Friday Woo
oracknows | February 29, 2008It's very bad when I have a week off. Very, very bad.
The reason is that when I have a week off I have this rather unfortunate tendency to stay up late at night, and when I stay up late at night I have an even more unfortunate tendency to check out late night infomercials that show up between the hours of 2 AM and 4 AM. Such was the case the other night when I found myself sitting in bed bathing in the glow of the LCD screen, staring in utter awe at the woo I found until my wife's annoyed retort told me that I was yelling at the TV screen. Even so, I still wondered whether I should use it for…
oracknows | February 22, 2008Sometimes woo jumps out and hits you from sources from which you least expect it.
Such was the case earlier this week, when I found my self in Detroit lazily watching a local newscast. Now, I realize that local news is not the place to look for skepticism. Heck, just the other day, I mentioned a really egregious example of a newscast from Oklahoma City that credulously regurgitated Generation Rescue talking points as fact. But it's rare in my experience to see such a sterling example of woo appearing in a major market newscast. So there I was, sitting in front of the TV, when I saw a story…
oracknows | February 15, 2008Balance.
It's what the woo-meisters who believe in "Feng Shui" tell us that it will bring to those who use its principles to arrange the objects in their life, be they furniture, homes, the design of buildings, or even the layouts of whole cities. Indeed, Feng Shui tells us that the way we arrange objects in our environment, choose a place to live, or even choose burial plots can allow us to achieve "harmony" with our environment. Obviously, this is true in a trivial sense. If your house is full of crap piled everywhere in seemingly random distributions, it is going to have a negative impact…
oracknows | February 8, 2008In the year and a half or so that I've been doing Your Friday Dose of Woo, I must admit that I've come across some truly weird stuff. Stuff so weird that, after reading it, you wonder either, "How on earth could someone seriously think something like this is true or would work?" or "How can anyone be so unscrupulous as to scam people like this?" Not infrequently, both questions come to mind simultaneously. Other times, I realize that it's fundamentalist religion of some sort or bizarre spiritual quasi-religious beliefs that are behind the woo. I've also started to notice recurring themes,…
oracknows | February 1, 2008Water.
It's the essence of life. Our bodies are mostly made up of it, and we can't live without it for very long. Our cells both contain it and are bathed in it. The enzymatic reactions necessary for life require an aqueous solution to work. Don't think these facts have escaped the woo-meisters, either. Water woo is a a long time favorite of woo-meisters everywhere. Indeed, it began with the "water cure" favored by the ancient Greeks and Romans, who could be forgiven for coming up with it, given that they had very little idea of how human physiology actually worked and at the very least it…
oracknows | January 25, 2008
One of the favorite failings in logic and science among the woo-friendly crowd is the ever-famous one of confusing correlation with causation, also known as non causa pro causa, which means "non-cause for the cause." Examples of this are rampant, and include the antivaccinationists who confuse correlation with vaccination and the age at which autism is usually first recognized with vaccines causing autism, taking a homeopathic remedy shortly before having their symptoms resolve spontaneously and mistaking this for the efficacy of the homeopathic remedy, chelating children with autism and…
oracknows | January 11, 2008
If there's one thing I've learned about woo in the more than a year and a half that I've been doing this regular Friday feature, it's that there's definitely a religious element to virtually all woo. In essence, it requires believing in something that cannot be demonstrated scientifically, often despite science outright refuting it. For example, there have been several "victims" (I mean subjects) for this Friday feature that have been explicitly fundamentalist Christian in nature1, 2, 3, 4, even a parody of such beliefs. Of course, if you're a New Age-type woo, you wouldn't call it "…
oracknows | January 4, 2008
Vibrations.
After a year and a half of doing Your Friday Dose of Woo every week with only a couple of breaks, it's all I can feel or hear sometimes.
Vibrations.
What is it about woo and "vibrations," "harmonics," or "waves," anyway? It doesn't matter if it's sound waves or electromagnetic waves. Somehow the denizens of Woo World seem to think that vibrations have special powers beyond what physicists tell us that they have, such as the ability to transmit energy. Hardly a week goes by, it seems, when I don't encounter claims by woo-meisters such as being able to "raise cellular vibration"…
oracknows | December 29, 2007...I find it rather amazing that after all these months I'm still getting a steady, constant stream of traffic, probably at least a couple of dozen visits a day, to this old post from Your Friday Dose of Woo, all coming from this discussion on the JREF forums.
That forum must get a lot of traffic. Who knew there'd be such interest in Kinoki "detox" footpads?
oracknows | December 28, 2007Orac's circuits have yet to recover from the assault on his logic circuits caused by the über-woo of a couple of weeks ago, coupled with the even more powerful woo two weeks before that. Consequently, in order to marshal additional time scour the Internet for only the finest woo to be featured in 2008, he has decided that Your Friday Dose of Woo will take a brief but well-earned holiday hiatus. Fear now, however! There will, however, be at least one, if not two, other posts today, and YFDoW will return in 2008, bigger and badder than ever.
