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http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/begging.htm

http://skepdic.com/begging.html

http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=1 9970627

It's a form of circular reasoning.

Isn't it possible that kids no longer need real-world environments to get those thrills, now that the games simulate them so vividly?

This is a very outdated idea from psychoanalysis that has leaked into the popular consciousness, but actual scientific evidence suggests otherwise. Freud observed that biological drives like hunger and thirst are temporarily diminished when they are satisfied, and he incorrectly assumed that all motivated behavior (including sex and aggression) worked the same way.

Think of it this way: If this were true, armies would be complete pussycats (because they would've gotten it all out of their systems in training), and pacifists would regularly go on murderous rampages.

There are lots and lots of Doctors (and not necessarily Medical Doctors, this includes physicists, biologists, etc.) that subscribe to some of these quackery beliefs, not even limited to simply reflexology or acupuncture. Dowsing, astrology, HOMEOPATHY all that stuff is just as unproven and fake as the next. The belief in some of these things even falls down to psychological factors (such as the ideomotor effect (2) with regards to dowsing, and placebo effect for most - if not all - alternative medicine practices). It's interesting how a physicist can believe that dowsing really works, but they are out there!

In the case of the "traditional chinese medicine", the arguement is that it has been around for 2000 years So It Must Work!. Unfortunately, just cause it's been around for a long time, doesn't mean it works either.

Aside from the personal/psychological influences that cause people to follow these things, a huge factor are the people marketing the products and therapies.

Snake oil charmers tend to be able to sell this stuff by scaring people with lies. Fear that the "industry" is out to get you. Fear that "drugs" are poisoning you. It's easy to get someone to believe that there are conspiracies (that are conveniently unprovable) working against them and that the only way out is their form of alternative medicine.

A lot of people lured to alternative medicine are done so because they feel they have been somehow wronged by the MD profession. Like they believe they have a true illness that MDs can't locate/cure (because it doesn't exist). So they go to a naturopath who is only too happy to say "Of course there's something wrong with you! Now that will be $50 a week for therapy plus $35 a month for my homeopathic pills. Don't worry, they are 100x diluted so they are SUPER-effective!". Lots of alternative medicine practitioners even go so far as to claim you have an illness you don't know about, and that only they can cure it! Colonix for example is one such thing, as well as people who say you should be taking TONS of vitamin supplements for various reasons. Anyone heard of magnet therapy (Quackwatch Info)?

The sad thing about it all, is that it's difficult to combat with logic and sense. You say "but its not proven" and they say "You just have to believe!" or "So-and-so said it worked, so it must! I don't care if science says it doesn't".

If you go to http://quackwatch.org/ there is an insane amount of information there with regards to how people get sucked in to this stuff.

PHP websites are more vulnerable to worms. Just six months ago, many PHP run forums were shut down and destroyed. The exploit was something that worked only with PHP forums.

So it was a shortcoming endemic to the langauge, and not sloppy coding, right? I mean to say, PHP itself was at fault, due its very nature? A similar thing can't possibly happen in a "real" programming language like Java?

Java is the better language to learn. It is more like a true programming language than PHP. The reward for the time spent learning a language is greater with Java than with PHP.

That's begging the question. And wooly-headed thinking at its best. I'd argue that the barrier to entry is a lot lower with PHP than Java (or C, C++, .Net, et al.). So someone new to the language is bound to see results faster. But your point is nonsensical to begin with...

I always thought of PHP as more of a scripting langugae, and not a true language. No large PHP applications exists out there. But there are tons of enterprise Java applications.

A scripting language is a "true language". BASIC is a true programming langauge. MSDOS batch is a true programming langauge. Further, have you ever heard the saying "use the right tool for the job"? There are a lot of types of websites filling a lot of roles. Many (most?) of them don't need the overhead and complexity of an enterprise-class system. Use what works, without specious limitations brought on by technical snobbery.

-B

Appeal to Authority is only a fallacy when the cited authority isn't qualified to express the stated opinion. So says The Skeptic's Dictionary, and if they say so, it must be true.

