A hilarious "Motivation Workshop" offer

In comes an email advertising a "Motivation Workshop (including Strategic Laughter)".

You can tell quite quickly that it's hogwash when you see the "Outcomes" they promise.

Outcomes:

• Motivates Employees
• Reduces Stress
• Team Building
• Having Balance in your Life
• Improves Productivity
• Attitude
• The Laws of Attraction (The Power of Thought)
• Numerology (Character Traits we are born with)

The Law of Attraction is New Age nonsense of the highest order. Numerology is Dark Ages claptrap.

It gets even sillier when they start quoting "research" that they claim supports these ridiculous claims. For instance:

"William Fry M.D. a Stanford University Medical School Professor has studied the effects of laughter upon the human body. He says that laughing 100-200 times a day is the cardiovascular equivalent of rowing for ten minutes."

Let's do the maths. If you laugh 200 times in a 16 hour day that means you laugh once every 4.8 minutes. If you do that in MY office I'll call the Police and a doctor. And isn't it simpler just to row for 10 minutes?

Then they claim that:

"Researchers at Indiana State University studied women who laughed out loud to funny films, as compared to those watching a boring tourism video. They found that when samples of Natural Killer immune cells (which attack cancer cells) were mixed with cancer cells, the immune systems of the people who laughed out loud were BOOSTED BY UP TO 40%"

This is nonsense. This is ONE experiment done in 2003 on a sample of 33 women, divided into two groups that showed an decrease in their self-reported levels of stress if they had been amused by a funny film. An experiment that was undertaken ONCE with a tiny sample group that showed that funny films amuse people and make them feel a bit better. And from that we are meant to believe that laughing in the office will make us more productive?

I've no problem with laughter and happiness, clearly they're both good things in and out of the office. But ascribing all these miracles to laughter is hogwash. Utter hogwash.

And if you want to laugh at something? Just laugh at the claims these people make.

The first death threat of 2013

You know you're doing something right when you get a death threat from a "Prophet".

It began when I saw this posting on Facebook:

I commented as follows:

And then asked this, I think rather simple, question:

When no evidence emerged I then commented:

And finally said:

Then my good friend Profit Bushiri got in touch directly:

I think his threat of imminent death is a good illustration of his nature, don't you?

-----

P.S. A colleague and friend asked me yesterday whether I am "anti Christian" and it's important to know that I'm not. I'm an atheist of course and will happily argue with those of a religious disposition, I mean "argue" in the pleasant, friendly way. I was thinking earlier of a former colleague who was a deeply committed Christian and who was, without doubt, one of the BEST people I've ever met. Generous, charitable, tolerant, open-minded and genuinely committed to his friends, family and neighbours, he spent almost all of his spare time with his wife caring for orphans in Joburg without trying to convert them, just because they needed love, sustenance and entertainment. People like him deserve our respect. But the key thing is that if he'd been brought up a Muslim, a Jew, a Hindu, a Rasta or an atheist he still would have been as good as he is. He's just a very good person.

My contempt is reserved for hypocrites, liars and thieves. Unfortunately much of religion is dominated by such people.

Weekend Post - I saw a UFO

I saw a UFO recently. It was early evening and I saw a bright light in the sky, much brighter than any of the stars that had just appeared. It seemed to be moving very slowly but was becoming brighter and brighter as I watched. Then, very suddenly it dimmed significantly and moved quickly to the left.

That’s when it ceased to be a UFO, an Unidentified Flying Object, and became an IFO, an Identified Flying Object. It was an Air Botswana flight initially heading directly towards me and then turning to approach the airport.

The problem with the initials “UFO” is that they are consistently misused. When most people see or hear them they think “alien spaceship”, not what it actually refers to, an Object that is Flying but which is currently Unidentified.

Here’s a bold statement about UFOs. So far, without exception, not one UFO has turned out actually to be an alien spaceship. Not one. It’s just like predictions of the End Of The World. Despite some religious cult predicting the end of the world every year, not once has any of them been right. Not once has the world ended. Not once has a genuine alien spaceship been seen.

Of course there’s no shortage of books, TV programs and above all web pages devoted to alien visits to earth. If you do a Google search for “aliens on Earth” you get over 78 million hits. In fact, I suggest you do exactly that as soon as you get a chance. Visit some of the links you find and you’ll learn one sure thing although it’s not about aliens, space travel of advanced technology. You’ll learn that a sizeable proportion of the human race is utterly insane. It’s a very good way of finding web sites written entirely in capital letters (always a sign of internet psychosis), bizarre colors and some deeply peculiar beliefs.

