Skepticism
Skepchick Quickies, 4.27
- The “Hand of God” rock is for sale. (Thanks to gr8googlymoogly and Kevin.)
- 5 superstitions with logical explanations.
- Mystery spots! Places where bizarre forces obscure reality. (Thanks to Steve.)
- A report on a surprisingly good mainstream newsstory on the dangers of homeopathic vaccination from Australia.
- Man died an hour after being treated for peanut allergy by an alternative medicine practitioner. Rae has some commentary here.
Why does Dog’s hand look skeletal? That can’t be a good thing.
Nice write-up on the superstitions even though I’ve got serious doubts about some of the explanations.
Leave the mystery spots alone! They’re fun!
Homeopathy/alternative medicine is nothing but a horror story and this is just another chapter.
So why is it the whenever there’s a giant phallic shaped rock nobody refers to it as “The Wang of God”?
What with the “virgin birth” thing, one would think that would be all the rage.
Or not I guess.
I especially liked the ending paragraph of the Cracked article:
“And in that, you can see the real root cause of all of the beliefs: The bar for convincing people something was magical back then was just set really goddanmed low. ”
Yeah, that’s similar to my realization that gods and religion are a crock. If people are dumb enough to get suckered in to Scientology today, it could not be that hard to get people to follow a zombie jew in a time when they knew hardly anything about the world around them and believed all sorts of nonsense.
@Matto: Maybe because Dog used his hand instead? ;-)
As I said yesterday, God’s hand has two thumbs. Whoever created God was a terrible designer.
Wait a second… I thought this:
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2009/b1509/
was the hand of god.
@Elyse:
Or Hunter S. Thompson is God:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_S._Thompson#Middle_years
The rock guy wants to use the funds “to pursue an unpaid internship in counseling when he graduates with a master’s degree in social work in two years.”
Oh brother. I feel like this is the key element of this news story.
@Catch22: That’s his other hand. It just happens to be really big and only viewable from certain angles.
With all these hands of god cropping up, it makes you wonder…
Uta Kogelsberger is an amazing photographer. The pictures in the Wired article are simply beautiful.
The peanut story and the coroner’s court completly missed what happened. A man goes to a quack. The quack claims medical skills that he doesn’t have and kills the man. He might as well have given the man strychnine. This was deliberate murder. Or manslaughter at the very least.
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I was disappointed. I thought the mysterious spots was going to be about the g-spot. That’s what I get for listening to old episodes of the SGU.
Back then? So is the bar just as low now, or even lower? No way homeopathy became a thing with improved standards.
Careful with the hand-of-God mockery. You don’t want the Hand of the Almighty to fall on you.
@Elyse: Why do you think two thumbs would be a bad design?
Funny, I thought Eric Clapton was God…