I'm not a scientist, but—well, actually, I am. It just doesn't stop me also from playing one. And it certainly doesn't stop me from playing with any other goof playing one. Which is to say fucking with one playing one.

And now I've lost track of the pronouns. Let's move on....

I just happened upon a decent article online, identifying elements common to junkscience: Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science.

It's worth reading on its own. Though it might contain a few big words, defined as those words which those who'd benefit most from knowing about this might be too stupid to look up. But maybe I can help; I'm a helpful guy. Rewording a few things, here's what to watch for in catching junkscience:

1. The Inventor Publishes His Findings to the Media. Strictly speaking, all findings are published to the media; in the best case, the media are journals of science or medicine or damned near anything but an infomercial. If the first place some quack submits his findings for peer review is YouTube.com, there's that chance that bullshit is happening. Kevin Trudeau keeps leaping into infomercials not so cleverly disguised as magazine format interviews to pitch a new book on...whatever he's on about—curing cancer by thinking real hard, or whatever. I can only guess why the first stop for this new, paradigmshifting information is an advert of less scientific interest than the Home Shopping Network. And that guess is that it's easy to typo the shortened name for Scientific American of SciAm by accidentally leaving out its middle letter.

2. The Inventor Claims to Be the Victim of a Conspiracy. That goes like this: hay peeps i invent a flying car & it run on FREE clean aardvark shit but big oil and detroit wont let me build it!!!1 I can't guess whether the guy in question has submitted his proof of principle to an infomercial yet, but my thinking is reasonably simple: whatever Detroit make, however badly and expensively they make it, they do in fact make it; cars being not math, you can't really prove their viability on paper; build a prototype, fill it with aardvark shit, and fly it around for a while; I'll catch it on CNN, I'm sure. At the least, I'll hear that the FAA grounded the aardvarkmobile for violating an airspace somewhere. Detroit have no jurisdiction over the FAA. Give that a try.

3. The Evidence Isn't Evident. I barely need to reword this one; it works pretty well as written. The flyingsaucer you filmed with your dying Sony Handicap and have to overexplain using tactics from 4 and 5, to follow, isn't really evidence of anything. When you show me fluttery footage of a bird acting erratically in the air and support it with excuses like well, it was windy and the camcorder wasn't very good; it was more obviously a flyingsaucer if you saw it live and this isn't the only evidence; people have been seeing flyingsaucers since the dawn of man, the footage you're presenting isn't evidence, but an opening joke to discuss abstract concepts.

4. Anecdotal Evidence. From above, I was there and I saw it is often used to augment inevident evidence. Other times, it replaces even that. Anecdotal Evidence is a greater nonsequitur than Military Intelligence, just within wordplay: evidence by its definition is material which itself shows a thing to be true; anecdotes don't show anything at all, but merely talk about them. Granted: anecdotes aren't necessarily fully prevaricative; a guy claiming that X occurred might believe that X had occurred, or misunderstand that Y, regardless its similarity to X, had occurred instead; but we hearing this bullshit can't observe, test, or replicate the anecdote, making it the opposite of evidence.

5. Argumentum ad Populum. I just wrecked my own format, using more arcane wording [Latin, anyway] than the original. Although: Argumentum ad Populum is fairly well known as the Bandwagon Fallacy. So we should all know what we're talking about here. To use a couple common examples, both of these statements are true: most people believe in a higher power and most people doubt that Jesus was a higher power. But: that 'most people' [out of about seven billion people, about five billion are theistic] believe in deities has nothing to do with indicating—let alone proving—that deities are or were real; that few people [the last solid number I saw counted christworshippers from catholics through mormons and beyond at about 1.9billion people] regard the BabyJesus to be one or the only deity doesn't particularly suggest that, therefore, some other deity is real. By the definition of evidence, none shows deities to be real animals; anecdotes and emotional thinkaboutitism are as close as you can get.

6. The Inventor Works Alone. We all know that Frankenstein invented the zombie with nothing more than Igor's questionable help, even if he did steal some Egyptian's general idea; furthermore, some of us know that Frankenstein was a fictional character; a couple of us even know that he was the guy building the creature, not the creature itself, because we're able to read a damned book. But, here in the real world, that one guy building the aardvarkmobile without any input is just about equally fictional. What actually happens in the algorithm of things not happening, above: a guy has an idea, works out what could potentially make that idea workable, brings in people who can each supply his own expertise for each component, outsources elements to people who can't be brought in, and ultimately volunteers the scientific community to playtest the prototype and watch for tricks. To put this into persepctive, the guy who thought it might be cool to make a sort of broom using static electricity to get dust off the tops of fanblades used a team of engineers and other agents to get the thing working correctly, outsourcing elements to others, and producing the Swiffer. Because the Swiffer is real, and the aardvarkmobile isn't. Seeing a trend here?

