Generally I try to avoid writing about politically-charged topics because the facts are difficult to navigate. Every potential source article may or may not have an agenda skewing its figures. My own goal for today is to do my part to help with some education about the food we shove in our collective faces, but I’m having to tread carefully.

There are a lot of organizations/people offering calculations of the “true” cost of a hamburger. I’ve found number ranging from $50 to $200, or just a non-quantified list of side-effects from the beef industry. In an effort to be conservative with my facts, I’ll just say that your 99 cent hamburger costs more than 99 cents.

One third of the grain crops in the world (this being the very same world with a shortage of good farming land) goes to feeding livestock. It takes about 12 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef.

Grazing land for cattle is the leading motivation for cutting down forests (most notably the rainforests of Brazil and India). I don’t like the hype around “global warming”, but this is a concern. Cows produce more greenhouse gas than our automobiles, while simultaneously needing to remove our leafy green air filtering friends from the face of the earth.

Livestock are injected with 50 percent of the antibiotics used in the world. To me, the troubling part is that these are largely preventative measures. Which means, for the most part, these antibiotics are unnecessary. What it does is give the bacteria the chance to interact and evolve to become immune to these antibiotics requiring new, stronger antibiotics. (the microbial arms race)

The last consideration I’m going to mention is water use. Not only the amount of water running through the livestock production system but the gross amount of pollutants that are flushed out the other end. Taking 8 percent of global water use, and leaving behind a third of all nitrogen and phosphorous pollutants.

Unfortunately, all this back-end stuff is not showing up in that 99 cent hamburger price tag. Somebody else, and most often somebody far away from you, is footing the bill.

Here in Canada we were the first to put strong health facts on cigarette packages, showing pictures of lung cancer and other negative considerations of the product within. I’m curious what would happen if the same thing would be required on the hamburger box.

• Source: Livestock impacts on the environment – UN Food & Agriculture

I’m a pretty steady optimist, usually assuming things will work out, though last week I had a bout of pessimism. (I think I’m over that now) So the traditional optimist/pessimist dilemma is this: “Is the glass half full or half empty?” Despite being on the positive side of the game, I do have to say that the odds are in favour of it being half empty.

If you remember last week I addressed the philosophical question “If a tree falls in the woods does it make a sound?” and pretty much drained out every ounce of philosophy in favour of the physical facts. I’m about to put this glass of water on the very same cold steel examination table.

I start with a pretty simple statement. The status of the water level in the glass depends on the direction of change. If a glass is in the process of being filled with water, the mid-point would then be half-full on the way to being fully full. On the other hand, if the water was emptying it would reach the half-empty point. So in the simplest form the answer depends on whether the water is being poured, or being drank.

But what happens if you come into a room with a glass having it’s water line mid-way with no knowledge of it’s past status. What then? Elementary, my dear Watson… you’d have to look for clues. Lip marks would suggest drinking. Water clinging to the inside wall would suggest recent pouring. Both would confirm half-empty. If lacking those clues, but the water is cold, you might assume it was recently poured. Half-full.

So let’s say the glass was placed by a ninja. No identifying marks, no spills, and it’s room temperature. Well there is one last thing that tips the odds definitely in favour of half-empty, so long as you don’t mind being the kind of person who argues such technicalities. When in doubt, the glass is half-empty because at any given moment the water is evaporating and the glass is making molecular baby steps towards being empty again.

Sure you can never be sure, but that’s science. You look at the data, make careful observations, and then take an educated guess at how to best describe what you see.

• Source: I’m not sure anybody other than me would want to take credit for this. This is so silly I really should have saved it for casual Friday.

There is a lot of noise these days about the imminent end of earth coming up in 2012. This latest doomsday prediction is based on an ancient Mayan calendar, showing the end of all creation on December 21, 2012. Before you think you’ve lucked out not having to buy christmas presents, let’s examine the facts.

The Maya was an ancient culture living in the neighbourhood of modern day Mexico. During their golden age of 250 AD to 900 AD, they were pretty much the most advanced civilization on earth. They excelled in mathematics and astronomy and they loved calculating big numbers. This whole end-of-life-as-we-know-it story is based on the Mayan Long Count Calendar.

Think of it like an odometer in your car where the first number reaches 9, then nudges the next number up one, and starts counting from zero again… except this Long Count Calendar wasn’t so neat and tidy as that. Like our modern calendar, the basic unit was a day, which they called a kin.

1 uinal (month) was 20 kin long. A tun (year) was 18 uinals, or 360 kin. Beyond that they also had katun, which was 20 tun, and baktun being 20 katun.

