re: #364 Floral Giraffe

*smooch*
Hi Sir!
You’re seeming feisty tonight!
Hope all is well.
another *smooch* for you.
Because I can!
All is well here.

Hey hey! I am fine. I am just not usually around at the birth of a cold fusion like burst of pseudo-scientific flatulence from people who should be respectable.

There are 5 warning signs.

1. It sounds implausible - not for the reason that it is weird, but rather that it does not make any sense at all that there could be a mechanism to do what is claimed. Usually it is an energy conservation argument.

In the case of cold fusion, the issue was that there was no way to overcome the coulomb barrier.

In this case, I simply don’t see how a wind mill, some hundreds of yards away on a windy day could make enough of any sort of sound that it could be easily detected (without a parabolic mic or such) let alone interact detectably with any structure in the human body. How exactly would incredibly faint and distant sounds cause learning disabilities?

This is an automatic red flag

2. There is no mechanism for the effect given. There is merely a claim that something happens. In of itself it is not necessarily bad, but usually people have some idea of how they think something works. This too is a red flag.

3. The data is always in the noise. There is never a clear statistical trend or a signal clearly above noise. In most medical claims, it is a matter of anecdotal evidence and refusal to consider confounding factors. In this case, we have the country doctor drawing inferences from a few of her patients - so she claims. This is really a giant red flag.

4. The work goes to the media before it gets peer reviewed. This is always, always a bad sign. If you have made the most earth shattering discovery ever, your first impulse is to publish in the best journal you can straight away. You want the scientific credit. If you want publicity first, and no one asking questions, then you go to the press. This is what happened with Cold Fusion. This is a super duper red flag.

5. There is a folksy, I am selling you something tone to the writing.

In this case, this whole lavender font, “I am a sweet country girl who loves kids and nature and my hubby’s burnt toast” (she actually said that) smacks of hucksterism. This is another colossal red flag.