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“PRIMARY school students are being taught that man and dinosaurs walked the Earth together and that there is fossil evidence to prove it.

Fundamentalist Christians are hijacking Religious Instruction (RI) classes in Queensland despite education experts saying Creationism and attempts to convert children to Christianity have no place in state schools.

Students have been told Noah collected dinosaur eggs to bring on the Ark, and Adam and Eve were not eaten by dinosaurs because they were under a protective spell.”

Source story.

Wow. Just…. Wow.

Yes, there are actually many people who think we never landed on the moon.

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A Bosnian man insists he is being targeted by extra-terrestrials after his house was hit by meteorites six times in three years.

Radivoje Lajic, 50, who lives in the northern village of Gornji Lajici, believes aliens are responsible for the meteor strikes.

“I am obviously being targeted by extra-terrestrials,” he insists. “I don’t know what I have done to annoy them but there is no other explanation that makes sense. The chance of being hit by a meteorite is so small that getting hit six times has to be deliberate.”

I’m not entirely sure why he’s so pissed about this considering that the selling price of ONE of the meteorites was enough to steel-reinforce his roof!

That’s definitely one of the weirdest ads I’ve seen…

James Randi exposes psychic fraud at a TED event:

This has been making the rounds. I got it from Respectful Insolence, and it’s too good not to share, even if I have a hunch it’s just a joke.

On January 12, 1870, a message ran in the magazine Scientific Opinion, offering a wager of up to ₤500 to anyone who could prove that the earth was round. The author was John Hampden, one of the most prominent members of the flat earth movement. Hampden had been writing pamphlets since 1839 on a number of religious and political topics, but his most extreme claim was that the earth is a flat disc surrounded by ice. He had been converted by the founder of the flat earth movement, Samuel Rowbotham AKA “Parallax,” that Bible contradicted the idea of a round earth.

The Challenge

Pullquote: The undersigned is willing to deposit from £50 to £500, on reciprocal terms, and defies all the philosophers, divines and scientific professors in the United Kingdom to prove the rotundity and revolution of the world from Scripture, from reason or from fact.
John Hampden

Not surprisingly, most professional scientists ignored Hampden’s challenge. The 19th century nickname for such fringe belief was “paradoxes,” and while some scientists were willing to speak or write against them, most were reluctant to dignify them with attention. Yet who should finally step forward but Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-discoverer of evolution.

Wallace fits oddly within the pantheon of famous scientists. Michael Shermer describes him as a “heretic personality.” He was a spiritualist and had published a work titled Scientific Aspect of the Supernatural, linking spiritualism and biology. He also argued that some higher intelligence must have influenced the development of the human brain.

Wallace’s ill fit within the scientific community may explain why he, out of all the scientists of his time, stepped forward to take Hampden’s challenge. Another explanation was the money. Wallace didn’t have Darwin’s inheritance to support him as he researched and wrote, and he was working as schools examiner to pay the bills. ₤500 was about a year’s pay for him.

The Contest

Pullquote: Parallax, whose proper name is Rowbotham, is not the man whose wager I accepted. He is far too clever for that ; Hampden was one of his dupes. Parallax makes the boldest false statements, and as the number of those who can contradict him from actual experience is small, his assertions are believed by thousands.
Alfred Russell Wallace

Wallace and Hampden arranged a contest on the Old Bedford River in Norfolk, England. One stretch was a straight uninterrupted six-mile stretch of drainage canal that had a history with the flat earth movement. Hampden’s mentor Samuel Rowbotham had waded into one end of the canal and used a telescope to watch boats as they sailed away. He proclaimed that there was no visible vertical movement of the boat through the entire stretch, proving that the earth was flat and level.

Wallace, who had worked as a surveyor in his early years, understood the types of optical illusions that can result in the effect that Rowbotham observed. He set up a different experiment to cancel out the effects of light refraction. Three boats were moored along the six-mile stretch of the Bedford. Two of the boats were moored by bridges at either end of the stretch, and one boat was moored in the middle.

The mast of each boat was marked at 13′4″ above the water line. The referees would be standing on one of the bridges and viewing three boats through a telescope. If the earth were flat, the markers would line up. If the earth were round, the marker on the middle boat would appear slightly higher than the two end boats.

The challenge took place 140 years ago today, on Saturday, March 5th, 1870. Wallace’s referee, John Henry Walsh, couldn’t make it as was replaced by Martin Coulcher. Hampden’s referee was a fellow flat earther, William Carpenter. In turns, both referees looked through the telescope. Coulcher declared that he saw the middle marker as 4-5 feet higher than the two end markers. However, Carpenter declared that he saw all three markers as level.

Naturally, an argument ensued. John Henry Walsh, Wallace’s first choice for referee, was called back in. After examining the notes – and visiting an optician at Hampden’s insistence – Walsh declared for Wallace. After almost a month of wrangling, Wallace received his £500 on April Fools Day.

