Sarah Silverman shows how do to compassion

January 7, 2018 • 1:30 pm

CBC Radio has a lovely article about one of my favorite people, Sarah Silverman. Yes, her comedy may sometimes be hard to take, but I love her nonetheless. Even more now, as the CBC’s piece shows how she dealt with a troll in an exchange that began as follows:

It turns out the guy was peeved because he was friendless and on prescription meds and smoked weed for the pain of slipped discs that he couldn’t afford to get treated. Sarah did a call-out and got a response (I’m omitting some of the tweets here; so go see them on the CBC page):

It even sounds as if she was willing to foot some of the cost, but it wasn’t necessary:

Sarah’s lately been calling for us to understand those we oppose, and here she goes the extra mile for someone who called her a “cunt”. Now that is a decent human being!

 

h/t: Barry

Was Jerry Sandusky, “the most hated man in America”, guilty of sexual child abuse?

January 7, 2018 • 11:30 am

Up to now, virtually everyone would have to answer the title question with a resounding “YES!”, but after reading a new article in Skeptic magazine by Fred Crews (former chair of English at Berkeley, a debunker of Freud and recovered-memory therapy and, for full disclosure, a friend), I’d have to answer “I’m not sure.”

Jerry Sandusky is a name well known—and well hated—to most Americans. Before retiring as an assistant coach of Penn State’s football team, he founded The Second Mile, an organization to help deprived young people in Pennsylvania. But his association with young boys eventually led to his downfall, and to the downfall of others. In 2008 the police began investigating Sandusky for sexual abuse of children, discerning a pattern of grooming and then of diverse forms of sexual abuse. A grand jury was convened a year later, and in 2011 Sandusky was charged with 52 counts of sexual abuse. Four charges were dropped, and in 2012 Sandusky was convicted of 45 of the remaining 48 charges of sex abuse. He was sentenced to between 30 and 60 years in prison—a life sentence for someone who was 67. He’s now in solitary confinement, as convicted pedophiles don’t fare well in prison, since they’re often attacked by fellow inmates.

At the time of the trial, nobody had any doubt about Sandusky’s guilt, and the press jumped on the story. It wasn’t just Sandusky who was involved: someone who thought he saw Sandusky raping a boy reported it to Penn State’s iconic football coach Joe Paterno, who, along with three other University officials, were found in an internal review to have covered up reports of Sandusky’s abuse. Paterno was fired after a long career (he died of cancer not long thereafter), and the three officials, who were also fired, were convicted or pleaded guilty to child endangerment, perjury, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice. Graham Spanier, the President of Penn State, was forced to resign, and the university was fined $860 million as well as giving $109 million to those who claimed to be Sandusky’s victims.

Then, in October of last year, Mark Pendergrast, who’s also published on the fallacy of “recovered memory”, came out with a book called The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgement . In his view, Sandusky is “probably innocent.” But how could that be, with ten alleged victims in the trial  and the press backing up the allegations?

I haven’t read Pendergrast’s book, but the Skeptic article by Fred Crews, “Trial by therapy: the Jerry Sandusky case revisited“, summarizes the book in an accessible way. I’d recommend reading it, as Crews isn’t somebody who is gullible, and has spent his career as a skeptic, largely about Freud and issues of recovered memory. I note as well that THE expert on the fatal flaws of “recovered memory”, Elizabeth Loftus, has also endorsed Pendergrast’s book:

“If potential readers are convinced that Jerry Sandusky is guilty, they need to read The Most Hated Man in America. This meticulously researched, provocative, and wonderfully written book by Mark Pendergrast, an enormously important contributor to the repressed memory debate, will certainly make them see another side. Maybe they will think twice.”
—ELIZABETH LOFTUS, Distinguished Professor of Psychology & Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine, author, The Myth of Repressed Memory and other books.

