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May 19th, 2025 (Permalink)

The Talented Mr. Ripley

Robert Ripley was a cartoonist who started a newspaper cartoon strip over a century ago called "Believe it or Not!", which told supposedly true but hard-to-believe stories in words and pictures1. Believe it or not, this strip is still being published despite his death in 1949. The success of the cartoon led to books, museums, television shows and, of course, a website.

Since the purpose of "Believe it or Not!" was to shock people with amazing "factoids" that you were invited to choose not to believe, Ripley wasn't overly-scrupulous about fact-checking2. For instance, the following headline is from the Ripley's site a couple of years ago:

Humans Inhale Credit Card-Sized Amounts of Microplastics Every Week3

Should we believe this or not? The Ripley's article was based on one published earlier that month with a similar headline and which begins:

Humans may be inhaling a credit card's worth of toxic microplastics every week…. In 2019, a team of scientists estimated that up to 16.2 bits of microplastic enter our airways every hour―adding up to a credit card's worth each week.4

A half-year later, the venerable Beeb repeated the story:

We inhale a credit card's worth of microplastics each week5

As in so many of these sci-fi media scare stories, the underlying claim seems to have come from a press release put out by the publisher of the journal in which the "team of scientists"' paper appeared. The first sentence of the release was originally: "Research shows humans might inhale about 16.2 bits of microplastic every hour, which is equivalent to a credit card over an entire week.6" However, that sentence has since been deleted and the following note appended to the article:

This press release was updated on March 12, 2024. The original version included a claim that humans might inhale a credit card's worth of microplastics every week. That statistic was determined to be an overestimate, the actual amount is much lower.7

How much is much lower? The false factoid appears to have originated in a "blog" post from a company that sells air purifiers. According to the author of the scientific article cited by the company, "at the highest rate he recorded, inhaling a credit card's worth would take thousands of years.8" How many people hearing from the BBC about inhaling a credit card every week ran out and bought an air purifier?

It turns out that the notion of measuring exposure to microplastic in terms of credit cards predates the above episode. There are, of course, other routes by which small pieces of plastic can enter your body, as in the following headline:

You could be swallowing a credit card's weight in plastic every week9

I find this hard to swallow―the headline, that is―though it's more plausible than the claim that you breathe in the same amount in a week. Interestingly, this earlier article remarks in passing: "Although microplastics have been detected in the air, the study says inhalation accounts for a negligible intake 'but may vary heavily depending on the environment.'" I assume that a "negligible intake" would be far less than a credit card a week.

This indigestible claim comes from a different study than the one that led to the inhalation headlines. Just as the previous one originated with a company that sells air-purifiers, this one comes from a study funded by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF)10, an environmental organization. At the end of the very report from which this claim originates, the WWF calls for "collective global action" "to address plastic pollution on a global level".

The study in question was a meta-study that looked at previous studies that attempted to estimate the amount of tiny pieces of plastic that people eat or drink11. The credit card claim came from the upper-end estimate of 5 grams of plastic per week, approximately the amount in such a card, but the lower-end of the range was only one-tenth of a gram, which would mean that it would take almost a year to ingest a credit card's worth of plastic.

The fact that this was a high-end estimate shows up in headlines and articles by words such as "could" in the above CNN headline: you could be if you're consuming the maximum amount. Similarly, another CNN headline originally read this way:

We consume a credit card's worth of plastic every week12

The headline was subsequently revised to:

We consume up to a credit card's worth of plastic every week13

The added "up to" indicates that this is a maximum.

It's obvious why an air purification company or an environmental group might exaggerate the amount of microplastic pollution in the air or water, but why do reputable news organizations such as CNN and the BBC repeat these exaggerations in their headlines? The goal of headlines is to get people to read the story beneath it, and one way to do so is through the same techniques used by Ripley. Is it shocking that so many of these headline-grabbing claims from industry and advocacy groups have to be later corrected, and the corrections always go in one direction? This is one fact you'll never see in Ripley's.

