Do People Really Not Know This?

A cousin of mine just posted an urban legend to her Facebook status. I first encountered this bit of misinformation 4 or 5 years ago, and was startled that anyone found it convincing:

In 1919 when the flu killed 40 million people there was this Doctor that visited the many farmers to see if he could help them combat the flu...
Many of the farmers and their families had contracted it and many died.
The doctor came upon this one farmer and to his surprise, everyone was very healthy. When the doctor asked what the farmer was doing that was different the wife replied that she had placed an unpeeled onion in a dish in the rooms of the home, (probably only two rooms back then). The doctor couldn't believe it and asked if he could have one of the onions and place it under the microscope. She gave him one and when he did this, he did find the flu virus in the onion. It obviously absorbed the bacteria, therefore, keeping the family healthy.

What jumped out at me back when I first heard this story was the country doctor examining the onion under a microscope and finding the flu virus (which did not mysteriously become a bacteria in the next sentence in the first version I heard.) Way back in high school, some fifty years ago, I remembered learning that a virus is too small to be observed with a regular microscope, and couldn’t be seen until the invention of the electron microscope. I can’t say that I recalled offhand when the electron microscope was invented, but 1919 sounded much too early, and even if labs had them in 1919, it would have been an exotic piece of equipment for a country doctor to have at his disposal.

So I did some Googling and discovered that the first electron microscopes weren’t available until the 1930’s, and they stood several feet high. Furthermore, it is only recently that an electron microscope that can be plugged into an ordinary household outlet has become available to the public - for $60,000. I don’t know what kind of outlet the standard electron microscope requires, but I’m pretty certain that there were country doctors back in 1919 who didn’t even have electricity.

I pointed this out (privately) to the co-worker who had sent us all the email revealing this interesting piece of information, which didn’t stop her from passing on other unlikely urban legends.

This time I decided to do a little more Googling. It turns out although in 1919 it was beginning to be known that flu was caused by a virus, it wasn’t until 1931 that Richard Swope found the family of  viruses that caused flu in pigs, and not until 1933 that the virus that causes human flu was isolated by Patrick Laidlaw. Our country doctor working in 1919 wouldn’t even have known what a flu virus would look like, and might not even have known that flu was caused by a virus and not by Bacillus influenzae (now known as Haemophilus influenzae), an opportunistic pathogen that usually is harmless until another infection (like the flu) gives it its opportunity to multiply. 

Now as I have pointed out, I did not learn all of this in high school, and wouldn’t have remembered it if I had, but I did retain that fact that a virus is really, really, itty-bitty, and can’t be seen in the kind of microscope we had in our school lab. It doesn’t take more awareness than that to see the holes in the onion story. Of course, as my son pointed out, even if the onion did absorb flu virus, it’s unlikely it could absorb enough to prevent humans from getting their share. Not to mention that if onions were this efficacious at preventing flu, doctors and medical journals might think to mention it.

I did not bother to correct my cousin. She has been going through a stressful time lately and a know-it-all post from her cousin is not needed. I just find myself wondering when I see someone fall for an urban legend like this, why they believe it. Almost always there is something in the story that sounds off, like the doctor being able to see a virus with an ordinary light microscope. 

There is something else I remember from my high school days, the question, “Says who?” I wish people would use it before passing improbable tales on to me.

Time Travelers

The last day of our London trip we took the train to Greenwich to see the Maritime Museum and the Royal Observatory, home of the 0 degree meridian and Greenwich mean time. I am familiar with Greenwich mean time because both Blogger and Flickr keep their daily statistics from midnight to midnight GMT, which means they end their day either 6 PM or 7 PM my time. It was odd being in London for two weeks and having the statistics collected from 1 AM to 1 AM each day, since London was still on Summer Time. Nothing makes me feel so out of whack as trying to figure out what time it is back home.