In the meantime, now that Christmas has passed,…
oracknows | December 21, 2007It occurred to me. For someone looking for last minute Christmas gifts for the credulous, perhaps the Chi Machine, which I mentioned this morning, won't fit the bill. One thing about it is that it's too limited in what it can do, and if I'm going to give the gift of woo for Christmas, I really want to give the gift of woo.
That's why I'm really grateful to a regular reader who, for reasons that will become obvious, will probably want to remain nameless, who turned me on to another great gift for the holidays. Even better, it comes from a most unexpected source. Yes, with the help of Duke…
oracknows | December 21, 2007
As hard as it is to believe, yet another Christmas is fast approaching. I can feel it in the blogosphere. Heck, I can feel it here on the ol' blog. Once garrulous commenters here have gone strangely silent for the most part (at least in comparison to their usual prodigious output), and traffic has already begun to plummet in anticipation of the even bigger plunge that it usually takes during that dead week between Christmas and New Years. It's almost enough to make me wonder whether I should just put the blog on hiatus until after the 1st.
Almost.
I might slow down a bit and throw a few…
oracknows | December 14, 2007
I have to confess, the ol' Folder of Woo was looking a little thin this week.
No, it's not that I'm running out of topics (a.k.a. targets) for my usual Friday jaunt into the wacky world of woo. Far from it. It's just that, in the run-up to writing this, perusing the odd stuff therein just wasn't getting me fired up to do the feature the way that it usually does. There just wasn't anything there that was grabbing my attention and refusing to let it go, as has happened so often in weeks past. I began to worry whether Your Friday Dose of Woo has been going on too long (it's approaching a year…
oracknows | December 7, 2007After last week's Your Friday Dose of Woo, which featured an amazingly extravagant bit of woo that took up 10,000 webpages of some of most densely-packed woo language that I've ever seen, I feel the need for a change of pace. It's time to simplify this week. After all, if I were to do nothing but woo on the order of sympathetic vibratory physics, the Wand of Horus, quantum homeopathy, or DNA activation every week, your brain might well fry. And, if your brain didn't fry, my brain would for subjecting myself to such material week after week. Every so often, I need just a little wafer to…
oracknows | November 30, 2007
I don't know what it is about woo-meisters and vibration.
I know I've said this before, but it seems to come up so often that I can't help but repeat it. Everything is vibration. Everything. And if it' not vibration, it's waves, be they energy waves, sound waves, or, as I like to describe them waves of pure woo. Add quantum mechanics to the mix, and you have the ingredients a veritable orgy of woo. (And if you want a real orgy, they might even have your back covered there, too.) I had thought that this fascination with vibration among purveyors of woo was a relatively recent phenomenon.
I…
oracknows | November 23, 2007Ah, the day after Thanksgiving. I had wondered whether I would have the wherewithal to actually come up with yet another installment of this blog's usual Friday feature. After all, too much food can lead to a decrement in brain function that would make it difficult, if not impossible, to come up with the goods. It seemed to me to be a perfect opportunity to do a treatment of the top-notch woo that you've all come to expect. Fortunately, there's a bit of woo hanging around that I've wanted to have some fun with. This woo is top-shelf, as you will see. The only problem is that I'm not 100%…
oracknows | November 16, 2007Pity poor Nikola Tesla.
Again.
It looks as though the woomeisters have found a way to abuse him yet again. I don't know what it is about Tesla, but he seems to be a magnet for such woo. Well, actually, I sort of do. Tesla was definitely a character and was known for a variety of strange beliefs during his lifetime. I'm pretty sure, though, that he never came up with anything like the Tesla Purple Energy Shield, which was lovingly described in this very forum about seven months ago. I'm also pretty sure that he never came up with anything like the Body Regenerator Tesla Coil, which starts out…
oracknows | November 9, 2007Now this is unexpected.
Normally, I find my victims/targets/subjects for my usual end-of-the-workweek bit of fun and skepticism from one of two sources. Either a reader sends a link to some woo or other that desperately deserves a little bit of Orac's loving attention, or in my wanderings across blogosphere I find some little (or huge) bit of woo that catches my attention and holds it long enough to make the case for a spot on my weekly feature. This time around it was different. While applying a sorely needed bit of skepticism to a story that's been going around the more credulous parts of…
oracknows | November 2, 2007In retrospect, I feel a little guilty about last week's edition of Your Friday Dose of Woo. As a couple of commenters pointed out, the guy responsible for the woo seems as though he's a bit disturbed, as evidenced by the ransom note-style literature on his website and the news story that mentioned how his family didn't take him seriously and he was divorced. On the other hand, the woo was truly top notch. As I pointed out, it also illustrated how a woo-meister can take a single erroneous idea about human physiology and run with it far beyond what anyone would think possible. Such woo can be…
oracknows | October 26, 2007Some woo is very, very complicated. The reason, of course, is that the often self-contradicting complexity of this sort of woo serves to make it harder for people without specialized training to figure out easily that it makes no sense scientifically. It's more a matter of baffling 'em with bullshit than because such complexity is actually needed. (No one that I can think of personifies this better than Lionel Milgrom, a man who's a veritable poet of woo.) Other times, the concept behind the woo is simple. In fact, it's usually just one idea. In fact, this one idea is usually based on an…