{"id":32293,"date":"2011-03-06T16:43:50","date_gmt":"2011-03-06T16:43:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/diluting-felicia-bad-astronomy\/"},"modified":"2011-03-06T16:43:50","modified_gmt":"2011-03-06T16:43:50","slug":"diluting-felicia-bad-astronomy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/astronomy\/diluting-felicia-bad-astronomy.php","title":{"rendered":"Diluting Felicia | Bad Astronomy"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s not hard to describe just how silly homeopathy is — after all, diluting a substance in water until nothing is left is clearly not a great way to base a medicinal practice. Unless you’re trying to cure dehydration. But if describing homeopathy’s silliness is easy, doing it well<\/em> is another matter; most people don’t have a very good sense of scale when it comes to very big and very small numbers (I guess numbers that dwarf even a trillion weren’t necessary for our ancestors on the plains of Africa, so we never evolved a way to grasp them). <\/p>

However, Steve DeGroof at MadArtLab (the same guy who does the skeptic web comic Tree Lobsters<\/a>) has found a way to put homeopathy into perspective: use Felicia Day<\/a>! <\/p>

\"\"<\/a><\/p>

[You really must click through to see the whole thing.]<\/p>

Well, pictures of her, anyway, and the concept<\/em> of Felicia’s uniqueness. This is actually a pretty good analogy: you can put Felicia into various categories (like women named Felicia, redheads, guest stars on \"House\"*<\/a>, and so on) and compare that number to how much homeopathy dilutes various solutions.<\/p>

I think this ...<\/p>

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It’s not hard to describe just how silly homeopathy is — after all, diluting a substance in water until nothing is left is clearly not a great way to base a medicinal practice. Unless you’re trying to cure dehydration. But … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32293"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32293\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}