Akusai from Action Skeptics here, folks. Well, ladies and gentlemen, plans for a symposium of reality-based programming at Gen Con Indy 2010 are coming together faster than I could have imagined. Some of you may remember that back in September Les was kind enough to allow me to post A Call to Skeptical Action, wherein I detailed my preliminary hopes and plans for Gen Con (i.e. trying to get a Dragon*Con style Skeptic Track going), and I’m back to beg your indulgence again for an update on those plans.

First off, we have a dedicated blog: Gen Con Skeptics. Everything I’m about to tell you here is covered in greater detail there, so it’s worth stopping by. I’m constantly adding new material, so click early and often.

Our plans, as of now, include half a dozen presentations covering various skeptical topics and delivered by a bunch of different people. We’ll be educating the Gen Con population on archaeology, evolution, and cargo cults, and we’re staging two different iterations of a four-man panel called “Skepticism, Critical Thinking, and Pop Culture,” for which we’re prepping basic information on almost twenty different woo-woo and pseudoscientific topics and letting the audience decide what we talk about.

Perhaps the biggest deal of all, however, is the fundraiser we’ll be running to benefit the Indiana Immunization Coalition. I spoke last week with the director of the IIC, and she’s very excited that we’re offering to raise money for them. They plan to put all proceeds toward new educational and informational programs in an effort to counter misinformation about vaccines spread by the antivaccination movement.

I don’t have the details finalized with Gen Con yet, but I have a scheduled phone call to make tomorrow afternoon with their Marketing Director to do just that. She, too, loves the idea, and it looks like we’re going to have a table situated in the Kids and Family section of the exhibit hall, which is almost perfect for our plans. What we’re going to do is trade our amateur magician skills (there are two of us with those skills) for donations based on a “menu” of card tricks, simple close-up magic, and amazing feats of mentalism and cold reading. While we’re doing that, we’re going to distribute information about vaccines and about the Indiana Immunization Coalition, basically what they do and why it’s important. We’re going to back up the fundraiser with a couple of pro-vax presentations that will combine good immunization information, counters to common antivax claims, and PR for the IIC and their mission.

We don’t have any so-called “Big Name” skeptics coming to the event, but hopefully with a good showing this year, we can attract people in the future. I do have a proposal into the fine ladies at Skepchick, but I’m not promising anything. I also have an e-mail out to Mike Stackpole, bestselling sci-fi author and founder of the Phoenix Skeptics, who was kind enough to meet with us last year and offer advice. Who knows? He might want to give a talk, too.

All in all, this year’s Gen Con Indy is shaping up to be a big win for grassroots skepticism. We have educational outreach, audience involvement, and a fantastic opportunity to help raise vaccine awareness and bolster Indiana’s pathetic immunization rates. If anybody is going to be in the Indianapolis area on August 5-8, we’d love to have you drop by. If anyone’s interested in joining our little dog-and-pony show, we’d love to have you. Event submission for Gen Con doesn’t end until mid-March, so we have until then to add programming to our schedule.

If you don’t want to talk or run an event, we still do need volunteers to help out with the fundraiser. The rest of us can’t man the table all day and still do our own presentations, and we’d like to enjoy the con at some point, too. If we get a decent rotating roster of people haranguing the masses for donations while supplying them with accurate information about vaccines, we can all take part in what I’ve just now decided to call “Vaccination Win 2010″ and have a good time at the con, too.

And, though I did note his (perhaps conspicuous) silence on this note when last I posted here, I still think that Mine Host Mr. Les Jenkins hisownself should come down to Gen Con for the festivities. Join me in bothering him until he says yes, would you kindly?

As before, you can visit the planning forum, leave a comment at the blog, use the contact form, or just drop me an e-mail at causticbox[at]gmail[dot]com. Hope to see some people there!

What’s the harm, the question goes, if herbal supplements don’t actually help cure anything? Well, they could kill you if you’re on certain types of real medications:

Researchers are warning that popular herbs and supplements, including St. John’s wort and even garlic and ginger, do not mix well with common heart drugs and can also be dangerous for patients taking statins, blood thinners and blood pressure medications.

