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

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:

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:

Jason Sullivan of Midwest Haunts finally has cleared up my lingering doubt about ghosts. He is the first Ghost Hunter I’ve heard define a ghost.

His definition is at 3:17 and is this: “When a person dies, they turn into a new form of energy.”

That’s it, no citation, no support, no evidence, and no facts. Just a statement.

I could say “When a person dies, they turn into a marshmallow” and have just as much factual support for that statement as he does for his “energy”.

This is a good post by Bryan Farha on the Smoke and Mirrors blog about ghosts and ghost phenomenon that I wanted to pass along.  I’ll excerpt a few good parts below:

Why some murder victims would stick around for eternity to haunt a place while others seem to evaporate is one of the great mysteries of the spirit world.

Scientists who have investigated haunted places account for both the temperature changes and the sounds by finding physical sources of the drafts, such as empty spaces behind walls or currents set in motion by low frequency sound waves produced by such mundane objects as extraction fans.

I just came across the very neat blog Bad Ghosts. The blog has a very good post carefully investigating a ghost photo sent in by a civil engineer who is highly impressed by it. The ghost photo in question is over here on the left.

It still blows my mind that anyone would think the photo shows a ghost. It takes about 10 seconds of looking at it closely to figure out what is going on.  The guy who submitted the photo refers to himself constantly as a civil engineer, which apparently is supposed to show that he’s smarter than your average cameraphone user.

Here is an excellent article by Dr. Steven Novella on the Skepticblog about the effects of fear on the brain.

Here are the first two paragraphs:

Have you ever had the chills? You know, the frights, spooks, willies, nerves, jitters, heebie-jeebies? Do you get these feelings when you have to enter a dark room alone, or if you find yourself on a lonely street at night?