That's something I wondered about too. I am a layman, but my understanding is that Chinese is extremely context sensitive, I think older versions more so than modern Simplified Chinese.
The literal texts of the magistrates of the imperial era seem to be so context sensitive that you can only really understand them if you are able to draw cross references to other texts, because some writer may have once used a specific sign in a novel context, changing its meaning subtly.

The accepted "translations" are often totally arbitrary, more related to the context of the first translators (more often than not European colionalists) than to the original context. Which for example leads many serious students of T'ai Chi Ch'uan to get into learning Chinese, because the accepted translations are totally off. For example the term "Ch'i is commonly translated as some form of "Energy". Which misleads laymen, and more often than not the sceptics that seek to debunk Ch'i.
In fact, it has nothing to do with what we call "energy" at all. This word is a projection of the European translators, who came into contact with T'ai Chi Ch'uan at a time when "energy" was the hip word in Europe (middle 19th century).

I don't know what this means for the discussion at hand, but it sure sounds complicated ;)

We were told this massive bureacracy was necessary to fight terrorism. We gave them lots of money and damn near everyuthing that had been on the law enforcement communities wish list since Oklahoma city, and now, after the fool's trade-off of protections of liberty for security of terrorism, they are using those tools and that money and their authority for issues that fall decidedly out of the realm of war on terror. Just like all those whacky bastards at the ACLU said. Just like all the the crazy Big L libertarians said they would.

They don't seem so whacky and crazy anymore, do they?
-John Cole

The missing girl case is not an applicable analogy to this. In that case, there was the fact that she was buried alive. An analogy to this case would be if they found the supposed pictures. The link I forget to include and later posted talks about how in accusations such as this (like satanic ritual abuse) where there is no evidence but "he said she said", "There is ample evidence that therapists and law enforcement personnel encourage and reward children for accepting the suggestions of bizarre abusive behavior".

Does that clarify why the testimony is uncredible, given the limited information contained in the article?

An exerpt:

Those children subjected to the whims of the therapists, the district attorneys, police and parents might have no idea what they're doing, or they might be bullied, forced, coerced into doing so (accepting the suggestions of bizarre abusive behavior). How do you know? Maybe the therapists, the district attorneys, police and parents are related to them?

Check out the truth about children's testimony

DA: Isn't ruining someone's reputation so I can seem successful great?
Therapist:Hell yeah, and this case will finally pay for my new Ferrari.

Sorry, meant to include a link Satanic Ritual Abuse Fraud.

Every now and then individuals get a clue: the Buddha, various monks in following in his footsteps, Jesus, etc. We've seen a rash of people in 20th century america who came to understand what it means to be human: Edgar Cayce, Jose Silva, etc.

If you're mentioning the Buddha in the same paragraph as Edgar Cayce, you're confused about the teachings of one or the other. (Jesus, it's hard to say through all the conflicting historical bullshit - it's hard to separate the political from the spiritual.)

The Buddha was concerned with the problem of human suffering, and offered a program of mental exercise and discipline to help allieviate it. While Sidhartha was a product of his times and soaked up some cultural beliefs, and various metaphysics were added in by some of the Mahayana sects to make things more palitable to the peasants, the core teachings are pretty metaphysically agnostic. Consult any Zen master for further enlightenment.

Cayce beleived in psychic powers and the existance of Atlantis, and made a bunch of failed prophecies.

The Buddha used meditation and intuition to explore the subjective world of his own consciousness, a method that works pretty well. Cayce used meditation and intuition to try to determine facts about the "objective" universe, which just doesn't work.

There's no genetic test for pedophiles like there is for some other diseases, not yet anyways.

The penile plethysmograph is somewhat useful but it has a lot of false positives:
If you had 1000 healthy male volunteers and 1000 otherwise-healthy known pedophiles undergo this test while looking at similar-posed children and adult, you would find the pedophiles as a group rating "more pedophile" than the control group. However, a lot of the control group would still register as "pedophile" and a number of the pedophiles would register as "non pedophile," making the tool pretty much useless to determine if someone is a pedophile or not.

