Japan has a reputation for originating new and pointless technological novelties, and its latest youth fad doesn’t disappoint.

The youth of Japan are apparently currently obsessed with a new selection of ringtones created by a company called the Japan Ringing Tone Laboratory. This isn’t another ‘Crazy Frog’ though.  If it was, I would have shot myself rather than write this post. No, it’s something altogether more interesting, although just as moronic. These ringtones are “therapeutic ringtones”. Yes, forget acupuncture, hypnotherapy or the pleasures of a good sit down: simply play the ringtone on your phone and all your cares and health troubles will float away down the winding river of easy cures, along with your wallet and your self respect. Only in Japan. Well, for now.

The Japan Ringing Tone Laboratory has good credentials. Its head, Matsumi Suzuki, used to work for the National Research Institute of Police Science, where he made award-winning advances in the field of voiceprints. He also developed the now well-known synthetic mosquito noise that is inaudible to the over-60s but apparently annoys the hell out of local good-for-nothing kids who like to hang around outside off-licenses. Incidentally, this can also be found on mobile phones around the world, usually played by good-for-nothing kids who like to hang around outside off-licenses, and playing with their mobile phones.

Suzuki followed up this sterling work by becoming head of the aformentioned Japan Ringing Tone Laboratory, and producing stupid novelty ringtones. Perfectly logical career step, I think you’ll agree.

So what are these “therapeutic ringtones”? Put simply, they’re just ringtones, but with an added (and made-up) therapeutic twist. We’re going way beyond soothing pan-pipes and whale-song here, though. There’s no shortage of conditions and problems they can’t combat. Here’s a brief selection of what they can do:

- Cure a hangover.

- Induce sleep.

- Prevent sleep.

- Scare away crows (apparently Tokyo has a big problem with crows attacking bin bags in the early hours).

- Inspire sluggardly housewives into doing housework (sexism not mine!).

- Improve your skin tone using alpha waves (maybe it’s just the glow from the screen?).

- Alleviate hayfever.

The ringtone for alleviating hayfever is my favourite. It is called the Ohana Sukkuri melody, and it is basically a series of sounds emitted at different frequencies so that, in the company’s words: “people can choose the sound that resonates most to their sinus and causes pollen lodged there to fall from the nasal cavity”.

I love the image of Japanese teenagers holding their chirping mobile phones against their noses in the middle of summer in the hope that pollen will somehow vibrate out of their nasal cavity. Couldn’t they just blow their nose? Jeez, next we’ll be brushing our tongues with our toothbrushes! Ah, no wait..

The ringtone for improving skin tone is apparently a bit of electro-Schubert mixed with woodland noises, while the one intended to rouse bored housewives is a high-energy rhythm. The ringtone intended to induce sleep is basically a lullaby, while its opposite is a dance track. A lot of thought has gone into this, I’m sure. Maybe there’s one which plays Coldplay-style dirges to calm down people who suffer from mania? Or you could have the sound of the Pope’s head being cut off with a rough plank to wake up fainting victims. The variations are endless!

As I’m sure you all guessed long ago, these ringtones are complete tat, and quite frankly I think even the kids buying them know this. It’s just a bit of fun, and harmless I suppose, but I’m feeling in an evil Skeptic mood today, so have no problem deriding this nonsense loudly in an aggressive manner in order to get cheap laughs. Both the Japan Ringing Tone Laboratory and Index, the content provider which sells the tones, fully admit there is no scientific evidence for any of them, yet still throw out euphemistic lines to reel people in: for example, while there is no evidence of the hayfever ringtone’s pollen-shaking power, it is apparently “generally understood” that it will work. That’s ok, then. Yes, let’s bite the bit of made-up anecdotal evidence and run, run like the wind! Therapeutic ringtones worked for me!

We also have Index’s comment that “the number of downloads suggests the ringtones must be working to a certain extent”, as well as authoritative scientific statements such as the one about how the hangover-cure “pulse melodies” are attuned to our bodies’ “medical rhythms”.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Made-up science follows the same patterns the world over, kind of like the way bullshit smells the same no matter what country you live in.