While Crews’s article is best fleshed out by reading the book, it summarizes the main problems with the case. These include a completely lame defense for Sandusky, with his lawyers not even presenting exculpatory evidence, and, most of all, the fact that every accusation against Sandusky seems problematic, with many based on flawed or faulty recollections and even on prompting by police and therapists who wanted Sandusky to be guilty. A huge swath 0f testimony is based on this kind of forced “recovered memory”, and research has shown that forgotten memories of trauma are deeply problematic and almost always wrong. Crews goes through each of the ten alleged victims of Sandusky’s abuse featured at the trial, including the accusation of Sandusky was seen raping a young man in the shower (this eyewitness report appears to be wrong). The judge admitted 12-year-old hearsay testimony, and some witnesses who said they saw or experienced no sexual abuse later changed their minds after treatment with recovered memory therapy and pressure from the police.

All this has led to me to reassess the whole issue, and to ratchet down my earlier strong feeling (based on press reports) that Sandusky was a serial sexual predator. I have no idea whether he’s guilty. What about the three Penn State officials who were convicted? Are they guilty of having covered up a crime? Not if they had assessed that no crime had been committed, and there wasn’t evidence that it had been at the time: the “sex act in the shower” wasn’t witnessed when they were supposed to have reported it! That came only much later.

If Sandusky is innocent, how could so many people have been wrong? Well, remember the recovered-memory-based testimony of many children that led to the wrongful jailing of some people in Satanic ritual abuse cases as well as accusations and trials against many more who were exculpated after it was found that cops and psychiatrists both had participated in wrongful solicitation of false memories. There may also be a group effect in which one “recovered memory” spurs others to manufacture false memories, and there’s at least one case in which sheer greed for money appears to have motivated an accusation against Sandusky. Further, Elizabeth Loftus has made a career dealing with “recovered memory” and the attendant false accusations it brings forth, as in the famous “Jane Doe” case.)

We’ll never know if Sandusky did what he was jailed for, but remember that conviction in America requires guilt beyond reasonable doubt.  When jurors buy the idea that recovered and once-repressed memories are an established psychological phenomenon, then a case is already contaminated.

Yet so heinous were the crimes of which Sandusky was accused that articles even questioning his guilt, like Crews’s, lead to rancor. This is on view in P.Z. Myer’s analysis of Crews’s article at Pharyngula, which is itself contaminated by Myers’s deep hatred of Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine (Myers’s post is called “Skeptic Magazine: rots from the head”, and ends by indicting “the stench from Shermer’s magazine”). Myers says this:

They’ve [Skeptic] published a defense of Jerry Sandusky! Look, Jerry Sandusky was found guilty of 45 counts of child sexual abuse. He’s a convicted pedophile. The prosecution brought in a long train of witnesses and evidence of criminal behavior spanning at least 15 years and 10 victims, and this case found him guilty in a community that was full of fanatical Paterno/Sandusky defenders. Anyone remember the riots and protests when the Paterno empire fell? You can’t have a witch hunt when the targets are regarded as holy saints — the evidence was just so overwhelming and undeniable that even angels by repute could be defrocked at last.

The issue, though, is whether the conviction was based on false remembrances and other tainted evidence. Was the evidence really “overwhelming and undeniable”? Since Myers hasn’t read Pendergrasts’s book, or seems deeply familiar with the evidence presented at the trial, I wouldn’t be nearly as sure as he that conviction is tantamount to guilt.  Myers’s commenters agree with him, and some say that they have no time for a book that defends “a convicted child rapist”. But that’s the very reason we have to reconsider the evidence, for it is in face of such odious accusations that the defendant is most likely to be presumed guilty, and convicted on insufficient evidence.

Needless to say, I abhor those who prey sexually on children, and if Sandusky really is a predator then he should spend the rest of his life in jail. Pedophile predators are famously incapable of being rehabilitated. But it’s worth mentioning that in the usual pile-on at Pharyngula by people who hew to Myers’ views and are unwilling to read the book or the articles, there’s one comment worth reading:

There’s nothing dishonorable about being a skeptic when there’s something to be skeptical about.  Something in the air these days has led people to immediately equate accusations with truths, and this is when we must be the most careful.

