"Is It Real?" on NatGeo right now (Sat. 6/27, 0930 AM PST)

[onager]

Looks like a mini-marathon, running until early afternoon. The show may be old news to many of you, but it's the first time I've seen it.

I'm watching the Nostradumbass show right now and so far it's pretty good, also delving into other attempts to predict the future (I Ching, tea leaves, psychics, and the Global Consciousness Project, etc.)

There's some great skeptical snark in this episode. This show started with some goofball French expert on Nossie, complete with the usual portentous voiceover...

His research says Nostradamus predicted WWII and 9/11...

Pause

...but he also predicted the invasion of France by Russia in 1980, and the assassination of Pope John Paul II.

Michael Shermer is prominently featured. And in this show, a reformed Nostradamus fan who now debunks him:

There is not one recorded case of Nostradamus actually predicting anything. All his predictions were retro-fitted to the Quatrains after the event.

Any fool can do that.

:rofl:

[moggie]

1. I'm actually surprised there are former Nostradamus fans

The whole deal is so obviously empty that you'd expect someone to either see through it almost immediately, or never. It's encouraging that he was able to break free - unless he's jumped onto the 2012 doomsday bandwagon instead.

[onager]

2. Apparently not. And they're doing ORBES now! W-o-o-o...

The reformed Nostradumbassian seemed completely skeptical of the whole foofaraw now. I'd like to look up some of his books etc.

Right now I'm watching the ghosts/orbes episode. I felt good about this one from the start, since the first face on-camera belonged to James Randi.

I just saw a crazy woman holding dowsing rods in a haunted house. The sequence was shot using night-vision to give a ghostly green glow to the scene.

And I could STILL see her damn hands moving to make the dowsing rods point the right way!

[onager]

3. Summary: well worth your time

Overall, I was impressed. One of the few shows of this type where the skeptics were actually given equal (and occasionally more than equal) time.

The show on Chupacabras showed that the whole idea was debunked in 1979. By a rural American lawman, who set up a very simple experiment: he parked a dead cow in a field and had two deputies watch it around the clock.

In just a few days, the carcass had all the marks of a classic "cattle mutilation" tale.

Yet this crap is STILL transfixing the gullible. (The Chupacabras show is on again tomorrow.)

Here's a good Amazon review. And look! Classes in Critical Thinking still exist!

Unlike most documentaries on the paranormal, which seem to present various opinions without any criticism, the Is It Real? series dares to ask if what they're investigating actually has any evidence to back it up...

I show this in a critical thinking class and the students seem to enjoy it. Overall, it's nice to see a documentary series that dares to ask the unfashionable question, Is It Real?

Hmm. May have to order that 2-disk set from Amazon.

Now if they would only do a similar show on religion...

[realisticphish]

4. i may actually have to check this out

normally, i assume that paranormal shows are garbage...

[onager]

5. "The EMF meter is spiking!"

:rofl:

Still being in a skeptical mood, I just caught a few old episodes of Penn & Teller's Bullshit.

Watched the episode "Ghosthunters," where they followed two teams of spook-seeking doofuses and threw in a psychic for good measure.

Unfortunately, they didn't throw the psychic into a woodchipper. But I digress.

Having the psychic around hugely pissed off the ghost-hunters. "She will completely invalidate our SCIENTIFIC research here!"

Their scientific research consisted of looking for the ghost of a man in a top hat. The psychic saw the ghost of a woman.

I thought surely, nothing in the show could be funnier than than statement.


I was wrong.

The funniest part was when one woman started yelling: "The EMF meter is spiking!"

She was holding her EMF meter right beside an electrical outlet.

[Silent3]

6. "looking for the ghost of a man in a top hat"

At least that's not much territory to search. Can a whole ghost actually fit inside a top hat? :)

[onager]

7. Ghosts can fit anywhere!

They're made of a non-corporeal, so-far-undiscovered form of energy. At least according to the ghost hunters.

Which, of course, explains perfectly why they hunt ghosts using sciencish instruments that can only detect boring old already-discovered forms of energy.

In cruising the ghost hunter websites, I've heard so many different woo explanations of electromagnetism that my head hurts. The relationship between electricity and magnetism is still mysterious. But not THAT mysterious, otherwise we'd still be using oil lamps and not writing these-here intertube messages among our electronic selves.

I'd like to see those clowns develop a Super-High-Current Ghost Detector, which might give them the opportunity to study ghosts first-hand when it instantly vaporized them.