My stance as a skeptic sometimes makes me something of a magnet for wackos. There are the earnest types who are driven nuts by the fact that I scoff at their favorite brand of nonsense (homeopathy, ghosts, and conspiracy theories seem to be favorites). And then there are the ones who find my blog because Google keyword searches seem to pick up on words like "psychic" and "haunting" and miss important words like "ridiculous" and "bullshit."
As an example of the latter, my blog was linked yesterday by Christie Marie Sheldon, who has a website called "Love or Above." With some trepidation I will include a link to her site (here), but for those of you who would prefer not to look at it and thereby murder scores of valuable brain cells, I will include a summary of its main points.
The headline says, "Are your vibrations helping or hurting you?" This is followed up by: "Your personal vibration frequency could be the ONE thing holding you back from abundance, happiness, and success. Discover how to raise it, so you can finally start living from the vibration of Love or Above."
Allow me to interject that in the interest of keeping this PG-13 rated, I will consider the obvious joke about "Personal Love Vibrations" to be already made, and we will move on.
Christie's website then goes on to say, "Ever notice how some uncannily lucky people can almost effortlessly attract good things into their lives?" These people, she claims, are leaders, have opportunities at work, good relationships, and a healthy attitude toward money. Myself, I just figured that people like this were smart and well-adjusted, but no: it's because they have a personal energy vibration score, not to mention probably a credit rating, of over 700.
All emotions, Christie explains, vibrate at a particular frequency. Shame, for example, vibrates at a frequency of 20. (At this point, I was shouting at the computer screen, "20 what? Hertz? Megahertz? Pounds per square inch? Fluid ounces? Fathoms per decade? Where are the damn units?" This caused my border collie, Doolin, who has the impression that she is personally responsible for the entire household, to slink around looking highly ashamed herself, and presumably "vibrating at a frequency of 20.") Apathy vibrates at 50, Desire at 125, Anger at 150. Then we move on to more positive emotions; Willingness is 310, Acceptance is 350, and so on. She says, if you vibrate at 1000, you are an "Enlightened Master." I guess that at that point, you're vibrating as fast as you possibly could. Any faster and you might just vanish in a flash of Psychic Aura Energy, or something.
She goes on to explain that the vibrational energy of the Earth, at the moment, registers at 207 on her Cosmic Vibration-o-Meter. This is somewhere between "Courage" and "Neutrality." So, basically, most people average out at somewhere between "Yes, I can!" and "Meh." Which seems about right, frankly. But then she says that we should all be vibrating at 500 or above, because 500 is the frequency of "Vibrations of Love."
As proof of how personal love vibrations work, she presents two experiments done by people we should automatically believe because they have "Dr." in front of their names. Dr. William Braud, of the "Mind-Science Foundation" in San Antonio, Texas, found that he could extend the life spans of red blood cells by having the owners of these red blood cells "think positive thoughts about them." And Dr. Masaru Emoto did an experiment in which he sent a variety of positive or negative emotional thoughts into glasses of water, and then froze the water, and he found that the happy water made pretty, symmetrical crystals, and the unhappy water made disorganized, ugly crystals. Christie then asks us a poignant question: since our body is full of red blood cells and water, what kind of damage could we be doing to ourselves with negative thoughts? The implications are staggering. I don't know about you, but if I ever froze to death, I would definitely want the water in my body to form attractive-looking crystals. Think of the humiliation if at my funeral, my friends and family said, "I guess it's just as well he died. Did you see those butt-ugly ice crystals? He must have been vibrating at 180 or lower."
She ends, of course, with a sales pitch for her program, the "Love or Above Energetic Breakthrough Kit." To show how awesome it is, she displays a photograph of herself at an event that I swear I am not making up: The Awesomeness Fest 2010. There are further details, including descriptions of a technique called "Space Cleansing," but at that point my remaining brain cells were crying for mercy so I had to stop looking at the website.
I suppose it's an occupational hazard, being a skeptic, that people want to convince you. After all, the word "skeptic" implies that there's a chance you might be swayed. This is, in fact, true; but the difficulty, of course, is that what sways a skeptic is empirical evidence, or failing that, at least a logical argument. When you have neither, all you have is a severe case of Doubt, which vibrates at a frequency of around 110.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Who you gonna call?
One of my (many) pet peeves is people claiming a scientific basis for something, and then their explanation indicates that they really have no understanding of the science they're citing.
An oft-quoted example is the way purveyors of the woo-woo liberally drizzle words like "quantum" all over everything. I've seen ads for "quantum-activated bracelets," whatever the hell that means. They often follow it up with ridiculous pseudo-explanations about how quantum physics teaches us that nothing is certain, that anything is possible, and that energy fields exist, and therefore if you buy our bracelet ($39.99 US, plus shipping and handling), you can harness quantum energy fields to realize your true possibilities.
The problem is, if you don't have much scientific training, which unfortunately a great many Americans don't, you might actually be suckered in by something like this. Funny how people will spend their hard-earned cash to buy a useless item because of an advertisement that sounds "scientific," but when actual scientists present their actual conclusions based on actual logic and actual hard evidence, such as with evolution and climate change, many people just go, "Damn pointy-headed, pocket-protector-wearing nerds. Whadda they know?" And then they go back to watching advertisements for "quantum-activated bracelets" on the Shopping Channel.
I bring all of this up because of a recent feature article in our local newspaper, The Ithaca Journal. The article was written by Steven Brewer, founding member of Paranormal Investigators of Central New York, and was a thinly-disguised attempt to drum up business from the credulous. PICNY (visit their website here), based in Auburn, has as its mission "to help the people being effected [sic] by (a) haunting better understand what is happening to them and help them address it." Most of the article was what you'd expect -- anecdotal reports of lights being found on when the people in question "knew they'd been turned off," fuzzy voices on a recording made in an empty house, a ball rolling across a table "when no one had pushed it." (This last one happens to my wife and I all the time, but it's because our house was built in such a way that there is not a single straight line, level surface, or right angle anywhere. The words "square" and "plumb" were not in the vocabulary of the builders of this house.)
In any case, Brewer goes on to explain how scientific his operation is: "PICNY does approach the paranormal with a scientific mindset and we go into every investigation trying to debunk any claims of activity, we even try to debunk our own experiences inside the location. We do this mostly because there are many things that are believed to be paranormal in nature but are in fact natural such as the feeling of being watched. This is caused by EMF or Electro-Magnetic Fields which are given off by the Earth as well as old or improperly wired electronics. The claims and experiences that we cannot reasonably debunk are classified as being paranormal in nature."
