Work and personal projects have kept me away. I hope to update more soon. In the meantime, check out this article on the famous “21 grams” experiment.

http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/3445/soul_catcher.html

I’ve been aware of this experiment for quite some time now and I don’t understand why ghost hunters don’t refer to it. It would seem to be great evidence for the existence of a human soul. That is, until it’s revealed that the original experiment suffered from serious technical problems with the instruments being used to weight the body of the patient/corpse.

Work and other responsibilities have been nuts lately. I have some interesting posts coming up soon. In the meantime, enjoy this reminder of what it means to do science:

I <3 Brian Dunning.

inFact: Ghost Hunting

I think it’s interesting that ghost hunting has become so accepted that towns are putting up articles about ghost hunter investigations on their town websites. A few years ago publishing such items would have been unthinkable because it was felt to be weird and possibly reflect badly on a town or business. Oh, I long for the good old days.

Today, it’s recognized that ghost tourism is a money-maker so if you can help to hype a legend or rumor, then your town might benefit. Too bad all of this hype is at the expense of rational thinking.

Listen to this awesome podcast (embedded at the end of this post) from the guys at HowStuffWorks discussing ghost hunter equipment in a real life, I-actually-understand-electronics-and-science way. Oooooh, this made me sooooo freakin’ happy.

Here is a text article to go along with it:  Ghost Detecting Equipment

I found this goodness via Ryan Johnson’s article on Skepticblog. Let me quote from him quoting them:

I propose a new Internet Law aimed specifically at the claims of paranormal believers.

Lou’s Law: One cannot invoke Quantum Mechanics in an argument or explanation unless one can show at least a basic, layman’s understanding of Quantum Mechanics. For example, one might explain what Planck’s Constant describes or the idea behind the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle or even list the “flavors” of Quarks.

This comes from hearing Quantum Mechanics mentioned in The Secret, bizarre explanations of how Astrology works, and a host of other paranormal crap. Specifically, I came across it again in reading this interesting article on the paranormal radio/phone called Frank’s Box.

I found some really great videos by YouTuber HauntedHoax. He is all about the ghost busting, debunking and hoaxing for educational purposes.

The nice thing is that his videos are also entertaining. A lot of skeptic videos that try to be funny usually fail. I don’t know why, but the humor is just lame. This guy does it right.

Check out his channel here for all his videos:  http://www.youtube.com/user/HauntedHoax

I’ll embed two of my favorites below:

First a funny one:

And a serious debunk:

This is a really great video explaining skeptical thinking. It’s kinda dry, but the info is spot on:

So awesome, so very very awesome:

TheFakingHoaxer, has been all over the blogs today. He makes CGI videos of UFO’s and Space Shuttle disasters mainly. The videos are made with faked camera shake and lens fuzziness to give them an authentic, raw film quality that helps to cover up the tell-tale signs of digital manipulation. His tools are commonplace (Photoshop, Adobe Premier), but the results are uncommonly cool.

He has one video of ghost photos. Unlike his other vids, this one is just a slide show of still images. They look like vintage photos taken in settings from around the turn of the century. I hope he gets around to doing a ghost video with moving action. I would love to see him fake a night-vision style video like the Ghost Hunters’  shows.