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One of the best resources I've found for general healthy skeptism is skepdic.com. Here's their entry on cattle mutilations. The site is effectively a catalogue of all kinds of phenomenon; I suspect even non skeptics would enjoy browsing through it.

In regards to skepticism in general, I have a thought on that. The first thing skeptics do is question the essentials of any situation. In the vast majority of cases, it is simply the initial information that is wrong and the impossible scenario never occured, at least not how others believe it did. People like to tell interesting stories and they usually aren't very happy when a skeptic begins questioning aspects of their tale. Hence we make a bad impression.

Now if someone could explain the Joplin Spook Light I would be eternally grateful.

One of the best resources I've found for general healthy skeptism is skepdic.com. Here's their entry on cattle mutilations. The site is effectively a catalogue of all kinds of phenomenon; I suspect even non skeptics would enjoy browsing through it.

In regards to skepticism in general, I have a thought on that. The first thing skeptics do is question the essentials of any situation. In the vast majority of cases, it is simply the initial information that is wrong and the impossible scenario never occured, at least not how others believe it did. People like to tell interesting stories and they usually aren't very happy when a skeptic begins questioning aspects of their tale. Hence we make a bad impression.

Now if someone could explain the Joplin Spook Light I would be eternally grateful.

For example, you ask for an explaniation of the "surgical tools." Who says there any cuts at all, much less of "surgical precison."? Who says surgical tools are required? Whether the evidence is of anything "surgical" is a judgment call and it turns out that the judgment is wrong.

I'd like to know how you leap from "You can't explain..." to "That proves it was done by aliens in UFOs." Those aliens must have lousy note taking capability if they have to keep doing cattle disections to figure them out.

Scientific investigation does not begin with such premises.

You turned around at your desk and you were surprised that I was standing right behind you. How did I get teleportation capability? Do I have alien technology? Don't just tell me that you think I snuck up behind you quietly!

Here's the explanation for you to ignore because it doesn't have enough fantasy: http://skepdic.com/cattle.html

No, that's not what "begging the question" means, either. Begging the question is assuming true what you are attempting to prove.

Congratulations!

First class example of pulling a Sokal on our ('Insightful' +4) Slashdot readership.

Sounds suspiciously like something Erich Von Däniken would have forged.... Chuck "Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work." T.A. Edison

From what I understand, it is relatively easy to patent a mechanism with flaws that prevent it from working as stated.

This is why you should never lend any credence to a product simply because it is patented.

"But of all the requirements for being granted a patent in the U.S., having a working device is not one of them." - Skeptic's Dictionary

More likely, the name refers to Edgar Cayce a supposed psychic who predicted that California would fall into the ocean among other things.

Do your research

...out with a song called "Baby Got Back"...

Can I ask what the hell that link had to do with anything?

Several years ago Sir Mix-A-Lot came out with a song called "Baby Got Back," hailing the beauty of large tooshes. In the video, there was an oversized magazine cover featuring a woman on the front, much like Cosmopolitan, but it showed her backside and the title of the mag was "Callipygian!"

It doen NOT beg any damn question. The claim may suggest a question, or raise a question or perhaps.

Does any-fucking-body know the meaning of "begging the question"? I don't believe I've heard correct use of the phrase even once in the past year.

</peeve>

Psychology is all to often dangerous pseudoscience. All too often "psychological research" consists of starting with a conclusion, then designing rigged experiments to support it and/or spin-doctoring the data to support whatever cause they are trying to prove. Take anything the APA says with a large grain of salt.

Why bother with praying? It doesn't do anything

Crystals storing healing "energy".Quartz is piezoelectric, 'nuff said.

Homeopathic cures. Anyone heard of Avogadro's number?

"Natural" cures being better than pharmacuticals. Lead and Radon exist in nature, should we take those too?

"Faith" healing. Confirmation bias anyone?

Aromatic healing. No comment needed.

While reading in the slashdot postings below about Raelean leader Rael, I hit a link to www.skepdic.com on rael, when i cycled through and found this page charles tart. It describes an anecdote by an apparently famous crackpot about a psycic experience about an explosion a woman had the night before Port Chicago blew up.

