More chiropractic shenanigans

March 5, 2017 • 1:15 pm

I don’t think I’ve ever been so besieged by newbie commenters as I have by chiropractors and their acolytes over the last several days. After I posted a few times on that form of quackery (here, here, here, and here), I’ve had chiropractors, students in chiropractic school, and even chiropactors’ wives try to comment on this site showing me how badly wrong I’ve gone. Chiropractic, they say, effects “miracle” cures. I’ve posted a few of their beefs, but they’re getting repetitive and tiresome, and they’re easily refuted. Here are a few of the common responses, which I’ll let readers deal with since they’re no-brainers (I can’t resist a few parenthetical comments):

  • Chiropractic is perfectly safe, and the cases of damage are overrated.
  • Scientific medicine is much more dangerous, with a higher number of deaths resulting after medical treatment (but the quacks don’t distinguish proper treatment that doesn’t work from medical malpractice).
  • Along those lines, one commenter said, “More people die from medical Drs. And from prescribed medicine than from a Chiropractor.” Probably true, but there are two good reasons, both obvious.
  • Malpractice insurance is higher for chiropractors than for real doctors (Duhhh!)
  • Chiropractic can cure bad lower backs (The evidence is weak at best, and it’s cheaper and better to see a physical therapist. And of course chiropractors usually claim to cure far more than bad backs, not to mention that they usually make you sign up for a long expensive course of treatment, which wouldn’t happen with a physical therapist.)
  • Doctors get people addicted to medications like pain medicine. (Ummmm. . .  is it the doctors’ fault? And many people get pain meds illegally.)
  • Chiropractors can be a good “first responder”. AS one chiro had the temerity to write, “We are primary care providers, which means we have to be able to differentially diagnose and recognize when things are life threatening and when patients need to be referred and where to.” Pro-tip: NEVER use a chiropractor as your primary care “provider”. Use a real doctor, an M.D.!

But enough; I’m tiring of these people and their refuted claims. The fact that I’m suddenly inundated by would-be commenters suggest that they’re communicating with each other, saying, “Go after that Coyne guy.” But as one of my friends said when I called chiropractors “quacks”, “That is an insult to ducks!” (Besides, ducks never present inflated bills. I’ll be here all week, folks.)

Oh, one more comment before I get to the comic at hand: I haven’t heard back from the Cincinnati Zoo after I wrote them (twice) asking for an explanation of why they used a chiropractor trained on humans to adjust the cervical vertebrae of a baby tiger. I doubt they’ll ever respond.

And the comic: over at Daryl Cunningham Investigates, you can see a comic-strip version about the history and practice of chiropractic “medicine”. The strip is pretty, but the story isn’t; I’ll give just a few panels from the long but engaging strip:

6058346125_d7930e02dc_z 6058893840_cd60ed864a_zand (remember that many chiros are anti-vaxxers):
6058891364_7cf79baee9_z 6058343415_7b005aa66a_z

Now I’m going to be even more inundated with outraged chiropractors, their wives, and their students. To which I say, “Come at me, bro!” but don’t expect that I’m going to publicize quackery on this site. You’ll see me do that when I start saying that creationists are right, for the scientific basis of chiropractic is about as sound as that of creationism.

Middlebury College students’ “peaceful” protest against Charles Murray

March 5, 2017 • 11:00 am

As I reported the other day, the author and political scientist Charles Murray was attacked at Middlebury College in Vermont, where he was invited to speak by the school’s American Enterprise Institute Club. Not only did the students shout him down, so that the talk had to be moved to a sequestered room and livestreamed (even then the students pulled fire alarms to cause further disruption), but then they mobbed him and his host as they left the venue, injuring the neck of the woman who was accompanying him.

As the Boston Globe and Inside Higher Ed report, it was indeed students who protested, though some “outside agitators” could have been part of the group that mobbed Murray. The 44-minute video below (the College president gives an introduction emphasizing civility and free speech) shows how exercised the students were; Inside Higher Ed reported this:

As soon as Murray took the stage, students stood up, turned their backs to him and started various chants that were loud enough and in unison such that he could not talk over them. Chants included:

  • “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Charles Murray, go away.”
  • “Your message is hatred. We cannot tolerate it.”
  • “Charles Murray, go away. Middlebury says no way.”
  • “Who is the enemy? White supremacy.”
  • “Hey hey, ho ho. Charles Murray has got to go.”

The scene was recorded and posted to YouTube. Murray appears around minute 19.

This behavior is reprehensible, and I wonder how many of these students read anything Murray ever wrote before they went wild. I suspect not very many.

