Quickies

Skepchick Quickies 3.24

  • Today is Ada Lovelace day! (ED: and Skepchick Jen is having a contest!
  • Horror film draws unwanted visitors to Conn. house – “The movie, “A Haunting in Connecticut,” doesn’t open until Friday, but curious fans are already making a beeline for the Southington home that inspired the movie.”  The current owners don’t believe the house is haunted, but the movie is based on stories of “hauntings” that occured during the 1980s. From Michael.
  • Right wing guru urges melding religion and money making – “Big business is not greedy, malicious and unscrupulous, Malloch argues in his recent Templeton-funded book, Spiritual Enterprise: Doing Virtuous Business. Malloch counters these charges by suggesting that capitalist economies thrive because they have a “profound connection to a fundamentally religious frame of mind.”” From SicPreFix.
  • Resveratol draws interest as anti-aging pill – “A lot of wellness counselors and homeopathic counselors are recommending it,” he said. “I even had one doctor recommend it to one of his cardiovascular patients.”  From Tim.
  • Fixing a genetic flaw – “An international team of researchers has successfully treated dogs with the canine form of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a rapidly progressing and ultimately fatal muscle disease that afflicts one out of every 3,600 boys.” From Ordinary Girl.

Amanda

Amanda works in healthcare, is a loudmouthed feminist, and proud supporter of the Oxford comma.

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13 Comments

  1. Similar things happened to the town of Burkittsville, Md when the Blair Witch Project movie came out. A lot of fans came to the town to take pictures, but some of them left with street signs and even tombstones from the local cemetery. I hope the thiefs ended up with “vandal’s remorse” by the time the second movie was released. Personally, I thought both movies were so bad they weren’t even funny.

  2. “Big business is not greedy, malicious and unscrupulous, Malloch argues in his recent Templeton-funded book. . .”

    Looks like religion was profitable to at least one person.

  3. You know I am a giant fan of horror movies, but would never visit a house supposedly the basis for a movie. I do get a kick out of seeing places I know in movies though. The railroad crossing in “House by the Cemetary” is right near my house in Lincoln MA.

    I was down the cape last weekend and called my sister “a bit delusional” when she told me she had seen ghosts, (yes plural) a few years ago. I was glad she didn’t get offended, just reclaimed that she knew what she saw.

    So how aggressive would you be in a conversation like that, where you love the person but know they did not see what they claimed? Do you bother?

    In another case my brother in law told me he had a short leg as a kid, and a faith healer actually grew his leg. When I questioned that a faith healer could grow a leg he got short with me and asked. “Are you calling me a liar?” I said no, but I thought he may be mistaken about thinking the faith healer made the leg grow and not some other process already going on.

  4. There’s that well known passage in the New Testament where the J-Man says, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God“.

    One day I’m going to read that these prosperity gospel types have built a gigantic needle in the desert in order to get around that particular problem.

  5. I have a friend that lives very close to the Amityville house. It got so bad there they ended up changing the name of the road as well as the numbers of the houses.

    The real horror is the people who end up buying a really nice house and end up dealing with idiots.

  6. I posted a blog item about Ada Lovelace this morning that included the phrase “enchantress of numbers”. Within hours, the author of “Ada: The Enchantress of Numbers” had commented on my blog. I figure the phrase tripped a web search alert that she set up. I find that satisfyingly self-referential, since it’s people like Ada Lovelace and her successors who made this sort of thing possible, or even conceivable.

  7. @Imrryr: Hey don’t forget 3rd Timothy verse 14

    “And Jebus spake saying ‘ I do loveth the man of great wealth for he shall stimulate the economy through his purchase of many slaves and slaves shall beleive unto me.'”

  8. I can’t imaginewhat it would be like having all those people loitering around your place, going into your yard and looking into the windows to see if they could see a ghost and/or you naked.

    That would be enough to turn me into that weirdo who screams at people who are on their lawn and who chases people who knock at the door off with a shotgun. “Geet off mah propertah”

    All I would need t

  9. (Crud. I must have pressed post too soon. )

    I was saying “All I would need are some missing front teeth to complete the effect.”

  10. capitalist economies thrive because they have a “profound connection to a fundamentally religious frame of mind.”” From SicPreFix.

    Hmm, a curious assertion:

    1) Free markets (which admittedly not the same thing as capitalism, but people tend to use them interchangeably) are driven by emergence a phenomenon that, when it appears in biology, is generally dismissed as “blind chance” by those with a fundamentally religious frame of mind.

    2) The freest economies in the world (Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand) are very secular. In fact, as a rule the more religious a country is, the less free it is (the US is a big outlier). Coincidence?

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