Speedkill

I meant to post about this last week. A study about sausage preferences:

People who scored high on “social authority” – they believed it was important to support people in power – tended to label the “vegetarian” sausage as inferior, even when the vegetarian sausage was actually from a cow. Likewise, people who scored low on “social power values” tended to score the vegan sausage much higher than the beef sausage, even when they were actually eating meat.

So sometimes a sausage isn’t just a sausage. Not all foods are like this, he notes, but still (the only soy replacement product I’ve tried is mozzarella cheese. It was close, but not quite convincing).

Another lesson in why you shouldn’t trust yourself to be objective.

This is completely insane. A psychic told an “educational assistant” that a student with a name starting with ‘V’ was being abused by young male. That forced the school to inform the authorities, who started investigating the claim. All because of a scam artist and a gullible mark.

The idea that anyone involved in educating children is gullible enough to believe something like this is mind-boggling. There’s a reason ads for psychics say “for entertainment purposes only” – it’s complete bullshit. And of course, the psychic made the vague prediction of a child with a ‘V’ name and picked an unidentified male in his 20s as the accuser. Just in case she wasn’t casting a wide enough net with her smear.

And if the psychic had accused the mother or a teacher? The potential for harm here is enormous. It’s bad enough that they’re being dragged through an investigation as it is, but if the mother or a teacher was the target? Smeared because of a con-artist claiming nonexistent supernatural powers. I’d be pretty pissed.

I keep seeing ads for Zicam on TV. Zicam is a homeopathic cold remedy that, unlike most homeopathic remedies, has progressed beyond anti-modern medicine hippiedom and found a marketing department. Homeopathy combines two stupid ideas: the claim that taking a substance that causes symptoms similar to an illness will cure that illness and that such a substance is most effective when diluted to the point where you’ve only ingested a couple of molecules of it.

I guess the moral of the story is that next time you get a headache, hit yourself in the head with a bat. A really tiny one.

Can you tell I’m bored tonight?

Apparently there are weird lights in Texas. Not all that weird, but then there’s this person, who posits that since they appear to be spinning, the Air Force could be experimenting with time travel. Now, you might think that’s a bit of a leap. You’d be wrong. It’s actually several gigantic leaps the landing points of which may not even exist. I prefer my simpler theory, which is that the Air Force has created enormous bits of rainbow colored Kabbalah string and is throwing them in the air in order to protect us from terrorists.

Item 2 is the fact that people actually watch professional wrestling. Apparently Vince McMahon has a midget son who is going to fight him in a steel cage. Every time I see an ad for one of those events I seriously consider becoming one of those Christians who thinks everything on TV is satanic.

Item 3 is that a city council in England paid a psychic to rid a house of poltergeists. She put a “circle of salt” in the house and the ghost left. Apparently ghosts are deathly afraid of getting clogged arteries.

1. Greatest award ever? The Ig Nobel for linguistics for this year:

Linguistics – A University of Barcelona team for showing that rats are unable to tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and somebody speaking Dutch backwards.

2. James Randi has challenged the reviewer of a pair of $7,250 audio cables to prove he can tell the difference between them and equivalent (and still overpriced) Monster cables. His million is the prize. While Randi is right in principle, it’s a little concerning. The review Randi quotes is absurd, but with the right equipment and really good ears it seems possible to hear a difference between the two cables. Extraordinarily unlikely, in my opinion, but possible in a non-paranormal way. In the end, Randi won’t be taken up for the same reasons the other famous purveyors of pseudo-scientific bullshit won’t: the risk to their livelihood is too great.

3. Downside to being an atheist: I have to deity to blame for the snow here. It’s October, I’m not prepared for this yet.

They never really go away, do they?

(via Pharyngula)

David Lynch, whose movies I enjoy quite a bit, spouts debunked New Age nonsense in the Independent:

Indy: You’re talking about Transcendental Meditation?

Lynch: Yes. Transcendental Meditation is a mental technique—it’s not a religion, it’s not against any religion, it’s not a cult, it’s not a sect. It’s a mental technique and an ancient form of meditation that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is bringing back now. It’s a mental technique that allows any human being to dive within and experience subtler levels of mind and intellect, and transcend and experience the unbounded, infinite, eternal level of pure bliss consciousness, what modern scientists call the unified field at the base of all matter and the base of all mind.