It's a wonder he didn't throw in the word "quantum." Yes, the Earth has an electromagnetic field. Quite a large one, in fact. Without it, it would be damned hard to get a compass to work. Yes, electronic equipment generates an electromagnetic field. That's how they work; note the use of the word "electronic" in "electronic equipment." And from this he accounts for our "feeling of being watched?" If this explanation was correct, we'd constantly feel like we were being watched, because we're constantly immersed in the Earth's electromagnetic field, and most of us are around electrical equipment all the time. In fact, rather few of us feel watched all the time, and those few are generally referred to as "paranoid" and are referred for psychiatric evaluation.
You'd think that, given that the previous paragraph requires an understanding of physics equal to that of your average 7th grader, people would immediately frown upon reading these claims and say, "Well, these guys certainly sound like a bunch of nimrods." Sadly, that is not the case. I just looked at PICNY's Facebook page (of course they have a Facebook page) and since the article came out, it's been "liked" 214 times. I saw, in fact, a post on their page that said, "I just read the article about what you're doing, and I wanted to let you know that I'm a reporter who tags along on paranormal investigations for the field experience, contact me if you'd like to connect." There you have it, folks -- the true purpose of social media: to bring together wackos.
I would be remiss in not pointing out another, and subtler, problem with the paragraph I quoted above; and that's in the last sentence, where they state that anything they cannot "reasonably debunk" is classified as being paranormal. Now, the difficulty with an investigation like this is how prone it is to confirmation bias. Investigators who come in, billing themselves as "paranormal researchers," who clearly believe in the supernatural, and whose reputations rely on successfully finding ghosts and hauntings and so on, are going to have a clear bias toward interpreting whatever they see or hear as evidence of the paranormal. Anything that happens -- a noise, a movement of air, a "feeling of being watched" -- is very likely to be unquestioningly accepted as having a supernatural cause.
The whole idea of "if we can't explain it, it must be paranormal" is contrary to the scientific way of thinking right from the get-go, and yet it's a fairly common theme you hear from people who accept the supernatural. It is especially pervasive amongst the religious; Richard Dawkins calls it the "god of the gaps" approach. "If we can't explain it, then god must have done it." A scientist does not need to label the parts of nature (s)he hasn't yet explained as either "paranormal" or "spiritual." Science's approach is, "if we can't explain it, we can't explain it -- yet." You gain nothing in understanding by labeling everything we have yet to comprehend fully as supernatural.
And, for crying out loud, if you're going to try to use science to support your position, get the freakin' science right. If you get the science wrong, all you do is make yourself look like a dunderhead, even if you do manage to convince a few other dunderheads along the way. To once again quote Dawkins: "Ignorance of facts is not evidence of fiction."
An oft-quoted example is the way purveyors of the woo-woo liberally drizzle words like "quantum" all over everything. I've seen ads for "quantum-activated bracelets," whatever the hell that means. They often follow it up with ridiculous pseudo-explanations about how quantum physics teaches us that nothing is certain, that anything is possible, and that energy fields exist, and therefore if you buy our bracelet ($39.99 US, plus shipping and handling), you can harness quantum energy fields to realize your true possibilities.
The problem is, if you don't have much scientific training, which unfortunately a great many Americans don't, you might actually be suckered in by something like this. Funny how people will spend their hard-earned cash to buy a useless item because of an advertisement that sounds "scientific," but when actual scientists present their actual conclusions based on actual logic and actual hard evidence, such as with evolution and climate change, many people just go, "Damn pointy-headed, pocket-protector-wearing nerds. Whadda they know?" And then they go back to watching advertisements for "quantum-activated bracelets" on the Shopping Channel.
I bring all of this up because of a recent feature article in our local newspaper, The Ithaca Journal. The article was written by Steven Brewer, founding member of Paranormal Investigators of Central New York, and was a thinly-disguised attempt to drum up business from the credulous. PICNY (visit their website here), based in Auburn, has as its mission "to help the people being effected [sic] by (a) haunting better understand what is happening to them and help them address it." Most of the article was what you'd expect -- anecdotal reports of lights being found on when the people in question "knew they'd been turned off," fuzzy voices on a recording made in an empty house, a ball rolling across a table "when no one had pushed it." (This last one happens to my wife and I all the time, but it's because our house was built in such a way that there is not a single straight line, level surface, or right angle anywhere. The words "square" and "plumb" were not in the vocabulary of the builders of this house.)
In any case, Brewer goes on to explain how scientific his operation is: "PICNY does approach the paranormal with a scientific mindset and we go into every investigation trying to debunk any claims of activity, we even try to debunk our own experiences inside the location. We do this mostly because there are many things that are believed to be paranormal in nature but are in fact natural such as the feeling of being watched. This is caused by EMF or Electro-Magnetic Fields which are given off by the Earth as well as old or improperly wired electronics. The claims and experiences that we cannot reasonably debunk are classified as being paranormal in nature."
It's a wonder he didn't throw in the word "quantum." Yes, the Earth has an electromagnetic field. Quite a large one, in fact. Without it, it would be damned hard to get a compass to work. Yes, electronic equipment generates an electromagnetic field. That's how they work; note the use of the word "electronic" in "electronic equipment." And from this he accounts for our "feeling of being watched?" If this explanation was correct, we'd constantly feel like we were being watched, because we're constantly immersed in the Earth's electromagnetic field, and most of us are around electrical equipment all the time. In fact, rather few of us feel watched all the time, and those few are generally referred to as "paranoid" and are referred for psychiatric evaluation.
You'd think that, given that the previous paragraph requires an understanding of physics equal to that of your average 7th grader, people would immediately frown upon reading these claims and say, "Well, these guys certainly sound like a bunch of nimrods." Sadly, that is not the case. I just looked at PICNY's Facebook page (of course they have a Facebook page) and since the article came out, it's been "liked" 214 times. I saw, in fact, a post on their page that said, "I just read the article about what you're doing, and I wanted to let you know that I'm a reporter who tags along on paranormal investigations for the field experience, contact me if you'd like to connect." There you have it, folks -- the true purpose of social media: to bring together wackos.