Chandigarh: Le Corbusier and Nek Chand’s Rock Garden

January 7, 2018 • 8:30 am

I have a few more travel posts from India: three or four, including this one, which documents my visit to the IISER (Indian Institute of Science Education and Research) at Mohali, a city adjacent to Chandigarh, which is here:

Chandigarh is an unusual city in two respects: it’s the capital of two of India’s adjacent states, Punjab and Haryana (I think this is unique in India; all its states are outlined on the map above). Further, it’s a planned city, envisioned by Jawaharlal Nehru and created out of uninhabited land, with the city’s overall layout and its government buildings designed and built by the architect Le Corbusier and colleagues in the 1950s. Here’s what Wikipedia says:

It was one of the early planned cities in post-independence India and is internationally known for its architecture and urban design. The master plan of the city was prepared by Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, which transformed from earlier plans created by the Polish architect Maciej Nowicki and the American planner Albert Mayer. Most of the government buildings and housing in the city, were designed by the Chandigarh Capital Project Team headed by Le Corbusier, Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry. In 2015, an article published by BBC named Chandigarh as one of the perfect cities of the world in terms of architecture, cultural growth and modernisation.

Chandigarh’s Capitol Complex was in July 2016 declared by UNESCO as World Heritage at the 40th session of World Heritage Conference held in Istanbul. UNESCO inscription was under “The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier an outstanding contribution to the Modern Movement”. The Capitol Complex buildings include the Punjab and Haryana High Court, Punjab and Haryana Secretariat and Punjab and Haryana Assembly along with monuments Open hand, Martyrs Memorial, Geometric Hill and Tower of Shadow.

I’ll show below the architecture of the Capitol Complex, but the planned nature of the city means that there’s no real city center, and several Indians complained to me about this on my trip. But it is spread out and spacious—a break from more crowded cities like Delhi or Kolkata (I took the three-hour train to get to Chandigarh from Delhi), but it doesn’t really feel like an Indian city.  Curiously, though it’s not at all crowded and industrial, it’s one of India’s most polluted cities. Here’s a figure that appeared in the Hindustan Times on the first day I visited. The pollution is caused largely by crop-burning, not by industry or cars:

I photographed the view from my hotel room the first dawn when I awoke, because I was told that it was often too smoggy to see the nearby hills, which happen to be foothills for the Himalayas to the north:

My host on this trip was the genial Rhitoban Ray Choudhury (“Ray”), a young assistant professor who knows a lot of my friends because he studied in the U.S. and works on problems of evolutionary genetics, including the parasitic wasp Nasonia (it lays eggs in Drosophila pupae) and  Wolbachia, a parasitic bacterium that produces weird evolutionary dynamics because it can sterilize or kill the offspring of its carrier. Here’s Ray (right) with some of his grad students after one ample dinner (previously documented here). Left to right: Manisha, Alok, Renuka, Ray:

Renuka works on termites, which fortuitiously have nests on the IISER campus. These are odd termites because, like leaf-cutting ants, they grow and cultivate a particular fungus on which they feed. So far they’ve been impossible to culture in the lab, though, and the fungus dies immediately after removal from the nest. But the student (I’ll try to get those names) showed me one of her termite colonies on campus:

One morning Alok and Reunuka took me on a tour of Chandigar’s Capitol Complex to see Le Corbusier’s buildings. You can read about them here, and it was too sunny to take good photos, but here are some. First, the Punjab and Haryana High Court, known as the Palace of Justice. All these buildings are designed to fend off the sun in summer’s brutal heat and maximize wind cooling:

A High Court judge enjoying his tea outside (and checking his cellphone, India’s new national pasttime):

An Indian swastika, a symbol of good luck, on a wall being steam-cleaned:

I was told that this structure, which isn’t used for anything, was built to test the design of the other buildings: whether such an open structure could be effective in cooling off the interior:

The famous Open Hand Monument, designed by Le Corbusier but only completed 20 years after his 1965 death. It’s 85 feet tall, made of steel, and weighs 50 tons. It’s supposed to symbolize “the hand to give and the hand to take; peace and prosperity, and the unity of mankind”, and was designed to look like a flying bird as well. It rotates in the wind.

