Remember chemtrails? Well, look at what I recently spotted coming out of the CN Tower:

This is clearly a government conspiracy to take over our minds. We’re doomed!

Also posted on That’s the Way the Banana Crumbles.

I was asked to write a post about Chiropractic. I am (obviously) not a medical professional, and so I won’t deconstruct any of the studies pointing to specific things that chiropractic can and cannot do. Instead, I’ll attempt to look at broader trends within chiropractic. Wikipedia has been used (and linked to), but for definitional purposes only.

Chiropractic is a minefield for any skeptically-minded person. On the one hand, the entire institution was founded on theories of health and disease which have been thoroughly discredited, and are obviously wrong. On the other hand, unlike faith healing or homeopathy, chiropractic involves an actual physical mechanism, which can plausibly affect the body. Regardless, the people who continue to practice chiropractic based on false beliefs and discredited theories of sickness and disease (i.e. “straights“) are dangerous, due to their lack of understanding of what they’re doing, and the inherently dangerous nature of manipulating peoples’ spinal cords.

Fortunately, amongst chiropractors, this group is slowly shrinking. The growing trend in the field of chiropractic seems to be one where genuine medical diagnoses are mixed in with vestiges of the old vitalistic belief system. These “mixers“, though not as dangerous as their “straight” counterparts, are still a few subluxations short of being medical professionals.

As with anything that can affect/be done to/be inserted into the human body, if you look hard enough, you will find claims that chiropractic can cure any disease — from headaches to cancer. However, this would be disingenuous to chiropractors, as the ones making these claims are part of a small (radical) fringe group. At the other end of the spectrum, there’s very little controversy over the studies and claims that show that chiropractic manipulation can ease lower back pain, or help treat other chronic pain-related conditions. In this way, chiropractic is somewhere between physical therapy and massage therapy in its efficacy.

So where does that leave us with chiropractic? Realistically, it’s disingenuous to talk about chiropractic as a unified organization (or profession) in the same way we might talk about neurosurgeons. There’s no unifying philosophy, standards of practice, or professional ethics that are upheld by all chiropractors.

Some who argue in defense of chiropractic might point to the developmental history of the medical profession. Medicine as it was practiced a century ago doesn’t resemble modern medicine at all. If medicine had not been given the benefit of the doubt, it never would have reached its present state, so shouldn’t we extend that benefit to chiropractic as well?

The medical sciences took thousands of years of trial and error and development to reach their present state. There was a time when the practice of medicine was based on flawed knowledge and, as a result, caused more harm than good. That being said, medicine has already evolved past this point. Thanks to things like the germ theory of disease, medicine is no longer a guessing game. That being the case, it’s hard for me to see why anybody would think it appealing to ignore this progress and practice medicine based on outmoded and flawed ways of thinking. We already have a system that works; so I don’t see the need to go back and re-iterate past mistakes.

I also think that it’s incredibly telling that the more chiropractic progresses and enters the mainstream, the more it begins to resemble modern physical therapy techniques. The fact that chiropractic seems to be honing in on real medicine as it matures seems to indicate not that it is a new way of treating disease; but merely that it is slowly converging on what medical science already knows.

Cross-posted from That’s the Way the Banana Crumbles.

I had always heard, and thus assumed, that Pringles were not classified as potato chips because they were prohibited from doing so due to their mostly non-potato make-up. It’s well known that Pringles are not manufactured like ordinary chips. As opposed to being made from whole potatoes, they are formed from a type of potato dough containing less than 50% potato content and then baked.

However, it turns out that the truth is somewhat different from popular belief (imagine that!). According to this article by the BBC, the fight to have Pringles classified as a “cake or biscuit” was led by Procter & Gamble (the parent company of Pringles). The reason? Potato crisps (chips) are subject to a 17.5% value added tax (VAT) in the UK, whereas cakes and biscuits are not. By having the snack food de-classified as a crisp/chip, they were exempt from paying the tax. This just goes to show that often times the truth is much more straightforward than people make it out to be and reinforces the notion that if you want to find the underlying cause of an issue, you should “follow the money”.

Also of interest, according to a more recent article, the decision has been reversed on the grounds that the 42% of Pringles batter made from potatoes “is more than enough potato content for it to be a reasonable view that [Pringles are] made from potato”.

So what should we conclude from all this? No matter what you thought you knew about Pringles, you were probably wrong.

Even though I’m not religious, it doesn’t mean that I don’t find religion interesting. This BBC interview of Hanif Kureishi echoes a lot of the sentiment I feel towards religion. It’s a fun, and short, read.

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• BBC.co.uk: ‘Most religious leaders are fools’

Courtesy of Bus Stop Bible Studies, I found myself confronted with the following question today while driving down Dufferin Street:

What would it take to convince you of God’s love?