I would be remiss in not pointing out another, and subtler, problem with the paragraph I quoted above; and that's in the last sentence, where they state that anything they cannot "reasonably debunk" is classified as being paranormal. Now, the difficulty with an investigation like this is how prone it is to confirmation bias. Investigators who come in, billing themselves as "paranormal researchers," who clearly believe in the supernatural, and whose reputations rely on successfully finding ghosts and hauntings and so on, are going to have a clear bias toward interpreting whatever they see or hear as evidence of the paranormal. Anything that happens -- a noise, a movement of air, a "feeling of being watched" -- is very likely to be unquestioningly accepted as having a supernatural cause.
The whole idea of "if we can't explain it, it must be paranormal" is contrary to the scientific way of thinking right from the get-go, and yet it's a fairly common theme you hear from people who accept the supernatural. It is especially pervasive amongst the religious; Richard Dawkins calls it the "god of the gaps" approach. "If we can't explain it, then god must have done it." A scientist does not need to label the parts of nature (s)he hasn't yet explained as either "paranormal" or "spiritual." Science's approach is, "if we can't explain it, we can't explain it -- yet." You gain nothing in understanding by labeling everything we have yet to comprehend fully as supernatural.
And, for crying out loud, if you're going to try to use science to support your position, get the freakin' science right. If you get the science wrong, all you do is make yourself look like a dunderhead, even if you do manage to convince a few other dunderheads along the way. To once again quote Dawkins: "Ignorance of facts is not evidence of fiction."
Saturday, April 23, 2011
ManBatPig
Reports are coming in from Steytlerville, a small town in the Karoo District of South Africa, of a shapeshifting monster terrorizing residents.
Local warrant officer Zandisile Nelani said, "The community says that the monster changes shape while you are looking at it." He went on to say that the monster had started out as a man in a suit, but had changed to a pig and then to a bat. He hastened to add that although the creature had scared a number of residents, no people or livestock had been harmed by it.
Besides being reminded, against my will, of the "ManBearPig" episode of South Park, of course I started looking through my top-secret Cryptozoology Files to see if there's anything that could explain it other than (1) someone playing an elaborate prank, (2) the eyewitnesses having consumed large quantities of booze, or (3) both. And, lo and behold, there is.
There is a long-standing South African tradition of a creature called the Thokolozi (or Tokoloshe) which matches the description of our mysterious ManBatPig. On the surface, the resemblance seems slim, as the Thokolozi most often appears as a brown-skinned man, hairy all over, with only one buttock. This last feature seems a little odd, and makes me wonder if he only has a right butt cheek, only a left one, or just one huge symmetrically-placed butt cheek, the last-mentioned option bringing up other anatomical considerations that I would prefer not to think about. Another characteristic of the Thokolozi is that he is said to be very well-endowed in the reproductive equipment department. Without going into graphic detail, let's just say that he is well-endowed to the point that tighty-whities would be pretty much out of the question. Between that and having only one buttock, getting fitted at the tailor's must be a fairly humiliating experience, and possibly accounts for his legendary ill temper.
So we have here one very odd-looking dude. But the key feature that identifies our mystery creature at Steytlerville as the Thokolozi is his shapeshifting ability. The Thokolozi carries around with him a magic pebble that allows him to become invisible, but he is said to be able to take the shape of many different animals, and also to fly. So I think we have a definite match.
What should the inhabitants of Steytlerville do? One possibility is to make a Thokolozi Repellant, but the problem is that the recipe I found requires Thokolozi fat. Obtaining that would seem to be a bit of a stumbling block, although one site I looked at said that it might be purchased from a muti, or purveyor of traditional medicine. You can also appease the Thokolozi by putting out food for him, but you must remember not to put salt in it; he apparently shares with many European spirit creatures the characteristic of not liking salt. Sometimes witches subdue a Thokolozi, and keep him around for their own purposes, about which I will leave you to speculate. They do this by a combination of magic and luring him with food, and keep him docile by "trimming the hair over his eyes."
So the good news for the people of Steytlerville is that Thokolozis mostly seem fairly harmless, and just like to scare people but don't actually harm anyone. The bad news is that there doesn't seem to be much they can do about his presence. They only have two choices, as far as I can see: either to put out food to appease a magical spirit with large genitals and one buttock, or to lay off the booze and then do a house-to-house search for some prankster who has a suit, a pig costume, and large fake bat wings.
I know which one I think would be more effective.
Local warrant officer Zandisile Nelani said, "The community says that the monster changes shape while you are looking at it." He went on to say that the monster had started out as a man in a suit, but had changed to a pig and then to a bat. He hastened to add that although the creature had scared a number of residents, no people or livestock had been harmed by it.
Besides being reminded, against my will, of the "ManBearPig" episode of South Park, of course I started looking through my top-secret Cryptozoology Files to see if there's anything that could explain it other than (1) someone playing an elaborate prank, (2) the eyewitnesses having consumed large quantities of booze, or (3) both. And, lo and behold, there is.
There is a long-standing South African tradition of a creature called the Thokolozi (or Tokoloshe) which matches the description of our mysterious ManBatPig. On the surface, the resemblance seems slim, as the Thokolozi most often appears as a brown-skinned man, hairy all over, with only one buttock. This last feature seems a little odd, and makes me wonder if he only has a right butt cheek, only a left one, or just one huge symmetrically-placed butt cheek, the last-mentioned option bringing up other anatomical considerations that I would prefer not to think about. Another characteristic of the Thokolozi is that he is said to be very well-endowed in the reproductive equipment department. Without going into graphic detail, let's just say that he is well-endowed to the point that tighty-whities would be pretty much out of the question. Between that and having only one buttock, getting fitted at the tailor's must be a fairly humiliating experience, and possibly accounts for his legendary ill temper.
So we have here one very odd-looking dude. But the key feature that identifies our mystery creature at Steytlerville as the Thokolozi is his shapeshifting ability. The Thokolozi carries around with him a magic pebble that allows him to become invisible, but he is said to be able to take the shape of many different animals, and also to fly. So I think we have a definite match.
