by Ben Goldacre
For the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway, the battle between childish fantasies and real life is even denser. It was conceived by two wealthy men, each obsessed with miniature railways, because they wanted their own to play with. Both were racing drivers, and one was a real-life Count. In the war it was used for serious freight work, while the world’s only miniature armoured train trundled up and down the track, monitoring the coast for invasion by the Germans. For the soldiers stationed here, amidst all the terror and uncertainty of war, it must have seemed like a very peculiar dream.
I’ve often fantasised about the same thing myself – combining grim reality and a very big train set – by moving to Dungeness. I could handle the travel time, five days a week, if the commute made adult life seem like a huge, silly game: through the fog, past the nuclear power station, waiting at a miniature station for my tiny train, then up to the mainline and on to meetings. All the while I’d know that my home, come nightfall, was a converted railway carriage, on a pile of shingle, by a nuclear power station, at the end of Toytown. Welcome to this very peculiar, working paradise.
If you like nerdy day trips, you should visit www.nerdydaytrips.com, a crowd-sourced website I built with friends, filled with thousands of weird days out from all over the world (although it’s recently been infested with normal days out too, after someone posted it on a museum curators’ mailing list). It’s great for planning a comprehensive nerd itinerary into any journey. For example, when you visit Dungeness for the RH&D Railway, it is compulsory to grow a WWII moustache and stop in at the sound mirrors, just one mile away. As you can see, when I did this, I found it all extremely exciting.
How I Stalked My Girlfriend1
Guardian, 1 February 2006
For the past week I’ve been tracking my girlfriend through her mobile phone. I can see exactly where she is, at any time of day or night, within 150 yards, as long as her phone is on. It’s been very interesting to find out about her day. Now I’m going to tell you how I did it.
But first: my girlfriend is a journalist, I had her permission (‘In principle …’), and this was all in the name of science. You have nothing to worry about, at least not from me.
First I had to get hold of her phone. This wasn’t difficult. We live together and she has no reason not to trust me, so she often leaves it lying around. I needed it for five minutes, to register it on a website I’d been told about. It looks as if this service is mainly for tracking stock and staff movements: I’ve shown the Guardian staff that it works, but they won’t let me tell you the name of the site (I agree). I ticked the website’s terms and conditions without reading them, put in my debit card details, and bought twenty-five GSM credits for £5 plus VAT.
My girlfriend’s phone vibrated with a new text message: ‘Ben Goldacre has requested to add you to their Buddy List! To accept, simply reply to this message with “LOCATE”.’ I sent the reply. The phone vibrated again. A second text arrived: ‘WARNING: [This service] allows other people to know where you are. For your own safety make sure that you know who is locating you.’ I deleted both these text messages, and put the phone back in my girlfriend’s bag.
On the website, I see the familiar number in my list of ‘GSM devices’, and click ‘Locate’. A map appears of the area where we live, with a person-shaped blob in the middle, roughly a hundred yards from our home. The phone doesn’t make a sound. It gives no sign of what I’m doing.
I can’t quite believe my eyes. I knew the police could do this, and phone companies, but not any creepy boyfriend with five minutes’ access. There is nothing on my partner’s phone that could possibly let her know that I’m tracking her location. I set the website to record her location at regular intervals, and plot her path on the map, so I can view it at my leisure. Even with her permission, it felt very wrong.
By the time she got home, I was over-excited, and the secret lasted less than a minute. To my disappointment, she wasn’t freaked out. But then, I already knew that she hadn’t gone to her ex’s flat, and she’d only really been at work all day, apart from one trip to the bank. It felt strangely protective, looking down on her, following her silently. If there’s anyone who might want to track you, and they’ve had access to your phone, call your phone company, create havoc, and make them find out if there’s a trace on your phone.