Not true.

http://skepdic.com/shark.html
http://www.canoe.ca/Health0004/06_cancer.html

"It's true that some sharks get cancer. I said this in my book," said William Lane, author of the 1992 book Sharks Don't Get Cancer. "My publisher thought it would be bad to call it, Almost No Sharks Get Cancer."

"This is good science that shows us that sharks can get cancer," said biologist John Coffey of Johns Hopkins University. "I don't think there is any benefit to buying shark cartilage and eating it, any more than I think that eating a rabbit will make me run faster."

This is a claim made by people trying to peddle products to desperately sick people. It has no basis in fact, and the FTC took action in 2000 to prevent companies from making this claim.

http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2000/06/lanelabs.htm
http://www.cancer.org/docroot/nws/content/nws_1_1x _ftc_stops_claims_made_by_makers_of_shark_cartilag e_products.asp

Sounds like you're actually agreeing with him.

BTW, this is known as the sunk cost fallacy.

It doesn't BEG the question, it RAISES the question.

No, really.

When I was in Peru I saw the Nasca Lines from a four seater plane and it beat the hell out of seeing them on TV. I've never seen them on IMAX but I think I'd still rather actually be there.

I see the "space" trip in the same way - I'd rather be there and experience the whole thing than sit in a theatre with a box of popcorn.

Each to their own I guess.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the Activator doesn't work, how come so many people say that it does?

It's very simple, really. Placebo effect and confirmation bias. These things drive all manner of quackery (naturopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture, etc.) and other pseudoscience. Confirmation bias is particularly powerful here as people don't want to admit they're stupid enough to have been duped into buying an overpriced sticker, even though they are.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the Activator doesn't work, how come so many people say that it does?

It's very simple, really. Placebo effect and confirmation bias. These things drive all manner of quackery (naturopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture, etc.) and other pseudoscience. Confirmation bias is particularly powerful here as people don't want to admit they're stupid enough to have been duped into buying an overpriced sticker, even though they are.

That does not beg the question

I'm sorry, but I think you are unfamiliar with the terminology as well. Agnosticism does not mean that God may or may not exist and Atheism does not necessarily mean that God must not exist. Agnosticism means that the existence or non-existence of God is unknowable and an Atheist simply looks at the current evidence for the existence of God and arrives at the belief that He does not exist.

You can see definitions for Agnosticism here and here. One of the links comes from a religious source and the other a non-religious one.

> > > Torture is not a punishment, it is an efficient method for extracting information.

> > Actually, it isn't. It produces plenty of false positives.

> When done properly - with a polygraph, drugs, and trick questions - false positives are minimal.

Polygraph testing is a fraud.

Information obtained by truth drugs has been shown to be highly unreliable, with subjects freely mixing fact and fantasy.

Trick questions??? Oh, now I see. You were joking, right?

Why not put science in the hands of politicians? I've got one word for you: Lysenkoism.

> Occam's razor: it's a simpler explanation than assuming that it does have a purpose, since the latter requires an extra entity.

> Of course cutting away large numbers of stars would affect the universe. You'd need a big knife, though.

This page has more information about this phenomenon, called the clustering illusion. Another manifestation is streak scoring in sports, a.k.a. the hot hand in basketball. Players are often though to be "on a roll" when in fact their larger scoring pattern fits a random distribution around a mean.

Scientist A was trying to do X when he claimed to have discovered Y. Dozens of other scientists confirmed the existence of Y in their own laboratories. However, Y doesn't exist. How could so many scientists be wrong? They deceived themselves into thinking they were seeing something when in fact they were not. They saw what they wanted to see with their instruments, not what was actually there (or, in this case, what was not there).

These people have set up the experiments so that their claims will either be supported by facts or not.

A quick search on the Net shows that the experiments themselves may not have been set up correctly, that the experimenters choose their data to fit the facts, seem to skew results, have a patent that presupposes their results and that plenty of bona fide quacks treat this as "truth" which always gets skeptics (like me, who do not take such publicity at face value) jumping all over gullible posters.

