For the few of you who have been on board the International Space Station and haven’t yet heard the news, the 150th anniversary of Origin of Species came along last year and some Young Earthers saw a chance to leverage this into propaganda. Since the copyright is long expired, the text is in the public domain, and any Joe Blow is free to publish it. This particular Joe Blow came in the person of evangelist Ray Comfort, who vomited a “Special Introduction” intended to discredit evolutionary biology into the front of Origin. He then published it inside a cover giving every indication that it was a legitimate copy of the seminal work. Regardless of whether he admits it or not, the whole charade was a deliberate attempt to trick students into reading Ray’s own mental diarrhea instead of the book they thought they were buying, and hopefully win over a few converts.People said “Just rip out the introduction and presto, you’ve got a good book” or “It’s still OK because students are smart enough to ignore the graffiti in the front, and just read the intelligent part in the back.” Maybe, but if you’ve ever had your hands on a copy and actually cracked it open, you’ve seen that this is not such an attractive proposition.

The Ray Comfort pages. Click for a larger view.

For, while the Ray Comfort pages are nicely typeset, well designed, and festooned with illustrations, spacing, bullet points, and indentation, the Charles Darwin part has been forced through some kind of Disneyland supershrink machine. It’s been compressed into a tiny, virtually unreadable font. All breaks have been removed. There is no whitespace at all, except for a double space and a centered title at each of the 14 included chapters (not even a page break!). I don’t consider my eyes to be the worst in the world, but I can’t read it. The font is so small over these long, unbroken lines that I lose my place every time I try to go to the next line. I’d need to use a straightedge to read it, seriously. I scanned a couple representative pages from each section. Click on them to see what I’m talking about. The scans are the same size as each other.

The Charles Darwin pages. Click for a larger view.

Was this done accidentally? Was it done to save money? Of course not. It was done to discourage readers from attempting to access the content they tried to purchase; to tie a gag around Darwin’s mouth while Comfort preaches away unrestrained. More than anything else, it reminds me of what TV networks do to the end credits of movies these days: The movie is squished into one side of the screen and made to scroll past at an accelerated rate, while the majority of the screen, and all the sound, are devoted to commercials for upcoming shows.

The content (and many other aspects) of Comfort’s “Special Introduction” have been thoroughly covered elsewhere, so I’m not going to repeat them here. But I do feel that this one seemingly insignificant tactic, often overlooked, speaks with a very loud voice.

Of course we answer “The last thing a skeptic would have done is rush right out and give their money to the (insert the salesman of your favorite alternative woo product here).” And here is where the heads butt. Believers often feel that a truly skeptical and scientific process would have tested the product by trying it firsthand. And, to the average layman, inexperienced in science, that sounds extremely reasonable.

This is going to be a very short blog post, because this question is very simple. No, trying a product personally is not a useful way to assess its value. A scientist understands that, a layperson does not; it sounds thoroughly counterintuitive.

The scientist knows that anecdotes and testimonials, while they can be interesting, are not useful evidence, not even the scientist’s own. Anecdotes are usually of unknown origin; and even when they’re not, they are uncontrolled, unscientific, and subject to a myriad of biases, influences, random variances, and external factors. Well designed scientific tests control for, and eliminate, as many of those influences as possible — and often, all of them.

The skeptical process does not ever require personally sampling the woo. Why would it? You’re certainly welcome to try the product if you want, but doing so is completely outside of a meaningful scientific assessment.

Does this mean that every time we hear a woo claim we must go out and perform a thorough scientific test? Of course not. Well performed tests take time and cost money, and it’s the party selling the product who bears that obligation. In science, good evidence is required to move from the null hypothesis (the null hypothesis states that the claims about the product are unsupported until they are proven true). So when I’m told about a woo product, I’m probably willing to ask to see good scientific evidence, but I’m not obligated to provide such evidence myself. I’m sure as hell not obligated to buy the damned product.

So the next time you hear “I was a skeptic until…”, you know that (a) that person is inexperienced in science, and (b) their endorsement of the product was born from an invalid process.

Your thoughts and comments are welcome.

The ATLAS detector at the LHC. Photo courtesy of CERN.

