Tetherd Cow Ahead

I’m not one for patriotism. In this rapidly shrinking world I feel that the idea of ‘belonging’ to one country or another is as silly as forever waving a flag for the town where you were born ((Goulburn, NSW.)) But sometimes, sometimes, along comes an event that makes me truly proud to be Australian.

This morning I read in the Guardian of one such event. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to announce to you, direct from Australia … Space Beer.

That’s right friends, the 4 Pines Brewing Company in Sydney, Australia, is proposing to go where no brewery has gone before by concocting a malty beverage fit for astronauts.

Humanity loves beer. We always have and always will. The Space tourism market is emerging and will take off in less than 2-years, with thousands of screaming, happy space fans booked on suborbital flights. Guaranteed some of them will want the option to enjoy a brew while looking at our big Blue Globe. Why deny them the chance?

Why indeed?! To this end, Jaron Mitchell and Jason Held from 4 Pines have developed their Vostok 4 Pines Stout, which, like good scientists, they have tested under the conditions in which it will be consumed.

A microgravity expert from the non-profit organization Astronauts4Hire (A4H) provided the test subject. The tester, who also works part-time as an in-flight coach for ZERO-G, had over 300 parabolas in microgravity. The tester consumed nearly 1-litre of the beer during weightless portions of the flight, while recording basic biometric data to track effects of the experiment.

This obviously gives the ‘vomit comet’ a whole new level of potential.

Making a brew suitable for consumption in zero gravity is not all beer & skittles though. There are a few obstacles to be overcome:

Beer aficionados will notice two differences when drinking in space. First, the sense of taste is reduced due to mild swelling of the tongue. Second, drinking beers can be uncomfortable—bubbles do not rise to the top, because there is no “top” in space. Gasses and liquids don’t like to separate. So if you have to burp, you will burp both beer and bubbles.

Hmmm. Beer-bubble-burps. Not something you might like to inflict on that groovy zero-g chick you have your eye on.

Undaunted, 4 Pines has pushed on to address these problems by re-engineering one of their previous award-winning beers to create the new highly-flavoured space stout.

This is not a “novelty beer” with the same bland taste as your normal stuff. This is a craft beer. It is meant first for people who love beer so it MUST TASTE SUPERB on Earth.

Of course you don’t need wait for your Virgin Galactic flight to sample Vostok 4 Pines – it’s already available Earthside. But only for Australians. Sorry foreign folks: that’s one of the perks you get for living in a country of innovation! ((I may have to acquire a few bottles and report back…))

OMG! ACOWLYTES!! Mobile phones are KILLING OUR BEES! The FOOD CHAIN is going to COLLAPSE and we’re ALL GOING TO DIEEEEEEEE!!!!!!

What’s that you say? That’s not news? You already heard it ages ago? Ah, yes, Faithful Acowlytes, the hoary old idea that bee Colony Collapse Disorder is caused by radiation from the cellphone network has, of course, been reported, sensationalized and thoroughly found to be wanting years ago, but that doesn’t stop it from rising once more like a zombie hopped up on homeopathy to chew on the brains of the stupid. Twice today I came upon this story, once in my local newspaper and once via a Facebook posting. Both times, the ‘accredited’ source was this credulous gaping by Inhabitat reporter Lori Zimmer.:

More Scientific Studies Indicate That Cell Phones are Harming Bees

Scientists may have found the cause of the world’s sudden dwindling population of bees – and cell phones may be to blame. Research conducted in Lausanne, Switzerland has shown that the signal from cell phones not only confuses bees, but also may lead to their death

The original title of this article was It’s Official – Cell Phones are Killing Our Bees (as you can still see in the story’s URL) but the editors have evidently been kicked soundly in the bollocks and told that it’s not actually official at all, at least unless your interpretation of the word ‘official’ is ‘I pulled it out of my ass’.

The Daily Mail carried the story as Mobile Phones ARE to Blame for Killing off the World’s Bee Populations as is nicely preserved in the digital amber that is the remnant Google search link: ((Ah, don’t we LOVE teh intertubes, where stupidity and duplicitousness is forever preserved!))

Presumably someone gave them a good swift kick in the testicles as well, since they have now amended it to: Why a mobile phone ring may make bees buzz off: Insects infuriated by handset signals.

So, what does the ‘research conducted in Lausanne, Switzerland’ actually show? Well, you can read the full text of researcher Daniel Favre’s findings here, if you’re so inclined, but, as is my wont, I have done the legwork for you.

