Twice in the past couple weeks I have walked by someones desk at work and saw them looking at one of the scare monger websites saying that the Large Hadron Collider is going to destroy the planet! Oh noes! Sadly, both times the person reading the site was buying into all the weapons grade bullshit the site was spewing. Also, sadly, I have no links to the sites they were visiting. I’ll have to remember to get links next time.
Anyway, thankfully, people way smarter than me have done all the hard work for me and have explained exactly why these scare monger websites are so very wrong and I was able to point these folks in the right direction and give them, hopefully, some peace of mind. I hate to see people scared over nothing and actually buying into whatever these snake oil salesmen are selling. And it’s always something, isn’t it. Continue Reading »
This alleged Bigfoot discovery was all the talk around the water cooler at work today. Yeah, color me skeptical. I could barely contain my laughter when I heard about it. Seriously? Are the news outlets bored? Continue Reading »
Today is the 39th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy, posted about it today along with the left half of the picture above of Buzz Aldrin’s footprint on the moon. There is a really neat trick of perspective in that picture (that many of the commenter’s noticed). When the picture is looked at right side up, the footprint looks raised and the surrounding ground more solid, while when turned upside down the footprint looks indented (like one would expect) and the surrounding ground looks softer. I just love stuff like this. Continue Reading »
A Russian court just convicted Grigory Grabovoy of fraud for bilking people out of money by claiming he could raise the dead. Like our own Silvia Browne and John Edward, this creep made a living preying on the desperate and the grieving. People who are very vulnerable to snake oil salesmen. Well, now he’s doing hard labor in prison. When can we start convicting fraudsters like this in this country? Continue Reading »
Richard Wiseman has the video up of 800+ of us at TAM doing the soon bending trick! My husband and I are even visible in the video! In fact, that’s us in the still frame of it. I’m the redhead and my husband is sitting to my left. This was such a fun experience. Heh.
Edited to add: By the way, there is nothing magical or mystical about spoon bending. There is a technique to it, that was first demonstrated to us by Teller (of Penn & Teller) along with a very funny story. Anyone can do this if they know the technique.
My husband and I just got back from Vegas where we attended our very first TAM! Wow. We’re both still processing all of it. In fact, I’m not entirely sure what to write. Man o man, it was just amazing.
We got into Vegas on Wednesday night and got checked in and stuff and were even able to get a semi good night’s sleep. We were both awake at 5am because we were still on east coast time and that was great for us because we got to have a leisurely breakfast and wander around a bit and get our bearings.
I’m going to try to get to the real highlights of TAM 6. This is going to be hard, there were so many, but ok, here it goes, in no particular order: Continue Reading »
Security was tight. There was a bomb sniffing dog and everyone that was able to get into the main ballroom was scanned by metal detectors. More on this later. Continue Reading »
I know people believe all sorts of nonsense, but it never fails to amaze me anyway when I read that people get taken in by such obvious scams as paying money (and lots of it!) to get rid of curses. No, this particular incident did not take place in some third world country, but right here in the US of A.
Grace Uwanawich was sentenced to 18 months in prison for scamming people out of tens of thousands of dollars because she convinced said people that they were cursed and they would stay cursed unless they paid her big bucks to get rid of the curses. I’m glad she was prosecuted (not for the first time, I might add) and I hope that her future would-be victims don’t get taken in by the likes of her.
It bewilders me that in this day and age many people still believe in curses and all kinds of other nonsense that should have been left in the dark ages. Self described psychics and fortunetellers prey on the misinformed and although some folk might call them harmless, I’m less inclined to agree. I think people like this are dangerous and manipulative. They are looking to make a buck and they are counting on people to buy their shill.
I do feel bad for the folks taken in by scam artists. I’m sure there are a number of reasons why they don’t recognize the scam. I hope that prosecutions of these fraudsters gets peoples attention and helps them to learn to recognize when they are being taken.
And since I’m blogging about this topic, here’s a worthy site to visit:
Title edited: I changed the title from “Repeat after me — “Fortune teller’s are scam artists”. ” to “Repeat after me — “Curses aren’t real”. ” after a fresh reading of my post today because although I fully believe that fortune tellers and the like are scammers, my main point is that curses aren’t real and it amazes me that here we are in the 21st century and otherwise (presumably) reasonable people still believe in curses. I just don’t get it.
