I was all kinds of excited when I was browsing Netgalley and came across Quack Quack: The Threat of Pseudoscience by Dr. Joe Schwarcz, the director at McGill University’s Office for Science and Society. The book aims to convince people of the importance of separating sense from nonsense, and it’s packed with plenty of examples …
Book Review: Quack Quack: The Threat of Pseudoscience Read More »
I find it interesting that people seem to love to hate on Big Pharma, but attitudes towards the natural products industry seem to be much more positive. I’m not trying to suggest that Big Pharma is wonderful, because they’re not; I just don’t think the dichotomy of Pharma being bad and the natural products industry …
The Natural Products Industry: A Major Money Machine Read More »
The COVID/5G conspiracy theory has been around since the early days of the pandemic. How did such an out-there idea become so widely known? The dumpster fire that is social media has a fair bit to do with it, with a combination of misinformation (wrong information spread without manipulative/deceptive intent) and disinformation (intentionally spreading wrong …
The Bizarre Spread of the COVID/5G Conspiracy Theory Read More »
Manifestation is all over the internet, part of the whole law of attraction vibrational package. Because I have a bit (or a lot) of a fixation on purple people eaters, they’ll help us see what we might or might not be able to manifest. The purple monster critter in the image above is someone I’ve …
What the heck is Benford’s law and why should anyone care? I was oblivious until I recently saw an episode of the series Connected on Netflix on the topic, but it turns out that the distribution of numbers in our world is a lot less random than you might think. Physicist Frank Benford was actually …
Benford’s Law and the Weird Ways Our World Works Read More »
Many fields have their own jargon, which Wikipedia describes as “specialized terminology associated with a particular field or area of activity” that often isn’t well understood by people outside of that particular field. While jargon can help people within a field communicate precisely, that doesn’t necessarily translate well outside of the field. It can be …
There’s a lot of knowledge out there in the world. We’ve all accumulated some of it, whether that’s by formal schooling, work, or life in general. Quadrants of knowledge There are several different ways in which we relate to the potential knowledge that’s out there in the world. This can be seen in the modified …
The Importance of What We Don’t Know We Don’t Know Read More »
We’ve probably all heard of the placebo effect, but what is it, and how does it work? For something that happens regularly, it’s not all that well understood. A placebo is any substance that’s not intended or expected to have any therapeutic effect. Ethically, it generally wouldn’t be considered acceptable to give a patient a …
The Placebo Effect: What Is It and Why Does It Happen? Read More »
I’m a very science-minded person, and one of the things that really grates my rutabagas is when people make things up and call it science. In particular, I’m not impressed with pseudoscientific made-up vibrations, and especially the made-up idea of vibrating thoughts, law of attraction style. Somehow, the notion of essential oil frequencies and “high …
“High Vibration”? Essential Oil Frequency Debunked Read More »
There are plenty of odd pseudoscientific health practices out there, but psychic surgery kicks it up to a whole new level of weird. Psychic surgery isn’t like what happens in an operating room; it’s more like what happens on a magician’s stage. Sleight of hand, fake blood, and animal parts are used to make the …
