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If NASA really wants to do something about these wackos, they should sic Buzz Aldrin on them.

I'd bet my life on nasa [sic] never have [sic] landing [sic...ah, hell, the whole sentence is a cock-up grammatically anyway] on the moon.

Y'know, if you call up Buzz Aldrin, I'm sure he'll be more than happy to take you up on that wager.

St. Petersburg Times" has more info on the incident, if you must.

Buzz Aldrin Punches Moon-landing Conspiracy Theorist

btw...The video is pretty funny!

Buzz Aldrin Punches Moon-landing Conspiracy Theorist

btw...The video is pretty funny!

You can say THAT again!

I much rather like demonstrations that are counter-intuitive. Especially things that seem "supernatural" to do, yet are very natural indeed. I'd like to point out the work of David Willey, whom I've worked with. He organized a world-record firewalk, and I attended (yeah, I've got a world record in firewalking... :-) ).

Check out his article in Skeptical Inquirer: The Physics Behind Four Amazing Demonstrations.

David has done quite a lot of explosions and rocketry too, he knows all about that too, but his best demos is really those that seem risky, but are not. The liquid lead is among them.

Skeptics should read CSICOP's guide to critising before commenting. Being rude, and casually passing off claims as foolish does not make a good argument.

-Sean

This reminds me of the Seattle Window Pitting Hysteria (about half way downb the page).

So these days we blame aliens instead of demons, but that is about the only thing that changes.

Idiocy is a universal constant...

CSICOP Press Release Responding to Crop Circle and Disney's Signs

CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) has several informative reports debunking crop circles including Joe Nickell's Investigative Brief into Levengood's Crop Circle Plant Research.

If you're interested in more informed discussion, check out the CSICOP Mailing List, where this topic (Disney's Crop Circle promotion) is also current.

CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) has several informative reports debunking crop circles including Joe Nickell's Investigative Brief into Levengood's Crop Circle Plant Research.

If you're interested in more informed discussion, check out the CSICOP Mailing List, where this topic (Disney's Crop Circle promotion) is also current.

CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) has several informative reports debunking crop circles including Joe Nickell's Investigative Brief into Levengood's Crop Circle Plant Research.

If you're interested in more informed discussion, check out the CSICOP Mailing List, where this topic (Disney's Crop Circle promotion) is also current.

The Shroud of Turin is a 14th century painting, see here.

This isn't intended as flamebait, honestly.

Here is a good definition on science that I found from a quick google search. But as you are a scientist, I shouldn't need to tell you that the theory of evolution is not science.

If you are convinced that evolution is scientific, then perhaps you can present to me a falsafiable statement that can be tested using the process of science.

People work pretty hard to drive traffic to Amazon, and Amazon benefits greatly. For example, on my website in March, there were fifteen thousand clicks over to Amazon, 223 items were purchased, and I earned about $200.

Amazon had this nice working agreement with their many associates, and then they started dicking around with their pages. First they changed the way the pages were displayed, making it less likely to get a "direct" sale to earn that 15% commission.

But the real kicker came when they added the used books, because Amazon does not pay referral fees on used item sales. So those associates who put a lot of work into linking to Amazon are getting nothing in return.

It doesn't bother me too much, because I mainly link to give my readers some additional info - the money is just an added bonus (but it does pay for the web fees); however, other people who build a business off of these fees are pissed at Amazon.

In conclusion, I think the author's guild is off base in its reasons for telling members to delink Amazon, but if their members are getting revenue from the Amazon associates program, they might do well by linking to another store.

The parent post is right on. Why can't more people apply the principles of critical thinking to software? Windows NT 5.0 and higher doesn't suck. They may not be as good for your particular purpose as *n*x, but its becoming more a matter of taste than an actual performance.

That group in sandiago (who made lots of money as an offbeat web development company) offed themselves in march or april, claiming that the ealier events did not matter.

other details here.

don't forget to look over your shoulder.

[smile]

Remember: complain about spam all you like, but the problem is that the spam is effective.

One of the few time I checked their web site there was an article about a VA Beach "Inventor" who created one of those "magic fuel line magnetic gas mileage booster" - just gas running thru a couple of perm mags, JC Whitney sells them; they come up every few years (once the last scam is forgotten) to bite the gullible - local govts have been known to buy them for school buses, etc. I wrote CSICOP about it and, probably coincidentally, someone wrote an article about similar claims.

