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The Greatest Scientific Hoaxes?
Ponca City, We love you writes "The New Scientist has an amusing story about the seven greatest scientific hoaxes of all time. Of course, there have been serious cases of scientific fraud, such as the stem cell researchers recently found guilty of falsifying data, and the South Korean cloning fraud, but the hoaxes selected point more to human gullibility than malevolence and include the Piltdown Man (constructed from a medieval human cranium); a ten-foot "petrified man" dug up on a small farm in Cardiff; fossils 'found' in Wurzburg, Germany depicting comets, moons and suns, Alan Sokal's paper loaded with nonsensical jargon that was accepted by the journal Social Text; the claim of the Upas tree on the island of Java so poisonous that it killed everything within a 15-mile radius; and Johann Heinrich Cohausen's claim of an elixir produced by collecting the breath of young women in bottles that produced immortality. Our favorite: BBC's broadcast in 1957 about the spaghetti tree in Switzerland that showed a family harvesting pasta that hung from the branches of the tree. After watching the program, hundreds of people phoned in asking how they could grow their own tree but, alas, the program turned out to be an April Fools' Day joke." What massive scientific hoaxes/jokes have other people witnessed?
What massive scientific hoaxes/jokes have other people witnessed?
E-meter comes to mind.
My work here is dung.
Hilariously enough, it bit L. Ron Hubbard in the ass too:
Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard met less fortunate timing, listing Piltdown Man as one of the ancestors of humanity in his book Scientology: A History of Man, and describing him as having "enormous" teeth and being "quite careless as to whom and what he bit." Piltdown Man would be exposed as a hoax just months after the publication of Hubbard's book.
I am not a historian but I find it hilarious that British, German and French scientists were rejecting claims of early human fossils in Indonesia or Africa on the grounds that their pride in being the origin of life. Instead they were pointing at anything and everything they could find on their own soil as the beginning of life. What made the Piltdown Man such a great hoax is that because of the mounting tension between European super powers leading up to World War I the British were grasping for anything to prove that humans originated in the UK (which, of course, is far from true). And here was this convenient find, an anomaly in the fossil record--but who cared? The British now had evidence of early humans on UK soil with large cranial regions (which they associated with intelligence). Prime minister, we must not allow an origins of our species gap!
All this stupid pride of who stood on the birthplace of humanity blinded so many intelligent people. If I recall correctly the Piltdown Man fragments were hilariously rudimentary painted lower jawbone of an orangutan combined with the skull of a fully developed, modern man. Let this be a lesson to anyone who lets emotions, national pride & religion get in the way of science.
My work here is dung.
It's such a great hoax that there are still people who believe it! :-)
But, then again, I guess its not actually science...
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Barnum tried to buy the Cardiff Giant off its owners, but they wouldn't sell. So he had one of his own carved, and traveled around exhibiting it. Barnum was showing a fake fake.
I piss off bigots.
Odd that NS didn't mention the hoax that started the story, the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 where it was revealed (incorrectly of course) that Sir Walter Herschel had found evidence of life on the moon.
My favorite wasn't really a hoax; it was a humorous science fiction story by Isaac Asimov who was a grad student studying biology when he wrote about thiotimoline, a substance that, when added to water, dissolves before it reaches the water.
Free Martian Whores!
Global Warming
Yes, I did go there.
http://www.globalclimatescam.com/?p=229
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
Nuff said.
Why...this is no poll? Dammit.
This from Wikipedia -
"The myth of lemming mass suicide is long-standing and has been popularized by a number of factors. In 1955, Carl Barks drew an Uncle Scrooge adventure comic with the title "The Lemming with the Locket". This comic, which was inspired by a 1954 National Geographic article, showed massive numbers of lemmings jumping over Norwegian cliffs. Even more influential was the 1958 Disney film White Wilderness in which footage was shown that seems to show the mass suicide of lemmings. The film won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature."
I think this one deserves honorable mention at least!
Have you compiled your kernel today??
Denon's $500 ethernet cables, those $9000 "vacuum chamber" cables, etc.
Oh, this is science, not technology.
Still, they use edge cases of science to make $$$$$$$$$$$$$$ off of rich fanboys.
In practice, the cable I mentioned are hoaxes.
proud caffeine whore
... proof given by empirical research (rather than evidence, as an explanation, if necessary).
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
har har
Ville / Varuste.net
Man landing on the moon. Duh.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
oh, since this is a Religious hoax it doesn't count? It's got "science" in the name and they pretend to explain the world in a pseudo-scientific method.
That people would actually think the spaghetti tree was real, on april first, kills me.
But then, the flying spaghetti monster is real, so, who knows.
The fraudulent research showing that high dose chemo followed by marrow transplants was an effective treatment for breast cancer. It was an experimental procedure, so insurance companies wouldn't cover it. But this study showed it worked, and it got some play in the media, and Congress actually passed a law requiring that insurance companies cover it.
Then it turns out that the researchers left out negative results which, when compiled with the rest of the data, showed a slightly WORSE outcome for this procedure. It seems that the researchers believed that the procedure SHOULD work, and since it was so important to get insurance companies to cover it, they simply modified the data to get the results they wanted.
Of course, insurance companies stopped paying for it, and the procedure isn't used, and Congress has moved onto other things. But I still need to ask: how many women had months or years removed from their life because 2 "scientists" thought they knew better than the data?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
This list is incomplete. I would provide a proof but this comment box is too small to hold it.
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
Global Warming.
Of course, there have been serious cases of scientific fraud, such as the stem cell researchers recently found guilty of falsifying data
Unless I'm mistaken, the fraud committed in this instance was that the photos taken were adjusted in photoshop to make them clearer (i'm not sure if they were brightened or darkened), which had no affect on the actual data or conclusions of the study. Please point me in the right direction if I'm wrong.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Laugh at the silly people all you want, but this happened to me as a kid. Some local new station ran a story on the "donut harvest," showing people picking donuts from plants ("These raw donuts will now be sent to a plant to be glazed"). When you're a small kid and don't know anything about how donuts or other pastries are made it seems logical enough. And is spaghetti really all that different from a lot of kelp and other seaweeds that come from nature? I can see where someone who knew nothing about pasta (this is Britain, after all) could be taken in by such a story.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Hard to beat a visit by space aliens.