What should the inhabitants of Steytlerville do? One possibility is to make a Thokolozi Repellant, but the problem is that the recipe I found requires Thokolozi fat. Obtaining that would seem to be a bit of a stumbling block, although one site I looked at said that it might be purchased from a muti, or purveyor of traditional medicine. You can also appease the Thokolozi by putting out food for him, but you must remember not to put salt in it; he apparently shares with many European spirit creatures the characteristic of not liking salt. Sometimes witches subdue a Thokolozi, and keep him around for their own purposes, about which I will leave you to speculate. They do this by a combination of magic and luring him with food, and keep him docile by "trimming the hair over his eyes."
So the good news for the people of Steytlerville is that Thokolozis mostly seem fairly harmless, and just like to scare people but don't actually harm anyone. The bad news is that there doesn't seem to be much they can do about his presence. They only have two choices, as far as I can see: either to put out food to appease a magical spirit with large genitals and one buttock, or to lay off the booze and then do a house-to-house search for some prankster who has a suit, a pig costume, and large fake bat wings.
I know which one I think would be more effective.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Tea? Water? Blood? Ram cutlets?
Here at Worldwide Wacko Watch, it's been a busy week.
First, we have news from far-off Kyrgyzstan, that their attempts to establish a parliamentary democracy have kind of gone off the rails. The new government, elected just last October, has had some difficulty in coming to consensus. In fact, last month a senior government official resigned temporarily in frustration, but was persuaded to return when it appeared that the government was on the verge of collapse.
So, put yourself in their shoes -- they are, for the first time in their history, conducting the noble experiment of a democratic government, and due to factionalism and sheer stubbornness, the whole thing seems to be coming unraveled. What do you do?
What you do, of course, is slaughter some rams to banish the evil spirits.
Which is what they did. Right on the front lawn of the parliament building. Leaving us here at WWW kind of speechless, honestly. My only question is, did they suddenly forget what century it was?
Then, we have news from Italy that a pair of perfume makers, Antonio Zuddas and Giovanni Castelli, are releasing a new line of perfumes that are intended to match your blood type.
"Blood Concept is just a celebration of human life through an interpretation of its evolutionary process," Zuddas said. "To be more accurate, it's an interpretation of the evolution of our most important element, the blood in our veins."
Apparently, each scent is supposed to match the "essence" of the blood type. So, the next time the doctor is doing blood type matching for you, to hell with those silly serum antigens and so on. If they want to know if you're type B, they should simply titer your blood for traces of black cherry, pomegranate and patchouli.
The story, unfortunately, doesn't end there. A fellow calling himself Merticus, who is a founding member of the Atlanta Vampire Alliance (I am not making this up) says he is eager to use the perfumes, and is especially fond of type O. He didn't say if he meant the scent, or the actual blood.
Not all vampires are so, um, sanguine, however. Meredith Woerner, a New York City vampirologist, said, "It's cheesy. It's chintzy. It's not their style. I can't imagine a real vampire would be that enticed by fake blood. In fact, if they detected the scent of it, it might make you more of a target for a mercy killing."
Which just leaves me with one question: how do you learn to become a vampirologist? Do colleges have departments of vampirology, from which you could get a degree? It's not like vampires actually exist, with apologies to Merticus and the other wingnuts at the Atlanta Vampire Alliance. So could you become a unicornologist? A centaurologist? A dragonologist? On the other hand, Woerner seems to take the whole thing pretty seriously, so maybe I shouldn't scoff, or make bad puns about how spending your time studying vampires would be all in vein.
Okay, right. In other news of beverages, we have a story in from China that a tea plantation in Gushi is advertising for buxom virgins to harvest tea using only their lips. Prospective harvesters have to have "large breasts, no sexual experience, and no visible scars or birthmarks."
You would think that any newspaper advertisement looking for women with the aforementioned characteristics wouldn't be wanting them to harvest tea. But strangely enough, that's exactly what they are after.
Li Yong, a spokesman for the Jiuhua Tea Plantation, said: "It is much harder work than it looks. They have to cleanse themselves completely before they start working and perform a special exercise program to build up their necks and lips."
I have to admit to some curiosity about how you do exercises to "build up your lips," but Mr. Li was not forthcoming about that aspect of the job.
The tea thus harvested, which is understandably very expensive, is supposed to invoke fairies, which rise to the sky when the tea is brewed. (Fairyology as a career? Nah, never mind.) The tea is then supposed to cure diseases, including, presumably, the curse of having too much money and too little brains.
Lastly, if blood or "lip tea" don't do it for you, we are finding advertisements for a relatively new health fad, and that's drinking "ionized" or "alkalinized" water. You buy a machine (they run upwards of $40 at most of the sites I looked at) which runs an electrical current through the water, and this is supposed to "apply electromagnetic forces" to the water molecules, "ionizing them, and activating them as a powerful antioxidant." The sites claim that "drinking acidic water is known by medical science to cause many ailments, such as obesity, heart problems, and high blood pressure."
Funny, I thought obesity was caused by eating too much and exercising too little, but what do I know?
One of many problems with this claim is that you can't ionize pure water. If you run a current through it, it will break down (very slowly, because pure water is a crummy conductor of electricity) into hydrogen and oxygen. Since any pH change (alkalinity or acidity) is caused by having an imbalance of hydrogen and hydroxyl ions, you can't do it by electrolysis; you're getting rid of the oxygen and hydrogen at the same rate, so when you're done, you still have pure water (pH = 7).
Secondly, if "drinking acidic water" is dangerous to health, you have to wonder why I don't drop dead after having my morning orange juice (pH = 5 or so). And because our stomach juices are highly acidic (pH = 1.5), we should all just immediately melt, or something.
So once again, this seems to simply be a way to relieve the gullible of their cash, which has been something of a theme in today's post.
And that's all the news here at Worldwide Wacko Watch. How fortunate for you that you have WWW's vigilant investigative staff (made up of myself and my extremely vigilant dogs, Doolin and Grendel) to ferret out breaking stories! As always, our watchword around here is: All The News That's Fit To Guffaw At.
First, we have news from far-off Kyrgyzstan, that their attempts to establish a parliamentary democracy have kind of gone off the rails. The new government, elected just last October, has had some difficulty in coming to consensus. In fact, last month a senior government official resigned temporarily in frustration, but was persuaded to return when it appeared that the government was on the verge of collapse.
So, put yourself in their shoes -- they are, for the first time in their history, conducting the noble experiment of a democratic government, and due to factionalism and sheer stubbornness, the whole thing seems to be coming unraveled. What do you do?
What you do, of course, is slaughter some rams to banish the evil spirits.
