Usefully Useless

So I’m eating a bag of “Kettle Chips”, with “sea salt and crushed black pepper”. Proudly on the front of the bag is “absolutely nothing artificial”.

Now I wonder, did these crisps come from a salt and pepper crisp tree? Let’s check those ingredients.

Select potatoes, sunflower oil, potato maltodextrin, potato starch, sea salt, black pepper, yeast extract, citric acid from sugar beet molasses, black pepper extract

How many of those are natural? Answer is not too many.

Potatoes are an artificially engineered version of a nightshade family plant once native to South America. They bear little resemblance to their natural ancestor and do not exist in nature.

Sunflower oil? You need to specially and artificially process sunflower seeds to get it.

Potato maltodextrin is made in large steel reaction vessels by the partial hydrolysis of potato starch. It is entirely artificial.

Potato starch is extracted from mashed up potatoes using solvents.

Sea salt is specially treated to remove all the things in seawater which will, given a chance, make you very ill. So again, it’s artifically refined.

Black pepper, for a change, is actually natural. Well, after we artificially process it. The berries of the pepper plant piper nigrum are dried in large factories which use giant fans to blow hot air over them. Once dried, they’re peppercorns ready for use.

Yeast extract is used because it contains massive amounts of monosodium glutamate and glutamic acid, two nutrients essential for life and good tasting. Flavourings, basically. It’s made by either hydrolysis or autolysis: Kill the yeast, filter off the cell walls and the contents of the yeast cells are the “yeast extract”.

Citric acid from sugar beet again requires extensive refinement to filter off the vegetable matter and the sugar. Artificial citric acid is much purer, as is citric acid from citrus sources – Sugar beet is just far cheaper.

Finally, black pepper extract. This is probably some piperine or some concentrate of it. Piperine is the slightly toxic chemical in black pepper that gives them their characteristic heat. This is used because it’s dirt cheap and means that less actual black pepper is needed to give it the same hot taste. It’s a cost-cutting measure, that’s all.

On the back of the pack are even more bold statements:

We don’t add MSG

Yes you do. What on earth do you think’s in that yeast extract? Yep, the exact reason you’re even using yeast extract – Because it contains huge amounts of MSG and that’s a flavour you just can’t get any other way.

We never use artificial flavours or colours

Calling cultured, processed and refined yeast “natural” is rather like calling a steel bar natural just because the iron ore was. Yep, that’s a flavouring.

We don’t use hydrogenated fat

I’m sure you don’t use diamonds either. Why are you telling us this? Hydrogenated fats would be unsuitable anyway!

We know the origin of all our ingredients

So what? As long as they meet quality standards, does it matter if they come from Surrey or Scotland? Better yet, why aren’t you telling us the origins?

We only use sunflower oil

Because it’s cheaper than the other suitable oil, olive oil.

The colour of our chips is determined by natural sugars in the potatoes we use

Same with everyone else’s.

Exactly how abstracted from nature do we need to get before something becomes artificial? Kettle Foods seems to think that drying, washing with solvent, filtering off the solvent and all different kinds of refinement means the resulting chemicals are still “natural”? Indeed, processing potato feedstock until it no longer contains any naturally occuring components means the end product is still natural?

By that logic, a car is perfectly natural. The aluminium came from natural bauxite, the steel from natural iron ores, the plastics from natural oil.

It’s important to understand probabilities and statistics, so here’s a whole bunch of them I’ve compiled from various sources.

