Sometimes I wish that I didn’t have a nagging conscience so that I could make millions selling crap at a 6000% profit just by claiming that it does something it doesn’t. Unfortunately, I’d be embarrassed by the first skeptic to challenge me. Oh, and then there’s that pesky fact that I’d be scamming people and promoting pseudoscience.

Anyway, there seems to be no end to the things you can convince people that some token item embedded in $.08 worth of rubber can do.

Last week I stumbled over Sharkbanz.

Screenshot of the Sharkbanz website. The band can be worn on the wrist or ankle.

Sharkbanz are rubber jewelry similar to a Fitbit Flex. Instead of a motion sensor, however, Sharkbanz contain magnets. The company’s founders claim that these magnets repel sharks.

Yes, you read that right. Magnets in a rubber bracelet repel sharks.

How does it work? Well, let’s look at what they claim.

Screenshot of the Sharkbanz website, explaining the technology.

Summary:

• Uses magnets
• No batteries, no electricity, no moving parts
• Rated for 200 meters. What happens when you dive below that? Does the magnet implode or the rubber erode?
• For ages 5 and up. So if you’re 4, you’re some Shark’s dinner I guess, because for some reason it is just not safe for those under 5. By the way, choking hazard warnings are usually for children under 3, so this arbitrary value makes little sense.

The idea is that sharks are annoyed or frightened by the electromagnetic field emitted by the magnet because of their keen electroreception capabilities.

Okay, so I’m not a shark expert, nor am I a physicist or an engineer. For this reason, I’m going to tread a little lightly on the examination of whether the idea is plausible and focus on whether they have demonstrated that the things work. But I will admit to a bit of skepticism given the knowledge I do have. Some of my thoughts:

• I don’t know that the differences between magnetic fields, electrical impulses, and electromagnetic fields matter, but the owners of Sharkbanz imply that any electromagnetic energy is disturbing to sharks. If that were true, then light would bother them. Clearly, just as the human eye only senses electromagnetic energy within a range of wavelengths, sharks’ electroreceptors are limited in range. Yet the website says very little about what research and testing they have done to determine whether sharks even sense their magnets. The most that I can find is a link to a list of tested species on the website of a group called SharkDefense. There is zero detail provided in this list and no citations to peer-reviewed literature about these tests. The site does cite some literature in a section which explains the theory (which, again, I am unqualified to adequately challenge, but it looks mostly correct), but provides no reason to believe that the idea because sharks have electroreception, they will be repelled by this specific small magnet wrapped in a rubber bracelet. In fact, take a look at the size of the magnet the claim to have tested (again, no citation for this): Click here
• Sharkbanz presents no reason that a man-eating shark would have for avoiding the electromagnetic field emitted by their magnets. Just because sharks have electroreceptors doesn’t mean that some random magnet is going to affect their behavior. Perhaps if they made an effort to produce some magnet that emitted a field that mimicked the energy put out by a predator it might make sense, but do bull sharks even have predators? I don’t know, but I’m skeptical.
• Then there’s the fact that the magnet is encased in rubber.

So if you’re an expert on sharks or the physics that apply here, please feel free to comment with your 2 cents, but I’m going to focus on their “scientific testing”.

Sharkbanz are a fun, easy way to add peace of mind to the everyday ocean swim, surf, or snorkel, but make no mistake: the science is real.

Bull*cough*.

This technology has been tested extensively on over ten of the most common predatory shark species…

On the website, there are several references to videos that supposedly show this “extensive testing”. However, most of the videos I’ve found when I click those links are media interviews in which the owners say very little. There are certainly no published articles from peer-reviewed journals, not even some about electroreceptors in sharks that don’t really support their claims. They don’t even try to fake it. What I did find are a few unconvincing videos which show a couple of guys dropping a buoy into the water and watching a fish or two swim away from it.

In this video, the only one that claims to show testing, the voiceover claims that they tied a bracelet to a buoy “in order to be scientific” as well as safe before throwing it into the water with reef sharks. Then, he put two shark bands on his ankles and got into the water which, he claims, induced “obvious repellent reactions when the sharks approached the bands on my feet”. Finally, they “decided to get more of the controlled type of testing” by tying the bracelets around lead weights, which he claims produced “really astonishing repellent behavior”.

