Can you solve this UFO mystery?
I was visiting my friend Jim (name changed to protect the embarrassed) when he happened to mention that for a few weeks now, his neighborhood had been receiving regular UFO visits.
At first I wasn’t sure if he was pulling my leg or what. I knew Jim to be a reasonable guy, not given over to the supernatural. Moreover, he was the UFOlogists’ favorite type of witness: A pilot. (Because, as we all know, pilots cannot be mistaken about anything seen in the sky.) But I also knew that Jim could be pretty darn stubborn once an idea got into his head. I realized he was quite serious, and from what he said, a lot of people in the neighborhood were equally serious about it. Well, quite obviously, I had to see it.
So he took me outside into the dark, and what a surreal experience that was. He simply said “Let’s go,” and had the mannerism of every expectation that we’d see the UFO. Like it’s always right there for the taking.
As we walked down the little street in his condo complex, he greeted a couple of neighbors standing by the dumpster. “You’ve got to stand right here,” he said, indicating the area in front of the dumpster where his neighbors, cocktails in hand, were already watching. The line of sight was straight back up the street we’d just come down. About a hundreds yards away the street dead ended into a cross street lined with carports along its far side. Beyond the carports were some trees and other regular neighborhood stuff. Far in the distance was a range of low hills, which I knew from experience, though they were not visible in the darkness. The sky was a little murky, there were very few stars visible, and no moon. The condo complex did have streetlights, but they were relatively dim and did not really affect our visibility much.
Jim and his neighbors described the UFO to me. It would always appear as a little squadron of two or three lights, bigger than stars, but not very bright. They would simply appear out of nowhere at the end of the street, above the trees. They’d hover around for a moment, and then shoot off to the left. The UFOs would appear and do their thing once perhaps every few minutes, and would keep doing it for as long as you wanted to watch. The neighborhood had been in contact with their local newspaper, but nobody had seen an article yet. I also gathered that the UFOs only appeared at night.
The woman neighbor believed someone was trying to tell us all something. Her husband was quite curious about what they were and had been trying all sorts of theories that didn’t pan out, everything from cars driving along the hills in the distance to airplanes to laser projections in the clouds. He liked the laser projection theory best, but even it did not fit the observation very well. Jim didn’t seem to have a theory. He accepted the UFOs calmly. I’m pretty sure he believed they were alien spacecraft and just didn’t want to say so. But whatever his idea was, he seemed satisfied with it, and kept it to himself.
Faith and Reason
CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE ORIGILAN ENTRY AT “RATIONALLY SPEAKING”
One of the constantly bewildering aspects of living on planet Earth is the assumption that most human beings seem to make that faith (usually, but not necessarily, the religious variety) is a virtue. This bizarre attitude — just to add insult to injury — often comes coupled with the equally strange idea that somehow too much reason is bad for you. Why?
Faith means that one believes something regardless or even in spite of the evidence. This, I should think, is so irrational, and potentially so bad for one’s health, that educators and policy makers would be very worried at the prospect of a nation where faith was praised and encouraged. I mean, suppose I tell you that I have faith in my auto mechanic, but then you discover that the guy knows nothing about cars, can never get one fixed, and on top of that charges me thousands of dollars every time I see him. You would be outraged at him, possibly to the point of calling for legal action against the rascal, and you would pity me for being such a fool. Now substitute any of the words “Preacher,” “Pope,” “Imam,” or even “Guru” for mechanic in the above example, change the care of my car to the care of my soul (whatever that is), and suddenly you get the phenomenon of strong social and legal defense of the concept of organized religion. How nut is that?
But Massimo, people usually ask me whenever the f-word is brought up, don’t you have faith in anything? Nope, I say, a denial that is immediately met with both bewilderment and commiseration. Don’t I have faith in my wife, for example? No, I trust her because I know her and know that she loves me. What about faith in humanity, considering that I profess to be a secular humanist? No, I have hope for the human lot, and even that is seriously tempered by my awareness of its less than stellar record throughout history.
Ah, but I believe in evolution, don’t I? Yes, I do, but notice the switch between “faith” and “belief,” two words that don’t necessarily mean the same thing at all. A belief is something one thinks is true, but beliefs — unlike faith — can be held in proportion to the available evidence and reasons in their favor. I “believe” in evolution because the evidence is overwhelming. I don’t have faith in evolution.
