To quote Michael Shermer, I “investigate paranormal claims, pseudoscience and fringe groups, and cults and claims of all kinds between science and pseudoscience, and non-science, and junk science, voodoo science, pathological science, bad science, non-science, and plain old nonsense.”
Recently, University of Missouri researchers have developed a pupil response test that is 92.5 percent accurate in separating children with autism from those with typical development. In the study, MU scientists found that children with autism have slower pupil responses to light change.
New data show that the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of carbon dioxide has stayed approximately constant since 1850, despite emissions of carbon dioxide having risen from about 2 billion tons a year in 1850 to 35 billion tons a year now.
This suggests that terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans have a much greater capacity to absorb CO2 than had been previously expected.
She admits that, on the surface, EBF3 reminds many people of a Star Trek replicator in which, for example, Captain Picard announces out loud, “Tea, Earl Grey, hot.” Then there is a brief hum, a flash of light and the stimulating drink appears from a nook in the wall.
In reality, EBF3 works in a vacuum chamber, where an electron beam is focused on a constantly feeding source of metal, which is melted and then applied as called for by a drawing — one layer at a time — on top of a rotating surface until the part is complete.
5. Did Glenn Beck rape and murdere a young girl in 1990? – I’m not saying he did, but like a lot of other people, “I’m just asking questions.” And these are apparently questions that Glenn Beck doesn’t want to see asked because he tried to shut down the satirical Beck-mocking site glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com. But Beck couldn’t silence the questions and the so mirror sites using this Fark-inspired meme applying Beck’s own “I’m just asking the question” tactic remain on the web. What are you trying to hide, Glenn? And why haven’t you denied that you raped and murdered a young girl in 1990? Huh?
Kiddos to South Park for nailing this particular Beck tactic on tonight’s show.
6. Mormons becoming pro-gay rights? – Last week I blogged about how filmmaker Paul Haggis left $cientology largely because of their unapologetic anti-gay position. Well now the Mormon church is coming out in support of gay rights. Seriously.
7. E.T. phone Rome – The Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences is holding its first ever conference to discuss the possible ramifications for the church should extraterrestrial life be discovered. Maybe they’ll finally pardon Giordano Bruno, an Italian monk, who was put to death by the Inquisition in 1600 for suggesting life might exist somewhere else in the universe.
They announced clearly that wearing these bras was unIslamic because it is a form of fraud and deception.
2. The Fourth Kind: based on a true story? – At least that’s what filmmakers would have us believe. It seems as though the “true story” the film is allegedly based on is probably not even based on a real account but more likely was just extra content created for an internet viral marketing campaign.
It was just an ordinary Sunday evening in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. The date was October 30, 1938. But soon after 8pm, panic broke out. The reason was that radio newscasters were reporting that the Martians had landed in Grovers Mill. . .and they were out for blood.
The broadcast could be heard across the U.S. but it was those closest to ground zero of the Martian invasion who reacted the most as they could immediately identify the locales mentioned in the reports. Then they decided to fight back against the unwelcome visitors. This was their town and they weren’t going to let the Martians take it from them.
Of course it turned out that there were no Martians. There never were. And those heard on the radio were not even real newscasters. They were radio play actors reading a script written by Howard Koch, loosely based on H.G. Wells’ classic book, The War of the Worlds. The project was produced by a then twenty-three-year-old Orson Welles. And the whole thing was broadcast from the New York City studio of the Columbia Broadcasting System’s Mercury Theater.
In his famous study of the Martian panic, Princeton University psychologist Hadley Cantril discusses the extreme variability of eyewitness descriptions of the “invasion.” These examples have been usually overlooked in subsequent popular and scholarly discussions of the panic. One person became convinced that they could smell the poison gas and feel the heat rays as described on the radio, while another became emotionally distraught and felt a choking sensation from the imaginary “gas” (Cantril 1947, 94-95). During the broadcast several residents reported observations to police “of Martians on their giant machines poised on the Jersey Palisades” (Markush 1973, 379). After checking various descriptions of the panic, Bulgatz (1992, 129) reported that a Boston woman said she could actually see the fire as described on the radio; other persons told of hearing machine gun fire or the “swish” sound of the Martians. A man even climbed atop a Manhattan building with binoculars and described seeing “the flames of battle.”
