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The Amazing Meeting 9 (2011)

Sunday, October 9th, 2011

I was at TAM 9 (The Amazing Meeting) almost three months ago, but have been too lazy to blog about it until now.

TAM is a yearly conference about science and skepticism, and has lots of panels and talks by scientists and the “big stars” from the skeptical community (those tend to overlap).

Day -1 (The trip)
Traveling from Norway to the west coast of the US is a major pain in the ass. I got on the airplane early as shit, having only about 2-3 hours of sleep, and only carrying my plastic grocery bag containing 2 tshirts, 1 boxer and 1 pair of socks, as well as my camera and charger (I decided to travel light). The aircraft rolls out from the gate, but something strange is happening. After a couple of minutes the captain announces that the computer system is refusing to start one of the engines, and they have to reboot the aircraft.. So everything is switched off, but rebooting the computer system of the airplane takes a long time as it has to do lots of tests and configurations at startup. After about 30 minutes the computer decides to start both engines and from there the flight to Amsterdam went quickly (about 2 hours), then I had to wait at the airport in Amsterdam for 4 hours. Not that I did mind, it’s a really nice airport, and I could listen to my favorite podcast for the whole time.

Traveling light

The flight from Amsterdam to New York went much better(quicker) than expected, never been on such a huge plane before and I’m sooo glad I paid the 10% extra to get economy extra seating (only 1 seat next to you, and more room for arms and legs). Can’t really remember much of the flight, except the vegetarian meal was excellent and the desert awesome (go KLM!). Spent the entire flight using the in-flight entertainment system, Think I watched ‘Battle Los Angeles’, ‘Ant Bully’ and some tv shows (Curb your enthusiasm, Seinfeld, and a few others).

However when I landed at JFK, the so far pleasant trip took a turn for the worse. I had done the whole ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorization) thing, so I expected to just walk trough the immigration area. So I stood in line for 1 hour, just to find out I had to do the paper version as well (which is just asking for exactly the same information again).. Back to the end of the line and wait for another hour. I make it through immigration, but for some reason the guy just stared at my passport without blinking for at least 45 seconds, and was starting to freak me out a little.

Now I’m trying to find my flight, but of course it’s not listed on the board. I go to the Delta place and after them trying to send me to another terminal, they finally locate the flight (apparently there was some mix up of the flight number between KLM and Delta) and I have to run trough the airport and literally get on the plane in the last minute. On the plane I get flabbergasted by some people from the Norwegian skeptical society that I somewhat know from online.

Flight to Las Vegas is like 5 hours and I was half asleep the entire trip. I land around midnight and take a taxi to South Point hotel and casino, where the conference is taking place. I make my way up to the room, set my alarm clock and go to sleep faster than you could say ‘snapple’.

This bed was a sight for sore eyes that had been traveling for 28 hours

Day 0 – July 13th.
My first day in the new world, I’m up at 6 am (2 hours before my alarm goes off), tired confused and looking out into the desert trough my hotel window.

It's the wild west, and I didn't bring a gun or a hat :(

I go downstairs and quickly gets something to eat from the hotel gift shop before I head into town:

Traditional american breakfast

Traditional american breakfast

I take a taxi into town to get some supplies (I came bringing only 1 carry on). So with a long shopping list I headed to the place where the american dream turns true: Walmart.

However right across the road from Walmart I found “The Gun store”, so I got to play with some weapons (AK47 and MP5) that it would be hard to get to try in Norway without joining the army.

Skinhead with beard and foreign accent rents AK-47

Skinhead with beard and foreign accent rents AK-47

Certified Nazi Zombie killer

Certified Nazi Zombie killer

After shooting zombies, I bought lots of stuff at Walmart (luggage case, netbook, boxers, socks, tshirts, shirts and a couple of shorts, toothbrush, shower gel, deodorant, sunblock + food and snacks).

Can haz loot!

I have no idea what happened from noon to midnight, by looking at the photos from that time it appears I just went back to the hotel and did nothing (damn you sleep deprivation + jet lag).