Okay, then, the irrepressible defender of faith might say, what about your acceptance of things you cannot possibly prove, either logically or empirically, such as that there is a physical world out there (instead of the universe being a simulation in someone’s mind)? Isn’t that faith? Nope, it’s a reasonable assumption that I adopt for purely pragmatic reasons, because it seems that if one rejects it apparently bad things will happen to him (like smashing his brains on the ground while believing that he can fly off of a skyscraper).
The exasperated faithful will then conclude that my life must be devoid of emotions, and that I am — once again — deserving of pity and commiseration more than anything else. But of course this is yet another common confusion that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny: my life is as emotionally rich as anyone else’s, I think, in accordance with both philosopher David Hume’s and neurobiologist Antonio Damasio’s conclusion that a healthy human existence requires a balance between reason and emotion. Without reason, we would not have been able to build our complex civilization; but without emotion we wouldn’t have given a damn about accomplishing anything at all. Still, while faith is obviously emotional, it is not a synonym of emotion; the latter is necessary, the former is parasitic on it.
What about this insane idea that somehow we live in a hyper-rational society which is already too burdened by the triumph of reason? If we are, it is hard to distinguish such society from a hyper-irrational one dominated by faith. This conceit that too much reason is bad is a leftover from the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, the so-called “age of reason” (which lasted much too briefly, and during which time reason was heard, but hardly dominated human affairs). If one wants to have a good measure of how little reason plays into our society, one only has to listen for a day to what most of our politicians say, or to what most of our journalists write, not to mention of course the often surprisingly frightening experience of simply overhearing people’s conversations on the subway or at work.
We are frequently told with a certain degree of smugness that we need to go “beyond reason,” even though that phrase is uttered by people who likely wouldn’t be able to pass logic 101. Now, this isn’t to say that reason is boundless, much less that it is a guarantor of truth. Reason is a tool, fashioned by natural selection to deal with largely mundane problems of survival and reproduction in a specific type of physical and social environment. But it seems to work pretty darn well even when it comes to proving complex mathematical theorems, constructing excellent hypotheses about how the universe got started, and even providing us with decent guidance on how to conduct human affairs while maximizing justice and minimizing killings — at least in theory!
Faith doesn’t bring us beyond reason, as amply shown by the fact that not a single problem — be it scientific, philosophical or socio-political — has ever been solved or even mildly ameliorated by faith. On the contrary, faith has a nasty tendency to make bumbling simpletons of us, to waste our energies, time and resources on pursuit that do not improve the human condition, and at its worst it convinces people to drive planes into skyscrapers, or to mount “holy” crusades to slaughter the “infidel.” Faith is not a virtue, it is a repudiation of one the few good things human beings have going for them: a little bit of reason.
CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE ORIGILAN ENTRY AT “RATIONALLY SPEAKING”
Taleban ‘kill love affair couple’
The Taleban in Afghanistan have publicly killed a young couple who they said had tried to run away to get married, officials say.
The man, 21, and woman, 19, were shot dead on Monday in front of a mosque in the south-western province of Nimroz.
Nimroz is an area where the Taleban have a strong influence.
Governor Ghulam Dastageer Azad told the AFP news agency the killings followed a decree by local religious leaders and were an “insult to Islam”.
Dangerous region
Mr Azad said: “An unmarried young boy and an unmarried girl who loved each other and wanted to get married had eloped because their families would not approve the marriage.”
Officials said the couple were traced by militants after they tried to go to Iran. They were made to return to their village in Khash Rod district.
“Three Taleban mullahs brought them to the local mosque and they passed a fatwa (religious decree) that they must be killed. They were shot and killed in front of the mosque in public,” the governor said.
Michael Egnor tries again
“Listen to the fool’s reproach! It is a kingly title!”—William Blake
Dr. Egnor has posted a response to <=”to<”>my comments about his blog posts. He basically makes three points: first, he accuses me of misrepresenting him by calling him a creationist; second, he claims that it is constitutional for creationists to teach religion in government schools; third, he claims I am part of a conspiracy to preach atheism to schoolkids…or something. Let’s see how much of this holds up.