Please mod parent up.
The given link is an excellent critical analysis of this experiment, and the fact that the experimenter even attempts to bring up the TM-Sidhi cult driven experiment of 1993 should be immediate cause for alarm

http://slashdot.org/articles/98/11/04/2341226.shtm l... these are the same people who were awarded a patent for a mental clapper in a previous slashdot article. The private company these guys formed, Mindsong, Inc., appears to have folded since 1998. This article also appears to be relevant. Apparently they're dealing with really really small numbers in what would seem to be dishonest ways, like rounding 50.01% up to 51% when discussing their results. I am the 100th Monkee!

She not only failed to get a better than chance success ratio - she failed to find a *metal plate* in the skull of one of the subjects.

Fraud or wishful thinking, nothing more.

THere is some covnerage of this on http://www.skepdic.com/

In other words, graphology is BS and the people who analyzed it already had a preconceived notion about whose it was and made the appropriate BS analyses.

Graphology is just as laughable as astrology, acupuncture or homeopathy. Here's a nice experiment for your amusement: when you meet a "graphologist" who'd like to demonstrate her amazing "skills" to you, be sure to make an experiment using text copied from some newspaper, the same text written by all of the tested people who had no contact with the graphologist before and during the handwriting examination at all. Observing the graphologist's face when she doesn't have "side channels data" and no interaction with people to play with "cold reading" is a trully hilarious experience.

"This shape might sometimes mean that maybe some kind of a impatience... am I right?"
"Just keep going, I don't want to disturb you!"

And the most funny thing is that unlike psychics they can't just make up some dumb excuses that they feel some disturbance of Force or that the Angels are scared by the camera, because they are supposed to be scientists. Looking at someone's writing you can usually tell the gender and age--the same I can guess reading someone's palm... Or foot... Or arse! Does it make me an arsologist?

For more interesting informations read: Wikipedia article on graphology, James Randi's comments on graphology (by The Amazing Randi of JREF who offers "a one-million-dollar prize to anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event"), graphology in the Skeptic's Dictionary by Robert T. Carroll, PhD, and of course the excellent Quackwatch paper How Graphology Fools People by Barry L. Beyerstein, PhD. This is not the first time we can laugh at psedoscientific morons on Slashdot thanks to The Amazing Randi.

And a comment to CmdrTaco: please add the Monty Python foot to the article because without it we look like a bunch of imbeciles. What next? Bill Gates tested by the lie detector and a story posted on science.slashdot.org? Please just add the foot. Thanks.

I had a bad experience with graphology woo-woo-heads about 20 years ago. I wrote about it to Bob Carroll of The Skeptic's DIsctionary, and it was posted in the reader's comments section. I'll just copy that here rather than retype the story:

Just wanted to let you know how much I appreciate your remarks about graphology. I've found that a distressing number of people assume there must be "something to it" without thinking about it at all. Let me share an anecdote regarding my brush with graphology:

When I graduated from college in 1986 with a degree in chemistry, I went to an employment agency, which got me an interview with a local paint company I'll call FooBar Paint. The unusual thing was, they asked me to submit a handwritten essay about my hobbies before they would schedule the interview. I complied with this request, and a few days later was told they would not interview me since they had determined some unspecified character flaw through graphological analysis.

I was livid, of course -- Both because they had dismissed me without even talking to me, and they had been dishonest in failing to tell me what they planned to do with my essay. I wanted to do something, but I was an impoverished and unemployed 21-year-old. Unable to hire an attorney, I contacted the Seattle Human Rights department, who was very interested in my story. SHR filed suit against FooBar, and subpoenaed all of their documents regarding hiring policy. We were suing for a job and back pay. It was quite a heady feeling.