Which is what they did. Right on the front lawn of the parliament building. Leaving us here at WWW kind of speechless, honestly. My only question is, did they suddenly forget what century it was?
Then, we have news from Italy that a pair of perfume makers, Antonio Zuddas and Giovanni Castelli, are releasing a new line of perfumes that are intended to match your blood type.
"Blood Concept is just a celebration of human life through an interpretation of its evolutionary process," Zuddas said. "To be more accurate, it's an interpretation of the evolution of our most important element, the blood in our veins."
Apparently, each scent is supposed to match the "essence" of the blood type. So, the next time the doctor is doing blood type matching for you, to hell with those silly serum antigens and so on. If they want to know if you're type B, they should simply titer your blood for traces of black cherry, pomegranate and patchouli.
The story, unfortunately, doesn't end there. A fellow calling himself Merticus, who is a founding member of the Atlanta Vampire Alliance (I am not making this up) says he is eager to use the perfumes, and is especially fond of type O. He didn't say if he meant the scent, or the actual blood.
Not all vampires are so, um, sanguine, however. Meredith Woerner, a New York City vampirologist, said, "It's cheesy. It's chintzy. It's not their style. I can't imagine a real vampire would be that enticed by fake blood. In fact, if they detected the scent of it, it might make you more of a target for a mercy killing."
Which just leaves me with one question: how do you learn to become a vampirologist? Do colleges have departments of vampirology, from which you could get a degree? It's not like vampires actually exist, with apologies to Merticus and the other wingnuts at the Atlanta Vampire Alliance. So could you become a unicornologist? A centaurologist? A dragonologist? On the other hand, Woerner seems to take the whole thing pretty seriously, so maybe I shouldn't scoff, or make bad puns about how spending your time studying vampires would be all in vein.
Okay, right. In other news of beverages, we have a story in from China that a tea plantation in Gushi is advertising for buxom virgins to harvest tea using only their lips. Prospective harvesters have to have "large breasts, no sexual experience, and no visible scars or birthmarks."
You would think that any newspaper advertisement looking for women with the aforementioned characteristics wouldn't be wanting them to harvest tea. But strangely enough, that's exactly what they are after.
Li Yong, a spokesman for the Jiuhua Tea Plantation, said: "It is much harder work than it looks. They have to cleanse themselves completely before they start working and perform a special exercise program to build up their necks and lips."
I have to admit to some curiosity about how you do exercises to "build up your lips," but Mr. Li was not forthcoming about that aspect of the job.
The tea thus harvested, which is understandably very expensive, is supposed to invoke fairies, which rise to the sky when the tea is brewed. (Fairyology as a career? Nah, never mind.) The tea is then supposed to cure diseases, including, presumably, the curse of having too much money and too little brains.
Lastly, if blood or "lip tea" don't do it for you, we are finding advertisements for a relatively new health fad, and that's drinking "ionized" or "alkalinized" water. You buy a machine (they run upwards of $40 at most of the sites I looked at) which runs an electrical current through the water, and this is supposed to "apply electromagnetic forces" to the water molecules, "ionizing them, and activating them as a powerful antioxidant." The sites claim that "drinking acidic water is known by medical science to cause many ailments, such as obesity, heart problems, and high blood pressure."
Funny, I thought obesity was caused by eating too much and exercising too little, but what do I know?
One of many problems with this claim is that you can't ionize pure water. If you run a current through it, it will break down (very slowly, because pure water is a crummy conductor of electricity) into hydrogen and oxygen. Since any pH change (alkalinity or acidity) is caused by having an imbalance of hydrogen and hydroxyl ions, you can't do it by electrolysis; you're getting rid of the oxygen and hydrogen at the same rate, so when you're done, you still have pure water (pH = 7).
Secondly, if "drinking acidic water" is dangerous to health, you have to wonder why I don't drop dead after having my morning orange juice (pH = 5 or so). And because our stomach juices are highly acidic (pH = 1.5), we should all just immediately melt, or something.
So once again, this seems to simply be a way to relieve the gullible of their cash, which has been something of a theme in today's post.
And that's all the news here at Worldwide Wacko Watch. How fortunate for you that you have WWW's vigilant investigative staff (made up of myself and my extremely vigilant dogs, Doolin and Grendel) to ferret out breaking stories! As always, our watchword around here is: All The News That's Fit To Guffaw At.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
It's not in the cards
I own two decks of Tarot cards.
I hasten to explain, before I have to (in the words of a friend of mine) turn in my Skeptic Badge, that these cards combine being a relic of the credulousness of my Foolish and Misspent Youth with a pure love of the artistry of the cards. They're beautiful, especially my Art Nouveau deck, whose images remind me of one of my favorite artists, Maxfield Parrish.
A Tarot deck, for those of you not acquainted with these tools for using The Psychic Interconnectedness of Being to extract money from the gullible, is comprised of 78 cards. There 56 minor arcana, which are broken up into suits, numbers, and face cards, rather like a regular deck of playing cards, but with different suits (cups, swords, pentacles, and wands) and with an additional face card (kings, queens, knights, and pages, the last-mentioned of which corresponds to the jack of a standard card deck). There are also 22 major arcana, each of which has a name and an image -- The Magician, The Fool, The Moon, The Sun, The Coffee Maker, etc.
Okay, I made the last one up. But some of the other ones are just as weird. How about "The Falling Tower?" "The Hanged Man?" "Judgment?" This last one shows people crawling out of open graves. So I'm to be excused, I think, if I prefer the image of a Coffee Maker.
Anyhow, the whole idea is, the cards are dealt out face down in a cross-shaped affair, and then turned up one at a time and interpreted. The position of the card in the cross determines what facet of your life it applies to -- the past, the present, the future, your work life, your worries, your love life, and so on. It matters whether the card is right side up or upside down (unlike standard playing cards, these cards are not reversible).
And of course, you can't just have any old person analyze them for you. The reader has to somehow be attuned to you psychically. According to a website I looked at called The Tarot Explained, "As the reader lays down the cards they also receive ideas and impressions in their subconscious that helps them answer your question. They are not simply looking at the pictures and giving you the answers. It is through special combinations that they are able to give you the information you seek."