The event also reminds us that the human mind does not function like a video camera capturing each piece of data that comes into its field of vision. People interpret information as it is processed.
As a skeptic who remains unconvinced of the supernatural, the paranormal, or the invisible strings of grand conspirators, I’m no stranger to the appeal to anecdotal evidence. I’ve frequently heard fantastical tales from those who swear to have truly encountered the unbelievable. And my demands for physical evidence are often met with the rolling eyes of true believers who think I’ve set the bar for evidence too high so as to be out of reach. They’ll insist that no amount of evidence would convince me and that I’d still deny these phenomena even if an angel/ghost/extraterrestrial/Reptilian/agent of the New World Order showed up at my door. And to this, I respond that this is an unfair assessment considering I’ve been offered no evidence even remotely as compelling as that which they’ve invented in their hypothetical scenario.
The religious ask me to account for all the reported miracles and angel sightings, etc. from trustworthy witnesses. The paranormalists ask me to account for all the reported ghost and UFO sightings from trustworthy witnesses such as air force pilots or police officers as well as all the alleged “psychic” claims that the “psychic” “couldn’t possibly have known.” The UFO crowd The “alternative” “medicine” proponents ask me to account for all the reported cases of a person appearing to get well after seeing faith healers, psychic surgeons, acupuncturists, homeopaths, herbal supplement dealers, etc. And the grand conspiracy theorists ask me to account for all the little details from “the official story” that doesn’t seem to “add up” like why did that one newscaster report the wrong gun after the Kennedy assassination, or why can I see the letter C on the moon rock, or why did the guy yell “Pull it!” before WTC 7 collapsed, or why did one 9/11 eyewitness from the ground report that he distinctly saw X number of engines on the plane that struck the Towers when video footage clearly shows that there were Y number of engines on the plane.
While some of these types of claims have been thoroughly and definitively debunked, the truth is that often I don’t have all the answers and that sometimes it’s impossible to arrive at a more plausible and rational alternative explanation without having either been there or more famous cases, having at least done extensive research.
But one thing that I don’t find compelling–and the Grovers Mill case illustrates why–is the argument that there were just too many witnesses for X to have not really happened or have been a mere misinterpretation. Maybe there was a real historical Jesus and there really were five hundred witnesses who thought they saw miracles. Unfalsifiable. Maybe Joseph Smith really did have twelve witnesses who sincerely believed they’d seen divine revelation. Meaningless. Maybe that Pilot Kenneth Arnold did really see craft that he couldn’t identify in 1947 and believed were from out of this world. Scientifically worthless. Maybe the townspeople of Roswell, New Mexico and Major Jesse Marcel really did believe they saw a crash flying saucer or saucers. Tell that to the town of Grovers Mills. Maybe Betty and Barney Hill truly believed they were abducted by space aliens. So what?
Human perception and memory reconstruction are deeply flawed and easily susceptible to suggestion (Ex. here, here, and here). Here’s another account of a witness of the great Grovers Mills Martian invasion:
These memories are not statically locked away in the brain forever, but our memories of events are reconstructed over time (Loftus and Ketcham, 1991). Cantril (1947) cited the case of Miss Jane Dean, a devoutly religious woman, who, when recalling the broadcast, said the most realistic portion was “the sheet of flame that swept over the entire country. That is just the way I pictured the end” (181). In reality, there was no mention of a sheet of flame anywhere in the broadcast.
