The Cynic Gazette

To quote one of the greatest fictional characters of all time, Gob (Jobe) from Arrested Development:

“Oh COME ON!”

There’s a *new* reality show on Lifetime which pits American “psychics” against each other in a challenge-format entertainment show called America’s Psychic Challenge. For any other skeptics out there who just thought to themselves “oh my sweet zombie jesus on a crud cracker,” all I can do is say “I feel ya, dog.”

I want to say, “who cares? It’s Lifetime. It’s entertainment.” I can’t.

While I find the concept of this show to be ridiculous fodder for the local vomitorium, we’re going to watch it and find out what alternate title is most suited to this show:

• America’s Best Guesser
• America’s Crappiest Testing Criteria Challenge
• America’s Cold Reading Challenge
• Make James Randi Cry
• America’s Shameless Fraud Challenge
• Will Women Freak Out if Sex And The City Isn’t On For An Hour

We’re hooking my laptop to the TV to watch episode 1 tonight… right after the new episode of Bones.

Joisey Mike Skepticism Americas Psychic Challenge, Crap, Fraud, Psychic, Skepticism

I guess my recent experience of my dad passing away’s started a little obsession with death, and mixed with my rampant skepticism of the more woo-woo beliefs people have, I want to quote this little probability calculation from Brian Dunning’s Here Be Dragons:

• There are 105,120 5-minute intervals in a year
• If you only know 10 people (family, friends, celebs, etc) who die each year…
• And you only think of each of them once a year
• There’s a 1:10,512 chance you’ll think about one during the 5-minute interval in which they die.
• But since there’s about 300,000,000 people living in the USA right now,
• That each year about 28,539 Americans think about someone during the 5-minute interval in which the person they’re thinking about dies.

Not so spooky anymore, is it?

Joisey Mike Skepticism Skepticism

OK, so we’ve established that nobody felt like commenting that they believe in palm reading… surprisingly nobody emailed me sand said they did but didn’t want to comment publicly either. I’m not trying to paint anyone green and put then in charge of an army of flying monkeys, I just want to know.

How about astrology? Do you believe in astrology? 

I know at least one of you* has to because you post daily bulletins about it, so the count here is at least one. So lets hear it. 

*You’re counted, you don’t need to comment if you don’t feel like it.

[This was originally a myspace blog entry, and it refers to the comments there]

Joisey Mike Skepticism astrology, palm reading, Skepticism

But really, smart-ass answers aside, do you believe in palm reading?

[This is from a myspace.com blog entry, and refers to the comments there]

Joisey Mike Skepticism palm reading, Skepticism

I’m pleased to offer the newest product from Snyder Heavy Industries, Snyder’s Homeopathic Birth Control Tonic, and I’m offering it at zero cost to the consumer. Because here at Snyder Heavy Indurstries, we care, and are hoping to get a Wholefoods distribution deal since they’re a leading retailer of homeopathic pills.

How does it work? I thought you might ask. Samuel Hahnemann, the father of homeopathy, bases everything on what he calls the law of similars (basically that like treats like). So, something that causes a problem becomes a solution when introduced in super dilluted quantities, since the medium (water usually, sometimes pure alcohol) remembers the “vibration” of the ingredient.

Being that sperm is the leading cause of pregnancy, homeopathic says that a super dillution will cure AND prevent it! That’s right, if I bolt in a cup and mix it with enough water, it’ll double as birth control AND a morning-after solution!

Most homeopathic remidies on the shelf at Wholefoods are available in dillutions of 30C, since Hahnemann says this as a good general dillution for most ailments, that’s what I’m going with. What’s that mean? Glad you asked.

Homeopathic ingredients, in this case, my freshly squozen sack chowder, all get dilluted on the X scale or the C scale with either distilled water or pure alcohol. A dillution of 1X means one part per 10, and a dillution of 1C means 1 part per 100. So, our dillution ratio of 30C means the dillution will be 1:100^30 or 1:1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Every few dillutions, you have to “actuate” or shake the mixture. Videos of professional homeopaths show actuating as banging a bottle on a leather book, or just shaking it (not unlike a polaroid picture) the way you’d shake a ketchup (NOT catsup) bottle. I’ll be using the “book” method to make sure my gentleman’s leavings are properly actuated.

So come one, come all (I know I will) and get your bottle of Snyder’s Homeopathic Birth Control tonic!

*ahem*

Sound stupid to you too? Well, that’s homeopathy in a nutshell. One other thing worth mentioning–at dillutions over 12C, you’re guaranteed that you won’t get a single molecule of the original ingredient (the math behind this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avogadro_constant).

And the chance you’d get one of my 2 million (ish) swimmy little buddies out of my liquid boy sauce? 1 in 500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Joisey Mike Geek, Skepticism alternative medicine, homeopathy, sarcasm, Skepticism, sperm, wholefoods

Stright out of the “Dam, I wish I’m the one who thought of that” files, comes a science teacher who takes a look at the global warming argument (not global worming itself) as a simplified cost-benefit argument the same way as noted scientician Pascal made his argument for the benefit of belief in god — the benefits of believing greatly outweigh the benefits of not believing. 

Roll that beautiful bean footage:

The only issue I have with this, as I post, think about it, and then edit, is that this assumes that if Global Warming is real, it’s something we can fix. That’s a little too much dewy-eyed optimism for me, since there’s favorable data that we can make things better, but not stop them. We can make it our grand kids’ problem though, and since they’ll be in the future they might have better ideas. Or they can stave it off until their grandkids’ robot overlords protectors fix it.

Joisey Mike Skepticism global warming, science, Skepticism, youtube