Happy Halloween!

Here are a few things to be afraid of today:

1. The WiFi hysteria in Ontario is still going on, despite an overwhelming scientific consensus that WiFi is perfectly safe.

2. While its fun to go to movies about the paranormal, it seems actual belief in the supernatural may be getting even more common.

3. Christopher Walken reading Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”. (Thanks to Zee’s Wordly Obsessions for bringing this video to my attention).

Women Get Scammed $85000 by “Psychic”

From http://www.xkcd.com

The headline read Women: We Were Scammed By a Psychic.

I thought to myself, ‘This will be funny!’

But as I read, it turned out to be quite a sad story, and unfortunately one that will probably be repeated.

The Coles notes version of the story is that two women went to see a psychic named Patricia Johns to help them with their relationship problems. The psychic proceeded to prey on their vulnerabilities, and eventually scored roughly $85 000 from these two women.

One woman wanted to improve her marriage, while the other asked for help with her best friend. Said one of the women (who asked to remain anonymous),

I’m devastated over what she has done to me…She has just ruined my life.

The psychic used a different approach with each woman. On the first she used “smooth-talk”, but on the second she used something darker. From the WLFI article,

She did not say anything that was sweet-sounding,” said the second woman. “She had you in such fear – for your life, of things that she said people were doing to you. You are already in a weird state of mind when you have a great loss.”

The psychic used scare tactics to keep these women coming in for more sessions. $100 sessions became $400 sessions, and in one instance, the psychic even got one of the victims to buy her a Rolex. How? Well she told the victim that because her problems occurred at a certain time and place, she had to buy a special time piece and throw it into the river to break the curse on her marriage.

The psychic went with the victim to the jewellery store, picked out a $26 000 Rolex, and the victim paid for it. Later, when they went to the river,

The woman said she caught a glimpse of a watch being thrown into the river, but admitted she had no idea if it was a Rolex.

It’s easy to look at this story and say “Oh, these women are stupid” or “They should have known better”. They are probably saying that to themselves right now. But there is a bigger picture here.

When people are desperate, they will try anything. One of the victims in this story was desperate to save her marriage. Can we really blame her for wanting to try anything?

Lets remember that these psychics are very good at what they do. They know how to prey on people’s emotions. They can convince you that they have predicted something about your life, when really they have been guessing the entire time. (Read up on cold-reading to see how they do this).

This rings true of alternative medicine as well. We can’t blame people for going to Homeopaths or faith healers, because they are simply so desperate that they are willing to try and/or pay anything to help themselves.

The culprits are the purveyors of woo. The psychics, palm readers, faith healers etc, who make a living preying on the vulnerabilities and desperation of people like the women in this story.

If you want to go to a psychic for entertainment, for a laugh, that’s fine. But remember that they have no powers, no special abilities. All they have is just a knack for performance.

“In the course of a successful reading, the psychic may provide most of the words, but it is the client that provides most of the meaning and all of the significance.” –Ian Rowland (2000: 60)

Moving!

I hate moving. I’ve moved 6 times in as many years, and it seems to get more annoying each time.

And here I am preparing to move again. The apartment I have now has grown to small, and I need to go out and find some more space.

That being said, I will be pretty busy the next few weeks. Gotta find the apartment, pack up all our stuff, move it. Guuuuuhhhhh.

Anyone have a pick up truck I can borrow?

So you may notice I’m only posting a couple of times a week for the next little while. Hopefully by mid-November I will be back to full form. I won’t be going away completely, but posts will be limited.

So don’t go deleting your Google Reader subscriptions just yet :)

Best Wildlife Photos of the Year

The winners of the 46th annual Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2010 competition, run by the Natural History Museum and BBC Wildlife Magazine, were announced a couple of days ago. You should go check out the site for all the photos, but I’ve included the winner (the first photo) and a few of my other favourites here for you.

Enjoy!

A Marvel of Ants

Are eBooks Really Killing Paper Books?

I love to read. Always have. Ever since I was a kid I’ve always had my nose in a book. So when eReaders started appearing on the market I had some mixed feelings. Sure they are portable and kind of cool, but they don’t feel like a book. They don’t smell like a book. There is just something about a good dead-tree book isn’t there?

Last month it was my birthday, and I got a Kindle. And in a word, it’s awesome! The screen looks better than I had imagined, its light, portable, and I can carry around an entire personal library of books at once.

My Kindle. Yay!

But there seems to be a growing fear that eReaders and eBooks will spell the inevitable doom of the printed word. And perhaps those fears aren’t completely unfounded.