Day 1 (June 14th) – First day of TAM
Fuck me, it’s 05:00 and I’m awake! I tried going back to sleep, but instead I ended up going out and taking pictures of the area around the hotel while waiting for the convention to start.

Las Vegas sunset

Las Vegas sunset

las vegas desert

Desert! I am in you!

Flowers are purdy

Red and shiny car being all red and shiny

South Point hotel and casino

More desert, now with hills in background

A random building

yaaay,a crosswalk! this is awesome

South Point hotel and casio from the front side

Registration opened at 7:30, I got my badge and wandered around waiting for the first workshop. The workshop was about examining UFO photos, and faking UFO photos without using photoshop. After that I attended a workshop called “Investigating monster mysteries” which was about cryptozoology (Bigfoot, Loch Ness monster, etc..)

After that I had lunch and I think I went up for a nap. I woke up in time for ‘The Rebecca Watson Game Show and Variety Hour’, which was really funny. After that I went straight to bed.

Day 2 (June 15th)  – Second day
Yesterday was kind of a slow TAM day, no panels, just the workshops.

This day however started with what I think was the highlight of TAM, a live recording of the podcast The Skeptics Guide to the Universe. This was followed by the official opening remarks by James Randi himself.

The SGU crew

Following that was an awesome panel with James Randi, Richard Wiseman, Phil Plait, Joe Nickell and Michael Shermer

Panel about skepticism on TV

After that I wandered around a bit, got some lunch,visited the vendor booths and got myself a couple of pet Trilobites :)

at 14:00 I was back in the main hall for a series of great panels/lectures.

A skeptical look at aliens by Biologist PZ Myers.

A panel with Astronomer Pamela Gay from Astronomy cast

This was followed by an extremely awesome panel about our future in space, with Neil Degrasse Tyson, Pamela Gay, Bill Nye (the science guy), and Lawrence Krauss with Phil Plait as a moderator.

Our future in space

This was immediately followed by Neil Degrasse Tyson’s keynote speech which was in lack of a better word, EPIC!.

Neil Degrasse Tyson Tam 9

I went to the Skeptics guide to the universe dinner at 18:00, and actually ate some real food. After that I was going to take a quick nap before the ‘Penn Jillette’s Rock & Roll, Doughnut and Bacon Party’, but dozed off and missed it :(

Day 3 (June 16th)  – Third day
This day there weren’t that many panels that I had to go to, so from I woke up at 7 (seriously, is jetlag supposed to last this long?) I headed into downtown and walked the strip and took lots of photos:

A hotel/casino with a rollercoaster, never got around to trying it :(

A casino/hotel that's a fucking castle! :o

Walking up the strip

Caesars palace! If this was Fallout 3 New Vegas I would go in there and kill everyone

Looks vaguely familiar

Yay, I got to see the Eifel tower without going to Paris

A place for the statistically illiterate

I rode the monorail! But saw no cat

I made it back to South Point and TAM just in time for the second half of the Skeptics Guide Live podcast event.

Steve, Evan, Jay, Rebecca and Bob

This was followed by the second Keynote speaker, Richard Dawkins. Again, the word Epic! comes to mind.

Day 4 (June 14th) – Final day
Day 4 had a few panels I wanted to see, but I had to make a flight to Los Angeles at noon, so left the hotel pretty early.

I’ll write about my LA trip in a while and put a link to it >>> HERE <<< :)

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Posted in General, Science, Skepticism, Traveling | No Comments »

Increasing earthquakes?

Saturday, May 14th, 2011

Are earthquakes increasing in strength or frequency?

Just found myself in a debate where the opposition claims earthquakes is on the rise (judgement day, wrath of god, etc..), being a skeptic I of course needed evidence, and where better to get it than to analyse it for myself from raw data?

How many earthquakes are there?
I went to the United States Geological Survey for the raw data, they have a pretty big list of “selected earthquakes of general historic interest” (6.0+) earthquakes recorded (ordered by magnitude, strongest quake first)
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/world/historical_mag_big.php

I then made a little computer program to parse the text, and output it in csv format:
java program: Test.java
data text file: quakes.txt (program input)
csv result file: quakes.csv (program output)

The output from the data was opened in a spreadsheet for further analysis. There are 722 quakes in the input data file. I used the data from the period 1900 to 2010 in the statistics below (660 of the 722 total data entries).

