science

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via The Skeptic’s Dictionary

In a nutshell: Remote viewing is a kind of ESP where a person in one place “sees” what another person in another place is looking at. Remote viewing is another name for clairvoyance or telepathy.

remote viewing_250pxRemote viewing (also called clairvoyance or telepathy) is seeing things at a distance using the mind alone. A remote viewer may claim to read the mind of a person in a distant place to see what that person is looking at (telepathy). A remote viewer may claim to somehow directly see the place where another person is located (clairvoyance). Or, a remote viewer may claim to see a distant place even if nobody else is looking at it (clairvoyance).

Skeptics doubt that it is possible to see places, persons, and actions that are not within the range of the senses or such things as telescopes and binoculars. ESP scientists (parapsychologists) claim that they have proof of remote viewing.

Tests of remote viewing often involve having one person go to a remote site while another in a different location tries to get impressions of the site by reading the mind of the person at the remote site. There has never been such a test where one person looks at, say, the Golden Gate Bridge while another person across town says “she’s looking at the Golden Gate Bridge.” In one test, a person went to the Dumbarton Bridge (pictured below) and the remote viewer reported that he was getting “impressions” of

dumbartonbridge

  • half arch
  • something dark about it
  • darkness
  • a feeling she had to park somewhere and had to go through a tunnel or something, a walkway of some kind, an overpass
  • there’s an abutment way up over her head
  • we have a garden, it’s a formal garden
  • formal gardens get passed
  • open area in the center
  • trees
  • some kind of art work in the center
  • this art work is very bizarre, set in gravel, stone.

If you try hard enough, you can match some of the impressions of the remote viewer with the Dumbarton Bridge, but if you only had this list to go by, I don’t think you’d ever figure out what he was talking about.

PPP30058022

Scientists believe a series of events sparked by static electricity lead to the 1937 explosion

via The Independent

The dream was a fleet of hydrogen-filled airships criss-crossing the globe, silvered hulls shining in the sunlight. And for a while the fantasy became reality, For the Hindenburg was the Concorde of its day – able to cross the Atlantic in about three days, twice as fast as going by sea.

With nearly 100 on board, the 245m airship was preparing to land at Lakehurst, New Jersey, on 6 May 1937, when the age of airship travel ended. In front of horrified onlookers, the Hindenburg exploded and plunged to the ground in flames. Thirty-five of those on board died.

Now, 76 years later, a team of experts claims to have solved one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th century: the real cause of the Hindenburg air disaster. And they name static electricity as the culprit.

Led by a British aeronautical engineer, Jem Stansfield, and based at the South West Research Institute in the US, the team blew up or set fire to scale models more than 24m long, in an attempt to rule out theories ranging from a bomb planted by a terrorist to explosive properties in the paint used to coat the Hindenburg.

Investigations after the disaster concluded . . .

MORE . . .

by Crispian Jago via Science, Reason and Critical Thinking

Many conspiracy theorists seem very keen on the idea of hidden messages or codes secretly embedded within ancient writings. Believers claim hidden prophecies of significant world events and disasters can be uncovered and deciphered by analysing the Bible. By simply selecting a random paragraph and taking out the punctuation and merely inserting the passage into a matrix a skeptic, if suitably motivated, and with the benefit of hindsight is easily able to uncover whatever it is they fancy. Believers see predictions of the assassination of President Kennedy and the 9/11 twin towers terrorist attack uncovered in the bible as irrefutable evidence of divine revelation even though rational thinkers can locate predictions of the death of Leon Trotsky and Princess Diana secreted within “Moby Dick”.

Click image for larger view

Click image for larger view

via Science, Reason and Critical Thinking: Bible Code.

American research finds cancer food scares don’t stand up to scrutiny with most culprit ingredients showing little or no increased risk of disease.

via The Observer

Bacon, tea and burnt toast have all been implicated in increased cancer risk. Now we learn this could be nonsense. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

They are mainstay stories of tabloid newspapers and women’s magazines, linking common foods from burnt toast to low-fat salad dressing to cancer. But now US scientists have warned that many reports connecting familiar ingredients with increased cancer risk have little statistical significance and should be treated with caution.

“When we examined the reports, we found many had borderline or no statistical significance,” said Dr Jonathan Schoenfeld of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.

In a paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Schoenfeld and his co-author, John Ioannidis of Stanford University, say trials have repeatedly failed to find effects for observational studies which had initially linked various foods to cancer. Nevertheless these initial studies have often triggered public debates “rife with emotional and sensational rhetoric that can subject the general public to increased anxiety and contradictory advice”.

Recent reports have linked colouring in fizzy drinks, low-fat salad dressing, burnt toast and tea to elevated cancer risk. In the past, red meat, hot dogs, doughnuts and bacon have also been highlighted. The cancer risks involved in excess alcohol consumption are not disputed by scientists, but other links have been less easy to substantiate.

via MORE . . .

