Some folks assert that the moon can impact behavior, and there is evidence for this. For instance:

• Its light and gravity can affect the growth rate of plants. But for lunar effect believers, this is mighty boring, unless it leads to a gargantuan Venus Flytrap.
• California grunions mate and spawn on four consecutive nights, beginning with new and full moons. But this is because tides are high, making it a successful reproduction strategy that is only indirectly related to lunar phases.
• Deep sleep decreased by 30 percent during a full moon in a Swiss study.  There could be a connection, but this was a small sample size and no attempt has been made at test replication.

However, an insomniac feeding azaleas to his fish isn’t what people envision when they consider the lunar effect. Rather, they connect the full moon with crime (preferably committed in a London fog), along with suicide, mental illness, natural disasters, accidents, fertility, and werewolves. Hey, have you ever seen someone succumb to lycanthropy under a quarter-moon?

These beliefs trace to at least ancient Assyrian and Babylonian times. They permeate most cultures and have been a regular feature in Hollywood. Nineteenth Century Englishman Charles Hyde got away with a murder committed during a full moon by convincing jurors that the satellite had sapped his sanity.

However, meta-analysis of more than 100 studies reveals no correlation between any phenomenon commonly attributed to a full moon.

Lunar phases are also sometimes erroneously associated with women’s monthly cycles. This is likely due to three factors. One, most moon deities, such as Diana, are female. Also, the moon was central to agrarian cycles, and one can draw a corollary between this and a woman bringing forth a child. Finally, the length of moon and menstrual cycles are similar. However, a lunar month is always 29.5 days, whereas women’s cycle is about 28 days, so this notion is as mistaken as the others.

Despite all this, British police inspector Andy Parr told the BBC, “From my experience of 19 years, undoubtedly on full moons we get people with strange behavior. They’re more fractious and argumentative.”

For every study that refutes this, there are 100 anecdotes from cops, nurses, and friends, who report sinister urges springing forth when the moon waxes. Indeed, there are factors at play here, but they are confirmation bias and communal reinforcement. With confirmation bias, if something malevolent happens during a full moon, it gets noticed. If something doesn’t happen, it goes unnoticed. It something fortunate happens, it likewise is forgotten. Closely related is communal reinforcement, where believers swap tales of moon madness, strengthening the conviction.

Skeptic leader Dr. Steven Novella related this experience: “I was working in the emergency room during a busier than average night. A nurse commented, ‘Wow, it’s really crazy tonight. Is there a full moon?’ When I informed her no, she shrugged and forgot the whole thing. But other busy ER nights that fall on a full moon would resonate with her and confirm her belief.”

Some prefer the moon’s power be veiled in mysterious cloak, while others try and inject a more scientific-sounding spin. One idea is that since the moon affects the ocean’s tides, it must affect the mostly-water human body as well. But astronomer George Abell pointed out that if observing a mosquito on one’s arm under a full moon, the annoying insect is exerting more gravitational pull than the light source. Besides, the moon’s tidal force depends on its distance from Earth, not its phase.

Then we have the notion that positive ions greatly increase during a full moon and that this impacts human behavior. This likewise is without merit. This may be selective memory similar to what believers in the lunar effect experience, but it seems to me that “ions” is one of those words that people who don’t understand science throw out there to make it sound like they know what they’re talking about.

I expected my 4-year-old to be excited when I told him Daniel Tiger was coming to town. Instead of joy, he responded with skepticism. Guess I’ve taught him well.

He didn’t understand that I meant a man in a Daniel Tiger costume would be here. He took it to mean that the cartoon character would come out of TV land and grace us with his anthropomorphic presence. He knew it doesn’t work that way because he can largely differentiate fantasy from reality.

And this ability certainly exists among teenagers and young adults, which is one of the reasons why the supposed link between playing violent video games and committing mass murder is as phony as Daniel Tiger popping out of our flat screen.

Penn & Teller demonstrated this on “Bullshit!” They took a 9-year-old who incessantly played violent video games to a gun range, where he popped off three automatic rifle rounds. He then broke down weeping because the experience so traumatized him. Yet there are those who insist that playing shoot-‘em-up games makes one more desensitized and violent.

Of course, the crying at the gun range is merely an anecdote. We need statistics to turn this into a valid argument. So here we go. Arrest rates for violent juvenile crime peaked in 1993, at 500 per 100,000. By 2013, that number had plummeted to 195 per 100,000. During this same 20-year stretch, sales of Grand Theft Auto and games with similar themes quadrupled.

Still, if a child who perpetrates a mass shooting is found to have an XBox in his room, some assign the blame to the games. Next to the XBox may be tennis shoes and candy bars, but nobody is blaming the sneakers or Snickers. Video games are so common they’ll be in almost any child’s home, including the overwhelming majority of non-mass murderers.

