You Decide - The Art of the Prank

April 9, 2007January 15, 2019

The Coulter Hoax: How Ann Coulter Exposed the Intelligent Design Movement

This article by Peter Olofsson about Ann Coulter’s 2006 book Godless: The Church of Liberalism, in which she criticizes the theory of evolution, is from LiveScience.com, in cooperation with Skeptical Inquirer.

Olofsson is a visiting associate professor in the Department of Mathematics at Tulane University. He has done research in mathematical biology and is the author of Probabilities: The Little Numbers That Rule Our Lives. -JS

In the summer of 2006, I heard that a new book called Godless presented an insightful and devastating criticism of the theory of evolution. Although I learned that its author, Ann Coulter, is not a scientist but a lawyer turned author and TV pundit, she nevertheless appeared to be an intelligent and well-educated person, so I started reading.

At first I was puzzled. There did not seem to be anything new; only tired and outdated antievolution arguments involving moths, finches, and fruit flies. But it wasn”t until Coulter dusted off the old Piltdown man story that I suddenly realized: it was a hoax! And it was brilliant…

Read the whole article here

April 9, 2007January 15, 2019

Laptop thieves accidentally upload their pix to victim’s Flickr account — HOAX!

Cory Doctorow:
Update: Jane McG sez, “The photos on the Flickr “someone stole my laptop” set were clearly borrowed from the Top Shop fashion-cam. This must be a clever prank or art project.”

A Flickr user whose computer was stolen has posted a gallery of the (unidentified) thieves, who have inadvertently uploaded dozens of photos of themselves to Flickr, not realizing that the MacBook had a photobooth program set up that uploaded photos taken with the built-in camera to the Web.

Our black apple macbook was stolen recently. It had an automatic upload to flickr set up from photobooth.

These photos appeared on our flickr a few weeks after it was stolen.

Have you seen these people?
Do you know who they are?

Link

(via Gizmodo)

A little complicated, but funny…

Originally by Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing on April 9, 2007

April 5, 2007January 15, 2019

Straight from the pranksters bag of tricks…

Here’s an example of how a carefully placed falsified document can foment a conspiracy theory. But remember, conspiracy theories are generally neither completely true nor completely false. That’s what gives them legs. The links here show the story from two opposing points of view:

Rove personally connected to email scandal
by www.dailykos.com · March 31, 2007

Land of the lost: Left-wing blogs get punked
by MichelleMalkin.com · April 04, 2007

There are lots of links to follow to piece the story together.

Post Script: Later in the day after this post was published, ArtofthePrank.com received this comment from Josiah at Coptix:

“You can see the whole thing here, if you’re interested.”

Thanks Josiah! -JS

April 5, 2007January 15, 2019

Dog Cheese

From Survive LA: As Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin put it, “A meal without cheese is like a beautiful woman who lacks an eye” and we’d add that a cheese without life, without flavor, without character like so much of the tasteless plastic wrapped crap to be found in our nation’s supermarkets simply isn’t worthy of the table.

As urban homesteaders we’re particularly interested in finding sources of food in our dense concrete jungles, and we are not alone. The movement is full of solutions to small scale animal husbandry: from pigmy goats, to pot-bellied pigs, city dwellers are trying to do that farm thing in the city–but sometimes with limited success.

So we were thrilled to find out that one of the best solutions for the urban livestock problem might be just underfoot. Two weeks ago we hooked up with some true revolutionaries out in the San Porn-ando Valley who are breeding dogs specifically for their lactation abilities. Continue reading “Dog Cheese”

March 30, 2007January 15, 2019

Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science by Robert L. Park, Ph.D.

This article provides a useful tool as well as an inspiration (wink, wink) and, for some hopefully, a revelation.

Reprinted with permission from Dr. Bob Park, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland at College Park and director of public information for the American Physical Society. He is also the author of Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness to Fraud (Oxford University Press, 2002). This article was originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan 31, 2003. -JS

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is investing close to a million dollars in an obscure Russian scientist’s antigravity machine, although it has failed every test and would violate the most fundamental laws of nature. The Patent and Trademark Office recently issued Patent 6,362,718 for a physically impossible motionless electromagnetic generator, which is supposed to snatch free energy from a vacuum. And major power companies have sunk tens of millions of dollars into a scheme to produce energy by putting hydrogen atoms into a state below their ground state, a feat equivalent to mounting an expedition to explore the region south of the South Pole.

There is, alas, no scientific claim so preposterous that a scientist cannot be found to vouch for it. Continue reading “Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science by Robert L. Park, Ph.D.”