The boring fact is that we are NOT being visited by aliens. Given that it’s estimated that there are over 3 billion cellphones with cameras in the world, why hasn’t there been one, just one, picture showing without doubt that aliens have been here? If our alien cousins have been popping over, I’d expect there to be even a little bit of evidence to prove it.

The really disappointing news is that aliens probably can’t visit. If our understanding of science is correct, and it seems so far to be, the distances between the stars are so horribly vast that the trip simply isn’t worth it. The nearest star to our solar system is over 4 light years away. In other words even travelling at the theoretical maximum speed it would take more than 4 entire years to get there and another 4 to get back. Easy to say, harder to do. The energy required to do this is almost beyond imagination. It’s calculated that to accelerate one ton of matter to just one tenth of light speed would take 125 billion kWh. That’s roughly the output of a very large power station running continuously for seven years, just for one ton of spaceship. Given also that the spaceship would have to carry it’s own fuel to accelerate and later decelerate, the energy required is cosmically vast. Given that the journey times would be measured in tens of years, if not centuries, we’d need to find a way of putting people to sleep for all that time. It’s just unbelievable.

Just in case anyone’s in doubt, the laws of physics apply to aliens as well as us.

And why would we, or aliens, do it anyway? What possible purpose would it serve? What purpose would it serve for aliens to do the same?

Of course it’s impossible to stop people fantasizing about alien visits and why should we? I like alien movies as much as anyone, but they’re movies, just fantasies, just entertainment. They’re not real.

None of this stops people making the leap from seeing a UFO to thinking it’s a space ship. In the last few months I’ve seen stories of people reporting UFOs, thinking they were alien, but which turned out to be the plant Venus, floating Chinese lanterns, insects caught in front of a camera, car headlights on a distant hill, planes near a military airbase and on one occasion the Moon. None of these false sightings of alien spaceships turned out to be real, they were all mundane, everyday things. Of course that doesn’t mean aliens won’t arrive tomorrow but I suspect it’s as likely to happen as those predictions of the end of the world, homeopathy being proved to work or a TV evangelist turning out to be honest.

Weekend Post - Where did the moon come from?

My father used to tell me that the Moon was made of cheese.

I didn’t believe him. Just like I’m told I didn’t believe in Father Christmas or any other mythical creatures. Maybe it was because I had the good fortune to be born and be a curious child in one of the historical golden age of science and engineering, the 1960s. In that decade and in the early 70s humanity achieved some remarkable things. The most obvious was the triumph of the missions to the Moon.

The Apollo missions were famously inspired by President John F Kennedy, who, in 1961 told the US Congress of his plan for "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" before the end of the decade.

There were several reasons for this. One was that Kennedy was desperate to get back in the lead in the so-called Space Race. Only 6 weeks beforehand Russians cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had become the first human in space, leaving the Americans lagging behind. Although space exploration wasn’t itself a defense priority any perception of weakness or being in second place was going to be a Cold War propaganda disaster for the USA.

The more uplifting motivation behind the program was a simple human one. Like our cousins, the other great apes, perhaps the one thing we have that separates us most from other species is our curiosity. It’s human nature to want to know what’s on the other side of the hill. Exploration of the world and of space has always fascinated humanity and in the 1960s Kennedy encouraged that with resources, money and a very limited amount of time.

Perhaps the most influential of all the reasons for this was the least planned. Out of this spirit of exploration came innovation and inspiration. There were also enormous economic benefits. It’s been suggested that for every $1 the US Government spent on the space program they received $8 back indirectly. The technological developments you and I now have that came from, or were encouraged by the space program is almost endless. Miniaturization of electronics, water purification, scratch-resistant lenses, smoke detectors, improved solar panels, fire resistant materials, radiation protection, air purification, MRI scanners and even sports bras were all influenced by the space program.

c/o Wikipedia

For me the most important thing was the generation of kids (like me) who were inspired to get involved in science and its often neglected cousin, engineering. The program created a genuine sense of excitement with regular launches of the enormous Saturn V rockets and the sense of achievement that resulted when a mission succeeded. There was also a genuine sense of danger, that technology was being pushed to the very edge as with the Apollo 13 mission which so nearly ended in disaster. If ever you want to see a movie that teaches you about creativity, perseverance and leadership watch Ron Howard’s film Apollo 13.

The trouble today’s generation face is that the space race is over. For various reasons, manned space exploration is effectively shut down. This is partially because of the expense but also because of the growing realization that it’s simply not worth the money. The latest exploratory missions have all been robotic, mainly because robots don’t need air, water and food and they don’t ever get bored. They also don’t expect ever to come home to earth. Robotic missions are therefore cheaper than manned ones. The science done by the robotic Curiosity rover on Mars is wonderful but let’s be frank, it’s not thrilling.

c/o Wikipedia

Last week there was fairly widespread news about new findings on the origin of the Moon. Despite stories of it being made of cheese, the new evidence seems to confirm a fairly recent theory that the Moon was formed from the debris following a collision between the early Earth and another planet, perhaps one the size of Mars. The scientists behind this, from Washington University in St. Louis, analyzed a phenomenon called “isotopic fractionation” and looked at fractional differences in the geology of the Moon and Earth.