Well, some of these hoaxes, like the hilarious Sokal hoax, weren't really scientific hoaxes moreso than exposing the idiocy of certain groups.
So, if you want to go down that route (and I see no reason not too!) then you MUST bring up the venerable James Randi.
Project Alpha humiliated a bunch of paranormal researchers and parapsychologists because of how easily fooled they were.
Banachek has a good article on his website:
http://www.banachek.org/nonflash/project_alpha.htm
The most interesting thing is that some people were such True Believers in the supposed "powers" of Banachek and Edwards that they continued to believe in them even after revealing it was all just an exposé. The most important thing was that it reveals that while many scientists in this area just didn't properly account for outright fraud; I would guess it is because most experiments do not have to worry about participants purposefully trying to mess with the results.
Please someone tell me it's a hoax.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
While we're at it, Atlanta Nights
Really?
Where?
Homer J.
...global warming? *ducks*
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything. - Neitzsche
It was thought up by Charles Darwin and it goes something like this: In the beginning we were all fish, okay, swimming around in the water. And then one day a couple of fish had a retard baby, and the retard baby was different, so it got to live. So retard fish goes on to make more retard babies, and then one day a retard baby fish crawled out of the ocean with its... mutant fish hands, and it had butt-sex with a squirrel or something, and made this retard fish-squirrel, and then that had a retard baby which was a monkey-fish-frog, and then this monkey-fish-frog had butt-sex with that monkey; that monkey had a mutant retard baby that screwed another monkey and that made you. So there you go. You're the retarded offspring of five monkeys having butt-sex with a fish-squirrel!! Congratulations!
My ex mother in law thought I only did my Ph.D to get out of paying maintenance, does that count?
(I paid it anyway btw).
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
My personal favorite is the gibberish computer-generated journal article that actually got accepted and published...
There are still people who wish it weren't a hoax. It's an interesting tale in the ways people will ignore evidence of the contrary when it comes to something they want to believe. The signs were obvious - found in a shop with stone cutting tools, yet ignored for years afterward...
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Judging from this recent /. article, perhaps one shouldn't be surprised that we are this gullible.
The memory of water was a famous hoax, at least in France, 15-20 years ago, although I'm not sure it's exactly an hoax. Another famous hoax was when a government-appointed researcher declared in 1986 that the radioactive cloud coming from Chernobyl had stopped at the eastern French borders, and thus the official policy was to not take any of the precautions that other countries took regarding grown food or the prevention of cancer. Isn't spoon bending a hoax as well?
You just got troll'd!
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Filter error: You can type more than that for your comment.
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Who can forget this guy who claimed to be able to boost the speed of data transmission across plain copper wires by 1000x, even 4x faster than fiber? He'd "prove" his invention by apparently streaming perfect, full-motion video across ordinary modem lines, and received millions in funding. Later, it was found out that he was simply using VCR playback on a very long cable. :-)
Not scientifically proved...
Let's see. First of all, evolution of course. That means that astronomy, nuclear physics, geology, paleontology and archaeology are wrong too, which (among others) invalidates Quantum Theory and General Relativity.
Special Relativity may be correct since the Bible doesn't say anything about the speed of light.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Don't know how they missed this one. Maybe they don't consider Cultural Studies sufficiently scientific. The beautiful part is that the end result is still useful reading.
Near as my rough research can tell, Castaneda's material itself is about 40-70% realistic, because he seems to have borrowed from other legitimate papers. If you go above the level of the specific plants used (de-emphasized in the later books), there are some fascinating ideas there.
Then Dan Millman cribbed his entire plot structure from Castaneda! However, he changed traditions. Instead of Old Mexican, Millman went for unsourced Buddhist (and other) parables. Millman had Castaneda to study from, and so hid under the category of "autobiographical fiction", and didn't try to swindle a degree out of it. So he ended up being about 80% authentic, to which I'd impose a 10% penalty for deliberately obscuring the source of some famous source texts.
Could be the biggest one of all. That or alchemy (dead) and astrology (still alive).
One of the greatest April's Fool jokes of all time must be the one Swedish state television ran in 1962: Place a nylon stocking over your black and white TV screen and get color reception! http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Hoaxipedia/Instant_Color_TV/
/* Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana */
Unquestionably, the greatest science hoax ever is this one.
Nothing beats the perpetual search for...ahem...male enhancement.
The scientific pioneer was a guy around the Great Depression who made a mint selling an operation in which he would implant goat testicles into his patients, many of whom claimed dramatic improvement.
In the process he managed to revolutionize modern radio and advertising.
Linky linky: John Brinkley
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
>I didn't think anything....was a bigger hoax than Global Warming.
Pfffft. 'Chemtrails'. Try that one out.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
My favorite hoax attempt is Smithsonian Barbie:
http://www.snopes.com/humor/letters/smithsonian.asp
Congratulations, you successfully managed to disprove a mainstream scientific theory admitted by an overwhelmingly large scientific consensus.
To achieve this feat you have :
(x) invoked facts that are just not true without providing any way to back them up
(x) jumped to a one-line conclusion based on these distorted facts
( ) implied there was a conspiracy among the scientific community
(x) implied there was a perverse effect in the way the "system" works that explains the consensus
( ) misinterpreted the theory so that a cherry-picked anectode could disprove it
You just got troll'd!
this is taught in school http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creationism.
People have successfully cloned sheep, cows, dogs, cats and monkeys. They are NOT particularly different from humans folks, at least in reproductive terms. IMO, the cloning thing happened, and the hoax is that it was a hoax, some of the powers that be deciding the civilian world wasn't quite ready for it to be real.
Anything mentioned on the new Fox show Fringe.
Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
HeadOn
I almost died laughing when I woman I work with bought some at lunch.
I stopped laughing when she put in charge of operations during our busiest time of year.