Of course, as I said before, it’s just a fad. Come next year the youth of Japan will have a new distraction, and no-one will have been hurt or damaged by the flash-flood of woo they’ve just experienced, but that doesn’t stop it being as annoying as a fat, naked frog riding a motorbike and making stupid noises. Plus, there’s one important thing you’ve got to remember: it might only be Japan now, but it’s only a matter of time before it makes its way to these shores.

Don’t worry, you could just relax with your new ringtone.

What Is It? #8

It’s that time of the week again – time for our What Is It? competition, courtesy of Prof. Dowling. Or at least, this week, it’s more of a Who Is It? The rest of the rules are the same, so tell us who/what you think this photo is.

Last week we showed you this photo, and asked you what it is. The answer? Pure gold atoms (as if there were any other type!).  The spacing between the gold atoms is 2 Angstroms (or 0.2 nm). They are not gold coloured due to the image having been taken with an electron microscope. Find out more on NanoNews-Now.

Not many of you attempted an answer this week. It was a difficult one, sure enough, and no-one quite got there in the end. The closest to the correct answer were probably Tom and Jon D, with graphite and crystal joints in metal respectively. Sorry, Stu, it wasn’t a stipple pad for artexing the ceiling, nor was it cake decorations on a biscuit tin lid, which was Jon D’s alternative offering! Better luck next time.

Woo doesn’t recognise geographical boundaries, as we found out when the 10:23 campaign caught the imagination of skeptics not just in England, but in countries as far afield as Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The ability to believe utter bollocks is a shared human trait, and it is in full view all over the world. Whether it’s the widespread use of homeopathy in France, Aids denialism in Africa or the belief that 9/11 was an inside job in the USA, woo is in rude and lively health, and it’s clocking up the airmiles.

So the Question of The Week is this: What Foreign Woo Have You Found On Holiday?

Were you accosted by Italian Scientologists? Did a small Brazilian boy try to sell you a mystical crystal skull? Maybe you’ve come across something ridiculous in another country that you’ve never found anywhere else. Whatever it is, let us know. Satiate our desire for new and wonderful woo!

Please leave your answers below.

Homéopathes Français, Flat Earthers and the Old, Old, Very Old Man.  With testicles both large and sound, it is Skeptics with a K.

Million Dollar Psychic

by Dr Matthew Smith

When: Thu, Apr 15, 2010 8.00 – 11.00 PM
Where: The Vines (aka the Big House), 81 Lime Street, Liverpool

Summary

Can a scientist become a psychic and win a million dollars?

Do we all have hidden psychic powers? Can we learn to be psychic? Psychologist Dr Matthew Smith is determined to find the answers to these questions and see if he can discover and develop his own abilities and claim the $1 million offered by magician James Randi for anyone who can demonstrate psychic ability.

Biography

Dr Matthew Smith was an Associate Professor of Psychology at Liverpool Hope University until September 2009. His sceptical views on the paranormal have led to appearances on a number of television programmes broadcast throughout the world.

After nearly twenty years investigating the paranormal from a scientific perspective, he is embarking on a unique and ground-breaking experiment in which he becomes his own test subject.

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I’m sure it’s no surprise to anyone when I say that psychics bug me. It’s the cold reading, the lying or fuzzy-thinking, the misguided and arrogant belief that they are helping people cope with death by making up stories about their dead loved ones – it’s all creepy and wildly disrespectful, I think.

I can, however, entirely see the appeal psychics have. We’ve all lost someone we love – it’s part of life, part of the human experience, and it utterly and completely sucks. The idea that there’s something beyond the world we see, that somehow a form of our consciousness survives it and is able to come back through the void to reassure the ones we love is immensely attractive. It’s also, thus far, demonstrably untrue.

