Doing Science (2) Sports supplement index.

In my last post I said I have science to do. That may have been a little misleading, because this is about to be another example of why some science simply hasn't been done. I've been into my fitness for a while now, including on-and-off use of protein supplements (and creatine, but never for long).…

Doing Science (1) Exploring psychics

I've posted a few times about the idea of doing research that hasn't been done yet. I had a look at why science hasn't investigated whether locally produced honey cures hayfever, pondered the look at comparing the locus of control of the religious and irreligious and then, as the previously mentioned investigation became increasingly complicated, I looked…

Does “Anecdotes” mean “Evidence”? Spiritual healing and public health

In my previous post I said anecdotes can be used as evidence, if the conditions are correct. That is a controversial statement, so does need to be explained. And, here I plan to do that by giving you one example of when anecdotes do work and when they don't. In typical-teacher fashion, I am going to…

Curing Hayfever, Science and the Interesting “Committee on Boring”

Somewhere in the dusty archives of the internet, there is reference to the “Committee on Boring Questions” or “The Ministry of Boredom”... or something like that. Their mission statement is “To answer seemingly boring questions”... or words to that effect. You can probably tell I have not been able to re-enter the murky depths of…

Review: The Jägermeister Experiment

In an earlier post I put up a mock, non-peer reviewed article called The Jägermeister Experiment. I now want to tear it to shreds, to show how terribly bad mediocre-looking science is. This is what peer review is (or another example of peer review no further than my blog, look at the comments under Holy…

The Jägermeister Experiment

Introduction On experience, the more inebriated or intoxicated a person becomes the greater their tolerance is for foods that person finds objectionable when they are sober. This phenomenon has economic impacts, such as the success of Turkish-styled kebab houses that stay open into the night for the drunk-custom. ‘Drunk-custom’ is the name given to people…

Climate Change, Agriculture and the Ice Age that Wasn’t

Given that I’ve been talking a lot about how evidence works recently (what might convince me of time travel and something that still hasn’t convinced me of ghosts), I thought it might be fun to talk about something else that is, quite probably, unknowable. There is a hypothesis that human caused climate change started 10,000…

Do Atheists believe in God and deceive themselves?

Lindeman, M et al (2013) Atheists become emotionally aroused when daring God to do terrible things is available for free from the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion. The study measured different people's emotional arousal by proxy of their skin conductance. The participants were given statements in three categories: neutral, offensive and God. As…

Scientism

Wikipedia defines scientism thusly: “Scientism is a term used, usually pejoratively, to refer to belief in the universal applicability of the scientific method and approach, and the view that empirical science constitutes the most authoritative worldview or most valuable part of human learning to the exclusion of other viewpoints. It has been defined as "the…

Does Studying Science Make You a Better Person?

I thought I’d take two minutes (I’ll add a footnote telling how long this really took to write) out of my uneventful morning to answer a question I just found in my WordPress feed: “Does studying science make you a better person?” The answer is no. That might sound weird coming from me, as I…