EARLY SNARKS
Staying Beautiful Is Easy to Do
Guardian, 1 May 2003
It’s been a great week for Bad Science spotters. Bob Conklin writes in about Seasilver nutrient potion. Kirlian photography of your aura will demonstrate an ‘increase in energy’ after taking it, and just one capful will deliver ‘EVERY [sic] vitamin, macro mineral, trace mineral, amino acid, enzyme, and bio-element known to man’ straight to your system. As Bob says: ‘I’m not sure I want every enzyme and bio-element known to man in my mouth.’
Dr Victoria Kaziewicz sends us even more preposterous pseudo-science: ‘In a book called How to be Beautiful, by Kathleen Baird Murray, you can read that beauty products containing natural ingredients are preferable because naturally occurring substances are irregularly shaped like the substances making up your own body, while manufactured chemicals are perfect spheres.’
Dr Cicely Marston writes about an easier way to stay beautiful. A team from Harvard School of Public Health took six years to find that watching television for an extra two hours a day increased the rate of obesity by 25 per cent in 50,000 women. Magnificently obvious – but possibly less obvious is why they were only looking at women.
Picky Bad Science Spotter of the Week Award goes to Jennifer Leech, who has been bothered for decades by an issue in Lord of the Flies. ‘In the book it says that Piggy has myopia. So,’ she continues, ‘how can the children marooned on that island have used his glasses to start a fire?’
There’s hope on the horizon for the so-called Sars epidemic (as opposed to malaria, which kills a million people a year, and tuberculosis, which kills three million). Richard Spacek sent us a full-page ad from Canada’s Saturday National Post from the Dr Rath Health Foundation: ‘It is a scientific fact that all viruses that have been scientifically investigated can be blocked by specific natural essential nutrients.’ The fact that life-saving information ‘is being withheld from the people of the world is irresponsible and must be stopped immediately’. Never let it be said that I am part of any global conspiracy to suppress this vital information.
And finally, thank God that in this cynical world, in Wales, Dewi ap Ifan is still managing to feel optimistic: ‘Aren’t we all lucky that Sars has arisen in China? Traditional Chinese medicine, herbalism and acupuncture will have it under holistic control in no time.’
Keep the Bad Science coming: you are not alone.
Because You’re Worth It
Guardian, 27 November 2003
Reader Helen Porter writes in to tell me about the Ion-Conditioning Hairdryer, which uses ‘Patented Trionic Action’ to ‘micronize’ water molecules and, impressively for a hairdryer, magically hydrate your hair. The Journal of Trionic Physics – in case you thought the hairdryer people made those words up themselves – was actually the name of a Jefferson Airplane fanzine. But I digress: the manufacturer, Bio-Ionic, is also the inventor of Ionic Hair Retexturising (IHR). And this is not just a new way to straighten your hair, it’s a whole new branch of physics.
Colour Nation, hairdressers to the stars in Soho, London, offers Bio-Ionic’s IHR. Its public-relations material explains how it works: ‘Positive ions have lost an electron, and are considered unhealthy,’ whereas negative ions ‘have gained an electron, and greatly assist in a body’s mood, energy level, and overall health’. When these benevolent negative ions encounter water, ‘the water molecules are broken down to a fraction of their previous size … diminutive enough to penetrate through the cuticle, and eventually into the core of each hair’.
I might be wrong, but surely shrinking water molecules must cost more than the £230 Colour Nation charges for IHR? The only
other groups that have managed to create that kind of superdense quark-gluon plasma used a relativistic heavy ion collider, and if Colour Nation has got one of those at the back of the salon, then I’m glad I don’t live in the flat upstairs. Although a Mirror reporter who had the compressed molecule treatment did say her hair ‘itched and smelled of chemicals’ afterwards. Maybe there’s something more potent than negative ions in there after all.