Question everything
E-meter [wikipedia.org] comes to mind.
You mis-spelled Polygraph. Slightly more important, given that, unlike E-meters, polygraphs are used in criminal investigations and employment decisions (namely, government security services) and police and prosecutors often try to get the results admitted in court as evidence.
Remember Ashley Todd, who claimed she was mugged and had a "B" cut into her face by an imaginary black dude? Cops gave her a polygraph test, but refused to release the results. Hmm, like maybe a "she's telling the truth" result, that would very publicly demonstrate what a piece of useless crap polygraphs are?
Please help metamoderate.
String Theory
Hi. I don't even have an account on Slashdot so I'm posting AC. This is from Wikipedia: ... Perón wasted lots of money on it. It was later found that it was all a hoax by Richter.
"The Huemul Project (Spanish: Proyecto Huemul) was a secret project proposed by the German scientist of Austrian origin Ronald Richter to the government of Argentina during the first presidency of Juan Domingo Perón. In 1948, Richter convinced Perón that he could produce nuclear fusion energy before any other country based in a lithium-deuterium nuclear reaction and deliver it in milk-bottle type/size containers."
"Today, the Huemul island with the ruins of the historic facilities, can be visited by tourists. It is reached by boat from the port of Bariloche."
Where's global warming on the list?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_ray Apparently someone was jealous of Roentgen...
As this one is still going on and not yet accepted on /. as a hoax, I'll be modded down and pilloried for this.
Just saying.
sigs, as if you care.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steorn Claims to have a device that creates free energy by violating "first law of thermodynamics"
Why didn't they mention cold fusion among the 7 biggest scientific hoaxes?
...and the claim that it's an Operating System.
That nobody has mentioned the Museum of Hoaxes, which documents all these and more. Much, much more.
I have a way to solve the conflict over global warming here in the US: let the government buy out all current beachfront property in the US that is 10 feet or less above sea level, to be given free to people who don't believe in global warming, with the stipulation that they must live on it and can live nowhere else. No matter what it is a win-win for everyone.
While I'm suprised the word Nazi hasn't even come up yet.
bjd
I submit that Godel solved this a long time ago.
1) Nothing is more awesome than sex with women.
2) We can imagine sex with women. And frequently do.
3) If we can imagine sex with women, the only thing that would be more awesome would be actually having sex with women. For that, women would have to exist.
4) Since point 1 says that nothing is more awesome than sex with women, they must exist, that being the most awesome thing possible.
Who says my philosophy class was a waste of time? =)
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The Science Report special, "Alternative 3" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_3) got a lot of people going back in 1977, partly because it got bumped from its original April 1 slot to later in the year, so the hoax element wasn't quite as obvious.
Slow gradual change just can't be rationalized given the six thousand year age of the Earth. It has to be the most elaborate hoax in history.
January 30, 2007, The Wow Starts Now.
I've always thought crop circles were an enduring, elaborate, and completely nonsensical hoax, deserving mention here
Who doesn't love a good perpetual motion machine? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbo
"Break in" in your cables for the best sound! Heheh . . . good call, but it's already been done for awhile:
Cable Cooker
FryBaby
There's a sucker born every minute.
How about Global warming? That has to be the biggest scientific hoax ever in history
Sorry. QC and David Deutsch take the cake. What with half-dead cats, infinite number of parallel universes and all that jazz. hahahaha...
"Battery operation is inherently selftimed, in that when the battery dies, the FryBaby output stops." Someone had fun writing this one. :-D
Its cause is not fully understood, but that hardly matters; we have to live with it no matter what causes it.
Ever notice how it's the same deluded people (political conservatives, for some reason) who claim that evolution doesn't happen (hello? antibiotic-resistant bugs?) as claim that global warming doesn't happen?
I piss off bigots.
Even National Geographic fell for it hook, line and sinker. LOL.
In the BBC "Spaghetti tree" piece, I was expecting Benny Hill to come out some where and do his goofy wave and go after those girls. Also at the end of the piece I wanted to hear Boot Randolph with Yackety Sax (Benny Hill theme) and Benny Hill chasing those girls at high speed.
While perhaps it was more of a parlor trick than a scientific hoax, The Turk was still peddled as a thinking machine that could play chess. Not only did its creator succeed, but subsequent owners did, as well.
Really interesting stuff, well before any modern computer (even beating Charles Babbage's work by almost half a decade). In fact, Babbage was another opponent of the turk, and was reportedly inspired by it.
(If you're a CS major and don't know who Babbage is, you really should read up.)
They left out more modern scientific hoaxes, including AGW and "a high-carb, low-fat diet prevents heart disease".
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
If you ask the average person whether marijuana is addictive, whether LSD damages your chromosomes, or whether MDMA puts holes in your brain I think you'll find that the scientific fraud behind the War on Drug Users is the most successful in history. I'll bet you anything that more people believe that marijuana is addictive than have ever even heard of Piltdown Man.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I could not complete my last year in college, was unable to graduate with my class, and had to repeat because the final project assigned to me was to make Polywater, which I failed to do and I honestly reported my findings.
When it was exposed as a fraud, I didn't even get an apology from the department.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater
The theory of ANTHROPOGENIC global warming is different from the fact of global warming. It's as if there was a theory that the Bubonic Plague was caused by demonic possession and I claim that demonic possession as a cause of the plague is a hoax and then you jump in and say that the plague is REAL and cannot be argued about. Do you not understand the meaning of "anthropogenic"?
Matter can be created and destroyed, but the by-product is energy. The resulting sum of matter and energy is what cannot be lessened.
As Trent Reznor one said "I am sure there is a god. I'm just not sure of his relevance." I think it would be mighty presumptuous to assume that it would be preoccupied with the ins-and-outs of our daily lives, and even our "salvation".
Without a caring god, we're left to science, cause-and-effect. And the body of evidence is that this world, the one free of deity intervention is the one we live in. So what is the point of his existence in excess of initial creation? Science has caused the planets to form, the organic chemistry to take place. In a universe of science there is no room for a controlling deity.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
My favorite was always so-called cold fusion.