M. Favre and colleagues have conducted an experiment that suggests that bees don’t really like active cell phones being close to them. That is THE SUM TOTAL of what they have found. To synopsize, M. Favre showed that when mobile phones were place directly underneath bee hives (that is, within mere centimeters of the bees living environment), and the phones were dialled, the bees acted strangely. Now, while this is very interesting, it is hardly surprising. It has been demonstrated that honeybees are at least aware of magnetic fields ((Daniel Favre says in his report: ‘It is known that honeybees possess magnetite crystals in their fat body cells and that they present magnetic remanence. These magnetite structures are active parts of the magnetoreception system in honey- bees. Importantly, it has been shown that honeybees can be trained to respond to very small changes in the constant local geomagnetic field intensity.’)) so there is a likelihood that they are also affected to some extent by electromagnetic radiation. We already know that cell phones emit electromagnetic radiation ((including microwave heat to some extent)) (that’s why almost all cell phone manufacturers advise you not to hold them close to your ears for long periods of time), so an educated speculation says that having a strong EM field radiating at them from centimeters away may well annoy them at least a little. M. Favre’s experiment tends to confirm this. THAT’S ALL.

What Daniel Favre’s trials explicitly don’t show is that the cell phone network in general (including its broadcast towers) has any effect on bees, or that, even if it did, that such an effect has anything at all to do with bee Colony Collapse Disorder. Journalists just made that shit up because their brains go like this: ‘Bees… oooh… cell phones… ooooh… sciency stuff… ooooh… COLONY COLLAPSE DISORDER IS OFFICIAL!!!

I don’t know who teaches journalists to think like this, but it is plain that it must be part of their training because so many of them do it. Here is a very funny cartoon from Zach Weiner’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal that illustrates in pictures, a typical journalist-meets-science scenario: ((With thanks to Zach for generously allowing it to be linkable.))

But I digress. Back to the science…

Daniel Favre’s experiment is reasonably sound as far as I can tell – if the aim is to find out what bees do if you put a phone in their hive. His protocol seems reasonable, and his results appear to be methodically tabulated. Where he wanders a bit off track is his further hypothesizing, prompted, one has to speculate, by an already-formed agenda. In his own words (my emphasis):

“We should ask ourselves, whether the plethora of mobile phone masts also have an impact on the behaviour of the honeybees”

To which I reply: Sure, let’s ask away, and while we’re at it, let’s also ask whether they have an impact on kangaroos, pigeons and water buffalo. Questions don’t cost anything. But for the question to have any meaning at all in relation to the experiment at hand, M. Favre has first to show that what mobile phones do when they receive and transmit calls is in some way relevant to the kind of behaviour that cell phone transmitter masts exhibit. ((Speaking personally, I don’t have a clue. For all I know, cell phone towers work in an entirely different manner to the way my iPhone does when they send and receive signals. Daniel Favre cannot just make an assumption that the two things are equivalent. Furthermore, as a scientist it is irresponsible of him to allow that assumption to colour the experiment in question, especially when he is presenting it to untrained minds. If he intends to make a case for cell phone towers having an effect on bees, he must show that cell phone towers are having an effect on bees, not simply demonstrate that an affiliated piece of technology has an effect on bees. Science is like that – it has strict and unforgiving expectations of thoroughness.)) This being established, he would then need to demonstrate that the signals are actually strong enough to affect bees. ((It’s kind of curious that it seems that, given his expressed concerns, M. Favre has conducted his phone experiments in an environment that was not actually isolated from the cell phone towers (‘Beehives were located either in the beekeeping and apiary school of the city of Lausanne (altitude, 749 m) or in a second site used by beekeepers north of the city of Morges (altitude, 510 m; both locations in Switzerland’). If the nominal ground state for ‘normal’ bee activity is taken to be one in which cell towers are present, then, ipso facto, the cell towers are not having any significant effect…)) Having done that, his next step would be to show how such an effect is related to bee Colony Collapse Disorder, if at all.

Do you see how that works, Acowlytes? There is no reason at all to suspect that cell phone networks play any part in CCD. It is a speculation that was raised years ago as one of dozens of possibilities and has, for some reason, fired up the paranoid fantasies of the media and the brainless. For it to gain any ground at all, numerous pieces of a a puzzle must be locked together in such a way that they make sense. To put it another way, why cell phone radiation in particular? Why not rising C0² levels, increasing UV levels, increasing ambient noise, decreasing night-time sky visibility or any of a thousand other things?