Well, I’m sorry guys, but scientists everywhere are laughing at you. They are giving you the virtual equivalent of “there, there” pats on the head and “aren’t you cute? Do you want to be a scientist when you grow up?” Except that given the voice on this video belongs to Dr. Patrick Rice, Senior Marine Biologist at SharkDefense, you’ll have a hard time convincing me that you don’t know quite well that you’re not scientifically testing anything. This is a marketing video and nothing more.

A very short, far-from-exhaustive list of plausible alternative explanations for what the video shows:

• fish in the shots are not darting away from the bracelet, but rather toward food that was just dropped in the water
• cherry-picking shots in which fish are swimming away
• fish examined the item (or the person) and immediately recognized that it wasn’t food (or preferred food)
• fish avoid things hanging from buoys or anything that looks like the item (rather than being repelled by the magnet)

Can you guess what a good, scientific test of this product might entail? A double-blind, placebo controlled study. In other words, you’d want to simulate the movement of a human being as much as possible. You’d want to stop chumming the water after you’ve introduced the treatment (the bracelet). Most of all, you would need to compare the fishes’ behavior toward a Sharkbanz bracelet to their behavior toward a placebo–a bracelet without the magnet. Also, you would need the people recording and judging the behavior to be blind to the condition (they cannot know whether the fish are reacting to an “active” bracelet or a placebo). Without that comparison all of these tests are worthless.

In sum, these guys are charging $60 for heavy rubber bracelet that people will buy because it claims to protect from shark attacks–an extremely rare event with a high fear factor.

In the U.S., it takes a lot of time and money to get a group like this to stop making ridiculous claims, but I have to wonder how this company is allowed to market and sell in Australia, given what happened with Power Balance.

By now, you’ve either wondered just what color the dress is or you’re living under a rock in the middle of a deserted island with no internet and the first thing you chose to read when you were back online is my blog. Weird, but awesome.

The last few days have seen a flurry of education about our visual system and I won’t duplicate too many efforts here. But I would like to talk a bit about the illusion and the way the internet exploded with pseudoexplanations and other BS as a result. I’m going to spend a little more time on what this illusion does NOT mean.

First, the dress…

http://swiked.tumblr.com/post/ 112073818575/guys-please-help-me-is-this-dress-white-and

When the ugly white and gold dress first appeared in my feed last Thursday, I had the same reaction that I’m sure many of you did: this is a hoax.

I quickly determined that it was indeed real, immediately saw additional pictures of the blue and black dress, both in an online store and on the woman who wore it (BTW, as ugly as that dress is, she manages to pull it off), and started to think about what was happening. I fully accepted that the dress was actually blue and black, but I couldn’t perceive it that way in that photograph to save my life. It was fascinating!

At this point I should note that I have studied color vision and color perception since I was an undergrad. My first real experiment involved asking people to rate the facial expressions of expressionless faces drawn on backgrounds of different colors. The purpose of the study was to test the claims made… well, everywhere… that colors affect people’s emotions. I continued that line of research for more than 10 years and won several awards for it. My master’s thesis was titled “The Physiological Effects of Color on Human Emotion”. A summary of many years’ worth of findings is available here.

I also taught cognitive psychology (a portion of which involves sensation and perception) for several years and supervised a number of student experiments about color, some with very interesting results. What I am trying to say is that I have a good handle on what is causing the illusion. I was still mesmerized.

The illusion itself is not what I find so fascinating. What’s fascinating, and what caused it to blow up the internet, are the individual differences. Most polls only offered two possibilities, with about 70% claiming to see it as white and gold, 30% as blue and black, but I counted about 1 in 5 in my Facebook feed who said that it was sometimes white/gold and sometimes blue/black. I can recreate very similar illusions quickly using a basic drawing program, but illusions tend to be fairly universal. While we see some differences across cultures, mostly due to differing environments, I don’t think that I have ever seen people in the same household, looking at the same picture, perceive an image so differently and in a stable manner. Yet my youngest son saw only blue and black while the rest of the house saw white and gold. When it comes to ambiguous figures, such as the famous figure/ground image below, most people can perceive the image either way and reverse it at will. Of those who said that they sometimes saw the dress as white/gold and sometimes as blue/black, nobody I talked to said that they could switch the perception at will.

Do you see faces or a vase?