He begins by ensuring us that although he believes in magic and mysticism, he isn’t exactly a young earth creationist. No, he’s an old earth creationist instead. He “respect[s] young earth creationists” and “strongly support[s] their right to participate fully in public discourse, but [he] do[es] not share some of their scientific viewpoints.” I believe that’s exactly what I said to begin with…. But obviously this is irrelevant. The point is, Egnor believes that government-funded, government-operated schools should teach other people’s children that God created life.
My point was that the phrase “participate fully in public discourse” can mean a lot of different things. It can mean the individual right of creationists like Egnor to state their beliefs in public—a right guaranteed to all individuals by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Or it can mean the purported “right” of elected officials to abuse their authority by using the government to endorse their religious views as true and to put that message into government-run schools, funded with taxpayer dollars—something that is absolutely prohibited by the Constitution of the United States. It is the latter that Dr. Egnor endorsed, and endorses again in his most recent post.
The Constitution (which Dr. Egnor can read here for free) forbids the government from anything like an establishment of religion. What that means is, it is illegal for the government to set forth a religious viewpoint as being true. To say that life was created and designed by a divine Designer is a religious belief. It is therefore unconstitutional to teach it in a government run classroom on the taxpayer’s dime to other people’s children.
The Constitution does not bar the government from making other kinds of statements—that is, it does not bar the government from making statements of fact that are supported by science. (It doesn’t even bar the government from teaching untrue facts; Egnor claims that evolution can “only” be taught “in a constitutional manner” if its “weaknesses” are taught—but in fact, the Constitution places very few limits on what government may teach in schools, and that is not one of them.) If those facts turn out to be inconsistent with Dr. Egnor’s religious views—well, that’s just too bad.
As I explained in my article, Reason And Common Ground, the government is perfectly free to teach children that the seasons are caused by the tilt of the earth’s axis, even though that conflicts with the views of Greek polytheists who think the seasons are caused by Persephone’s annual visits to her husband Hades. What the government may not do is say that the myth of Persephone is true or that it is false. It certainly can say that there is no evidence to support it, or that all the evidence points in the direction of the theory of the earth’s tilt on its axis. In exactly the same way, the state may teach students evolution, even though it conflicts with some people’s religious views.
Think what it would mean if the opposite were true: if every person claiming a mystical revelation or an insight into magical processes could wield a heckler’s veto over every expressive act by government. Government could not set up a fire department, because people would complain that fires are caused by Thor’s lightning. Government could not promote sanitation, because it might offend those who believe diseases are God’s punishment for sin. Government could not try to educate the public about violence against women, because it might offend fundamentalist Muslims. There is good reason that the Constitution allows—indeed, expects—the government to teach non-religious concepts and even concepts that are contrary to some people’s religious views, while forbidding it from making religious statements.
And Then There Are These Claims…
So, as skeptics, we evaluate evidence and come to a provisional conclusion. Sometimes, we’re told a story and we simply don’t have the evidence to come to a conclusion. This is often the case with ghost stories and alien sightings, though to date, most skeptics agree that there is a lack of sufficient evidence to support a belief in either.
What do we do if such a story is on the news? Mosnews from Russia reports that a man was taken to the emergency room complaining of severe chest pain and coughing up blood. Suspecting cancer, surgeons performed a biopsy and found not a tumor but a tree. Or a least a sapling… a young fir 5cm long was growing in the man’s lung.
That’s the story. The evidence… needs some discussion.
Is this a believable story? Can a tree grow in a man’s lung?
There’s a photo on the site of some bloody tissue with what looks like a tree in it. Now, how do we know whether to believe this story or not?
We have:
A photo of tissue (lung tissue? scar tissue?) with a branch in it (grown? placed?)
A report from a source I’d never heard of before. (Discover got the story from the same source)
Alternate explanations (hoax)
We don’t have:
Motivation for a hoax
An explanation for how a tree could grow in a lung
Is giving hope a good thing?
One of the arguments that believers use to support their faith is that their religion gives hope. What hope, they ask, does atheism give people? This question carries a major unstated premise, which is the idea that giving hope is good, admirable, and of course the other unstated premise that if it is good it must be true. Nevertheless, I will concentrate on the first unstated premise here.
Religion does give hope to people, I don’t think that can be denied. It comes with lots of other baggage to be sure, but hope is one thing many religious people derive, and this is used as an argument by some religious people in an effort to either prove that there is a God, or to show that faith is superior to atheism.
