That's brilliant, easily understandable to a child, but intelligent enough for an adult.

BTW, it's "I'm often told", you're still a young wippersnapper, Jeff. Votes: +0

I'm often told yes, but I'm always old. Votes: +0

"After explaining it to people, I'm often [T]old "But no one would believe that... you must have it wrong"......

Mr. Wagg, tell them that the water in your brain has retained all of your memory so you actually have it right.
(Well, it's their theory!)

Votes: +0

I've always wondered: what about the prior uses of water? For example, in a city with a recycling sewer/water system, there's a good chance that the water in my glass may have been someone else's urine a generation back, and that person ingested it as tea, after it was runoff from someone's yard with grass fertilizer and weed killer, mixing with additional water drawn from the river with agricultural & industrial run-off and full of aquatic life from bacteria to human swimmers. How does water know which memory to retain and which to reject? Especially since water lacks any kind of cerebral cortex, hypothalamus, and other organs associated with long-term memory? Votes: +9

Wait a minute!!!! Are you saying our water supply systems are being polluted not only by agricultural and industrial runoff, but now also by homeopathic runoff?!?!

If that's the case we need to get the environmentalists on to this right away.

Votes: +4

I've been making and using a homeopathic remedy for years.
I take a grain of sodium chloride which as you all know causes thirst. I dilute it as many times as necessary, depending on how thirsty I am. Then I drink the tincture and my thirst is cured. What more proof do you need? Votes: +16

"young whippersnapper" as opposed to old whippersnapper? Votes: +0

if you dilute it until you have only distilled water left, you will actually get really thirsty if you drink enough of it, of course you have to not eat too Votes: +0

"If water has memory, homeopathy is full of shit!" Votes: +13

I always thought that fluoride was a skank. I'm so happy for Sodium that he has his gotten rid of that cheating Potassium. Votes: +1

You're right, of course.
Sometimes I use alcohol as the dilutant as recommended in the delpletedcranium.com article. My first choice is beer but I have to admit that I don't always discard the intermediate dilutions which means that I tend to lose count (and consciousness) as I head towards the final dilutions.

Anybody know a good homeopathic hangover cure? Votes: +2

There is another story at Depleted Cradium, the sourse for the homeopathy story.

http://depletedcranium.com/insultingly-bad-article-on-cancer-and-patrick-swayze/

This really appals me - and the piece is anonymous. The beliefs given in this article are downright dangerous. It basically says that cancer patients are killed by their treatment, not by cancer, and that a bit of fruit juice and some detox can 100% cure all cancers, even pancreatic. This is criminal. Votes: +0

So its the shaking that makes the difference is it?? So what does water pick up when it goes over a waterfall or down some rapids? Votes: +1

StarTrekLivz, homeopaths claim that dilution is not enough to make a remedy. You also have to "succuss" it. That is, you have to give it 10 shakes in each of the three dimensions (forward/back, up/down, right/left) between dilutions. Accidental dilutions in the ocean or your drinking water therefore "don't count".

harpman, actually distilled water is quite thirst-quenching. The idea that it extracts electrolytes is an urban legend. Ask a chemist about the osmotic pressure of distilled vs. tap water. The difference is tiny. Votes: +0

You also have to "succuss" it. That is, you have to give it 10 shakes in each of the three dimensions (forward/back, up/down, right/left) between dilutions. Accidental dilutions in the ocean or your drinking water therefore "don't count".

What *evidence* is there that it makes a piddle of a difference? Not meant as a comeback, just wondering why their claim has any relevance. Votes: +0

So homeopaths do not think that water through any lengthy journey will not get 10 "shakes in in any dimension? Think of how much motion occurs when water falls down a waterfall if it does not move at least 10 times in any direction i will eat my hat. Maybe not every molecule will do this but at the very least the majority will be moved in the required directions. Votes: +1

Again, what about 9 or 11 shakes in each orthogonal direction? What about 1 or 100000? There are no scientifically based studies to show the efficacy of this practice, therefore it is pseudo-science at best, subjective, woo-woo at worst. Ya know, spinning in circles to help your favorite sports team get the score is simply superstition no matter how many times it appears to work - unless you can validate that everytime you do it they score and everytime you don't they don't score. This is the basis of conformation bias and why so many scam-artists (including psychics like Sylvia the Terrible) continue to profit from people's misery. Reality (and science) are about objective replication not anecdotal and skewed rememberances of what supposedly happened. Votes: +0

What *evidence* is there that it makes a piddle of a difference?

Well it's got to be something like that, otherwise it wouldn't work, would it? Durr!! Votes: +0

Nice little expose, marred slightly by the numerous typographical errors. I find that if you're taking the moral high ground, the quality and correctness of your presentation is important. Otherwise, all the errors make it look amateurish and you lose some impact. Just sayin'... Votes: +0

Nice little expose, marred slightly by the numerous typographical errors. I find that if you're taking the moral high ground, the quality and correctness of your presentation is important. Otherwise, all the errors make it look amateurish and you lose some impact. Just sayin'...

Okay, look: Anyone who has done any amount of writing knows it is difficult to proofread your own work because you gloss over the errors. I've put the entire article through the spell check on Wordpress, Firefox and Word for Windows. Of course, these will always miss words that are incorrect but spell another word. Also, the spell check in Photoshop is far from perfect.