Notes:

  1. "Robert L. Ripley", Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed: 5/16/2025.
  2. See:
  3. Noelle Talmon, "Humans Inhale Credit Card-Sized Amounts of Microplastics Every Week", Ripley's, 6/30/2023.
  4. Ben Turner, "Humans inhale a credit card's worth of microplastics every week. Here's where it ends up.", Live Science, 6/19/2023. This is the Internet Archive's cache of the page which, as discussed below, has been edited since. Paragraphing suppressed.
  5. "We inhale a credit card's worth of microplastics each week", BBC, 1/29/2024.
  6. "Microplastics Stick Around in Human Airways", AIP Publishing, 6/13/2023. This is the Internet Archive's cache of the page which has been edited since, as discussed below.
  7. "Microplastics Stick Around in Human Airways", AIP Publishing, 3/12/2024. This is the current, revised press release.
  8. Leo Benedictus, "You do not inhale a credit card's worth of microplastic every week", Full Fact, 3/14/2024.
  9. Isabelle Gerretsen, "You could be swallowing a credit card's weight in plastic every week", CNN, 7/17/2019.
  10. Wijnand de Wit & Nathan Bigaud, "No Plastic in Nature: Assessing Plastic Ingestion from Nature to People", World Wildlife Fund, 2019.
  11. Casey Decker, "Claims you eat a credit card's worth of plastic per week need context", Verify, 4/25/2022.
  12. Chris Cillizza, "We consume a credit card's worth of plastic every week", CNN, 10/31/2022. Timed to scare you for Halloween! This is the unrevised version of the article from the Internet Archive; for the current, revised version, see the next note.
  13. Chris Cillizza, "We consume up to a credit card's worth of plastic every week", CNN, 11/2/2022. Highlighting added.
May 7th, 2025 (Permalink)

"Versus" Vs. "Verses"

I found the following sentence in a book I was recently reading: "Paul Krugman tweeted that 'since Trump seems to have decided that stocks are proof of his success, here's US verses euro stocks over the past year.'"1 Do you see what's wrong with this sentence? The title of this entry gives it away, but I couldn't resist.

Though the words "verses" and "versus" are pronounced identically, and differ in spelling by only one letter, they do not even belong to the same grammatical category. "Verses" is the plural of the noun "verse"2, which usually refers to a line of poetry, a section of a song, or a sentence in a book such as the Bible; whereas "versus" is not a noun but a preposition used to link two nouns that denote opponents in a sporting match, a trial, or some other competition3. In the context of Krugman's sentence, the two noun phrases that should be linked by "versus" are "US [stocks]" and "euro stocks". Also, it's "versus" that "vs.", or just "v." in legal contexts, abbreviates.

Krugman's "tweet" spelled the word correctly4, so the incorrect spelling was introduced in the book and not caught by a spell-checker, whether human or automated. Since both spellings are legitimate English words, a spell-checking computer program that simply checks the words in a passage against an English lexicon will not catch the misspelling; but, because the two words belong to different grammatical categories, a program that parses the sentence may flag it.

I tried the sentence in a few free online spelling and grammar checkers, one of which did correct "verses" to "versus", but others found no errors. Turning from spelling and grammar checking programs to supposedly artificially intelligent ones, Grok spotted the error but, as was the case previously5, the answer it supplied was unnecessarily long though its advice was not technically wrong.

I don't think the confusion of "versus" and "verses" is common since none of my reference books mention it, but a short web search did turn up the following headline:

Roe v. Wade verses Corporate America6

So, it's not as uncommon as it should be.

Notes:

  1. Matt Palumbo, Debunk This!: Shattering Liberal Lies (2019), p. 433
  2. "Verse", Cambridge Dictionary, accessed: 5/2/2025
  3. "Versus", Cambridge Dictionary, accessed: 5/2/2025
  4. Paul Krugman, Tweet, Twitter, 10/11/2017
  5. Pedaling Lies?, 4/5/2025
  6. William Schmick, "Roe v. Wade verses Corporate America", Valencia County News-Bulletin, 5/26/2022
Puzzle
May 4th, 2025 (Permalink)

Crack the Combination IX*

The combination of a lock is three digits long and each digit is unique, that is, each occurs only once in the combination. The following are some incorrect combinations.

