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Archive of "humour" Category
Celebrate the 13th
Today is one of those days when we are all reminded of the superstitions that surround us. Most people reading this will know how these beliefs in “bad luck” are perpetuated – confirmation bias and the rest. So I propose a couple of simple and entertaining ways of celebrating rationality on this supposedly unlucky day. Feel free to join in with either, both, or none at all.1. Recklessly and with joyous abandon, indulge in as many “unlucky” activities as possible. Opening umbrellas indoors, stepping on cracks in the pavement, walking under ladders… Go crazy!*
2. Count and notice all the good things that happen to you today – and draw no conclusions relating to some mysterious common cause.
* Any injuries sustained by such reckless indulgence is to be attributed not to the date but to clumsiness/stupidity etc.
Light Relief for Monday
It’s Monday. Odds are in favour of you being somewhere or doing something you’d rather not. So have a quick comic from Married to the Sea:
Enjoy your Monday in any way you can.
Fictional Sceptics #5: Questionable Content
A very brief Fictional Sceptics post today, because this is something which has only just become apparent to me and there’s not a lot to say on the matter.
You may or may not be familiar with the webcomic Questionable Content, drawn by Jeph Jacques. It’s a usually-amusing serial comic about a bunch of twenty-somethings, most of whom have some pretty messed up issues. You know, the usual. It’s not my favourite webcomic, certainly, but it’s usually entertaining enough.
Today, it climbed up a little more in my estimations by having one of the characters fly off into a rant about metaphysical beliefs and evidence. It may not be much, but it’s nice to see the sceptical mindset portrayed as another facet of an everyday person’s persona.
It’s a shame it had to invoke the clichéd “strict religious upbringing” as the cause of the character’s scepticism, but it is true that many sceptics have that in their past. Certainly not all, however – I’m pleased to say I’m part of the exception.
So thanks, Jeph. I’m looking forward to seeing more of this aspect of Penelope’s personality.
Rebel without an advertising campaign
There has been an advertising campaign over here recently, in the style of the classic American road movie – girl meets boy, girl gets pregnant, mother doesn’t approve of boy, boy and girl shout “screw you!” and run away together. Oh, and in this particular case, the boy is made of cactus.
I was generally uninterested in this, as I am with most advertising campaigns. Until the advert was pulled, after a series of complaints about its content and message:BBC News: Cactus kid advert ordered off air.
Apparently this is because it depicts teenage pregnancy in a less than demonising light, and its hookline, “for people who don’t like water”, discourages a healthy diet. Let’s take the latter first, because it’s easier to deal with.
Discourages a healthy diet. Unlike, for instance, adverts for McDonalds, Galaxy chocolate, Haribo, and every other advert on television? I’m sorry, but that just doesn’t wash. At all. If anyone can see sense in that proposition, please tell me, because it entirely escapes my grasp.
The pregnancy is the more interesting part; as far as I can see, it’s there as part of the spoof/homage referring to the classic genre of American road movies. I don’t think there is any danger that anyone watching it would take away from the advert the message that “teenage pregnancy is desirable” – it doesn’t play a significant enough role in the advert for it to be anything more than a plot device.
Did it “condone teenage pregnancy and underage sex”? Not that I could see. The girl didn’t seem to be underage, though she may have been in her late teens. Underage sex (in this country at least) would imply under 16 – and she certainly didn’t look that young. As for the pregnancy, all it did was acknowledge that these things happen; if that’s enough for some people to claim that it condones the action, then they should be complaining until they’re blue in the face about soap operas.
Poor Cactus Kid. They’ll never stop persecuting rebels.
Repentance
It has recently come to my attention that I have been terribly disingenuous to you all. I have been repeating the poisoned lies of Big Pharma and misleading people in their honest pursuit of wellness.
Homeopathy can and does work. The anecdotal evidence is enough to void the claims of any so-called “scientific trial”. This doesn’t mean, however, that I have ceased to have any problem with homeopathy. I still think there are better alternatives.
I mean, it’s just so expensive isn’t it? Do we really want to pay that much for sugar (and lactose) pills?
My solution to this problem is something I like to call Haribology. I, like the homeopaths, make no claims that the treatment contains even a molecule of active ingredient; rather, the healing powers of Haribo™ come from the spirit of joy and wellness embodied by the smiling face on the packaging. This instills the very same essence into the tasty, sugary goodness within, and leads to optimal health – at a fraction of the cost of homeopathic remedies.
Not suitable for vegetarians.