The problem is, there's our old friend the Dart-Thrower's Bias at work here; during readings, people are very much more likely to notice the hits and ignore the misses when they are given such "information," especially if the reader has an air of authority (which in this case might consist of flowing purple robes and a turban). Interestingly, there was a study done on Tarot readings by Itai Ivtzan and Christopher French in 2004, and test subjects were unable to tell the difference between "real" Tarot readings and readings done from cards randomly selected by a computer. Most tellingly, people who believed in Tarot divination fared worse in this test than the average background population did.
So anyhow, it looks like accuracy-wise, Tarot readings fare no better than dowsing and crystal balls and palmistry and so on. It's a shame, because the images in some decks are really quite mysterious and beautiful. Except for "Judgment." Try as I might, I'm still not into the whole open grave thing.
I hasten to explain, before I have to (in the words of a friend of mine) turn in my Skeptic Badge, that these cards combine being a relic of the credulousness of my Foolish and Misspent Youth with a pure love of the artistry of the cards. They're beautiful, especially my Art Nouveau deck, whose images remind me of one of my favorite artists, Maxfield Parrish.
A Tarot deck, for those of you not acquainted with these tools for using The Psychic Interconnectedness of Being to extract money from the gullible, is comprised of 78 cards. There 56 minor arcana, which are broken up into suits, numbers, and face cards, rather like a regular deck of playing cards, but with different suits (cups, swords, pentacles, and wands) and with an additional face card (kings, queens, knights, and pages, the last-mentioned of which corresponds to the jack of a standard card deck). There are also 22 major arcana, each of which has a name and an image -- The Magician, The Fool, The Moon, The Sun, The Coffee Maker, etc.
Okay, I made the last one up. But some of the other ones are just as weird. How about "The Falling Tower?" "The Hanged Man?" "Judgment?" This last one shows people crawling out of open graves. So I'm to be excused, I think, if I prefer the image of a Coffee Maker.
Anyhow, the whole idea is, the cards are dealt out face down in a cross-shaped affair, and then turned up one at a time and interpreted. The position of the card in the cross determines what facet of your life it applies to -- the past, the present, the future, your work life, your worries, your love life, and so on. It matters whether the card is right side up or upside down (unlike standard playing cards, these cards are not reversible).
And of course, you can't just have any old person analyze them for you. The reader has to somehow be attuned to you psychically. According to a website I looked at called The Tarot Explained, "As the reader lays down the cards they also receive ideas and impressions in their subconscious that helps them answer your question. They are not simply looking at the pictures and giving you the answers. It is through special combinations that they are able to give you the information you seek."
The problem is, there's our old friend the Dart-Thrower's Bias at work here; during readings, people are very much more likely to notice the hits and ignore the misses when they are given such "information," especially if the reader has an air of authority (which in this case might consist of flowing purple robes and a turban). Interestingly, there was a study done on Tarot readings by Itai Ivtzan and Christopher French in 2004, and test subjects were unable to tell the difference between "real" Tarot readings and readings done from cards randomly selected by a computer. Most tellingly, people who believed in Tarot divination fared worse in this test than the average background population did.
So anyhow, it looks like accuracy-wise, Tarot readings fare no better than dowsing and crystal balls and palmistry and so on. It's a shame, because the images in some decks are really quite mysterious and beautiful. Except for "Judgment." Try as I might, I'm still not into the whole open grave thing.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
"Many people" report alien sightings in Siberia!
Apparently, if you're an alien, Siberia is the place to be. Who'da thought? Me, if I was an alien, capable of traveling through interstellar space in my flying saucer and presumably landing wherever I wanted, I'd pick somewhere rather nicer, not to mention warmer. Availability of margaritas would also be a consideration, as would the presence of scantily-clad women. So I find it a bit peculiar that you never see aliens in, for example, Cozumel.
But for whatever reason, Siberia seems to be the happenin' place, for aliens. Back in 2007, there was the discovery of some quartz rocks with "mysterious inscriptions" on them, near the site where the Tunguska meteorite hit the ground in 1908. Now, it must be mentioned at this juncture that many people think that the Tunguska event wasn't a meteorite at all, but the explosion of an interstellar spacecraft. (By "many people" I mean "people who have waffle batter where most of us have brains.") The quartz rocks with the inscriptions disappeared shortly after the claim was made; and there has never been a single metal fragment recovered from the site that could be, for example, a catalytic converter from a spacecraft. Further, there is no trace of radioactivity at Tunguska, indicating the use of some sort of nuclear propulsion device. But this just makes our aforementioned "many people" say, "they're pretty wily, these aliens! Even when they crash and blow up and presumably all die, they still remember to cleverly erase all the evidence! Including suspicious quartz rocks!"
Then, last month, air traffic controllers in Siberia took a break from a highly critical nap time to log a flying craft, moving at an estimated 1000 km/hour near the city of Yakutsk. The object changed directions several times. When the air traffic controllers tried to contact it, all they heard was "a female voice" saying "meow meow all the time." The object finally vanished off the radar screen. There's a video of the event on YouTube, but to my disappointment you never get to hear the meowing. All you hear are some people chattering in Russian, and you see some blips on a screen. But what crossed my mind was, "Someone had a hand-held videocamera in an air traffic control tower?" Because that is clearly what the video was made with. It's not an official-looking video at all. In fact, it pretty much screams "hoax" at me, but I don't have much to support that other than a hunch. I hope I'm right, though; I have enough trouble with the cats that are already here, clawing up the sofa and jumping on the dinner table and leaving dismembered dead rodents on the carpet and so on. The last thing we need are superpowerful alien kitties who have learned how to fly.
Last, we have a report only a couple of days ago of an alien corpse found near the village of Kamensk. (Check out the video here). The video captioning asks how some poor Russians could afford to fake something this convincing, which is certainly a question worth considering. The alien is admittedly creepy looking, lying there in the snow. One of its legs is missing, which "many people" are saying is because it died in a horrific spaceship crash. There's only one problem with this theory, and that is that when a spaceship crashes, you'd think that somewhere nearby you'd have a crashed spaceship, but all there is is this dead naked alien lying in the snow.
And that brings up another point: why would anyone, especially a presumably intelligent alien, want to be naked in Siberia? I'm fully supportive of wearing as little clothing as is legally permissible when the weather is warm, but being naked in Siberia seems to be just asking for freezing off critical body parts. Not that this alien appears to have any of the critical body parts I was thinking about, if you catch my drift. They never do, do they? All of the alien-dissection videos seem to show these alien bodies, stark naked, but with no reproductive organs whatsoever. "Yes, well," respond "many people," "that's because they're so highly evolved that they reproduce a different way." Myself, I'm kind of fond of the old way, and if that's where evolution is heading, I'll just take a pass, okay?
