just began an MSc in Cognitive & Evolutionary Anthropology. Now, although I’ve not been blogging lately I’ve still been keeping up with my usual skeptical and sciencey events and so hopefully some time this week I’ll post up a short summary of my thoughts on any interesting points that came up at the events I attended.
Also, as I’m sure everyone reading this knows Simon Singh had the first bit of good news in his ongoing legal battle as he won the right to appeal Justice Eady’s decision on the intended meaning of his article. So… WOHOOO!!!
Ahem, this was an unexpected development but certainly came as welcome news and again I’m hoping to have a slightly more detailed post up shortly that covers my reaction to all the ‘Singh-BCA and general crazy UK libel law’ news.
I also haven’t forgot that I promised to write a post discussing the role (or lack thereof) of suicide in Buddhism. It’s about 50% finished now but I have some more pressing and interesting things I want to get off my chest first before I get round to finishing it off. So I haven’t forgot but it’s still going to be a while.
So that’s all for now just a short shout to say hello again to the blogging world, let everyone know I’m still around and will be posting more stuff soon and I also wanted to post up an excellent science song that was pointed out to me today (Cheers again Connor!). The song was created by John Boswell of The Symphony of Science and as he describes:
“We Are All Connected” was made from sampling The History Channel’s Universe series, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, Richard Feynman’s 1983 interviews, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s cosmic sermon, and Bill Nye’s Eyes of Nye Series, plus added visuals from The Elegant Universe (NOVA), Stephen Hawking’s Universe, Cosmos and more.
Derren Brown is a magician of the mentalist variety. Mentalists use a variety of techniques to create the illusion that they can read minds and have other amazing mental powers.
Recently Derren Brown created a storm of controversy when he claimed that he was able to predict the lottery numbers and then appeared to do just that on a live TV show filmed as the lottery numbers were announced. He claimed that he would reveal the technique used to make the prediction a few days later on a subsequent show however, when the show aired the explanations he provided were not convincing and created a substantial amount of uproar among both his fans and his detractors.
Various sites have provided detailed examinations of the problems with his explanations along with more plausible alternatives (which you can see examples of here and here) so I’ll just provide a brief summary.
The majority of the show was spent suggesting that he had used a group of 24 volunteers, various psychological experiments/complex mathematics and automatic writing to arrive at the numbers. This is a non-explanation as group psychology has absolutely no way of impacting a machine randomly selecting numbered balls nor can automatic writing give you insight into the future.
The second explanation, offered alongside immediate denials, intended to arouse suspicion of the ‘methinks, the lady doth protest too much’ variety, was that the lottery balls could have been tampered with. This is illegal and would also be practically impossible given the amount of security and safety systems that are in place to prevent such things from happening.
The much simpler explanation, as discussed by a significant amount of newspapers and commentators, was that it was a trick achieved by some clever camera effects, projecting the numbers onto the balls or some other form of trickery. This is the simplest explanation and is strongly supported by the fact that Derren did not reveal the numbers until the lottery draw was completed, has not yet won the national lottery and says himself that it was a trick (albeit with a nudge and a wink to suggest that maybe it wasn’t).
In essence Derren is simply a magician performing a trick on TV and as such there should be no real surprise that he would provide false explanations for how his trick was performed. Yet there was surprise, or at least there was a significant sense of irritation, which stems from the fact that Derren does not package what he does as magic or as involving traditional illusionist techniques. And without invoking those it seems that he did something impossible.