I spent my first couple hours with my Kindle downloading all the free classic books that have had their copyright expire. Dracula, White Fang, Alice In Wonderland, and so on. I actually have real copies of these books hidden in a basement somewhere; but let’s be honest, I never actually read them. But since I got the Kindle I’ve already gone through a couple of Sherlock Holmes novels and re-read all my favourite Edgar Allan Poe short stories (Seriously, how awesome is ‘The Cask of Amontillado‘?).

But those poor old paperback versions of the same books still sit collecting dust in my basement. However, I think this is a great advantage of eBooks. Imagine all the eReaders out there with copies of Oliver Twist and Moby Dick and all the classics. Everyone will be carrying them around and, eventually, they may even read them!

I also never read a real newspaper anymore. I get all of my news online. Now you can have a newspaper electronically delivered to your Kindle every single day, wherever you are. Who needs all that ink smudging on their fingers anyway?

A couple of months ago Amazon fueled this fear of eBooks when it announced that eBooks were outselling hardcover books. This was quite an announcement, but be sure to take it with a grain of salt. Hardcover books only contribute a small portion of their total sales. But this still shows a growing trend in the market: people want to buy eBooks.

So does this mean that the printed book is doomed? Of course not!

I think the growing popularity of eReaders is just like the advent of mp3 players like the iPod when it came out 10 years ago. The term “mp3” was still unknown to most people, but already the winds of change were coming to the music industry.

Digital downloads of music took the market by storm. iPod sales have been climbing for years, though now they have started to level off as the market gets saturated.

This did mean declining CD sales. Used CD stores started going out of business.

Sam the Record Man, one of Toronto's most famous record stores, closed on May 29, 2007 after more than 75 years in business. Photo by David Sherret from Flickr.

But the CD never went away. It is still around. I still like to go to a dark, dirty, smelly club to see an independent band rock out harder than any big name band could ever do. They always have a box in the corner where they sell their personally pressed CDs, and this is where the CD market will live on. Sure, it’s not big business. But people love to support bands that they love, and this will never change.

Not to mention Vinyl! I think printed books are probably going to end up just like vinyl records. Any music enthusiast probably owns a vinyl player. A lot of indie bands release their albums as vinyl records, with a passcode for the digital download from iTunes. People still buy vinyl and keep them for their aesthetic and purist appeal. But for everyday listening we all still carry around an iPod; so for everyday reading, people of the future will all be carrying an eReader. But you bet your ass they will also have a collection of real paperbacks on their shelves at home.

That eReader could be a Kindle, or an iPad, or simply a smart phone. But the technology is here to stay. And yes, it will probably result in declining paper book sales and some books stores going out of business. I feel bad about that, but at the same time the market has to evolve. Technology has to improve, and it was only a matter of time before this affected books. Read on!

Awesome Video of the Moon Crossing the Sun

The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)

is designed to help us understand the Sun’s influence on Earth and Near-Earth space by studying the solar atmosphere on small scales of space and time and in many wavelengths simultaneously.

 But also (and perhaps more importantly), it takes some pretty sweet pictures and videos.

 Take this one which I saw posted on Bad Astronomy. It shows the moon moving between the SDO and the Sun, making the moon clearly visible as it crosses the disc of the Sun.

 Cooooooooooooool!

Acupuncture: Not As Harmless As You Thought

Acupuncture is one of the most widely used alternative medicine treatments today. Photo: GETTY

A recent review article published in the The International Journal of Risk and Safety in Medicine has found reports of 86 deaths in the last 45 years relating to acupuncture treatment.

Incorrectly placing needles and poor sterilization techniques were the main culprits. These poor practices led to punctured hearts and lungs, infections, liver and artery damage and haemorrhages.

From the Guardian,

The most common cause of death was a condition called pneumothorax, where air finds its way between the membranes that separate the lungs from the chest wall and causes the lungs to collapse.

The article was written by Edzard Ernst, a professor of complementary medicine at the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter. When describing his research he said that “these fatalities are avoidable” but are “the tip of a larger iceberg.”

Now, every medical treatment has some form of risk associated with it. What is important is the risk/benefit analysis of the treatment. If you could potentially save a life, the benefit is high which could make a risky procedure worth it.

The problem with acupuncture is that it has consistently been shown to offer little more than a placebo effect. Therefore, if it has no benefit than even a very small amount of risk is unacceptable.

When discussing complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) treatments I always get the question, “Well, whats the harm?”

Studies like these and websites like Whatstheharm.net are showing the growing amount of evidence that some CAM treatments are not as safe as we once thought.

The Adventure of Links: October 18, 2010

I know, I know. I missed last weeks Adventure of Links. And the week before too…but theres some great stuff this week so check it out.

Health

More anti-vaccine crap disguising itself as “Vaccine Safety Activism” on the Huff Po. Now they are trying to portray themselves as the underdogs to gain public support.