Meanwhile, a tip from a friend – who, may I just point out, doused for the sex of her baby. She was delighted, at her antenatal yoga class, after being told how immunisations would kill her baby, to be handed Homeopathy News. The pamphlet mentions a study from the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital in which 80 per cent of twenty-five children reported an improvement in their asthma after homeopathy. Which sounds impressive. But there was no placebo control group, and it doesn’t seem to have actually been published anywhere (or not anywhere peer-reviewed). Which doesn’t mean it’s not true. Just remember that in a recent review of all the evidence on homeopathy – I’ll say it again – it was shown, overall, to be no more effective than a placebo …
More Than Water?
Guardian, 22 January 2004
What is it with pseudo scientists and water? After last week’s ‘clustered water’, Caroline Stacey in the Independent’s Food and Drink section was getting excited about Oxygizer water. ‘Oxygizer doesn’t just slake a thirst, it provides the body with extra oxygen too. A litre contains 150mg of oxygen, around twenty-five times more than what’s in a litre of tap water.’ Handy. ‘This apparently helps remove toxins and ensures a stronger immune system, as well as assisting the respiratory system, so you recover better from exercise … cleverly they’ve added something to water that’s not an additive.’
In the spirit of Victorian gentleman scientist self-experimenters, I decided to put Oxygizer to the test. Back in the sixties, a scientist in New York managed to get mice breathing underwater, in a saline solution at six times normal atmospheric pressure, just like in that movie The Abyss – it takes a lifetime of popular-science books to collect this kind of trivia. Unfortunately, the mice died after eighteen hours.
So instead, I decided to drink some Oxygizer after a three-mile run. I can take in about 100ml of oxygen with every breath, or 150mg, and like most humans I only absorb about 30mg of that. That’s 300mg a minute, but after serious exercise it goes up to about 3,000mg a minute. To help myself recover significantly faster after my run, I figured I’d need an extra 20 per cent of oxygen, or 600mg a minute. That meant drinking forty litres of Oxygizer over ten minutes, getting the stuff into me at a rate of one litre every fifteen seconds. This cost £120, and almost doubled my body weight, but it’s all in the name of science. Fairly soon my circulatory system was so overloaded that pints of frothy sputum were spewing up at the back of my throat; then my abdomen burst open and covered my laptop in guts.
This was inconvenient. But with my dying keystrokes, just in case any Oxygizer customer ever looks up Oxygizer to buy some Oxygizer, I’m using the word Oxygizer as much as Oxygizer, because articles on the Guardian website come up right at the top of the first page on Google keyword search.
‘Nanniebots’ to Catch Paedophiles
Guardian, 25 March 2004
As I sit here, quietly shedding the weight off my fat arse in my Dr Norbert Wurgler caffeine-impregnated SlimFit tights, I find myself bitterly regretting the title of the column. Here’s one I’m not sure of. Artificial intelligence, in the form of ‘Nanniebots’, is being used to catch paedophiles. Nanniebots are AI programs which hang out in internet chatrooms, allegedly spotting the signs of grooming. They have done ‘such a good job of passing themselves off as young people that they have proved indistinguishable from them’, according to New Scientist. So that’s the Turing test – where a computer program is indistinguishable from a real person – passed; and who’d have thought it, in a program written by a lone IT consultant from Wolverhampton with no AI background. So I call him.
Here’s the problem. Reading New Scientist’s chat with Nanniebot, the excellent www.ntk.net/ (Private Eye for geeks) points out that Nanniebot ‘seems to be able to make logical deductions, parse colloquial English, correctly choose the correct moment to scan a database of UK national holidays, comment on the relative qualities of the Robocop series, and divine the nature of pancakes and pancake day’. Jabberwock, the winner of last year’s Loebner Prize for the Turing test, is rubbish in comparison (you can talk to it online and see for yourself). But Jim Wightman, the Nanniebot inventor – whose site claims they’ve passed the Turing test – isn’t entering the Loebner Prize this year. Maybe next year … it’s too buggy. But it’s live on the internet already? Can I test it? Sure. But I want to see with my own eyes that there’s not a real human being somewhere tapping out the answers, I explain. Jim offers network-monitoring software on my computer, to prove it’s connected to the one server. But what about that server? I want to see it working on its own, without a human. Can I come round to Jim’s place? He chuckles … Jim doesn’t keep the conversation datasets on site in Wolverhampton. ‘I know it sounds a bit Mission Impossible, but …’ He’s worried they might get stolen. They’re in a secure facility ‘with an iron lid under a mountain’. He has no copies. It’s eighteen terabytes of data, he says. There are copies in the hosting facilities, and one in London. I offer to go there. ‘There might be security issues with them letting us in,’ he says. So here it is. I’m going if I can. I’d love to see it work. If there is an AI academic who wants to come, email me: it could be the biggest ever breakthrough in AI. Or it could be a lot of fun.