I had never heard of Port Chicago before, and here I find it connected like Kevin Bacon to Slashdot.

My guess is these are things that the child has heard many, many times in his/her life, and eventually forms a 'memory' around it. Sort of how some people hear a story about something happening and incorporate that into their stock of things they believe happened to them.

You can't trust your own brain. You may think you remember things, but you don't. Whenever you "remember" something, your brain is recreating the experience. It isn't like a computer where it's stored as an exact sequence of binary.

Here is a short blurb on memory theory.

Incidently, I have no idea what my earliest memory is. How could anybody? I have numerous memories from when I was quite young (catching a fish, swimming, riding on a train) but how can I accurately say which is my earliest memory and how do I know that my brain didn't just brew them up based on stories I heard about my youth?

How was the parent post flamebait? I hope someone meta-mods your ass unfair, you dumbass mod.

Parent post != flamebait. Check here for more info about false memories.

Choice quote from that article:
"Apparently, the Raëlians are not bothered by the rather absurd image of a race of superior beings working for thousands of years in a laboratory to create all our insects, fungi, bacteria, viruses, etc., not to mention all their lovelies that have gone extinct. Why would any beings do such a thing? And why would they wait 25,000 years to reveal their handiwork to a French race car driver who spots their UFO in a volcano? And then tell him that the message is to clone ourselves so we can be immortal. Then again, is this story any stranger than the ones in the Bible?"

I wouldn't put too much weight on what they Raelians say, this is a publicity stunt and I wouldn't be surprised if the Scientologists were saying the same. There definition of a cloned human probably follows their guidelines too and not scientifically sound.

In my neighorhood for quite some time the Raelians have been trying to recruit ppl. They drive around in this van with sparkling stickers - kind of like a moving target. I got one of their fliers one day and had quite chuckle. I don't think they are too far off Scientologists either. There is some info on the Raelians here.

this guy goes into a psychiatrists office and the doc shows him some ink blots (rorschach test) - the first one reminds him of sex, the next one reminds him of sex, etc. The doc finally say, "I zee you are obsessed with sex", and the guy says, "Me? You're the one with all the dirty pictures".

It's worth remembering that all that `eat popcorn/drink coke` subliminal stuff was a hoax. It's not true - it doesn't work.

skepdic

Goddamnit people, can't anyone use the phrase "begging the question" correctly anymore?
Educate yourself regarding idioms.

No. It's a common error. It should be "raises the question".

Here's a decent explanation or just do a Google search and you'll come up with a bunch of sites.

When I buy a book, I get access to what Tom Clancy actually wrote. No human wrote the binary image of kernel32.dll. The Copyright Clause is very specific that the rights cover the "writings and discoveries" of "authors and inventors." Both of these imply that copyright should not apply to the output of a mere machine.

You're not paying for the source code. You're paying for permission to use a binary copy of the program and there is a big difference.

You're begging the question. Of course that's how it works now, but the whole point is that I (and the article) claim that this is artificial and unfair and should be changed. It's unfair to the public to allow software manufacturers to obtain copyright protection for something that is essentially useless for promoting progress when it hits the public domain.

While I agree OSS promotes academic achievement its hardly practical for making money off of.

Having source code != OSS. It means only that whoever buys a copy of the software also gets a copy of the source code that they can look at and modify for their own use, but not necessarily copy and distribute.

Could you please send me the HDL/VHDL [etc] source for a GeForce processor please? Can't? Didn't think so.

A GeForce processor isn't copyrighted either. I'm free to make my own if I can legitimately reverse engineer the design. Only patents can prevent that, but guess what. Patents are already fully disclosed to the public. Yet, as you pointed out, both Nvidia and ATI are doing just fine.

Occam's Razor requires that all simpler possible explanations be eliminated first.

Nope, quite the reverse. The principle states that one should not make more assumptions than the minimum needed.

Take a look here or here or do a search on Google.

There are enough documented cases of [spontaneous] human combustion to at least give some credence to the phenomenon

I don't know of any documented cases. There are cases some have attributed to spontaneous human combustion that can be explained with an external ignition (cigarette, fireplace, etc.) and slow candle-like burning of their body fat. See the entry from The Skeptics Dictionary.

