A FAQ From the Bureau of International Guidance on Spiritual, Complimentary and Alternative Medicine

Spiritual, complimentary and alternative medicine (SCAM) has been growing in popularity in the US and abroad for a number of years and the plethora of contradictory information on the subject has left many medical consumers in need of clear answers.  It is with this in mind that we present the following answers to question frequently asked about SCAM treatments.

What are Spiritual, Complimentary and Alternative Medicines?

The term SCAM is a broad umbrella that covers a number of modalities including herbalism, faith healing, reiki, acupuncture, straight chiropractic, therapeutic touch, homeopathy, magnetic therapies and other types of treatment that fall outside the traditional narrow view of science.

How does SCAM differ from traditional science based medicine?

Science based medicine hinges on very narrowly defining terms like “wellness”, “health” and “treatment”.  In SCAM treatments, we accept a far broader definition and thus things need not “work empirically” before they can be utilized by SCAM practitioners.

This allows SCAM doctors to use treatments far earlier instead of waiting for all the data to come in and neglecting the health of our patients while a scientific consensus on efficacy slowly forms.  Science takes time and the needs of our patients are too great to sacrifice their vital time on things like continuing research or well designed trials.

Do Regular Doctors use SCAM Treatments?

In a time of lower revenues and morals, more and more doctors have turned to SCAM treatments.  To this day, the entrenched medical community ridicules them when they open their minds to these treatments that have been known the world over for thousands of years.

Where do SCAM Treatments Come From?

They’ve been known the world over for thousands of years.  Try to keep up here.

SCAM treatments come from a variety of sources including ancient Eastern medicine, pagan philosophy, traditional Druidic notions of herbal magick, early Christian practices and the knowledge of aboriginals that have lived with Mother Nature as their only pharmacy for generations.

But Didn’t Those People Have Substantially Shorter Lives Than People Treated With Science Based Medicine?

While it is true that many of the modalities used by SCAM artists today have their roots in nations and cultures that lacked our current state of physical fitness and longevity, they were also cultures that lacked the numerous conveniences we now have.  We are not healthier now because of evidence based medicine, but rather because all of our modern conveniences have saved us the wear and tear on our bodies that people from more traditional cultures take for granted.

So We Shouldn’t Use Their Technology But We Should Use Their Medicine?

Science doesn’t know everything about the human body.  There is a spiritual force that animates the human form that some call the soul (others might refer to it as Chi, Ki, Prana or Innate Intelligence) and the balance of this life force is essential to proper health.  Many SCAM treatments rely heavily on detoxifying the body to bring this force into proper alignment.

Science, on the other hand, does not even recognize the existence of this fundamental force just because they can’t measure it with their instruments.  This means that by necessity anything the scientists say about medicine will be limited by the fundamental limitations of their models about human health.

But If Scientists Can’t Detect It, How Can SCAM Doctors Detect It?

They can’t.  It’s undetectable.

Then How Can They Tell If It’s Out of Alignment?

They determine this from any number of SCAM methods.  The actual method of determining it will vary depending on which SCAM you use.  While no physiological test exists to “rate” the spiritual force, the results of the SCAM treatments are plenty of indication that these modalities work.

Are There Valid Studies That Show That SCAM Treatments Work?

Well, there is an answer to that question and it’s a very good question and thus it deserves a very good answer.  I will here upon answer that question.  Right here in this very next sentence.  Unless… is there maybe a “pass” option?

No.

Okay, so I admit that no well designed scientific study has ever shown any of these SCAM treatments to be even remedially effective and the current understanding of science doesn’t even consider them remotely plausible.  But in many ways, this lack of evidence is proof that SCAM treatments are worthwhile.

Why Are You Sweating?

It’s not warm in here to you?  Anyway, like I way saying, no well designed study has shown these treatments to be effective which is why they’re not “science based” medicines.  But many of the modalities like faith healing cannot be adequately tested in a laboratory setting.

You see, there are so many variables in things like faith healing, therapeutic touch, acupuncture and the like that it is almost impossible to remove all the variables to conduct a proper and useful test.  In other words, you can’t make sure that every person gets the same amount of prayer.

But If They Can’t Be Controlled In a Lab, How Can They Be Controlled by a SCAM Doctor?

Skilled Spiritual, Complimentary and Alternative Medical practitioners are very good at measuring the results of treatments and adjusting them on the fly as your treatment progresses.

You Just Said The Life-Force Thing Can’t Be Measured.

Please frame that in the form of a question.

Didn’t You Just Say That The Life Force Thing Can’t Be Measured?

The “innate energy” or “chi” in your body can’t be directly measured, but it can be measured by the actual changes in your physical health.  They use... you know, techniques and stuff.  And it definitely works.  We can't exactly "prove" that, like I said, but look at how innocent I look in these glasses.

Besides, the problem with trying these types of measurements in a lab is that when you do they show that the SCAM treatments are ineffective so there must be something wrong with the lab measurements.

Couldn’t That Just Mean That Aboriginals Didn’t Have Good Medicine?

No.  Sufficient anecdotal evidence exists to convince a large portion of the populace that such treatments are effective.  These people have money and they really want to give it to us whether or not the treatment can be shown to work.

How Is That Even Legal?

Freedom of choice, baby.  Get used to it.  Who are you to tell people that they can’t spend their money on treatments that are ineffective and potentially dangerous?  Who are you to shut down places where people go to put off getting meaningful medical intervention?  These people have a right to make up their own minds about what does and doesn’t work in their own quest to achieve spiritual and physical wellness.

