What is a psychic party?

A psychic party is pretty much what it sounds like:

“The new trend is hosting Psychic Parties which gives people a fun purpose for a gathering. It’s also a great way to add interest to any function whether it is social or business related. It opens the opportunity for people to get a psychic reading inexpensively”.

“It’s not just for the rich and famous anymore. Everyone wants to know what the future has in store for them,” says well known celebrity psychic Rachael Bleau. She says her business has never been better with a who’s who list of celebrities who regularly seek her out. Due to the slowing economy people are seeking out psychics more than ever before to gain insight on where their life is heading.

There is so much wrong with this that it’s not even funny. Okay, maybe it’s a little funny picturing the rich and famous customers who have made their fortunes presumably without the aid of psychics to guide their every move now gathering around at parties letting some glorified street hustler not only bilk them out of their money but tell them how to live their lives like William Shater’s character in that great Twilight Zone episode.

Liberty U student talks about seeking another school

I blogged a few months ago about how Liberty “University” had officially terminated the organization, Liberty University College Democrats on account that they felt the Democratic Party didn’t reflect their school’s values. Well now Brian Diaz, the former president of the organization talks about being forced to resign:

Although I have put in a tremendous amount of work this past year, I believe that based on the dismissal of Maria Childress as our club sponsor, as well as an email from the administration to me stating that, “You are distorting the truth, and you know it. You have no credibility with me” forces me to resign as club President and look for other educational opportunities by the means of transferring to a new institution.

I do not wish to speak badly about the Liberty; I only wish to be apart of an institution that fosters diversity within its student body. I am deeply saddened by this decision but I feel that with the present administration the Liberty University College Democrats cannot be effective.

I hope that I can transfer to an institution this coming fall that will continue to help me develop my education, bipartisanship, and leadership skills. I will be applying to a number of schools including Virginia Commonwealth University, Randolph College, and a number of other universities across the Commonwealth.

Liberty “University” apparently taught him to seek an education elsewhere, where diversity of ideas is actually welcomed instead of only accepting Jerry Falwell’s ideas.

Clooney embraces woo

I always got the impression that George Clooney was one of the more rational celebrities in Hollywood. He certainly seems to hang out with the more rational crowd. But now it seems he’s hired a psychic to contact his beloved potbellied pig Max, who died in 2006. Ugh! Say it isn’t so, George. You can’t be that gullible.

George reportedly told a friend: “The psychic told me Max had a great life with me. He is very happy in spirit and still hangs out with me sometimes.

“I am not sure she was telling the truth but I do want to believe her.”

I guess it could be worse. He could be a $cientologist or an ant-vaccinationist.

Atheist Bus Campaign stops in NYC!

Finally, after almost every other place on Earth has put up some for of atheist advertising or as I call it, “athvertising,” the Atheist Bus Campaign hits New York City, thanks to the NYC Atheists:

This month, some two dozen buses will roll through Manhattan, debuting our 12-foot long, three foot high message, “You don’t have to believe in god to be a moral or ethical person”. Look for the signs the first day our buses maneuver through the city in late June.

I’m happy they went with one of the non-offensive slogans.

NYC Atheists is sponsoring the ads and you can help them offset costs by contributing to the ad fund.

The Science and Entertainment Exchange & Unscientific America

To restate a comment made by Phil Plait, “Seth MacFarlane rocks.”

I also wanted to post this other video that relates to general science issues. This is a speech given by science blogger Chris Mooney who’s written the book, The Republican War on Science and who has just co-written the book, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future:

Black hole created by Israeli scientists

Israeli scientists have created a black hole capable of sucking in sound:

Using Bose-Einstein condensates, the scientists created a black hole for sound. The new research could help scientists learn more about true black holes and help confirm the existence of as-yet to be discovered Hawking radiation.

“It’s like a black hole because waves get sucked in and can’t escape,” said Jeff Steinhauer, a scientist at the Israel Institute of Technology and the corresponding author of the article recently posted on the ArXiv.org pre-print Web page. “But in this case we use sound waves instead of light.”

That is so freakin’ coll it’s not even funny.

To create the sonic black hole, the scientists first had to create the Bose-Einstein condensate, a cloud of atoms cooled to almost absolute zero that acts like a light wave. The Israeli scientists actually created two clouds of rubidium 87 atoms cooled to 50 nano Kelvins and separated by a small gap.

Of course! It’s so simple. Why didn’t I think of doing that?

Maybe they can use it to finally get the cone of silence to work.