Piltdown is an interesting case precisely because it had so little impact on the understanding of human evolution. Piltdown didn't fit with the general patterns of what had been found and well before the time it was discovered to be a hoax scientists generally ignored it or considered to be possibly some malformed example of another species or possibly an off-shoot that wasn't part of the main human lineage. Thus, what happened with Piltdown is at some level an example of how well science works and how robust a theory evolution is.
I know of at least two documents, the Vinland Map and the Paraiba Inscription, that were declared "hoaxes" by experts but were later found to be authentic.
In both cases the documents contained messages encyphered in a manner common for many years. Cyrus Gordon discussed both in his book Riddles in History. Gordon was an expert in ancient languages who also had worked at Bletchley Park during World War II, giving him a knowledge of encryption.
The encypherment was what Gordon called "acrostic/telestic". The first and last letters of a line are treated as a count into the line and the appropriate letters marked. Then the pairs of letters are rearranged according to a pattern. The usual message was the name of the author (by the rearranged front count letters) and a religious message (by the back count letters). An example of this encypherment was found in a scribe's practice attempts in Turkey.
One item of hoax "evidence" was a spelling error in the Vinland Map. It turned out that the author had forced a letter into place, which resulted in the apparent error.
The Jammal Ark Hoax fooled creationists, and CBS television. What was claimed to be a piece of Noah's Ark was really a railway tie soaked in teriyaki sauce.
We're coming up on the 70th anniversary of the Orson Welles broadcast on Halloween 1938. Not really a hoax, since they told listeners during the broadcast that they were listening to a radio play.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
I know it's not exactly a scientific hoax, but there have been many scientists who have wasted a lot of time and resources to prove nothing...
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Since it's a science, why not include something from economics? The hoax would be the part where it was supposed to help versus the reality of it causing long-term harm.
Not fraud, because they truly believed what they saw and their publications supported it. And then it went far beyond the source.
Binaural Beat, or EEG "beat frequency" brain stimulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_frequency (see Binaural Beat section), as originated at The Monroe Institute http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_institute (TMI).
In acoustics, two beats of nearly the same frequency interfere to produce a change in summed volume of a period equal to the difference between the two frequencies. At TMI, they found that if they played sine waves into each ear of a slightly different frequency, they could detect an increase in EEG power at the beat frequency. I was so taken with an article in OMNI on TMI that I saved it for over a decade until I started studying EEG research under Karl Pribram.
Once I started studying it, a glaring error came to mind. We had to put subjects in a Gaussian cage to shield them from stray signals from the heaters and pumps for the swimming pool elsewhere in the building our lab was at. These caused induced currents in the EEG. If that was necessary, how could they justify putting electromagenticially driven headphones on top an EEG cap?
To first pull things apart, I tested a single subject -- a styrofoam head (a wig stand) with EEG cap and headphones on it. I was able to show power increases at precisely the same frequencies as the beat signal. (I'd first suggested using a bowl of Jell-O. Karl suggested not to, since he'd found increases in alpha waves in a bowl of Jell-O when shaken. No, I don't know why. Neither did Karl. We just thought it was extremely cool.)
To make it more official, I helped teach some students at University of Virginia at Wise to run EEG research. Their EEG system could produce sound remotely in a closed box and transmit it via air conduction up long plastic tubes into the ears -- no electromagnets anywhere near the head. They ran it this was as well as the traditional Monroe way (headphones on top of EEG cap). In the each of the same subjects, the traditional method produced power increases at the beat frequency. With air conduction stimuli, no changes were observed.
My two greatest joys in science are having undergrads produce results presented at international conferences, and in bursting the bubbles of old farts in the field. This particular project resulted in both. Not only did TMI present several pieces of research as valid, but many other people used the same set up and got stuff published elsewhere. Go to PubMed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez and put in "binaural beat" to get the relevant results (and some not relevant, but they're easy to tell apart).
Now, you'd think that once results are presented that show it's bogus, people would quit. Not so. We did the work on 2002. Check the dates on the PubMed results. Now, that's kind of fraudulent, but more a sign that there's way too many people publishing way too many things in way too many places to be able to keep track of everything. OTOH, our work isn't in PubMed because it was a conference presentation.
What is fraudulent is the many places that produce all sorts of new agey junk based on binaural beat, claiming there's scientific evidence, but not ever quoting any, whether the original well done but slightly fatally flawed TMI work, or any subsequent. Also fairly fraudulent by TMI and all the others is claims that specific frequency differences can be used to produce specific changes such as, oh hell, here's just a sampling from TMI: http://monroeinstitute.com/store/home.php
I try to go easy on the scientific community when it comes to possible fraud claims in this area. To their credit, there used to be many more people producing work in this field, including some at U. Va. itself. In fact some from U/
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
***ducks***
Your trolling is too obvious for this place. Go back to Digg, that's more your speed.
Right you are, the scope of this swindle is unmatched.
I'm sorry man. But i'm serious.
Of course, this was all placed on April 1 of approximately 2002, and promptly removed on April 2. It was understood to be a hoax, but still a very funny one.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Who can forget the very toxic substance Dihydrogen Monoxide? How many dozens of people have fallen for this???
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihydrogen_monoxide_hoax
This one's a classic from the April 1995 issue of Discover mag. A friend compounded things by handing it to me in August - the bastard. Maybe if I had known what 'pazzo' meant at the time...
---------
April Pazzo was about to call it a day when she noticed that the penquins she was observing seemed strangely agitated. Pazzo, a wildlife biologist, was in Antarctica studying penguins at a remote, poorly explored area along the coast of the Ross Sea. "I was getting ready to release a penguin I had tagged when I heard a lot of squawking," says Pazzo. "When I looked up, the whole flock had sort of stampeded. They were waddling away faster than I'd ever seen them move."
