Pseudoscience tries to get sexy

Apologies for missing my daily posting yesterday – real life once again interfered, as I actually was forced to work all day (and all night). The horror! Thankfully, the boss is rewarding our crew today with donuts (Dunkin, of course, this is Boston) for breakfast, fine Italian cuisine (I’m not facetiously referring to pizza, it really is delicious) for lunch, and the usual Friday chips and beer for . . . well, it usually counts as my dinner.

Also, thankfully today things are a bit quieter, in between all the free food, so I have a moment to post. And there was much rejoicing. Okay, quiet down.

Following up on the “Master” QiGong fellow from the previous posting, James Randi has received an interesting letter about a possible debunking of the clip performed on Chinese television for a different station. JREF General Manager Jeff Wagg asked me the other day if I had heard of such a thing — I searched YouTube but was unable to find a clip. Please let me know if any of you have better luck.

In that same commentary, Randi also mentions an item that a few other people have emailed me — Global Orgasm Day is coming up on December 22. From the site:

The mission of the Global Orgasm is to effect change in the energy field of the Earth through input of the largest possible surge of human energy. Now that there are two more US fleets heading for the Persian Gulf with anti- submarine equipment that can only be for use against Iran, the time to change Earth’s energy is NOW!

I know that many rational people are dismissing this out of hand as complete bunk. The site includes a “Science” section quoting the Global Consciousness Project at Princeton, which some of you may know as the Egg Weirdos. They watch random number generators during arbitrarily chosen significant events, hoping to find deviations that prove a world consciousness exists and is capable of influencing random number generators, for some reason. It’s been pretty heavily criticized by better skeptics than I, so feel free to read up on that. Anyway, that’s their science.

So the organizers of Global Orgasm Day are hoping that they can bring about a happier, more peaceful place by affecting the global consciousness if they get enough people to have an orgasm on the same day. They make it clear that it doesn’t have to happen at exactly the same time, which I’m sure has a lot of people breathing a sigh of relief. You know how difficult that is.

Despite the fact that their “science” is ridiculously stupid and as a whole they display the sort of wide-eyed idealistic naivete that would embarass most college freshmen, I think it’s an idea that could work. Just imagine what would happen if the vast majority of the world’s adult population were to do this — don’t you think more people would be a little nicer, at least for the day? I think that would count as having improved world peace, just a tiny bit.

However, I hate to lend any more positive publicity to such a ridiculously stupid and insulting abortion of science (I’m not really sure all those words went together correctly, but it’ll have to do), so I think maybe we should wait a month and then promote “International Screw for Science Day,” when skeptics and scientists the world over can come together, literally and figuratively, to just be happy. I’m now a little disappointed that the calendars are currently at press, since it would be nice to add Screw for Science Day. Let’s make it, oh, how about the third Saturday in January? That day, of course, was not chosen at random — it coincides with the Amaz!ng Meeting in Las Vegas, when hundreds of skeptics meet up to learn, debate, and enjoy one another’s company. Now for those of you attending, you have the perfect line to strike up a conversation — “Hi there. Know what today is?”