Click The Image To Chat With CleverBot

Description (courtesy Wikipedia): Cleverbot is a web application that uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to hold conversations with humans.

Since being launched on the web in 1997, the number of conversations has exceeded 65 million. Unlike other chatterbots, Cleverbot’s responses are not programmed into it, but rather selected from phrases entered by humans in previous conversations. Humans type into the box below the Cleverbot logo and the system finds all of the keywords or an exact phrase matching the input and after searching through its saved conversations of previous chats, responds to the input by finding how a human responded to that input in past conversations when posed by Cleverbot,[2][3] although the commercial version of Cleverbot has more than one thousand requests per server, the ones hosted were for 1 or 2 people per server. This allowed more speed and quality of responses hosted by the artificial intelligence system.

I can tell you from experience, chatting with CleverBot can get a bit creepy at times. Some of the responses generated by CleverBot’s computer can seem so human-like.

From the CleverBot website:

PLEASE NOTE  -  Cleverbot learns from real people  -  things it says may seem inappropriate  -  use with discretion, and at YOUR OWN RISK

PARENTAL ADVICE  -  Visitors never talk to a human, however convincing it looks  -  the AI knows many topics  -  use ONLY WITH OVERSIGHT

Try conversing with CleverBot: Cleverbot.com – a clever bot – speak to an AI with some Actual Intelligence?.

Three unarmed rockets fired from New Mexico to test Patriot defense system

via NBC News

People across the Southwest got an early-morning show in the sky Thursday, courtesy of a trio of unarmed missiles fired from New Mexico, one of which left a brilliant contrail that changed colors as it was illuminated by the rising sun.

The twisting cloudlike formation was visible in southern Colorado, Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Las Vegas just before sunrise, and led to hundreds of calls and emails to area TV stations.

Law enforcement agencies in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado received some reports of a crash, but those were quickly discounted. A sheriff’s deputy in northern New Mexico who saw one of the missiles leaving behind a contrail as it lifted into the pre-dawn sky said he spotted what appeared to be an explosion and a part falling off the craft.

“When I saw it, it surprised the heck out of me, and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s not something you see every day,’” said San Juan County deputy J.J. Roberts. “So I pulled over, pulled out my iPhone and started taking some pictures and video.”

Keep Reading: Missile test sparks UFO reports in Southwest – Technology & science – Space | NBC News.

By: Natalie Wolchover via LifesLittleMysteries.com

According to the fringe sector of the Internet, Mars is practically teeming with aliens.

“Mars animal” spotted by one YouTube user.
CREDIT: YouTube | StephenHannardADGUK

Since NASA’s Curiosity rover touched down on the Red Planet two weeks ago and powered up its cameras, it has already managed to photograph several alleged UFOs and other “anomalies” in the surrounding landscape.

From classic flying saucers to an absurdly out-of-place fossilized human finger, here’s a rundown of what UFO believers claim to have found in Curiosity photos so far. [Gallery of Mars 'UFO' Photos]

Horizon anomaly (aka impact cloud)

Speculation about Martians in Curiosity’s midst got off to a running start when the very first sequence of photos taken by the rover raised questions. A hazy, distant object mysteriously appeared and then disappeared in consecutive images of the Martian horizon, perplexing even NASA scientists at first.

But the much-discussed “anomaly” turned out not to be a sign of alien activity, but rather the plume of dust kicked up by the sky crane that delivered the rover close to the Martian surface, then veered off and struck the ground some 2,000 feet (600 meters) away.

“We believe we’ve caught what is the descent stage impact on the Martian surface,” said NASA engineer Steven Sell, sky crane specialist on the Curiosity mission.

Flying saucers (aka dead pixels)

In footage posted to YouTube Aug. 18, user “StephenHannardADGUK” applies a series of filters to a Curiosity image of the nearby rim of Gale crater, revealing what he says are four flying saucer-like objects stationed in the sky. More than 700,000 people have since given the video a gander.

“Four objects caught by Mars Curiosity, very difficult to make out on original image so I have used a few filters to highlight,” he said in the video description. “What are these four objects? UFOs, Dust particles, or something else? As always you decide.”

Experts say the four “objects” are actually just dead pixels in the rover’s CCD camera — single points in the camera’s imager that have lost functionality and register as white.

Keep Reading: Curiosity Photos of Mars Teeming with ‘UFOs’ | Mars Anomalies | LifesLittleMysteries.com.

By Patrick Fennelly via Who Forted? Magazine

Is there something on Mars they don’t want us to see, or is it just a big old red desert, as we’re led to believe?

