Bunkum, Pish and Tosh
Offline I've been reading some recent editions of New Scientist (and I'll be posting links to a couple of interesting stories) and in doing so I stumbled across the idea for this thread. Simply put, I thought it'd be fun to have a repository for the craziest and funniest bits of pseudoscience that are out there on Teh Intarwebs!!1 or in other media.
To kick things off I thought I'd point you all in the direction of this wonderful site advertising Liquid Zeolite. A few highlights from the page:
Combining cellular zeolite with humic minerals, delivers a powerful natural chelating, pH balancing, immune supporting & re mineralizing vitality supplement. Liquid cellular zeolite in a laboratory-grade amber bottles with real glass dropper liquid zeolite is a food supplement that is used primarily to remove heavy metals and other toxins efficiently and safely from your body. It also supports a healthy immune system and balances the bodys pH levels. A healthy balanced pH level in the body makes it difficult for diseases to thrive!
Real Glass Droppers?!? Sign me up for 20!
It's absolutely fascinating. Who knew that scientific words picked at random, with little thought for their meaning, could have so much power? It doesn't stop there though. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "But Michael, they don't use the word quantum enough to make it proper pseudoscience". Well aren't you in for a treat...
On the what is zeolite? page we are told that
"The zeolites are a group of minerals with a four-sided honeycomb structure and, rare among minerals, a negative magnetic charge... its [liquid zeolite] processed with the same proprietary, interdimensional technology that creates the high energy signature of all our products. Here are some of the other special qualities in liquid zeolite that you will not find elsewhere...Through a natural, proprietary process, concentrated quantum humic acid molecules have "naturally digested" the zeolite... Liquid zeolite is chemical-free... Because the humic acid in liquid zeolite is in quantum, interdimensional form..."
And so on. It's almost beautiful in its absurdity.
Forget Jesus, the stars died so that you could be here
- Lawrence Krauss
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Hey, this is kind of fun! Someday I'll have to see if I can create a random word generator.
The what? This doesn't mean fuck-all. "The body" doesn't have pH levels. The term "pH" can only be applied to a homogeneous aqueous solution.
A what? Haven't these people ever heard of Maxwell's equations? (This is a rhetorical question. Do not answer it). You see this?
You know what this means? This is Gauss' Law for magnetism. This guarantees that there is no such thing as "magnetic charge".
What?
Really? So it has no constituent atoms? Fascinating. A material which isn't made of anything. Do go on.
You know what? Fuck this. I'm not equipped to deal with this level of crazy. I'm just going to go do something else, like repeated head-brick wall contact.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
Snake oil sure has gotten complex over the years.
Actually Jill, the origin of “snake oil” as a derogatory term is itself pseudoscience bunk. It goes back to the days of the traveling medicine shows where aggressive salesmen would tell people not to buy snake oil from the Chinese immigrants on the grounds that it was ineffective bunk. By so discrediting the product, it opened up the market for them to sell their own ineffective bunk such as blends of camphor, kerosene and turpentine as “real medicine”, which itself was bunk.
Real snake oil is the body fat from Chinese water snakes. While it was pseudoscience in itself, the Chinese do have a track record of finding biologically active compounds from nature. With modern laboratory analysis, we now know that the real product is a better source for omega 3 fatty acids than even salmon.
=
Wait! Let's turn the people who sell this into an homogeneous aqueous solution, and see if it really does balance their pH! BTW: what pH could be considered "balanced?"
It's a magnetic monopole! I knew they existed! I just needed something manufactured with a proprietary quantum interdimensional process to get it.
"Yes, I seriously believe that consciousness is a product of a natural process. I find that the neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers who proceed from that premise are the ones who are actually making useful contributions to our understanding of the mind." - PZ Myers
I'm sorry, did you say "humic minerals"? Wait, like dirt? Don't we remove those in the process of treating water for potability? So this is ... untreated water?
How exactly does one make a four-sided honeycomb structure? I think that's like an eight-sided triangle.
How do these people sleep at night? Honestly. There's lying, and then there's this shit. (Or dirt, more accurately.)
Hey, everyone! I just moved from one position to another through time. I'm interdimensional!
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
Phlogisticated kerosene camphors, anyone?
"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray
That was almost certainly the claim that the "snake wine" I was offered while on a river cruise in China would be "very good for you". They had a largish glass jar of clear liquid with a cut-open dead snake floating in it.
I tried a small plastic cup of it. It was not the most appealing drink I have ever had....
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
Oh man, I took some flights recently, and that SkyMall catalog is filled, just FILLED with positively charged this and magnetically enhanced that. So much crap. It'd be funny if it weren't for the fact that they are making enough money to produce these things for a profit.
-Triften
Indeed, Gauss' Law guarantees against the existence of magnetic monopoles, since every line of magnetic flux over an arbitrary closed surface S must return to the source, and if S does not enclose the source, then the flux would be zero anyway (since div yields the source function for a vector field). Of course, modern theoretical physics does predict the existence of magnetic monopoles, in which case, Gauss' Law for magnetism would be wrong (it would change to become divB= μ0ρm where ρm is the newly discovered quantity of magnetic charge) , but I doubt that these people even know what magnetic monopoles are, or why they are required to exist by hypothetical unified field theories. In fact, I don't think these people can go to the bathroom by themselves.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
But . . . proprietary quantum interdimensional manufacturing process!
"Yes, I seriously believe that consciousness is a product of a natural process. I find that the neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers who proceed from that premise are the ones who are actually making useful contributions to our understanding of the mind." - PZ Myers
Okay, I reckon I should actually add something to this conversation, since so far I've just been wasting posts.
A friend's mom died last November. She was a very intelligent woman, and I enjoyed her company, even if she was a fairly devout Baptist. A month ago, my friend asked if I would help clean out her home, the very house he'd grown up in. There were several of us there.
Before she died, she apparently started selling devices from Nikken. There are all kinds of very nice devices, like water filters with magnets in the bottom, extremely nice cooking pots with electromagnets in them (batteries go in the very sturdy handles), and so on. Expensive, well-built bullshit.
I don't know what makes someone as intelligent as Janie get into woo like this. All I know is, they made a lot of money from her.
They aren't quite as ridiculous as the quantum interdimensional manufacturing process, but they really push all the magnetic flim-flam that's so popular with the kids these days.
"Yes, I seriously believe that consciousness is a product of a natural process. I find that the neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers who proceed from that premise are the ones who are actually making useful contributions to our understanding of the mind." - PZ Myers
This is a good one:
Yup. Infrared LEDs.
And, uh... don't look directly into the LEDs. Because, y'know that infrared spectrum that our eyes can't even register... it's a doozy.
EDIT: It's worth linking to the product just so you can see the price.
250.00 so you can have a fancy-looking, low-powered flashlight. Man, if only I had, like, no morals at all...
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
...I guess the 'PAIN WAND!!@@!!' is only thetip of the iceberg, though:
400 bucks for a lite-brite. Man, people really ARE gullible...
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
That'll be 350.00 in order to look exactly as stupid as you must have been to buy into this crap.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940