Before the advent of rail travel, there wasn’t a need for standardized time zones. People used local solar time to set their clocks by. The first attempts to standardize timekeeping were known as Railway Time, since it was used by railway companies using Greenwich Mean Time kept by portable chronometers. 

Now with even faster means of transportation and almost simultaneous worldwide telecommunications, time zones are taken for granted, as are adjustments such as Daylight Savings Time or Summer Time, depending on where you live. I was surprised to find out that even the state of Alaska adopts Daylight Savings Time, but as a merchant explained to me, Alaska is already two hours behind Pacific Standard Time. If they did not adopt Daylight Savings Time, they would be three hours behind, making doing business by phone or internet even harder.

We went to the Maritime Museum first. In addition to giving a history of shipbuilding, it also had displays that gave a history of British colonial expansion, tied to shipping as it was. One of the rooms we went into smelled to me like crab boil. It turned out it had an interactive display that allowed you to guess which spices came from which plants on display.

Cutty Sark, one of the last clippers built before the use of steam

Cutty Sark

Prince Frederick's Barge

Ships' Figureheads

Ships' badges eventually replaced figureheads.

The Royal Observatory was well worth visiting. Neal had a history teacher in high school who used to talk about the “Ooh - ee- ooh” feeling you get from coming in contact with historical sites and artifacts. Her ooh - ee- ooh moment came from seeing tracks in the Rockies left by wagon trains heading west. Mine was seeing William Herschel’s telescope.

View of London from outside the observatory

View of London from outside the observatory

William Herschel's Telescope

William Herschel's Telescope

William Herschel's Telescope

East is east, and west is west.

Straddling the meridian

The Royal Observatory also serves as a listening post for Longplayer. You are supposed to be able to stream Longplayer to your computer. I can't always get it to work, but I am listening now. 

Flowers at Greenwich market

In Short

This is what passes for witty conversation around our house. This morning I told my husband I wanted to stay up and follow Curiosity’s landing on Mars, but “I crashed”.

Hubby replied, “It didn’t.”

Video can be found here for other sleepyheads:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnG-rFFpP8A&feature=player_embedded

Plague

A recent post on thenewcivilrightsmovement.com about how Bryan Fischer of The American Family Association denies that HIV causes AIDS, led me to think about how AIDS got identified as a “gay disease” to begin with.

According to author Nathan Wolf in his book The Viral Storm, 

The history of HIV begins with a relatively simple ecological interaction - the hunting of chimpanzees by monkeys in central Africa. While people normally think about the origins of HIV occurring sometime in the 1980’s, the story actually begins about 8 million years ago when our ape ancestors began to hunt.
More precisely, the story of HIV begins with two species of monkeys, the red-capped mangabey and the greater spot-nosed guenon of central Africa.They hardly seem like the villains at the center of the global AIDS pandemic, yet without them this pandemic would never have occurred. . . One thing these monkeys share is that they are naturally infected with SIV, the simian immunodeficiency virus. Each monkey has its own particular variant of this virus, something it and its ancestors have probably lived with for millions of years. Another thing these monkeys have in common is that chimpanzees find them very tasty.

He goes on to say, 

No matter what the particular order of cross-species jumps, at some moment a chimpanzee became infected with both the guenon virus and the mangabey virus. The two viruses recombined to create an entirely new mosaic variant, neither mangabey virus nor guenon virus.
. . .The virus, now known to harm chimpanzees, would persist in chimpanzee populations for many years before it would jump from chimpanzees to humans sometime in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. And it all started because chimpanzees hunt.