Last week the latest in tip-top technology NASA have soldered together landed on the red planet safely in the latest bid to provide us earthlings with information from our neighbors. Yet, only moments after the Curiosity rover landed, the conspiracy world went abuzz once more with stories about the Martian landscape. Our intrepid robot explorer seemed to photograph a massive crash or explosion in the distance, sparking rumors that it was an alien craft that Curiosity had caught crashing into the Martian surface. But engineers were soon out with their pens and rulers and supercomputers trying to explain what the photographs had shown. And they came back with this explanation; the ‘explosion’ captured by Curiosity was actually its landing device, or ‘Sky Crane’ which helped to lower the rover into the Mars atmosphere, which had severed itself from Curiosity and purposely crash landed, some 2,000 feet away, in the distance, thus causing this pyramid shape of soil and debris flung into the air by the craft. The fact that gravity is 38% less of that on Earth was the reason that Curiosity managed to capture the event. Yet many scientists still claim that it was statistically impossible for the rover to capture its own crash landing. And so more doubt has been cast over what is really going down on the Martian surface, hmmm…

Of course, this isn’t the first theory that Mars was or is inhabited by some extraterrestrial beings. The theories go way back, and involve a whole plethora of dubious yet somewhat enthralling research and imagery, mainly thanks to our recent ‘human’ presence on the red planet. Of course this ‘research’ goes from being in the ‘hmm, that’s kind of interesting’ variety to the, ‘wow that person should be in a padded cell’, end of things. The classic example is the face on Mars in the Cydonia region of the planet as snapped by the Viking 1 Orbiter back in 1976, which has sparked many a debate surrounding the idea that our neighbor Mars was once inhabited. And then the monumentally less impressive ‘skull’ which was just laying about the surface, and not to mention the dead storm trooper that somehow strayed from his pals, a deserter of the Empire, perhaps. My personal favourite though, is what has been dubbed the Mars mermaid, or the ‘Woman of Mars’. What is more than likely an oddly weathered rock formation does look creepily like a woman pointing to something, but to what!? Sadly no follow up pictures were ever snapped, so we’re left wondering.

But it doesn’t end there, oh no. Near the ‘face’ in the same region, Cydonia, the Viking orbiter also photographed what appear to be pyramids.

more: Mars Attacks! Well, Maybe… – An Assortment of Mars Conspiracies | Who Forted? Magazine.

Post by Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV

Impossible objects, like those drawn by artist M. C. Escher, don’t seem like they could exist in the real world. But Kokichi Sugihara from Meiji University in Kawasaki, Japan, is well known for building 3D versions of these structures.

Now a new video shows his latest construction: a gravity-defying roof that seems to attract and balance balls on its edge. When the house is rotated, its true form is revealed.

More: New Scientist TV: Impossible roof defies gravity.

I’d like to take this moment to thank everybody for their continued support of iLLumiNuTTi.com. Since we first opened our doors in April we have had a fantastic growth in the number of visitors. Thank you! Keep telling your friends about us and don’t forget to “Like” us on FaceBook and we’ll continue to bring you the weird, wacky and fun stuff!

Have fun and feel free to comment your ideas and suggestions. :)

Mason I. Bilderberg

By via guardian.co.uk

It’s often said in their defence that psychics such as Sally Morgan do little harm, even if their powers are illusory

Earphone claims: Sally is seen removing a microphone from her right ear, and what appears to be an earpiece from her left ear.

It has been a difficult, but financially very rewarding 12 months for Sally Morgan, otherwise known as Psychic Sally. Although most nights she is giving demonstrations of mediumship on stage to an audience of more than a thousand people (each paying £25), there have been concerns about whether she has genuine psychicpowers and whether she obtains information about audience members in advance.

In Dublin in 2011, two audience members said they overheard a voice at the back of the theatre, which they felt was feeding Sally information via an earpiece. In Edinburgh in 2012, there was another odd incident, this time involving a large glass bowl always placed in the theatre foyer by Sally so that audience members could write notes about the departed. One audience member wrote a fictional name on a slip of paper and placed it in the bowl, only to receive a message during the show apparently from that fictional person (Toby Wren, played by Robert Powell in the BBC Doomwatch drama in 1970).

I should stress at this point that Psychic Sally strenuously denies any allegation of being fed information via an earpiece or peeking at the contents of the glass bowl, and she continues to believe that she can speak to the dead. Actually, talking to the dead is not particularly impressive, but Sally also believes that the dead talk to her. That is the spooky bit.

Read More: Is psychic Sally Morgan deluded but essentially harmless? | Simon Singh | Science | guardian.co.uk.

The term déjà vu is French and means, literally, “already seen.” Those who have experienced the feeling describe it as an overwhelming sense of familiarity with something that shouldn’t be familiar at all. Say, for example, you are traveling to England for the first time. You are touring a cathedral, and suddenly it seems as if you have been in that very spot before. Or maybe you are having dinner with a group of friends, discussing some current political topic, and you have the feeling that you’ve already experienced this very thing — same friends, same dinner, same topic.

The phenomenon is rather complex, and there are many different theories as to why déjà vu happens.

Keep Reading: HowStuffWorks “What is deja vu?”.

Reblogged from The Color of Lila:

Click to visit the original post

Okay, all you the-moon landings-were-faked conspiracy nuts:  now we have photos taken from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter showing the flags that the Apollo astronauts left behind on their moon landings.