In any case, it turns out that this one is a fake, not that there was another option. The guys who "found" the alien admitted under questioning that they made it out of a chicken skin and some bread. This answers our earlier question of how poor Russians could afford to make such a fake. I'm impressed, actually; it's pretty damn scary-looking, and I admire their artistic skill. I know I couldn't do anything near as clever with a chicken skin and bread.
So, it looks like our Siberian alien sightings are 0 for 3. It's just as well. If there was really a serious claim of evidence for aliens in Siberia, I'd feel obliged to go there to investigate, and I hate the cold. Even if I have all of my critical body parts well insulated. So, I guess we'll just need to wait and see what happens. If you hear any more reports coming in from "many people," do let me know.
But for whatever reason, Siberia seems to be the happenin' place, for aliens. Back in 2007, there was the discovery of some quartz rocks with "mysterious inscriptions" on them, near the site where the Tunguska meteorite hit the ground in 1908. Now, it must be mentioned at this juncture that many people think that the Tunguska event wasn't a meteorite at all, but the explosion of an interstellar spacecraft. (By "many people" I mean "people who have waffle batter where most of us have brains.") The quartz rocks with the inscriptions disappeared shortly after the claim was made; and there has never been a single metal fragment recovered from the site that could be, for example, a catalytic converter from a spacecraft. Further, there is no trace of radioactivity at Tunguska, indicating the use of some sort of nuclear propulsion device. But this just makes our aforementioned "many people" say, "they're pretty wily, these aliens! Even when they crash and blow up and presumably all die, they still remember to cleverly erase all the evidence! Including suspicious quartz rocks!"
Then, last month, air traffic controllers in Siberia took a break from a highly critical nap time to log a flying craft, moving at an estimated 1000 km/hour near the city of Yakutsk. The object changed directions several times. When the air traffic controllers tried to contact it, all they heard was "a female voice" saying "meow meow all the time." The object finally vanished off the radar screen. There's a video of the event on YouTube, but to my disappointment you never get to hear the meowing. All you hear are some people chattering in Russian, and you see some blips on a screen. But what crossed my mind was, "Someone had a hand-held videocamera in an air traffic control tower?" Because that is clearly what the video was made with. It's not an official-looking video at all. In fact, it pretty much screams "hoax" at me, but I don't have much to support that other than a hunch. I hope I'm right, though; I have enough trouble with the cats that are already here, clawing up the sofa and jumping on the dinner table and leaving dismembered dead rodents on the carpet and so on. The last thing we need are superpowerful alien kitties who have learned how to fly.
Last, we have a report only a couple of days ago of an alien corpse found near the village of Kamensk. (Check out the video here). The video captioning asks how some poor Russians could afford to fake something this convincing, which is certainly a question worth considering. The alien is admittedly creepy looking, lying there in the snow. One of its legs is missing, which "many people" are saying is because it died in a horrific spaceship crash. There's only one problem with this theory, and that is that when a spaceship crashes, you'd think that somewhere nearby you'd have a crashed spaceship, but all there is is this dead naked alien lying in the snow.
And that brings up another point: why would anyone, especially a presumably intelligent alien, want to be naked in Siberia? I'm fully supportive of wearing as little clothing as is legally permissible when the weather is warm, but being naked in Siberia seems to be just asking for freezing off critical body parts. Not that this alien appears to have any of the critical body parts I was thinking about, if you catch my drift. They never do, do they? All of the alien-dissection videos seem to show these alien bodies, stark naked, but with no reproductive organs whatsoever. "Yes, well," respond "many people," "that's because they're so highly evolved that they reproduce a different way." Myself, I'm kind of fond of the old way, and if that's where evolution is heading, I'll just take a pass, okay?
In any case, it turns out that this one is a fake, not that there was another option. The guys who "found" the alien admitted under questioning that they made it out of a chicken skin and some bread. This answers our earlier question of how poor Russians could afford to make such a fake. I'm impressed, actually; it's pretty damn scary-looking, and I admire their artistic skill. I know I couldn't do anything near as clever with a chicken skin and bread.
So, it looks like our Siberian alien sightings are 0 for 3. It's just as well. If there was really a serious claim of evidence for aliens in Siberia, I'd feel obliged to go there to investigate, and I hate the cold. Even if I have all of my critical body parts well insulated. So, I guess we'll just need to wait and see what happens. If you hear any more reports coming in from "many people," do let me know.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
"Slender Man" and the persistence of belief
A recent article by Chris Mooney in Mother Jones, which you should all read in its entirety (here), considers the mysterious phenomenon of why people believe things for which there is no factual evidence. The most perplexing thing in Mooney's article, which he does an admirable job explaining but which I still can't quite comprehend, is the well-documented phenomenon of people's beliefs actually strengthening when they are presented with persuasive evidence contrary to their ideas.
I won't steal Mooney's thunder by repeating what he said -- he said it better than I could, in any case. But do want to give a brief example, described more completely in Mooney's article. He tells about a doomsday cult whose leaders were convinced that the world was going to end on December 21, 1954. A researcher went to join the cult members on the fatal day, waiting to see what was going to happen when the clock struck midnight. What you'd think -- that they'd all kind of blink, and look around them, and laugh and say, "Okay, I guess we were wrong. What a bunch of goobers we are," didn't happen. They came up with a cockamamie explanation of why the world hadn't ended -- that their faithfulness and belief had caused the alien overlords to issue Earth a reprieve. What it didn't do, amazingly, was cause anyone to question their root assumptions.
I came across a perfect, if rather maddening, example of this phenomenon yesterday. I'm always on the lookout for any news in the cryptozoology world, and yesterday morning I bumped into one I'd never heard of before. Dubbed "Slender Man," it's a tall, thin humanoid, dressed in black, with no facial features -- just a shiny, smooth, white face. Allegedly, it has been associated with a number of mysterious disappearances, often of children, and there is even a short documentary (also worth taking a look at, here) which contains video and audio footage showing appearances of Slender Man. It's quite creepy -- not recommended for watching at night. (Don't say I didn't warn you.)
