I also found this news report, which is in Spanish, of course.

Apparently there are recycling companies who have some interest in receiving these plastic caps. They have offered to donate 200€ for each metric ton (1,000 kg = 2,204 lb) of caps collected. The little eleven-year-old girl, Aitana, requires an operation in Boston (“which is very expensive since medicine is private over there”, the reporter mentioned) that costs 200,000€.

Let’s do some math, shall we? For every kilogram of bottle caps I save, the company will give 0.20€. I asked the internet how much a bottle cap weighs, and the general consensus is that it’s between 2-3 grams. That means that I need 333-500 bottle caps to complete my kilogram, which comes out to 17-25 bottle caps for one euro cent going to Aitana’s 200,000€ operation.

Further research has uncovered the recycling companies’ motivation behind such an effort.

Plastic bottle caps are often made from a different type of plastic from the bottles they’re attached to. Soda bottles are generally made from Type 1 Plastic (Polyethylene Terephthalate) while bottle caps are made from Type 5 Plastic (Polypropylene). These different types of plastic have to be recycled separately. If the bottle and the cap were recycled in the same batch of plastic, the two different plastics would melt unevenly and the whole batch would be ruined.

Whoever came up with this idea is an absolute genius. Ignoring any marketing philanthropic “corporate image” benefits for the recycling companies – of which there aren’t many since I can’t seem to find the name of any participating companies – it seems pretty obvious that it would cost considerably more than 200€ to remove the caps from 500,000 bottles, even if it could be mechanized. The task of getting the general public to properly separate items for recycling must be one of the hardest issues for recycling companies to tackle.

The media, of course, absolutely loves tearjerking stories of little dying girls, so there’s no problem getting the message out. Local governments are also suckers for positive press, and are willing to set up bottle cap collection centers at the town halls. Schools can use it as an easy way to teach simple philanthropy to the nation’s children.

Your average citizen that decides to participate in this scheme by saving bottle caps isn’t going to do the math and see that, if it takes five seconds to save each bottle cap, then it requires three and a half hours of work to produce a single euro to help the little girl. But, what it steals from you in paying ridiculously low wage is made up for by the positive feelings of wellbeing that philanthropy brings. I’m certain that, psychologically, someone saving bottle caps is going to be happier than a cynic who has done the math and refuses to based on the triviality of it.

It’s nice to find a scenario in which all parties involved come out winning.

• The people saving the caps get to feel good about themselves.

• The schools get to teach philanthropy give children the experience of happiness through helping the less fortunate.
• Local governments and organizations get to put on a positive philanthropic face.
• The recycling companies save money, which, in turn, results in lower government contract bids and tax money saved.
• The environment is ultimately less contaminated.
• A little girl gets a life saving operation. (I’d be skeptical of them reaching their goal, but this isn’t the first iteration, so they’ve done it before.)

It’s a win-win-win-win-win-win-win situation. Like I said, pure genius.

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Bad Education

In Spanish driving school, the students are taught that, when circulating in a roundabout you should always be in the far outside lane no matter which exit you are planning on taking. How ridiculous is that? Any driving student with half a critical thinking neuron should raise their hand and ask, “Then what are the other lanes in the roundabout for?” But no one does because the authoritarian Spanish school system has extinguished any such behaviors.

I’ve lost track of the number of times that I’ve narrowly escaped an accident when trying to exit a roundabout from the inside lane and somebody is trying to keep going around the roundabout in the outside lane. I suspect that if we were to collide, the authorities would rule the accident as being my fault.

This brings me to what I consider to be a fundamental flaw of roundabouts, specifically roundabouts with two-lane exits.

A Fundamental Flaw

Please focus only on the northeast exit in the image above, and the red and black cars approaching it. Follow my logic here:

1. If there are two lanes in the exit, then cars are meant to exit parallel with each other from the outer two lanes of the roundabout.
2. In the image above, if the black car wants to exit into the left lane of the exit road, it may do so legally.
3. Therefore the red car must exit to the right exit lane to avoid a collision.

The conclusion #3 is a necessarily consequence of the premises #1 and #2.