As Skeptoid listeners know, occasionally I like to go the Listener Feedback files to hear what people have to say. I found a note from Nick from Albuquerque, who disagreed strongly with the way I discussed the safety of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. I offer my response to his criticism herewith. He began:

I find it disheartening that someone who purports to be a common-sense skeptic of zany theories is completely incapable of making a logical, evidence based argument.

Now, I think it’s fair to say that I’ve established a decent reputation for making good, rational arguments (see this page for a bandwagon fallacy supporting this assertion). When someone starts an email to me with the statement that I am “completely incapable of making a logical, evidence based argument”, it tells me something about what to expect in their following paragraphs. I was not disappointed:

The fifth paragraph is the first paragraph of argument, and is also a great fallacy. Boiled down it essentially says that LHC is not dangerous BECAUSE other planned colliders were bigger. This is a classic “begs the question” fallacy; so how do you know those weren’t just as dangerous?

I’m afraid you made this up completely on your own. That paragraph does indeed compare the size of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider to that of other colliders, but it’s to give general background and perspective. If you feel you found a statement in this paragraph where I claimed this is why the LHC is safe, please bring it to my attention. In those five sentences I can find nothing remotely like that. Did you think before you wrote this?

The sixth paragraph is fallacious in that it withholds essential evidence from the reader. Cosmic ray collisions are photon collisions, photons have no mass. The whole point of the LHC experiment is to collide particles that DO have mass. Cosmic ray collisions also happen at random angles and trajectories, creating different results than the LHC collisions which will be head-on.

This time you’re simply wrong. You are probably thinking of solar radiation. Solar radiation and cosmic rays are not the same thing. Only a tiny fraction of cosmic rays are photons; the vast majority are massive, energetic particles. You have not even the most basic knowledge needed to discuss this subject. Before you make a charge like this, you should take the trouble to at least look it up on Wikipedia (at a minimum) to have some vague clue what you’re talking about. Here is a link to the Wikipedia page on cosmic rays for your benefit.

The point of this paragraph was to illustrate that the biggest collider of all, the universe, has been performing the Large Hadron Collider’s experiments, at up to tens of millions of times its energy levels, and has been doing so constantly for billions of years with not a single detectable consequence. And that, Nick, is just one reason physicists consider the LHC to be safe.

The next argument, that CERN’s own study into their own collider shows no risks is a false authority fallacy; an institute given $10 billion to build the project is not objective in evaluating its dangers. Following that is probably the best argument that the author makes. Yes, a long complex chain of unlikely conditions does make something unlikely.

CERN is not a false authority. CERN physicists are among the best authorities; and are the ones at greatest personal risk of death or injury if they’re wrong. They’re also not the only ones who have studied this (not remotely). I would agree with you that independent studies are generally most desirable, and we have them, in droves. Every valid theoretical argument ever developed (inside or outside CERN) supports its safety. Yes, there are some people who dispute this, but none of them has ever put forth a sound theoretical argument indicating any possibility of danger.

The point: Danger IS highly unlikely, but based on the available evidence, not the fallacious assertions above.

Thanks for clearing that up, and for pointing out my “fallacious assertions” that you so eloquently “corrected” for us. Danger is not merely highly unlikely, it’s vanishingly unlikely. If there is such a thing as a quantum of probability, CERN destroying the universe probably has less than 1 quantum. If so, then it would be accurate to say it is impossible. But I’ll leave that question to CERN’s physicists, if it’s not too “fallacious” to do so. Nick, you should probably think about doing the same.

The video was made and sent to me back in January by John Rael of SkepticallyPwnd.com, and he asked me to write up something that looked like a critical review of it. He said it would be easy, since it’s such a lame video, and I suppose it was. It would have been easier if it had been more compelling. When a video is so dumb, it’s kind of hard to say anything intelligent about it.

I’m not exactly sure what role I played in his gag, but what the heck, it was a fun little lark. His reveal video is here.

But Google Alerts made this a little more fun. Turns out some Bigfoot site, the Bigfoot Lunch Club, picked up on my SkepticBlog analysis and found it lacking. The author’s comments are well worth a read:

Today SkepticBlog wrote a post about a video they received a link to. They thought they would make fun of it and call themselves skeptics.

I always wanted a Bigfoot video to make fun of, so I could finally award myself the badge of Skeptic.