St. John’s wort raises blood pressure and heart rate, and garlic and ginger increase the risk of bleeding in patients on blood thinners, the researchers said. Even grapefruit juice can be risky, increasing the effects of calcium-channel blockers and statins, they said.

via Vital Signs – Study Warns That Some Supplements and Medicine Do Not Mix – NYTimes.com.

People don’t tend to think of herbs as being a type of chemical, but they are and they can have an impact on any other chemicals you might be taking:

The paper includes a list of more than two dozen herbal products that patients should approach with caution, as well as a list of common drug-herb interactions. Among the products listed are ginkgo biloba, ginseng and echinacea, as well as some surprises like soy milk and green tea — both of which can decrease the effectiveness of warfarin — and even aloe vera and licorice.

The abstract to the paper will get your attention:

More than 15 million people in the U.S. consume herbal remedies or high-dose vitamins. The number of visits to providers of complementary and alternative medicine exceeds those to primary care physicians, for annual out-of-pocket costs of $30 billion. Use of herbal products forms the bulk of treatments, particularly by elderly people who also consume multiple prescription medications for comorbid conditions, which increases the risk of adverse herb-drug-disease interactions. Despite the paucity of scientific evidence supporting the safety or efficacy of herbal products, their widespread promotion in the popular media and the unsubstantiated health care claims about their efficacy drive consumer demand. In this review, we highlight commonly used herbs and their interactions with cardiovascular drugs. We also discuss health-related issues of herbal products and suggest ways to improve their safety to better protect the public from untoward effects.

Visits to so-called complementary and alternative medicine practitioners exceeds those to primary care physicians? Really? Have we all gone that nuts? The $30 billion a year in money wasted doesn’t surprise me that much, we’ve been a nation willing to waste tons of money on shit that doesn’t work for quite a while now, but the fact that the woo-woo practitioners are seeing more people simply shocks me.

Given that they’re talking about health effects from supplements made from a single herb, consider what that means when you take something like (We-Can’t-Say-It-Cures-Colds-Anymore-But-It-Kinda-Does-Wink-Wink) Airborne which contains a shit load of herbs and vitamins. According to the official site it has the following in it: Vitamins A, C, and E, Zinc, Selenium, Manganese, Magneisum, Riboflavin, Amino Acids, and a proprietary herbal blend that includes Lonicera, Forsythia, Schizonepeta, Ginger, Chinese Vitex, Isatis and Echinacea.

That’s quite the mix and you have no idea what the dosages are for most of the ingredients. Consider that it contains 5,000 units of Vitamin A per tablet and you are encouraged to take five tablets a day or more. Did I mention that taking more than 10,000 units of Vitamin A a day is considered unsafe? Not to mention that it also contains high doses of Vitamin C which can lead to kidney stones, among other problems. Combine that with the fact that several of its components are known to interact with legit medicines and you could be doing quite a bit of harm by taking it.

But hey, it was created by a school teacher and they know better than any stupid old doctor what’s best to put in your body, right?

As if we needed yet more proof that homeopathy, acupuncture, and all the rest of the woo-woo “alternative” medicines don’t really help, here’s a story about a man who suffered from the hiccups for years until he was finally cured after doctors removed a tumor from his brain stem:

He tried yoga, hypnotherapy, acupuncture, pickled plums, mustard, vinegar and every single way you could imagine to drink water but now Chris Sands, the man who suffered hiccups for over two and a half years, has finally been cured.

[...] Mr Sands, who is an aspiring musician and lives in Timberland near Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire, first got the hiccups in September 2006 and, after a few days, began searching for a diagnosis.

After finding that hiccups could be linked to brain tumours, he went to visit a doctor.

“They said, ‘don’t worry about it, it’s probably just linked to your heartburn, here’s some Gaviscon’,” he said.

The hiccups went away but returned for good in February 2007.

What followed was a two-year search for something to stop the hiccups that took him to the other side of the world.

“When you first tell people about the hiccups they do laugh straight away and I suppose they don’t think about how debilitating it is.

“It has ruined my life pretty much.”

I’ve boldfaced an important bit of text in the quote above. It’s important because Mr. Sands’ initial concern that it might be brain tumor ultimately turned out to be correct. When the hiccups returned in 2007 he should have gone back his doctor’s office and asked that they do a more in-depth examination.

