Flour Power

The title says is all:

On a related note, have you seen how old French men settle their disputes?

(via CrunchGear)

I’ve wanted to write my own contribution to the exposure of homeopathy as complete nonsense for a while now, so here goes. Let me start with a short introduction on this type of “medicine”.

Homeopathy is governed by two main principles:

• The “law of similars”, or ”let like be cured by like”, which states that by taking a preparation that induces the symptoms of a disease, it will cure the disease itself;
• The more diluted the preparation is, the more effective it gets. In some preparations the dilution is done to a point where not a single molecule of the active ingredient is left.

I’ve seen doctors calling it witchcraft, TV shows debunking the whole thing, and campaigns like 10:23 trying to raise awareness to what must be one of the biggest myths of modern times. But people are still spending billions of dollars per year in homeopathic treatments. Yes, billions!

Steve DeGroof at MadArtLab found a very interesting (and fun) way of explaining it. He looks more closely at that second principle, and uses Felicia Day to put it all into perspective:

He puts Felicia into various categories (like women named Felicia, redheads, people on Earth) and compares that number to how much homeopathy dilutes various solutions. The conclusion is that for typical homeopathic solutions, the concentration of the active ingredient is comparable to having one Felicia Day dissolved 100 million universes. If that doesn’t help you grasp the nonsense of homeopathy, I don’t know what will…

(Source: Geekologie)

“Jørgen was wrong. And I am the happiest man alive”. That’s what Ola Helland, a 25-year-old guy from Norway, wrote on his blog a few hours ago. He’s the one responsible for the One Million Giraffes project:

On the 6th of June last year I made a bet with my good friend, Jørgen. He didn’t believe it was possible for me to collect one million giraffes. 440 days later I proved him wrong with help of people from all around the world. 102 countries helped out showing Jørgen how amazing the internet is.

So yeah, he did it. One million frigging giraffes! Unbelievable!

It’s definitely worth checking the website to get to know this crazy and funny project a bit better. There’s a “guess the age” game, a map showing the contributors, and some cool mosaics.

Now I feel a bit bad that I didn’t contribute.

Update: This was the millionth giraffe.

Just brilliant…

(via RealityAmuck’s Twitpic)