And then, to support his statement, he quoted the last two paragraphs of my original post about the video. These two paragraphs followed what was, I think, at least a half decent discussion of what was actually known about the video: its time, place, equipment used, and stuff that’s actually testable. There was none, so I wrapped up with a laissez-faire rumination:

Maybe it is a Bigfoot. Maybe it’s a guy in a suit, one that flares out bellbottom style, like my own cheap-ass gorilla suit does. Maybe it’s an autonomous robot in a suit. Maybe it’s a Bigfoot in a Bigfoot suit. Maybe it’s an example of high-end composite work combined with low-end 3D modeling, all rendered on Renderman.

The fact is that we can’t really know or conclude much of anything about this video, and the million others like it. We can’t prove it’s a fake any more than we can prove it’s a real Bigfoot. What it is is crappy evidence. It’s not testable. It’s fun, and it’s interesting, but its value as evidence is zero. Its value as an anecdote is that it suggests a direction for research. So to all who feel motivated: Grab your 3CCD cameras and head on up to Greenhorn, Oregon. A bellbottomed Bigfoot might be waiting for you.

And then he brought out the big guns, to show by comparison how lame those self-described “skeptics” really are. He quoted from someone named Autumn Williams, evidently a much more serious Bigfoot enthusiast, who had “dug a little bit deeper” into the video in her own analysis:

I’m not sure what to say here. No offense intended if you’re trying to be serious (it sure sounded that way?), but the hair is obviously synthetic, the face appears to be a poor reconstruction of a “planet of the apes” theme, the makeup pitiful, the movements awkward, the staging is obvious, subtle references to the Patterson film are rather amusing… and I’d have to say, if it’s not an attempt at a hoax on your part, you’ve been hoaxed. Somehow, though, I find it difficult to believe that you could follow something for that long and NOT know it was someone in a stovepipe-legged, poorly-made suit. I didn’t even need to pause the footage to tell that…

…Finally, asking people for “offers” and having “james randi” in your tags in your youtube account is a dead giveaway that you’re looking for money. I’m sorry, but ol’ Jim won’t buy it, and I doubt anyone else will either.

“Kudos to Autumn Williams,” he went on to conclude. Well, I take issue. This analysis by Autumn is guilty of exactly the kind of useless commentary I panned in my Skeptoid episode about Bigfoot research. She makes no attempt to address anything in the video that’s testable. She basically says only that it’s a really stupid looking suit. That’s a terrible analysis. The first person who ever saw an okapi probably thought it was a really stupid looking suit too.

To Autumn, and to your Bigfoot Lunch Club associate, I suggest you work on improving your analytical skills. You have to have testable evidence if you want anyone to take your claims seriously. You omitted the part of my blog where I discussed what was testable (which was almost nothing), so it was of course very easy to make my analysis look weak. But if what you quoted here was the strongest part of your analysis, the rest of it must have been strongly wanting. Red herrings, like mentioning the James Randi reference in the YouTube description, are not testable data. The assertion “The movements are awkward” is not testable data, and since some animals are awkward as hell, it’s not even a useful observation. “The hair is obviously synthetic” is laughable. If you can truly discern synthetic hair from real hair by a YouTube video shot from a distance, you’re a freaking wizard.

So, Mr. bravely-anonymous Bigfoot Lunch Club, you’ve not succeeded in impressing me, and if this is the level of analysis that passes for science with you, you’ve got a long way to go before you’re going to impress anyone. Oh, and it appears that you’ve been SkepticallyPwnd by Mr. Rael.

A frame from the video in question.

I am in receipt of a new alleged Bigfoot video, the YouTube version of which is hereinafter appended. A fellow emailed it to me with the request that I help him “get it into the right hands”, because, you know, routing Bigfoot videos to the appropriate cryptozoologist is what I’m all about.

These are actually kind of fun to get. At a first glance, there’s nothing in there that’s inconsistent with a guy in a suit. If a guy had a suit like this and his homey filmed him in it, this is exactly what you’d expect the video to look like. By Occam’s Razor, this is a guy in a suit; because the other possibility requires the introduction of the assumption that an unknown species of great ape roams about. But I hate to stop there; that’s too easy.