 Wolf has a lot to say about AIDS, since The Viral Storm is about pandemics, and what aspects of human life and technology allow them to spread. Here’s a section about the first known AIDS patient:

The earliest historical HIV samples date from 1959 and 1960, twenty years before AIDS was even recognized as a disease. In an amazing piece of viral detective work, evolutionary virologist Michael Wirobey and his colleagues managed to analyze a virus from a specimen of a lymph node from a woman in Leopoldville, Congo (now Kinshasa, DRC).
The lymph node had been embedded in wax for over forty-five years. By comparing the genetic sequence of the virus they found in the specimen with other strains from humans and chimpanzees, they were able to attach rough dates for the first ancestor of the human virus. While the genetic techniques they used cannot pinpoint dates closer than a few decades, they concluded that the virus split from the lineage sometime around 1900 and certainly before 1930. They also concluded that by the time the woman in Leopoldville became infected with HIV in 1959 there was already a significant amount of genetic diversty of HIV in Kinshasa, suggesting that the epidemic had already established itself there.

Wolf goes on to talk about why it took medical researchers so long to recognize AIDS as a disease, and then about the social changes that occurred in central Africa that led to the spread of the disease:

In 1892 steamship service began from Kinshasa to Kisangani in the very heart of the central African forest. The steamship service connected populations that had been largely separated, creating potential for viruses that might previously have gone extinct in local isolated populations to reach the growing urban centers. In addition, the French initiated the construction of railroads, which, like shipping and road lines, connect populations. This produced another mechanism for viruses to spread from remote regions to urban centers, effectively providing a larger population size of hosts for a spreading virus.
. . . Large groups of men were conscripted, often forcefully, to build railroads.Moore and his colleagues note that the labor camps were populated mostly by men, a condition that dramatically favors transmission of sexually transmitted viruses like HIV. . .

 It's much harder to see AIDS as "the gay plague" if you look at the entire history of the crossover of AIDS from monkeys to chimps to humans and not just at the first cases in the US. It's a fluke that the first person to transmit AIDS from Africa to the US was a gay male. Even if AIDS had never made it across the ocean from Africa, it would still be ravaging the African continent, killing women and children as well as men (as it does here).Whatever Bryan Fischer’s narrative would have been then, I doubt he would have blamed colonialism or hunting the way he blames homosexuality for causing the disease. He might even have been willing to accept that this disease, like many other diseases,  is caused by a virus. 

Contact

As everyone knows, June 5 saw the last transit of Venus across the face of the sun until December, 2117. Scientists kept telling us this event won’t be seen again in our lifetimes, and for me, that’s almost certainly true. I doubt very much I’ll live to be 170. It’s almost certainly true for just about everyone living today. A newborn of today would have to live to be 105 to see the next transit, and the newborn wouldn’t have been part of the audience who could understand the phrase “for the last time in our lifetime.” On the other hand, a list of the verified oldest people on Wikipedia lists ages ranging from 115 years to 122 years for the top ten. So it’s just barely possible that a 10 - 17 year old amateur astronomer of today could be around for the next one. Wouldn’t that be cool? Imagine a very old woman telling her great-great-whatever granddaughter, “The last time I saw this happen I was your age.” And great-whatever answering, “Yeah, Gammy, it’s a spot on the sun, okay?”

Since we’ve established I’m not going to be around, I spent most of the evening of June fifth glued to my computer monitor watching the live feed from Oahu on the Exploratorium website. Not that there was much to watch. It was a spot on the sun, moving so slowly that it was impossible to detect actual motion at all. It was kind of like watching hour hand on your watch: you know it’s changing position but you can’t make your eyes see it move. So when I say “watching”, I mean mostly sitting reading a book, looking up every so often, listening to the kickass background music ( a sound composition being created from the video of the transit in real time) and to the audio commentary every thirty minutes or so. From the commentary I discovered that the transit is marked by four points of contact: first contact being when the leading edge of Venus appears to touch the outer surface of the sun, second contact being when the entire disk of Venus is first visible against the sun, third contact being when the leading edge of Venus touches the opposite side of the sun, and fourth contact being just before Venus appears to have completely cleared the sun, when only the trailing edge is making contect. You can see videos of first and second contact and third and fourth contact here (just look down at the index).