There are some numbers that might suggest a link between games and behavior. In the book Grand Theft Childhood, 60 percent of middle school boys who played violent video games responded that it would be OK to slug someone who offended them. By contrast, just 39 percent of those who didn’t play such games said it would be OK. But this confuses correlation and causation. Youth that are more prone to violence are drawn to images of legs being blown off and bloody corpses strewn across a post-Apocalyptic landscape. My boys play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video games because they love the characters; they do not love the characters because they play the game.

It’s similar to the way that some persons blame mass shootings on antidepressants, noting that a high percentage of perpetrators were on them. Of course, the reason they were heavily medicated was to try and tame their simmering rage. An otherwise normal person won’t turn into a killer by playing Call of Duty any more than playing Mario will make one a plumber.

Despite the idea that the joysticks are being throttled by sulking loners, most video games are played with friends or with online partners. A 2007 study found that 45 percent of boys played video games for anger relief and 62 percent said it helped them relax. There have always been violent youth, long before video games, and no study using sound research methods has found a causal link between the two.

The U.S. Supreme Court acknowledged this in 2011 when it declared Game Over to California’s attempt to ban violent PlayStation imagery. In an unusual move, the Court went beyond the law and addressed the scientific inadequacies of those arguing for censorship. From the ruling: “These studies do not prove that violent video games cause minors to act aggressively. The research is based on correlation, not evidence of causation, and most of the studies suffer from significant, admitted flaws in methodology.”

Indeed, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, toying with the idea of federal legislation, said, “Recent court decisions demonstrate that some people still do not get it. They believe that violent video games are no more dangerous to young minds than classic literature or Saturday morning cartoons. Parents, pediatricians, and psychologists know better. These court decisions show we need to do more and explore ways Congress can lay additional groundwork on this issue. This report will be a critical resource in this process.” Rockefeller was encouraging scientists to arrive at the conclusion first, then seek supporting evidence, which is the antithesis of research.

When the type of research that annoys Rockefeller was conducted, results were clear. Christopher Ferguson, chair of Stetson University’s psychology department, found that the studies linking video games to violent behavior failed to account for other factors such as abusive homes or mental illnesses.

Ferguson also studied 165 10-to 14-year-olds for three years and published his results in the Journal of Psychiatric Research. He found no long-term link between violent video games and aggression and violence. Similar study results were published in Media Psychology and Review of General Psychology.

There’s more. A 2004 U.S. Secret Service review of school shootings found that 88 percent of shooters had no interest in violent games. In 2005, the United States, adjusted for population, had three times as many murders committed by juveniles than did Japan. Yet the Asian nation had nine times as many video game sales.

These numbers illustrate that fantasy is unlikely to change behavior. I already knew this, because my 4-year-old is no more likely to clean his room after seeing Daniel Tiger do so.

I position myself on the front line of the skeptic wars and over the past year have engaged cryptozoolgists, dowsers, ghost hunters, mediums, Reiki practitioners, Young Earth creationists, and so on. While conspiracy theorists might occasionally test my ability to do so, I refrain from launching personal attacks.

For one thing, such attacks are at the bottom of the debate pyramid, resting even below an ad hominem, and are unworthy of someone blogging about critical thinking. Moreover, it is going to be irrelevant to the point being made and will drive off potential converts. Finally, it would be hypocritical, since I formerly believed that Nostradamus fired a shot from Roswell’s grassy knoll. I may have some of the details mixed there, but the point is that I once gulped up ideas such as ghosts, demons, the Loch Ness Monster, the Bermuda Triangle, and using red cherry bark to treat the flu. If Robert Todd Carroll, Steven Novella, and James Randi had ridiculed people like me, rather than using facts, logic, and persuasion, I would have never adapted.

One of my first forays into the skeptic movement came during a seven-year stretch in the 1980s when I viewed a series of mostly poorly-produced and reactionary videos centering on backward masking in music.

First, a critical distinction. Taking recorded music and putting it in reverse on an album has happened many times. The Beatles were the first to use it regularly. Frank Zappa employed it on a song when his record company wouldn’t let him say the lyrics forward.

The key, though, is that the sound in these cases is garbled and distorted, and it is clear that backward masking is being used. In contrast, some Protestant Evangelical preachers and broadcasters insisted that bands could make music that sounded normal, perhaps even wonderful, while implanting a sinister message that played in reverse. All record producers queried about this testified to its impossibility. Audio engineer Evan Olcott noted that the allegedly backwards messages were in fact phonetic reversals, with sung phonemes forming new combinations when played in reverse. Olcott explained, “Engineering or planning a phonetic reversal is next to impossible, and even more difficult when trying to design it with words that fit into a song.”