The data in table form

6+ 7+ 8+
1900 9 5 1
1905 14 12 5
1910 14 9 1
1915 9 6 0
1920 10 8 3
1925 15 10 0
1930 20 13 4
1935 12 7 2
1940 16 15 4
1945 21 18 5
1950 21 11 3
1955 20 18 3
1960 12 10 3
1965 34 18 3
1970 21 13 2
1975 18 12 0
1980 15 4 0
1985 17 6 1
1990 17 11 1
1995 31 21 1
2000 110 50 5
2005 194 67 8

The first column is the date of the quakes, the next 3 are number of earthquakes with a magnitude of at least 6, 7 and 8 respectively.
Data is grouped into 5 years.. so the first row with year 1900, is data from 1900 to 1904, followed by 1905 to 1909, etc..

Graph
Earhquake frequency last 110 years

Click for larger version

Conclusion
This graph makes it look like earthquakes are running rampant, and you might have seen a very similar graph on the Internet (YouTube and other places), used by conspiracy cranks as an argument that earthquakes are increasing. But fortunately this graph is very misleading.

The data used to make it is complete rubbish, to quote the page they are collected from: “selected earthquakes of general historic interest”.. These quakes have been hand picked as the most interesting ones, and the data has a HUGE bias towards newer earthquakes, so you can’t make any meaningful statistics out of it (except if you are making statistics of which years the guy who compiled the data finds “interesting”).

Maybe we should try and remake the graphs using some good solid data..

== Real Data ==

A scientist at the USGS was kind enough to send me a datafile with all the 7.0+ earthquakes from 1900 to 2010 (all the registered quakes, not filtered in any way).

Making some graphs from those data yields results consistent with what the experts on earthquakes are saying.. They are totally random and unpredictable, and there has been no increase of earthquakes since we started recording them:

Frequency of earthquakes from 1900 to 2010. Click for bigger version:
Earthquake frequency, 1900 to 2010

Distribution of earthquakes by month:
Earthquakes by month

Distribution of earthquakes by day of month, (day 31 omitted for obvious reasons):
Earthquakes by day of month

Distribution of earthquakes by hour of day:
Earthquakes by hour of day

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Exponential ferret

Monday, March 21st, 2011

Last night a ferret just stood idly on the floor for about half a minute just staring blankly at us. It looked a bit like she was really concentrating, so the first hypothesis to explain this strange behavior was that she was trying to create a copy of herself through agamogenesis (asexual reproduction). This naturally led to the notion of a ferret able to replicate itself once every minute, and seeing that playing with exponential growth is always fun, this scenario deserves some illustrations:

0 minutes

one ferret.

1 minute

WOW!, did you see that? That ferret just duplicated!

3 minutes

Sweet, 8 ferrets. This is awesome.

5 minutes

Ehm, I love ferrets but 32 is a bit much.. how do you stop this thing?

18 minutes

Help! 268’000 ferrets just filled and breached the entire volume of our ~200 cubic meter apartment!

23 minutes

Neighborhood overrun, time to evacuate.

35 minutes

The blue dot is me, speeding away from the 50 square kilometer sea of ferrets half a meter deep.

48 minutes

Despite speeding like crazy I was just overtaken by a huge wave of ferrets, twice the area of Rhode Island and 30 meters tall.. By now there are 281 trillion ferrets in Norway.

1 hour

The 1 billion billion ferrets now cover all of Scandinavia with a height of the Eiffel tower

1 hour 15 minutes

Ferrets now rule the earth. covering the entire surface of the planet, filling up all the oceans, in a huge ferret sea 5 times the height of mount everest.
the 37 sextillion ferrets weight about 1/3 of the moon.

1 hour 23 minutes

The ferrets now have the same mass as the earth.

1 hour 55 minutes*

The ferrets now weigh 13’000 times more than our sun, the speed at which they can expand is limited, so the pressure and heat is extreme, this makes the huge ball of ferrets shine more powerful that any star, while a black hole has formed at the center.