 

The Palace of Assembly, or Legislative Chamber. Here’s where the lawmaking gets done for the two states. We were allowed to go inside and see the assembly chamber, but no photos were allowed. It was pretty imposing inside, with a big chair where the boss sits and a huge painting of Gandhi on the wall. There are no windows in the chamber, which is apparently quite cool in the summer. The first photo is mine; the second from Wikipedia:

 

The Secretariat Building, where the bureaucrats work:

My conclusion: the buildings are nice, and were innovative, but they are crumbling, getting dirty, and, as the Indian Express noted, “a mess, in dire need of facelift” (see also this article from the Guardian about the complex’s being plundered, with parts sold off). But it’s worth seeing them, especially the Hand Monument and the interior chamber of the Legislative Assembly.  Tours are free, must be conducted by a guide, and you have to go through a process of showing ID and filling out forms to be allowed onto the Complex grounds. Security is quite tight.

The other touristic highlight in Chandigarh, which attracts far more people, is the Rock Garden, secretly built by a bureaucrat in his spare time and made totally out of scrap material and discarded stuff like plates and broken bangles. Wikipedia:

The Rock Garden of Chandigarh is a sculpture garden in Chandigarh, India. It is also known as Nek Chand’s Rock Garden after its founder Nek Chand, a government official who started the garden secretly in his spare time in 1957. Today it is spread over an area of 40 acres (161874.25 m²). It is completely built of industrial and home waste and thrown-away items.

. . . It consists of man-made interlinked waterfalls and many other sculptures that have been made of scrap and other kinds of wastes (bottles, glasses, bangles, tiles, ceramic pots, sinks, electrical waste, broken pipes, etc.) which are placed in walled paths.

In his spare time, Nek Chand started collecting materials from demolition sites around the city. He recycled these materials into his own vision of the divine kingdom of Sukrani, choosing a gorge in a forest near Sukhna Lake for his work. The gorge had been designated as a land conservancy, a forest buffer established in 1902 that nothing could be built on. Chand’s work was illegal, but he was able to hide it for 18 years before it was discovered by the authorities in 1975. By this time, it had grown into a 12-acre (49,000 m2) complex of interlinked courtyards, each filled with hundreds of pottery-covered concrete sculptures of dancers, musicians, and animals.

His work was in danger of being demolished, but he was able to get public opinion on his side. In 1976 the park was inaugurated as a public space. Nek Chand was given a salary, a title (“Sub-Divisional Engineer, Rock Garden”), and 50 laborers so that he could concentrate full-time on his work. It appeared on an Indian stamp in 1983. The Rock Garden is still made out of recycled materials. With the government’s help, Chand was able to set up collection centers around the city for waste, especially rags and broken ceramics.

The place is amazing, and I’m surprised that anything could be hidden in India for 18 years—even though it was in a gorge—for people are everywhere. Here are some photos of that amazing place:

A wall made out of broken electric fittings:

And one from broken crockery:

Weird animals and figures—Nek Chand had quite an imagination!

It goes on forever!

x

These objects are made from broken bangles, the glass bracelets worn by gazillions of women in India. Who knew that one could use them in such a creative way?

A Bangle Bird:

Bangle Men:

Indian tourists abound, far more than at the Capitol Complex. And, to be sure, the Rock Garden is more interesting. Here are some of the artificial waterfalls:

Selfies. The biggest change I’ve noticed in India over the last five years has been the rise of cellphones, which are now ubiquitous and so cheap that even the very poor can afford them. While that’s all to the good, it of course leads to Selfie Disease!