I haven’t read The Bell Curve, so I’ll make no pronouncement about Murray’s topic, but I doubt that Murray was even going to talk about that old book. Regardless, I don’t have to know what he said to vehemently defend his right to speak without disruption (or physical attack!) since he was invited. IHE adds this:

Murray has said that critiques of The Bell Curve are incorrect. He issued a letter defending the book last year — at a time when some wanted Virginia Tech to call off an appearance there (it did not).

Via email Friday morning, Murray declined to comment on what took place at Middlebury, but he posted several comments on Twitter, including this one.

The good news is that the students are showing some contrition, and Middlebury’s administration has issued a strong statement in support of free speech. The Globe reports this:

Many on campus, including the college president and leaders of the student organization who invited him, disagree vehemently with Murray’s views on social welfare programs and race, but on Saturday they said the campus failed in its duty to exemplify how to debate unpopular ideas with civility.

Donald Trump’s presidency formed the backdrop for the protest, students said. The election has made people on campus dig their heels in ideologically, said Sabina Haque, a junior from Westford, Mass. They’re less willing to accept conflicting viewpoints, she said.

But you can’t blame this on Trump. Yes, he’s a narcissistic bully and a godawful President, but the students should be conducting themselves honorably, and in accordance with the First Amendment, which undergirds much of the social progress made in America. It is true, though, that Trump’s election is making many Americans not just rightfully upset and prone to activism, but actually unhinged (see HuffPo for an example). That leads to demonstrations, like those at Berkeley and Middlebury, that are counterproductive, further damaging the credibility of the Left.

Kudos for Middlebury, though, for issuing this statement:

In a statement Friday morning, Middlebury said, “We’re deeply disappointed that Charles Murray was not permitted to give his talk in the way it was intended. A large group of students took it upon themselves to disrupt the event, which forced us to move Mr. Murray and Professor Allison Stanger, the moderator of the Q&A, to another location. Thanks to some advance planning, we were able to livestream Mr. Murray’s talk and his conversation with Professor Stanger. We will make a recording of that available as soon as possible so the members of our community who came to the event wanting to hear Mr. Murray will be able to do so.”

The college is investigating the incident, and I think any students involved in the mobbing of Murray should be expelled or suspended. The rest of the College should be given some lectures on freedom of speech.

_________

UPDATE: A group of students have responded, blaming, of course, the College, Murray himself, and the security personnel. They show no contrition, and refused, like the cowards they are, to give their names. You can read their pathetic defense here; an excerpt is below:

The administration’s support of a platform for white nationalist speech was an intense act of aggression towards the most marginalized members of the Middlebury community. Though President Laurie Patton stated her disagreement with many of Murray’s views, by sharing a stage with him and designating his non-peer reviewed work as academically valuable, she effectively legitimized him. Furthermore, peaceful protest was met with escalating levels of violence by the administration and Public Safety, who continually asserted their support of a dangerous racist over the well-being of students.

Note that the “peaceful” protest included disrupting Murray’s talk and pulling the fire alarm several times during his subsequent livestreamed presentation.

UPDATE 2: Murray’s account of the scrum is here, and differs from the student account. Even for a man used to protest, Murray was surprised:

Absent an adequate disciplinary response, I fear that the Middlebury episode could become an inflection point. In the twenty-three years since The Bell Curve was published, I have had considerable experience with campus protests. Until last Thursday, all of the ones involving me have been as carefully scripted as kabuki: The college administration meets with the organizers of the protest and ground rules are agreed upon. The protesters have so many minutes to do such and such. It is agreed that after the allotted time, they will leave or desist. These negotiated agreements have always worked. At least a couple of dozen times, I have been able to give my lecture to an attentive (or at least quiet) audience despite an organized protest.

Middlebury tried to negotiate such an agreement with the protesters, but, for the first time in my experience, the protesters would not accept any time limits. If this becomes the new normal, the number of colleges willing to let themselves in for an experience like Middlebury’s will plunge to near zero. Academia is already largely sequestered in an ideological bubble, but at least it’s translucent. That bubble will become opaque.

Neil deGrasse Tyson messes up a bit about linguistics

March 5, 2017 • 9:00 am

Most of us are picky about errors that laypeople make about our fields of expertise—as I’ve learned from the many misstatements I’ve made on this website. And that goes double for linguists, whose job is often to be picky about language itself. Here’s a tw**t from Neil deGrasse Tyson that has raised the hackles of some linguists.

