Skepticblog

A Taiwanese man, after losing 2 million dollars to a Vegas casino, is demanding his money back because, he claims, the casino deliberately gave him bad feng shui. Yes, that is the kind of world we are living in.

Yuan was happy with his Feng Shui when we was winning $400,000, but then his luck turned and eventually he lost his winnings plus 2 million more. Now it is reported:

…the Venetian dug a one-metre (40-inch) square hole on the wall of the presidential suite he was staying in April last year and covered it with a black cloth, said Apple Daily.

The casino also put two white towels in front of Yuan’s suite and turned on two large fans facing his room without notifying him, it said.

Those bastards!

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OK, this is weird.

Today I was invited to host an episode of a new series for a major cable network in which I was to interview and administer a test to three professional psychics. This was the first episode they’d shot, and the producers and director were really nice and cool and it had all the makings of a fun and productive day. They had located three psychics who were all game, and were fully willing to undergo the tests under controlled conditions. Moreover, the show had even secured a $50,000 prize that any psychics who passed today’s tests would be qualified to try for. I arrived fully prepared, with some detailed protocols, and a raft of properly controlled materials.

Here’s the rub. The entire day was a setup. It was a gag, with Michael Shermer and myself as the unwitting victims. (continue reading…)

Some UFO stories are sillier than others. Among the very silliest are claims that NASA not only has evidence that the Space Shuttle is buzzed by flying saucers, but that they have video of it and this video is commonly released by NASA.

OK, can we first screw our heads on straight here? If you’re claiming that astronauts routinely take video of alien spacecraft, and that NASA is desperately trying to cover them up, why in the frak would they release the video?

Hello, McFly? I mean, seriously?

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So tonight I was helping a friend of mine who wanted to advertise his business on the internet. He’s not computer savvy at all. And little did I know, he had no real idea how the internet really worked with regard to search engines, rankings, keywords, and the like. He is a really smart person, but not in this area.

He wanted to setup a web page to create a web presence there so he could get more customers. Simple enough.

That’s fine, he’s a friend and will be a good client. Little did I know that the internet and all it’s seedy folks had already got their greedy little hooks into him. (continue reading…)

The friendly folks behind the registration counter were efficient in processing the badges for the 450+ attendees, plus selling you a t-shirt or two of primate Darwin, denoting that this year’s HBES conference celebrates the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species.

On Friday May 29 I attended the 21st annual conference of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) — the official organization of evolutionary psychologists and champions of applying Darwinian thinking to human psychology. The last HBES meeting I attended was at U.C. Santa Barbara in 1995, which was sparsely attended compared to this year’s 450+ attendees packed into tiny conference rooms for the simultaneous sessions — always a frustrating choice architecture when you want to attend more than one talk being presented at the same time. I only had a day to attend the three-day conference, so this will be necessarily unrepresentative of the remarkable body of research now being churched out by hundreds of professional evolutionary psychologists from all over the world. (continue reading…)

As much as unscientific medicine is a problem in relatively wealthy Western nations, it is even more so in developing and third world countries. In the US so-called CAM (complementary and alternative medicine) is largely consumed by the “worried well” – people with disposable income who use it to treat common everyday ailments or symptoms. CAM does also infiltrate the treatment of serious diseases, but to a much smaller degree.

In the third world, however, unscientific treatments for serious public health threats is a real problem. Malaria, HIV, TB, influenza, and childhood diarrhea are all epidemic in Africa and other locations, all exacerbated by the lack of adequate health care resources. The impact of this lack of resources is worsened by reliance on ineffective pseudoscience treatments, and sometimes (as with HIV) the denial of scientific treatments.

The World Health Organization (WHO) whose very purpose is to serve the public health worldwide, especially in developing and struggling nations, has failed to adequately address the problem of unscientific medicine. The WHO, unfortunately, is an imperfect political organization and as such is vulnerable to sectarian interests. It has a poor record on combating unscientific medicine, and in fact promotes it.

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