Nevertheless, there is one major issue that the religious people overlook when advancing the Hope Argument, and that is the distinction between False Hope and Real Hope. Say for example that your father is going in surgery and the doctor tells you that there are great chances for a successful operation and that everything will be ok. The doctor is giving you hope. However, we must ask ourselves, is it true? What if the doctor is solely saying that to make you feel better? What if the odds of your father coming out alive are only at about 20%? Would you think that what the doctor is doing is to be considered good? No, providing false hope cannot be considered good.
Are there situations in which you must lie and provide false hope and it would be justifiable? Yes, of course. If a person is in his/her dying moments I grant that we are allowed to say whatever would make them feel better in those last moments, provide whatever hope we possibly can. I am sure readers can come up with other similar cases, but those scenarios are the exceptions to the rule, and they are done with the understanding that we are misleading the other person.
In order to make the Hope Argument, one must be able to show that the hope they are providing is true and not false, that the hope of the eternal afterlife and the rewards of heaven are true, and not figments of one’s imagination. And just how can a religious person even start about doing that? How can they assert that the story they are using is not a myth? That they are not propagating a lie? That they are not providing people with false hope? Even more importantly how can they deny the Hope Argument to the other religions, which they must, lest they are willing to accept the other religions also to be valid, because they too offer hope!
So, what hope does atheism provide people with? It doesn’t have to. Something does not have to provide hope in order to be true. In fact, anytime you as a non-believer are asked the Hope Questio you should turn it around on the believers and ask them, how do they know that they are not providing false hope? Do they even care?
Case study : Bad Studies
Homeopathy enthusiasts are pointing to yet another bad study as proof that homeopathy has a basis in science. This one is from March 2007 and is titled “Homeopathic and conventional treatment for acute respiratory and ear complaints: A comparative study on outcome in the primary care setting“. It purports to show that homeopathic remedies worked just as well as conventional remedies to treat “accute runny nose, sore throat, ear pain, sinus pain or cough”. You can read the details at the link above. What I want to concentrate here is on just how badly designed this study is. It seems to me as though it was set up specifically to produce the sort of answer that the homeopaths were after. Nevertheless let me present my arguments and you can make up your own mind.
Before we look at this specific study, let us go over the basic things to look at when reviewing any study. How well the study is designed and how well it conforms to certain rules has a profound effect on how much reliance we can put in its results. One way of assesing how good a study is, is what is known as the Jadad Scale. The Jadad scale is a simple checklist that helps you decide how well designed, therefore how trustworthy a clinical study is. It concentrates on the following areas: Randomizatin, Double Bliding, Withdrawals and Drop Outs. Here is a typical way of calculating the Jadad Score.
Basic Jadad Score is assessed based on the answer to the following 5 questions.
The maximum score is 5.
Question Yes No 1. Was the study described as random? 1 0 2. Was the randomization scheme described and appropriate? 1 0 3. Was the study described as double-blind? 1 0 4. Was the method of double blinding appropriate? (Were both the patient and the assessor appropriately blinded?) 1 0 5. Was there a description of dropouts and withdrawals? 1 0 Quality Assessment Based on Jadad Score
Range of Score Quality 0–2 Low 3–5 High
So let us go over the homeopath’s study and see how it ranks based on the Jadad Score.
1-Was the study described as random? NO – 0 points (cumulative)
Methods
The study was designed as an international, multi-centre, comparative cohort study of non-randomised design.
Not only that , but the patients were asked which group they wanted to be in, homeopathy or conventional medicine (misspelling of the word enrollment is theirs not mine! Also emphasis is added by me).
Upon enrolment in the study, patients, or the patients’ legal guardians were asked for their treatment preference. In the homeopathy group, 81% of patients had a preference for homeopathy, 18% had no treatment preference. In the conventional group, 55% of the patients’ preferred conventional treatment, 2% homeopathy and 43% had no treatment preference.
Fun Fact – 81% of the patients in the homeopathy group had chosen homeopathy and the results from the homeopathy group were…drum roll….86.9% reported complete recovery. Can you say placebo?
