Yay, I'm next! Gimme your posts so that I can make a badass Skeptic's Circle! Send 'em to bahumatdragonking@yahoo.com.
I'm going to let you guys vote on how the Circle will be themed. Shall it be a game of Calvinball, take place from the perspective of my ferret, no-frills link and description, a pretend piece of spam from a woo, or other? Enter your votes now!
Most of you are probably familiar with detox woo; the idea that we need to be cleansed of all the "toxins" that are building up in our colons, livers, kidneys, or whatever the fuck the woo wants us to believe toxins are in, and that if we don't we're going to die horribly from the toxin-caused diseases. But this makes very little sense if you look at it in terms of evolution.
Natural selection will wipe out any species that can't stay alive long enough to reproduce. This is obvious to anyone who knows the most basic of basics about evolution. Obviously, our ancestors must not have been affected by these toxins; if toxins built up in the body from normal biological processes in enough amounts to cause serious diseases, we'd be extinct. So, if we can know that our ancestors won't have had this problem, why would we have this problem now? Is there a reason that we're now going to have horrible things happen to us if we don't start cleansing? What could possibly cause us to suddenly start building up toxins?
I await the answers of any detox woo who feels interested in replying.
Yahoo has a news story up about pharmaceutical contaminated water! O noes! Then they try to scare you, especially by saying "The pharma companies aren't testing it cuz they're eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil!" but you really can't tell if there's actually a threat or not. (There might actually be a threat, but I'm going to relentlessly mock it either way for not presenting very good evidence of this) I'll show you what I mean.
Last year, the AP reported that trace amounts of a wide range of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in American drinking water supplies. Including recent findings in Dallas, Cleveland and Maryland's Prince George's and Montgomery counties, pharmaceuticals have been detected in the drinking water of at least 51 million Americans.
Researchers have found that even extremely diluted concentrations of drugs harm fish, frogs and other aquatic species. Also, researchers report that human cells fail to grow normally in the laboratory when exposed to trace concentrations of certain drugs. Some scientists say they are increasingly concerned that the consumption of combinations of many drugs, even in small amounts, could harm humans over decades.
Pharmaceutical company officials point out that active ingredients represent profits, so there's a huge incentive not to let any escape. They also say extremely strict manufacturing regulations — albeit aimed at other chemicals — help prevent leakage, and that whatever traces may get away are handled by onsite wastewater treatment.
Just to clarify the title; there's no attempt that I know of to have acupuncture used in schools or anything. This is just me being annoyed with school's lack of mentioning important things, like "evidence does not support it" when talking about acupuncture.
My sister is doing a project on Eastern culture, and one thing she's doing is making a teddy-bear shaped pancake to demonstrate acupuncture on, because that was one of the things she was required to cover. Nobody, of course, mentioned what I'm complaining about, namely the lack of evidential support.
When schools are teaching us stuff, they really should tell us, if something from another culture is complete and total BS, that it is, in fact, complete and total BS! Some people might say criticizing another culture's traditions isn't politically correct or something, but to hell with political correctness when it puts people's health on the line! Not only that, but talking about things like acupuncture would be a great way to help critical thinking; the schools need all the goddamn help they can get with that one; the questions for "fostering critical thinking" are completely useless for that purpose.
I mean, c'mon, what the hell?
Apparently, I have an absurdly good head for math, and especially figured out how to solve math problems more easily.
Example: Today, we started learning about logarithmic functions (I'm not entirely sure what the hell they are, because the teacher didn't even bother trying to explain, but I can apparently solve them! Yay!). The teacher informed us that we wouldn't be able to solve any logarithmic functions that weren't base 10 with our calculators until she taught us the trick for it.
20 seconds later, I was happily hitting buttons on my calculator while everyone else was doing it by hand, and getting all the right answers by using the graphing function of my calculator. (Apparently, if you have, for example, log710 or something, then you could convert it to something like 7^x=10. So I would put in y=7^x and y=10, then use the find the intersection function, and tada! I've got the answer.) So, I go up to the teacher after class. Apparently, I came up with an entirely different method of doing the problems, and one that worked! She had a completely different method in mind.
Interestingly, I have a history of doing this, and tend to catch up immediatly even if I was absent or slept through the last period because I can figure the basics of doing a certain type of problem out after seeing one solved just once.
Does anyone have some interesting family recipes? If so, post them here. If anyone is interested, I can also post some of mine.
In debate class today, we had some fun. A couple of people decided to have a mock debate, using idiotic cases they had made up a while back. One side argued that we should use the sexual energy of Donald Rumsfeld to power the world, supporting his argument using the Time Cube and arguing that the UN has been taken over by reptilians planning to destroy the sun with a black hole asteroid. It was hilarious how much of a straight face he managed to keep right up until the end (at which point he broke out laughing). His significantly less funny opponent argued that we must instead submit to the anti-Rumsfeld forces of IHOP, or suffer the horribly fatal ravages of PDS (Pancake Deprivation Syndrome).
In other breaking news, I have gotten Cave Story and dub it awesome, and my mom made a pie, causing experts to predict a suspiciously pie-shaped lump to appear in my stomach in the next 10 minutes. More on the story at 10.
My school has apparently decided to make us bring our student IDs to school to use our lunch accounts. Of course, they decided to do this without telling anyone in a venue where they would pay attention (I'm told they announced it during lunch. Of course, nobody listens to announcements then.) To make things better, I eat breakfast at school too.
I'm hungry now.
Posts
All Comments