When I was growing up, I’d spend every summer at my grandparents’ static caravan in a little wooded caravan site, every year between the ages of 1 and 14 (or so). When I was maybe round about 4 or so I made friends with a kid there, and every year we’d spend the whole summer at each others’ side – he was the first person I’d go call for when I woke up in the morning, and other than mealtimes I’d be with him until I went to sleep, for 6 weeks every year, for maybe 14 years. We were as close as brothers. His name, too, was Michael, and though I’d only see him a few weeks of the year, for those weeks we were like family.

Still, kids grow up, and the appeal of a tin-pot caravan in the middle of small wood in County Durham soon wears off for a teenager, and I stopped heading to the caravan site every year, and in doing so I lost touch with Michael.

When I was 20, I learned Michael had taken an overdose, and had died. Understandably, I was knocked sidewards when I found out. To this day it still hurts that my best friend isn’t around any more, and that I’ll never see him again.

I got to thinking of Michael the other day, and how we were when we were growing up. I remembered one time in particular when – disaster! – I’d run out of cereal. I was a dramatic sod of a kid at the best of times, and early morning with nothing sugary to put in my bowl of milk is most certainly not the best of times. The small caravan site shop was pretty limited, and offered no solution – but a quick knock on Michael’s door and I was soon tucking in to a bowl of Sugar Puffs (something of a treat at the time, as my parents didn’t believe in buying named-brand cereals). It’s a memory that, for no clear reason, has stuck with me very distinctly.

The other day, I was making a similarly-urgent dash to the shops for cereal, and I found myself hankering for some Sugar Puffs – not one of my regular cereals these days, but I thought ‘Why not?’. Pouring myself a bowlful, I suddenly remembered the time I had it at Michael’s and it made me smile to remember my best mate at the time, and the years spent with him as kids.

I guess my point is: we all have people we’ve lost, and we all yearn to connect with them again. Personally, rather than paying a ‘psychic’ £30 or £40 to invent from whole cloth new memories about someone I loved, I spend a little money on something that brings back genuine memories. Listen to a CD they loved, go somewhere that meant something to them, or even just buy a box of the cereal they used to eat – that’s how we can truly re-connect with the ones we’ve lost.

What Is It? #7 (click to enlarge)

It’s that time of the week again – time for our What Is It? competition. Same rules as always apply, check out the image and tell us what it is.

Last week we showed you this photo, and asked you what it is. The answer? It’s a photo of nanoparticles (in brown) attaching themselves to cancer cells (in violet) from the human abdominal cavity. This is actually pretty cool – scientists at Georgia Tech and the Ovarian Cancer Institute have further developed a potential new treatment against cancer that uses magnetic nanoparticles to attach to cancer cells, removing them from the body. The treatment, tested in mice in 2008, has now been tested using samples from human cancer patients. The results appear online in the journal Nanomedicine. [Image Credit: Ken Scarberry/Georgia Tech]

It was a difficult one, sure enough, and nobody got it entirely correct, but the closest to the correct answer was Stan T, with this guess:

Out of focus bone marrow aspirate, acute leukaemia, non specific esterase stain.

A partial congratulations to Stan T for coming closest – let’s see you all raise your game for this week’s photo!

Last weekend, the Bluecoat gallery in Liverpool hosted a day of events under the title Views From The Grassy Knoll. It was a mixture of talks, screenings and performances covering everything from conspiracy theories and art, to science and politics. It also included an overview of what Skepticism is by Gavin Schofield from the Greater Manchester Skeptics, which I sadly missed but which I heard was a very good talk.

The headline lecture was 2012 by Dr Bill Aitchison, a performance artist and researcher. I was lucky enough to be able to make this one, albeit fifteen minutes late, and found it a very interesting and entertaining, if strange, experience.

It’s difficult to give an overview of exactly what the lecture was about. It was technically about four or five mini-lectures spliced together. Aitchison would talk about one for a few minutes, and then at musical and visual cues from his laptop would react as if conditioned and switch to another thread. A lot of the content concerned various conspiracy theories, some well-known, some more obscure, some utterly absurd and possibly invented for the lecture itself. How much Aitchison believed any of them, if at all,  is difficult to tell. Some of the theories were obviously presented in a satirical manner, though as the whole thing was a performance piece no real grasp of Aichison’s own beliefs was possible. Not that it mattered overall. The entertainment of the talk was in entering the world of these theories and enjoying the wilful blending of fact and fiction.