2 hours 23 minutes

Ferrets now weigh the same as our entire galaxy, have formed a supermassive black hole and things are starting to get nasty.

3 hours

At 30 times the mass of the observable universe, outputting extreme amounts of energy through a geometrically challenged universe, the laws of physics are probably breaking down and fusing together again for the first time since the big bang.. It’s safe to say the ferrets have ruined reality as we know it.

 

Note: What happens after about 1 hour 30 minutes gets pretty speculative, it’s hard trying to apply the laws of physics to something that is physically impossible :)

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Posted in Animals, Ferrets, General, Science | No Comments »

evidence against homeopathy

Wednesday, February 9th, 2011

Seeing as I made a list of what lesser scholarly inclined would call “evidence for homeopathy“, I find it only fitting to also provide a a few studies that show no effect of homeopathy. These are only a few, you can find tons more on pubmed, or wikipedia.

Note, that many of these are meta studies which means it’s a study of several other studies (usually some poor ones). This means there will often be some weak results saying there is an effect other than placebo. This is caused by poor studies (methodological flaws, insufficient randomization, ineffective blinding, confirmation and publication biases, etc..) that are “averaged” into the results of the meta study.

A systematic review of systematic reviews of homeopathy (link)
“In conclusion, the hypothesis that any given homeopathic remedy leads to clinical effects that are relevantly different from placebo or superior to other control interventions for any medical condition, is not supported by evidence from systematic reviews”

Homeopathy for childhood and adolescence ailments (link)
“The evidence from rigorous clinical trials of any type of therapeutic or preventive intervention testing homeopathy for childhood and adolescence ailments is not convincing enough for recommendations in any condition”

Are the clinical effects of homoeopathy placebo effects (link)
“This finding is compatible with the notion that the clinical effects of homoeopathy are placebo effects”

Clinical trials of homoeopathy (link)
“At the moment the evidence of clinical trials is positive but not sufficient to draw definitive conclusions because most trials are of low methodological quality and because of the unknown role of publication bias”

Are the clinical effects of homeopathy placebo effects? A meta-analysis of placebo-controlled trials (link)
“the results of our meta-analysis are not compatible with the hypothesis that the clinical effects of homeopathy are completely due to placebo. However, we found insufficient evidence from these studies that homeopathy is clearly efficacious for any single clinical condition”

Evidence of clinical efficacy of homeopathy (link)
“There is some evidence that homeopathic treatments are more effective than placebo; however, the strength of this evidence is low because of the low methodological quality of the trials. Studies of high methodological quality were more likely to be negative than the lower quality studies”

Impact of study quality on outcome in placebo-controlled trials of homeopathy (link)
“We conclude that in the study set investigated, there was clear evidence that studies with better methodological quality tended to yield less positive results.”

The methodological quality of randomized controlled trials of homeopathy, herbal medicines and acupuncture (link)
“While the methodological quality of the trials was highly variable, the majority had important shortcomings in reporting and/or methodology.”

Is homeopathy a clinically valuable approach? (link)
“Contrary to many claims by homeopaths, there is no conclusive evidence that highly dilute homeopathic remedies are different from placebos. The benefits that many patients experience after homeopathic treatment are therefore most probably due to nonspecific treatment effects. Contrary to widespread belief, homeopathy is not entirely devoid of risk. Thus, the proven benefits of highly dilute homeopathic remedies, beyond the beneficial effects of placebos, do not outweigh the potential for harm that this approach can cause”

Efficacy of homeopathic arnica (link)
“The claim that homeopathic arnica is efficacious beyond a placebo effect is not supported by rigorous clinical trials”

A systematic review of the quality of homeopathic pathogenetic trials published from 1945 to 1995 (link)
“The central question of whether homeopathic medicines in high dilutions can provoke effects in healthy volunteers has not yet been definitively answered, because of methodological weaknesses of the reports”

Efficacy of homeopathic therapy in cancer treatment (link)
“Our analysis of published literature on homeopathy found insufficient evidence to support clinical efficacy of homeopathic therapy in cancer care”