Death from asteroid or meteorite strike: 1 in 1,960,000,000
Injury due to asteroid or meteorite impact: 1 in 210,000,000
Death due to earthquake (UK): 1 in 120,000,000
Death from anthrax: 1 in 55,053,000
Death from an act of terrorism (2008): 1 in 44,000,000 (note 5)
Death from venom (snake, jellyfish, spider, etc.): 1 in 54,050,000 (note 1)
Death from accidental fall: 1 in 45,000,000 (note 2)
Poisoning by cleaners, paints, other chemicals: 1 in 27,000,000
Death from an act of terrorism (1987): 1 in 19,000,000 (note 5)
Under 16 killed by stranger: 1 in 17,800,000
Any specific combination of 24 coin tosses: 1 in 16,777,216
UK National Lottery, all six numbers: 1 in 13,983,816
Death due to police action: 1 in 11,000,000
Death from salmonella: 1 in 10,587,115
Property damage due to earthquake: 1 in 4,900,000
Under 16 killed by his/her own family: 1 in 4,300,000
Death from lightning strike: 1 in 3,100,000
UK National Lottery, 5 numbers + bonus ball: 1 in 2,330,636
Randomly selected person is a paedophile: 1 in 1,300,000
Death from necrotising fascitis (flesh eating bacteria): 1 in 1,250,000
Death in a plane crash: 1 in 660,000
Royal flush in five card poker: 1 in 649,739
Death in a rail accident: 1 in 525,000
Death by firearm in England and Wales (1990): 1 in 510,000
Death by poisonous gases or vapours: 1 in 495,000
Death by electrocution: 1 in 493,000
Death by a falling object: 1 in 375,000
Death due to MRSA infection (2007): 1 in 300,000
Death by firearm in England and Wales (2007): 1 in 264,000
Death due to being stabbed in Greater London: 1 in 240,000
Death due to lack of healthcare: 1 in 83,720
Death in a residential housefire: 1 in 83,025
UK National Lottery, 5 numbers: 1 in 55,491
Death in a road accident: 1 in 6,500
Death from suicide (England and Wales, 2008): 1 in 4,350
Death from influenza: 1 in 4,100
Death from badly treated diabetes: 1 in 4,000
Death from accidental self-inflicted injury: 1 in 2,900
Death from chronic respiratory disease (asthma, cystic fibrosis, etc.): 1 in 2,200
Death from a stroke: 1 in 1,650
A Dutch dyke will flood in the next year: 1 in 1,250
Odds you will never marry (2007 rate): 1 in 1,200
UK National Lottery, 4 numbers: 1 in 1,032
Thames Barrier will flood in the next year: 1 in 1,000
Death from cancer: 1 in 500
Death from enemy action during active duty: 1 in 480 (note 4)
Death from heart disease: 1 in 390
Sharing a birthday with a randomly selected person: 1 in 370.4 (Note 7)
Being involved in any knife-crime in England and Wales (2005): 1 in 177 (note 8 )
Odds you will marry in the next year (2007 rate): 1 in 111
Britons as a proportion of global population: 1 in 100
UK National Lottery, 3 numbers: 1 in 57
UK National Lottery, any win: 1 in 54
Card deal is any specific card: 1 in 52
Odds police will arrest you for something that isn’t illegal (2009): 1 in 36
You are ill right now: 1 in 30
Home computer being an Apple Mac: 1 in 25
Being on the UK DNA Database: 1 in 19
Next meal is fast-food: 1 in 10
Developing or having an incurable disease of any severity: 1 in 10
PCs having at least one item of malware: 1 in 8
Undergraduate achieving a First: 1 in 7
Driver has an endorsed licence: 1 in 7
Randomly selected couple will be infertile: 1 in 6.7 (Note 6)
Chance you went to church last Sunday: 1 in 6
Die throw is any specific number: 1 in 6
Attending a private funeral in the next year: 1 in 5.6
A randomly selected child is obese: 1 in 5.5
Your front door has a CCTV camera aimed at it: 1 in 5
Odds a 13-17 year old has performed some act which was legally paedophilia: 1 in 4.2 (note 9)
You are obese: 1 in 4.1
Odds you have an illegal item in your household: 1 in 4
Odds that a car driver will break the law during his next journey: 1 in 3.2
Broadband speed is less than half of that advertised: 1 in 3
Black man being on the UK DNA Database: 1 in 2.7
Odds two children in a class of 23 will share a birthday: 1 in 2
Odds your first sexual encounter was legally paedophilia: 1 in 2 (note 3)
You have used illegal drugs: 1 in 1.9

Notes:
1. World-wide.
2. Age dependent.
3. 53% of the population is not virginal at the age of 18 (2009 estimate)
4. Assumes you’re already a soldier.
5. Terrorism deaths that year divided by population that year.
6. Defined as no conception after one year of unprotected sex.
7. It isn’t one in 365 as randomly selected 365 people could have all different birthdays! Given by 1-(365/364).
8. Includes merely carrying a blade longer than 3 inches in a public place
9. From estimated “sexting” rates.

After being published in Lancet in 1998, Dr Andrew Wakefield caused one of the biggest health scares in years. His finding was that the MMR vaccination was closely correlated with, even caused, autism spectrum disorders.

It causes vaccination takeup rates to plummet and caused the deaths of hundreds of children from easily preventable diseases.

Dr. Wakefield failed to disclose that he was being paid by lawyers looking for someone to blame autism on, failed to disclose that he’d paid children £5 at a birthday party for blood samples (hardly clinical accuracy or professional integrity) and carried out invasive tests on children “against their best clinical interest”. The General Medical Council ruling that Wakefield had acted with “callous disregard for any pain they might suffer” and considered the case proven on both counts in a ruling made public yesterday (27th Jan).