Daniel Favre knows this. In his own words, again:

“Among other factors such as the varroa mite and pesticides, signals from mobile phones and masts could be contributing to the decline of honeybees around the world ; I am calling the international scientific community for more research in this field. ”

Once more, I’ve emphasized the points that you should attend. I think it’s pretty clear that M. Favre is in no way putting his conclusions forward as ‘official’. And what he doesn’t say, but should know if he’s doing research in this field, is, that among apiarists and scientists, pretty much every other speculated reason for CCD is considered more likely than cell phone signal radiation. In fact, it is beginning to appear that the number one contender for Colony Collapse Disorder is our love for convenience and the satisfaction of our cravings at a cheap price. In other words, the thing that is most likely killing off the bees is our creation of a vast honeybee monoculture. Hives are weakened by expedient farming practices and a lack of genetic diversity and so become highly susceptible to environmental stressors such as pathogens, pesticides and parasites. A recent USDA report says:

…based on an initial analysis of collected bee samples (CCD- and non-CCD affected), reports have noted the high number of viruses and other pathogens, pesticides, and parasites present in CCD colonies, and lower levels in non-CCD colonies. This work suggests that a combination of environmental stressors may set off a cascade of events and contribute to a colony where weakened worker bees are more susceptible to pests and pathogens.

So, while we may well be responsible for the collapse of the honeybee population (a population that we made unnaturally big in the first place) it’s not because we’re making phone calls. It’s just because we want something sweet and cheap for our toast at breakfast.

That, however, does not make for a much of a paranoia-inducing headline for the idiotic news media. And selling papers, is, after all, MUCH more important than giving people the facts.

No new cracks. Oopsy. Another miss for the fruitloops.

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Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

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Ah, you gotta love the combination of the internet and the tendency for people in large numbers to suddenly lose all capacity for coherent thought. The Guardian reports today that, probably due at least in part to a Facebook group called 11 Maggio Terremoto a Roma, thousands of people in Rome believe that the city is destined to be destroyed by an earthquake tomorrow, May 11.

And it is, supposedly, all because of the predictions of a self-styled ‘geophysicist’ by the name of Raffaele Bendandi.

It will not surprise you to learn that Bendandi, who died in 1979, was not any kind of proper scientist. Despite being awarded a knighthood by Mussolini, he had no formal scientific training and none of his research was ever supported by independent corroboration. The many ‘theories’ that he advanced in his lifetime were not inhibited by actual factual content. Among other things, Bendandi advanced an hypothesis for the flooding of Atlantis and believed that he had discovered a planet in an orbit between the sun and Mercury.

But here’s the best part – the rising panic in Rome appears to be the result of some idiot somewhere getting his wires crossed. Bendandi didn’t actually ever predict an earthquake for May 11, 2011. According to Paola Lagorio, the president of an organization who looks after Bendandi’s legacy, there is no such indication in any of the the writings attributed to him. Someone just pulled that right out of their ass (Paola Lagorio didn’t say that, you understand, but I bet she was thinking it).

But hey – Rome is the where the Pope lives, right? Why don’t the people who think there’s going to be an earthquake just pray to God that it won’t happen? ((I’m betting that the Venn diagram of People Who Are Very Religious in Rome and People Who are Very Gullible in Rome has a pretty big area of intersection…)) Oh, yeah, right. I guess they will, and that’s why it won’t happen. Silly me.

Be sure to tune in tomorrow Faithful Acowlytes, in order that we might comprehensively ridicule all those Romans who took their kids out of school and fled to the countryside. You know you want to.

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Thanks once more to Atlas for bringing this to the attention of the Cow.

I really love a good mystery! In my last post Desperate? I talked about the apparent spamming of my (and others’) blog comments by Microsoft. Cow reader Damned Skeptic took me to task about this conclusion, and I defended my logic in the Comments of that post.

In a nutshell, what I said was that given that 99.9% of all the comment spam I get is about link hoarding, what evidence is there that the Bing (and also Yahoo) links were not cut from the same cloth? To me it looks like someone is trying to get some link action happening for those sites.

Except…

This morning I was inundated with a whole lot of spam such as this one from ‘Datherine’:

Here’s where Datherine is linking:

Now, is that not totally bizarre? Firstly, I will acquiesce: it’s fairly conclusive evidence that my first hypothesis was incorrect. I doubt that ALL the search engines are attempting to up their ranking like this. That would just be ridiculous. But what IS going on, then?

One thing that I can tell you is that Akismet (my spam filter) is on top of this – look at the stuff that was scooped up overnight:

There were dozens like this. These, of course, are all generated by bots and are easy to screen, unlike the spumans I mentioned yesterday. But look at those links! Way to add some pile carpet to the noise floor. Why would anyone want to generate lots of links to just any search engine? What are we seeing here? Are the big search engines involved in some kind of clandestine link deluge war? Is there any relevance in the fact that all the attempted links from yesterday and the day before were exclusively Bing and Yahoo, and this morning, for the first time, it’s Google? Wow.