Instead he decided to try just about every form of “alternative” medicine he could find and made a few TV appearances along the way. One show in Japan invited him back after their initial story about him generated some 500 suggested cures from viewers. It was during that visit that his true problem was found:

Straight off the plane, his first day was spent with a hiccup specialist who had been studying the condition for years.

It was there that he underwent the MRI scan that revealed the tumour.

The man who diagnosed Mr Sands in Japan, Dr Condo, said: “CT scans are extremely poor at detecting in this area – unless you use an MRI scan you won’t be able to detect it.

“If they had done an MRI scan in England, they probably would have found it.”

But Chris is not angry about the way he way was treated.

In fact, despite being offered the opportunity to have the operation in Japan, he chose to return to England.

“Everyone else seems to mean harm to the NHS for various reasons but I really don’t.

“They probably should have done [an MRI exam] but it just never happened.

“I don’t blame anyone and I got treated well no matter where I went.”

Think on that for a moment. Two years of constant hiccuping and trying all manner of oddball treatments and a simple MRI scan was all it took to find the problem. A tumor that, had it continued to go untreated, likely would’ve killed him before too much longer.

Mr. Sands underwent surgery that removed most of the tumor and his hiccups have largely subsided, though he still gets occasional bouts from time to time. His doctor’s made a mistake in not taking the condition seriously in the beginning, but Mr. Sands made a mistake in not insisting they take it seriously and opting to try any ridiculous idea that came along. I can only imagine the desperation he must have felt that probably drove him to trying anything he could, but two years is a long time to suffer for want of insisting your doctor refer you to a specialist. Stick to the stuff that’s been shown to work. The “alternatives” are a waste of time and money.

The International Cancer Genome Consortium scientists have successfully mapped out the entire genetic code for two of the most common cancers — skin and lung — and are continuing to work on several others:

BBC News – Scientists crack ‘entire genetic code’ of cancer.

Scientists around the globe are now working to catalogue all the genes that go wrong in many types of human cancer.

The UK is looking at breast cancer, Japan at liver and India at mouth.

China is studying stomach cancer, and the US is looking at cancers of the brain, ovary and pancreas.

The International Cancer Genome Consortium scientists from the 10 countries involved say it will take them at least five years and many hundreds of thousands of dollars to complete this mammoth task.

But once they have done this, patients will reap the benefits.

Professor Michael Stratton, who is the UK lead, said: “These catalogues are going to change the way we think about individual cancers.

“By identifying all the cancer genes we will be able to develop new drugs that target the specific mutated genes and work out which patients will benefit from these novel treatments.

“We can envisage a time when following the removal of a cancer cataloguing it will become routine.”

It could even be possible to develop MoT-style blood tests for healthy adults that can check for tell-tale DNA patterns suggestive of cancer.

Already they’re learning new things about skin and lung cancer:

The scientists found the DNA code for a skin cancer called melanoma contained more than 30,000 errors almost entirely caused by too much sun exposure.

The lung cancer DNA code had more than 23,000 errors largely triggered by cigarette smoke exposure.

From this, the experts estimate a typical smoker acquires one new mutation for every 15 cigarettes they smoke.

Although many of these mutations will be harmless, some will trigger cancer.

This is some excellent news. It’ll still be awhile before we’ll see any treatments come from this, but it should result in many new avenues for fighting cancer as well as understanding what causes it and how best to avoid it.

There is a town in Brazil where the birth rate of twins in almost 1000% higher than anywhere else on the planet. All manner of explanations from aliens to nuclear tests have been put forth to explain why, but one theory stands out from the rest. That the infamous Nazi Joseph Mengele’s experiments into creating a master Aryan race are somehow responsible for the high ratio:

Joseph Mengele, the escaped Nazi war criminal and SS physician, known as the Angel of Death, spent years doing bizarre medical experiments on twins at Auschwitz working to determine if twins held the key to building a blond-haired, blue-eyed master race for Adolf Hitler. Now a historian says he has evidence that Mengele’s attempts may not have ended at Auschwitz, and that his obsession to engineer an Aryan master race continued, and that succeeded while he was on the run in South America. Deep in the Brazilian outback in a tiny town among the 80 households in a one-square-mile area are reportedly some 38 pairs of twins. Blond, blue-eyed twins. Bizarre and inexplicable, could they be the product of Mengele’s machinations? Now, with exclusive access, EXPLORER goes inside the investigation; From the secret agents who trailed him, to the scientists now uncovering the facts behind the fantastical phenomenon, no stone is left unturned.