Homeopathy for chronic asthma (link)
“here is not enough evidence to reliably assess the possible role of homeopathy in asthma”

Homeopathy for dementia (link)
“In view of the absence of evidence it is not possible to comment on the use of homeopathy in treating dementia”

Homoeopathy for induction of labour (link)
“There is insufficient evidence to recommend the use of homoeopathy as a method of induction”

Double-blind randomized placebo-controlled study of homoeopathic prophylaxis of migraine (link)
“Overall, there was no significant benefit over placebo of homoeopathic treatment”

Randomized controlled trials of individualized homeopathy (link)
“The results of the available randomized trials suggest that individualized homeopathy has an effect over placebo. The evidence, however, is not convincing because of methodological shortcomings and inconsistencies.”

The effects of homeopathic belladonna 30CH in healthy volunteers (link)
“There is no indication that belladonna 30CH produces symptoms different from placebo or from no intervention”

Comparison of homeopathy, placebo and antibiotic treatment of clinical mastitis in dairy cows (link)
“Evidence of efficacy of homeopathic treatment beyond placebo was not found in this study”

Homeopathic Arnica 30x is ineffective for muscle soreness after long-distance running (link)
“Homeopathic Arnica 30x is ineffective for muscle soreness following long-distance running”
I just had to include this. not often the conclusion and title are identical :)

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Posted in General, Science, Skepticism | 2 Comments »

The evidence for homeopathy

Wednesday, February 9th, 2011

Recently in a “discussion” with a homeopath, I’ve been asking for documentation that homeopathy actually works. In the references I got, even the studies that claim even a small effect of homeopathic medicine, also point out methodological weaknesses and flaws of the studies. If this is the best studies homeopaths can point to, it’s nothing short of pathetic.

The title of the studies are in bold, to find the study just google the title and you’ll find it on pubmed. You should also read the whole article if available (especially the findings, conclusion and discussion parts are fun).

Homeopathy for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder or hyperkinetic disorder
MAIN RESULTS: The forms of homeopathy evaluated to date do not suggest significant treatment effects for the global symptoms, core symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity or impulsivity, or related outcomes such as anxiety in Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.

Evidence of clinical efficacy of homeopathy. A meta-analysis of clinical trials. HMRAG. Homeopathic Medicines Research Advisory Group
CONCLUSIONS: There is some evidence that homeopathic treatments are more effective than placebo; however, the strength of this evidence is low because of the low methodological quality of the trials. Studies of high methodological quality were more likely to be negative than the lower quality studies.

A critical overview of homeopathy
some randomized, placebo-controlled trials and laboratory research report unexpected effects of homeopathic medicines.However, the evidence on the effectiveness of homeopathy for specific clinical conditions is scant, is of uneven quality, and is generally poorer quality than research done in allopathic medicine

Clinical trials of homeopathy. British Medical Journal
CONCLUSIONS: At the moment the evidence of clinical trials is positive but not sufficient to draw definitive conclusions because most trials are of low methodological quality and because of the unknown role of publication bias

Are the clinical effects of homeopathy placebo effects? A meta-analysis of placebo-controlled trials
INTERPRETATION: The results of our meta-analysis are not compatible with the hypothesis that the clinical effects of homeopathy are completely due to placebo. However, we found insufficient evidence from these studies that homeopathy is clearly efficacious for any single clinical condition.

The conclusions on the effectiveness of homeopathy highly depend on the set of analyzed trials
CONCLUSIONS: Our results do neither prove that homeopathic medicines are superior to placebo nor do they prove the opposite. This, of course, was never our intention.

Are the clinical effects of homoeopathy placebo effects? Comparative study of placebo-controlled trials of homoeopathy and allopathy
INTERPRETATION: there was weak evidence for a specific effect of homoeopathic remedies, but strong evidence for specific effects of conventional interventions. This finding is compatible with the notion that the clinical effects of homoeopathy are placebo effects.