In the beginning there were sightings, and those sightings began with private pilot Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947. As soon as news stories appeared reporting Arnold’s claim that he saw nine airborne objects that flew “like a saucer if you skip it across the water,” others began reporting seeing the “saucers” too (a curious development, since Arnold did not say that the objects looked like saucers—they looked like boomerangs, he said—but skipped like saucers, a subtlety lost in the public’s imagination). Soon sightings of “saucers” were pouring in from all around the country and from around the world. Sightings occurred in waves, which appeared to be fueled by media reports. A wave would typically start in one location, but as soon as news reports began to carry the story of the localized excitement, sightings activity would pick up nationally. Great waves of UFO sightings occurred in 1947, 1949, 1952, 1957, 1965—67, and 1973.
Then in 1973, there was a significant drop-off in the number of reported UFO sightings. Then after the release of Stephen Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, all of a sudden, the UFOs returned in droves. What are the odds? And it turns out that a pattern emerges. It seems the UFOs seem to always resurface every time Hollywood has renewed interest in aliens. I guess the movies on their planet are all directed by Joel Schumacher, so they have to traverse the whole universe to see anything good. And there was a time when aliens were always described as being little green men. Then after the Hill case, all of a sudden, the little green men stopped visiting and sent their friends the big-eyed Grays instead. What we’re seeing here, as with religions, is meme evolution. It seems like we’re seeing exactly what we’d expect to see if all these weird paranormal events were nothing but a self-perpetuating mass delusion.
People create false memories. This is the horrible reality of eyewitness testimony. Sometimes honest, well-meaning people simply get it wrong. They see or experience something strange or unexplained and their brain fills in details based on their own prejudices or expectations. This is how the real power of suggestion works. If your primed to think weird lights in the sky is a flying saucer, that’s what you’ll perceive it to be. And if you’re primed to think aliens are gray with big eyes, that’s what you’ll see.
The problem with anecdotes:
Test your skills as an eyewitness:
Watch this video and see if you can count how many times the players in the white shirt pass the ball around.
Do not read on until you’ve done this. This is more tricky than it seems.
-
-
-
Now, did you see the gorilla?
Here’s another test of your eyewitness skills:
And for more lessons in critical thinking, click here.
If these reports are to be believed, the authorities have already allocated a large plot of land in the city of Almaty for this ambitious project. Facilities to be built within the complex will include a guesthouse, theatre and translation service. A purpose built UFO landing pad and checkpoint will be attached to the embassy.
Kazakhstan’s government believes open contact with aliens is imminent and by being the first nation to specifically create such facilities they are convinced they will reap enormous financial and economic rewards. The Kazakhstan Government also see this as a chance to demonstrate their nations forward thinking policies.
This has got to be an elaborate prank because I find it hard to believe that Kazakhstan could possibly thikn their nation is more forward thinking than the rest of Western world. And wouldn’t it occur to them at all that the space aliens might not be anything like us and might not have any use for such things as a theatre.
There’s just no way this is real story. If this would true, it’d make every comedian’s day. It’s just too absurd, far more absurd than Borat’s “Running of the Jew” festival.
Here is the latest from the one news source that makes Fox News look objective, Infowars.
It includes a video of 9/11 conspiracy theorists doing what they always do, videotaping themselves while they harass some celebrity, in this case Former President Jimmy Carter, at a book signing and then framing their getting kicked out of the bookstore as further proof their beliefs that were allowed to stand or fall on their own merits in the public sphere (and in this case fell like a rock) is being silenced.
But now they’re no longer asking if particular celebrities think “9/11 was an inside job.” No, I suspect they’ve been burned too many times on that one.
So taking a page from the creationist Wedge Document, they’ve decided to spin it into something far more reasonable sounding:
“I was just wondering if you’d support the victims’ family members that want a new investigation into 9/11.”
Who doesn’t want to support the victims’ families?
And when Carter casually said, sure that he’d support “the victims’ family members that want a new investigation into 9/11″, Paul Joseph Watson decided to add him to the list of celebrities that support his cause.
“I think the basic reason is that our country suffered, in 9/11, a terrible and shocking attack … and George Bush has been adroit at exploiting that attack, and he has elevated himself, in the consciousness of many Americans, to a heroic commander-in-chief, fighting a global threat against America,” Carter says.