The sheer range was exhilirating. Saddam Hussein turns out to have spent a lot of his time writing novels, which I was completely unaware of, and Aitchison even read out an extract from one of them. He even implied that a cover from one book, showing two tall buildings collapsing, was Hussein claiming responsibility for the attacks of 9/11. This was cross-referenced to Osama Bin Laden’s taped addresses to camera, with mention of the one where he claims responsibility for 9/11 being of particularly bad quality, with a left-handed, chubby Bin Laden instead of a right-handed, skinny one.

An actor? Who knows? The possible answers in the lecture just get weirder and weirder.

We also heard about I Ching predictions, and how China’s five mascots for the 2008 Olympics are supposed to have predicted world events, as well as a retread of Pavlov’s famous experiments with dogs (which links to Aitchison’s ‘conditioning’ schtick throughout the talk). We also had sections on the Tunguska event of 1908, and of course, the various conspiracies surrounding the supposed end of the world in 2012.

But this was nothing on the common conspiracy which Aitchison used to link all of these, which was psychic dogs. The idea is that radiation from the Tunguska explosion caused mutations in local dogs which gave them a shared psychic link, and that this link has been passed down genetically from generation to generation. As well as psychic, these dogs are also supposed to be intelligent, and not only that, but are apparently influencing world events.

In case you hadn’t guessed, this was the point in the talk where Dr Aitchison was quite clearly after laughs.

The evidence for these dogs’ Machievellian schemes? Numerous photos of world leaders with their pets: Vladimir Putin, with his trusty dog, Koni, who goes everywhere with him; Barack Obama, who suspiciously bought a new dog upon entering the White House; Clinton; even David Cameron, with his new puppy (no mention of cats, despite the fact that they always look like they know more than they’re letting on…). Of course, it’s all an evil scheme, and these dogs are part of a controlling cabal, quietly placing themselves in the homes of the movers and shakers of the world in order to influence world events. How could you deny it? All those pictures of presidents with their trusty companions sitting by their feet, hearing everything and passing it on to their psychic compadres the world over. It’s all preparation for the end of the world in 2012.

I found the talk very interesting and exhilirating, and in all honesty didn’t give a damn about whether any of the conspiracies stood up to examination. It was simply fun to immerse myself in this world of paranoia, random elements and even more random linkage. There was even a bit of new knowledge along the way (I still can’t imagine Saddam Hussein sitting down for several hours a day, churning out romantic adventure novels). It is easy to forget that skepticism for a lot of people comes out of this kind of interest. Skeptical thinking and the thought processes of conspiracy theorists are in some ways similar, in my view. Both involve trying to investigate and get to the bottom of the ‘truth’ behind things, looking for patterns and evidence. The difference is that most conspiracy theories are unintentionally blinkered. They usually miss one or more important facts, or let paranoia take it a little too far off the reality path. A lot of people who are interested in conspiracy theories end up becoming skeptics, because quite often that is where objective study of the theories will lead you. It seems like a natural progression to me. Skeptics don’t look down on conspiracy theories or silly beliefs. Quite often they’re as interested in them as the non-skeptics, it’s just that their standards for judgement have become more rigorous.

Sometimes, it seems like skepticism in the UK is mainly based around pseudoscientific or pseudomedicinal claims, rather than other areas of ‘woo’ like ghosts, UFOs or conspiracy theories. This is understandable, as it is in medicine and science that bad logic and sloppy thinking can become dangerous, so it makes sense to focus more on these areas. No-one gets hurt by someone’s belief in UFOs or who may have been on the grassy knoll (except maybe Kennedy), after all. But those less dangerous areas of woo are still part of skepticism, because they are interesting subjects in their own right. Skeptics would not go out of their way to examine extraordinary claims if they didn’t have an interest in the subject in the first place. It’s not necessarily about debunking, it’s just about getting your facts right. I would love it if reported UFO sightings turned out to be of real alien spacecraft, but unfortunately the evidence does not lean that way. Nevertheless, I keep my eye on the subject, not in order to keep seeing it debunked, but because if there is something in it, I want to know! The same applies to conspiracy theories.