2-Was the randomization scheme described and appropriate? There was none. – 0 points (cumulative)
Randomization is very important when setting up clinical studies. Not only is it important to randomize the patients, but also how you randomize them matters. Different methods of randomization rank higher than others. According to Wikipedia:
Randomisation is a process to remove potential distortion of statistical results arising from the manner in which the trial is conducted, in particular in the selection of subjects. Studies have indicated, for example, that nonrandomised trials are more likely to show a positive result for a new treatment than for an established conventional one.
I haven’t checked that claim on the last sentence, so take it with a grain of salt, even though it does make sense.
3-Was the study described as double-blind? No, there was no blinding whatsoever, doctors knew what treatement each patient was getting and patients knew it too (they got to choose remember) – 0 points (cumulative)
Since it was not possible to blind patients for their treatment, potential reporting bias from patient’s expectations may have influenced the outcome.
You think?
4-Was the method of double blinding appropriate? (Were both the patient and the assessor appropriately blinded?) There was no double blinding, there wasn’t even single blinding. – 0 points (cumulative)
This is where I would start worrying if I was trying to use this study to prove my point. We’re up to question 4 of 5 and they have 0 points!
5-Was there a description of dropouts and withdrawals? Not even close, they only mention that 6 people who got no treatment were dropped. – 0 points TOTAL!
This study ranks as possibly the worst designed study you could come up with. There was no randomization, no blinding of any sort, let alone double, no control group, in other words nothing that would lend it even a slight amount of legitimacy. The authors seem to have benn aware of this, for they make sure to make the following point: None of that stuff really matters, our study is good enough as it is! Notes in red are my comments.
Objective data collection and evaluation is needed to assist physicians in patient care and advance the quality of medical practice [2] This study will presumably be objective!. Clinical trials, especially randomised controlled trials (RCTs), are generally accepted as producing the highest level of evidence for medical interventions. I feel there’s a “but” coming! Driven by the discovery of new pharmaceutical substances, demands from regulatory authorities for clinical data and the need of physicians for evidence based treatment strategies, the methodology of RCTs became the subject of research itself. Within this context, the strengths and weaknesses of such trials have been debated [3]. Placebo-controlled RCTs are indispensable for the development of pharmaceutical agents with unknown efficacy and safety profiles Such as maybe homeopathic agents. On the other hand if the efficacy and safety of an agent is known why would one even bother to do a study?. Their limitations result from highly standardized study protocols and patient populations, which may create artificial situations that differ from daily practice Oh, I see they are more tightly controlled and have stricter requirements, and THAT makes them problematic. What? . Moreover, even the fact that patients are enrolled into a placebo-controlled clinical trial will influence treatment outcome, sometimes leading to high placebo or low verum response rates [4] Somehow I did not think it was a matter of high or low, I thought it was a matter of the truest measure which is the point of the control groups. Further, proper blinding should guarantee the truest results possible. Consequently, more practice-based studies have been developed such as pragmatic RCT’s or non-randomised cohort studies. In other words, when you can’t live up to these standards make up more lax standards and claim they are just as good. Pathetic! Especially non-interventional outcomes studies have only few inclusion and exclusion criteria. Therefore they may provide information about a broad and heterogenous patient population thus resulting in high external validity for daily medical practice Actually lack of controls will result in exactly the opposite, it will be useless for daily medical practice. It may provide a good gauge for people’s ability to deceive themselves though. However, the fact that patients are not randomly assigned to treatments in such outcome studies may lead to baseline differences between groups and makes the interpretation of the results more susceptible to bias. May? That’s putting it mildly! This disadvantage may be overcome, at least in part, by the application of statistical methods to control for baseline differences between treatment groups No it can’t, otherwise randomization would not be required, EVER. Good statistics can never make up for bad data. Statistics rely on the data itsel. The above claim makes no sense!
Fun Fact -
Apart from the ongoing discussion about clinical evidence, complementary therapies are well integrated into primary care in most Western countries
Yeah appart from the fact that CAM has not been shown to work, IT IS POPULAR. Good enough for me!
Conclusion
This study is horrendously designed. It lacks all of the basic requirements that every clinical trial should have, such as randomization, double blinding, control group etc. Based on that fact alone, regardless of the sample size, regardless of how careful and precise the statistics, the results of such study will be completely unreliable. The data set is corrupted due to the lack of controls, as such it does not matter how carefully you analyze it, the result would be meaningless. Even if it had told us that homeopathy is useless, we would still have to ignore it. And ignore it, I, we and all the science based community will. Sorry homeopaths, you’re still stuck at 0. Good luck next time.