Defaluters will be fined! (100 rupees is about $1.50):

 

Sunday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

January 7, 2018 • 6:30 am

Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus) is back doing the Hili dialogues, with many thanks to Grania for substituting for me when I was in India.

Good morning to all, including humans, beasts, and all the ships at sea: it’s Sunday, January 7, 2018. Yes, 2018 is here, and now I have to get used to writing that year on my checks, except I hardly write checks any more (Like books made from real paper, checks are disappearing). It’s National Tempura Day, as well as Christmas in countries like Russia and Ukraine, whose Orthodox Churches adhere to the Julian Calendar.

On January 7, 1610, Galileo first observed the four “Galilean moons”: the four largest moons of Jupiter (Ganymede, Io, Callisto, and Europa). On this day in 1835, HMS Beagle, on the way home with its cargo of Darwin and his specimens, anchored off the Chonos Archipelago, the subject of Chapter 13 in The Voyage of the Beagle.  On this day in 1927, the first transatlantic telephone service was inaugurated, sending calls between London and New York City. On January 7, 1955, Marian Anderson became the first African-American to sing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. The opera was Verdi’s “Un ballo in maschera” and she played Ulrica. It was the first and last time she appeared on stage in an opera, but she had a distinguished career giving recitals and playing with orchestras. She died at 96 in 1993.  Here’s a bit of that famous performance in which you can hear her lovely contralto (singing begins at 2:35):

Finally, on January 7, 1999, 1he Senate began the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. He was charged with one count of perjury and one of obstruction of justice, both involving Paula Jones—not Monica Lewinsky, as many people think. Clinton was acquitted on February 12.

Notables born on this day include Millard Fillmore (1800) and Bernadette Soubirous, the young girl who became famous when she saw a vision of a woman (never described by her as the Virgin Mary) at Lourdes in France. She died of tuberculosis in 1879 at age 35 while praying, and of course Lourdes, given the imprimatur of the Pope as a site of miracles (Bernadette was made a saint) became one of the world’s most famous religious sites. It’s now visited by 5 million praying and supplicating pilgrims per year. Here’s what Bernadette looked like:

You may know the schmalzy and religion-osculating movie about her life, The Song of Bernadette (1943), for which Jennifer Jones, playing the title role, won the Best Actress Oscar. Here’s the trailer; but YouTube has the entire movie here.

Others born on this day include the racist Orval Faubus (1910), the black actress Butterfly McQueen (1911), Gerald Durrell (1925), Katie Couric (1957), and Nicholas Cage (1964).  Those who died on this day include Catherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII (1536), Nikola Tesla (1943), Emperor Hirohito of Japan (1989), and mountaineer Heinrich Harrer (2006, age 93) who wrote the famous climbing books Seven Years in Tibet (1952) and The White Spider (1959). Both are great reads if you like adventure and the mountains.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili got another tube of the delicious Japanese “cat’s snack” sent by embroidery artist Hiroko Kubota.

Hili: This Japanese paste loves to be in the mouth of a Polish cat.
A: Did you ask the paste?
Hili: No, but I can feel it.
In Polish:
Hili: Ta japońska pasta bardzo lubi być w pyszczku polskiego kota.
Ja: Pytałaś ją?
Hili: Nie, ale czuję to.
The good news from Poland is that the wooden house of Elzbieta, Andrzej the Second, and Leon has been moved to Dobrzyn in pieces, where Andrzej and Malgorzata are storing it in their barn equivalent until it can be assembled and put on a foundation this year (yet to be poured). Stay tuned. Meanwhile, Leon is having business as usual:
Leon: Menu, please.
Here are a few tweets from Heather Hastie, whose latest post deals with Fire and Fury, the new book about Donald Trump, (By the way, thanks to Heather for sending me a swell birthday present—an All Blacks rugby jersey, the official garment of all Honorary Kiwis).  In the first tweet I’ve stolen, someone is offended by needy baby raccoons:

. . . and a needy cat, who needs to GET IN!
Look at the size of this moggie, probably a Maine Coon Cat:

https://twitter.com/AwwwwCats/status/949766317636227077

Matthew sent a clever cat using what I think is the mail flap of a house to make its egress:

Finally, we have two illusions tweeted by the same person, but sent by two different people, the first from Matthew Cobb. . . .

