bad science
sciencepunk | March 6, 2009
The BBC has a bit of a patchy track record when it comes to promoting pseudoscience. On the one hand, they've featured investigations into homeopaths and Brain Gym, on the other, various charlatans still manage to slip the editorial net and promote their particular flavour of quackery on air. This is one of the latter occasions.
Last Wednesday, life coach Janet Thompson managed to bag herself a good chunk of air time on the Chris Evans Drive Time show on BBC Radio 2 to promote herself and make bizarre false claims about how the human body works. You can listen to the show here, the…
sciencepunk | March 1, 2009Last month, the UK Government came up with an ingenious new idea to stem the rising tide of obesity that is already spilling over low-slung jeans everywhere: eat less. Health Minister Alan Johnson met with a coalition of confectionery giants including Mars, Coca-Cola and Nestle, urging them to reduce the sizes of their delicious, calorie-laden snacks.
Shrinking portions is not a new idea. Last year, Food Standards Agency formed a panel to explore the role of food portion in our diets after announcing that reducing portions would be one of four key proposals for encouraging healthier…
sciencepunk | February 26, 2009Today the Big Daddy of bad science journalism, Ben Goldacre, received the advance new-look copies of his fantastically brilliant book, Bad Science. He didn't take well to having his picture in it, either because he is so modest he gets flustered by these things, or because he is in reality several different people engaged in an elaborate ruse the meaning of which we cannot fathom.
Anyway, all his harping inspired me demonstrate just how bad the Bad Science cover redesign could have been. His publishers may, for example, have tried to boost female readership by breaking into the misery-lit…
sciencepunk | February 24, 2009
Today is Shrove Tuesday in the UK, relating to some archaic mumbo-jumbo religion nonsense about Jesus but generally celebrated as a good excuse to gorge oneself on pancakes. For some reason, newspapers like to ignore these religious overtones and focus on adding their own mumbo-jumbo science nonsense instead. Making and eating pancakes is one of life's simplest pleasures. Why is everyone trying trying to complicate things with god and science?
In 2002, the BBC reported on physics lecturer Dr Gary Tungate who had calculated the mathematics involved in flipping a pancake,
contributing this…
sciencepunk | February 22, 2009A: No.
Although many news outlets (including the BBC) are claiming that a billion people will tune in to the 81st Academy Awards, the figure turns out to have little grounding in reality. The billion-strong audience claim has been knocking around for a long time - Daniel Radosh recounts in an article for the New Yorker that the figure was first touted way back in 1985. Although no supporting evidence has ever been provided to verify the claim, Radosh makes the reasoned guess that someone must extrapolated the 43.5 million domestic audience (15% of the US population) to 15% of the global…
sciencepunk | February 19, 2009I came across this quote today - can you guess which group of pseudoscientists is being discussed?
These people use the "reverse scientific method"... they determine what happened, throw out all the data that doesn't fit their conclusion, and then hail their findings as the only possible conclusion.
No cheating with Google! Your suggestions below please.
sciencepunk | February 14, 2009Last week the Guardian ran an amusing story of photo-fakery by enthusiastic Spanish tourism board employees:
Spain's Costa Brava uses Bahamas photograph in ad campaign
Tourist board denies being deceitful by using picture from tropical islands to advertise beaches in north-eastern Spain
It's only afterwards that things get weird...
Quite predictably, it turns out that sometimes the pictures in holiday adverts aren't actually representational of the destination. Who knew? The photo of an idyllic deserted beach used in a campaign for the Costa Brava was actually taken in the Bahamas. For…
sciencepunk | February 6, 2009Thanks to a sterling effort by a group of dedicated science bloggers and blog-readers, the whole Jeni Barnett MMR radio show has been transcribed for your reading pleasure.
Browse it, read it, blog it, be shocked, be amazed, tell your friends, etc etc.
OBVIOUS DISCLAIMER: This is a transcript pulled together by lots of people working late into the night. There will be mistakes, I'm sure, so use it as a tool to skim the show before listening to the bits that interest you. A recording of the show is available on Wikileaks, see here. You can also listen to each part via YouTube here.
The…
sciencepunk | February 1, 2009When I first stumbled across the page entitled "50 Reiki One-Liners" I thought it was going to be some kind of introspective quack humour. Silly me. No, this is the real deal:
On July 30, 2008 I started a new service in the microblogging world by sending out this one-liner about Reiki:
Reiki is living with wisdom & compassion.
Since then Reiki One-LinerSM has gone out to Plurk and Twitter everyday between Monday and Friday, with two breaks of a few days since its inception.
Now I know that Reiki - a 'therapy' that doesn't even require the practitioner to be in the same room as the…
sciencepunk | January 27, 2009Is it possible to pack a DVD with idiocy so dense that light bends around it? I don't know, but I found someone who gave it a damn good try. The Beautiful Truth is a 2008 documentary about Gerson Therapy, the supposed diet-based cure for cancer. It produced by earth NOW! a small indie label from the Cinema Libre Studio. There are numerous excerpts from the movie on YouTube, which give a fascinating insight into the nonsensical, incomprehensible world that the filmmakers live in.
(weirdly, YouTube links all of them to a video entitled 'How masturbation damages the body'. It's not clear why,…
sciencepunk | January 23, 2009Shares in Sony, Nintendo, and major games companies dropped sharply today after scientists linked playing video games with poor relationships with friends and family and increased drug use. Nintendo, long the face of family-friendly gaming, were said to be aghast and promised to immediately discontinue their wildly popular Wii system.
OK, so only one part of the above is true. A press release from Brigham Young University revealed that undergraduate Alex Jensen and his tutor had questioned 813 college students on their gaming habits and other behaviours, concluding that:
"As the amount of…
sb admin | January 16, 2009
As some sharp-eyed reader may have already spotted, the SciencePunk blog has relocated to the Seed Media Group's ScienceBlogs. Let's take a moment to absorb these new surroundings.
OK, done? Those of you who have already run back to check sciencepunk.com will find it too has changed substantially. Drama abounds!
From today, the whole SciencePunk caboodle is getting cranked up a notch. Wave goodbye to the version 5 we all knew and loved, and say hello to version 6. (Ah, you always wondered what that stray /v5 signified, didn't you? Why not check out v4? Web 1.0-tastic!) The site has…