Tyson is referring to the 2016 movie “Arrival“, which deals with the arrival of a group of friendly aliens on Earth and the desire of some humans to extirpate them. The movie stars Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Tzi Ma, but I haven’t seen it because I’m sci-fi illiterate. (It gets a very high critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes.)

Here’s the first paragraph of Wikipedia‘s plot summary so you can see what Tyson’s talking about:

In what appears to be a flashback scene, linguist Louise Banks is caring for her adolescent daughter, who dies of cancer. While she is lecturing at a university, twelve extraterrestrial spacecraft appear across the Earth. U.S. Army Colonel Weber asks Louise to join Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist Ian Donnelly to decipher their language and find out why they have arrived. The team is brought to a military camp in Montana near one of the spacecraft, and makes contact with two seven-limbed aliens on board. They call the extraterrestrials “heptapods”, and Ian nicknames them Abbott and Costello. Louise discovers that they have a written language of complicated circular symbols, and she begins to learn the symbols that correspond to a basic vocabulary. As she becomes more proficient, she starts to see and dream vivid images of herself with her daughter, and of their relationship with the father.

It didn’t take long for four linguists, all from different countries, to write an open letter to Tyson at Language Log, setting him straight about the “cryptographer” and “linguist” part. I won’t reproduce it all, but here’s an excerpt:

Most importantly, a cryptanalyst would likely be much less suited to the task of communicating with aliens than a linguist would (a cryptographer even less so, since they work on encryption, not decryption). Cryptanalysis relies on decrypting coded messages from a known language. If the source language and the encryption method are both unknown, ordinary cryptanalytic methods will fail. This is why the Native American code talkers of the 20th century were so invaluable to the US in both world wars: their languages were not understood by enemy cryptanalysts, so their encrypted versions could not be cracked, unlike with well-known languages like English.

A linguist’s interactive methodology is more likely to result in successful communication with aliens. Whereas cryptanalysts generally work with a static corpus of encrypted messages and cannot obtain new ones of a particular type on demand, linguists are trained in a variety of techniques to elicit targeted utterances from speakers, as broadly demonstrated by the elicitation sessions in Arrival. These elicitation sessions are designed to bring to light subtle information about the atomic units of a language, how they are combined into longer units, what those units mean, and how they are used. These methods are used for analyzing the structure of well-known languages as well as for documenting and analyzing endangered languages that the linguist may not speak with any fluency and may be typologically quite different from widely spoken languages of the world.

I can understand why they’re a bit exercised, as Tyson has nearly four million followers on Twitter, and if I were a linguist I’d be a bit miffed at the widely-propagated misrepresentation of what linguists do.

And if you don’t know what the “code talkers” were, it’s a cool story. These were Native American soldiers, mostly Navajos, and mostly during World War II (there were other tribes of Native Americans as well as Basques), who, during battle, relayed messages to each other in their native languages—verbally. Since Navajo is a language that is unwritten, there was no reference the enemy could use to decrypt the words. This was both clever and effective, though the contribution of code talkers to the war effort—they greatly helped win the Battle of Iwo Jima, for instance—has gone largely unrecognized.

Here’s a short video about them that I recommend:

h/t: Stephan Hurtubise

 

Readers’ wildlife photos

March 5, 2017 • 7:45 am

Reader Ed Kroc sent some “vacation” snaps from Vancouver Island; his notes are indented:

I just got back from a few days around Pacific Rim National Park on Vancouver Island and thought I would send along some wildlife photos.

The first shot is of a Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), mid-descent. Someone was cleaning fish near one of the docks in Tofino and throwing the spare parts down to the shore for the gulls and crows to fight over. Naturally, the eagles also came sniffing around, but they kept their distance at first as the Glaucous-winged Gulls (Larus glaucescens) and Northwestern Crows (Corvus caurinus) are too adept at swarming them. Bald Eagles can actually be major pushovers. But this one floated down to the shore, then sidled up to a fish head being picked at by a few gulls and crows. Once they got into a bit of a squabble, the eagle pounced on the fish head and swooped up into the air with it. The gulls and crows fought back immediately, though, and the eagle dropped the remains just a few metres away in the harbour. A couple gulls fished it out and continued to pick at and fight over it.

bald-eagle

Next, here are two shots of a Brandt’s Cormorant (Phalacrocorax penicillatus). We see lots of Pelagic (P. pelagicus) and Double-crested Cormorants (P. auritus) in Vancouver, but never Brandt’s. Confusingly, these guys are the truly pelagic species, always sticking to open ocean waters, whereas the Pelagic Cormorant seems to prefer calmer, inner waters like the Strait of Georgia.

