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...because homeopathy explicitly includes the idea that things get more powerful as the dilution decreases, even past the point that the original substance no longer has even a molecule in the final product. A homeopathy practictioner would thus claim that these exposures are at far too high a level to work, and still need to be diluted by a factor of, oh, at least 10^10 to be more useful, probably more. (That number is not a typo. Yes, Homeopathy shoots right past Advogadro's Number and never looks back.) Homeopathy explicitly claims to be many times more beneficial then these low-level exposures. As they are completely wrong, they still don't win any points. (Nor is this as big a surprise as the article writer thinks it is, it merely establishes some examples of a long-known general principle.)

For those wishing to learn more about homeopathy, please see Homeowatch, and in particular this page which provides an overview of homeopathy.

Tryptophan was never the problem, it was more comlicated then that.

I BELIEVE we should have the right to purchase nutritional supplements. As an adult I should really be able to put just about anything I want into my body. But as a business person I SHOULD NOT be able to make untested claims about either the benifits or safely of a nutraceutical (or any other substance). And if I do I should be subject to the heavy charges. If the nutraceutical industry (a multi-billion dollar industry) wants to sell and promote medice they should be as carefully regulated as the pharmaceutical industry. Let them cure depression with St. John's wart, just be sure as hell they've done reasonalble health, safety and effectiveness studies. Otherwise, its just fancy snake oil.

It always makes me sad to see supposedly-intelligent people citing Dr. Atkins as a reputatable source of dietary information. Dr. Atkins is listed on Quackwatch's list of Nonrecommended Sources of Health Advice. In addition, a good debunking of fad diets and Atkins' in general can be found here.

Please, people. Don't be giving this quack anymore publicity than he already gets. Just eat a balanced diet and exercise more. That's all you need to do.

GMD

Is it ever.

All this does is make it harder for an independent artisan to make a living -- I don't want Intel's stamp of approval. The only approval I need is a legion of satisfied customers who tell their friends and colleagues and word spreads and reputation builds -- like in the old days before you could "buy" a certification.

At the risk of being modded a troll or offtopic, I wanted to draw an analogy here. The statement that you don't want a stamp of approval and that your satisfied customers is all the "proof" of your competance bothers me a little. I see it coming dangerously close to the current state of alternative medicine. Like you, those practioners do not particularly care if they are recognized by the medical community as a legitimate treatment -- they proudly point to their satisfied customers as "proof" that their methods work. I'm not going to go into a long diatribe of how people can be mistaken in their belief that alternative medicine has helped them here (check out QuackWatch for a more detailed explanation). People can be easily fooled. In the process of repairing someone's hard drive, you might actually wipe out the data through your own negligence. Then you simply tell the customer that the hard drive and all the data on board could not be salvaged. Hey, it's not your fault, you tell them, it was simply fried that bad when they brought it to you. Because the customer doesn't know any better, they simply take your word for it. If you do a speedy job of replacing their hard drive, they might very well end up being satisfied customers, completely unaware that YOU were the reason the data was lost.

I'd just like to point out that this attitude that I hear in so many fields about "I don't need credentials. My customers will vouche for me." kind of spooks me a little.

GMD

Check out "Colloidal Silver: Risk without benefit" for a representative sample of the medical community's opinion of colloidal silver. I myself have been using nothing at all on external wounds/infections, and that's worked quite well for me.

And for my own favorite test, just like chiropractric, colloidal silver users make some wide, sweeping, and exagerated claims for what silver "can cure". I mean crap, that's a huge list of things it will cure or alleviate. You just have to wonder when you see that many claims of a miracle medicine/tonic.

Here's a site critical of eye exercises. And another article at the same site. Complete with scientific journal references.

Here's a site critical of eye exercises. And another article at the same site. Complete with scientific journal references.

Here's the page on colloidal silver at Quackwatch. Apparently the stuff can turn you permanently gray anywhere you're naturally light--skin, whites of the eyes, some of your insides (lungs? fat?) etc. And, the producers are big on hype, not so interested in rigorous testing or even keeping microorganisms out of their medicine bottles. See also this FDA site. As for a conspiracy preventing effective medicines from reaching the consumer, isn't it obvious that researchers, pharmaceutical company stockholders, scientists, and doctors are all ALSO consumers? They and their families are just as likely to get cancer or heart disease as you are. Think they'll suppress something that could cure their kid of leukemia so that the company can profit? Give me a break.

You forgot about all the websites that feature essays and term papers and whatnot :)

Seriously, there is a lot of good information on the net. The important thing is to be critical of the information you find.

Good sites for the critically minded include James Randi's website and Quackwatch.

BTW, Oregon Trail rox nadz!

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."