NASA has a nice web page explaining the science that debunks the conspiracy nuts, but a picture is worth a thousand words.  Then again, conspiracy nuts are notoriously committed to their world views…

Read more… 104 more words

“…magical thinking is “a fundamental dimension of a child’s thinking.” –Zusne and Jones

According to anthropologist Dr. Phillips Stevens Jr., magical thinking involves several elements, including a belief in the interconnectedness of all things through forces and powers that transcend both physical and spiritual connections. Magical thinking invests special powers and forces in many things that are seen as symbols. According to Stevens, “the vast majority of the world’s peoples … believe that there are real connections between the symbol and its referent, and that some real and potentially measurable power flows between them.” He believes there is a neurobiological basis for this, though the specific content of any symbol is culturally determined. (Not that some symbols aren’t universal, e.g., the egg, fire, water. Not that the egg, fire, or water symbolize the same things in all cultures.)

One of the driving principles of magical thinking is the notion that things that resemble each other are causally connected in some way that defies scientific testing (the law of similarity). Another driving principle is the belief that “things that have been either in physical contact or in spatial or temporal association with other things retain a connection after they are separated” (the law of contagion) (Frazer; Stevens).

Keep Reading: magical thinking – The Skeptic’s Dictionary – Skepdic.com.

… the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) has just given approval to Proteus Digital Health for the use of a tiny microchip to be placed in medication taken orally.

The supposed purpose of the microchip embedded in the medication is to “improve the effectiveness of existing pharmaceutical treatments.” If that were only the case, then I would not question it at all, but when you read what they really say on the company’s website, it causes me concern about who is getting what information about my body and what it will be used for:

Digital Medicines are the same pharmaceuticals you take today, with one small change: each pill also contains a tiny sensor that can communicate, via our digital health feedback system, vital information about your medication-taking behaviors and how your body is responding.”

Please take note that these chips will be monitoring when you take the medication, how much you take and how effective it is. Then it will be reporting this information back to someone who will then have that information about you and your body. Someone we don’t know will be receiving our personal information and sharing it with whom?

Keep Reading: Could Microchip Laden Drugs Be Used To Invade Our Privacy – Godfather Politics.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — For millennia, humans have pondered their mortality and whether death is the end of existence or a gateway to an afterlife. Millions of Americans have reported near-death or out-of-body experiences. And adherents of the world’s major religions believe in an afterlife, from reincarnation to resurrection and immortality.

Anecdotal reports of glimpses of an afterlife abound, but there has been no comprehensive and rigorous, scientific study of global reports about near-death and other experiences, or of how belief in immortality influences human behavior. That will change with the award of a three-year, $5 million grant by the John Templeton Foundation to John Martin Fischer, distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, to undertake a rigorous examination of a wide range of issues related to immortality. It is the largest grant ever awarded to a humanities professor at UC Riverside, and one of the largest given to an individual at the university.

Keep Reading: UCR Today: $5 Million Grant Awarded by Private Foundation to Study Immortality.

I have a theory: There’s something inherent in human nature that makes people need religion. Some kind of religion. Any kind of religion. Even the most atheist people in the world still can’t fight this urge to have some kind of religious conviction.

With this I don’t mean that every single individual person in existence has religious convictions. Of course there are exceptions, ie. people who truly are neutral and skeptic in the proper sense of the word, who do not obsess about some conviction. However, these seem to be more the exception than the rule. What I mean is that no matter what group of people we are talking about, there will always be some fanatic individuals which obsess about something with religious conviction.

Even people with an atheist world view can still have hard time resisting this urge, and thus they will find some substitute.

One such substitute in the modern world are conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theory fanatics present all the symptoms of religious fanatics. Here are some of them:

  1. A conspiracy theorist has “seen the light”, so to speak. That is, he has seen the Truth, which the majority of other people haven’t.
  2. A conspiracy theorist has the absolute, irrefutable, unshakable CONVICTION that he knows the Truth, only the Truth, and nothing but the Truth. There’s absolutely no doubt in his mind that what he believes is the Truth.The conspiracy theorist will say things like “there’s NO WAY these photos are not faked” and “there’s NO WAY this is something else than controlled demolition”, etc. He is absolutely sure and certain at all possible levels that he knows the truth.
  3. There’s absolutely nothing you can say that will convince the conspiracy theorist otherwise. You can refute every single claim he makes to absolute smithereens with hard scientific easy-to-understand facts, and that will not move his conviction even a fraction of an inch. Not even a shadow of a doubt will cross his mind at any point.
  4. The doctrine which the conspiracy theorist believes is based on a series of books, web pages and “documentaries” made by some other conspiracy theorists (which are completely akin to prophets), and every single word in these works is considered the absolute Truth by the conspiracy theorist. Every single claim, no matter how small or how ridiculous, is the absolute Truth. Not a single claim is considered dubious or unimportant.
  5. The conspiracy theorist has the irresistible urge to spread the Truth to others, the lost lambs who wander in darkness and still don’t know the Truth, who haven’t seen the light, and who must be converted.Spreading the Truth is in no way limited to the Internet. Like the most vocal religious movements, also conspiracy theorists will organize protest marches and parades, where they will disturb the peace of completely unrelated events, they will get into TV shows to spread their convictions, they will preach to individuals at their workplaces and other places, etc, etc.

