TED is a prestigious biannual conference whose brand is, “Ideas Worth Spreading.” (TED originally stood for “Technology, Entertainment, Design,” but its scope has since expanded.) It has spawned TEDx – regional independent TED style conferences that are allowed to use the TED brand as long as they strive for the same level of quality.

Deepak Chopra apparently thinks that TED’s logo should be, “Let’s throw any crap against the wall and let the audience sort it out.” Of course that is what all self-styled gurus and purveyors of pseudoscience want, no real scientific standards so that they can present their crackpot ideas as legitimate.

This conflict of vision recently came to a head when TEDx directors (Lara Stein, TEDx Director and Emily McManus, TED.com Editor) wrote an open letter to TEDx organizers giving them guidance on how to avoid accidentally promoting bad science. The letter is an excellent primer on pseudoscience and I recommend reading it in its entirety. The letter was a response to several dubious TEDx talks and the backlash that resulted. Early in the letter they make clear its purpose and their philosophy.

“It is not your audience’s job to figure out if a speaker is offering legitimate science or not. It is your job.”

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“Bottom line, at the end of the day, we want our kids to be exposed to the best facts. Let’s teach them about the big bang theory, let’s teach them about evolution…”

Not a bad sentiment so far. I don’t think I would have used the term, “best facts.” It’s a bit awkward, and more importantly science is not just about facts, it’s about how we know what we know, and the interaction of facts and data with hypotheses and theories.

This is not quibbling. A public figure with responsibilities toward public science education should have a thorough and nuanced understanding of science education.

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An Iranian inventor claims to have created a machine that can predict an individual’s future 5-8 years in advance. Ali Razeghi claims to have registered “The Aryayek Time Traveling Machine” with the state-run Centre for Strategic Inventions, but the Iranian government denies this.

Details are, as you might suspect, sketchy. Razeghi claims his machine works by a complex “algorithm.” It sounds like it’s a machine, not just computer software. Also he claims that the machine works by simply touching the user.

Obviously this is nonsense, but stories like this (now spread far and wide by the internet) always raise the question for skeptics and scientists – how do we address scientific claims that are “impossible,” and is it even meaningful to characterize anything as impossible given the limitations of human knowledge?

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Imagine that one of your limbs did not feel as if it belonged to you or was a natural part of your body. In a weird way the “extra” limb makes you feel incomplete, less than your whole self. The limb functions, you can feel it, and its completely healthy – it’s just not yours. It is a constant irritant. Eventually you become obsessed with the idea of amputating the limb. You fantasize about amputation and imagine yourself without the offensive body part.

This desire to amputate a healthy limb was described and named apotemnophilia  by Money in 1977. It has recently been renamed Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID). This is a rare and interesting disorder – at first it was thought to be psychological, but it is more likely to be a neurological disorder.

Recent fMRI evidence suggests that people with BIID have decreased activation of their right superior parietal lobe when the “extra” limb is touched. This likely relates to the brain’s internal map or schema of the body.

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Social media has been getting a bad rap recently. Blogs, podcasts, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and other social media outlets have certainly had a dramatic impact on how people communicate. They are powerful tools and many people have put them to good use.

There are some unintended consequences as well, and as a society we are still learning to adapt to this new factor in our lives. There are issues of privacy, the rules of social behavior, and the ethics of spreading dubious information online.

We discussed two related issues recently on the SGU. The first was about the recent paper, “Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation,” by Lewandowsky. Essentially Lewandowsky wrote a paper about conspiracy theories around the denial of global warming. Part of the backlash against that paper by self-described global warming skeptics included further conspiracy theories about the paper. Lewandowsky could not resist the irony, hence his subsequent paper.

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I’m a big fan of solar energy, and specifically photovoltaics (PV). The earth is bathed in free clean energy, far more than we need to run our civilization, and all we have to do is harvest it. But, of course, it’s not that simple.

There are many ways to calculate the efficiency and effectiveness of PV technology. One way it to calculate its cost-effectiveness compared to other forms of energy. The bottom line for any consumer is this – if you install PV in your residence, what is the total cost of installation and maintenance compared to the cost savings of the energy produced?

You can also think about the energy efficiency of PV – what is the total energy cost of manufacturing, maintaining, and disposing of PV across its lifetime compared to the amount of electricity it generates.

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What was actually in Thompson’s Cattle Powder, Hostetter’s Stomach Bitters, or Hamlin’s Wizard Oil?

Prior to regulation by the FDA, over-the-counter medicine in this country was largely a creation of small businesses. There was a large variety of so-called “patent medicine,” each a proprietary blend of – what?

The term “patent medicine” has nothing to do with being issued a patent. The term refers to a letters patent, which is  essentially permission to use a royal endorsement. Most patent medicines were not actually patented mainly because the promoters did not want to disclose their ingredients.

Instead, such products were branded and their brand heavily marketed.

As a result the ingredients of these patent medicine products were largely unknown. Compounding pharmacists were familiar with the ingredients, however, and often sold cheap knockoffs, making it all the more important for promoters to protect and promote their brand.

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It’s always amusing to see two pseudosciences combined into one greater pseudoscience – it’s like chocolate and peanut butter. It’s not uncommon because those who would embrace one pseudoscience are likely to follow the same flawed logic and process to accept others. My colleague David Gorski has termed this effect “crank magnetism.”

Take, for example, Gian Paolo Vanoli. He has been making international headlines recently because of his claim that vaccines cause homosexuality, which he insists is a disease. The story appears to have been first picked up in English by the Huffington Post – all other reports of this story I have found cite this article as their source.

Because of the date of this article (4/1) I wanted to make sure I had another source, but the only other sources are in Italian. The story does seem to check out – here is one article: Gian Paolo Vanoli: Cricket on the urine that has been around the world. 

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This is just a quick note to inform my readers that the SBM website is temporarily down. There appears to be an automated bot attack trying to hijack our servers. We thought we fixed it yesterday but it went down again overnight. Troubleshooting is commencing. We will have it back up as soon as possible.

Update: SBM is back up, and fully functional. You will need to reset your password to sign in and comment, however. Sorry again for the inconvenience.

I am fascinated by the mind of the crank. Cranks are their own species of pseudoscientist – they are generally intelligent, full of information, and highly creative. There is something malfunctioning in their process, however.

Cranks tend to be far too enamored of their own ideas. They are loners who don’t have the patience to justify themselves to the barbarians who occupy mainstream science.

Their fatal flaw, however, is that they are not skeptical of themselves and their own ideas. They see endless beauty and elegance in their own theories, and then enthusiastically seek to confirm them, without ever truly asking the question – but is it real?

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