> God does not want you to worship other "gods"
> because He does not want you to be duped by fakes.

Isn't it rather arrogant to believe that one little god would only start out with one little tribe, and leave the rest of humanity to see their wisdom or go to hell?

Remember that there were other actual Gods existant (and maybe so even unto today!) It was a real, Egyptian god that made "Pharoah's" priest's stick turn into two asps, not just some slight of hand easily detectable.

And then there's the demigods born when the gods walked the earth and mated with human women.

Although I heartily endorse relieving foolish mortals of their cash through preposterous entertainment lies, CSICOP has pointed out this show did go too far by suggesting NASA arranged the murders of 10 people to "keep it quite".

I know this is OT but since it comes up so often I thought we would all benefit by knowing that the idea "We only use 10% of our brain!" is a myth.
The two points snipped from the article:

1.) Brain imaging research techniques such as PET scans (positron emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) clearly show that the vast majority of the brain does not lie fallow. Indeed, although certain minor functions may use only a small part of the brain at one time, any sufficiently complex set of activities or thought patterns will indeed use many parts of the brain. Just as people don't use all of their muscle groups at one time, they also don't use all of their brain at once. For any given activity, such as eating, watching television, making love, or reading Skeptical Inquirer, you may use a few specific parts of your brain. Over the course of a whole day, however, just about all of the brain is used at one time or another.
2.) The myth presupposes an extreme localization of functions in the brain. If the "used" or "necessary" parts of the brain were scattered all around the organ, that would imply that much of the brain is in fact necessary. But the myth implies that the "used" part of the brain is a discrete area, and the "unused" part is like an appendix or tonsil, taking up space but essentially unnecessary. But if all those parts of the brain are unused, removal or damage to the "unused" part of the brain should be minor or unnoticed. Yet people who have suffered head trauma, a stroke, or other brain injury are frequently severely impaired. Have you ever heard a doctor say, ". . . But luckily when that bullet entered his skull, it only damaged the 90 percent of his brain he didn't use"? Of course not.

As the article says "For a much more thorough and detailed analysis of the subject, see Barry Beyerstein's chapter in the new book Mind Myths: Exploring Everyday Mysteries of the Mind [1999]"

Ashcroft is not a sympathetic guy

am i the only one who sees a resemblence between ashcroft and this man?

Looks like Lee was recently arrested in Kentucky and freed on bail. More info at the following sites:

• Promoter of "free electricity" scheme arrested in Loisville, Kentucky
• Dennis Lee's free electricity claims
• Examining the Amazing Free-Energy Claims of Dennis Lee

SHAME on people for posting this kind of nonsense. Nostradamus has been discredited numerous times.

You need to read some books by James Randi, such as The Mask of Nostradamus.

Some other skeptic-related links:

http://www.randi.org/
http://www.csicop.org/
http://www.skeptic.com/

Here's a list of some skeptical sites that I visit regularly or on occasion. They're, in my opinion, very useful in refining one's own baloney detection sense. (Re, "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection" by Carl Sagan.)

The Skeptic's Dictionary. An A to Z of mythical, supernatural, and other bizarre topics, but looking at them from the point of view of, "Is this shit for real?" (Hint: the site basically debunks every mystical supernatural piece of BS you ever heard of.)

The Committee for the Scientific Inquiry into Claims of the Paranormal. A great general site with articles, references, links, etc. CSICOP basically keeps a watch out for people making paranormal or supernatural claims, and then investigating them scientifically to see if they stand up. (Strangely, they never do... maybe this tells us something about paranormality in general?)

The James Randi Educational Foundation. Similar to CSICOP, but headed by James Randi, a long-time debunker of the supposedly mystical and magical.

Also, go and read everything Carl Sagan ever wrote; it's a pity we lost him a few years ago, for he was one of the best skeptics the world had.

• www.debunker.com
• Skeptical Inquirer
• If it's on TV, it must be true, right?
• Ah, the innocence of childhood

> You realize that we use only ten percent of our brains?


The Ten Percent Myth

we do only use 10% of our brains, anyway.