. . . the second by reader Diane G.:

Stunning footage of flying birds from a ultralight plane in the flock

January 6, 2018 • 1:30 pm

Here is some unbelievably mesmerizing video showing a man flying with birds that he rescues and trains to migrate.  According to Storytrender and National Geographic, the man is 58-year-old Christian Moullec of France, who started training lesser white-fronted geese (Ancer erythropus) to fly from Germany to Sweden in the 1990’s to reintroduce them into the wild. These flights took weeks, as National Geographic’s interview notes:

How did you get started in flying among birds?

In 1995 I wanted to reintroduce lesser white-fronted geese into the wild in Lapland [north of Sweden]. At the beginning it was very difficult for me. The birds didn’t want to follow me.

Do you have a favorite story from flying with the birds?

My favorite was a big flight with 33 lesser white-fronted geese, from northern Sweden to southwestern Germany. My wife was on board with me and she was [five months pregnant and] expecting our first son. The trip lasted 5 weeks. With my wife and some biologist friends, we hope to continue to make other migrations for the success of the reintroduction project of lesser white-fronted geese in the wild.

Now, from March to October, in the season of non-migration, he takes tourists up to fly with the birds in a camera-equipped two-person ultralight aircraft, using the money to fund his conservation efforts. Watch the video below to see some amazing footage. You’ll also see the tourists try to touch the flying birds, something I wouldn’t want to do. But according to Storytrender it’s dangerous only for the tourist:

The Frenchman encourages passengers on his microlight to reach out and touch the birds mid-flight although admits that can sometimes end in disaster.

He said: “My birds are happy to be touched but generally birds do not like to be caressed in flight because it can unbalance them.

“If a bird is unbalanced during flight they can poo on the passenger and that has happened once or twice.”

Watch and be amazed, but be sure to watch the whole thing and put it on the biggest screen that you can. (One person brought an accordion up there!)

The beauty of this almost makes me weep. If you want to have a “vol avec les oiseaux”, you can get the details here. It’ll cost you 636 euros, but I’d do it in a heartbeat. Where else can you get the chance to fly right up among the birds? Next time I’m in France. . . .

SciBabe, paid by Splenda, touts its product

January 6, 2018 • 12:00 pm

Yvette d’Entremont writes about popular science, especially consumer scams and misconceptions, on her website SciBabe. Her site’s bio notes that she has bachelor’s degrees in theater and chemistry from Emanuel College in Boston, a masters degree in forensic science with a concentration in biological criminalistics from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, and worked eight years as an analytical chemist.  Most of her stuff appears to be good and constitutes worthy debunking of fads of issues like the supposed “dangers” of GM food and the touted benefits of jade vagina eggs.  A few years ago I wrote a controversial post criticizing her and other women’s use of sex to sell science, concluding that the advantages of popularizing science were offset by the use of female pulchritude and dirty jokes, which, to me, seemed to contribute to the objectification of women. As I recall, d’Entremont responded sharply to what I said, and possibly will to this post as well.

I note all this here because I’m not on a vendetta against d’Entremont, but  want to criticize another aspect of her blogging in this post, one that I see an unalloyed problem: her writing of science posts showing that a product is safe to use at the same time she’s being paid and sponsored by the company who makes that product. I’m referring to Splenda, an artificial sweetener that I myself use when trying to lose weight. Splenda is largely sucralose, a sugar substitute that isn’t broken down and metabolized by the body, so it contributes fewer calories than sugar. Because of added “bulking agents”, a packet of Splenda actually has 3.4 calories, or 31% of the calories of a single packet of sugar, which itself has 10.8 calories). But the fact that there are fewer than 5 calories per “serving” of Splenda means it can legally be labeled as “zero calories”. (I’d prefer that it be labelled more honestly: something like “69% fewer calories than sugar.”)