Nanniebots and Neverland
Guardian, 1 April 2004
Where were we? Everyone was questioning the authenticity of Jim Wightman’s paedophile-entrapping artificial-intelligence chat program Nanniebot, since it was more than ten years ahead of all other artificial-intelligence technology, and no one is allowed to see it in the flesh. But Jim – from the unfortunately named Neverland Systems – had personally guaranteed me a demonstration. Now he has changed his mind, although he is still claiming to have thousands of Nanniebots in action on the web. I’m not going to waste your time with any analysis of his ‘chat transcripts’, since no one can be sure they were generated by his program.
Of course, the BBC, ITV and New Scientist couldn’t possibly have known that Jim was caught out making false claims about writing software a year ago, on the Holocaust denial newsgroups he likes to frequent. He now admits to making these false claims, but said they were made in jest. He also got noticed in the Tivo hacking discussion boards, claiming to have modified the device to stream shows over a network, which the other experts felt was impossible. Jim provided no evidence to make them think otherwise, and disappeared. He still claims to have it working.
People are perfectly entitled to spend time on Holocaust denial chatboards if they really want to. Jim admits posting as ‘Death’s Head’, the same name as the SS murder and torture units. Death’s Head has made postings containing violent and graphic threats to rape, assault and kill, often with a firearm, in the context of chatboard discussions about the Holocaust.
In an online discussion after similar violent threats were mentioned, a posting did state that ‘me = Jim Wightman = Death’s Head = Totenkopf … all you needed to do was ask’. Jim denied to me that he made the postings, and says they were faked. Maybe they were, but his previous postings give reason to question his work. So far, he’s made a grand claim with no good evidence: business as usual for Bad Science.
Now he’s collecting donations and volunteers for chatnannies.com, a service where adults will enter children’s chatrooms to monitor them for paedophile activity. He will now be greatly assisted in this venture by the fact that he can cite on his website the uncritical reports on his work by New Scientist and the BBC.
Artificial Intransigence
Guardian, 24 June 2004
You may remember Jim Wightman. He claimed to have written
a piece of chat software that could pass itself off as a real child in a chatroom, and identify internet paedophiles by their behaviour. To say this was thought highly dubious is an understatement: the software, if it existed, would have been ten years ahead of everything written by huge teams of AI academics; he offered to let us see the software working, and then refused; and the NSPCC and Barnardo’s distanced themselves from his ideas about monitoring children’s activities, partly because he has no child-protection background. Embarrassingly, New Scientist accepted his claims uncritically, and the BBC and others followed suit, although New Scientist did, after two pieces here, remove its glowing article about him from its website.
Now they’re back with Wightman. Here’s what happened. New Scientist visited Jim at home with two AI academics to chat with the program. In previous ‘test conversations’ over the web – where experimenters couldn’t tell if the computer was working alone – the program gave highly sophisticated answers, albeit after a rather long delay (almost as if someone was typing them). This time, running on a machine in the room, with Jim present, it instantly gave rubbish computer-generated responses, that were nothing like those in the previous transcripts. In fact, it gave the very same answers that ‘Alice’ – an old and not very sophisticated AI program written by somebody else, not Wightman – gave in subsequent tests. Then Wightman offered to show them the code. But suddenly, and inexplicably, the power to Jim’s whole house went off. The test was over.