The chocolate diet, or how to lie with science

woman-eating-chocolate

I have to say that I was positively thrilled by this article on how you can lose weight by eating chocolate. It encapsulates so many things I try to drill into my students — I’ll probably use it in my genetics class as an example of bad statistics, and my writing class as an example of using science writing skills for evil.

Here’s the deal: chocolate doesn’t help you lose weight. But if you confuse the data with a large number of variables that you ignore, and do a little unscrupulous p-hacking, you can get an effect with statistical significance. So these authors set out to produce a bad study in nutritional science, and see if they can get it to be publicized.

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Junk DNA: A Journey Through the Dark Matter of the Genome

junkdna

I made a dreadful mistake. Before embarking on my trip to Germany, with those long transatlantic flights, I stocked up my Kindle with a couple of books to keep me entertained. One of them was Nessa Carey’s Junk DNA: A Journey Through the Dark Matter of the Genome. It was a poor investment. I could not finish it. I got maybe a half hour worth of reading out of it before I was too exasperated to continue, and instead watched a ghastly Night at the Museum sequel being shown on the plane’s entertainment system. It was a terrible movie, but better than this book.

Actually, it didn’t take me a half hour to become peevish. The very first page after the acknowledgments, in a section called “Notes on Nomenclature,” contained this abomination.

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Another phrase that annoys

Over there on the right is a classic example of garbled science: the claim that vegetables can be grown ‘without chemicals,’ as if the vegetables themselves weren’t little lumps of chemicals already.

But I have another one to add to the list of bad ideas, and this one comes from a press release from the American Thoracic Society.

Electronic cigarette flavorings alter lung function at the cellular level.

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Four million dollars is not “free”

FreezePeachPlain

While I’ve been distracted and gallivanting about, some good news has come in. The Australian government had set aside $4 million to give to Bjørn Lomborg, to create an institute of climate quackery at the University of Western Australia. I’m sure UWA could use $4 million (is there a university that isn’t strapped?) but they decided they didn’t need it that much and turned it down. I think most institutions of higher learning would similarly reject money for that purpose, or for building an astrology center, or a creationist think-tank.

It’s a little something called intellectual integrity.

(Universities sometimes fail in this regard, though, which is how the University of Minnesota ends up with a Center for Spirituality and Healing. But that’s a different story.)

As you might guess, conservatives are furious. Their standard line is that this was a violation of FREE SPEECH!

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I really, truly hope it didn’t save the space program

wwmd

Don’t get me wrong — the space program is important, I support it fully, but this claim that a single book may have saved it is a bit much. Especially since that book was The Martian.

“The Martian” doesn’t make a compelling political or budgetary case for sending humans to Mars. But it does make a human landing and perhaps even colonization of Mars seem plausible at the nuts-and-bolts, airlocks-and-solar-panels level. Sure, it would be wildly expensive, and there’s that whole EDL (Entry, Descent and Landing) issue, but remember, the story is set in the future, where people are smarter, and the duct tape still just as reliable.

Aaaaargh.

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