How Is That Different Than Saying Mugging Victims Have The Right To Get Stabbed?

It’s way different, that’s how.  Why are you all up in my face like that?

How Do You Even Sleep At Night?

What do you mean?

You Take Money From Sick People and Offer Nothing in Return Except False Hope and Cobwebs in the Wallet.  Do You Drink Puppy Blood as well?

You can actually drink puppy blood without hurting the dog all that bad, but that’s beside the point.  The point is that the medical industry is a rampaging monopoly that continues to thrive by getting you sick and keeping you there.  The community of Spiritual, Complimentary and Alternative Medical practitioners are stepping outside of the mold and offering something new.

But Aren’t You the Ones Selling Cures That Don’t Work?

Cures not proven to work.  Being effective and being proven effective are different things.

Is That Really Your Answer?

It’s the best I can come up with on the spot.  Listen, I just remembered that I have a thing.  Can we do this some other time?

This is a FAQ, you Jackass.  You Can’t Leave in the Middle of a FAQ!

I know, but I didn't know you were gonna be asking such tough questions.  And also I’ve got this thing.  I forgot about it until just now.  But seriously, it’s been fun.  Take care.  Hope to see you around.

…Jerk


Aaron Davies
www.blognoscor.blogspot.com

6 Old Things Being Sold as New Things

Innovation is the lifeblood of the economy but it is by definition a fleeting and occasional thing.  It can hardly be planned upon or scheduled and thus many companies have settled for the next best thing.  Barring any new innovation, they decide to have old innovations.  Without adding anything new to an idea, they boldly repackage it and sell it as new.

Hollywood has led the way in this modality for decades and it has finally caught on in the consumer world as well.  If the major studios can sell movie-goers the same movie over and over again why not sell them the same ideas as well?

 #1) The Swiffer 

Hailed as a revolution in house cleaning, the static charged Swiffer Sweeper was launched in the late nineties with a clever ad that showed us the unending dust-pan line.  Like Zeno’s Runner, the line of dust would diminish but never fade completely.  Then, through space age technology, the Swiffer would come along and lick that age old problem in seconds.

It is true that Swiffer uses space-age technology, but this is true because the space age began in the sixties.  Static charged sheets are nothing new and we’ve been tossing them in our dryers for ages.  Two rubber bands and a sheet of fabric softener will serve the same function as the sweeper sheets, but it does so at 1/5th the cost.

 #2) Flavored Water 

The bottled water phenomenon has served as something of a high water mark for consumerism in the US and abroad.  Selling or buying bottled water is not stupid in itself but an equation of national stupidity could theoretically be charted by comparing the sales of high dollar and generic brands of the exact same oxygen and hydrogen molecules.

The beverage companies indulged our gullibility and provided us with dozens of brands of exactly the same substance.  Upping the ante of stupidity, they eventually added vitamins and flavors and called it “Flavored Water”, as though the notion of introducing a flavor agent to water was not the basis for the very term “Beverage Industry”.

But despite the inanity of the term, whole sections of “Flavored Water” greet you at every convenience store.  The term virtually demands a tongue in cheek winking emoticon since all the other drinks contain both flavor and water as well.  It’s rumored that the people that brought us this innovation are presently hard at work designing solar powered sundials.

 #3) Transitions Lenses 

The makers of "Transitions Lenses" earn an honorable mention in this list for the sheer stupidity with which they advertise this decades-old technology.  In a world that looks like a sterilized Buck Rogers set, a space age couple wearing space age white unitards take the space-shuttle to the space-mall and when the space-sun hits their space-glasses they magically go from simple corrective lenses to sunglasses.

Despite the Michael Bay backdrop, the notion of glasses that turn from clear to dark in sunlight is at least two and a half decades old, as my brother had a pair in 1986.  I suppose the commercial is not entirely disingenuous as I’m sure the same technology will still exist in the future as well.  In the same way one could sell a paper clip as a “data collation system used by top universities and NASA.”

 #4) The Fushigi 

I know that I’ve mentioned the magical gravity-obeying ball on this blog before, but it deserves a quick revisit.  For those who still haven’t seen the late-night infomercials, let me see if I can sum up the unique properties of the Fushigi in a short paragraph:

It’s a ball.

The commercial subtly suggests that there is something more to this ball that seems to magically roll around upon the hands and arms of a skilled juggler.  The fact that a person could literally do the exact same thing with an orange should take some of the wind out of the Fushigi’s sails, but these poorly constructed contact juggling balls are now popping up all over the country.

 #5) Oxi-Clean 

If you have yet to see the Oxi-Clean commercial congratulate yourself and get back under the rock for another decade.  For the rest of us, just the mention of the term brings to mind imposing beards, blinding blue shirts and far more enthusiasm than should ever be ascribed to a cleaning agent.

But fueling their late great pitchman’s success was the notion that there was something new or unique about the formulation of this miracle product.  Surely Oxi-Clean was the byproduct of the kind of laboratory tinkering that usually results in super-villains.  Surely it was the brainchild of some lonely chemist who spent years toiling with different compounds until the fateful Eureka moment that would skyrocket him into Nobel contention.

Or, on the other hand, it might have been the result of a clever marketer taking some sodium percarbonate that you could buy at any pool supply store, diluting it a bit and wrapping it in a fancy package before charging you a 400% markup for his efforts.  Certainly it was one of those two scenarios.

 #6) Boneless Wings 

At some point, the fate of the chicken wing was forever altered.  In my youth, the wing was the crummy piece you got stuck with when the drumsticks and breasts were gone.  The feeble scraps of meat fortified between the bones of the wings were hardly worth the trouble of freeing.