Keep Reading Facts about conspircy theorists and beleivers. | Autistic skeptic..

Can you remember what you ate for lunch on March 8, 1999? What about what you were wearing on Oct. 29, 1985? A handful of people — only 33 confirmed to date — can remember such minutiae, recalling almost every moment of their lives after about age 10 in near-perfect detail. They have what scientists call a highly superior autobiographical memory, and now researchers have identified what makes their brains special.

Researchers at University of California, Irvine (UCI) studied 11 people with the condition and flagged distinct quirks in nine structures of their brains. Most of those differences, unsurprisingly, were in areas associated with autobiographical memory. The participants also had more robust white matter linking the middle and front parts of the brain compared with a group of control subjects.

Documenting these brain anomalies gives scientists a “descriptive, coherent story of what’s going on” in the minds of people with this unusual condition, UCI researcher Aurora LePort explained in a statement.

Keep Reading: Why Some People Can Recall Life’s Every Moment | LiveScience.

Lucid dreamers, people who can deliberately control their dreams during sleep, have long fascinated scientists. And now brain scans of those self-aware sleepers could offer insight into the seat of self-reflection in the mind.

It is difficult to get a full picture of what goes on in the brain when we make the transition from sleep to wakefulness. In fact, the specific areas of the brain underlying our restored self-perception and consciousness when we wake up have eluded scientists, according to a statement by the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry. But a team of researchers was able to get a picture of that isolated activity in lucid dreamers.

“In a normal dream, we have a very basal consciousness, we experience perceptions and emotions but we are not aware that we are only dreaming,” study researcher Martin Dresler, of Max Planck, said in a statement. “It’s only in a lucid dream that the dreamer gets a meta-insight into his or her state.”

Keep Reading: Lucid Dreamers Offer Clues to Consciousness | LiveScience.

Your brain may be more likely to recognize new things as new when the unknown is already on your mind, according to new research.

The findings suggest that memories are not made or recalled in a vacuum, said study researcher Lila Davachi, a psychologist at New York University. Instead, memories are built with the influence of what your brain has just been exposed to, she said.

“Your previous state of mind can influence the way you see the world and what sort of decisions you make,” Davachi told LiveScience.

In fact, the research suggests that the hippocampus, the part of the brain that encodes memories, may have two jobs that it can’t perform at the same time: building new memories and recognizing old ones. The time it takes to switch between these two tasks may explain why the brain is better at recognizing new things when it’s already in “new thing” mode.

Keep Reading: Brain Is Biased When Learning New Information | LiveScience.

“There are many different forms,” says David Eagleman, a neuroscientist known for his ability to garner important insights into the nature of perception and consciousness through idiosyncratic methods. “Essentially, any cross-blending of the senses that you can think of, my colleagues and I have found a case somewhere.”

Seeing Sound, Tasting Color: Synesthesia – YouTube.
See Also: Synesthesia – The Skeptic’s Dictionary

I’d like to take this moment to thank everybody for their continued support of iLLumiNuTTi.com. Since we first opened our doors in April we have had a fantastic growth in the number of visitors. Thank you! Keep telling your friends about us and don’t forget to “Like” us on FaceBook and we’ll continue to bring you the weird, wacky and fun stuff!

Have fun and feel free to comment your ideas and suggestions. :)

Mason I. Bilderberg

Inattentional blindness is an inability to perceive something that is within one’s direct perceptual field because one is attending to something else. The term was coined by psychologists Arien Mack and Irvin Rock, who identified the phenomenon while studying the relationship of attention to perception. They were able to show that, under a number of different conditions, if subjects were not attending to a visual stimulus but were attending to something else in the visual field, a significant percentage of the subjects were “blind” to something that was right before their eyes.

Because this inability to perceive, this sighted blindness, seemed to be caused by the fact that subjects were not attending to the stimulus but instead were attending to something else … we labeled this phenomenon inattentional blindness (IB).*

Mack and Rock go on to argue that, in their view, “there is no conscious perception without attention.” We might add that visual perception does not work like a video or any other kind of recorder. Objects or movements may occur in the visual field that are not attended to and may not be consciously or unconsciously perceived. Things can change in the visual field without our being aware of the changes. Perception, like memory, is a constructive process, and it seems that the brain builds its representations from a few salient details, often determined by our purposes or desires. Thus, two people may witness the same events but see and remember quite different things, even if both are good observers paying close attention to what is going on.

Read More: Unnatural Acts that can improve your thinking: inattentional blindness.

