Whatever happened to bin Laden's Super-Fortress?

In the lead-up to the US invasion of Afghanistan, there was a lot of press about Osama bin Laden's super-fortress buried deep under the mountain of Tora Bora. The British press told us that bin Laden was holed up in a vast redoubt, a fortress buried as deep under the mountain as the World Trade Centre was high, powered with its own hydroelectric generators, housing 2,000 fanatical fighters and equipped with at least one Russian tank in perfect working order.

This story caught the imagination of the press corps, especially when the basic claims were repeated by American officials such as Donald Rumsfeld.

In December 2001 Afghan mujahadeen forces attacked the "impenetrable" fortress, assisted by American and British air-strikes and a small number of American, British and German special forces. According to Time Magazine, the battle cost the lives of one mujahadeen and seven Taliban fighters. Afterwards, American troops combed the mountain for bin Laden. No fortress was discovered, no hydroelectric generators, no massive hotel housing thousands of fighters, and no Russian tank.

They did however find a tube of deodorant.

(On a related note: Edward Jay Epstein also casts serious doubt on the box-cutter story from 9/11.)

When psychics attack

Orac from Respectful Insolence discusses what happens when zero tolerance meets psychics about :

You get the Child Protection Services called in to investigate the suspected (or should I say imaginary?) sexual abuse of her autistic daughter on the basis of a vision by a so-called psychic.

So this mother was reported to the authorities on the basis of a pinheaded, woo-loving, credulous teacher's aide who apparently regularly sought out the advice of psychics and even believed their B.S. I understand that the law probably seemed to leave the school authorities no choice in the matter. [...] The credulous insinuation of a moronic teacher's aide who believes in psychics must be treated exactly the same as a real allegation based on observations and evidence.

Fortunately for Colleen Leduc and her daughter, to say nothing of her fiancé, she had recently equipped her daughter with a GPS unit that made a continuous audio recording of everything that happened to her daughter, and this proved that nothing untoward had happened to her daughter.

And the reason she had bought the GPS unit in the first place? She had become tired of the school repeatedly losing her daughter.

Sagan's dragon

The late Carl Sagan once declared that he has a fire-breathing dragon living in his garage:

"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle -- but no dragon.

"Where's the dragon?" you ask.

"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."

And for every test that the skeptic proposes, Sagan had an excuse for why the test won't detect the dragon. It floats in the air; it's incorporeal; the flame it blows is heatless; and so on.

Naturally Sagan didn't actually believe he has a dragon in his garage, but he was making a point about religion and the invisible, incorporeal god that many people believe is in their garage. Instead of gathering evidence to support the idea of the dragon in the garage, believers insist that we accept the existence of such an invisible, soundless, heatless, incorporeal, undetectable dragon unless it is disproved. But of course it cannot be disproved, because there's an excuse for every failure.

Under normal circumstances, we treat the failure to find expected evidence as almost as good as positive evidence. In a murder trial, the failure to find gunpowder residue on the accused shooter can legitimately cast doubt on the claim he was the shooter. But such negative evidence is only useful when there is a clear-cut pass or fail. You can't accuse somebody of shooting the victim, and then when no evidence supports your accusation, turn around and say that the murdered must have used a special gunpowderless gun that fired invisible bullets that left no visible wounds.

God is invisible, that's why you can't see him.

In the face of such special pleading, then the failure to disprove the claim doesn't mean anything. There is no way to disprove the existence of god, because for every test there's always an excuse after the fact why it didn't work.

The game is always rigged, and you will lose if you play.

The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that there's a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You'd wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously?

(Thanks to PhillyChief.)

Believers will counter that of course they have positive evidence for their god. (It's evidently only other gods that are illusionary or mythical.) But the problem with the evidence given is that it either has other explanations ("see, there are no elephants living in my garage, because the dragon ate them"), or that it's entirely subjective. Your epiphany is my bad burrito -- and contrariwise, the awe and sense of wonder I have when I contemplate dirt is a never-ending source of amusement for Mrs Impala and her friends. (Some people hug trees. I play with dirt. If rocks are the bones of the Earth, then dirt, earth, is the flesh. Carl Sagan famously said we are all star-stuff, but the star-stuff had to become dirt before it became us.)