But at some point, wings hired a PR company or something and became one of America’s favorite menu items.  Soaked in buffalo sauce and dunked in bleu cheese dressing, these once hated morsels became a staple of nearly every restaurant in the nation.

Through it all, the problem of the bones remained.  Little drumsticks snuck in with the wings to distract us from this obvious flaw in our hors d’oeuvres but still the inconvenience of freeing the third of a mouthful of chicken was a clear drawback.  It seemed that the wing was forever doomed to mild pain-in-the-assery.

And then along came the “Boneless Wing”.  They were different from chicken nuggets in that they weren’t called chicken nuggets; they were called boneless wings.  The only real innovation here is that the nuggets of chicken parts were being pressed back into the shape they were in before they were shredded.  This was likely inspired by the famous restaurant industry adage, “well it worked for dog food, didn’t it?”

Aaron Davies

www.blognoscor.blogspot.com

PS If you arrange all the words in this blog alphabetically and then read only every eleventh word, it will spell out the location of this week’s mystery body.

Airport Security: An Exercise in Insanity

This year I took the train.  I sacrificed the 11 hours I might have saved by flying to my vacation destination and instead opted for an overnight trip on Amtrak.  There were a few advantages, not the least of which was the $280 I saved.  Another welcome amenity was the fact that coach seats on Amtrak provide more room and comfort than first-class airline tickets.  But none of that entered into my decision making process.

In truth, I'd have chosen the train even if the cost and comfort was equal.  I'm simply sick and tired of airport security.  It's reached a point now where going through airport security is only slightly less demoralizing than getting arrested.

I proclaimed my decision loudly and publicly and naively assumed that many people would applaud my choice.  I hoped that others might be inspired to give up a few hours in exchange for keeping their dignity.  I was, of course, hopelessly wrong.

"But we have to stop the terrorists!" the public exclaimed.  "It's a worthwhile sacrifice if it saves lives, isn't it?"

And I rolled my eyes.  I've gotten really good at rolling my eyes in the last few years.  "No," I replied to the paranoid public at large, "It is not remotely worth it."

"Are you saying terrorism is no big deal?" my fictionalized detractors responded.

"I am."

And the nation gasped with horror at the very suggestion that perhaps we shouldn't spend each waking moment terrified that some random jackass would wander onto a plane with a bomb in his Fruit of the Booms.  They looked on in slack-jawed disbelief at the idea that we should have perspective on this issue.

And, of course, that's the point.  A terrorist's job is to terrify people and to that end they have been incredibly succesful in the US.  It doesn't seem to matter that the odds of an American being killed on US soil by a terrorist are smaller than the odds of being killed by a falling meteor.  We have to stop them at any cost.  We have to implement any security protocol we can dream up regardless of the cost/benefit ratio.  We have to do everything we can regardless of the civil liberties we crush under the tires of security theater.

But what are we accomplishing?

This nation has been in a stupor since 9/11 and that is understandable.  Such a coordinated and devestating attack forced us to rightly reconsider all of our security procedures.  There was obviously an unacceptable level of risk and we moved quickly to right it.

This was reasonable.  Afterall, before 9/11 it was perfectly legal to board a plane with a pocket knife big enough to be a lethal weapon.  Before 9/11 one could all but accidentally wander into the cockpit looking for the bathroom.  Before 9/11 one could hijack an airplane with nothing but a box-cutter.

And thus we shifted our focus and revamped our security procedures.  Many of the changes were common sense ideas that should have been implemented decades earlier.  Many more were essentially useless security thater procedures that existed to reassure weary travellers that the TSA had their act together.  Still others were there to remind the potential terrorists that we were no longer going to have lighter security at our airports than our inner-city high schools.

And that was good.  Not only was it sensible, it was necessary in order to reestablish the trust of the travelling public and make them feel safe enough to climb aboard a plane once more.  The problem arose when we failed to downshift afterwards.

It is as though a switch was flipped and then broken and now we've lost the ability to reasonably assess the pros and cons of any given protocol.  A few terrorists in Europe cook up a Rube Goldberg-esque plot to take down a plane by combining liquids in flight to make a bomb.  It doesn't seem to matter than this plot failed and was deemed horribly unrealistic by experts in the field.  We respond by banning all liquids on planes.

A dingbat squeezes some explosives between his butt-cheeks and sets his Underoos on fire in flight.  We respond by spending $173 million on full body scanners at airports.  It doesn't matter that the plot failed and was considered horribly improbable by the experts.  Somehow it is considered reasonable to respond by forcing modest old woman to walk through a machine that photographs them in the buff.  Nevermind that only a few decades earlier that was such an assinine notion that it was actually an Abrams, Zucker & Zucker gag.

Of course, we can point to the success of such systems by saying that we've not suffered a terrorist attack since 9/11.  Of course, we could just as realistically attribute the lack of attacks to the fact that 3rd Rock From The Sun was cancelled that year as well.

The thing that we seemed to have forgotten after 9/11 is that despite the brutal and horrible success the terrorists achieved on that day, the enemy here is still a group of bumbling idiots.  Recall that the first time they tried to bomb the WTC they got caught when they went back to the rental house for the deposit on the van they used in the bombing.

It is as though Wile E. Coyote, after many years of failure, actually managed to catch the Road Runner for a change.  Would this one success force all the other Road Runner's to drive around in Pope-Mobiles?  Would the landscape of the cartoon Southwest suddenly be littered with coyote insurance plans, coyote detection equipment and batteries of anti-coyote missiles?