Not only does that fly in the face of what Spaniards are taught in driving school, it also is contrary to my speculation of legal fault above. There is something very wrong here, because I don’t think anyone, in practice, truly believes that the red car is prohibited from continuing around the roundabout to another exit. In that case, either premise #1 is false – in which case, why do they build roundabouts with two exit lanes?? – or premise #2 is false, meaning that the black car may only exit the roundabout if he somehow verifies the location and intention of the car to its right – in which case, why do they build roundabouts with two exit lanes??

This is the same roundabout exit, as seen from street level. If you’re in this lane of the roundabout, can you continue on around, or must you exit? Does it depend on whether or not there’s a car to your left that wants to exit? Who yields? Argh!!

In Practice

Personally, I am utterly dumbfounded that more traffic accidents don’t happen in roundabouts. The whole scenario seems so chaotic, and the proper rules can’t account for every situation, not to mention that they don’t even teach the proper rules in driving school. But somehow there is an emergent behavior of the system and swarm intelligence takes over to avoid accidents and make roundabouts safer and more efficient than they seem at first glance.

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After a scandal involving a photoshopped image of Paul picking Spain, they finally had him make his selection, and, for the semi-final match tomorrow, he has chosen…… SPAIN!!

Of course this is all a load of hooey, and that, with complete chance, a coin or octopus or rock would be correct in five matches or 3.125% (1/2⁵) of the time. Still it’s kind of funny and probably has the Germans a bit worried. I recommend they cook him Galician style.

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Extended rear-facing, beyond one year and [9 kilograms], has big safety advantages that parents should strongly consider. In fact, the most recent study on this subject shows that toddlers are up to five times safer if they remain rear-facing until age two. Turning baby’s car seat around isn’t a milestone to rush on. It’s actually a step down in safety, so don’t be in a hurry to make the big switch.

I believe it. After a cursory look at the physics involved, it makes a lot of sense that, for frontal collisions, at least, facing backwards must be safer. But the same physics applies to all passengers, and at some point we decide that the comfort of facing forwards is worth the risk.

Four years ago, when I saw one of my favorite TED talks, I made a mental note to go back and re-watch it when contemplating just this issue. The talk is by economist Steven Levitt, examining the data involving in child automobile fatalities to see just how effective car seats are. His findings were astonishing: Car seats do nothing more than the adult seat belt to prevent death after age two. You don’t believe it, do you? It’s a tough pill to swallow, and he even likens the psychology around car seats to a placebo, namely that it just feels better to be doing, and paying for, something rather than nothing.

In the end, we have succumbed to the attractiveness of a single-investment car seat that is approved from 9 kg up to twelve years old. Even if I had never learned of Levitt’s study, that upper limit would seem a little ridiculous to me. Do sixth graders really ride in car seats to middle school? We still have plenty of time to think about and decide when to stop car seat use, but I can’t imagine my daughter still using the car seat much past the end of Obama’s second term.

We are also going to start using the forward facing car seat immediately, despite her being a few grams shy of the nine kilogram threshold. It’s a risk, yes, but I have to believe that there is some added safety provided by the increased driver concentration as a consequence of reduced backseat screaming. As I said, parenting is about weighing trade-offs between comfort and safety, and living with the constant fear that some decision you make may bring harm to your child, a fear so strong that entire industries are built on it.

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Spoiler Alert: I will not discuss any aspects of the plot in this post, nor any of the puzzles that are solved along the way. What I will discuss is thematic elements, particularly as they relate to the “science” in the book. If you want to be completely surprised by everything you read in The Lost Symbol, read no further, but I promise you can read this post and still enjoy the exciting twists of the book.

The lone breakthrough scientist

In The Lost Symbol, there’s a character that has her own isolated super-secret research lab where she “does science”, particularly in the pseudo branch called Noetic Sciences, where she makes mind-blowing (kind of literally) breakthroughs that will forever change the way we look at the human mind. Her research shows that human thoughts can, and do, affect the physical world.

She “proves” that group prayer can heal the sick.

This experiment has been run hundreds of times, and when it is done properly (i.e. double blind), absolutely no statistically significant effects have been shown. In fact, when it’s not double blind, and patients know that they are being prayed for, they actually get sicker because they stop trying as hard as the patients that know they are not being prayed for.

She records, with super-chilled CCDs the actual energy flowing from a healer’s hands into a cancer patient’s body.