7. PFM. PFM is an actual acronym in use by the military, standing for Pure Fucking Magic. In military applications, it's a sort of Here Be Dragons excuse for declining to cram huge amounts of information understandable only to weaponised forms of Stephen Hawking when all anyone actually looking at something needs to know is that the thing making the other things work on a submarine is three decks down from the kitchen. Which is fine when explaining a submarine to people who had no need or potential to understand it. Up here in science, though, you can't really explain that your cool new aardvarkmobile oughtta work because Einstein himself conceded that gravity don't make no sense. It's true: gravity is only a theory, kinda like evolution; unlike evolution, no one's ever figured it out. Evolution has been observed because things change; it's been explained as the phyletic gradualism of allelic frequency [punctuated equilibrium notwithstanding] via environmental pressures. Gravity has been observed because stuff falls down; it's been explained as Pure Fucking Magic. But: our current inability to show gravitons to exist, or map spacetime precisely with blackholes migrating around, isn't a good excuse for assuming that the aardvarkmobile oughtta work because Einstein never technically said it wouldn't.

So. Swiffers and aardvarkmobiles aside, let's look at a commonish claim of junkscience to see how it displays these seven signs.

Ever heard of homeopathy? It's the nadatheory that water has memory. That you can add, say, one part per ten of aardvark shit to nine parts per ten of basic water [possibly distilled; who knows], stir that up, and add a tenth of the solution to nine parts pure water. So you've got a litre of diluted aardvark shit, and you're gonna add a decilitre of that to nine hundred milliltres of water. Make sense so far? And the new solution ready to go, we'll take 100ml of that and add it to 900ml of water again, and again, until anyone who can find a juniorhigh lunchroom is squinting and noting that there shouldn't be any aadvarkshitium molecules left in the water we're left with after a few dozen iterations.

The homeopaths have a different story: that, by purifying the aardvark shit through pure water, we're making that aardvark shit more and more potent. Until, in the end, it oughtta power the aardvarkmobile nicely, and for free. Goody.

Let's go through the list real quick....

How do we know about homeopathy? I'm not seeing it in a lot of science journals; but I can find it in endless supply at YouTube.com. One for seven.

Why isn't homeopathy in widespread use? Nevermind that no one's shown it to work, or even to make any damned sense; obviously, the problem is that the pharmaceutical industrial complex are terrified for their profits, and they're trying to make this go away. Two for seven.

Why hasn't it ever been shown to work? The highly concentrated aardvark shit is submolecular; we can't zoom in enough with a microscope; but it works!!!1 Three for seven.

If we can't see that it works, why should we assume it works? Those drinking potentised aardvark shit get very sick; I know because I've seen it; I even tried it once; it's gotta be good for powering the aardvarkmobile. Four for seven.

That's the best you can do? Look: everyone knows that homeopathy works, because everyone knows that big pharma are evil and greedy. Hell: it's all over YouTube.com; you can't miss the evidence. Five for seven.

Who developed this stupid thing? It doesn't need to be developed; you can just do it. Go look at YouTube.com: you'll see people doing this in their kitchens. That's what's so great about it: you don't need to pay a bunch of experts to make it possible. Six for seven.

Why the hell would diluting aardvark shit produce more aardvark shit than you started with? Because science is incomplete. In fact, what we do know about science supports the theory. Did you know that the sun is really just a fusion reactor, containing a bit of helium, and creating more helium every second? It's kinda like that. All you need to know is that it works. Seven for seven.

Make sense? Good. That's how junkscience happens: not especially well.

Oh. Back up at the top, I included a linked image to senseaboutscience.org. They've got that whole Keep Libel Laws out of Science thing you've probably been noticing lately. And, while I'm not any sort of activist, I kinda agree with them: science can't work correctly when the results of an experiment stand a good chance of being enjoined by people who infer the results to be defamatory. So, provided the science itself is valid, and isn't instead about aardvark shit, I'm with the scientists on this one: repressing discovery through legal action isn't a good thing.

That said, to the extent I've defamed homeopaths herein, I hereby offer to settle out of court. Here are the terms I'm sure we'll all agree with:

Make payable to me the sum of one million dollars [US$1,000,000]. I'll give $100,000 of that to a friend, who'll give $10,000 to another, who'll give $1,000 to yet another, who'll give $100 to yet another still, who'll give $10 to yet another still after that, who'll give a dollar back to you; and that dollar will have more purchasing power than the million you'd given to me. That work for you?

More later....