What I found most interesting about the Mauna Loa feed is that it gave three views of the transit: in white light, and filtered through a calcium filter, giving the sun a blue-violet look, and through a hydrogen alpha filter, giving it a red look. Each view revealed a somewhat different surface: the sun as seen through the calcium filter looked somewhat smaller, because you saw below what is considered the surface, and so third and fourth contact appeared sooner than they did when the sun was viewed in white light. The hydrogen filter allowed us to see more of the gases off the surface, making the sun appear larger and delaying the onset of third and fourth contact.

Since I am not really an astronomy person and definitely a words person, knowing this leads me to muse about the definition of the word “surface”. We ordinarily don’t think of “surface” as having a vague meaning. We live with surfaces all around us, and graceless as I am, I bump into them a lot. When I’ve stubbed my toe or banged my hip or barked my shin on a surface, I think it’s pretty clear where that surface is.

The sun, however, is a ball of fiery gases. What we call the surface is really the photosphere, the part we can see. What we see depends on how we look at the sun. Since looking at it with the naked eye is harmful, that generally means looking through a filter, and a filter changes where we perceive the surface. So what is the surface? The outermost area we can see in white light? The outermost area we can see through a filter? Which filter?

Furthermore, when Venus transits the sun, it is not at any time making contact. Venus is a little over 67 million miles from the sun. The “contact” is apparent, not real, as Venus comes between Earth and the sun. Even if it were real, however, just how much contact counts as contact? How many degrees of arc must be touching for us to perceive contact?

If “surface” and “contact” are vague, “lifetime” is even vaguer. An individual’s lifetime is easy to measure, from birth to death, at least if allow a little wiggle room in the times of “birth” and “death”. When we use the term “in our lifetime”, however, whose lifetime do we mean? The average life expectancy of a poor child in a developing nation? The natural lifespan of a person in good health who does not meet with any accidents or violence?

I think there’s a good chance that one of the world’s many newborns kicking in their cradles on June 5, 2012, unaware of any astronomic events of note, will make it to December, 2117, possibly still unaware at that great age of any astronomic events of note. For myself, however, I think it’s a certainty - never again in my lifetime.

Cladoselache

Recently I received a request through Flickr from a student who wanted to use my photo of a cladoselache fossil in a report she was writing for school. The only fossils I could think of that I had taken photos of were the ones at the dinosaur exhibit in Lafayette, and none of them were of something called cladoselache. Some of them were untitled, and one I had titled “Marine Fossil”, so for all I knew, the student had recognized one of those as cladoselache. I shamefacedly admited to not knowing which picture she meant, and gave permission for her to use it if she would tag it for me.

It turned out that the picture in question was in an older group of pictures taken at Moody Gardens Aquarium in Galveston, Texas, and I had in fact titled it Cladoselache because the name was displayed prominently in one of the pictures I took. Like many people with digital cameras, I have more enthusiasm than skill, and take a lot of pictures, which I then post to Flickr and apparently promptly forget.

I like to encourage the young, however, so I was happy to email her a copy of the picture to use. In exchange, she offered me a copy of the finished paper. I accepted, since I am hoping fervently that her paper is based on orthodox science and not a claim that the fossil is the result of Noah’s flood. I couldn’t think of a polite way to ask.

Now I need to think of a tune to use to remember the word “cladoselache”. I became aware of the usefulness of music as a mnemonic device while reading an article by Isaac Asimov about the molecular structure of the molecule para-dimethylaminobenzaldehyde. Asimov explained how each change in a benzene ring led to each prefix and suffix in the name, as a larger lesson on organic molecules. Then he told a story about how he was traveling one day and began singing the word  “para-dimethylaminobenzaldehyde” to the tune of The Irish Washerwoman. A woman sitting near him exclaimed, “You know it in the original Gaelic!”

I cannot for the life of me tell you what para-dimethylaminobenzaldehyde is*, but thanks to The Irish Washerwoman, I have never forgotten the word.