On Friday, post after post tumbled through my Facebook feed. The first posts I saw picked apart the image, extracting information about the color of the pixels. Well, that stuff is mostly irrelevant. Perception is much, much more than the simple sensation of the color of light hitting our eyes. The color of the dress in the photograph does not tell us the color of the dress (which we know from other sources) or why some people perceive the dress’s color as it is (blue/black) and some so differently (white/gold). Both, btw, are considered illusions since neither matches the pixels in the image, but nobody should perceive the dress as the pixel colors because they wouldn’t perceive it that way in person. Confused yet?

Next came all of the explanations. Some claimed to show us how we could perceive the dress differently, replete with not-quite-right explanations for why it’s happening. Yet I have met nobody who could force a different perception, at least not for more than a fraction of a second, much less using the methods suggested. Those doctored images just looked like doctored images to me. They did not change my perception that the dress was white with gold lace. Many gave some pretty bad explanations (those who saw blue/black do not have better color constancy). Some suggested that one’s sleep cycle could explain individual differences (it can’t). This guy says:

Your eyes have retinas, the things that let you interpret color. There’s rods, round things, and cones that stick out, which is what gives your eye a textured appearance in the colored part.

And that, my friends, is how a little bit of education can lead to dangerous things like deciding not to vaccinate your children. He has either skimmed Wikipedia’s entry on color theory or was half asleep through a half hour lecture in an intro psych class and now thinks he understands how eyes work.

And as of this writing that bit of BS has been RTed over eight thousand times.

My favorite bogus explanation: Mood. The color you see depends on your mood. That’s the one my kids heard the most during school that day.

And the jokes. Oh, the jokes. Some, like XKCD, were 10 kinds of awesome (make sure you read the alt text, and if you don’t get it, read this post). Others were not so funny.

Then, late Friday evening, after I’d taken a bit of a break from “the dress”, someone sent me this video and all hell broke loose. The video content isn’t relevant; it’s just a fun look at how to correct the photo. What is relevant is that suddenly the dress was BLUE AND BLACK. Not brown, not like an altered photo of a white and gold dress, but blue and black–the same royal blue that is in the other photos. I thought maybe the image in the video had been altered, so I pulled up a blog post with the original picture and it looked the same. I Googled “what color is this dress” and looked at the images. I saw a sea of blue/black dresses with one white/gold one in the corner. It looked to me like someone had replaced most of the pictures on the internet!

Since then the dress color switches for me. I usually see it as white with gold lace, but now and again it’s deep blue with black lace.

And I know why, yet I am helpless to control it.

And over the weekend, I started to see about-the-dress-here’s-some-more-BS-about-color-vision posts. Business Insider, which is becoming more and more like Buzzfeed every day, posted a number of pieces of varying quality. One of them had the unfortunate title, “No one could see the color blue until modern times”. The piece itself isn’t bad. It speculates about the effect that naming colors has on perceiving colors. There is some evidence that cultures which fail to distinguish between blue and green perceive fewer distinct hues in that area of the spectrum, but to extract from that the idea that human beings didn’t “see” blue until they had a name for it? Well, that’s a preposterous leap that’s actually a bit silly. Why would they name something that didn’t exist?

Another which has been picking up steam in the last couple of days is this incredibly bad piece on linkedin which makes the bold claim that 25% of people have a 4th cone that allows them to “see colors as they are”. It’s a very strange thing to claim–to “see colors as they are”, since colors are simply the brain’s interpretation of wavelengths of light. In that sense, colors aren’t. They kind of don’t exist. The article talks about tetrachromacy, which is a real phenomenon, but the author basically made up the rest. I cannot fully explain color vision (or vision in general) in a blog post, but I can tell you this is wrong. Also, tetrachromacy is extremely rare, at least in functional form, and her “test” is totally bogus. The author calls herself “Prof. Diana Derval, expert in neuromarketing”. I know that it’s trendy to slap “neuro” onto everything, but really? Neuromarketing? Ugh. I first saw and responded to the piece on Facebook Sunday night and by Monday afternoon Snopes had covered it (they did a nice job, too, but they usually do), but that didn’t keep it from going viral.

So what is going on with the dress?

Well, several pieces have explained it with relative accuracy. I said I wouldn’t duplicate those efforts and I won’t. I will instead recommend that you read/watch more than one of those links, take a look at the additional illusions that I created below, and internalize this perfect summation:

“It’s an illusion,” said [David] Whitney. “But everything is an illusion.”