Two days later, I got a phone call from the president, Mr. FooBar himself, asking me to come in for a personal interview. Mr. FooBar wanted to "set things straight" as it was costing him time and money to comply with SHR's document subpoena. When I got to his office, he explained that graphology was their preferred method of determining who fits into the "FooBar mosaic," as he put it. I explained that this was a totally unsubstantiated method, and asked him why he didn't employ witch doctors or use a magic 8-ball to determine a candidate's fitness. He had no answer for that, instead offering me a job if I'd drop the suit and take another handwriting test. Apparently, one of the qualities FooBar likes in its "mosaic" is unmitigated gall.

I ended up dropping the suit after FooBar twisted in the wind for a while. I had to get on with my life, and the best I could get was a job working for those clowns. Still, I felt I had made my point.

I sincerely hope that people refuse to take workplace pseudoscience lying down. If this type of "new age" employer is given free reign to evaluate people on graphology, I Ching, auras, or whatever, they'll just keep doing it.

There wasn't that much at stake in my case, but there could have been much more if my circumstances were different. People need to educate themselves about pseudosciences like graphology, so they might have the conviction to stand up against it as well as the facts to win the fight.

--end quote--

I'd like to add that when I went to SHR, I wasn't looking to sue them. I just wanted to know if what they did was legal and if not, ask them to call them and tell them so. But they just went forward and did it, and I was fine with it.

I'll never forget sitting in that idiot's (Mr. FooBar's) office. I swear, he looked just like Lumbergh, but lacked his intellect and personality.

Some of the prophesies involved the place of birth, the method of death, specific details of his life that would have been impossible to emulate by anyone other than the real Messiah.

As I said, such details could simply have been lies. Making stuff up is a well-established religious tradition; it's quite probable that Matthew made up the whole Herod-killing-the-babies thing, since it's found nowhere else.

Even then, these "prophecies" have to be distorted to claim they fit the story.

If Jeshua wanted to give evidence via prophecy that he was divine, all he had to do was write a few good solid predictions for years to come.

Heck, he could at least have given us a definative autobiography, instead of leaving it to a dozen contradictory biographers. (He was a rabbi, so I'm presuming he was literate in Hebrew.) Certainly if you believed you were to most important person to ever walk to face of the earth, you could write a few things down for the rest of us?

Sorry. No evidence from prophecy. Heck, the case is better for Nostradamus having magical powers.

And Soon... BatMax will have it's own entry at http://www.skepdic.com/!

Alex Chiu devlops a ring which grants immortality, homeopathy can preserve the effects of chemicals even when diluted to less than one molecule per world's oceans' worth of water, and scientology can help you get rid of evil body theatens.

Oh, and you've all been educated stupid.

Sheesh, it's one thing to report on out-of-date speculation, and another thing to report on blatent hoaxes. What is this, the Weekly World News?

Actually, I find it hard to say that a virus does any those things. Let's look at those in order. A virus...

...moves: If you're talking about locomotion--no, it doesn't. Viruses get pushed around passively. Once assembled and released, they float around until they hit something that sticks to their protein coat. This is not to say that locomotion is a requirement for life, but viruses don't do it.

...consumes: Again, not really. It doesn't photosynthesize. It doesn't absorb nutrients from its environment. It doesn't barbecue steak. It can hijack the machinery of a living cell to make more viruses, but I'll come back to that.

...grows: Nope. Once a virus is assembled, its size and shape remain essentially fixed. If you look at sputum from someone with a cold, you won't find little baby viruses and giant overweight viruses. Barring mutations, all the viable viruses you find will be identical. Particularly durable viruses may undergo reversible changes in shape caused by dehydration, but that's no more growth than soaking and drying a towel.

...reacts to stimuli: I don't know where this comes from. About the only 'stimulus' a virus can respond to is binding to a cell surface, in which case it fuses to the cell and dumps its genetic cargo inside. It's not much more complicated than a soap bubble 'responding' to the 'stimulus' of hitting a wall by bursting.

...and reproduces: The replication and synthesis of new viral matter (proteins and DNA or RNA) is carried out by the machinery of the host cell, not the virus. Though viruses are pretty much self-assembling once all their bits are present in a cell, this doesn't imply life either. Disturbing a supersaturated sugar solution will cause crystals of sugar to form, but even though they're highly ordered, they aren't alive. If I take a toaster to a machine shop, the guys inside can make me an identical toaster. They could even set up an assembly line and make millions of them. That doesn't make toasters alive.