I have never known of an attempt to explain how the technical process would work. And only a handful of attempts were made to explicate why the backward message would matter. One of these few tries was made by Dr. Joe Stuessy during the PMRC hearings in 1985. He said, “These are heard by the subconscious but not the conscious mind. Some experts believe that while the conscious mind is absorbing the forward lyric, the subconscious is working overtime to decipher the backwards message.” He cited none of these experts, nor any evidence, nor any hypothesis for how it would work.

This was not backward masking at all, but a form of mass apophenia and pareidolia that peaked in the mid- to late-1980s. It was part of the Satanic Panic that included the McMartin Preschool injustice, Geraldo specials, and the Night Stalker trial.

Some artists responded to these accusations with witty lines spoken in reverse on their albums. Weird Al commented on how bored the backwards listener must be. An Iron Maiden track included a backward masking of an intoxicated Nicko McBrain doing an Idi Amin impersonation. A backwards message from Electric Light Orchestra announced, “The music is reversible,” in response to having been accused of the practice. Another accusation was launched at Styx, and this served as the impetus for “Kilroy Was Here.” In this concept album, an organization similar to the ones that had attacked Styx gains enough power to ban rock and roll. Some copies of the album came slapped with a sticker bearing the satirical message, “By order of the Majority for Musical Morality, this album contains secret backward messages.” In probably the most delicious irony of the backward masking hysteria, at least one anti-rock crusader took this seriously and included this “admission” in future backward masking presentations.

It wasn’t all funny, however. That same year, the Arkansas legislature voted to require warning labels on any record containing back masking. Though nothing ever came of it, owing to a veto by Gov. Bill Clinton, it took little imagination to envision an agenda-driven prosecutor convincing culturally conservative jurors that Journey needed to pay for paving children’s path to Hell. Attempts at regulation in Texas and at the federal level failed, though California’s legislature passed the only document in jurisprudence history to contain the phrase, “turn us into disciples of the Antichrist.”

One proponent of the sinister backward masking theory agreed that it was impossible to do so intentionally. But he claimed that the messages were still there, with demons controlling the guitarist’s fingers and singer’s vocal chords since them there devils is tricky like that. His evidence (apologies to Noah Webster for mangling the definition) was that all the deciphered messages were homage to Satan or at least his spawn, recreational drugs. Were the backwards messages coincidence, he opined, there would be an equal number of praises to God and nonsensical sentences. Of course, there were many such messages, using the standards of the Peters Brothers, Paul Crouch, Dave Benoit, Jacob Aranza, and many other obscure crusaders. For instance, Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” was said to have announced, “We decided to smoke marijuana.” In fact, the line is more accurately transcribed as “Wheesua arDEEEscher fff Zrv%&$*72 DENONO Jhermin jaja.” Hence, this could also be interpreted as “We love Mary and her son, Sweet Jesus,” or “What’s the optimal way for a Bulgarian to install a carburetor?”

Detecting any of these messages would require, first, that someone play it backwards for you since most people listen to music the other direction. Then you would need to have the supposed message pointed out to you. Next, you would have to be highly susceptible to suggestion, which is easier if one is a teenager or already holds a negative opinion of loud music.

If you can meet all these criteria, you may be all set. As skeptic Michael Shermer noted, “The human brain evolved with a strong pattern recognition ability that was necessary to process the large amount of noise in man’s environment. But today this ability leads to false positives.” Given this tendency to recognize patterns, it’s easy to cram satanic meaning into any sound if one is prepped for it.

Listeners may also suspend incredulity since backwards music has the distinction of being distorted and may sound a little spooky. Combine this with an “aha” moment, and the realization that Satan is in our midst, and people can freak. I may have witnessed the zenith of this hysteria when I watched a friend spin a 45 of “Oh Mickey!” in reverse. In this case, Toni Basil was deemed clean, with no detection of backward Beelzebub beatitudes.

While mostly comic fodder and a lesson in panic, there was one serious manifestation beyond the legislative attempts and PMRC hearings. Judas Priest was unsuccessfully sued over the unfounded idea that one of its songs contained a subliminal message. The trial was not precisely over backward masking since the claim was that the message was subliminal. But one cannot miss the connection between the backward masking hysteria and a heavy metal band being hauled into court for a clandestine evil.

Though associated with the 1980s, playing tunes in reverse goes so far back in antiquity that the first person to listen to it this way was the inventor or recorded music, Thomas Edison. Aleister Crowley suggested in a 1913 book that his minions “train themselves to think backwards by external means, such as by listening to phonograph records reversed.”

Of course, neither of these instances were backward masking. When the Beatles began doing it, rock DJ Russ Gibb encouraged his listeners to find messages from other artists. Fundamentalist Christians soon joined in. They were emboldened by the idea that some Satanists incorporate backward motions into their ceremonies, such as writing in reverse or reciting the Lord’s Prayer that way. The idea that Black Sabbath was incorporating an Alesiter Crowely technique proved a dream for Satan slayers.