Yep, that should be a fascinating episode. It’ll air this Saturday at 7PM and I’ll be setting my DVR to catch it in case I forget.

Found via The Huffington Post.

Susan B. Anthony said in 1896: I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.

The above is not news to anyone who is paying attention. Ask most Believers what they feel God’s stance is on a particular moral question and then ask what their own views are on the topic and, more often than not, you’ll get the same answer. Now there’s a study that supports that simple truth:

For many religious people, the popular question “What would Jesus do?” is essentially the same as “What would I do?” That’s the message from an intriguing and controversial new study by Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago. Through a combination of surveys, psychological manipulation and brain-scanning, he has found that when religious Americans try to infer the will of God, they mainly draw on their own personal beliefs.

Psychological studies have found that people are always a tad egocentric when considering other people’s mindsets. They use their own beliefs as a starting point, which colours their final conclusions. Epley found that the same process happens, and then some, when people try and divine the mind of God. Their opinions on God’s attitudes on important social issues closely mirror their own beliefs. If their own attitudes change, so do their perceptions of what God thinks. They even use the same parts of their brain when considering God’s will and their own opinions.

Religion provides a moral compass for many people around the world, colouring their views on everything from martyrdom to abortion to homosexuality. But Epley’s research calls the worth of this counsel into question, for it suggests that inferring the will of God sets the moral compass to whatever direction we ourselves are facing. He says, “Intuiting God’s beliefs on important issues may not produce an independent guide, but may instead serve as an echo chamber to validate and justify one’s own beliefs.”

It’s the sort of thing that prompts a knee-jerk reaction of, Well duh! But it’s probably best that there’s some research that supports what seems obvious to many of us. If nothing else it can act as a jumping off point for challenging believers to truly consider what they think they know about their God(s). Combined with the fact that there’s such a wide-ranging variance between believers on what they think their God’s viewpoints are, it also bolsters the argument that there likely aren’t any God(s) to begin with.

Gods are created in man’s image and always have been as it is only in the mind of man that they exist. Considering some people’s opinions on what God is like, perhaps it’s best that simply wishing for something doesn’t make it real.

How many times have you had someone tell you to avoid drinking milk or consuming other dairy products when you’ve got a cold? It’s one of those bits of conventional wisdom that everyone seems to know, but how accurate is it?

For centuries, milk has been blamed for increased mucus production – and in turn a range of other conditions like asthma and snoring.

But while many people swear milk produces mucus, the effect can’t be explained by science, says allergy specialist Dr Ray Mullins.

A 2005 review of studies concluded that there was no link between milk consumption and mucus production or asthma. In one study, participants infected with the common cold virus reported symptoms of increased in mucus production after drinking milk, but when their mucus production was actually measured there was no statistical difference. In another study, there was no difference in the sensation experienced between drinking soy milk and cow’s milk.

This doesn’t mean people don’t experience the sensation, says Mullins, but rather that there is no actual increase in mucus production.

via Does milk make mucus worse? – Health & Wellbeing.

I have to admit that I’ve had mixed experiences over the years with regards to this phenomena. I have ignored the advice and consumed dairy products while I had a cold to no noticeable effect on how stuffed my head was, but I also find that if I consume a glass of milk immediately prior to going to bed — even when I’m not ill — I’ll often wake up with a clogged nose. Not always, but often enough to draw a correlation. Of course correlation is not causation, but it’s happened often enough that I avoid drinking milk if I’m about to go to bed.

What’s even more interesting than the article itself, however, are the bevy of comments left by vegetarians and creationists who aren’t happy with the statements made in the article itself. A small sample:

Lindsay: As a vegan I am sick and tired of *doctors* proclaiming that it is a bad idea to not consume dairy products because it is unhealthy. That is a complete lie.

