science

Via the Slog: Researches are giving octopuses toys to find out if they prefer a tentacle over all the rest in everyday usage. Among these toys are Rubik’s Cubes. Now, I’m all for doing research on sea creatures, but when said creatures can actually solve these Rubik’s Cubes, look out, humanity…

The Canadian government is cracking down on Internet scams offering a miracle cure for cancer. Now, if only they (and allied governments) would go after Hasidic rabbis with quack cures for the same:

The websites advertise medicines, herbal remedies, other supplements and treatment regimes of questionable value. It’s impossible to know how much money has been lost to bogus claims, but the amount could be huge. Health information is the third-most-searched topic online. An estimated 8.7 million Canadians are turning to the Internet for medical advice, but only one-third actually talk to their doctors about what they found online, according to Statistics Canada.

By taking decisive action against scammers who trick unsuspecting cancer victims into paying millions of dollars for snake oil, the Conservative government in Ottawa is showing its resolve to crack down on people unfairly and illegally taking the money of innocent people afflicted with cancer. Unless, of course, the cancer victims in question are independent MPs whose votes they’re trying to buy in order to bring down the government…

Author, sci-fi author, scientist, futurist, inventor of the artificial satellite, co-creator of 2001, part-time philosopher and theologian, citizen of the world, formulator of one of the most memorable set of three laws since Newton or Kepler, a man whose writings had such a profound impact on me and my own writing—Arthur C. Clarke has died at the age of 90. R.I.P. Sir Arthur.

Ack! Another ‘monstrous’ headline! And on no less a reputable Web site than CNN.com. I am utterly aghast that they would write such a thing without a proper citation to everybody who ever used the word ‘monstrous’ or even the image or the very idea. Quick, overzealous Internet-dwellers, sue CNN for plagiarism!

Seriously, though, the monstrous robot in question that NASA’s shooting up into space next is pretty darn cool.

Our friendly cyber-neighbourhood rabbi Lazer Brody is at it again, it would appear. You may remember our unfortunately-named friend from an incident last month in which he told a woman experiencing homosexual urges that she could ‘lick the battle’ with her latent desires by, among other things, making sure to ritually wash her hands in the morning. Today, Rabbi Lazer is peddling a cure for cancer found in mushrooms, which somebody forwarded to him in the full-blown manner of an e-mail scam. The typography has been preserved exactly:

THERE WAS A MAN IN BORO PARK (BROOKLYN, NY) WHO WAS DIAGNOSED WITH PANCREATIC CANCER. HE ASKED FOR A FRUM DOCTOR, BUT HIS INSURANCE AFFORDED HIM WHAT THEY OFFERED JAPANESE DOCTOR. IT ENDED UP, THAT THIS DOCTOR WAS A GIFT FROM HEAVEN. THE DOCTOR WAS STRAIGHT WITH HIM AND TOLD HIM THAT THE MEDICAL PROFESSION COULD GIVE HIM 6 MONTHS OF LIFE, BUT IN HIS COUNTRY (JAPAN) THEY USED A PARTICULAR MUSHROOM WITH SUCCESS AND THAT HE COULD GIVE HIM SOME AND SHOW HIM HOW TO USE IT. 4 YEARS LATER HE IS THANK G-D DOING WELL. FOR THOSE WHO ARE INTERESTED, THE CURE IS BASED ON THE CONCEPT OF A PH BALANCED BODY, THERE IS THE OPINON THAT CANCER FEEDS IN AN ACID BASED BODY. THIS MUSHROOM IS VERY ALKALISING.

Amazing, isn’t it? If you only ‘balance’ the pH of your body, you can cure cancer! And guess what—doing this is, in fact, really easy, because all you have to do is eat this mushroom! There is a link to more information, helpfully provided, on a Hebrew-language website from Israel about the pseudo-medicine of reflexology. More nonsense can be found on a herbalism website, which again refers to the natural powers of this mushroom to balance your pH.

For his part, Lazer himself responds:

From what I understand from alternative-medical literature, cancer patients have too little L-Lactic acid (+) in their connective tissues. In theory, as long as L-Lactic acid (+) is predominantly present in tissue, cancer cannot develop. When there is a deficiency, the cellular respiration starts to fail and this leads to a build up of DL-Lactic acid (-) in the tissues.

Of course! The obvious problem, with cancer, is that they’re missing the right kind of acid in their connective tissues! Why did the medical establishment never think of this, and insist that they just go home and drink a tall glass of milk? (It could be mushroom milk, if you really want, I guess.) No need for all this expensive chemotherapy or anything debilitating. Besides, what do these doctors really know? All they have are fancy degrees from fancy medical schools. They don’t have the thousand-year traditional knowledge of Eastern medicine to back up their ’science’! (By the way, this particular orientalizing tradition among many Jews—especially among, but by no means limited to, Hadisim—is one worthy of a lengthier rant, but that’ll have to come at a later time.) Back to Lazer:

The Kombucha cultured fungus … is supposedly able to re-balance the blood pH and, in so doing, prevent disease conditions from occurring, and repair and relieve existing suffering. I need to learn more about this, but in the meanwhile, I sent out emails to all the Cancer patients who are in contact with me. This is certainly worth further investigation.

I don’t know anything about this subject, but I sent this nugget of information out to every cancer patient I know. This has all the trappings of an e-mail scam, doesn’t it? ‘I don’t know anything about Prince Omar, the deposed former president of Nigeria, but his story is just so compelling, I think I have to send it to everyone in my e-mail address book!’ Or, ‘I don’t know anything about these penile enlargement pills (or that they could be called “male enhancement supplements”), but the mere fact that someone somewhere says they work is enough to get me to forward it to my entire e-mail list!’ Or, ‘This eight-year-old girl who survived a catastrophic plane crash…’ you get the picture.

