Skepticblog

As P.T. Barnum famously said, “There’s a sucker born every minute”. Sometimes the scams are old and well known, but some con artist will resurrect them and try to cash in before people get wise.

Take, for example, this video, which my friends at Panda’s Thumb were dissecting a few months ago. The credulous Fox news station reports this “great invention” as a “miracle” that can solve the energy crisis. This “inventor” is proclaiming that he has “discovered” a new form of dihydrogen oxide (they claim it’s HHO, not H2O) by separating hydrogen from the hydroxyl ion by electrolysis. The video then breathlessly describes how hot this gas burns through various objects while allegedly it is not hot to the touch. Then the “inventor” shows off his hybrid car which runs on a mixture of this “miracle gas” plus regular gasoline. The video footage concludes with various people trying to help him get a patent on his “invention” and the possibility of him testifying before Congress about his “miracle discovery.”

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The Geological Society of America (GSA) is one of the largest organizations of geologists in the world (over 24,000 members). It holds not only an annual meeting every fall in a different city, but also five regional meetings around the U.S. regions (Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, Rocky Mountains, and Cordilleran) throughout the year. Although 97 different countries contribute members, it is composed mostly of U.S., Canadian, and some Central American geologists. The GSA focuses on the cutting-edge and pure research aspects of geology, performed mostly by academics and government geologists. Thus, it is very different from meetings of petroleum geologists or mining geologists or engineering geologists, who tend to be employed in for-profit enterprises and focus on purely practical local problems. The annual GSA meeting routinely draws 6000 or more people for a four-day session, so there are over 2000 talks and posters in at least 30 different sessions with talks every 15 minutes in at least 30 different rooms scattered around some  huge convention center. There SO much to see and hear for a broadly trained and wide-ranging geologist/ paleontologist like myself that I can’t even catch a fraction of what I want to see and hear. For me, it is crucial to make the annual meeting each year to keep up with the latest developments, as well as see old friends that I see only at the meetings, and also to keep up with my geology textbooks and my other books sold in the gigantic exhibits area. I attended my first meeting in 1978 in Toronto, and I have not missed a national GSA since then. I just returned from this fall’s meeting in Minneapolis October 9-12, which was my 33rd in a row.

Most of the time when I attend the meetings, there are plenty of controversial topics and great debates going on within the geological community, so the profession does not suppress unorthodox opinions or play political games. This is the way it should be in any genuine scientific discipline. I’ve seen amazingly confrontational knock-down-drag-out sessions about particularly hotly debated ideas, but always conducted in a spirit of honest scientific exchange and always hewing to rules of science and naturalism. To get on the meeting program, scientists must propose to organize sessions around particular themes, along with field trips to geologically interesting sites within driving distance of the convention city, and the GSA host committee reads and approves these proposals. But every once in a while, I see a poster title and abstract with something suspicious about it. When I check the authors, they turn out to be Young-Earth Creationists (YEC) who claim the earth is only 6000 years old and all of geology can be explained by Noah’s flood. When I visit the poster session, it’s usually mobbed by real geologists giving the YECs a real grilling, even though the poster is ostensibly about some reasonable geologic topic, like polystrate trees in Yellowstone, and there is no overt mention of Noah’s flood in the poster. But the 2010 meeting last year in Denver took the cake: there was a whole field trip run by YECs who did not identify their agenda, and pretended that they were doing conventional geology—until you read between the lines.

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Quite often I’ll get an email suggesting some new woo topic, and some of these are so absurd that I have to laugh and say “There’s a new one.” I got one such email last week. There is a practice called Earthing, of which I had never before heard. The idea is that you connect yourself to the Earth, usually with some sort of wiring and electrodes. The obvious result: Improved health, of course.

Why should this be expected to have any kind of therapeutic value? It’s quite simple. Here is the explanation on the Earthing Institute’s home page:

In an age of rampant chronic disease, reconnecting with the Earth’s energy beneath our very feet provides a way back to better health. We are bioelectrical beings living on an electrical planet.

I hope that clears it up. Continue reading…

I was recently asked about a device for saving energy costs at home – a device for power factor optimization. I checked it out, and it indeed does have all the red flags for a juicy scam.

Techno Scams

One flavor of scam is to overwhelm a potential customer with technical information that sounds superficially impressive but which the customer is sure not to understand. There may be a kernel of truth to the science, but it just takes one technical fatal flaw to doom an otherwise plausible scheme. Examples include special audio cables that cost thousands of dollars, but do not produce any audible difference in sound quality.

A subset of these scams is to take a technology that actually has some advantage in specific industrial applications and then adapt them for residential or personal use, where they have not benefit. An examples of this is filling tires with pure nitrogen – this has a small but real benefit for trucks and large vehicles, but not for your family car.

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How would the average investor know that
Bernie Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme?

Here’s a supreme irony for you. About six months ago a colleague of mine named Stephen Greenspan, a psychiatry professor at the University of Colorado, sent me a book manuscript to review and blurb for him (a blurb is one of those back jacket endorsements from someone who hopefully knows something about the subject of the book). Greenspan’s book is called Annals of Gullibility (Praeger, 2009, due out in January), and it includes chapters on gullibility in literature and folktales (Pinocchio, Gulliver), in religion (end-of-the-world predictions), in war and politics (the Trojan Horse), in criminal justice (child witnesses), in science (cold fusion), and in finance (Ponzi schemes). It’s a great read and an excellent reference source that, as I wrote in my blurb, “belongs on the bookshelves of skeptics and scientists, not to mention politicians and policy analysts, especially before they go to war.” Continue reading…