Another musical mnemonic I use, with a more practical application, comes from Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. In Episode 1105, Baby Ana, the platypus, is given her name, short for “ornithorhynchus anatinus”.  Handyman Negri writes her a song based on her name. I searched diligently online to try to find a video or audio of the song, and couldn’t. So you will just have take my word for it that the words 

“Ornithorhynchus anatinus,
Ana, Ana, Ana,
Ornithorhynchus anatinus,
Ana, Ana, A-a-a-na”

can be replaced with

“Trustworthy, loyal, friendly, helpful, 

Courteous, kind, obedient,
Cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean,
And reverent, reverent, reverent.”

So what is a cladoselache, you ask? I don’t know. I’ll have to wait until Monday to find out. That’s when the paper is due.

*other than that it is an aldehyde and see correction below.

Viral

I don’t remember where online I heard of the book, The Viral Storm: The Dawn of A New Pandemic Age, by Nathan Wolfe, but wherever I did, I saw it and thought, “I want to read that.”

It belongs to a whole subset of books that I want to have read, more than that I want to read, because while the information in them is interesting to know, I have the attention span of a flea. And while The Viral Storm is written for a popular audience, it’s not an easy read. It took me over a month to slog through it.

It was a worthwhile read. I was amused to see that one of the reviews on Amazon contained this line: “While reading the first 100 pages or so I was pretty sure I picked up a book about primate behavior instead of viruses.” The book is about pandemics, what they are and how they spread. Primate behavior, according to the author, has a lot to do with how humans acquire viruses from the animal world and how we spread them. When the first apes decided to add meat to their diet, they exposed themselves to microbes in the blood of their prey. Chimpanzees and bonobos hunt meat, particularly monkeys. It is likely our last common ancestor did,  too.

Why is that relevant to pandemics?

Hunting, with all of its messy, bloody activity provides everything infectious agents require to move from one species to another. The minor skirmishes our early ancestors had with other species probably resulted in minor cuts, scratches and bites - insignificant compared to the intense exposure of one species to another that is a direct result of hunting and butchering.
The chimpanzees who were devouring their feast of red colobus monkey in the Kibale forest that day were an instant, visual example of blurring the lines between species. The manner in which they were ingesting and spreading fresh blood and organs was creating the ideal environment for any infectious agent present in the monkeys to spread to the chimpanzees. (Kindle edition, location 558-571)

Wolfe spends the bulk of his book on the human behaviors that make pandemics possible: advances in domestication of animals, in travel, and in medicine. Living in proximity to livestock exposes us to their diseases. The rapidity of airplane travel means a traveler can pick up a disease in one place and spread it in another, sometimes before even showing symptoms. The medical advances that save lives, like blood transfusions and organ transplants, also open up a direct route for microbes to get from one body to another.

Wolfe also discusses new ways of tracking pandemics. Borrowing from a term used by intelligence communities, he talks about listening to “viral chatter”, reports of low level incidences of viral infection that need watching. One of his projects is getting hunters of bushmeat to use baseball-card-sized sampling papers to take samples of blood from the meat they hunt and drop it off in easily located collection spots. This allows researchers to check for microbes that may be making their way from the meat into human populations.

Wolfe also cites a 2009 Google study that shows that search patterns of individuals “provide a sense of what individuals are becoming infected with”. 

With the vast stores of search data kept by Google and the US influenza surveillance data collected by the CDC, the team was able to calibrate their system to determine the key search words that sick people or their caregivers used to indicate the presence of illness. The team used searches on words related to influenza and its symptoms and remedies to establish a system that accurately tracked the influenza statistics generated by the CDC. In fact, they did better. Since Google search data is available immediately . . . Google was able to beat the CDC in providing accurate influenza trends before the traditional surveillance system. (Kindle edition locations 2768-2764)

Okay that’s scary, and not just in the “I could get sick and die” sense of scary, but it is also impressive.

So read the book. It’s well worth the time.

