I saw Richard Dawkin’s two-part documentary The Enemies of Reason a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been meaning to add a note of criticism here.

It’s not that I disagree with his assessment that people such as spirit mediums and alternative health gurus are not antithetical to enlightenment values; far from it. My problem is that the programme lacked analysis about why such movements have grown in popularity over the past forty years.

Take homeopathy for instance, and the fact that the NHS now ploughs millions of taxpayers pounds into clinics such as the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital. How has such a thing come to pass? Have health managers lost their minds? While no doubt there are true believers working inside the NHS who are pushing for homeopathy, I suspect the underlying reason is more prosaic. Indeed, Dawkins himself alluded to this, as Susan Blackmore points out, by alluding to the Placebo effect and comparing the amount of time a homeopath spends with their patient - 1 hours - to the amount of time a GP spends with their patients - 8 minutes.

We could, arguably, achieve the same effects as homeopathy by allowing GPs to prescribe a wider range of treatments. A week in a health spa, for instance. Healthcare professionals know however that such leftfield treatments would be politically untenable. Mental health treatment is very much a Cinderella service, despite the fact that it is now well recognised that depression and a whole range of long term health problems are inextricably linked. So is it any wonder therefore that they turn to an approach with is supported by people such as the Prince of Wales and has at least a quasi-scientific basis to it? Who can blame them for indulging in a noble lie, if the result is more people treated successfully?

Who, then is responsible for creating this climate whereby mental health treatment is marginalised while homeopathy is lauded? We can’t really blame the Prince of Wales. The real problem is that the latter is championed by a whole section of the media. The same media champions horoscopes, the Bible Code and all sorts of anti-intellectual faffery. By coincidence, it also advances an agenda that women are better off staying at home being dutiful housewives, that Princess Diana was murdered, that the poor get what they deserve, that padeophiles are lurking on every street corner, that asylum seekers live like sultans at taxpayer expense while local people struggle to find housing and that the house price boom is an unequivocal good.

What I’m getting at, of course, is that the missing third part of Dawkins’ the Enemies of Reason is an expose of Paul Dacre, his poisonous empire and his competitors at the Express. It seems odd to expose well meaning dowsers as frauds while failing to lambast the people at the top of the chain. Of course, were Dawkins to indulge in such a project he would find himself having a torrent of shit poured onto him by the very people he chose to attack. That may be what is holding him back. But if he doesn’t, who will? It would at the very least be entertaining to watch the likes of Melanie Phillips and Peter Hitchens go bright purple.

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I, for one, welcome our new black feathered overlords.

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Tony Blair is lamenting about that eeevil old media. You know, the thing that he used to become Prime Minister:

the media can operate like “a feral beast” and its relationship with politicians is “damaged” and in need of repair.

Can this be true? Well, it would appear that we now have a way to find out. Simply stick one of these up a journo’s bum, et voila!

If the test is positive, the good news is you can use the bile they produce to make shampoo. How wonderful is that?

(I’d hat tip Chris Keating, but actually I read about it somewhere else first and thus he deserves no credit whatsoever)

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The front page of the Daily Mail has this masthead: “Do dogs have a sense of humour?“.

I don’t know who originally observed this, but it has been said that if the Daily Mail ever uses a question mark at the end of a headline, the answer is usually ‘no’. In this particular case however, we are assured, scientists don’t know the answer either. Indeed, it is a lead in to an article by the Mail’s science editor in which he is promoting his new book “Ten questions no-one knows the answer to (Yet)”.

As this book is brought to you by the guy who happily spends his days attempting to scare the living shit out of his credulous readers by presenting the most speculative and shoddy of research as incontrovertible fact (as long as it is seeking to prove a link between something and cancer/autism/piles/whatever), I’m not entirely sure he is exactly a reliable witness. In fact, the main agenda of this book appears to be to cast insinuations about scientists. If we can ‘prove’ that scientists don’t know what time is, then how can they claim to know anything about mobile phone masts? Eh? EH?! Etc.

I find the links between right wing, nasty politics and credulous anti-science fascinating. Tony Blair goes off to have rebirthing mudbaths; his buddy George Bush has conversations with God. Both consider intelligent design to be a subject worthy of discussion. Both think human rights should be compromised and the US should be able to trample on any country which annoys it. And there’s nothing neo-cons like more than to cast aspersions about climate change science. What is it about conservatives and the indulgence of irrationality? Answers below, please.