This isn’t the first time the often good-natured Jimmy Carter has had his words exploited and twisted by fringe movements promoting an agenda. For many years, UFO nuts have touted Carter as someone who’s admitted to seeing a UFO himself.
The implication was that Carter believed like they did that the unidentified flying object was from outer space, a misconception that Carter didn’t even know was being perpetuated and was very clear in correcting when he was a guest on The Skeptics Guide To The Universe podcast.
UPDATE: SINCE THE VIDEO IS NO LONGER WORKING, CLICK HERE FOR A BRIEF GLIMPSE AT THE IMAGE AND CLICK HERETO READ STEVE NOVELLA’S RESPONSE TO IT.
I think Rebecca Watson says it best:
Highlights include the gnat obviously zipping back and forth in front of the Washington Monument while the hick points out that it is actually (contrary to the video) a very large object flying behind “the obelisk.”
Though I think my favorite part is at the 1:35 mark when he admits seeing the flapping of the wings but then just dismisses it as a glitch in the video because it doesn’t conform to his insanely idiotic hypothesis.
I think somebody’s watched The Day The Earth Stood Still too many times:
Child Sacrifice – Last year 11-year0old Kara Neumann of Wisconsin died from a treatable form of juvenile diabetes because her parents foolishly trusted faith healers. And despite the outcome, the parents are not remorseful and still believe in the faith healer. But now they’re going to trial.
AND NOW FOR A MOMENT OF SCIENCE:
Scientists Agree Global Warming Is Real – “While the harsh winter pounding many areas of North America and Europe seemingly contradicts the fact that global warming continues unabated, a new survey finds consensus among scientists about the reality of climate change and its likely cause.”
Smoking Linked To Most Male Cancer Deaths – “The association between tobacco smoke and cancer deaths — beyond lung cancer deaths — has been strengthened by a recent study from a UC Davis researcher, suggesting that increased tobacco control efforts could save more lives than previously estimated.”
Hobbit Is Not Human, Skull Study Finds – “In a an analysis of the size, shape and asymmetry of the cranium of Homo floresiensis, Karen Baab, Ph.D., a researcher in the Department of Anatomical Scienes at Stony Brook University, and colleagues conclude that the fossil, found in Indonesia in 2003 and known as the “Hobbit,” is not human.”
Atheist buses invade Italy! – For non-Italian-speakers, it translates as: “The bad news is that God does not exist. The good news is that you do not need him.”
The Douche Card – Finally something to get the douche in who has everything. Anyone know Jenny McCarthy’s address?
Is The Force strong with you? - A new toy, the Star Wars Force Trainer uses a modified version of EEG technology that detects your brain activity and translates it into a command for the toy.
AND NOW FOR A MOMENT OF SCIENCE:
Monkeys, Humans Share Social Anxiety Gene Link – “A genetic variation involving the brain chemical serotonin has been found to shape the social behavior of rhesus macaque monkeys, which could provide researchers with a new model for studying autism, social anxiety and schizophrenia. Humans and macaques are the only members of the primate family to have this particular genetic trait.”
Oldest Fossil Bird Had Hearing Similar To Emu – “The earliest known bird, the magpie-sized Archaeopteryx, had a similar hearing range to the modern emu, which suggests that the 145 million-year-old creature — despite its reptilian teeth and long tail — was more birdlike than reptilian, according to new research.”
Bioethicists save organ donation by tweaking the definition of death – “In response to an emerging moral controversy over whether most vital organs used in transplants are technically taken from living people, the President’s Council on Bioethics issued a new report that defines brain death as the cessation of engagement with the world.”
Ricardo Montalban 1920-2009 -The man who portrayed one of the greatest villains in cinema history has died. Montalban also was featured in 2 of the Planet of the Apes sequels, which for some reason nobody reporting this story seems to mention even though they were great films.
Not Mississippi too? – The state is introducing yet another textbook disclaimer bill warning children of the dangerous learning contained inside. NOOOOOOOOO!!! Protect the children!!
But Texas on the other hand might soon be safe again from creationists – The final proposed science standards for the state actually strengthen science and deprive creationists of their favorite tool, language manipulation. Way to go y’all in Texas! I am slightly less afraid of your state.