And that’s the long and short of it. What we “see” is never, ever exactly what’s out there in the world. It’s our brain’s best interpretation of what’s out there. We are amazingly good at it, but it’s not perfect and perfection is not possible.

The grey bar in the middle is a solid color. We only perceive it as darker on one side than the other because of contrast with the surrounding color.

Although one bird appears to be more orange than the other, they are identical.

So this Good Morning America piece showed up in my Facebook feed the other day touting the sensational headline “Odd-Defying Babies Born 10:11 12/13/14″.

Now, I think it would be adorable to have a baby born on 10:11 12/13/14 (in America, of course. In Europe, that would be 10:11 13/12/14, which just doesn’t hold the same cuteness). Human beings love the symbolism that comes from conventions such as labeling and ordering. My good friend and fellow Skeptic, Ani Aharonian (Insight blogger and guest blogger here) was married on 5/8/13 for a reason (can you guess?). But “odds-defying”? No. These babies defied no odds.

Odds are a property of something that is yet to be. They are really only valuable as a means of predicting something and have no value after the event has occurred. This is a bit like post-hoc (after-the-fact) thinking about lottery outcomes. Did your next-door neighbor defy the odds when they won the lottery? Well, it depends on your perspective, especially in time.

A given individual has an extremely slim chance of winning the jackpot of a lottery. For a Powerball lottery, a single ticket has a one in 175 million chance of winning. However, if 525 million tickets are sold, there’s a pretty good chance that at three, much less one, will be winners. Is it “odds-defying” that your next-door neighbor won? Well, perhaps from your perspective, but not to a total stranger in another state.

Similarly, the question of predicting the odds that any given child is born at that time is quite different from the post-hoc consideration of the odds. The prediction actually changes whether you are predicting the birth from before or after conception. Clearly, if you are carrying a child whose due date is around 12/13/14, the chance are much, much higher than if you have yet to conceive (especially if it’s already April 2013). But nobody even thinks much about these things until after the fact, probably because they are more concern about having a healthy child and mother at the end of it all. Post-hoc, we are really not talking about odds anymore, so unless someone predicted a very different outcome for one of these births, there was no defying of odds.

Well, except this:

Approximately, on average, eight babies are born in the U.S. every minute, so there should be around eight babies in the U.S. right now with the “lucky” birth time of 10:11 12/13/14. There are, according to the article, only two. It’s entirely possible that the author missed some, but let’s say she didn’t. That’s an unusual event. Probably not *very* unusual, as I’m sure the number of children born each minute varies a great deal, but still quite different from what we would predict given what had happened in the past. It’s also a bit interesting that both were born in the mid-west–one in the city of Cleveland, Ohio and the other in the relatively small city of Billings, Montana. Cleveland is not a small town, but why are the biggest metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles and New York not represented? For that matter, they are both girls, yet averages tell us that one should be a boy. Probably because the variability in these events is very, very high and while averages are the best predictors we have, “best” isn’t always very good.

But the reason I wanted to talk about the piece wasn’t just the sensational headline. The contents are pretty eye-rolling, too.

“We knew she was going to be born today [Saturday], we just didn’t know it would be at 10:11 a.m.,” Campbell said in a statement. “Everyone is telling us we should play the lottery. We feel this is a lucky day and are excited to get family photos with Santa.”

It’s a number. It’s cute and all, but really, it’s just a number. It won’t help you win the lottery. It won’t help her succeed in life.

These conventions don’t care who you are. They don’t care where you live or what you ate for breakfast. So don’t complain about the lack of diversity in this sample, either. The universe is colorblind. Sort of.

In my mini-review of The Amazing Meeting 8 I mentioned that there were two very dark spots in an otherwise amazing (sometimes the word just fits) weekend.

I was not ready to discuss these in detail, but when I stumbled over this blog post by Blag Hag Jen McCreight, I felt that at least one should be discussed and I would like to do so through the filter of one of the best talks of the weekend, given by Massimo Pigliucci.

McCreight addresses the question of sexism, saying:

The one annoying thing I saw was the perpetuation of the Sexy vs. Smart binary in talks.