Homeopaths: fallacies, lies, and dangerous advice
Since this is the World Homeopathy Awareness Week, I might be spending more time on this particular well of credulity. I will also re-post my piece from last year’s WHAW. But today, I’ll be talking about Melanie Grimes, a homeopath who writes for HealthNews as a health “expert”. The irony though is painful -you will soon see that if “expert” was to be used in the same sentence as Melanie, then that would be: “Melanie Grimes is the exact opposite of a health expert“. So let’s start the fun, shall we?
I had a look at 3-4 of her articles*, and I can assure you they are filled with fallacious arguments of the worst kind; a very bad understanding of modern scientific research; misrepresentation or outright ignorance of the relevant scientific literature; and propagation of very dangerous homeopathic beliefs as to what their pet therapy can treat (from cancer to diabetes, it’s all there).
Starting with her piece on this year’s WHAW (starting slowly with some common stuff):
Homeopathy provides an effective and gently way to treat allergies. Using potentized medicines, homeopaths prescribe minute doses to treat both the acute reaction to allergens, as well as the cause.
I hope you have spotted that subtle piece of misinformation: “minute doses”. It’s not minute doses actually. It’s non-existent doses usually. The most common potencies of homeopathic remedies are 12C and above -a dilution so high that no molecule from the original substance remains in the remedy!
But the most interesting claim is that homeopathy is effective for allergies. In fact, this is a very common claim of homeopaths but is there any evidence to back it up? Readers of this blog already know the answer: no.
A quick search in PubMed brings up some relevant reviews [1][2][3], none of them recommending homeopathy (or CAM in general) for diagnosing or treating allergies. Quoting from “Systematic review of complementary and alternative medicine for rhinitis and asthma”[1]:
Some positive results were described with homeopathy in good-quality trials in rhinitis, but a number of negative studies were also found. Therefore it is not possible to provide evidence-based recommendations for homeopathy in the treatment of allergic rhinitis, and further trials are needed. A limited number of studies of herbal remedies showed some efficacy in rhinitis and asthma, but the studies were too few to make recommendations. There are also unresolved safety concerns. Therapeutic efficacy of complementary-alternative treatments for rhinitis and asthma is not supported by currently available evidence. [emphasis mine]
READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY AT “JOURNEY THROUGH A BURNING MIND”
Important Studied Page Update
Hi there. As you know I am keeping an “Important Studies” page where I will link to studies on which I base my various stances on different Alternative Medicine Modalities. I have just updated it by adding a second study/analysis to the Homeopathy section and adding a new section and a new study in the General/Multiple CAMs studies. Check them out and send me links to other studies as comments on that page. Thank you.
The Royal Society is no match for these three
Behold, the most serious challenge to the Royal Society in that august body’s 350-year history – the medical musings of Madonna, Gwyneth Paltrow and Stella McCartney. These women are not just singers, or actresses, or fashion designers. They are distinguished professors at the University of Celebrity, and are coating your understanding of science like a totally amazing organic body oil.
On top of this, they are best friends, so we can say their pronouncements are peer-reviewed in the best sense of that term. Can you imagine their gatherings? It must be as if Isaac Newton were taking antioxidant tea with Robert Koch and Marie Curie.
We shall come to her latest discoveries shortly, but by way of background, do recall that Gwyneth has formerly claimed that eating “biological foods” can prevent cancer, reminding us that starring in Iron Man and maintaining a glittering career in clinical research are not mutually exclusive. Then we have Madonna, who has cited the extraordinary healing powers of Kabbalah water, which costs $4 a bottle, is said to have had energy injected into it, and may or may not have been blessed by the former insurance salesman who dreamed up her religion.
Other fields of specialism? Alas, Lost in Showbiz hasn’t the space today, but Madonna has previously championed a soi-disant scientist who claims to have reversed the second law of thermodynamics. And then there’s Stella, who launched her organic skincare range with the warning that “lots of skin products use the same petrochemicals as the antifreeze in your car!”, and is one of those celebrities who thinks they eat “chemical-free” food and use “chemical-free” products. I beg you not to tell her that water and trees are made of chemicals. The shock could finish her off.
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