Archive for category Pseudoscience
When Is A Watch Not A Watch?
Posted by Andy in Pseudoscience, Skepticism on February 13th, 2010
When is a watch not a watch?
There’s something about a certain type of selling that really gets my goat. It’s the really well written, apparently credible, charismatic selling that shows itself in marketing brochures and various collateral online or in print. Mostly this happens where the commercial entity that seeks to benefit is well-funded. They can employ the best marketing people and get the best writers.
To people like me, and I hope, you, the marketing speak comes over as a cloud of bullshit arrows, words desperately devoid of facts and trying to strike home between whatever neurones aren’t paying close attention.
For example:
Philip Stein has recently introduced its first Automatic timepiece with Swiss movement, its unique e-tailing program that includes profit sharing for local retailers from online sales and the opening of the company’s first store in the Americas. For a complete history of Philip Stein or technical information related to natural frequencies or the new Natural Frequency Disc, please visit www.PhilipStein.com.
Oh, hold on. Did someone mention frequencies? Oh yes. Get ready for it. It’s the latest solution to the everyday stresses and strains that YOU can’t cope with. It reduces stress, increases how quickly you get to sleep, increases how well you feel AFTER you’ve slept and makes you have better dreams. Read the rest of this entry »
I Believe in… Miracles
Posted by Allan in Crop Circles, Media, Pseudoscience, Skepticism, UFOs on February 5th, 2010
Well folks, I think everyone is pretty much recovered from the events following the big swallow and with all of us swallowers retaining the use of body, mind and ‘energies’, then it must be time to turn some attention further out, deeper into the big, bad, wild and woolly world of woo. Woohoo!
The “I Believe in…” series that is currently playing out on BBC Three at the audience-friendly time of ‘midnight-ish’ is, by far, the most incredulous, poorly thought-out, nonsense-laden idiot-fest seen on British TV since, well… *cough* erm… Jeremy Kyle is on every day… and The Wright Stuff… and then there’s almost all of Channel 5’s output… Satellite channels… (has anyone ever watched anything of Conspiracy TV? *giggles*)
OK, so there’s stiff competition out there in the time-rich and thought-poor facets of British media, and anything that comes with short sentences, a couple of nice locations and a pretty face or two is likely to get up there on the box at some point, no matter how inane the subject material, or how utterly bonkers the take on said substrate may be. This is where Danny Dyer, Jodie Kidd and “I Believe in…” come in.
Danny Dyer’s effort, “I Believe in UFO’s”, deserves its own lengthy analysis, but I’ll just relay one little element that really made me chuckle… Loveable, credulous, silly old Danny has just been out in a crop field with a ‘Crop Circle Expert’, who is in fact just some random dude with a VW campervan and an IQ problem, calmly explaining how crop circles must be produced by aliens, because the ‘knees’ of the stalks on the crops can only be bent over in this way by high temperatures of some sort, and thus ‘steam’ in the joint and… WHOOM… down go the grasses into this week’s pattern picked out of ‘Flying Saucer Crop Patterns Lightyearly’ (WHSmith will get it in if you ask nicely, have two green heads and 6 limbs (but don’t tell Danny!)) by our Alien UberSturmFuhrer on duty to watch over us puny Earthlings and molest cattle on that particular night. Our hero, swollen with ‘knowledge’, goes into the local pub to meet some thoroughly delightful chaps at the pool table – very casual. These delightful chaps then go on to tell him that it’s all a load of bollocks. It’s them! They go into the crop circles at night, mob-handed, and proceed to inflict criminal damage on a lot of innocent arable crops and the brains of gullible, half-witted townies… without actually admitting it of course – the local constabulary might be watching. Cue Danny’s almost weepy lament pouring out of his drizzle-stricken grid. For everything else there may well be credit cards, but these moments which warm the heart… Priceless. Read the rest of this entry »
Quantum of Senseless
Posted by Allan in 10:23, Homeopathy, Pseudomedicine, Pseudoscience on January 26th, 2010
Returning to the MSS Blog, resident linguist Allan takes a look at Quantum Homeopathy…
Particles everywhere. Quarks strangely up the continuum, where they can be postulated without arbitrary precision to flow among the hadronic mesons and baryons; Leptons down the scale of posited particulates, where electrons roll neutrally, defiled among the 105.7 MeV/c2 of muons and the apathetically gyrating tauons of a great (and probabilistically determined) Quanta. Sleptons in the supersymmetric marshes, Higgsinos on the hypothetical heights. Quarks creeping into the collider-beams; Gluons lying out on the fields, and hovering in the rigging of the august atom; Higgs bosons drooping on the W, Z bosons and the massless photons. Higgs field like molasses in the eyes and throats of ancient university professors, wheezing lyrical over their lecterns at their wards; Protons and plumbons in the spoon and bowl of the afternoon muesli of the wrathful scientist, leucous in their locked labs; Uncertainty principles cruelly pinching the lobes and hippocampus of their equivocating little ‘search babe in the back. Chance people on the galleyways peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of particles, with particles all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.*
Oooh… Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? If you’d believe anything, and I don’t, didn’t know anything, and I don’t, then you’d swear I knew of what I was on about, and I don’t. Still, it is rather lovely, isn’t it? Me and Dickens… aside from 150 years and light years of ability in the sphere of stylistics, we’re like this: *crosses fingers*
So what is that? That, my great and only friends, is a cacophony of sumptuous, semiotic manifestations that garners much to appearances, and less to substance. In other words, it’s word soup. Bullshit. Beautiful bullshit, perhaps a load that the bull in question felt a sudden, artistic need to shape and sculpt into transcendent forms, but, still, finally, when all is silkily said and finally done, and aside from the rose delicately balanced in its crescendo, it is still a steaming pile of moderately meaningless gibberish.