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Over at Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science Blog, he has a Daily Politics piece by Jasper Carrot about the eeeevils of mobile phone masts. It’s all very nudge, nudge, wink, wink, conspiracy theory laden stuff with virtually no rebuttal (apart from a good dressing down by studio guest Gwyneth Dunwoody). About the only thing he gets rights is his choice of ELO for the incidental music (and I accept I may be in a minority here).

One word to Jasper: “MWOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAARRRR!!!!”

(and if you don’t understand that, you’re too young)

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Last week I blogged about Panorama’s then upcoming programme about the supposed dangers of wi-fi. Nich Starling castigated me for criticising the programme before having watched it, which was fair enough. So, having watched to programme this lunchtime, what do I think?

What I think is that TV programmes that investigate potential health risks ought to spend at least 25% of the time explaining the science behind the issue. What I think is that the motto that should be plastered above the monitors of the whole production team should be ‘remember the MMR scare’. What I think is that they should avoid using loaded terminology, such as insisting on the sensationalist word ‘radiation’ instead of the more mundane ‘radio waves’ (same number of syllables, natch) and shouldn’t use hyphenated portmanteau nonsense words like ‘electro-smog’ which were coined by the anti-lobby. What I think is that you shouldn’t question the independence of one scientist while swallowing whole the agenda of another, as Ben Goldacre has pointed out.

I don’t think you should use an alleged health condition like electro-magnetic sensitivity as proof of another alleged health condition that radio waves give you cancer. I think that you shouldn’t take the isolated results of one woman who appears to be able to sense radio waves as proof when the whole study has not been published yet. I think you should take note of the researchers of that study who appear to think that the best ‘cure’ for electromagnetic sensitivity is cognitive behavioural therapy. I think that if 3% of the UK population suffered from electromagnetic sensitivity, we might have noticed before now.

And finally, I agree with Guy Kewney: Sir William Stewart (not to be confused with William G Stewart, lest Will Howells accuse me of blasphemy) should indeed ‘shit or get off the pot‘. Yes, by all means have another review. In fact, with new technology like this, it is probably a good idea to have a review every five years or so for a good half-century. But let’s have a bit of perspective, eh?

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Last week, BBC’s Panorama did an expose on the Scientologists, a cult that believes we are all imprisoned space aliens. This week, the same programme is purporting to prove that wi-fi fries your brain. And so, the cosmic balance of the BBC’s sensible/face-slappingly idiotic halves is once again restored.

I don’t really know where to start. James Randerson gives it a gentle booting in the Guardian, which broadly sums up the response, but no words can quite describe the sheer appallingness of comparing a mobile phone mast signal from 100m away with a wi-fi signal from 1m away and coming up with the scare statistic that the latter is 3 times more powerful than the former. So I have to get this off my chest. Indulge me.

If the two signals were exactly the same strength, the inverse square law would mean that with a distance differential of 100, the 1m away signal would be 10,000 times more powerful. So, taking that into account, you can conclude from these figures that the wi-fi signal is more than 3,000 times weaker than the mobile phone mast (3,333 point 3 recurring, but who’s counting?). The mobile phone mast which, lest us forget, there is no evidence causes any harm in the first place.

It beats me why they stopped their. If they had compared a wi-fi signal from 10 cm with a mobile phone mast signal from 1 km away, they could have shouted about wi-fi being 30,000 times stronger than mobile phones. That sounds much scarier. And why not? There’s nothing particularly significant about 1m and 100m - just two numbers they plucked out of the air.

Compared to all this, Scientology sounds positively evidence-based, and at least Martin Durkin can come up with a couple of impressive looking graphs. On which point, I recommend everyone picks up a copy of this week’s New Scientist, which rather satisfyingly eviscerates the Great Global Warming Swindle point by point (in fact, the online version appears to have even more myth debunking).

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Rob Fenwick points me in the direction of the Great Global Warming Swindle website.

I’ve got my foot out of the door and was barely looking at the website, but two inaccuracies screamed out at me, one mere exaggeration, the other a bonkers, brainless, stupid factual error that only a complete moron would commit.

Claim the first:

A DVD of the film, The Great Global Warming Swindle, will be available in the next few weeks (despite the strenuous efforts of those who support the theory of global warming to prevent its release).