Fossils from Liaoning Province, China

Tuesday, I took my husband and my good friend D to the Lafayette Museum of Science to see the exhibit Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries before it closes on Sunday. I had seen it before, but wanted to see it again and take a few more pictures with my good camera. I think I may have done better with my iPhone.

I began to have my doubts about the wisdom of bringing my husband when his first words were, “We’re too late. They’re all dead”, but he made up for it by paying for lunch.

A big part of the exhibit is a diorama of what Liaoning Province, China, would have looked like 130 million years ago, along with several of the actual fossils discovered there. The fossils, which were discovered in the early 1990’s, not only show skeletons, but skin texture and feathers as well. It was hard taking pictures of the fossils, which were all in glass cases, but I did my best. Click "read more" to see pictures of the diorama and the fossils themselves. If you click on the pictures themselves, you see a larger version and the details show up better.

Making Tracks

If you go to this link, you can see a huge, searchable image of ancient elephant tracks laid across what is now a desert in the United Arab Emirates. They were made at least 6-8 million years ago, while the land was watered by a river, not the dry wasteland it is today.

According to Discover Magazine

There are many fossils of prehistoric elephants that show how their bodies evolved from smaller ancestors. But elephants are much more than just tusks and trunks. They have rich social lives, full of empathy, and their behaviours haven’t fossilised as well. We know that some elephants, like the mammoth and mastodon, spent some of their time in groups, thanks to the occasional trackways and mass graves.  But the Mleisa 1 site offers much clearer evidence.
Studying it wasn’t easy. The site is too massive to photograph from the ground, but the individual prints are too small to show up on satellite images. To accurately map the trackways, Nathan Craig from Pennsylvania State University attached a small pocket camera to a kite and snapped a set of overlapping images from above. He stitched the images together into a single large mosaic, which you can see on Gigapan. By calibrating the aerial mosaic with measurements taken on the ground, the team could study the herd’s footsteps from the air.

Wired.com also has an article on the elephant tracks.

One day, sometime around seven million years ago, a herd of bizarre, four-tusked elephants crossed the desert that stretched over what is now the United Arab Emirates. Thirteen of the behemoths plodded along together, perhaps moving towards one of the wide, slow rivers which nourished stands of trees in the otherwise the arid region. Sometime later, a solitary animal trudged across the herd’s path in another direction. We know all this because paleontologists have found the tracks of these massive animals.
Scientists were not the first people to wonder about the fossil footprints. The huge tracksite – which stretches over an area equivalent to seven soccer fields – had been a source of speculation among local Emirati people for years. Dinosaurs and even mythical giants were thought to have been responsible for the potholes. It wasn’t until the spring of 2001 that a resident of the area, Mubarak bin Rashid Al Mansouri, led researchers from the Abu Dhabi Islands Archaeological Survey to the immense fossil field.
Dinosaurs had not created the tracks. The snapshot of time represented by the trace fossils came from the Miocene, sometime between six and eight million years ago — all the gargantuan non-avian dinosaurs had died out over 60 million years previously. Based upon the geological context and what had been found in the area before, fossil elephants were quickly identified as the trackmakers. The site was named Mleisa 1.

If the world had had to wait for me to think of using kites to make aerial photographs of the tracks, it would have been waiting still. I think it’s the most creative use of a kite since Ben Franklin and his key.

It’s amazing what the tracks themselves can tell us about elephant behavior. Elephants travel in herds organized around a matriarch. When the males hit puberty, they set out on their own until they find another group to join. The lone tracks in this picture were made by such a male, not at the same time as those of the herd.

I’m grateful for the scientists who know how to give us these snapshots of long ago. Our lives are measured in decades rather than centuries, and we can’t run as fast as some of our fellow mammals, swim as well as fish or soar like birds, but thanks to the curiosity and inventiveness of some, we can look back over billions of years of history and see out for trillions of miles.

What could be cooler than that?