For those of us who use all of reasoning skills, a good resource is the Skeptic's Dictionary. Here's some authoritative debunking of auras.

http://www.skepdic.com/auras.html

Fantastic site - a great resource. I read up a bit on one of the links, and I think this is the crux of the matter (from http://www.csicop.org/si/2000-05/i-files.html:

Although the Kirlian aura was claimed to present information about the "bioplasma" or "life-energy" of the object, actually it is only "a visual or photographic image of a corona discharge in a gas, in most cases the ambient air."
Moreover, experiments have failed to yield any evidence that the coronal pattern is related "to the physiological, psychological, or psychic condition of the sample," but instead only to finger pressure, moisture, and other mechanical, environmental, and photographic factors (some twenty-two in all). Skeptics observed that even mechanical objects, such as coins or paper clips, could yield a Kirlian "aura" (Watkins and Bickel 1986).

This is what I originally suspected that auras were, hence the UV comment. That is, your body generates em radiation, and that means electrons shifting orbits, and electrons shifting more orbits than average causes UV radiation, so you are emitting a small amount of UV. This would excite the air around you slightly, which could be perceived as a corona of glowing air. As the equilibrium of electrical activity that is your brain changes state, changes might be perceived to the aura; this group seems to have decided it didn't change, but I guess I'd have to read the methodology of their study to make a decision on that. It is always possible that changes are detectable, but it is difficult to gather any useful information from it other than whether the person is alive or dead.

I'm as skeptic as anyone else here of what usefulness auras are - but apparently some people can see them all of the time, and can tell things from them. What of that women who had tetrachromic vision reported recently? I wonder whether it was UV or IR that she saw, or whether she simply had a colour quadrilateral in the visible region. I wonder exactly how well the cornea transduces UV light; some say it's UV opaque, but I bet it's not completely.

I like to read even a "skeptic's" web site as a skeptic - scientists are well known for their ability to toss away figures in an experiment that are so wildly wrong that they don't fit their model. They seem to be working under an assumption that the universe is governed by a small set of rules, which seems to be true - but you never know. I think making assumptions is always dangerous.

Not any more. The "Zombie Island" and other new movies produced by Cartoon Network have made the monsters real. The Skeptical Newsletter had an interesting editorial on it a while back.

Skeptical Inquirer did a cover story on Tesla and the pseudoscience cult that has formed around him:

Skeptical Inquirer
SUMMER 1994 (vol 18, no 4.): `Extraordinary science' and the strange legacy of Nikola Tesla, by Johnson. Nikola Tesla: Genius, visionary, and eccentric, by Johnson.

Their take on it was that he a lot of good ideas, but also a lot of bad ones, and that the common perception of him as an infallible genius is misplaced.

Skeptical Inquirer did a cover story on Tesla and the pseudoscience cult that has formed around him:

Skeptical Inquirer
SUMMER 1994 (vol 18, no 4.): `Extraordinary science' and the strange legacy of Nikola Tesla, by Johnson. Nikola Tesla: Genius, visionary, and eccentric, by Johnson.

Their take on it was that he a lot of good ideas, but also a lot of bad ones, and that the common perception of him as an infallible genius is misplaced.

Another good organization to consider might be the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP page) They have their work cut out trying to debunk lots of fraudulent claims.

There are also science advocacy organizations, for example those listed at this page, who often have their work cut out for them promoting sensible research against the uncompromising efforts of PETA and so on.

There are also organizations like Zero Population Growth, ZPG site who try to do what they can to address what is clearly behind many current and impending problems, the lack of thought that goes into reproductive decisions worldwide.

Libraries of course are historically important for science literacy and depend on contributions. There hasn't been a local library that I know of that hasn't been very happy to get a subscription to Sky and Telescope, for example.

These aren't charities in the traditional sense, but they are underfunded groups working for causes that may be important to geeks.

D'oh! IANACE either, but I was looking forward to showing off my limited knowledge of this topic by pointing that out first. You beat me to it.

I agree, it seems very likely that these stations are using one-time-pad encryption, particularly since the messages are so short, and (presumably) intended to be decoded by hand. I thought that was pretty common knowledge. It makes me wonder why they'd even bother... Although a thought just occurred to me: with a little imagination, I'm sure you could "decode" these broadcasts and find messages about alien abductions, government conspiracies, terrorist plots, or anything else. It's just like the "Bible Code"... a modern-day Rorsarch test.

*shrug*

I was always under the impression that subliminal messages were shown ineffectual in studies, and thoroughly discredited.