These ’strenuous efforts’ amounted to writing Durkin a letter and asking him not to release it. What a big baby. Next, the website has a page explaining how the sun is responsible for global warming:

It would be surprising, surely, if the sun did not have a major influence on the earth’s climate (why is summer warmer than winter?).

Read that again - why is summer warmer than winter? The answer has nothing, zero, zip, to do with the temperature of the sun. It has everything to do with the Earth spinning on an axis which is tilted relative to its orbital plane (pre-schoolers struggling with this concept may find the diagrams here useful).

Durkin and WAGtv appear to be under the misapprehension that the Sun gets warmer in the summer and colder in the winter. They appear to be wholly unaware of the fact that when it is summer in the northern hemisphere, it is colder in the souther hemisphere. Indeed, one might even be so bold that they are unaware that the Earth is a globe at all, insisting that in fact it is flat (okay, maybe not, but the ’sun gets warmer’ theory of how seasons work went out in medieval times).

Two screaming inaccuracies in 30 seconds. And people take these clowns seriously?

(I’m convinced that even Durkin might concede he’s wrong on this one, but in the interest of this little boo-boo being whitewashed out of history, I’ve included it here for posterity).

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Appalling media misinformation about kryptonite today.

As any fule kno, kryptonite doesn’t have to be green, that is just the type that kills Kryptonians (not ’sap them of their powers’ as the BBC and others put it - that’s gold kryptonite). In fact, white kryptonite is supposed to have a lethal effect on plantlife, but it also appears to be useful for stabilising bizarros.

Of course, if you read the small print, it turns out that the story is based on the fact that the newly found compound has ‘almost‘ the same elements as the kryptonite shown in the recent Superman Returns film, except it doesn’t contain fluorine. This is a bit like saying that oxygen is the same as water, except for the fact that it doesn’t contain hydrogen. It’s also a completely different formula to the one in Superman 3:

The chemical composition for the Kryptonite that Richard Pryor’s computer screen reads: Plutonium: 15.08% Tatalum: 18.06% Xenon: 27.71% Promethium: 24.02% Dialium: 10.62% Mercury: 3.94% Unknown: 0.57%.

But the worst thing about this story is that it turns out that Ananova doesn’t know the difference between Serbia and Siberia.

In fact, on the last count, 24 news sources found via Google News made the same elementary mistake.

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The Times has an article today about how a cancer clusters have been identified around mobile phone masts. Quick! Panic!

Or don’t. I’m frankly amazed that, even taking into account the general appalling reporting of science in the UK press, that a journalist would fall for that one. The story is about seven , isolated clusters, all of which have been ‘discovered’ by anti-phone mast activists around phone masts. They don’t appear to have found a link to a specific cluster, but rather a vague linkage to “cancers, brain hemorrhages and high blood pressure”. Anyone who knows anything about statistics (and I would never claim to be an expert) knows that clustering is a fact of life.

I play a lot of board games, and thus I’m accustomed to the fact that people can roll 12s on two dice with alarming frequency. It doesn’t happen neatly once in every 36 throws. On the road my parents live on, which has around 20 houses, there were 6 instances of breast cancer in a two year period. They have no mobile phone mast nearby - a fact which causes me great inconvenience when I come to stay.

The point is, not only do statistically insignificant ‘clusters’ happen all the time, but our very existence depends on it. If the universe was uniformly spread and had no ‘clumps’ in it, there’d have been no big bang, no universes, no stars, no us. While cancer clusters can indeed suggest there is something in the environment causing it, most don’t: they are simply brutal reminders of reality.

Who is this ’scientist’ who has co-ordinated this study? Well, Dr John Walker, it emerges, “spent 40 years in statistical research for Dunlop.” I’m afraid that isn’t reassuring. You don’t send a glorified tire number-cruncher in to do an epidemiologist’s job. The biggest nonsense is when he is quoted as saying:

“Masts should be moved away from conurbations and schools and the power turned down.”

The man is clearly as much an expert in radio communications as he is in disease control. You can’t have both. Either you move them away and ramp up the power (in which case, individual phones will have to use more power to work - right next to your ear where they would be doing more damage), or you turn the power down and have them nearer conurbations and schools. I actually quite like the latter idea, but I suspect it has a snowball in hell’s chance of finding favour with Dr Wilson and his anti-mast pals.

UPDATE: Bad Science this week is relevant here.

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