Acupuncture can apparently cure 461 diseases. It won’t be long before it can cure-all of them!

Anti-vaccination Network stripped of its charitable status.

Why weight loss supplements are not always “all-natural”.

First human clinical trial using stem cells begins.

Cool

The T-rex was a cannibal. They were probably easy prey, what with those tiny arms and all.

Worlds longest tunnel (57 km) being completed in Switzerland.

Khagendra Thapa Magar was crowned as the worlds smallest man, measuring up at 26.4 inches tall.

The epic 10 000 km journey of a single humpback whale is documented.

Fun/Funny

Michael J. Fox reshoots the original Back to the Future trailer.

What do you get the person who has everything? Why, an $8 million iPhone of course.

On why opening beer bottles with your teeth may not be a good idea.

A cool little demo of how the abrupt change in direction of a baseball during a curve ball is a bit of an optical illusion.

Women like to cuddle after sex. Men don’t. They needed a study to show this.

Physics and Astronomy

NASA photographs the aftermath of two asteroids colliding.

Physicists observe an electron being ejected from an atom for the first time.

The Universe could end in 3.7 billion years. Better hook up with that cute neighbour now before it’s too late.

Why does spaghetti always break in 3 or more pieces? Why do these problems give physicists such problems?

Science is self-correcting, as proven in this slide show of some scientific announcements that may have jumped the gun a bit.

 

 

 

UFO Over NYC! Run! Run For Your…Oh Wait, Nevermind.

UFO Sighting Above Manhattan (Twitter @mobius1ski / October 13, 2010)

You may have seen some of the headlines. They weren’t just in tabloid newspapers either:

Local Group Investigates UFO Reports in Manhattan (NBC Connecticut)

Mystery shiny objects floating over Manhattan spark UFO frenzy (New York Daily News)

UFOs Spotted Over NYC Prompt Panic, 911 Calls (Chicago Tribune)

UFO over Manhattan Caught on Tape (CBS News)

Said Peter Bryant,one of the witnesses,

I saw five or six lights shining in the sky. There was no way that thing was a balloon.There was something weird about it. Light just doesn’t reflect off balloons like that. If Martians were to land anywhere, New York is a much better location than some backwoods town in the Midwest.

Another witness compared what he saw to the “creatures from ‘Predator’.”

Indeed, around 1:30 in the afternoon on October 13th, the Federal Aviation Administration began receiving calls about the strange lights in the sky over West 23rd Street in Manhattan.

But alas, it was not Martians or the aliens from the (possible) exo-planet Gliese 581g. Looks like Peter Bryant was on the right track, he just didn’t want to believe it.

It seems a Westchester Elementary school was holding an engagement party for Andrea Craparo, one of their teachers (aww). They had about 40 pearl balloons filled with helium and around 1 pm the wind blew a bunch of them away.

From the New York Daily News, the day after their original story:

“UFO? They’re crazy – those are our balloons!” said Angela Freeman, head of the Milestone School in Mount Vernon. “To me it was the most automatic thing. But it’s all over YouTube.”

Andrea Craparo and her students pointing to a news story featuring UFOs, which actually were their party balloons. Image from New York Daily News

Some of the sightings could also be explained by a tourism promotion event held on Broadway in Times Square for the centennial of the Madrid’s Gran Via on Wednesday, which included the release of several bunches of yellow balloons into the sky.

A tourism promotion in Broadway Times Square involved releasing many yellow balloons which could have contributed to the UFO sightings. Image from Chicago Tribune

I know whats it’s like to “Want to Believe”. I’ve written a previous blog post about my coming of age into the world of science. And as I’ve said before, there is much more exciting things in the world of real science, than that of pseudoscience.

As the great Carl Sagan once wrote,

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Who Is Better At Math, Guys or Girls? Answer Found Within…

It’s always been an unfair stereotype that girls are not as good as guys at math. A lot of girls feel like they are not supposed to be good at math; that math and science are boys territory.

Science teachers and parents have been trying to spread the word that its OK for girls to be good at math, and to like math. And now, we have the science to prove it.

A recent meta-analysis of the published research in this area was performed. In total over 1.2 million people were studied between 1990 and 2007. Students from grade school through college level were included, as well as the results from several long-term, large-scale studies. The results all show that there is no significant difference between the math skills of men and women.

JS Hyde, one of the authors on the paper, discussed why there is still a stereotype in our society,

There is lots of evidence that what we call ‘stereotype threat’ can hold women back in math. If, before a test, you imply that the women should expect to do a little worse than the men, that hurts performance. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So having the data to show that women are just as good at math as men is only half the battle. We have to start making a change in our culture and encourage more girls to pursue their interests in science and math.