The idea mostly died with the CD. While the digital era would seem to create a ripe new market for evil backward masking message deciphering, this has not happened. Demons have apparently moved onto writing Twilight screenplays and officiating gay marriages.

This month, Judge Kathleen Watanabe sentenced a Hawaii man to one year of probation and fined him $200 because his son walked a mile home from school. He also has to attend a parenting class for being convicted of endangering a minor’s welfare.

Now in my day, sonny, we walked a half mile to and from school every day, much of it up a steep hill, with no coat, in 10-degree weather. This is actually true, although the coat-free trek was optional, as I had one, but dragged it home in the snow. I also put my wool cap away and arrived home with my ears as red as the Chiefs coat I was dragging.

In her sentencing, Watanabe allowed that children once walked long distances to school. But, she said, it’s different today, with dangers like more cars and child predators. I have no information on Pacific Island traffic patterns, but with regard to child predators, the judge is greatly mistaken. She’s not alone. I bemoaned that my oldest child, a 7-year-old boy, isn’t traipsing the neighborhood on foot and bike, going to friends’ homes and tree houses, and playing on creek banks, like I did at his age. My mother said this was a good thing, and she cited the same beliefs as the judge.

But these are fears, not facts. There has been a 35 percent decrease in juvenile homicides since I dragged my coat home in the snow. I can’t blame the judge or my mother for thinking otherwise. With dozens of 24-7 news sources in competition, any missing child is going to be publicized. It’s simply much more reported today. Interestingly, that technology also makes it more likely the child will make it home safely. Cell phones, Amber Alerts, and social media have all played roles in children being recovered and kidnappers being arrested.

Beyond the drop in crime targeting juveniles, there have been improvements in health care, food sanitation, and automobile safety. Child labor in the U.S. went away 100 years ago. These factors combine to make today in the developed world the safest time in world history to be a child.

This is seldom pointed out, nor is the panic new. Despite my mother’s insistence that things are worse now, she thought they were plenty bad back in the day. In a well-meaning but frightful tactic, she plied me with stories of youth who were abducted and abused by strangers. An inordinate number of these horrors seemed to take place in public restrooms. I don’t think anyone was killed in these terrifying toilet tales, but they were harrowing enough that I was in junior high before I felt OK going into one. Sometimes my mother would ask me to accompany my little brother into a restroom. HELL NO! This would make her angry, as she remembered what supposedly went on in there. She never seemed to make the connection between her telling me these stories and my reluctance to enter such locales.

This is not the usual type of subject for my blog. Whereas Reiki practitioners, mediums, and astrologers are always fraudulent or self-deceived, Stranger Danger is sometimes a terrifying reality. The reason I’m addressing it is to point out four ways that Stranger Danger is misapplied. The first has already been mentioned, as numbers show that juvenile abductions and murders have declined significantly in the past four decades.

The second myth is that strangers pose the most danger to children. In most years, there are about 250,000 minor abductions, of which only about 100 are by strangers. The overwhelming majority are by family members or supposed friends. From a purely statistical standpoint, a stranger is the safest person for a child to be with.

The third issue is the inconsistency with which many parents apply safety lessons. Only three percent of juvenile murders are committed by strangers and the chance that any given child will be killed by a stranger is one in 5 million. It is hard to relay these messages effectively to people because, by using “only” or “just” in conjunction with the most emotional topic possible, the speaker comes across as insensitive. This causes the listener to double down on their beliefs, and that’s partly why these myths continue.

The usual response is that these numbers are irrelevant if your child is that one in 5 million. This is true, but there are still inconsistencies because other dangers are not regularly stressed. Children are also killed by lightning strikes, but most parents have not instructed on lightning safety. I have, by the way, had the lightning talk. And to be clear, my children have also heard the stranger talk. I don’t want to leave the impression that I would be OK with my children jumping into a car with an unknown person wielding a candy cane. We’ve had that conversation and have plans in place to prevent the scenario from occurring. But I had the talk and made the plans while recognizing the unlikelihood.

When I was dragging that coat home, there were Block Mother signs in some windows along the route. Children lost or otherwise in peril knew they would find harbor there. In other words, we were taught to talk to strangers. This is the final, most ironic point: That lost children should be encouraged to talk to strangers, preferably a police officer, firefighter, or even a letter carrier. If none of those are sighted, a lost Kindergartener is still more likely to get back safely if they ask a stranger for help instead of navigating their way through traffic, weather, rivers, and railroads. This should be done as a holistic approach that includes measures taken to minimize the chance of that 5-year-old ever being lost, and they should have phone numbers and addresses memorized. Following these methods are far more efficient than perpetuating the Stranger Danger myth to children and adults.