  1. 7 3 1: One digit is correct but in the wrong position.
  2. 4 2 1: Two digits are correct but neither is in the right position.
  3. 9 0 2: One digit is correct but in the wrong position.
  4. 1 4 3: One digit is correct and in the right position.

Can you determine the correct combination from the above clues?

*Previous "Crack the Combination" puzzles: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII.

May 2nd, 2025 (Permalink)

New Book: An Abundance of Caution

Quote: "School closures…don't only affect children. … Their closure en masse was the rarest of public policies, one that knocked society off its axis, and the decisions that set it in motion were made incredibly quickly―and without a notion of their impact or when things would return to normal. This book is an anatomy of that historic decision-making process and the many that would follow in its wake regarding schools during the coronavirus pandemic. … We see how incentives that were misaligned with the interests of the public often drove decisions. We see how authority figures' influence was channeled through the media and, in turn, how the media influenced the authorities and regular citizens. We also see how the nature of news, and the muddling effect of the media's penchant for anecdotes and the spectacular, obscured mundane and nuanced reality. Lastly, we witness how ideological tribalism and groupthink overrode long-established values…."1

Title: An Abundance of Caution

Subtitle: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions

Comment: The subtitle and excerpt, above, indicate that the book is entirely, or at least primarily, devoted to the bad decisions during the pandemic that related to American schools. Since some of the worst decision-making at the time was that which affected children, this limitation may actually exaggerate how bad decisions were in general, though they were certainly bad enough.

Author: David Zweig

Comment: Zweig is one of the few mainstream journalists during the pandemic who didn't swallow the government's propaganda line, including hook and sinker, and I recommended two of his articles at the time2. He was also one of the journalists given access to the Twitter files3.

Date: 2025

Summary: The book is divided into four parts and, since I haven't read it yet and Zweig doesn't explain the book's structure in the preface or introduction, I'm going to have to guess, based on the titles of the parts and their chapters, what they are about:

  1. "Seductive Models": I don't think this part is about Heidi Klum and Kate Moss, but I could be wrong. Rather, I think it's about the computer models, such as that of Imperial College London (ICL), which influenced early decision-making about how to respond to the pandemic4. The second chapter is entitled "GIGO", which is an old computer science acronym for "Garbage In, Garbage Out". Applied to computer models, "GIGO" means that the predictions produced by a model will be only as good as the information they are based on5.
  2. "The Illusion of the Precautionary Principle": It's difficult to say exactly what the Precautionary Principle (PP) is, which is partly due to it not being a single principle but a family of related ones6. However, the fundamental idea is that one should avoid acting unless the action to be taken is known to be harmless, or at least less harmful than not acting. As such, the PP is a generalization of such common sense principles as the ancient medical precept of "primum non nocere"7―"first do no harm"―and slogans such as "safety first", "better safe than sorry" and "look before you leap".

    I'm unsure what Zweig has in mind in this part of the book, especially by the reference in the title to "the illusion" of the PP. If the PP had been consistently applied during the pandemic, many things that did happen would not have happened, such as the shutting down of schools. There was no evidence that shutting down schools for an extended period of time, such as a school year, would be harmless, or even less harmful than the tiny risk to children from the coronavirus. In addition, if the so-called lab leak hypothesis is correct, the PP surely should have ruled out the "gain-of-function" research that may have created the specific coronavirus that leaked from the lab, in which case there would have been no pandemic at all.