So their very first day, with the odometer just starting, would look like 0.0.0.0.0. Eighteen more sleeps and it would look like 0.0.0.0.19. Since a uinal was 20 kin, the next day would show 0.0.0.1.0, so it would bump the month column up one, and start counting the days over again… just like in your car.

To throw a more confusing wrench in the works, they would count kin from 0 to 19, and uinal were counted from 0 to 17 before resetting. The baktun, the longest unit on the calendar, are counted from 1 to only 13. So really, technically, 0.0.0.0.0 should be displayed as 13.0.0.0.0. (kind of like how we go from December 31st to January 1st with no zero in between)

Now, this whole count goes along for 1,872,000 days until it once again reaches it’s capacity and ticks over from 12.19.19.17.19 to the clean slate of 13.0.0.0.0 and starts over again. Converting this long count calendar into our modern Gregorian calendar places that roll-over date on the now famous December 21, 2012, causing numerologists to let out a squeal of joy. (12/21/12 is just the sort of coincidence that starts religions)

So that’s what the Mayan “doomsday prediction” is. The end of a calendar. My wall calendar goes to the end of next January, but I’m not panicking. I’ll buy another calendar. My grandfather’s favourite truck had it’s odometer start over multiple times (they didn’t have as many digits back then) and it kept on running fine. It’s just numbers arbitrarily assigned to days. Heck, they aren’t even certain when the 13.0.0.0.0 count really started according to our modern date system, so the 12/21/12 date is just the best guess.

We’ve survived plenty of doomsday predictions without a scratch, and this is just yet another one that will bring many manipulative people momentary fame and a few extra dollars. You can relax knowing that the end of the world will most likely come about in a completely random cosmic event that, while kind of a big deal to us, will be insignificant in the scope of the universe.

• Source: http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/calendar-mayan.html

This post is part of “Blog Action Day“, wherein over 7000 blogs will be posting on the topic of climate change. The goal is to raise awareness of the issues and concerns of the global environment. I have a hunch that my post is not quite what they had in mind.

I’ll come right out and say it: I am not at all worried about global warming. I don’t believe it’s a crisis, or even a concern. The current state of fear and sense of impending doom has been nurtured by the media, who are just trying to sell newspapers. I don’t deny that the global temperatures are rising, but it’s not a problem. Here’s some hype-free facts about climate change…

The leading cause of global warming is the sun. The giver of all life. Obviously, it has the biggest impact on everything here on earth. Like most humongous balls of burning gas, it’s not a static thing. It moves, it changes. A scientific paper form March 2008 determined that 62% of temperature change has been the result of the sun, caused by short-term fluctuations and long-term solar cycles.

The earth also has it’s cycles. In the time of the dinosaurs, carbon dioxide levels were 2 to 4 times higher than they are now, but things have cooled off a few times since then. About 125,000 years ago, at the peak before the most recent ice age, global temperatures were much higher, and the sea level was 20 feet above current levels. Still, things froze up yet again.

We only really started keeping track of temperatures around 1850. Studies of Greenland ice cores, which offer a timeline of weather going back a few millenia, indicate that the northern hemisphere circa mid 1800s was the coldest period in about 8,000 years. So the average temperatures would have nowhere to go but up. The point being, rising temperatures are not a crisis. We’re just on a natural upswing.

In 2007 all the world heard reports about the University of Illinois study revealing that Arctic ice was at it’s lowest levels in 30 years. Nobody seemed to mention the bit in the same study that mentioned the Antarctic ice down south was at record highs.

I don’t understand why people love doom and gloom news stories so much, but I do hope I’ve encouraged you to take a peek beyond the hype. There are some serious environmental concerns we should be dealing with rather than fretting about the multi-millennial ebb and flow of climate cycles.

• Source: http://www.climatechangefacts.info/ (This is a massive resource of scientific research presented plainly. You don’t have to take my word for it.)

This is part the fourth of “deception week”. This time we don the white coats and head into the lab to show that science is not immune to deception. (well… good science is)

In 1979 half a million dollars was donated to the Washington University (in St. Louis) to create the McDonnal Laboratory for Psychical Research. That’s “psychical” as in the study of psychics. No, not physics. I’m talking palm-reading, crystal-gazing, spoon-bending, I-can-see-the-future psychics.

This new lab had 300 self-claimed psychics apply to be studied, and they whittled that down to just two. For the next three years, these two psychic subjects were given a multitude of tests, and the observing scientists repeatedly had their socks knocked off with amazing displays of paranormal ability. They were really excited about the discoveries they were making but, alas, it was all fake. The scientists had been fooled.

