How on earth did I miss this article, which describes a paper to be published in the journal Neuroquantology showing how teens can actually have telekinetic powers?
Oh, wait. Look at the date it was published. Never mind.
Not bad, though.
More like this
On a busy weekday morning as members of the Free-Ride family prepare to get out the door:
Elder offspring: Let's check if you have psychic powers.
Younger offspring: How can you check if I have psychic powers?
Elder offspring: We'll see if you can tell which Pokemon is on the card before I flip…
A "reality" television show is being developed in Israel that has to be about the biggest misnomer I've ever heard. You see, infamous fake "spoon bender" Uri Geller is doing a televisions show in which he seeks an "heir" to his psychic/telekinetic throne:
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - After four decades of…
While I know that there's no great love for basketball in these parts, I can't let Jonah Lehrer's post on the "Hot Hand" go without comment. It's about a paper analyzing the statistics of jump shooting, which finds that contrary to popular belief among basketball players, they don't really get "hot…
My criticism of Mark Armitage's "research" published in the ICR "journal" seems to have struck a nerve — he just sent me (and his colleagues at the ICR) an angry letter in which I think he is attempting sarcasm, he just isn't very good at at it. Poor baby. Here it is:
I am SO THANKFUL and indebted…
Maybe I just need more coffee, but I don't think this was an April Fool's joke, just incredibly bad science. If it is a joke, it is not noticeably different from some serious papers I have read, all making the fundamental assumption that troubled teens would not lie to researchers.
After seeing that someone on the ABC site gave some verifiable facts, I wanted to investigate.
There is actually such a paper that purports to be released in Vol. 6, No. 2 of NeuroQuantology; you can view it here. I didn't really read through it too thoroughly, but it does mention its upcoming release and is by the authors mentioned in the ABC News article, and the language is such that it could have plausibly been written by Italians with a less than thorough grasp of English (e.g. 'fenomena' occasionally instead of 'phenomena,' some verb tense issues). There are no details for No. 2 yet on NeuroQuantology's website, so I can't really confirm or deny anything except that the authors have never been published in NQ before (which frankly isn't much of a surprise).
One funny thing to note about the paper: There's an Appendix A where an anecdote is given, but the anecdote itself verges slightly on the absurd. It's almost the sort of thing I would expect if someone had made up the paper with pseudo-scientific language just to play a prank, but I'm not entirely convinced it is, unfortunately. I hope so.
I'm going to hope that it's someone writing nonsense for the sake of nonsense. Is NeuroQuantology a peer-reviewed journal ? if so are the "peers" of the same sort who reviewed the article claiming a link between cell and or wi-fi and Autism?
You know... Quacks. Nutcases. flakes.
NeuroQuantology is a haven for kooks, loons and fractured ceramics. Even the least nonsensical papers in it read like treknobabble, or like ideas which Philip Pullman considered for The Subtle Knife or The Amber Spyglass but abandoned when he realized he couldn't even make them float as science fiction.
That's got to be a joke. Anyone who writes this in a paper:
"The theory is rather complex and we do not dwell on this matter."
Has got to be joking. And if they aren't joking we should laugh harder.
It is a confirmed joke. But it's a double joke--the original paper is real!
The story isn't very plausible.
They have Brian Josephson saying "This looks distinctly flaky to me".