Poor Vani Hari, the Foodbabe. She just got mauled by Orac over her self-righteous whininess about all those chemicals in your food.
It turns out that she hasn’t a clue — she brags about having a hard science background, but it’s in computer science, not chemistry or biology, which would be far more relevant to her tirades.
If only she’d taken organic chemistry at some point in her life, maybe she’d know that all of her food is chemical.
I have to wonder if being in love with a box of plastic and blinky lights is considered a fetish.
When Shadow-ling was learning to speak, we made sure to expose the kid to large words (with meanings) and then se would run around pointing at food (and people) saying “I’m a chemical, you’re a chemical, everyone’s a chemical.”
Terminally cute.
But, but, but, if Mother Nature made it, it must be safe. *snicker*
Think ricin with LD 50 around 22 micrograms per kilogram of body weight (1.78 milligram for an average adult). Now, how does this not refute the presupposition that all natural chemicals are safe for consumption? And all manufactured chemicals are all toxic (FDA GRAS list) by presupposition?
Presuppositional thinking is not science. It is used by religions, whereas science uses evidence based conclusions.
se=xe
Um, computer science is not anything approaching a “hard” science. The theoretical side is rooted in information theory or formal logic, both of which are branches of philosophy, while the practical side is a set of vocational skills, not a science. “Hard” sciences study material reality, not conceptual abstractions like logic systems or cultures or eistemology or human social systems – those are “soft” sciences. Electrical engineering may involve a fair bit of physics and/or chemistry, but computer science not so much (for the most part – upper level degrees might pull in more from electrical and materials engineering fields).
Crud, that should be “epistemology”.
I liked the picture in the linked article about being unable to pronounce the name of an ingredient is not an argument against it.
It reminded me of the movie Remo Williams (gack) when Remo chided chun aboutn monosodium glutamate, which Chun couldn’t pronounce — Chun replied “I can say rat droppings”
I had to read that three times until I understood that Hari had not been mauled by an Orc.
yeah.. when she did her “evils of whats in beer” I was rather humored… She was calling out things that either happen naturally during fermentation, or ingredients that have been used for over a 100 years (like some of the clarifying agents).
No clue about the process and yet somehow and industry that has been around for a rather long time is being secretive and evil. sigh.
Uh-oh. Orac totally doxxed himself. Now we all know. And it was such a well-kept secret, too.
I loathe woo woo food theories. One person I knew used to refuse to eat microwaved vegetables because “it reverses the molecules” (ignoranti version of dielectric heating). I kept trying to explain that boiling or steaming probably “removes” more “nutrients” – whatever that is – but, no, they were certain. And no GMO foods. It’s amazing all the theories people make up around this stuff.
Another really funny thing is to point out that most food additives are natural: MSG from soybeans, BHA from apricots (why they dry so nicely) citric acid from lemons, etc. Most food-woos are parading their ignorance.
I majored in CS and that’s where I make my living and I don’t consider myself a science, just someone who’s interested in science and the scientific method (and that has more to do with me being an Atheist than a programmer). I think Foodbabe has done more harm than good with her mindless rants.
@Marcus, I agree about GMO, the left’s paranoia about GMO is embarrassing.
Burt’s Bees all natural lip balm is made with castor oil from the same plant as ricin. Oh no- TOXINS!!!
Bruce Ames tested many common foods in his mutation test. Plant toxins are worse than many synthetic chemicals. But we have wonderful things like livers and kidneys that evolved to detox this stuff.
I see this all the time, as an environmental science teacher. My students want to answer every question with “pollution” or “chemicals”. I struggle with this, and feel like I’ve accomplished something if they leave class understanding that water is a chemical.
Holy shit. It’s time to de-pressurise the cabin, and free her body from this hard sciency stuff..
Jenny McCarthy should forget about the evils of vaccines and start a campaign to get all that nasty nitrogen out of the air.
Do you know what nitrogen is used for? Nitroglycerin! Unless we replace all that nitrogen with pure oxygen, the whole place could blow up!
And I know this, because I took some computer programming classes in junior high school.
Plant toxins are worse than many synthetic chemicals
I forget which toxin broccoli makes but i seem to recall that broccoli and brussel sprouts (!Yum! Microwave them then pan sear in butter!) produce some pretty evil insecticide. Don’t boil broccoli because it destroys some nutrients.
And don’t forget: pyrethrin insecticide was invented by chrysanthemums!
Bruce Ames et al.:
99% of pesticides eaten in the American diet are produced by plants to protect themselves
http://www.pnas.org/content/87/19/7777.full.pdf
As the saying goes, eat shit, it’s organic. (That said, we greatly overuse pesticides and antibiotics, and synthetic fertilizers, and there is a lot to be said for organic farming techniques. Separate issue altogether, let us not conflate.)