But more simply, your immune system kills the[m] (if it works right). If it is killed, then it dies, and if it dies then it had to be alive first.

You're just begging the question here. The immune system recognizes viruses; it inactivates them; it digests them--but that doesn't mean that viruses have to be alive, or have to be killed. The body is capable of digesting any number of different macromolecular structures. (Are sugars alive? Naked RNA? Collagen?) Cutting a toaster into tiny pieces certainly renders it nonfunctional, but few would say it has been killed. Fewer still would suggest that it had been alive.

Little Off topic but, What do you ppl see the future of drugs, I mean related to the placebo effect.

No! It does not beg the question.

You could say "It raises/asks the question..." or "The question begs to be asked...".

..."It Just Evolved".

There are many, many physical situations in which Intelligent Design is easily the top Ockham's Razor candidate.

But thanks for yet another example of argument from ridicule. <sarcasm>We really, really needed another one of those</sarcasm>

If 80% aren't spherical one must ask why the other 20% are NOT.

Why even bother to ask why? If you come across something and you can't figure out how it could have occurred, just claim the event or process is the product of Intelligent Design .

Why spend year after tedious year engaging in reductionist scientific inquiry when you can just bail out immediately with an answer that cannot be falsified: Intelligent Design .

Worried that your invisible sky-ghost or imaginary all-powerful personal friend isn't getting the deferential worship He deserves in this age of secular humanism? Sneak your sky-ghost back into the schools and indoctrinate another generation of devout sheep with Intelligent Design .

Remember the "Argument from Personal Incredulity": if you're too thick to figure out how something works, it must be because no one can figure it out! Don't sweat it! Just explain it away by saying it was caused personally God^H^H^H an Intelligent Designer!

Don't waste time asking question or doing science! Just give credit to an Intelligent Designer and go back to sleep!

However, it begs a question

Once again: begs the question or this one.

Sure. It's been a while since I've read specifically on this subject, so these are a bit old, but I got a lot out of these:

• Crossan, John Dominic (1991): The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. North Blackburn, CollinsDove.
• Lane Fox, Robin (1986): Pagans and Christians. Harmondsworth, Penguin.
• Lane Fox, Robin (1991): The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible. Harmondsworth, Penguin.
• Romer, John (1988): Testament: The Bible And History. London, Michael O'Mara.

I thought The Unauthorized Version, especially, was brilliant, although his opinions on the dating of the Gospels are unorthodox (he thinks John was the earliest - but he makes a good case). Testament was good for a broad introduction. Also, more recently, articles and book reviews from time to time in The Skeptic , particularly by Tim Callahan, although I haven't read any of his books.

Spouting claims like this without any evidence doesn't help your cause either. Please englighten me.

Sorry; I assumed since you mentioned them that you knew who they were, they are very well known. The Skeptic's Dictionary has good summaries of the skeptical position on both Velikovksy and Sitchin. Velikovsky was not a scientist, as you described him, but a psychiatrist; similarly, Sitchin is a journalist, not a Hebrew scholar. It was said of Velikovsky that astronomers thought his astronomy was ludicrous, but were impressed by his history, while historians were impressed by his astronomy, but not his history. (The same could probably be said of Sitchin, though fewer academics ever noticed his existence, as opposed to Velikovsky.) And as a graduate in both astrophysics and history, I think both his astronomy and his history are rubbish!

References and Links please...

Well, I gave you my reasoning as to why that slab story is dubious at best, we can discuss that. I'm not about to go through google and dredge up a bunch of dodgy pravda.ru stories (I call it pravda.ru and not Pravda because it actually has no connection with the old Soviet newspaper of that name, AFAIK). But one pravda.ru exclusive that came up recently was about an expedition to Tunguska to prove that the 1908 explosion was caused by a UFO. Even the ufologists on the ufo-updates mailing list found this an absurd, unscientific thing to do. And sure enough, the expedition found the "proof" they set out to find.