As the medical world geared itself up for another ‘thalidomide’ type case in 1999, researchers around the world started to discover that they weren’t able to reproduce Dr. Wakefield’s results. If there was a link between MMR and autism, they couldn’t find it. Nobody could. Only Dr. Wakefield and the lawyers paying him were able to find a link. How surprising is that?

After numerous independent doctors called into question Wakefield’s study, Lancet came out and admitted it didn’t meet standards of integrity and accuracy and should never have been published. Lancet’s reputation took quite a beating in the aftermath.

Even a newspaper got in on the story, The Times of London, bringing up clinical abuses and inconsistencies in the way Wakefield had conducted the study and demanding he be held to trial for it.

The end seems in sight for the corrupt doctor’s career, as he seems certain to be struck off by the General Medical Council as the two and half year investigation draws to a close, with a verdict of “serious professional misconduct” being almost predetermined at this point.

In this case, it was greedy lawyers who bought off a corrupt doctor, but it wasn’t just the lawyers. Wakefield also had financial interest in a company who was trying to market an alternative to the MMR vaccine. However, the alternative vaccine was less effective and hadn’t been adopted anywhere. If Wakefield could discredit MMR, then he stood to make a fortune. The end result of their greed has been dead babies.

In the end, science roots out bad eggs due to its distributed, competitive and independent nature. But there’ll always be bad eggs in science or any field of human endeavour. Ill-informed or outright ignorant parents are just as much to blame, however.

Go here to read about the story if you like. I’m not about to go into the event, but instead why it’s happened.

Why would anyone want to contaminate milk with melamine? What’s there to gain?

Usually milk is tested for concentration, to ensure it isn’t watered down or adulterated, and this is done by testing its protein content. Watered down milk, or milk powder cut with flour, will contain less protein as it contains less milk.

The standard test done is simply measuring nitrogen content, since in milk most of the nitrogen is in protein. Protein in milk is usually around 15% nitrogen by mass. However, melamine is 66% nitrogen by mass and so can be added in to watered down milk to make it appear to be undiluted.

Normally this would be almost undetectable, without specific reason to test for melamine. Melamine is about as toxic as normal table salt, you could drink melamine contaminated milk every day for your whole adult life and merely have a heightened risk of kidney stones, nobody would notice without specifically testing for it

It’s fraud, plainly and simply. By passing off the milk as undiluted and passing off animal feed as higher in protein than it is, the companies who buy the stuff to use it are being ripped off.

Melamine itself is harmless, but mix it with cyanuric acid (again totally harmless) and the two form melamine cyanurate, which is insoluble and forms crystals in the kidneys, kidney stones. An adult’s kidney is large enough to simply expel the crystals before they grow any larger, but a baby (or small animal) cannot.

If melamine contaminated milk finds its way into infant formula, then the problems start. A baby’s kidney will form melamine cyanurate itself, infants do not have the same kidney function or renal chemistry that adults (and older children) do, meaning melamine is much more harmful, rapidly forming kidney stones which can prove fatal in babies.

It’s not just milk formula, however. Other products tested and sold by protein content are also known to have been contaminated in the 2006-2008 timeframe, such as animal feed. This is harmless to humans, but did kill 1,500 raccoon dogs being bred for fur and can find its way into eggs produced from chickens fed with contaminated feed.

China already sentenced two people to death for their part in the 2008 scandal (which affected 300,000 children, hospitalised 50,000 of them and killed six) , it’s likely more will follow. China is very protective of its booming export trade and will deal very harshly with people or companies which threaten confidence in its exports.

Jim McCormick, director of the company ATSC, was yesterday (Friday 23rd) arrested on suspicion of fraud by misrepresentation.

For around £30,000, he would sell you an “explosives detector” (Iraq spent about £52 million on them) which worked using the “body’s own static electricity” for power. The device had a wand on a loose hinge and “detector cards” would slot into the base to make it detect different things, in ATSC’s claims anything from TNT to semtex to elephants with the ADE-651 (the device in question). I didn’t make that last one up.

Except that BBC’s Newsnight got hold of one of the cards, one for TNT, and had it analysed. It turned out to be nothing more than a simple retail anti-theft tag. In essence, the device is a dowsing rod, which have never been shown to work any better than dumb chance in any trial. Iraq has ordered an investigation, the UK has banned their export and Mr McCormick is looking at time behind bars.

I’d like to know what the hell Iraq was thinking of? The FBI had had warnings out since 1995 not to use “bogus explosives detectors”, the ADE-651 had never passed a single effectiveness test and James Randi offered McCormick his $1 million USD prize for proof of paranormal power should the ADE-651 pass a controlled effectiveness trial.