Splenda also appears to not cause dental caries or have any injurious effects on diabetics.  I like it because it tastes pretty close to sugar and because research shows that it’s safe, but it wasn’t until today that I found out it’s not really a “zero” calorie product”. At any rate, I was reading one of d’Entremont’s posts on Splenda (she has at least two, here and here, both of which tout the product’s safety), and saw the the following:

So let’s talk about it. I’ve partnered with Splenda to try to combat some of the more pervasive myths about low calorie sweeteners like sucralose that I see every day on social media. And I see them on my timeline or in my inbox every day. Are they causing weight gain? Are they causing stomach pains?

Are they safe?

Aware of how this “partnering” looks, she uses some of her trademarked snark to defuse the issue:

. . . Before every single shill accusation shows up, yes, let’s just get this out of the way. Indeed, I’m working with Splenda and these are all things I never would have said otherwise. I’m kicking my heels up on a desk made of fossilized unicorns wearing a coat made of Dalmatians, sipping a martini made from the tears of my enemies. Specifically Gwyneth Paltrow…. Wait, we collected that fluid from a jade egg, you say? Goddamnit.

…Or more accurately I really like Splenda because it’s safe for everyone, it bakes well (which is important for someone like me who loves to bake), and if this is something that you like the taste of in your diet, you deserve to understand why the science says it’s safe.

There’s a bit of error in her characterization of the product’s “zero calorie” reputation, though:

The amount of calories in a daily iced coffee I would have needed for how sweet I like my coffee? 60 (four raw sugar packets). For the record, I now take mine with three Splenda and one raw sugar – just 15 calories, if it’s a day when I skip the cream,

Well, no, for that implies there truly are no calories in Splenda, so that she can claim that a single packet of raw sugar plus three of Splenda has exactly one-fourth the calories of four raw sugar packets. In fact, it has 25.2 calories (15 + 3 X [3.4]), or 68% more calories than she represents. She concludes:

Or more accurately I really like Splenda because it’s safe for everyone, it bakes well (which is important for someone like me who loves to bake), and if this is something that you like the taste of in your diet, you deserve to understand why the science says it’s safe. Over the coming months, I want to address all the questions and concerns that people have had about Splenda and low calorie sweeteners in general. It’s a field where chemiphobia has run rampant, leading to incorrect assumptions about diets, calories, and health.

So have you heard some crazy things on the internet about Splenda? Comment. Email. Ask, but don’t let it go unchecked without asking, and I will do my damndest to answer with evidence.  I’m not going to find any random paper to support my positions. I’ll hunt for quality evidence and papers that come from the most reputable resources possible. I wouldn’t expect you to trust your health to anything less.

Her sponsorship is noted by the product’s own publicity blog, Splenda living:

Working with two content creators – Yvette d’Entremont, a scientist also known as SciBabe and the parody ecard platform Someecards, we at SPLENDA® Brand will be introducing digital and social content with one goal: to empower fans of the SPLENDA® Brand to take an active role in busting myths about sucralose. We also created a unique hashtag to help you identify this content on social media: #DebunktheJunk. The content will be available beginning today at www.Someecards.com/Splenda and on SciBabe.com/debunkthejunk It will continue to be released in the months to come so be sure to stay tuned for additional information and resources that help you debunk junk science!

These content partners were specifically selected because they have expertise in translating what can often be complicated concepts into understandable, relatable terms, and they are supporters of the brand’s passion for discerning good science from junk science. Additionally, they are SPLENDA® Brand fans.

So we have someone who’s paid by the makers of a product telling us good things about the product.  To me, this represents a perceived conflict of interest that should not exist in a science popularizer.