From other posts, it seems reasonable that getting hit by one of these things would do some damage -- equivalent to setting off a few grams of high explosive along the path of the object, but why would it be any more likely to trigger SHC than any number of other violent ends one could meet? Getting hit with large-caliber bullets, or setting off kgs of explosives strapped to one's body don't seem to do the trick so why would quark matter do it?

If SHC were a real phenomenon, militaries would have probably developed weapons to exploit it long ago. SHC-catalyst-tipped bullets? Yikes.

If you scroll ... you can see a nearly perfect image of a face.

It's a phenomenon known as pareidolia , and is quite a fascinating subject in its own right. Briefly, the human mind tends to seek patterns that it recognizes. When faced with a chaotic input, the mind creates patterns where none exist. Carl Sagan argues that faces in particular are hardwired into our recognition centres.

Incidentally, I can't see the face you're talking about there. (I'm probably not tired enough, as I find I'm very prone to seeing faces everywhere after an all-nighter.)
I did find a yin/yang symbol, though...

Reminds me of the classic French physics fiasco with N-Rays. Can anyone think of others?

Sorry to single out the French, but I suspect they have a knack for this kind of thing!

Actually, I was trying to be funny (ie/ there are reviews for a game that nobody outside of the company has even played yet). The reviews are from consumers, not futureshop.

Neither you nor the moderator got the joke (incidently, how can I be 'overrated' when nobody rated me yet?). Obviously, I'm not as funny as I think I am.

Of course... I don't need any sort of headset. I am an excellent driver and I can concentrate on the road without a headset...

Of course... I don't need any sort of headset. I am an excellent driver and I can concentrate on the road without a headset...

Of course... I don't need any sort of headset. I am an excellent driver and I can concentrate on the road without a headset...

"Any sophisticated theory of the postmodern ought to bear something of the same relationship to Horkheimer and Adorno's old 'Culture Industry' concept as MTV or fractal ads bear to fifties television series."

If you don't know what this means, it's because your brain evolved to reject drivel. To be perfectly honest, I hope this is a hoax. Wouldn't be the first time.

But then, with postmodernism, you can't really tell the hoaxes from the honest nonsense.

Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker noted some time ago that the message of postmodern work is almost always trivial (like "violence is bad"), but couched in the most inscrutable and/or eye-catching terms (like "search for an interpretive skein within that overburdened word 'violence'" or "violence as style"). How about this one, from the paper: "Without a grand narrative, there will no be one common way to program, or even one common kind of interface between programs." More than one way to program? Sign me up for a grand narrative, post-haste!

I thought Slashdot was immune to this kind of idiocy. (Well...no, I didn't, but I can dream, can't I?)

Discover a clue

Discover a clue

The first article seems to make the case that all geeks demand open source exclusively, because if you don't make such demands, you're not a geek. (A classic falacy of logic).

"All geeks like open-source. If you are against open-source, then you aren't a geek."

Sounds like the 'psychic' strategy - predict enough weird stuff and odds are that one will eventually come true, make you famous, while the bogus ones are quickly forgotten by the beleivers / suckers. That's called the Jean Dixon effect.

That isn't what begging the question means. Read up: http://skepdic.com/begging.html

ol' Indian rope trick .

Very Cost effective.

where viewers are encouraged to examine...despite the fact that the majority of viewers have no idea what the code means.

Once again art critics are commenting on something that they have no business commenting on. Thus the definition of art broadens just a bit more and loses more meaning. Right now it seems that humanities study equates to being able to make up more BS with a straight face than anyone else.

It's like those conversations you have on some CS topic where Joe Average says something and you have to reply "Um... that isn't how it works at all."

Of course in the arts it doesn't matter what is being said but what sort of crack-headed theory you can come up with about it and how loud your posse of "experts" can beat their chests. Of course in science we have terms for that too: Lysenkoism or Pathological science

where viewers are encouraged to examine...despite the fact that the majority of viewers have no idea what the code means.

Once again art critics are commenting on something that they have no business commenting on. Thus the definition of art broadens just a bit more and loses more meaning. Right now it seems that humanities study equates to being able to make up more BS with a straight face than anyone else.