A randomised, controlled, triple-blind trial of the efficacy of homeopathic treatment for chronic fatigue syndrome
CONCLUSIONS: There is weak but equivocal evidence that the effects of homeopathic medicine are superior to placebo. Results also suggest that there may be nonspecific benefits from the homeopathic consultation. Further studies are needed to determine whether these differences hold in larger sample

How healthy are chronically ill patients after eight years of homeopathic treatment?
Our findings demonstrate that patients who seek homeopathic treatment are likely to improve considerably, although this effect must not be attributed to homeopathic treatment alone.
“The aim of this study, however, was not to test the effectiveness of homeopathic drug treatment”

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10:23 Trondheim (Sleeping pill overdose)

Saturday, February 5th, 2011

Today was the international 10:23 campaign. Thousands of people with a bias towards reality took huge overdoses of Homeopathic “Medicine”.

I took around 70 (3500% overdose) homeopathetic sleeping pills today, if I had taken real sleeping medicine I would probably be dead or dying about now.

Homeopathy of course is pure and utter bullshit, the 70 pills did not make me sleepy or affect me in any way, which is exactly what is expected for a “medicine” which has no active ingredients and consequently fail to show any effect besides placebo when scientifically tested.

Letting 60 pills melt under your tongue at once kinda sucks btw…

Homeopathy overdose
OM NOM NOM NOM!

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Posted in Food & Drink, General, Science, Skepticism | 1 Comment »

Homeopathic sleeping pills

Monday, January 17th, 2011

A couple of hours back, I took 10 pills of the homeopathic sleeping “medicine” called Viasedal, markeded in Norway by Norges NaturmedisinSentral AS (Norwegian Nature medicine sentral inc).

Viasedal

these 10 oddly tasting little things constitutes a 500% dose of sleeping pills, yet I’m unsurprisingly very much awake, and will of course stay that way until midnight or so.

What is homeopathy?

To sum it up, homeopathy is the belief that what makes you sick, also makes you well. But only if you take it in ridiculously tiny doses.
Example: You’re having trouble sleeping, and since caffeine makes you NOT sleep, quite logically a tiny amount of caffeine will make you sleep.

The way you make homeopathic “medicine” is to mix 1 part caffeine with 99 parts water. Then you take out 1 part of this new mixture and put that in 99 parts of water, then that part into another 99 parts of water, and so on, and so on..

This is when homeopathy gets really fun, the more dilute (less of the active ingredient) you have, the stronger the “medicine” is.. Yes that totally makes sense. The strongest homeopathic medicine is actually so dilute that it crosses the a limit in chemistry known as Avogadro’s number, which means that not even a single molecule of the original substance is present in the concoction you are making. So you eventually end up with very expensive water.

The homeopaths say this makes perfect sense because water has magical properties unknown to science, and that “remembers” the stuff it was in contact with. The inventor (Samuel Hahnemann) called this a spirit-like healing force. Hopefully the water won’t remember all the fish poop and pollution it came into contact with while in the ocean.

Samuel "numbnuts" Hahnemann

Of course this is all bullshit, it’s completely asinine, defies even the smallest  amount of common sense, contradicts hundreds of years of research into chemistry and physics, and have been tested by science countless times, showing that taking homeopathic medicine does in no way differ from drinking water (pun intended).

Viasedal

The vial of Viasedal i got contained 50 pills, each weighing aproximately 0.35 grams.

pill weight

And the contents of this so called medicine is:

Viasedal Content

  • Calcarea phosphorica (or as normal people call it: Calcium phosphate, the stuff you get from milk).
  • Ignatia Amara (the plant Strychnos ignatia) Believed by homeopaths to help with Hysteria.
  • Arnica montana (wow, I’ve actually seen this plant outside lots of time without knowing it was magical)
  • Nux vomica (better know as the Strychnine tree, highly poisonous, at least if taken in non-homeopathic doses).
  • Jalapa (plant to help with colic and diarrhea) not sure what they’re supposed to do for sleep though.
  • Kalium carbonicum (or what scientists might call Potassium carbonate, or old school baking powder)

Now all of these are present in extremely small amounts, lets’ start with the calcium one. which says “D5″. in homeopathy this means 10% 5 times.

So in a 0.35 gram pill there should be 3.5 microgram of calcium. which is 0.003% of the daily recommended calcium intake.