First let’s see where and when the video was made: Just north of Greenhorn, Oregon in October of 2009. That appears consistent with the foliage seen in the video, about the right season judging by the leaves, and I probably wouldn’t expect to see any snow on the ground. John E Walker is what’s on the YouTube page, but that’s not the name he emailed me with; and though the Scotch Whiskey reference calls attention to itself, there are people with that name. He says is that it was shot on a JVC Everio GZ-HD7 3CCD camcorder, which is a real model of camera. The picture looks pretty good, so probably a 3CCD, but that’s about all I can guess. I didn’t find anything in the mechanical details of the video to prove or disprove its authenticity.

So that doesn’t leave us much to go on. Maybe it is a Bigfoot. Maybe it’s a guy in a suit, one that flares out bellbottom style, like my own cheap-ass gorilla suit does. Maybe it’s an autonomous robot in a suit. Maybe it’s a Bigfoot in a Bigfoot suit. Maybe it’s an example of high-end composite work combined with low-end 3D modeling, all rendered on Renderman.

The fact is that we can’t really know or conclude much of anything about this video, and the million others like it. We can’t prove it’s a fake any more than we can prove it’s a real Bigfoot. What it is is crappy evidence. It’s not testable. It’s fun, and it’s interesting, but its value as evidence is zero. Its value as an anecdote is that it suggests a direction for research. So to all who feel motivated: Grab your 3CCD cameras and head on up to Greenhorn, Oregon. A bellbottomed Bigfoot might be waiting for you.

As you may or may not know, the Bible doesn’t even contain the word pyramid, at least not an online King James Version that I searched. This is quite interesting. All the evidence points to Herodotus of Halicarnassus as the originator of the tale of Jewish slaves laboring under Egyptian whips to build the pyramids [In fact Herodotus only mentions the number of workers on the pyramids, he did not identify them as either Jews or slaves. - BD]. However, the Book of Exodus was written nearly exactly the same time as Herodotus wrote this in his book The Histories (about 450 BCE), and it seems strange that these two contemporaneous accounts would match up so well on all details except the one that should appeal most to storytellers: the pyramids.

The other glaring difference between the accounts of Herodotus and Exodus is the Exodus itself. Despite a few poor attempts by some Christian scholars to try and shoehorn other events recorded by Herodotus into excuses for an Exodus, it’s clear that the Biblical account, where Moses led hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees out from the Egyptian labor camps, is wholly absent from Herodotus’ version.

Whether they were slaves or not, Jewish or not, or had worked on pyramids or something different, no group that large could possibly have camped for even one day and left no archaeological evidence. We find prehistoric camps tens of thousands of years old where hunters spent a single night. To claim that a group of thousands (let alone hundreds of thousands) could camp for even a week (let alone forty years) and leave no archaeological evidence displays gross naivete. A group numbering anywhere close to a million would have constituted the world’s largest city in those times, and short of a tectonic subduction, entire cities do not disappear. Whatever the Exodus was, if it happened at all, was certainly not what was depicted in the Book of Exodus.

No, I’m not trying to be controversial, and not trying to rub Christians or Jews or anyone else the wrong way. But I would like to be enlightened as to why some who hold such texts dear sometimes regard them as mere lists of events, rather than being otherwise meaningful. Whatever value they have is demonstrably not as lists of events. Might it lie elsewhere?

The criticism I received has been of two general varieties. First, that I’m an “Exodus denier”. Well, sorry to say, it’s not me who’s denying it: It’s virtually every historian and archaeologist, based on the evidence. I merely report what has been thoroughly established – that the evidence that must necessarily exist if the Exodus happened has never manifested itself. Second, that the Egyptians never recorded their losses in battle, only their victories; and it is this that explains the lack of evidence for the Exodus. Whether this is true or just an apologetic argument is irrelevant. The lack of Egyptian corroboration is certainly consistent with the lack of archaeological evidence, but it is hardly the reason historians don’t support the Exodus story. Again, your beef is with the evidence, not with the researchers who report the findings.

I submit that all efforts to prove that which is to be taken on faith with scientific evidence are not only doomed to fail, they are ultimately illogical and counterproductive to the purpose of faith.

I received a forwarded email from the University of Pittsburgh’s Critical Care Medicine Group email list:

Absolutely enthralling video of David Blaine explaining how he held his breath for 17 minutes! Interesting the assistance he received from the medical fraternity, including trying liquid ventilation with perflurocarbons.