A single success, no matter how massive or devestating should not force us to lose sight of the fact that we are up against a bunch of cottage-cheese-for-brains zealots who do things like accidentally set their underwear on fire.

Now, I'm not trying to make light of the tragedy of 9/11 and I'm not trying to underplay the dangers that terrorism presents.  But without perspective, everything in our lives is terrifying beyond belief.  We all understand the dangers inherent in, say, driving on the interstate.  We accept the risk and go about our lives.  We take reasonable precautions by building safer and safer cars, but we don't close down the lifeblood of commerce every time there's an 18 car pile-up.

If we wanted to eliminate the dangers of interstate travel, we could do it tommorow.  We could implement a national 30 MPH speed limit and set up random check points where teams of mechanics could inspect the brakes of every vehicle that passes.  That would undoubtedly save tens of thousands of lives every year.  Of course, we opt not to do so because the risk is deemed less than the inconvenience of tooling around like Morgan Freeman in Driving Miss Daisy.

But if you divided the cost of setting up these checkpoints by the number of lives they would likely save, the sum total comes up to far less than the dollars-per-life-saved that we invest in anti-terrorism procedures.  Does that not make it reasonable?

Keep in mind that the goal of the terrorist is to terrorize.  Their goal is not as much the body count, but the echo of horror that the body count leaves in its wake.  The terrorists did not "win" on 9/11, they won on 9/12 when the reaction to their attack came.  They won when we hunkered down in our basements with our shotguns and our duct tape.  They won when we started thinking that a few dingle-berries in a cave in Afghanistan were a worthy enemy for the full force of the American military.  They won when we invested billions upon billions of dollars in the fruitless and unrealistic attempt to insure that no terrorist attack would ever happen again.

Every time we funnel a few million dollars into an unnecessary security procedure, it is a victory for the terrorists.  Every time we strip away a layer of civil liberties from the American populace, it is a victory for the terrorists.  Every time we elevate a bunch of bumbling douche-bags to a legitimate national threat, it is a victory for the terrorists.

I for one have grown tired of handing these victories over and I refuse to do so any longer.  I will take the train until the terrorists bomb one of those and the TSA implements full cavity searches for train passengers.  At that point I will drive where I need to go until the terrorists blow up a bridge and prompt the TSA to strip search every driver at every interstate on-ramp.  At that point I will walk until the terrorists drop thumb tacks on some sidewalk and the TSA responds by forcing all pedestrians to walk naked with their hands behind their heads.

I vote with my dollar and I hope that there are enough like-minded people who choose not to go through the demoralizing nonsense that is airport security.  I am clear headed enough to know that the risk of the plane falling out of the damn sky is greater than the risk of a terrorist attack and I refuse to live my life as though that were not the case.

This is an unpopular view, I know.  My hope is that our paranoia is on the wane as we approach the 10 year anniversary of 9/11.  My hope is that reason will someday shout louder than Chicken Little.  My hope is that someday soon people will realize that "liberty" and "freedom" are synonyms such that one cannot be traded for the other.

Until then the terrorists are racking up victory after victory.

Aaron Davies
http://www.blognoscor.blogspot.com/

PS Sorry it's been so long since the last blog.  I'm on vacation and while I never vacation from blogging, I've been away from a computer for several days.  I'll be back on my game in no time... Unless the terrorists get me on my way back home.

Pseudoscientific Proof That my M&Ms are Psychic

Over the weekend I recounted a fictitious event that suggested that my M&Ms may or may not be psychic.  I was understandably dismissive of the possibility but when my fictitious friend Sam read the blog entry, he was irate over what he considered a wholly inaccurate recollection of the event.  I reminded him that both he and the event were fictitious but he was unswerving in his conviction that I had grossly exaggerated the details to create an unjust impression that there was nothing remarkable about the powers my M&Ms displayed.

I was still unconvinced, but I decided it would be unfair to dismiss the possibility outright.  My skepticism may have led to confirmation bias that did not allow me to see the actual predictive powers of the M&Ms.  Conceding this point, I proposed a fictional test.

We set about creating a rigorously controlled set of scientific protocols.  Sam picked up several bags of test M&Ms and a few bags of Skittles for our control group and we spent the next several hours asking the M&Ms to predict random coin flips.  To be thorough, we also tested Peanut M&Ms, Dark Chocolate M&Ms and the new Pretzel ones, though we were unable to obtain a sufficient sample size of the third group (starting eating them).

After several hundred trials, we crunched our numbers and determined that all of the predictive powers fell well inside normal ranges:

• Original M&Ms: 47% success rate
• Peanut M&Ms: 51% success rate
• Dark Chocolate M&Ms: 54%
• Pretzel M&Ms: 48%
• Skittles (control): 49%
• Reese’s Pieces: Do they still even make those?

The data clearly showed that the predictive powers of the M&Ms obtained by assigning value to the color was easily explainable by random chance.  This seemed to deflate Sam.  I was satisfied just knowing we could finally start eating all of the test subjects.

But Sam lifted himself from his depression quite quickly.  I was surprised to see the smile creeping back into his lips mere minutes after the negative conclusion.  Clearly something had occurred to him that merited a full-bellied laugh before he would share it with me.

“I’ve got it!” Sam said, “I think the M&Ms might still be psychic.”

“But… we just scientifically proved that they weren’t,” I argued.

“Right.  We scientifically proved it.  But you can’t scientifically prove the paranormal.  That’s what makes it paranormal.  We shouldn’t have been doing scientific tests at all.”

“Then what should we have been doing?” I asked around a mouthful of milk chocolate and colored candy shells.