Giant sperm and pants!

Okay, I’ve decided to combine 2 stories that have nothing to do with one another except that their both rather silly.

The first involves giant sperm:

Tiny mussel-like creatures living 100 million years ago made giant sperm longer than their own bodies, proving size has always mattered for some animals when it comes to sex, scientists said on Thursday.

Giant sperm are still around today. A human sperm, for example, would have to be 40 meters long to measure up against a fruit fly’s. The insect is only a few millimeters in size but can produce 6 cm-long (2.5 inch) coiled sperm.

You hear that? The giant sperm is still here. I can see the 50′s movie poster now: Attack of the Giant Sperm!

And by the way, for those keeping track, that’s 99,994,000 years before the existence of the whole universe, according to Young Earth Creationists.

Now the other story involves pants. The Christian group Focus on the Family has decided to join finally enter the 19th century and allow women to wear pants:

“Beginning today, men who work at Focus no longer have to wear mandatory business attire, including tie, and women employees don’t have to stick with just dresses or skirts and hosiery. Men can now come to work donning an open collar shirt – but no spandex – and women can arrive decked in dress pants and pantsuits.”

PANTS!!!

Sadly however, there’s still no love for spandex. Still though, this dress code change caused many a Christian to cheer at the arrival of their salvation:

After hearing the announcement about the dress code change at a Tuesday staff meeting, Focus employees erupted in applause, and some women gave President and CEO Jim Daly a standing ovation, Focus spokeswoman Lisa Anderson said.

“We can get rid of the hosiery,” Anderson joked. “Some women wanted to stage a bonfire right on the spot.”

Hurray for pants!!!

What The Exorcist films don’t show you

I am a big fan of the website, What’s The Harm, because it shows the deadly consequences of pseudoscience by putting a name and a face to the victims. I too have begun collecting names and faces by creating a category on this site entitled “What’s The Harm.” Now unfortunately, I have to add another blog entry to that category about 6-year-old  Frantzcia Lauradin. Frantzcia’s mother, Marie Lauradin, is accused of burning her in a ritual meant to purify her of demons. Funny how they never seem to show that part of the story in all those Exorcist movies. Fortunately though, Frantzcia survived:

Only after a day of begging by relatives was she eventually taken to the ER, where she was found to have 2nd and 3rd degree burns on 25% of her body, including part of her face.

Ugh!

The mother, Marie Lauradin, is denying the charges, saying she accidentally spilled some boiling rice on her daughter and did not notice the burns until she was in the ER. As reported, that defense is not credible – a mother not noticing severe burns on her daughter’s face?

This is I guess the Haitian equivalent to saying, “she fell down some stairs.” These stories exemplify why I promote skeptical and critical thought as well as why I condemn superstition and pseudoscience.

From death do we unite

There have been many instances over the years of a man killing his wife. But this is the first instance I’ve heard of in which she was already dead when he married her:

Five men have been arrested in China for digging up a dead teenage girl’s body so she could be married to one of the men’s dead son. Ancient Chinese superstition (no, not the one about cleaning your clothes) says that swinging singles can’t be happy in the afterlife, so they must be betrothed to other single dead people even after they’re rotting in the ground. It’s sort of like eHarmony, but slightly less scientific. Assuming there’s anything less scientific than unscientific. Anyway, one of the men had a son who died in a car crash, so he hired the four others to exhume the body of a teenager who poisoned herself after failing her college entrance exams. Traditionally, the two corpses are bound in unholy matrimony and tossed into the same grave.

There’s even been cases in the past of young girls being murdered solely so that their bodies could be used in this ritual.

Today in Evolution 6.18.09

New research suggests that humans most likely share a common ancestor with orangutans and that we’re more related to orangutans than chimps:

Reporting in the June 18 edition of the Journal of Biogeography, the researchers reject as “problematic” the popular suggestion, based on DNA analysis, that humans are most closely related to chimpanzees, which they maintain is not supported by fossil evidence.

Also, scientists have found even more evidence that validates what we already knew that modern birds descended from dinosaurs:

Scientists have discovered a unique beaked, plant-eating dinosaur in China. The finding, they say, demonstrates that theropod, or bird-footed, dinosaurs were more ecologically diverse in the Jurassic period than previously thought, and offers important evidence about how the three-fingered hand of birds evolved from the hand of dinosaurs.

. . .

“This new animal is fascinating, and when placed into an evolutionary context it offers intriguing evidence about how the hand of birds evolved,” said scientist James Clark of George Washington University.