Beautiful, big words alone or juxtaposed do not a great point make. Read the rest of this entry »
Why We Should Avoid Ubisoft Products
Posted by Mike in Media, Pseudoscience, Public Health, Quacks, Skepticism, vaccination on January 5th, 2010
In 1994, my friend Russel called me raving about a new playable demo he’d got from the cover disc of a PC magazine. The game was a reasonably early example of a real-time strategy game, in which the player was required to harvest resources, construct buildings and raise an army with which to crush the opposition; lest they do the same. It was called Warcraft: Orcs and Humans; you may have heard of its descendants. The playable demo came with four levels, which I devoured. I quickly bought the full game shortly thereafter and its sequel, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, the following year. I had developed a taste for real-time strategy games and wanted more.
In 1995, another phone call from Russel introduced me to Westwood Studios new RTS game – Command & Conquer – which I came to love more than I loved Warcraft. One of its distinguishing features, setting it apart from the Warcraft series was the inclusion of full-motion video sequences (with real actors!) introducing each mission. After making free with Russel’s copy of C&C, I bought my own copy in early 1996, followed by its sequels as they were released, including the games from the C&C spin-off series Red Alert.
That was until 2008, and the publication of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3. By then Westwood Studios had been bought up by gaming giants Electronic Arts, and with more money behind them (and much more money in the video game market than in 1995), EA were able to cast Hollywood stars for Red Alert 3’s full motion video segments. The cast included Tim Curry as Soviet Premier Antony Cherdenko; J. K. Simmons as US President Howard T. Ackerman; Jonathan Pryce as Field Marshall Robert Bingham; George Takei as Japanese Emperor Yoshiro; and one Jenny McCarthy as Special Agent Tanya.
‘Psychic Detective’ Joe Power Rides Again (And He’s Still Not Psychic, And Still Not A Detective)
Posted by Marsh in Joe Power, Media, Pseudoscience, Psychics, Skepticism on December 2nd, 2009
Last week I wrote about the Dyfed-Powys Police force and their investigation into the death of Carlos Assaf - an investigation which saw them spend £20k following up supposed tips from a so-called psychic. The affair, as well as causing outrage throughout the country, sparked something of a debate on the use of psychics within police investigations, which then played out across the various news outlets after the BBC’s Donal McIntyre investigated the claims of one particular medium – psychic detective (although not psychic and not a detective) Joe Power.
Regular readers, and regular listeners of me on various podcasts or just ranting tipsily in a pub in fact, will be familiar with Joe Power – he was the Liverpudlian supposed-psychic I met at a book signing way back in June. The meeting, as I’ve spoken about before, was somewhat surreal in it’s content – especially when Joe decided to go on a random and pretty vehement rant whereby he likened skeptics (and specifically my good self) to paedophiles. He’s wrong of course, which I guess shows in that particular case his psychic powers were proven to be bullshit. It was actually that very conversation that led to my becoming a host of a podcast, so I suppose I should thank Joe for that. Cheers, Joe. If anyone wants to read a full account of the encounter, they can check it out elsewhere on the blog – or simply Google Joe Power’s name followed by the word ’skeptic’ or ‘paedophile’ (I’ll let you guys choose which, but I know which I’d prefer. There’s something satisfying about the idea of a load of people typing ‘Joe Power Paedophile’ into Google. A GoogleBomb, I think it’s called…) Indeed typing ‘Joe Power’ into Google is a pretty popular way of finding this site – looking at the key words for accessing it, Joe-related phrases come in both 3rd and 5th. So again, cheers Joe.
So, with Joe proving himself to be a distasteful, angry and pretty disgusting man on a personal level (ask him anything about his powers and you’ll see what I mean), it’s a real surprise and a real shame the BBC and other news outlets took him fully at his word on his ability to solve crimes. Read the rest of this entry »
Woo Or No Woo
Posted by Marsh in Media, Pseudoscience, Skepticism, Superstition on December 1st, 2009
MSS Skeptics in the Pub regular and professional gambler AJ drops in to offer his take on superstition and gameshows…
Noel Edmonds. Love him or hate him, or dream about setting about him with a claw hammer; one thing you can’t deny is that he has a beard. An immaculate beard. Let’s be honest, it’s a prize-winner. As could you be if you were to appear on his daily quiz show woo spectacular that is Deal or No Deal.
The format is probably familiar to a lot of people by now – the game starts with twenty two contestants, each with a sealed box in front of them containing an amount ranging between 1p and £250,000 that is unknown to them, or indeed anyone bar the independent adjudicator. Each box is clearly numbered on its exterior from 1 to 22 to identify them. A contestant is chosen to start the game, they bring their box to the front of the stage, give a synopsis of their life story to Noel, who nods and emotes in all the right places and then its seatbelts on and we’re off. Read the rest of this entry »
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