There is another fact about conspiracy theories that keeps some of us skeptics coming back for more, too. They’re fun! It is great fun to enter these tapestries of fact and speculation, to examine and dissect them. It is great fun to imagine they may be true. I may not think that dogs are secretly running the world – in fact I definitely don’t – but I love the idea. It is worth remembering this sense of fun any time someone accuses you of being a killjoy or hating everything because you’re a skeptic. If anything defines a skeptic it’s enthusiasm and an interest in discovering the truth, not crushing people’s dreams. The negative stereotypes of skeptics don’t really hold up to scrutiny.

I hope anyone reading who went to the event at the Bluecoat enjoyed it as much as I did. If anyone missed it, we have a talk in May by journalist David Aaronovitch on conspiracy theories and their role in shaping modern history, which promises to be a superb evening out, so why not come along and enjoy some of that supposedly dry, ‘killjoy’ skepticism?

Hopefully see you then, if the dogs haven’t got to me…

Last week we celebrated the one year anniversary of the Merseyside Skeptics Society with a special Liverpool Skeptics in The Pub, which included a live recording of our podcast Skeptics With a K. In a change from our usual dictatorial style, we asked the audience for suggestions for a Question of The Week, and ended up with two of them!

Questions that is, not audience members.

In the interests of fun, and because it means we don’t have to make a decision about it, we’ve decided that instead of choosing only one of them as this week’s question, we’ll let you answer both. Think of it as a Question of The Year as well as a Question of The Week, an extra special gift from us to you!

So this week’s Question(s) of The Week, courtesy of Andrew Johnston and Tom Williamson are:

1/ If you could have three dinner guests, one living, one dead and one ‘woo’, who would they be?

2/ What ‘woo’ presents have you received?

Maybe you have a thing for white beards and want to have dinner with James Randi, Darwin and Santa; or maybe you once recieved a ‘genuine’ Mayan crystal skull from a boyfriend or girlfriend. Whatever it is, we want to know. I’ll leave the definition of ‘woo’ here deliberately vague, so no-one feels limited. It’s up to your good selves whether you answer one or both questions.

Please leave your answers in the comments section below.

What Is It? #6 (click to enlarge)

It’s time once again to put your peepers to the test, with the latest edition in our ingeniously-titled ‘What Is It?’ competition. By now I’m sure you know the drill, and if you don’t it’s kinda self-explanatory, but here’s what you do: 

1. Look at this photo
2. Tell us what it is 

Pretty straightforward stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree. And cheers once more to Prof. Dowling for the image. 

Last week we got all mushy and asked you what this photo is. As usual we got a good set of responses. Most got pretty close, although unfortunately for Barra, there was no doomed Martian lovers involved:

Is it the famous heart cliffs of mars? Where ancient alien civilisations used to jump like lemmings to the rocks below expressing their love for each other?

And no liquorice allsorts either; apologies to Ross Clark:

Is it a sample from the abortive Bertie Bassett factory at Sellafield?

What it actually is, is a rather cool Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy (STM) image of palladium atoms. Amazingly, the heart is roughly a nanometre across.

No fully correct answers this week, but nearly all of you got most of the way there. Sophie, Jon d, Tom Williamson and Ellie all recognised we were looking at something very small, probably an STM image. Unfortunately, nearly everyone claimed we were looking at carbon nanotubes, and not Palladium, so no 100% pass rates today.

But you know what, as you were all on the right track, and as the image was in honour of Valentine’s Day and we’re all loving souls here at MSS, we’re going to credit you as having got this one right. So… well done, everyone!