Nice fractals, but you’ve got my baloney detector on red alert!

Image via Wikipedia

Hat Tip to @emilyhasbooks on Twitter.

This was pointed out to me last night, and I chilled my evil fractalicious heart with thoughts of Benoit Mandelbrot spinning in his grave in agony:

It’s a blog page [Here] on a New Agey site called Human Angels, with some nice fractals, but very little in the way of valid factual substance, allegedly using religious lore from Hindu, Mayan, Hopi and Jewish scripture, the long-since debunked Bible Code, the Mayan calendar 2012 nonsense, with a a bit of the appeal to quantum physics fallacy and the silly invocation of the geological record to make claims of predicting the future, presumably in ways impossible for mainstream science.

The first sentence of the page I have no issues with:

A fractal is “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole,” a property called self-similarity.

Okay, there’s nothing off about that, but after that, the text goes down the proverbial rabbit-hole and into the land of meaningless word-salad immediately following:

All of the manifested universe can be described as fractions of dimensions, or fractalic, while the whole dimensions themselves are of infinite measure. From the whole dimensions are derived the finite dimensional parameters which define what we know of as space/time.

I’m tempted to say WTF??, though I’m aware that the universe is NOT fractal, but is largely relativistic on the macro-level and quantum on the micro-level (Individual bosons, like photons, are discrete packets of energy as shown by experiment, not infinitely divisible into self-similar parts.) as far as anyone can show at present.

Never mind that New Age claims, like those of Old Time religion, lean heavily into bald assertions of knowledge that is not and cannot possibly be actually known given the fact that wishful thinking to the contrary, believers don’t really have any special powers the rest of us don’t.

This one really did it for me…

Part of the make-up for a fractal, is the idea of a pattern repeating within a pattern. This is how Gregg Braden explains the cyclic patterns of time experienced on the earth. Basing it on two major cycles; the 5,125 year cycle that it takes the earth to once again cross the galactic equator of the Milky Way, and the 25,625 year cycle that represents the progression of the equinoxes, Braden paints a picture of the possible changes life on this planet faces.

Sorry, nice metaphor, but it means nothing. The claim of passing through the galactic “equator” every 5,125 years is based on a false premise, two actually: The Earth will not be passing through the plane of the galaxy’s disk in 2012, though as far as the sun is concerned, it does cross the equator twice each year, and there’s nothing at all special about it, and no evidence that space-time is fractal – See Planck length and Planck time for the reasons why…

…These are not the droids you’re looking for…

Second, and finally, this idea that ancient civilizations knew more than we is literally old and illogical, an appeal to antiquity fallacy:

The Mayans didn’t have nearly the knowledge we do of the age, nature, and shape of the galaxy, and even we don’t know it precisely, so any claim that their calendar took into account Earth’s passage through the mid-plane of the galaxy’s rotation is simply silly. No credible archaeologist would make such an assumption of facts not in evidence. We know now far more than they, and their ancient writings and monuments have value as historical records and artifacts only.

As tempting as it is to cut loose with the snark, I’ll have to refrain from indulging myself this time to file this one away in my collection of amusing and possibly unsinkable misunderstandings of reality.

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C0nc0rdance – The Global Consciousness Project

In posting this, I hereby cheerfully affirm my lack of sophistication with the New Age intricacies of Noetic Science™

Seriously, though, this is a good take on what to many looks deceptively like valid science, but not so valid when you pull back the curtain to see what’s going on in peoples’ heads concerning misjudgments of probability, and the use of occult statistics, to support those errors.

Make Mine a Granola with Almonds…

This is about something that one of my Twitter friends, @Tao23 sent me a while back. It’s pseudoscience with an emphasis on the “pseudo-” and this is just one of the things that pisses me off about many promoters of woo woo.

‘Energy bars’ in your head that let you magically fulfill your every ambition if only you learn to access them?? WTF?? I’m not sure what to make of this.

I don’t know how to express the contempt they seem to have for the intelligence of their clients, and no, it doesn’t matter how much of this they really believe themselves.

Nope, even being totally sincere in making claims like these is no excuse…

…Never mind that the only energy bars that actually exist are the ones you unwrap and eat.

It’s normally my policy not to do this, but this truly deserves “that image” since anything less would give this too much credibility, so here it is peeps…

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Sanal Edamaruku Skeptically Pwns Tantrik on Live Television [Reposted]

Sanal Edamaruku, President of Rationalist International and the Indian Rationalist Society, challenges tantrik Pandit Surendra Sharma, to use his magical powers to kill him on national television, and seems most amused throughout the attempt, even to third part where the tantrik, with some assistance, tries the Ultimate Destruction Ritual™…to no effect on Sanal, who remains very much alive as of this writing… Woo… gotta love it.