It's like those conversations you have on some CS topic where Joe Average says something and you have to reply "Um... that isn't how it works at all."

Of course in the arts it doesn't matter what is being said but what sort of crack-headed theory you can come up with about it and how loud your posse of "experts" can beat their chests. Of course in science we have terms for that too: Lysenkoism or Pathological science

It is a reasonable criticism directed at Science and Nature that they seem to compete with each other to publish attention-getting results (the recent bubble fusion experiment comes to mind), but what it comes down to is that a reviewer of a paper has no way to validate experimental data given to him. You have to take the research group at its word that the data are not fabricated. You can question their data reduction and analysis methods, but if they said they did this measurement and these are the resulting data then you have to take them at their word.

One of the ways science operates is that results like these are presented, and if the results are interesting enough (i.e., unexpected or never seen before) then other labs repeat and verify the experiment. When the results are confirmed, then great. If not, then the results (or at least the conclusions drawn from them) become suspect. This happened with cold fusion and it looks like bubble fusion is heading down the same road. This has happened in the past (N-rays are another example), and it will happen in many other instances that don't draw the big press stories. That is how it should work. The Salon article seems to suggest (among some valid points) that the paper reviewers should have had some all-knowing wisdom and immediately questioned the data.

I also doubt, as the article suggests, that the reputation of physicists has been harmed and that all over the world school children are crying "Say it ain't so Jan Hendrik." The biosciences have many many scandals related to data forging, or at least questionable massaging or analysis of data, because the stakes ($$) are much higher for a new drug to come to market as well as the difficulty in collecting consistent data. The biosciences continue to draw huge numbers of people into the field and it enjoys (deservedly) a positive reputation.

I also thought the article was way over the top with regard about the government funding aspect of this. It made it sound like that all the government money spent on R&D is a waste as it obviouly is going to charlatans and rouges. The author should have looked up the research dollar amounts in relation to the total government budget (such as its percentage of the GNP) as well as in relation to the total non-DoD R&D budget and see how well the NSF or the DOE compare to, say, NIH (I'll give you a hint, they are quite neglected). This isn't "Big Science" by any stretch of the imagination.

The myth is more of a media phenomenon, much like the alleged curse of King Tut's tomb. It was a twisting of facts and numbers by a writer to create the illusion of something supernatural, with the aim of bringing in a lot of readers (because frankly, people love this stuff). It's essentially tabloid writing.

There were a couple of pieces written in the fifties noting disappearances in that general area, but the Bermuda Triangle as we know it was invented by a magazine writer in 1964.

The Skeptic's Dictionary explains the Triangle pretty well.

Proven medical treatments, such as silver, acupuncture, homeopathy, etc. (proven not by a few piddly years of research, but in most cases many decades or centuries of use)

I can't speak for silver (I've not done enough reading on this particular 'treatment'), but I can say that both acupuncture and homeopathy are NOT proven treatments, nothing even close. I challenge you to produce one paper in a reputable medical journal that demonstrates the effectiveness of these treatments.

Just because something has been done for a long time, does not mean it works. All it has to do is make people think it works, and people are pretty easy to fool. People believed in the 4 bodily humours for centuries too, and the entirety of Western medical practice was based on this premise for a long time. Eventually though, evidence-based medicine took over and properly so.

For more info, visit The Skeptic's Dictionary.

Occam's razor is the principle of simplification and minimalism taught by a Fransciscan monk named William of Ockham in the 14th century. It basically stated, "The profoundly simple is simply profound." In short, the simpler explanation, the better. Are you arguing for some sort of parsimony in attributing blame to the garbage in the music industry?

I totally agree with you about the "good taste" argument, but I'm curious about the connection to Occam.

I remember another study where students were asked to fill out a small survey. The professor then reviewed all the surveys and gave each student a customized personality profile. The students were asked the rate the profiles, and all gave them very high rankings....

The whole site is worth reading, covers confirmation bias too.

I remember another study where students were asked to fill out a small survey. The professor then reviewed all the surveys and gave each student a customized personality profile. The students were asked the rate the profiles, and all gave them very high rankings....

The whole site is worth reading, covers confirmation bias too.