You may remember I posted recently about how stuff passes through populations and in particular how this often leads to things changing (or being changed by the hands/mouths it passes through).
Ben Goldacre [via Twitter] points us to this great example of bad science posted by Aubrey
That's why the processes of science seem to be important - to stop us just choosing to believe what we want to believe (or, more probably, what the fella next us says is true)
Free gift: top interview with comedian Dara O'Briain about his love of maths and hate of the kind of pseudoscience that this all adds up to
"You can say anything about art, but science is cumulative and people say, 'I can't understand what's at the top of that, so I'm just going to scrabble around in the mud outside the castle and build my own shitty version of it out of reassuring platitudes and borrowed terms.' Terms like energy. The use of the word energy is one of the great scandals of pseudoscience. That anyone can grab the word energy and say "I can move your negative energy" or "grab this crystal'senergy" drives me up the wall. Up. The. Wall."
