Rochester Michigan has a really nice light display setup on all of the stores on Main St. Here's a link to a slideshow from the company that put them up. Not surprisingly, the lights cause gridlock for about a mile in each direction, but it's worth it.
The photic sneeze reflex has nothing to do with the sun hitting your nose and everything to do with cross-talk from your optic nerve (at least that's the last hypothesis I heard).
As for the nose magnet, yes there is a bit of magnetite in the nasal region, but given how poor people are at finding their way around I doubt it has much of any effect. Furthermore, a quick google and pubmed search failed to demonstrate that a proper study of this has yet been performed. So, I wouldn't hold my breath that this compass is actually functional.
As for dowsing rods, we call the "evidence" for it anecdotal for reason. Every time this ability has been studied it's shown to be false. Consequently, it's proper to assume that those using dowsing rods are frauds until they can give real evidence to the contrary.
Up until the 60 minutes report the FBI said that informing those convicted wasn't their job. Apparently after the report they've changed their minds (at least from what I remember from watching 60 minutes).
Your analogy is flawed too. You have to remember that in this case the car has a loud speaker attached over which "Car available to all" is being played. Permission is thereby granted.
I'll agree with what Rakishi said above and mention that this has nothing to do with some perceived elitism but with reality. No one currently understands enough to do proper error analysis. We still lack a good enough understanding of normal physiology to always begin to truly grasp what's going on. To add to this problem, even if we know the proper things to test for, in each individual such tests may be untenable. We do deal with people after all, we can't always just do every possible test on them even if it might yield the answer (i.e., House is not reality).
As a scientist I can state categorically that it is not currently feasible to do the types of failure analysis that is common in electrical engineering. The most complicated machinery or circuitry ever constructed by humans is trivially simple when compared to the human body. We're slowing developing techniques that will allow for such failure analysis but this is a slow process.
And his idea of needing more non-conformists is fine provided he favors snake-oil salesmen. While the scientific community is a little slow to change, this is overall a good thing. Even the biggest changes, the most recent of which being the acceptance of prions, eventually occur and only take a 5-10 years (largely because only a few people were working on it and they needed to do a LOT of experiments).
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He was with them and, presumably, also taunted them.
Rochester Michigan has a really nice light display setup on all of the stores on Main St. Here's a link to a slideshow from the company that put them up. Not surprisingly, the lights cause gridlock for about a mile in each direction, but it's worth it.
The photic sneeze reflex has nothing to do with the sun hitting your nose and everything to do with cross-talk from your optic nerve (at least that's the last hypothesis I heard).
As for the nose magnet, yes there is a bit of magnetite in the nasal region, but given how poor people are at finding their way around I doubt it has much of any effect. Furthermore, a quick google and pubmed search failed to demonstrate that a proper study of this has yet been performed. So, I wouldn't hold my breath that this compass is actually functional.
As for dowsing rods, we call the "evidence" for it anecdotal for reason. Every time this ability has been studied it's shown to be false. Consequently, it's proper to assume that those using dowsing rods are frauds until they can give real evidence to the contrary.
Up until the 60 minutes report the FBI said that informing those convicted wasn't their job. Apparently after the report they've changed their minds (at least from what I remember from watching 60 minutes).
Your analogy is flawed too. You have to remember that in this case the car has a loud speaker attached over which "Car available to all" is being played. Permission is thereby granted.
I'll agree with what Rakishi said above and mention that this has nothing to do with some perceived elitism but with reality. No one currently understands enough to do proper error analysis. We still lack a good enough understanding of normal physiology to always begin to truly grasp what's going on. To add to this problem, even if we know the proper things to test for, in each individual such tests may be untenable. We do deal with people after all, we can't always just do every possible test on them even if it might yield the answer (i.e., House is not reality).
As a scientist I can state categorically that it is not currently feasible to do the types of failure analysis that is common in electrical engineering. The most complicated machinery or circuitry ever constructed by humans is trivially simple when compared to the human body. We're slowing developing techniques that will allow for such failure analysis but this is a slow process.
And his idea of needing more non-conformists is fine provided he favors snake-oil salesmen. While the scientific community is a little slow to change, this is overall a good thing. Even the biggest changes, the most recent of which being the acceptance of prions, eventually occur and only take a 5-10 years (largely because only a few people were working on it and they needed to do a LOT of experiments).