Vaccine hysteria is a trend of mistrust of vaccination that is almost as old as the technique itself. “Anti-vaxxers”, “vaccine deniers”, or “anti-vaccinationists” blame vaccines, or their ingredients, for a range of maladies whose mechanisms are rejected or have not been explained by current scientific research. Some of these maladies can often be childhood illnesses in order to increase the emotive factor of the argument. The ubiquity of vaccination often makes it an easy target for blame.

Vaccine-preventable diseases have been a major cause of illness, death, and disability throughout human history. The advent of the modern vaccine era has changed this significantly; most North Americans and Europeans have little memory of a pre-vaccine era where diseases such as mumps and measles – to say nothing of smallpox or polio — were common and often deadly.

Keep Reading: Vaccine hysteria – RationalWiki.

by Steven Novella, Jul 23 2012

According to reports, 21 people had to be treated for burns from walking over hot coals at a Tony Robbins inspirational event.

Robbins is a successful self-help guru with a schtick that depends upon the scientific illiteracy of his audience. After a session of telling people how to “unleash the power within” he demonstrates their new-found power by inviting them to walk barefoot over hot burning coals while thinking about cool moss. This is meant to demonstrate the power of mind over matter. This is, of course, nonsense.

The Hot Coal Deception

Many physicists have used the hot coal demonstration to teach a bit of elementary physics, as there is a very simple explanation for how people can walk over hot coals in their bare feet.

Keep Reading: Skepticblog » Firewalk Mishap.

The illusion of understanding occurs frequently due to selection bias and confirmation bias. By selecting only data that support one’s position and ignoring relevant data that would falsify or compromise one’s position, one can produce a convincing but misleading argument. By seeking only examples that confirm one’s belief and by ignoring examples that disconfirm it or reveal the insignificance of the data you’ve put forth, one can easily create the illusion of understanding. The illusion of understanding is particularly prominent in the field of economic forecasting.

[...]

Think about it. If stock analysts could really beat the market consistently, wouldn’t they be stinking rich? Do you really think they are a clan of benevolent elves whose only goal is to help people like you get rich from their technical advice? Their cousins appear in infomercials all the time, telling stories about unfathomable riches that await you if you invest in their program. That’s how they make their money: not by using their program, but by selling it to others!

Keep Reading: Unnatural Acts that can improve your thinking: illusion of understanding.

The chemtrail conspiracy theory seems to frequently misidentify ordinary contrails as “chemtrails” – some kind of secret spraying program. This theory comes in many flavors, and there’s a large number of things people bring up as “evidence” to support this theory. I’ve tried to gather all the debunks of this evidence in one place here, for easy reference. This is a work in progress, and will remain on the front page here as I expand and refine it.

While the title of this post is “How to Debunk Chemtrails”, the actual debunking depends on what version of the theory needs debunking. There’s a variety of common claims, and variations on those themes. The best approach is to debunk the individual claim (such as: contrails only last a few seconds), rather than trying to debunk the entire theory.

I’ve tried to arrange each section in the order of most useful links first.

Keep Reading: How to Debunk Chemtrails – Contrail Science » Contrail Science.

«Cleverbot is a web application that uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to hold conversations with humans.»

«Since being launched on the web in 1997, the number of conversations has exceeded 65 million. Unlike other chatterbots, Cleverbot’s responses are not programmed into it, but rather selected from phrases entered by humans in previous conversations. Humans type into the box below the Cleverbot logo and the system finds all of the keywords or an exact phrase matching the input and after searching through its saved conversations of previous chats, responds to the input by finding how a human responded to that input in past conversations when posed by Cleverbot,[2][3] although the commercial version of Cleverbot has more than one thousand requests per server, the ones hosted were for 1 or 2 people per server. This allowed more speed and quality of responses hosted by the artificial intelligence system.» (Description courtesy Wikipedia)

I can tell you from experience, chatting with CleverBot can get a bit creepy at times. Some of the responses generated by CleverBot’s computer can seem so human-like.

From the CleverBot website:

PLEASE NOTE  -  Cleverbot learns from real people  -  things it says may seem inappropriate  -  use with discretion, and at YOUR OWN RISK

PARENTAL ADVICE  -  Visitors never talk to a human, however convincing it looks  -  the AI knows many topics  -  use ONLY WITH OVERSIGHT

Try conversing with CleverBot: Cleverbot.com – a clever bot – speak to an AI with some Actual Intelligence?.

Related Links:

via Debunked: KMIR6 Geoengineering the Skies (chemtrails) – YouTube.

Conventional wisdom has it that when people talk, the direction of their eye movements reveals whether or not they’re lying. A glance up and to the left supposedly means a person is telling the truth, whereas a glance to the upper right signals deceit. However, new research thoroughly debunks these notions. As it turns out, you can’t smell a liar by where he looks.

Researchers in the United Kingdom investigated the alleged correlation between eye direction and lying after realizing it was being taught in behavioral training courses, seminars and on the Web without the support of a shred of scientific evidence. The idea has its roots in a largely discredited 1970s theory called Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), a set of techniques intended to help people master social interactions.