Deepak Chopra Interview with Richard Dawkins

This is Your Sense of Wonder When You’re Clueless About both Crop Circles and QI

Here’s something I found at the Skepchick Blog on this page (Click me Here). Much humerusness ensues in this. Enjoy.

NorwegianSkeptics | September 14, 2010

Norwegian film-crew stumbles uppon a fresh crop cicle in Wiltshire. Watch teh spiritual ecstasy unfold.. Hilarious !!
FYI : The crop circle is part of an advertising campaign for the TV show Q.I. by the team at Quite Interesting Ltd as part of the new series which is currently in production. The show will be returning to BBC One in the Autumn says Hanna Smith, Publicist for TalkbackThames

Also see Quite Interesting Crop Circle in Wiltshire – What is it? :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfmiGU…

The Woo is Strong on eBay

OMCC. A friend forwarded this to me and it reminds me of an episode of the Skeptics Guide where a haunted doll on eBay was discussed, along with several others like it.

(Warning: The following link leads to a listing with an image file that may be inappropriate for minors.) This is a – get this – “booty enhancement” spell casting.

For real. I sh*t you not.

No, I’m really not kidding, and this appears to be a genuine listing – though the actual efficacy of the service offered for purchase is highly dubious – in addition to the other hilarious listings it links to.

I wonder if eBay’s buyer protection policy would apply here? Apparently not, given that the item and those listed with it remain on sale. Ah well, to each her own…

As of this writing, the sellers seem to have sold 20 of them, though one wonders at the need to use occult magic to get a great ass instead of diet, workouts or medical assistance.

Maybe I’m being judgmental, but it seems when nothing else has been or can be done, literally magical solutions to mundane problems are the easy answer, I suppose…

…an actor playing the role of a psychic

Well, this time there’s not really much to say about this, except that it’s not entirely expected when the following happens…

Colorado psychic arrested for telling clients their money was possessed by evil spirits…

…’Nuff said.

This is plainly ridiculous…

I find this article to be contemptuous of the intelligence of its readers, as I do those who claim to have ‘studied’ the tricky fellow in question. To quote one of my uncles “They don’t call these guys fakirs for nothing.” — See for yourself…

‘Starving yogi’ astounds Indian scientists

Quantum Mechanics: New Age Entanglements

(Last Update: 2011/01/23 – Text Corrections & Clarifications)
One of the most commonly used means of supporting belief in various sorts of New Age and mystical/psychic woo is the invocation of that popular and notoriously poorly understood icon of modern physics, Quantum Mechanics: Wouldn’t it be ducky if everything in the Universe were intimately connected to everything else, every particle bound to every other through the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, all of reality in holistic unity; a holographic universe in which nothing was truly separate from anything else, all existing as a single zero-dimensional point in which all possibilities are realized, our notions of objective reality an illusion? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if All were One?  That instant communication with anyone in the universe, regardless of apparent distance or time by reading the quantum oscillation of entangled atoms across the universe, including particles in our own brains so bound to those of others, was possible? Doesn’t this sound just a little too convenient? Well, unfortunately it is. It’s bullshit, and here’s why:

The phenomenon of entanglement, or the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) effect, is a property in which two or more particles, though separated by distance, perhaps even at opposite sides of the universe, can show a sort of ‘spooky action at a distance’ through the action of quantum non-locality, and a thing which we have experimentally confirmed through our tests of quantum teleportation, instantaneously transmitting the quantum properties of one particle to an entangled counterpart at theoretically any distance.

This entanglement allows the instant exchange of quantum states, such as, say, the property of spin, between the bound particles, even as far apart as the other side of the Galaxy, simultaneously. Where one particle would be, say, spin up at any instant, its twin would simultaneously be spin down. And any change in one particle’s quantum state would instantly result in change to that of the other. The problem is that Einstein’s theory of Special relativity still holds at astronomical distances, so that nothing, no energy, and thus no information that could be carried by that energy, may travel faster than light, much less instantly.

It should be noted, however, that there is some controversy among physicists as to the exact operative definition of the term Instant.

The act of ‘observing,’ really just physical interaction, and having nothing to do with any human notions of ‘consciousness’ since one is merely interacting with the particles in order to read them by bouncing other particles of radiation of some form or another off of them, thus changing their quantum state, and this would cause the entangled particles to exchange their quantum properties between each other randomly.

This, and the limits on the speed of energy transfer imposed by Special relativity ensure that only random noise would be obtained from such non-local ‘communication.’ No meaningful data may thus be instantaneously transferred.

Our current understanding, and laboratory observations thus far indicate that quantum cryptography, the transfer of data in a way that seems to disallow any possible eavesdropping, at the speed of light by way of entangled photons, is possible, but the ansible, while interesting in principle, from the Ender’s Game science-fiction series is not.

