pseudo-science
hrynyshyn | August 7, 2006Here's a depressing way to start your week, courtesy of The New Statesman:
.."psychic schools have never been so busy, and it's not the Doris Stokes brigade who want to learn, but the young, the prosperous and the educated. Stephen Armstrong uncovers a paranormal boom."
If you don't know who Doris Stokes is, that's probably a good thing; those familiar with the name are more likely to have enrolled in the aforementioned schools. Plus, The New Statesman piece deals with the situation in England. But things aren't much better this side of the pond.
Earlier this year came the results of a…
hrynyshyn | August 3, 2006I used to be dead-set against the idea of letting Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Scientists deny their children conventional treatment for life-threatening illnesses. It still makes me angry to know that there are mothers and fathers out there who love their god more than their sons and daughters. And yet...
And yet, there is a case to be made for letting parents determine the fate of their children. The libertarian argument against the state forcing a course of treatment on a child against their parents' wishes is a compelling one. This meditation on the dilemma in Reason magazine hits…
hrynyshyn | July 24, 2006Time was when I wouldn't have cared much if my alma mater had invited a New Age quack to give a lecture on the university's dime. That was then. This is now. Under the very clever headline of "Pitching Woo-woo," Vancouver's online newspaper, The Tyee tells us that the University of British Columbia last week provided a platform for Rubert Sheldrake, he of the "sense of being stared at" theory of telepathy.
How sad is that?
The thing that really gets my goat is that UBC is trying very hard to be a top-rate research school. Its new tag line is "Canada's Leading Edge." The university has…
hrynyshyn | July 21, 2006This week's Science includes an interesting "forum" on the value of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), that wing of the U.S. National Institutes of Health charged with checking out whether or not herbal remedies and other medical techniques not sanctioned by MDs are worth taking.
The center's been around for about eight years now, and apparently not everyone thinks it's a wise use of $123 million of taxpayers' money every year. My first thought was: isn't it a good idea to apply the scientific method to testing the efficacy of echinacea, St. John's wort…
hrynyshyn | June 26, 2006No. I'm not talking about Dick Cheney's metric for how probable a threat must be before taking it seriously (that would be 1 %). Instead we have this bizarre statement in Newsday from a researcher of the paranorma identified only as "Wendy":
"Only one-tenth of 1 percent of all those who claim to be psychic are," she said, basing her conclusion on 15 years of research.
The story, by Newsday reporter Tania Padgett, ran on Friday. Although it started out well enough, with a headline of "Psychic or quack? Skeptics cry foul," the piece immediately ran into problems. Critics of psychic power are…