To start, it would be useful to know that God actually existed. I feel that this is a fair prerequisite condition to be met before I could be convinced that God actually loves me.

Second, it would help if God talked to me on occasion. It’s really hard to know if somebody loves you when they’re never around, and don’t even bother to write or call.

Your move, God.

Still need proof that The Star wouldn’t know decent journalism if confronted by it at an intervention? For an article about the vernal equinox, Star reporter Nick Aveling decided to ask to professionals to explain the vernal equinox. The problem? One of the two ‘professional opinions’ was that of Michael Barwick, an astrologer who is a member of such prestigious organizations as ‘Astrology Toronto’, the ‘Canadian Association for Astrological Educators’, and the ‘National Council for Geocosmic Research’. The idea that an astrologer could lend any type of useful professional opinion to a discussion of astronomy is laughable at best.

Whereas Astronomer Randy Attwood served the article well, answering the questions which the article set out to have answered, Mr. Barwick managed to make a surprisingly large ass out of himself for what is (all things considered) a relatively short interview. However, don’t take my word for it, look at the two answers to the relatively simple question: Does the fact that the equinox occurred at 7:44 a.m. have any significance?

Attwood: It’s the exact time when the sun is directly over the equator, but it’s not like you can go outside at that time and notice anything. It’s like one of those really useless sports statistics, like the number of goalies who have red hair.

A simple answer that directly answers the question in a way that even most of The Star’s readers would be able to understand.

Barwick: For sure. People could do an ingress chart, which is basically a horoscope set up for 0 degree Aries. From the basis of that, you can use it to make predictions on a variety of things including elections. But that’s not the kind of work I do.

Ignoring the fact that this answer seems to require in-depth knowledge of astrology to begin to understand (ingress charts? 0 degree Aries?), it also fails to provide anything that could even be accidentally misconstrued as an answer. As for predicting elections, we already have Halloween masks for that.

Just because the words Astronomy and Astrology are spelled similarly, it does not mean that the professions are equally valid.

As much as I respect the media’s distinction to reporting ‘both sides of a story’, reporters need to learn that the other side to science is not pseudo-science. There is plenty of controversy and debate within the scientific community to make going elsewhere for debate a non-issue. Even ignoring that, the different sides of a story are not always necessarily equally valid. Sacrificing accuracy and intellectual honesty for the perception of non-biased reporting isn’t a sacrifice that any self-respecting journalist should be willing to make.

You can read more about it on the Bad Astronomy Blog, here.

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• The vernal equinox: Science and mysticism

A simpler truth.

Courtesy of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

If you’ve been following the news over the last couple of days, you may have heard about Gary Goodyear, Canadian Minister of State for Science and Technology, and his strange remarks regarding evolution. On Tuesday it was reported that he was asked whether he believed in evolution, and his response was, “I’m not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don’t think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate.” This created a bit of a stir, naturally, and he has since changed his answer – now saying that he does believe in evolution, but that the question was irrelevant.

Irrelevant, Gary? No matter what your beliefs, evolution is currently one of the most contentious points between religion and science - and as you are the Minister for Science, I’d say it is pretty clear what side you should be on. The question is as relevant as ever, and your wishy-washy answers have got a lot of rationally-thinking people feeling uneasy. I’d like to note that I personally am fine with Mr. Goodyear being a Christian. Despite what my personal feelings are on the compatibility of his religion with science, the fact is that many brilliant and successful scientists in the past have been religious in one way or another. But the way he drags religion into a question that should be purely scientific, quite frankly worries me. It’s not too hard to picture him promoting so-called “intelligent design” as a valid alternative to evolution. This is a road that we as a country do not want to go down. We’ve done a good job so far of keeping religion out of our government, and I’d like to see it stay that way.

Despite successfully running in several cities in Canada, including London, Calgary, and Toronto, the Atheist Bus Campaign was blocked from running in Ottawa (Link). Despite the city staff’s approval of similar Christian bible study advertisements, the ads were disallowed from being placed on Ottawa buses with no obvious explanation.

Despite this seeming like a gross violation of the Freethought Association of Canada’s freedom of speech, it’s troubling that the city government in our Nation’s capital would so blatantly apply a double standard to religious and non-religious messages. This would be less troubling if the city had a policy against religious messages of any sort, but this is simply not the case.

“I don’t follow the logic,” said Bus Stop Bible Studies founder David Harrison. “Why would they approve ours and not theirs? If we don’t stand up for (the atheists’) rights, ours will be trampled too.”

Hell, even the other side is sticking up for the rights of the non-believers. To say that I am ashamed in the City of Ottawa would be a gross understatement.

Now, if somebody really wanted to spice this debate up, they would try to get Qur’an verses displayed on the buses.

Originally posted on That’s the Way the Banana Crumbles.