“Pseudoscientific tests,” he offered triumphantly.

My first instinct was to argue but as I tried to formulate a rebuttal I realized that it was perfectly valid.  After all, Tarot cards and astrology don’t pass scientific tests and people make a living off of them.  Perhaps I had been looking at it the wrong way the whole time.

“So how do you do pseudoscientific tests?” I asked.

“Well, instead of starting with something falsifiable, we’ll need some kind of untestable, unrepeatable, unverifiable claim.”

I nodded.  “Gotcha.  Like last night when I was visited by those space aliens that gave me the sacred parchments upon which were scrawled the ancient secrets of M&M divination.”

“Really?  Are you serious?” he asked excitedly.

“Sure, why not?  I could be lying.  I don’t believe me, but since I can’t prove me wrong…”

Sam was nodding along but suddenly a wrinkle occurred to him.  “Do you actually have the parchments?”

I swallowed the dark chocolate I’d been munching on.  “Turned to dust and blew away as soon as I finished translating them.”

“Ooh… good one.”

“Thanks.  So that’s step one.  What next?”

“Next we need to throw out all the data that doesn’t support our hypothesis.”

“So we trash all this,” I concluded, nodding toward the results of our failed survey.

Sam regarded me as though I’d just made an animal noise.  “What?  Of course not.  There’s some good stuff in there.”

“But… it proves we’re wrong,” I argued.

“Not all of it.  You remember that run we had with the Peanut M&Ms while you were playing Wii Tennis?  We got 12 out of 15 at one point.”

“But that was just random noise…” I argued stupidly.

“Not in pseudoscience.  We just publish that along with the best run we had with the other ones, leave out all the stuff about “control groups” and “blinding” and then list the relative psychic abilities of each type of M&Ms.”

“Like, Dark Chocolate is better, regular is the worst, et cetera.”

“Exactly.”

“Alright, what’s step three?”

“That’s it.  We’re done.  M&Ms are now officially psychic,” Sam pronounced.

“Don’t we need a plausible mechanism or something?”

“Chi.”

“Do M&Ms have chi?” I asked.

“All things have chi.”

I scratched my head and glanced back at the colorful bowls.  I’d eaten enough now that they’d stop looking delicious and now simply looked like a McDonald’s playhouse for hamsters.  “I don’t know… are you sure that’s enough?”

“Dude, we now have as much support for our hypothesis as there is for acupuncture, reiki, feng shui, chiropractic, herbal supplements, astrology, magnet therapy, dowsing, anthroposophic medicine, cartology, palmistry, UFOs, cryptozoology, auras, seances, graphology and homeopathy combined.”

“Wow… so what do we do now?”

Sam scratched his chin and peered beyond me for a moment.  He was in his element to a degree I’d never witnessed before.  His gaze descended slowly and finally landed a few feet to my right.  “I think we should ask the M&Ms.”


Aaron Davies
www.blognoscor.blogspot.com

How I Know My M&Ms Are Psychic

If you fire a Nerf dart from my love seat and angle it properly, it will bounce off the coffee table, off the opposing wall, back off the coffee table and into your hand.  I was in the midst of discovering this a few days ago when a friend of mine arrived unannounced.

I knew who it would be and considered not answering.  It was my friend Sam and most of the time Sam is a pretty good guy but of late he has become enamored with a psychic who sets up shop in Forest Hills.  I live nearby so for several weeks I’d been receiving him shortly after having his mind blown by his palmist and it doesn’t take many recollections of the experience to bore me to tears.

“Come in”, I said over my own objection.

“Dude!” Sam said, thrusting his way through the door like Kramer, “I just came from…”

“Your psychic,” I finished and fired a Nerf dart a few inches off the mark.  I had to stretch and reach for it, which totally killed the cool factor.

“Right,” he said, hastily tossing his jacket on the couch beside him.  “I know you’re skeptical of this kind of stuff but after what she told me today…” he hesitated, searching the chunk of my living room above him for words grandiose enough to describe the magnitude of this revelation.

I saved him the trouble.

“What did she tell you?” I asked politely, reloading my gun.  He moved his lips for a second but the words changed their minds and retreated.

“No…” he said with a shake of his head, “It won’t do any good.  It doesn’t matter what I say, you’ll shoot it down and not believe it.”

I nodded noncommittally.

“I have a different way to prove it to you,” he said with a wry smile.

I tried to project dubiousness but it’s anyone’s guess to what degree I succeeded.  “What?”

“You’re coming with me.  She’s free for the rest of the afternoon.”

I glanced to the TV, which wasn’t on, and then back to the coffee table.  “I don’t know man… these darts aren’t just gonna shoot themselves.”

“I’ll even pay for it,” he offered.

“It’s cold,” I complained.

“Tell you what, if you can hit that shot five times in a row and catch the dart every time, I’ll shut up about it.  If you miss you have to come and have your aura read.”

Sam knows my weakness.  I accepted.

So a few minutes later I arrive at this psychic’s place that has a vibe that I could only describe as “clinically hippie”.  There’s a small waiting area but I didn’t have time to explore it.  The psychic was desperately not busy so she urged us in right away.  She did us the favor of not saying we were expected.

Now, I’m not going to spend a thousand words ripping on this nice woman who steals money from ignorant people by promising them something she can’t remotely deliver so I’ll just sum up the details of my Tarot reading (I know, I thought I was getting an aura reading as well).

In all, Madame Fraudulina (name changed to protect the guilty) never made any concrete or testable predictions about the future exactly, but she did make six statements that could more aptly be called predictions of the present.  She said that I was dissatisfied with my job, married, an only child, I loved to write, I have great aspirations and a special connection to the month of April.