I saw none of this in talks. She gives two examples: Michael Shermer’s talk included a Los Angeles County Fair commercial from a series which has been shown for several years now.

This series is meant to portray a stereotype of geography, not the attractiveness (or the gender; they could have easily used the dumb surfer boy image) of the actors. I can understand this getting past much of the audience. Those of us who live in southern California and have seen the entire series likely take it for granted.

That said, the video seemed to have little to do with the rest of his talk and seemed a bit too “look at these dumb people”; I cringed myself when I saw it. So this is probably worthy of discussion, but I do not think it is a strong example of associating appearance with intelligence.

McCreight also accuses SkepDoc Harriet Hall of sexism:

Whenever she mentioned Jenny McCarthy in her talk as an example of someone saying something stupid (which Jenny McCarthy certainly does often), she would include a picture of her bending over in a bikini or some other scantily clad outfit. Why was this effective? Why not use a photo of Jenny McCarthy in a suit?

Why is it sexist for Harriet Hall to show Jenny McCarthy, a former model and Playboy bunny, in a swimsuit rather than something more modest? If McCarthy were, say, a cashier by trade, the image of her in a cashier’s smock would have been just as appropriate, no?

The purpose of the images was to show that frightened parents will favor the message of someone entirely unqualified to give medical advice over their MD. McCarthy is qualified to have her picture taken and did so “scantily clad” for years.

McCreight also repeated something central to her own talk (which I am not ready to review in its entirety):

The stereotype goes that women can sexy/attractive/beautiful and stupid/ditsy/unscientific, or they can be smart/witty/scientific and frumpy/plain/ugly. This myth annoys the hell out of me, especially because it’s so common.

This is where I put on my “Massimo” glasses and discuss expertise.

Media stereotypes are not “myths”. In fact, they do not necessarily reflect what individuals in society actually believe. These definitions are important, especially when one’s argument relies on them. When you make statements about one thing (media portrayals), but you are really talking about something else (behaviors and attitudes), you need to prepared to cite sources which clearly show that these are interchangeable; the distinction matters.

The truth is that attractive persons are more likely to be associated with an occupation that is held in high regard, including scientist, than less attractive persons. That’s the halo effect. It is very well-established in the psychological literature and not limited to men or even human beings.

Some of the points Jen made are valid criticisms, but the valid criticisms are overshadowed by vague, uninformed statements. Many of the points rely on whether her general claims of “this is what people think” are accurate. She does not cite sources which show that she knows “what people think”, nor is her background in psychology or a related field, which might provide some evidence of expertise in this area.

“I’ve seen it” is not evidence, something a young scientist in training (and many older, experienced ones) must constantly remind themselves in order to overcome our brain’s desire to think that it is.

McCreight defended TAM organizers by repeating a statement made many times by Jeff Wagg about speakers at TAM7:

Last year, 8 women were invited to speak at TAM. 2 said yes. 1 of those women had to cancel.

I have never heard Jeff compare this with the number of men who were invited and how many of those accepted or canceled. Without that comparison, this information tells us nothing.

Frankly, however, I care much more about the quality of the speakers than their gender, but given the number of high-quality speakers available who are women and the ratio seen at other events, the lopsidedness at TAM in past years was a bit disturbing. I thought they did a great job all around this year and didn’t need to be defended.

I thought the sex workshop was on Sunday…

Regarding the “Feminism & Skepticism Workshop”, although I am not the person she quoted, I was sitting directly behind McCreight and walked out when “Angry Vagina Craft Time” was announced.

My take? There are three criteria which should have been met for a topic or activity to be included in this workshop:

1. It is a feminism issue.
2. It is a skepticism issue.
3. The discussion is well-researched and well reasoned.

Although there were definitely some good points, much of what was discussed prior to “Angry Vagina Craft Time” failed to meet one or more of these criteria, especially #3.

Asking people to make vaginas (term used loosely) out of felt and googlie eyes did not make me uncomfortable, but infantilizing women’s genitalia and calling it “light humor” made me a bit angry – yes, I had an angry vagina. And an angry jaw. It could have made many women very uncomfortable, yet it served no purpose that I could see short of a “fuck you” to those who have criticized the workshop’s organizers in the past for such things.

I left because I had seen enough.

Overall, in regard to sexism at TAM8, I thought this year was a huge improvement over last. I attribute this largely to a different mix of attendees. I really wish that friends who were turned off by the culture last year could have experienced it. Perhaps they would see the community differently.