  3. "Tribalism, Public Health, the Elite, and the Media": It seems clear what this part is about, namely, the way in which people during the pandemic were forced to join certain "tribes". One of these tribes is identified in the title of the first chapter in this part: "If Trump is for it, then we're against it". Of course, there was also an "if Trump is for it, then we're for it" tribe. Tribalism and "Groupthink"―the title of chapter 15―no doubt contributed to bad decision-making during the pandemic since certain policy positions became political. As a result, you could usually predict a person's position on pandemic policies based on which party they supported; that this is a bad way to make decisions about scientific and medical matters ought to be obvious.
  4. "Progressive Dogma and Narrative Control": I'm even less sure what this part is about than part 2, though perhaps "narrative control" refers to the propaganda put out by the progressive media. Possibly it also denotes the efforts at censoring critics of the government's response to the pandemic undertaken by the Democrats after Biden's election gave them control of that response.

The Blurbs: The book is blurbed favorably by Marty Makary8, Nate Silver and Matt Taibbi.

Disclaimer: I haven't read this book yet, so can't review or recommend it, but its topic interests me and may also interest readers. The above remarks are based solely on a sample of the book.

Notes:

  1. "Introduction", pp. 2-3.
  2. See: Unmasking the CDC & Manufacturing Fear, 12/28/2021 and Rigging the Debate & Over-counting the Dead, 1/31/2023.
  3. David Zweig, accessed: 5/2/2025.
  4. See: Stephanie Glen, "What Went Wrong with Pandemic Modeling?", Data Science Central, 8/23/2021.
  5. Herman & Leo Schneider, The Harper Dictionary of Science in Everyday Language (1988).
  6. Tanja Rechnitzer, "Precautionary Principles", Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed: 5/2/2025. Everything you wanted to know about PPs, and then some.
  7. Eugene Ehrlich, Veni, Vidi, Vici: Conquer Your Enemies, Impress Your Friends with Everyday Latin (1995).
  8. See: New Book, 3/27/2025.
Recommended Reading & Listening
April 30th, 2025 (Permalink)

Presumed Guilty Syndrome

  • Jennifer Block, "The Junk Science That Gets Parents Convicted of Murder", The Free Press, 3/17/2025
    The Innocence Project has taken up the cause of exonerating Robert Roberson, a man who has spent more than 20 years on death row in Texas―mostly in solitary confinement―for the 2002 death of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki.

    Gretchen Sween, Roberson's attorney since 2016, took his case after Texas passed a law allowing courts to revisit prosecutions based on "junk science." … If Texas executes Roberson, he will be the first person put to death for a conviction linked to the shaken baby diagnosis.

    His case has attracted a high-profile group of supporters… [who] are working to expose how bad forensic science gets so embedded in the medical and criminal justice systems that actual innocence becomes almost impossible to prove. With shaken baby syndrome [SBS], the last adult with the child is essentially presumed guilty.

    You're not supposed to have to prove your innocence.

    "Over the last two decades, extensive scientific research has discredited SBS," wrote [Barry] Scheck. But "because misinformation and misconceptions about SBS persist, Mr. Roberson is still at risk of execution for a crime that never occurred."

    Horrible details of the daughter's illness and death omitted. Read the whole thing at your own risk.

    It was research into the potential harms of motor vehicles that led to the shaken baby hypothesis…. British neurosurgeon Norman Guthkelch had read about whiplash experiments on monkeys, which demonstrated that sharp back and forth motion alone could cause brain injury without direct impact. He theorized that caregivers, who shook children in frustration or anger, could cause the same damage.

    Of course, when a baby or young child unexpectedly falls unconscious or dies, society rightfully wants to know why. But sometimes there is no obvious cause, no visible injury, no immediate explanation. [SBS] provided one. …

    Throat clearing omitted.

    In the U.S., John Caffey, a Pennsylvania pediatrician, took Guthkelch's suppositions further and published a template for signs that a baby had been shaken: bleeding between the brain and skull, in the back of the eyes, and swelling in the brain. This "triad," as it is known, was swiftly accepted as definitive and became standard in the worlds of both medicine and criminal justice. …

    Detour about the "Satanic panic" omitted.