Seriously, how can seemingly intelligent people buy into this crap—and not only buy into it, but repost it without a second thought on their blogs, and more importantly, send it to all the cancer patients they know, thus proving, yet again, that (false) hope springs eternal? Pity the fool who buys into this miracle mushroom cure (and stops her chemo as a result), but no pity for the man who sells them the snake oil.

A big Beam blessing to Ruth from Crown Heights!

Just…no.

It has recently been rediscovered that Professor Geoff Pullum, late of the University of California at Santa Cruz but now of the University of Edinburgh, as well as of the terrific blog Language Log, has published a proof of the undecidability of the halting problem in the manner of Dr. Seuss. The original poem was published as ‘Scooping the loop snooper: an elementary proof of the undecidability of the halting problem’ in Mathematics Magazine 73.4, 319–320, and can be found here (JSTOR access required) or reprinted, probably not entirely legally but entirely freely, here.

A photograph recently released by NASA from the Spirit rover on Mars shows what appears to be a humanoid form in a rock formation, curiously similar to the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen. Naturally, the BBC science section, traditionally noted for its stellar science reporting, picked this up and immediately ran it under the headline ‘Mystery image of “life on Mars”‘. Casting this as an even-handed, two-sided report between alien life enthusiasts and dour, grumpy old skeptics, the Beeb reported, apparently in all seriousness, that theories explaining this phenomenon ranged from a garden gnome to Sasquatch to the Virgin Mary. But by far the best comment came from some poster on some site somewhere, which the BBC did not see fit to identify except by the handle ‘Madurobob’, who ’said it was a statue “obviously built by an ancient civilisation that later departed Mars and settled Denmark”.’ There are also some gems to be found in the talking point page on the BBC website.

Bad Astronomy, mentioned in the article but not linked to, has some terrific commentary and follow-up posts.

Yesterday’s New York Times runs an article that paints a very complicated picture of Lyrica, the first drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat fibromyalgia. The drug is already available in the United States, Canada, and other countries as a prescription antidepressant, but it is not being approved for this other purpose. Two other large pharmaceutical companies are seeking government approval for their own fibromyalgia-treating drugs. I see three main troubling things about this development:

1. Fibromyalgia may not really exist. Its symptoms, which seem to vary from person to person but often include chronic pain, fatigue, and ringing in the ears, may in fact be attributable to various factors such as stress, age, depression, and others. There are no standard diagnoses and no established causes, it is not communicable or linkable to any external factors, and, as the article reports, ‘doctors who are skeptical of fibromyalgia say vague complaints of chronic pain do not add up to a disease.’ The article further reports that some skeptical doctors ’say that diagnosing the condition actually worsens suffering by causing patients to obsess over aches that other people simply tolerate. Further, they warn that Lyrica’s side effects, which include severe weight gain, dizziness and edema, are very real, even if fibromyalgia is not.’
2. The drug in question, which goes by the generic name pregabalin, is, as previously mentioned, already marketed as an antidepressant. The problem is nobody really seems to know how it specifically works. It apparently has some effect on the central nervous system that may desensitize it to pain on some level, but using this drug to essentially blot out a person’s ability to feel some kind of nebulous pain strikes me as a rather cavalier way to approach medicine. Now, as a matter of course, painkillers and antidepressants alike act upon the nervous system, but when an antidepressant appears to have an effect on chronic pain, might it not be possible that it’s actually treating an underlying depression?
3. The marketing itself is scary. What’s being marketed is not so much the drug as the disease: the pharmaceutical industry is hoping that by saturating the market with the message that fibromyalgia is real, they’ll get people to buy their drug.

It is the third of these that really bothers me. By legitimizing the disease, or at least appearing to by putting out lots of advertising, they’re going to make a huge profit selling drugs to millions of people who may not really need them. Again, the article paints a fairly bleak picture: ‘In November, Pfizer began a television ad campaign for Lyrica that features a middle-aged woman who appears to be reading from her diary. “Today I struggled with my fibromyalgia; I had pain all over,” she says, before turning to the camera and adding, “Fibromyalgia is a real, widespread pain condition.”‘ And at the end, after speculating that this drug will probably be prescribed in conjunction with others—thus enabling multiple drugs to be sold to the same patient for the same ‘problem’—the article gives us the kicker:

But physicians who are opposed to the fibromyalgia diagnosis say the new drugs will probably do little for patients. Over time, fibromyalgia patients tend to cycle among many different painkillers, sleep medicines and antidepressants, using each for a while until its benefit fades, Dr. Wolfe said.

“The fundamental problem is that the improvement that you see, which is not really great in clinical trials, is not maintained,” Dr. Wolfe said.

Still, Dr. Wolfe expects the drugs will be widely used. The companies, he said, are “going to make a fortune.”

And that’s really the problem, isn’t it? It reminds me of the episode of Dilbert in which Dogbert invents a ‘disease’ called ‘chronic cubicle syndrome’, publishing a book full of made-up information and anecdotal evidence. The book’s tagline is ‘If you think you’ve got it, you’ve got it’. Dogbert proceeds to flood the airwaves with this message, but Dilbert remains skeptical. He convinces his company to engage in some research to determine whether ‘chronic cubicle syndrome’ actually exists, but runs up against the common reaction: ‘Of course it’s real, I saw it on TV!’ (You can find this episode in three parts on YouTube beginning here, at least until some overzealous authority removes the files.)

Whether or not fibromyalgia actually exists, the fact remains that once you’ve created the perception of a problem, the door is open for you to sell people things to alleviate that problem.