A quick word to let you all know that our project to promote herd immunity through vaccination is still in the fund-raising stage. We have been working behind the scenes to secure funding from a large donor, but still need your help.
An article in the Herald this week talked about several innovations that were showcased at the Hamilton Fieldays event. Unfortunately, one of the products, DermaShield, appears to be very much pseudo-scientific.
"… she successfully resisted the forces pitted against her, giving an astounding manifestation of some power other than that making up the ordinary phenomena of nature." So wrote the Feilding Star on 25 October 1899, reporting on an early incarnation of the supernatural showpeople that still tour the world today. But other newspapers took a sceptical line that media today could learn from.
Ken Ring of Titirangi is New Zealand's best known proponent of the idea that the Moon is an accurate weather forecasting tool. He publicly scoffs at official forecasters and climate scientists for ignoring the lunar effect, and the news media love him.
This book thoroughly demolishes the pretence that laboratory experiments in ESP have produced statistical evidence for the phenomenon's reality. But like almost all writers on the subject, Hines treats telepathic communication and precognition as merely alternative forms of the same thing. ESP does not exist. But telepathy conceivably could exist, if there was a "fifth force" explain it, whereas precognition would require that information travel backward in time -- an absurdity that can be refuted by the reductio ad absurdum it would produce.
Dr Michael Evans, a former student of Atlantic College, came last week to give a Friday evening lecture on anthroposophical medicine (A.M.). From what J can gather, it seems to be a system of medicine founded at the instigation of Rudolph Steiner, who claimed that a science limited to what was perceptible by the physical senses and using only analytical thinking would not be capable of understanding the fundamental life processes of man. A.M. believes that many illnesses are not wholly or ultimately explicable in terms of disordered physics and chemistry, but that the subject of the illness is lacking in some "vital essence" or that the vital essence has been disturbed in some way. It questions the reductionist approach of breaking down processes to the cellular or molecular level because: :
Dowsing, the art of searching for water or minerals using a hand-held pendulum, may really work, according to an Australian engineer. Frank Irons of the University of New South Wales has analysed the chaotic swings of dowsing pendulums. His analysis shows that diviners might be able to detect ore deposits by the variations in the force of gravity they produce (European Journal of Physics, vol 11, p 107).
Claims by an Auckland Physician, Dr Matthew Tizard, of having diagnosed cases of herbicide Poisoning have been rejected by a task force set up by the Director-General of Health.