To sum up my experiences and in answer to McCreight’s questions: There were exactly two times during the weekend when I was offended. That workshop was one of them. Ironic, isn’t it?

Cross-posted at Woo Fighters

St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia

A couple of days ago I read something that I found very disturbing and I was reminded of it today. It illustrates the challenge we have in educating the public about science and, perhaps, why it is so challenging. There must be an idiom which fits. Perhaps you have some suggestions.

So, first I will tell you what I read, then I will tell you why it was more disturbing than what I commonly encounter. If you want to skim, I cannot stop you, but please scroll down to the bottom for the shocker.

The offending paragraph was found in a review of Daniel Loxton’s wonderful children’s book, Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be which appeared in CM Magazine, a publication of the Manitoba Library Association.

Although the text is very good in describing the theory of Evolution, there are points in the book where the author makes comments that could imply that Evolution is more than a theory. For example, “…Charles Darwin revealed the solution to the mystery of evolution” (p. 7). He also makes the comment that Evolution is the most important idea in all of biology (p. 7). Such phrases may lead the reader into thinking that scientists completely understand the theory of Evolution which would be incorrect, else Evolution would be a principle or a law and not a theory. As well, it is a bit bold to claim that evolution is the most important idea in all of biology – biology is a huge field of study with other key discoveries.

This text could be read by a young reader for ‘fun.’…

First, let me address this criticism because it is a common one made by evolution deniers and because it preys on a misunderstanding of science that many laypeople have.

As with most words in the English language, the word “theory” has multiple meanings. In general use among non-scientists, it is often used to express “conjecture”, “speculation”, or some other unproven or untested guess.

None of those definitions are what a scientist means when they use the term “theory”.

Neither a “principle” nor a “law” is a theory which is “completely understood”, either. Laws are simple statements which describe, not explain.

The descriptions given by Dr. Genie Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, of the definitions of fact, law, hypothesis, and theory. It occurs about 3:50 into the video.

Theories vary in strength from very weak to very strong. The theory of evolution through natural selection has withstood 150 years of rigorous testing. It is one of the strongest theories in science.

And, yes, it is, by far, the most important idea in biology. It is probably the most important in all of the life sciences including behavioral sciences like psychology. Of course, this is a statement of opinion and I am not a biologist. However, I cannot imagine a biologist of any quality who does hold this opinion. I offer as evidence the words of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whom Theodosius Dobzhansky quoted in his 1973 essay in American Biology Teacher titled “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in Light of Evolution“:

(Evolution) is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforward bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow — this is what evolution is.

So, to summarize so far, a theory is an explanation – it is a set of testable and tested statements about relationships among variables which explains a given phenomenon. Ideas are not called “theories” because we do not know if they hold true. The strength of a theory depends on the quantity of observable facts explained, the quality of the explanation, the amount of testing it has withstood, and many other factors.

Evolution is an amazingly strong theory.

The author of the review does not understand the term “theory” as it is used in science, nor does she understand “law” and “principle”. Although these are often misunderstood by laypersons, they are fundamental to science. They are the language of science.

What is so shocking?

The review was written by an Assistant Professor of Science Education.

Katarin MacLeod is an Assistant Professor in Science Education at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, NS. Her areas of interest include physics educational research (PER), and the incorporation of science, technology, society and environment (STSE) outcomes into science courses at all levels to help students understand the relevancy of science, increase scientific literacy, and to promote citizenship.

That, my friends, is disgraceful.

Well, my son wanted to know if it was indeed a spider. I didn’t think so, but the internet was right in front of me, so I Googled “tiny red spider”.

I don’t normally get my information from Yahoo! Answers and clicking on it today reminded me why. The link was to the question:

What’s with these teny-tiny red spiders?

blah, blah, blah.

The first few answers were pretty accurate (they are mites, by the way, who probably latched onto our clothing as they eat plants). Now, I have heard the myth that they are red because they suck blood (like lice), but I had not heard this one before:

in the UK they are called Money Spiders and they mean you are going to come into money. So keep an eye out!

Money? Because you see a spider?

What baffles me about superstitions like this is the complete and total lack of connection. I mean, they aren’t even green. Maybe because they live on green leaves?

?