The other ingredients are listed at 4C, this means 1% 4 times (in other words, 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% of X)

In other words, each pill should have 3.5 nanograms* (1 nanogram is one billionth of a gram) of the ingredients listed above.

To put that in perspective, if you ate 857* of these pills, the ingredients would in mass equal a single grain of sand.

The pill also consists of 0.000000005%* active ingredients (the ingredients above).

UPDATE:
*I finally got the amount of active ingredients in each pill from the supplier/producer:
Even though each pill weigh 0.35 gram, less than 0.035 grams is actually the diluted calcium “medicine”, the rest is just mostly inert pill material. So all numbers above are 10 times as high as they should, which means you would need 8570 of these pills to make up a grain of sand in active ingredients. each pill has 0.35 nanograms of the ingredient.

Why??

Why am I wasting my time eating “medicine” that obviously does not work?
Just trying to do my part, showing people that it does not work!

The belief in homeopathy actually kills people by preventing them from getting real medicine. Luckily homeopathy is not very wide spread in Norway, but some pharmacies like “Apotek Løven” at Byhaven in Trondheim promotes this crap

Apotek Løven

I’ll be eating the rest of my 40 pills on February 5th, as part of the 10:23 campaign, a UK based initiative (where Homeopathy is widely used). So along with thousands of other skeptical, scientifically minded people all over the world, I’ll be eating a bunch of placebo pills.

“Homeopathy, there’s nothing in it”

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Posted in General, Science, Skepticism | 4 Comments »

Bad Cereal Science

Thursday, January 13th, 2011

I noticed this morning that my cereal box has the following claim on it:
“A study shows that 8 out of 10 who eats Kellogg’s All-Bran at least 3 times a week experience better  digestion*”.

“*Source: Nordic study based on 643 respondents (who eats Kellogg’s All-Bran at least 3 times per week). The Nielsen Company 2007.”

This claim is reiterated on the Norwegian site, but the US site makes no such claims. (googling for “Kellogg’s health claims” might explain why).

Now, when making a health claim one would usually (unless you’re a homeopath, faith healer, acupuncturist, chiropractor, aura cleanser, can shoot rainbows out of your tummy, etc..) back up that claim with good scientific evidence, in other words you can show to a collection of scientifically valid experiments/studies.

This so called study as described above certainly raises a couple of red flags, and I suspect this “study” is of extremely poor quality, or maybe even be just a simple poll (not a scientific study at all).

Of course being a curious fella I sent the following mail to Kellogg’s:

Regarding the study being referred to on the All-Bran packaging and the website (http://www.allbran.no), carried out by The Nielsen company 2007.

  1. How may I obtain a copy of this study?
  2. How did the selection of participants for the study take place?
  3. What’s the distribution of participants between the different nordic countries, age composition and sex composition?
  4. What where the criteria for participant selection?
  5. Which questions where used, and how were the answers quantified?
  6. Of the 643 persons referred to in the study, how big a part of the total participants in the study do these represent?
  7. Is the data collected only based on self reporting of the daily intake of All-Bra, and the self reporting of the perceived increase in digestive function?
  8. Which methods were used to account for the  placebo effect?

I’ll update this post when I get a reply :)

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Posted in Food & Drink, General, Science | No Comments »

The Sound of Science

Monday, January 10th, 2011

As a huge science nerd I feel obliged to make this post:

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Neil Degrasse Tyson on my wall

Thursday, November 4th, 2010

I finally got around to hanging the picture I made of Neil Degrasse Tyson on my wall today, I finished it over a month ago and now it’s finally up there for the whole world to enjoy (well, at least anyone who might happen to visit my apartment).

Neil Degrasse Tyson Perler

Now I can have this handsome hunk of an astrophysicist watch over me while I work :D

Neil Degrasse Tyson

The picture took about 10 hours to do, and is made from 8100 small plastic beads (perler). The picture itself is 45×45 cm, I wanted to have it much bigger, but when you have  a girlfriend you learn to compromise)

If you’re not already, you should follow him on Twitter (@neiltyson), he has very interesting tweets about science and astronomy.

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Posted in General, Science | 2 Comments »

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