The problem is, it's a fake. Not just the documentary; the entire story. A certified, up-front, yeah-okay-we-admit-that-we-made-the-whole-thing-up fake. Back in June of 2009, there was a "paranormal photograph" contest on the Something Awful forums, a site devoted to pranks, digitally altered photographs, and hoaxes. A fellow named Victor Surge sent in a submission, with the description of his creation, whom he dubbed "Slender Man." The original thread on the forum is still going, and runs to 46 pages. If you can bear to go back through it, you can read how the story developed, starting with a single digitally altered photograph, and finally blossoming into a whole cryptozoological "phenomenon," complete with a history.
The difficulty, of course, is that when you make up something convincing, people are... convinced. Lots of people. If you Google "Slender Man" you'll pull up hundreds of websites, and amazingly, many of them consider him a real paranormal phenomenon. (Upon realizing what I just wrote, I had a momentary thought of, "Implying that there's a difference between real and unreal paranormal phenomena? I'm losing my marbles." But I hope that my readers will understand what I meant by that phrase, and not think that I've turned into some kind of Sasquatch Apologist, or anything.)
At first, I thought that the owners of these websites simply hadn't heard that it was a hoax -- or actually, not even a hoax, because Surge had never really intended for anyone to believe him. The most astonishing thing is that a number of these websites state that they know all about Surge and the Something Awful contest -- and they believe that this story was invented, after the fact, to cover up the "research" that Surge had done on Slender Man and to keep the phenomenon a secret, to stop the public from panicking!
After reading that, and recovering from the faceplant that I experienced immediately thereafter, I thought about Mooney's article, and the desperation with which people cling to beliefs that are contrary to known fact. Why on earth does this happen? Aren't we logical beings, imbued with intelligence, rationality, and fully functional prefrontal cortices?
Sadly, Mooney's answer seems to be "only sometimes." Again, I won't go into tremendous detail -- you should simply read Mooney's article. But the basic claim is that when we've infused a belief with emotion, we meet contrary evidence with a physiological and neurological reaction that mimics our fight-or-flight response -- we either decide to fight ("what you're saying isn't true!") or we flee ("I won't listen."). What almost none of us do is to take that evidence, think about it clearly, and revise our basic core beliefs to fit.
All of which makes it abundantly clear to me that humans are, in fact, animals, and that we often respond to new situations with no more "higher thought" than your typical fluffy woodland creature does. It makes me wonder why we still see a fundamental divide between "human" and "animal" -- but of course, looking that assumption in the face is pretty likely to generate a fight-or-flight response, too.
I won't steal Mooney's thunder by repeating what he said -- he said it better than I could, in any case. But do want to give a brief example, described more completely in Mooney's article. He tells about a doomsday cult whose leaders were convinced that the world was going to end on December 21, 1954. A researcher went to join the cult members on the fatal day, waiting to see what was going to happen when the clock struck midnight. What you'd think -- that they'd all kind of blink, and look around them, and laugh and say, "Okay, I guess we were wrong. What a bunch of goobers we are," didn't happen. They came up with a cockamamie explanation of why the world hadn't ended -- that their faithfulness and belief had caused the alien overlords to issue Earth a reprieve. What it didn't do, amazingly, was cause anyone to question their root assumptions.
I came across a perfect, if rather maddening, example of this phenomenon yesterday. I'm always on the lookout for any news in the cryptozoology world, and yesterday morning I bumped into one I'd never heard of before. Dubbed "Slender Man," it's a tall, thin humanoid, dressed in black, with no facial features -- just a shiny, smooth, white face. Allegedly, it has been associated with a number of mysterious disappearances, often of children, and there is even a short documentary (also worth taking a look at, here) which contains video and audio footage showing appearances of Slender Man. It's quite creepy -- not recommended for watching at night. (Don't say I didn't warn you.)
The problem is, it's a fake. Not just the documentary; the entire story. A certified, up-front, yeah-okay-we-admit-that-we-made-the-whole-thing-up fake. Back in June of 2009, there was a "paranormal photograph" contest on the Something Awful forums, a site devoted to pranks, digitally altered photographs, and hoaxes. A fellow named Victor Surge sent in a submission, with the description of his creation, whom he dubbed "Slender Man." The original thread on the forum is still going, and runs to 46 pages. If you can bear to go back through it, you can read how the story developed, starting with a single digitally altered photograph, and finally blossoming into a whole cryptozoological "phenomenon," complete with a history.
The difficulty, of course, is that when you make up something convincing, people are... convinced. Lots of people. If you Google "Slender Man" you'll pull up hundreds of websites, and amazingly, many of them consider him a real paranormal phenomenon. (Upon realizing what I just wrote, I had a momentary thought of, "Implying that there's a difference between real and unreal paranormal phenomena? I'm losing my marbles." But I hope that my readers will understand what I meant by that phrase, and not think that I've turned into some kind of Sasquatch Apologist, or anything.)
At first, I thought that the owners of these websites simply hadn't heard that it was a hoax -- or actually, not even a hoax, because Surge had never really intended for anyone to believe him. The most astonishing thing is that a number of these websites state that they know all about Surge and the Something Awful contest -- and they believe that this story was invented, after the fact, to cover up the "research" that Surge had done on Slender Man and to keep the phenomenon a secret, to stop the public from panicking!
After reading that, and recovering from the faceplant that I experienced immediately thereafter, I thought about Mooney's article, and the desperation with which people cling to beliefs that are contrary to known fact. Why on earth does this happen? Aren't we logical beings, imbued with intelligence, rationality, and fully functional prefrontal cortices?
Sadly, Mooney's answer seems to be "only sometimes." Again, I won't go into tremendous detail -- you should simply read Mooney's article. But the basic claim is that when we've infused a belief with emotion, we meet contrary evidence with a physiological and neurological reaction that mimics our fight-or-flight response -- we either decide to fight ("what you're saying isn't true!") or we flee ("I won't listen."). What almost none of us do is to take that evidence, think about it clearly, and revise our basic core beliefs to fit.
All of which makes it abundantly clear to me that humans are, in fact, animals, and that we often respond to new situations with no more "higher thought" than your typical fluffy woodland creature does. It makes me wonder why we still see a fundamental divide between "human" and "animal" -- but of course, looking that assumption in the face is pretty likely to generate a fight-or-flight response, too.
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