I can put my hands in the dirt, I can touch it and weigh it and dig it over, and if I treat it right, it will bring forth all manner of life. Perhaps that's the difference between religion and spirituality: spirituality is about subjective feelings related to real things, while religion is about subjective feelings about imaginary things.

Water water everywhere

Via Les the Stupid Evil Bastard, another article debunking the myth that people are chronically dehydrated and need to drink at least eight glasses of water a day.

Myths have consequences, and this myth leads to an absolutely enormous market in bottled water: $7.7 billion in the USA in 2002. In Australia, consumers bought 520 million litres in 2004, and at a growth rate of 20%, that's probably passed a billion litres this year. The water has to come from somewhere: often it's merely tap water stuck in a fancy bottle, but it's often shipped great distances, increasing the environmental harm done by the manufacture of all those billions of one-use-only throw-away plastic bottles. And it frequently doesn't make economic sense either: the water companies have enough muscle to distort the market. For example, in the middle of a long-lasting drought in Victoria, a subsidiary of Coca-Cola has a permit to buy aquifer water at one quarter of one percent of the market rate for water: $2.40 per megalitre, compared to $960 per megalitre for tap water.

The Sydney Morning Herald wrote:

The 750ml size remained the same - people want a big drink these days. And as many people say they find it hard to drink the recommended two litres of water a day, Frucor brought in flavoured - but still colourless - waters to relieve the monotony.

Here's a hint folks: if your body is telling you "No more water please!", that's a sign that you should stop.

On a related note, with Australia in a state of essentially permanent drought, a British House of Commons report on the state of water treatment in Australia makes fascinating reading.

Family walking on all fours

National Geographic has an article about a Kurdish family where five out of the nineteen siblings in one family walk on all fours instead of upright.

Scientists who have studied the three sisters and two brothers insist that it is not a hoax.

Uner Tan, a Turkish neurophysiologist, has studied them and believes they are "evolutionary throwbacks" to our ancestors. A team of German scientists led by Stefan Mundlos believes they have found the precise gene which has knocked out their ability to walk upright.

It's not clear what they mean by "the" gene that controls bipedalism: walking on two legs successfully requires many features, both anatomical and mental, and knocking out just one of them will cause the whole system to break. To take an extreme example, it's hard to walk upright if you have no legs. Less extreme example: the move to bipedalism would have required changes to our hips and backs. Our backs are still not completely evolved to suit our upright stance, which is why people are prone to back problems. Comparing us to our cousins (gorillas, orangutans, chimps and bonobos) shows that we have significantly longer legs than they do, relative to our body-size. The evolution of bipedalism would have required all these features to evolve more-or-less in lockstep (albeit presumably in fits and starts), and it isn't credible that there is a single gene that controls them all.

Nevertheless, certainly there could be a single gene -- or many single genes -- that the lack of could disable bipedalism. If you remove the accelerator cable from a car, the car won't move, but that isn't to say that the accelerator cable is the thing that makes cars move forward.

After studying the family, the British evolutionary psychologist Nicholas Humphrey pointed out that the genetic mutation alone wouldn't be sufficient to cause the lack of bipedalism. He gives equal credit to a family that was accepting of the children's strange gait, and making no efforts to cajole them into standing upright. Sensible, so far. But then he goes on:

"This is for real," Humphrey said. "You only have to look at the calluses on the hands of the young man [Huseyin] to see he's been on his hands for a very long time."

Why single out Huseyin? Don't the other four siblings have calluses on their hands? And walking on your hands is hardly the only way to make them callused.

I don't have any specific reason to expect a hoax, but calluses on the hands of one of the five siblings is hardly a reason to give the all-clear. Nevertheless, in the absence of any specific reason to expect a hoax, I think it is worth treating it as genuine.

The behavior could potentially reveal much about our own evolution, Humphrey says.

"Here we've got a living example of how it might be for a member of our species to walk on four legs," he said.

Most experts assume that the quadruped ancestors of humans walked in a similar way to apes such as gorillas and chimpanzees.

But the Turkish brothers and sisters walk on only their wrists or the heels of their hands, with their fingers held off the ground, the researchers say. This position appears to have saved their fingers from damage; the sisters, for instance, engage in both crochet and embroidery.

Chimps, our closest living relatives, use their whole hands and fingers for walking.

"Chimpanzees basically wreck their fingers by walking on them," Humphrey said.

[...]