Congratulations to Per Ahlberg

Belated congratulations to Dr. Per Ahlberg on his having been elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Per Ahlberg is a paleontologist and Professor of Evolutionary Organismal Biology (stop sniggering and read that s-l-o-w-l-y; it means as opposed to molecular biology) at Uppsala University, Sweden. He also has a wicked sense of humor.

Dr. Ahlberg is not a personal acquaintance of mine, but I know of his election because we both post on TalkRational. Dr. Ahlberg posts things like, 

Tiktaalik is correctly dated as far as I can judge. The best constraint on the human-zebrafish split is Guiyu oneiros, a lobe-finned fish from the Silurian of China described by Zhu and colleagues last year. Guiyu is a basal member of the coelacanth + lungfish + tetrapod lineage, and must thus postdate the human-zebrafish split. It is 419 million years old. The Polish trackways show that the tetrapod line had separated from the lungfishes and coelacanths by 395 million years ago. 

I post things like, “It’s a house band that had a small cult following in the mid-90’s" in answer to questions like, “What is evo-devo?”* 

So despite that nasty little incident in which Dr. Ahlberg called me a marriage wrecker, I decided to be the bigger person and offer him my congratulations anyway, here on my blog where he won’t read it, along with pretty much the rest of the population of the earth, including Sweden, wherever that is. Somewhere cold, is my understanding. Somewhere where having published a few (dozen, hundred, whatever) seminal papers on tetrapod evolution is considered reason enough to elect someone to a society that probably doesn’t even have fancy hats like the Swedish Chef Institute.

Seriously, though, Talk Rational is a fascinating place, especially the Life Sciences (formerly Evolution and Origins) board and the Physical Sciences message boards. Per is not the only working scientist to post there, although as most of them post under screen names, I tend to get the physicists confused with the geologists and the biologists. Since the whole point of Talk Rat is spirited discussion on a number of topics (science, politics, religion and secularism, mathematics, philosophy, history) plus more community oriented boards for discussing games, sports, media, pets, family and whatever, and since the moderating policy is fairly loose, the science boards tend to draw a number of cranks who are certain they can upend all of modern science by referring the resident scientists to badly mangled versions of the second law of thermodynamics, quantum physics or outlier statistics from poorly done experiments, or to the work of other cranks. The discussions that ensue tend to be highly educational for those of us who are really there to learn. As for the cranks themselves, they follow a derived set of laws that have been described as follows:

Laws of [Crank] Discourse on Internet Discussion Forums 

First Law: All evidences for [standard science theory] are speculative. All speculations for [crank preferred theory] are evidential. 

Second Law: One may escape intellectual responsibility on any issue merely by stating an intent to pursue it. 

Third Law: If you have an objection to any point I’ve raised, I’ve already addressed it. No, I won’t tell you where. 

Fourth Law: Unanswerable questions are invisible. 

Fifth Law: The truth of all previously established facts and conclusions are subject to their being convenient to the argument I am presently making. 

Sixth Law: Any claim  . . . post[ed] on a new discussion board invalidates the refutations of the same claim . . . already seen and acknowledged on previous discussion boards. 

Seventh Law: No matter how transparently pathetic . . . any [such] claims may be they can always be followed by something even more pathetic . . .  

Eighth Law: Any thread where I'm getting my ass handed to me on the original topic can be prolonged indefinitely by the introduction of tangential diversions or an abnormal focus on meaningless minutiae.  

These laws in their original have a particular poster’s name attached to them, i.e, “Poster Name’s Seventh Law”, but my experience is they apply to a number of people.

It is fascinating to me to see how often the credentialed scientists will post for pages on end patiently dismantling farfetched claims that they have seen numerous times before, even after it becomes obvious that they are talking to persons who are not arguing in good faith and operating on most, if not all, of the above laws. They do it for the lurkers, they say, and I am glad they do. I’ve learned a lot. 

So again, congratulations to Per and a thank you to all of the scientists who see public education as one of their tasks in the face of the perverse determination of some folks to remain, blissfully or not, ignorant.

*In case, you are wondering, it’s not.