Pazzo waded through the panicked birds to find out what was wrong. She found one penguin that hadn't fled. "It was sinking into the ice as if into quicksand," she says. Somehow the ice beneath the bird had melted; the penguin was waist deep in slush. Pazzo tried to help the struggling penguin. She grabbed its wings and pulled. With a heave she freed the bird. But the penguin wasn't the only thing she hauled from the slush. About a dozen small, hairless pink molelike creatures had clamped their jaws onto the penguin's lower body. Pazzo managed to capture one of the creatures -- the others quickly released their grip and vanished into the slush.
Over the next few months Pazzo caught several of the animals and watched others in the wild. She calls the strange new species hotheaded naked ice borers. "They're repulsive," says Pazzo. Adults are about six inches long, weigh a few ounces, have a very high metabolic rate -- their body temperature is 110 degrees -- and live in labyrinthine tunnels carved in the ice.
Perhaps their most fascinating feature is a bony plate on their forehead. Innumerable blood vessels line the skin covering the plate. The animals radiate tremendous amounts of body heat through their "hot plates," which they use to melt their tunnels in ice and to hunt their favorite prey: penguins.
A pack of ice borers will cluster under a penguin and melt the ice and snow it's standing on. When the hapless bird sinks into the slush, the ice borers attack, dispatching it with bites of their sharp incisors. They then carve it up and carry its flesh back to their burrows, leaving behind only webbed feet, a beak, and some feathers. "They travel through the ice at surprisingly high speeds," says Pazzo, "much faster than a penguin can waddle."
Pazzo's discovery may also help solve a long-standing Antarctic mystery: What happened to the heroic polar explorer Phillipe Poisson, who disappeared in Antarctica without a trace in 1837? "I wouldn't rule out the possibility that a big pack of ice borers got him," says Pazzo. "I've seen what these things do to emporer penguins -- it isn't pretty -- and emporers can be as much as four feet tall. Poisson was about 5 foot 6. To the ice borers, he would have looked like a big penguin."
Perhaps this is too recent to be forgotten, but the huge announcements of the breakthrough of water powered cars that only release oxygen and water is always a good show stopper. Just funny home many times this keeps coming up and news stations keep latching onto it.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
We've been hearing stories for 30 years about water-powered cars, and every single one of them has been a hoax. We get a new one every year, and the story doesn't get any more interesting. They never show you how their engine works, because, simply enough, it doesn't.
It's sad to think that so many major car manufacturers have bought into the hydrogen fuel cell nonsense. By rights, you'd think that someone, somewhere, would know enough about where the energy comes from to have put a stop to it years ago. As it stands, it's the fuel of the future - and it always will be.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
The biggest and most successful fraud was that the Earth is the center of the universe. Humanity lived with that for millenia.
Saying that the big bang, or fish turning into men, or fossils being millions of years old seems like a hoax. None of it is observable or repeatable. Saying that watching a butterfly change/adapt to a new environment equals men evolving from monkeys or fish, is like comparing apples to potatoes. Sure, they're both round and grow, but really, that's about it.
I do understand that most of you who believe in evolution will never even consider creationism. Not because it lacks credibility, but because your presuppositions are most likely already ingrained in your head and no amount of evidence will sway you. It really goes both ways. Both sides are thick headed. But, for those who aren't so thick headed and are interested in expanding their little box, here's a starting point to some research.
https://www.csm.org.uk/faqs.php
I have yet to see anyone do anything other than binge junk food and play Quake as a result of Weed addiction.
No one has ever been busted for selling their Children/grandmother into prostitution for a joint...Ever!
I do have a lot of experience with losing friends over other addictions; weed isn't even in the country, let alone close.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
comes to mind. Not a scientific hoax per se, but it had enough believers to cause mass panic.
I love cracked.com as much as anybody, but I'm surprised to see newscientist.com actually use their idea.
Ok, so just to make sure I understand you right, creationists really *do* believe there's a massive conspiracy behind the theory of evolution? Running from every physicist geologist and astronomer who does the experiments to let us date the fossil evidence, to the geneticists lying to us about DNA, the doctors lying to us about diseases developing resistance to drugs (that one I might buy...), every mathematician whose studied mutation+natural selection properties, everyone who ever dig up homo habilis skull, all of these people are lying to us?
Hmm, how do they embed the fossils I've dug up into the rock like that? It's a neat trick.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
Mercury's eccentric orbit had many astronomers believing there was another planet in the solar system, which they named Vulcan. Then in 1915 Einstein dreamed up the Theory Of Relativity, which explained almost all the eccentricity of Mercury's orbit.
What most don't realize is that Albert Einstein was in fact a Zindi from the future, sent to annihilate Vulcan and substitute a fancy cover story so we would never make first contact.
Man, would that ever make for a bad TV series!
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
If you only consider ME and Vista as supposed "upgrades", then it's actually not very funny at all.
While calling it "Scientific" even within the context of this article is probably giving it too much credit, I think the entire idea of ID being even remotely considered as Scientific has to be considered one of the greatest hoaxes of the 20th century.
Not even going to mention the idea of "Christian Science", since that is so wrong as to not even qualify as a hoax...
evolution is the biggest scientific hoax of all time.
Haeckel's embryo pictures
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
fuck all science behind it but everyone believes it.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Ernst Haeckel's embryo research (http://www.uark.edu/~cdm/creation/shame.htm)
The Kensington Runestone is an intriguing item in my neck of the woods. It's largely considered a hoax these days, but there will always be believers. It's pretty elaborate for a hoax if it is one, causing a century of controversy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDOn639E114
Isaac Asimov's fake thesis paper from his college days: "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline".
In it, he described a substance that would actually dissolve just before it touched the solvent. This is a great one, well worth the read if you can find it.
This prank was not actually "pulled" on anyone, but when the professors who were to judge his real thesis caught wind of it, he was strongly reprimanded and apparently there was some question about whether he would be given his doctorate.
(And the owners, not P.T. Barnum, were the ones to say "there's a sucker born every minute" due to this event, but Barnum somehow stole credit for that, too!)
This one reminded me of a book, one of my favorites back in my college days, titled "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science" by Martin Gardner. Originally (c)1952, revised Dover version (c)1957.
