This sure makes me laugh!
Michael Shermer showed a gadget a called the ADE651. It's a black box with an antenna. The manufacturer claims it can detect both bombs and drugs up to 1000 meters away. It sells for $40,000. The Iraqi government bought 800 of them. Shermer's friend James Randi says:
the ADE651 is a useless, quack, device which cannot perform any other function than separating naïve persons from their money. It's a fake, a scam, a swindle, and a blatant fraud. The manufacturers, distributors, vendors, advertisers, and retailers of the ADE651 device are criminals, liars, and thieves who will ignore this challenge because they know the device, the theory, the described principles of operation, and the technical descriptions given, are nonsense, lies, and fraudulent.
(Does that mean he doesn't like it?.)
Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and columnist for Scientific American. He talked about patternicity -- the evolved tendency for people to find patterns, even in meaningless noise, and agenticity -- the belief in souls, spirits, gods, ghosts, government conspirators, and aliens who more advanced than us, and are either coming to save us or enslave us. Even idea that the government can rescue us is a form of agenticity.
9/11 is a conspiracy (people planned the attack in secret), but truthers think it was an inside job by the Bush administration. "But we know that can't be true because it worked."
More details: ADE651: wtf? – Bad Science
Michael Shermer showed a gadget a called the ADE651. It's a black box with an antenna. The manufacturer claims it can detect both bombs and drugs up to 1000 meters away. It sells for $40,000. The Iraqi government bought 800 of them. Shermer's friend James Randi says:
the ADE651 is a useless, quack, device which cannot perform any other function than separating naïve persons from their money. It's a fake, a scam, a swindle, and a blatant fraud. The manufacturers, distributors, vendors, advertisers, and retailers of the ADE651 device are criminals, liars, and thieves who will ignore this challenge because they know the device, the theory, the described principles of operation, and the technical descriptions given, are nonsense, lies, and fraudulent.
(Does that mean he doesn't like it?.)
Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and columnist for Scientific American. He talked about patternicity -- the evolved tendency for people to find patterns, even in meaningless noise, and agenticity -- the belief in souls, spirits, gods, ghosts, government conspirators, and aliens who more advanced than us, and are either coming to save us or enslave us. Even idea that the government can rescue us is a form of agenticity.
9/11 is a conspiracy (people planned the attack in secret), but truthers think it was an inside job by the Bush administration. "But we know that can't be true because it worked."
More details: ADE651: wtf? – Bad Science
Last edited by a moderator:
)