    By then, prosecutions for [SBS] were proving highly effective, frequently winning convictions against the accused. In these cases, typically the defense asks juries to accept that we may never know how or why an infant died. Signs of damage to the brain, juries are told, can have numerous causes, often completely unrelated to abuse. The prosecution, on the other hand, offers certainty. Prosecutors call on expert witnesses―specialists in child abuse―who confidently assert that a child's caregiver delivered mortal damage.

    As convictions based on [SBS] rose, so did questions about the reliability of that diagnosis. In 2001, seminal research on playground accidents by a Minnesota forensic pathologist and medical examiner demonstrated that a fall from even a short height, or an object falling on a child, could generate brain swelling and bleeding. The pathologist, John Plunkett, began testifying in court on behalf of defendants accused of [SBS]. As a crime reporter for The Washington Post put it, "Plunkett was now a threat to SBS cases all over the country."

    Pediatric radiologists were also raising alarms. Dr. Julie Mack was in practice in the early 2000s in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and had pronounced many shaken baby diagnoses after reviewing CT scans. "In med school everybody was taught" that if you couldn't readily explain the cause of brain swelling and bleeding, "the parents must be hiding something," she told me.

    To address her growing doubts about this dogma, she explored the anatomical literature and had a breakthrough. She found that the dura, the membrane between the skull and the brain, can bleed without trauma―resulting in a "subdural hematoma"―one of the supposed key markers of SBS. Mack co-authored a widely cited paper with Dr. Waney Squier, a British neuropathologist who specialized in infant brains.

    Squier also dove into the literature and found that subdural hematomas are a common artifact of childbirth. Around half of babies have them and they can last for several months. Furthermore, bleeding in the dura and behind the eyes can be triggered by an infection, a genetic disorder, diabetes, cancer―the list of conditions that share these symptoms is "ever expanding," said Mack.

    Squier told me she "became completely convinced there is no good evidence" to support the [SBS] hypothesis. … When Guthkelch came to understand what had been spawned from his original hypothesis, he devoted his retirement to assisting people accused of criminally shaking a baby. Shortly before his death in 2016, he told a journalist: "I am frankly quite disturbed that what I intended as a friendly suggestion for avoiding injury to children has become an excuse for imprisoning innocent parents." …

    At Robert Roberson's murder trial in 2003, the jury was told that Nikki's symptoms could point only to one thing: that she'd been violently shaken. … Last September, Roberson's attorney Gretchen Sween filed a petition for clemency that includes several new, exonerating findings. For instance, Nikki had been prescribed a drug that combines an antihistamine and a narcotic. Today the Mayo Clinic warns the medication "is not recommended in children… [Ellipsis in original.] because of the increased risk of respiratory depression." …

    Even the detective who helped convict Roberson, Brian Wharton, has since recanted. "Our bedrock accusation, 'Shaken Baby Syndrome' as used in Robert's trial, is junk science," he wrote in a letter to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. "There is no evidence of a crime, much less a capital crime."

    On October 17, 2024, Roberson was scheduled to die, but he was saved by a bipartisan group of state legislators who issued a subpoena asking him to testify before them, which led to the Texas Supreme Court delaying his death. There is currently no execution date. But Sween says that could change at any moment.

    It's bad enough that Roberson has been in prison for over two decades, but he shouldn't be executed for a possibly non-existent crime.

    The following podcast also concerns SBS.

  • Jerusalem Demsas, "The Scientific Controversy That's Tearing Families Apart", The Atlantic, 3/11/2025

Disclaimer: I don't necessarily agree with everything in this article and podcast, but I think they're worth reading or listening to as a whole. In abridging the excerpts I may have changed the paragraphing.

Puzzle
April 28th, 2025 (Permalink)

One More Cup of Coffee

During a recent visit to my favorite coffee shop, I noticed that some of the customers put only milk in their coffee, some took only sugar, some used both, and more than one drank their coffee black. In fact, eleven customers took milk and nine took sugar, but three times as many put both milk and sugar in their coffee as drank it black.

How many customers visited the coffee shop while I was there?

Disclaimer: This puzzle is a work of fiction.

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