You know, I use an antifreeze on my sidewalk every winter. It’s also used as a dye fixer and in other textile industry applications among others. I’m also pretty sure there’s some of that same chemical in almost everything I eat.
Apart from nitrogen (which can cause inebriation at circa 3 bar pressure), air contains this nasty stuff called oxygen, which causes a lot of fires and corrosion and also it’s toxic if you breathe it pure at high pressure (<2 bar IIRC).
So yeah, chemicals…
Alverant @13:
More agreement, here. I recently went to a political site “I Side With” or somesuch and took their quiz in hopes of finding candidates I might be able to support or at least keep an eye on. It gave me a breakdown of where I agree with political parties. 96% Green party, followed by 80% Democrat. Both were in favor of the unnecessary labeling of GMO food. I’m not.
>I majored in CS and that’s where I make my living and I don’t consider myself a science
I’m sure everyone here shares that opinion of you!
@5: I once had a YEC boast to me that his friend and fellow-YEC was a scientist….a computer scientist. And as it happens, I am a EE, and yes, I’m sure I got quite a bit more basic science in my education than his friend did (including specifically: geology, and that much-abused-by-creationists subject, thermodynamics). “Computer Science” is only marginally more the latter than “Library Science”.
Jibbers H. Crabst, I love Orac’s work but I wish he’d proofread. Nothing breaks the spell of a good takedown like the nth misplaced letter, missing word or sentence that just.
That’s my only complaint about his writing but it’s also the one thing he will not accept criticism on.
Right, now to read the second paragraph.
I would expect many computer scientists know a *lot* more about thermodynamics (in the form of entropy and information theory) than any creationist.
Aside from that, I’d like to see the food babe’s reaction if someone told her about retinol. Would she try to remove absolutely all traces of it from her diet because it’s, you know, a chemical? Or would she try to consume as much as possible when she finds out it’s vitamin A (and more is, of course, better)?
There’s something about food which, like sex, triggers all sorts of moralistic tendencies. “If you get cancer then it’s your fault for eating french fries which I don’t eat because I’m better than you.” It gets tiresome.
It also gets frustrating. A friend of mine was going to invest in a popular form of water woo because the website claimed that when water is ionized it will ‘help with’ numerous health conditions. She really did not have the money to waste. I sent her several skeptical reviews of the device — including a a chemistry professor’s step-by-step take down of their “science-y” description of “how it works.” The people selling the magic water were either painfully ignorant in the area in which they were claiming expertise or they were flat-out lying. One or the other. Water can not and does not do what they claimed. It was wrong all the way down to the laws of physics, you didn’t have to consider the medical aspect.
So? Didn’t matter. Apparently the science of chemistry all comes down to “opinion.” They had one and others think something else. The testimonials trumped the teacher. The Periodic Table of the Elements must have been something some people made up for amusement, one guess among many. So she bought the machine and quietly praises it regularly when she thinks I think she thinks I can’t hear her.
This is the ready audience for the Food Babe. When chemicals aren’t bad, they’re magic formulas for occult practices.
Gah why are there always these blithering fools around to make my profession look bad.
Worse not only did she study CS but at an engineering level. Sometimes I despair when I see (yet) another engineer think they aren’t subject to Dunning-Kruger and spout nonsense about a subject they didn’t study.
Maybe I got lucky when an prof asked me to work for him permanently after I did an internship. That teaches someone very quickly that there is a lot out there you don’t know anything of.
@John Horstman(#5):
You are wrong about computer science being soft. Granted due to it’s youth it is the softest of the hard sciences but it isn’t even close to being as soft as the other examples you gave.
There is a lot of math you get, at least where I studied. If you got in from the HAVO there was a mandatory set of math courses just to get you up to the minimum level required to be able to follow the curriculum.
Also logic is surprisingly hard is seeing the amount of people that failed the discrete mathematics courses.
The softest part is perhaps the bit where you have to ask the customer what they want. Then again they could have done more then 2 units (of 42 units/year) worth across 4 years seeing how hard it is to get a customer to express what they need/want instead of what they asked for, which is a common problem seeing how often a product is what a customer asked for and not what they wanted.
And that to just get the title engineer (or to go on to the university to get their version of the title engineer).
@Who Cares #29:
Story of my life! The number of times I have to count to ten and be diplomatic rather than let loose with the “Listen, you fucking moron, I’m not doing this ‘you-nod-your-head-at-each-step-of-my-explanation-but-then-you-demand-the-obviously-wrong’ process because it makes me orgasm” tirade…
Huh. Whereas the closest I got in my degree to real science was “computers see 1 as a higher voltage and 0 as a lower voltage, and this voltage in the middle just screws everything up”, and the closest we got to math was “This program needs a complicated algorithm that we’ve written for you. Now implement these tiny little bits around the edges”. I’m not even joking. Then again, pretty sure my course should have been called “bachelor of project management” rather than “bachelor of science in information technology.