The Aftermath

Pullquote: Madam – If your infernal thief of a husband is bought home some day on a hurdle, with every bone in his head smashed to a pulp, you will know the reason. Do you tell him from me he is a lying infernal thief, and as sure as his name is Wallace he never dies in his bed.
Hampden to Annie Wallace

Hampden went crazy. The controversy resulted in a blizzard of pamphlets from the flat earth side, and Hampden tested the limits of his vocabulary of insults on Wallace and Walsh. He mailed letters and pamphlets to everyone connected to Wallace, calling him a thief, knave, impostor, rogue, swindler and so on. As seen in the pullquote, he sent threatening letters to Wallace’s wife.

Wallace reached his limit and sued Hampden for libel in January 1871. Wallace won, but Hampden had signed all his property over to his son-in-law and declared bankruptcy. Hampden would be repeatedly incarcerated, but his attacks continued until his death in 1891. “The Bedford Canal Swindle,” became one of the Flat Earthers battle cries.

Hampden’s only legal victory came in 1877, when he sued Walsh for the return of the ₤500. The Judge would not rule on the outcome of the bet, but he did note that during the argument in March 1870, Hampden had demanded his stake back. The Judge ruled that since the outcome of the bet had not been decided at that point, this qualified as negating the wager. Wallace and Walsh were required to give Hampden back his ₤500.

So Wallace did not profit from the wager. Worse, his reputation among his peers – already rather low because of his spiritual opinions – took a hit. By engaging with a member of the lunatic fringe, Wallace had inadvertently raised the status of Hampden. Worse, he had attempted to profit from it. When Charles Darwin began to lobby for Wallace to receive a government pension for his contributions to science, scientists like Joesph Dalton Hook would bring up the way Wallace went about, “taking up the Lunatic bet about the sphericity of the earth, and pocketing the money.”

I think the moral to this messy story is a simple one for skeptics: choose your battles wisely. Wallace handled the challenge well and designed a good experiment, but it all fell apart in the face of Carpenter’s denial. There was little chance that he could ever convince Carpenter or Hampden, even of the evidence of their own eyes. In the end, Wallace lost far more than he gained from the experiment.

Ten years ago the government set out to test herbal and other alternative health remedies to find the ones that work. After spending $2.5 billion, the disappointing answer seems to be that almost none of them do.

Echinacea for colds. Ginkgo biloba for memory. Glucosamine and chondroitin for arthritis. Black cohosh for menopausal hot flashes. Saw palmetto for prostate problems. Shark cartilage for cancer. All proved no better than dummy pills in big studies funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. The lone exception: ginger capsules may help chemotherapy nausea.

Oh well, I guess we’ll have to rely on prayer instead, right?

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Whereas non-scientific (and potentially dangerous) thinking starts with a premise and then looks for things that support it, scientific thinking constantly tries to disprove itself. That alone makes all the difference in the world.

—Derren Brown, Tricks of the Mind, p. 266

If we start with a premise and only look for things that support it, we will find something, and we will be confirmed in our belief. But science — at least good science — looks not only for things that support it, but for things that disprove it. That is why studies and tests are done, instead of citing an ancient “authority” and/or appealing to emotions.

If everyone tried to disprove their own beliefs, we would be much closer to the truth.

See the rest of the lecture

I disagree strongly with this. Through my rigorous testing and analysis, I measured 43.5% accessibility of Divine Consciousness frequencies, and 12.97% of Divine Consciousness frequencies transmitted outside the body.

I dare them to show evidence against my claims!

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We’re in the 21st century now, and we’re still asking that question? Sheesh. But get a load of these answers from people:

Definitely. After my Dad died, at least two or three times, I smelled his presence really strongly at least four times on four different occasions.

OH YES!!!!! too many freaky things have happened to me personally for me to think otherwise

In my opinion, of couse they can. The follow you around until you tell them to leave. And even then, if their “mission” isn’t completed, they shift themselves into different things, like an animal, or a bird you see often. If ghosts scare you, they will present themselves in a different way. Have you ever thought of someone out of the blue? That is their way of saying hello.

I believe the dead do communicate with us in different ways, but I think that you have to be open to the “communication” in order to recognize what is happening.

Yes. My mother swears that she saw my dead Nana (my mom’s mom) sitting in a chair in her room for months. Finally she told Nana that she forgave her for the horrible way she treated my mothers during her youth. The next night she was gone.

Humans want immortality. So we deceive ourselves into believing in ghosts and ghouls and gods. It gives us hope there is more.

But there’s probably not more. There has never been any evidence a dead person can communicate with a living person. Countless numbers of psyhics and mediums have been shown to be frauds. None have been shown to be legitimate. Yet we still believe, because we want it to be true.

We fool ourselves far too easily.