See, say

a Skeptical Inqurirer article, with references.

if (Linux_community == (creationists ||fundamentalists)){
you = CSICOP ;
}

/*
i was one of those 25% that windows wouldnt work well on. then i found linux does everything i need and more. maybe not as easy but it's geting there.
*/

nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE

Now, I'm not claiming that order in spacetime is entirely the result of proto-spacetime randomization, but when skeptics appeal to Ramsey as a means of debunking claims that synchronicity has deeper meaning than mere coincidence I find it ironic -- proto-spacetime is deeper than the spacetime that we observe and even if it were totally random, it would still have amazing amounts of order.

But I digress -- here's a typical example of self-proclaimed skeptics attempting to conduct a control experiment based on the Ramsey theory:

CSICOP Presidential Coincidences Contest Back in 1992, the Skeptical Inquirer held a Spooky Presidential Coincidences Contest, in response to Ann Landers printing "for the zillionth time" a list of chilling parallels between John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln. The task was for readers to come up with their own list of coincidences between other pairs of presidents. There were two contest winners, Arturo Magidin of Mexico City, and Chris Fishel, a student at the University of Virginia. Magidin came up with sixteen stunning coincidences between Kennedy and former Mexican President Alvaro Obregón, while Fishel managed to come up with lists of coincidences between no fewer than twenty-one different pairs of U.S. presidents.

A few examples from Magidin's list:

Both "Kennedy" and "Obregón" have seven letters each; each was assassinated; both their assassins had three names and died shortly after killing the president; Kennedy and Obregón were both married in years ending in 3, each had a son who died shortly after birth, and both came from large families and died in their forties.

Fishel came up with dozens of coincidences; here are a few between Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Both men served two full terms; both their wives died before they became president; each had six-letter first names; both were in debt at the time of their deaths; each had a state capital named after him, and both their predecessors refused to attend their inaugurations. [For more information and the full lists, see SI Spring 1992, 16(3); and Winter 1993, 17(2).]

I leave it to the reader's skepticism as to whether this sort of "skepticism" is more self-congratulatory belief-maintanence than intellectually honest demonstration that seemingly meaningful coincidences are actually cognitive failures of biased observers.

I'm for more homeopathic remedies for minor things

Do you like taking sugar pills? Check this out for info on homeopathy http://www.csicop.org/si/9709/park.html

Previous results of Geller lawsuits.

The first one was published in 1952 (!!!). Things don't change that much.

Also you should visit the website for CSICOP, the organization that tries to spread sanity thoughout the world. Carl Sagan was a card carrying member of CSICOP.

...richie

Your point about "rejecting theories out of hand can lead to boringly-safe science" is well-taken, as well as your insight that "what makes a better idea better" is an - is the - important question.

The key - also as you point out - is to screen out the chaff before spending a fortune trying to repeat the experiments of crackpots. The thing I've not fully articulated is "how do you screen the wheat from the chaff in absence of experiment". So here are some random thoughts:

• My original post (Asimov's Corollary to Clarke's Law) is actually a pretty useful guideline -- if the reason you want to test a theory is that it's Really Really Appealing To Laypeople, odds are it's bunk that can't stand on its own merits and must appeal to human emotion to get approval. Apricot pits for cancer, free energy, and the like.

• Following closely in the footsteps of "Really Really Appealing To Laypeople" is often "putting the cart before the horse". The other reason people believe apricot pits cure cancer is because "science has been working on a cure for cancer for decades and I need something I can buy NOW!". The quack sells you an answer for now, and promises the research to back it up later. The scientist performs the research first, and only worries about productizing it later.

• By "research", I don't mean "going away for 20 years and emerging with a theory out of thin air". Although Einstein was a clerk in a patent office, he wasn't wholly divorced from the scientific community, even though his theory was pretty revolutionary.

• Another indication of junk science - sort of a combination of all of the above - is the "I understand everything and you don't" effect. Most great scientific discoveries didn't start with "I know the Answer to Life, The Universe, And Everything, and You Don't!", but with a guy looking at an experimental or mathematical result and saying "huh? that's funny..."

• Finally, Occam's Razor. Relativity was a revolutionary theory, but it was worthy of investigation. Why? Because physicists at the time already had reason to believe that classical mechanics wasn't quite what it was cracked up to be. The canonical example would be the Michelson-Morely experiments on the speed of light to see what the preferred frame of reference for the universe was - but unfortunately, the speed of light seemed to be constant no matter which way the experimental apparatus was moving.