It includes such gems as Flat Earth and Hollow Earth, the Babson Gravitation Institute, and Bridey Murphy. I haven't looked at it in many years, but my treasured copy sits on the shelf, and this may prompt me to pull it down and reread it.
I wouldn't have thought it was still in print, but gosh, golly, IT IS! (Just checked amazon.com).
I highly recommend it if you are interested in this sort of thing.
Teen Angel - a Ghost Story
Global Warming is quickly going down as a bunch of Barbara Streisand.
That's easy - global warming.
It's so cold here now, I don't even need flame retardent underwear for the undeserved flames this will generate.
Genocide with a twist or natural selection so those ignorant fools will face the direct impact of their ignorance but I can't decide which comment would be most appropriate here.
...organised religion. OK, so it says 'scientific', but the earliest 'scientists' were generally from a religious background and frequently labeled 'heretic' for discovering flaws in the 'god-designed' hypothesis (or at least, being able to show miraculous properties which a mere mortal shouldn't have been able to reproduce).
Stupid git.
No, you're not. Nobody who's "serious" cites Conservapedia as a source. You're not fooling anyone.
I remember reading a description of the events by Asimov as in introduction to the "story" in one of his anthologies. Other sources have stated it differently, and present that the professors who were reviewing his thesis were amused by the spoof. Perhaps my memory was swayed by Asimov's telling of his own misgivings at the time.
... Among the Nacirema,
published in American Anthropologist 58:3, June 1956.
How do they get the eggs inside those shells anyway? I smell a hoax.
Congratulations, you successfully managed to disprove a mainstream scientific theory admitted by an overwhelmingly large scientific consensus that depends on this consensus for continued funding.
I fixed it for you.
Advice: on VPS providers
Here's a "little gray men" fiasco which I have personal experience with. This UFO abductee and charlatan along with his group of friendlies really got to the serious UFO investigators, crystal-loving peaceniks and hippies back in the day:
Brian Allen Scott is a purported UFO abductee who claims to have been kidnapped by gray aliens while living with his family in Arizona. Later in the 1970s not long after building up this story with additional claims of continued contact with and abductions by the same type of aliens, Scott makes a glory hound visit to Peru, South America with some bosom buddies. After interpreting strange etchings in boulders and rocks near the Nazca Lines as the Incans' ancient account of visitors from space, Scott stepped under an arch at Isla Del Sol in Tiahuanaco between the borders of Bolivia and Peru and reportedly became spiritually "transformed," somehow becoming a personal conduit for an intergalactic being named Voltar who was both the essence of a larger, gray alien and the reincarnation of Incan god Ticci Viracocha. Scott returned to "spread the word of Voltar" to the public in Tustin, Orange County, California.
While getting his group to videotape his tirades in Tustin and at the same time forming a network behind the scenes with the Tustin City Council, Scott gained increased publicity within the community of UFO believers. Receiving considerable private funds and having a play based off of his supposed encounter, Scott and his cohorts devised a media campaign revolving around traveling to Washington D.C. to the Jimmy Carter White House just before the Iranian hostage crisis started to try to deliver a "message" from Voltar under the pretext of what Scott, et al. called the "The Voice of Common Man". This message also contained a prophecy about a race of benevolent large aliens mentioned once before returning to Earth in 2011.
Scott's stories of abduction and having been the living reincarnation of Viracocha have been thoroughly debunked by several UFO researchers and a scientist over the years on purely evidential grounds, lack of meaningful corroboration and Scott being unable to reproduce quantifiable facts based on either proof or verifiable measurements that solidly backed up his claims. The whole ordeal sounds like something out of the 1970's The Questor Tapes ( see the following paragraph with an external citation ), more recently the movie Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull or an Erich von Daniken book.
Scott currently works as a well paid Health Sciences designer for a defense contractor in Pennsylvania and runs a web site still maintaining he was abducted by aliens.
http://www.talkingpix.co.uk/ArticleGaucheEncounters.html
"...The Seventies brought into prominence a case involving a character named Brian Scott. It was written up in a book called The Etherian Invasion and was critically dissected in a paper by Alvin Lawson for the 1976 CUFOS conference. Scott's aliens are clones of a central host intelligence in the form of a vast on-board computer. There is a second floor on the saucer where young clones are grown in cylinders. During an early hypnosis session Scott feels his heart has left his body. In the third hypnosis session he has a vision of a cataclysm sweeping the Earth and learning this would happen on December 14, 2011 from his alien Host.
Though deeply impressed by the emotionality of Scott's recountings under hypnosis, investigators found suspicious aspects to the case that made them doubt Scott's credibility. Though they did not play a role in discounting Scott's claims at the time, cultural factors were eventually uncovered for aspects of the case. Lawson checked local TV schedules at the time of the hypnotic regressions and found a repeat of a failed TV pilot, The Questor Tapes, which had a scene of stored human clones in
n/t.
Please help metamoderate.
Biggest hoax is that antidepressants work by fixing a "chemical Imbalance". Completely unfounded that depression is caused by such a thing. Equally preposterous that antidepressants would somehow fix this imbalance. The only scientific explanation as of yet, is that antiD, dull the emotions, to the point that the person cant feel the depression.
Let me guess, American?
You just got troll'd!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrino [Wikipedia.org]
Garnered 6 million in funding, had a Board of Directors from Wall Street. Absolutly and completely fake. Total lies. unverifiale clams. Someone still holding onto Cold Fusion.
YET! Some people still believe in the tooth fairy, flat earth society
To compare the South Korean cloning scam with the Piltdown man is a stretch - the latter was a joke while the former really just a bit of bluffing from a proper scientist who otherwise had performed quite impressively in his field.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
http://www.princeton.edu/~chm333/2002/spring/Fusion/tour2/coldfusion2.html
Toothing.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Why does anyone believe this kind of rise in sea-levels is going to happen? Stop and think for a minute. How far has the ocean risen in the last 10 years? maybe an inch? So we could expect maybe two feet in my lifetime if the rate of increase doubles. And even if it does rise 10 feet, would it really be that hard to move out of the way? We'll have a while to do it. It beats going back to the stone-age.