"I think this new evidence, suggesting that [early-human ancestors] walked on their wrists, is much more plausible and interesting," Humphrey said.

I question this completely. Chimpanzees wreck their fingers? Chimps have very good manual dexterity, I'd need to see some support for this astounding claim before accepting it.

But even if correct about chimpanzees, Humphrey's claim that the siblings walk only on the heels of their hands isn't supported by the evidence available. The article has one photo of four of the siblings walking. In it, you can clearly make out just two hands on the ground, and in both of them, the people are clearly using their entire hand, fingers and all.

(Click image for full view.)

The photographic evidence contradicts Humphrey's claim, and calls into doubt Uner Tan's conclusion that this is a viable model of pre-bipedal human movement.

If you try it for yourself, I'm confident you'll find that it is impossible to do what the researchers claim. With the heel of the hand, or the palm, flat on the ground, it is virtually impossible to bend the fingers back far enough to keep them off the ground. There's maybe a couple of millimetres give in the finger joints, and it is quite tiring. There are basically three ways of hand-walking: with open hands flat on the ground; on closed fists; or on the knuckles of the fingers, as apes do when knuckle-walking. I do not believe there is any evidence at all, either in anatomically modern humans or any plausible ancestor, for a mode of quadrupedal walking where the fingers are held up off the ground.

There is no doubt at all that human development is complex. The five siblings in question all display a range of congenital deficiencies, include mild mental retardation and lack of balance. It is absolutely possible that whatever genetic damage the five siblings have -- and it might be as little as a single gene -- could lead to them doing the "bear crawl" into adulthood.

But I am extremely skeptical that this gives us any insight into human evolution. For Uner Tan to describe this as "backward evolution" is as absurd as it would be to describe Tay-Sachs disease as backwards-evolution, or sufferers of Huntington's Disease as "evolutionary throwbacks" to an otherwise unsuspected ancestor. The siblings are clearly broken. They're not a throwback to "primitive Man". The most one could say is that, possibly, early pre-bipedal ancestors of human beings may not have had the gene which the siblings are missing. But that's not the same thing: if you rip out the computer chip from a modern Ford Fiesta you don't get a Model T Ford, you get a broken Fiesta.

(Unlike modern cars, biological organisms are astonishingly good at continuing to work with bits missing. As fragile as living things are, we're also incredibly resilient.)

Update, January 3rd: More information here.

The Onion on opinions

When satire makes more sense than conventional wisdom -- The Onion reports that "38% of people not actually entitled to their opinion":

In a surprising refutation of the conventional wisdom on opinion entitlement, a study conducted by the University of Chicago's School for Behavioral Science concluded that more than one-third of the U.S. population is neither entitled nor qualified to have opinions.

"On topics from evolution to the environment to gay marriage to immigration reform, we found that many of the opinions expressed were so off-base and ill-informed that they actually hurt society by being voiced," said chief researcher Professor Mark Fultz, who based the findings on hundreds of telephone, office, and dinner-party conversations compiled over a three-year period. "While people have long asserted that it takes all kinds, our research shows that American society currently has a drastic oversupply of the kinds who don't have any good or worthwhile thoughts whatsoever. We could actually do just fine without them."

The difficulty, alas, is distinguishing the 38% from the rest...

(Here's a hint though... if you think that "If humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes?" is a good argument against evolution, you're in the 38%.)

Tiger and piglets

This mother tiger is raising piglets:


The photo is genuine, and despite gags about it ending in tears when momma gets a little peckish, the tiger herself was raised by a pig and is very unlikely to turn on "her" babies. It's a good example of animal psychology: the tiger isn't likely to be fooled by the tiger skins on the piglets, especially once they skins have been washed a few times and lose any residual tiger scent, but it shows that some animals learn what to consider prey and what not to.

Although the above situation was artificial in the sense that human beings manipulated the tiger to raise the piglets, such situations sometime occur in the wild. True stories (and some not-so-true) of human children being raised by wolves are common. Less common but still well-documented include cases of predators raising babies of their usual prey species, for example the well-documented case of a lioness in Kenya that tried to raise no fewer than three baby antelopes.

There are no stars!!!

Oh noes!!! There is no stars, the moon landing must have been faked on a sound stage!!1



Heh heh heh.

For the real reason there are no stars, see Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy site.

Geller versus YouTube

Second-rate magician and first-rate fraudulant psychic, Uri Geller, has been using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to censor skeptics who have been showing videos of his tricks on YouTube.

