Articles tagged with "number"

Angel Numbers are patterns you may notice when looking at the numbers around you - maybe the digital readout on your oven's clock, a number plate of a car on your street, or the total of your dinner bill at your local Indian restaurant. These special numbers are supposed to be sent by your angels to guide you in life. Most of the number patterns you're meant to look out for are pretty simple - either the same number repeating, like 2:22 or $88.88, or a simple run of numbers, such as RKH123. The numbers are meant to have significance, letting you know about your life, in a kind of fortune telling way.

New Zealand had a remarkable number of quacks and fraudsters active in the early 20th Century. They travelled the length and breadth of the country promoting their curative gadgets. The Cotter Collection includes many of these devices, and even a completed phrenology chart. A medicine chest contains pills and potions thought to provide cures for many common complaints. The outright quacks, who invariably came via Australia, once exposed in New Zealand returned to cause further mayhem there.

We've been promoting making submissions to the Therapeutic Products Bill. The NZ Skeptics committee has met and put together its official submission, and I've put in a personal submission.

Recently I received an email that purported to be from the anti-virus company Norton that was blatantly a scam, but I decided to follow through as much as I could to see what the scammers were trying to do. There's often a side effect of doing this, which is that I can waste the time of the scammers - the more time they're on the phone to me, the less time they'll have for scamming people who are at risk of falling for the scam. Plus maybe, just maybe, the scammers will start to question their career choice if many of their potential marks end up making their life a frustrating misery. Below is a series of events that, all in, might have taken about an hour from start to end.

It's nice to be reminded sometimes that the number of skeptics in society is likely to exceed the number of Skeptics in our Society by several orders of magnitude. I was reminded of this recently after seeing a couple of interactions on social media, one where a friend tackled misinformation, and another where it was the friend that was spreading misinformation. In both interactions, the misinformation was quickly and easily debunked, with references given to sources. The first one was about Ukraine's president Zelenskyy being a Nazi, as “proven” by a picture of him holding up a football (I'm from England, so for all you kiwis I mean soccer here) shirt with his name and a swastika on it. The second is about the recent parliament protest, with an image of a child who had supposedly been pepper sprayed by the Police.

This week, long time skeptic Felicity Goodyear-Smith tells us her story...

Over the past week or so we've seen headlines separately related to the magnitude of the holiday road toll, and high number of summer drownings.

Late last week NZ Skeptics published a spoof website built (NZ Skeptics Secretary and past Chair, and alternating newsletter author).

As everybody will know, the COVID pandemic is still here. This week we've seen the number of active cases continue to fall, and Auckland/Tāmaki Makaurau has moved down into alert level 3.

Obviously as skeptics we're pretty clued up on the idea of not using unproven therapies, especially when there's positive evidence that they don't work. It's been apparent for a while now that the evidence for Ivermectin as a COVID treatment or preventative is not very good, and it's been sad to see how many people don't seem to care about the lack of evidence and are taking it anyway.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about lawyer Liz Lambert's effort to claim a small part of New Zealand - the Abel Tasman National Park - as her own property, which she's called New Freeland. Well, it turns out that she's worried about an organisation who have not just claimed Allodial Title over a piece of land, but have claimed sovereignty over the entirety of New Zealand. Liz has been warning anyone who will listen that this rival group, the Crown of the Mauri Nation, have secretly entered into an agreement with the government to hand over the keys to our country.

Speaking of anti-vaxxers, they've recently set up a website which allows people, including doctors, nurses and allied health professionals (including alt-med practitioners) to register themselves as objecting to the COVID vaccine rollout. They claim to have 33 doctors, 123 nurses, 244 allied health practitioners (gee, I wonder why this number is so large compared to the number of doctors!) and over 3,300 NZ “concerned citizens”.

A recent article from Radio NZ did a great job of pointing out just how useless online polls are, and raising concerns about how often New Zealand media outlets, including Newshub, the AM Show and the Herald, rely on them as source material for news articles.

After talking about Sue Grey's threat to sue the government last week, I found out that Sue was planning to give a talk on the steps of parliament the next day. So during my lunch break last Thursday I wandered up to the Beehive, to see more about why Sue thinks the government's rollout of the COVID vaccine needs to be stopped.

The UK Mirror recently carried a weird story claiming that there are numbers so big that they would create a black hole in your brain if you could memorise them. The title of the article is:

It is hard to avoid hearing about Bitcoin and other so-called cryptocurrencies these days. Almost every issue of every newspaper has an article about some aspect of Bitcoin. As a researcher in cryptography I have been interested in Bitcoin since around 2013 (though I confess to have never "mined" a block or invested in Bitcoin). The purpose of this article is not to explain the technology of Bitcoin or to give a detailed overview of it. And I am definitely not giving investment advice! Instead I want to highlight a few aspects of the Bitcoin story that I think are of particular interest to skeptics.