Video here <http://www.ted.com/talks/david_blaine_how_i_held_my_breath_for_17_min.html>

OK, well enough. This is pretty much what has been publicly broadcast about the stunt. Nothing new here. But then another poster replied:

I love magic and I very much respect David Blane`s skill as an illusionist and the training he does for his stunts. The talk is, indeed, enthralling. Blane is a superb magician and , even though the people at TED took his talk at face value (including some aspects of his medical assistance), I do not. A number of David Blane`s and Chris Angel`s stunt-illusions (including the prolonged breath holding under water) have been recreated by the nefarious “masked magician” with a reveal of the underlying principles of the illusion. To me, the “face emersion in a sink full of perflurocarbons” and some of the other medical discussion add to the illusion but don’t give a cogent alternative explanation to the true aspects of the illusion. An important part of the fun/magic of an illusion is the magician convincing you that there is no other explanation to what you believe you are seeing. You can find the “reveal” of the illusion on the net if you are so inclined.

Well, neither do I take the perfluorocarbons explanation at face value. Another poster replied with this:

My father participated in some of the original experiments with the SEALS using perflurocarbons.  After watching James Cameron’s “The Abyss”, which attempted to show the liquid breathing effects on rats and people, he remarked it was reasonably accurate.  The ‘panic’ reaction of holding one’s breath for as long as possible until being forced to breath in the fluid was an issue, and once the subject was breathing the liquid, they were unable to perform tasks because it took so much effort to breathe.

There is good reason to be skeptical of David Blaine’s feats. His famous TV show “Street Magic” is widely known to have been largely accomplished with post-production editing. For example, his “levitation” was a cleverly edited conflation of a parlor trick called the Balducci and a demonstration of using a wire rig for flying onstage (and I don’t think I’m violating any magician’s trade secrets by pointing that out). Should we not be equally skeptical of his breath holding trick? It was performed on Oprah, for FSM’s sake; and it’s not like no magician has ever taken advantage of the limited view television offers its audience.

Pretty much all of the authorities accept Blaine’s record as legitimate, though short-lived (it was broken only a few months later). Blaine’s problem is that he has established himself as the boy who cried wolf. Whether his feat was genuine or a trick along the lines of the Masked Magician’s reveal, his audience has good reason to doubt its authenticity.

What do you think?

http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/email/oc/buyonline/buyonlineform.cfm

Selling crap online, and claiming that it has medical value, is illegal. This is just and proper, because it’s wrong to con sick people out of money. Yet it’s so profitable to do so that it remains a flourishing business. And those sellers who may genuinely believe their product helps people also deserve to be turned in and prosecuted. They’ve heard the research already, they’ve just chosen to ignore it. Well, they may find it a little harder to ignore a warning letter from the Food & Drug Administration.

This online form can be filled out to report online sales of fraudulent products that make specific health claims. If you claim that your product diagnoses, treats, prevents, or cures any disease, then your product is classified as a drug; and it’s illegal to sell unapproved drugs in the United States. Therefore, any web site that sells any form of alternative medicine, or  non-FDA approved gadgets or contraptions, and makeS specific medical claims about it, are breaking the law, and are fair game for this form to be used.

The form is short. Just be sure to state your complaint specifically and succinctly. An unapproved product must be offered for sale over the Internet, and a specific health claim must be made about it.

Bookmark it. Use it. Protect your neighbors from con artists and vultures.

Digging through the Intertubes, I found that it’s true. Each large, commercial wind turbine in the United States kills an average of about two birds per year. This varies a lot based on where the wind farm is. Some are right in bird migration paths, and some aren’t. But the average is about two per year per turbine. In 2001 there were 3,500 operational wind turbines in the U.S., for a grand total of 6,400 birds killed.

Sounds like a lot, I suppose. But I wanted to know how many birds died from other manmade causes. Here are those numbers (based on the most common annual estimates I found):

The granddaddy of human-caused bird population decline is habitat destruction. Numbers are not available, but it’s said to dwarf the causes listed above.

But even that pales in comparison to natural bird deaths. About one third of all birds die in collisions with natural objects, like rocks, trees, or the ground. Most of these are young birds learning to fly.

However, simply that more birds are killed by other causes doesn’t justify the incremental increase imposed by wind turbines. The entire argument is a non-sequitur, technically speaking. But it’s not completely irrelevant, in that it does put the issue into proper perspective.