I was actually trained in TM as a teenager, but I think I was too young to appreciate it. I understand the basic principles, but not some of the concepts you discuss in the book. Like, what are peace factories?

In Transcendental Meditation, you’re experiencing the deepest level of life, and it enlivens that level, and that level is totally positive. It’s like a bright light of positivity, and when you experience it you enliven it and you grow in that. The side effect of growing that unity and that pure consciousness and that bliss, is that negative things start to recede. When negativity recedes you start to enjoy life more and more.
Negativity is hate, anger, fear, depression, sorrow, anxiety, tension, corruption, disease—all these things. When that goes there is huge freedom, huge happiness and a flow of creativity, increased intelligence, energy and power. Beautiful, beautiful things happen just from transcending and visiting “back home” and enlivening that beautiful field. If you can enliven that beautiful field as a group, it has been proven successful at reducing crime, violence, road accidents, trips to the hospital.

Indy: And you say that it takes the square root of 1 percent of the population to create a peace factory?

Lynch: It has been tested 52 times, and independently verified. It’s a group that practices advanced techniques of meditation together, enlivening that field of unity within, and pumping this light out into collective consciousness, influencing collective consciousness with harmony, coherence, dynamic peace. The side effect of that is negativity starts to recede and peace can come to earth.

Um, no. TM has done nothing like that and has not been verified scientifically. It’s a meditation technique with the benefits of such techniques and that’s it.

The interview continues with more New Age babble and a few interesting comments about his movies. Kind of a bust, if you ask me.

(link via Jay)

A lesson in being skeptical of things that confirm your biases.

I thought it was some combination of roller-blading and golfing, but what do I know? Anyway, I came across it at work and wondered what exactly it was. I sort of knew it was related to New Age-y alternative medicine, but didn’t really know much about it. A brief synopsis:

Rolfing® seems to be a kind of myofascial massage, but Rolfers prefer to call it “movement education.” Whatever you call it, Rolfing involves touching the skin, feeling around for “imbalances” in tissue texture, and separating “fascial layers that adhere and muscles that have been pulled out of position by strain or injury.”* It is also a kind of energy medicine.* Rolfers consider their unique contribution to be “to balance the body in gravity.” Deep massage or other forms of soft tissue manipulation can’t do that, they say.

It looks for all the world like a form of massage. Rolfers apparently don’t really think so, but they don’t seem to do a good job explaining why it isn’t. As would be expected from a form of alternative medicine, there’s plenty of weird and nonsensical gibberish explaining it:

The Rolf Institute of Structural Integration (RISI) has continued Dr. Rolf’s profound inquiry into how to enhance the whole person by organizing the body in gravity.

…

Rolfing is a holistic technique in that changes in structure can impact the whole person, physically, emotionally, and energetically.

…

In Rolf Movement Integration, the Rolfer helps clients become aware of their inhibiting movement patterns and teaches them how to change them. In Rolfing structural integration, the Rolfer releases these patterns through manipulation as they manifest in the client’s structure. Rolfing is as concerned with how people experience and use their bodies in their daily lives as with their structural organization in gravity.

I’d like to see anyone to explain how rolfing improves “structural organization in gravity.”

That’s really the problem with the sort of physical therapy-ish alternative practices. To the extent that they do anything, it’s placebo and basic muscle, joint, and skeletal function improvement. Not content with that, a bunch of metaphysical pap and elusory benefits are added to dazzle the consumer into thinking it’s something new and exciting.

Cruising around the MT blogosphere I see I’m not the only one who received a bit of 9/11 conspiracy theory spam. I imagine it’s all from the same person, with the IP address of 69.3.84.145, which appears to be from the San Jose, CA area. A Google search reveals lots of similar comments.

I haven’t decided whether I’m leaving it up or not, as it’s somewhat entertaining, but is only a step above spam.

It’s almost worth debunking, actually. Except it’s mostly already done here.

UPDATE: Enlightenment, your comments were caught by SK2 (probably due to the number of links and the repeated postings). I restored the ones I could find in the logs. It would serve you well to calm down and remember some of us have jobs where we can’t attend our sites at all times.

UPDATE 2: I decided to delete the pointless insult from Enlightenment on the post following this one. Also, sorry to those he decided to spam out of impatience.