We are just entering the cormorant breeding season, and you can see this bird’s lovely blue throat patch and white neck-plumes, only visible for the few short breeding months. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any when it wasn’t raining or cloudy, so the colours aren’t as vibrant as they should be. In the first photo, the cormorant has just surfaced from the Tofino harbour with a fresh fish catch, maybe some kind of turbot.

brandts-cormorant-1

brandts-cormorant-2

On the south side of the national park, in the town of Ucluelet, there was a lively group of young, male California Sea Lions (Zalophus californianus) hauled out on an industrial dock for several days, in perfect picture-taking position. I was staying at a rental unit about 2 kilometres away, but awoke the first morning to the sound of their barking. I spent that morning tracking them down and finding the best shooting spot (through the salmonberry bushes just outside the fencing of the industrial yard whose dock the sea lions had commandeered).

I don’t know much about sea lion social behaviour, but I gather that these types of “parties” are not uncommon among young groups of males in the spring. Most seemed like they just wanted to sleep, basking in the sun, happy to rest their head or their butt on a fellow napper, but a few kept pushing and causing brief but intense barking matches. Occasionally, a new sea lion would show up and cause a real disturbance, as in the last photo. I watched one spend 30 minutes trying to find a spot to haul out on the dock without being barked at by half a dozen other sea lions unwilling to make room.

ca-sea-lions-1

ca-sea-lions-2

ca-sea-lions-3

Finally, I was lucky enough to spot a mother Killer Whale (Orcinus orca) with at least one, maybe two, young orcas swimming just off the rugged coast at the Amphitrite Lighthouse in Ucluelet. I saw three fins, two small and one massive, and was able to snap a few photos of the massive one as she surfaced before slipping behind the bend of the rocky coastline. This photo was taken from about 500 metres away, but you can still make out the two notches taken out of her dorsal fin. I am not a whale expert, but I do know that such features are routinely used to identify individuals in BC waters. I’m sure this individual is well-known, as she was positively huge. The picture gives no scale, but I had no problem seeing her from the distance I was at. Her dorsal fin seemed disproportionately huge compared to everything else around.

orca

Sunday: Hili dialogue

March 5, 2017 • 6:30 am

Happy Sunday: March 5, 2017. It’s still cold in Chicago—a bit above freezing right now—but the high today is predicted to be at warm 57° F (14° C). As for food holidays, it’s National Cheese Doodle Day, but I’ll eschew those tubes of air-filled Styrofoam, though many do chew them. It’s also St. Piran’s Day in beautiful Cornwall, commemorating the patron saint of tin miners.

On this day in 1616, the Catholic Church added Copernicus’s work On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres to its list of banned books. In 1770, the Boston Massacre took place, in which five Americans were shot by British troops: an incident that helped bring on our War of Independence. On March 5, 1933, after huge runs on banks, Franklin Roosevelt declared a “bank holiday” in the U.S., deepening the Great Depression.  On this day in 1940, the Soviet government, including Stalin, ordered the execution of over 25,000 Poles, including many intellectuals and prisoners of war. This led to the Katyn Massacre in April and May. Finally, on this day in 1963, Patsy Cline and three others were killed in a plane crash in Tennessee. She was 30. Here’s the Queen of Country, singing her most famous song—one composed by Willie Nelson and recorded by Cline in 1961:

Notables born on March 5 include Louis Kahn (1901), Rex Harrison (1908), Lynn Margulis (1938), Penn Jillette (1955), Andy Gibb (1958), and Eva Mendes (1974). Those who died on this day include Crispus Attucks (1770; possibly a slave, he was killed in the Boston Massacre and is often considered the first casualty of the Revolutionary War), Edgar Lee Masters (1950), Sergei Prokofiev and Josef Stalin (both 1953), Patsy Cline (1963), and Hugo Chávez (2013). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Cyrus are conversing, but from separate sofas:

Cyrus: Do you have any bright ideas for what we can do today?
Hili: Yes, I have, but they’re not ripe yet.
(Photo: Sarah Lawson)
hili-and-cyrus-on-their-sofas
In Polish:
Cyrus: Masz jakis pomysł co będziemy robić?
Hili: Mam, ale jeszcze nie dojrzał.
(Foto: Sarah Lawson)
Lagniappe: in both Russian and French, there is no gender-neutral term for “cat”: you must refer to them by the male or female noun—unless they’re kittens, in which case there’s but a single word.  Learn how to say “cat” and “kitten” in Russian here, and in French here. (h/t: Michael)