It doesn’t even address the ongoing death toll to birds from particulate air pollution caused by coal and oil burning power plants, which is what we’re left with when alternative energy sources are taken off the table for “environmental” reasons. I couldn’t find a number for this, but I’ll wager it’s at least as much as it is for humans. As many 100,000 people die each year, in the United States alone, from particulate air pollution from coal and oil burning power plants. I don’t know how many are killed by the environmental effects of wind turbines, but I think it’s safe to say the number is lower.

Sources:

Sagrillo, Mick. “Putting Wind Power’s Effect on Birds into Perspective.” Wind Energy Technical Info, 2003. Web. Jan 6, 2010. <http://www.awea.org/faq/sagrillo/swbirds.html>

Curry & Kelinger. “What Kills Birds?” Curry & Kerlinger, LLC. Web. Jan 6, 2010. <http://www.currykerlinger.com/birds.htm>

Erickson, W., et. al. “Avian Collisions with Wind Turbines: A Summary of Existing Studies and Comparisons to Other Sources of Avian Collision Mortality in the United States.” National Wind Coordinating Committee. Aug 2001. Web. Jan 6, 2010. <http://www.west-inc.com/reports/avian_collisions.pdf>

ACS News Center. “Air Pollution Linked to Deaths From Lung Cancer.” American Cancer Society. American Cancer Society, Inc., 6 Mar. 2002. Web. 21 Dec. 2009. <http://www.cancer.org/docroot/NWS/content/NWS_1_1x_Air_Pollution_Linked_to_Deaths_From_Lung_Cancer.asp>

Therefore, the only way to produce inFact is to take time away from my regular professional career as a consulting computer scientist. This is the kind of career change that I’m looking to make anyway, to become of a full-time science journalist and skeptical outreach professional. But being the family breadwinner, I can only make such a change when there is sufficient money in the game.

So I’ve been studying the web video landscape for some time, seeing what models are making money. It’s an easy answer. None of them are making money. There are exceptions to every rule – every financial model for web video has a few standouts who make good money – but the rule for each is that it must be done at your own risk and at your own expense. Most sponsors are not seeing a worthwhile return. Investors have shifted their venture dollars from content to infrastructure. On the plus side, it’s a dynamic arena, so much so that this paragraph will very likely be outdated very soon. But that doesn’t offer much practical assistance to those like myself, who have good content and just want to get it out there.

The default offering for such content producers is ad revenue. Video sharing sites, of which YouTube is just one of many (albeit by far the most important), offer you a pittance. Ads are overlaid, or placed in front of, your video, and you receive a small share of any ad revenue. Unless you have huge traffic because you’re a celebrity or are driven by a popular television show, you’re unlikely to get enough traffic for the ad revenue to cover your costs. I’m neither, so that does not bode well.

Skeptoid is listener supported. About one half of one percent of listeners make a voluntary 99 cent per episode recurring payment. This covers the out-of-pocket expenses for Skeptoid and some of the travel and related costs. It certainly doesn’t cover my time, but then I never expected it to; Skeptoid is done strictly outside of business hours. I’ll ask the same for subscribers to inFact, most of whom I expect to come from outside the Skeptoid listenership. inFact will be enrolled in all the ad revenue programs, but it will also be offered as a video podcast so it can be downloaded through iTunes. As of this writing, those downloads are ad-free (and thus revenue-free); so it’s that market from whom I hope to get some viewer support.

You’ll see the new first season of 13 episodes of inFact appear early in the first quarter of 2010, unless something changes between now and then. When you do, it will be most widely distributed through ad supported channels. It will also be available for ad-free distribution as a video podcast. I fully expect that the first season will be produced at a near-total loss, but these are the kind of first steps that everyone needs to take if we’re going to find a profitable model. Yes, this was a difficult decision to make, and yes, I do have domestic support, if you know what I mean.

When inFact appears, I hope you’ll subscribe and enjoy it, but mostly I hope you’ll share it with others. It should be ideal for schools for all ages, and I promise there won’t be a single episode that you wouldn’t show to your mother. Listen to Skeptoid, or watch SkepticBlog, for further announcements. As I always say, supportive viewers and listeners are the critical link in the chain for spreading the value of critical thinking to those out there who need it most.