Clips censored by Geller include a slow-motion clip of him palming a magnet just before making a compass needle move, and his famous flop on the Johnny Carson Show when he was unable to perform when Carson provided his own spoons instead of Gellar's pre-prepared ones. (That's why I call him a second-rate magician -- a first-rate magician would have ad-libbed and done something.)

The DMCA is ripe for abuse, and leaves service providers like YouTube in the unfortunate position of being "copyright cops", removing material on no more basis than the say-so of somebody claiming to be the copyright owner.

Something to think about

(My first ever YouTube clip. Thanks to Les the Stupid Evil Bastard.)

Milk folklore

One of the more interesting pieces of folklore about cows milk is that skim milk is more fattening than regular, full-fat milk.

I've heard two different versions of this. The first doesn't try to explain how it is possible for milk minus the fat to be more fattening than milk including fat at all. There is no reason, skim milk "just is" more fattening. The so-called proof, to use the term laughingly, is that "farmers feed skim milk to pigs to fatten them". More likely they feed skim milk to pigs because (1) it is rich in vitamins and protein, and (2) it is cheap.

The second version seems a little more plausible. Skim milk is more fattening because it has added sugar to make it more palatable.

But is it true? To find out, I recorded the energy values, amounts of fat and sugar from four different brands of milk: Pauls full-fat milk, Woolworths "Lite" milk, Rev, and Farmdale UHT skim milk.

Energy value of milk

Type	Energy/100mL (kJ)	Total : Saturated fat (g)	Sugars (g)
Full fat	271	3.6 : 2.3	4.8
"Lite"	193	1.4 : 0.9	5
Rev	191	1.3 : 0.8	4.9
Skim	150	0.1 : <0.1	5.3

As the above table shows, it simply isn't true that full-fat milk is more fattening than skim milk. Skim milk has just 55 percent of the calories of full-fat milk. It is true that it has a tad more sugars (10 percent more), but that is well and truly made up for by the drop in fat content.

(It isn't necessarily the case that the extra sugar has been added to the skim milk. It may be that the process of making skim milk has a side-effect of concentrating the milk sugars. Either way, the extra calories from the milk sugars are dwarfed by the calories removed by discarding the fat.)

Now, I suppose it is just barely possible that all the milk sellers are lying when they list the nutritional analysis of their products. A grand conspiracy of thousands of dairy farmers and milk boards and scientists, all over the world, just so they can fool people into thinking that taking the fat out of milk makes it more fattening.

Nah, I don't think so.

Where does folklore like this come from? As you can see, there is a tiny, almost microscopic kernel of, not truth but plausibility to the story. Skim milk has a smidgen more sugar than regular milk. Has the myth come about from mere confusion over this factoid? I don't think so.

Even now, long after skim milk has become respectable, it still has the tiniest little shadow of weenie, hippy-dippy effeminacy. Real Men don't drink "double-decaff skinny vanilla latte with a sprinkle of cinnamon". I don't think it is a coincidence I've only heard this myth from men, none of whom are the slightest bit concerned about counting calories. Nevertheless, they justify their unwillingness to drink skim milk or low-fat milk on the grounds that fat-free milk is more fattening.

This is conjecture, of course -- who knows why people believe the things they believe? -- but I strongly suspect that the myth allows them to justify an unconscious feeling that "only girls drink skim" as being health-consciousness (thank you Herr Doktor Freud). Or perhaps they just prefer the taste of regular milk, but feel that "fat" milk is too sinful, unless it is actually better for you. Or maybe they simply like the idea of being one of the Chosen Few who are smart enough to see through all the wicked advertising that fools everybody else.

If I knew why people believed things, I could put memetics on a solid scientific grounding.

The Denialists' Deck of Cards

Chris Hoofnagle of Samuelson Law has written a paper discussing the rhetorical techniques and tactics used to deflect debate and reform. Hoofnagle writes from a perspective of consumer protection, but the same denialist techniques can be used in many other fields.

Public policy debates on consumer protection and the environment almost always start with the "no problem" theme. The argument emphasises that whatever consumer reform being debated is unnecessary. This is because there is no problem.

"No problem" is the chorus of a denialist argument. The skilled denialist, even after engaging in a debate for an extended period of time, will never concede that a problem exists.