I suppose I could have written each blurb in multiple word processors and then copied it. Only I have a day job and this took me a week to do as is. You'd be very surprised how long it takes to cook up simple graphics that are smooth and all go together well. It was like half an hour to do that caffeine molecule and get it so it looked good. (I made all the atoms as dots and then applied a bevel effect then a surface blur to make it look smooth, then I arranged them, then I applied a perimeter glow, turned the overlay to "normal" and cranked up the noise. Then I made another layer and drew lines between them. Then I blurred the lines and applied more Gaussian noise. Then I darkened that and rearranged them a bit.)

If I actually were a "professional" I would hire a professional copy editor and pay them to certify the post. They would go through word per word and use a dictionary to assure there was not a single problem. I might even hire multiple editors to sign off on it. That's what many publications do.

But I don't have that kind of money.


I'm not the best in the world at spelling things. I'm just not. Sorry if that makes me an idiot. It's not my strong point.


In fact, I am amazed that people can spell as well as they do or even that I can spell as well as I do. When you think about it, since English does not follow the rules of phonetics strictly, you have to memorize each word. That's over 200,000 commonly used words - 200,000 strings of alphanumeric data of 26 characters.

It blows me away that anyone can even do this. The human brain is good at certain things but one thing it is very bad at is accurately storing huge amounts of explicit alphanumeric strings of data which have no abstract connections. Quick: what's the phone number of your dry cleaner? Don't know it? Didn't think so. Being a good speller is more difficult a task for the human brain, in terms of raw data throughput than memorizing every postal code in the US. It would be easier to memorize all the phone numbers in the greater New York area than to have the data of the 26-character combination of a quarter million words.

However... somehow, you have managed to pull off this task. Good for you.

Therefore, given the fact that I still don't have the money to actually hire a copy editor or an entire editing staff to go over this and the fact that it takes a fair amount of my spare time to even make this, I'd kindly ask that if you are going to start railing about how bad it is that it has a misspelled word in it, you be kind enough to actually point out where that word is so that I might do something tonight other than spend hours trying to figure out where these misspellings are. As is I've found two and fixed them - but I've been at this for 45 minutes.

Even better, there's a little thingy that says "contact me" that would allow this all to happen without telling the entire world that I've destroyed the moral high ground by virtue of my inability to commit a quarter million alphanumeric data strings to my memory. Votes: +0

Nice little expose, marred slightly by the numerous typographical errors. I find that if you're taking the moral high ground, the quality and correctness of your presentation is important. Otherwise, all the errors make it look amateurish and you lose some impact. Just sayin'...

By the way. "Sayin'" is not a word. It is "saying" that is proper, but even if it were "Just Saying" it would still be an incomplete sentence. A proper way of saying this would be "I am only saying."


Also, "Nice little expose, marred slightly by the number of typographical errors." is a grammatically incorrect sentence. It's not even a sentence at all. There is an implied subject, I'll give you that, but it's not grammatically correct to use this as a sentence. It should be "This is a nice little expose."


Also
"Otherwise, all the errors make it look amateurish and you lose some impact" is missing a comma. The statement "you lose some impact" is a new sentence with a new subject and therefore the contraction "and" needs to be accompanied by a comma. Votes: -1

Steve, hi,

Please don't try to play grammar nazi with my post that (mildly) criticised your homeopathy article. There's a big difference in the level of rigour required in a very informal comment made in a blog, and in an article up on the web that is debunking pseudoscience, for all the world to behold.

I had hoped that you would take my comments about the errors in your otherwise very humourous and excellent article in the spirit they were intended. But that was obviously not the case. For me, and I'm sure for a lot of other people (especially we pernickity skeptical types), a few errors is acceptable. But there is a threshold that - once crossed - begins to ruin the credibility of what's being presented. For me, that's about 5 errors. Then I actually stop reading. For the record (not counting punctuation errors which didn't bother me all that much), I count 11 errors after just a cursory review:

"I have a very *have a* good memory."

Should be: I have a very good memory.

"Together we *from* a molecule that can do some very interesting..."

Should be: form

"Each time the water is diluted, it *caries* the information..."

Should be: carries

"...but if we ever end up in a human, I think we should do the *opposit*."

Should be: opposite

"So while this caffeine you speak * is a stimulant..."

Should be: speak of

"But we should only act as a very mild *depressent*."

Should be: depressant

"We shouldn't be *a strong* a very potent *depressent*."

Should be: We shouldn't be a very potent depressant.

"So now they're all mild *sedative* that make a human sleepy."

Should be: sedatives

"However, the potency of the *waters* response is low."

Should be: water's

"If this were third then we'd be fairly strong, *forth* and..."

Should be: fourth

"...and fifth *and* we'd be super strong."

Should be: and fifth we'd be super strong.

Votes: +1

As an educator of children with dysgraphia and dyslexia I can tell you that grammar and spelling is not remotely indicative of intelligence. Poor grammar is less crippling than abandoning the material because typos put you off.

Now, back to the topic? Votes: -1

pxatkins, hi,

[qoute]As an educator of children with dysgraphia and dyslexia I can tell you that grammar and spelling is not remotely indicative of intelligence. Poor grammar is less crippling than abandoning the material because typos put you off.

Well said, point taken. I'll try to remember that the next time I run into some errors in an article. Trouble is, I'm an editor. So a bit anal in that respect, I'm afraid :-

Belated apologies to Mr. Packard, if anyone is still reading this thread... Votes: +0

A professor once told me..and he was a real professor in a college of environmental science and forestry.. that...
"The solution to pollution is dillution."
But he wasn't talking about homeopathy, and it came with some
other caveats as well, like, too much pollution takes too much dilution to reach a solution. That is, a solution to the problem of pollution, not homeopathy. That takes even more. mc Votes: +0