There was a nice story about the 30th anniversary of the Lotto this week from Stuff. The article talked about how the fact some numbers come up more often than others is likely chance (Lotto take this seriously, and apparently regularly wash and weigh the balls to ensure there's no bias). The difference in frequency between the most drawn ball, number 1 (16.91%) and the least drawn ball number 34 (13.97%) is not huge, and I suspect the number frequency draws a bell curve.

A man from Nelson won $100,000 recently when his numbers came up in the lottery, and he'd purchased 12 tickets with the same numbers. Although this is touted as a lottery tactic, in the long run, on average, people using this method to play the lottery will win less than others, as any wins they have will result in a lower payout per ticket.

Yet another infomercial style article has been published on the NZ Herald, this time talking about the benefits of bee venom. Abeeco are a major seller of bee products in New Zealand, and they have several successful ASA complaints against them. Abeeco talks in the article about their products, but all they are able to produce in support of them is anecdotes - no proper data. The article even has an 0800 number at the bottom, and although it just says to call the number for "more information", nowhere does it state that the number is Abeeco's sales line!

This weekend's lottery Powerball jackpot was worth $40 million, with 3 winners. The NZ Herald and Newstalk ZB reported on Richard Lustig, a US man who has won several prizes and written a book explaining how to win the lottery.

The NZ Herald published a list of the top 5 luckiest stores, and went so far as to claim that your chances of winning the lottery would increase if you visit one of these stores!

First, please don't panic! This article is about pseudoscience and those who practice it, and does not require knowledge of mathematics.

Siouxsie Wiles doesn't find too much humour in a supposedly satirical paper.

Vicki Hyde presents the chair-entity's report for 2009.

When the Sunday Star-Times decided to survey the nation on how superstitious New Zealanders are and about what, Vicki Hyde got used as a guinea pig. Part One of her responses was published in the last issue of the NZ Skeptic. This is Part Two.

On Saturday, July 10, Cynthia Shakespeare died in a car accident on the way to a tramping trip. With her death we have lost a wonderfully enthusiastic and energetic member of the Skeptics.

The universe we live in is vast, in both space and time, so vast as to be beyond human comprehension. Mathematicians have devised a way in which the large numbers involved can be manipulated, the "exponent"1, but it can mislead us into thinking we comprehend more than we really do. It can blind us to the true difference between two numbers whose exponents differ by only one unit. Thus, if my bank balance grows from $102 to $103, I am richer by $900, but if it grows from $106 to $107, I have gained $9 million.

Numerology, or What Pythagoras Wrought, by Underwood Dudley, Mathematical Association of America, Washington DC, 1997

A lucrative new career option!

Chances are, you're worried about all the wrong things.

John Cole, editor of Creation/Evolution, recently wrote of his tendency toward hair-pulling, in the National Centre for Science Education Reports, Vol 12 No 2 (Summer 1992).

This is a summary of a talk given at the 1992 Skeptics conference by Dr Eric Geiringer.

At the Skeptics Conference in Christchurch in 1989, Denis Dutton mentioned that women's magazines offered horoscopes but men's magazines did not. There were two significant exceptions: the feminist magazine Broadsheet did not, but the gay (and nominally lesbian) Pink Triangle did -- a particularly bland and space-wasting one:

While archiving material on Irene F. Hughes, the Golden Numbers astrologer about whom Hugh -Young spoke at the 1989 Conference, I noticed she has a variety of signatures. The three printed below no doubt reflect her varying state of mind. Interpretative comment is welcomed.

Keith Lockett, our hard-pressed and indefatigable Editor, has particular difficulty in getting good material for the NZ Skeptic and it turns out that he is not alone in his editorial problems. One overseas skeptics group editor has offered a free subscription to the US Skeptical Inquirer to anyone who agrees to write a regular column. Another editorial, from the Iowa group, complains that "material was in short supply, as was time" and that "sometimes the time involved in putting together a newsletter like this can become large". These problems, which Keith will recognise readily, meant that their Fall issue was late and had to be combined with the Winter issue. Even then it was about the same size as one of our regular issues.

THE Lotteries Commission has been accused of tacitly supporting crackpot lucky number schemes to boost the sales of Lotto tickets.

Many thanks to all members who have sent me material recently. Most of it is too voluminous to be used and some of it will be well known to us all. It was nice to have sent on Irene F. Hughes' Golden Numbers form letter and to know that "It is always a strange feeling—opening letters from people whose desire is so clearly intense. At this very moment, your desire is priority #1. It is now '11:33' and your case has just been completed. As always, it gives me a warm feeling to see that once again the numbers reveal their hidden meanings so willingly to someone who asks from the heart." Incidentally my Golden Lucky Number is 11 and so my lucky times are 11 a.m. or 2 p.m.

I am making the transition from part to full time availability and thus need to expand the number of people who are aware of what I have to offer.

I return this born-again spoon to you as a symbol of the power of the press. I assure you I have no knowledge of what sleight of hand unbent it. I only left it in the newsroom for a few moments, too.