One of the first things that a scientist will tell you about being skeptical of pseudo-scientific claims is, “As soon as someone refers to ‘energy’ as a physical thing that can be seen, rather than a ‘the ability to do work’, you can be reasonably certain that they are full of shit.”

She mentions the noticeable shift in the randomness of the world’s random number generators following September 11th, 2001

This episode of Skeptoid is all you need to know about that.

She has a terminally ill person die on a scale and measures a noticeable weight drop, and concludes that this is the soul leaving the body

This experiment was actually performed by a Dr. Duncan MacDougall, who really did measure a slight decrease in body weight. Unfortunately, his methodology was suspect and his results inconclusive.

Science is not done in a hidden secret laboratory by a single researcher! New scientific theories are published and then critiqued and torn apart by other scientists with more voracity than anyone has ever criticized Dan Brown’s writing. Only the strongest most correct theories can withstand such an onslaught.

I wouldn’t be so ticked off about this if the very first page of the book didn’t say:

All rituals, science, artwork, and monuments in this novel are real.

This statement demonstrates a truly profound ignorance of what Science is. It is equivalent to claiming that some wacko in California claims that drinking his urine will cure cancer is Real Science just because the wacko calls it such. It doesn’t work like that Danny boy.

Ancient peoples knew more about Science than modern scientists

This is the classic ploy behind all kinds of New Age scams, often involving crystals or astrology, and it is also, unfortunately, the basic premise of this entire book. Brown equates quantum entanglement to Buddhist and Hindu beliefs that, “We’re all, like, connected, maaaan!” What a joke. When challenged with the cutting edge superstring theory, a character pulls out a copy of Zohar, a thirteenth century religious text written in medieval Aramaic, and reads (not out loud, conveniently) a passage that convinces his challenger that mystics in the 13th century clearly understood superstring theory. From my limited knowledge, I understand superstring theory to be based almost entirely on very complex mathematics. Call me a skeptic, but I find it just a little hard to believe that medieval priests were calculating the effects of ten-dimensional D-branes. As it does not support his case, he mentions nothing of astronomy, knowledge of galaxies or the nature, size, or age of the universe. In fact, even worse, he repeatedly implies an equivalence between astronomy and astrology. Talk about a pet peeve for scientists!

But people believed the Earth was flat!

In every case where a skeptic challenges some claim in The Lost Symbol, rather than present any sort of evidence, the claimant pulls out this common fallacious argument:

Can’t you see you’re being closed-minded? People used to believe the Earth was flat, until brave pioneer explorers sailed around it and proved it was round! You’re being just like those people who wouldn’t believe the Earth was round!

And every damn time the skeptic agrees, “Yeah, maybe you’re right. I should open my mind!” For the love of Zeus! Eratosthenes, using simple geometry and shadows, calculated the circumference of the Earth to within a 1% error back in 200 B.C.! No one by the time the sixteenth century circumnavigators were around had any doubt that the world was round. Dan Brown obviously didn’t research this beyond his grade school textbook.

If a story survives, it must be true.

The likelihood that a story will be passed on from one person to another is a matter of how entertaining, dangerous to not pass on, advantageous to pass on, the effort required to pass it on, and how believable it is. In the modern world, we see this every day with viral emails that promise good fortune if they are passed on and bad fortune if they are not. There is an entire field of study, called Memetics, devoted to the reproduction and mutation of ideas. No one really believes that Oedipus Rex or Odysseus, or Pyramus and Thisbe actually existed, but the stories about them are didactic and entertaining, so we continue to tell them. [I'm looking at you, Mr. Shakespeare!]

Humans are special

The Lost Symbol talks at great length about the relationship between humans and God, never once mentioning a little totally proven scientific theory we like to call Evolution. Dan Brown mentions that the founding fathers of the United States were Deists. What he fails to mention is that Deism is just about as atheistic as any thinking person could be until a gentleman by the name of Charles Darwin came along and explained how complexity could arise from simplicity without a designer. Just because they loved ancient Greek symbology and mythology doesn’t mean they believed any of it.

Conclusion

In The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown does his best to make his spiritual message non-denominational, not favoring any sacred text over others (well, okay, The Bible is pretty prominent), and definitely preaching an allegorical interpretation of the scriptures. Frankly, I was very, very underwhelmed by The Big Secret that the whole book is about chasing. Let’s just say it was the spiritual equivalent of Ralphie using his Secret Society decoder ring to decode the Little Orphan Annie secret code, only to discover that the code translated to “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine!”

