Comic Sans = woo

Today I learned of yet-another self-published exercise in woo:

So, one fine day Lucy awakes. Observing her peers acting more or less like monkeys, she probably thinks something like: "“Who on Earth are these fools, what the heck am I doing here.” . It must have been very tough indeed to be the first, and only, intelligent person around, but at last, probably she must have abandoned herself to her primordial brain, mated and passed on her double brain to future generations

This may sound like nothing more than the run-of-the-mill,  grammatically-challenged drivel that passes for written english these days, aided by a poor translation from the original italian. From a scientific standpoint it's a complete dog's breakfast but any doubt as to the book's sheer wooticity is confirmed by the simple fact that the entire exercise is typeset in Comic Sans...

Click to enlarge

Pharyngula (enjoy the comments)


In other woo news, television's Dr. Oz continues his spiral into the same old, and I do mean OLD, shit:

Dr. Oz then immediately asks Yogi Cameron about tongue examination. Now, there's one thing you need to know about tongue examination. When an Ayruvedic practitioner talks about tongue examinations he is not talking bout what they teach us in medical school about tongue examinations, where we look for turgor, moistness, plaques, and a variety of other physical findings that might indicate disease. No, the Ayruvedic art of tongue diagnosis is very much like reflexology in that various organs are claimed to map to various parts of the tongue.

Having this knowledge can help describe the current state of a person's health, as well as his or her genetic tendencies. It is a diagnostic technique, and it can reveal an existing disease process and disclose many things about a person on many levels. Much like reflexology, all the organs and the entire body can be located on specific regions of the tongue. As a mirror of the body's digestive system, the tongue can reflect what minerals and vitamins may be deficient and can reveal the health of other various organs in the body.

Respectful Insolence


Meanwhile, woo captures yet another psychologist unable to resist its siren call:

Through nine experiments at the University involving more than 1,000 students, Bem confirmed his hypotheses in all but one of the experiments. This signified that evidence of psi exists, since “the odds against the possibility that the combined results are merely chance coincidences or statistical flukes are about 74 billion to 1,” according to Bem.

✂...

In the 100 sessions, the hit rate for those shown erotic stimuli was 53.1 percent, while the 49.8 percent hit rate of those shown non-erotic pictures did not deviate from chance. This shows that on average, given that the erotic image shown to the participant made a considerable impression, that participant’s ability to foresee the future is statistically higher than chance, according to Bem.

FAIL. Next time consult a statistician—and a magician. They've seen this done many times before.

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