Bus ath-vertising spreads to Italy and Spain – I just posted the other day about how godless Spain has become but now we’re entering even into Pope-territory. Speaking of which, wouldn’t it be awesome if the Pope-mobile broke down and he was spotted on a bus with an atheist advertisement along the side?
“If you’re not Christian, you’re going to die” – Okay, obviously very few religious people in the U.S. are this nuts but some lunatic stormed a ski resort in Colorado and killed 1 person. He’s alleged to have shouted the above quotation. Make of it what you will.
AUTISM NEWS:
Autism test could “hit maths skills” – BBC reports that prenatal testing for autism is being developed and with that comes a possibility for prenatal treatment. But this could result in less math geniuses.
ABC trying to make up for the awful first episode of Eli Stone? – Last year, ABC introduced a new show called Eli Stone. Sadly the premiere episode promoted all sorts of woo including the myth that vaccines cause autism. ABC’s only response to the many critics who wrote the network prior to the airing of the episode was to include a little disclaimer at the end of the episode. Well a show on ABC that’d I’d never watched until tonight, Private Practice, addressed this issue from the medical perspective. And although the show wasn’t nearly as preachy as the Eli Stone episode, they definitely came out in favor of vaccines and didn’t pander to the kooks. For that I commend those who worked on this show for taking a position that without doubt will lead to tons of hate mail.
RANDOM WOO:
Glastonbury, England is actually afraid of Wi-Fi - Oh no, internet without a wire! Run for your lives! Give me a break. I wonder if they also think the voices on the other end of their telephones are trapped evil spirits.
CNN promoting the CAM Scam? – Afraid so, thanks to the network’s senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen
It turns out only about 58% of black voters supported the ban.
AND NOW FOR A MOMENT OF SCIENCE:
‘Tetris’ May Help Reduce Traumatic Flashbacks – “Playing ‘Tetris’ after traumatic events could reduce the flashbacks experienced in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), preliminary research by Oxford University psychologists suggests.”
Human Antibodies Take ‘Evolutionary Leaps’ – “With cold and flu season in full swing, the fact that viruses and bacteria rapidly evolve is apparent with every sneeze, sniffle, and cough. A new report explains for the first time how humans keep up with microbes by rearranging the genes that make antibodies to foreign invaders. This research fills a significant gap in our understanding of how the immune system helps us survive.”
1. Lou Dobbs leaves CNN – Good riddance!
2. Children with autism show slower pupil responses -
3. Can Earth absorb CO2 much greater than expected? -
4. Star Trek-like Replicator Makes Metal Parts -
5. Did Glenn Beck rape and murdere a young girl in 1990? – I’m not saying he did, but like a lot of other people, “I’m just asking questions.” And these are apparently questions that Glenn Beck doesn’t want to see asked because he tried to shut down the satirical Beck-mocking site glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com. But Beck couldn’t silence the questions and the so mirror sites using this Fark-inspired meme applying Beck’s own “I’m just asking the question” tactic remain on the web. What are you trying to hide, Glenn? And why haven’t you denied that you raped and murdered a young girl in 1990? Huh?
6. Mormons becoming pro-gay rights? – Last week I blogged about how filmmaker Paul Haggis left $cientology largely because of their unapologetic anti-gay position. Well now the Mormon church is coming out in support of gay rights. Seriously.
7. E.T. phone Rome – The Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences is holding its first ever conference to discuss the possible ramifications for the church should extraterrestrial life be discovered. Maybe they’ll finally pardon Giordano Bruno, an Italian monk, who was put to death by the Inquisition in 1600 for suggesting life might exist somewhere else in the universe.
Posted by mjr256 
Posted by mjr256 
Posted by mjr256 
Even space aliens love Obama
Child Sacrifice
Scientists Agree Global Warming Is Real
Afghan schoolgirls burned with acid two months ago are still 
Not Mississippi too?
8 reasons you should keep Coke away from your vagina