Now, this would be pretty impressive if it was true.  I am married, I do love to write and I suppose that I have “great aspirations”, though I’m not sure how exclusive that club is.  I’m lucky enough to have a job that I love, unlucky enough to have three siblings and can’t imagine what would be significant about April.

To be fair, my friend got a lot more than this for his $65.  She also told me a lot of stuff like “you have a very old soul”, “your energy is focused in your heart charka” and “you’re more of a stone than a tree,” but I don’t think these constitute testable prophecy.  In all, she made six quantifiable statements and had a hit rate of 50%.  Even that’s being pretty generous because I have to believe the “great aspirations” line counts for more than half of us and though I don’t wear a ring, I’m far too careless with my appearance to be single.

Sam seemed surprised when my mind failed to throb visibly in my skull on the way back out into the bitter cold.  His every molecule vibrated with anticipation as he regarded me with a smile.  “Well?” he prompted.

“About what I expected.”

“Are you kidding me?  How did she know you liked to write?”

“The fact that I used words she didn’t know probably clued her in.”

“But still,” he argued as though those syllables actually represented a cogent rebuttal.

“She said I was an only child.  I’m the third of four kids.”

“But she still got most of the stuff right, though.  You can’t expect her to get it right every time.”

“Well… the weather man has a better hit rate than that,” I said, turning into the Duane Reade and sighing when I caught sight of the line.  I needed a Mountain Dew and the psychic’s place was too cold to get my bones up to temperature for the walk home.

“She was right three times out of six,” I reminded him.

“She said way more than six things.”

“Six real things.  Whether or not I was an artist in a former life doesn’t count.”

“You’ve just closed your eyes to the possibility and you can’t see psychic powers when they’re right in front of you.  Man, that’s kind of sad.  What would convince you?”

I shrugged and grabbed a green bottle of yellow corn syrup.  “How about better than coin flip odds?” I shuffled through the surprisingly ample greeting cards section and stepped into the red ribbon labyrinth that preceded the checkout.  As usual, two cashiers manned the eight registers.

“I think you’re just too cynical,” Sam interjected.

“Man, anybody could guess right half the time.  Look, I’ll prove it.”  The gentleman in front of me in line had glanced back and I caught his attention.  He shifted a muscle magazine under one arm.  “You mind helping me test my psychic powers?” I asked.

I half expected him to dismiss me as a new age nutcase or lecture me about the sin of the supernatural but to my surprise he was quite amiable.  I suppose it’s better than the entertainment one usually gets in line at the Duane Reade.

I proceeded to make six random guesses about the guy and for the sake of recreating the actual circumstance I tossed in a few neo-pagan buzzwords.  I told him he was a moon bearer and a temperate soul.  I also offered the same six guesses that the psychic had given me.  I said that he was married, siblingless, filled with great aspirations, hated his job, loved to write and felt a connection to April.

As it happened, I was right on four of the six guesses and he also seemed to agree emphatically that he was a moon bearer.  I’d managed to best the psychic’s hit rate on a random stranger and felt that the argument had been settled.  I turned back to Ian with a victorious grin.

“Holy crap,” Sam said as the revelation sunk in.  “You’re psychic too.”

I rolled my eyes and shuffled forward in line.  “I am not.  How many people hate their jobs?  How many people in their thirties are married?  Who doesn’t have great aspirations?”

“Come to think of it, I used to like to write songs,” the man in line remarked.  “Maybe that’s what you were sensing.  I think you actually got five out of six right.”

“I was just repeating what some supposed charlatan told me today,” I assured him, “There was nothing psychic about it.”

“And my sister and I haven’t spoken in years…” he continued.

“Next!” a cashier yelled, saving me from any further states of epiphany from my demonstration.

“You try,” I said, nodding to the woman in line behind Sam.  Like every woman ever standing beside me in line at a Duane Reade, she was carrying a box of tampons.  “Ma’am, do you mind if my friend tests his psychic powers on you?”

She laughed a bit but agreed.  The elderly woman occupying the other cashier was arguing about a coupon so I figured we had plenty of time.

Sam hesitated but eventually he recited as much of what I said as he could remember.  He forgot the only child part and he called her a moon baron, but other than that he nailed it.

“I am a moon baron,” she said with a face-devouring grin.  “And my husband was born in April!”

“Do you hate your job?” Sam asked excitedly.

“I loathe it!” she agreed.

“Do you love to write?” I asked.

She considered for a second and nodded with something of a visible asterisk in her expression.  “Kind of!”

“Okay so that’s five for five,” I summarized, “See?  Anybody could say that to anybody and be right at least as often as they’re wrong.”

“But what if I’m psychic too?” Sam offered as I plucked a pack of M&Ms from the counter front.

“Oh, you’re definitely psychic,” the tampon lady offered.

“You said the exact same thing as I said.  How can you be psychic if you’re just repeating something somebody else predicted about somebody else?”

“Next!” the cashier said in typically inviting New York fashion.  I reached into my wallet for a five-dollar bill with Sam in tow.

“Maybe we predicted psychically what spot to get into in line.  Heck, you don’t know why we happened to wonder into this particular store.”

“Because it’s on the way to my house,” I said, taking my change and cracking open my soda.

“But we could have stopped at any of these stores,” he said with a wide gesture as we exited back onto the street.  The guy who I’d offered my psychic wares to greeted us on the sidewalk and presented his wife.

“I was just telling my wife about your abilities,” he said.

“No…” I protested but he cut me off.