  Yes, Einstein threw Newtonian physics for a loop, but there was ample evidence that there were things going on that couldn't be explained by Newton's vision of the world. Einstein did some funky math and came up with a better explanation. Newtonian physics works for most problems, but Einsteinian physics works just as well for those problems, and much better for problems where you're moving really quickly or near big heavy things.

  (And the quantum physicists came up with a better explanation still when they showed that, contrary to Einstein's famous quip, God does in fact play dice with the universe, and that He sometimes throws them where they can't be seen... and so on, through QCD, superstrings, and whatever's at the forefront of physics research today.)

So's the hydrogen atom. (Cue the "If you fuck with hydrogen, you fuck up the rest of the natural world" thread - which is merely a snarky way of saying "If you change basic physical properties of matter, you end up with a universe that's wholly unlike the one we observe around us."

I don't mean "unlike commonsense results for slow objects", as was Newtonian physics, nor "unlike commonsense results for big objects", like physics before quantum theory, but "wholly unlike anything we observe", in the sense of nuclear fusion in the sun working, basic chemical processes essential to life working, etc.) This is a reductio ad absurdum argument - if Mills' theory were true, yes, we'd have free energy -- which is all well and good, but if the truth of his theory also implies that the sun would be a diffuse cloud of goo at three times its mass and half of its radiation output, or that water is a highly-unstable explosive compound when it comes into contact with nitrogen, his theory must be an absurdity.

Which reminds me of one more "good way to tell what's worth investigating and what's not":

• Good science doesn't throw out old theories, it builds upon them.

And speaking of theories, what is his theory? Does he even have one? Is he even interested in any aspect of physics whatsoever, for that matter, apart from its ability to provide him with a product to hawk to the world?

Recommended reading for anyone who's put up with my ramblings thus far:

The Demon-Haunted World - Carl Sagan. If you read only one book on the philosophy of science in this millenium, read this one.

Anything that looks related to "what constitutes good science" on CSICOP's web site.

For medical analogies to the "junk physics" problem, Quackwatch

I'll close off with a Sagan quote that I saw buried in one of the subthreads on Slashdot today - more relevant to my initial post on Clarke and Asimov than this post, but worth repeating: "They laughed at Galileo. They laughed at Columbus. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

Correct me if I'm wrong (and I know you will), but wasn't religion originally created for the sole purpose of explaining the unexplainable? It seems to me that this methodology is moving to the forefront...

In this day and age, there is often a cynicism about religion because "science will explain everything." Well, I would agree, however, it also seems that we have reached a "scientific block" where we have explained what we can, and what's left is beyond our **current** understanding.

So, what to do? Well, one can accept the fact that we just don't know right now, or one could rekindle their religious beliefs. So saying that religion is making a comeback is not exactly accurate.

Cultural and social factors play a major role, as does the scientific understanding of the general populous. If understanding is low, well, religion is easy to push on the masses. But, it can be as easy (if not easier) to do the same when understanding is high, but phenomena remain that seem unexplainable (and somehow attributable to a divine being).

I suggest checking out http://www.csicop.org. I don't think they discuss this exact topic, but there are many related articles on logic and reasoning, along with thoughful analysis of UFOs, pyschics, etc. An article I read discussed UFO "researchers" claiming that they have proved the existence of UFOs. Here's how their logic goes (roughly):

• [See an unidentified flying object]
• Research possible explanations of the object.
• Declare that such an object cannot be identified
• Claim that because it cannot be indentified, it must not be of earthly origin.
• Proceed to show (by this "indisputable" evidence) that the object (most likely now designated a "craft") is of alien origin, and controlled by intelligent alien life.

In the same way, you cannot logically claim that the universe must have been created by some divine being just because you have no other means of explaining it.

IMO, this is what leads to suppression of learning... assuming something is "beyond" human understanding and then arbitrarily making up explanations that cannot be proven (I guess you could never prove they couldn't be proven, because they're beyond understanding!).

Like most scientific folk wisdom ("You use only 10 percent of your brain power," "Right-brained people are more creative") the Mozart effect, as it is sometimes called, is extrapolated from research whose meaning is open to debate.

There is an interesting Skeptical Inquirer article debunking the 10-percent myth.

...richie