The details of the research are fairly interesting to those of who aren’t geochemists but the thing I found surprising (silly me) was how little coverage the story received. This was about something meaningful, how our Moon was created. Forget the myths and fables, forget the business about cheese and forget superstition. This is about how it was really created, using the latest evidence.

But perhaps that’s the biggest result of the absence of excitement in Science these days. At the moment it’s hard to get people excited about the one thing that can possibly improve their lives in a genuine, measurable and meaningful way: genuine progress in material, knowledge and well-being.

Weekend Post - Admit you're wrong occasionally

A key component of the scientific method is being able to admit that you were wrong.

In his best-selling book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins describes an occasion when he was a student. An elderly and highly respected professor attended a lecture at which a visiting American academic publicly disproved the professor’s cherished theory. According to Dawkins, who was also at the lecture, instead of arguing with the American, or just ignoring his ideas, the elderly professor walked right to the front of the lecture hall, shook the visitor firmly by the hand and loudly said “My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.”

I’m not going to say that all scientists are as grown up and noble as this. A very good example of scientific conservatism is the reaction from the scientific establishment in the early 20th century to the theories of relativity and quantum physics. These ideas were so revolutionary that the establishment couldn’t accept them. Many “scientists” at the time even thought that they were close to a complete understanding of the universe, that classical science from the time of Newton, Kepler and Copernicus explained everything. The new science, complicated by the fact that much of it came from Germans and Jews, was too revolutionary for the old guard. The resistance was formidable.

However the good thing is that the scientific community realized in the early 20th century that science doesn’t have to be convenient, it has to be correct. Einstein and his colleagues WERE right and progress was necessary.

The rest of the world often seems to find inconvenient evidence hard to digest.

Take the example of nuclear power. Almost everyone in the world thinks that nuclear power production is massively dangerous. Ask people and they’ll think of disasters like Chernobyl and, more recently, Fukushima.

But if you drill a little deeper, it’s not quite as simple as it seems. The biggest risk with exposure to radiation is cancer. It’s obviously impossible to say with any particular cancer victim that a particular thing caused their cancer but you can look at the number of deaths in an area and time and see if they’re different. In the initial explosion at Chernobyl 25 years ago, 57 people were killed but the long-term effects were significant. The International Atomic Energy Agency estimated that the long-term effect might be as high as 9,000 deaths. They also noted that there was no evidence of higher levels of birth defects or “solid cancers”.

The situation in Fukushima is similar but less significant. The Japanese government estimated that the release of radiation was about one tenth of that at Chernobyl. Even today, a year later, there remain some after-effects of the disaster. The BBC reported recently that fish caught in local waters remain contaminated above acceptable levels for human consumption. However that was at least in part due to the Japanese authorities changing the acceptable level to appease local consumers. The generally accepted predicted death toll is expected to be in the low hundreds.

It’s critical to understand how both of these disasters occurred. Both of the reactors were outdated, Chernobyl in particular, and used designs that haven’t been used in new reactors for decades. Although it was initially thought that the disaster at Chernobyl occurred because technicians at the plant were fooling around, it later transpired that the main cause was a combination of design flaws in the reactor and it’s catastrophic misuse. The main problems with Fukushima were its age and, again, operator errors.

No recently built nuclear reactor has any of the design problems that led to these two disasters. Of course new disasters can’t be ruled out but the chances are lower than ever before. There’s also the fact that although radiation can be dangerous, it’s not nearly as dangerous as the so-called “green” lobby would have us believe.

What about “conventional” power production, such as coal-fired power stations? They’re a much safer alternative, surely? There’s another uncomfortable truth we have to face.

Generating electricity by burning coal is by far the most dangerous way to produce power. It’s estimated that over 13,000 people in the USA alone are killed directly by inhaling particles from coal-powered power stations every year. The World Health Organisation estimates that around 3 million people around the world die every year from the results of air pollution caused by the combustion of fossil fuels.

Let me put it another way. For every one person killed by nuclear power, it’s been estimated that 4,000 die from coal. And which type of power production are we investing in? Why are we digging up large amounts of coal instead of encouraging more prospecting for uranium?

Is it possible we’re wrong but afraid to confront the truth?