It did prepare me pretty well for the industry though. I learned right from day one there’s not a goddamned person on this planet who knows how to follow simple instructions.
I wish she got (metaphorically) mauled, but I doubt she or her fans or in fact most people will even notice Orac’s rebuttal.
Her arrogant ignorance will still be put on the same level as Orac’s science.
Her first name means “voice” in her native language. Her last name means “day” in Indonesian. Is she Vox Day?
Yeah, I have an engineering degree, and happened to wind up working as a Biological Technician testing water quality in a lab. I *know* that I don’t know enough chemistry to argue with the pros. I also know that carrageenan, which she was slagging on her site, is an extract of seaweed. Irish seaweed, indeed it is.
#29, #30
I’m with ya! As a programmer I would think more of us would not be creationists. We’ve all had programs fail. If the universe was designed by someone, we all would have been blue-screened by now.
Rich Woods said:
An opportune time to repost The Expert (the infamous “seven red lines” sketch…)
I think it would be funny pose as some of her fans and see how many important chemicals we could get her to call for banning. Maybe start with histidine and proline and try working our way up to glucose and hydrogen hydroxide.
Funny to pose, even.
And chemicals aren’t the worst of it. Many foods contain DNA. There’s no end to the health problems that have been linked to DNA.
@jste | cogito ergo violence(#31):
Well you can make something fool proof, most of the time, idiot proof on the other hand
@mithrandir(#35):
I think the first hour of work tomorrow will be slightly unproductive as a group of people will be commenting on how that sketch is being to nice.
After studying the public science sources online, I oppose to all foods that contain genes, chemicals and atoms.
All of which are bad. Because of fukushima and Monsanto.
I don’t just see chemicals, I use chemicals to see chemicals and process the input using chemicals, too.
Is rum a chemical?
Of course not, it doesn’t contain enough syllables. Drunkocausinol, on the other hand, is a quite dangerous chemical.
Problem is, for about 20 years, all the major news and entertainment media has been constantly bombarding everybody with the message that computer science people are extra super smart. Because, computers are wonderful.
And when we take all those math classes, we watch a lot of other people fail out. So the message seems to be confirmed.
Thus, computer science people are relatively vulnerable to the belief that we have extra-super-smarts which we can apply to any field. After all, every field makes extensive use of math and computers, and we know math and computers.
And we tend to have higher incomes, and with more money comes the desire to spend it on better stuff. Practically all food marketing tells us that chemicals are bad and organic is good … and we can afford the resulting over-priced food. Furthermore, the fact that we spend more money on encourages the belief that it is higher quality.
Most people can’t easily the cafeteria of a major computer giant, like apple, or google, or whatever – but if you could, you would see a ton of food woo.
Did you know that most schools allow students not only to handle, but also to consume dihydrogen monoxide?
Sometimes even with added carbon dioxide!
Maybe we could get the Food Babe to do something about this…
“Natural” is a marketing term. It has no meaning other than to make people feel good about something they’re about to purchase. “It’s okay, it’s natural.”
@Giliell #45 – DHMO has warned about dihydrogen monoxide for years.
@Lofty#43
Especially when mixed with solid cubes of dihydrogen monoxide.
Sweet Christ on a bike, this person claims to be a “hard scientist”?
I read “her self righteous whininess” as “her self righteous whinnies” and thought it a fair substitute.
I think llewelly @ 44 has it. It’s the same curse as the curse of theoretical high-energy physics. It seems to me it’s the engineering side of CS that is most afflicted, whereas the theorists tend to assume they (or we, depending on my mood) don’t know much about science.
#notallcomputerscientists
CS isn’t a hard science, but a nice mixture of engineering (to actually get stuff working) and maths (to figure out what to do and that it’s sure to work). And as a mathematician, I can wholeheartedly claim that maths is totally not a science, but really more a type of brain-wank: Basically, it’s the art of following a chosen set of rules to squeeze out as many consequences as possible from a given set of facts. And with the right set of rules and facts it’s pretty useful for modelling reality, but you can also make up or omit rules as you like, as long as you state what you’re starting with. And there’s a surprisingly widespread tendency among maths people to do exactly that with the fundamental workings of reality that they’d prefer to be different…
Doing a course called computer science doesn’t necessarily make you a computer scientist, given that most such courses are more like software engineering, at best. Precious little formal logic in most such courses.
Doing software engineering doesn’t really make you an engineer either; ‘real’ engineers tend to deal a lot more with things like predictability and reliability. If civil engineers were like software engineers, you’d never go near a bridge or tall building if you knew what’s good for you.
And in this case, doing a programming degree doesn’t even necessarily make you a competent code monkey; the Food Babe went on to be a management consultant. And there’s a bunch of people much more deserving than teachers of the phrase, ‘Those who can, do. Those who can’t, become management consultants.’