…
Hopefully back to regular (and moderately serious) posting within a couple of weeks. As a taste of what’s to come, I already have two entries in the making – both quite large, hence not having the time to work on them at the moment. One is another in my “Fictional Sceptics in Popular Culture” series, and the other concerns an interesting and amusing email I received this weekend. Stay tuned.
Alternative Flight and our Gappy Friend.
In a recent QuackCast, Dr Mark Crislip put together a rather amusing satire on the topic of “alternative flight”, taken largely from his earlier blog post at Science-Based Medicine. The jist of it is that we should be introducing more alternative modalities into aeronautics just as they have been introduced to medicine; if there’s a problem with the plane, don’t necessarily just call the engineers – get some Reiki Masters and Tarot readers in there. Crislip’s actual satire is far more involved and entertaining than that brief summary, but you get the idea.Now I do hope I’ll be forgiven if I’m wrong in this assessment, but I got the impression that the general point of the satire was to say “you wouldn’t apply these crazy unscientific methods to something like aeronautical engineering, so why would you do so with medicine and the science of human biology? It’s a fair question up to a point: if the scientific method is good enough for flight, why do people go elsewhere when it comes to their own bodies?
It is a fair question, but the analogy is limited in its scope; a cursory probing will actually adequately answer the question it poses. We created aircraft; the science of aeronautics is pretty complete – we (or at least, those qualified in the necessary fields) know how every last bit of an aircraft works, because we came up with the damned things and have been developing them for over a century now. The same can hardly be said of the human body; we certainly didn’t design them ourselves and had only an “ignition” role to play in their actual creation. As for the expertise, even the most qualified and knowledgeable in the medical profession don’t know everything there is to know about the function of the human body – certainly not to the extent that aeronautical engineers understand that of aircraft.This isn’t to say either a) that we never will or b) that there is any other way to get the answers than the tried-and-true scientific method. But it does explain why people are far more willing to look into “alternatives” in medicine than in aeronautics: there are far more unknowns. SCAMs are just another God of the Gaps.
A sign in the sky
Apologies for the absence (once again). Work, holiday and a broken internet connection are to blame in this particular case – certainly not me.
Anyway, I was
wandering aroundstriding purposefully between one important engagement and another at my university the other day, when a strange sight made me stop in my tracks. Finally, I thought to myself; incontrovertible proof that there is a higher power. Validation of all those stories told as a child, all those bizarre rituals at bedtime.Ladies and gentlemen, there is a tooth fairy:
I always knew. Parents wouldn’t lie about that sort of thing.
Clearly this dental daemon also operates a kind of “Bat-signal” style of alert system. That the signal disappeared soon after its sudden appearance only lends weight to this clear-cut fact.
Rejoice, humanity. The proof is given.
Fictional Sceptics #2: House, M.D.
House is one of my favourite shows of all time, one of those rare instances of greatness on the otherwise-wearying Box of Blight. I won’t bother giving you a thorough synopsis of the general idea behind the show – I’m sure you’re skilled enough at the intertubes to track down the information if you require it. Suffice it to say that my entry today regards the eponymous character, Doctor Gregory House – flawlessly played by fellow sceptic Hugh Laurie.
It’s hard to know where to begin with House; there is so much about him that simply screams “sceptic”. He is a champion of deductive reasoning and the scientific method, a great critic of religion and anything remotely false or non-evidence based. Perhaps, as with my examination of Lisa Simpson, it would be best to take a look at a typically illustrative episode as an example.Season 2, Episode 19: House vs. God. A young preacher is brought in after collapsing during a faith healing session (itself a great scene, he asks for a doctor after praising the healing power of Jesus). God apparently talks to this particular teenager, prompting House to consider psychosis as a possible symptom. “If you talk to God, you’re religious; God talks to you and you’re psychotic.”
The kid’s first trick is claiming that God had spoken to him of a female physician harbouring vengeful thoughts about a co-worker. This is true of Doctor Cameron, and both she and Doctor Foreman (the co-worker in question) are somewhat impressed by this. House is not, as he could see for himself the body language the boy had picked up on. It’s a classic trick of psychics and the like, and though a useful thing to bring attention to it’s hardly difficult to debunk.Slightly more impressive at first glance is when Boyd, the patient, tells House that God wants him to invite Doctor Wilson to his poker game. House’s first reaction is to tell Wilson to stop talking to his patient, but Wilson denies having done so. It remains a mystery until it is revealed that Boyd has been talking to Grace, Wilson’s liver cancer patient; Wilson has been seeing her socially for a short while and has kept it a secret. Nevertheless, it is she who has passed on the information about House’s poker game.
