James Randi's Latest Debunking Operation 498
An anonymous reader writes "The pair of documentarians behind An Honest Man — The Story of the Amazing James Randi will not only talk to the likes of like Adam Savage, Bill Nye, Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Penn and Teller about the life of the famous magician/skeptic, but they'll also follow Randi's latest operation as he assembles 'an Ocean's Eleven-type team for a carefully orchestrated exposure of a fraudulent religious organization.'"
James Randi is a fake! (Score:1, Funny)
Teh religion and magick is real, it is James Randi whois FAKE!!11!!
scient....[blocked by lawsuit] (Score:5, Funny)
[blocked by lawsuit]
Re:Unfortunately, people will still believe (Score:5, Funny)
ignore the evidence even harder.
I'm confused, are you talking about Democrats or Republicans here?
Re:"a fraudulent religious organization" (Score:5, Funny)
As opposed to all the non-fraudulent religious organizations?
They're out there. I have faith that even you, too, shall one day be Touched by His Noodly Appendage.
Re:James Randi is a fake! (Score:2, Funny)
Spoken like a... nevermind.
Whoosh!
Re:"a fraudulent religious organization" (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Title: An Honest Man or Honest Liar? (Score:4, Funny)
OP says title is "An Honest Man", but TFA says it is "An Honest Liar".
Its a lie. Honestly.
Re:Just another Con Man (Score:5, Funny)
"the one time he stumbled in to something interesting with the case against Water Memory he created a perfectly blind study without taking in the error factor.
Then did not follow up to find out why the two studies differed and were both repeatable getting the same data along the two different testing technics."
uhm, link? I'm sure that's described in parseable english somewhere. I like to read actually, very much so -- I just don't have much patience for empty words.
Here is a good place to start but it is incomplete:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Water_memory [rationalwiki.org]
It does not really recount everything or consider all the repeated experiments since then.
In a nutshell.
A paper was published around 1980 in the Journal Nature using the standard chemistry testing protocols still in use today that suggested that water had some form of memory.
The experiments were meant to disprove homeopathy, but suggested that it may in fact be the real deal. (I have no opinions on homeopathy)
The experiment had been recreated around the world resulting in the same data.
The editor in charge of the magazine wanted the experiments rerun with Randi controlling the protocols.
Remember Randi is not a PHD or a chemist.
Randi came up with a new chemistry protocol where no one person knew what they were doing with what samples. Basically it was a completely blind testing protocol, and there have been a few TV shows on this and it was on 60 minutes and NOVA too.
Now they never ran Statistical error analysis on the new protocol so no knew what the error ratereally was.
The experiment came up inconclusive and could not prove that water had memory.
But the cool thing is this that both experiments have been recreated using both protocols several times and came up with the same data results.
Standard protocol’s says water has memory, and Randi’s protocol was inconclusive suggesting that water does not have memory.
Also Randi’s protocol has only been used to recreate this experiment.
So all other chemistry experiments still use the standard protocols today.
So my beef with Randi is that he butted in to a science lab experiment and never followed up with why the data was different and repeatable.
Although these experiments have been repeated a lot since then research in to why was dropped because of the journal bringing in Randi.
My belief is:
The data would suggest that test results are subjective much like the physic experiments done in Princeton Engineering Labs and may give us additional clues towards solving some Quantum Mechanics and M theory unresolved issues.
Then again it could just bring up more interesting questions.
Re:"a fraudulent religious organization" (Score:3, Funny)
Touched by His Noodly Appendage.
That would be appropriate, but Pastafarians can't keep playing catch up to other religions. At some point you're either full of noodles, or you're not.
I was touched a few months ago. The message that fell in my lap told about the gradual downfall of all spaghetti on Earth by 711 AP (After Pasta). Of course it's confusing how many years we have left - due to floating point error or something. Because as we know, pasta is the origin of all math symbols, so the years start counting erratically towards the end. But, based on how many times the number 1 occurs in the Wikipedia article for pasta, I'd say we've got less than 66 months (5.5 years).
Don't despair! Because later that week, a flaming stove spoke pig latin in morse code to me that one of each type of noodle needs to be launched into space in an arc. Unfortunately, that may or may not include worms (they are noodle-like and the stove wouldn't elaborate on it). If this is done and all goes well, then one day pasta will return...
Please, please help save the noodles.
Ramen.
A sudo religion doesn't have root. (Score:5, Funny)
A sudo religion doesn't have root.
Re:"a fraudulent religious organization" (Score:5, Funny)
Re:"a fraudulent religious organization" (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Just another Con Man (Score:3, Funny)
Re:James Randi is a fake! (Score:2, Funny)
You can't prove a negative. There's always a chance that the leprechaun is really under the next rock.
Find an example that isn't math.
Look, all you have to do is consider every leprechaun-shaped region of spacetime and compare its contents to our agreed-upon template for leprechauns. Given that the observable universe is finite and the volume of a leprechaun is nonzero, we can show that this would take a finite amount of time. QED.