An Australian study used carbon-14 dating to determine the actual age of wines. The results are not incredibly surprising. They found that 5% of wines are actually not of the advertised age. From a wine maker’s point of view, this would be a pretty easy scam to pull off, as no one but the finest wine connoisseurs would probably be able to notice.
I wonder if those crazy creationists that don’t “believe” in carbon-14 dating would buy this?
[via Cosmos Magazine]
Edit: Obviously the story is sad, but the sadder story is the terrible journalism.
People not knowing the relationship between correlation and causation has become a recent pet peeve of mine, especially when talking about global warming.
So, if you don`t get the comic below, please go educate yourself and read this article.
-from xkcd
One of my biggest pet peeves is numbers without units. Kelloggs claims that every box of Raisin Bran contains two scoops of raisins. This is a stupid claim as the scoops could obviously be any size. A quick google search didn’t yield any answers, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. I am in between school semesters right now and have a lot of time on my hands. With this surplus of time, I decided to measure the amount of raisins in a box of Raisin Bran. I was originally planning on counting them, but then I decided that was a bad idea.
I checked out the official Kellogg’s website and it didn’t have any info on what size scoops they use.
I separated the flakes from the raisins and found that there was 1 cup of raisins which weighed 150g in the 475g box. Kellogg’s made a good marketing move as “contains two half-cup scoops” doesn’t sound very good. The raisins barely filled the 1 cup measuring cup, and they made a heaping 3/4 cup.
The whole process is documented with pictures below.
[update] I just found somebody else that did the same thing!
The term ‘New Age’ is becoming more common. When I think of new age things, I think of magnetized wrist bands with healing power, healing crystals and phony spiritualism. They are all things that put mind over matter and they fall under pseudoscience.
One specific new age belief that really bothers me is the belief that intuition is better than rationalism and the scientific method. There are too many cases where our intuition is wrong, that we really can’t trust it all the time.
Another example of this is in the movie “What the bleep do we know?” Here, quantum mechanics is hijacked by pseudo-scientists that link it to new age thinking. They steal all of the scientific terms, but leave behind all the science.
Why hasn’t the term new age been claimed by science and reason? Shouldn’t an age of reason be the new age? I hope that someday our world will become one.
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