BGM: As a practicing veterinarian I do not know of any species other than Man which consumes milk past weaning. On a personal note, many of the skin, bowel and weight issues I experienced resolved when I switched to soy milk and avoided all daily. No way did early man evolve needing dairy products.

Alisha: man did not evolve anyways, but no. I have Bronchitis and I haven’t found it to be worse because I have been drinking milk.

It’s always enlightening to read the comments on a science article. Well, perhaps “enlightening” isn’t quite the word. Entertaining. Yes, that’s a better word.

It’s autumn in Michigan which means it’s time for the swarms of Multi-colored Asian Ladybeetles to start making a nuisance of themselves. The insects look very much like our native ladybugs, but are distinct in several ways including their tendency to invade homes in preparation for the coming winter.

I first noticed them last night when I walked in the house after work at 12:45AM and heard a peculiar “tink tink tink” sound as I passed through the dining room. My initial thought was that the faucet in the kitchen was dripping, but checking found that not to be the case and that the sound was now occurring behind me. My next thought was that we had a leak of some sort that was dripping into the dining room, but I was having trouble locating the source of the sound. Pacing about comically sticking one ear out in the way cartoon characters do when listening for something eventually brought me to look up at the dining room light where the source of the sound was discovered. Three or four of the ladybeetles were happily knocking themselves senseless against the dining room light fixture.

Then this afternoon as I got ready for work I stepped into the foyer to grab my shoes and found the place home to at least a dozen of the beetles, most of whom where trying to figure out why they couldn’t move through the glass window next to the door and out into the yard beyond. There was another beetle hiding in the bathroom, four more in the dining room, and one totally lost beetle near the back door in the kitchen. Stepping outside and going around to the front of the apartment, which faces the sun this time of year, there were literally hundreds of the beetles plastered to the wall soaking up the rays.

As if often the case when presented with phenomena that I’ve encountered before, but hadn’t stopped to think much about, I decided it was time to look these guys up on the Intertubes. As it turns out the fine folks at Michigan State University have a whole webpage devoted to the Multi-colored Asian Ladybeetle complete with a FAQ page. Here’s a couple of snippits:

What is the correct name of this insect?
You will hear several versions of the common name of this insect. It has been called the multi-colored Asian ladybird beetle, multi-colored Asian ladybug, Asian lady beetle and even the Halloween beetle. The name we are most familiar with is multi-colored Asian lady beetle. The scientific name of this insect is Harmonia axyridis. It only has one of these!

Where did the multi-colored Asian lady beetle come from?
This insect is native to northeastern Asia.

How did this insect find it’s way to Michigan?
There is some confusion about this issue. There are records of attempts to establish this insect in the U.S. as far back as 1916. In the early 1980’s the United States Department of Agriculture experimented with this insect in the southeast U.S. They were trying to establish it as a predator against aphids and other soft-bodied pests of pecan trees, a valuable nut crop. According to USDA scientists, they were unsuccessful in their attempt to establish the beetle. However, in 1988 an established population was discovered in Louisiana, near New Orleans. The multi-colored Asian lady beetle was first officially reported in Michigan in 1994 but has probably been present since the early 1990’s. Today, it can probably be found in all 83 Michigan counties and several other states.

Why do so many multi-colored Asian lady beetles show up in and on my house in the fall and sometimes—lasting right into spring?
In the fall of the year, multi-colored Asian lady beetles begin to seek out cavities where they will spend the winter hibernating. They require cavities that will stay cool and dry and offer concealment. Throughout their native range in Asia, the adult beetles seek out cavities in cliff faces and other naturally occurring cool, dry cavities. In our part of the world, they have found equivalent winter quarters in the exterior of buildings. They are most commonly found gathering in the fall on the sun-facing exposure of the building—usually a southern exposure. This activity often results in the beetles getting into the inhabited portions of the building. In the spring, they will all leave.