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The Computer Radiation Myth

The idea that a consumer electronic device is producing enough harmful radiation to damage your health is ridiculous. These products are tested. Thanks to Chernobyl, the Cold War, and the microwave oven, the general public is terrified of “radiation”, but almost no one differentiates between regular old radiation, the emission and absorption of electromagnetic waves/photons, and ionizing radiation, where the photons have enough energy to damage atoms. The kind of radiation your computer is giving off is not ionizing radiation:

Multiple studies have been completed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Center for Radiological Health and Devices, Bell Laboratories, and The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. The data from their work indicates that computer VDTs “emit little or no harmful ionizing (e.g., x-rays) or non-ionizing (e.g., infrared) radiation under normal operating conditions.”

As long as you’re not working for twelve hours a day with your head sandwiched inches between the backs of two CRT monitors, you’re gonna be just fine.

The Cactus Myth

I’ve done a little internet searching, and the only evidence I can find is the same plagiarized paragraph on hundreds of “living green” websites, which I will paste here onto yet another web page:

In the mid-1980s, researchers at the Institute of Geobiology in Chardonne, Switzerland, announced that tests showed employees who used to suffer from headaches and tiredness felt better after working for two years with a cactus next to their monitors. A hypothesis has been suggested that cacti evolved to counter the effects of harsh solar radiation. The science is unproven, but why not play it safe and enjoy a little nature while you work?

That’s it. Everywhere that mentions this “phenomenon” specifically says that the science is unproven. Not only that, but the study involved no measurement of radiation whatsoever, only tiredness. But that’s how myths form, isn’t it? It sounds clever and reasonable, assuming you don’t understand anything about radiation.

To The Next Level

Let’s take this myth to the next level and assume the worst case scenario: your computer monitor is built of Cobalt-60, a gram of which would kill you after a one month exposure, and the cactus on your desk has the radiation absorption properties of a block of lead. Unless you placed the cactus completely between you and the computer you would get no benefit whatsoever! There’s no way to “attract” the radiation towards the cactus. Radiation goes out in all directions until it is absorbed or reflected by something. You can’t even bend light with a strong magnetic field. Your best bet is to bend space-time. So here’s a health tip for you that really works!

Place a black hole on your desk next to your computer to absorb radiation. Why not play it safe and enjoy a little nature while you work?

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They made me open a brand new bottle of wine (you know how I hate doing that) just so they could put a cork in the oil. Something about it preventing fire or burning of the rosquillas.

I’m curious as to why this would be. Searching the internet, I can only find references to putting a wine cork in the oil when frying octopus, and even then the only explanation given is that “My mother always did it, so I always do.” Does anyone know why putting a wine cork into frying oil would have any effect on anything?

You have to keep a stick in the middle of the dough ring and spin it around at first until it forms a good shape.

When they come out, they are lightly dusted avalanched with sugar.

Not bad, huh?

I ate one warm, and it was delicious, but everyone immediately informed me that eating warm rosquillas will make your stomach feel bad. When I asked why, I was chastised for always asking why. This was a fact that everyone knew (there’s even a song that mentions it), and I should accept it as true. As I’ve already discovered, there is plenty of “common cultural knowledge” that is complete humbug, so pardon me if “everyone believes it” isn’t good enough for me.

I suspect that the real explanation is that this “fact” was made up to keep little kids (and husbands) from robbing the cooling plate, and also supported, via confirmation bias and mothers saying, “See? I told you you’d feel bad!”, by the times when too many of them were eaten because they were just so delicious. My bet is that the only difference between eating them hot and cold is that they taste better and you’re more likely to overeat them hot.

But I fully admit that there could be some enzyme reaction taking place during cooling that is the real explanation. If so, I’d love to learn about it.

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My father-in-law tried to explain them to me recently. He explained that, he already knew that August wouldn’t be very warm this year because he’d observed the weather during Easter. What?? He explained that everyone knew that the weather during Easter affects the weather for the rest of the year. I said, “But you don’t really believe that, right?” He said, “Sure, the shepherds and farmers have been using that wisdom for centuries!” I was just a liiiittle bit skeptical.