The big mystery, however, is the “miracle” that takes place in this episode. Boyd was wandering the halls in a daze after a complex partial seizure, and came across Grace. He told her not to worry, and asked God to make her whole again. Nothing much is thought of this, until Wilson scans her liver and finds that the tumour is shrinking. The team gets to work trying to diagnose some medical reason for this, but get nowhere.Until, that is, House reaches one of his trademark epiphanies. All Boyd’s symptoms are explained by the virus herpes encephalitis, which he transmitted to Grace when he “healed” her. The virus attacked her tumour first, shrinking it temporarily. Rare, yes, but not unheard of. This is the traditional medical fare of the show. As House asserts, “There is nothing in the universe that can’t be explained – eventually.”
This is not to say that House is the perfect sceptic, of course – a man with so many problems is hardly a candidate for being the perfect anything. While he always makes diagnoses based on the evidence available, he is reckless and will often skip over further testing and move straight onto treatment – or trust his instincts rather more than a doctor probably should. He will also make assumptions based on his less-than-generous view of human nature; while this often works in his favour, it does sometimes obstruct the diagnosis process.He is, after all, and like us real sceptics, a flawed human being. But he remains a great example of rational thought and critical thinking on television.
Genies
A nice whimsical post today, as I’m feeling rather jolly due to travelling to the Midlands for the weekend. A few days of seeing old friends – and spending some much-needed time with my other half – await.
I’ve scheduled a pre-written entry to go up while I’m away, so that’ll keep the blog ticking over nicely. Today, however, I bring you a joke (that’s mildly NSFW) about one particular danger of superstitious, uncritical thinking.
A Husband takes his wife to play her first game of golf. Of course, the wife promptly hacked her first shot right through the window of the biggest house adjacent to the course. The husband cringed, “I warned you to be careful! Now we’ll have to go up there, find the owner, apologise, and see how much your lousy drive is going to cost us.”
So the couple walked up to the house and knocked on the door. A warm voice said, “Come on in.” When they opened the door, they saw the damage that was done: glass was all over the place, and a broken antique bottle was lying on its side near the broken window. A large black man was sitting on the couch and asked, “Are you the people that broke my window?”
“Uh..yeah, sir. We’re sure sorry about that,” the husband replied.
“Oh, no apology is necessary. Actually I want to thank you. You see, I’m a genie, and I’ve been trapped in that bottle for a thousand years. Now that you’ve released me, I’m allowed to grant three wishes. I’ll give you each one wish, but if you don’t mind, I will keep the last one for myself.”
“Wow, that’s great” the husband said. He pondered a moment and blurted out, “I’d like a million dollars a year for the rest of my life.”
“No problem,” said the genie. “You’ve got it, it’s the least I can do. And I’ll guarantee you a long, healthy life and now you young lady what do you want?” the genie asked.
“I’d like to own a gorgeous home complete with servants in every country in the world,” she said.
“Consider it done,” the genie said. “And your homes will always be safe from fire, burglary and natural disasters!”
“And now,” the couple asked in unison, “what’s your wish, genie?”
“Well since I’ve been trapped in that bottle and haven’t been with a woman in more than a thousand years, my wish is to have sex with your wife.”The husband looked at his wife and said, “Gee, honey, you know we both now have a fortune, and all those houses. What do you think?”
She mulled it over for a few moments and said, “You know, you’re right. Considering our good fortune, I guess I wouldn’t mind, but what about you honey?”
“You know I love you sweetheart,” said the husband. “I’d do the same for you!”So the genie and the woman went upstairs where they spent the rest of the afternoon enjoying each other. The genie was insatiable.
After about three hours of non-stop sex, the genie rolled over and looked directly into her eyes and asked, “How old are you and your husband?”
“Why, we’re both 35,” she responded breathlessly.
“No kidding.” He said, “Thirty-five years old and both of you still believe in genies?”Blink 6: Beaten to it.
I was planning a nice short entry in my “In the Blink of a Sceptical I” series to start me back after being MIA in Essayland – this one about the preposterous claim that vaccines cause autism. They don’t. The “rise” in autism is a statistical anomaly caused by broadening definitions, greater vigilance and improving detection methods.
However, while reading through my week’s worth of RSS updates, I found that I had been beaten to it on this score. Rebbecca Watson of Skepchick.org – a woman with whom, it seems, I am more deeply enamoured every time she blogs – explains it all on her parody Crap-Based Medicine blog:
She has such a way with words.
Substantial post to follow sometime in the next few days.
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