Now note that I am not accusing d’Entremont of distorting the science about Splenda because she’s sponsored by the product. In fact, I don’t think that’s the case. Although there appears to be an error in the product’s favor in her calculations, I think that comes simply from her accepting its characterization a “zero calorie” product.  As far as I know, d’Entremont has otherwise accurately represented the qualities and usefulness of the sweetener, and in both of her posts (the latest last November) she notes that she’s sponsored by Splenda. She’s also written other posts and articles defending the safety of non-Splenda sweeteners.

To my mind, it’s simply not good for one’s reputation as an objective science popularizer to create the appearance of a conflict of interest. Would I take money from Splenda and at the same time write articles telling everyone how safe it was, even if I believed it? Nope—not a chance. d’Entremont, if she responds to this, will undoubtedly say that she believes in Splenda, and that their sponsorship doesn’t have an iota of influence on what she says or the topics she writes about. And that may be true. But there is a reason why politicians and the like are supposed put their financial investments in a blind trust when in office—to prevent the appearance of a conflict of interest. When people like Hillary Clinton take money for their foundation from foreign donors while they’re in government, that’s a problem, but of course they always say, like everyone who takes dough and then does something to help the donor, “I was not influenced by the money.”

Sometimes that’s true, but it’s best to avoid the problem entirely by not creating the appearance of a conflict. In the case of d’Entremont, I’d recommend that she either ditch the Splenda sponsorship or stop writing about it. (For the good of the public, I’d recommend she do the former. For her own financial good, perhaps the latter is preferable.) I realize that science popularizers have a tough time making a buck unless they’re someone like Neil deGrasse Tyson, but one’s reputation for objectivity seems to me too precious to sully with the appearance of a conflict like this one.

Finally, I’d recommend reading her articles in general, especially if you’re interested in product scams and popular misconceptions about products. She has a recent piece in Cosmopolitan on the stupidity of colon “cleanses” and “juicing” that should be read by the large number of people who practice this worthless cleansing in the hopes it will “detox” them.

Caturday felids: Drug wars between Maru and Hana,11 year old imagines his dead cat in the cycle of life, cat saves professor and family from fire

January 6, 2018 • 10:00 am

Happy Saturday! Professor Ceiling Cat Emeritus is back in the building, though his office has a heat problem: it’s about 55 degrees F (13°C) in here. But it’s a frigid 7° F (-14°C) outside, and I froze my face on the 10-minute walk to work.

But let’s keep up tradition and have a Caturday felid. (Does anybody read these carefully selected items?)

First up, Maru and Hana fight over catnip, and both of them get baked. Ive never seen a video of Maru stoned before, and I’ve seen many Maru clips!

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From Aeon Videos, , we have a touching video of an 11-year old narrating what he thinks happened—and will happen—after his beloved cat ( “puss” in Dutch) dies.  The cat doesn’t go to Heaven or anything, for of course most Dutch are atheists.

The notes:

1Minute Nature is a Dutch series of short vignettes in which children from the Netherlands reflect on how they experience nature. In this episode, 11-year-old Lieuwe recalls finding his pet cat dead, and gives an imaginative (if not entirely accurate) account of what will happen to the cat’s body after he buries it, grappling with the universal human struggle to process death by finding a slightly macabre, but funny link between himself and the dead pet.

Director: Katinka Baehr, Stef Visjager
Animator: Kris Kobes
Website: Radiomakers Desmet

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Tom Nichols is an anti-Trump conservative whose Wikipedia bio describes him as “a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, at the Harvard Extension School, a Sovietologist, and a five-time undefeated Jeopardy! champion.” That’s a pretty polymathic bio, and he’s also the author of several books, one of which, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters, is recommended by Grania.  In this series of tweets, which I couldn’t reproduce without some duplication, he tells the story

And here is the lovely and prescient Carla from Nichols’s Twitter feed:

h/t: Blue