As an engineer raised by a family of scientists, I have to agree that CS is not, for lack of a better term, “natural science”. The rigor in CS is real, but in the form of math and logic; there is not a necessary connection to the natural world. Even stipulating that Food Babe took courses with that rigor, if you start with the premise that normal air is 100% oxygen, logic isn’t going to be able to help you do anything more than square up and decorate the walls of the deep deep hole you’re in.
To be honest, she could have done all the courses in the world. She is still ignorant. I would probably pull up my 9 yo daughter for saying some of that stuff.
Gillel (45): I was thinking the same thing at 36.
@mithrandir #35:
Brilliant! Thank you.
I’ve been racking my brain to figure out what she was talking about with respect to oxygen on planes. The best I’ve been able to come up with is she was referring to the fact that planes are not pressurized to full sealevel atmospheric pressure, but then got *every* *single* *detail* wrong. Any other hypotheses?
Are you seriously asking? She said two things about airplanes and because she is seriously an idiot got the important factors of both completely backwards.
First, she commented on the pressurized cabins. She figured that as the cabins are pressurized the air pressure on a plane in flight is *higher* than the air pressure on the ground, and therefore our organs get squished. (Air pressure in a plane in flight is, of course, lower than air pressure on the ground, because the added pressure to the cabin is to partially compensate for the extreme lower pressure of higher altitudes. duh!)
Second (okay, I might get the details wrong on this one– I might be ignorant but at least I understand my ignorance when I am), she comments on the pumped air in airplanes. Apparently (I had never really thought about this before so forgive me if I get the details wrong) to compensate for lower air pressure and the resulting lower amount of air mass, and thus less oxygen, per breath, airlines pump in air that is *oxygen* enriched. And, if we can trust Hari’s accuracy in ignorance, sometimes the oxygen enriched air can have nitrogen levels as *low* as 50%. Hari, apparently, was under the impression air is naturally pure oxygen, with no nitrogen at all, so she assumed that this air was pumped to have *high* levels of nitrogen (“as high as 50%”) which she simply assumed, with no reason at all, is unhealthy. (Air normally is 78% nitrogen. Again duh! )
Thus, to her, we are flying in a tube with air pressing down on all our vital organs breathing in a huge amount of carcinogenic nitrogen.
====
About Computer Science and “hard” science; I don’t think Hari was a good computer scientist. Computer science needs logic and she simply doesn’t have it. One can be ignorant of science and still be a good computer scientist, but you can’t be good at logic and utterly *fail* to follow a scientific explanation, when presented, as badly as she does. The science vs. computer science is pretty moot, in my opinion.
And walking across the bridge or in the door of the building would entitle the software engineering firm that designed it to your firstborn child.
@59 Woozy
I was seriously asking. I got my BS in Aerospace Engineering, but I do not design planes. In the course of my studies, I was taught that cabin air was usually produced by the compressor in modern turboprop/turbofan engines and was considered a parasitic loss. Then, perhaps because of the parasitic loss, or due to structural reasons, airplanes use regular air, but at somewhat lower than sea level pressures. My understanding could be wrong (undergrad education generally focuses on understanding of basic principles, not the ins and outs of aircraft design practices). In any case, I didn’t read her original article because the takedowns are always so much more fun than the facepalm-inducing insanity that prompts them. I was just trying to figure out if there was any kernel of fact (e.g. the air is thinner in planes for economic reasons) that inspired her rant. Either way, she’s amazingly ignorant. I’m just wondering if she’s conflating something real with her ridiculous delusions.
@59 Woozy
I just read the freezepage article… and nevermind. Nothing approaching scientific thought is going through her head. She missed the most basic fact, which is that airline cabins are pressurized compared to the air at 30,000 ft. It’s significantly lower than the pressure at takeoff. I also loved the “the air is recycled from right outside your window” argument. That is what’s also known as “fresh air”. Again, if my understanding is correct, the air pumped into the cabin is air from one of the least polluted layers of the atmosphere, and for reasons of basic fluid dynamics couldn’t possibly contain any significant amount of jet exhaust fumes.
Just because we have a crackpot on our hands, it doesn’t mean we should get caught up in the BS that is the distinction between “hard” and “soft” science. Sciences are fields interested in generating new knowledge about the physical world. Just because biology and psychiatry study systems with more degrees of freedom than chemists doesn’t mean they’re less rigorous – it’s that their conclusions are necessarily more limited in scope.
There is a continuum from COBOL MIS applications to CPU implementing microcode. 40+ years have shown me that programming mostly involves reading manuals and suffering fools who think they know how to design code. I say the software … microcode side of CS is engineering. It’s not science in the sense of discovery about the insides of atoms, cells, living creatures, the earth or stars and galaxies.