bone in sub

remember this monster post from last month, and how all the crazies somehow came out of the woodwork to defend their imagined afflictions? i suppose they could realistically say “you’re a 22-year-old with a music degree and you like to read, what makes you an expert on things like ionizing radiation and human anatomy?” while i will vehemently defend all of the facts i presented (they’re well-accepted tenets), i would have accepted this attack on my credibility. however, look what was in this month’s issue of the skeptical inquirer!

the concise and easy to understand article runs down the scientific impossibility of EHS and sums up the pathetic state of the general public’s knowledge on the subject in a much less angry way than i did. i know the space background and planet icons make it look a little like a star trek fan website, but the skeptical inquirer is the periodical of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a group of scientists that – in short – set pseudoscientific nonsense straight. its founding members include carl sagan (my favorite person), isaac asimov (come on), glenn seaborg (he has an element named after him), and james randi (the guy with the million dollar challenge to anyone who can prove supernatural ‘powers’ that has been unclaimed for over 10 years). unless you’re in the same group of utterly illogical new-agers as the conspiracy theorists that replied en relative masse to my last post on the matter, their credibility is unsurpassed.

a couple weeks ago i was doing some tech work for an intelligent, successful older woman. her laptop had a keyboard plugged into it, and when i had to unplug it to access a USB port, i casually asked why she uses a keyboard with her (obviously already equipped) laptop. she responded “to keep the computer farther away from me, you know, for the radiation.” i asked what she meant by the radiation. “well, it’ll give you cancer, of course! this isn’t something you worry about with all the computer work you do?”
that was an interesting situation – normally if someone had said that to me, i would quickly judge them as ignorant and uneducated, but this was obviously not the case. i guess dozens of years of mainstream media (news and otherwise) had drilled “ELECTRICITY WILL EVENTUALLY GIVE YOU CANCER, AND THE MORE, THE SOONER” into her head, and that ‘knowledge’ pushed the high school science out the other side.

i wish i had had this article to reference, because i definitely don’t want to give a paying client a link to my post where they would find themselves lumped in with “morons”, “crazies”, and “insane [people]” (my words). don’t get me wrong, i love aggressive science-related namecalling when people firmly decry cell phones or microwaves, and harsh judgement against anybody who believes in astrology, but there ARE people that i would like to correct in a civil, non-condescending way. so long story short, if you know anybody who thinks that cell phones can give you brain cancer or that you shouldn’t have computers near your bed, send them the article linked at the top. or this one. or buy them a subscription to skeptical inquirer. or lovingly give them a high school science textbook with a bookmark in the chapter on electromagnetic fields.

related to the above, i’m reading the demon-haunted world by carl sagan, and it’s already one of my favorite nonfiction books. it covers some middle-school basics like the scientific method and double-blind studies, but all with extremely interesting anecdotes and i totally love it. i somehow didn’t know that carl sagan wrote books NOT directly focused on space.