This blog might save your life
No, I’m not joking. The information in this blog really might save your life, or the life of someone you know.
What you are about to read is fairly old news, but surprisingly - to me, at least - not many people seem to know about it. It’s important people know this, so please take a few minutes to read it. I know it’s long, unfortunately there’s a lot of information to convey and there’s no easy way to make it shorter.
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Time for the skeptics to eat - nay, *choke on* - their words. It seems the qua homoeopaths have been right all along.
This paper: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v434/n7030/full/nature03383.html describes some recent scientific research which indicate that water does indeed have a memory. They’ve even managed to measure it pretty accurately.
It’s a bit of a long read, so I’ll summarise:
“Our results highlight the efficiency of energy redistribution within the hydrogen-bonded network, and that liquid water essentially loses the memory of persistent correlations in its structure within 50 fs.”
I guess that about wraps things up for the critics of homoeopathy, huh?
Oh, by the way, “50 fs” is 50 femto seconds. A femto second is 0.000,000,000,000,001 seconds. It seems that homoeopathic remedies might have a very short shelf life.
I don’t normally set a lot of store by petitions, but this I believe to be worth supporting.
So what’s this all about? In recent years homeopathy has begun making an entry into the NHS, so much so that recently £10 million of NHS funds was used to refurbish the Royal London Homeopathic hospital. This is only a good use of NHS funds if you approve of state-sponsorship of quackery.
You’ve seen The Secret.
You’ve seen The Secret behind The Secret. <– this one is a MUST SEE, trust me, it really is.
But are you ready for … The Secret of The Secret Behind The Secret?
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This quotation is often attributed to Mark Twain, but poor Mr Twain gets attributed with almost everything these days, along with Oscar Wilde and Winston Churchill. There’s a writeup from York University’s Mathematics Faculty about the true origin of the phrase, for anyone who is interested. But I digress.
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I almost never watch TV, but I’ll make sure I have control of the remote next week when Richard Dawkins’ new documentary The Enemies of Reason airs on Channel 4. The Times Online has a very entertaining writeup about it here and if the series is even half as entertaining, it’ll be a must-see for anyone tired of the flakes, fakes and frauds of the so-called “New Age”.
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If you want your Woo to be accepted, it seems the best way is to mention Quantum Physics. But just how much Woo is there which tries to make itself seem “scientific” by adding a sprinkling of quantums?
A quick google for the phrase “Quantum Physics tells us” came up with a few links.
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Australian Skeptics have a longstanding $100,000 challenge to anyone with paranormal abilities. If you are a psychic, medium, spoon-bender, dowser; if you can divine the future using tarot cards, tea leaves or chicken giblets; if you can move objects at a distance using only the power of your mind; if you can talk to the dead; if you can heal the sick using nothing but “energy healing” then all you have to do is apply to Australian Skeptics, prove your amazing powers, and you win a cool $AUS 100,000. But wait, there’s more.
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You might have heard of a system of self-discovery named “Core Process”. This involves a lengthy session with a specially trained[1] Core Process Psychotherapist where your innermost self - your Real Self™ will be revealed to you and encapsulated for all time in a pithy two word verb-noun phrase[2].
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Recently, I’ve been reading lots of rubbish about the so-called LoG (Law Of Gravity). In case you’ve not heard about it (unlikely as that might be) it appears that way back in the 17th century, some smarty-pants called Isaac Newton was sitting under an apple tree and an apple fell on his head. Now, that must have addled his brain somewhat, because he came up with this bizarre notion about objects attracting one another.
But even more bizarrely, when he told people about it, they didn’t say to him “Isaac, you’ve been out in the sun too long.” Oh, no; instead they said “Hmm, you might be on to something there, matey. Why not write a book about it?” And so was born Newton’s Principia which proposes the so-called Inverse Square Law. Now, any sensible person reading the Principia nowadays would dismiss it as complete tosh. Full of arcane formulae and explanations for things that really need no explanation. And to think that he actually tried to give credence to this ridiculous idea by swinging a bucket around his head. Really, Isaac, you should have got out more.
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