Economics isn't science, it's just a joke. Does that count?
No, you're not. Nobody who's "serious" cites Conservapedia as a source. You're not fooling anyone.
Whatever ..
Ok, so just to make sure I understand you right, creationists really *do* believe there's a massive conspiracy behind the theory of evolution? Running from every physicist geologist and astronomer who does the experiments to let us date the fossil evidence, to the geneticists lying to us about DNA, the doctors lying to us about diseases developing resistance to drugs (that one I might buy...), every mathematician whose studied mutation+natural selection properties, everyone who ever dig up homo habilis skull, all of these people are lying to us?
Hmm, how do they embed the fossils I've dug up into the rock like that? It's a neat trick.
If you are really interested. I would like to show you this: http://www.drdino.com/downloads.php Believe me, this is worth watching and thinking abut. You are free to decide.
Anthropogenic global warming will prove to be the greatest 'scientific' hoax of all time - and economically one of the most disastrous.
these have to be the longest running and expanding hoaxes of all time
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Because it's fucking annoying.
Your post is wishful thinking, unfortunately.
While not actually a scientific hoax (As no one with even the slightest scientific knowledge can think it possible) are the most inane thing to believe is true. Just simple observation can prove this is just nonsense and is a shows the shocking state of education in the world.
For those who have heard of these woo woo theory start here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemtrails and here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_(cryptozoology)
I mean ffs one is the ejection of moisture and condensation nuclei from jet engines and the other is fsking lens blur.
What surprises me is that elena ceaucescu was not on the list. Not only did she barely pass fourth grade, but after her husband took power over Romania, she - somehow - held a Ph.D. in chemistry, and "authored" several scientific papers (actually written by romanian scientists). Then again, i doubt anybody took her seriously so perhaps this was a joke more than a hoax. on a somewhat off topic note: anybody in the Boston area can see a hilarious take on Ceaucescu's regime (while mercilessly making fun of Elena's intellectual abilities) in the play "communist dracula pageant".
from the article:
"When the journal published it, Sokal revealed that the paper was in fact a spoof. The incident triggered a storm of debate about the ethics of Sokal's prank."
The hell it did - it triggered a storm about the bullshit that passes for meaningful discourse under the banner of "post-modernism".
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
When the probabilities don't work out, it's nice to just add on a few million years to "give it time."
No need to say more
My favorite hoax is "Dianetics" by L. Ron Hubbard.
Definitely Human Caused Global Warming.
http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=ya2huA-VDfw
Whales are not fish.
The view was horrible and the smell was even worse; Julie severely regretted becoming a proctologist.
Hi, this post is all about Upas trees, REAL Upas trees. This post is awesome! My username is SlowMovingTarget and I can't stop thinking about Upas trees. These trees are cool; and by cool, I mean totally sweet.
Facts:
Testimonial:
Upas trees can kill anyone they want! These trees are so crazy awesome that they flip out ALL the time! I heard that there was this Upas tree in Java that was sitting around soaking up sun. And when some dude leaned on the tree the tree killed the whole town. And that's what I call REAL ULTIMATE POWER!
Anthropogenic Global Warming is a scientifical theory that has yet to be clearly disproven. Even if it has since been recycled by politicians to fill their own personal agenda, it is originally an hypothesis that was formulated on the sole base of observable facts, outside of any manipulation intend.
Now, get an English dictionary, and find the differences between meaning of the words "hoax" and "hypothesis". Using your own personal definition, Ptolemy's Almagest was also an hoax, since it was ultimately disproven yet used by the Church authorities to fill a political agenda.
Summary: an hoax implies conscious fraud; an hypothesis doesn't.
They simply wrote gibberish and statements that were no more than simple tautologies when you boiled away the strained lingo in a few physics journals and now they have had two French TV shows including Temps X.
There are some more good ones (some duplicates to the linked article) at http://www.cracked.com/article_16696_6-ballsiest-scientific-frauds-people-actually-fell.html.
The Norwegian maritime economy does not wholly consist of catching whales anymore than, say, the Seattle maritime economy consists of catching salmon. A comment like yours is deserving of a good fish slap.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Not one solitary mention of cold fusion? not even an honorable mention?
Pfffft, some list that is...
EOM.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
The Problem: In every region of Germany, between 45% and 86.3% of the electricity that flows from the outlets is from nuclear power. Everyone has to use this electricity, regardless of whether he wants to or not. Even nature activists have no choice. Plus the energy lobby keep telling us that electricity is electricity.
The Solution: NucleoSTOP, a compact device, is the answer. Through an innovative process, electricity from nuclear power is recognized and, before it can flow through your appliances, is sent back to the source.
The device can be easily attached to any power outlet -- ideally at the house's main circuit -- and you can immediately use electricity with a clean conscience. And the nuclear lobby doesn't profit from it.
Technical Info: Nuclear fission is the source of electricity from nuclear power. Along with the well known energy discharge from fission, a second discharge occurs, called the tachyon impulse, which, unlike the rest of the released energy, cannot be altered. This tachyon impulse gives all of the energy produced from fission a special signature, which is immutable due to the law of conservation of engergy. Consequently, all electricity from nuclear power is marked with this signature.
I kept trying to type something discursive.... Just erased the 3rd draft of that effort.
I don't think I want to go down that path.
-Secular Humanist
We were told in school that XY genes determine sex.
How would you explain then that:
1. Some females become males when there are no males around? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-396612/Third-male-fish-rivers-changing-sex.html and
2. Some species determine sex by the temperature the eggs are exposed to? http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7178/edsumm/e080131-08.html
Did you seriously link me to the site of the guy who got sent to prison for swiping millions of dollars out of a 'non profit' and then refusing to pay taxes on it? Also, you didn't answer the question, do you really believe there is a massive conspiracy behind evolution?