All the warning signs were there, yet Iraq still blew £52 million on a piece of plastic, a few clothes tags and a bent coathanger which was even claimed by its own vendors to operate in a “non-scientific” way.

Think back to June 2007, when Britain flooded pretty much top to bottom. That has the same underlying cause as the big freeze of 2009-2010. What cause would that be? Global warming.

Surely I have to be making some kind of bad joke?

Absolutely not. Let me explain.

Britain’s climate is controlled by the jet stream, in the winter it hovers over Britain, deflecting air masses which would otherwise be coming down from the Arctic, the jet stream’s moist but not so cold air from the North Atlantic (warmed by the Gulf Stream). This keeps us much warmer than our latitude would suggest, after all, we are as far north as Moscow, Edmonton and Minsk and further north than Winnipeg.

(Note: This is why usually in winter when we have snow, it’s when easterly or south easterly winds bring up air masses from the continent and it’s the source of the phrase ‘it’s too cold for snow’, since when it really gets cold in Britain, it’s usually a stationary winter anticyclone)

However, the jet stream never came north this winter, it remained over the Mediterranean, giving Spain some terrible floods in December 2009. Without the jet stream protecting us, the northerly winds from the Arctic could freely blow south over Britain, giving us the sort of weather our northerly latitude would otherwise consider to be perfectly normal.

Why would such a thing happen?

The jet stream changes course as it cools from summer to winter, but the jet stream was too warm to head north, so it remained in its summer position. Back in 2007 a similar thing happened, the jet stream didn’t cool down enough in the winter (2006-2007 was an exceptionally mild winter) to head south for the summer, so remained over us in its winter position and dumped off a ton of rain from the North Atlantic which gave Spain a hell of a bad drought and was meant to be distributed across the Mediterranean as far as Egypt, instead we got it all.

The same problem both times: The jet stream was too warm.

Two more members of the ACMD have resigned over political interference in the scientific process. Alan Johnson, Home Secretary, is increasingly in an ever more beleagured position after his blundering reaction to Prof. Nutt has disturbed a hornet’s nest.

But that’s not why this post is here. This post is for the most hilarious, backwards, reality-denying piece of “journalism” I’ve ever read. Yes, it’s the Daily Mail.

Go on, read it.

It essentially boils down to “The problem with science is that it’s based on facts”.

At no point does the Daily Mail tell us why we shouldn’t trust facts, indeed about half way down it Godwins itself by pointing out that the Nazis used facts too.

So then, Daily Mail, if we are not to use facts, then what are we to use? Hunches? Wild guesses? Chicken entrails?

Do people really fall for this blatant propoganda?

When evidence, facts and truth do not fit in with what the Government wants, simply sack those who’re promoting them! Not wanting sound scientific and medical principles clouding his judgement, home secretary Johnson has got rid of the head of the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs, Professor Nutt.

The home secretary said that Nutt had been “lobbying for a change in policy”, citing this as his reason. Now I don’t know about you, Mr Johnson, but I thought the entire point of independent scientific advisors is to tell you politicians – and you are politicians, not medical professionals or scientists – what you should be doing. If that’s “lobbying for a change in policy” then the people doing things wrong are the politicians, not the scientists and doctors.

Alan Johnson, home secretary in question, stated “I cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy” – yet he did not explain why policy is running contrary to scientific advice and if he thinks that science is at the whim of one man or is in any way belief based, he is sorely mistaken, because Nutt’s successor is going to be telling Johnson (or, more likely, his Conservative replacement) the exact same things based on the same data, the same evidence, the same reality.

This has been coming ever since Brown took office and started spouting nonsense like “Cannabis is lethal” and “Cannabis kills”, to which the Advisory Committee got back to Brown saying “we’ve reviewed the evidence, the medical data and there’s just no support for your claims” – Brown was not happy. How dare reality not respect Brown’s beliefs? It is the hallmark of failed leaders throughout modern history that they ignore independent scientific advice, from Napoleon’s dismissal of the steam ship to Bush’s promotion of “abstinence only” sex education. If a policy is not science based, not reality and truth based, then what exactly is Brown basing his policies on?

For his part, Professor Nutt is predicting that more of the ACMD advisors will be quitting, citing government interference in the scientific process. In this case, it seems the impact of facts and truth with politics has left reality in the worst shape, with politics blundering on as usual.

Nutt in particular believes that politicians wanting to appear “tough on drugs” for simple popularity reasons is undermining the entire purpose of drugs regulation:

There’s no point in having drug laws that are meaningless and arbitrary just because politicians find it useful and expedient occasionally to come down hard on drugs. That’s undermining the whole purpose of the drugs laws.