Weekend Post - They're just charlatans

We’re surrounded by people who are deceiving us. I’ll be charitable and acknowledge that some of them are doing it out of ignorance, some of the ones selling us “alternative” health remedies and potions. I’ll be charitable. I suspect that a few of them genuinely believe the rubbish they say when they claim acupuncture, homeopathy, reflexology and QXCI machines actually DO something. Of course there’s precisely no evidence that they do anything, there’s even an enormous body of evidence suggesting that they do nothing at all but maybe these people haven’t seen that yet.

They’re the naïve, perhaps even gullible ones who believe they’re actually helping. My disdain is reserved for other groups.

Firstly I have moderate contempt for those that secretly suspect that their cures, potions and practices are nonsense but deliberately close their eyes to the evidence, presumably because they’re making an income out of it. And yes, despite the way “alternative” practitioners present themselves, they’re in it for the money. Their products and services aren’t free. Luckily for them there’s more than enough people who are easily conned by smart-talking salespeople selling pseudoscience and miracle cures. Who want money.

There’s another group whose outlook on life is reliant on nonsense: the believers in magic. It somehow fits into their worldview that science is bad, progress is evil, that there are magical explanations for complex phenomena and that fairies, hobgoblins and thokolosi exist. They believe in nonsense in a deep, almost religious way. For them nothing would be better than humanity turning it’s back on progress and diving back into the dark ages when we were all “more in touch with nature”. It doesn’t seem to matter to them that we were also more in touch with smallpox, dysentery, staggeringly high levels of child mortality and a life expectancy in the 30s.

Then there’s the least palatable crowd, the ones for whom I have complete contempt. The people who know they’re lying. Amongst this despicable group you can find a horrible mixture of so-called traditional healers, fake TV evangelists and my pet hate, psychics.

I suspect that everyone reading the Weekend Post knows that so-called traditional healers are charlatans. You’ve only got to read the stories in the tabloid press about how many are arrested, how many are illegal immigrants and the cons they pull on their unsuspecting victims. Like the fake termite mound one group of them created that contained a cellphone and speaker. A fellow crook could then call it and produce the voices of ancestors to convince the victim to part with more cash. Complete crooks.

You might think this is comical but presumably the (admittedly very gullible) victims were presumably desperate for help.

TV evangelists are worse. Perhaps the best example I know to illustrate how corrupt they can be is Peter Popoff.

Popoff was (and remains) a con-man. His ability to “see” the personal details of sick people who came to his miracle conventions was remarkable. He would “know” everything about his gullible victims in the audiences, including the illnesses they were suffering and even their home addresses. Of course this was all a huge con. The attendees had all filled in a questionnaire as they arrived and then Popoff’s wife would read the details to him over a radio link to a tiny receiver in his ear. After Popoff’s scam was exposed by James Randi he rapidly went bankrupt but that didn’t stop him bouncing back a few years later appearing on TV selling “miracle spring water”, “holy sand” and more cons.

You can still see the same thing happening with a variety of TV evangelists. The people who attend the meetings often are required to supply their personal details before they attend. These days it’s simple for the evangelist’s support team to then discover all sorts of things about the worshippers before they attend.

That approach is called “hot reading” and is a common technique also use by so-called psychics. A little Googling can unearth all sorts of facts about you that you might have thought were secret.

The other technique used by psychics is a little more clever. “Cold reading” involves a mixture of educated guesswork and responding to the clues the victims give as they talk with the psychic. Here’s a simple example. I sense, through the newspaper you’re holding, or the web page you’re viewing, that you’ve lost a relative or friend whose name starts with M, or perhaps S or E? If you respond by telling me it was one of your grandparents I can also be fairly certain they had some chest problems in the year before they passed away? Or perhaps problems with mobility? Of course a psychic does this face to face. The moment he sees your eyes light up he’ll know he’s onto something and will seize that as proof he has a connection with your lost relative. You’ll conveniently overlook the initials he got wrong or the non-existent chest complaint.

Psychics and TV evangelists use these techniques repeatedly to produce their fake miracles. The reason is simple: money, large quantities of it. The good news is that just a little knowledge of psychology and of hot and cold reading can help people see through their tricks.

"Quack company litigates against its critics"

"Quack"

A South African "quack company" has decided that threatening legal action against people who expose their quackery is a good idea.

They're wrong.

"Solal Technologies is suing Kevin Charleston for R350,000 because he wrote on the Quackdown website that Solal Technologies' magazine, Health Intelligence is a "disguised marketing programme for Solal Technologies, a company that actively promotes pseudoscience and aggressively attempts to shut out valid criticism of its advertising."

Charleston will be defending himself against Solal’s charges. He will have the support of the Treatment Action Campaign. He will be represented by SECTION27. The case, when it comes to court, promises to be an important test of the right to freedom of expression, and the duty of companies to market their products honestly and accurately."