Keep Reading: Notion That Liars Glance to the Right Debunked | LifesLittleMysteries.com.
Related: The eyes don’t have it: New research into lying and eye movements.

You and your family are on holiday, driving round a mountainous part of Greece, when suddenly a tire bursts. You roll over and over down some 100 metres before a large olive tree blocks your fall. Amazingly, you all emerge from the battered heap. Some days later, at work, you recount the tale, struggling to capture for your colleagues one of the odder aspects of the experience. It was, you say, a bit like a dream – or maybe a slow-motion movie, it was like being outside yourself, unreal…

Keep Reading: Short Sharp Science: Out-of-body experience highlights clues to consciousness.

Much of what we call “paranormal” are facets or properties of the natural world that we do not yet understand. And although ball lighting is not usually considered a paranormal phenomenon – and is almost certainly a natural phenomenon – its mysterious nature has puzzled scientists and paranormal researchers alike for centuries.

There currently is no fully satisfactory or generally accepted scientific theory for ball lightning, mainly because it is so rare, and when it does occur it doesn’t stay around long enough to be studied; it generally has a lifetime of less than five seconds. According to one researcher, “ball lightning is the name given to the mobile luminous spheres which have been observed during thunderstorms. Visual sightings are often accompanied by sound, odor, and permanent material damage.” Many scientists still deny its existence, but there are so many eyewitness accounts of the phenomenon that it’s difficult to deny its reality.

Continue Reading: The Mystery of Ball Lightning.
Related: Encounters with Ball Lightning

Beloved of spiritualists and bored teenagers on a dare, the Ouija board has long been a source of entertainment, mystery and sometimes downright spookiness. Now it could shine a light on the secrets of the unconscious mind.

The Ouija, also known as a talking board, is a wooden plaque marked with the words, “yes”, “no” and the letters of the alphabet. Typically a group of users place their hands on a movable pointer , or “planchette”, and ask questions out loud. Sometimes the planchette signals an answer, even when no one admits to moving it deliberately.

Believers think the answer comes through from the spirit world. In fact, all the evidence points to the real cause being the ideomotor effect, small muscle movements we generate unconsciously.

That’s why the Ouija board has attracted the attention of psychologists at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Growing evidence suggests the unconscious plays a role in cognitive functions we usually consider the preserve of the conscious mind.

Keep Reading: Short Sharp Science: Ouija board helps psychologists probe the subconscious.

Reblogged from Red Lipstick & Caviar:

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By now most of you all know I'm in to what other people would consider "bizarre". I collect books that fulfill the explorer and inner investigator in me. After purchasing several books off Amazon I - obviously - read them all, but one book in particular stood out the most to me; a book by Dr. Fred Alan Wolf called 

Read more… 3,362 more words

Holy cow. Talk about the weird and wacky way people think and believe ...

Do you spend a lot of time worrying about the future, living in the “good old days” or just “live the moment? How we subjectively perceive the past, present and future may play a role in how fulfilling our lives are and finally how happy we are at the end of the day.

According to a recent study published in the Journal of Happiness Studies (April 2012) … if you can look fondly at the past, enjoy yourself in the present, strive for future goals and hold these time perspectives simultaneously (and don’t go overboard on any one of them) you’re likely to be a happy person.

Keep Reading: Scientific study: Key to happiness is a balanced perspective of time – National Holistic Science & Spirit | Examiner.com.

The Skeptic’s Dictionary definition of the day …

Astral projection is a type of out-of-body experience (OBE) in which the astral body leaves its other six bodies and journeys far and wide to anywhere in the universe.

There is scant evidence to support the claim that anyone can project their mind, soul, psyche, spirit, astral body, etheric body, or any other entity to somewhere else on this or any other planet. The main evidence is in the form of testimonials.

via astral projection – The Skeptic’s Dictionary – Skepdic.com.

This may seem like something out of a science fiction movie: researchers have designed microparticles that can be injected directly into the bloodstream to quickly oxygenate your body, even if you can’t breathe anymore. It’s one of the best medical breakthroughs in recent years, and one that could save millions of lives every year.

via Scientists Invent Particles That Will Let You Live Without Breathing.

The Skeptic’s Dictionary definition of the day …

Self-deception is the process or fact of misleading ourselves to accept claims about ourselves as true or valid when they are false or invalid. Self-deception, in short, is a way we justify false beliefs about ourselves to ourselves.

Read more: self-deception – The Skeptic’s Dictionary – Skepdic.com.

Watch this EXCELLENT video -  Michael Shermer: The pattern behind self-deception (19 minutes):

Evolution has tailored the human eye for detecting red, green, blue and yellow in a person’s skin, which reveals areas where that person’s blood is oxygenated, deoxygenated, pooled below the surface or drained. We subconsciously read these skin color cues to perceive each other’s emotions and states of health. Rosy cheeks can suggest good health, for example, while a yellowish hue hints at fear.