Another thing I can tell you is that this spam was targeting my most visited pages, such as the FAQ, the Rasputin contests and some of my Peter Popoff posts. There is definitely some method behind this madness…

For most of you, Tetherd Cow is an unfolding story of antics in Cow World that plays out on a fairly linear daily or weekly basis. You know how it goes – I post a story, you comment, we have a some fun repartee and then we move on. Very civilized. But because I have an expansive overview of The Cow (a Cowish ‘omnipotence’ as it were) the Cowiverse looks somewhat different to me. I see a whole lot of stuff to which you are not privvy. There is, for example, activity that occurs way back in time, in posts that have had their moment in the sun and are never visited again except by the occasional lost web traveller. Or by spammers. Spammers discovered long ago that the vast hinterland of forgotten blog comments provides another fertile venue for their pathetic attempts to hawk various car insurance/viagra/cheap mortgage/locksmith ((Yes. A New York locksmith and his pals were, apparently, touring the blogosphere and leaving comments in an attempt to boost their linkability. Rather sad, really.)) schemes. Because visiting millions of blogs and posting comments is (quite obviously) a tedious and time consuming task, the spammers have mostly relegated this drudgework to bots. Sometimes very clever bots, but bots all the same. Bots are mostly pretty easy to defeat, and these days most bot comments get swept up by blog spam utilities and never see the light of day. ((My spam tools automatically shift such comments into the spam graveyard without me even being aware of them. On average, TCA gets about forty of these a day.))

Recently, though, a new spamming ruse appears to be on the rise. This technique requires real people to spend time browsing around blogs and posting comments and linking their names to some crap or other. ((The technical reason they do this is to increase the number of legitimate websites ‘linking’ to their garbage product. This, in turn, increases their search ranking in various engines. Search engines find it easy to defeat standard spambot link farming, but this kind of ‘human’ bot requires (so far) human brains to intercept. And not only that, human brains that understand the context of their own blogs.)) Here’s one that I got yesterday:

This was a comment left on my post Ooze which you may remember concerned the curious fungus that once appeared in my backyard. On the face of it, ‘Jeff’ appears to be taking an interest in the post and leaving a pertinent comment – he is obviously not a bot.

What the spammers don’t appear to understand, though, is that when a commenter leaves his or her mark on TCA comments, I can tell all kinds of things about them other than just their email address and their name. I know, for instance, that while Jeff Morgan is (most likely) a real person, with a real Bigpond email address, it is not the real Jeff Morgan who has visited my blog. Someone has stolen his name and email address for the purposes of making their spam look legitimate. The clue to Fake Jeff’s real agenda is written clear in two places – one is in his IP address which comes out of Pakistan, and the other is in ‘his’ website which is easily recognizable ((By a person, at least.)) as a ‘front-door’ for a spam operation linking off to various kinds of crummy products. ((Typically, these ‘front’-door’ sites are set up as link farms into products that the spammer has been paid to ‘advertise’. They are disposable sites that will be abandoned as soon as they are busted, only to spring up somewhere else in a matter of minutes. The spammers probably have thousands of them on the shelf, ready to go.))

As is usual in these cases, I leave the comment intact and ‘repair’ the weblink to take it somewhere a little more useful. ((I usually redirect it to the JREF, because I think if there’s one thing we could do with a whole heap more of in this world, it’s some rational thinking. Can’t ever have too many links to the JREF. Did I mention the JREF?)) This morning though, I got a rather intriguing one of these ‘comments’ from ‘Mircea’:

This one appeared in my post We’re All DOOMED! as a reply to Cissy Strutt. Unlike Jeff’s comment, it only half makes sense, but I have had far more incomprehensible legitimate comments in my time. ‘Mircea’ evidently thinks that by embedding it in the flow of commenting (he/she would have to have physically clicked the ‘Reply’ button) that it would go unnoticed. ((And I guess on a lot of blogs maybe it would have.)) But I don’t see comments the same way as commenters do, and for me it’s a trivial exercise to spot it as spam. Here’s part of what I see:

Did you see the very interesting thing here, Cowpokes? ‘Mircea’ appears to be spamming for Microsoft. Oh, I’m sure that Microsoft would deny having anything to do with such a practice. They would, most likely, claim that anyone can type any URL in the web field and that they can’t be held responsible for random punters being fans of their search engine. But It is easy for me to see that ‘Mircea’ is not a legitimate entity: she/he has an IP in Quebec and an ISP in Germany – a very curious and probably impossible combination. Additionally, this is not the only one of these I’ve had in recent times.

There is a bit of discussion going on about this elsewhere, and one suggestion has been that the Bing URL is being truncated in some way and that Bing (and Yahoo as it turns out) ((I’ve also had several linked off to Yahoo.)) are just victims of a software snafu. But I want to point out that the way these blog commenting systems work does not support that conclusion – if people are physically reading the posts and entering comments, they are also physically entering the URLs they have been given to promote. To put it in clear terms, ‘Mircea’ is a fraudulent identity who has visited an historically distant Tetherd Cow Ahead post with the sole intention of leaving a link to Bing.