If the multi-colored Asian lady beetle hibernates all winter, why do I get them in my house in the winter?
Even on cold winter days there are often times when the wind is calm and it is sunny. On these days (especially later in the winter when days grow longer), there is sufficient radiant energy on sunny exposures (especially southern exposures) to warm the siding. If the temperatures where the beetles are hibernating get near 50 degrees F, some beetles will wake up and begin crawling around. Some or many will then find their way into inhabited areas of the house.

When they get into the house during the winter, I see many of them gathered on and around windows, but for the life of me, I cannot find any cracks or gaps around the windows where they may have gotten into the house. How can this be?
These insects are photopositive—they move toward the light or towards the window in this case. Insects also have very small brains. They can’t figure out glass and why they can see the outdoors, but can’t get there! They have found their way into living areas by other routes and have only ended up on the window.

It’s true that most of the year you’d hardly know they were around, but come about this time in autumn you can’t miss them. They’re pretty harmless and they’re just looking for a warm place to ride out the winter. Some people are allergic to the beetles after prolonged exposure to an infestation, but for most folks they’re just an annoyance. If nothing else, though, they can be a good indicator of the need to check your home for cracks and poor caulking that could result in higher energy bills as they have to be getting in some way.

Of course if you use the door on the sunny side of the house then some will just fly in with you, but if you have dozens of them then you’ve probably got a problem some place. My guess for our apartment is that they’re getting in through the vent for the downstairs bathroom which has an external port. I’ll have to ask the maintenance guys to check the screen on it. In the meantime the recommended means of dealing with them in your home is to use a dust buster and just vacuum them up.

So that made for an interesting bit of reading on what is a wonderful fall afternoon here in Michigan. It also made me a bit more sympathetic to the plight of the multi-colored Asian ladybeetle. They don’t mean to invade my home, they’re just too stupid to know better. I’ve known some people that were just like that.

This is exactly what we need more of to encourage folks to learn critical thinking skills. Mentalist Derren Brown in partnership with Kat Akingbade have set up a website called Science of Scams with a matching YouTube Channel. I could give a lengthy description of what it’s about, but I’ll let Derren handle that:

What their plans are beyond the first seven videos remains to be seen, but hopefully this will be an ongoing series for quite some time to come. There’s a lot of nonsense that gets posted to YouTube and then passed around as authentic and having another group out there exposing the reality is more than welcome. Incidentally, if you’ve never seen Derren Brown’s act then you should check it out. He’s amazing.

They’ve already revealed three of the seven videos including a debunking of the Psi-Wheel trick and a pretty common fake ghost effect. I’ll embed the psi-wheel video after the jump. I’ll be keeping on eye on this channel to see what the remaining four videos are.

Found over on Boing Boing.

Seeing as I’ve not posted for three days I thought I should get something up here, but I haven’t had much to say in part because my shift at work the past two days has been canceled and my usual web browsing routine has been altered as a result. One thing I did stumble upon last night was a Nova special on PBS called Hubble’s Amazing Rescue that I thought was worth sharing. Here’s the show description:

The best-known scientific instrument in history was dying. After nearly 20 years in space and hundreds of thousands of spectacular images, the Hubble Space Telescope’s gyroscopes and sensors were failing, its batteries running down, and some of its instruments were already dead. The only hope to save Hubble was a mission so dangerous that in 2004 NASA cancelled it because it was considered too risky.

Scientists and the general public alike stubbornly refused to abandon the telescope, and a new NASA administrator revived the mission. This program takes viewers behind the scenes on a riveting journey with the team of astronauts and engineers charged with saving the famous “orbiting observatory” against all odds.

Hubble had been serviced four times before, including the famous 1993 repair mission that had corrected its blurred vision. But all previous missions had involved replacements, not actual repairs. Astronauts undid latches, removed a balky module, and replaced it with a new one. This mission would be different. Two of Hubble’s instruments—a camera and a spectrograph—had died, and no replacements existed. To revive them, astronauts would attempt procedures never before tried in space: opening up electronic assemblies, getting “into the guts,” and performing delicate tasks previously thought impossible.

I remember being disappointed when I heard they weren’t going to fix the Hubble and then elated when the decision was reversed. And boy was it worth it. Some of the pictures from the newly restored Hubble are absolutely stunning and the story of how they fixed the Hubble is equally amazing. You can watch it online for free at the official website.