Sure. It's been a while since I've read specifically on this subject, so these are a bit old, but I got a lot out of these:

• Crossan, John Dominic (1991): The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. North Blackburn, CollinsDove.
• Lane Fox, Robin (1986): Pagans and Christians. Harmondsworth, Penguin.
• Lane Fox, Robin (1991): The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible. Harmondsworth, Penguin.
• Romer, John (1988): Testament: The Bible And History. London, Michael O'Mara.

I thought The Unauthorized Version, especially, was brilliant, although his opinions on the dating of the Gospels are unorthodox (he thinks John was the earliest - but he makes a good case). Testament was good for a broad introduction. Also, more recently, articles and book reviews from time to time in The Skeptic , particularly by Tim Callahan, although I haven't read any of his books.

Spouting claims like this without any evidence doesn't help your cause either. Please englighten me.

Sorry; I assumed since you mentioned them that you knew who they were, they are very well known. The Skeptic's Dictionary has good summaries of the skeptical position on both Velikovksy and Sitchin. Velikovsky was not a scientist, as you described him, but a psychiatrist; similarly, Sitchin is a journalist, not a Hebrew scholar. It was said of Velikovsky that astronomers thought his astronomy was ludicrous, but were impressed by his history, while historians were impressed by his astronomy, but not his history. (The same could probably be said of Sitchin, though fewer academics ever noticed his existence, as opposed to Velikovsky.) And as a graduate in both astrophysics and history, I think both his astronomy and his history are rubbish!

References and Links please...

Well, I gave you my reasoning as to why that slab story is dubious at best, we can discuss that. I'm not about to go through google and dredge up a bunch of dodgy pravda.ru stories (I call it pravda.ru and not Pravda because it actually has no connection with the old Soviet newspaper of that name, AFAIK). But one pravda.ru exclusive that came up recently was about an expedition to Tunguska to prove that the 1908 explosion was caused by a UFO. Even the ufologists on the ufo-updates mailing list found this an absurd, unscientific thing to do. And sure enough, the expedition found the "proof" they set out to find.

The Law of truely large numbers.

Basically, the more data you have, the more likely you'll find weird coincidental correlations.

I guess these kinds of 'statistical finding' will become more and more prevalent in the future, given that we're living in an age where we're collecting ever-larger amounts of data, and have the resources to process all this data automatically.

It would be a good thing if people were a bit more sceptical of this kind of stuff. Correlation isn't causation.

This doesn't beg any questions.

Teleport yourself to http://skepdic.com/ bjd

ID is Creationism and most certainly not a scientific theory.

As a scientist, I must say "no", on the grounds that this is the poster child of a Clustering Illusion(driven by Wishful Thinking). Mathematically speaking, that is the statistical problem that occours when you plot a small dataset against another small dataset and try to regress a line out of it.

As a scientist, I must say "no", on the grounds that this is the poster child of a Clustering Illusion(driven by Wishful Thinking). Mathematically speaking, that is the statistical problem that occours when you plot a small dataset against another small dataset and try to regress a line out of it.

I took three polygraphs as part of a process to obtain a security clearance (no, I didn't get it.) I believe the effectiveness of the polygraph has little to do with the 'technology', and a lot to do with the theater surrounding the examination.

From Skepdic:

'It doesn't appease me that many defenders of the polygraph know it is junk science but defend its use because many people confess to crimes during interviews done before or after being given the test. The machine may not be able to detect lies accurately but, as Richard Nixon said, "it scares the hell out of people." The end justifies the means.'

Of course, you see right through this. You're far too intelligent to be fooled by these techniques. But, if you choose to, you can use them to manipulate your own mind. And, your customers, of course, will be completely taken in! Our new high-tech mental marketing tools have shiny new MRI technology. Not at all the same as that other new agey junk--nosiree! To sell your product, you MUST buy ours!

Wanna buy a lure?

Wanna laugh at the fishermen?