James (the Amazing) Randi, the dedicated skeptic-activist, heard about the grant money and cooked up a plan. Parapsychologists (that’s what psychic-studying people call themselves) had always complained that they’ve never had sufficient funding to find the results they knew existed, so Randi saw this new lab as a way to prove that money was not the issue. The two “psychics” that were picked for the study were both young magicians, trained by Randi himself.

To be fair, Randi warned the lab with a letter to the director of the lab (previously a professor of physics at the university) explaining certain protocols and attention to detail when arranging the experiments to prevent any deception on the part of the test subjects. The advice was dismissed, and the resulting sloppy experiments allowed much abuse by the fake psychics. Here’s just a few of the psychic feats that were performed under so-called strict laboratory conditions:

• spoons and keys were bent
• sealed messages were read
• drawings were duplicated with mind-reading
• causing fuses to blow
• digital watches were “affected”

In 1981, after running experiments for three years, the Psychical Research Lab began to share their results within the parapsychology field, and the more critical observers weren’t too impressed. At that time Randi and the two fake psychics admitted to the scam, which they had dubbed “Project Alpha”.

The test subjects, Michael Edwards and Steve Shaw (aka: Banachek), were both talented magicians and all of the above was well within their knowledge of conjuring tricks. Had a trained magician been a part of the test committee (as Randi had originally suggested) none of their bold techniques would have been accepted. So what should we learn from this?

Smart people can be deceived by simple things. If you believe something first, it’s easy to find supporting evidence. And most importantly, all psychics are fake.

• Source: http://www.banachek.org/nonflash/project_alpha.htm

I’m declaring “casual Friday” here at LSNED today, for this post is not really a fact. It is, however, rather interesting (to me) and most importantly you just might learn something, which fulfills my requirements.

For the last couple days I’ve been working at an internet technology trade show booth, giving demonstrations and educating people about a new website. In this booth there are seven accessible computers and laptops with live internet connections. During the day the whole event is flooded with junior and senior high school students and at any given time there were multiple computers being used to check in with Facebook. Obviously, this was not at all in line with the purpose of the booth, so for day two I decided to put a stop to this.

On each laptop, I placed a sticky note that read “FACT: using Facebook may cause lung cancer”. I assumed everybody would read it, giggle, and I could interject with a polite request not to use the computers for that. And so it went for a while. As one group of pre-teen girls had just loaded up Facebook, I stepped up and announced my new fact, tapping on the posted note. One girl turned to me, having gone pale, “Really?!?”

“Yes,” I exclaimed matter-of-factly, and appreciating any variation in a monotonous day, I ran with it. “I can show you the research.” I searched the term “Facebook Lung Cancer” and started reading the resulting page titles in an extremely selective and biased fashion, picking and choosing from the words displayed. “Facebook allied with lung cancer, Lung cancer partnership with Facebook, Causes on facebook”, I stated aloud. (All these words were taken from the pages of cancer related charities, organizations, and support groups)

I went on without flinching, expecting, waiting, hoping for them to interject, calling me out as a buffoon. But they didn’t. They… believed me. “I’m like totally freaked out now”, another girl said, visibly concerned. Through my shock, I tried to say “just kidding”, but I don’t think that message was received. The girls walked away.

I figured it was a random occurrence. Sure, I’m hired to be a persuasive demonstrator, but making people believe nonsense? Would never happen again, right? Sadly, no. Throughout the day I had the chance to do my biased “research” spiel multiple times (which means they at least sort of believed the initial fact) and at least 10 kids appeared to buy it enough to express concern.

Now, kids are smart, computer savvy, and often underestimated but this gross lack of critical thinking shocked me. (nothing against kids, I’m sure I would have fooled many more adults had they any interest in Facebook) Critical thinking, not believing what you’re told, is a fundamentally important life skill. When you hear a statement, you must check it against your own knowledge and logic to see if it computes, and if not seek understanding. Doubt first, ask questions later. It’s healthy to be a skeptic. Unfortunately, I don’t think schools will ever be too excited to encourage students to doubt and second-guess the teachers. Very unfortunate.

All that said, if you’re so addicted to Facebook that you have to check-in during a field trip, you just might have an addictive personality. Enter smoking, enter lung cancer. So I’m not completely off.

• Source: There is no source, because I made the fact up
• Fake research source: You can see the page titles I used as “research” here: http://www.bing.com/search?q=facebook+lung+cancer
• More persuasion: If you like Facebook, and you like real facts, try the LSNED Fan Page for a daily dose of wisdom.

*I want to reiterate, this fact is not true. Not at all true. I’m a big, fat, liar. It’s false. Untrue. Not based on facts of any sort. To clarify… don’t sue me, please.