Témporas are the days right around a change of seasons, and, legend has it, one can observe the weather on these days and forecast the weather for the entire season. Here’s a translation of one of the only websites I’ve found about it:

There’s an extended tradition from many years ago about Las Témporas, their changing dates, their origins, their climatological incidence, especially in four periods of the year, and their veracity or not. The following and loyalty of many people to the outcome or approximation of meteorology that will predominantly occur during the months that follow one témpora until the next.

The témporas are on four times and days of the year. The days are Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. The first témporas of the year are in the first week of Lent, on the 40th, 38th, and 37th days before Easter Sunday. [Ash Wednesday and the following Friday and Saturday.] The second témporas are the 53rd, 55th, and 56th days after Easter Sunday. The third and fourth témporas are similar. Since Advent begins on the first Sunday after the 26th of November and has four Sundays, the témporas correspond to the third and fourth Sunday, in other words, in December, it oscillates between the 14th, 16th, and 17th and the 20th, 22nd, and 23rd, and in September it’s the same days as December, except whenever Wednesday is the 14th, since you get close to the Festival of the Exaltation of Santa Cruz, the 14th is incompatible with fasting and penitence témpora ceremonies. In other words, whenever September 14th, 16th, and 17th are Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, the témporas must be moved to the next week and are the 21st, 23rd, and 24th. And one must remember that Holy Week must be a full moon.

No, the Spanish version isn’t worded much better. The gist is that there are sets of three days right around the season change that are special somehow. It would make sense if they corresponded exactly with the solstices and equinoxes, but no, they have been warped to fit in with the long history of Catholic tradition.

So what can they tell us about the weather? Let’s look at an excerpt from Témporas and Prognostications: A Living Tradition in Cantabria, from the January 2004 edition of Popular Meteorology: (the bold is mine)

As for the relationship that témpora dates may have with dominant atmospheric weather conditions during a specific season, there are no known documented studies that support the claims. It’s simply a tradition that has persisted for centuries. There are many people that are advocates of the long-lasting axiom – whatever it is – it’s the logic consequence of the témporas being “like this”… The fans make such predictions, acquire traditional calendars that publish the variable dates of these charismatic days. Then, they observe the weather – especially the direction of the wind – on the témpora dates that the almanac indicates.

Curiously, this prediction has made furtunes and for centuries the weather in the region has been justified, depending on how the wind was during the last témpora days. The collective memory of the people has established this prognostication, although, paradoxically, those who ratify such a thing are normally unaware of the exact dates of the témporas they just cited and are limited to repeating something that they heard somewhere, and they retell it, as a topic, without any further understanding of the cause. There are scarce exceptions, like those who make the position of the stars in equinoxes and solstices the dates of the témporas and consider that the dominant weather for those days of season change are premonitory of what will happen during the corresponding spring, summer, autmn, or winter of each year.

There is a lot of wisdom wrapped up in cultural traditions and beliefs. The problem is that, for every tiny nugget of wisdom, there is a gigantic boulder of bullshit. Particularly when it comes to predictions, the human mind is absolutely terrible at reasoning logically about causal relationships. This theory of témporas absolutely reeks of confirmation bias: only the instances that confirm the hypothesis are remembered and all others are forgotten.

In the US, we have Groundhog(Imbolc-Candlemas) Day which is similar and (hey, what do you know!) falls almost exactly on a témpora, but no one actually believes the way the sunlight travels around a woodchuck has any bearing on climate.

In my research for this, I came across Cabañuelas, which is the version of the Témpora myth as it got twisted on its way to South America. Cabañuelas believers claim that the weather during the first 24 days of August dictate the weather for the rest of the year, with each day assigned to either the beginning or the ending of a month. The designers cleverly assigned August 1st and August 24th to predict the weather at the beginning and ending of August each year. Gosh, I wonder how often that’s true!?

A side note: Another example of confirmation bias nonsense I heard recently between housewives at the grocery store. They had all heard it said, but had no idea if it was true, that “premature babies born after only seven months in the womb have a better chance of survival than those born after eight months.” Everyone agreed that it didn’t make much sense, but that, if everyone had heard it said, that it must be true. Wow.

Judging from Wednesday, Friday and today, it’s gonna be a nice warm, cool, sunny and rainy autumn!

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