“Can you see her aura?  My sister says it’s green.”

“You hate your job, you dig April, you’re married, you love to write, you have great aspirations and you’re an only child,” I blurted out.  “Oh… and you’re a moon bearer.”

“Oh my God!” she screamed excitedly, “can you talk to dead people?”

Of course, like anyone, I can talk to dead people but I didn’t feel like explaining the semantic error.  “Was any of that stuff true?”

“Well, I’m not an only child and I don’t have a job but the rest was dead on.”

“When’s my birthday?” came a random voice from the street.

“I don’t know,” I said, tearing open my M&Ms and glancing over at a Starbucks employee on a cigarette break, “June?” I guessed.

His expression froze.  “Whoa…” he remarked.

Sam jumped excitedly.  “Was that right?  Was he right?”

“No, August, but still…”

“Only two months away!” Sam said with a proud punch to my shoulder.

“Yeah… I kind of nailed the season,” I conceded sarcastically.  “It’s really cold…”

“How do you do it?” the wife demanded, “What’s your secret?”

“There is no secret.  I’m just saying random stuff and as often as not I’m getting it wrong.  You want to believe that I’m psychic so in your mind you’re exaggerating the veracity of my claims.”

Her husband nodded slowly but she seemed unsatisfied.  “He doesn’t want to tell us,” he whispered.

“He doubts his powers,” Sam argued.

“No…” I tried, but the woman interrupted again.

“Please?  I’m very into the occult and sometimes I see auras and stuff, but I’d love to develop a power like yours.”

“It’s in the M&Ms,” I said.  I’d given up on trying to argue.  It was cold and it seemed the easiest way to end the conversation.  “I divine based on the color of the M&Ms.”

She nodded and smiled as though she’d always suspected as much.  “Can you tell me about my grandmother?” she pleaded.

I shook three M&Ms into my palm; two yellows and a blue.  “Well,” I said as I pondered them,  “Blue represents imagination and intellect based in the stillness of yellow.  The more her mind opens, the more she will be at peace.”

She grinned and her husband poked her excitedly.  “Thank you so much,” she said and shook my hand.  I turned away and the Starbucks employee offered me a wide berth.

“That was amazing,” Sam uttered and remained silent for the rest of the walk.

As I reflect on that afternoon I’m left with two distinct possibilities.  Either I’m the last sane man on earth or my M&Ms are psychic.  I refuse to believe the former.

Aaron Davies

www.blognoscor.blogspot.com

8 Silly Things We Believe About Water

One of the most telling consequences of our lack of scientific understanding is our relative inability to distinguish genuine scientific fact from the pseudo-scientific ramblings of urban legend.  There is no finger pointing in that statement, for I am the product of an American public education and thus as susceptible to misinformation as the next person.  Even things that contradict logic can be made to sound sensible when cloaked in the mysterious verbal trappings of chemistry or (God forbid) quantum mechanics.

How are you gonna float in yourself?
That's just not natural.

To illustrate our vulnerability, consider the most familiar chemical compound on the planet.  By the time we are self aware, we are aware of water.  It is probably the only chemical compound on the planet that the average American could identify solely by its chemical components.  We can easily recite the freezing and boiling points of water and nothing else on earth.

And yet, despite its ubiquity and the relative strength of our knowledge about it, we are fully capable of believing complete nonsense about water.  Consider just a few of my favorite widely believed yet wholly unsupported myths about dihydrogen oxide.

 #1) Boiling Water Freezes Faster Than Cold Water 

As contrary to common sense as this seems, a surprising number of people believe this one.  When pressed, they will give a stuttering and stilted scientific explanation that often relies on some mistaken belief that chemicals that are “boiled out” would otherwise inhibit the water from freezing.

Ice waiting to happen.

Even the most basic scientific understanding can puzzle through this one.  It will take more energy to cool water from 212 degrees to 32 degrees that it will take to cool water from, say, 78 degrees to 32 degrees.  I don’t really feel a need to explain why that is.  It would seem that most minds would require some pretty compelling evidence before they would willingly abandon this self-evident fact.

As it turns out, there can be compelling evidence but it’s harder to come by than some people would have you believe.  Under the perfect circumstances, boiling water can freeze faster than room temperature water, but it’s not as miraculous as one might think.  The culprit here is evaporation.  Boiling water might evaporate much faster than cold water and thus there would be less water to freeze.  This hardly constitutes “freezing faster” since we can all agree that less water freezes faster than more water.

 #2) Cold Water Boils Faster Than Hot Water 

My mother introduced me to this myth as a child and I did not bother to question it until more than a decade later.  “When boiling water”, she told me, “always use cold water from the tap, not hot water.”  It sounded wrong, but she said it convincingly and at that point in my life my mother was the highest authority on all things kitchen.

Also, this is the fastest route to China.

Like the previous myth, this one is based not on a misunderstanding of science, but rather on a willingness to toss that understanding out the window.  I couldn’t pin down any consensus on the origin of this myth or what explanation is used to justify it, but clearly it remains a widely held belief.

If it were true, a nuanced scientific explanation would be in order.  Since it’s not, I need only say that hot water is already hot so it boils faster.  There is a hot water heater “pre-boiling” water for you all the time so it doesn’t make much sense to start with cold water if your goal is to make it hot.

 #3) You Should Drink 8 Glasses of Water Every Day 

This may just be the most widely believed medical myth.  There are a few competing theories about where this myth comes from, but one thing that is in consensus is the fact that it is incorrect.  What’s more is that there is no recommended daily allowance of water that would be correct for every one.

To save time, drink it all
in one serving.