As Hoofnagle says, many of the arguments give can be legitimate. Sometimes industrial groups are correct, and denialism serves a good purpose. But often these rhetorical tools are used for Wickedness rather than Niceness. A common example is appeals to competition. Competition can be a very strong force for reform, but the loudest voices in favour of "leave it for the market to decide" come from uncompetitive markets. Consumer choice in the Model T Ford style ("any colour you like, so long as it is black") is always valued by those who have locked up the market.

The paper can be downloaded for free from here.

Eerily accurate psychic powers

Violent Acres [warning: strong language] has written a guide to impressing your gullible friends and family with your psychic powers:

For example, a woman sits in front of you. Her hair is dyed black and she has gone heavy on the eye make-up. She has got more than 3 facial piercings and a tattoo of miniature crows around her wrist. She is clad almost completely in black and she is carrying around a mid-sized notepad.

Label: Little Miss Ignored and Emo.

Your Reading:

“Your father molested youuuuuuuu. Nooooowww you sleep with multiple men because it’s the only way you know how to shooooowwww affection. You try to show your one night stands your crappy poetry, but no one wants to read your crappy poooooeeeetrrryyyyyy.”

Cold reading with attitude.

The Final Authority

Surely this has to be a spoof? Perhaps not -- there is no limit to nuttery.

The author of this website has decided that, on the basis of Biblical authority, the Earth must be stationary. The Sun naturally moves around the Earth (like a million tonne battleship being spun around on a string by a two-year-old). The author also has a bee in his bonnet over the name of the American continents. Or should I say, "Cabotia".

There's more: Hitler had a hydrogen bomb, big enough to devastate the entire UK, but it was stolen by the Americans and tested in Alaska, causing a tsunami. Naturally enough, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in Indonesia was also caused by the Americans -- following orders from the Jesuits.

You can't parody stuff like this! Summing up the author's level of misunderstanding and confusion about scientific knowledge is this quote, from the stationary Earth page:

Many people consider the Encyclopedia Britannica the FINAL AUTHORITY on all scientific matters.

Hoodwinked Americans

Glenn Greenwald, writing for Salon, asks why it is that 31% of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was behind the September 11 attacks, even after President Bush has publically admitted that he had absolutely no connection at all with the attacks?

"Because they're stupid" is too pat an answer. Yes, many of them are just dumb, but even dumb people can follow the bouncing ball. The President has admitted that Saddam wasn't involved, why won't people listen?

(Not that he would admit making a mistake -- no, the story now is that nobody ever suggested Saddam was involved, no sir-e, Bush has no idea where people got that ridiculous idea. Maybe the terrorists suggested it.)

Still, even if almost one third of Americans believe this falsehood, things are much improved compared to September 2003 when 69% of the country was convinced that Saddam was behind the attacks.

What does it say about the potency of the Bush administration's propaganda abilities that this myth was believed by so many Americans in the first place, and that it still endures quite vibrantly? And is there any more potent evidence of the profound failure of the American media to fulfill its central function of informing the citizenry and exposing government falsehoods than the fact that America went to war while most of the country believed this fiction, and that almost one-third of Americans continue to believe it? Regardless of one's ideological orientation, shouldn't it be considered highly disturbing -- to put it mildly -- that such a large percentage of the electorate believes in rank fiction with regard to such critical matters?

The Bush administration can't take all the credit, or blame, for the endurance of this lie. There are deeper things at work. After all, it was just a few months ago that a poll showed that 30% of Americans couldn't remember what year the 9/11 attacks happened.

That's right. Just shy of five years after September 11 (the defining moment of the last half decade, the day "everything changed") and almost one third of Americans didn't know what year it happened. (It is too much to hope that it was the same one third that believe Saddam was the mastermind behind the attacks.)

6% gave an earlier year, 8% gave a later year, and 16% admitted that they had no idea whatsoever. An additional 5% couldn't even name the date and month correctly.

The Hedgehog and the Shaman

Nanny Ogg was right: the hedgehog can never be buggered at all.

Following the advice of a traditional healer (a.k.a. witchdoctor), a Serbian man tried a rather unusual cure for premature ejaculation: having sex with a live hedgehog. Not surprisingly, he ended up rather worse for the experience, with severe lacerations in the parts one would rather there were no severe lacerations.

The Register has the full story.

That ain't no goat, it's my brother!