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
Dug up all the strong-rooted prairie plants so that we could plant crops there, and the first really big storm that came along made a hell of a mess. Turned the Aral Sea into a poisonous sump. Wiped out a whole lot of species. Introduced other species that severely disturbed the local dynamic equilibrium.
When humans set out to change the Earth they're pretty good at it. When they interfere with systems that they don't understand, unforeseen consequences occur, especially if they happen to coincide with undesirable natural phenomena. I think you underestimate the human power to screw things up.
Any way you look at it, dumping large quantities of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere ain't really a great idea.
I piss off bigots.
Clearly the intelligent design crowd is pushing the greatest science [non-science truly] hoax of all time.
Did you seriously link me to the site of the guy who got sent to prison for swiping millions of dollars out of a 'non profit' and then refusing to pay taxes on it? Also, you didn't answer the question, do you really believe there is a massive conspiracy behind evolution?
Euhm. Hi agane. Good morning. I find it nice we are talking. I hope that is like that. What can i say. Best what i can say, and i do it alweys. Because ive seen it working. I can only open my heart and say what i know. What i have in my heart. Look you asked me very interesting question. But at the same time very complicated one. I can write alot about it. But i have to spend also some time to digg it all on the net in English. About 6 or 7 different kinds of evolution that are there. And only one of them is real. Its molecular microevolution. (Your example with drugs and desiases). Here a quote "*NOTE: When I use the word evolution, I am not referring to the minor variations found in all of the various life forms (microevolution). I am referring to the general theory of evolution which believes these five major events took place without God: 1. Time, space, and matter came into existence by themselves. 2. Planets and stars formed from space dust. 3. Matter created life by itself. 4. Early life-forms learned to reproduce themselves. 5. Major changes occurred between these diverse life forms (i.e., fish changed to amphibians, amphibians changed to reptiles, and reptiles changed to birds or mammals)." This all is immagenary. So instead of searching it up i decided to show you the best explanation that is there available on the internet. To watch videos is a littlebit easyer then read. Also, sometimes people tellme that he is in prison now. And taxes issue. I didnt knew it before someone told me that on internet. I watched those videos before that. But for me in the first place it doesnt matter alot who is talking about it. But the material that there is talking about. And second. I dont know whats the conspiracy theory exactly is. I dont get it a littlebit. I cannot talk about something that i dont see or really get what is it about. If we are going to talk about New World Order or something. I dont know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Even in Kent Hovinds videos, I persnally think, maybe, its a littlebit to mutch of that. But if we are going to talk about Evolution, u ask. Then i can talk about something i know. This is something i can talk about because i know what im talking about. Look there is something, how could i name it. Some, kind of spirit. I just try to name it with my own words. Some kind of spirit or maybe an moral idea. Yes indeed that is the way maybe to explain it. Look, if there are view people that are lead (i dont know how do you write this word, sry for my English:) So, view people that are lead by the same idea. They are lead by something same. Other group havee other idea, they are lead by something different. So we can give it a name, something like spirit, so we get "Spirit This" and "spirit that". Wow thats getting interesting. Mathematics are usefull here. So lets name "Spitir This" = X and "spirit that" = y. So.. Next. Ohh, im heading here a littlebit not in the dirrection i wanted. But ok. So this some kind of spirit can influence different people. And One Spirit can lead in one direction. And other spirit can lead to another direction. Then i can say (i could of ask, but there is no other answer) What is the most important in the life of a human? The life itself. If there is no life there is nothing else anymore. This is everything or nothing. So, this something that we called X and y can lead people to everything or nothing, life or death. Why i explain it like this. I dont want to pop up big names. That you can directly get controversive about. But i want to explain the idea behind it. So One leads people to life. And other leads people to death. By any means. All possible to use to lead people to it. One of the means of a bad one, that leads to death is that evolution kind of hoax. Here. Ive spend some time, with pleasure to show whats happening in my heart. You are free to think and make your decisions. I wish the best for you. Have a nice day. Nikolai
Oh meh geh, that's the best site ever. Where's my electronic pen so I can sign the electronic receipt for my credit transaction?!
"Little is much when little you need."
1. Time, space, and matter came into existence by themselves. 2. Planets and stars formed from space dust. 3. Matter created life by itself.
These first three aren't actually part of evolution. The others I accept are hard to swallow, but how then do you account for the massive evidence that these happened? (Don't claim missing link without giving an example, you'll have a hard time finding one)
The Microevolution thing is a 'no true Scotsman' fallacy, every time we discover a major change the bar for what constitutes microevolution and what constitutes evolution gets changed by the nay sayers.
I'm afraid you lost me on the other stuff? Is it an argument for morality type thing, that the no evolution world view is better than other? Or that evolution is wring because you'll be punished for believing it?
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
Can someone help me here please:
All I have to go on is a name, "Duncan Lunan", and the so called deciphering of a message from outer space
- wasn't there some kind of hoax involved here?
References on the Web seem to be verbose and fragmented.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
That blows my mind because I watch the Weather Channel and they can't even get things right for the next week. If we've got models that can go out 10-50 years accurately, why the hell is the weather forecast still so bad?
Because they aren't the same thing.
I can't predict exactly the position and momentum of a single particle.
I can predict the position and momentum of the baseball it's a part of.
I can't predict the economic decisions of a single person.
I can predict that a recession is coming.
I can't predict the lifespan of an individual cancer patient.
I can tell you the average lifespan of people suffering from that specific kind of cancer.
I can't tell you whether an individual popcorn kernel will pop.
I can tell you how much time it will take to pop 95% of the corn.
I can't tell you where a random driver on the road is going and how long it will take to get there.
I can tell you how long a traffic jam that they are in is likely to last.
There are a lot of localized, seemingly random phenomena that I can't tell you a THING about, but when you step back and look at a large enough scale, a strong pattern emerges. Weather is too small and too short of a time-scale dominated by strongly pseudo-random external forces to predict. Climate is not. Climate is kind of the "average" of weather, and that's a LOT easier to predict. Sadly, many people like yourself don't understand the difference between how systems act at large and small scales. In other words, they don't get the big picture.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").