Another problem presents itself during the observation of these particles, an issue not taken into account by some ‘Oneness’ models of cosmology derived from quantum mechanics: that of quantum decoherence, a phenomenon caused by entanglement itself, the new bonding resulting from the interaction of any one or more of a set of entangled particles with any other particles in the universe, causing an overriding of the original entangled state of the particles, thus scribbling over any older non-local connections with new ones, whatever particles they have most recently interacted with.

Quantum entities tend to be promiscuous when it comes to entanglement, interacting and entangling with any new random particles they come in contact with, the very source of their own decoherence.

This is why alleged phenomena such as psi are untenable quantum mechanically as we currently understand physical laws to operate. Even if any particles in one person’s brain could somehow be entangled with those in another brain, thus supposedly allowing non-local exchange of information by paranormal means, the fact that these same particles are interacting with any other particles in either of the two linked brains, means that any entanglement existing would be scribbled over almost as quickly as it began.

Human beings alone are composed of a staggering number of particles, all of them interacting with each other and foreign particles originating from outside the body, reaching us from other parts of the universe, especially from our immediate environs and from other regions within our own bodies.

For objects as large as humans, even our brains alone have such a large de Broglie wavelength, such a high quantum number, that the decoherence caused by the continuous entanglement of the particles making it up with each other and indeed all other surrounding particles bombarding them, that for any noticeable quantum effects to occur, one would have to wait longer than the lifespan of the universe to see them.

To quote Robert Novella, ‘human beings are walking bags of decoherence.’ Such quantum intimacy seemingly granted by entanglement is denied us on any meaningful timescale, for it is overcome almost immediately in the event that it does happen by its own indiscriminate nature. It seems that, as far as current understanding of quantum theory is concerned, I’m sorry to say that science really doesn’t support the mystics after all…

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Disappointed, But not Surprised…

Well kiddies, it looks like even over a week after the November Nor’easter fun and games I mentioned two weekends ago, after an exhaustive bit of mucking around on the Wayback Machine and other sources, looking at the archived Web pages of psychic websites, that I have thus far been completely unsuccessful at verifying a single prediction by a major psychic concerning the Nor’easter, neither its timing nor its effects before the storm actually formed (you’d think that those psychics would at least have a heads-up that clueless, blathering meteorologists would be completely blindsided by–but no, it was the psychics who were blindsided…chortle evilly with tentacles waving).

More to the point, after over a week of poking around, I was completely unable to verify a single prediction that was meaningfully specific in content and time of occurrence, that was not added to the site retroactively when it was updated, nor a successful prediction that wasn’t so likely as to almost certainly be fulfilled anyway.

One would think that with so many self-styled psychics in the world that statistically (and statistics are very important in the arcane lore of parapsychology) at least one of them would have verifiably predicted (as opposed to retrodicted…) the 2004 Tsunami, the effects of Hurricane Katrina, the horror of September 11, 2001, or lately, the aforementioned Nor’easter.

But no, not one did on any internet archives that my vile Troythuluness could access.

That doesn’t mean that no psychic predicted these events at all, anywhere, at any time, but that’s not the point. It means that no psychic has ever predicted these tragic events in a way that is subject to meaningful verification using archived sources existing prior to the events themselves. And until that happens, I remain skeptical of such claims.

A Question…and Some Thoughts

Here’s a question I came across on the JREF forums by one of the members, which I’ll post here as well, just to raise a point:

Scientists can correctly predict astronomical occurrences…down to the minute, and often down to the second. Why should psychics and prophets be held to a lesser standard?

It is true that psychics use a different method than scientists to allegedly gain their knowledge, but this is merely a statement that ‘They are different ways of knowing, therefore they are different ways of knowing,’ which is begging the question and does not serve as a valid excuse for why psychic predictions are not only always a little of target, but often completely wrong (when made beforehand and meaningfully specific in time of fulfillment and content).

Dedicated believers in the paranormal see nothing logically inconsistent with criticizing ‘mere materialistic scientists’ like meteorologists about even slightly inaccurate weather forecasts, and at the same time coming up with all manner of ‘reasons’ to support psychics whose only meaningfully accurate predictions are those made after the fact. Hindsight is 20/20, though most savvy media psychics will tailor their retrodictions to make them just a little off target to avoid suspicion.

Saying that the psychic and science are different provides no valid reason for giving the psychic a free pass no matter how off target its predictions, yet castigating science for even the smallest uncertainty or inaccuracy in the same. As the believers like to say, and as I will now, “…the forest for the trees, people!”

If psychic abilities are even as good as conventional, materialistic ‘ways of knowing,’ much less superior, what is the logic that they shouldn’t be held to at least the same if not better standards of accuracy? I’m gonna pull an Oprah and say, ‘I’m just asking questions.’