This is an alibi you don't hear every day. A Nigerian man arrested for killing his brother with an axe claims that he actually killed a goat, which magically turned into his brother after it was dead.

Murder suspects in Nigeria, where many people believe in black magic, sometimes claim spirits tricked them into killing. In 2001, eight people were burned to death after one person in their group was accused of making a bystander's penis magically disappear.

Thanks to BoingBoing.

In case you didn't notice...

...the world didn't end on Tuesday.

Shocking but true.

Sept 11 - controlled demolition?

One of the most puzzling things about the September 11 attacks five years ago is the way the three World Trade Centre buildings fell so perfectly, as if they had been carefully demolished by experts. Do buildings normally fall straight down, collapsing in on themselves, from random collapses? Coincidence-theorists suggest that maybe they do; after all, no steel-framed building has ever collapsed from fire, before or since, so how would we know?

Brigham Young University physics professor, Steven E. Jones, has publically cast doubt on the official theory, and has suggested that controlled demolition is a more likely cause of the collapse of the towers.

Some of the facts which cast serious doubt on the offical story:

• film of the collapses show horizontal explosions and eyewitnesses report the sound of explosions


• the antenna dropped first in the North Tower, which suggests the use of explosives in the core columns


• the collapse of the 47-story WTC 7 building, which was not hit by a plane, yet dropped in its own footprint; WTC 7 housed no fewer than seven government agencies, including the U.S. Secret Service and the Central Intelligence Agency


• WTC 7 collapsed in 6.6 seconds, just 0.6 of a second longer than it would take an object dropped from the roof to hit the ground -- as the floors collapsed, they apparently did not strike lower floors causing them them collapse


• the concrete was pulverized into powder, which is not consistant with an ordinary collapse, but is consistant with the use of explosives


• steel supports not only melted, but were partly evaporated, but neither diesel fuel nor ordinary office materials burn at the required 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures needed to evaporate steel

Professor Jones is a member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth.

Some perspective on sports doping

Freakonomics has reprinted a letter to the editor of Sports Illustrated magazine which is worth repeating.

The letter is from Brandon Gaut of Irvine, California.

As a scientist and a sports fan, I believe the current doping scandals compromise science as much as sports. The tests are performed by entities motivated by and funded to achieve the goal of detecting cheaters; their objectivity is suspect. Also, it is a scientific fact that there will be positive tests even when there are no cheaters. From my perspective, the puzzle is not the occasional prositive test, but why there aren't a great many more. The system is broken, and I fear it is not always due to cheating athletes.

I must admit I don't understand the obsession with banning "performance-enhancing drugs". All of sports training is designed to enhance performance, and none of it is particularly natural. Whether it is intensive training, dietary supplements or "approved" drugs (antibiotics, pain-killers, medicines of many varieties), none of it is especially natural, and all of it takes a great toll on the athlete's body.

I don't see that anaerobic steroids and other banned drugs are any worse for the athlete, nor cheating. We don't try to distinguish between natural athletes and "unnatural" athletes. All athletes are allowed to exercise and train hard, which is a pretty unnatural thing to do. They pump their bodies full of "permitted" chemicals, including antibiotics, painkillers and other drugs, as well as other chemicals such as vitamins, minerals and "nutritional supplements". They eat carefully tailored food combinations. There is nothing natural about "loading up on carbs". Why are hormones and steroids treated differently?

It is a double standard for sports administrators to allow athletes to eat protein supplements to put on more muscle mass, but not natural hormones that assist in growing muscles. I don't believe the excuse that it is because of the side-effects. If they were genuinely worried about the health of the athlete, they wouldn't allow them to become athletes in the first place. The high-intensity training and competition they go through not only leads to serious, permanent, mechanical damage to joints, but it also seriously weakens the immune system. Elite athletes might be able to push their bodies further, faster and harder than ordinary folks, but they aren't healthier. Sport is about performance, not health.

But all that is by-the-by. Even if we decide that "drugs are bad, m'kay?" and ban anabolic steroids and others, it is important to remember that the drug testing labs are highly motivated to detect cheats, and there will always be false positives. Claims of drug cheating should always be taken with a grain of salt.

[Update, 2 Sep 2007: fixed a silly typo/thinko where I wrote "anaerobic" instead of anabolic. Drugs for athletes who don't breathe perhaps?]