Your body is made mostly of water and to remain healthy you need only replace the water your body uses each day.  This amount will vary greatly depending on your size, your level of activity and your unique physiology.  While eight glasses may be right for someone, for most people that’s simply way more water than their body needs.

If we accept that all of us have the sense to drink when we’re thirsty and thus avoid death by dehydration, there are as many health risks in drinking too much water as too little.  Finding the proper balance of water intake is really just as easy as drinking when your body alerts you that it doesn’t have enough water.  Cutting out sugary beverages would have far more impact on your health than adding another 5 or 6 glasses of water.

 #4) Adding Salt Causes Water to Boil Faster 

In defense of people who believe this, it is actually true.  This myth doesn’t come as much from a lack of understanding of science as a lack of understanding of proportions.  Water will boil faster if there is salt in it.  That much is not in question.  This crosses over to myth, however, when you start adding a spoonful of salt to a pot in hopes of saving yourself some time.

"Gimme some more salt!  I haven't got all minute..."

In truth, the amount of salt you would have to add to make a difference in the boiling time is quite high and even then it would be only save you a few seconds.  To make a worthwhile difference the water would have to be somewhere between brackish and briny.  In other words, you would be trading a minute of boiling time for pasta that tasted like it was just rescued from the ocean.

 #5) Toxic Chemicals Can Be Leeched From Water Bottles 

It amazes me how the pendulum of myth can swing so far when it comes to bottled water.  There are plenty of unsupported and demonstrably false myths about how healthy bottled water is, but there are just as many urban legends that make it out to be cancer-laden witchery as well.

Perhaps the most prevalent of these myths is the notion that there are toxic carcinogens trapped within the walls of the bottle just waiting to break down and seep into your unsuspecting esophagus.  Reusing the bottle or allowing it to sit in a hot car is said to accelerate this poisonous decay.

Just look at all the death waiting to happen...

Now, if you’re the type of person that would be willing to except the explanation that the bottled water industry is in league with the Illuminati and wants to kill us all with tainted plastics, you’re probably too far gone to be talked back from the ledge by anything I write of Blognoscor.  The remainder of my readership can rest assured that we have government programs in place to keep companies from using toxic plastics to package consumables.

Reusing a water bottle will not cause it to release anything into your water and beyond that, there is nothing within that bottle that would be carcinogenic.  Far too many purveyors of urban health myths rely on our national tendency to equate chemicals with danger.  But everything is laced with chemicals.  The very word “thing” implies that there are chemicals involved.  You and I are laced with chemicals.  Our chemicals are laced with chemicals.  Water is made up entirely of chemicals.  The fact that there are chemicals in the water bottle is to be expected and should come as no concern.

 #6) The Coriolis Effect Cares About Your Bathtub 

This is a classic example of misapplying an existing phenomenon in an inappropriate circumstance.  This widely held misconception is based on the fact that hurricanes spin in the opposite direction south of the equator and prefer to be called “typhoons”.  The Coriolis effect, a byproduct of the earth’s rotation and the interaction between the surface and the atmosphere, actually does cause this.

Pictured: Mother Nature showing off.

This effect, however, acts slowly on massive systems.  The brief cyclonic action that takes place in your bathtub doesn’t really have time to be affected by the rotation of the planet.  Far more important is the actual geometry of the tub and the direction from which the water is introduced to the drain.

This myth is perpetuated in places near the equator where unscrupulous charlatans will “show” you the effect by moving a few paces north or south of the equatorial line and draining water into specially made trick tubs.  In point of fact, the Coriolis effect is so weak at the equator that it essentially has no effect on anything, let alone something as short lived as a bucket’s worth of water in a pan.

 #7) Filtered Water is Healthier 

The scope of the water purification industry is astounding.  In a country with amazingly clean publicly available water, American’s spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year treating, filtering and purifying water that has already been treated, filtered and purified.  This is not to mention the massive amounts we spend foregoing tap water altogether in favor of bottled water (now with 20% more “H”!).

So are all these water pictures making
you have to pee yet or what?

There are reasons to filter tap water, but none of them are really health related.  In some municipalities water might have a sulfurous odor or a displeasing taste and filtering water will certainly improve that.  In a few older homes they might even remove tiny (and ultimately insignificant) impurities picked up in decrepit plumbing.  But none of this really makes the water any healthier.

 #8) Water can be “Ionized” 

This is something of an extension of the previous point, but so blatant is the lunatic buffoonery around these money-funnels I felt they needed their own place along my list.  The product is called a “water ionizer” and it promises to treat your water with electrolysis in order to make it healthier and easier for your body to absorb.  This “ionized” or “alkalized” water is said to infer all manner of health benefits.

"But where does the gullibility go?"

This is nonsense standing on the shoulders of bull crap.  Your body has no problem absorbing water, nothing that can be done to it will make it any easier to absorb, electrolysis does nothing whatsoever to water and the term “ionized water” is as meaningless as the term “Awesome-ized water”.  There is absolutely no evidence anywhere on the planet that anything these companies claim is based on so much as a fraction of truth.

If it seems like I’m getting carried away on this one, keep in mind that these machines cost upwards of $2000 and as much as $6500.  Because of the miraculous health benefits they promise, they are often marketed to people with terminal illnesses that are willing to forego logic in hopes of finding anything that works.  This blatant and merciless thievery should not be treated lightly or given any respectful deference.  But don’t take my word for it, just ask anyone who has any reason to know and isn’t selling a water ionizer.

Aaron Davies

www.blognoscor.blogspot.com

Note: No participles were dangled in the making of this blog.