Now, researchers have created new glasses, called O2Amps, which they say amplify the wearer’s perception of blood physiology, augmenting millions of years of eye evolution.

Read more: How New ‘Mood Ring’ Glasses Let You See Emotions | LifesLittleMysteries.com.

The Center for Inquiry-New York City and NYC Skeptics hosted noted skeptic and bestselling author Michael Shermer for a talk about his new book, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies – How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths.

Read more: Michael Shermer: The Believing Brain (Lecture) | Watch Free Documentary Online.

This video is 80 minutes long but, for me, i enjoyed it. Grab a snack and watch it here:

Tractor beams — which allow spaceships to pick up and shift objects without physically touching them — have long been a staple of science fiction.

Previous attempts to build them have relied on inducing electric or magnetic charges, using heat to create air pressure differences, and even attempting to manipulate gravity. However, a physicist has proposed and intriguing new possibility — one that uses nothing but light.

Keep Reading: Could Tractor Beams Be Made From Light? | Wired Science | Wired.com.

“Communion” at 25: Whitley Strieber’s Alien Claims Re-examined


The following three part series is courtesy of Muertos, owner and operator of Thrive Debunked – a blog dedicated to fact checking errors and false statements contained in the conspiracy theory documentary “Thrive“.

Today, the concept of “alien abduction” is now a cultural meme. Virtually everyone in the Western world, and probably a good chunk of the non-Western world, is familiar with the paradigm: the belief that extraterrestrials visit the Earth, occasionally kidnap unsuspecting persons, subject them to weird experiments (usually involving an anal probe or some other humiliating procedure) and set them loose again. Alien abduction is now mainstream enough to be mentioned on comedy shows like South Park and Mad TV and gag lines in blockbuster movies like Independence Day. It’s one of those fringe topics that arouses intense, but usually temporary, curiosity.
Continue Reading Part 1

In part 1 (above), I wrote about the book Communion by Whitley Strieber, which so far as I know remains to date the best-selling book ever written on UFOs or related subjects. Strieber’s central claim was that he was abducted and sexually assaulted by nonhuman beings, which he calls “visitors,” on December 26, 1985 (a quarter century ago this week) and that after this experience he realized he’d been interacting with the “visitors” for most of his life. In this blog I continue the discussion of Strieber and his claims, focusing on his sequels, Transformation (1988) and Breakthrough (1995), as well as the film of Communion made in 1989.
Continue Reading Part 2

In the two previous blogs in this series (Part I (above), Part II (above)) I examined Communion and Transformation, the books written by horror author Whitley Strieber in which he claimed that he has been abducted by aliens repeatedly for most of his life. Communion came out in 1987 and began with the claim that Strieber was abducted from his New York cabin on December 26, 1985, which was 25 years ago this week. From there his claims evolved to include the following: (i) the beings that abducted him, which he initially declined to state were objectively real, actually are physical reality; (ii) that these “visitors” are conducting a large-scale program of “contact” with the human race; (iii) that the point of this “contact” is to transform human consciousness and get us to pay attention to spiritual matters; and (iv) that there are a number of weird side effects of “contact,” such as the ability to have out of body experiences (OBEs).
Continue Reading Part 3

Selection bias partly explains why there are reports of many satisfied customers who go to psychics, tarot card readers, palm readers, faith healers, acupuncturists, homeopaths, and others who provide bogus treatments such as mistletoe for cancer. The unsatisfied customers are either not asked for their opinion, they’re too embarrassed to give it, or they’re dead.

via Unnatural Acts that can improve your thinking: selection bias.

Few topics in science excite the popular imagination more than antimatter, perhaps because the idea sounds like science fiction that you can really be­lieve in. For the same reason, it should not be surprising that when a story about antimatter surfaces in the news cycle—as regularly happens—the real science sometimes gets parked on the shelf and media-promoted pseudoscience takes over.

via CSI | Antimatter Pseudoscience.

The human brain is a weird old thing. When confronted with a new, uncertain situation, it virtually always abandons careful analysis, and instead resorts to a host of mental shortcuts—that almost always lead to the wrong answer. Turns out, the smarter you are, the more likely you are to make such mistakes.

via Why Smart People Are Actually Dumb.

A growing body of psychology research shows that incompetence deprives people of the ability to recognize their own incompetence. To put it bluntly, dumb people are too dumb to know it. Similarly, unfunny people don’t have a good enough sense of humor to tell.

This disconnect may be responsible for many of society’s problems.

More: Incompetent People Too Ignorant to Know It | LifesLittleMysteries.com.

Links in the comment section of the above video.

Links in the comment section of the above video.

Ancient Aliens Debunked – Part 8 – Now Posted

This 4,500 year old painting was found in an Egyptian tomb. Is this a painting of an alien grey? Does this prove the building and placement of the Pyramids were aided by alien intelligence? Does this explain how the Egyptians were able to build the Pyramids with such precision?

Click Here and learn the truth!

Ancient Aliens Debunked