That’s right folks, Brown and his motley gang have no intention of making useful and working laws, they simply want to hoodwink people into liking them. I can think of another party which does the same, headed by a certain Griffin.

As many of you are no doubt aware, the former Home Secretary, one highly oppressive woman by the name of Jacqui “That’s Terrorism!” Smith upgraded cannabis from its class C (lowest class) to class B last year, as well as upgrading ecstacy from class B to class A. Say what you like about ecstacy, but is it really in the same category as heroin and methamphetamine? As well as creating new offences at a record-breaking rate, against police advice, she also went against medical and scientific advice withe cannabis upgrade.

Now, head of the Government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, a Professor David Nutt, has spoken out against the Government’s stance. In a scathing lecture, he revealed how ministers had deliberately distorted evidence, ignored hard facts and fallen for the “skunk scare”, where a “highly potent” form of cannabis was rumoured to cause mental illness.

In truth, the “highly potent” cannabis had been available two decades or more (it was commonplace and overwhelmingly more common than other forms when I was 15, I’m now 28) and all evidence – the Government’s own figures included – shows that from its introduction in the late 1970s to proliferation throughout the 1980s and later had actually seen a small decline in schizophrenia.

to prevent one episode of schizophrenia, we would need to stop about 5,000 men aged 20 to 25 years from ever using the drug
- Professor Nutt

Yes, you read the good professor right. One in five thousand. On a per-capita basis (so that alcohol and tobacco are not hopelessly skewed upwards by their ubiquity), this makes cannabis about eighty times less harmful than cigarettes and about equal to alcohol. The problem which Nutt also explored was that of correlation not equalling causation. In many “cannabis linked” schizophrenia cases, the patient had a genetic pre-disposition to mental illness. It could be that people who are prone to anxeity, schizophrenia and so on are also more likely to use cannabis as a result of those mental conditions.

Those using cannabis frequently, according to just one study which is cherry-picked here as to be most negative to cannabis use, were 40% more likely than the general population to develop psychotic conditions. Another study I have to hand here shows that art and music students at two universities are 52% more likely than the general population to develop mental illnesses. Does studying art cause mental conditions, or are those predisposed to mental problems drawn to art?

At least I hope the Home Office doesn’t read this blog. If they did, we’d see arts and music banned from universities and the professors imprisoned.

Now led by B-list actress and fringe lunatic Jenny McCarthy, “Antivax” has become a spiritual movement rivalling Scientology for lawsuit hilarity and anti-truth beliefs.

It’d be easy to go light on them and point to a simple misunderstanding fifty years ago or something like that, but it’s not possible. The whole thing started, simply, as fraud.

In 1990, a crooked researcher falsified some data to publish a strong correlation between the MMR vaccine with autism. Why? Wakefield never told anyone, but the fact he was taking money from malpractice lawyers who were suing vaccine makers may be relevant.

The “autism link” just wouldn’t go away, even after numerous follow-up studies failed to find any correlation. Eventually someone pointed out that thimerosal, a preservative used in vaccine preparation, contained mercury and the whole thing went to hell. This reached a crescendo in 1999 and doctors asked the pharmaceutical industry to replace thimerosal, which they did.

This is taken as solid proof by the anitivax faithful that something, somewhere was wrong.

It breaks down into two facets. First is the mercury containing thimerosal, surely this has to be harmful in some way, right? Mercury is toxic stuff! However, toxicity is all about the chemistry. For example, chlorine was used as a poison gas in the first world war, yet you have no problem using table salt, which contains extremely high levels of chlorine – 60.7% by mass to be precise, with the other 39.3% being sodium, a flammable alkali metal which catches fire on contact with water.

With mercury again it is the chemical form of it which is important. Thimerosal contains ethyl mercury, while the toxic form is methyl mercury. The difference is that methyl mercury is soluble in fats and tends to accumulate in the body, where ethyl mercury is not soluble in fat, doesn’t accumulate and is rapidly excreted.

If thimerosal is so harmless, then, why did they remove it in 1999? This is the second facet of the antifax faithful’s argument. Doctors were scared of a health-craze meaning babies wouldn’t get their immunisations – They feared it would (and, sadly, eventually did) mean dead babies.

The antivax cult was without a leader, a charismatic high priest, until the early 2000s when Jenny McCarthy’s child was diagnosed with autism. Immediately she went, to a word, batshit insane. Not a scientist and without any healthcare background, she saw the fraudulent 1990 study and blamed anyone, everyone, who made vaccines for her kid’s autism. The cult snapped up their new messiah without delay and there you have it today, busy killing babies to further their agenda.